Throughout history, every political movement, tribe, nation, and empire has invented its own foundational narrative, a confabulation of historical fact, archetypal mythic motives, and overt propaganda. Near the beginning of the Augustan Age, Virgil’s Aeneid provided the nascent Roman Empire with its own (forgive the redundancy) august prehistory, identifying as its progenitor the Trojan prince and demigod Aeneas, who fled his fallen city and with his fellow exiles was guided by divine providence across land and sea to the Italian region of Latium–as anciently preordained, according to Virgil, by Jupiter’s promise to Dardanos, the forefather of Troy. Notably, Virgil’s myth pushed Roman origins back another 400 years before the traditional date of the Rome’s founding in 753 B.C. by the twin sons of Mars, Romulus and Remus.
Modern political movements and the polities engendered by them are no less avid to authenticate themselves as divinely ordained, or at least the product of same esoteric historical dialectic. Beginning at the end of the 16th century, Zionists (both Jewish and Protestant Christian) were already predicating the legitimacy of a modern state of Israel on the promise made by Yahweh to Abraham (ca. 1800 B.C.) and reaffirmed to Joshua (ca. 1250) prior to the conquest of Canaan. (Indeed, for centuries following the Reformation, a number of radical Protestant millennialist sects, interpreting Old Testament history literally and in contradiction to the Christian soteriology and eschatology of the preceding 1600 years, argued that the restoration of a Jewish state in the Holy Land, in belated obedience to God’s promise to Abraham, was a prerequisite for the Parousia.)
Somewhat implausibly, modern Zionists to this day have continued to adduce these anachronistic biblical loci as proof of their legal right to Palestine, notwithstanding that David and Solomon presided over a minor empire in the Ancient Near East for less than a century, after which the Israelites were absorbed as satrapies of successive empires (the Assyrians in the 8th century, followed by the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines), during which time much, if not the greater part of the Jewish population lived (and generally flourished) in the Diaspora. The notion that Israeli “nationhood” goes back three millennia without interruption is thus risible, leaving aside the Muslim conquest of the Levant in the early 7th century A.D., and the Muslim Arabs’ continuous inhabitation of Palestine thereafter for thirteen centuries.
In 2025, it is difficult to know whether the biblical argument for the legitimacy of the modern state of Israel can have been intended to be taken seriously by the Zionists who have repeatedly invoked it. For early and medieval Christian theologians—indeed, for Jesus himself—the besetting sin of the Jews was a fundamentalist historical literalism, which remained blind to the spiritual significance of the Old Testament promise as an adumbration of what Paul conceived as the “New” or “Inner Israel” of the Church. In its own way, accordingly, the traditional Church has come to the same conclusion as both modern “higher critics” of the Old Testament and international legal scholars, all of whom recognize the patriarchal narratives of Abraham and his “seed” as teleological folk-legends intended by their redactor (the “J” or “Yahwistic” editor who compiled the oldest of the four strands of the Old Testament ca. 950 B.C.) to justify the Hebrews’ conquest of Canaan, and their brutal expulsion of the indigenous inhabitants, as commanded by God.
The Book of Joshua (compiled by the Deuteronomic redactor ca. 550 B.C.) recounts the Conquest in its first eleven chapters. They remain monotonously grim reading. In Joshua 1: 3-4, Yahweh reiterates his promise to the children of Israel of “every place” from “the river Euphrates…and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun” (cf. also Joshua 3: 10). I’ve already alluded to the irony that the Palestinian Arab battle-cry “from the river to the sea” was the unapologetic telos of the original and ongoing Zionist enterprise. Indeed, it is to these verses that Evangelical Christian and Jewish Zionists have repeatedly appealed in justification of their maximalist ambition to possess all of Greater Israel, beyond, that is, the territory recognized as the Jewish homeland since the U.N. Partition of 1947; and indeed, since 1967, Yahweh’s ancient “promise” of the land “from the river to the sea” has been incrementally fulfilled.
The darker side of that promise is revealed in the horrifying idioms in which the author of Joshua describes the devastation of the cities of Canaan and the slaughter of their populations—in ways, that is, that are eerily similar to the massacres and expulsions (the Nakba, or “Catastrophe” as the Palestinians remember it) carried out by the terrorist gangs, paramilitary units, and Haganah against the indigenous Arab population of Palestine during the British Mandate and in the post-war years immediately prior to the recognition of the modern Israeli state:
And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword…And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein…And it shall be, when you have taken the city, that ye shall set the city on fire: according to the commandment of the Lord shall ye do… And they smote them all, so that they let none of them remain or escape…until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants, and made it a heap for ever, even a desolation to this day…So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs…he left none remaining but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded…
–Joshua 6: 21 – 10: 40
These formulas are repeated throughout Joshua chapters 1 – 11 in recounting the successive destruction of the ancient Canaanite cities of Jericho, A’i, Bethel, Gibeon, Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Gezer, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, Zidon, Hazor, and “all that remained,” with the exception of Gaza and Ashdod; and so Joshua “left nothing undone of all that the Lord had commanded.” It is passages such as these that go some way to explaining the attraction of the Marcionites for the early Church, and have demanded of Christian biblical exegetes an ingenious talent for allegorical improvisation.
The author of the Book of Joshua’s triumphalist exultation over such genocidal depredations and ascription of them to the “Lord’s command” may well be consonant with the primitive psychology and morality of a late bronze age tribe; that modern Zionists, on the other hand, have appealed to the same divine promise and employed the same genocidal means is an unfathomable moral anachronism. Whether this is history or myth repeating itself, it certainly reminds us that the veneer of civilization has always remained thin enough that eruptions from the most primitive strata of the human psyche can occur even amongst a people that has itself suffered from such nationalist genocidal frenzies.
One would think that contemporary Zionists would exert themselves to avoid reminding the world of the barbarous biblical ancestry of the modern Israeli state. And yet, on two occasions, in speeches in October and November of 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu exhorted his citizens to “remember Amalek.” Animadverting on the sub-human cruelty of Hamas, Netanyahu assured the Israeli people that “[we] are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world,” concluding that, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”
Netanyahu’s allusion was to Samuel’s admonition to Saul in I Samuel 15: 2-3: “Thus saith the Lord of hosts…Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” Such moral enormities as the wholesale extermination of the Amalekites as a justification for the Nakba or the current genocide in Gaza have been regularly recalled from the Old Testament without a tincture of embarrassment by members of the Knesset and the Israeli military since the war in Gaza began.
In the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in the post-war years leading up to the recognition of the modern state of Israel in 1948, and from 1967 to today, the periodic and ongoing slaughter and expulsions of the indigenous Arab population have by now—forgive the pun—reached or exceeded biblical proportions. Whenever a Muslim jihadist cites a text from the Koran, we, in the enlightened West, reflexively denounce him as a fanatical fundamentalist. When an Israeli prime minister enjoins that we “remember Amalek,” the democratic West yawns.
Though the civilization of the West has been overwhelmingly Christian for the past two thousand years, since the Holocaust, the guilt-ridden phrase “Judaeo-Christian civilization” has been exalted to the status of an obligatory piety, requiring that we gloss over all that is uncivilized in our ancient Judaic heritage. In any case, the fact that Netanyahu invoked God’s command to the ancient Israelites to exterminate the Amalekites to the last man, woman, and suckling child at the very beginning of his Gazan offensive demonstrates clearly enough that his original intentions and objective were hardly the elimination of Hamas, but the total annihilation of the non-Jewish Palestinian population and the establishment of an ethnically pure Jewish state. These days, comparisons to the Nazis are so promiscuously merchandised as to lose all credibility; but the comparison becomes inevitable because of the moral insouciance with which an oppressed people has become an oppressor, in spite of the fact that a Jewish minority lived for centuries in relative harmony with an indigenous Muslim majority that had nothing, in any case, to do with the Holocaust.
As I have said, the charge of antisemitism, along with post-Holocaust Christian guilt, has immunized the modern state of Israel from criticism for its paradoxically racist and genocidal regime. Antisemitism, of course, is understood as Christianity’s original sin, for which Christian Zionism can be explained, at least in part, as a rite of atonement, notwithstanding that Christian Zionism remains an oxymoron.
For Christians before the Reformation and Catholics thereafter, the Old Law, including its exaltation of the Jews as the “Chosen People” and God’s promise to them of a territorial state in the Holy Land is understood (as a matter of orthodox doctrine) to have been wholly superseded by the New Dispensation of Christ. Following the Crucifixion, the veil of the Temple was rent in two, and the election of the Jews as the Chosen People was abrogated and volatilized by the New Israel understood as a universal spiritual community of believers in the redemptive Incarnation of the Messiah whom the Jews continue to await. The inauguration of the New Israel of the Church, that is, represents the fulfillment and superannuation of God’s promise to Abraham, and stands in frontal contradiction to the Zionist aspiration for a territorial nation in the Holy Land.
But modern Christians have lost sight of their own soteriology. From at least the infancy of Christian Zionism after the Reformation through the 20th century “search for the historical Jesus,” the essential harmony and continuity between Judaism and Christianity (and the Old and New Testaments) has become a settled datum in Christian theological circles. That Jesus was a Jewish “rabbi,” even if a radical reformer, and that the primitive Christian community in Jerusalem was a sect or movement that arose and remained within the temenos of the Temple, have been widely accepted amongst modern Christian laymen, clerics, and theologians alike, who are nervously disinclined to acknowledge the Church’s deracination from Judaism at any time earlier than Saint Paul’s mission to the Gentiles.
It is true, of course, that throughout the early Christian and medieval periods, biblical exegetes, using the allegorical method known as typology, discovered, in the events, personalities, and doctrines of the Old Testament, analogical adumbrations and foreshadowings of the New; yet the effect of typology was not simply to demonstrate the continuity between the two covenants, but also to demote the Old Testament from an empirically veridical and historical record of the Israelites to a repository of quasi-poetic symbols and images, whose higher, spiritual reality and truth were occulted beneath the veil of the historical letter and only revealed in the New. As Paul makes clear, the revolutionary ethos of Christianity was grounded aprioristically in its allegorical repudiation of Jewish literalism and historicism.
After the Holocaust, when struggle sessions over the Church’s supposedly congenital “antisemitism” took place all over Europe and America, the movement of Christian Judaization took on an inexorable momentum. One recalls the hysterical reaction to Mel Gibson’s film The Passion, in which scenes depicting Sanhedrin zealots as the provocateurs behind Jesus’s indictment and crucifixion and the Chief Priest’s proclamation, “Let it be on our heads,” led to massive protests by Jewish mobs and the branding of Gibson as an ”antisemite,” even though his script followed closely the Gospel narrative.
The Jews’ proximate role in the crucifixion of Jesus has been a taboo subject ever since. But again, one doesn’t have to be a Marcionite to recognize that central to the foundation of the Christian Church was a muscular rejection of the regnant valencies of Old Testament soteriology and eschatology, which began with Jesus himself and therefore antedated Paul’s evangelistic mission to the Gentiles by at least two decades.
No serious reading of the Gospels can fail to recognize Jesus’ determination to emancipate the Church from the tribalistic, separatist, legalistic, and literalist ethos of the Old Law, without which Paul would have foundered in his efforts to explode the ancient Hebrew presumption—that God’s providential plan ran through the narrow national and ethnic corridor of the history of his “Chosen People”—into a genuinely universal religion.
It may be politically incorrect to acknowledge, but the antithesis between the Old Law of the Jews and the New Law of the Church is one of the oldest and most continuous topoi in Christian literature, theology, and art. It is ubiquitously illustrated in the sculpture and stained glass of the medieval cathedral, in which a young and beautiful personification of Ecclesia is juxtaposed against the image of Synagoga, a withered and barren hag from whose grasp the tablets of the Decalogue have slipped and whose crown teeters precariously on her head, both about to come crashing to the pavement below.
One of the recurrent themes of the New Testament narrative is Jesus’s fulminations against the Jews’ (especially the Pharisees’) hypocrisy in their outward, ceremonial piety of gesture, and their belief that a purely legalistic obedience to and performance of the Byzantine web of commandments and rituals encoded in the Old Law are the sufficient conditions of salvation, needless of any inner righteousness or, in Paul’s evocative phrase, the “inner law,” “written upon the heart.”
The central locus in which Jesus distinguishes his messianic mission from the expectations of the Jews is his rebuff in Luke (17: 20-21) to the Pharisees who ask him, “when the kingdom of God should come?” Jesus deigns not to answer because he roundly denies its empirical-historical premise: “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here!, or lo there!, for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”
The Jews expected a political deliverer in the mold of Moses, who would liberate them as a people from bondage to Rome and re-establish a terrestrial kingdom of Israel in all the worldly glory it ruefully recalled when David was a minor potentate in the Levant; but what Jesus promised wasn’t the liberation of the political nation of Israel from its subjugation to imperial Rome, but only to liberate the individual soul from bondage to sin.
Paul’s doctrine of the Christian supersession of the Abrahamic promise is promulgated unambiguously throughout his preaching, especially in his Epistle to the Galatians, where he reiterates (Gal. 2:16) that “man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ.” For the followers of Christ, “deadness to the law” is the precondition of life in God (Gal. 2: 19):
So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham…But that no man is justified by the law…it is evident: for the just shall live by faith. And the law is not of faith…Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law…That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith…Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, and to thy seed, which is Christ.
–Gal. 3: 9-16
The meaning of the promise to Abraham’s Israelite descendants has now been revealed to have been made to the single “seed,” which is Christ:
Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made…Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster, to bring us unto Christ…But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. For ye are the children of God by faith in Jesus Christ.
–Gal. 3: 19-26
For Paul, God’s bequest to Abraham’s progeny of the Holy Land has been fulfilled in the Heavenly City which is both “above” and “within,” and the election of the Jews as the “Chosen People” has been annulled. With Christ’s Incarnation, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to promise.” (Gal. 3: 28-29)
Paul’s teaching not only invidiates the Old Testament premise of Christian Zionism (which is patently heterodox), but anticipates Augustine’s seminal distinction between the universal City of God and the terrestrial City of Man, in which we are citizens merely (as the Stoic Seneca put it) “by the accident of birth.” But as the adopted sons and co-heirs of the Father, Christians, as Paul insists, are born not “according to the flesh, but according to the spirit.”
The cultural separatism and ethnic nationalism that are the leitmotives, indeed, the imperatives of the salvation history of the Jews in the Old Testament are, accordingly, now dissolved in the one mystical body of Christ. Concomitantly, the Old Testament promise to the Jews of a territorial Promised Land is thus, once again, rescinded and universalized in a New Israel conceived as the spiritual community of Christ’s adherents which transcends all ethnic, geographical, or national boundaries.