The eschatological prophet of Jamaica Estates

by David Benjamin

“Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said, ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even life itself—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” —Luke 14:25

PARIS—In popular lore, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, was a humanitarian healer who selflessly served the suffering denizens of darkest Africa, However, before that, he was one of Germany’s most erudite and ingenious young theologians. In that capacity, at the turn of the twentieth century, Schweitzer wrote one of the most important books in the history of Christianity, The Quest of the Historical Jesus.

The book was a bombshell.

For most of the nineteenth century, religious scholars in Germany labored to usher Jesus Christ out of the mists of mythology, oral tradition and ambiguous Scripture to unveil a Savior of flesh and blood, of mind and doctrine. Their quest was to unearth a historical figure, and to clarify his prophecy, from a hodgepodge of teachings that—decades after his death—had been written, heard, or repeated like a game of Telephone, by disciples, believers, scribes, clerics and “prophets.”

This project wasn’t easy. The German scholars’ dilemma was that in the scant written histories of first-century Palestine—not counting the Gospels—there is no mention of this Jesus person supposedly from Nazareth, allegedly hailed as King of the Jews and hypothetically crucified in Jerusalem.

Curiously, Jesus’ brother James, an outright celebrity among historians, probably deserved to be called King of the Jews. “James the Just,” a fierce and ascetic enforcer of orthodox Judaism, was such a nuisance to the priests of the Temple that they had him killed in the year 66.

The German scholars who studied the history of Jesus’ times determined that he was a real person. Albert Schweitzer agreed. But his “heresy” in The Quest of the Historical Jesus was to deduce, based on an exhaustive analysis of his colleagues’ research, that Jesus was an eschatological prophet. The message of Jesus, according to Schweitzer’s analysis, was that the end is near. In references that weave like a thread through the New Testament, Jesus intimated that with the death of his mortal body and his ascension to the right hand of the Father, all hell would literally break loose. The Crucifixion would be the herald of Judgment Day.

A typical implications of Jesus’ eschatology appears in John 12:47: “As for those who hear my words but do not keep them, I do not judge them. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. There is a judge for those who reject me and do not accept my words; the very words I have spoken will condemn them on the last day.”

As he tallied references to that big “last day,” Schweitzer figured out that Jesus had a clear and present vision of when the Apocalypse was coming, how fast it was moving and what was gonna happen when it came.

I can only imagine the consternation among Schweitzer’s elders. After spending a century building up Jesus from myth to man, Schweitzer hit these august churchmen with the inference that they’d created a monster, a grim reaper sweeping all humankind up to Heaven or down to Hell, leaving Earth a barren skull where nothing lived save cactus and cockroaches.

Schweitzer’s penance was to see his book suppressed, lest he be excommunicated. And he had to go to Africa.

Albert Schweitzer’s Jesus, of course, never got the End of Days he foresaw. Post-Crucifixion, thanks largely to Paul, Christianity adapted to a future that just kept going on and on. But, as indicated by the New Testament’s last book, the End-of-Days phantasmagoria of Revelation, the prophets of the Church never stopped dreaming darkly of a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape just around the bend.

The latest, unlikeliest Messiah—sent by God, according to his millions of believers, to herald the End of Days—is Donald Trump. Somehow, we have elevated an eschatological prophet—an oracle of Doomsday—to status as the leader of a free world that he prefers not to be free.

Of course, he doesn’t wanna be crucified, either. In that sense, Trump is less like Jesus and more like John the Baptist, who raged and raved at the iniquity of the faithless masses and called down curses on his moral enemies—especially Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and incestuous stepfather of Salome, who ended John’s career by having Herod serve up the Baptist’s head on a plate.

(I can’t get out of my head the image of Ivanka flanked by her dad as they gaze rapturously at a huge gold platter on the Resolute desk, bearing the bodiless noggin of James Comey, garnished with the fingers and toes of Letitia James.)

Donald Trump’s apocalyptic references are too numerous to recount. It has been part of his stump speech for a decade to threaten that, without him, “you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He has seen cities—Portland, Memphis, his adopted hometown of Washington—devolve into Sodom and Gomorrah, doomed to be laid waste by the vengeful Old Testament hand of his Father (Fred).

(I can’t blot out the image of Melania, peering out from under her Inauguration sombrero, screaming with terror as the backward glance of her husband—oops!—renders her the most fashionable salt-shaker since Marie Antoinette’s last breakfast.)

Trump has warned that the obliteration of America, and the world, by radical-left Democrat communists, can be forestalled only by a third, then a fourth Trump presidency, succeeded by a dynastic succession of Trump upon Trump, unto eternity—for without Trump, we face the Abyss. There will be nothing!

The imminent Apocalypse has already reared itself in the depredations of DOGE and Trump’s scorched-earth approach to the Constitution, the institutions of government and the foundations of American democracy. All these rules, regulations, yellowed documents and shibboleths are the corrupt trappings of Herod Antipas, from which we must all be purged, lest we are consumed by the fire and brimstone that will descend upon us from on high.

The mirror image—and catalyst—of “Only I can fix it,” is “Yeah, but first, I gotta wreck it.”

When Jesus, in Schweitzer’s frightening interpretation, promised the end of the world, the end of life itself, he told humanity that on the Day of Judgment, he would be resurrected as the only thing—the Only One—left. After this prophecy was not fulfilled, Christianity was able to see it in a different light, as a message of hope and redemption. Theologians could do this because Jesus had couched his preaching in parables, ambiguities and metaphor, imbuing his words with the power of mystery that gives lifeblood to any lasting religious faith.

In his Second Coming, Donald Trump is not remotely so subtle, nor gentle, nor loving as the Savior to which his followers compare him. Rather than the “Son of Man,” a title assigned to Jesus throughout the Bible, his successor, Trump, is better suited to a more vividly apocalyptic sobriquet from the Bhagavad Gita—“destroyer of worlds.”

Lately, commentators viewing Trump’s misrule with alarm, have gotten into the habit of citing a motto attributed to Louis XIV: “L’etat, c’est moi.” If Albert Schweitzer were around to study Trump’s bizarre and fatalist regime, his quote from the French would more likely invoke Louis XV, who said—before the French Revolution separated his head from his eerily Trumplike body, “Après moi, le deluge.”