He then proceeded to expound the concept that had become a fixation with him: “Thee must acknowledge that Jesus Christ was himself a Jew. Living in Palestine under the hot sun, he was probably darker than many American Negroes. And his features could not have been the sweetly simple ones of our religious calendars. He was a Jew, and he doubtless looked much as thy tailor or doctor or professor looks today. If Jews have large noses, he had one. If they are swarthy, he was swarthy. If they talk with their hands, he did so too. During much of his life Jesus Christ was a Jewish rabbi, and if we forget this, we forget the nature of Christianity.” At

Jesus, with a view, no doubt, of sweetening the lot of his apostles, recommended compassion to the listening multitude, of which he, as well as his party, stood in the greatest need. It is readily perceived, that the messiah felt the most imperious necessity to preach charity to his auditors; for he lived on alms, and his success depended on the generosity of the public, and the benefactions of the good souls who hearkened to his lessons.

His [the Jewish person's] life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took to the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties — and this against their own nation.

After his encounter with Jesus, a real Christian changes his conduct.

Though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more. And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law; To them that are without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law. To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.

He prayed, 'Lord God, let us be the kind of Christians that you would be if you were a Christian'. ~ Ch. 24

From my early childhood Lucanus, or Luke, the great Apostle, has obsessed my mind. He was the only Apostle who was not a Jew. He never saw Christ. All that is written in his eloquent but restrained Gospel he acquired from hearsay, from witnesses, from the Mother of Christ, from disciples, and from the Apostles. His first visit to Israel took place almost a year after the Crucifixion. Yet he became one of the greatest of the Apostles. Like Saul of Tarsus, later to be known as Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, he believed that Our Lord came not only to the Jews but to the Gentiles, also. He had much in common with Paul, because Paul too had never seen the Christ. Each had had an individual revelation. These two men had difficulty with the original Apostles because the latter stubbornly believed for a considerable time that Our Lord was incarnated, and died, only for the salvation of the Jews, even after Pentecost. Why has St. Luke always obsessed me, and why have I always loved him from childhood? I do not know. I can only quote Friedrich Nietzsche on this matter: "One hears — one does not seek; one does not ask who gives — I have never had any choice about it."

inside every Christian is a Jew

My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became life-long companions. Through these friends I came to learn much of their age-long persecution. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close. Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them. Apart from the friendships, therefore, there is the more common universal reason for my sympathy for the Jews.... If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

I was born Jewish. I received the name of my paternal grandfather, Aaron. Having become Christian by faith and baptism, I have remained Jewish. As did the Apostles.

Christ, one of the great men of humanity, condemned Judah with the sharpest words. He cursed and damned their devilish goals. His whole life was an antisemitic struggle against Judah and its methods. The Jew Paul, born Saul, also called Schaul, transformed the honest, noble and elevated goals of the founder of the Christian religion into its very opposite, making them serve Jewish purposes. That may not dim the light of this great man of human history.

The remarkable thing about Jesus was that, although he came from the middle class and had no appreciable disadvantages himself, he mixed socially with the lowest of the low and identified himself with them. He became an outcast by choice. Why did Jesus do this? What would make a middle-class man talk to beggars and mix socially with the poor? What would make a prophet associate with the rabble who know nothing of the law? The answer comes across very clearly in the gospels: compassion.

...a demand was raised for the total separation of Judaism from Christianity, and for the complete elimination from Christianity of all Jewish elements... To-day these single voices have swelled together into a chorus : Away with the Old Testament! A Christianity which still clings to the Old Testament is a Jewish religion, irreconcilable with the spirit of the German people... Even the Person of Christ is not spared by this religious revolution. Some have indeed tried to save Him with a forged birth-certificate, and have said that He was not a Jew at all but an Aryan... But so long as historical, sources count for more than surmise, there can be no doubt about the fact. The first chapter of the first gospel gives us the genealogy of Jesus... And so others now take up the cry : Then we must renounce Him, if He was a Jew..."

The apostle Paul … was conscious of the new in his apprehension of the gospel over against the primitive Jewish-Christian Church, and based the right of his apostolic preaching not upon human tradition, but upon the revelation of the Spirit of Christ in his heart. ... The “Christ according to the Spirit,” as Paul preached him, was certainly not identical with the “Christ according to the flesh,” as he lived in the recollection of the Primitive Church. For Paul had stripped off the Jewish in this individual phenomenon, in order to bring forth and exalt as an object of faith to gentiles and Jews alike the universal religious principle alone. His Christ is the ideal Son of God, i.e. the personification of the religious idea as it lived in the soul of Jesus, of the love of God and men as it had been the impelling principle of his life-work.