Category: Christendom

The PDF of Revilo Oliver’s article
on Christianity is now available here.

A religion for sheep, 1

by Revilo P. Oliver
Published by Liberty Bell Publications in 1980,
under Oliver’s nom de guerre Ralph Perier.

OUR contemporaries are coming to a radically new understanding of the Jewish problem. One by one, and independently of one another, several of our best minds have re-examined the historical record or analysed the forces that are today driving our race to suicide. And each of them has come spontaneously to the conclusion that Christianity was a Jewish invention, devised for the specific purpose of enfeebling and paralysing the civilised peoples of the world, on whom the Jews were preying in antiquity and have preyed ever since.

A century ago, Nietzsche perceived that our civilisation, although it seemed to have an absolute mastery of the whole world, was infected by a degenerative disease, a cancer of the spirit that would destroy it, if our people did not have the intelligence and the fortitude to excise the malignancy. He came to the conclusion that Christianity was a “transvaluation of values,” a mental virus cunningly invented and propagated by the Jews to implement “Jewish vengeance and hatred, – the deepest and sublimest hatred in human history.” Our contemporaries, whether or not they have read the Genealogy of Morals, reason largely from events that have occurred or from historical evidence that became available since Nietzsche’s day. They come to substantially the same conclusion.

The origins of Christianity are extremely obscure. No historical record of its beginnings has survived, and scholars can only draw deductions from the earliest historical references to it and inferences from its confusing and incoherent mythology.

One thing is certain. Christianity was originated by Jews and based on oral traditions about one or, more probably, several of the Jewish agitators and miracle-mongers who bore the extremely common Jewish name of Jesus and called themselves christs. The word ‘christ’ comes from a Greek word that means ‘oil, grease,’ but which was used in the Jews’ uncouth dialect of Greek to mean ‘a messiah,’ that is, a man appointed by the Jews’ tribal god to lead his Chosen barbarians to a definitive victory over the civilised peoples, whom they implacably hated. One of the cleverest tricks of the Fathers of the Church in promoting their cult was to give to non-Jews the impression that ‘christ’ was the name of a person, and even to this day many Christians ignorantly believe that their god was a man who was baptised “Jesus Christ.”

Nietzsche saw that successful promotion of Christianity depended on a pretence of reciprocal hostility between Christians and Jews. It depended on making the Jewish cult, when peddled to the goyim, seem non-Jewish and even anti-Jewish. “Was it not,” he asked, “a necessary feature of a truly brilliant politics of vengeance, a far-sighted, subterranean, slowly and carefully planned vengeance, that Israel had to deny its true instrument publicly and nail him to the cross like a mortal enemy, so that ‘the whole world’ (meaning all the enemies of the Jews) might naively swallow the bait?” This policy, however, produced an unexpected backlash, which was only with difficulty brought under control.

It would take a volume even to summarise the scandalous and scabrous history of Christianity from its known beginnings around the middle of the second century to the triumph of a particularly shrewd and aggressive sect in the fifth century. There were hundreds of sects, each with its own bundle of gospels, peculiar doctrines, and adroit theologians, but among them there were dozens of sects that took seriously the purported antagonism of the Jews to the new religion.

One of the earliest of the Christian sects of which we have some record, and for almost two centuries one of the largest, was the Marcionites. It is noteworthy, by the way, that until quite recently, the earliest extant inscription from a Christian church came from a Marcionite church that was built in 318 and, of course, destroyed when the victorious sect got the power to persecute.

The Marcionites believed that the Jews were “the synagogue of Satan.” They denied that their Jesus had been a Jew. They saw that it was preposterous to claim that an incarnate god could die or would foolishly have himself crucified. They held that it was outrageous to identify the supreme god, who was a just god and loved all mankind, with the capricious, ferocious, and highly immoral god described in the Jews’ story-book, which Christians now call “the Old Testament.” The Marcionites naively thought those stories historical, but regarded them as a chronicle of the crimes perpetrated by the Jews and their supernatural accomplice, a much inferior deity whose abused power the supreme god had justly revoked. Other Christian sects took the logical step of frankly identifying the Jews’ god with Satan. This plausible identification commended itself to goyim who had to live with Jews and suffer their depredations.

We have no means of estimating numbers, but it is possible that early in the third century, taking the numerous sects as a whole, a majority of the Christians repudiated the notion that the wily Jews were God’s People and that the Jesus who was divine could have been a Jew. The anti-Jewish sects, however, appear to have thought of themselves as merely religions and to have believed what was said in their scriptures about love, faith, and peace. Content to believe certain dogmas and to observe rules that would assure them postmortem bliss, they seem to have had no interest in political intrigue and conspiracy, for which they had no talent. So they eventually fell victims to a gang of crafty, ruthless, and tightly-organised theologians, who are now known as the Fathers of the Church and given a prominence they cannot have had in their own time, when they must have appeared to be just another clique of salvation-hucksters.

When the Fathers of the Church finally got their hands on the police powers of the state, doubtless with much covert help from the Jews, they extirpated the anti-Jewish Christians with fire and sword, the natural instruments of Christian love as understood by ambitious holy men. Despite all the pious massacres in the fifth century, the anti-Jewish “heresy” has reappeared from time to time in later ages. It is found today in certain “fundamentalist” churches and, most clearly, in the group of loosely affiliated sects called “British Israel,” whose members probably have never even heard of the Marcionites or their other ancient precursors.

“British Israel” may be another ploy that backfired. It began in England at the time when Disraeli was crawling up to the British Prime Ministry and peerage. In its original form, it taught that the “ten lost tribes” supposedly taken captive by the Assyrians had been Anglo-Saxons, who migrated en masse from Assyrian territory to the British Isles. A handsome genealogy was concocted to show that Queen Victoria was a lineal descendant of a bandit chief named David. It followed, therefore, that God’s Own People, to-wit, the Anglo-Saxons and the Jews, reunited at last after many centuries, should jointly rule the world. That notion, however, imposed too great a strain on even Christian credulity.

Today, the “British Israelites” accept the story that the “ten tribes” were Anglo-Saxons or, at least, Nordics, and hot-footed it from Assyrian territory to the British Isles or, at least, northern Europe. They further claim that the Jesus of Holy Writ was an Aryan, despite his distinctively Jewish name and the distinctively Jewish (or conceivably Egyptian) name of his supposed mother. They rely principally on some of the early Christian forgeries which explicitly describe that Jesus as having had blue eyes and blond hair and beard. They do not use, and seem not to know, the tradition, attested as early as any of the other Christian tales, that one of the Jesuses was the son of a Jewess by a soldier named Pandara/Panthera, who probably was not a Jew and could well have been a Macedonian or other Greek in a Seleucid or Roman army.

We must feel a considerable sympathy for the “British Israelites” of the present. They candidly recognise the Jews as the eternal enemies of our race. They are the best of the Christians and are making a valiant effort to free their religion from its Jewish trammels and make it conducive to the survival of our race. Unfortunately, their doctrine is historically preposterous and, what is even worse, demoralising. It makes our race the accomplices and beneficiaries of the ferocious god, Yahweh, who, according to the “Old Testament,” helped his pets swindle, plunder, torment, and butcher their betters in Egypt and Canaan.