Bartholomew's Notes

My recent posting on fundamentalist apocalyptic debates sparked by the “Muslim anti-Christ” ideas of Walid Shoebat strangely got thousands of hits, so here’s a bit more – this time from James Jacob Prasch of Moriel Ministries:

Moriel and Jacob Prasch endorse the important ministry of brother Walid Shoebat (a co-labourer in Christ and personal friend and associate of Jacob Prasch). Moriel has hosted Walid as a featured keynote speaker at Moriel conferences in both the USA and UK. Walid and Jacob have also shared platforms at various other events.

…Concerning Walid’s view of the mark of the beast, it is not something we dismiss as having no potential merit. But it is in our estimation speculative and deficient in that it relies on Arabic, while the book of Revelation is written in Greek (Arabic did not yet exist in the 1st Century) and any gemmatrial hermeneutics of “666” would depend on Hebrew characters. Walid does appear mistaken concerning his rejective position on Gemmatria being used in witchcraft. Gemmatria is used by Matthew in chapter 1 in the Matthean genealogy of Jesus…Having said this, Walid highlights an Oriental perspective of New Testament eschatology too often ignored by most of the Western Church and his views in our estimation do merit serious prayerful and scholarly consideration. His thesis should not be dismissed. Most of what he proposes is biblically true.

I blogged all this here. Shoebat claims that he discerned an “Arabic” meaning to “666” when looking at ancient manuscipts of the Bible; from his presentation on the subject, though, it is obvious that he hasn’t done any such thing, and his risible hand-drawn reproduction of what he supposedly saw bears no resemblance to any manuscript.

Prasch, an American who lives in the UK, is a Messianic Jew, and his Moriel Ministries offers withering and abusive assessments of a range of opponents: evolutionary biologists (“Darwinism is not merely at odds with Judeo-Christian beliefs or creation science, it is at odds with the cause of human rights and of saving the environment”), Roman Catholicism (“Radzinger [sic] chose to wear the swastika and the uniform of a nazi and fight for Hitler”), Charismatic revivals (“carnal and demonically-influenced counterfeits of biblical charismata”), Rick Warren (“the very magazines whose editorial ownership is liberal, pro-Obama, and globalist are trumpeting Rick Warren’s ‘plan’,”), and a host of others. Unsurprisingly, Moriel’s views on Islam are worthy of the Swanksta:

Claiming to be Christian Bush put a Koran, a book teaching that God has no Son, in The White House…Putting a Koran in the White House after September 11th is like Churchill putting a copy of Mein Kampf in Number 10 Downing Street during the Blitz…

Prasch and Moriel express particular animus against Stephen Sizer, an evangelical pro-Palestinian Anglican vicar who wrote Prasch an “open letter” in November – Prasch begins his response with a sniffy “It has been brought to our attention that Stephen Sizer addressed an open letter to myself…on his website…”, as if he never looks at Sizer’s website himself!

Interestingly, back in October Prasch was a special guest at the Mount Carmel Revival Centre in Ballymoney, Northern Ireland. The pastor there is none other than Nigel Owens, who featured on this blog back in 2006 when I noted that he ran the Northern Ireland branch of Alan Harvey’s Springbok Club (more on Harvey, who longs for the return of “European rule” over Africa, here). The Northern Ireland Springbok Club is now apparently defunct.

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