Does Josh Hammer Love Jesus?

Journalist Josh Hammer is steamed at Tucker Carlson for many reasons, but most recently he is upset because Tucker said, “Muslims love Jesus.”

Hammer is plenty annoyed that Tucker says anything that is complimentary of majority Muslim countries. You cannot say, according to Hammer, that cities in the Gulf states tend to be cleaner and safer than, say, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, or really almost any major American city. He says Tucker likes Sharia law, and maybe, just maybe, Tucker is not only paid by Muslim states but he might also have become Muslim himself. Oh yes, and Hammer says Tucker hates our Jewish brethren.

But to the assertion that Muslims love Jesus, let’s consider. We must admit right away that the Muslims, like our Jewish brethren, do not believe that Jesus is God. But Muslims, unlike our Jewish brethren, do believe He was one of the five elite prophets (the “Ulul ‘Azm”), along with Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Muhammad. And when they mention the name of Jesus, Muslims add, “peace be upon him.” They believe He was born of the Virgin Mary, that He was a messenger of God, and that it will be Jesus who returns at the end of time. An Imam once told me that Jesus is returning not to judge us but “to tell the Christians they were wrong!” He said this with a bony finger stuck in my face. 

Turning to the Blessed Mother, the Koran devotes an entire chapter to her, naming her. She is the only woman named in the Koran.

I suspect that Hammer may not know the story of Fatima, where the Blessed Mother appeared to shepherd children, the greatest event in modern history. And he certainly would not know that during the Christian reconquest of Portugal, a Muslim princess was captured by the Christians and fell in love with her captor, a Christian prince. She converted to Christianity, they were married, and in her honor, he named the place for her. Her name was Fatima, and she was named for Muhammad’s daughter.

It should be noted that when an artist in Brooklyn displayed a painting of the Blessed Mother that he also covered in elephant dung, it was the Muslims who turned out to protest.  

For all of these reasons, Bishop Fulton Sheen speculated that Muslims would convert en masse to the One True Church before our Jewish brethren. Indeed, Muslims in the Middle East are converting in droves because Jesus is appearing to them in their dreams. You can look it up.

So, it is not far-fetched to say that Muslims love Jesus. Not at all. One could say the Jesus they love is not entirely Jesus, but you can also say they are on the way.

Now, what about our Jewish brethren? Well, one of my Jewish girlfriends in college told me that when her family referred to Jesus they called him “Yeschke and Pippick.” I never knew what that meant, but I recently looked it up. Pippick means belly button and refers to a puffed-up buffoon, while Yeschke is a diminutive for Yehoshua (Jesus), also meant as mockery. And we know that in the Talmud, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism, Jesus is referred to as a sorcerer.

Ben Shapiro said Jesus was a revolutionary who got what all Jewish revolutionaries got.

All of this Yeschke and Pippick business may now be anachronistic, from another age, a sweeter age, the Catskills age, when religious and ethnic groups could kid with each other about religion and ethnicity and not get in trouble. Now we have all become so prissy, and such kibbitzing makes people quake and quiver. And it is unlikely that most of our Jewish brethren care much about Jesus and the Talmud as an everyday thing.

So, we can easily put all this away and consider the underlying question. What do our Jewish brethren believe about Our Lord and Savior? When they think about Him, it is probably as a lunatic blasphemer. There are two other such messiahs mentioned in the New Testament; and, to paraphrase Ben Shapiro, they got what was coming to them.

Jesus Christ was a different story. He really caught on and became the founder of a global religion with claims of Divinity. Jews converted by the thousands. This certainly would have irked the Jews of those days, and it may still irk the Jews of our day. Without a doubt, they believe that Jesus founded a false religion that continues to fool more than a billion people and billions more who have passed. And it certainly has not helped that in His name throughout the ages our Jewish brethren have been manhandled and far worse.

Putting aside Tucker’s assertion that the Muslims love Jesus, which is quite obviously true, the question becomes: Does Josh Hammer love Jesus?