Our Violent World and the Ethics of Jesus

By John Dudley Willis

This book is driven by forty years of study on 1700 years of Christian violence. The historical section, Part 1, opens with, “Christianity is the most homicidal religion in the history of the world…Half a Billion men, women, children, infants, elderly, sick, and disabled slain.” You read how Christians were and are taught to obey their governments more than Jesus Christ, whether killing as soldiers, torturing for governments, or harming innocent citizens as police. You read the words of Christian European Kings, Queens, and Popes to their Christian explorers sent into world, “Discover, subdue, and conquer.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Dec 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684712298

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WILLIS

Copyright © 2019 John Dudley Willis.

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ISBN: 978-1-6847-1228-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6847-1230-4 (hc)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019917330

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Dedication

To the Millions of Past Victims

Slain, Harmed, Tortured, Enslaved, Defrauded, Conquered and Ruled

By Christians

To the Millions of Present Victims

Being Bombed, Being Embargoed, Being Discriminated Against, Being Plundered,

By Christians

To the Hundreds of Millions of Future Victims

For Whom God Will Give Life, but Whose Lives Will Be Ended

By Christians

God Have Mercy, Christ Have Mercy

Acknowledgments

In this book are many signs of commitment to learn the truth, pursue the truth, and tell the truth, and I must acknowledge my father, William Henry Willis, who as I write this is nearing the end of his long life, for not only drilling into me the importance of honesty, but for modeling it in how he lived his life. I am convinced his admonitions and urgings to be an honest man were, are, and always will be one moral compass point for me.

Some of the men I acknowledge now have left us, but some still live, so I write in general.

Insecurity about one’s talents and capacities, insecurity about one’s own intrinsic worth, insecurity that one even has a welcomed place in the world, are very bad things to carry. So I thank David Hull, for having urged me not to quit Christian education due to experiences with some dishonest fundamentalists. Without David’s encouragement, who knows where I would have gone, or where I would be.

It is a wonderful thing to be a young impressionable intellectual, and to meet a scholar and teacher with the gifts and force as possessed by S. Scott Bartchy, a scholar who managed to do what few attempt: take his Harvard-educated mind and harness it with his heart. A scholar of early Christianity at ease in fearlessly challenging the academic consensus, Scott set an imprint in me for doing what you see done here—blending history, reading texts, ethical subjects, and a modest hope for change. Add to this classical trumpeter’s delight that Scott had talent and sensitivity to speak through his jazz piano.

The University of Chicago I have compared to a delightful intellectual warm bath for how it hit me. Don S. Browning, Dean of the Disciples Divinity House of the University of Chicago, opened the door for me to have no financial concerns at all, while I drilled as deep as I could with mature scholars related to my interests and concerns. Don’s decision was the seed that ultimately produced this book. To the following fine scholars, excellent in their fields and demanding in their standards for themselves and their circle, I thank them all: Brian A. Gerrish, erudite and elegant historian, and Chairman of my PhD committee; James A. Gustafson; Bernard McGinn; Eric Cochrane; Robin Lovin; Stanley Hauerwas; and Leonard Kreiger, on historiography.

Last but not least, I thank Willard Swartley, without whom there is no doubt this book would not have been written. When I was debating whether the impulse to write was from me or God, I asked him to read my work, to see if my Greek translations might withstand criticism from some New Testament scholars. Willard is not to blame for content, but he encouraged me as he had time, and I kept writing because he kept saying my work was valuable. Now you be the judge!

Introduction

I remember when I first read a statement that really expressed how I felt about religious people who talked a lot about their religion, but whose lives most definitely were contradictions to what they said about themselves. The remark was made in the 17th century by the unorthodox Jew, Benedict Baruch Spinoza:

Everyone says that Sacred Scripture is the Word of God, that it teaches people true blessedness or the way of salvation. Truly, the facts themselves plainly indicate something else. The common folk indeed care nothing less, it is obvious, than to live by the texts of Sacred Scripture…. Because if people who attest to the words of scripture were speaking their real minds, then they would have reason to be living other than they do.¹

He was writing about Christians where he was living at the time. Spinoza expressed well how many of us feel when we meet someone just full of scripture quotes, yet whose personalities and other habits convince us they are more talk than substance, or more hypocrite than saint. All the religions have such people.

Yet for me, people can talk all they want and, unless they have me cornered, I can walk away from their verbal barrage and then later, I can run if I see them first. Talk is talk and talk is cheap. On the other hand, when things move from talk, to someone slapping me in the face, or knocking me to the ground and kicking me, or pulling a knife or gun with the intent to kill me—all because of their religion, or because of my religion, or my lack of what they consider religion—then we have crossed not an invisible line, but we have crossed the line from talk and sound into the personal and real territory of flesh and blood.

As Spinoza observed, there is much talk about God and the Word of God, but the behaviors of many religious people are not obedient to divine commands for virtue, goodness, and benevolence. Indeed, the behaviors of some religious people reveal what Spinoza implied. They are sick in their inner spiritual, mental, and emotional conditions, which all their religious words cannot overcome or hide.

One of the principal reasons Jesus of Nazareth constantly got into hot water with some of his fellow Jews was his belief that (1) real religion begins and exists within the heart, our innermost minds, conscious and unconscious—which God always sees truly and completely, regardless of religious chatter and rituals—and (2) the truly religious person seeks congruity and harmony between what is inside them and how they live in the external world towards people. That is my interpretation, not anything he said.

Jesus earned some antagonism from his fellow Jewish leaders when he criticized theological traditions. Note the following statements attributed to him, which generated ill will.

For what reason do you break the commandment of God on account of your tradition…you invalidated the commandment of God on account of your tradition….²

Jesus said to them, "Isaiah prophesied correctly about you, hypocrites, as it has been written, ‘This people honors me with lip-service, but their heart is kept far away from me. For no purpose they worship me, teaching doctrines [which are] human precepts.’ You abandon the commandment of God so you might hold on to your tradition…. Invalidating the Word of God for your tradition you pass down [to others], you do many things like this."³

Jesus’ fellow Jews did not appreciate, indeed, resented and were angered by his statements that their theological traditions (1) broke and invalidated God’s Word and (2) invalidated their attempted worship of God. If you look at the Hebrew Bible and review the Prophets, you will see they spoke what God gave them to speak, and they condemned human traditions, and false religions. They also suffered isolation, mockery, physical abuse, and some were killed—just like Jesus—for telling people what God wanted them to hear, that they were sinful, their religion false, and that they needed to turn away from their sins and return to a holy righteous God, so as to become spiritually whole again.

General Thoughts About This Book:

Its Beginnings and End

Spinoza had nothing to do with my life or this book. I have been concerned for more than forty years with the history of violence done by Christians around the world. This book is, in one broad sense, the result of historical saturation in those studies, and a conviction that, because of the seventeen centuries already known, and our current escalations of violence today led by Christians in various governments, we are on the cusp of cataclysmic events that survivors will call at least World War Three, if not the Bloody Heart of the Apocalypse. So, impelled from behind, with the force of historial studies, and accelerated and intensified by observations in the present, some readers might consider this book is a kind of declaration of literary war against seventeen hundred years of Christian violence, and a prophecy of what seems to be coming all too soon, aided by Christians following the same doctrines as in the past.

A War with No Victory. So, then, what weapons exist as tools for such a literary war? As I worked on my PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago, at least by 1989 I realized there were no ways to persuade the Christian Churches to abandon their theological systems, which justified the use of killing and harming other persons. From that time to now, it has been a dark cloud over me to realize that nothing can be done to alter the present and future course of the violence done by Christian governments, war planners, generals, soldiers, police, secret assassins and agents for coups d’état, etc. The Christian Churches essentially will remain the Christian Churches, and they are too intertwined with governments and the societies of their members ever to surrender such forms of power, however transient and elusive.

A War Against Ignorance, Ideological Victimization, Cognitive Violence, and Lies. When motivated, some people will tell any lie and use any manipulation for their own ends, so there is no victory against such people. On the other hand, for the victims of the sellers and manipulators of violence done in the name of Jesus Christ, there are some weapons useful for at least helping victims become not victims any more. I decided to wage a different kind of war against such things as Christian war, Christian nationalism, Christian capitalism, and any other systems of human destruction.

The weapons of my war are educational. My weapons are historical facts, supported by enough primary footnotes that readers can cross-check them on their own. My facts are not propaganda. My intention is to convey the truth as I see it, though surely some construals here are weak. So I want to present to my readers enough materials so they are armed for criticism, armed for self-criticism, armed against propaganda, and armed to make decisions on who they are and where they stand on the issues. I am trying to so arm my readers that they become the best possible moral agents for their own lives and, if they believe in God, so they become morally and religious accountable to God, if and when they consider killing or otherwise harming another human being, for any reason, at any time.

I am a liberal in this sense. I am satisfied that people may believe whatever they want to believe; that they become answerable to themselves for what they believe and do; and they become answerable to anyone else they harm, or may harm (with harm understood in its fullest range of damage, physical, mental, emotional, familial, social legal, institutional, commercial, financial, etc). People may believe whatever they want to believe, nevertheless, when people’s beliefs move them to arrest, arraign, and imprison; or to form a crowd and lynch; or to abduct and torture; or to construct a net of lies against innocent people, then declare war on them, in order to take their lands and resources, then these behaviors in the real three dimensional physical world are different from intellectual and ideological debates.⁴

I once was having a polite discussion with an aggressive intellectual arguing for the complete relativity of morals. He was saying morality only is a human construct, subjective, and arbitrary. Being tired of this worn out old cocktail talk, I thought I would challenge it from real life. I said, Well, my morals are that I am going to put a knife in your ribs, and take your wallet, because my values say I deserve what you have, and your life is no obstacle to my taking what I want. He protested, not surprisingly, and his protest was enough for me to say I had won our little academic micro-debate. So in my liberalism, I say people can believe whatever they want to believe, but if their beliefs put into practice means they harm or kill others, then I must draw the line, just as my fellow debater drew the line.

So while there are thousands of Christian ideas and doctrines, and while we all can sit around and discuss or debate them, there are limits to the argument that these are only doctrines, and I have my right to believe what my Church teaches, or what I have come to believe, if the doctrines and beliefs result in harming or killing other people. So in this book I want Christians holding to violent, harmful, deadly values, to know what Jesus commanded in general and in particular about everything violence-related, whether they ever personally harm or kill another human being, or whether they just stand by and watch while other Christians harm or kill, or whether they give orders or pay other Christians to harm or kill.

The Pleasure of Waging Educational War. Jesus was alleged to have said something interesting and important, and which made a deep impression on me the first time I read it.

The slave who, having known the inclination of his master and [yet] not having prepared nor having acted upon his inclination, will be scourged many [times]. But the one not having known, yet having done many things comparably worthy of stripes, will be struck with few. Now to everyone to whom much has been given, much will be demanded from him; and to whom much is committed, even more they will demand from him.⁵

I think my initial positive respond to the scripture above was having been raised by a father very concerned about personal responsibility. He told me the old people in his family had this homespun saying. Every tub has to stand on its own bottom. The statement from Jesus suggests in its own way that God holds people accountable for what they know. The issue in that text is accountability, and it reveals Jesus’ clear viewpoint that God has a sliding scale for justice, depending on what people knew about what they were doing.

I would like to think this book is primarily a tool for increasing readers’ personal accountability on the subjects treated here. I have tried to provide factual, clear, and compelling evidence, with deep footnote documentation, so readers possess the tools and capacities to think on their own for all the subjects treated here. Here I am offering some material which possesses its own force, without a doubt. My responsibility is to do the best I can, then let it go, to let the tub stand on its own bottom. Whatever your level of education, whatever your personal preferences and prejudices, I have intended to give you enough factual information, each component which possesses its own inductive force, so you must wrestle with it and reformulate your own conclusion.

Of much greater importance, however, is this. I hope I have given you enough factual information so, should you master it, two things will happen. First, I hope this book enables you to become informed enough, confident enough, and empowered enough with facts, so no one ever again can seduce you with their logic and arguments as to what Jesus said and did on violence-related subjects. Surely you now will have enough data to think on your own, and to question or refute what propagandists or dogmatists historically have put into the trough for public consumption. Second, whether you are a Christian, or a member of some other religion, or a complete skeptic or atheist regarding God, it would please me enormously if you not only were safe from future manipulation, but also if you become an active critic of propagandists, and an active defender of innocent people who have not read this book, and who are capable of being seduced by the centuries-old arguments discussed here and revealed for what they were and are.

I did not write a final deductive chapter titled, Jesus’ Views on Violence. I could have done that. But when someone gives me their true summary, all that does for me is arouse my critical capacities to find what they have omitted, or misrepresented, whether by accident or intention. Why should I summarize for you, when you have the data I have offered? You have your own mind. Would you not prefer to think about the material, then to use your own freedom, and then to be accountable for your own thinking process on such grave, bloody, and violent subjects? If you believe in God, then take the mantle of responsibility for yourself, and stand tall, in answering to God for yourself, in teaching your children and grandchildren what you have come to believe on these matters.

Killing is such serious business. Make your own decisions. I hope my translations and discussions of the Jesus-materials are full enough so you feel comfortable with the soundness of the evidence, so you can use it to develop responsible positions for which you then can go to God on your own. And if you do not believe in any kind of deity, then I am positive I have offered you more than enough to head down your own path, make your decisions, and live with them, before you die and are transformed into other forms of energy.

For people who like learning new things, this book will have plenty of new things to learn, some which ought to be of considerable help in living in our violent world, or at least in understanding more of why some Christians are so violent, seemingly with clear consciences. For people who prefer to live by evasion and deception will find their gooses cooked fully in this book. Liars and manipulators receive severe treatment here, not because they are liars and manipulators. All of us have lied and manipulated. But this book book concentrates heavily on people who perpetrate violence in any form against other people, and mass-violence is simply impossible without lies and manipulation to mobilize hundreds, thousands, and millions of ordinarily good people, so they become killers and torturers of other people just like themselves.

One Victory at a Time. So, since I cannot turn the tide of history, it is enough to potentially turn the tide of thinking within an individual reader or two. And what is the tide to be turned within a particular reader? It is not for them to believe what I believe, as if that would be good. If the information in this book enables a reader to be stirred to question the common viewpoint about Christian violence, then that is a very good battle to win. If a reader can be opened up to consider change, then I will have won a battle with the Closed Mind, and with the Mind Committed to Violence, although winning a battle is not winning the war.

I will tell you that, thoughout the writing of this book I have prayed much to God, not only for guidance and help in thinking and writing the truth as I see it, but that God has prepared at least ONE reader whose life will be dramatically changed by all this work, and who will become less violent, or perhaps even nonviolent, embracing some of the same reasons given by Jesus of Nazareth. I love my human family enough that for me it has been worth these forty years of sweat and sometimes tears so that, if only ONE reader’s mind is changed so he or she is less violent, or believes he or she must rethink the status quo, that is a major achievement.

However, I have asked God for another thing. I have asked that there would be ONE PERSON whose life will be saved and preserved, as a result of my work, because some potential killer read this book and, when the target appeared, he or she said, NO, I will not kill this one. Maybe that sounds silly, but for me, I have been asking God for that. I realize that books are physical objects, which often travel to many places, arrive and gather dust for many yearsm, before someone picks it up, dusts it off, and then is transformed by it. I would like to think that, when my life is over, that I will have some soul come up to me and say, John, I am THE ONE for whom you prayed while you wrote that book. I have a right to dream little dreams.

Regardless, God knows everything, and I have worked and labored for YOU, reader, to benefit you in some way, whether you believe in God, or whether you reject both idea and reality of any deity.

The Paradox of Christians Killing and Harming

Christians all wear the name of Jesus Christ. They say they believe in him. They say they love him. They say they expect to be saved by him. The Christian Churches have salvation doctrines (soteriologies) where Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection are the preconditions for the Christian hope of the forgiveness of sins and the gift of eternal life. On the one hand, it is simply historical fact, manifested thousands of ways in every century, that Christians are very willing, sometimes eager and willing, to be militaristic and bellicose. Conquest of territories, rule over laboring indigenous populations, and consumption of natural resources, run throughout much of the global history of Christianity, aided and abetted by Christian clergy, who often receive generous offerings from their people become rich by disobeying Jesus’ commands.

So the premise of this book, or perhaps you might say, the historical foreground of this book, is the tension between Christian homicidal misbehaviors, simultaneous with Christian claims and expectations for the forgiveness of sins and eternal life.

The Global Christian Population: Huge and Cantankerous. Around one-third of the world’s population apparently claims to be Christian. There are around 2.2 Billion Christians among the 7.7 Billion people in the world. While these all wear the same nametag, and while all would say they have some kind of relationship with God and Jesus Christ, these billions of Christians are not members of the same Church.

There is one Christian graduate school which has published an estimate that there are around 47,000⁶ Christian Denominations, as of 2017, with more splintering and springing up every year. So while one-third of the world may be Christian in one way or other, it is clear that Christians cannot get along with each other, and there are many Christian Churches which openly say that other Churches are serving Satan and his realm.

Christian Nations’ Standing Commitments to Annihilate Other Christian Nations. There is no major nation in the world, that I know of, which has a public legal constitution stating that it is a Christian Nation. On the other hand, a Pew Research Council study shows that there are around one hundred twenty four (124) Nation-States with Christian political supermajorities of between seventy and ninety-eight percent (70-98%).⁷ In terms of at least theoretical political domination and control, supermajorities of these magnitudes suggest that, while these are not legally Christian, these nation-states are running over with Christians.

It so happens that the United States and Russia both have political supermajorities of Christians. The United States apparently has around 78.3% of Christian citizens, with Russia just barely behind with 73.3%.⁸ Now what the whole world knows is that both of these nations historically are political, military, and economic enemies. Both have vast nuclear weapons stockpiles, and unknown stockpiles of other weapons of mass destruction to kill thousands or millions by biological and chemical means.

These two predominately Christian nation-states are of such importance in illustrating the past 1700 years of Christians killing Christians, so that I will devote a little more, at the end of this book to run out some of the contradicitons, and their implications. After all, if the Christian leaders in these nations eventually do their worst to each other through nuclear weapons, then they will be expecting God to forgive them for their genocidal sins, and welcome into Heaven many millions of Christians waiting at the heavenly gates because they all murdered each otherz.

Christian Nationalism, Christian Political Partisanship, Christian Capitalism. Regardless of any command or teaching by Jesus Christ to the contrary, it simply is a fact that there are many Christian nation-states in which the Christian populations hold love of country, love of political party, and love of capitalism, as their Christian way of life. We can begin with the United States of America but, if you will consult the Pew Research Council statistical study cited earlier, you can move on down the list of Christian nation-states—that is, predominately Christian populations—which are heavily Nationalistic, Political, and Capitalistic.

The Christian Churches and their clergy are directly to blame for this. Christian Church clergy exist within each nation. Their members love their nation. Their members respond to patriotic events and propaganda. The clergy dare not alienate their members for, if they do, this will produce a very practical backlash (even in the most authoritarian Churches which assign clergy to their posts). Donations of money and volunteer hours dwindle quickly when the people turn against their clergy, should they criticize national governments, national political parties, or economic systems enjoyed by Christians. When clergy start becoming more prophetic than predictable, critiquing openly Christian nationalism, or Christians facilitating lies and harms against innocent people, many congregations usually do not respond very well. Christianity is supposed to be a complement to life in the nation, and when the veneer of this expectation is stripped off to reveal the moral cancer of Christian nationalism, the disaffected Christians love to be rid of the messengers.

These attitudes are actually part of the legacy of the Emperor Constantine the First, whose career and influence on Christianity are discussed later in this book, in Part 3, Chapter 2.

As has been the case for many centuries, the Christian Churches make many claims about being the true custodians of Jesus and his message to the world. Nevertheless, regardless of whatever Jesus commanded and taught, there is at least a seventeen century history of Christians warring against each other, opposing other religions with their own claims, and Christians holding political, legal, military, economic, industrial, and banking-financial positions of leadership in nations wherever Christians are political supermajorities.

The Purpose and General Plan of the Book

No single book, nor even a thousand books, could alter the theological systems of the Christian Churches, which will remain the same, or change only incrementally, and after much debate. The Churches are tied to their theological histories, and their systematic-dogmatic theologies, which provide them with (1) unique identities apart from other Churches; (2) established frameworks of Bible interpretations familiar to them; and (3) institutional formulations that do not need tampering, easily and quickly lose members when the historic truthx of the Church come under public discussions as possibly needing revision, dissolution, and reformulation. Look at the Roman Catholic Church during and after the Second Vatican Council. The same can be said of Protestant Churches’ efforts to make changes on fundamental doctrines.

While the Christian Churches loudly proclaim that their doctrines really are God’s Word, or divinely guided distillations of God’s Word, their leaders are precisely like the Hebrews and Israelites in the Hebrew Bible. Their Christians are attached to their traditions. Their doctrines have been held forth as divine truth for generations. Whatever the costs were in past theological arguments and debates to develop the official doctrine, no theologians or clergy look forward to a rethinking of what was settled. Because of the clergy-guild, and its self-reinforcing intellectual traditions, there is enormous resentment against anyone—including Jesus, if he were present—suggesting that the Received Tradition needs reexamination, jettisoning, and subordination to the Word of God.

However, I think there should be many non-Christians, religious and nonreligious, who will find this book extremely interesting, insightful, and even revelatory as to (1) the entire history of Christian violence; (2) seeing for themselves how different and contradictory to that history of violence are Jesus’ violence-related words and deeds; and (3) understanding that our presently violent world, partly made violent by Christians, will be really nothing compared with the explosion of global, international violence brewing now, with heat applied by Christians in nations around the world.

Plan and Process. In general, the plan of the book is chronological, and the process is inductive and highly restricted to documentary evidence.

1. Part 1: The Violent Christian Past. Part 1 deals with the past history of Christian violence, certainly not all of it—which would be at least a fifty-volume set, if all language sources were used for documentations—but a few illustrations of importance.

2. Part 2: Critique from Jesus’ Violence-Related Words and Deeds. In Part 2, you will read every violence-related command, teaching, and deed or behavioral interaction, from the first four books of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), which are the sources for Jesus’ words and deeds.

3. Part 3: Dissolution of Jesus’ Authority and His Violence Traditions. Christians and non-Christians will be interested in Part 3, which moves through three major historical figures, each with a watershed importance for what Jesus commanded, taught, and did, concerning violence: Saul of Tarsus, the Apostle Paul; the Emperor Constantine, more than 200 years later; and finally but not least, Aurelius Augustine, the single most foundational Christian theologian in Western history.

4. Part 4: The Violent Christian Future and the Apocalypse. Since the Christian Churches will not fundamentally critique or consider abandonment of their theological traditions, even to consider return to the direct commands of Jesus regarding nonresistance and nonviolence, a few thoughts are in order. You, the reader, can make decisions for yourself as to where you stand on the subject of violence.

The Origins of My Interest in Christian Violence

My first interests in Christian violence began around 1967 or 1968. I was a voracious reader as a boy, and was shocked to read in the Foreword to a scholarly history of World War Two the allegation that the Nazi propaganda machine had been given a huge boost 400 years before the Nazis came on the scene. The author said that the Christian Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, laid the groundwork for German antisemitism. I was in the eighth grade, but that statement shocked and puzzled me. The Willises were not Lutherans, and really only nominal Christians, but I had the impression that Marin Luther was a godly man. Around ten years later, in my first year of Christian seminary, I was allowed to choose the topic for my first graduate research paper in history. My topic was approved, Luther and the Jews, and I read the English translation of his 1543 tirade, Von die Juden und ihre Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies). I could not believe that Martin Luther wrote what he did.

That fueled more of my interest in Christian violence. It seems that the more Christian history I learned, the more I found that Christians had killed thousands or millions of other people of various categories. Around ten years after that first graduate paper in history, I was invested heavily at the University of Chicago, working on my PhD dissertation,⁹ and Martin Luther also was in that three-volume work, but alongside three other major Christian leaders during the 16th century era of the Wars of Religion. My broad question was, How could Catholic and Protestant Christians persecute, torture, rape, rob, expatriate, and slay brutally each other, with both groups confessing Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, and both groups knowing Jesus commanded, Turn the other cheek…do not resist evil…love your enemies,? etc.

There is a great irony that the Catholics and Protestants, after a long time persecuting, torturing, murdering and expatriating one other, both became tired and then united to kill a cluster of Christian groups they termed in Latin, Anabaptistae, meaning rebaptizers. These Anabaptist groups really were not rebaptizers at all,¹⁰ but Christians earnestly dedicated to reading and obeying any commands given by Jesus to his disciples.

What this meant also was that—because of what Jesus had commanded and was in the Bible for all to read— the Anabaptists were nonresistant, peaceful, pacifistic, and they refused to do harms to other people, regardless of what their governments ordered. It is unimaginable for us that one of the resons Catholics and Protestants wanted them dead as heretical literalists and rigorists¹¹ was that the Anabaptists refused to harm or kill. Read what happened to the nonresistant pacifist Christians in one of their cherished books, The Martyrs Mirror.¹² Both Catholics and Protestants had the will to exterminate the peaceful Christians, if they could. They were limited by opportunity and technology.

After studying Christian violence until I tired of forms and arguments finally just repetitious, I moved on to study other forms of religious violence, in Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. I found a number of structural similarities with what I had discovered in Christian violence, and continued to work in those until the data also became monotonous (although their victims tortured and killed never were monotonous for me, only tragically said).

I left religious violence to transfer attention to general governmental, secular acts of legal wars. I paid attention to all the forms of war as well (defensive, offensive, combat, biological deprivation, etc.). Then, after having spent so much time in the histories of people killing people, for all the reasons they gave and give, I moved over to the history of torture, where people did not intend to kill their victims right off but only first after having inflicted neurological, emotional, mental suffering, which usually led to death by complete exhaustion.

Of course, as far back as the 1980s when I did my studies at the University of Chicago to earn the PhD, all along the way I was aware, in all these researches into killing and torture, of the psychological factors, the educational-conditioning factors, which have enabled human killers to kill and say they only were swatting mosquitoes or killing rats or, in the cases of religion, killing demon-filled humans or killing heretics who were the spawned defecations of Satan.

Last of all, I came full circle, in a way. Having begun with mass-killings of human beings, having been so occupied with what people had done to other people, I finally also began to research more into the human brain and its functions. Whether victim or victimizer, when certain events happen—real or repeated or imagined—the brain suffers injuries which are so deep that complete resilience and healing are impossible, and dysfunction and maladaptation become normal. Physical torture and horribly painful deaths are one thing, but the death of a healthy brain makes human zombies.

Motivations of Grief and Angst:

A Historian’s Suffering for Victims

This book has been propelled by long-felt emotionals of grief for all the innocent victims slain by Christians. As I have read ancient documentary evidence, much of it left by Christian witnesses, whenever I have come across something particularly horrible, it is often too easy to forget that, in whatever I am reading, it has been reduced in quantity and quality, and sanitized according to the judgment of the writer. For the most graphic documents we have, I believe that the writers did not really realize how shocking what they were writing would be to us in the future, because they were so much in sync with the events, comparable to some casual reporters of genocides. For example, look at the narratives of Europeans killing Native American savages describing what was done. No one ever writes of blood spurting and hitting someone in the eye, how a skull popped open like a melon with brains like gray scrambled eggs, or fecal smell on a bloody sword or knife. Historical research into ancient sufferings and killings always is more sanitized, even if you obtain comments and pleadings from dying victims.

For a man who once was a trumpet player whose mental and emotional world was filled with many genres of music, I have asked God many times, "Why have you put within me to be drawn to the narratives of Christians doing violence, other religious people doing violence, and human beings in general doing violence; but even more, why can I not myself remain detached and cool, and not imagine so much of what innocent victims suffered, as they were being tortured or killed?" It is not morbid psychology or psychopathology.

I think the real answer is that so few people, especially Jesus-related people, want to admit or talk about it, and my parents taught and demonstrated that telling the whole truth was part of the Willis family. I do love God. I love the Jesus portrayed in the New Testament. And loving both, and loving all human beings means that John must do something few want to do—to honor the dead, to warn the living, and to shine God’s bright light upon the guilty hiding in the dark Valley of Avoidance-and-Denial.

I think God has put this in me because someone must be a witness to bloody history done in the name of the one many Christians call the Prince of Peace, or the Good Physician. God never has forgotten the victims, and God wants Christians—and all people, religious or not—to be reminded of what really happened by Christian hands, although text documents, or artists’ primitive renderings, do not in any remote sense capture the screams, smells, and sights.

So this book is written partly because I have been carrying inside me a kind of emotional-empathic burden, having read so many testimonies of so many good people, who were tortured, who were slain in the most horrible ways, sometimes with their children being tortured or killed before their eyes, and sometimes dying knowing their children’s warm corpses would soon be tossed on their cold ones. Had the words I have studied for so long been the words of serial killers or psychopaths about to receive the penalties of their crimes, I know I would not have been deeply moved. I have read the words of some executed persons, and I remain unmoved when they took the lives of the innocent.

Right now as I write, there are Christian soldiers, and some Christian police, who in various nations are killing people. Some of those people being killed have guns, or other weapons which kill. There are reasons for the killings. Yet there are others being killed whose hands are empty, but in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they looked the wrong way at the wrong person, or they said something truthful that was not smart-aleck—just unwelcome—or they simply showed neither fear nor defiance, but a Christian with legal lethal force decided to teach them a lesson, and end their life. Such things have happened, and will happen, and only God knows the truth in many cases.

There is nothing I can do about what is happening now. Only God sees it, and God is not stopping it any more than I am, insofar as I know. There are innocent people having life snatched out of them, being changed from loved family and friends into tear-filled memories and horrible anguish.

But in writing this book, I have been thinking most of all about the millions of victims in the future, who will be slain because of an indescribably awful war, a war that is coming just as surely as anything I can be predicted by the gathering clouds circling above not just one, but many nations. Christians will not be the sole cause of that war, but they will be in the middle of it, just as Christians are in the middle of so many wars right now I cannot keep track of them all.

I know that future war is approaching, faster and faster every day, as Christians in high places continue to lie, and continue to slay the innocent by false wars. As I was writing the central core of this book, being a historian I knew in advance how rare it is that a single person can change much. And I am the least prone to delusions of grandeur. So, knowing how unlikely it is that this book will accomplish very much, I have prayed constantly to God that there might be at least ONE for whom my work was intended, and in whom the book will be more than merely fully effectual, but even life-changing. I have prayed for that, but accept silence.

Form and Content:

What to Expect to See In this Book

• Violence-Centered Study of Jesus. This is a comprehensive examination of all the alleged violence-related words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth in the Christian New Testament.

• From Commands to Example. The presentation is ordered according to the moral force of Jesus’ words and deeds: Commands, showing his strongest demands on his followers; his Teachings, showing how he reinforced and illustrated his values; and, his Actions in speech and behaviors, showing how he lived out what he ordered and taught.

• Fresh Translations. The New Testament’s Lives of Jesus or first four biographical stories of Jesus—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—are left to us mainly in Greek manuscripts, so new translations have been done, putting Greek language original texts in the footnotes, sometimes including linguistic discussions, for interested readers.

• Text-Based Discussions. The chapters, sections, and sub-sections all are based on and adhere to the Greek texts, their fair and reasonable meanings, as stated, with no tolerance for eisegesis (inserting meaning) or unanswerable speculation.

• Text-Based Charts and Tables. Sometimes linguistic charts are offered for specially important commands, such as Love your enemies, and comparative charts for close illustration, such as Jesus’ commands listed on the left, and the Apostle Paul’s contradictory teachings against them listed on the right.

• Text-Based Quizzical Footnotes. Sometimes a footnote is offered, not because of the content of the Greek text, but its omission to answer an obvious question (for example, Jesus’ alleged words in a prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, when all disciples were asleep, with no one to record what he said).

• Text-Illuminating Historical Footnotes. Ancient Jewish sources, such as the Babylonian Talmud, and comparative religious Greek and Roman sources, are included periodically when these seem relevant and interesting.

• Intellectual History Footnotes. Rather than clutter the main body of discussions with material some readers would find distracting, some footnotes connect the Greek text discussions with great intellectuals in history (for example, Sigmund Freud’s mockery of Love your neighbor as neurosis-producing, and Love your enemy as so absurd as unworthy discussion, or, Christians who study von Clausewitz’s much-followed definitions of war as factually false, both addressed in their original German).

• Personal Engagement Footnotes. Again to avoid clutter in the main body of discussions, I sometimes step outside formal modes to share personal viewpoints, including emotional language, as if the reader and I were together; and these to draw readers’ participation.

• Limited Historicity Questions. All religions’ canonical texts deserve analysis from every angle, and all religions have deep historical-critical bibliographies. Many years have been devoted to reading such literature by me. Yet in this book, the goal is the reading and close analysis of the Biblical Jesus on Violence-Related Subjects not discussions of the history of scholarship on the Historical Jesus.

• Absolute Refusal to Cite, Note, or Discuss, in the Main Body of the Discussions, Any and All Christian Church Dogmas and Doctrines. This book is about what it is about, the alleged words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, related to violence, framed in the contexts of world history past, present, and future. If you want to read what Christian Churches’ historians, theologians, and clergy have to say about all their legal violence and legal obedience to governments around the world, then go for it. I have thousands of books related to Christian interpretations and in this book, I respond based on the Greek texts of the Bible, and not cutting-and-pasting apologetics.

Jesus Without Theology

In This Book

In this book, there only is interest in the alleged words and deeds of Jesus as found in the four books found at the very beginning of the Christian New Testament, which serve as the four Lives of Jesus about his life and work. Those four books, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, provide the complete basis for all the violence-related commands, teachings, and deeds of Jesus.

Because of the subjectivity of each biblical writer, each one of those books presents