Saint Peter and Saint Paul

When, in the twentieth century an anti-Jewish European movement took possession of the heart of Europe, it may be again not entirely a coincidence that its messianic element was and is globally known as Nazi. In tribal religions the present and the future are but replays of the old stories.

Plastered over much of the Vatican are the murals of the Church fathers. They are the great Jewish Saints, Saint Peter and Saint Paul. In their words and deeds, are the twin pillars of the historical Church. Saint Peter embodies the Church. Saint Paul gives its spirit. It is only in our multi-cultural age that the irony has been noticed. The single traditional Jewish Pope remains an enigma. Demonology is stirred over his presence in the Papacy. By the middle of the Middle Ages, such a phenomenon was a racial impossibility. A Jewish Cardinal, converted to Christianity after World War Two, had been tipped to succeed John Paul 11. He had no show against the German Cardinal. The Cardinals were not unaware that Nostradamus' mumbo-jumbo had been interpreted that the last Pope would be a Jew.

The morning prayer of each Pope since the Middle Ages that the perfidious Jews convert to the true faith appears to now be on its last legs. Church doctrine declares that Christ was not the promised Messiah of the Old Testament. The Church Fathers were right by faith but wrong by historical fact. That cop-out has, since Darwin, destroyed the heart of all the established Protestant Churches. The pundit could easily conclude this will be the grenade in the heart of the Vatican. Catholicism will most likely survive as the spiritual side of liberation theology.

To the devout Jews and ardent Zionists the cross is only slightly less sinister than the swastika. Since New Testament Times, the followers of Christ had been called the Nazarenes and Nazirites by Jewish non-believers.

Nazi is the Hebrew meaning of root vine. The prophet Isaiah had prophesised that a root vine would spring from the birthplace of King David, Bethlehem. It would be a man-child that would be succoured by the land and restore Israel. In probably public sarcasm in Israel, every wandering preacher from Galilee was called a Nazirite. From the first century B.C. until the destruction of the Temple there were more than several of them. They raised the dead, said wise and often deluded things, and walked on water. The Temple hierarchy took them in their stride.

Administrators in the Roman Imperial age were likewise bemused. Nor is this thought merely ironical. Galilee was a pagan district forcibly converted to Judaism only two hundred or so years before Christ.

Shamans, filled with the spirit of the Jewish God, cast bad spirits from humans into pigs, predicted the future, cured blindness by incantations and rubbing of muddy water.

Jesus Christ of Nazareth may really mean Saviour Annointed Nazirine. There is no historical record that Nazareth even existed in the first century A.D. Nazareth may have been a linguistic play of the discredited name Nazirine.