On Mary and the Mob

Mary—the Holy Virgin, the Theotokos, the Mother of God—was a Jew. Only a fool or an antisemite could deny this. You can doubt the theological claims made for her role in the drama of salvation, of course, but that she was a daughter of Israel? Don’t be absurd. “Salvation comes from the Jews,” said her son, Jesus of Nazareth, to the Samaritan woman (John 4:22). Well, he would know, wouldn’t he?

Let us stop and consider what a stupid time we live in. It’s an era when people are losing their minds with hatred over the fact that a Jewish actress was cast to play a Jewish woman. Think about that. Then again, antisemitism has never been about actual Jews, has it?

Like a boil on the backside of the body politic, there has been an ugly irruption of Jew-hating foolishness over casting in the upcoming Netflix film Mary, about the life of Jesus’s mother. People are outraged—outraged!—that director D.J. Caruso cast an Israeli Jew, Noa Cohen, to play the title character.

“First Netflix taking all Palestinian content down and now they stream a movie about Mary with an all Israeli cast whilst those same people are bombing the birthplace of Christ? Boycott that shit,” said a Muslim woman in an X post. She added video commentary noting that the choice to film the movie in Morocco and not in Bethlehem—the actual birthplace of Christ—was “diabolical.”

The filmmakers could have shot in Bethlehem had the Palestinian Authority, which controls the town, given their permission. Then again, Israeli citizens like Noa Cohen, who plays Mary, are not allowed into Bethlehem.

I’ve been to Bethlehem, and I’ve visited Checkpoint 300—the crossing that makes daily life very hard for Palestinians who live in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority but work inside Israel proper. You would have to have a heart of stone not to pity the honest, decent Palestinians humiliated by these obstacles.

But why does any of this exist? As a response to the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings in the Second Intifada, which killed or wounded thousands of Israeli civilians. The Israeli government began building the barrier in the early 2000s; it dramatically reduced the number of suicide attacks—a fact lamented on Arab television by Ramadan Shallah, former leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group.

“There is the separation fence which is an obstacle to the resistance, and if it were not there, the situation would be entirely different,” Shallah said in 2006.

I digress, but this is the kind of thing one can’t let pass in this current propaganda war. The fake controversy over the Mary film is just one more audacious lie told in the service of the anti-Israel cause. The lie about the security barrier and the lie about Mary’s origins are the same kind of falsehood, one that depends on radical decontextualization to advance a pro-Palestinian, anti-Jewish narrative.

You can only see the security barrier as an inexplicable outrage if you gloss over why Israel built it in the first place. Similarly, you can only see Noa Cohen playing Mary as an outrage if you. . . well, if you ignore everything we know about Mary from Christian Scripture and the society into which she was born.

Were it not for the Gospels, written in the first century, the world would know nothing of Mary. The second-century, noncanonical Gospel of James says that she was the daughter of Joachim and Anna, who, like Abraham and Sarah before them, were barren into old age, when God miraculously granted them a child who would play a central role in the unfolding of the divine plan.

Joachim and Anna are revered as saints in Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and by some Protestant traditions. Yet every Christian knows from the Bible that Mary was a Jewish maiden visited by the Archangel Gabriel, who told her that, though a virgin, she would conceive by the Holy Spirit and bear Israel’s long-awaited messiah.

“Behold, the handmaid of the Lord,” she replied. “Be it done unto me according to thy word.” (Luke 1:38)

The Gospel of Matthew begins with a recitation of the long lineage of Jesus, to demonstrate that the Nazarene son of Mary descended from both Abraham and King David. This is not coincidence: It is necessary to establish Jesus’s messianic credentials according to the Hebrew Bible.

Of course Jews don’t accept this, but believe that the messiah is still to come. The point is simply that it is impossible to extricate Jesus and his mother from Judaism. Indeed, from a Christian perspective, the great tragedy of the life of Jesus is that he came first of all to redeem the Jewish people (“He came to his own, but his own did not receive him,” John 1:11), and through them, all the world.

To deny the Jewishness of Jesus is not only to negate the clear and unambiguous testimony of Scripture but to render as nonsense the entire salvation narrative.

Indeed, as Jesus himself told the Samaritan woman, God sent salvation to all of humanity through the Jewish people. No Jews, no Jesus. Though from the Christian perspective, Jews today reject the divinity of Jesus, as did their ancestors—while from the Jewish perspective they have merely remained true to their covenant with God—followers of Jesus cannot reject the Jews without being guilty of a serious, even fatal, heresy.

That heresy is a very old one, and it is called Marcionism. Marcion was a wealthy second-century Christian who, under the influence of Gnosticism, taught that the God of the New Testament was not the God of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew god was, according to Marcion, a god of wrath; the Christian god was a god of love. These are two distinct deities, he said, and the Christian god is sovereign.

To achieve this, Marcion eliminated from the Christian canon Genesis, Exodus, and the Psalms. He also cleansed the Bible of Moses, King David, and the Prophet Isaiah, believed by Orthodox Christians to have foretold the coming of Jesus as Israel’s messiah (Isaiah, Chapters 9 and 53). For readers of the Marcionite Bible, the God of the Christians was no longer the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but a reduced deity cobbled together from a rewritten portion of Luke’s Gospel, and ten of Paul’s letters.

Marcionism was strongly condemned by the Church fathers, who defended the legitimacy and necessity of the Hebrew scriptures. In Marcionism, Christianity replaces Judaism; in Christian orthodoxy, Christianity fulfills Judaism. “Don’t misunderstand why I have come—it isn’t to cancel the laws of Moses and the warnings of the prophets,” said Jesus (Matthew 5:17). “No, I came to fulfill them and to make them all come true.”

This is a complex theological point, one on which Christians do not fully agree. The traditional Christian understanding—one still held by Orthodox Christianity today—is that the Church became the new Israel by virtue of receiving the Jewish messiah, and therefore being grafted onto the Hebrew root stock (Romans 11:16–24).

In modern times, in part out of admirable repentance from forced conversions, Catholicism has moved away from this “replacement” theology, and now teaches that Jews do not need to accept Jesus as the messiah to be saved. In 2015, the Vatican even strangely (in light of Scripture—especially Paul’s letter to the Romans) instructed Catholics to stop evangelizing Jews. Given the incredible diversity of Protestant belief, it is impossible to generalize in its case.

Nevertheless, what all authoritative Christian traditions share is an irrevocable, undeniable testimony that God chose the Jewish people to make Himself known to all of humanity, and that without Hebrew Scripture and tradition, the Christian faith would make no sense at all.

So why the controversy over the Mary movie? Why are so many people eager, even desperate, to deny Mary’s Jewishness?

It is clear that partisans for the Palestinian side in the current war wish to do anything they can to delegitimize Israel and Judaism in order to gain credibility for their cause. They understand well that many American Christians, especially evangelicals, sympathize with the Israelis in part because they know their Bible. If they can sever Christianity’s roots from Judaism in the Christian imagination, they reason, they can gain sympathy among followers of Jesus. But to claim the historical Mary as a “Palestinian”—a people and a concept that did not exist at the time of Jesus’s birth—is a malicious anachronism.

The vast majority of American Christians believe in Israel’s legitimate right to exist and defend itself. But too many of us deny, or discount, the hardships that Palestinian Christians suffer. Those of us who have traveled to places like Bethlehem are acutely aware of them. For example, Palestinian drivers in the West Bank face difficulties from roadblocks and checkpoints, and the expansion of Israeli settlements is a constant source of friction.

The question is why they are suffering. Were it not for the ever-present and all-too-real threat of Palestinian Islamic terrorism against Israelis, the security arrangements that make daily life so onerous would not exist.

Palestinian Christians suffer in other ways from the actions of the Islamic majority. It is little known by American Christians that Bethlehem was over 80 percent Christian until the Oslo Accords, which awarded control of the town to the Palestinian Authority in 1995. Today only 12 percent of the town’s population is Christian.

The exodus can be attributed to several reasons, including the difficulty of conducting daily life under a de facto state of siege. Again, though, if not for the rash of Islamic suicide bombings in Israel in the 1990s and early 2000s—some of which originated in Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem—conditions in Jesus’s birthplace for its residents would be far more livable.

Arab Christians living in Israel—about two percent of the population, compared to the 18 percent of the population that is Muslim—enjoy far more safety and liberty than their counterparts living under Islamic rule. But it is hard for Palestinian Christians to be honest about what they experience in this regard. In the year 2000, I spoke to two Palestinian Christian men in East Jerusalem who told me that they hate the Israelis, but they fear Hamas, which has never been shy about its contempt for Christians, and its view that they deserve second-class status as dhimmis in a rightly ordered society. The men begged me not to write about it, visibly frightened for their lives.

On that same press trip, an American-born Catholic cleric serving a Palestinian parish who walked with me to Bethlehem, and expressed his love for his congregation, shared with me his frustration that then–PA leader Yasser Arafat’s cronies exploited Christians and others by robbing them blind, and then convincing them that all their problems are the fault of the Jews.

To sum up: Life is difficult for Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim, and it is understandable that American Christians pity them. But the fanatical Jew-hating mentality prevalent among Palestinians, and the resulting Islamist terrorism against Israeli civilians, severely compromise—to put it mildly—the victim narrative that has gained so much currency in progressive U.S. church circles.

As troubling as these propaganda victories are, it is far more concerning, at least to me as a political conservative and theologically orthodox Christian, that Christian antisemites of the American far right have taken up the cause of de-Judaizing Christianity as part of their general campaign against Jews.

The white supremacist Nick Fuentes is particularly notorious. A proponent of what he calls “Christian Nationalism,” Fuentes frequently claims that Jews are subverting the rightful rulers of America. “We want this century to be the most Christian century in the history of human earth,” he ranted at a rally last year.

But perhaps the most prominent example is Candace Owens, a Catholic convert and a right-wing internet influencer, who is far more mainstream in her affect than the jittery Fuentes. Owens has promoted bizarre conspiracy theories, such as the claim that Jews kidnapped and murdered Christian babies (a blood libel that, alas, originates deep within Christianity’s tradition.) In Owens’s telling, “Catholics and Christians were going missing on Passover and then they would find bodies across Europe” and “they were able to trace them back to Jews. Blood libel!” Owens claims that these evildoers aren’t actually Jews, but people “masquerading behind Jews,” but the effect is the same.

She also helped popularize on X the statement “Christ Is King,” which, in its Christian context, is an anodyne statement of belief in God’s sovereignty, but more recently has become a code phrase for antisemitic sympathy among right-wing Christian edgelords.

When called out for this wicked nonsense, Owens deployed a strategy that she has often criticized when the left does it. As Christine Rosen noted:

When she is criticized for saying something irresponsible, or factually incorrect, or antisemitic, Owens immediately plays the victim and claims persecution as a Christian or an African American. When Dennis Prager (for whom Owens once briefly worked) gently chastised her for defending [Kanye] West’s antisemitic statements, Owens used her podcast as a venue to attack Prager, who is Jewish. As she told The New Yorker, she called and yelled at him, saying, “I’m not playing this game with the Jewish community again.” Game?

The #ChristIsKing campaign Owens championed appealed for Christian solidarity against supposed Jewish enemies of the faith. It is easy to see how the seeds of contemporary Marcionism find purchase in minds filled with such taurine byproduct. But seriously: Who falls for this stuff?

Well, theologically and historically ignorant Christians are legion in an age when the shallow pseudo-faith dubbed “moralistic therapeutic deism” has displaced authoritative forms of Christianity. It is common to hear engaged Catholics and Protestants complain that the intellectually vacuous “relational” model of catechizing youth—the “Jesus is my best friend” approach so popular in churches—has robbed at least two generations of substantive theology and church history. The susceptibility of young people to emotionalism and to intersectional claims of oppression, as well as a scant awareness of both history and the Bible, sets them up for exploitation by latter-day Marcionists.

As ridiculous as the attempt by pop Marcionists to strip the Virgin Mary of her Jewishness is, it is dangerous to downplay it. The revival of this ancient Christian heresy is happening in Western societies undergoing a vile renaissance in antisemitic rhetoric and violence. On elite college campuses as well as in the streets of cities like London and Montreal, pro-Palestinian Jew-haters openly celebrate Hamas and Hezbollah.

Modern history shows us where weaponized Marcionism can lead. In 1939, the Nazis founded The Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, for the purpose of “defense against all the covert Jewry and Jewish being” that had polluted the West. The Institute dedicated itself to “understanding Christian German being” in light of this refined knowledge.

Founded with the participation of eleven German Protestant churches, the Institute refashioned Jesus as an Aryan persecuted by Jews. Galilee, where Jesus grew up, was in this view a region inhabited by Aryans—Assyrians, Persians, Indians—who were forced to convert to Judaism. Jesus, then, who in reality died as a Jew, was really an Aryan martyr. When anti-Mary activists shout “Jesus was Palestinian!” you’d better believe there is precedent.

“The Institute shifted Christian attention from the humanity of God to the divinity of man: Hitler as an individual Christ, the German Volk as a collective Christ, and Christ as Judaism’s deadly opponent,” writes Susannah Heschel in her 2010 book The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.

It has been said that heresy emerges when people take a portion of the truth and turn it into the truth’s entirety. For believers in the Gospel accounts, there is no gainsaying that Jesus of Nazareth died in part because his claim to be the messiah outraged Jewish religious authorities, who demanded his death as a blasphemer. As much as Christians today may despise how our ancestors in the faith used charges of deicide to justify persecuting Jews over the generations, it is intellectually unjustifiable to rewrite Scripture, in effect, to compensate for sins of the past.

That said, it is also the case that Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, could have saved the life of a man he judged to be guilty of no crime, but instead chose political expediency in killing him.

What’s more, in contemporary Christian understanding, the responsibility for deicide lies not simply with the Jewish religious authorities and the Roman political authorities, but with every single human being. This is why, in the Holy Week liturgies of the Roman Catholic Church, the entire congregation recites the words of the mob in Jerusalem: “Crucify him! Crucify him!” (Luke 23:21). It continues to this day, in the hearts and minds of every believer. As an Orthodox priest once told me in confession, every time we sin, we in some sense crucify Jesus again.

From a Christian point of view, the crucifixion is above all a tragedy. It is a tale in which the actors who murdered Jesus did so because they wanted to do what they thought was right—defend the holiness of the Most High, keep social order, and so forth—but in so doing killed the incarnate God, sent to them by heaven for their own deliverance.

You don’t have to look to the Gospels for an example of this kind of tragedy. Go further back in history, to the ancient Greeks. In Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, the title character inadvertently murders his father and marries his mother. This is the basis for Sigmund Freud’s theory of the “Oedipus complex,” which supposedly explains a boy’s desire to murder his father and sexually possess his mother. In Freudian theory, this accounts for neurotic guilt.

Freud’s theory has been widely criticized as unscientific theorizing, and is not taken seriously today. Nevertheless, there is a reason why Oedipus Rex retains its power to shock and move audiences. The ancient Greeks interpreted the Theban king’s sin as hubris, or pride.

A righteous man, Oedipus thought he could escape the Delphic oracle’s advice that the plague gripping Thebes could be ended only by capturing and punishing the murderer of King Laius, the father of Oedipus. We learn from Oedipus that a prophet had told him he would kill his father and marry his mother; he ran away from Corinth to escape the hideous prophecy.

And yet, he could not. In his zeal to avenge his father’s death, Oedipus learns that in fact he earlier slaughtered his father, whom he did not recognize, at a crossroads. Once he discovers the truth, Oedipus’s wife, Queen Jocasta, commits suicide in shame and horror, and Oedipus gouges out his eyes.

The Greeks considered Oedipus a tragic hero because he intended to do good, but instead committed great evil. What does this have to do with the Mary controversy, and the de-Judaization of Christianity?

The effort by some Christians and Palestinian sympathizers to cast out Judaism from the Jesus story amounts to an attempt to murder Christianity’s father. Some do this in full awareness of their own bigotry. Others, though, may not grasp that by doing so they are destroying the very religion that they profess. The de-Judaized Christianity of the Nazis was no Christianity at all. By symbolically murdering Christianity’s father—Judaism—these Christians make themselves blind.

One understands why Muslims, who have no obvious stake in Christian theological disputes, would turn this lie into a propaganda weapon in their ongoing war with Israel. It is much harder to grasp why Christians would take what amounts to a poison pill for our own faith, aside from sentimentality married to ignorance—or, more darkly, a desire to cloak with virtue sheer hatred of the Jewish people.

True, one does not have to deny the inextricable Jewishness of the Christian faith to oppose the Israeli government’s Gaza war strategy. Though those who do should ask themselves why the Jews, and only the Jews, are expected to tolerate Islamic terrorist mass murder, from suicide bombings to the October 7 pogrom. If Christians want to seek what they believe is justice for suffering Palestinians, they had better know, and know well, that their mindless pursuit of what they believe to be righteousness risks bringing about what the Greeks called hamartia—a fatal flaw—that leads them to nemesis, the catastrophe that always follows hubris.

“Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall,” warns the Hebrew Bible in Proverbs 16:18. Christians who have read the Old Testament know this. Latter-day Marcionist Christians who effectively cast out the Hebrew Bible will remain ignorant of this wisdom. If they won’t listen to the ancient Hebrews, then they ought to at least pay attention to the Greeks.

In the end, these hubristic Christians won’t have to gouge out their eyes, for they will have already made themselves blind. And by denying Mary’s Jewishness, they will have denied her son as surely as the braying mob did on that tragic Passover eve in Jerusalem.

Rod Dreher is an Orthodox Christian and writer who lives in Budapest. His most recent book is Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.

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