Can a Holocaust Denier be a Great Bible Scholar?

Can a Catholic priest who dwells in the demonic dungeon of holocaust denial be considered a “great Scriptural scholar?” One might as well ask if Josef Mengele, dubbed the “angel of death” by his Auschwitz victims, should be honored as a “distinguished medical professional.”

Inexplicably, three of Britain’s top Catholic influencers are persuaded that Fr. James Mawdsley, a radical historical revisionist who calls the Shoah “the biggest lie in history,” deserves to be canonized as the patron saint of biblical scholarship.

The accolade heaped on the Holocaust denier has attracted media attention mostly because Dr. Gavin Ashenden, the best-known member of the triumvirate, is a media pundit, celebrity Catholic convert, and a former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II.

Along with his colleagues Mark Lambert and Katherine Bennett, the trio host the Catholic Unscripted podcast — a show favored by traditionalist Catholics who love the Latin Mass, hate the late Pope Francis, and despise Vatican II for expunging the prayer for the “perfidious” Jews from the Good Friday liturgy.

Antisemitism Rife Among Traditionalist Catholics

If you are a Jew who sings with John Lennon “Imagine there’s no antisemitism (in the Catholic Church), It’s easy if you try,” just spend an hour scouring traditionalist Catholic websites. Alternatively, take the “Candace Owens Crash Course in Jew-Hating” and ask why Owens’ antisemitism coincides with her conversion to traditionalist Catholicism.

This year, Rome is celebrating the 60^th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document that, in an epochal U-turn, turned the Jew “from enemy to brother,” using the Latin superlative carissimi to describe the Jews as “beloved by God.” Paradoxically, this is triggering a meltdown among Catholics who believe in the “myth of magisterial continuity.”

Astutely anticipating the annual ritual of traditionalist Catholics bemoaning the Vatican’s alleged capitulation to the “Jewish lobby” in amending the prayer for the “perfidious” Jews, Catholic Unscripted hosted the arch-antisemite, Fr. Mawdsley, just before Passover and Holy Week to discuss the Good Friday liturgical changes.

Mawdsley began his maledictions almost as soon as his host Bennett flagged off the interview: “I think that the Jews have basically infiltrated the church, destroyed her liturgy, her dogma, her morals, and unless we call that out and overcome that and be honest about the governance in our Catholic faith then things are only going to get worse.”

Shoah: “The Biggest Lie in History”

Jews like Nahum Goldmann, then head of the World Jewish Congress, had a “Talmudic element” whose goal was to “destroy everything” of the old order of society, including a social hierarchy, so “no tradition will be considered sacred anymore,” Mawdsley fulminated.

“I won’t say too much on your channel on YouTube but that’s [Shoah] the biggest lie in history,” he continued. “The World War II lies are the biggest and the first lie of the devil against God.”

Mawdsley outshines the traditionalist Catholic bishop, Richard Williamson, who stated on a 2009 Swedish TV program that “historical evidence is strongly against — is hugely against — 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.”

The internet is an open sewer into which Mawdsley religiously vomits his venom. A 30-second Google search is all the journalistic rigor it takes to discover the depths of his Jew-hatred, Holocaust denial and historical revisionism.

The Holocaust Did Not Happen

“Adolf Hitler did not start World War II. It was the Jews,” Mawdsley rants on the white nationalist Substack “White Rabbit.” He says his mission is to “expose the demonic falsity of the Holocaust narrative” and “to expose the Jewish lies which cause innumerable wars.”

“Hitler did not set out to conquer Europe, while the Jews schemed then and now to rule the world. And crucially, the responsibility for the Jews who died in World War II, and that number is much closer to 1 million than to six million,” the revisionist priest adds.

“The Holocaust is a lie. It didn’t happen,” Mawdsley claims on The Backlash. “Many Jews suffered as they were being expelled from Europe by the Nazis, but there was no genocidal plan from Hitler or the Germans to annihilate the Jews.”

The UK-based Jewish group Campaign Against Antisemitism flagged up the Catholic Unscripted podcast on X and Facebook reporting that “several people from the Catholic community” had written to them “in disgust” regarding the priest’s well-publicized views on “the Jews” and the Holocaust.

Praising Holocaust Denier’s Books

Ashenden initially did a diplomatic tap dance around the issue in an incoherent video and an article euphemistically noting that Mawdsley “is unambiguous in his focused claims about ‘the Jews.’”

But how did Catholic Unscripted respond as a team? Did they repent in sackcloth and ashes? Delete the offensive video? Apologize to Britain’s Chief Rabbi Efraim Mirvis? Go for confession and perform the penance of reading Nostra Aetate? Nein! Nein!

Catholic Unscripted issued a fatuous statement endorsing Mawdsley as a “great scriptural scholar.” They chorused: “We have all met Fr. Mawdsley and read his books.” “His books are well worth reading.” “He was also perfectly pleasant and kind when we met him.”

Surely one can be wrong in one field and right in another? A good cardiologist can be a bad carpenter, nu? Can Mawdsley be wrong about the Holocaust, but expound great truths from biblical texts? As a biblical scholar, I don’t think so.

Biblical Studies as a Historical Discipline

First, biblical studies is a specialist discipline. At the very least, it demands technical proficiency in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. A Scripture scholar must be skilled in textual criticism and know his way around manuscripts and their variant readings.

When I taught biblical studies at university, I warned students it was one of the most difficult disciplines because it demanded an understanding of linguistics, literature, geography, economics, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and, above all, a mastery of the historical method.

Jews and Christians believe that our faith is rooted in history. The Bible (despite its wide range of genres from prophecy to poetry) is the historical repository of our religion. You’ve got to be a skilled historian to be a good biblical scholar.

If Mawdsley gets contemporary history so catastrophically wrong and engages in mega revisionism of recent history, can he be trusted to interpret history dating back to over 3,000 years and in ancient languages he demonstrates no proficiency in?

Building a Case on Copyist’s Errors in the Bible

If Mawdsley misrepresents modern history so catastrophically and indulges in extensive revisionism of recent events, how can we rely on his ability to analyze history from over millennia ago, especially in ancient languages where he shows no expertise?

Mawdsley cannot even detect the egregious copyist’s error in the Latin Vulgate translation of Genesis 3:15, which reads: “she shall crush your head” instead of “he shall crush your head.” He bases an entire book Crushing Satan’s Head: The Virgin Mary’s Victory Over the Antichrist Foretold in the Old Testament on his mistranslation.

He refuses to acknowledge the superiority of the Hebrew Massoretic Text or the Greek Septuagint. Even the Vatican corrected this error in the Nova Vulgata (1979) acknowledging that the verse refers to the Messiah and not to Mary, Jesus’ mother.

Second, Mawdsley has no degree in biblical studies. He dropped out after three terms at Bristol University, studying maths and physics. His priestly formation at St. Peter’s Seminary in Germany, included neither a bachelor’s nor a licentiate degree in scripture — the latter is a canonical requirement to qualify as a scripture scholar in the Roman Church.

The impostor has never published a peer-reviewed article or a book through an academic press. His seven books are all self-published. No biblical scholar has ever endorsed any of his works. No guild of Catholic biblical scholars would ever accept him. Mengele, at least, had degrees in medicine.

False Prophet in Mortal Sin

Third, according to Catholic teaching, Mawdsley is in a state of mortal sin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains how while “a lie in itself only constitutes a venial sin, it becomes mortal when it does grave injury to the virtues of justice and charity” (2484). Mawdsley’s colossal lies are neither just nor charitable.

Can someone who is living in mortal sin be guided by the Holy Spirit — who Christians believe to be the divine guide in interpreting Scripture? Or, the false prophets Hananiah, Pashhur, and Shemaiah in Jeremiah’s day, is Mawdsley being led by a diabolical spirit?

Fourth, Catholics also believe that a priest must submit to a bishop in order to minister. Mawdsley disingenuously told Catholic Unscripted he had been “suspended.”

I emailed his former religious order, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, and Fr. Daniel Powers, the Provincial Secretary, wrote back to confirm that Mawdsley had been “canonically expelled.”

Were Recent Popes Lying About the Shoah?

Fifth, Mawdsley’s Holocaust denial suggests that recent popes, who have expressed both regret and remorse for the Shoah, are lying. In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI visited Auschwitz and declared: “The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth.”

“The hatred and contempt for men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah was a crime against God and against humanity,” Benedict said in 2009. “This should be clear to everyone, especially to those standing in the tradition of the Holy Scriptures.”

In 1979, Pope John Paul II visited Auschwitz saying he had “walked amid the ruins of the Birkenau ovens.” The Polish pontiff expressed his grief for the six million Poles, most of them Catholics. Many, including priests and nuns also suffered the fate of their Jewish neighbors. Mawdsley’s Shoah denial insults the sacred memory of his own Catholic martyrs.

Mawdsley sneers at modern Bible translations calling them “judaized Bibles.” If only he was a “great Scripture scholar” he would know that the Jews not only wrote the entire Tanakh (Old Testament) but also the whole New Testament, with the possible exception of Luke’s gospel.

Even the view that Luke was a Gentile Christian is now being discarded by biblical scholars since Joshua Paul Smith’s groundbreaking doctoral disseration Luke Was Not a Christian: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Jewish Authorship of Luke and Acts (2021), demonstrated that Luke, in all likelihood, was Jewish.

Defending Hitler is perverse. Endorsing neo-Nazis is evil. Ashenden, Bennett, and Lambert are guilty not by association but because they have rejected the exhortation of Psalm 1:

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.