web analytics

Category: Christendom

Categories
Christendom New Testament Old Testament Theology

Gospel Fictions, 2


 
Below, part of Gospel Fictions’ second chapter, “How to begin a Gospel” by Randel Helms (ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages):


A central working hypothesis of this book and one of the most widely held findings in modern New Testament study is that Mark was the first canonical Gospel to be composed and that the authors of Matthew and Luke (and possibly John) used Mark’s Gospel as a written source. As B.H. Streeter has said of this view of Mark:

Its full force can only be realized by one who will take the trouble to go carefully through the immense mass of details which Sir John Hawkins has collected, analyzed, and tabulated (pp. 114-153 of his classic Horae Synopticae). How anyone who has worked through those pages with a synopsis of the Greek text can retain the slightest doubt of the original and primitive character of Mark, I am unable to comprehend… The facts seem only explicable on the theory that each author had before him the Marcan material already embodied in a single document.

When the author of Mark set about writing his Gospel, circa 70 A.D., he did not have to work in an intellectual or literary vacuum. The concept of mythical biography was basic to the thought-process of his world, both Jewish and Graeco-Roman, with an outline and a vocabulary already universally accepted: a heavenly figure becomes incarnate as a man and the son of a deity, enters the world to perform saving acts, and then returns to heaven. In Greek, the lingua franca of the Mediterranean world, such a figure was called a “savior” (soter), and the statement of his coming was called “gospel” or “good news” (euangelion). For example, a few years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the Provincial Assembly of Asia Minor passed a resolution in honor of Caesar Augustus:

…in giving to us Augustus Caesar, whom it [Providence] filled with virtue [arete] for the welfare of mankind, and who, being sent to us and to our descendents as a savior [soter]… and whereas, finally that the birthday of the God (viz, Caesar Augustus) has been for the whole world the beginning of the gospel [euangelion] concerning him, therefore, let all reckon a new era beginning from the date of his birth.

A few years earlier, Horace wrote an ode in honor of the same Caesar Augustus which presents him as an incarnation of the god Mercury and outlines the typical pattern of mythical biography: Descent as a son of a god appointed by the chief deity [Jupiter] to become incarnate as a man, atonement, restoration of sovereignty, ascension to heaven—a gospel indeed, and so the pattern of the Christian Gospels!

(The divine emperor. When a Roman emperor died he was traditionally regarded as having become god. Here Claudius, in life a timid man with a stutter and a limp, has been transformed into Jupiter, Vatican Museum, Rome.)

The standard phrase “the beginning of the gospel” (arche tou euangeliu) of Caesar (or whomever) seems to have been widespread in the Greco-Roman world. A stone from the marketplace of Priene in Asia Minor reads: “The birthday of the god (Augustus) was for the world the beginning of euangelion because of him.” Mark uses the same formula to open his book: “The beginning of the gospel (arche tou euangeliu) of Jesus Christ the son of God [theou hyios].” Even the Greek phrase “son of god” was commonly used for Augustus. On a marble pedestal from Pergamum is craved: “The Emperor Caesar, son of God [theou hyios], god Augustus.” Mark begins his mythical biography of Jesus with ready-made language and concepts, intending perhaps a challenge: euangelion is not of Caesar but of Christ!

The early Christians could have found out what we would call historical information about Jesus, but in fact they did not. Neither Mark nor anyone else in the Christian community (perhaps circa 70 A.D. Rome) had been in Palestine at the time; all the participants were now dead, and Mark had a book to write.

Certainly, there lived a Jesus of Nazareth, who was baptized in the Jordan by John, who taught, in imitation of John, that “the kingdom of God is upon you” (Mark, 1:15); and who was killed by the Romans as a potentially dangerous fomentor of revolution. Of the outline of Jesus’ life itself, this is just about all that Mark knew. Mark possessed a good many fictional (and some non-fictional) stories about Jesus and a small stock of sayings attributed to him, and he incorporated them in his Gospel; but he had no idea of their chronological order beyond the reasonable surmise that the baptism came at the beginning of the ministry and the crucifixion at the end. Mark is, in other words, not a biography; its outline of Jesus’ career is fictional and the sequence has thematic and theological significance only. As Norman Perrin bluntly puts it, “The outline of the Gospel of Mark has no historical value.”

Mark certainly knew what to put first: “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). But Mark’s beginning comes when Jesus is already a grown man only a few months away from death. His Gospel says nothing about Jesus’ birth or childhood, has almost no meaningful chronology, presents very little of Jesus’ moral teaching (no Sermon of the Mount, no parables of the Prodigal Son or Good Samaritan), and has a spectacularly disappointed ending: the Resurrection, announced only by a youth, is witnessed by no one, and the women who were told about it “say nothing to anybody, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). End of Gospel.

Mark wrote some forty years after the Crucifixion, when Jesus was already rapidly becoming a figure of legend. John the Baptist presented genuine problems. Since the baptism made John look like the mentor of Jesus and the initiator of his career, the Baptist had to be demoted, but not too much; the initiator became the forerunner. Mark’s method of performing that demotion is fascinating because, paradoxically, it does in fact the opposite, and had to be corrected, three different ways, by the other three evangelists.

The baptism itself was the first awkward fact. Ordinarily, John’s baptism stood as a sign that one had repented of sin: “A baptism in token of repentance, for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4). It appears not to have troubled Mark that he presented Jesus as a repentant sinner. There is no hint in Mark’s first chapter that Jesus was in any way the Son of God before his baptism; indeed, there is the clear hint that at least Mark’s source, if not Mark himself, held the “adoptionist” theology.

(Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist, from a fifth century mosaic in Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Ravenna. Note Jesus’ nudity and his youthful, beardless face.)

All things considered, Mark does not begin his story of Jesus very satisfactorily. Indeed, within two or three decades of Mark’s completion, there were at least two, and perhaps three, different writers (or Christian groups) who felt the need to produce an expanded and corrected version. Viewed from their perspective, the Gospel of Mark has some major shortcomings: It contains no birth narrative, it implies that Jesus, a repentant sinner, became the Son of God only at his baptism; it recounts no resurrection appearances; and it ends with the very unsatisfactory notion that the women who found the Empty Tomb were too afraid to speak to anyone about it.

Moreover, Mark includes very little of Jesus’ teachings; worse yet (from Matthew’s point of view), he even misunderstood totally the purpose of Jesus’ use of parables [see below]. Indeed, by the last two decades of the first century, Mark’s theology seemed already old-fashioned and even slightly suggestive of heresy. So, working apparently without knowledge of each other, within perhaps twenty or thirty years after Mark, two authors (or Christian groups), now known to us as “Mathew” and “Luke” (and even a third, in the view of some—“John”) set about rewriting and correcting the first unsatisfactory Gospel. In their respective treatments of the baptism one obtains a good sense of their methods.

Mark had used his source uncritically, not bothering to check its scriptural accuracy. But Mathew used his source—the Gospel of Mark—with a close critical eye, almost always checking its references to the Old Testament and changing them when necessary, in this case dropping the verse from Malachi wrongly attributed to Isaiah and keeping only what was truly Isaianic. [Mark writes as if he quotes Isaiah 40:3 but his verse is a misquotation of Malachi 3:1]

Mathew disliked Mark’s perhaps careless implication that Jesus was just another repentant sinner, so he carefully tones it down, inventing a little dramatic scene. When Jesus

came to John to be baptized by him, John tried to dissuade him. “Do you come to me?” he said. “I need rather to be baptized by you.” Jesus replied, “Let it be so for the present; it is suitable to conform in this way all that God requires.” John then allowed him come. (Matt. 3:13-15)

This scene is found in no other Gospel and indeed contains two words (diekoluen, “dissuade”; prepon, “suitable”) found nowhere else in the New Testament. The verses are Matthew’s own composition, created to deal with his unease at Mark’s implication about the reason Jesus was baptized—not as a repentant sinner but to fulfill a divine requirement. Why God should require Jesus to be baptized, Mathew does not say.

Like Mathew, Luke was also unhappy with Mark’s account of the baptism and made, in his own way, similar changes. The Fourth Gospel takes an extreme way of dealing with the embarrassment of Jesus’ baptism by John: you will find there no statement that Jesus ever was baptized.

Developing theology creates fictions. Moreover, each gospel implicitly argues the fictitiousness of the others. As Joseph Hoffman has put it, “Every gospel is tendentious in relation to any other.” This is especially true with regard to Mark and the Gospels—Mathew and Luke in particular—intended to render Mark obsolete. The fictionalizing of Mark is one of the implicit purposes of the First and Third Gospels, whose writers used what were probably, in their communities, rare or even unique copies of Mark and who clearly expected that no more would be heard of Mark after their own Gospels were circulated. We do an injustice, Hoffman notes, “to the integrity of the Gospels when we imagine that these four ever intended to move into the same neighborhood.”

This becomes quite clear, for example, in two synoptic scenes describing Jesus’ telling the parable of the sower and the seed:

When he was alone, the Twelve and others who were round him questioned him about the parables. He replied, “To you the secret of the kingdom of God has been given; but to those who are outside, everything comes by way of parables, so that (as Scripture says) they may look and look, but see nothing. They may hear and hear, but understand nothing; otherwise they might turn to God and be forgiven.” (Mark 4:10-12)

It is not difficult to imagine Mathew reading this passage, scratching his head, and wondering how Mark could so totally misunderstood the purpose of a parable—a small story intended to illuminate an idea, not obscure it. But Mark was a gentile, living perhaps in Rome; and though he clearly knew little of the tradition of Jewish rabbinic parabolic teaching, he was familiar with Greek allegorical writing, which was often used to present esoteric ideas in mystifying form. Mathew, on the other hand, was a Hellenistic Jewish Christian who knew perfectly well that a rabbi’s parables were intended to elucidate, not obfuscate. Yet, here was Mark clearly insisting that Jesus’ parables were meant to prevent people’s understanding his message or being forgiven by God: a passage, moreover, that cites Scripture to prove its point.

We can imagine Mathew’s relief when he checked the reference in the Old Testament and found that Mark had got it wrong. Actually, Mark’s citation of Isa. 6:9-10 agrees with the Aramaic version rather than with the Septuagint, but Mathew went to the latter for his quotation, which allowed him completely to change the point of Jesus’ statement. Jesus speaks in parables to enhance people’s understanding, insists Mathew, not to prevent it. That Mark’s account of the scene is simply wrong is Mathew’s implication [see Matt. 13:10-15].

Mathew and Luke found that one way of dealing with the Sonship question lay in the nativity legends already circulating about Jesus: he was the Son of God because God impregnated his mother. Both Mathew and Luke added birth narratives to their revisions of Mark, basing them on legends quite irreconcilable with each other. The next chapter examines these nativity legends.

Categories
Ancient Rome Catholic Church Christendom Inquisition Judeo-reductionism Miscegenation

With and without Jews: The same old story

Or:

There are other histories and pre-histories
besides the American story



In a recent article at Counter Currents George Hocking said:

The current tendency of American whites to embrace their self-destruction clearly resembles past suicide cults but is a phenomenon on such a vastly larger scale that it even dwarfs the fratricidal slaughter of World War I trench warfare. Its origins are no mystery since Kevin MacDonald thoroughly and brilliantly described them. They are almost entirely a direct consequence of a Jewish Establishment and its supporters gaining increasing dominance of American intellectual discourse and media during the last century.

This is what in my recent posts I have called “monocausalism,” the belief that there’s nothing wrong with us and that the Jews are the main culprits of the runaway liberalism that is destroying the West (“almost entirely a direct consequence of a Jewish Establishment”).

In a sense American monocausalists are right: the Jewish influence on American society has been overwhelming and ubiquitous. And it has been a malign influence. The trouble I see with monocausalism is perspective and meta-perspective.

Perspective

Monocausalists focus almost exclusively in the United States of the 20th and 21st centuries. On the other hand, I include the history of Latin America, where the native Iberian Spaniards and the criollos (pure Iberian whites born in the Americas) sans Jews betrayed their ethnicity through massive mestization.

The beauty of studying the history of the Americas conquered by the Spanish and the Portuguese is that, since the Jews were ruthlessly persecuted and literally eliminated by The Inquisition, it is not possible to blame them for what happened on this side of the continent. (For an introduction to a racial history of the blunders committed in New Spain by people of pure European origin see this brief piece that I translated for Counter-Currents.)

Monocausalists are not only myopic about what happened throughout the whole subcontinent conquered by the Spanish and the Portuguese, but of what happened at the other side of the Atlantic as well. The story of the Spanish conquests in the Americas is not the only story that can be described as “ethno-suicidal without the Jews.” Yesterday I purchased a copy of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and it surprised me to learn that Gibbon starts his history from the 1st century of the Common Era, when Rome was at its apex and when, at the same time, an embryonic cult was formed in one of Rome’s provinces, the Jesus cult. (I look forward to read the six volumes of Gibbon’s magnum opus, which surely will give me ammunition to annotate what I have already said about Porphyry and Julian.)

Meta-perspective

The fall not only of the Greco-Roman world in Europe but also of the Roman Empire at the East is another textbook case of the suicidal tendencies among the white people where Jews, who were emancipated only after the French Revolution, cannot be blamed either. (Burning whole libraries of classical knowledge, as the Christians did once they reached political power, was nothing short of cultural suicide.) What I find most intriguing is that people like Hocking are completely missing that MacDonald, in addition to his approach to the Jewish Question, has laid the basis for a scientific understanding of our suicidal traits in his studies about “altruistic punishment” and our “out-group altruism”: inseparable traits from the mental causes of why Whites emancipated the Jews in the first place. Studying the white psyche beyond history, well into prehistory, as MacDonald and others are starting to do, is what I would call “meta-perspective.”

What I am trying to say is extremely simple: to understand the white people there are more histories than the American history or the Jewish influence in Europe since the 19th century. Never forget the history of Rome, the history of Spain, let alone how the white psyche was formed in the glacial eras…

My family’s priest

I would like to end this entry with a personal vignette.

This photo, that I uploaded for the Wikipedia article of Fr. Joaquín Sáenz y Arriaga, was taken during my First Communion of May 12, 1966. As can be read in the Wikipedia article, Fr. Sáenz was a harsh critic of the Second Vatican Council and of the post-conciliar popes; was declared excommunicated in 1972, and presently is considered one of the founders of sedevacantism.

Fr. Sáenz, who died in 1976 not very far from my home, helped my father to study music in Madrid thanks to his old Jesuits friends in Spain. Fr. Sáenz also celebrated the mass of the wedding of my parents, baptized me and blessed my home of the Street Palenque at Mexico City (I have a super-8 homely film registering the event). What the Wikipedia article omits is that Fr. Sáenz abhorred that the Second Vatican Council made official peace between the Catholic Church and Jewry after centuries of enmity. After the council, Fr. Sáenz started to see Jews everywhere, even Jewish symbols on the Pope’s chasubles. At the Archdiocese of Mexico City the late Fr. Faustino Cervantes Ibarrola once told me that Fr. Sáenz “estaba trastornado” (“became a disturbed person”).

I mention all this because Fr. Sáenz was both right and wrong. I very much doubt that Paul VI wore malicious Jewish symbols at his chasubles, which reminds me the monocausalists’ paranoia of smelling Jews under every stone and even labeling “Jew” anyone whom they strongly disagree with (I myself was once called “Jew” in a featured article at Majority Rights… because I don’t believe that the Mossad orchestrated 9/11!). But Fr. Sáenz, like Mel Gibson’s father—another sedevacantist—, was certainly right that something horrible wrong happened in the Church after the council.

Of course: I have lost my Christian faith since Fr. Sáenz gave me the communion and am not approaching the subject from a sedevacantist viewpoint. To my present mind, both pre-Council and post-Council Catholicism are possibly legit interpretations of Christian doctrine (“Catholic,” it must be remembered, means “universal”). Both Torquemada and St Francis may be considered legitimate interpreters, albeit opposite, of the New Testament and the legacy of the Church Fathers.

Finally, I must say that my childhood memories of Fr. Sáenz’s lovely home, which I recount in Hojas Susurrantes, are nothing but idyllic.

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Christendom Friedrich Nietzsche Hojas Susurrantes (book) Psychology

A Christian troll

Usually I don’t respond to trolling. But these days I got a terrible toothache and lost my patience. So here we go.

In my previous post a native German speaker (see how he uses quotation marks below), Thomas Fink, said in a comment that I didn’t allow to pass:

I checked occasionally into Chechar when I came across him on his journey from Larry Auster into eternity. He had a lot of conversions and recently he converted from the „jewish problem“ to the „Christian problem“.

“Conversion” is the wrong word here. I knew that there was a big Christian Problem since, as a young boy, my father’s doctrine of eternal damnation caused havoc in my worldview, and by 1976 I read Nietzsche for the first time in my life. Hardly can such an old critique of Christianity that gradually matured in my mind be called a sudden “conversion.”

As to the Jewish Problem, “conversion” is the wrong word too. A few years ago I didn’t know that the Jew Yagoda and his Jewish henchmen killed more innocent Whites than the millions of slaughtered Jews attributed to Himmler by orthodox historians. Awakening up to the facts of history—the Bolshevik Jews, not the Germans, started the genocide—is no “conversion,” but an awakening from the matrix of political correctness.

Fink’s trolling continues:

He is obviously a psychologically very troubled person, who was himself quite frank about this.

One of the reasons that I didn’t let Fink’s comment appear in the thread where it was posted, but instead added it as a whole new entry here, is because this is the second time that an angry Christian insults me in the last few days with sentences similar to the above: a perfect inversion of reality.

Why is this is a perfect inversion of reality? Because those who were abused in their childhood or adolescence and speak out vehemently about the abuse as adults are the sanest humans in the world.

Fink should know better, since a native German speaker, the Swiss psychologist Alice Miller, devoted her entire literary career to demonstrate why those who speak out about the abuse are infinitely saner than those who, following the accepted norms of conduct, repress their traumas. I wrote a book on the subject, the third of my Hojas Susurrantes, and cannot discuss this complex subject here (but you can take a look at my other blog, Fallen Leaves).

The Christian troll continues:

I do not think that it is ad hominem to link his anti Christianity with his upbringing as a Catholic and psychologically not resolved problems [my emphasis] with his Catholic parents, documented by himself.

This is an obvious lie. Fink simply has not read my Hojas Susurrantes. He doesn’t know, therefore, how “resolved” or “unresolved” my inner psyche might be.

Fink’s implicit commandment, Thou Shalt Not Talk About Your Abusive Parents, is the flawed implicit commandment of millions upon millions of psychologically dissociated humans: If you publicly talk about your traumatizing childhood or adolescence you must be a dissociated adult. In other words, our society only allows the victim of parental abuse to keep absolutely quiet about his or her life, or perhaps speak only in the privacy of a so-called therapist office. This is exactly why many neuroses and most psychoses cannot be healed by psychotherapy (besides Alice Miller’s work see also Jeffrey Masson’s).

The troll continues:

If someone works in the field of pure logic it is possible to detach the results of his work from his way of living but in the field of religion and social science your personal conduct [Chechar’s], who you are and where you came from is important, even if you can citate [sic] [Karlheinz] Deschner and write coherent sentences in a seemingly detached manner.

You see? Zero arguments.

Fink seems to be saying that because like Deschner—the German scholar who authored the multivolume Criminal History of Christianity—I feel passionate about Christianity, I must be emotionally unbalanced. In other words: I am not allowed to emotionally rebel openly and publicly against, say, the doctrine of eternal torture that my father used against me when I was a little boy.

Nope! You just cannot rebel publicly! Go to the therapist’s office instead! Otherwise that would be “personal conduct” reflecting “unresolved” emotional issues.

This grotesque line of reasoning is like asking Solzhenitsyn to write a “detached” Gulag Archipelago with no mention of any of Solzhenitsyn’s personal suffering he endured in the Gulag System. According to Fink’s logic, should we also call Solzhenitsyn “obviously a psychologically very troubled person” because he dared to speak out publicly using his own life experiences?

Let’s continue with the troll’s comment:

So it is of significance that Chechar and most of the anti Christian right circle around the thinking of a compulsive masturbator who went certifiably mad, that is Nietzsche.

In the last few days, because of his tragic death, I did a little research into the life of another Nietzsche fan, that is Jonathan Bowden. He was a great orator, but he was also a very troubled person, I could sense this on the spot. This is, by the way an ability I have. There is a lot of talk now, that Jonathan only was so great, because he was always on the edge. Maybe. But by definition, everyone who is „on the edge“ is troubled by unresolved sin. And I will never be part of a movement which is dominated by people like this. And this definition of troubled persons includes by the way also many persons who call themselves Christian.

I cannot speak of Bowden’s life, but I have read thick volumes by German authors about the life of Nietzsche, and neither Curt Paul Janz nor Werner Ross ever used the word “sin” against the poor philosopher.

Yes, Nietzsche went mad after his cataclysmic breakdown of  January 3, 1889, and never recovered his powerful intellect. A tragedy. But I remember my High School lesson of logic so well! It is a classic ad hominem to dismiss all of Nietzsche’s work prior to 1889 because of what happened to the poor man in and after that year.

Listen to the troll:

In fact this whole anti Christianity boils down to a graffiti on a wall near the Catholic Church in my small German town, which translates as: „Get the bible out of my head!“ which translates as: Get the law of nature out of my head! And that is what Nietzsche found out the hard way: you cannot redefine sin as virtue and live a happy life thereafter. It is not possible, because Gods [sic] law is natures [sic] law, and every unresolved sin will rot in you and make your life miserable.

What a personal and fallacious way of dismissing our arguments! I won’t speak of Nietzsche here, but can speak of me.

Fink simply does not address any of the arguments I have presented so far critical of Christianity. Not a single one. He reminds me of Fjordman, who got mad at another blogger, Tanstaafl, and me when we dared to point out to some philo-Semitic counter-jihadists that besides the Muslim Problem we have a Jewish Problem throughout the West. Half-Jew Fjordman never advanced any argument whatsoever in his many “replies” in the commentariat section of the counter-jihad site. Instead, he insulted Tanstaafl and lied about me.

Fink’s ad hominem stance is so self-defeating that, instead of indulging myself with the last word, I better reproduce his last sentence and leave his comment hanging:

For the non believer the only way out of this dilemma is suicide which now becomes fashionable as antinatalism or the way of the Marquis the Sade which is open rebellion against God by the way of torture and murder.

Categories
Christendom Literature New Testament Old Testament St Paul

Gospel Fictions, 1


 
Below, excerpts of Randel Helms’ Gospel Fictions’ first chapter, “The Art of the Gospels: Theology as Fictional Narrative” (ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages):


I shall use the word “fiction” rather than “myth” to refer to the study, contained in this book, of the fictional aspects of the four canonical Gospels.

I write as literary critic, not as debunker. The Gospels are, it must be said with gratitude, works of art, the supreme fictions in our culture. Literary artists use their imaginations to produce poetry and fiction, works open to the methods of literary criticism. This literature was oral before it was written and began with the memories of those who knew Jesus personally.

Their memories and teachings were passed on as oral tradition for some forty years or so before achieving written form for the first time in a self-conscious literary work, so far as we know, in the Gospel of Mark, within a few years of 70 A.D.

Luke was obviously writing during a time when literature about Jesus was flowering. Paul was an ecstatic visionary who experienced, for what seems to be a period of nearly thirty years after the death of Jesus, visions of a heavenly being he called “Christ” and “the Lord,” and the fact is that neither Paul nor any other first-century Christian felt a need to distinguish between the heavenly being and the “historical Jesus.”

What is surprising is the great differences among the stories, even though they share, for the most part, similar sources. For example, according to Matthew and Mark, the dying words of Jesus were, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” According to Luke, Jesus’ dying words were “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” But according to John, they were, “It is accomplished.” To put it another way, we cannot know what the dying words of Jesus were, or even whether he uttered any. It is not that we have too little information, but that we have too much. Each narrative implicitly argues that the others are fictional. In this case at least, it is inappropriate to ask of the Gospels what “actually” happened; they may pretend to be telling us, but the effort remains a pretense, a fiction.

We are, with these scenes, in the literary realm known as fiction, in which narratives exist less to describe the past than to affect the present. In De Quincy’s phrase, the Gospels are not so much literature of knowledge as literature of power. As in the case mentioned above, the content of the Gospels is frequently not “Jesus” but “what certain persons in the first century wanted us to think about Jesus.” In the language of the Fourth Gospel, “Those [narratives] here written have been recorded in order that you may hold the faith that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31).

The Gospels are Hellenistic religious narratives in the tradition of the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament, which constituted the “Scriptures” to those Greek-speaking Christians who wrote the four canonical Gospels and who appealed to it, explicitly or implicitly, in nearly every paragraph they wrote. A simple example is the case of the last words of Christ. Mark presents these words in self-consciously realistic fashion, shifting from his usual Greek into the Aramaic of Jesus, transliterated into Greek letters Eloi eloi lama sabachthanei (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?—Mark 15:34). Mark gives us no hint that Jesus is “quoting” Psalm 22:1; we are clearly to believe that we are hearing the grieving outcry of a dying man.

But the author of Matthew, who used Mark as one of his major written sources, is self-consciously “literary” in both this and yet another way. Though using Mark as his major source for the passion story, Matthew is fully aware that Mark’s crucifixion narrative is based largely on the Twenty-second Psalm, fully aware, that is, that Mark’s Gospel is part of a literary tradition (this description would not be Matthew’s vocabulary, but his method is nonetheless literary).

Aware of the tradition, Matthew concerned himself with another kind of “realism” or verisimilitude. When the bystanders heard Jesus crying, according to Mark, to “Eloi,” they assumed that “he is calling Elijah [Eleian]” (Mark 15:35). But Matthew knew that no Aramaic speaker present at the Cross would mistake a cry to God (Eloi) for one to Elijah—the words are too dissimilar. So Matthew self-consciously evoked yet another literary tradition in the service both of verisimilitude and of greater faithfulness to the Scriptures: not the Aramaic of Psalm 22:1 but the Hebrew, which he too transliterated into Greek—Eli Eli (Matt. 27:46)—a cry which could more realistically be confused with “Eleian.”

Luke is even more self-conscious literary and fictive than Matthew in his crucifixion scene. Though, as I have said, he knew perfectly well what Mark had written as the dying words of Jesus, he created new ones more suitable to his understanding of what the death of Jesus meant—an act with at least two critical implications. First, that he has thus implicitly declared Mark’s account a fiction; second, that he self-consciously presents his own as a fiction. For like Matthew, Luke 23:46 deliberately placed his own work in the literary tradition by quoting Psalm 30 (31):5 in the Septuagint as the dying speech of Jesus: “Into your hands I will commit my spirit” (eis cheiras sou parathsomai to pneuma mou), changing the verb from future to present (paratihemai) to suit the circumstances and leaving the rest of the quotation exact.

This is self-conscious creation of literary fiction, creation of part of a narrative scene for religious and moral rather than historical purposes. Luke knew perfectly well, I would venture to assert, that he was not describing what happened in the past; he was instead creating an ideal model of Christian death, authorized both by doctrine and by literary precedent.

First-century Christians believed that the career of Jesus, even down to minor details, was predicted in their sacred writings. By a remarkably creative fiat of interpretation, the Jewish scriptures (especially in Greek translation) became a book that had never existed before, the Old Testament, a book no longer about Israel but about Israel’s hope, the Messiah, Jesus. Northrop Frye nicely sums up this self-reflexive aspect of the two Testaments as early Christians saw them:

How do we know that the Gospel story is true? Because it confirms the prophecies of the Old Testament. But how do we know that the Old Testament prophecies are true? Because they are confirmed by the Gospel story. Evidence, so called, is bounced back and forth between the testaments like a tennis ball; and no other evidence is given us. The two testaments form a double mirror, each reflecting the other but neither the world outside.

A voice, for example, in the (now) “Old” Testament became by interpretative fiat the voice of Jesus. When the psalmist wrote “My flesh shall rest in hope: because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see corruption” (Psalms 15 [16]:9-10 LXX), it was in fact not “really” the psalmist speaking, but Jesus, a thousand years before his birth. As Luke has Peter say, in interpreting these verses to the crowd at Pentecost:

Let me tell you plainly, my friends, that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this very day. It is clear therefore that he spoke as a prophet… and when he said he was not abandoned to death, and his flesh never suffered corruption, he spoke with foreknowledge of the resurrection of the Messiah (Acts 2:29-31).

By fiat of interpretation, a psalm becomes a prophecy. David becomes Jesus.

We see a two-stage creative process here: first, the psalm is turned into a prophetic minidrama; then the interpretation of the psalm becomes another dramatic scene: Peter explaining it to the multitude. That the fictive creative act is Luke’s, and not Peter’s, is clear from the Greek of the scene: Luke has Peter quote, fairly loosely, as if from memory, the Septuagint Greek text of Psalms (though the historical Peter spoke Aramaic and needed, Christian tradition tells us, a Greek interpreter). The point of Luke’s interpretation depends on the Greek texts of the verse, not on the Hebrew. The Hebrew text of Psalm 16:10b has something like: “nor suffer thy faithful servant to see the pit,” which stands in simple parallelism to the first line of the distich, “Thou will not abandon me to Sheol” —that is, you will not allow me to die. The Greek text could, however, be taken to mean “You will not let me remain in the grave, nor will you let me rot.”

Peter’s speech is an effective work of dramatic fiction, the culmination of a complex two-stage creative process. Luke, as we shall see, creates the same kinds of dramatic fictions in his Gospel, the first half of the Christian history that includes his Acts of the Apostles.

Invention of that kind is the subject of this book.

Categories
Axiology Christendom Demography

Christian axiology: the enemy within

I didn’t comply with what I said in a previous post: that I would ignore further discussion with White Nationalist Christians (WNCs) at The Occidental Observer and refrain myself to offer my views in this blog, because I continued to discuss there a little bit more.

Although the author of the article in question has studied the Bible in formal courses, he and the WNCs of the ongoing debate seem to be ignorant of the devastating results arrived by New Testament scholarship.

In the next entry I will reproduce excerpts from the first chapter of Randel Helm’s Gospel Fictions and, hopefully, in the subsequent entries I will reproduce passages of the rest of Helm’s book.

Presently I don’t have internet connection at home. I am writing this entry in my bedroom and will post it tonight in the nearest internet café that’s still open on this Mexican holiday of May 5th. But before doing it I’d would like to respond here to what a WNC commenter told me in the above-mentioned thread. Without connection I can’t quote him (and I hate to do any serious writing with the browns beside me in the café), but he criticized me by claiming that my Nazi stance was just Judaism in reverse, and that good Christians ought not to be that racist.

Well, I live in Mexico City, a metropolis with more than 20 million people, most of them of brown skin color. And this day I am dismayed to see that the Mexican celebration of 5 of May is now almost official in Obama’s America. Taking into account that you will be a persecuted minority in your own nation, wouldn’t something like the Nuremberg Laws have been good for Americans had you allowed Germany to defeat the Bolsheviks?

The reason that in the next entries I’ll take the trouble of typing excerpts of Helm’s Gospel Fictions is simple: I believe that Christianity must be debunked. I believe that Christian axiology is to blame for the creation of such a depressing sea of Untertmenschen here in the Big City and elsewhere in the Third World.

While WNCs concur with counter-jihadists that non-white immigration into the West is the main symptom of the elites’ treason toward our people, their diagnosis is epidermal. Beneath the skin rash of treason lies a metastasis that has been eating the organs of people of European origin for centuries. That infection has been comprehensibly explained in a long entry reproduced in this blog, “The Red Giant” where a Swede criticized Christianity:

People here at Gates of Vienna focus on the immigration problem. But mass immigration is just the local projection of this much larger and more fundamental problem of which I’m talking of here, that is, the planetary population explosion and our attitudes towards it (which also caused it). It won’t help to address the immigration problem without addressing this global problem. That is, it won’t help to be a lonely, purely Polish, if surrounded by Arabs, Pakistanis and Africans all along the border.

What is happening across the world is the large-scale version of what is happening within our countries. Our relative numbers are diminishing by theirs increasing exponentially, in both cases.

But Christian ethics cannot stand the sight of little brown children dying. They must help them, or they will freak out. They cannot keep their fingers away.

For the very same reason that Christian ethics abhors [abortion and] infanticide, it causes the population explosion in the world. It’s a deeply held doctrine within Christian ethics that every single human life across the planet must be saved if possible. According to Christian ethics it is forbidden and unthinkable to think in terms of not saving every little brown child across the planet [through Western medicine, vaccinations, hygienic advances imported from the West, etc.]. But the consequences of this mindset are catastrophic, not only for us but also for them, as I have already explained. But since people are so programmed according to Christian ethics, what I’m saying does not seem to enter their heads. The thought is too unthinkable to be absorbed. It’s an utter taboo.

At this point it wouldn’t help putting back god and Christ into the equation. Instead we need to leave Christian ethics.

My fellow WNCs:

You better start leaving Christian ethics altogether and let the brown babies, without further help from the First World, start dying like flies as infant mortality rates were so common before the deranged altruists arrived from the Eastern coast. Otherwise the swarm of Neanderthals that I am about to suffer when I step outside my home’s entry door en route to the café will reach, and eventually conquer, the rest of your lands at the north of Río Grande…

Categories
Christendom Jesus

White nationalist Christians—in a nutshell

“Yes, I understand that you’re an anti-Semite who worships a Jew.”

—Fender


Categories
Ancient Greece Arcadia Architecture Art Arthur C. Clarke Beauty Child abuse Christendom Civilisation (TV series) Counter-Reformation Demography Free speech / association Friedrich Nietzsche Homosexuality Industrial Revolution Islamization of Europe Kali Yuga Kenneth Clark Mainstream media Martin Luther Michelangelo Montaigne New York Philosophy Philosophy of history Protestantism Real men Reformation Rembrandt St Francis William Shakespeare

On Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation”

Kenneth Clark may have been clueless about the fact that race matters. Yet, that our rot goes much deeper than what white nationalists realize is all too obvious once we leave, for a while, the ghetto of nationalism and take a look at the classics, just as Clark showed us through his 1969 TV series Civilisation.

Compared to the other famous series, Clark’s was unsurpassed in the sense that, as I have implied elsewhere, only genuine art—not science—has a chance to fulfill David Lane’s fourteen words.

By “art” I mean an evolved sense of beauty which is almost completely absent in today’s nationalists. Most of them are quite a product of Jewish modernity whether with their music, lifestyles or Hollywood tastes, to a much greater degree than what they think. For nationalism to succeed an evolved sense of female beauty has to be the starting point to see the divine nature of the white race. In Clark’s own words, “For all these reasons I think it is permissible to associate the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy that one finds in the madonnas of the thirteenth century. Were there ever more delicate creatures than the ladies on Gothic ivories? How gross, compared to them, are the great beauties of other woman-worshiping epochs.”

Below, links to excerpts of most of the chapters of the 1969 series, where Clark followed the ups and downs of our civilisation historically:

“The Skin of our Teeth”

“The Great Thaw”

“Romance and Reality”

“Man—the Measure of all Things”

“The Hero as Artist”

“Protest and Communication”

“Grandeur and Obedience”

“The Light of Experience”

“Heroic Materialism”

Categories
Art Christendom Christian art Civilisation (TV series) Counter-Reformation Friedrich Nietzsche Inquisition Kenneth Clark Michelangelo Painting

Civilisation’s “Grandeur and Obedience”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “Grandeur and Obedience,” the seventh chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, and my brief comment.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:


In my previous post criticizing Erasmus I mentioned how the modern mind is too coward to approach the main psychosis of Christendom, the doctrine of hell. Unlike the previous entries on Civilisation, of the episode about the Counter-Reformation I’ll barely quote the essentials to annotate what I have just said in that post. Clark said:

The first thing that strikes one is that those who say that the Renaissance had exhausted the Italian genius are wide off the mark. After 1527 there was a failure of confidence; and no wonder. Historians may say that the Sack of Rome was more a symbol than a historically significant event: well, symbols sometimes feed the imagination more than facts—anyway the Sack was real enough to anyone who witnessed it.

If you compare the lower part of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, which was commissioned by Clement VII as a kind of atonement for the Sack, with a group in Raphael’s Disputa or with the Creation of Adam, you can see that something very drastic has happened to the imagination of Christendom.

Michelangelo had been reluctant to undertake the Last Judgement; under Clement’s successor, Pope Paul II, he was persuaded to continue it although with a rather different purpose. It ceased to be an act of atonement, or an attempt to externalise a bad dream, and became the first and greatest assertion of the Church’s power, and of the fate that would befall heretics and schismatics. It belongs to a period of severity, when the Catholic Church was approaching its problems in rather the same puritanical spirit as the Protestants.

Paul III took the two decisions that were successfully to counter the Reformation: he sanctioned the Jesuit order and instituted the Council of Trent. [The Counter-Reformation] was also a period of austerity and restraint, typified by the leading spirit of the period, St Carlo Borromeo, whose legendary asceticism is commemorated in this picture.

How had that victory been achieved? In England most of us were brought up to believe that it depended on The Inquisition, the Index, and the Society of Jesus. I don’t believe that a great outburst of creative energy such as took place in Rome between 1620 and 1660 can be the result of negative factors, but I admit that the civilization of these years depended on certain assumptions that are out of favour in England and America today. The first of these, of course, was belief in authority, the absolute authority of the Catholic Church. This belief was extended to sections of society which we now assume to be naturally rebellious. It comes as something of a shock to find that, with a single exception (Caravaggio), the great artists of the time were all sincere, conforming Christians.

And so what most repulsed Nietzsche, the restoration of Christianity after the Italian Renaissance, was consolidated.

Categories
Christendom Hojas Susurrantes (book) Kenneth Clark Matthias Grünewald Theology

On Erasmus

When I was a boy I heard of Erasmus and imagined that his famous book was about something like praising so-called “mad” people in a world gone mad. Later, still before reading him, I imagined Erasmus was a great humanist who saw the madness of the religious wars of his time.

I was not prepared in the slightest to find out that Erasmus himself was pretty much part of civilizational madness. When in 1996 I hit Kenneth Clark’s page 146 of his illustrated book Civilisation I was moved to purchase the excellent 1993 Penguin edition of Praise of Folly totally unsuspecting of what the contents really were. A few days after I wrote on the book’s inside cover that Erasmus disappointed me; that, contrary to what I had expected, he did not see the folly of his age but was a fool himself.

A.H.T. Levi’s Penguin introduction to Praise of Folly is worth reading, and precisely on page xlii of the long introduction I was shocked to learn that no one in the whole Middle Ages had questioned Christian “truths.” Instead of challenging the accepted wisdom, I found in the introduction to Erasmus’ other works scholastic discussions about whether or not the ancient Greeks and Romans would be saved—from eternal damnation!

Erasmus is truly an alien for the people of our time. The problems he struggled with in his soul—he never considered his Praise of Folly his most important book—are infinitely distant from the problems that overwhelm us today. His worldview is dead except for those who, like me, were tormented by our parents with doctrines of eternal punishment.

Erasmus was the most famous humanist of the so-called “Northern Renaissance,” a man in touch with all leading princes and scholars of the time. Many consider him the central figure of the intellectual world of what, to my mind, was a pseudo-Renaissance (the real intellectual Renaissance would only begin with Montaigne). How could the “Northern Renaissance” be compared to the Italian Renaissance when its most emblematic intellectual, like Thomas à Kempis, was an Augustinian canon that took Pauline folly as a panegyric to Christian piety? Erasmus, who was deeply shocked before the pagan atmosphere of Julius II’s Rome, probably decided to publish Praise of Folly precisely to support the growing opposition to Julius in France. When the art of Michelangelo and Raphael were conquering the soul of Rome, Erasmus went as far as recommending a return to scripture and the so-called “Fathers”: Origen, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine, and Erasmus’ Greek New Testament was in fact more feared by the Church than his Praise of Folly.

Now that I am talking of Clark’s Civilisation, let us remember the image that Clark chose to depict St Francis: Jacquemart de Hesdin’s The Fool. In Erasmus’ most famous book, women, “admittedly stupid and foolish creatures,” are Folly’s pride. Erasmus takes a surprisingly modern, “liberal” position about the role of women in society. Since Folly praises ignorance and lunacy, Erasmus reasons, women must be instrumental for the Christian cause. In his book Folly is only interested in following the example of Jesus, the exemplar of charitable simplicity against the budding intellectualism of the sixteenth century. The fact that Erasmus took St Paul’s “praise of folly” against the best minds St Paul encountered in Athens speaks for itself and needs no further comment.

It doesn’t take a great intellectual effort to recognize that the so-called Northern Renaissance was set against the real Renaissance of Italy, which had fallen in love with our genuine, Greco-Roman roots. Erasmus et al’s “optimist” discussions around the subject of the predestination of both the elect and the damned represent the medieval mind. How could Erasmus’ work that discusses whether or not a personal God “predestined” some of us to an eternity of torture be called “Renaissance” by any stretch of imagination? It is true that, in Erasmus’ century, the current theology was Pelagian rather than Augustinian, in the sense that we were supposed to be allowed to earn salvation by our own efforts. But this is altogether medieval, not modern, thinking.

To understand Erasmus one must remember the bestsellers of his time. The Pseudo- Gregorian Dialogues, composed in 680 C.E. and translated to all known vernaculars, reinforced in the faithful what priests used to call “a salutary fear of hell.” The book clearly implied that hell was eternal and that the soul, though spiritual, suffered physically from burning. Dante himself drew heavily from the Dialogues “and its influence on popular piety was greater that that of any other single work of piety in the history of western Christendom.”

(Detail of a Grüenwald painting. Grüenwald’s Isenheim Altarpiece painting in the times when Erasmus published his book depicts the spirit of those still dark ages far better than any scholastic treatise.)

Visualize yourself one moment living under the sky of Erasmus’ age. Visualize yourself trapped in the Church dogma and struggling with the terrible discussion about whether the ancient Greeks could possibly be “justified”—a nasty Lutheran word inspired in Augustine—and thus saved from the eternal flames.

For the so-called humanists of Erasmus’ time this dilemma was all too serious theological business, and they rationalized their wishes to save the “pagans” after the recent discoveries of Indian “souls” in America, who had no opportunity to receive the gospel through no fault of their own. That such doctrines represented a slight advance from Augustine’s “pessimism” (cf. Erasmus’ treatise against Luther, On Free Will and Luther’s reply, On Unfree Will) will never refute the fact that Erasmus and his ilk were chained in the trappings of medieval thought.

I was moved to write this article because all westerners, including white nationalists, have forgotten what living under Christendom was like. With the exception of the final section of my Hojas Susurrantes, no contemporary writer that I know—no one—has said something real about the horrors of the infinitely evil doctrine of eternal damnation, and how that fear was so central in Christendom. On the contrary, modern westerners seem to retroproject their own healthy psychoclass and never wonder about the subjective horrors that millions upon millions of whites endured during the Dark Ages as a result of such doctrine.

Categories
Christendom Judeo-reductionism Kali Yuga

Fascinating Guessedworker / Linder exchange

In 2009 the British Guessedworker interviewed the American Alex Linder. The full interview (here) is 1:17 hrs. I boiled it down to the bare essentials: only 15 minutes.

It touches the subjects discussed in the previous entries: the single-cause hypothesis—i.e., Jews as the basic etiology of Western malaise—versus the more complex models that would involve depth psychology of the white people.

My edited clip also includes other topics discussed here recently, such as Christianity and Anti-christianity, the toxic role played by Hollywood and more: