THY KINGDOM COME: ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN
O ye Millerites, ye made a great mistake; you thought the first thing was the coming of the Lord in power and great glory; you were going to have him come immediately, without any kingdom to come to.
Many have thought that all will believe in the revelations of the Lord Jesus Christ when the kingdom of God is fully established; but they will not; and if those characters were in heaven, they might believe, but would not obey the revelations of Jesus Christ…. The kingdom of God will grow out of this Church and the time appears to have been hastened faster than we anticipated. This is the best time we ever saw. We are happy, and we make a heaven of every place to which we go, which is the reason we are happy.
FIGURE 40 Arnold Friberg, Helaman Leads an Army of 2,000 Ammonite Youths
The Book of Mormon, large ed. (1957; reprint, Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1966).
THE HISTORY OF THE Christian Church, its remarkable rise from the ashes of Roman intolerance and growth in the years before and after Constantine’s conversion, may have much to do with what one scholar calls “The Apocalyptic Vision and Its Transformation.”1 Primitive Christians chanted maranatha, “Come Lord, come!” Jesus repeatedly said, “The kingdom of God is at hand,” and his miracles signaled the nearness of that kingdom. Ascending into heaven, he promised to return in glory before the present generation should pass away.
The Parousia, or Second Coming, did not occur when or how early Christians imagined. An eschatological adjustment is detectable in Paul’s letters. In his first letter to the Thessalonians, for example, Christ’s coming is said to take place in the apostle’s lifetime (1 Thess. 4:13–17). However, by the time he wrote Philippians, his enthusiasm had cooled considerably (Phil. 1:19–25). The Gospels themselves proffer several possible and indeed competing scenarios, none of which are unequivocally apocalyptic. Jesus does not prognosticate the time of the end with any real precision. Luke and Acts, more than Mark and Matthew, ease the sense of urgency: Jesus sits at the right hand of God while the church he established redeems the world (Luke 24:51 and Acts 2:33, 3:20–21). The Fourth Gospel, more than Luke and Acts, lessens apocalyptic exigency, diverting attention away from future fulfillment to the realm of the inward and personal. The inner life of the sinner is the seat of divine government in John.2 The Pastorals, the author of 2 Peter, in particular, justify the seeming delay, rationalizing that a day to God is a thousand years to mankind and thus what seems long to the one is truly brief in the larger cosmological scheme of things (2 Peter 3:8–10). Yet the revelation ascribed to St. John (undoubtedly penned by rogue disciples with a revisionist apocalyptic agenda) propounds a chiliastic vision of political and communal conquest, not religious and individual mastery,3 compounding the problem since its millenarian predictions do not come to pass. A truant Christ returns bodily in the Eucharist in the nick of time—a suspension and fulfillment of millennial hope.
The early petition “Come Lord, come! And may the world pass away” would, given enough time, inexorably become a prayer “for the Caesars, for their ministers, and for all who are in high positions; for the commonwealth of the world; for the prevalence of peace,” and, perhaps most important of all, “for the delay of the end.”4 Augustine saw what really lay ahead, reinterpreting Revelation 20 and the millennial kingdom of God as the first thousand years of the Christian Church, its mission being simply a campaign to help individuals remain unsullied by this present world. He meant Christ no injury, merely putting off the final judgment and resurrection of the dead both great and small until the very end, giving humankind a little more time in which to prepare. At that time, the church appeared to be losing its battle with a wicked world. Conceding defeat without proclaiming the other side victorious might be scriptural after all (with just a little teasing).
Christian eschatology, Jaroslav Pelikan explains, is a dialectic. “If the teachings of the early church and of Jesus could simply be described as consistent eschatology, we could then trace the decline of such an eschatology,” he writes, “as the primary factor in the establishment both of ecclesiastical structures and of dogmatic norms. Neither primitive Christianity nor the church catholic was consistent in so single-minded a way.”5 “The plain fact,” he argues,
was that the categories of an undifferentiated apocalyptic were inadequate to the needs of a faith whose content was a history that had already happened. In the teaching of Jesus its “not yet” had stood in dialectic with the “already” of his visible presence. Both poles of the dialectic appeared in his words and deeds, as these were remembered by the church. When the apocalyptic vision was eclipsed, however, many of those words and deeds appeared enigmatic….To deny the historical character of the first coming, as Gnostic Docetism did, or to spiritualize the second coming into a parable of the soul, as Origenistic speculation did, was to subvert the apostolic doctrine…. But once the dialectic of already/not yet is permitted to emerge from the texts, the magnitude of the change may become visible. It was nothing less than the decisive shift from the categories of cosmic drama to those of being, from the Revelation of St. John the Divine to the creed of the Council of Nicea. Yet it was through that very creed that the human portrait of the Son of Mary was preserved, and by the very creed that the postapocalyptic generations of the church catholic were taught to look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.
(pp. 130–132)
PROTESTANTS, MORE SO than Catholics, seemed to forget this, choosing between the already and not yet, threatening to undo what the founder of Christianity may or may not have intended: an apocalyptic vision in (the) Word, not deed.
Protestant revisionists such as Albert Schweitzer went over Augustine’s head, but in this instance Origen proved egregious, imbibing Gnostic heresy, which denies the physical resurrection and the bodily advent of Jesus. Reading far too selectively, Schweitzer concluded that Augustinian Christianity had underestimated Jesus’ debt to apocalypticism, among other things.6 Disciples of the not yet would take this information and run with it, putting Christianity on a collision course with itself by drawing a straight line between their own (neo-Judaic) dreams of chiliastic empire and the so-called apocalyptic vision of the early church. These radical premillennialists often saw themselves as part of an unbroken chain of underground popular revolt on par with Jesus’ anticlericalism and disestablishmentarianism—the Montanists of second-century Asia Minor, the Bohemian followers of Jan Huss and the bitter fifteenth-century Czech reform movement, the sixteenth-century mystical Dutch and early South German-Austrian Anabaptists, the Fifth Monarchy Men and other radical Puritans of seventeenth-century England and America, and eighteenth-century Republican apocalyptic writers. The Millerites and, for that matter, early Mormons seem perfect candidates for inclusion.7
The early church had its fair share of millenarian enthusiasm, Augustine notwithstanding. The early Apologists—Justin, Barnabas, Cerinthus, and Papias—employed premillennialist arguments to counter the Gnostics, who denied the physical resurrection, the implication being that the human soul had a divine right to heaven without delay and possibly with or without Christ’s blessing. In its battle with Gnosticism, the church had to walk a fine line, on constant guard not to seem to make of Christianity a purely spiritual or political entity. Indeed, too much of the latter had been the Jews’ great mistake, which Christian heretics—premillennialists, in short—seemed eager to repeat.8
Calvin certainly, less so Luther, sided with Augustine. According to Hodge, the orthodox Protestant doctrine does not subscribe to an earthly, intermediate kingdom with Christ and the faithful as his chief governors of world affairs, this theocratic governance lasting a thousand years, after which the general resurrection, final judgment, and end of the world occur in rapid succession.9 Orthodox Protestants, not unlike orthodox Catholics, plead for greater vigilance but much patience, too. Hodge explains: “The Church waited four thousand years for the first advent; we may be content to wait God’s time for a second” (3:868). According to the orthodox Protestant mainstream, premillennialism is crass, anthropomorphic, and, as Hodge puts it, altogether “a Jewish doctrine” (3:862).
Orthodox Protestants, then, locate Jesus’ second advent at the very end of world history. Tending to frown on literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation, they look forward to a universal diffusion of the gospel and, consequently, the conversion of the Jews, but as part of a progressive and expansive vision for the future. As a rule, they reject out of hand the literal restoration of Israel and the unique premillennialist dream of a separate Jewish state before or during the millennium, most of all the idea that the temple in Jerusalem will be rebuilt and blood sacrifices reinstituted. As Hodge explains, the New Jerusalem and Zion “are the Church and not the city made with hands” (3:809). Similarly, believers are the spiritual seed rather than natural descendants of Abraham. To propound a biological determination abnegates Jesus’ fundamental message, which did away with such distinctions as Jew and Gentile, enslaved and free, male and female, making all equal partakers of the spirit of universal peace. Christian apocalypticism, in principle at least, is an oxymoron. It threatens to resurrect the primitive antipathy between Jew and Gentile that the founder of Christianity fought so hard to eradicate. The conflict between postmillennialism and premillennialism, then, is a conflagration between Christianity, on the one hand, and its Judaizers, on the other.
Before the nineteenth century, postmillennialism and premillennialism in American overlapped considerably. Ruth Bloch explains:
Although some religious historians have maintained that these divisions extend back to the seventeenth century, it has recently been demonstrated that before the end of the eighteenth century there was little polarization along premillennial and postmillennial lines. Earlier premillennialist and postmillennialist interpretations were respectively linked with a seemingly infinite combination of magical, naturalistic, optimistic and pessimistic points of view. Even in the 1790’s, differences between premillennialists and postmillennialists did not correspond clearly to wider progressive and fatalistic world-historical outlooks: There were still both activistic premillennialists and pessimistic postmillennialists.10
MILLENNIALISTS VACILLATED rather than choosing between the two.11 Revolutionary War rhetoric, she points out, used both postmillennialist and premillennialist language. The lines that divided the two camps were not as yet clear.
Following the war, however, American millennialism began its long and protracted transformation from the political activist vision of the Revolutionary period to the more theocentric reformist vision of the antebellum period.12 Premillennialism, Bloch argues, was “far more compatible with Republican than with Federalist politics.”13 Ideas about the French Revolution, she writes,
were usually positive, even enthusiastic, still expressing typically Republican rather than Federalist political sentiments. Within the volatile political culture of the 1790s, the distinctively conservative, Federalist, and francophobic millennial literature produced in New England in such great quantities between 1798 and 1800 has gained a false reputation as the predominant political expression of millennial thought of the decade. Far from being the special province of the Federalist clergy, millennial speculation in the 1790s appears initially to have suited religious Republicans far more. Under the combined stimulus of the French Revolution and domestic political conflicts, the renewed politicization of millennial thought in the mid-1790s occurred primarily along francophilic and often even radical-Republican lines.
(pp. 185–186)
The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 allied Republican and premillennialist ideas. Herman Husband, a Republican lay preacher who helped foment the rebellion, couched his critique of Federalist politics in decidedly premillennialist terms. The prophecies of Ezekiel, he believed, foretold an American schism, a conflict between East and West. The West, in his view, would become the New Jerusalem.14 Christopher Love, another rabid anti-Federalist and exponent of radical French Freemasonry, employed inflammatory political rhetoric unmistakably premillennialist in tone.15 In America at least, premillennialism had obvious political overtones and applications.
Premillennialism quickly became the popular alternative to the postmillennialist and spiritualist tendencies of the Enlightenment.16 In the early nineteenth century, England begat several such reactionary premillennialist countermovements.17 In the summer of 1826 the London cleric Edward Irving translated a little-known millenarian treatise by Manuel Lacunza, an equally obscure Chilean Jesuit. Lacunza renounced the Roman Catholic Church, taking issue with the Augustinian teaching that Christianity fulfilled the prophecies concerning Israel foretold by the Hebrew prophets. Lacunza believed that the gathering of Israel was literal, not a mere allegory for the rise of the Christian Church. Adopted by radical Protestants, Lacunza’s eschatology gave impetus to a new Christian apocalyptic hybrid known as Dispensationalism. Irving borrowed from Lacunza, hoping to amend Historicism (the conservative orthodox Protestant or premillennialist belief in the ability to predict the precise hour of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, among other things) and skillfully avoid its self-destructive tendency. (Historicists down through the ages have tended to prognosticate the day of the Lord with far too much precision.18) A charismatic blunder proved Irving’s undoing.19 Indeed, this new branch of premillennialism might have died out had the Irish-born Dispensationalist (or Futurist, another term for the same thing) John Nelson Darby not appeared as auspiciously as some thought the Messiah should have.20
Those for whom modernization had already exacted a heavy toll gravitated toward rather less optimistic eschatological and sociopolitical scenarios, ideas, and communities. The premillennialist–anti-Evangelical notion that things would get much worse before they got appreciably better—which emphasized too strongly the attendant bad news of the eschaton, or Second Coming—made most sense to those who knew firsthand that things had become much worse for themselves despite increased opportunities for advancement. However, it also appealed to a few well-to-do folk who, despite their privileged economic positions, still might despair. Whether they had a right to feel cheated or not, many of the truly disenfranchised and some of the psychologically troubled pined for the day when Jesus would appear bodily in the clouds and wipe away their tears.21
This resurgent pessimism found its most articulate defender in the famous William Miller. A moderate premillennialist of the Historicist persuasion, Miller predicted the end of the world in 1843 and then in 1844. When Christ failed to show (p. 58), he lost some followers but not all.22 Long before the great disappointment, as it was called, when Christ failed to appear, Smith had been careful to distance himself and his movement, despite the Millerites’ fantastic growth in the 1830s and 1840s.
“Brother” Smith and “Father” Miller had much in common.23 Both their families had resided in Poultney, Vermont, and sympathized with Universalists and Deists. Smith and Miller were devotees of such popular infidelity and critical of the Evangelical establishment. Both prophesied that the end was imminent. And both had a huge following despite extraordinary miscalculations (Miller’s were chronological; Smith’s social and political).24 Neither movement suffered to the point of extinction. (As we know, prophecy seldom really fails if one believes strongly enough.)
The two differed mainly on points of Christian doctrine. On the issue of grace, Smith was an Arminian, Miller a Calvinist. Miller objected to the literal return of the Jews to their homeland—in keeping with the Augustinian or spiritualist view that holds that the restoration of Israel refers to the Christian Church, not the Jews. Smith went even further than Lacunza, speculating that the restoration of Israel included any and all willing Jews but also the lost tribes and any other Hebrews, the North American Indians, and even Gentiles. Clearly the biggest difference, however, was Smith’s apparent hesitation to commit to a firm date for the Lord’s Second Coming; he constantly hedged his bets.25 In June 1831 he promised the Saints they would “live to see it come [the second advent] with great glory.”26 Later, in 1833, he sent a letter to the American Revivalist and the Rochester Observer in which he made similar promises.27 Only four years later, however, he carefully repositioned the Second Coming at a comfortable distance in the future,28 a consequence, in part, of his failure to retake Jackson County, the Mormon New Jerusalem, from the local “infidel” population.29 In 1835, at a meeting of his newly ordained twelve apostles, he stated, “even fifty-six years should wind up the scene.”30 In a 1843 revelation, the Deity promised that if Smith lived to see his eighty-fifth birthday, he would see the “face of the Son of Man.”31 With this new light, Smith became increasingly scornful of William Miller’s eagerness to hasten the coming of the Lord, declaring in 1844 that “Christ will not come this year, as Father Miller has prophesied,” nor “in forty years.”32 When Smith died at just forty himself, all bets were off.
In which camp Mormonism falls within the wide array of Christian beliefs regarding the earthly kingdom of Christ and thousand years of peace, the Millennium, is not a difficult question—though one would not think so given the lack of consensus in the scholarly literature. Learned Mormon opinion has vacillated back and forth between the two great eschatological poles in Christian thought, premillennialism (the belief in the literal second coming of Jesus Christ as an apocalyptic event that ushers in the millennium) and postmillennialism (the belief in the transformation of the world into a millennial Christian utopia before his arrival), attempting to harmonize Mormonism’s premillennialist theology of saints literally caught up in the clouds to meet Jesus when he comes again with its seemingly postmillennialist, political-kingdom-of-God idea—a new world order or theocracy of the saints’ making, not God’s, that ushers in the Second Coming of the Messiah. Although opinions vary, theological-driven formulations that argue in favor of a Mormon-premillennialist nexus and those of a more historical nature that see in Mormonism something akin to the Evangelical Protestant or postmillennialist belief in the perfection of the world gradually in the here and now, knowingly or not, both proffer an orthodox Christian interpretation. They disagree only on which half of Christian orthodoxy Mormonism mimics. Those who suggest a combination are, in fact, the most Christian in their outlook, whereas those who proffer a more one-sided and dogmatic premillennialism as the basis for Mormon eschatology, without intending to, greatly undermine all such apologies for the faith in relation to an alleged theological congruity with primitive Christianity. The recent suggestion that the political kingdom was never more than a metaphor is suspiciously like the Augustinian City of God, although Mormonism, like early Christianity, might be said to have backed down in the face of vandals of a kind, toning down the rhetoric or else.
A rudimentary understanding of Christian eschatology is all that is required to resolve much of the confusion. For starters, the orthodox Christian position (Catholic and Protestant) is not an either-or proposition but rather a double helix; to rip its two strands apart is to invite trouble. Historically, premillennialism—the belief in a literal (political) kingdom of God on earth—has been attacked as a Judaization of Christianity. Premillennialism is a scion of Jewish apocalypticism. Here is the problem, and here is the means of solving it. The Mormon political kingdom of God—a literal and premillennial world government—and the religion’s predilection for premillennialism fit hand in glove. Next, we require a more precise determination with regard to the several premillennialisms out there. Dispensationalism (the belief in the secret rapture of the Saints before the public premillennial appearance of Jesus in glory) is the best candidate but does not quite suffice in the end, because Mormon eschatology arises out of a Judaic eschatology, but as act one of a two-act play. In its final definitive scene, Mormonism expounds a Hebraic-Christian eschatology along British Israelite lines (the belief in the failure of the Jews to live up to the covenant and thus that Israel’s alleged British progeny are the true sons and daughters of God) that opens the door to anti-Semitism despite professions of love and respect for Israel. At the same time, early Mormonism’s tendency to live and let live keeps it from falling into a vitriolic anti-Semitism, dividing the world equally between America (the New Jerusalem and homeland of the children of Israel) and Palestine (the homeland of the children of Judah).
Early Mormonism clearly falls on the side of Christianity’s eschatological troublemakers. In theory, then, the Mormon political kingdom of God conforms with what Hansen has said: an earthly institution with a very literal geopolitical agenda. Ironically, Hansen proffers a synthesis of postmillennialism and premillennialism as the basis for the political kingdom, weakening his case slightly (from a purely theological standpoint), since the latter favors the idea of heaven on earth even more than the former.33 The wide support for early Mormon eschatology as a combination of pre-and postmillennialism suggests that attention to theological detail has not been the first priority for other historians, either—though perhaps this has caused no great harm, in the final analysis. Ernest Lee Tuveson, for example, argues that Mormon speculation regarding the end time did not choose between the two.34 In concert with Tuveson, Richard T. Hughes writes: “The fundamental question regarding Latter-day Saints, therefore, has to do with the relation between the pessimistic, regressive strands of Mormon thought, on the one hand [consistent with premillennialism], and the optimistic, progressive strands of Mormon thought on the other [consistent with postmillennialism].”35 David Smith suggests it was more of an “eccentric embodiment” of the “postmillennial idea.”36 Timothy Smith, in concert with Hansen, puts more stock in what Mormons did as opposed to what they said. “Though premillennialists,” Smith writes, Mormons “must prepare the way of the Lord by uniting under his kingship now and accepting all the commands which came from the mouth of his prophet. They thus laid upon themselves the responsibility to hasten the millennium, much as the main body of American and English evangelicals called postmillennialists had accepted responsibility to prepare a kingdom for the King.”37 Keith E. Norman espouses the Hansenean view, too.38
Underwood, defender of the only truly doctrinaire premillennialist interpretation in his seminal The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism, purports to wipe the slate clean, as the resident theological headmaster of the Mormon History Association. He objects to the postmillennialist label, especially when one considers (in large part thanks to his meticulous scholarship) that early Mormons categorically rejected the postmillennialist vision of mainstream Evangelicals.39 Accordingly, “Mormons should not be placed within the reformist tradition since it was antithetical to their basic theology.”40 “Against the backdrop of nearly two thousand years of eschatological thought,” he further argues, “Mormon teachings fall clearly and consistently on the apocalyptic end of the spectrum, however labeled.”41 A link with conservative Protestants, who, as Ernest Sandeen points out, were biblical literalists and premillennialists, is implied.42 Yet Mormonism, in Underwood’s view, is a unique species of classical Christianity and orthodox Protestantism.
My own meager contribution to this question does not add very much to what Underwood says, offering a slight correction at best to his nuanced discussion of early Mormon theology. I will belabor the point only to suggest that in addition to his all-too-diplomatic exclusion of such radical millenarians as the Dispensationalists (who have something to contribute to the discussion), he does not go outside the rather narrow possibilities of antebellum conservative Christianity.43 That said, if Protestant heresy is our only guide, then it seems that Mormon eschatology has most in common with the branch of Protestant apocalyptic known as Futurism and/or Dispensationalism, the brainchild of Edward Irving and John Nelson Darby, in particular. Underwood admits, for example, that a significant number of British and Canadian converts to Mormonism were Irvingites or sympathetic to Dispensationalist teaching.44 Joseph Fielding and John Taylor (the latter going on to became president of the LDS wing of the church) espoused Futurist or Dispensationalist ideas before and after joining. Mormons and Irvingites (the latter among the best known of the Dispensationalists) were often confused; in fact, Joseph Smith accused them of counterfeiting the truth (p. 134).45
But what does this add to our understanding of early Mormonism’s relationship to the Evangelical standing order, other than the fact that some contemporary source seems a more likely antecedent? Not unlike the way the Book of Mormon might be said to borrow from Swedenborg and yet take the discussion beyond to some anti-Swedenborgian position, so, too, Dispensationalism might be said to represent the basis for an idea that transcends itself. Dispensationalism can be seen as an attempt to balance Jewish and Christian, literal and spiritual, as part of an effort to harmonize premillennialism and postmillennialism. One begins to see why some might have confused Mormons and Irvingites. The two agree on many points of doctrine, but such homology is a convergence of means only, the same set of biblical-literalist tropes employed to very different ends. This becomes quite clear when one compares their respective views on the future of the Jews (I will come back to this).
Smith was perhaps not being overly defensive when he objected to comparisons between his movement and the Irvingites. Although he shared their view that God’s covenant people had a role to play in the unfolding millennial kingdom, Dispensationalists gave Judaism too much. This ran afoul of Smith’s larger Templar agenda, which forgave but did not forget the crucifixion of the Lord at Jewish-Roman hands. The seat of political power and priesthood authority during the millennium would thus be located in the New World rather than in the Old, the posterity of Joseph (the Hebrew descendants of Ephraim and alleged progenitors of the Gentiles), not Judah, God’s chosen people.
Perhaps Smith’s premillennialism came from sources closer to home that were not so anti-Semitic and thus presumably more to his liking. Congregationalist minister Joshua Spaulding of Salem had something to say on the matter of biblical prophecy and the Jewish people. Smith convalesced after his operation at the home of an uncle who resided in Salem; perhaps he became acquainted with Spaulding’s thought at that time. Sentiments Concerning the Coming and Kingdom of Christ was widely known, in any event. Ethan Smith, author of View of the Hebrews, thought to have been the inspiration for Joseph Smith’s ideas concerning the Hebraic origin of the Indians, published a book on biblical prophecy, entitled A Key to the Figurative Language Found in the Sacred Scriptures, of which the Mormon prophet may have been aware.46 Smith’s apocalypticism might just as easily be seen as Masonic speculation, however. Webb’s Masonic bookstore in Albany, New York, trafficked in Masonic-driven apocalyptic works. He published Richard Brother’s Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times in 1796. His business partner, J. Bicheno, published a prophetic work, The Signs of the Times,47 just when Webb was putting the finishing touches on his Freemason’s Monitor. Indeed, some of the apocalyptic ideas in Bicheno’s book found their way into Webb’s monitor.
Who are the apocalyptic Masons? They are the Order of the Temple, Knights of the East and West, Knights of the Holy Sepulcher, and a host of other “plagiarisms,” according to Waite, of the Rose-Croix of Herendom—types of Templars, one and all, for which the Apocalypse figures prominently, as do the Second Coming, Resurrection, and millennium.48 “The Apocalypse is to those who receive the nineteenth Degree [or Grand Pontiff],” Pike explains, “the Apotheosis of that Sublime Faith which aspires to God alone, and despises all the pomp and works of Lucifer.” It is surely not difficult to see why Scottish Rite Masons, in particular, might be attracted to the Book of Revelation, “a book,” Pike continues, “as obscure as the Sohar.”49 Templars, having failed to liberate Jerusalem, quite naturally pine for the day when it shall be rebuilt—by them, under the banner of a Christian republic.
Ultimately, Mormonism’s apocalyptic lineage is pro-Masonic rather than anti-Christian because it claims that “Jews” are not “Hebrews” for the same reasons the British Israelites do. And so who are they? Suffice it to say that not all British Israelites are Masons, but most of if not all Masons tend to be British Israelites—pro-Jewish and yet deeply anti-Semitic. This goes well beyond the irony of the Jewishness of Jesus for Christians, as we will see.