Levitt Letter Extra News

By James Lewis
www.americanthinker.com

Every government action in Israel is the result of endless debates and committee negotiations. The current punitive campaign against Hamas in Gaza has so many military and political levels that it seems like Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But the one thing it will not do is wipe out radical Islamist control of Gaza.

That does not mean the pinpoint attacks on Hamas are useless. But consider a simple number: Hamas is estimated to have 15,000 trained gunmen in Gaza. Another 5,000 belong to other radical jihadist groups. The Second Lebanon War showed that Hezbollah, a deeply dug-in Iran-type militia, which glorifies death to its people from childhood onward, cannot be wiped out by air attacks alone. Such wars require costly boots on the ground, and plenty of time and patience to clear every bunker, every tunnel and every house. That basic military fact has not changed since the Civil War, World War I and the US Marines at Okinawa. It has always been immensely costly in lives.

To drive Hamas out of Gaza Israel would therefore have to put at risk enough infantry and armor to uproot 20,000 deeply bunkered Iran-trained, suicidal defenders, much like the Imperial Japanese in World War II. It cannot afford to do that strategically, because Gaza is only one out of four dangerous fronts — Syria, Hezbollah and Iran are all potentially more dangerous. You don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Further, Israel cannot afford to put thousands of lives at risk in an optional war, because it is a democracy and its army is one of the last citizens’ armies left in the world.

Finally, the timing of this punitive campaign suggests at least three political layers, all of which happen to coincide at this particular moment in time. No political or military benefits would accrue if thousands of IDF soldiers were put into the meat grinder of dug-in Hamas bunkers, in combat situations where the defense always has the edge.

All that suggests that the Gaza action will be a long-distance campaign, using air and artillery, along with some armored and special forces strikes, all ending before January 20 — the inauguration date of the next US president. The president-elect has been conspicuously silent so far, and the Bush White House has actively accused Hamas of sabotaging peace negotiations — which is obviously true. It looks like a tacit agreement between the US and Israel to allow a period of punitive strikes against the most radical Palestinian die-hards in power.

Here are some of the apparent calculations.

The US-Israel connection

The United States accepts Israel’s right to strike back under international law, after many months of passivity in the face of primitive but still lethal missile attacks on the little town of Sderot and its surrounding areas. Kassam and Grad rockets look like minor news only if you’re not in the line of fire. No nation can accept constant harassing missile strikes on its civilian population from a sworn genocidal enemy, in a decades-long war of endurance. A ‘proportional response,’ as recommended by the fat and secure busybodies at the UN and the world media, has never led to peace with a fanatical enemy, who is ready to sacrifice thousands of civilians and gunmen just for propaganda advantage.

In the last few years the Bush Administration has held out high hopes for peace negotiations, based in good part on Saudi and Arab League gestures toward Israel, and the shared danger of Iran, which threatens the Arab world as much as it does the Jewish State. That hope for a comprehensive peace agreement has not been realized, and Israel is essentially re-asserting its right to self-defense, as it has no doubt told the US it must do at some point.

The incoming Obama Administration can point out that it is not yet in charge of foreign policy. The die-hard jihadis in Gaza are being punished, and every sane person in the Arab world understands that. Many secretly approve. They have seen what Al Qaida does in Iraq. That fact may strengthen the hand of the Hillary-Obama State Department next year. But nobody really believes this campaign will defeat the jihadi die-hards in a final and conclusive way.

The Israel-Palestinian connection

Israel’s policy is always to strengthen Palestinian “moderates,” those who are willing to postpone their genocidal hopes to a remoter future. That means the Fatah organization run by Mahmoud Abbas and his fabled corruptocracy on the West Bank, which would dearly love to overthrow Hamas in Gaza. Abbas is leaving office soon, and the next prime minister of the PA will be strengthened vis-a-vis the radicals by the IDF campaign. The Gaza campaign therefore fits the Fatah agenda as well. Whether it will end up strengthening the pragmatists is anybody’s guess.

The Iranian threat

Since 1979 the IDF has viewed Iran as its biggest military challenge, and has constantly built up means to face a fanatical Iran with long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction. That moment of truth will come in the next US administration. By importing Clintonistas into the State Department, the US is at least aware of that reality. By now Obama must be fully briefed on the state of Iran’s nuclear program, perhaps even with Russian intelligence information. (The Russians want to sell dangerous stuff to Iran, but they don’t want a nuclear maniac regime next door. Russia and Eastern Europe have long been a barrier against jihadi fanatics, including the Chechnyans whom the Russians brutally repressed. So Putin will try to play both sides, and hope that somebody else will neutralize the Iranian threat. Briefing Obama about the reality of Iran’s nuclear program would serve Putin’s purposes.)

Bottom line: mullahs with nukes are a lethal threat to everybody. What we are seeing in Gaza, and two years ago in Lebanon, were proxy campaigns designed to scare and if possible neutralize a dangerous local enemy in order to face the genocidal strategic enemy if push comes to shove. Like any skilled military force, the IDF is constantly probing its opponents to assess strengths and weaknesses.

Gaza is therefore a test-bed for lessons learned after the Second Lebanon War. If IDF probes reveal weaknesses in the Iranian-style Hamas defenses, they will push and push and push until they meet a hard wall. Then they will add up lessons learned, and apply them wherever Israel (and US armed forces) might confront Iranian military tactics. Even the bunker-penetrating bombs being used by the IAF in Gaza today originally were made by the US Air Force, to hit deeply bunkered positions in Iraq while minimizing civilian casualties. Iran’s bunkered nuclear installations may fit the Gaza and Hezbollah pattern as well.

The domestic Israeli connection

The Obama Administration wants a Leftist prime minister in Israel, someone who is pliable and willing to make major territorial concessions to the Palestinian Authority. That means either Ehud Barak, who led the retreat from Lebanon in 1992, or Tzipi Livni. They represent two parties of the Left, which could form a majority coalition in the Knesseth. One reason why the punitive Gaza strikes are taking place right now is that Obama and Hillary don’t want a Bibi Netanyahu right-of-center coalition. The Gaza campaign will strengthen the Left in Israel, or that is at least the calculation.

The kicker in all the political and military calculations

Both the US and Israel have been engaged in a truly painful learning curve against Iran and its proxies. Chances are that the IDF is more effective today against Hamas fortifications than it was in 2006 against similar Hezbollah bunkers and tunnels. But the enemy always gets a vote, and no rational military can risk over-confidence. That is why rational military campaigns perform “reconnaissance in force” at many levels.

The big unknown is the outcome of this punitive campaign, both politically and militarily. Already it seems that Ehud Barak is promising more than the IDF is likely to achieve, “a war to the bitter end.” Such a war would be foolish, in view of the fact that the real strategic enemy is not in Gaza but in Tehran. Barak’s apparent overstatement is justifiable as strategic disinformation to confuse the enemy, forcing Hamas to keep men and materiel in reserve for a prolonged ground attack. But it also raises the possibility of a major disappointment among Israel’s voters, as occurred after the 2006 Hezbollah campaign.

If the Israeli public is disillusioned by the Gaza campaign, it may vote Netanyahu into power rather than the Left. In that case, the Obama Administration may have a harder time trying to arm-twist Israel into making big territorial concessions.

This is a political-military campaign. That is not inherently wrong, since it is defensive in nature, it demonstrates the lawful will of a democratic nation to defend itself in the face of endless (if rather random) missile strikes against its civilian population, and it will kill some of the Hamas leadership and force the rest to hunker down. The Gaza campaign has already destroyed many of the visible symbols of Hamas pride and show. It might strengthen more pragmatic Palestinian factions enough to enable them to make a public deal with Israel — at a hefty price — in the next few years.

In the face of real danger to the civilized world from mad mullahs with nukes, it is to the advantage of sane nations to tamp down the fires of any other conflict that threatens to split the opposition to the mullahs. That may be an achievable goal. It will no doubt come under the glorious banner of Peace Eternal, hyped up by the PR team of Barack Obama and David Axelrod, with the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo doing the background jive and rhythm.

With real luck and sacrifice, we will see a period of greater stability — but as Michael Ledeen keeps pointing out, real safety for the entire world, including the US, the Middle East and Europe, can only come if the Black Widow Spider in Tehran can be defanged for good.

By Duke Helfand Los Angeles Times

Dr. Joel Kushner, left, and Rabbi Richard N. Levy unroll the Yanov Torah during a ceremony at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion near USC. The Torah survived the Holocaust by being cut into pieces, hidden during the war and reassembled afterward. photo credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times

During World War II, Jewish inmates of the Yanov labor camp in occupied Poland defied their Nazi guards, secretly conducting religious services inside their darkened barracks.

To observe their ritual, the Jews had cut religious scrolls into sections, bound the parchment pieces around their bodies, and walked them through Yanov’s front gate. They hid the fragments wherever they could—beneath the floorboards of their barracks, inside hollow bedposts, even in a camp cemetery.

After the camp’s liberation in 1945, one survivor collected the scattered pieces. He assembled them into a single ragged scroll, the Yanov Torah.

Three decades later, the Torah — its parchment warped and water-stained, its patchwork sheets held together by fraying threads — found its way to Los Angeles and into the hands of a leader of the city’s Reform Jewish community, Rabbi Erwin Herman, who devoted the final years of his life to telling its remarkable story.

Last November, Herman’s dying wish was fulfilled when a new generation of Jews celebrated the rebirth of the Yanov Torah.

Carrying the fragile scroll beneath a chuppah, or wedding canopy, Herman’s widow and grandson presented it to the rabbis and rabbinic students at the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion near USC. The students, in turn, will carry the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, to their internships at synagogues throughout California.

“The Yanov Torah is a true child of the Holocaust,” Agnes Herman, 86, told a gathering at the seminary campus. “A survivor.”

The hand-over came as Jews commemorated the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when Germans rampaged against their Jewish neighbors, destroying synagogues, businesses and homes, killing dozens and rounding up thousands for deportation to concentration camps.

Though worldwide audiences are marking the occasion in solemn tones, those who gathered at the seminary struck a joyous chord.

“This Torah is living evidence of people who fought the Nazis in the best way they knew how, which was through faith,” Rabbi Richard N. Levy, director of the School of Rabbinic Studies at the seminary’s Los Angeles campus, said in an interview. “Every time I read the story, and now talk about it, my eyes well up.”

The Yanov Torah might have been lost to history if not for a survivor of the camp, known only as Joseph. After the war, he remained in the nearby city of Lvov.

In 1975, as he was dying, Joseph gave the Torah to a young Jewish doctor, Naum Rit, and his wife, Emma, just weeks before the couple left for the United States. The meeting had been arranged by Naum Rit’s grandfather, who was a longtime friend of Joseph’s.

As the years passed, two versions of the story emerged.

One is told by Rit’s widow. Emma Rit-Uskali says she and her husband visited Joseph’s threadbare room and listened as the survivor recounted the Torah’s tale.

Joseph, she said, told how the Jews of Lvov had braced for their harsh life in the nearby camp by smuggling in sections of the holy text, hiding the pieces in Yanov’s cemetery. Joseph said he collected the Torah sections after the camp was liberated, reassembled them, and hid the piecemeal Torah under his wooden floorboards.

“He asked us to bring this Torah to the free world,” recalled Rit-Uskali, 61, who now lives in Las Vegas. (Naum Rit died in Los Angeles in 1993.)

The Rits, nonobservant Jews who had never seen a Torah, agreed to take the 17-pound scroll from Joseph. When the couple arrived in Los Angeles in 1976, they spoke little English and desperately needed money to feed their two children. So Naum Rit decided to sell the only thing of value he had.

It’s unclear how Rit found Herman, the Reform rabbi. But one day, Rit appeared at the rabbi’s North Hollywood office.

“You buy my Torah,” Rit said in broken English. He related its story with the help of Herman’s secretary, who spoke Yiddish.

Retelling the story
The rabbi and his wife, Agnes, recalled the exchange in a book they later wrote based on the conversation with Rit. That account, called “The Yanov Torah,” offers a variation of the story told by Rit’s wife.

According to the book, small groups of Jews from the Yanov work camp were allowed to return to Lvov for daylong leaves of absence granted by the Nazis for good behavior. Once in Lvov, they dug up Torahs that had been buried in the Jewish cemetery for safeguarding. The Jews cut the Torahs into pieces, binding the sections around their bodies and smuggling them into the camp.

After the war, one survivor, a tailor, collected the pieces and stitched them into a single scroll. Meanwhile, the handful of survivors who remained in Lvov made a pact. The oldest would care for the Torah, handing it to the next in line before each man died. The decades passed, until only one was left. He gave the fragile scroll to Rit, who later offered it to Rabbi Herman.

The rabbi at first declined to buy the Torah, protesting that it was priceless. But astounded by Rit’s story and eager to help him, Herman gave Rit a check for $250, emptying his bank account, and then located benefactors.

A Jewish couple gave $750, but with a request that Herman tell the story of the scroll, rather than leave it in a museum. Herman spent the next 30 years taking the Torah to audiences around the world. Everywhere he went, he unrolled the sacred text and encouraged people to touch it.

In February 2008, Herman died after a prolonged battle with cancer. Agnes Herman asked officials at the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College to honor her husband’s wish that rabbinic students pick up where he left off.

“It was like another child, and I had to make arrangements before I die,” said Herman, a freelance journalist and retired social worker. “I’m almost 87 years old. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here. I want this to continue to live.”

During the ceremony at the college, Herman recounted the Torah’s story one more time. Then, rabbinic students removed the scroll from a hand-sewn cover marked with a faded Star of David and unfurled it, displaying its script written by different hands.

After 100 guests recited morning prayers and the Torah was placed back in its cover, a faculty member cradled it and joyously carried it around the room.

One student, who will share the Torah with congregants at University Synagogue by UCLA, spoke of his own faith being strengthened by the sacrifices of the Yanov inmates.

As the ceremony drew to a close, Herman rose quietly from her seat, approached the scroll, touched it, and kissed her hand, marking the beginning of yet another step in its long journey.

Comment from Dry Bones cartoonist, Yaakov Kirschen:

Today’s Golden Oldie is from December 1978.
Golda Meir, Israel’s tough grandmother of a Prime Minister passed away exactly 30 years ago this month. I drew a Yahrzeit Candle. Yahrzeit is Yiddish for Yearly Time and a Yahrzeit Candle is lit to mark the anniversary of the death of a loved one.
When I was a kid Yahrzeit Candles were encased in heavy weight drinking glasses (like the one in the cartoon) …which, after they had served their solemn purpose, were indeed added to the household’s supply of drinking glasses.
* * *
I posted this cartoon because thirty years since the passing of Golda is a milestone in our history, or so it seems to me.

As you read the short article below, ask yourself what the would be said if the “Chairman of the Society of Christian Lawyers” publicly proclaimed that Ramadan is “evil” and a “pathway to hellfire.”

Remember, the Muslim lawyer who branded Christmas “evil” is not just any Muslim, but the Chairman of the Society of Muslim lawyers. Note also that he is the Principal Lecturer at the London School of Sharia. These are the kinds of people American financial institutions are affiliating with when they offer sharia-compliant financial products.

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Muslim lawyer Anjem Choudary brands Christmas ‘evil’
By Murray Wardrop The Daily Telegraph (London)
www.telegraph.co.uk

Muslim preacher Anjem Choudary has branded Christmas “evil” in a sermon posted on the Internet.

Choudary said Christmas was “the pathway to hellfire.” Photo: PA

The lawyer, who recently praised the Mumbai terror attacks, urged all Muslims to reject traditional Christmas celebrations, claiming that they are forbidden by Allah.

The 41-year-old shocked Christians and even those of his own faith by branding yuletide festivities as “the pathway to hellfire”.

Choudary, who is chairman of the Society of Muslim Lawyers, ruled out all celebrations, including having a Christmas tree, decorating the house or eating turkey.

In the sermon posted on an Islamic website, he said: “In the world today many Muslims, especially those residing in western countries, are exposed to the evil celebration Christmas.

“Many take part in the festival celebrations by having Christmas turkey dinners.

“Decorating the house, purchasing Christmas trees or having Christmas turkey meals are completely prohibited by Allah.

“Many still practise this corrupt celebration as a remembrance of the birth of Jesus.

“How can a Muslim possibly approve or participate in such a practice that bases itself on the notion Allah has an offspring?

“The very concept of Christmas contradicts and conflicts with the foundation of Islam.

“Every Muslim has a responsibility to protect his family from the misguidance of Christmas, because its observance will lead to hellfire. Protect your Paradise from being taken away – protect yourself and your family from Christmas.”

Choudary is Principal Lecturer at the London School of Shari’ah and a follower of the Islamist militant leader Omar Bakri Mohammed.

Earlier this year, he led a meeting at the heart of the area where the liquid bombers lived, which warned of a British September 11.

www.dailymail.co.uk

The Jewish mother murdered in the brutal Mumbai terror attacks last week was six month pregnant, her father revealed today at her funeral.

And Rivkah Holtzberg’s two-year-old son, Moshe, may have been beaten by the militants, reports have claimed.

His back was covered in bruises consistent with abuse, the chairman of Zaka, Israel’s ultraorthodox recovery service, told Sky News.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men attend the funeral procession of Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, and his wife Rivkah, 28, killed in the Mumbai Jewish center attack.

Moshe Holtzberg, the couple’s two-year-old son, cried repeatedly for his mother during a memorial service in Mumbai yesterday.

Moshe’s grandfather revealed that his daughter Rivkah had been six months pregnant as he gave a eulogy at her funeral. Rivka and her husband Gabi were buried in Israel along with four other victims of the attacks.

Throngs of mourners today packed the funerals of the six victims, turning the narrow alleys of one Jerusalem neighborhood into a sea of black coats and hats.

A huge crowd gathered outside the red-brick Israeli headquarters of the Chabad movement, whose emissary to Mumbai, Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, was murdered along with his 28-year-old wife, Rivkah.

Those in attendance included President Shimon Peres and a slew of other dignitaries.
Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, a Chabad official from New York, delivered an impassioned eulogy, describing the young couple as dedicated people who would stop at nothing to help a fellow Jew.

Israelis have begun burying the six Jews killed in the Mumbai murder spree, including American Leibish Teitelbaum, 38, whose body above was buried.

The religious Mea Shearim neighbourhood of Jerusalem was the scene of wailing and chanting as thousands of people bid a final farewell today to the six Jews killed in last week’s bloody Mumbai attacks.

‘We will answer the terrorists,’ he vowed, his voice shaking. ‘We will not fight them with AK47s. We will not fight them with grenades. We will not fight them with tanks.

‘We will fight them with torches!’ he cried, referring to God’s teachings.
He pledged to rebuild the Mumbai centre and name it after the Holtzbergs. Chabad operates thousands of such outreach centers around the world.

Addressing the crowd, Peres called on the world to unite in the fight against terrorism. He singled out Iran, which supports anti-Israel militant groups and whose president has called for Israel’s destruction.

‘If the entire world doesn’t join together as one man and say ‘enough!,’ then the world is in danger. This is a plague that is difficult to stop,’ he said.

Grief: Ultra-Orthodox mourners sit behind the bodies of Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, right, and his wife Rivkah, 28, left, killed in the Mumbai Jewish centre attack, during their funeral procession in Israel today.

Religious Jewish women grieve during the funeral service Holtzberg’s funeral service.

The Holtzbergs’ bodies – hers wrapped in a shroud, his in a prayer shawl – rested on chairs on the dais where the eulogies and prayers were delivered.

There are already fears that Moshe witnessed his parents’ murder after he was found by his nanny crying next to their bodies, covered in blood.

She dashed him to safety before commandos launched an attack on the Jewish house in which the terrorists were holding the family hostage last week.

In an emotional scene before the flight to Israel yesterday, Moshe repeatedly cried for his mother at a tearful memorial ceremony at a Mumbai synagogue. The scene was broadcast repeatedly on Israeli TV stations.

‘You don’t have a mother who will hug you and kiss you,’ Rabbi Kotlarsky cried out during a eulogy that switched back and forth between Hebrew and English. But the community will take care of the boy, he vowed: ‘You are the child of all of Israel.’

The area became a sea of black hats and coats as ultra-Orthodox men followed the service.

Mourners pray over the bodies of the Holtzbergs.

Moshe has not slept in four days, the rabbi who found his father’s body told The Times. Now, the nanny – Sandra Samuel – is the only person that Moshe responds to. his family told Sky News.

Yesterday she and Moshe flew to Israel on the same plane that was carrying his parents’ bodies. His family have asked her to stay and live in Israel as they struggle to come to terms with the trauma of the attack.

In addition to Peres, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s two chief rabbis were among the thousands who attended the nationally televised ceremony.

Most of the people who came were bearded men in the black suits and black fedoras of Chabad members. Women gathered behind a yellow metal partition, in accordance with the Jewish custom of separating the sexes during prayer.

The Holtzbergs on their wedding day in 2002. They were expecting their second child, Mrs Holtzberg’s father said today.

The grimness of the funerals was deepened by the conviction that the victims were struck because of their religion.

‘It’s a very difficult feeling because we know this was targeted against us,’ said Eliahu Tzadok, 41, who attended the funeral of another victim, 38-year-old Leibish Teitelbaum, in Jerusalem.

‘It’s a continuation of acts against the Jewish people when the Jewish people did nothing to deserve it.’

Teitelbaum, a U.S. citizen who lived in Jerusalem, was in Mumbai last week supervising the preparation of kosher food.

Several thousand ultra-Orthodox mourners, most of them bearded men with sidecurls garbed in long black coats and black hats, packed the main square, narrow alleys and rooftops of Mea Shearim, a large religious neighborhood in Jerusalem, for his funeral.

The bloody scene inside the Mumbai house after the failed rescue attempt by commandos last week.

Moshe Holtzberg is held by his nanny Sandra Samuel as she and his grand parents, Yehodit and Shimon Rosenberg, arrive at Mumbai airport on their way to Israel.

Death notices plastered the neighborhood’s billboards and walls, reading ‘May God avenge them.’ Loudspeakers blazed with the sounds of weeping, wailing mourners reciting prayers from the Book of Psalms.

Teitelbaum belonged to a prominent family in the small, ultra-Orthodox Satmar sect, which is ideologically opposed to the state of Israel.

His family informed the Israeli government that they wanted no state involvement or symbols at his funeral, an official in the government ministry in charge of state ceremonies said Monday.

But when Teitelbaum’s casket was taken off the plane from Mumbai, it was draped with an Israeli flag.

Shmuel Poppenheim, who studied with Teitelbaum in his youth, told Israel Radio that ‘disturbed his family very much.’ There were no Israeli flags or government representatives at the funeral.

A fourth victim, 50-year-old Norma Shvarzblat Rabinovich of Mexico, had planned to immigrate to Israel to join two of her children who had already moved here.

She had spent the past few months touring India, and had planned to fly from Mumbai to Israel on Monday – the 18th birthday of her son, Manuel – before she was killed, according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry Web site.

The two other victims were Yocheved Orpaz, 60, who had been traveling in India with a daughter and grandchildren, and Bentzion Chroman, 28, who like Teitelbaum, was a supervisor of kosher food.

By Albert Mohler
President, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Just in time for Christmas and Easter, the major news media regularly present magazine cover stories and prime-time television events that focus on the historical questions concerning the birth of Jesus Christ and the theological issues central to Christianity.

Like clockwork, the programs and articles appear — often following a predictable pattern. A question related to a Christian claim is raised and a panel of experts is asked to respond. This panel most often ranges across the theological spectrum, providing the appearance (and sometimes the reality) of a fair consideration. These are secular news magazines and networks, after all. The supposed interest of the media lies in the current relevance of the issues and the impact of these beliefs upon the world. We should not expect the secular media to serve as evangelists for the Christian Gospel. We are right to expect that the media should be fair in their consideration of these subjects.

Fairness does not mean that evangelicals should not expect to see non-evangelical and non-Christian viewpoints expressed. Liberal theologians and biblical scholars are to be expected among the sources cited or consulted. Fairness does suggest that the orthodox position and a representation of evangelical conviction should be present as well.

For the past two years, CNN has presented a major news production as “CNN Presents: After Jesus.” Narrated by actor Liam Neeson, the special program was described as an investigation of “how the earliest Christians spread their message, despite infighting over the faith and violent persecution by Rome.”

From the CNN Pressroom release:

Immediately following Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the first Christians were challenged to define their faith. Two of Jesus’ disciples – Peter, who preached that the followers of Jesus had to be Jewish, and Paul who argued that this new faith must be available to all – would emerge as Christianity’s first and most influential leaders. Their eventual consensus, that Christianity would be available to all through conversion, and their missionary zeal throughout the Roman Empire, helped the new faith to spread rapidly. But Christianity’s growing power was also a threat to the empire, so the Romans killed Peter and Paul and other early leaders. Christians were so brutally persecuted that Christianity’s survival was repeatedly in danger. That Christianity eventually became the world’s largest religion is perhaps the faith’s second biggest miracle.

In all, that paragraph is a good summary of the facts and the central question — how did Christianity grow from a band of frightened followers of Jesus into a world-changing force?

CNN described its program as “the story behind the greatest story ever told.” Mark Nelson of CNN explained: “The fundamental themes of challenge and resolution, power and struggle that we explore continue to be relevant in modern times.” So far, so good.

The teaser is found in this paragraph:

In telling this remarkable tale, viewers may be surprised to learn that followers of some early branches of Christianity believed in more than one god; that there were many more Gospels than those included in the New Testament; and that Christmas was originally a springtime celebration. There was also a group of Christians – the Gnostics – who believed that man’s existence on Earth was a mistake and that salvation required a mystical experience of self-discovery and self-realization. They wrote their own Gospels, and their power struggle with the orthodox Christians was a threat to the new faith.

That paragraph should stand as a reminder that theology and scholarship are not well reduced to press releases. In this case the teaser is indeed a tease.

The related press materials available at CNN’s Web site were a source of evangelical concern. The panelists chosen by CNN did not include an evangelical theologian, historian, or New Testament scholar. The network claimed to have consulted “the most renowned authorities on the ancient church,” but no evangelical scholar appeared. Given the issues and questions covered by the program, a fair observer would wonder about the absence of any scholar like Darrell Bock, D. A. Carson, or Bishop N. T. Wright — all of whom have internationally established reputations for scholarship in these areas — and with extensive published engagement with these issues. None is a stranger to the media.

Instead, the authorities featured on the program included, among others, figures like Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament who teaches at Vanderbilt Divinity School; Judith Lieu, who teaches New Testament at King’s College London; Rabbi Richard Freund of the Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford; and Marvin Meyer, a specialist on Gnostic texts who teaches at Chapman University.

Most notable among the panelists was Bart Ehrman, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has published several books that cast doubt upon the New Testament canon and reject Christian orthodoxy. Ehrman, a former evangelical, often appears in the media as an opponent of evangelical faith. Yet, to his credit, Ehrman often criticizes the worst arguments of the skeptics as well.

Why no evangelical scholar? Only CNN can answer that question.

Nevertheless, when the entire program is reviewed, I would judge the project to be more evenhanded and responsible than I had first expected. My main criticisms would have to do with some of the claims made in the program and especially with the teasers used for the program as a whole and its individual segments.

The production was visually engaging, fast-paced, and respectful in tone. Liam Neeson brought his vocal skills and theatrical experience to the narration.

The program began with good historical background material. The context of the Roman Empire in the first century, the political unrest and Messianic expectation of Jerusalem, and so on. The problems emerge when the program explains Jesus and His mission. As Neeson narrates:

Into this powder keg walks Jesus of Nazareth. His protests against the Romans make Him a popular hero. To some, He is the Messiah. But to the Romans, He is political trouble. So they crucify Him.

This is just not an accurate representation of the events and the New Testament Texts. Where in the New Testament is Jesus portrayed as leading “protests against the Romans?” Nowhere. The program blames the Romans alone for the crucifixion of Jesus, studiously avoiding any suggestion that the Jews rejected Jesus and demanded His crucifixion. The program is left with an account that is politically correct but demonstrates little resemblance to the New Testament. Pilate, you might remember, is presented in the New Testament as very reluctant to crucify Jesus. Political correctness simply trumped historical accuracy.

The program’s treatment of the earliest experiences of the church and the first Christians contains much good and even fascinating material.

So the problem is not in the belief that Jesus is the Messiah. The problem is when the belief is moving from Messiah to a kind of deified Messiah and as this begins to be understood by the Jews, then opposition to this movement is no longer a political thing. It’s a very strong religious thing.

The problem with this statement is the fact that it presses the recognition of the deity of Christ to a later development after The Resurrection. The New Testament claims that it was Jesus’ claims to deity that were, at least in part, what led some Jews to demand His crucifixion.

Neeson does a good job of explaining the transformation of Saul, the persecutor of the Church, into Paul, the Apostle to the gentiles. “Saul of Tarsus, who never met Jesus in the flesh, never traveled or supped with Him, and who wanted to kill His followers, becomes the greatest defender of the Jesus faith, known to the world by the Greek version of his name, Paul.” Further: “People listened to Paul because he was the perfect man for the job, able to speak to both Jews and gentiles in their own languages.”

The program also provided a rather fair explanation of the roles played by the Apostles James, Peter, and Paul. The Jerusalem Council is presented as the “first Apostolic Council” and Professor Levine rightly explains:

Paul argues that the Holy Spirit had descended upon the gentiles apart from the Law of Moses. Therefore, there was no reason to insist that those gentiles be converted first to Judaism in order to be a member of the Church, and James, the brother of Jesus, presiding over this Jerusalem Council, agrees with Paul.

Levine, a Jewish professor of New Testament studies, also offers keen insight into the mission of the Apostle Paul:

I can picture him just trying to convert the entire Praetorian Guard. The early Christians, particularly the Evangelists, the Apostles, were politically problematic. They were proclaiming a son of God, a god from God, a savior, but those happened to be titles that the Roman Emperor arrogated to himself.

The program presents the next great crisis of the faith as the deaths of James, Peter, and Paul. This argument has significant theological and historical merit. Interestingly, the program assumes the traditional (but non-scriptural) explanations of the deaths of James and Peter. It is clear from the New Testament that James was executed in Jerusalem and that Peter was martyred as well, most likely in Rome. However, the specifics ascribed in the program to the martyrdom of James are from only two historical sources (Josephus and Hegesippus as cited by Eusebius), and the upside-down crucifixion of Peter is likewise attributed only to later tradition.

What makes these observations relevant is the fact that so many authorities seem willing to accept such details on scant evidence when they often cast doubt upon the much more substantial evidence offered in the New Testament Text.

The program also did well in describing the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (the great crisis of Judaism) and the rise of Roman persecution of the Christians.

The portion of the program perhaps most vulnerable to controversy had to do with the emergence of the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) as the authoritative historical texts concerning the life and ministry of Jesus.

Neeson points to the controversies in this statement: “At the end of the first century, Christian leaders decided they needed a new holy scripture. They started writing down what Jesus had said and done. And now Christianity would take a new direction, a religion based on the word of the written gospels, a religion that would guide them far into an uncertain future.”

Further:

The core of Christian belief is the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, as told in the four gospels, the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, named after the evangelists said to have written them.

At this point Bart Ehrman appears to make this claim:

I think most people imagine that after Jesus died, the Church just emerged suddenly and that you had Christians confessing the Nicene Creed, reading the canon of the 27 books of the New Testament, and that it was all in place right after Jesus’ death. And, in fact, it took centuries for these things to fall into place.

Fair enough. It did take centuries for all that to “fall into place.” But the insinuation of the program is that Christianity was in tremendous flux at this time. Interestingly, the authorities cited in the program take the view that the Gospels were all written before the end of the first century — a fact well established in modern scholarship but denied by many liberal scholars just a few decades ago.

The program then turned to the conflict of early Christianity with Gnosticism. Neeson dramatically narrated that “By the start of the second century, Christianity was at a crossroads.”

Further:

After the crucifixion of Jesus, around 30 A.D., the New Testament recounts how the faith He started took on a new life. Inspired by the leadership of the Apostles Peter and Paul, the message of the resurrected Jesus spread into the heart of the Roman Empire. But success brought persecution and death. As Christianity’s early leaders began to die out, it was critical to keep the story of Jesus alive. So, they compiled sacred books about His life, what we know today as the New Testament. But to the south, in the desert sands of Egypt, a group of Christian monks and mystics were writing their own gospels with a very different version of the life of Jesus, one that launched a battle for the very heart of Christianity. Of all the threats to Christianity over the past 2,000 years, perhaps the greatest came in 1945, near the village of Nag Hammadi in southern Egypt, where the waters of the Nile dry up into desert sands.

This is hyperbole made for television. The Christian faith was hardly shaken by the discovery of Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi. Gnosticism is a perennial heresy and a powerful competitor to orthodox Christianity in the early centuries of the Church. But the undeniable fact, left unacknowledged by many current controversialists and popularizers, is that the Church effectively denounced the Gnostics and their texts.

The program presented the core beliefs of the Gnostics fairly well. Professor Meyer explained:

The word “Gnostic” comes from the Greek “gnosis,” which means knowledge, but it’s not the kind of knowledge that you simply get out of books, but, rather, it is mystical knowledge. It is insight into the true nature of — of who you are, and what is your relationship to God, and is there an essence, a spark, a bit of the light of God within your own self.

Neeson rightly commented: “The Gnostic message was very seductive: a mix of Greek philosophy, Egyptian religion, and Eastern mysticism, all very contemporary in its spirituality.”

Meyer pointed right to the key distinction between the canonical Gospels and the Gnostic texts:

The New Testament Gospels are gospels of the cross. The Gnostic gospels are gospels of wisdom. The New Testament Gospels care about salvation from sin. The Gnostic gospels care about salvation from ignorance. The New Testament Gospels look to stimulate faith. The Gnostic gospels look to stimulate knowledge and insight.

That statement is worth filing away for future use. He got it just right.

The program was less sure-footed when it tried to present Gnostic variants as more friendly to feminist concerns. Meyer claimed: “It was the Gnostics that thought that the role of the female as an image and the role of women within the Church should be advanced, so that God is not only male; God is also female. There are not only male leaders; there are female leaders. There are not only male priests; there are female priests. And, in this way, there is a kind of gender balance found in these texts.”

Well, as long as you look at the texts that fit that characterization. Neeson quickly commented: “That balance is not found in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, where Peter asks Jesus to send Mary Magdalene on her way, for women aren’t worthy of apostolic life.” Ehrman further explains: “And Jesus replies, “Leave her alone, for I shall make her a male, for every woman who becomes a male will enter the kingdom of God.” That statement will not go over well where feminist theologians gather. It is also a rejection of New Testament Christianity. As Ehrman notes, “This isn’t a very liberating view of women, and not one I think that people probably want to latch on to today.”

The panelists helpfully rejected the most hysterical suggestions of recent days, including the claim popularized by The DaVinci Code that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children with her. Further, Neeson also noted: “Perhaps the biggest problem with the Gnostic gospels is that they were written decades, and even centuries, after the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. For some historians, that passage of time raises serious questions of authenticity.” Indeed.

In the end, the program was more fair than the advertising materials would have indicated. The most ideological portion of the program came when claims were presented to the effect that early Christianity was “completely egalitarian.” This is irresponsible. It is not true to the Gospels, much less to the remainder of the New Testament. The program insinuated or claimed that the development of Church offices, the restriction of the teaching office to men, and the development of the New Testament canon were basically due to political concerns rather than theological imperatives.

Finally, the program attempted to explain the transformation of Christianity from a movement oppressed to the point of martyrdom by Rome into a faith officially recognized by the Emperor. In the course of this consideration, the program turned to the Council of Nicea, called by the authority of Emperor Constantine in 325. The program got the theological judgment right, but confused the context.

Neeson explained:

In the year 325 AD, Constantine called the world’s bishops to the small town of Nicea outside the imperial city of Byzantium to grapple with the essence of Christian belief. . . . And the heart of the Nicene Creed and Christian faith is the Jesus was both God and man.

Ehrman commented:

The Council of Nicea was not called in order to decide whether Jesus was divine. It was called in order to decide in what way is Jesus divine. Is Jesus a secondary deity, a subordinate deity or, in fact, is He equal with God the Father. And the side that won out was the side that declared that Jesus was equal with God the Father, that He had always been God.

Further:

Constantine declared Christianity a legal religion and he stopped the persecution. But it’s not correct to say that Constantine made Christianity the official Roman religion. In fact, he didn’t make it the official religion. He did make it a favored religion and he started giving lands to Christian bishops and supplying funds for the building of churches and so forth. This made it a very popular thing to become a Christian, especially to become a Christian leader. So from going from being a persecuted small sect, it turned into an important religion that was favored by the emperor.

The program concluded by repeating the current claim that early Christianity was a diversity of belief systems and conceptions of the faith. The point of all that was made clear by Meyer’s claim: “The struggle regarding orthodoxy and heresy never comes to an end and these battles about truth and inclusion and exclusion are with us to the present day.”

To this day, yes. But this does not mean that there is no recognized orthodoxy – no standard and classical expression of the Christian faith. That standard was already in view when Jude instructed the Church to contend for the faith – the faith once for all delivered to the Church.

Programs like “After Jesus” can cause some Christians to wonder about the very foundations of the faith. But, in the beginning and in the end, the Church must learn to trust the New Testament as the only authority for defining Christian faith and practice. The discovery and publication of “other gospels” should only serve to remind Christians of how thankful we must be for the four New Testament Gospels given by divine inspiration to the Church.

Christians should not be shaken by the recognition that centuries of development stand between, for example, the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry and the adoption of the Nicene Creed, along with the canonization of the New Testament. The orthodox faith was already defended and the truth about Jesus Christ was already confessed long before the Council of Nicea. Indeed, even as the New Testament books were already recognized, the true Gospel was already defended.

Christianity has nothing to fear from an honest investigation of the facts. Next time, let’s hope that CNN invites some Evangelical scholars to join their team of authorities.

But remember this – it is not the job of CNN to defend the Christian faith and share the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That is the job of the Church. Let’s get to it.