Jesus the Pacifist

Jesus cleared the temple with a whip. He told his disciples to buy swords. He praised a Roman centurion, told parables in which kings have their enemies killed, and, according to Revelation, will return to strike down the nations with a sword.

So how can anyone call him a pacifist?

That question is the reason this book exists. Most Christians assume the turn-the-other-cheek Jesus and the not-peace-but-a-sword Jesus cancel each other out, leaving nonviolence as a nice ideal for the especially devout. Jesus the Pacifist argues the opposite. Read in context, every passage used to prove Jesus endorsed violence either says nothing about the ethics of violence or actively condemns it. What remains is a Jesus who was, in Gandhi's words, "nonviolence par excellence."

Written for skeptics as much as for the already convinced, the book works through the evidence one passage at a time:

• Why "do not resist an evil person" is a command to resist evil nonviolently, and why the Sermon on the Mount was addressed to everyone, not just saints and monks
• What "I came to bring a sword" and "go buy a sword" actually meant, and why Jesus ordered the swords put away just hours later
• Why praising a centurion's faith is not an endorsement of his profession, and what that logic would prove about tax collectors and prostitutes
• The temple cleansing: what the four Gospel accounts actually say about the whip, and why no one present accused Jesus of hypocrisy
• Jesus's violent parables and the New Testament's military metaphors, and why they use the language of war to teach peace
• Two full chapters on Revelation: the rider on the white horse, the winepress of God's wrath, and why the Lion of Judah turns out to be a slaughtered Lamb
• Why Jesus refused political power outright, and why the church read him the same way for its first three hundred years

The pacifism defended here is not passivity. It is active, nonviolent resistance to evil, modeled on a king who was willing to die for God's kingdom but not to kill for it.

This is not a book about what to do when someone breaks into your house, or about Hitler. Fleischer says plainly that those questions come after this one. It is a book about the prior question every Christian has to settle first: what did Jesus actually teach and do about violence?

Concise, plainly written, and backed by more than 300 endnotes engaging Richard Hays, Walter Wink, N. T. Wright, Preston Sprinkle, and others, Jesus the Pacifist makes the systematic case that nonviolence is not a fringe concern of Christianity. It is the shape of the gospel itself.

With a foreword by Gregory A. Boyd, author of The Myth of a Christian Nation and Crucifixion of the Warrior God.