The Scofield Conspiracy Part III: Money Answereth All Things

In the conclusion to this series, I separate the myths from the conspiracies we can reject, the conspiracies we can't confirm, and the conspiracies that we can.

It was dang near the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. My friend, Trevor, stood over a patch of scrub brush on a blanket of fresh snow and looked at a tiny speck of blood underneath it, where the snow had not yet drifted. He then looked over to another patch of brush, just one out of thousands, and there found another speck.

My wife had clipped a deer the night before, and we called off the search until the morning, but over night a deep snow had fallen, making tracking exceedingly difficult. So I called in the big gun, the redneck of all rednecks, who I had grown affectionate for over the years.

Without a single misplaced guess, Trevor went from scrub brush to scrub brush - on nothing but a hunch and gut feeling - finding increasingly large piles of blood. The deer was wounded, and had moved from bush to bush over night. But a half mile later, the deer hobbled frantically away, where Mandy made a swift end of him.

That’s when I knew that Trevor could track. But according to Trevor, he couldn’t track like that if I wasn’t with him. He thought it supernatural. But over the years, we’d call each other when the tracking wasn’t going well, and help each other find the animal we were looking for.

LET’S TRACK

In 2016, Trevor called me and said, “[This girl] from my daughter’s class is missing. I’ll pick you up in five minutes. Let’s track.”

The tween girl had run away from home, and her dad was another local pastor. She was last seen on a bicycle headed south. Hundreds of volunteers gathered about 20 miles away at the fire hall, to look for her. The fear, of course, is that she could have been picked up by a ne’er-do-well. Trevor and I were given our assigned streets to search, and instructions on how to look.

About five minutes in, he and I just looked at each other and said, “She’s not here.”

I believe it was a supernatural thing. He and I both, somehow intuitively, knew she was nowhere near where they thought. We notified the fire hall we were looking elsewhere.

We just stopped on the side of the highway and prayed. And then, again at the same time, knew where she was. There was a wildlife area, popular for camping, about halfway between where she was last spotted and where they thought she was, nestled on a backwater of the Yellowstone River.

I called a church member who lived near the Seven Sisters river access and told her, “I don’t know why I think this the case, but that little girl is camping down there. Don’t take the main entrance. Take the road to the right, not on the river, but the backwater where nobody goes.”

She was found five minutes later, and the church member had her packed up and was driving her home.

TRACKING IS TRACKING

Before I had received the call tipping me off to James Riady having financed a substantial part of the Social Justice movement inside Reformed evangelicalism, I was already tracing the funding from George Soros.

Soros, the billionaire who named his international nation-pilfering organization after an important tenet of the Post-War Consensus, “Open Society,” had been funding Social Justice in evangelicalism as well. Tracing that money was like tracing laundered cash from the mob, as went to different sources and accounts, changed names and identities, and eventually found its way to evangelicals advocating of the kind of Marxism that wears clerical collars.

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The Open Society Foundation founded and funded the National Immigration Forum. The National Immigration Forum founded and funded the Evangelical Immigration Table. And the Evangelical Immigration Table has tentacles all throughout the evangelical world, most notably, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. But like all Dark Money, it allows “plausible deniability” to the culprits, who know that most people aren’t capable of tracking a deer in the woods, let alone laundered money through 501(C)3s.

When we pointed out this connection (which might as well have had an umbilical chord attached to it), this plausible deniability of attention span limitations prompted the Southern Baptist blogs to attack us for violating “Thou Shalt Not Lie” because - they said - Soros never put cash directly into the hand of Russell Moore.

Their arguments for this were predictably absurd.

• The Open Society Foundation is not George Soros (it’s only an organization founded and funded by him, but it’s not him personally).

• The National Immigration Forum hasn’t received money from The Open Society Foundation in a couple years now (so it’s not currently being supported by The Open Society Foundation…technically).

• The Open Society Foundation only gave the National Immigration Forum three million dollars (and that’s not that much money anyway).

• The National Immigration Forum isn’t funding the Evangelical Immigration Table directly (it’s just paying for all their advertising campaigns directly).

• Russell Moore doesn’t run the Evangelical Immigration Table (he’s just on the board).

Despite SBC blogs accusing us of lying, and Moore’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) finally putting out an “explainer” seven years later, obfuscating the facts, we tracked the blood and found the deer, so to speak.

Solomon is the wisest man who ever lived, and he acknowledged…

“…Money answereth (explains) all things (Ecclesiastes 10:19).”

Let me refresh your memory from where we left off.

A SUMMARY OF PARTS 1 and PARTS 2

European Zionism (the promotion of a Jewish State) was the merger of two interests. The first interest was that of Jews, headed-up by Theodore Herzl, who argued that carving out a piece of the Middle East, or perhaps Argentina, for the Jews to establish a nation-state was in the best interest of both Jews and Europeans. It would reduce conflict, as Europe had grown increasingly tired of Judaism almost everywhere.

The second interest was that of the British imperialists, who saw that a Jewish nation-state in Palestine would be of particular value to Great Britain, because it could serve as a colonial outpost, providing a British military presence in the region and could protect the trade route with India to get British goods to their hopeful new colony. In the mean time, they thought, it would be good to get the problematic Jews out of Europe, killing two birds with one stone.

There were impediments to both Herzl and the British Imperialists (headed up by Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Palmertson). For Herzyl, the Pope was unimpressed with his idea and refused to help. And Herzyl recognized that Christians had to be on board. For Shaftesbury and Palmertson, the Americans were not on board, and they needed to be.

At roughly the same time that the British imperialists and the European Jews were hitting roadblocks, John Darby of the Plymouth Brethren from Ireland had formulated a novel doctrinal framework that disputed the historic Covenant Theology held by Christians since the first century. Of chief importance, it claims that the physical lineage of Abraham is in a special Covenant with God, despite rejecting his Son. This meant that eschatologically, the Jews were entitled to the Promised Land deeded to Abraham, and Christians had a religious duty to “help the Jews prosper.”

Despite the history of the Jews demonstrating that they need no help to prosper, and in fact, most of the contention they experienced with Europeans was related to their disproportionate wealth and power, Darby’s Dispensationalism spread in Europe in tandem with the growth of Christian Zionism. In short, they found it incredibly useful for their foreign policy goals.

Americans, however, were disinclined to go along. For them, the Dispensational view toward Jews furthered no national interest, because Americans did not desire constant warfare across the Atlantic as the British Empire did. And the Jews in America faired better than their counterparts in Europe, because they were not high enough in population to cause much of a disturbance, so they faced less contention with their presence; in fact, the Jews in America were almost entirely opposed to a Jewish State.

How could Americans be brought on board, especially in a pre-Holocaust world?

SCOFIELD

Printing in 1909, by the end of World War II, more than two million Scofield Bibles were in circulation. That was a gigantic number for the days when virtually any Bible would cost a pretty penny. And it was the first Bible since the 1570 Geneva Bible that included commentary in the margins.

The change in Christian perspective on Jews as “God’s chosen people” in this present age cannot be over-stated. At one time, the claim would have seen like an alien notion. But for those who lived by the Holy Trinity of “Father, Son, and Scofield Notes,” it largely became a standard belief within the realm of perceived orthodoxy.

The Scofield Bible seemed to have been made for American religion. The United States, unlike Europe, had a strong “low-church” presence. While Europe certainly had non-conformists and congregationalists, European ministers attended seminaries in much higher numbers than in America. During this era, the Baptist sod-busting preachers and Methodist “circuit-riders” were pastoring rural and frontier churches in regions isolated from religious higher education. Many could not afford commentaries, and had never seen one, let alone own one. The Scofield Bible provided explanations and commentary help for a vastly undereducated American clergy. And many considered the notes to be next-to-inspired.

Scofield’s notes on Genesis 12:3 (I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee) set the tone; “It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew—well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.”

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The interpretation of this passage - and Scofield’s injection into it - was most certainly new. Despite the New Testament explicitly teaching in places like Romans 11 that unbelieving Jews have been “cut off” of True Israel, somehow unbelieving Jews are still entitled to the promises of True Israel. Suddenly, the entire teaching on God’s redemptive plan was on its head.

Covenant Theology aside, Scofield also makes another very important invention; that diasporic Jews are the same as Abraham’s lineage in Genesis 12:3.

Even before the use of DNA technology, it was well known that the Ashkenazi Jews, who comprised well more than half of the Jewish population in Europe, were either minimally Jewish by blood, or not Jewish at all. The presumption at the time, turned out to be correct as DNA technology has revealed; the Ashkenazi Jews are Greek and Iranian, and are traced to those who colonized Turkey centuries prior and had converted to Judaism.

How does the promise to Abraham follow those who deny Christ and who happen to not be of Abraham’s lineage by blood? Scofield doesn’t attempt an answer. He simply applied this promise to anyone who calls themself Jewish. And from Scofield onward, whether or not most Jews are Jews at all, and how the promise of Abraham can be applied to those who are not related to him by blood, has hardly been asked.

Within several decades of the Scofield Bible’s popularity, the attitude toward the Jews changed dramatically in America. It largely created the sentiment that Christians in America were somehow obligated to “protect and help prosper” European Jews. And most importantly, because Darby’s Dispensationalism requires the Jews to eventually reclaim the Promised Land (which has historically been interpreted as fulfilled in the Millennial Reign of Christ), it was a prophecy that Christians were bound to help fulfill as a matter of Christian duty.

In other words, Jews reclaiming Palestine could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, if only Christians could get behind a Jewish state in Palestine. When this occurred in 1948, those who grew up on Scofield Notes declared it an act of God and proof that Dispensationalism was true. Never mind the fact that Scofield’s marginal notes were tantamount to the prophecy’s “fulfillment.”

ON THE MAN

Cyrus Ingerson Scofield was raised an Episcopalian in Michigan, and later moved to Tennessee where he served in the Confederate Army. He attended no seminary and had no formal religious education. He was elected twice to the state house as a representative after moving to Kansas, once for two different counties. He then became the U.S. District Attorney in Kansas, but had to soon resign after allegations surfaced of financial shenanigans. Some accusations exist of an arrest on forgery charges, but that’s unclear.

What is clear is that Scofield left his wife and two daughters, and she eventually divorced him on the grounds of abandonment. He then married his mistress, with whom he had another child. When the local newspaper announced his conversion, they described him as, “late lawyer, politician and shyster generally.”

By 1879, Scofield was volunteering at Dwight Moody’s revivals in St. Louis. He was then mentored by James Brookes, a Presbyterian minister. Soon after, he became a Congregationalist minister in 1883, before his divorce was finalized. After some success in church growth, he took Moody’s pastorate.

Beginning in 1903, Scofield set to work on his study Bible, completing it in 1909.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SCOFIELD BIBLE

Two short years before Scofield started his study Bible, he earned entrance to a highly exclusive (and expensive) membership at the Lotus Club in New York City. The significance of this has been often-stated. Despite his success in ministry, it was practically unheard of for a man without serious pedigree, especially without deep roots and deep pockets in the New York socialite culture, to obtain membership in the club.

UNTERMEYER

Samuel Untermeyer VII was born in Lynchburg, Virginia to two Jewish parents. After the Civil War, his family moved to New York where he went to the City College of New York and then, Columbia University. With his friend and brother, he started a law firm, which to this very day is prominent. He holds the record as the first attorney in U.S. history to have earned a million dollars from a single case.

Untermeyer soon became a politico in New York, and used his political power to heavily promote central banking and lobby Congress to create the Federal Reserve. He was also a delegate to the Democratic Convention at least four times, and was an advisor to the U.S. Treasury.

But it was his Zionist work to which Untermeyer devoted much of his attention. He was president of the Keren Hayesod organization. It’s “Foundation Fund” organized Zionist hubs in 45 different countries around the world, united in the effort to build a Jewish state in Palestine. Today, Keren Hayesod is a registered corporation with the State of Israel.

That organization was established as the World Zionist Congress in 1920, and was created to help bolster the Balfour Declaration, which was was Britain’s declaration in 1917, clarifying its official Zionist position to create a Jewish State. It was this effort to which Lord Palmertson and Lord Shaftesbury, explained in Part II, devoted their efforts for foreign policy reasons (and “Christian duty,” extrapolated in Darby’s new Dispensationalism, tagged onto the end of their reasoning).

It was probably not at the Lotos Club that the two, Scofield and Untermeyer, met. Rather, the connection was probably the practice of law, because outside of professional relationships, it’s unlikely that the Jewish Central Banking advocate would have met an evangelical preacher like Scofield. Some sources suggest that Untermeyer paid his membership fees and organized his admittance. Either way, they were both members of the Lotos Club where if they weren’t associates before, they certainly were after.

Scofield biographer, Joseph Canfield, wrote, “The admission of Scofield to the Lotos Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C.I. Scofield.”

If true, then Untermeyer would have been the most likely benefactor. Either way, reports indicate that Untermeyer was on the admission panel that accepted Scofield’s membership.

Canfield, above, opined, “This was not a club in which one applied for membership, rather you had to be invited and have a sponsor. Why would a wealthy German Jew like Untermeyer living in America sponsor Scofield and sponsor and spend money on a man who was working on a new Bible translation and preaching Jesus?”

The two then took up traveling together, and Untermeyer paid for his tour of Europe, where he introduced him to powerful Zionist leaders.

Prof. David W. Lutz writes, “Untermeyer used Scofield, a Kansas City lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism. Untermeyer and other wealthy and influential Zionists whom he introduced to Scofield promoted and funded the latter’s career, including travel in Europe.”

While in Europe, Untermeyer introduced Scofield to other wealthy Zionists at Oxford, including Samuel Gompers, Fiorello Laguardia, Abraham Straus, Bernard Baruch, and Jacob Schiff.

There is no solid evidence that these men funded Scofield’s work, but it’s almost certain that they were intrigued by his impending project, which he had spoken of for several years before beginning work on the Scofield Bible. After all, they found Darby’s theology incredibly useful to their cause, and were looking for a way for that theology to spread in the United States.

Canfield writes, “"...the Bible project was not originally based on the support of a broad spectrum of the Christian constituency. It was supported from a select group who were economically able to finance special ideas and ride ideological hobbies."

The publishing of Scofield’s Bible by Oxford University Press also, likely, speaks to the influence of the above-mentioned Zionists, because Scofield met them during his tour of Oxford, with whom they were closely aligned as benefactors. It’s certainly peculiar that they published his work, considering Scofield was not a religious scholar, not an expert in the Biblical languages (nor, does it seem, he knew them at all), and was not widely published in the realm of academic work. It’s highly unlikely that anyone today, with such a total lack of conventional credentials, could be published by Oxford University Press. Indeed, it was unlikely then, also.

It seems that for Oxford, the purpose of the book was indeed to push a Zionist ambition. In the 1967 edition of the Scofield Bible, for example, they edited Scofield’s words to apply the Biblical prophecies not just to the ancestors of Abraham, but indeed to the new Israeli state in Palestine, in particular.

In fact, they crammed a new word into Scofield’s work altogether. They added the note, “For a nation to commit the sin of anti-semitism brings inevitable judgment (page 19-20, footnote (3) to Genesis 12:3).”

The term “antisemitism” was an invention by a Jewish Zionist in 1860 named Morris Steinschneider, advocating for Jewish Specialism, the idea that the Jewish race is not necessarily superior to others, but uniquely special. Because the Jewish race is uniquely special, more so than all the other races, then a special category of bigotry needed invented to classify bigotry against Jews as being uniquely bad. And now, Jewish Specialism was written into the pages of Scofield’s Bible, long after he was dead.

Other changes were made as well in 1948. Promises to Abraham were then characterized as promises to the Nation-State of Israel. Similarly, where Scofield wrote of “promises to Abraham,” new revisions changed it to “unconditional promises” or “irrevocable promises” to the body politic of modern Israel. Other changes are peculiar, including changing commentary from “the Jews who are the lineage of Abraham” (distinguishing between Jews who have Abraham’s DNA and those who don’t) to “all Jews are descendants of Abraham,” which is a matter of material untruth.

Other changes are less noticeable, but clearly designed with the newly minted “antisemitism” in mind. For example, when Jesus looked directly of the Pharisees and called them “sons of the devil,” Oxford injected a new posthumous statement from Scofield, that “this is not exclusive to Pharisees,” undermining the context to whom Jesus said it (no Gentiles were present in the Biblical scene, so the clarification seems oddly placed).

It’s even stranger to discover that Scofield did not own his Bible; Oxford owned Scofield’s Bible from the beginning, a fact not known until after Scofield’s death. An organization heavily involved in British Zionism produced the Bible that popularized Dispensational theology in the United States, which drastically changed public opinion on the supposed obligation to defend Jews and “help them flourish.”

Essentially, the question is not if Scofield’s Bible was influenced by Zionists. Rather, it’s not Scofield’s Bible at all. It always was, from the beginning, Oxford’s Bible.

Do you recall how we discussed Theodore Herzl’s initial Zionist appeal made to Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and later re-named, Der Judenstaat? It was originally entitled, “An Appeal to Baron Edmond de Rothschild” and was only later renamed when it was rejected by Rothschild because Jews in Europe had grown wealthy and powerful without a Jewish state. Rothschild reasoned that immense effort, time, energy, and money had been spent commandeering power in various nations around the world, and surrendering that for the sake of a single Jewish state was nonsensical.

The Balfour Declaration, the statement in Britain adopting Zionism as a foreign policy goal in 1917, was addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, the cousin of Edmond, who turned down Herzl’s appeal decades before. Lionel was the figurehead of the Jewish community in Great Britain, the counterpart to Edmond, the figurehead of the Jewish community in France.

But this time, the Rothschilds were on board, and Lionel heartily signed on to the Balfour Declaration, signifying that the Jewish Community and foreign policy wonks in Great Britain were finally unified in their goal of establishing a Zionist state.

Lionel Walter Rothschild was also the first Jewish Parliament member, and made waves by taking his oath of office with his hand placed upon the Old Testament, rather than the Christian Bible. And it was the Rothschild bank that funded Cecil Rhoades in his endeavors with the British South Africa Company and administered his estate after his death, setting up the famous Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. In fact, Lionel Rothschild gave philanthropically to Oxford University extensively, with various complaints made over the years that he was controlling its curriculum.

I hope you’re seeing the connections.

THE SCOFIELD CONSPIRACY IN A NUTSHELL

To summarize, Theodore Herzl made his initial Zionist appeal to Edmond Rothschild, but it was turned down. But a few decades later, Zionism grew in popularity in Great Britain thanks to the foreign policy benefits of a Jewish state in Palestine (and was helped mightily by Darby’s Dispensationalism, which added the incentive of helping Christians fulfill Biblical prophecy).

Using Dispensationalism as the last, final reason to promote Zionism, Lord Shantesbury, Lord Palmertson, and Lord Balfour drafted the Balfour Declaration, cementing the British commitment to Zionism, and the head of the Rothschilds in Britain, Lionel Walter Rothschild, happily signed on. Unfortunately, commitment from Great Britain was not enough, and Americans also needed to commit.

Cyrus Scofield, someone with dubious credentials and little theological credentials at all, began to hobnob at the Lotos Club with Samuel Untermeyer (who happened to have been instrumental in creating the Federal Reserve), a ridiculously wealthy Jew, who financed his travels to visit Zionists in Europe, including and especially the Zionist hub at Oxford University. Oxford University was strongly influenced - and to some extent, funded, by Lionel Walter Rothschild, who signed on a few years later to the Balfour Declaration. And, it turns out, the Scofield Bible didn’t belong to Scofiled at all, but Oxford. And over the years, whenever it fit British foreign policy concerns as it relates to the nation-state of Israel, Scofield’s posthumous notes became noticeably more politically Zionist.

CONSPIRACIES WE CAN RULE OUT

We can rule out easily enough a conspiracy that suggests the Rothschilds funded Darby or created Dispensationalism for Zionist purposes. That simply isn’t possible by the timeline, and no facts support that. We can also rule out that Darby created Dispensationalism while being influenced by Zionism, because the timeline doesn’t make that likely. Rather, it seems that Dispensationalism developed independent of Zionism.

We can rule out a conspiracy that suggests Scofield made a professional faith in order to carry out a Zionist plot. It appears he professed faith long before he started to build deep relationships with Zionist Jews. In addition, it seems he adopted Darby’s Dispensationalism years prior to entrance to the Lotus Club or made his associate with Untermeyer. While this conspiracy is more probable than the conspiracy listed above, it’s still not likely.

CONSPIRACIES WE CANNOT CONFIRM

We cannot confirm that Untermeyer paid Scofield to produce his Bible. While Untermeyer developed an odd infatuation with Scofield and paid for his travels to meet prominent Zionists who would ultimately publish his Bible, we do not know if “Scofield was paid” by Untermeyer for the work. We can also not confirm that Untermeyer’s support of Scofield’s work affected his doctrinal viewpoints.

Likewise, we cannot confirm that Rothschild paid Scofield to produce his Bible, or that it affected his doctrinal viewpoints.

CONSPIRACIES WE CAN CONFIRM

We can confirm that Untermeyer became a financial benefactor of Scofield for a reason other than his usefulness in American religion. From his likely sponsorship in the Lotus Club, to paying his travel expenses to Europe, it was surely not pure kindness. It only makes sense that his motivation in funding Scofield’s travels (and probably his club dues and no telling what else) appears to have been the chief motivation in Untermeyer’s life; working towards the establishment of a Jewish state.

We can also confirm “Scofield’s Bible” is a misnomer. It is Oxford’s Bible, and Oxford was where Untermeyer sent him to meet with Zionist leaders.

We can also confirm that Oxford was heavily influenced and financially supported by the Rothschilds, to whom the Balfour Declaration and Der Judenstaat were both addressed. In this way, there is definitely a sense in which the Rothschilds paid to finance the Scofield Bible and its publishing.

Thank you for reading to the conclusion of Part III and the series, The Scolfield Conspiracy. If you appreciate my work, please consider a monthly subscription for $8 a month or $80 a year. This is one of the things I do to support my family, so I very much appreciate it.