Why hasn’t the Church disowned ‘endtime’ quacks?
The doctrine that the universe will perish in one huge eschatological Bang is pagan and much older than Christianity.
It dominated the Mediterranean basin throughout classical antiquity. The term eschatology comes from the Greek adjective eschatos, which means “final”.
It refers to the imagined “end-time” event when the dying-and-resurrecting god-man will reappear to lead the “Sons of Light” in an apocalyptic battle against the “Sons of Darkness”.
According to the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, this was how the Essenes — the Habakkukist (proto-Christian) Jews of Qumran — envisaged the “Second Coming” of their “Teacher of Righteousness”.
But the Church has an unassailable authority for it from the god-man himself. Between his resurrection and ascension — according to the evangelist John — Jesus asserts that some of his disciples will still be alive when he returns.
The controversy raised by this statement has never been resolved.
There are three possibilities. One is that the English version is a mistranslation from Syriac (the Aramaic mother tongue of Jesus).
The second is that, if Jesus uttered those words, then history has proved him wrong and Christians must drum up the courage to admit it.
If his disciples were his age-mates and his Second Advent was to precede their deaths, then the advent should occur by the end of the first century AD. Yet, 20 centuries later, it has not occurred.
The best we have seen of it are only poetic dreams, like this one:
Lo, he comes in clouds descending,
Once for favoured sinners slain;
Thousand, thousand saints attending,
Swell the triumph of his train:
Alleluyah, God appears on earth to reign...
But I just cannot accept the surrealism of it. I prefer the third interpretation. It is that Jesus never made that statement. Jesus was an inimitable model of honesty — terribly let down only by the egregious hypocrisy and evil of those who profit by uttering his name in vain — the Church and its priesthood.
The words are likely to have been smuggled into the text by an over-enthusiastic later European convert.
Scholars depict the Italian machismi who founded the Vatican systematically corrupting both testaments to bring them into line with the secular self-interests of Rome’s imperial officials.
One manifestation of it is the Church’s profound silence over the continuing vanity with which individuals all over the world utter Jesus’ name to horrendously disturb the ordinary person’s mind with the promise that the Son of God is coming down tomorrow to bring the world to a catastrophic end.
But this cruelty is not the work of isolated cranks. Eschatology is the entire ideology of both the Vatican and America’s entire evangelism.
Because the Second Coming “is nigh”, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others openly preach that the “Anti-Christ” be killed violently.
And who is the “Anti-Christ”? The answer — the non-Caucasian, the feminist, the pacifist, the homosexual, the “communist”, the Marxist, the working class, the Muslim, the Arab, the Palestinian, the Iranian, the Iraqi, the Afghan, the North Korean — everybody may oppose the present bid by the US corporate family to swallow the world.
That is why the American Church fully supports Washington’s struggle to remove all “weapons of mass destruction” from the “wrong hands” and concentrate them in the hands of the corporate governments in Washington, London and Jerusalem.
Two self-confessed eschatologists, Ronald Reagan and George Bush II, have recently actually enjoyed the privileged access to the world’s most dangerous war device. Mr Reagan actually had his finger on the nuclear button even in the absent-mindedness of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Yet every year, for 2,000 years, men have predicted the world’s impending disaster. All have proved false.
The question is: Why do so many of you continue to give credit to quacks and con men like America’s Harold Camping? And why does the Church consistently refuse to distance itself from this crime?
