Review and Reflections Upon: The Aryan Jesus by Susannah Heschel

How to cite this article: Joshua N. Tilton, “Review and Reflections Upon: The Aryan Jesus by Susannah Heschel,” Jerusalem Perspective (2026) [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/35375/].

In her book, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany,^[1] Susannah Heschel documents a concerted effort that took place in Germany during the Nazi era to sever Christianity from its Hebraic roots and to purge all traces of Jewishness from Christian practice. This effort was spearheaded by the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Life (Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben).

The members of this Institute were (mainly Protestant) theologians, pastors, and laypersons who belonged to a German Christian nationalist movement that embraced Hitler’s anti-Semitic, pro-Aryan (German) ideology. As Heschel explains, the German Christian nationalist movement was “a faction within the Protestant church of Germany, not a separate sect, and eventually [it] attracted between a quarter and a third of Protestant church members” in Germany:^[2] 

Enthusiastically pro-Nazi, the movement sought to demonstrate its support for Hitler by organizing itself after the model of the Nazi Party, placing a swastika on the altar next to the cross, giving the Nazi salute at its rallies, and celebrating Hitler as sent by God. It was ready and willing to alter fundamental Christian doctrine in order to bring the church into compliance with the Reich….^[3] 

One of the fundamental Christian doctrines the German Christian nationalists were willing to sacrifice was that God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law (Gal. 4:4-5). On the contrary, the German Christian nationalists claimed that Jesus was not Jewish but Aryan (i.e., of the same “race” as the Germans), and that Jesus had come not to redeem the Jews but to destroy Judaism.

These Christian nationalists argued that Jesus was not Jewish because in their view religion was understood as a spiritual expression of race: “If…religion was an expression of race, then Jesus’s religious teachings…were evidence of his racial heritage.”^[4] Since Christian doctrine had an ancient tradition of construing Jesus’ teachings as both unique and anti-Jewish, it followed that Jesus himself could not be Jewish: “If his religiosity was unique, [Jesus] could be declared racially distinct from the Jews.”^[5] 

That Jesus was not only not Jewish but racially Aryan was argued from Jesus’ Galilean origins. Galilee was supposedly resettled by people of the Aryan race following the exile of Israel’s northern tribes. These “racial Aryans” had, it was alleged, only recently converted to Judaism at the time Jesus was born, and their spirituality purportedly remained distinct from that of the Jews of Judea.^[6] For the German Christian nationalists, “calling Jesus a Galilean meant calling him an Aryan.”^[7] According to their view, although Jesus was technically born to the Jewish religion, he was neither Israelite by blood nor Jewish in spirit. On the contrary, the Galilean Jesus was racially Aryan and spiritually anti-Jewish.

Heschel explains that the German Christian nationalists also used a linguistic argument to claim that Jesus was not Jewish. The supposed inability of the Galileans to correctly pronounce the guttural Hebrew letters “proved” that Jesus (and his fellow Galileans) could not have been ethnically Jewish. Aramaic—not Hebrew—was claimed to be Jesus’ mother tongue, which Hugo Odeberg, a scholar of Jewish texts active in the Institute, claimed was “modern, worldly, and close to German.”^[8] “Thus,” Heschel writes, “even from a linguistic point of view,” the German Christian nationalists were able to argue that “Jesus could not have been a Jew.”^[9] 

According to Heschel, the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Life was instrumental in giving the portrait of an Aryan Jesus a semblance of legitimacy. “Such ideas,” which allowed these Christian nationalists to claim Jesus as one of their own, “might have remained in the realm of demagoguery or bad scholarship, had it not been for the establishment of the Institute in 1939.”^[10] The work of the Institute was to give the Christian nationalist ideas of the pro-Nazi church members a veneer of respectability and academic credibility. “With the enthusiasm of its directors and the support of its sympathizers within the church, the Institute transformed bad ideas into dangerous realities. As the Nazis began their crusade to eradicate Jews from Europe, the Institute launched its crusade to eradicate Jews from the church, Judaism from Germany, and any traces of ‘Jewishness,’ however loosely defined, from the heart of Christianity.”^[11] 

Another doctrine the German Christian nationalists were willing to sacrifice was Paul’s doctrine of baptism: For as many of you as were baptized into Christ, you have put Christ on. There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither enslaved nor free, neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:27-28). Whereas Christian doctrine taught that baptism forged a new unity in Christ, the German Christian nationalists denied unity between German Christians and Christians of Jewish origin:

[T]o bring the church into compliance with the Reich…[the German Christian nationalists] welcomed the [Nazis’] April 1933 order of removing Jews from the civil service by demanding that the church do likewise and remove any non-Aryans, that is, baptized Jews, from positions within the church. That demand contravened the doctrine of baptism…but the German Christian leaders insisted that the Nazi racial laws took precedence and that baptism could not erase race.^[12] 

The aims of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Life, however, were even more insidious than removing ethnic Jews from church life. Not content to remove non-Aryans from church pews, the Institute sought to eliminate Jewish influence from every aspect of Christian thought and expression. The defining slogan of the Institute was that “Jewish influence on all areas of German life, including religious-church life, must be exposed and broken.”^[13] “What makes the Institute worthy of particular attention,” Heschel argues, “is its context: it carried out its program of eradicating the Jewish within Christianity precisely while the Jews of Europe were being deported and murdered.”^[14] 

The motivating force behind the Institute’s work was the desire on the part of the German Christian nationalists to ingratiate themselves with the Nazi regime, which generally looked upon Christianity with contempt. In the eyes of the Nazis, Christianity was potentially corrosive to German identity because Christian teachings smuggled Jewish ideas, customs, and traditions into German national life. Christianity, in the view of the Nazis, was an essentially Jewish religion for non-Jews. What Germany needed was a purely German national religion that touted the unique qualities and virtues of Germanness and that would inspire the German people to embrace Germany’s destiny to become the dominant world power under the Third Reich. The German Christian nationalist movement sought to quell the Nazis’ skepticism of Christianity by advocating a thoroughly de-Judaized form of Christianity that would be compatible with the Nazi ideal of Germanness.

Heschel explains that for the German Christian nationalists the Aryan Jesus functioned as an orientation device during a time of intense upheaval in German society: “As Jesus, he was the anchor of the Christian identity of Germans, and as Aryan, of the Germanic identity of Christianity. Jesus was an anchor in a nazified society that was undertaking a radical overhaul of culture as well as institutions…. Most important, in the context of Third Reich politics, [the Aryan] Jesus was the figure through whom the fundamental race distinction between Jew and Aryan could be affirmed.”^[15] 

According to Heschel, “[t]he Jewish Jesus with the Christian message for all humanity was…replaced by a Germanic Jesus with a message in accord with Germany’s military and racial goals of domination over Europe.”^[16] One of the most important means by which the Institute popularized this transformation of Jesus from a Jew into an Aryan was through the publication in 1940 of a de-Judaized version of the New Testament entitled Die Botschaft Gottes (“The Message of God”). In it, the Institute presented what it regarded as the “authentic” message of and about Jesus. This re-vamped Bible was divided into four sections. Section one, Jesus der Heiland (“Jesus the Savior”), was a life of Jesus in which the Gospel of Mark served as the basis for a harmonization of extracts from the Synoptic Gospels that emphasized Jesus’ break with Judaism. Section two, Jesus der Gottesohn (“Jesus the Son of God”), was an epitome of the Gospel of John that explained the significance of Jesus’ actions as anti-Jewish. Section three, Jesus der Herr (“Jesus the Lord”), was a thematically arranged anthology of passages from the epistles. Section four, Das Werden der Christusgemeinde (“The Emergence of the Christian Community”), describes Paul’s mission to the Gentiles and his rejection and persecution by the Jews.^[17] 

Nevertheless, the figure of Paul remained deeply problematic for the German Christians, since in his writings Paul identified himself as a Jew and wrote of his love for and anguish over Israel. According to Walter Grundmann, one of the founders of the Institute, “a German faith cannot be based on Paul, because it would then be deformed through his Jewish system of coordinates, and the necessary Germanic foundations would not be able to come into effect.”^[18] The editors of Die Botschaft Gottes, the de-Judaized New Testament, felt compelled to include some of Paul’s writings and to acknowledge Paul’s Jewish origins, while omitting Paul’s autobiographical statements, and presented him as a former Pharisee to whom God had revealed Jesus.^[19] Even the best efforts of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Life, it seems, could not completely erase the Jewish origins of Christianity.

The Institute’s methodology for “recovering” the Aryan Jesus from the New Testament texts was to identify that which was thought to be most unique about Jesus’ teaching or that which could be construed as the most anti-Jewish and to brand that as “authentic.” The true Jesus, the Institute maintained, was Aryan, but his views had been distorted by Paul and the Jewish writers of the Gospels.^[20] Grundmann used this methodology to explain why Jesus’ statement to the woman at the well in John 4:22 (“salvation is from the Jews”) should be omitted from the New Testament: Jesus was anti-Jewish, and the Gospel of John was an anti-Jewish text; therefore, the offending statement in John 4:22 must be a later interpolation.^[21] According to Grundmann, Jesus’ goal “was to bring an end to Judaism, but instead [Jesus] fell victim to the Jews.”^[22] 

Heschel’s book not only documents the work of the Institute to promote the image of an Aryan Jesus, it also outlines the careers, both before and after the War, of its most prominent members, particularly the aforementioned Walter Grundmann. Heshel reveals the Institute’s lasting legacy in rehabilitating the careers and reputations of its members in the post-war period. Conveniently obscuring its intention of eradicating Jewish influence from German life, members of the Institute were able to argue that, having spent the war years active in an institute focused on the study of Jews and Judaism, they could not possibly have been pro-Nazi. Grundmann himself had a prolific post-war career as a respected New Testament scholar.

An undercurrent in Heschel’s book is a critical examination of the struggle between the German Christian movement and its opposition in the so-called Confessing Church. As Heschel points out, despite their theological and political differences, one view the German Christian nationalists and the members of the Confessing Church shared in common was their anti-Semitism.^[23] The Confessing Church consistently argued that the nationalist ideology of the German Christians was “Jewish,” and had no qualms about accusing the Jews of having committed deicide. Both of these arguments are evident even in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s 1933 essay “The Church and the Jewish Question,” written in opposition to the Aryan Clauses, which disqualified people of Jewish origin, regardless of their religion, from holding public office in the German state. The German Christian nationalists strove, and eventually succeeded, in mirroring this exclusion within the church. Despite the overall thrust of Bonhoeffer’s essay that “[t]he church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community,”^[24] Bonhoeffer conceded that “the ‘chosen people’, who nailed the redeemer of the world to the cross, must bear the curse for its action through a long history of suffering.”^[25] But while affirming the curse, Bonhoeffer argued that “no nation of the world can be finished with this mysterious people, because God is not yet finished with it.”^[26] Thus, Bonhoeffer mythologized Jewish suffering in the very moment of German Jewry’s greatest need. Bonhoeffer further argued that “from the point of view of the church it is not baptised Christians of Jewish race who are Jewish Christians; in the church’s view the Jewish Christian is the man who lets membership of the people of God, of the church of Christ, be determined by the observance of a divine law…for example the racial unity of the members of the community…. The exclusion of Jews by race from our German church would bring this latter into the Jewish Christian category.”^[27] Bonhoeffer’s essay is thus one example of “how antisemitism linked the competing German Christian movement and Confessing Church during the Third Reich.”^[28] 

Reading Heschel’s book in the present moment, when new forms of Christian nationalism are on the rise, has given me cause for personal reflection. One of the outstanding achievements of Jerusalem Perspective has been to repudiate and refute the specious arguments advanced by the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Life. Countless JP articles have demonstrated that Jesus’ teachings only make sense within the context of Second Temple Judaism. Jesus’ life and teachings were not a reaction against but an expression of first-century Jewish commitment to the Torah and the covenant people to which Jesus belonged. Articles such as Shmuel Safrai’s “The Jewish Cultural Nature of Galilee in the First Century”^[29] demonstrate that Galilean Jewry was in no way inferior to the Judaism of Judea. Randall Buth’s article, “Language Use in the First Century: Spoken Hebrew in a Trilingual Society in the Time of Jesus,”^[30] shows that Hebrew was very much alive in the first century and the most probable language in which Jesus taught his followers. The parables in particular, which were designed for mass audiences, were almost certainly told in Hebrew, since all rabbinic parables, even in Aramaic contexts, are preserved in Hebrew.

Dozens of JP articles show that a clearer understanding of Jesus’ words can be achieved when they are reconstructed in Hebrew. Flusser’s article on the Jewish source behind the Gospel of John (“The Gospel of John’s Jewish-Christian Source”)^[31] and Notley’s article on anti-Judaism in the Synoptic Gospels (“Anti-Jewish Tendencies in the Synoptic Gospels”)^[32] show how backward was Grundmann’s methodology of throwing out the positive statements about Judaism as later accretions. It is the anti-Jewish layers in the Gospel of John and in the Synoptic Gospels (particularly the Gospel of Matthew) that are the later interpolations introduced by Gentile authors.

As powerful as these efforts to draw an accurate portrait of a Jewish Jesus are, equally important is Jerusalem Perspective’s modeling of an alternative to Christian nationalism, namely religious pluralism. Jerusalem Perspective was founded upon the collaboration of Jewish and Christian scholars who worked together in a spirit of mutual respect to discover the historical truth about Jesus. This collaborative effort is antithetical to the spirit of Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism is both an ideology and a political project, which believes that Christians should occupy a privileged position in a given society. Christian morality should set the society’s cultural norms, Christian traditions should be given special recognition in society, and Christian profession should be inseparable from national identity. Those who do not share this nationalistic Christian identity—either because they practice another religion, adopt no religious creed whatsoever, or simply dissent from the Christian nationalists’ political agenda—should have less freedom, fewer rights, and a smaller say in society.^[33] 

While Christian nationalism uses the language and symbols of Christianity to convey its message, it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It does not use Christian language or symbols to promote utter devotion to the God of all creation or love for all one’s neighbors, it hijacks them to demand complete devotion to the idealized State and to justify cruelty toward those it refuses to recognize as belonging to society. Christian nationalism has little interest in Jesus’ teachings on humility, and serving others, and striving for peace and justice; it is far too occupied with discussions of how supposedly persecuted Christians are in society and how supposedly dangerous to society are those groups who, for one reason or another, are said not to belong.

But while pretending to be Christian, Christian nationalism denigrates the Kingdom of Heaven by elevating national identity to the level of salvific significance. It is not adherence to the virtues and ethics of the Beatitudes that determines whether a Christian nationalist is accepted as a Christian, but how zealous one is for a country’s heritage and traditions. And it is not profession of faith that determines whether a person is welcomed into Christian fellowship but patriotic enthusiasm for the greatness of a particular state.

All these people
[i.e., the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel]
were still living by faith when they died…,
admitting that they were foreigners
and strangers on earth.
People who say such things
show that they are looking
for a country of their own.
If they had been thinking
of the country they had left,
they would have had
opportunity to return.
Instead, they were longing
for a better country—
a heavenly one.
Therefore God is not ashamed
to be called their God,
for he has prepared a city for them.

Heb. 11:13-16

Christian nationalism has a “heads I win, tails you lose” mentality when it comes to belonging in society, in that it believes the only “legitimate” members of society are those who share the cultural, religious, and ethnic identity of the Christian nationalists, and the only “true” Christians are those who share their political, ideological, and social agenda. In this way Christian nationalism attempts to squeeze out difference and dissent in society and the church in order to acquire the upper hand in both the political and religious spheres. To achieve their aims Christian nationalists will often align themselves politically with authoritarian leaders, whom they regard as having been sent by God to save their nation. The German Christian nationalists viewed Hitler in this manner: “Both the Nazis and the German Christians identified Hitler as Christ’s second coming,” Heschel writes. “That gave Hitler the status of a supernatural being and gave Christ renewed glory as a contemporary figure of political significance.”^[34] Present-day Christian nationalists tout their leader as a new Cyrus figure—a pagan leader appointed by God to liberate his people and referred to as the “messiah” in a verse in Isaiah (Isa. 45:1)—or a new David, God’s anointed but flawed political redeemer.

Their minds are fixated
on the things of the earth.
But our citizenship
is in heaven.

Phil. 3:19-20

When, for instance, Congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee recently posted on X (formerly Twitter) that “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie,” that is an example of Christian nationalism.^[35] How do we know? Because the same man also posted, “America is and must always be a Christian nation,”^[36] a statement which actually is a lie.^[37] Or when Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville reposted a picture on X of Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim mayor of New York City, celebrating Ramadan next to an image of the September 11th terrorist attacks with the caption “The enemy is inside the gates,” that is Christian nationalism, too.^[38] 

For too long and too often Jews have been the targets of Christian nationalism. But no matter who is the target, the impulse to exclude and deny and eject from society those whose religious or ethnic or sexual identity is different from one’s own is equally disgusting and dangerous. It is important to recognize such statements for what they are: expressions of Christian bigotry. It is necessary to call them out lest they be regarded as socially, politically, and morally acceptable. Otherwise, the impulse of Christian nationalists to suppress the rights and liberties of those who are not Christian nationalists, be they Muslims, Jews, or simply the “wrong” sort of Christian, will go unchecked. Despite the theological and rhetorical shortcomings of his 1933 essay, Bonhoeffer was correct that it is not sufficient “just to bandage the victims under the wheel” of society.^[39] When we witness our fellow humans being crushed beneath the grinding wheel, it is necessary for people of good faith “to put a spoke in the wheel itself.”^[40] In other words, it is our responsibility to demand that injustice committed against our neighbor be stopped.

Christians are not distinguished
from the rest of humankind
either in locality or in speech
or in customs.
For they dwell not somewhere
in cities of their own,
neither do they use
some different language,
nor practice an
extraordinary manner of life….
They dwell in their own countries,
but only as sojourners.
They bear their share in
all things as citizens,
and they endure all
hardships as strangers.
Every foreign country
is a fatherland to them,
and every fatherland
is foreign.

(Epistle of Diognetus 5:1-5)

The alternative to Christian nationalism, or any other kind of religious nationalism, is cultural and religious pluralism: the recognition that everyone in a given society, no matter what creed they follow, what ethnic traditions they might cherish, no matter what language they speak or what partner they make love to, belongs. They belong just as much as we belong because we all belong to one another. We may approach life differently, we might have different interests or concerns, we might even disagree over our opinions, but nevertheless, each person has a rightful place in society that is equal to my own. Cultural and religious pluralism is for those who are mature and confident enough to be humble, and comfortable enough to learn from and appreciate people who are different from themselves. I know there is no risk that I will lose my Christian identity, in part because part of that identity is learning to see the image of God in the human being next to me and learning to love the stranger who turns out to be not so very different from myself.

Reading Heschel’s book led me to reflect that Christian nationalism in any form is an historical betrayal of the mission of Jerusalem Perspective and the broader movement to promote goodwill and understanding between Jews and Christians to which it belongs. It is a betrayal of my professor Dr. Wilson’s efforts to bring Evangelicals and Jews together in respectful conversation. It is a betrayal of David Flusser’s efforts to work together with those “Christians who are chiefly concerned with living by Jesus’ message in the gospels.” To the extent that Christian nationalists withdraw into their political identity, they retract the hand of friendship Christians were just beginning to offer their Jewish and non-Jewish sisters and brothers of other faiths. Christian nationalism is a backsliding into xenophobic paranoia that opens ourselves up to the possibility of creating another false image of Jesus crafted in our warped nationalistic image.

Christian nationalism is also a betrayal of the theological achievements of Christians who, in the post-Holocaust era, have struggled to come to terms with the Church’s history of anti-Semitism. One of those achievements was to recapture Paul’s insistence that Gentile followers of Jesus do not and cannot replace Israel. We are rather grafted in to God’s promises to Israel. Authentic Christian faith knows that it is through the seed of Abraham that God intends to bless all the families of the earth. Christian nationalism, by contrast, elevates a given nation to divine status. God is said to have a special plan for that nation, a plan that overshadows God’s covenant with Abraham and that makes the role of the Kingdom of Heaven irrelevant. Christian nationalism is an act of defiant hubris which rejects the notion that Gentile believers are merely wild olive branches supported by the ancient root—God’s promises to the patriarchs. We cannot return to Christian nationalism without sawing off the theological branch we sit on.

Finally, Christian nationalism is a rejection of Jesus’ command to love our neighbors as ourselves by doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. Whereas Jesus’ command highlights the universal plight and common destiny of all humankind, teaching that we are all in the same boat and therefore have a duty to love and care for one another, Christian nationalism trivializes Jesus’ command by focusing instead on national identity and political borders. Instead of recognizing every fellow human being as a neighbor to whom we owe love, Christian nationalism only recognizes as “legal” those few human beings who possess the right documents from a particular government. In the end, Christian nationalism idolizes national identity, prioritizing the nation over both God and neighbor.

Heschel’s detailed examination in The Aryan Jesus of German Christian nationalism during the Nazi era can help us to think critically about Christian nationalisms of every flavor in the world today. It is a chilling reminder in a time of rising Christian nationalisms in my country (the United States) and beyond of what is really at stake.

Take Action For more information on Christian nationalism and how to take a stand against it, check out the Christians Against Christian Nationalism website: https://www.christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org/. There you will find resources, ways to connect, and a statement to sign (geared for followers of Jesus in the United States), should you wish to do so. The statement reads: As Christians, our faith teaches us everyone is created in God’s image and commands us to love one another. As Americans, we value our system of government and the good that can be accomplished in our constitutional democracy. Today, we are concerned about a persistent threat to both our religious communities and our democracy — Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our fellow Christians to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation. As Christians, we are bound to Christ, not by citizenship, but by faith. We believe that: People of all faiths and none have the right and responsibility to engage constructively in the public square. Patriotism does not require us to minimize our religious convictions. One’s religious affiliation, or lack thereof, should be irrelevant to one’s standing in the civic community. Government should not prefer one religion over another or religion over nonreligion. Religious instruction is best left to our houses of worship, other religious institutions and families. America’s historic commitment to religious pluralism enables faith communities to live in civic harmony with one another without sacrificing our theological convictions. Conflating religious authority with political authority is idolatrous and often leads to oppression of minority and other marginalized groups as well as the spiritual impoverishment of religion. We must stand up to and speak out against Christian nationalism, especially when it inspires acts of violence and intimidation—including vandalism, bomb threats, arson, hate crimes, and attacks on houses of worship—against religious communities at home and abroad. Whether we worship at a church, mosque, synagogue, or temple, America has no second-class faiths. All are equal under the U.S. Constitution. As Christians, we must speak in one voice condemning Christian nationalism as a distortion of the gospel of Jesus and a threat to American democracy. You can sign the statement at: https://www.christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org/statement.

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Notes

1. Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), approx. 350 pages. My thanks to Pieter Lechner for providing the funds to make this book available to Jerusalem Perspective. ↩
2. Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, 3. ↩
3. Ibid. ↩
4. Ibid., 32. ↩
5. Ibid. ↩
6. Ibid., 56-57. ↩
7. Ibid., 32, 152. ↩
8. Ibid., 145. ↩
9. Ibid. ↩
10. Ibid., 64. ↩
11. Ibid. ↩
12. Ibid., 3-4. ↩
13. Ibid., 90. ↩
14. Ibid., 16. ↩
15. Ibid., 65. ↩
16. Ibid., 66. ↩
17. Ibid., 109. ↩
18. Ibid., 145. ↩
19. Ibid., 106, 109. ↩
20. Ibid., 58-59. ↩
21. Ibid., 106. ↩
22. Ibid., 152. ↩
23. Ibid., 7. ↩
24. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” in No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes 1928-1936 from the Collected Works [of Dietrich Bonhoeffer] (ed. Edwin H. Robertson; trans. John Bowden; London: Collins; New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 217-225, esp. 221. ↩
25. Ibid., 222. ↩
26. Ibid., 223. ↩
27. Ibid., 223-224. ↩
28. Quotation from Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, 286. Heschel does not discuss Bonhoeffer’s 1933 essay. I chose to discuss Bonhoeffer in order to denigrate him, but to evaluate him honestly. In other respects I regard Dietrich Bonhoeffer with great admiration. ↩
29. Shmuel Safrai, “The Jewish Cultural Nature of Galilee in the First Century,” Jerusalem Perspective (2010) [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/4452/]. ↩
30. Randall Buth, “Language Use in the First Century: Spoken Hebrew in a Trilingual Society in the Time of Jesus,” Jerusalem Perspective (2026) [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/31004/]. ↩
31. David Flusser, “The Gospel of John’s Jewish-Christian Source,” Jerusalem Perspective (2015) [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/13826/]. ↩
32. R. Steven Notley, “Anti-Jewish Tendencies in the Synoptic Gospels,” Jerusalem Perspective 51 (1996): 20-35, 38 [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/2773/]. ↩
33. For a definition of Christian nationalism, see Amanda Tyler, How to End Christian Nationalism (Minneapolis: Broadleaf, 2024), 26-29. ↩
34. Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, 9. ↩
35. The comment was posted on X on March 9, 2026. See Barbara Sprunt, “House GOP leadership silent as more members post anti-Muslim statements,” National Public Radio (March 14, 2026): https://www.npr.org/2026/03/14/g-s1-113667/republicans-sharia-law-andy-ogles-mike-johnson. ↩
36. Ibid. ↩
37. According to Article 11 of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which was signed in Tripoli on November 4, 1796 and in Algiers on January 3, 1797 and ratified by the United States on June 10, 1797, the U.S. government officially acknowledged that “the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” See Hunter Miller, ed., Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America (8 vols.; Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1931-1948), 2:349-385, quotation on p. 365. ↩
38. The comment was posted on X—what a vile cesspit of hate speech X has become!—on March 12, 2026. See Brian Mann, “Mamdani Put Ramadan at the Center of NYC’s Cultural Life, Bringing Joy—And a Backlash,” National Public Radio (March 18, 2026): https://www.npr.org/2026/03/18/nx-s1-5751787/mamdani-put-ramadan-at-the-center-of-nycs-cultural-life-bringing-joy-and-a-backlash. ↩
39. Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” 221. ↩
40. Ibid. ↩