The writing of “revisionist history” is not unknown. Persons look back at an event or program and recast it in view of their own purposes. They explain the records and evidence consistent with those purposes.
One of the periods most oftensubjected to such revisionism is European history of the 1930s and 1940s. Neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and a number of historians with accredited Ph.D.s in their discipline consistently deny that a Holocaust of Jews in Europe ever happened.
The Holocaust deniers do not reject the claim that millions of Jews died in Europe in the early ’40s, but they attribute those deaths to malnutrition, exhaustion, and disease. They disavow Hitler’s “Final Solution” that systematically sought to eradicate the Jewish people via a program of industrialized murder in death camps and crematoria.
What of the evidence given to prove the reality of the Nazi campaign? Bogus. Presented to a gullible public by Zionist propagandists and those either duped by or in league with them! Yes, Zyklon B was used at Auschwitz but for delousing rather than murder. Yes, there is a gas chamber there, but it was created by the Soviets and Poles out of an air-raid shelter. In other words, the deniers offer an alternate interpretation of the data left from 60 years ago to obscure the truth.
That is why the hard evidence of Auschwitz must be preserved. Survivors must record their eyewitness testimony for posterity. And legitimate scholars must resist the efforts to explain away one of history’s great atrocities. The revisionist historians are doing a disservice to honest scholarship and have an agenda other than the discovery of truth. One French writer had denounced them as assassins de la memoire–murderers of memory.
Attacks on Holy Scripture ranging from Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (claiming that Jesus was married) to the so-called Jesus Seminar to Bishop John Shelby Spong’s A New Christianity for a New World are simply revisionists looking back at Jesus. They recast his life and the history of the earliest church in light of their own purposes and reinterpret the biblical data in ways consistent with an anti-Christian agenda.
We must not give credibility to the revisionist case by being so strident in our preaching that we turn the gospel into a moralism. We must renounce and shun the very appearance of racism, sexism and similar behaviors that are betrayals of Christ’s example. While not compromising Christ’s exclusive claim to be the only way to the Father, we must press that claim as he did by being inclusive with our loving outreach to those who have been shunned and shut out by self-protective religion.
We must never forget the real Christ. Never.