(UNDATED) In 1650 Oliver Cromwell blasted the Church of Scotland for its pro-royalist position with these words: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

If Cromwell were alive today, I believe he would hurl those same words at his fellow Christians to demolish a dangerous myth currently being foisted upon the public: the courageous record of German church opposition to Nazism.

The myth contains egregious self-congratulation and spreads the false message that German Christian leaders and their followers vigorously opposed Nazism. They did not. It is a pernicious lie.

In the 1980s, Methodist scholars Franklin Littell and Alice Eckardt were among the first to break down this myth. “The record of most theologians and churchmen was confused and weak where not outright wicked … the term `Church Struggle’ (is) almost farcical, certainly misleading.”

Because the myth of extensive German Christian resistance to Hitler endures, it must be rejected before it becomes the locked-in narrative of how the church reacted to Nazi totalitarianism.

Soon after Hitler gained dictatorial power in January 1933, the Nazis created the “Deutsche Christen” (German Christian) national church that featured highly visible swastikas on clergy robes, stiff-armed Nazi salutes, the teaching of virulent anti-Semitism, the appointment of a “Reich Bishop,” and the obscene belief that Adolf Hitler was the longed-for “savior” of the suffering German people. The Nazi goal was the eradication of all Jewish vestiges from Christianity, even transforming the Jewish Jesus into an “Aryan” and eliminating the Hebrew Bible from sacred Scripture.

In response to the Nazi-controlled ecclesiastical body, some Christian leaders formed the “Bekennende Kirche” (Confessing Church). Sixteen months after the Nazi takeover, a group of Protestant theologians, led by the prominent Swiss-born Karl Barth, met for three days in May 1934 in the German town of Barmen. The result of their efforts was the publication of the “Barmen Declaration” that proclaimed, among other principles, the centrality and rule of Jesus over all governments and states, and a critique of Deutsche Kristen policies.

But before the mists of legend completely envelop that meeting, it must always be remembered the Barmen Declaration was not a direct attack on the Nazi regime, but only a criticism of Deutsche Christen’s extremism. In fact, the Declaration was an attempt to preserve the Confessing Church as an institution in the face of the growing power of the Nazi-sponsored church.

The Confessing Church, which was always a minority among German Protestants, employed the Barmen Declaration as a major confessional statement of faith. But Kurt Hendel of the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago correctly notes that despite the efforts of Barth and his colleagues, “The course of history was not changed by … the message of Barmen. … Most Germans were not persuaded by the claims of the Declaration … and there was minimal outrage as the realities of Hitler’s `final solution’ to the Jewish question became apparent.”

In 1938, 85 percent of Confessing Church members signed an oath of loyalty to Hitler. Clearly, the Nazis had little trouble living with the Barmen Declaration.

A Lutheran expert on the Nazi period, Stephen Haynes of Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., has written that”despite a chorus of scholarly voices eager to correct misleading images of the church’s response to Nazism … (positive) popular conceptions of the Church Struggle remain largely undisturbed.”

Sadly, the “undisturbed” myth has an insidious second part: the inaccurate and mischievous assertion that the Confessing Church was a foe of anti-Semitism and the Nazis’ “Final Solution” that resulted in the mass murder of 6 million Jews.

Seventy-five years later, it’s often forgotten that the Barmen Declaration makes no mention Jews or Judaism. Nor is there a specific mention of the highly visible Nazi persecution of the Jews that was already well underway in 1934.

Attacking Nazi anti-Semitism was simply not high on the Confessing Church’s agenda because most of the Barmen Declaration’s authors harbored anti-Semitic feelings, as did many Confessing Church leaders.

The Confessing Church’s most famous member, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ultimately rejected the Church’s obsequious passivity in the face of radical evil. He joined the political (not religious) anti-Nazi resistance movement and was arrested and imprisoned for nearly two years. He was hanged in April, 1945, only a month before war’s end.

Germany’s most famous Protestant, Martin Luther, once defied his critics by saying, “Here I stand; I can do no other.” Perhaps Bonhoeffer did the same. Yet it pains me to wonder what might have happened had he not been forced to stand alone.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)