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Category: Catholic Church

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Catholic Church Christendom

Ireland

by Gaedhal

St. Colman’s Cathedral, County Cork, Ireland.

I would criticise atheism more, however, atheists are a tiny fraction of the Irish population. I expend my antitheistic energies upon what is causing the most harm. If I walk into town, I meet two illegally placed religious posters threatening me with Hell. Christian privilege means that Political Posters must come down, but posters threatening people with eternal post-mortem torture in the name of a fictitious legendary rabbi who floated off into the sky, 2,000 years ago, are never taken down. As a secularist, I would be equally opposed to illegally placed atheist posters. Secularism guarantees a neutral public space for us all.

And so atheism isn’t causing that much harm in Ireland. On the contrary, the divers hoisted Rabbi cults have caused 1600 years of harm in Ireland. Ireland hasn’t even begun to secularise, yet. Ireland is still, very much, a Christian theocracy. Our constitution begins by invoking an arithmetic-defying trinity of gods, and it ends with ‘Do chum glóire Dé agus onóra na hÉireann’ (This [constitution] has been composed for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland).

However, atheism can cause some harm. In this video, Seth Andrews drew a doodle of a cat, and Matt Dillahunty promptly tattooed this onto his thigh. Dillahunty just looks mentally ill, these days.

I agree with atheism on a single point: I claim to know, as a fact, that no classically theistic gods exist.

Mercifully, neither Seth nor Matt have reproduced. Hopefully natural selection will eventually put an end to this version of atheism.

However, all of the other things that atheists believe, my soul violently kicks against. Chaotic determinism, Heat death, Eliminative materialism etc.

Categories
Catholic Church Deranged altruism

Heydrich, 7

Let’s be honest: Should they come to power, could you imagine American white nationalists casually talking about mass genocides, as these German hierarchs did after the buffet (in the film, from this point on)? And if they will be unable to do so, don’t you think such scruples have to do with worshipping the Jew on the cross, and regarding the Aryan Pilate who had him crucified as a wicked man?

American anti-Christians did realise this. Remember that passage in The Turner Diaries where racist revolutionaries let a Jewish community live and it caused so much trouble that those altruist revolutionaries had to be eliminated by transvalued revolutionaries?

When in the future the cold war against the Aryan man turns into a hot one, it will become clear that there is no way to save the race unless one repudiates Judeo-Christian morality. This is so true that, as we see in the film when they enjoy the buffet Heydrich offered them, it came out that the Vatican began to complain about such executions, and those present scoffed openly and uninhibitedly, laughing at Christian compassion.

Above, Cesare Orsenigo with Hitler and von Ribbentrop. In November 1943, nuncio Orsenigo spoke to the Führer on behalf of Pope Pius XII. In his conversation with Hitler, he talked about the status of persecuted peoples in the Third Reich, apparently referring to Jews. Over large parts of the conversation the Führer simply ignored the nuncio; he went to the window and didn’t listen.

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Ancient Greece Autobiography Bible Catholic Church

Mental regression!

In his most recent statement, Gaedhal says the following:

I mentioned Thucydides, because, as Otto English points out in Fake History a distinction is drawn—although largely artificially—between Herodotus and Thucydides.

In my view, the Old Testament takes a Herodotian method. In Genesis, there are three competing and contradictory accounts regarding who pimped his wife to whom. Did Abraham pimp his wife to Pharaoh, or Abimelech or was it his son, Isaac?

Two competing and contradictory accounts of the creation and the flood are given. Two contradictory versions of the binding of Isaac, the Flood, and the Joseph story are poorly woven together and given.

In the main, Herodotus would recount everything he heard, whereas, in the main, Thucydides would critique his sources, and only give the version of events that he found most probable. In the main, Thucydides was willing to throw unreliable stories into the waste-paper basket.

However, as English points out: Herodotus often acts in a Thucydidean way, and Thucydides often acts in a Herodotian way.

Thucydides was an excellent Ancient Historian… however, even the best ancient historian is woefully bad when compared to modern standards. One could not publish Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War as a scholarly monograph and have it pass peer review.

I also agree with Pine Creek Doug that if God is the ultimate author of the Gospels, then we should hold him to the same standards that we would hold a modern PhD historian to. We should be able to publish the four gospels as scholarly monographs and have them pass peer review. We are not able to do this. Thus, God is a poorer historian than any modern human historian who can pass peer review. Do not lower your standards for God!

The first thing that is scraped away by Thucydides’ razor into the waste-paper can is accounts of miracles.

As I said before: Christianity was never in date. The Bible is Herodotian in what it relates, and not Thucydidean. Thucydides essentially discovered how to do modern history in the 400s BCE. One of the things that the Christian Dark Ages reversed was Thucydidean historiography. A continent that had known Thucydides, thanks to Christianity, was soon swamped with Herodotian martyr tales, i.e. unevidenced religious fantasies.

I was listening to Book 1 of History of the Peloponnesian War, last night, by Thucydides. Homer says that an impossible number of Achaeans—essentially the entire population of Ancient Achaia—went off to fight in Troy. Thucydides therefore rejects Homer’s legendary number of Achaean fighters. Similarly, in the Pentateuch, an impossible number of Israelites—essentially the entire population of Ancient Egypt—left Egypt during the Exodus.

If Europe had still been in a Thucydidean mindset, then the stupid Jewish fairytale that is the Exodus would never have been accepted by this continent’s people. Lamentably, it has really only been in relatively modern times that Thucydidean criticism has been applied to the Bible. Spinoza, Valla, Thomas Paine et al. got the ball rolling. However, the Thucydidean ball should never have been stopped. What stopped it? Christianity.

This is why I am of the opinion that the Conflict Thesis—‘systematised academic knowledge’ (i.e. ‘science’ sensu lato) and revealed religion are diametrically opposed to one another—is correct, and also that the Dark Ages were real.

In ancient times, Homer was no less divine than Moses. Indeed, like Jesus Christ, in some legends Homer was born of a virgin. And yet Thucydides contradicted this divine oracle. Lamentably, nobody contradicted Moses until the Renaissance.

The staggering regression that the white man suffered with the imposition of Christianity in the Middle Ages reminds me of what I was saying this year about the friend I knew when I was a teenager and, after decades of not treating him, found him in a state of psychosis: a regression like treating an eighteen-month-old infant! (cf. my series on malignant narcissism: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 and #6).

A sage from ancient India might say something similar if he had been long enough to see Rome before and after the imposition of Christianity by Constantine. What Gaedhal says seems to me very true, and we could even illustrate it with the subject that is my forte: the analysis of my family.

Unlike Protestantism, in Catholicism the Church of Rome claims to have proof of divine intervention through miracles. Psychically, I grew up under my father’s sky where the miracles of the Virgin of Lourdes—the French virgin of the 19th-century Tort family—were taken as absolute fact. The same can be said of my late father’s claims about the 20th-century miracles attributed to the Virgin of Fatima in Portugal. Although after two years of my life studying the Shroud of Turin I ended up sceptical of the supernatural hypothesis, my father continued to believe up to the present century that this Catholic relic proved the resurrection of Jesus. (I studied the literature on the shroud from 1988 to 1990 because I was still struggling with parental introjects—cf. my autobiography.)

When at Easter some of the American white nationalist sites post entries commemorating the day, they have no idea that believing this Jewish fairytale is as dramatic a psychogenic regression as that of the friend whom I knew sane and, after a few decades, I found him with a psychic structure reminiscent of that of a small infant.

Categories
Axiology Catholic Church Deranged altruism

Catechetical lunacy

by Gaedhal

According to Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), paragraph 1935:

The equality of men rests essentially on their dignity as persons and the rights that flow from it: ‘Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design.’

The above statement is as woke and as DIE [Diversity Equity and Inclusion] as one can get. Absent the talk concerning a mythical Jewish god, the above statement could easily be stated by Joe Biden, Alexandria Occasio Cortez, Michelle Obama or Kamala Harris.

The above statement does not merely seek to ‘eradicate’ inequalities in opportunity, but also inequalities in outcome. If we all had identical ‘social conditions’ then that is ‘equity’. If we all had identical ‘social conditions’ then that is ‘equality of outcome’.

In my view, depopulation and eugenics are a path, eventually, to all humans having prosperous and peaceful social conditions.

It is Christian axiology that renders so much of Western Society so crime-ridden and so needlessly miserable. Christianity is a sect of ‘the least of these’, and so it is anti-eugenic i.e. dysgenic in its foundations. As Saul puts it: Christianity is a sect of the foolish—i.e. those of low IQ—and not of the wise. Christianity is a sect of ‘the off-scourings of this earth’. As the parable says: the rich, and the well-educated did not want to attend Jesus’ wedding feast, so he brought in all the tramps and misfits from ‘the highways and byways’ instead. In its foundation, Christianity is a sect for the mob; for the rout; and not for the aristocrat, the gentleman, the man who is refined in his bearing. As Richard Carrier puts it: Saul does not want you to read Euclid’s Elements lest you deconvert from Saul’s utterly foolish cult.

An absolute equality in social conditions? That is madness. That is Bolshevism. And the funny thing is that the above statement, which anticipates the DIE of modern times, was written in 1992 by the ‘conservatives’ Ratzinger—later Benedict XVI—Schönborn and Saint John Paul II. One of the reasons why I converted to traditionalist Catholicism is because I quickly found out that there was really no such thing as conservative post-conciliar Catholicism. They were all sell-outs and lunatics.

In my view, belief in human ontological equality is a superstition inherited from Christianity. If the Christian god does not exist, then there is no god up there magically making us all equal.

The virus with shoes that is destroying the planet, and swiftly rendering it uninhabitable is of ‘infinite value’ according to the Catechism. And it is not just humanity in sum that has infinite value, but each individual also! You can’t get depopulation done with beliefs like that! In my view, Christian axiology—which carries over into many forms of atheism—is the number one existential threat that humanity faces. Humanity is a petard that can hoist itself through overpopulation, the carbonisation of our atmospheres and our seas, and other threats. If Humanity is a pest, then viewing each specimen of such a pest as ‘infinitely valuable’—as the Catholic Church does—is a harmful delusion.

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s criminal history, 178

– For the context of these translations click here –
 
Frankish bishops humiliate the emperor

The bishops strove to subjugate the state and in 829 in Paris, going back to the arrogant teachings of Pope Gelasius I, they demanded that no one could judge them, that they would be responsible only to God and that the other great ones, on the other hand, would be subject to them: the bishops. Indeed, their auctoritas was even above the potestas of the king and the emperor, who would otherwise become a tyrant and any moral right would disappear with his rule.

Their arrogance, sometimes clothed in the rhetoric of apparent modesty and false humility—the notorious sanctimonious hypocrisy—could hardly be greater. They praised, and rightly so, the humility of the emperors, because they always found humility in others very praiseworthy. But they always presented themselves as those on whom the Lord bestowed the power to bind and unbind, and recalled the supposed words of Emperor Constantine to the bishops (according to Rufinus’ ominous history of the Church): ‘God has made you priests and has given you the power to judge us also. Therefore we shall be rightly judged by you, whereas you cannot be judged by men.’

Too beautiful to be true.

The Empress Ermengarde had borne three sons to the sovereign: Lothair (795), Pippin (797) and Louis (806). When she died on 3 October 818 in Angers after about twenty years of marriage, it was feared that the pious widower would shut himself away in a monastery. And, naturally, for the clergy, it was preferable to have ‘a monastic mentality on the throne… rather than an emperor in monastic habit within the walls of a monastery’ (Luden).

The first uprising of 830 against the sovereign opened a decade of continuous palace rebellions and civil wars in the pious and family-friendly West. Understandably, the emperor’s eldest sons were irritated by the course of events. Especially Lothair, whose kingdom was seriously diminished in favour of Charles, and who saw his future supremacy in jeopardy. But also the younger couple of Pippin and Louis were threatened by another loss of territory. The ecclesiastical hierarchy, concerned about the unity of the empire, also feared its idea of unity.

Bernard, a descendant of the high Frankish nobility and son of William—Count of Toulouse, who was highly regarded under Charles I and who, on the advice of his friend Benedict of Aniane, became a monk of great asceticism—had little inclination for the Emperor’s tastes. It seems that he was much more attracted, according to especially episcopalian gossip, to the bed of the young empress. And Louis the Pious had protected the man from an early age, had him baptised at his baptism and later made him Count of Barcelona.

At the head of the conspiracy were former supporters of the emperor, some of his advisors, the then chancellor Elisachar, the arch-chancellor and abbot Hilduin of Saint-Denis, Bishop Jesse of Amiens and, above all, Abbot Wala, the spiritual leader of the uprising and Louis’ most dangerous enemy. He coined the slogan Pro principe contra principem and his monastery in Corbie became the de facto centre and headquarters (Weinrich) of the rebels. (Over the centuries, some Catholic monasteries became the headquarters of conspirators, as happened for example during the Second World War.)

The rebels wanted not only to drive away Bernard and the young empress and her entourage, but also the old emperor, and if possible to put Lothair in his place. After various tortures Judith, the second wife of Louis the Pious, was even threatened with death and a promise was extracted from her that she would force the emperor to have her hair tonsured and enter the monastery, and she had to shave her hair and go into seclusion among the nuns of the Holy Cross (Sainte-Croix) in Poitiers.

Lothair, who was viciously persecuting the supporters of the reclusive princess, avoided depriving her father of all power at the Imperial Diet of Compiégne (May 830). He contented himself with annulling his dispositions of the last year, or that he had the upper hand. But while the great men became more and more at odds with each other, each seeking his advantage, far from improving the situation distrust of the new government grew, and the emperor succeeded in setting his two younger sons against the elder. He offered Louis and Pippin an extension of their kingdoms, which quickly attracted them to his side and divided the allies, especially since the brothers felt that the supremacy of Lothair was no less oppressive than that of their father. For all these reasons the coup d’état failed.

Since Lothair was now confined to Italy, the emperor assigned in February 831 roughly equal kingdoms (regna) to his other sons Pippin, Louis and Charles.

But in early 833 the three elder brothers allied to attack their father with greater military force, trampling on their oaths of vassalage and filial duties. They appealed to the people ‘to establish a just government.’ For even Louis the Germanic (who had already risen again and again in 838 and 839) and Pippin of Aquitaine felt themselves to be under attack and threat. With a hastily mobilised army, Lothair marched into Burgundy together with Pope Gregory IV (827-844), who had tried to win over the Frankish clergy even from Italy. The archbishops of the region, Bernard of Vienne and Agobard of Lyon, immediately went over to his camp. The latter was the rabid enemy of the Jews, who now, disregarding also the fourth commandment, published a manifesto advocating the right of the children against the father.

Lothair re-joined his brothers and once again took the lead of the rebels.

As Louis was in danger of defeat, fewer and fewer prelates stood by his side. The pope mocked his haughty and foolish writings, and especially disputed the reproach which the imperialists had everywhere levelled at him, saying that he had become a mere instrument of the sons to launch the excommunication against their enemies.

The pope had to justify the uprising in the eyes of the masses and win over the rest of the wavering rebels to his side. Just after his return to the brothers’ camp almost the whole of Louis’ army (despite his additional oath of loyalty to fight against his sons as against the enemy) treacherously switched to the latter’s side ‘like an impetuous torrent,’ writes the Astronomer, ‘partly seduced by the gifts and partly terrified by the threats.’ The clergy on Lothair’s side recognised this as a divine miracle. And then almost all the bishops, who had previously threatened Gregory IV with deposition, also changed front so that the pope, who had fulfilled his obligation, was able to return to Rome with Lothair’s approval.

But the old emperor had to surrender unconditionally that summer. He was then regarded as overthrown by the hand of God, as a ‘non-king’, as a second Saul, and the bishops and others ‘did him much harm’, as Thegan puts it.

To begin with, Lothair had taken him through the Vosges, via Metz and Verdun, to Soissons, where Louis was imprisoned in the monastery of Saint-Médard. Prince Charles, who was barely ten years old, was taken from him and placed in the monastery of Prüm in the Eifel region under a severe prison regime as if he were a great criminal, as Charles would later say, although he was not made a monk. But the brothers of the empress were tonsured and sent to Aquitaine, Pippin’s territory, while she was immediately taken with Gregory to Italy and banished to Tortona.

With papal approval, the transfer of the empire from the hands of the old emperor—now designated by the bishops as ‘the old emperor’, ‘the venerable man’ and also ‘Lord Louis’—to those of Lothair was decreed.

Stained glass depiction of
Lothair, Strasbourg Cathedral

For his part, Rabanus Maurus, abbot of Fulda and one of the champions of the unity of the empire, embraced the party of Louis the Pious and in a treatise dedicated to him wrote that it was ‘totally inadmissible for sons to rebel against their father and subjects against their sovereign’. Rabanus showed the injustice of the plot against Louis. Neither Lothair was authorised to dethrone his father, nor could the episcopate condemn and excommunicate him.

But how was Louis’ defeat interpreted by the prelates gathered at Compiègne, who with all the grandees had sworn an oath of loyalty to Lothair? The say him as a consequence, of course, of his disobedience to the exhortations of the priests. He had committed many evils against God and man and had brought his subjects to the brink of catastrophe. And so he was declared ‘tyrant,’ while his victorious son and successor was proclaimed ‘friend of Christ the Lord’. They, the ‘representatives of Christ,’ the ‘bearers of the keys of the kingdom of heaven,’ demanded from the old ruler a general confession of his sins: a renunciation of the world and presented him with a document of his crimes, so that ‘as in a mirror he might behold the abominable deeds’.

In his recent History of the Councils, Wilfried Hartmann observes: ‘Such procedures were only possible because the Frankish episcopate had already formulated certain theses in Paris in 829 which envisaged a kind of control of the political sovereign by the bishops.’ Thus, canon 55 proclaimed: ‘If someone governs with piety, justice and clemency, he is deservedly called a king; but those who govern in an impious, unjust and cruel manner are not called kings but tyrants.’ But whether a king is to be called just or unjust is naturally determined by… the prelates.

Louis must have been deeply humiliated at the Abbey of Saint-Médard de Soissons, where the prelates read him the card again, having to prostrate himself three or more times before the bishops and a multitude of other clerics, having to confess all that they had instilled in him with precise words—what is still called brainwashing today—and having to ask for their forgiveness.

To savour his wickedness, the hierarchs had staged this spectacle before the altar of the monastery’s St. Mary’s Church. In the presence of a large crowd of the people, they had the confession of his sins, which they had drawn up, read three or four times to the emperor ‘aloud and amidst a copious stream of tears,’ lying in a penitential garment of manes.

The whole process was, on the one hand, intended to morally annihilate the emperor and render him incapable of returning to the throne and even of bearing arms: canon law excluded him, as Louis knew very well, after a public canonical penance. On the other hand, the unbelievable degradation had to demonstrate the total superiority of the bishops.

It was 33 years since Charlemagne had judged Pope Leo III. Now the Frankish episcopate was judging the emperor! With the deplorable ceremony, the greatest opprobrium in Louis’ life and one of the deepest humiliations that any prince could have suffered, far worse than that of Canossa, Louis the Pious was also excluded from ecclesiastical communion and henceforth could only treat and speak with a few chosen persons.

Archbishop Otgar of Mainz acted as the jailer of the deposed Louis.

The leading role in this tragedy, which triggered a series of civil wars between 833 and 843, was played by Archbishop Ebon of Rheims, a close friend of Agobard of Lyons and a true prototype of ecclesiastical ingratitude and perfidy, as well as a man of notable missionary success. Years earlier, in fact, ‘on the advice of the emperor and with the authorisation of the pope, he left for the country of the Danes to preach the gospel, having converted and baptised many.’ This prelate, appointed by Pope Paschal I as the legate of the north in the framework of the Scandinavian policy of the Carolingians, is considered to be the initiator of the Nordic mission.

Categories
Catholic Church Constantine Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 172

Constantine I (also Saint Constantine or Constantine the Great)
was a Roman emperor from 306 to 337 c.e.

 

Karlheinz Deschner responds to Prof. Maria R.-Alföldi’s review

Mrs Alföldi reviews and censures in just twelve pages (148-159), and under the title ,,Kaiser Konstantin: ein Grosser der Geschichte?”, the seventy-two pages of my chapter ‘Saint Constantine, the first Christian Emperor: Symbol of Seventeen Centuries of Ecclesiastical History’, which appears in the first volume of my Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums [pages 157-176 of our abridged translation — Ed.]

Almost at the outset, she finds it ‘difficult to give even a rough account of the content of Deschner’s explanations’ (page 149). Why’s that? No doubt because she dislikes the content itself, which is divided into ten subheadings and thus perfectly outlined, just as she dislikes the non-academic orientation, which she describes as ‘popular’ and even ‘populist’ (page 159), ‘marked by a strong tendentiousness’ (page 149), which I had already explicitly acknowledged in my General Introduction. And at the end of her report, she urges a cautious handling of historiography, which I can only agree with all my energy!

Maria R.-Alföldi’s essay appears in the book’s third part, which the editor entitles ‘Model of Concrete Criticism’. Model, pars pro toto. I now submit this rebuttal, closely following the text, to a detailed critique.

‘It is read’, writes the professor ‘that Constantine falsified his genealogy.’ And also: ‘The first years of the young emperor’s rule in the West are nothing but dreadful wars against the poor Germans, who were later taken prisoner and mercilessly slaughtered’.

It all appears as terribly exaggerated by me, as untrue, although again this isn’t said explicitly. Both ancient sources and modern research confirm that Constantine’s barbarism was already in his time something infrequent and appalling. However, the lady critic prefers discreet insinuations, and hurtful ironies, which present me as an obscurantist historian, without her openly expressing it with decent malice aforethought.

But while Mrs Alföldi reproaches me, as she often does, of misleading the reader, it’s she who does it. And while she states that I suggest that Constantine carried out the war, she suggests already with the following sentence, and again against truthfulness, ‘once again one reads extremely emotional descriptions of atrocities of all kinds’ (page 150). Such descriptions, as I wrote, come to me in their entirety from the Church Fathers Eusebius and Lactantius.

With ‘underhanded acrimony’ (page 150), that is what I am reproached for, I then comment on the universal sovereignty of him whom she labels ‘Byzantine’ rhetoric. Constantine ‘forces the Church to come under his sway; and the Church in turn, according to Deschner, willingly and opportunistically bends over backwards to get at money and power’. But that would only be ‘a certain, perfectly recognizable palace group.’

No, because the Church as a whole achieved through Constantine, and his immediate successors, eminent influence and prestige. This is indisputable. Throughout the empire, the bishops exalted the dictator. Their tokens of favour were showered even on the hierarchies of distant countries, and reached the Catholic clergy as a whole—who was now a recognised and privileged caste—in the form of money, honours, titles, basilicas and other buildings; in the form of exemption from burdens and taxes, release from oath-taking and the obligation to testify, permission to use the state post, the right to admit last dispositions and bequests; moreover, the sovereign—as many others would do in the future!—delegated part of the state power to the prelates, although he also decided on matters of faith.

Quite a few prelates already imitated the style and ceremony of the imperial residence in their episcopal sees. Again and again, it is said in the sources: ‘He made them respectable and enviable in the eyes of all’, ‘with his orders and laws he brought them even greater prestige,’ and ‘with imperial munificence, he opened up all the treasures…’ Soon, precisely the greatest fathers of the Church, such as Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome and Cyril of Alexandria, will praise Constantine, who not only called himself co-bishop, ‘bishop for external interests’ (epískopos tôn ektós) but who modestly didn’t hesitate to call himself ‘our divinity’ (nostrum numen)…

The always obscene association of the throne and altar, especially in countless massacres from the 4th century to the present day, is not a product of my ‘tendentiousness’ (page 149), but something quite appalling. But as with so many conformists by profession, in her prose there is hardly any blood flowing, not a single drop; whereas it reminds me, as it seems to me, with all horror: ‘the battles are awash with blood’ (page 149) as if I had spilt it!

On the contrary, she ignores, no doubt with the bulk of the historians’ guild, the lamentable practice of hanging the little rascals and extolling the great ones. Nothing specifically Christian, no doubt. Already the African bishop Cyprian, martyr and saint, decried this practice in paganism and lamented that when blood is shed in private, the act is called a heinous crime, but if it is shed publicly it is bravery. ‘The extent of the havoc is that which leaves the crime unpunished.’

She speaks only in an aside, summarily and with the coldness of the investigator, of the ‘tragic end’ of Constantine’s relatives. Conversely, my prose narrates that the great saint had his father-in-law Maximian hanged in Marseilles, then had his brothers-in-law Licinius and Basianbus strangled; had Licinius’ son murdered at Carthage, ordered his own son Crispus poisoned (while murdering many of his friends) and had his wife Fausta, mother of five children, drowned in the bath… In addition, Constantine sent other parricides to hell using the terrible and long-gone insaculation (poena cullei, the particularly slow drowning in a leather sack).

This in no way fits in with his apologetic concept of the despot who is still highly celebrated by theologians and historians; who, ‘under the influence of Christian conceptions’, as the Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte exalts him, shows ‘a growing respect for the dignity of the human person’, the ‘Christian respect for human life’ (Baus, Catholic). That saintly usurer would, for example, have the tongues of informers cut out before their execution, would have the domestic servants who had taken part in the abduction of a bride killed, would have the slaves burnt and the wet nurses killed by pouring molten lead into their mouths, would have every slave and domestic who had accused his master executed immediately, without investigation or the production of witnesses.

On all these things and many more, the expert on Constantine doesn’t say a word. Quite the contrary: she goes on to say that I always treat the Constantinian penal legislation negatively, that I even ‘brand the emperor as anti-Semitic’, and this ‘despite the known fact that at that time the Jews were still free to practise their faith’ (page 151).

As if the Jews’ free practice of their faith were in contradiction with the anti-Semitism of the emperor, a sovereign who mocks the Jews as spiritually blind, a ‘hateful nation’ to whom he attributes an ‘innate insanity’; to whom he allows the visit to Jerusalem only one day a year. He bluntly forbids them to have Christian slaves, thus beginning their alienation from agriculture, with such grave consequences. Moreover, this is the first anti-Jewish law on conversion to Judaism (autumn 315), threatening both the Jew who converts and the Christian convert with the stake.

The specialist on the emperor silences the fact that her hero, with increasing power and freedom of movement, also attacked the pagans with increasing rigour.

This is particularly evident in the last years of Constantine’s rule, although he had no interest in opposing the vast majority of the empire. Nevertheless, Constantine forbade the rebuilding of ruined temples and even ordered their closure. In all the provinces, moreover, the temples were stolen and ‘plundered without regard’ (Tinnefeld) for him, his favourites and the churches; in fact, it came to ‘the theft of works of art such as had never occurred before’ (Kornemann). And then Constantine also arranged for their destruction. ‘He destroyed to the ground those temples which the idolaters held in the greatest veneration’ (Kornemann). ‘At a sign whole temples were lying on the ground’, Bishop Eusebius recounts in triumphant tones.

Nor did the potentate delay in ordering the burning of Porphyry’s fifteen books Against the Christians, in which he ‘advanced the entire biblical criticism of the Modern Age’ (Poulsen), which, according to the theologian Harnack, ‘has not yet been refuted’.

On all this Maria R.-Alföldi is once again completely silent…
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: I won’t abbreviate the following 4,700 words of Deschner’s retort; the above translation is enough to provide an idea. My post tomorrow Sunday will be devoted to my aspirations on how to pass on Deschner’s legacy in the English-speaking community, especially among those non-Christians who still believe in the fourteen words.

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 171

 

Response given

by Hermann Gieselbusch

– Reinbek, 23 August 1996 Sachbuchlektorat Rowohlt Verlag –

 
(Left, Karlheinz Deschner with his editor Hermann Gieselbusch.) After some thirty years of preparation, the first volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s ten-volume Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity) appeared in Germany in September 1986. The second volume was published in October 1988 and the third in October 1990. This marked the end of the first epoch: Antiquity.

Three imposing volumes, representing some 1,600 pages, with some 350 scientific notes, around half a thousand names of historical characters and as many place names and thousands of quotations from primary and secondary sources. In all, a veritable Milky Way of names, dates, Christian dogmas, titles and data.

Such a well-founded and fundamental accusation against Christianity—not only against the Church—has never been made before. In any case, the attacked party in principle adhered to Oggersheim’s rule: hold on.

When competent and professional Christians could not ignore it; when tens of thousands of readers devoured every new volume of Deschner’s historical Krimi every two years, when the number of annual departures from the Church was rapidly increasing sixfold and many of the dissidents were giving historical reasons in support of their decision—in particular the cruelties Deschner exposes—then it seemed to the attacked ministers of organised Christianity that the matter had passed the point of no return. And in 1992 they went on a counter-attack.

Hans Reinhard Seeliger, professor of historical theology at the Siegen University of Applied Sciences, organised a conference entitled ‘Criminalisation of Christianity? Deschner’s Church History on the Test Bench’: a three-day symposium at the Katholische Akademie Schwerte am Nordrand des Sauerlandes.

From 1 to 3 October 1992, lectures were given on the twenty-three chapters of the three volumes that have appeared to date, either in general or in particular. Most of the lecturers were professors from Germany and Austria: ordinary, extraordinary, supernumerary, and emeritus, as well as one professor and one honorary professor. Two belong to the Dominican order and one is a Franciscan. The spectrum of specialisations ranges from ancient church history, patrology, Christian archaeology, ancient history, ancient philology and Judaism to historical and systematic theology. The group was joined by a professor of criminal law (because Deschner’s is a criminal history!) as well as a newly qualified doctor of medicine from Freiburg.

Karlheinz Deschner was also invited—a chivalrous gesture—to present ‘the basic and general conception of his work’. One against twenty-two, a very tempting challenge for the combative spirit like Deschner. Nevertheless, he declined the invitation. He had already discussed the proposed topic at length in the general introduction to his work: ‘On the Subject, Methodology, the Question of Objectivity and the Problems of Historiography in General’, which consists of sixty printed pages. To this introduction, as Deschner himself wrote to the organisers, he had nothing to add. [1]

All lectures appeared in book form in the Catholic Traditionsverlag Herder in Freiburg, edited by the initiator Hans Reinhard Seeliger, with a total of 320 pages. On the cover we see the image of the Dominican Savonarola in Florence, painted by Fra Bartolommeo. A joke? (in 1498 Savonarola was burned at the stake). An aspiration? In any case, the editor writes in his introduction that ‘a “beheading” of the author would have been easy to execute’.

Of course, the book published by Herder, which is quite expensive by the way, has not been a bestseller. But even with a limited number of copies it fulfilled its function as a smokescreen. From now on, and with the very erudite reference to this collective volume, is interwoven the verdict that in that book more than twenty experts have shown that Deschner works in an unscientific way and writes with bias. When someone referring to Deschner now asks the Church painful questions, the initiate need only smile with a compassionate expression and refer to the said book—without having read it, of course—and with this magic trick of authority the whole historical mosaic of criminal history is diluted into complacency, and the soul seduced by Deschner must continue to believe that Christianity and its Churches have never had a criminal history, but only and exclusively a sacred history.

The philosopher Hermann Josef Schmidt, a professor in Dortmund, has thoroughly analysed the volume edited by Seeliger in Herder and published his exposé under the title Das ,,einhellige” oder scheinheilige ,,Urteil der Wissenschaf”? Nachdenkliches zur katholischen Kritik an Karlheinz Deschners ,,Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums”.

Deschner assumed that the interested reader can judge for himself which point of view is more convincing, and which author is closer to the critical and historical truth. Deschner, who continually advises his audience to examine what he says, not to ‘believe’ him, believes in the undertow of reason.

But to remain silent in this case would be self-harming and out of touch with reality. Calumniare audacter, semper aliquid haeret: Don’t be shy to slander, there is always something left! A foreign scientist recalled with special emphasis this old, and true, cynicism: Deschner should take a sharp, immediate and clear stand against his Schwerte critics.

The malignant flu in the winter of 1996 made it difficult for Deschner to write the fifth volume of the Criminal History, so he took up the Herder volume again, as a kind of spiritual gymnastics for convalescents, and looked for a modus operandi. To critically analyse the entire three-hundred-page-long text? Impossible. He could only proceed selectively by choosing a single article and analysing it in depth.

Deschner decided on the paper ,,Kaiser Konstantin: ein Grosser der Geschichte?” by Maria R.-Alföldi (the only woman in the Schwerte group). On the face of it, this lecture corresponds to the average level of volume. Some texts yield to all kinds of criticism. A few at least refrain from personal defamation and try to do justice to Deschner’s peculiarities and contribution: Maria R.-Alföldi occupies a middle ground and is therefore representative of the work.

She was born in 1926 in Budapest, received her doctorate in 1949, was appointed professor in Munich in 1961 and worked since then as a scientific advisor and later as a lecturer at the seminar for Greek and Roman history at the University of Frankfurt of Main in auxiliary sciences for archaeology and the history and culture of the Roman provinces (among the auxiliary disciplines of history are epigraphy, papyrology, glyptography and sigillography). Maria Radnóti-Alföldi has mainly published works on numismatics, such as Die constantinische Goldpragung: Untersuchungen zu ihrer Bedeutung für Kaiserpolitik und Hofkunst (1963) and Antike Numismatik: Theorie, Praxis, Bibliographie (1978).

Professor Radnóti-Alföldi is a corresponding member of the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz. Hans Reinhard Seeliger, at the Schwerte meeting, introduced her as a ‘Constantine researcher of international standing’. Her lecture was received with particular sympathy at Schwerte, but here it seemed like a chorus to torpedo Deschner’s reliability as a historian. How many targets did she make? That is what Karlheinz Deschner discusses in the following reply.

______________
[1] Editor’s note: Our abridged translation of Deschner’s global introduction to his ten volumes can be read on pages 15-25 of a PDF. Deschner’s response to Professor Radnóti-Alföldi will appear in the next post.

Categories
Axiology Catholic Church Christendom Dominion (book) Painting Philosophy of history St Francis Tom Holland

Dominion, 1

Or:

How the Woke Monster originated

See what I wrote on Saturday about Tom Holland’s book Dominion, some of whose passages from the Preface I quote below. Holland contrasts the jovial spirit of the Greco-Roman world with the medieval spirit after the Church infected the minds of Europeans:

Something fundamental had indeed changed. ‘Patience in tribulation, offering the other cheek, praying for one’s enemies, loving those who hate us’: such were the Christian virtues as defined by Anselm. All derived from the recorded sayings of Jesus himself. No Christians, then, not even the most callous or unheeding, could ignore them without some measure of reproof from their consciences. [page 9]

Because the American racial right is ignorant of European history, they don’t realise that the Woke Monster—i.e., the inversion of Greco-Roman values—has been suffered by whites since the Middle Ages, not only in recent years:

God was closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich. Any beggar, any criminal, might be Christ. ‘So the last will be first, and the first last.’ To the Roman aristocrats who, in the decades before the birth of Jesus, first began to colonise the Esquiline Hill with their marble fittings and their flowers beds, such a sentiment would have seemed grotesque. [page 9]

But Holland is similar to Kevin MacDonald in one respect. Although he has abandoned the faith of his childhood, he is still sympathetic to Christianity in some ways. Holland is a secular historian, and like most secular historians that makes him dangerous: he gives us the impression that he is objective, not what we have been calling a neochristian. For example, in the Preface Holland refers to Nero as a ‘malignant Caesar’ (page 10). If the visitor has read the masthead of this site, the Spaniard’s essay on the Judean war against Rome and how Christians wrote history, he will remember that from the ancient world these Judeo-Christians were engaged in defaming figures like Caligula and Nero because they took anti-Jewish measures. (Believing mainstream historians is akin to believing what CNN has said about Trump.)

In the middle of Dominion, the book contains splendid colour reproductions such as the following, in the context of the reversal of classical to Christian values, with St Peter, the very vicar of Christ on earth, depicted in this way:

No ancient artist would have thought to honour a Caesar by representing him as Caravaggio represented Peter: tortured, humiliated, stripped almost bare. And yet, in the city of the Caesars, it was a man broken to such a fate who was honoured as the keeper of ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’. The last had indeed become first… [page 10]

In the Middle Ages, no civilisation in Eurasia was as congruent with a single dominant set of beliefs as was the Latin West with its own distinctive form of Christianity. Elsewhere, whether in the lands of Islam, or in India, or in China, there were various understandings of the divine, and numerous institutions that served to define them; but in Europe, in the lands that acknowledged the primacy of the pope, there was only the occasional community of Jews to disrupt the otherwise total monopoly of the Roman Church. [page 11]

As we have often insisted in discussing the climax of the Spaniard’s essay, the incredible juggling act that the Judeo-Christians performed in a process that culminated with Emperor Theodosius II, was to allow only Judaism and Judeo-Christianity as the religions of the Roman Empire. No other—and under no circumstances the previous religions with Aryan gods!

Well might the Roman Church have termed itself ‘catholic’: ‘universal’. There was barely a rhythm of life that it did not define. From dawn to dusk, from midsummer to the depths of winter, from the hour of their birth to the very last drawing of their breath, the men and women of medieval Europe absorbed its assumptions into their bones. Even when, in the century before Caravaggio, Catholic Christendom began to fragment, and new forms of Christianity to emerge, the conviction of Europeans that their faith was universal remained deep-rooted. It inspired them in their exploration of continents undreamed of by their forefathers; in their conquest of those that they were able to seize, and reconsecrate as a Promised Land… [page 11]

Time itself has been Christianised. [page 12]

If today’s members of the racial right were not charlatans, the first thing they would want to do would be to proclaim that the coming new age is no longer to be measured by the birth of a non-existent Jew (pace Holland, Jesus didn’t exist), but of the Aryan man about whom Savitri Devi wrote: ‘To the god-like Individual of our times; the Man against Time; the greatest European of all times; both Sun and Lightning…’ (see the featured post).

How was it that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world? To attempt an answer to this question, as I do in this book, is not to write a history of Christianity. Rather than provide a panoramic survey of its evolution, I have sought instead to trace the currents of Christian influence that have spread most widely, and been most enduring into the present day. That is why—although I have written extensively about the Eastern and Orthodox Churches elsewhere, and find them themes of immense wonder and fascination—I have chosen not to trace their development beyond antiquity. My ambition is hubristic enough as it is: to explore how we in the West came to be what we are, and to think the way that we do… [page 12]

Today, at a time of seismic geopolitical realignment, when our values are proving to be not nearly as universal as some of us had assumed them to be, the need to recognise just how culturally contingent they are is more pressing than ever. To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable—indeed the inescapable—influence of Christianity. Fail to appreciate this, and the risk is always of anachronism… [page 13]

Remember the negrolatric revolution (BLM riots) that surprised everyone less those who see recent history as the explosion of the Christian sun in its secular, incendiary form: a red giant that I have called neochristianity (although it’s more precise to see it as ‘neofranciscanism’)?

The West, increasingly empty though the pews may be, remains firmly moored to its Christian past. There are those who will rejoice at this proposition; and there are those who will be appalled by it. Christianity may be the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history, but it is also the most challenging for a historian to write about. [page 13]

One thing I like about Holland’s prose is that he sprinkles his erudite treatise with personal vignettes:

…although I vaguely continued to believe in God, I found him infinitely less charismatic than the gods of the Greeks: Apollo, Athena, Dionysus. I liked the way that they did not lay down laws, or condemn other deities as demons; I liked their rock-star glamour. As a result, by the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and his great history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, I was more than ready to accept his interpretation of the triumph of Christianity: that it had ushered in an ‘age of superstition and credulity’. My childhood instinct to see the biblical God as the po-faced enemy of liberty and fun was rationalised. The defeat of paganism had ushered in the reign of Nobodaddy, and of all the various crusaders, inquisitors and black-hatted Puritans who had served as his acolytes. Colour and excitement had been drained from the world. ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean,’ wrote the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, echoing the apocryphal lament of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome. ‘The world has grown grey from thy breath.’ Instinctively, I agreed. [pages 15-16]

Then Holland says something that reminds me of Yockey’s words in Imperium: that Europeans claim to be based on the Greco-Roman world when in fact they are completely different civilisations:

Yet over the course of the past two decades, my perspective has changed. When I came to write my first works of history, I chose as my themes the two periods that had always most stirred and moved me as a child: the Persian invasions of Greece and the last decades of the Roman Republic. The years that I spent writing these twin studies of the classical world, living intimately in the company of Leonidas and of Julius Caesar, of the hoplites who had died at Thermopylae and of the legionaries who had crossed the Rubicon, only confirmed me in my fascination: for Sparta and Rome, even when subjected to the minutest historical enquiry, retained their glamour as apex predators. They continued to stalk my imaginings as they had always done: like a great white shark, like a tiger, like a tyrannosaur. Yet giant carnivores, however wondrous, are by their nature terrifying. The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilisation into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organised, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted. [pages 16-17]

And in the final words of the Preface, Holland tells us:

The ambition of Dominion is to trace the course of what one Christian, writing in the third century AD, termed ‘the flood-tide of Christ’: how the belief that the Son of the one God of the Jews had been tortured to death on a cross came to be so enduringly and widely held that today most of us in the West are dulled to just how scandalous it originally was. This book explores what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mindset of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that is often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain—for good and ill—thoroughly Christian. [page 17]

Categories
Catholic Church Catholic religious orders Christendom Franks Old Testament Protestantism

The Holy Hook, 2

 
by Laurent Guyénot

 
The Old Testament as Israel’s Trojan Horse

In pre-Christian times, pagan scholars had shown little interest in the Hebrew Bible. Jewish writers (Aristobulus of Paneas, Artapan of Alexandria) had tried to bluff the Greeks on the antiquity of the Torah, claiming that Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato had been inspired by Moses, but no one before the Church Fathers seems to have taken them seriously. Jews had even produced fake Greek prophecies of their success under the title Sibylline Oracles, and written under a Greek pseudonym a Letter of Aristea to Philocrates praising Judaism, but again, it was not until the triumph of Christianity that these texts were met with Gentile gullibility.

Thanks to Christianity, the Jewish Tanakh was elevated to the status of authoritative history, and Jewish authors writing for pagans, such as Josephus and Philo, gained undeserved reputation—while being ignored by rabbinic Judaism. Christian academia uncritically tuned to the rigged history of the Jews. While Herodotus had crossed Syria-Palestine around 450 BCE without hearing about Judeans or Israelites, Christian historians decided that Jerusalem had been at that time the center of the world, and accepted as fact the totally fictitious empire of Solomon. Until the 19th century, world history was calibrated on a largely fanciful biblical chronology (Egyptology is now trying to recover from it).[4]

It can be argued, of course, that the Old Testament has served Christendom well: it was certainly not in the nonviolence of Christ that the Catholic Church found the energy and ideological means to impose its world order for nearly a thousand years on Western Europe. Yet for this glorious past, there was obviously a price to pay, a debt to the Jews that has to be paid one way or another. It is as if Christianity has sold its soul to the god of Israel, in exchange for its great accomplishment.

The Church has always advertised itself to the Jews as the gateway out of the prison of the Law, into the freedom of Christ. But it has never requested Jewish converts to leave their Torah on the doorstep. The Jews who entered the Church entered with their Bible, that is to say, with a big part of their Jewishness, while freeing themselves from all the civil restrictions imposed on their non-converted brethren.

When Jews were judged too slow to convert willingly, they were sometimes forced into baptism under threats of expulsion or death. The first documented case goes back to Clovis’ grandson, according to Bishop Gregory of Tours:

King Chilperic commanded that a large number of Jews be baptized, and he himself held several on the fonts. But many were baptized only in body and not in heart; they soon returned to their deceitful habits, for they really kept the Sabbath, and pretended to honour the Sunday (History of the Franks, chapter V).

Such collective forced conversions, producing only insincere and resentful Christians, were conducted throughout the Middle Ages. Hundreds of thousands of Spanish and Portuguese Jews were forced to convert at the end of the 15th century, before emigrating throughout Europe. Many of these ‘New Christians’ not only continued to ‘Judaize’ among themselves, but could now have greater influence on the ‘Old Christians’. The penetration of the Jewish spirit into the Roman Church, under the influence of these reluctantly converted Jews and their descendants, is a much more massive phenomenon than is generally admitted.

One case in point is the Jesuit Order, whose foundation coincided with the peak of the Spanish repression against Marranos, with the 1547 ‘purity-of-blood’ legislation issued by the Archbishop of Toledo and Inquisitor General of Spain. Of the seven founding members, four at least were of Jewish ancestry. The case of Loyola himself is unclear, but he was noted for his strong philo-Semitism. Robert Markys has demonstrated, in a groundbreaking study, how crypto-Jews infiltrated key positions in the Jesuit Order from its very beginning, resorting to nepotism in order to eventually establish a monopoly on top positions that extended to the Vatican. King Phillip II of Spain called the Order a ‘Synagogue of Hebrews.’[5]

Marranos established in the Spanish Netherlands played an important role in the Calvinist movement. According to Jewish historian Lucien Wolf,

The Marranos in Antwerp had taken an active part in the Reformation movement, and had given up their mask of Catholicism for a not less hollow pretense of Calvinism… The simulation of Calvinism brought them new friends, who, like them, were enemies of Rome, Spain and the Inquisition… Moreover, it was a form of Christianity which came nearer to their own simple Judaism.[6]

Calvin himself had learned Hebrew from rabbis and heaped praise on the Jewish people. He wrote in his commentary on Psalm 119: ‘Where did Our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles draw their doctrine, if not Moses? And when we peel off all the layers, we find that the Gospel is simply an exhibition of what Moses had already said.’ The Covenant of God with the Jewish people is irrevocable because ‘no promise of God can be undone.’ That Covenant, ‘in its substance and truth, is so similar to ours, that we can call them one. The only difference is the order in which they were given.’[7]

Within one century, Calvinism, or Puritanism, became a dominant cultural and political force in England. Jewish historian Cecil Roth explains:

The religious developments of the seventeenth century brought to its climax an unmistakable philo-semitic tendency in certain English circles. Puritanism represented above all a return to the Bible, and this automatically fostered a more favourable frame of mind towards the people of the Old Testament.[8]

Some British Puritans went so far as to consider the Leviticus as still in force; they circumcised their children and scrupulously respected the Sabbath. Under Charles I (1625–1649), wrote Isaac d’Israeli (father of Benjamin Disraeli), ‘it seemed that religion chiefly consisted of Sabbatarian rigours; and that a British senate had been transformed into a company of Hebrew Rabbis.’[9] Wealthy Jews started to marry their daughters into the British aristocracy, to the extent that, according to Hilaire Belloc’s estimate, ‘with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception.’[10]

The influence of Puritanism on many aspects of British society naturally extended to the United States. The national mythology of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ fleeing Egypt (Anglican England) and settling into the Promised Land as the new chosen people, sets the tone. However, the Judaization of American Christianity has not been a spontaneous process from within, but rather one controlled by skillful manipulations from outside. For the 19th century, a good example is the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909 by Oxford University Press, under the sponsorship of Samuel Untermeyer, a Wall Street lawyer, Federal Reserve co-founder, and devoted Zionist, who would become the herald of the ‘holy war’ against Germany in 1933. The Scofield Bible is loaded with highly tendentious footnotes. For example, Yahweh’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 gets a two-thirds-page footnote explaining that ‘God made an unconditional promise of blessings through Abram’s seed to the nation of Israel to inherit a specific territory forever’ (although Jacob, who first received the name Israel, was not yet born). The same note explains that ‘Both OT and NT are full of post-Sinaitic promises concerning Israel and the land which is to be Israel’s everlasting possession,’ accompanied by ‘a curse laid upon those who persecute the Jews,’ or ‘commit the sin of anti-Semitism.’[11]

As a result of this kind of gross propaganda, most American Evangelicals regard the creation of Israel in 1948 and its military victory in 1967 as miracles fulfilling biblical prophecies and heralding the second coming of Christ. Jerry Falwell declared, ‘Right at the very top of our priorities must be an unswerving commitment and devotion to the state of Israel,’ while Pat Robertson said ‘The future of this Nation [America] may be at stake, because God will bless those that bless Israel.’ As for John Hagee, chairman of Christians United for Israel, he once declared: ‘The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.’[12]

Gullible Christians not only see God’s hand whenever Israel advances in its self-prophesized destiny of world domination, but are ready to see Israeli leaders themselves as prophets when they announce their own false-flag crimes.[13]

________

[4] Read Gunnar Heinsohn, “The Restauration of Ancient History” (webpage), “The Revision of Ancient History – A Perspective” (webpage).

[5] Robert A. Markys, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus, Brill, 2009.

[6] Lucien Wolf, Report on the “Marranos” or Crypto-Jews of Portugal, Anglo-Jewish Association, 1926.

[7] Vincent Schmid, “Calvin et les Juifs : Prémices du dialogue judéo-chrétien chez Jean Calvin,” 2008, on www.racinesetsources.ch.

[8] Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (1941), Clarendon Press, 1964, p. 148.

[9] Isaac Disraeli, ‘Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, King of England’, 2 vols., 1851, quoted in Archibald Maule Ramsay, The Nameless War, 1952 (archive.org).

[10] Hilaire Belloc, The Jews, Constable & Co., 1922 (archive.org), p. 223.

[11] Joseph Canfield, The Incredible Scofield and His Book, Ross House Books, 2004, pp. 219–220.

[12] Jill Duchess of Hamilton, God, Guns and Israel: Britain, The First World War And The Jews in the Holy City, The History Press, 2009 , kindle, e. 414-417.

[13] Michael Evans, The American Prophecies, Terrorism and Mid-East Conflict Reveal a Nation’s Destiny.

Categories
Ancient Rome Catholic Church Josephus Judaism Judea v. Rome Nero New Testament

How Yahweh conquered Rome, 4

by Laurent Guyénot

 

The foundation of the Roman church under the Flavian dynasty

In 70, newly proclaimed emperor Vespasian and his son Titus brought to Rome about 97,000 Jewish captives (Josephus, Jewish War vi, 9), as well as members of the Jewish nobility rewarded for their support in the war in Judea—Josephus being the most famous of them.

Soon after, as Josephus started working on his Antiquities of the Jews in 20 volumes, we are told that the Gospels were written.[11]

In the same period, according to standard Church history, we already have in Rome a Christian church, headed by a certain Clement of Rome (88-99). Clement must have been an educated Jew like Josephus, because his only genuine epistle is characterized by numerous Hebraisms, abundant references to the Old Testament, and a Levitical mindset. An ancient and credible tradition makes him a freedman of consul Titus Flavius Clemens, a cousin of the Flavian emperors. We learn from Cassius Dio that Flavius Clemens was executed by Domitian, brother and successor of Titus, for ‘atheism’ and ‘deviation toward Judaic customs.’ His wife Flavia Domitilla was banished to the island of Pandateria (Ventotene). Over time, Flavius Clemens came to be regarded as a Christian martyr, and this gave rise to the idea of Domitian’s persecution of Christians. But historians now dismiss this notion (there is no clearly attested persecution of Christians prior to the middle of the third century),[12] and assume that Flavius Clemens and Flavia Domitilla were simply accused of Judaizing, and the former perhaps of circumcising himself.[13] One of Domitian’s assassins in 96 was a steward of Domitilla named Stephanus, which may suggests a Jewish vengeance.

The attitude of the Flavians towards the Jews was apparently twofold. On the one hand, they seemed determined to do away with the Jewish religion, which they saw, correctly, as the source of Jewish separatism. Not content with having destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, Vespasian also ordered the destruction of the one in Leontopolis, Egypt. In general, the Romans used to integrate the vanquished gods with a ceremony of evocatio deorum, by which the god was granted a sanctuary in Rome. But the god Yahweh was considered inassimilable, which is why his objects of worship were treated as mere booty, according to Emily Schmidt: ‘The treatment of the Jewish god can be seen as an inversion of the typical Roman treatment of or attitude towards foreign gods, perhaps as an anti-evocatio.’[14]

On the other hand, Josephus’ biography shows that Vespasian and Titus were not just merciful, but even grateful to the Jews who had rallied to them in Judea. There is no contradiction between those two aspects of the Flavians’ Jewish policy: they repressed Jewish separatism and forbade Jewish proselytizing but encouraged Jewish assimilation. Assimilationist Jews abandoned circumcision and had no objection to the syncretic assimilation of Yahweh with Zeus or Jupiter. The same basic twofold policy was followed by the Flavians’ successors Trajan (98-117) and Hadrian (117-138).[15]

From these basic facts, and keeping in mind the pattern set by Ezra’s priestly circle in Babylon, it is not difficult to imagine what was going on in Rome in the first century. The theory I’m going to discuss now goes like this. The cornerstone of the Roman Catholic Church was first laid by a secret brotherhood of priestly Jews, who had been brought to Rome by Vespasian and Titus in the aftermath of the Jewish War that destroyed their Temple in 70 AD. Some had gained Vespasian’s favor and protection by handing him the fabulous Temple treasure that made possible his ascension to the imperial throne. Flavius Josephus, who had defected to the Romans in Galilee and was rewarded beyond measure by Vespasian, may have been an influential member of that Jewish circle. Those powerful, wealthy and self-conscious Jews, using assimilation for dissimulation, had the motive, the means and the opportunity to fabricate the syncretic religion that could serve as their Trojan horse.

I borrow this theory from Flavio Barbiero’s book The Secret Society of Moses: The Mosaic Bloodline and a Conspiracy Spanning Three Millennia (2010). The author is not a trained historian, but a scientist with a sharp inquisitive and logical mind combined with a great imagination and a taste for sweeping theories. There is a great deal of speculation in the grand story he unfolds, from Moses to modern times, but it is insightful and consistent. At least it is a good starting point for trying to answer the question of how the Jews created Christianity.

According to that thesis, these priestly Jews brought to Rome by Vespasian and Titus had come to terms with the ruin of their nation and Temple, but they had not given up on their biblical program of Jewish supremacy; they simply reinterpreted it from their new vantage point inside the Empire’s capital. Still jealous of their birth and strictly endogamous, they retained and passed on to their progeny a sense of mission to pave for Israel a new road towards its destiny. Can we not even assume that, under their apparent loyalty to the Emperor, they shared the same hatred of Rome that inspired first-century Jewish texts like the Apocalypses of Ezra and of Baruch?

In Ezra, the roar of the Lion of Judah makes the Roman eagle bursts into flame, and a reunited and free Israel is gathered in Palestine. In Baruch, the Messiah routs and destroys the Roman armies, then brings the Roman emperor in chains to Mount Zion and puts him to death.[16] The same hatred of Rome permeates the Book of Revelation, where Rome, under the thin veil of Babylon, is called the Great Harlot, whose flesh will be consumed by God’s wrath, to make way for a brand new Jerusalem.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: Already from Nietzsche’s texts it was clear that the author of the Book of Revelation was a Jew who hated Rome in a hellish way. If there is one overtly anti-Roman text in the New Testament it is the one attributed to the Jew John of Patmos (not to be confused with John the Evangelist, let alone the fictional figure of John the Apostle).

It was a book written after the destruction of Jerusalem. No wonder the Jew John of Patmos dreamed of a ‘New Jerusalem’ in the final book of the Bible!

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Let us consider, as a working hypothesis, that these Jewish priests had a plan. They adopted the network strategy that had allowed their distant ancestors to infiltrate the Persian court and thereby regain their lost power under the patronage of Ezra. Their goal, according to Flavio Barbiero, was ‘taking possession of the newborn Christian religion and transforming it into a solid power basis for the priestly family’ (p. 146). There existed already a cult of Christ, attested by Paul’s epistles written in the 50s, but the Gospels gave it a completely different orientation in the decades following the destruction of the Temple. The Law-abiding Peter, presented as the head of the Jerusalem Church by the Gospel of Matthew, was made the founder of the Roman papacy in the literature attributed to Clement of Rome, thus establishing a spiritual bond between Rome and Jerusalem.

To get a better understanding of the Jewish community that elaborated these traditions, we must take a closer look at the first Jewish war. In 67, emperor Nero sent his army commander Vespasian to crush the rebellion of the priestly Sadducees who had defied Roman power by banning from the Temple the daily sacrifices offered in the name and at the expense of the Emperor. When, after Nero’s death, Vespasian was declared emperor in December 69, his son Titus was left in Judea to finish putting down the rebellion.

In Book vi of Josephus’ Jewish War we learn that, from the early stage of Titus’ siege of Jerusalem, many Jews went over to the Romans, including ‘heads of the priestly families.’ Titus ‘not only received these men very kindly in other respects, but […] told them, that when he was gotten clear of this war, he would restore each of them to their possessions again.’ Until the last days of the siege, Josephus informs us, some priests obtained safe conduct under the condition that they handed to Titus some of the Temple’s wealth.

One, named Jesus, delivered ‘two candlesticks similar to those that were deposited in the Temple, some tables, some drinking chalices and cups, all of solid gold. He also handed over the curtains [those that were torn as Jesus expired according to Matthew 27:51], the robes of the high priest, with the precious stones and many other objects used for sacrifices.’ Another, named Phineas, introduced by Josephus as ‘the guardian of the Temple treasure,’ handed over ‘the priests’ tunics and belts, a large quantity of purple and scarlet cloth […] and a large quantity of the sacred ornaments, thanks to which, even if he was a prisoner of war, he obtained the amnesty reserved for deserters.’

Those priests obviously bargained their lives and their freedom with parts of the Temple treasure. The Temple was not just a religious sanctuary, it was, in a real sense, a central bank and a giant vault, harboring enormous quantities of gold, silver, and precious artifacts financed by tithes from around the world. One of the purposes of the Temple, we could say, was to satisfy Yahweh’s greed: ‘I shall fill this Temple with glory, says Yahweh Sabaoth. Mine is the silver, mine the gold!’ (Haggai 2:7).[17] According to the Copper Scroll found near the Dead Sea in 1952, the Temple treasure, amounting to tons of gold, silver, and precious items, had been hidden during the siege in 64 locations.[18] So it is logical to assume, as Barbiero does, that Titus and Vespasian were only able to get their hands on it with the help of high-ranking priests.

This huge booty, of which the symbolic centerpiece was the enormous menorah depicted on the Arch of Titus (opening picture), certainly helped Vespasian to earn the acclamation of his troops as emperor, and then to convince the Senate. The construction of the Coliseum, between 70 and 80, was entirely financed by this booty.

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[11] The earliest gospel, the Gospel of Mark, is commonly dated in the late 60s, but that date is much too early, especially since it mentions the destruction of the Temple.

[12] Tacitus wrote in the Annals (xv, 44) that Nero accused Christians of starting the great fire of Rome in 64, and had many of them ‘thrown to the beasts, crucified, and burned alive.’ But this is the only attestation of that story, and some modern scholars have cast doubt on its credibility. Richard Carrier sees it as a later Christian interpolation, and Brent Shaw argues that Nero’s persecution is a myth. There is one other mention of persecution against Christians before the third century, in a letter written to Trajan by Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia (north of Asia Minor). But this letter is of dubious authenticity as well, belonging to a book of 121 letters found in the 16th century, copied, and lost again.

[13] Paul Mattei, Le Christianisme antique: De Jésus à Constantin, Armand Colin, 2011, p. 119.

[14] Emily A. Schmidt, ‘The Flavian Triumph and the Arch of Titus: The Jewish God in Flavian Rome,’ UC Santa Barbara: Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group, 2010.

[15] Trajan is said to have had a pro-Jewish wife, Pompeia Plotina, and he once sentenced to death a Greek dignitary named Hermaiskos for having complained that the emperor’s entourage was ‘full of impious Jews.’ (Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt – From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 193-196). But Hadrian is credited for having banned circumcision, and, when faced in 132 with a new anti-Roman Jewish uprising in Judea, led by Simon bar Kokhba, he destroyed Jerusalem once more, converted it into a Greek city named Aelia Capitolina, and forbade Jews to enter it.

[16] Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Essential Books, 1957, p. 4.

[17] According to 1Kings 10:14, the amount of gold hoarded each year into Salomon’s temple was ‘666 talents of gold’ (1 talent = 30kg). Salomon’s treasure may be legendary, but it illustrates what the Jerusalem Temple still meant for the priests of the first century AD.

[18] Because the Copper Scroll is part of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, which have been wrongly assigned an Essenian origin for decades, its content was long considered fictional. The revision of this misguided theory, pioneered by Norman Golb in Who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls?: The search for the secret of Qumran, Scribner, 1995, has corrected that bias.