“How his story unfolds has everything to do with who is telling the story.” -From the National Geographic official web site. Amen to that.
by Don Clasen
March 19, 2015
Beacon Fellowship is the largest arts and entertainment ministry in Los Angeles and makes its home at Bel Air Presbyterian Church. Our monthly meetings usually consist of dinner and a movie, followed or preceded by discussion and sometimes even guest panels featuring principles involved in its production or experts in the field. The announcement that this month would be an advanced showing of Killing Jesus featuring a poster of Christ making a Masonic hand signal certainly caught my attention. The fact that it was based upon a novel by the horrid Bill O’Reilly only reinforced my low expectations.
It is perhaps a testimony to my utter ignorance of so much of what goes on in popular culture that I was unaware that Bill O’Reilly had even written such a book, let alone that it was the latest in a trilogy that included Killing Lincoln and Killing Kennedy. But that’s what happens when you don’t have a TV and count yourself the better for it anyhow. The idea that O’Reilly was implying that Jesus Christ was assassinated for God’s sake, and not executed on trumped up charges is but one small reason why I can barely stand to watch that spin doctor extraordinaire and his in-your-face “No Spin Zone.”
Finding out that the bottom line of Killing Kennedy was that to him and co-author Martin Dugan, Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone killer in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary did not surprise me at all. The fact that 90% of my fellow Americans according to polls agree with me is nonetheless no point of shame to him, for this is what he does.[i] Bill O’Reilly has made countless millions year after year shilling for the criminal oligarchs who own our Congress, own our media, own our economy and apparently think they own our very souls if Revelation 18:13 is to be believed. What other “great city” can this be referring to but New York, the very seat from which the Fox News propaganda machine broadcasts its bottomless “sorceries” over the whole earth (vs. 23)?
How Right Wing Public Perception Manipulation Works
Many Christians and the public in general are unaware of how so many overnight “best seller” sensations are generated. When some leading light within the right wing firmament has a new book to manipulate the public with, they simply arrange to have an advocacy group, a political action committee, a think tank or some such front lavishly funded by these same oligarchs to buy up thousands of freshly-minted books. All of these are counted as “sales” and voila, a New York Times bestseller, or at least a good pump-priming to begin the stampede with.
In the case of O’Reilly however this is hardly ever needed, so vast are the hordes of credulous fans who adoringly lap up his every pronouncement anyway. When he tried to argue on air once that Christianity was a philosophy, even secular critics came to our aid with, No Bill, Christianity actually is a real religion, complete with a Deity, liturgy and doctrine. But that’s what change agents like him do, they downgrade the holy revelation of God into a mere Book of Virtues to live by.
Killing Jesus is no exception. Sooner or later the Christian Church is going to have to face the fact that it has a very big and well-funded enemy in these perilous last days known as the New World Order whose devices we cannot afford to be ignorant of. Christians have to understand that the attempt to syncretize all religions into one global, UN-type, esoteric, New Agey “love” ethic is just a front. It may express the legitimate hopes and longing for peace by the masses but the masses don’t control this world, a handful of oligarchs do.
Their New World Order is a much darker, even occultic and satanic agenda that involves among many criminal objectives, massive population reduction.[ii] And we know enough about Satan to know that the discrediting of the Person of Jesus Christ, His unique claims to be the only Messiah of all mankind, and the distortion of Who He was and what He came to accomplish is his highest priority.
Killing Jesus Is One More Way To Kill The Gospel
This objective cannot be emphasized enough. Faithful Christian preachers exhaust language, media material, time and energy to convey a clear image of Who Jesus Christ was, what He actually said and did, and what it all means. If we fail in this we fail in our mission, period. “If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” (I Cor 14:8).
Yet the state of confusion about the meaning of the Gospel is at epidemic proportions today. The proliferation of so many English translations of the Bible may help Christians understand the meaning of a verse but it also makes it difficult to quickly recognize familiar passages and stories. To this has been added a massive number of heresies, fad movements and ecumenical pressure to de-emphasize sound doctrine, that propositional truth which alone can “both save thyself, and them that hear thee” (I Tim 4:16). In an age of such abject Biblical ignorance, what hope do those who aren’t even believers have of understanding the message, without which the seed of the Gospel simply cannot take root (Mt 13:23)?
To all this you can add the near-impossibility of cramming the life of Christ into a two-hour movie, but if you are going to do it, what you leave in and what you leave out can greatly affect the overall impression left. Simply put, the flooding of the market with widely-divergent interpretations of the life of Jesus has the effect of making people throw up their hands and saying, “What’s the use? Who knows what the truth is?” This is not an accident. It is the exact agenda Satan and his human minions are deliberately pursuing.
Into this precarious mix now comes Killing Jesus, a movie that could sweep away all the benefits of Zefferelli’s 8-hour masterpiece Jesus of Nazareth and even Campus Crusade for Christ’s vastly more inferior yet still accurate The Jesus Movie before the eyes of a world with a notoriously short attention span and memory. According to executive producer and panelist Terri Weinberg, Killing Jesus so caught the imagination of higher ups that the plan is to translate it into no less than 45 different languages to be viewed in 170 countries! And this before it even airs on National Geographic two weeks from now!
This is not a marketing strategy; this is an agenda. Do these hidden, stratopheric members of the global power structure just want to spread the Gospel for us out of the goodness of their hearts? Hardly.
The Heart of the Matter
So, what kind of a Gospel is this? The old adage that beauty is in the eye of the beholder never has more relevance than when applied to the life of Jesus Christ, Who is almost by definition the most controversial person in human history. When a Christian watches a movie about his hero Jesus, he is so enthralled that he is inclined to minimize any distortions, but to a skeptic such things may loom a lot larger and reinforce his doubts about who Jesus really was/is.
If that is the case then Killing Jesus gives that person more than enough ammunition to stay unconvinced, and that in fact is probably the aim of this movie. The impression the average non-believer is going to come away with is that Jesus was a near-lunatic spouting quotes from the Gospels alright, but all out of context of the settings. They will see Him as someone who could never quite figure out Who He was or what His mission was, that He initially preached “love thy enemy,” then quickly switched to violent revolutionary rhetoric, led a tax revolt, then changed His mind again to an other-worldly emphasis quickly followed by a violent overturning of the money changers tables.
Is it any wonder everyone in authority wanted Him dead? The rabbis and Pharisees couldn’t have framed Him any better than this if they wanted to.
Jesus According To Talmudic Fantasy
In short, Killing Jesus is “another Gospel” (II Cor 11:4; Gal 1:9), one that starts out with Jesus acting surprised when He senses that God is calling Him to a special mission but He doesn’t know what it is. He goes into a business partnership no less, with Peter, the two of them buying a fishing boat. When they are catching none, they both pray and miraculously their net becomes full! This is what passes for the account when Jesus tells the Apostles to cast out their nets for a catch over their objections (Lu 5:4-7), which was obviously meant as a sign of Christ’s power to the Apostles. Yet in this account, it becomes a sign to Jesus and Peter of some special favor.
Likewise, upon hearing of His cousin John baptizing in the Jordan, it is not John who is surprised to find that his cousin is the Messiah, but Jesus, who is surprised and confused to hear John hail Him as the Messiah! We are from this account supposed to believe that the two of them had never met one another until then. Furthermore, John ends up exhorting Jesus to take up the challenge! They might as well have had John say, “Suffer it to be so now, for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness” (Mt 3:15). As a matter of fact, from what I can remember, that may be exactly what happened.
The impression left is quite obvious—that Jesus was not sure of Who He was and only grew to understand as time went on. This is a crucial point, for if there is one thing that Jesus Christ never, ever gave even a hint of, it was uncertainty about Who He was and what He came to do. Even as young as age 12 he was referring to the necessity of “being about my Father’s business” (Luke 2:49). So rock solid was His confidence, so authoritatively did He speak and act (Mt 7:29) that those around Him were the ones constantly asking, What manner of man is this? (Mt 8:27), and Where is He leading us now? (Mt 16:21,22; Jn 11:16), etc. When He is portrayed as finally admitting that He failed while on the cross, that famous but controversial line, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me” is thrown in to make sure the audience gets the message.
This latter incident is an excellent example of how careful Killing Jesus is to make sure that all the “hardest sayings” He ever uttered and all the most difficult and delicate things He ever taught are thrown into the screenplay, and again devoid of any helpful context. That passage quoted above has historically been a real stumbling block to even highly-skilled expositors who make the theological assumption that God had to turn His back on Christ when placing the sins of the world upon Him. But the best commentary I’ve ever read on it noted that Jesus was only doing what a good rabbi of that day would do—quoting from the first verse of a passage and allowing his disciples to mentally finish it from there. In this case it was Psalm 22 where David inspired by the Holy Spirit foresees the whole crucifixion scene before him—the piercing of his hands and feet, the gambling for His robe, etc.
For what it’s worth, I remember one time around 1990 when I asked God if He really did feel estranged from Christ at that moment. I’ll never forget the thought that floated up from deep within me—“To the contrary, I never felt closer to Him.”
A Jesus Who Doesn’t Know Who He Is
But this is the rule rather than the exception for this unflattering work. In the early days of His preaching, the emphasis is on Jesus’ message of loving your enemies. Those who hear it then ask the natural question that is the standard objection of the Pharisees to this day, namely, How then can we defend ourselves against our enemies? Will this not weaken us? The subtleties of this issue are never dealt with, but the movie makes sure that when Jesus hears of the beheading of His cousin John, He bewails how much this “tries His faith” in reciprocating love and forgiveness, a vacillation the Gospel accounts know nothing of.
Even worse, He then screams out, “I came not to bring peace but a sword”! The implication is quite clear here that He was suggesting a bloody uprising against Rome and Herod as He runs off half-cocked, His disciples in tow. Anyone familiar with that passage knows that it was metaphorical not literal, and meant that the effect of His message was that it would divide people, right down to members of one’s own family (Mt 10:34-36). But the damage is already done. From this point on in the movie the fact that Jesus of Nazareth (He’s never once called Jesus Christ from what I can remember) is a man confused, inconsistent, easily shaken, unstable, or just downright devious and treacherous. Again, this is the exact same slander about Him found in the Talmud.
Right Wing Fantasies
I have not read O’Reilly’s book but hearing that a strong theme in it would be that of Jesus as a tax protestor did not surprise me. Railing away on taxes is alone a great example of what Paul warned about in regards to the last days, that men would “despise government” (II Pe 2:10), and be found “speaking lies in hypocrisy, their conscience seared with a hot iron” (I Tim 4:2). After all, there are few welfare queens in our politics bigger than banks, defense contractors, agri-business and other recipients of billions in tax revenue (and in the case of banks, sometimes trillions). And among their spear throwers there are few who outdistance the great Saint William the Righteous when it comes to hypocrisy. Starving the government of the revenue it needs to protect the public is always a big favorite of criminal predators and their fawning right wing devotees who love to starve the general welfare but make sure astronomical sums go to the rich.[iii]
Killing Jesus the Movie has a steady undercurrent of this theme with Jesus of course leading the way. Only later after He “gives up His anger” as Mary Magdalene puts it, does He soften the militancy of this ridiculous caricature of Him. This is followed by His famous “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s…” scene which then comes across as a weasel-like attempt to have it both ways.
The point of fact, Jesus Christ was exactly the opposite, never a tax protestor nor a threat to Rome. If anything He was accused by His double-dealing enemies of cavorting with (Mt 8:10) and supporting the hated Romans (Mt 17:24-27). Yet his scene of the Caesar statement is soon followed by the one of Him overturning the money changers’ tables, cementing the impression that He was an unstable, double-minded hypocrite on the one hand or a devious imposter on the other. The only claim that Jesus Christ was a threat to Rome was the distorted portrayal of Him that His enemies fed to the Gentile authorities, and a clear example of their slander of Him. Again, the Pharisees themselves couldn’t have framed Him according to their jealous fantasies any better than this.
One other thing I found so offensive was the almost complete lack of miracles in the story. Besides the one in the beginning when Jesus and Peter are fishing, the only other I can remember was Jesus casting a demon out of a boy by hugging him! No conversations with demons, no commands, nothing. When He encounters a woman leper He doesn’t instantly cleanse her, He sits there and daubs her sores with a cloth! What is He, a nurse now? No walking on the sea, no calming of the storm, no blind and lame, no raising people from the dead, no loaves and fishes—nothing!
In fact, the only other time there’s a miracle is a redux of the catch of fishes, but this time by Peter alone in the boat. This is parlayed into “proof” to Peter that Jesus has actually risen from the dead! No bodily appearances—just “faith” that somehow He’s here. Most people have that kind of deluded faith about departed loved ones more than they do about Christ. I have rarely witnessed anything so pathetic in my life.
By the time He’s being railroaded by the Sanhedrin, the taunts of some in the crowd that these rumors of miracles were just the figment of the crowd’s wild imagination begin to actually sound believable. Yet there are few “calling cards” to Messiahship that Jesus Christ carried as authoritatively as that of His miracles—things never seen in such numbers or power in all of history (Jn 9:32). As John MacArthur pointed out in a sermon just today, the Judea Jesus Christ came to was riddled with disease—leprosy, cerebral palsy, lameness, deafness, blindness, and demon possession unlike anything we see here today. And yet He single-handedly cleaned out the whole nation! This was unheard of in that day and the major thing that grabbed everyone’s attention, even that of the jealous Pharisees who couldn’t exorcize people if their lives depended on it (Acts 19:13,16).
All of Time Is Measured By His Birth
This is no small matter. The very reason we are living in 2015 is because it is 2015 Anno Domini, the “year of our Lord.” All of time itself is measured from before and after His incarnation, that’s how much of an impression Jesus Christ left on the world. The fact that today’s Pharisees want so desperately to change that in the public’s consciousness to the disrespectful C.E. (Common Era) and B.C.E shows you that they understand at least, the impact this one man had on all subsequent Western history.
Jesus Christ could do this because He did not leave us with the option of explaining His life away as just another Good Teacher, or a mere prophet or an anomaly suitable for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. The timing of His appearance in fulfillment of Daniel’s 490 year prophecy (Dan 9:24-27), the place of His birth (Micah 5:2), His coming out of Egypt, His being called a Nazarene—all these things and more foretold screamed that this was no ordinary man.
Jesus Christ came out of an obscure nation but one specially created by God so He could build a history with them. This was so that when the Messiah comes he would not be Joe Blow from Timbuktu but from a specific tribe of a specific nation. And not only so, but from the aristocratic house of Judah, the line of David (Lu 2:4). All these things and more but especially the miracles, forced the world to deal with that greatest question in all of history, “Whom say ye that I am?” (Mt 16:15). If we don’t stand for this and stand for it clearly, we are of no value to anyone.
Is Killing Jesus A Conspiracy Against The Church?
One of the most difficult existential realities we humans have to deal with in life is never quite knowing the real motives behind the things that others say or do. For that matter, often neither are we conscious of our own motives. Only God alone knows “where we’re coming from” at any given moment (Jer 17:9; I Cor 4:3,4). When it comes to this movie and after listening to the panel, I concluded that none of the three guest panelists, actor Haaz Sleiman who played Jesus, writer Walon Green or producer Terri Weinberg had any evil intention in mind. Yet on the other hand I could tell that they did not understand Biblical doctrine like a Christian disciple does.
I do not believe that Walon Green intentionally sought to distort the life of Jesus Christ. But his treatment of it is a testament of the fact that only a committed Christian should attempt such a work, someone well-versed in the chronology of Christ’s life, solidly grounded in the context of stories and statements and a sound understanding of Bible doctrine. Anything less runs the risk of distorting the fragile meaning of a life played out within a very complex historical situation that is the basis of deep-seated controversy to this day.
Haaz Sleiman is Lebanese by birth and Muslim by background. I told him I appreciated his kind words about Jesus and his sharing of how playing Him as a character was an honor and great inspiration to him. I completely agree with him that Jesus Christ is highly regarded in the Koran. Only in the Talmud is he considered the son of Beelzebub and described in the most contemptuous of language. I asked him afterwards if someone instructed him to place his hand over his heart that way for the poster shoot. He told me it was spontaneous on his part but was surprised when I mentioned it was a Masonic hand signal. He did say that the National Geographic people encouraged him to keep it, and thought it was a great idea.
Well, one way or the other I’m sure somebody did. The poor guy seemed like a lamb wandering into a project owned by crouching tigers and hidden wolves at some level in the dark hierarchies of our time. This movie is going out over the world with an alert to all Masons and occultists that this indeed is their movie, tailor-made to drop one more distorted account of His life on a confused world in all the best tradition of The Passover Plot, the Jesus Seminars, History Channel Bible revisionism and the like. I don’t doubt that mysterious forces high up the Illuminati ladder will get a lot of mileage out of it, for it does leave the distinct impression that Jesus Christ “got what He deserved,” that He was confused at best and a dangerous imposter at the worst.
But the Lord Jesus Christ was no failure at all. He didn’t die as a criminal, much though His enemies may want you to believe it. He was the unblemished Passover Lamb fulfilling all the typology that prefigured Him. All that He did was intentional and successful, and He certainly deserves a better presentation than the one in this movie.
Notes:
[i] History News Network, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/8059
[ii] The “New World Order” is basically an amalgam of Talmudic supremacist philosophy, their Masonic disciples, European aristocracy, bankers, very rich oligarchs, occult secret societies including Satanism, and organized crime networks. Yes, it’s that bad. Its pyramidical structure and methodology I outline in my book American Babylon, Israeli Antichrist. https://donclasenseriousguy.com/antichrist-america-apologies/
[iii] For a free chapter from my book about how the US economy actually works, go to https://donclasenseriousguy.com/economic_beast_11-13.pdf
