Bartholomew's Notes

From Christopher Hitchens:

He continued to “see” [racial segregation as an accepted part of the world] as an adult…switching his party allegiance from Democrat to Republican in tune with the Nixon “Southern strategy” and famously deploying the “white hands” ad 20 years later, in which the genius of Dick Morris exploited the woes of the rejected white job seeker. That episode did get a mention in the [New York Times] obituary, but there was no recollection of Helms’ role in opposing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, in protecting the apartheid state from the imposition of sanctions, or in defending white Rhodesia.

…Had it not been for Helms, it is unlikely that the United States would have become so fatally embroiled with the scabrous contras of Nicaragua. And probably nobody but Helms could have surveyed the situation in El Salvador in the 1980s and concluded that the problem with that small and tortured country was that its government was already too socialist.

From Billy Graham:

“Jesse Helms, my friend and long-time senator from my home state of North Carolina, was a man of consistent conviction to conservative ideals and courage to faithfully serve God and country based on principle, not popularity or politics.

“In the tradition of Presidents Jefferson, Adams and Monroe — who also passed on July 4th — it is fitting that such a patriot who fought for free markets and free people would die on Independence Day. As we celebrate the birth of our nation, I thank God for the blessings we enjoy, which Senator Helms worked so hard to preserve.

“Over three decades in the United States Congress, Senator Helms was a loyal and effective leader on behalf of our State, with whom I connected during times of national crisis…”

Helms also had his supporters in the UK; in 1985 a group of “libertarian” Young Conservatives headed across the Atlantic to meet the man for themselves.

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UK liberal hawk website Harry’s Place has been threatened with a libel action by the British Muslim Initiative over claims that the BMI’s president, Mohammad Sawalha, had railed against the “[evil Jew/Jewish evil] in Britain” in Arabic. Sawalha’s view was reported on the Arabic al-Jazeera website, which later changed the wording to “Jewish lobby in Britain” (without the “evil” bit), as if that were somehow better. Medyan Dairieh, who wrote the al-Jazeera article, complained in the comments that it was all down to a spelling mistake:

I wrote the report that has been misquoted, I mispelt one word in arabic, ????? instead of ?????? (lobby). The mistake renders the word meaningless in arabic and english except to people who can actually read arabic and posess intelligence who would understand the mistake to read as ‘lobby’. It is fairly obvious that the author of the piece we are discussing has a deliberate agenda, cannot read arabic and has no common sense…The only reference to jews as evil is on this site. Could you please get a grip. This is a non story.

That’s a rather casual way to admit to having made a disastrous error. The BMI responded with a press release, followed up with a legal threat:

Anas Altikriti, spokesman of BMI, commented earlier: “…This is another example of not only very basic incompetence at play, but pure evil that sees no shame or wrong in plainly lying for the purpose of demonising certain individuals and organisations, regardless of reality or facts”.

BMI have alerted its legal advisors to this matter and will be monitoring the blog-site in question as well as any quoting of this error by any other media outlet, and will be pursuing measures to bring those who do to account.

Harry’s Place does have a habit of spinning critics of Israel in the most negative way possible (in ways that I often find quite annoying), but this bombastic response is absurd.

However, as David T of Harry’s Place notes, a legal action will certainly fail. Sawalha has links with Hamas, so the disputed quote would hardly lower his reputation even if the “evil Jew” interpretation is wrong. Further, it seems to me that there there is a public interest in bringing the dispute to light, and the BMI have been allowed to put their side of the story.

Sawalha may have more luck suing Dairieh. I’ll even help him out by noting a precedent, from 1999:

THE SINGER and aspiring politician Patti Boulaye yesterday accepted pounds 15,000 libel damages and a public apology over The Guardian’s allegation that she was a supporter of apartheid… The journalist had misheard what Ms Boulaye said and had understood her to be saying “apartheid” when she was in fact saying “a party”.

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A comment arrives from Joel Richardson, author of Antichrist: Islam’s Awaited Messiah  (endorsed by Robert Spencer) and co-author of WorldNetDaily‘s new book Why We Left Islam: Former Muslims Speak Out (which I blogged here). Richardson is unhappy with my debunking of his associate Walid Shoebat’s claim that Greek number “666” in the Book of Revelation is actually the author’s attempt to write “In the name of Allah” in Arabic.

Shoebat claims that he realised this after consulting ancient codices, in particular the Codex Vaticanus. One point I made was that Codex Vaticanus does not contain the Book of Revelation (although it wasn’t my main point, and I did allow that Shoebat may perhaps have seen some other ancient manuscript, such as one that is doing the rounds online). Richardson blows his raspberry:

I went to the personal blog of the author of this article and saw that the image that he has posted of himself shows him sitting in a pub sipping a pint of beer. I fear that he may have been sipping a bit too much before writing this article.

The Codex Vaticanus does indeed contain the Book or Revelation, it is simply a later supplementation to the earlier manuscripts. A tiny bit of research could have produced this fact. The actual image of the portion of the Book of revelation that is part of the Codex Vaticanus is below. Scroll to the third column to the right and the top line, marked 18 (Revelation 13:18) contains the image that Walid used:

www.csntm.org/Manuscripts/GA%2003/GA03_150b.jpg

Images of the entire Codex may be viewed here:

www.csntm.org/Manuscripts/GA%2003/

Which could have been found if Mr. Bartholomew had gone here instead of sipping beer:

www.csntm.org/Manuscripts.aspx

Next time, you may wish to step outside of the usual Wikipedia sourcing for your articles Richard.

Actually, I researched this using various sources, such as The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism (1995):

Codex Vaticanus, a fourth century manuscript of the Greek Bible…All NT Scripture after Heb 9:14 is missing.

Other scholarly sources concur (Google Books is useful here). The older Catholic Encyclopedia gives some further background:

In modern times (fifteenth-sixteenth century) the missing folios were added to the codex, in order, as Tregelles conjectures, to prepare it for use in the Vatican Library.

Presumably this is the origin of the “later supplementation” that Richardson thinks in some way makes Shoebat’s case stronger; a supplement added 1,000 years later in Italy that in no way can be seen as part of the original codex. But there’s worse: the jpeg in fact shows a page from the 1868 Bibliorum Sacrorum Graecus Codex Vaticanus. This is a facsimile of the ancient text, but with a clearly typeset version of Revelation tacked on at the end. Here’s how the start of Revelation appears in the fifteenth-century manuscript compared with how it appears in the 1868 edition:

Incidentally, this “minuscule” way of writing Greek developed in the Seventh Century, and there are no examples prior to 835; the ancient Codex Vaticanus was written in an “uncial” form that looks more like block capitals (see Bruce Metzger, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Greek Palaeography, Oxford University Press 1991, and also this website).

So, Richardson is telling us that Shoebat used a nineteenth-century typeset edition of Revelation to draw the paleographic conclusion that a fourth-century Greek manuscript of the book (which doesn’t exist anyway) meant to show Arabic letters!

Let’s make this as simple as possible: if you read Revelation 13, it is obvious that the phrase for “666” appears where you would expect to see a number. The wider religious context here is numerology, which Shoebat rejects simply because he finds numerology objectionable. Early Christian tradition and manuscript evidence from long before Codex Vaticanus was written also both point to a number, either “666” or “616”. A fifteenth-century “supplementation” in a different script has no evidential value whatsoever, let alone a nineteenth-century typeset version!

Perhaps Richardson could do with a drink…

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As expected, the move to WordPress has revealed a legacy of rather dodgy HTML. The archive is likely to look rather untidy for a while. Blogroll and other frills to follow in due course.

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Following on from my examination of Walid Shoebat’s snake-oil Biblical scholarship a couple of days ago, I decided to check out his former collaborator, Simon Altaf. Altaf, who is based in the UK, explains his links to Shoebat on his “Abrahamic Faith” website:

Three years ago [2000] when I met Walid Shoebat, an Ex-Muslim convert from Bethlehem we started to discuss end times prophesy.  He was the one who enlightened me about real theology and eschatology of the Bible….I am an Ex-Muslim Convert of the dominant Sunni sect from Lahore, Pakistan.  I came to know the Lord Jesus Christ back in September 1998 after reading the testimony of an Egyptian convert while browsing the internet one day.  Later Walid and I both decided to create a website on the internet… to propagate the truth to the world about what is coming to pass.

Early versions of the “Abrahamic Faith” website state that Shoebat and Altaf founded it together. As well as pushing hardline Christian Zionism, it originally attacked other Christian groups, including Evangelicals and Charismatics, Billy Graham, and the Pope. They also wrote a book, This is our Eden, This is our End, and the above paragraph is taken from that. However, in a report in the Arab American News Shoebat’s handler Keith Davies suggests that a falling-out occurred:

Davies denies Shoebat is a follower of that fundamentalist branch of Christianity, or any branch, and is just trying to unite everybody, “Muslims, Christians, Jews together to bring peace.” He also denies any working relationship with Altaf, saying they once were friends and were going to write a book together.

After Shoebat wrote [This is our Eden], he decided he didn’t want to release it, which Altaf did without permission. Afterwards, the Shoebat Foundation asked to be removed from Abrahamic Faith, “because we didn’t agree with the stuff he was putting on his website,” Davies said.

Altaf and Shoebat founded the website in 2001, although they appear to have kept their full names off it for a while. A version of the site from 2002 tells us that

This site was founded by Walid and Shimoun, Ex-Muslims who discovered God’s love for Israel. They believe in the God of Israel (YHWH) who re-established Israel in her original land in 1948 as He promised in the Bible (Isa 66:8), they proclaim that the Messiah (Jesus of Nazareth) of Israel is Yahshua who died for Israel and the rest of the world and is coming soon. It is time for both Muslims and Jews to look at the Hebrew Scriptures. We are offering these numerous details explaining why the Bible alone is God’s eternal word.

When Altaf found Jesus in 1998 he was baptized into a Messianic Jewish group in London, and Messianic terms like “Yahshua” for “Jesus” appear throughout; in later versions, “God” becomes “G-d”. There is also an early version of Shoebat’s conversion narrative, in which he describes himself as having been involved in anti-Israel rioting during the Intifada, but which doesn’t mention any PLO membership or bomb-planting. This version of the story also tells us that Shoebat’s mother was a Christian, and that he was converted in 1992 after reading Armageddon, Appointment With Destiny, by Grant Jeffrey. On his own current website, Shoebat says he was converted after reading the Bible in an attempt to convert his wife to Islam.

In early versions of the website, Altaf and Shoebat took a hard line against various other Christian groups:

We reject any church or group that is a member of the World Council of Churches or its allied agencies, nor shall the mission or its agents ever become organically involved with ecumenical movements or projects. We reject Evangelicals and Catholics together as part of the falling away who teach false doctrines. We reject unscriptural emphasis on the “sign gifts” as essential part for evidence of salvation. We reject the Faith Theology Movements, Charismatic Catholics, Benny Hinn, School of Prophets, Toronto Blessing, Pensacola Florida, Rodney Howard Brown, Jack Hayford, or anyone similar or associated with these as part of a counterfeit revival.

There’s also a denunciation of “Billy Graham’s Love affair with the Pope”.

But why did they fall out? It seems that a couple of years ago Altaf became involved with the Bnai Yahshua Synagogue Florida, which is the home of Rabbi Moshe Yoseph Koniuchowsky, and Altaf was ordained by him as a Rabbi. Koniuchowsky is a controversial figure, and he has developed a movement called “Messianic Nazarene Yisrael”, which is distinct from Messianic Judaism. Koniuchowsky explains:

Messianic Judaism views saved gentiles as non Israelites, who have no Israelite blood whatsoever, having no legitimate claim to be physically descended from the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They believe that any born again “gentile”, who claims physical descent from the patriarchs, either has a drop of Jewish blood from an ancient grandparent, or are just Jewish wannabe’s, engaged in delusion. Views the concept that any saved non-Jewish believer, could be a lost non-Jewish Israelite, as utter nonsense.

Messianic Nazarene Yisrael believes that most of the non-Jewish followers of Yahshua are Ephraimites, those who were scattered amongst the gentile nations starting in 721 BCE. They were the Lo Ami of Hosea one, who were not a people, but have now been restored as individuals as promised by the prophets, through Israel’s Messiah. These latter day “gentiles”, are washed and then awakened to their Israelite heritage by Messiah Yahshua, in fulfillment of many promises. Their recognition of their identity as the seed of Ephraim and their union with Jewish Israel, is a necessity for all Israel to be saved and for the Kingdom to be restored to Israel.

This claim that non-Jewish followers of Jesus have physical descent from Ephraim would be problematic to most Christian groups, as it appears to bring in a racial element. And historically, of course, it is even more preposterous than British Israelism. However, it’s not the only “Ephramite” group out there: I blogged on some others back in 2005. Various websites dispute Koniuchowsky’s theology, and raise questions about his identity. Koniuchowsky’s movement is international, and known as “Bnai Yahshua Synagogues Worldwide” (BYSW) – as well as Altaf’s Synagogue in London (Southall), there are apparently affiliates in Australia, Columbia, Cuba, India, Pakistan and Panama.

UPDATE: Shoebat explains his split from Altaf

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As sites such as MediaWatchWatch have noted, Stephen Green of Christian Voice is on his uppers after attempting to bring a private prosecution against Director General of the BBC Mark Thompson and Jonathan Thoday of Avalon Promotions over the BBC2 broadcast and theatre production of Jerry Springer: the Opera. Green spent thousands trying to have both men put on trial of blasphemy, but the High Court refused to allow a prosecution in December. The UK blasphemy law was abolished a few months later.

However, Green now owes the two men’s solicitors a fair bit in legal costs, and he is facing bankruptcy, as he explains in a third-person press release:

In a hearing a fortnight ago, Mark Thompson and Jonathan Thoday were awarded costs totalling £90,000 against Green, who is the National Director of the prayer and lobby group Christian Voice. The BBC’s solicitors were awarded £55,000 and Olswangs Solicitors, who acted for Thoday, got an order for £35,000.

…The money is due to be paid today, but Stephen Green doesn’t have it.

He has written to both Mark Thompson and Jonathan Thoday inviting them to waive their costs in the interests of goodwill and justice.

Green goes on to argue that because both men could well afford to write-off the legal costs, to pursue him would be “vindictive”. He then complains about how the BBC uses its money, noting that “the BBC is currently wasting £18million a year on a Gaelic TV channel”, among other random observations. He concludes:

‘Quite simply, I do not have the money anyway, and will be certainly end up bankrupt if Thompson and Thoday decide to enforce these punitive costs.’

Human Rights barrister Paul Diamond said the case raises issues under the European Convention of Human Rights about access to the courts.

Stephen Green concluded: ‘How are people with limited means expected to bring actions of public importance against public bodies or wealthy people? It is outrageous that a public-spirited individual should be dissuaded from upholding standards of public decency in a public body because of the fear of adverse, grotesque costs orders.’

I actually have a bit of sympathy here: legal costs can be excessively high. But Green didn’t go after “a public body” – it seems that he went after Thompson personally, while Thoday is a private individual. Green is himself solely responsible for the “adverse, grotesque costs” which Thompson and Thoday were obliged to rack up to defend themselves; it would indeed be exceptionally generous if they were to show kindness to a man seems to have some personal problems, but there is no moral reason why they or their solicitors should be out of pocket rather than him. There’s even a moral case against a bail-out: I know of cases where people have been obliged to pay out for legal assistance over threats that have never even come to court, and without the risk of losing money there would be many more enemies of free speech using the courts – and the very same threat of high costs – to silence ideas they didn’t like. Why couldn’t the courts have demanded evidence that Green had the funds to pay for any losses before he was allowed to proceed?

Paul Diamond, meanwhile, is a specialist in “religious liberty” issues, and he works closely with the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship and the US Alliance Defense Fund.

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*Text has been amended (June 2009) following input from a reader. The “Very Old Text (Rev. 13:18) in glass display” fragment is from the supplement to the Codex Vaticanus; I had originally doubted this.

When Joe Lieberman gives credibility to the upcoming Christians United for Israel with his attendance, he won’t just be lending his reputation to conspiracy-monger John Hagee. Also on the CUFI line-up is Walid Shoebat, the self-proclaimed former Palestinian Muslim terrorist-turned Christian evangelist. Various sources have challenged Shoebat’s account of his former terrorism, with the Jerusalem Post in particular raising questions about his story that so far have not been answered.

Shoebat also fancies himself as a bit of a Biblical scholar and palaeographer, and in a video clip that I have just been made aware of he expounds his theory that the “number of the Beast” mentioned in the Book of Revelation is in fact a reference to…Allah.

The argument is that the author of Revelation was shown the Mark of the Beast in “video” form from God – obviously following Hal Lindsey’s idea that the visions in Revelation, rather than being symbolic, in fact are John’s interpretations of images from the future he couldn’t understand (“locusts” being helicopters, and so on). With the Mark of the Beast, John saw some strange squiggles, which he incorporated into the text. For centuries, readers thought these squiggles were the Greek letters for either “666” or “616”, but finally Shoebat has cracked the mystery: the squiggles are in fact Arabic, and they spell out “In the Name of Allah”!

Apparently Shoebat has been promoting this “theory” for a few years, and it appears in an obscure book by a certain Simon Altaf, entitled Islam: Peace? or Beast? (Altaf and Shoebat collaborated on an equally obscure book, entitled This is our Eden, This is our End.) Some details are here (and more at sites such as this one), including the supposed evidence, from the Codex Vaticanus:

One website adds the unpromising caption:

Very Old Text (Rev. 13:18) in glass display at Bob Jones University Library – Greenville, S.C.

One small problem however, is that the Codex Vaticanus does not include the Book of Revelation. The above is from a much later supplement, and the Greek is in a “miniscule” script which came in only centuries later. Irenaeus in the Second Century discusses the text as consisting of the number “666”, and there are no fragments of Revelation which predate this source: therefore any ancient copies we have must have been written by scribes who certainly intended to write Greek characters.

Shoebat, meanwhile, prefers to give his credulous audiences his own version of what he says he saw in the Codex Vaticanus, which allows him to elaborate further:

It’s worth comparing that with the earliest fragment of the text we have, identified in 2005 from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri:

This follows the “616” variant reading, and so does not include the Greek character which Shoebat finds the most suggestive.

[UPDATE: The Codex Sinaiticus, which Shoebat also assures his audience he has seen, spells out the number in letters:

That’s “six hundred and sixty-six”.]

One obvious question is how this strange twist on 666 fits with the wider context of the text, which speaks of a “number of a man” which will be known to he who “has understanding” (most scholars take it to be a reference to the Emperor Nero). Shoebat claims that it can’t be a numerological code, because that would be “Gematria”, which God has nothing to do with. I’ve always found it interesting that fundamentalist Christian Zionists, while appropriating all kinds of things from Judaism, have a horror of Jewish mysticism, which is seen as occultic.

UPDATE: More on Shoebat and Altaf here.

UPDATE 2: Joel Richardson digs the hole deeper.

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A few days ago I wrote a blog entry on Todd Bentley’s faith-healing revival in Florida, noting support for Bentley from Steven Strang, the influential editor of Charisma, and from Paul Cain, the neo-Pentecostal revivalist who is now described as a “restored prophet” following past Ted Haggard-like indiscretions. Bentley’s revival has been going on since the beginning of April, and now after some debate all the “Third Wave” big-hitters have decided to jump on the bandwagon. Peter C Wagner joined Bentley on stage to offer a remarkable endorsement which shows us as much about his own self-importance as his views about Bentley:

“This commissioning represents a powerful spiritual transaction taking place in the invisible world. With this in mind, I take the apostolic authority that God has given me and I decree to Todd Bentley, your power will increase, your authority will increase, your favor will increase, your influence will increase, your revelation will increase.

“I also decree that a new supernatural strength will flow through this ministry. A new life force will penetrate this move of God. Government will be established to set things in their proper order. God will pour out a higher level of discernment to distinguish truth from error. New relationships will surface to open the gates to the future.”

Bentley responded in self-effacing kind:

“I am no church historian, but I do not know of any other time in history, since the book of Acts, have so many different apostles and so many different prophets and movements and leaders [been represented],” Bentley said of the capacity crowd. “This is so much bigger than [anything else] ever before. The devil is shaking in his boots because the apostles are gathering and the prophets are gathering.”

Joining Wagner on stage were the following high-profile ministers:

Ché Ahn, pastor of Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, Calif.; John Arnott of Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship in Canada; Bill Johnson, pastor of Bethel Church in Redding, Calif.; and Rick Joyner, founder of MorningStar Ministries in Charlotte, N.C.

Peter Wagner is most famous for his theories about spiritual warfare and the demonic, and he was particularly influential in the 1980s and early 1990s. Wagner sees Christians in battle against demons of particular vices that seek to control aspects of one’s personality at an individual level, and against “territorial demons” that control the politics and society of whole countries. Christian prayer is weapon against Satan, to be deployed strategically: Charisma’s Lee J. Grady compares Wagner’s World Prayer Center to a kind of spiritual Pentagon. Eventually, Christians will take dominion over society, and certain leaders will have their authority confirmed through supernatural abilities. As we can see from Wagner’s rhetoric, the emphasis is on God as a source of power: notions of Christian humility and quiet self-examination do not appear to figure very strongly.

However, despite the crowds flocking to Florida to receive Bentley’s blessing and healing powers, he remains a controversial figure among conservative evangelicals: a bit of Googling quickly reveals dozens of sites which dispute his theology and his claims from a conservative Christian perspective, and even many of the Freepers appear sceptical. Although Wagner waited a while before calculating whether to hitch his wagon to Bentley’s star (or rather, God waited a while before telling Wagner to do it), it’s by no means clear yet that this will result in a general revival of Wagner’s exuberantly supernaturalist “Third Wave” theology.

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An attack on same-sex marriage in California from the Roman Catholic organisation Tradition, Family and Property has brought the organisation back into the public eye. As in the past, TFP has used newspaper advertisements to get its point across. Bill Berkowitz notes:

In the press release announcing the ads, TFP director Preston Noell hit a handful of Christian conservative talking points: “Mainstream America is understandably upset about same-sex ‘marriage,'” it said. “It is a grave offense against God and undermines 2,000 years of Christian morality. Same-sex ‘marriage’ threatens the social stability of our nation and future.”

Noell pointed out that “there’s a battle going on for America’s soul. At the root of this conflict lies a profound divergence of worldviews. The Christian worldview is anchored in reality, whereas secularism does not respect reality’s constraints.”

I’ve blogged on TFP a couple of times before now: as part of the US New Right “RAMBO Coalition” in the 1980s it supported causes such as South Africa, and in the UK it had links with the Conservative Monday Club. In 2006 there was also an association with an Italian conference on the Crusades that had a revisionist agenda. A good general introduction to TFP is provided by Bill Berkowitz on Talk to Action.

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2004: Lawyer Trevor Asserson denounces Saudi attempts to use British libel law to go after an American writer:

“Some Saudis appear to be using the U.K. as a back door to silence their critics and repress free speech by threatening litigation, persuading publishers to back down rather then face years of expensive litigation — even if what they’re publishing might in fact be true,” said Trevor Asserson, who specializes in defamation in the London law office of Morgan Lewis & Bockius.

One of Mr. Asserson’s clients, Rachel Ehrenfeld, had a British deal to distribute her new book, “Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It” (Bonus Books), canceled because of a legal threat by one of the Saudis she wrote about. Mr. Asserson declined to reveal who that person was.

As I blogged here, and as is well-known, this escalated into a Saudi billionaire using the British courts to pursue Ehrenfeld over the few copies that eventually made it into the UK.

2008: Lawyer Trevor Asserson helps an Israeli academic to use British libel law to go after an American-Palestinian writer:

In a discussion of Palestinian Art (Reaktion Books, 2007) by Gannit Ankori, Mr. [Jospeh] Massad alleged that Ms. [Gannit] Ankori had appropriated the work of Kamal Boullata, a Palestinian painter and art historian, without giving him due credit. That allegation has been made elsewhere as well.

Ms. Ankori, who chairs the art-history department at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, considered the review defamatory. She consulted British lawyers, who contacted the association. The College Art Association reviewed Ms. Ankori’s assertions, consulted its own lawyers, and decided to settle.

…Ankori’s lawyer, Trevor Asserson, is quoted as saying that America’s commitment to the First Amendment is “a very parochial way of looking at things” and that America “is out of step with many, many other countries.”

I blogged on this case here.

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