Evangelical’s Controversial Novel Re-Imagines Anne Frank As Born Again Christian

(Jerusalem Post) If there could be anything more offensive to Jews than Christian evangelizing, it would be the idea that their patron saint of the Holocaust™ — Anne Frank©, the Jewish version of the Virgin Mary — converted to Christianity before succumbing to typhus — one of the most common causes of death among Jews in the camps during World War II:

The Republican nominee for Congress in Texas’ 7th district is a self-proclaimed history buff, but his take on Anne Frank is not one that most historians would endorse.

Johnny Teague, an Evangelical pastor and business owner who won the district’s primary in March, in 2020 published “The Lost Diary of Anne Frank,” a novel imagining the famous Jewish Holocaust victim’s final days in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps as she might have written them in her diary.

The kicker: In Teague’s telling, Frank seems to embrace Christianity just before she is murdered by the Nazis.

Published by Las Vegas-based publisher Histria Books, the speculative book attempts to faithfully extend the writing style of Frank’s “original” diary entries into her experiences in the camps: it “picks up where her original journey left off,” according to the promotional summary. Teague claims to have interviewed Holocaust survivors and visited the Anne Frank House, multiple concentration camps and the major Holocaust museums in Washington, DC, and Israel as part of his research.

“I would love to learn more about Jesus and all He faced in His dear life as a Jewish teacher,” Teague’s Anne Frank character muses at one point, saying that her dad had tried to get her a copy of the New Testament. Anne’s father Otto Frank, who in real life did survive the Holocaust, seems to have been spared a tragic fate in Teague’s telling because of his interest in learning about Jesus.

Later, Anne does learn about Jesus through other means, reciting Christian psalms and expressing sympathy for Jesus’ plight.

By book’s end, Anne is firm in her belief that “every Jewish man or woman should ask” questions like “Where is the Messiah? … Did He come already, and we didn’t recognize Him?”

Teague, responding to a query from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after the story’s initial publication, said his book had been “misrepresented” and that it shows Frank “relating her suffering to the historic persecution by Egypt, Haman, Assyria, Rome and others — all horrific facts of how the precious Jewish people have been attacked for so many centuries.”

Teague said he based Frank’s interpretation of Jesus off of a reference in her original diary to her father wanting her and her sister Margot “to be exposed to the New Testament and the life of Jesus”…

…[And], “As she made those entries in her own hand, I could not pretend that the thoughts, lessons, or questions of Jesus never crossed her mind afterward.” He also said he included Jesus because “when the Jewish people were suffering so much torment and suffering, it is impossible to imagine them not contemplating in their turmoil the longing for a Messiah to rescue them.”

While Teague’s version of Frank doesn’t explicitly indicate she wants to convert to Christianity, she makes many comments praising Christians she meets in the concentration camp, noting of one woman, “What I love about her is her faith in God and her faith in Jesus.” Later, Frank says, “I am seeing a stark difference in some of the Christians here, as opposed to the others… It seems Christians are more willing to die than the rest of us.”

Teague says such passages don’t necessarily represent a full conversion to Christianity. “Do I think Anne Frank became a Christian? No one can know what spiritual decisions or conclusions people make in a time of tragedy and persecution,” Teague continued. “This book does not indicate either way.”

He added, “We must stand with the Jewish people and for them.”

Teague also claims in his candidate biography that he “has been affiliated with” the Association for Jewish Studies, the academic membership organization devoted to Jewish studies. Teague’s Anne Frank book appears on a 2021 AJS list of books by its own members, under the author name “Johnny Mark Teague.”

Jews should love this book because it’s an example of “metafiction” — an unintentional fiction about a fiction — of course, Teague wouldn’t see Anne Frank’s diary as the fiction — the hoax — that it largely is — but Otto Frank most assuredly knew when he wrote fictionalized diary entries in ballpoint pen after his in his attempt to capitalize on his daughter’s death.

Talk about chutzpah — Otto Frank finds his own daughter’s diary after she has died, and — being the recidivist con man that he was — sees it as a potential get-rich-quick moneymaker — it just needed to be expanded upon to make it more marketable.

It is indeed pure fiction to claim that the “Nazis murdered Anne Frank” — so sacred is her false memory as a victim of “the Nazis” that even Jews who rightly point out that she died of typhus will be smeared as “antisemites.”

If anyone is responsible for her death, it is the Allies whose relentless bombing of Germany’s infrastructure made it impossible for the Germans to resupply the work camps with food and medicine — this is according to the International Red Cross.

That said, it shouldn’t surprise us that an evangelical Christian like Teague — who seems to worship Jews as much as he does Jesus Christ — would want to save a “saint” like Anne Frank from the fate of all unbelievers — the Lake of Fire.

But trying to retroactively save Jews who died during the Holocaust™ — formerly known to historians as “World War II” — is not confined to evangelicals — apparently the Mormons have also gotten in on the act — converting over 380,000 Holocaust “victims” much to the chagrin of their surviving — and deeply offended — family members.

But is converting dead “Holocaust” victims any more “offensive” than imagining, as some have, that Adolf Hitler and Anne Frank had a secret love child?

According to the International Red Cross — which had access to and monitored the prisoners in the concentration camps throughout the war — there were far fewer than 380,000 Jews who died in the camps — so the Mormons must have been converting Jews who didn’t die “in the Holocaust” — something that Jesus most assuredly would frown upon.

Any real evangelical would have little sympathy for unconverted Jews who died in the Holocaust™ — after all, the ultimate holocaust — the lake of fire — is what awaits all unbelievers like Anne Frank and her father — to a Born Again Christian, the Franks got what all unbelievers deserve.