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Apart from offering a few sensible observations on later developments (such as the Holy See's foot-dragging about recognition of the State of Israel, down to the year 1993), Bialer concludes his account with the year 1967. The context changed drastically after the Six-Day War, when the nominal headquarters of most of the major churches and large numbers of their properties as well as their adherents were transferred from Jordanian to Israeli jurisdiction. We must hope that Bialer will show the same zeal in pouncing upon all the documentation as it becomes available for these later chapters.

In Christian Zionism: Road-Map to Armageddon?, Stephen Sizer advances the fantasy, previously elaborated by a host of anti-Zionist polemicists, that the long and honorable history of defense by Christians of Israel's right to be Israel is merely an epiphenomenon of the history of a singular, off-center school of theology called premillennial dispensationalism. According to this thesis, all Christian Zionists are mindless acolytes of a Sanhedrin of pamphleteers which carries on the teachings of John Nelson Darby.

By my casual reckoning, about 80 percent of the book is devoted to a sedulous taxonomy of End Times speculation. The project began as a doctoral thesis for which Sizer bravely sifted through the mountain of English-language prophetic theology from the 17th to the end of the 20th century and disposed its components into categories: amillennialist, postmillennialist, and premillennialist—the latter further divided into covenantal and dispensationalist, and, in the latter section of the book, apocalyptic-dispensationalist and political dispensationalist. Do not despair: there are charts.

Early in the book, Sizer outlines a sequence of political figures who carried the message of premillennial dispensationalism forward into a plan of action for establishing a Jewish state. The list breaks off with Balfour, and thus Sizer spares himself having to explain the connection between dispensationalism and Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and their successors in the front ranks of political actors after 1918.

Among major misrepresentations of historical fact too numerous to list, let alone to deconstruct, I take the case of Arthur James Balfour, he of the Balfour Declaration, who stands in this book for the entire class of Christian Zionists. We learn that he was a man who was "brought up in an evangelical home and was sympathetic to Zionism because of the influence of dispensational teaching," hence naïve, uncultivated, weak-minded, his thinking processes dulled, like those of the rest of us Christian friends of Israel today, by low-brow pamphleteering and thus easily led by the Zionists. Balfour, dim bulb that he was, "regarded history as an instrument for carrying out a Divine Purpose." (Since when did this become a heresy?)

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