BELIEVE ME

I recently read an article about how teenage boys are getting recruited to the neo-Nazi movement in chat rooms associated with on-line gaming. A guy goes into chat with an anonymous partner in a game of alien blasting and finds out how he can put his murderous skills to work freeing America from undesirable people.

Cool!

In this article, a father is disturbed to find a lot of Nazi propaganda piled up on his printer, his son having forgotten to harvest the downloaded bounty. A conversation ensues, and so forth.

But don't fret. Before long, this kid turns out okay. The last line of the article points out the young fellow has taken to attending church.

All's well that ends well, right? What could come of church attendance that would cause a father to doubt its influence over an unformed mind?

Well...

You may recall a mass shooting in Pittsburgh, where a guy went into a Jewish temple and opened up on those he found there. His reasoning: All Jews must die.

On his anti-Semitic Web page, the man features a Bible quote from the Gospel of John. "Your father is the devil..." [John 8:44, King James Version]

So says Jesus to the Jews.

But there are many translations of the Bible. I believe the shooter's quote was more like: "Jews are the spawn of Satan."

Powerful words, brother.

If you're not supposed to suffer a witch to live (it's somewhere in the Old Testament), what are you meant to do with the children of the devil himself?

It seems the shooter was taking his orders from the Word of God: All Jews must die!

It's not clear, however, if the whole "Jews are Devil-spawn" thing is supposed to be taken literally. It might just be a rhetorical position, hardly more than a figure of speech.

Jesus is in the Temple, arguing with the Pharisees about his story. He was sent to Earth by God, right? But he's having trouble getting any traction with these people.

The Temple leaders say he is just boasting—and lying, to boot.

Jesus points out that when two witnesses say the same thing, it must be true. He's one of the witnesses, and God is the second. So there!

His audience is not convinced.

Jesus says he's going his way, and where he goes, they can't follow. Why not? "Ye are from beneath; I am from above," he says. They will die in their sins, precisely because they don't know him.

(Elsewhere in John it is stated the only way to the Father is through the Son.)

Jesus says: "If God were your Father, ye would love me; for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me."

Jesus then speculates on why these guys don't get it. "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it."

The Jews of the Temple can't believe the truth of God because they don't come from God. It's that simple. Jesus speaks the truth because his father is God, and of course God always speaks the truth (just as the Devil always speaks lies).

If you knew God, Jesus says, you'd know me. I know God, so I know the truth. If I said I didn't know God, then I'd be a liar like you guys.

The Pharisees had earlier claimed their father was Abraham. Jesus taunts them by saying: "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it and was glad."

The Jews are perplexed, saying Jesus is not old enough to have known Abraham.

Jesus says, "Before Abraham was, I am."

Well, that tears it. The Jews gather up stones to put paid to this nonsense, but Jesus has slipped out unnoticed. (They'll get another shot at him later.)

In all this, the logic of Jesus is flawed. When he appeals to the law of the land regarding witnesses, he's forgetting that the Jews are only getting the testimony of one of those witnesses.

But surely God wouldn't lie. And the Son of God would therefore also not lie, since he wants to please his father.

Jesus implies the truth is so obvious only the sons of the Devil would have trouble perceiving it.

It's reminiscent of the logical conundrum about the island where there are two tribes, one of which always tell the truth and the other always lies. If your time is spent in the company of those who always tell the truth, you'll get in the habit of believing anything those guys tell you.

Clearly, the Jews haven't been trained to believe everything they hear. They must therefore be from the cynical side of the island, where nobody believes anything.

Jesus knows he's telling the truth, so if those guys aren't getting it, there has to be something wrong with them. Something genetic.

(It is not permitted to consider the possibility Jesus might himself be mistaken.)

All of this is from the Gospel of John, the last to be written, and the one most anti-Jew. Perhaps his readers would have little trouble believing this stuff, since everybody knew (by then) Jesus was telling the truth about his origin. According to the story, Jesus was resurrected after his death on the cross. There's your proof, okay? (Even Doubting Thomas came on board.) Belief in Jesus as the Son of God predated John's Gospel by eighty or ninety years.

For the uninitiated, however, there would be problems with the logic of this episode. Unless you already hated Jews for some other reason. Then you might go along with it, taking from Scripture another fat data point on your graph.

Another reason to oil up your weapons and catch a ride to the Temple.