Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, king and queen of Judenfreistan, just missed the craziest Jewish conspiracy of 2026, and I was right in the thick of it. For three days, I hung out with fellow Christian Zionists as well as rabbis at the Vert Hotel in Jerusalem, plotting to subvert 17 centuries of Christianity with the blessings of Bibi and his government.
It felt like a James Bond movie. The plot’s mastermind was Dr Jürgen Bühler, a physicist trained at Israel’s Weizmann Institute. Bewitching us with biblical preaching from his wheelchair in his hypnotic German accent, he reminded me of Bond’s arch villain, minus the Siamese cat.
Bühler heads the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ), the world’s best-known Christian Zionist organisation. ICEJ was born in 1980, when the Knesset declared Jerusalem Israel’s eternal capital. Threatened by an Arab embargo, 13 embassies moved from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. To show solidarity with the Jews, evangelicals decided to establish a “Christian Embassy”.
In June, ICEJ called for an emergency Jerusalem Summit in response to the alarming surge in antisemitism following Hamas’s October 7 massacre. ICEJ’s summit would respond with the heavy artillery of academic discourse.
Nick Hansen, a delightful Dane coordinating the summit, asked me to deliver two lectures on Anglicanism’s historic role in securing the Balfour Declaration and on the rise of Christian Zionism in the Global South. The speaker line-up was formidable – I was going to share the platform with about 30 of the finest Christian and Jewish scholars. Tucker wouldn’t be able to disparage us as dispensationalists – a slur often hurled at Christian Zionists.
It was electrifying to hear Arab and Aramaic Israelis, Africans, Afrikaners, Americans, Britons, Indians, Italians, Germans, Swiss, and Pacific Islanders sing Hatikvah by heart and from the heart
The conference hall was packed with 200 participants from around the world while 3,000 attended online. It was electrifying to hear Arab and Aramaic Israelis, Africans, Afrikaners, Americans, Britons, Indians, Italians, Germans, Swiss, and Pacific Islanders sing Hatikvah by heart and from the heart. We even had interpreters for the Chinese delegation. US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Israel’s global ambassador to Christians George Deek and other heavyweights spoke at the summit, with a concert and dinner at Israel’s Foreign Ministry on the last night.
I’ve been to dozens of Christian Zionist conferences and even organised a couple – one with Israel’s first Bedouin diplomat, Ishmael Khaldi, as the speaker. We pray, sing Hebrew songs, dance to Hava Nagila, drink wine from the Golan Heights, listen to a couple of speakers expound texts from the Tanakh, cheer for Israel, and hurl invectives at Candace Owens. These holy huddles aren’t academic powwows.
ICEJ was breaking new ground. We were building on epoch-making scholarship that has been burgeoning over the past few decades – a movement of Jewish, Christian, and secular scholars known as the New Testament within Judaism. The movement is churning out tonnes of doctoral dissertations, peer-reviewed journal articles, and books from university presses – toppling the triumphalist Christian supersessionism of two millennia.
The premise of this movement is no longer contested: Jesus and his disciples were Jews; the Jesus movement was another Jewish sect in the milieu of Second Temple Judaism; the Christian Bible is a Jewish midrash on the Tanakh; its main audience was Jewish; and Paul the Pharisee never converted to Christianity. What is debated is when and why the “parting of the ways” took place.
Our summit was breaking ground on the question of why the sect of Jesus followers so substantially lost the plot and turned on their Jewish ancestry. The Christian Bible records the “sibling rivalry” among Jewish sects. Pharisees and Sadducees have fist fights over the resurrection. The Judeans can’t stand the Samaritans. It sounds like the joke about the Jew on a desert island who builds two synagogues. One to worship. The other never to set his foot in.
ICEJ’s summit went way beyond a Jewish joke. After sessions on the biblical basis for Zionism and combatting supersessionism, we addressed the 800-pound gorilla: what went wrong 1,700 years ago? In 2025, Christians celebrated the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in 325. After his conversion, Roman Emperor Constantine I convened the first ecumenical council to correct the Arian heresy and promote stability across the Roman Empire.
With eye-popping chutzpah, the academics at the summit acknowledged that “the legacy of Nicaea has been disastrous for Jews”, as Dr Gerald McDermott succinctly summarised. McDermott, an Anglican theologian who has published 25 books on Jewish-Christian relations, showed us how “the Nicene-Constantinople Creed, finally approved in 381, was an example of structural supersessionism” because it “leaves out Israel’s history and election”.
Worse, the letter sent out after the council told “all our brethren in the east who formerly followed the customs of the Jews” to shift the Church to a non-Jewish calendar and “celebrate the said most sacred feast of Easter at the same time with the Romans”. And Constantine’s letter, dispatched after the Council, is full of Jew-hatred, McDermott pointed out.
Constantine writes: It is “unworthy… to follow the customs of the Jews who had soiled their hands with the most fearful of crimes, and whose minds were blinded… we ought not therefore to have anything in common with the Jews… we desire to separate ourselves from the detestable company of the Jews… it is your duty not to tarnish your souls by communications with such wicked people… [they are] the murderers of our Lord.”
McDermott called for “a revised creed that brings Jewish salvation history and the Jewishness of Jesus and the apostles back to the forefront” – a call that is tantamount to rewriting the Shema. The Nicene Creed is the gold-standard Christian creed. For centuries, millions of Christians in the East and West have recited it on Sundays and in daily liturgies, indelibly shaping their faith.
The fault with the Nicene Creed is “in what it omits”, Dr Paul O’Higgins noted. The Irish pastor told the summit that two-thirds “of the Bible (including the history of Israel) are ignored with one stroke of a theological airbrush”.
“If the Church had remembered God’s covenant with Israel and instructed its members to be aware of the fact that they are still God’s chosen and beloved people with a unique destiny, there would have been no massacre of Jews by the Christian Crusader armies in the Middle Ages; there would have been no blood libels, no inquisitions, no pogroms and no Holocaust,” he stressed.
Criticising the creed for its omissions isn’t terribly controversial. NT Wright, the world’s leading Christian Bible scholar, flags the creed’s gaps in his book How God Became King. The creeds do not “mention anything that Jesus did or said between his birth and his death”, he writes. Wright is right. The creed takes a flying leap from Jesus being “incarnate of the Virgin Mary” to his being “crucified under Pontius Pilate”.
Criticising Constantine for antisemitism isn’t especially provocative. In 2012, Rome’s Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni remarked: “The conversion of Constantine changed everything. That event had a decisive impact on history and is closely connected to the persecution of Jews.”
What is revolutionary is ICEJ amending the creed, while claiming that its omissions were Jewish and that these gaps led to endemic Jew-hatred. On the final day of the summit, Bühler released a Judaised upgrade of the creed, calling it “A Jerusalem Affirmation of the Nicene Faith.”
The additions are critical. For example, after the opening sentence: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, of all things visible and invisible,” the revised creed adds: “He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Lord God of Israel.”
Left to right: Judaised revision of the creed; Roman Emporer Constantine I; a drawing of the First Council of Nicaea in 325[Missing Credit]
When the Nicene Creed mentions Jesus, the revised version adds: “He is the One of whom Moses, the Prophets and all the Hebrew Scriptures bear witness.” It describes Jesus as “the Son of Abraham and of David according to the flesh, a light to bring revelation to the gentiles, and the glory of His people Israel” and “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root and Offspring of David.” It speaks of his ministry as “to the Jew first and also to the Gentile.”
The church, the new version states, is a body in which “Jew and gentile are reconciled as one new man in Christ, and in which the nations, having been grafted into the cultivated olive tree by faith, share in the covenants and promises given through Israel”.
This is the knockout blow to supersessionism. It draws on the warning from Paul’s letter to the Romans, where Paul asks gentile converts not to be arrogant towards the Jews because they are still God’s people – indeed, the original “olive tree” into which non-Jews who follow Jesus are grafted. The “covenants and promises” include restoring the Jews to their ancestral land, a central premise of Christian Zionism.
The summit climaxed with the entire gathering standing to recite the amended creed, followed by thunderous applause. Bühler had printed dozens of scrolls with the new creed, which he urged us to take home and get churches to recite.
On Succot, ICEJ will release an anthology of the lectures published by Asia’s biggest Catholic publisher – Nigel Fernandes of the Asian Trading Corporation, who recently won a papal knighthood. The book is titled Reclaiming the Jewish Foundations of Christian Faith.
Succot is ICEJ’s biggest celebration. It draws thousands of Christians from 100 nations to Jerusalem each year. “The Feast of Tabernacles is unique from the other pilgrimage festivals in that not just Jews, but all nations were also invited in ancient times to come to Jerusalem at this season to worship the Lord alongside the Jews,” Hansen notes.
Zechariah had a vision of all nations coming up to Jerusalem every year “to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles”. John’s Gospel records Jesus celebrating Succot.
“When Christians flock to Jerusalem to celebrate Succot, it serves as a powerful statement that we believe that day is coming when the Earth will finally be at rest in Messiah, the King of Israel,” Hansen affirms.
If Constantine and the bishops at Nicaea had travelled to Jerusalem to celebrate Succot – trading their palaces for a hut for seven days – Christianity would have never become so antagonistic towards Jews. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens would be out of a job. ICEJ knows it cannot rewrite the past, but by amending Constantine’s creed, it has taken one of the boldest steps in writing the future.
Jules Gomes has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge and is a former Vatican-accredited journalist. The author of five books, he has lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities
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