Mr. Syncrete was the religion class teacher during Judd Thompson Jr.'s senior year at Nicolae Carpathia High School.
Biography[]
After the Rapture[]
Judd Thompson Jr. had the most trouble in his senior year at Nicolae Carpathia High School in Mr. Syncrete's religion class and he did not struggle in his other subjects. He had no trouble in trigonometry, and although he had a feud with his biology teachers on evolution, he could back up his views with scientific data. However, Judd did not have the option to avoid religion class, if he wanted to avoid religious controversy and confrontation as the Global Community required religious education for graduation. Nevertheless, Judd try to avoid causing commotion in Mr. Syncrete's class, but there were occasions where Judd found it irresistible to speak up for his beliefs.
In many of the arguments in class, every topic Judd argued about redounded upon the resurrection of Jesus, as it was the singular event that validates Christianity. Judd claimed that Jesus was the only spiritual leader to prove his claims of divinity. Mr. Syncrete asserted that Judd had no evidence to assert that the resurrection of Jesus happened and demanded a shred of evidence that it was not the work of "fishermen turned fiction writers". Judd said that he would gladly provide the evidence once Mr. Syncrete admitted that if he granted that the resurrection happened it would change everything that Mr. Syncrete taught in the class. The narrative said that Judd had Mr. Syncrete in a corner because if Mr. Syncrete admitted that "rising from the dead would prove the claims of Christ" then Judd can demonstrate that Jesus was a real person who rose from the dead. If Mr. Syncrete did not let Judd speak, he would be shown to be a coward. However, Mr. Syncrete said, "We'll come back to this," but the issue was never addressed again.
Death Strike strongly suggested that because of Mr. Syncrete's final, Judd did not become class valedictorian. The final accounted for fifty percent of his grade in the religion class, and Judd's protested against answering the essay question on the final that assumed that the Enigma Babylon One World Faith is superior to all other individual religious systems. Judd said that it may be his teacher's job to indoctrinate his students, but he refused to be brainwashed. In response to his protest to the essay question, Mr. Syncrete asked for Judd's test back, excused him from the test, and told Judd that he had just failed the class. Judd immediately went to the dean of students, Mr. Kurtz. Mr. Kurtz was willing to lend a sympathetic ear, but he outlined the options to Judd that either he was to come back to Mr. Syncrete and throw himself at his mercy and have an opportunity to answer the question, or "to take his lumps". Mr. Kurtz said that Judd appealing to the the school board would take too much time, as graduation would have long passed when the issue would be addressed and resolved (if it would be dealt with in Judd's favor). Mr. Kurtz also said that Judd was a virtual lock for class valedictorian, as only a F could only derail him from being at the top of his class. However, the perspective in Death Strike to burnish Judd's academic ability seems to discount that Marjorie Amherst, the class valedictorian, was a formidable student who broke the curve for every test that she took as Mark Eisman stated in Uplink from the Underground.
On the multiple choice section, Judd took it upon himself to put asterisks on some of the questions and wrote at the bottom of the page that his answers reflects the view of the class, not his own personal view.
Judd returned to Mr. Syncrete's class when he only had three minutes left to finish the test. He apologized to Mr. Syncrete, but Mr. Syncrete said that it would not be fair to allow Judd to have extra time, as he walked out on the test. Judd asked him to just count the multiple choice section. After that the bell rang.
Nevertheless, Judd was the class salutatorian and had an opportunity to speak at the class graduation. However, his incendiary speech that evangelized for Christianity resulted in his high school degree being revoked.
Personality[]
Mr. Syncrete had immense antipathy and contempt for Christianity and an admiration for Eastern religious practices and beliefs, such as animism, yoga, and ancestor worship. He spoke glowingly for hours on those subjects, and invited guest lecturers in his classroom. Mr. Syncrete did not withhold many of his personal views to the class.
Mr. Syncrete enthusiastically embraced the Global Community agenda of indoctrinating people to the ideology of Enigma Babylon One World Faith and detested the exclusivity of Christianity because it proclaims that Jesus is the only to God and salvation. In class, he read a statement from Pontifex Maximus Peter Mathews that those claiming that the "Jewish and Protestant Bible" is the final authority for faith and practice (an allusion to 2 Timothy 3:16-17) are heretics. He also has contempt for Judaism due to his perception that it has an impotent, monotheistic God as that God allowed them to be annihilated during the Holocaust.
He said that Christianity has "three Gods" and that it is "an irrational, superstitious belief system". It is unknown whether Mr. Syncrete really thought that the deities and supernatural forces referred to in Eastern religions and mythology were real entities. If he thought they were not real entities, then they would be as impotent as he thought the Judeo-Christian God is by virtue of them not existing. He might be enamored with Eastern religions and spirituality because they pragmatically promote social cohesion and pro-social behaviors and allow individuals to pursue personal spirituality without any exclusive claims of authority and imposing orthodoxy.
He was uncomfortable in the presence of Judd Thompson Jr.'s bold evangelism efforts in his class and, because of this, Judd became convinced that Mr. Syncrete was out to fail him. His test questions reflected his personal biases and the essay question on the final assumed that Enigma Babylon is a superior belief system because it encompasses all religions and asked the student for a justification for that belief.
Critical Remarks[]
Proving one's "divinity" and proving one's call to prophethood are different. Many purported prophets, including in the Judeo-Christian tradition, were able to perform miracles to establish their prophethood, but they did not claim themselves to be divine. Later on in the series, it is apparent that Jesus being resurrected does not really prove His divinity, if "divinity" belongs solely to one God, because Nicolae Carpathia was able to resurrect himself and Carpathia's miracle workers were able to resurrect people in the name of Carpathia. One could also ask on the occasion of Carpathia's resurrection whether that proves that he is a god and validates his claims. Leon Fortunato became convinced that Nicolae is a god after Nicolae resurrected him after the Wrath Of The Lamb earthquake. More generally, the performance of an ostensible miracle does not necessarily prove one's divinity or prophethood, because such marvelous deeds can also be performed by sorcerers through demonic powers or some unknown artifice. Hence, the issue of miracles is a philosophical problem. This issue of miracles should be covered in a philosophy of religion class, but that subject may not be on the syllabus of Mr. Syncrete's religion class, and according to the brief description in Death Strike, he does not seem to incorporate philosophical issues in his religion class.
The authors having Judd take a bold stand for Christianity on the basis of some unstated evidential apologetic argument for the resurrection of Jesus may be disingenuous. Judd did not become a Christian on the merits of those types of apologetic arguments, but rather Judd experienced events, such as the Rapture, that uncannily correspond to a premillennial dispensationalist eschatology that impelled him to Christianity.
Also, liberal Biblical critics would likely not disparage the disciples of Jesus as being "fishermen turned fiction writers". They would say that it is unlikely that uneducated Galilean fishermen whose native language was Aramaic could have composed literary documents in sophisticated Greek prose. Moreover, the Acts of the Apostles (4:13) says that Peter and John the Apostle were uneducated, and hence did not even have the ability to read, let alone compose Greek prose. These Biblical scholars would conclude, while considering other reasons, that John, son of Zebedee, did not compose the Gospel of John and the Catholic epistles that are traditionally ascribed to him as those Johannian works did not even have an author named in them. The epistles of First and Second Peter are generally considered to be pseudepigrapha, since they are written in Peter name but Peter did not compose them. The Gospel of Mark, commonly regarded as the earliest gospel and a foundation for the other synoptic gospels, had its material originate from stories transmitted through oral tradition, but was later codified in that Gospel when an unknown person literate in Greek was able to compile and compose these stories into a coherent narrative. Thus, the Gospel of Mark (and the other gospels) is not really fiction, since the author did not make up an entire story and characters from his imagination, as the Left Behind series was.
Appearances[]
- 8. Death Strike (only appearance)
Trivia[]
- Mr. Syncrete's only appearance was in book 8.
- The name Syncrete suggests "syncretism," the combining of different mythologies or religions, which is purported to assert an underlying unity and allowing for an inclusive approach to other faiths, which is what Enigma Babylon One World Faith claims to be.
- Mr. Syncrete's first name was never revealed.
- Mr. Syncrete is absent from the dramatic audio presentation. He is replaced by a female teacher named Mrs. Lacousic.