The Folly of Christian Zionism

Christian Zionism is based upon a lie told by John Nelson Darby, which led to Jewish Zionism, which led to the colonization of Palestine by the Ashkenazim, which led to a State dominated by a single ethnic group at the expense of all others, making Darby father of much of the misery in West Asia today.

Darby was a Church of Ireland priest who had an epiphany after falling from his horse and hitting his head.  Part of that epiphany was that the predictions in the Mt. Olivet discourse were yet to be.  Specifically, the sign of when those things predicted in the discourse were to take place, at least in Luke: “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies…”. 

As Nelson’s predecessor in the Church of Ireland, Archbishop James Ussher, was well aware, the events in the Mt. Olivet discourse came to pass in 70 CE at the height of the Great Jewish Revolt, which began in 66 CE.  The defenders of Jerusalem were too busy fighting each other in a four-sided conflict (Temple garrison & Idumeans vs. Galilean Zealots vs. Judean Zealots vs. Sikarii) to make an effective defense once the Romans arrived.

Fundamentalists love to ignore history and are thus ignorant of these historical facts.  Ussher, however, was well aware of the Great Jewish Revolt and ends his lengthy history based on the timeline of the Bible with those events.  Since Ussher’s timeline was well known, especially in the British Isles and certainly in the Church of Ireland, the only way Darby could miss that is by deliberately ignoring it because it didn’t fit the ideas convenient to him.

It certainly didn’t help that the Sikarii burned all the food, which brought about the fall rather quickly, after which the city was leveled completely.  The Temple Mound was completely dismantled by prisoners in order to recover the gold that had melted and oozed through the cracks into the base when the temple was burned.  Darby is not the only liar here, after all, three centuries before him, the Ari “saw” that the last remaining wall of the Roman compound of the temple to Jupiter was the Western Wall, another lie.

The “prediction” in the Olivet discourse according to Matthew and Mark is a bit ridiculous since the events it “foretells” (‘when you see the abomination of desolation…’) had taken place two centuries before, in 167 BCE.  As related by Josephus and in the books of Maccabees which were canon until the Reformation (and still are in the Roman, Eastern, and Oriental Churches), the abomination of desolation occurred when Antiochus IV allegedly set up a statue of himself in the Holy of Holies on his way back to Damascus from Egypt. 

What actually occurred was that Antiochus put down a revolt against Seleucid rule in sympathy with the similar revolt in Egypt, the latter strongly supported by the Republic of Rome.  As part of his punishment, Antiochus took the temple treasury, to the priests far more of a sin than the alleged statue.  When the Hasmoneans rebelled against the Oniad dynasty and their Seleucid supporters later that year, they had Rome as their ally and were never less than clients of Rome.

In Darby’s concussed and historically ignorant epiphany, for the predictions of the Olivet discourse to come true, Israel had to reconstitute in order to be set up as a fall guy, a pawn, a sacrifice for the glory of Christianity.  Thus the mistaken identification of Israel’s return with the Second Coming, which gave birth to Christian Restorationism, which gave birth to Jewish Zionism, which gave birth to Christian Zionism.