Some of you may recall that disgraced preacher Eddie Long stepped down from his position as spiritual leader of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church late last year. His stated goal was to focus on his family — in particular, his long-suffering wife who is divorcing him.
Well, Bishop Long is back in the pulpit. And he returned in typical dramatic fashion.
New Birth brought in a controversial “Rabbi” to crown Long as King in an elaborate Jewish ceremony using 300-year-old sacred scrolls that were found discarded outside a concentration camp in Germany in the 1940s.
I wonder how the Jews feel about this?
Update I, 4:45 pm ET: according to this blog, the “Rabbi” isn’t even Jewish and the 300-year-old “Jewish scrolls” are fake:
Rabbi Ralph Messer isn’t Jewish.
Messer is a proponent of so-called Messianic Judaism, a religious movement founded in the 1960s that wraps evangelical Christian theology in Jewish cultural trappings.
Put simply, it’s a Christian movement. Messer is a Christian minister.
And despite Messer’s claim to be acting “on behalf of the Jewish people and the land of Israel,” there’s nothing Jewish about the performance he put on at Long’s church. Neither the ritual nor the language of Messer’s act have any basis in Jewish traditions, while his repeated references to the divinity of Jesus and quotations from the Christian bible make his actual theology clear.
Also, the “priceless” Torah scroll Messer wraps Long in is almost certainly a fake. As you can see at 5:15 in the video, the thing is held together with scotch tape.
Oh, and one more tip for “Rabbi” Messer, if he’s reading this. The name of the Nazi concentration camp where you claim you found that scroll? It’s Auschwitz-Birkenau, not “Auschwitz and Birkendal.”
Thanks to loyal readers Maya S. and Velvet W. for the tip!
This post, originally written Feb. 2, 2012 @ 11:42 a.m., was edited to reflect the following corrections: deleted text erroneously attributed to blogger Fresh of Crunktastical.net.
