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Author: C .T.

Categories
Racial right Vegetarianism

Jef Costello’s article

The article ‘American Renaissance 2022’ published yesterday on Counter-Currents contains a few passages I would like to say something about:
 
 

What can explain such madness—this moral fanaticism coupled with hatred of one’s own? Taylor noted that white people seem to have a compulsion to throw themselves into virtuous causes… But the real mystery is why whites are attracted to causes that are anti-white—why, as Taylor put it, they ‘make a fetish out of opposing their own people.’ We simply do not see this at all in other races. Is there any other race that campaigns for other races to the detriment of its own? Why are we the only race that gets a dopamine surge from hating ourselves? So far as I can see, Taylor did not really offer a theory that might explain this most mysterious aspect of whites.

One of the things I have noticed is that there is no dialogue between our position, which we call here the priesthood of the 14 words, and the American white nationalists. That which Taylor and Costello find so mysterious has been answered ad nauseam on this site, and the PDFs in the featured post explain our POV didactically.

But let’s say it for the umpteenth time: whites didn’t do these suicidal follies prior to Christianity. There is nothing wrong with the ‘hardware’ of whites: only their ‘software’: the Christian ethics that even atheists suffer from. In his article Costello quotes D. H. Lawrence: ‘In attempting to convert the dark man to the white man’s way of life, the white man has fallen helplessly down the hole he wanted to fill up. Seeking to save another man’s soul [italics added], the white man lost his own, and collapsed upon himself.’

Christian ethics! But Costello doesn’t connect the dots. He also tells us:

A further characteristic they [the leftists] exhibit is hatred—not just hatred for their political enemies, but for strength, health, beauty, achievement, masculinity, femininity, family, hierarchy, religion, meat [italics added], and much else. In short, a hatred for life itself.

Nationalists might argue that The West’s Darkest Hour is such an obscure forum that hardly anyone reads it. But the above passage shows that these American racialists also don’t bother to educate themselves about the big movement that preceded them: German National Socialism. About those words I italicised, does Costello know what Hitler and his close associates thought of Christianity? Or how Hitler wanted to close the slaughter-houses after winning the war? I mention these two things—religion, meat—because Hitler was closer to today’s vegans than to the old-fashioned American racialists, Christian or not, who still sympathise with Christianity and eat meat.

American racialists will continue to tell themselves such things in their conferences (‘Oh mystery! Why are we doing these things to ourselves?’) if they don’t have the decorum to listen to voices other than their own.

I didn’t want to add more entries this month because I’m way behind in proofreading Karlheinz Deschner’s book on the real history of Christianity (I’m only on page 120 in a text of more than 400 pages). But Costello’s article motivated me to respond to him and the racial right of the neighbouring country to the north.

Categories
American Revolutionary War Americanism Individualism Racial right

Sam Dickson at AmRen

I am still reading Deschner’s book before publishing, in PDF, the 2022 edition. It is slow work that takes me about a chapter a day.

The annual American Renaissance conference recently took place, from which I would like to quote an abstract of the last of its papers according to the AmRen staff article:

Sam Dickson concluded the conference, as he always does. He said that aspects of our national history are difficult problems for whites. He said the American Revolution may have been a mistake, as it divided the British and American people. He also argued American culture favors too much materialism, opposes the frank and necessary use of state power, and often gives Americans the “easy way out,” of just moving away. Mr. Dickson argued that Americans are the descendants of men and women who uprooted themselves in the name of personal fortune-seeking rather than staying loyal to places their families had lived for centuries. This makes our people dangerously individualist and leaves them with only shallow roots and traditions.

Mr. Dickson argues that this easy-way-out mentality means that Americans have always avoided hard choices. Southern slaveholders were never willing to free the slaves and send them back to Africa to build a nation of their own, even though compensated emancipation and colonization would have cost the nation a fraction of the cost of the Civil War. We must delay hard choices no longer. We need a home of our own. Mr. Dickson said that if whites don’t meet this historical challenge to secure self-determination, our children will pay ever higher costs. There remains only one question: How high a price will we have to pay?

I doubt that anyone at that conference was thinking, when listening to Sam, of prices that reach the fiction of The Turner Diaries…

Categories
Currency crash Daybreak Publishing Sponsor

Yet another proofreading…

Yesterday The Occidental Observer published an article in which the author says that the results of the recent midterm elections are due to the fact that Americans are still in a comfort zone, and that they won’t change their paradigm until the dollar collapses (just as the Germans of the degenerate Weimar period didn’t change until their mark hyperinflated).

However, there is a phrase of the author with which I disagree: ‘I don’t want to see anyone suffer.’

Only suffering saves! For example, only the enormous suffering, inflicted by my father’s Catholic beliefs, led me to apostatise from Christianity. If my teenage life hadn’t been completely shattered, as my foreword to the forthcoming edition of Deschner’s book begins, I wouldn’t now have such a negative image of our parents’ religion.

So I hope that the times ahead with the collapse of the dollar will drag the desperate to awaken. (It is time to think about buying silver coins: the recent FTX disaster is deeper than you think: huge losses are coming for all cryptocurrencies).

Changing the subject, the backbone of this site is its books, which after the printer that published them for me refused to reprint them, are now only available as PDFs. Before I post a link to the PDF of the enlarged edition of Christianity’s Criminal History which incorporates blog posts 101-172 of that series, I will do a review reading.

That means that I will not add new entries here until I finish reading all 441 pages of the book. However, visitors can entertain themselves in the meantime. As our friend Ørdnung said yesterday on Twitter, ‘[C.T.] just released an excellent compendium of exterminationist thought. Read it here [link].’

Please note that, as I have no printing press at the moment, I am not earning a single penny from these books which I am offering free to visitors to The West’s Darkest Hour. A donation, however modest, is always appreciated. Although I still maintain my Bitcoin and Monero accounts, my PayPal account is still working.

Categories
Daybreak Publishing Destruction of Greco-Roman world Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte 2022!

 
EDITOR’S FOREWORD
[pages 5-8 of the forthcoming Edition]

In his after-dinner conversations Hitler said: ‘Christianity is the greatest regression humanity has ever experienced: The Jew has thrown back humanity one and a half thousand years’. And the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who once described himself as a Hitlerist, wrote: ‘The whole world has forgiven Christianity.’

Well, not the whole world. As I confess in my philosophical autobiography De Jesús a Hitler, Christianity played a central role in the destruction of my teenage life and my twenties, something I will never forgive…
 

Some clarifications

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was a Christian, wisely allowed Edward Ericson to abbreviate The Gulag Archipelago so that the heavy volumes of the original work could reach a wider audience in a single, readable tome. The present book, Christianity’s Criminal History: Volume I is an abridged translation of the first volumes of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums. The original German volumes, and also the Spanish translation I have used, contain thousands of endnotes, which are omitted here. This preliminary translation is only the first step towards a more formal German-English translation of Deschner’s maximum opus.

In this abridged translation I have added a few headings, as well as several illustrations with footnotes explaining them, and brackets translating German or Latin terms. Unlike Ericson’s abridgement of the Archipelago, sometimes I have omitted ellipses between unquoted paragraphs, and I have simplified some sentences. I have also replaced some words. I refer to the phrases where the author uses the word ‘pagan’. I replaced it with terms such as ‘Hellenes,’ ‘defenders of Greco-Roman culture,’ ‘classical culture’ or simply added inverted commas on the word ‘pagan.’

The term I have chosen, Hellenes, requires some clarification. It could not be more significant that before the introduction of the pejorative term pagan to refer to unconverted citizens of the Roman Empire, whites were called héllenes or éthne by 4th-century treatises (the expression hellénon éthne can be translated into modern English as ‘the Greek races,’ i.e. the white peoples). As I am aware of the rhetorical use of language, instead of the author’s pejorative term ‘pagan’ I have sometimes chosen the non-pejorative term common in the 4th century vernacular, ‘Hellenes.’

White nationalists claim to be quite informed on the Jewish question. But very few are aware that Jewish subversion began with Christianity, as Hitler said in the opening lines of this preface. Who among today’s nationalists knows the true history of the religion of their parents? Who is aware that Christian fanatics used violence to destroy the ‘pagan’ (i.e., the Greco-Roman world)? Yes: Deschner wrote in German. But how many English-speaking racialists are familiar with Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, published in 2017?

Independently of the nationalists and the racial right, virtually all Westerners ignore the apocalyptic catastrophe of early Christianity after Constantine handed over the Roman Empire to his bishops. They know only the myths of the martyrs (see the chapter ‘The Persecution of the Christians’ in this book), the pious legends, hagiographies and the New Testament fictional tales we were told as children: topics covered in the first section of this abridged translation.

Karlheinz Deschner (1924-2014) was a liberal German. He spent the first sixty years of his life researching the history of the Catholic Church before beginning the ten volumes of his Kriminalgeschichte series in 1986, which he completed in 2013. The series is an encyclopaedic treatise on the true history of Christianity.

I started reading Deschner at the beginning of this century, when I was a liberal, and I would not wake up to the Jewish question until 2010. But Deschner, like all Germans of our time who aspire to see his books in bookshops, never woke up. In his Kriminalgeschichte he went so far as to harshly criticise the anti-Semites of the Early Church: passages omitted in this abridgement. This said, the difference between Deschner and liberal theologians like Hans Küng (The Church) and conservative historians like Paul Johnson (A History of Christianity) is that Küng and Johnson concealed a great deal of the criminal history of Christianity. It is remarkable how Deschner, a scholar who like me became an apostate, was able to see Church history in a way that Küng, Johnson and a veritable galaxy of other Christian scholars would never dream of. After waking up to the reality of the Christian problem I realised that Deschner’s massive work, despite his liberal bias, could be rescued. It just has to be processed through the prism of someone who is racially awake. Of course: if Germany had won the war, Deschner, shown here in National Socialist uniform as a young man, could have written his story from our point of view.
 

Three German holocausts

More than one holocaust with millions of victims each has been perpetrated against the Germanic peoples. After 1945, the Allies killed millions of defenceless Germans (see, for example, Thomas Goodrich’s Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany: 1944-1947). This is the best-kept secret of modern history. Conversely, the genocide committed in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War by fanatic Catholics is fairly well known (in the next volume of our abridgement we will incorporate those chapters). But who knows about the millions of other Germanic peoples killed by Emperor Justinian, recounted in this volume?

If the Aryan Man is currently committing ethnosuicide, it is because the System has lied to him about his own History.[1] The System’s favourite method is what we might call lying by omission: not saying, for example, a word about what happened to the Germans in 1945-1947, or how Christianity was imposed on the white race by Constantine and his successors. It was not enough for the Imperial Church to destroy the Greco-Roman world in the 4th and 5th centuries. In the 6th century, after the fall of Rome, Justinian, the Emperor of Constantinople went on to commit a gigantic genocide of the Germanic race, which by then had established itself on the Italian peninsula. Deschner’s chapter on this Holocaust appears in his second volume, Die Spätantike (Late Antiquity), published in 1989. The full title in translation is: ‘Late Antiquity. From the Catholic “child emperors” to the extermination of the Arian Vandals and Ostrogoths under Justinian I (527-565).’ These were the two Germanic peoples that were exterminated during the Byzantine Empire’s military incursion into Italy and Africa (no wonder there are few pure Germanic peoples in those regions today).

Finally, Deschner died in the same year that Richard Carrier published a book which will be considered the most important book since Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ critical approach to the Gospels. I refer to Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Deschner did not have the opportunity to evaluate the Christ myth theory in its phase of full exegetical maturity. For a new history of Christianity to be complete, Deschner’s criminal history must be complemented by Carrier’s ongoing work, and even our axiological critique of Christianity (see our booklist on page 3).

César Tort
November 2022

____________

[1] See ‘Foundation Myth’ on pages 90-93 of On Exterminationism.

Categories
Ethnic cleansing Mauricio (commenter) Miscegenation

Basket case

by Mauricio

There would be little consequence for a racial awakening of the Hispanics.

For the Hispanic world to become racially conscious, it first needs to accept the fact that they are a conglomerate of inferior races. Hispanics (Latinos, or ‘Meds’) are all part-Whites mixed with Black, Semitic and Amerindian blood. Racial truth is a massive blow to their egos [bold emphasis by Editor], and they prefer to believe the blue pill of an ‘independent’ Latino Race.

And even if they accept the red pill of them being dirty Muds, and that the ultimate goal is to become White, how can they achieve it? How can they form racial brotherhoods, when they are so compromised and diversified? Are they going to unfriend their mulatto friends, and divorce their mulatto/Latina wives? Will they abstain from reproduction, and work to provide for White families? Are they even capable of that level of altruism?

In the end, miscegenation has taken root, and it would take many generations of proper breeding and dedicated effort to repair the genetic damage—which is ultimately a wasted effort, because it’s better to raise a White child to fight for its own race, than to raise a Latino child to fight for another.
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s note: This is precisely why I no longer blog in Spanish: Latin America is a basket case! It would be better to convince the Anglo-Americans of the North to transvalue their fucking values, think like Himmler and devise a ‘Master Plan South’ (cf. the book whose revised edition we have just published).

As Christian ethics is the barrier that prevents such a transvaluation of all their cherished (it’s better to use the F-word here) values, the next book I will put in the featured post is Deschner’s enlarged edition…

Categories
Daybreak Publishing Exterminationism On Exterminationism (book)

November 2022 edition

Thanks to the programme DeepL Translator, which allows me to correct the style (as English is not my mother tongue), I have finished proofreading the November 2022 edition of the book On Exterminationism, which can now be read here.

If I receive enough funds, I will hire a cover designer to make this horizontal image appear vertically so that the printed book can be sold through IngramSpark.

I would suggest that visitors read the Preface because, compared to the earlier editions, in this one I not only added new articles but removed a large number of articles from the previous edition.

The final three articles, where in addition to my voice the voices of Gaedhal, Maurice and Krist Krusher also appear, provide a good insight into the axiological and metaphysical POV of The West’s Darkest Hour.

I will now add this book to the list of our books in the featured post…

Categories
Cicero Judea v. Rome Literature

Krauze and the JQ

Last Friday I added a short piece on Spinoza in Mexico Park: a book by the Mexican-Jewish Enrique Krauze that I had just bought. Now that I’ve been reading it, I couldn’t resist the urge to write a critical review of it for The Occidental Observer (TOO). My book review has just been published in that webzine for JQ connoisseurs—click: here!

The following is a passage (my translation) of Spinoza in Mexico Park that I could have quoted in my TOO article:

José María Lassalle: In our last conversation we had covered a decade in your intellectual life: that of your integration into Mexican culture as a historian and as editorial secretary of the magazine Vuelta… The one you described in the first conversation with great detail and love: your culture of origin, Jewish culture. I was very surprised by everything you said. I didn’t know that this root was so deep. It almost covered everything… I understand that you wanted to belong to Mexico and to the Hispanic world, and all your life you have worked to achieve it. But secretly you were driven by that initial impulse, by that root. That root is Judaism: the tree grew in Mexico, in Mexican soil, and bore Mexican fruit, but the root and the trunk were Jewish.

Enrique Krauze: What I did was to build that Jewish compound in Amsterdam [obliquely, Krauze is referring to Spinoza, who was born in Amsterdam]… And I began to build a library of Jewish subjects from all eras. A library, above all, of characters and ideas. [pages 419-420]

Latin Americans idolise their intellectuals and writers, so there are a couple of things I’d like to add to what I wrote in the TOO review.

Besides having enormous fame in the Spanish-speaking world, Krauze is one of those serene-speaking ethnic Jews with subtle but toxic messages for the white world. For example, he hasn’t only translated Susan Sontag for the cultural magazines in Spanish he has edited (I have read Krauze since 1990). In Spinoza in Mexico Park, where he talks a lot about WW2, the historian Krauze doesn’t mention David Irving once. Moreover, Krauze writes ‘Holocaust’ in a capital letter and ‘gulag’ in a lowercase in spite of the fact that far more Gentiles died in the Gulag than Jews in the so-called holocaust!

In the TOO piece I only mentioned a few names of the Jewish authors that influenced Krauze, but Spinoza in Mexico Park is replete with other names of historical Jews, from cover to cover. (There is no notable writer in the Spanish-speaking world to point these things out. That’s why I have been calling Latin America the ‘blue pill’ subcontinent.)

On the dilemma that plagues every Westerner—Athens or Jerusalem?—Krauze wrote the following (my translation) about the Greco-Roman world, in the context of Jewish writers of antiquity, such as Josephus and Philo:

[Jewish historian Arnaldo] Momigliano argues that Jerusalem resisted Athens because of the radical religious obstinacy of the people. The Jewish people remained faithful to the priests, the guardians of orthodoxy. For them, Greek culture was synonymous with idolatry, vain pleasures, frivolous comedies, and pagan myths… The Alexandrian Jews tried to persuade the Greek world of the goodness of their faith… One text points to the excesses of a certain Flaccus, the Roman governor in Egypt, who unleashed a veritable pogrom in that city. Even then, this persecution took on the dramatic forms and dimensions that were to be seen many centuries later in the Middle Ages. The profile he [the Jew Momigliano] draws of the delirious Caligula is a jewel worthy of Suetonius [Spinoza in Mexico Park, pages 430-431].

Regular visitors to The West’s Darkest Hour know that this site has a masthead, a guide that allows us to navigate the seas of history. Compare Krauze’s Jewish POV quoted above with the Aryan POV of our ‘masthead’ (pages 33-123 of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, linked in our featured post):

In 62-61 b.c.e., the proconsul Lucius Valerius Flaccus (son of the consul of the same name and brother of the consul Gaius Valerius Flaccus) confiscated the tribute of ‘sacred money’ that the Jews sent to the Temple of Jerusalem. The Jews of Rome raised the populace against Flaccus. The well-known Roman patriot Cicero defended Flaccus against the accuser Laelius (a tribune of the plebs who would later support Pompey against Julius Caesar) and referred to the Jews of Rome in a few sentences of 59 b.c.e., which were reflected in his In Defence of Flaccus, XVIII:

‘The next thing is that charge about the Jewish gold… I will speak in a low voice, just so as to let the judges hear me. For men are not wanting who would be glad to excite those people against me and against every eminent man, and I will not assist them and enable them to do so more easily. As gold, under the pretence of being given to the Jews, was accustomed every year to be exported out of Italy and all the provinces to Jerusalem, Flaccus issued an edict establishing a law that…’

From these phrases, we can deduce that already in the 1st century b.c.e., the Jews had great political power in Rome itself and that they had an important capacity for social mobilization against their political opponents, who lowered their voices out of fear: the pressure of the lobbies.

Thus spake Cicero (brown letters) before the senate. The story of the Flaccus family doesn’t end there. In the masthead we then see what happened to another Flaccus[1] in the section about Caligula: another historical figure maligned by Jews and Christians, including the historian Krauze.

Incidentally, I’m in the final proofreading of the November 2022 edition of On Exterminationism, so I won’t be adding more entries here while I work on it. But I’ll answer any questions I am asked about Krauze, whom I met personally—even shook hands with him in 1993!—when he and Octavio Paz published a book by Cuban dissident Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

________

[1] Aulus Avilius Flaccus was appointed praefectus of Roman Egypt from 33 to 38 c.e.

Categories
Democracy Francis Parker Yockey Videos

Midterm election

‘If voting mattered it would
be illegal.’ —Mark Twain.

Editor’s note:

The American racial right is made up of normies and semi-normies.

He who has already left Normieland and passed to the other side of the psychological Rubicon (NS) no longer believes in democracy. But the semi-normies of the racial right continue to vote for the Republican party! What a shame that a mestizo thinks better than these pretenders (see Gonzalo Lira’s latest video).

Americans: If you don’t want to listen to Lira, at least listen to another American. The following are a few excerpts from Francis Parker Yockey’s chapter about his country, the United States, in Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

In the 20th century, when the Rationalist type of ideology had been discarded by the advancing Western Civilization, the American universalizing of ideology turned into messianism — the idea that America must save the world. The vehicle of the salvation is to be a materialistic religion with “democracy” taking the place of God, “Constitution” the place of the Church, “principles of government” the place of religious dogmas, and the idea of economic freedom the place of God’s Grace. The technic of salvation is to embrace the dollar, or failing that, to submit to American high-explosives and bayonets…

The central-motive of the new cult is “democracy.” In the propaganda-picture, this concept takes the place of God, as the center and ultimate reality. Thus, a Supreme Court Justice, speaking to the graduating class of a Jewish college, said in 1939: “In a larger sense there is something more important than religion, and that is the actualization of the ideals of democracy.”

The word has been endowed with religious force, and has in fact attained to the status of a religion. It has become a numen, and cannot be the subject of critical treatment. Apostasy or heresy bring immediate response in the form of a criminal prosecution for sedition, treason, income tax evasion, or other allegation. The saints of this cult are the “Founding Fathers” of the War for Independence, particularly Jefferson — despite the fact that they uniformly detested the idea of democracy, and were nearly all slave-owners — and also Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt. Its prophets are journalists, propagandists, film stars, labor-leaders, and party-politicians. The fact that the word “democracy” cannot be defined is the surest evidence that it has ceased to be descriptive, and has become the object of a mass-faith. All other ideas and dogmas of the propaganda-picture are referred to “democracy” for their ultimate justification.

Immediately below “democracy” in importance is “tolerance.” This is obviously fundamental to a Culturally-alien regime. Tolerance means primarily tolerance of Jews and Negroes, but it can mean the cruelest persecution of Europeans or other persons with a viewpoint differing fundamentally from the prevailing mass-idea. This persecution is social, economic, and, if necessary, legal…

Far more important to Europe than the propaganda about domestic affairs in America is that about foreign affairs.

The numen “democracy” is used also in this realm as the essence of reality. A foreign development sought to be brought about is called “spreading democracy”; a development sought to be hindered is “against democracy,” or “fascistic.” “Fascism” is the numen corresponding to evil in theology, and in fact they are directly equated in American propaganda.

The prime enemy in the propaganda picture was always Europe, and especially the Prussian-European spirit which rose with such self-evident force in the European Revolution of 1933 against the negative view of life, with its materialism, money-obsession, and democratic corruption. The more surely it appeared that this Revolution was not a superficial political phenomenon, a mere transfer of one party-regime for another, that it was a deep spiritual, total revolution, of a new, vital spirit against a dead spirit, the more violent became the hate propaganda directed against Europe. By 1938, this propaganda had reached an intensity, both in volume and in emotional frenzy, that could not be surpassed. Ceaselessly the American was bombarded with the message that Europe was attacking everything worthwhile in the world, “God,” “religion,” “democracy,” “freedom,” “peace,” “America.”

Categories
Heinrich Himmler Individualism Marriage Videos

On silly Joe Rogan

This discussion between Joe Rogan and Matt Walsh shows how infinitely rotten today’s typical Westerner (Rogan) is, completely incapable of understanding the institution of marriage.

Walsh tried to refute him, but as a Christian, he failed to say that the ultimate goal of Western marriage is the 14 words. Compare Walsh’s lukewarm answers with the philosophy of Himmler, who wanted Aryan Germans to breed to 200 millions.

If I had been arguing with Rogan I would have crushed him with my NS reasoning. Just compare Rogan’s individualist POV with what we say in the article ‘Lebensraum’ in the forthcoming edition of On Exterminationism.

Categories
Dominion (book) Judea v. Rome New Testament St Paul

Dominion, 2

Or:

How the Woke Monster originated

by Tom Holland

Holland’s book in my bedroom—Editor. For the
first instalment of this abridged series see here.

Mission AD 19: Galatia

Only the Jews, with their stiff-necked insistence that there existed just a single god, refused as a matter of principle to join in acknowledging the divinity of Augustus; and so perhaps it was no surprise, in the decades that followed the building to him of temples across Galatia, that the visitor there most subversive of his cult should have been a Jew.

The Son of God proclaimed by Paul did not share his sovereignty with other deities. There were no other deities. ‘For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live’ (Romans 8.6).

Now, by touring cities across the entire span of the Roman world, Paul set himself to bringing them the news of a convulsive upheaval in the affairs of heaven and earth. Once, like a child under the protection of a tutor, the Jews had been graced with the guardianship of a divinely authored law; but now, with the coming of Christ, the need for such guardianship was past. No longer were the Jews alone ‘the children of God’ (Deuteronomy 14.1). The exclusive character of their covenant was abrogated. The venerable distinctions between them and everyone else—of which male circumcision had always been the pre-eminent symbol—were transcended. Jews and Greeks, Galatians and Scythians: all alike, so long as they opened themselves to belief in Jesus Christ, were henceforward God’s holy people. This, so Paul informed his hosts, was the epochal message that Christ had charged him to proclaim to the limits of the world.

‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28-9).

Only the world turned upside down could ever have sanctioned such an unprecedented, such a revolutionary, announcement. If Paul did not stint, in a province adorned with monuments to Caesar, in hammering home the full horror and humiliation of Jesus’ death, then it was because, without the crucifixion, he would have had no gospel to proclaim. Christ, by making himself nothing, by taking on the very nature of a slave, had plumbed the depths to which only the lowest, the poorest, the most persecuted and abused of mortals were confined…

To repudiate a city’s gods was to repudiate as well the rhythms of its civic life. It was to imperil relations with family and friends. It was to show disrespect to Caesar himself.

By urging his converts to consider themselves neither Galatian nor Jewish, but solely as the people of Christ, as citizens of heaven, he was urging them to adapt an identity that was as globalist as it was innovative. This, in an age that took for granted local loyalties and tended to look upon novelty with suspicion, was a bold strategy—but one for which Paul refused to apologise. If he was willing to grant the Law of Moses any authority at all, then it was only to insist that what God most truly wanted was a universal amity. ‘The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’ (Galatians 5.14) All you need is love.

Paul wrote to a second church, preaching the redemption from old identities that lay at the heart of his message. Corinth, unlike Galatia, enjoyed an international reputation for glamour.

As much as anywhere in Greece, then, Corinth was a melting pot. The descendants of Roman freedmen settled there by Julius Caesar mingled with Greek plutocrats; shipping magnates with cobblers; itinerant philosophers with Jewish scholars. Identity, in such a city, might easily lack deep roots. Unlike in Athens, where even Paul’s greatest admirers found it hard to pretend that he had enjoyed much of an audience, in Corinth he had won a hearing. His stay in the city, where he had supported himself by working on awnings and tents, and sleeping among the tools of his trade, had garnered various converts. The church that he had founded there—peopled by Jews and non-Jews, rich and poor, some with Roman names and some with Greek—served as a monument to his vision of a new people: citizens of heaven.

Among a people who had always celebrated the agon, the contest to be the best, he announced that God had chosen the foolish to shame the wise, and the weak to shame the strong. In a world that took for granted the hierarchy of human chattels and their owners, he insisted that the distinctions between slave and free, now that Christ himself had suffered the death of a slave, were of no more account than those between Greek and Jew. ‘For he who was a slave when he was called by the Lord is the Lord’s freedman; similarly, he who was a free man when he was called is Christ’s slave’ (Corinthians 7.22).

Like the great salesman that he was, he always made sure to pitch his message to his audience. ‘I have become all things to all men, so that by all possible means I might save some’ (Corinthians 9.22). Despite this claim, and despite the convulsive transformation in his understanding of what it meant to be a Jew, in his instincts and prejudices he remained the product of his schooling…

That the law of the God of Israel might be read inscribed on the human heart, written there by his Spirit, was a notion that drew alike on the teachings of Pharisees and Stoics—and yet equally was foreign to them both. Its impact was destined to render Paul’s letters—the correspondence of a bum, without position or reputation in the affairs of the world—the most influential, the most transformative, the most revolutionary ever written. Across the millennia, and in societies and continents unimagined by Paul himself, their impact would reverberate. His was a conception of law that would come to suffuse an entire civilisation. He was indeed—just as he proclaimed himself to be—the herald of a new beginning…

[Left, Paul the Apostle – Catacombs of St. Tecla, c. 380 C.E.—Ed.] Paul was not the founder of the churches in Rome. Believers in Christ had appeared well before his own arrival there. Nevertheless, the letter that he had sent these Hagioi from Corinth, a lengthy statement of his beliefs that was designed as well to serve as an introduction to ‘all in Rome who are loved by God’ (Romans 1.7) was like nothing they had ever heard before. The most detailed of Paul’s career, it promised to its recipients a dignity more revolutionary than even any of Nero’s stunts. When the masses were invited by the emperor to his street parties, the summons was to enjoy a fleeting taste of the pleasures of a Caesar.

But Paul, in his letter to the Romans, had something altogether more startling to offer. ‘The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children’ (Romans 8.16). Here, baldly stated, was a status that Nero would never have thought to share. It was not given to householders filthy and stinking with the sweat of their own labours, the inhabitants at best of a mean apartment or workshop on the outskirts of the city, to lay claim to the title of a Caesar. And yet that, so Paul proclaimed, was indeed their prerogative. They had been adopted by a god.

To suffer as Christ had done, to be beaten, and degraded, and abused, was to share in his glory. Adoption by God, so Paul assured his Roman listeners, promised the redemption of their bodies. ‘And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you’ (Romans 8.11). The revolutionary implications of this message, to those who heard it, could not help but raise pressing questions. In the cramped workshops that provided the Hagioi of Rome with their places of assembly, where they would meet to commemorate the arrest and suffering of Christ with a communal meal, men rubbed shoulders with women, citizens with slaves. If all were equally redeemed by Christ, if all were equally beloved of God, then what of the hierarchies on which the functioning of even the humblest Roman household depended?

The master of a household was no more or less a son of God than his slaves. Everyone, then, should be joined together by a common love. Yet even as Paul urged this, he did not push the radicalism of his message to its logical conclusion. A slave might be loved by his master as a brother, and renowned for his holiness, and blessed with the gift of prophecy—but still remain a slave. Despite his scorn for the pretensions of the Caesars, Paul warned the churches of Rome not to offer open resistance to Nero. ‘Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established’ (Romans 13.1).

If Roman power upheld the peace that enabled him to travel the world, then he would not jeopardise his mission by urging his converts to rebel against it. Too much was at stake. There was no time to weave the entire fabric of society anew. What mattered, in the brief window of opportunity that Paul had been granted, was to establish as many churches as possible—and thereby to prepare the world for the parousia. ‘For the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night’ (I Thessalonians 5.2). And increasingly, it seemed that the world’s foundations were indeed starting to shake…

In AD 66, the smouldering resentments of the Jews in Judaea burst into open revolt. Roman vengeance, when it came, was terrible. Four years after the launch of the rebellion, Jerusalem was stormed by the legions. The wealth of the Temple was carted off to Rome, and the building itself burnt to the ground. ‘Neither its antiquity, nor the extent of its treasures, nor the global range of those who regarded it as theirs, nor the incomparable glory of its rites, proved sufficient to prevent its destruction’ (Josephus Jewish Wars 6.442).

God, whose support the rebels had been banking upon, had failed to save his people. Many Jews, cast into an abyss of misery and despair, abandoned their faith in him altogether. Others, rather than blame God, chose instead to blame themselves, arraigning themselves on a charge of disobedience, and turning with a renewed intensity to the study of their scriptures and their laws. Others yet—those who believed that Jesus was Christ, and whom the Roman authorities had increasingly begun to categorise as Christiani [1]—found in the ruin visited on God’s Chosen People the echo of an even more dreadful spectacle: that of God’s Son upon the gallows.

The gospels written in the tense and terrible years that immediately preceded and followed the annihilation of Jerusalem were different [than Paul’s letters—Ed.]. The kingdom of God was like a mustard seed; it was like the world as seen through the eyes of a child; it was like yeast in dough. Again and again, in the stories that Jesus loved to tell, in his parables, the plot was as likely to be drawn from the world of the humble as it was from that of the wealthy or the wise: from the world of swineherds, servants, sowers.

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[1] Tacitus explicitly states that those condemned by Nero were abusively referred to by the name of Chrestiani.Unsurprisingly, then, neither in Paul’s letters nor in the Gospels does the word appear; but already, by AD 100 at the latest, Christians themselves seem to have begun to appropriate it.