Donald Armstrong
1 min readJul 12, 2021

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Which “system” are you referring to—the Roman? that of the Pharisees? or that of the Sadducees? They weren’t the same and the relationship between them was always uneasy and too often violent. You make no distinction here, simply drawing an ahistorical dichotomy between a liberated Jesus and a repressive “Jewish system.”

The New Testament portrayal of Pontius Pilate reluctantly agreeing to execute Jesus at the insistence of “the Jews” did not emerge until many years after the fact and flies in the face of the little that we know about the man (Pilate was apparently removed from his post by the Romans due to his excessive cruelty).

Simplistic and inaccurate narratives such as this have been used for centuries to justify persecution of the Jewish people. If you need a repressive system as a counterpoint to your asystemic Jesus, perhaps you could use the unholy alliance between the contemporary evangelical church and a president who has done his best to make white nationalism respectable again.

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Donald Armstrong
Donald Armstrong

Written by Donald Armstrong

Moved by a conviction that we humans--gifted with reason--can do so much better than we are; asks how both politics and faith can better serve humanity's needs.

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