Texe Marrs: The average Jew believes that the Old Testament is a wonderful book of myths and stories that have good meaning, but you can understand the Old Testament only by studying the Talmud and the Kabbalah.
Pastor Anderson: The Jews stop believing in the Torah starting in Genesis chapter 1.
Rabbi Wiener: I believe that creation is a design that is unending. Evolution is part of the process, and the beginning to me...you know, there are people who talk about the Big Bang Theory. I have no quarrel with them.
Pastor Anderson: So you don't take the beginning of Genesis with the Garden of Eden and the serpent...you don't take that literally then?
Rabbi Wiener: No, to me, those are parables.
Pastor Anderson: When you look at the key teachings of the books of Moses, Genesis to Deuteronomy, the Jews don't really believe any of these. Circumcision I know is a big part of...
Leader Schesnol: Ouch!
Pastor Anderson: It's a big part of Judaism I think. Am I right?
Leader Schesnol: It is.
Rabbi Wiener: If an adult comes to me for conversion and is not circumcised, then it is a very simple matter. You take a pin and just prick the p****, so that a drop of blood comes out, and that's enough.
Pastor Anderson: So it's more symbolic?
Rabbi Wiener: Right.
Leader Schesnol: Just to represent the willingness to be able to be part of that covenant.
Pastor Anderson: So, they don't remove the whole foreskin? They just do more of a symbolic...
Leader Schesnol: Exactly.
Pastor Anderson: Well, in the Torah, Abraham was 99 when he was circumcised, and his son Ishmael was 13, but nowadays they don't?
Leader Schesnol: They don't.
Pastor Anderson: Now we as New Testament Christians don't practice circumcision, but the Jews, remember, are saying that they still follow that Mosaic law, so if they were actually following it, they would have to remove the foreskin and circumcise that adult convert. That's what the Torah teaches.
Pastor Berzins: I've heard it said so many times, "Oh, the Jews just believe the Old Testament. They believe everything we do, just without Jesus," and that is a lie. They don't believe God. They don't believe Jesus Christ. They don't believe the Old Testament, and they don't believe the New Testament. They don't believe any of it.
Rabbi Wiener: And how is it determined which is good and which is bad? That's called "civilization." People get together and determine, "You shouldn't steal." So civilization says, "That's bad." That's how you measure good. If you come from a society where stealing is good, then that's how that civilization determines good from bad. If you don't steal, you're bad. If you do steal, you're part of us.
Pastor Anderson: Is there an absolute right and wrong where stealing is always wrong because God said so?
Rabbi Wiener: There's no absolute in my opinion.
Pastor Romero: It says in John 5:46-47
"For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me; for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?"
Pastor Romero: Jesus Christ is telling the Jews of his day that they did not believe Moses. Their whole claim was that they believe Moses, and they don't believe him, but he explains here, that if you don't believe in him, then you don't believe in Moses.
Rabbi Wiener: We practice differently. We believe differently, and maybe our approach is different, but the destination is the same. We're trying to reach God, and that's the whole objective.
Pastor Anderson: So you believe that all religions are going to the same destination, just taking different routes to get there?
Rabbi Wiener: Exactly! And different ways to get there, and different understandings of how they get there, but that doesn't make one better than the other. There is no one path to God. There is no one understanding of God. To understand God, we have to understand each other. We have to understand ourselves.
Rabbi Abrami: There is no such thing as a salvation that transforms. You do what is right, and you save yourself at every moment. God is not in Heaven. If someone starts telling me that a soul is in Heaven...what do they know about the souls, the spiritual souls of people in Heaven? This is for children! You have to tell them this way. "How come grandfather didn't come home today?" "Oh, he's in Heaven."
Pastor Anderson: What about Hell? Is Hell something that is part of Judaism, or no? Being like a place of fiery punishment...
Rabbi Abrami: I have been in Hell. What we call Hell is the Valley of Hinnom.
Pastor Anderson: Tophet also, right?
Rabbi Abrami: There is a place right outside of Jerusalem that is called the Valley of the sons of Hinnom. It was a place where pagans used to offer human sacrifices, and by extrapolation, somehow they imagined that there was a place like that in the universe somewhere where wicked people would be going.
Pastor Anderson: So you don't believe that the Old Testament teaches any kind of a literal Hell?
Rabbi Abrami: No.
Pastor Anderson: Okay, alright.
Rabbi Wiener: A lot of people will tell you the Bible says that if you don't do something you'll have a bad life, or you'll go to the netherworld...
Pastor Anderson: Hell
Rabbi Wiener: Right, well, we don't subscribe to that anyway, but my feeling is different.
Pastor Anderson: If the Jews don't believe in the creation story of Genesis 1, they don't believe the story of Adam and Eve literally, they don't believe in Noah, they don't believe in the Tower of Babel, they scoff at these stories, they don't believe in circumcising adults, they don't believe in the animal sacrifices, what part of the Torah do they believe in?! This is supposedly their most exalted book, yet when you look at all the particulars of what the Torah teaches, they don't believe any of it.
Pastor Anderson: Today you have a lot of evangelical Christians in America that are very pro-Israel.
Rabbi Mann: Very.
Pastor Anderson: Christians are just really zealous in their support of Israel. Now has it always been that way throughout history?
Leader Schesnol: Oh, God, no!
Pastor Anderson: or is that a newer phenomenon?
Leader Schesnol: No, it hasn't been that way throughout history.
Rabbi Mann: Traditionally Christianity was essentially anti-Semitic. The phenomenon of the Christian Zionists is relatively recent. They maintain that the Jews are God's chosen people and will always be God's chosen people. They use the term "the apple of God's eye."
Pastor Anderson: And that's a more recent phenomenon?
Rabbi Mann: Yeah, I'd say a few hundred years, as far as I know. That does not go all the way back.
Rabbi Abrami: Replacement theology has played a very important role in Christianity.
TV Preacher 1: What is replacement theology?
Hal Lindsey: Replacement theology is the root and branch of Christian anti-Semitism.
TV Preacher 2: It's like a virus in the church.
TV Preacher 3: Basically it is saying that the church now has superseded Israel, and this theology that discards the place of the Jewish people and replaces it with the church, the new and true spiritual Israel, is very dangerous because I believe it's the primary root of anti-Semitism.
Rabbi Abrami: Many theologians all through the centuries have preached replacement theology.
Pastor Anderson: Can you name some that have preached that?
Rabbi Abrami: I have here everything about John Chrysostom. He is the chief anti-Semite of the church.
John Chrysostom: “The synagogue is worse than a brothel…it is the den of scoundrels and the repair of wild beasts…the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults…the refuge of debauchees, and the cavern of devils. It is a criminal assembly of Jews…a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ…a den of thieves, a dwelling of iniquity, the refuge of devils, a gulf and an abyss of perdition. I would say the same things about their souls.”
Rabbi Abrami: They have demonized the Jews. This is still present in the minds of many.
Pastor Anderson: Throughout history, Christians have not looked at the Jews as God's chosen people. They looked at them as a people that rejected Christ and were therefore rejected by God. For example, the last book written by Martin Luther before he died was called "On the Jews and Their Lies," and in this book, he gives all kinds of scriptural arguments for why the Jews are not God's chosen people, and he also exposes a lot of the blasphemous teachings of the Talmud.
Texe Marrs: His very last sermon, he preached about the Jews, and he said the Jews hate our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and through their perfidious behavior, they create all kinds of stratagems and ruses to deceive us. And he got so angry at them, he actually said we should go and burn all their copies of the Talmud. He was infuriated about the Talmud. Of course, today the Jews consider him a great anti-Semite.
Rabbi Abrami: St. Augustine was no better.
Pastor Anderson: He was also anti-Semitic?
Rabbi Abrami: That's right! He was very demeaning. All this is pure hatred.
Pastor Anderson: It doesn't matter whether you're listening to John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, Peter the Venerable, Martin Luther, John Calvin...you name the church father. You name the protestant leader throughout history. They are all saying the same thing about the Jews: that they're the Synagogue of Satan, that it's a false religion. This doctrine that the Jews are still God's chosen people is a new doctrine.
Texe Marrs: You know, back before the late 1800s, everybody recognized what we're talking about now, but something began to change, first with Dr. Cyrus Scofield.
Pastor Furse: C.I. Scofield was a divorced man. He had trouble with alcohol. He was a lawyer turned preacher. He left his first wife Leontine Cerrè in 1883. That's the year AFTER he wrote his first book "Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth." So in 1882 he writes his first book "Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth," and in 1883 he leaves his first wife, marries another lady, and then becomes a pastor in Texas - very famous, very popular. Scofield's dispensational, premillennial Bible was edited with financial assistance from prominent businessmen, some of which had questionable religious ties.
Texe Marrs: He had Jewish retainers who made him a member of the Lotus club - sort of a secret society - and suddenly he had plenty of money. This corrupt lawyer who had abandoned his wife and was found guilty of numerous offenses as a corrupt attorney - but Scofield was given money, and the Oxford group out of England published his Bible. Why would they take a crooked lawyer and make him the editor of a Bible? And then suddenly they had millions of dollars to promote it. With that amount of money, the Bible took off, and it basically sealed the deal for the Jews.
Pastor Anderson: The Scofield Reference Bible is very pro-Israel, very Zionist, and this book more than any other book changed the thinking of an entire generation of young preacher boys.
Pastor Jimenez: Another belief that Christians have today, that is an incorrect belief, that is not found in scripture, is the belief that we should bless Israel. They go back to what they refer to as the Abrahamic covenant. They go back to Genesis 12, and they say, "We have to bless Israel if we want God's blessing, we have to bless them."
Genesis 12:1-3 is the key scripture where God calls and blesses Abraham. It reads, “Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”
Pastor Anderson: Now according to this scripture, God is making a covenant with Abraham, and he tells Abraham, "I will bless THEE." The word "thee" is singular. He is speaking to Abraham. Well, in Scofield's notes on Genesis 12, he applies this blessing unto the future nation of Israel. That is not what the scripture teaches. Many evangelical Christians today do not get their doctrine on Israel from anything that's written in the New Testament. They are getting it from the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible. When you are reading these promises made to Abraham in the Old Testament, you have to realize what the Bible teaches in Galatians 3:16, when it says:
" Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made..."
Pastor Jimenez: Now if we stopped right there, all the Christians of today, or Zionists, or whoever, could say, "See! It was to Abraham and his seed, but the verse goes on. It says:
"He saith not, And to seeds..." (with an "s" at the end making it plural)
"He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ."
Pastor Anderson: So according to the Bible, the promises made to Abraham were made unto Abraham and unto Christ, and the Bible says in verse 29:
"And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise."
Pastor Anderson: According to the Bible, we as Christians, whether we be Jew or Gentile, are the heirs of the promises made to Abraham. Those today, who are in the Middle East in the nation of Israel, they are not in Christ. 99% of them do not believe in Jesus Christ. Therefore they are not the seed of Abraham. Therefore Genesis 12:1-3 does not apply unto them.
Pastor Furse: People will say, "Well, we have got to support Israel if we want God's blessing on ourselves, if we want God's blessing on our church, if we want God's blessing on our nation, we must support a physical Israel. Well, if you just count back the last 66 or 67 years of American history, do you find the blessing of God on our country? Did we have legalized abortion back in the 1940s? No, it has come since then. What was our debt in the 1940s versus today? What were we like then compared to what we are now? You can't convince me that the blessings of God have fallen on this country because a "promise" to support a physical group of people somehow correlates to blessings from God.
