Ave rex Judaeorum (Hail, king of the Jews)

King of the Jews (Dirck van Baburen, 1623)

Evangelium Secundum Matthæum 27: 24-29

Videns autem Pilatus quia nihil proficeret, sed magis tumultus fieret: accepta aqua, lavit manus coram populo, dicens: Innocens ego sum a sanguine justi hujus: vos videritis. Et respondens universus populus, dixit: Sanguis ejus super nos, et super filios nostros. Tunc dimisit illis Barabbam: Jesum autem flagellatum tradidit eis ut crucifigeretur. Tunc milites praesidis suscipientes Jesum in praetorium, congregaverunt ad eum universam cohortem: et exeuntes eum, chlamydem coccineam circumdederunt ei, et plectentes coronam de spinis, posuerunt super caput ejus, et arundinem in dextera ejus. Et genu flexo ante eum, illudebant ei, dicentes: Ave rex Judaeorum.

The Gospel According to Matthew 27: 24-29

And Pilate seeing that he prevailed nothing, but that rather a tumult was made; taking water washed his hands before the people, saying: I am innocent of the blood of this just man; look you to it. And the whole people answering, said: His blood be upon us and our children. Then he released to them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, delivered him unto them to be crucified. Then the soldiers of the governor taking Jesus into the hall, gathered together unto him the whole band; And stripping him, they put a scarlet cloak about him. And platting a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand. And bowing the knee before him, they mocked him, saying: Hail, king of the Jews.

England's Jews and Protestants

Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, in a painting by Samuel Cooper, 1656 

At any rate, the thirteenth century saw in England a rapid decline of Jewish financial power and at the same time an official animosity toward them… The final step came when their special license to practice usury was withdrawn by Edward I in the earlier part of his reign; and at last, in 1290, after increasing severities, they were all expelled from the country under pain of death…They returned, as everybody knows, under Cromwell. Their numbers, and still more their wealth, increased at the end of the seventeenth century and concomitantly with this, partly as an effect of it (but here we must not exaggerate), a number of novel financial features appeared in the English State each of which shows the increased power of the Jews. The institution of the Bank, of the National Debt, of speculation in Exchange, and in fluctuation of stock… There were, of course, many other causes contributory to the peculiar position which the Jews came to enjoy in modern England, a position which he has not yet lost in external circumstance, though it is so badly shaken morally. There was the fact that England was the Protestant power of the West. This religious motive played a great part. Between the Catholic Church and the Synagogue there had been hostility from the first century. In so far as it was possible to take sides in that quarrel it was natural for the Protestant power to take sides against the Catholic tradition and therefore in favour of the Jews. Again the English were not only Protestant, their middle classes were steeped in the reading of the Old Testament. The Jews seemed to them the heroes of an epic and the shrines of a religion. You will find strong relics of this Provincial England to this day.

Hilaire Belloc, The Jews  (pp.185-187)   

Pictures of hell set before our eyes

Undoubtedly modern philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis have firmly contested the idea of human sin, guilt, or responsibility in an effort to “liberate” us. A strange thing has happened, then, for we have ended up by being convicted that sin (especially original sin) no longer counts, that there is no responsibility, that we can do as we like with no limits, and the result is not conduct that is open to the good or liberated for it, but frantic egoism, scorn for others, a desire for aggrandizement and domination. Once we begin to attain to the conviction that we are not sinners, what do we see around us? What is brought to us by the thousands of pictures transmitted by television? Epidemics, famines, massacres, genocides, revolutions, everywhere leading to innumerable executions even when the intentions are the best, the installation of bloody and capricious dictatorships, socialism transformed into an instrument of oppression, of murder, and of hatred, the spoliation of the planet by technology. Pictures of hell are set before our eyes every day. 

Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity (p. 144)