{"id":4355,"date":"2022-05-28T09:31:31","date_gmt":"2022-05-28T13:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sourceministries.net\/go\/?p=4355"},"modified":"2022-05-31T09:46:47","modified_gmt":"2022-05-31T13:46:47","slug":"the-pogrom-in-the-coliseum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sourceministries.net\/go\/2022\/05\/the-pogrom-in-the-coliseum\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pogrom in the Coliseum"},"content":{"rendered":"

A MESSAGE FOR THE JEWISH COMMUNITY<\/b><\/p>\n

The Pogrom in the Coliseum<\/b><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Norman Saville<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>It’s an old joke. A priest, a minister and a rabbi were strolling in the jungle. Suddenly, a lion jumped out in front of them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“Help!” hollered the priest. “Run for your life!” shouted the minister.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“I should worry,” said the rabbi. “They only eat Christians.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>But it’s only a joke.<\/b> Because so many of the martyrs who faced the lions in the Roman Coliseum were in fact Jews. They were born Jews. They were raised and educated in Jewish homes. And then, they did what more than a million Jews of their day did:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

They met the Messiah of the Jewish people!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>So many Jews followed this Messiah that, in those days, Jews and Christians were considered to be the same. When the Roman emperor Vespasian determined to put to death ” … all who said they were descendents of David,” he meant everyone who believed in one God. And Domitian, who became emperor by killing his own brother, ordered the deaths of all people “… qui en mores Judaeornm transierant;”<\/i> that is, all jews who believed that the true Messiah was Jesus Christ.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>How many thousands of the people killed by the Roman lions were born Jews? The number must have been immense, because history records great shiploads of Jewish captives brought to Rome after the emperor\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>Titus destroyed Jerusalem in 70 c.e. The Coliseum itself was built with Jewish forced labor; an estimated 40,000 captive Jews worked eight years to build the huge arena. How many of those Jews were followers of their Messiah … and were kept around to be killed for the amusement of the Roman mob?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>All through the Roman Empire’s history<\/b> there have been bitter persecutions against Jewish and Gentile Christians. In O’Reilly’s Martyrs of the Coliseum<\/i> we read:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>“The houses of the Christians were wrecked and laid in ruins, their goods became the prey of rapine, their bodies of the ferocious Hctors, who tore them like\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

wild beasts, dragging their matrons by the hair along the streets, callous alike to the claims of pity for the aged and of those still in tender years. The innocent were submitted to torments usually reserved for the vilest criminals.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Is that really very different from what the Cossacks did in the Jewish Pale?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In Fox’s Book of Martyrs<\/i> we learn:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>“Nero had some (Christians) sewn up in skins of wild beasts, and then worried by dogs until they expired; and others dressed in shirts made stiff with wax, fixed to axletrees, and set on fire in his gardens in order to illuminate them.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>“During the persecutions of Maximinius, numberless Christians were slain without trial, and buried indiscriminately in heaps, sometimes 50 or 60 being cast into a pit together, without the least dignity.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>“A variety of fabricated tales were, during Domitian’s reign, composed in order to injure the Christians. Such was the infatuation of the pagans that if famine, pestilence or earthquakes afflicted any of the Roman provinces, it was laid upon the Christians.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>The same lies, the same torments, the same pogroms<\/i> that Jews have endured for centuries. Jews and Christians are brothers in persecution, and have been for 2,000 years. Just as Hitler had his spiritual ancestor in Nero, so the Six Million had their spiritual ancestors in the ancient Christian martyrs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>Then what went wrong with the Christians?<\/b> What kind of “brothers” were the sadists of the Inquisition, the Cossacks, the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan? Didn’t every one of them torture and murder Jews in the name of Jesus Christ?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>Every one of them can be proved a liar by their actions…not toward Jews alone …but also toward their alleged brothers and sisters in Christ:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n