web analytics

Category: Christendom

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 115

Editors’ note: To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.
 
Head hunting

Christendom liked to contemplate the heads of defeated enemies; the rulers found pleasure in it and also the governed. It was customary to send throughout the Empire the heads of the notable men who had been punished, as trophies of war. As Mark Twain said in The Mysterious Stranger, ‘They all did their best—to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history—but only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians…’

Already Constantine, the first Christian ruler, made that in the year 312, after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, his troops took the head of the emperor Maxentius in the triumphal procession, throwing stones and excrement, and then sent to Africa. Also the head of the usurper Julius Nepotianus, who rebelled probably at the behest of Constantinople, was paraded in the year 350 in Rome, the 28th day of his government.

Three years later, in many provinces of the Empire they could contemplate the head of the usurper Magnentius; as a sign of Christian victory, the heads of Procopius, a relative of Emperor Julian, in 366; of Magnus Maximus in 388, and of Eugene in 394. At the end of the 4th century or the beginning of the 5th century, the heads of Rufinus, Constantine III, Jovin, Sebastian and even, at times, the relatives of fallen persons in disgrace were exposed.

In addition to their hostile policy to the Goths, the governments of Arcadius and Honorius were characterised for persecuting so-called ‘pagans’ and ‘heretics’, and for taking even more stringent measures than those of their father, who in 388 still greeted the priests of classical culture in Emona, belonging at that time to Italy.

Categories
Catholic Church Catholic religious orders Christendom Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Free speech / Free press Libanius Ovid

Darkening Age, 21

Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Story of Saint Paul: The Burning of the
Books at Ephesus, designed ca. 1529, woven before 1546 (medium:
wool and silk, woven under the direction of Jan van der Vyst).

Editor’s note.Bold-typed emphasis in the last paragraph is mine. In chapter eleven of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:

In Egypt, a fearsome monk and saint named Shenoute entered the house of a man suspected of being a pagan and removed all his books. The Christian habit of book-burning went on to enjoy a long history. A millennium later, the Italian preacher Savonarola wanted the works of the Latin love poets Catullus, Tibullus and Ovid to be banned while another preacher said that all of these ‘shameful books’ should be let go, because if you are Christians you are obliged to burn them’…

* * *

Before there had been competing philosophical schools, all equally valid, all equally arguable. Now, for the first time, there was right—and there was wrong. Now, there was what the Bible said—and there was everything else. And from now on any belief that was ‘wrong’ could, in the right circumstances, put you in grave danger.

As Dirk Rohmann has highlighted, Augustine said that works that opposed Christian doctrine had no place in Christian society and had scant time for much of Greek philosophy. The Greeks, Augustine said dismissively, ‘have no ground for boasting of their wisdom’. The Church’s authors were greater, and more ancient. John Chrysostom went far further. He described pagan philosophy as a madness, the mother of evils and a disease.

Classical literature was filled with the incorrect and demonic and it came under repeated and vicious attack from the Church Fathers. Atheism, science and philosophy were all targeted. The very idea that mankind could explain everything through science was, as Rohmann has shown, disparaged as folly. ‘Stay clear of all pagan books!’ the Apostolic Constitutions advised Christians bluntly. ‘For what do you have to do with such foreign discourses, or laws, or false prophets, which subvert the faith of the unstable?’ If you wish to read about history, it continued, ‘you have the Books of Kings; if philosophy and poetry, you have the Prophets, the Book of Job and the Proverbs, in which you will find greater depth of sagacity than in all of the pagan poets and philosophers because this is the voice of the Lord… Do therefore always stay clear of all such strange and diabolical books!’…

An accusation of ‘magic’ was frequently the prelude to a spate of burnings. In Beirut, at the turn of the sixth century, a bishop ordered Christians, in the company of civil servants, to examine the books of those suspected of this. Searches were made, books were seized from suspects and then brought to the centre of the city and placed in a pyre. A crowd was ordered to come and watch as the Christians lit this bonfire in front of the church of the Virgin Mary. The demonic deceptions and ‘barbarous and atheistic arrogance’ of these books were condemned as ‘everybody’ watched ‘the magic books and the demonic signs burn’. As with the destruction of temples, there was no shame in this…

What did the books burned on such occasions really contain? Doubtless some did contain ‘magic’—such practices were popular prior to Christianity and certainly didn’t disappear with its arrival. But they were not all. The list given in the life of St Simeon clearly refers to the destruction of books of Epicureanism, the philosophy that advocated the theory of atomism. ‘Paganism’ appears to have been a charge in itself—and while it could mean outlawed practices it could, at a stretch, refer to almost any antique text that contained the gods. Christians were rarely good chroniclers of what they burned.

Sometimes, clues to the texts remain. In Beirut, just before the bonfire of the books, pious Christians had gone to the house of a man suspected of owning books that were ‘hateful to God’. The Christians told him that they ‘wanted the salvation and recovery of his soul’; they wanted ‘liberation’. These Christians then entered his home, inspected his books and searched each room. Nothing was found—until the man was betrayed by his slave. Forbidden books were discovered in a secret compartment in a chair. The man whose house it was—clearly well aware of what such ‘liberation’ might involve—‘fell to the ground and begged us, in tears, not to hand him over to the law’. He was spared the law but forced to burn his books. As our chronicler Zachariah records with pleasure, ‘when the fire was lit he threw the books of magic into it with his own hands, and said that he thanked God who had granted him with his visit and liberated him from the slavery and error of demons’. One of the books removed from the house in Beirut is mentioned: it is very possible it was not magic but a history by a disapproved-of Egyptian historian.

Divination and prophecy were often used as pretexts to attack a city’s elite. One of the most infamous assaults on books and thinkers took place in Antioch. Here, at the end of the fourth century, an accusation of treasonous divination led to a full-scale purge that targeted the city’s intellectuals. By sheer chance, Ammianus Marcellinus, a non-Christian and one of the finest historians of the era, happened to be in the city; a wonderful piece of luck for later historians and wretched luck for the man himself, who was horrified. As Ammianus describes it,

the racks were set up, and leaden weights, cords, and scourges put in readiness. The air was filled with the appalling yells of savage voices mixed with the clanking of chains, as the torturers in the execution of their grim task shouted: ‘Hold, bind, tighten, more yet.’

A noble of ‘remarkable literary attainments’ was one of the first to be arrested and tortured; he was followed by a clutch of philosophers who were variously tortured, burned alive and beheaded. Educated men in the city who had considered themselves fortunate now, Damocles-like, realized the fragility of their fortune. Looking up, it was as if they saw ‘swords hung over their heads suspended by horse-hairs from the ceiling’.

And, once again, there was the burning of books as bonfires of volumes were used as post-hoc justification for the slaughter. Ammianus Marcellinus writes with distaste that

innumerable books and whole heaps of documents, which had been routed out from various houses, were piled up and burnt under the eyes of the judges. They were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various liberal arts and on jurisprudence. 

Many intellectuals started to pre-empt the persecutors and set light to their own books. The destruction was extensive and ‘throughout the eastern provinces whole libraries were burnt by their owners for fear of a similar fate; such was the terror which seized all hearts’. Ammianus wasn’t the only intellectual to be scared in these decades. The orator Libanius burned a huge number of his own works…

* * *

The Great Library of Alexandria might have attempted to collect books on every topic, but Christianity was going to be considerably more selective…

One surviving Byzantine manuscript of Ovid has been scarred by a series of ridiculous redactions—even the word ‘girl’ seems to have been considered too racy to remain. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits were still censoring and bowdlerizing their editions of the classics. Individual abbots, far from Umberto Eco’s avenging intellectual ideal, sometimes censored their own libraries. At some point in the fifteenth century, a note was left in a mutilated manuscript in Vienna. ‘At this point in the book,’ it records, ‘there were thirteen leaves containing works by the apostate Julian; the abbot of the monastery… read them and realised that they were dangerous, so he threw them into the sea.’

Much classical literature was preserved by Christians. Far more was not. To survive, manuscripts needed to be cared for, recopied. Classical ones were not. Medieval monks, at a time when parchment was expensive and classical learning held cheap, simply took pumice stones and scrubbed the last copies of classical works from the page. Rohmann has pointed out that there is even evidence to suggest that in some cases ‘whole groups of classical works were deliberately selected to be deleted and overwritten in around AD 700, often with texts authored by [the fathers of the Church or by] legal texts that criticised or banned pagan literature’. Pliny, Plautus, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Livy and many, many more: all were scrubbed away by the hands of believers…

The texts that suffer in this period are the texts of the wicked and sinful pagans. From the entirety of the sixth century only ‘scraps’ of two manuscripts by the satirical Roman poet Juvenal survive and mere ‘remnants’ of two others, one by the Elder and one by the Younger Pliny.

From the next century there survives nothing save a single fragment of the poet Lucan.

From the start of the next century: nothing at all.

Far from mourning the loss, Christians delighted in it. As John Chrysostom crowed, the writings ‘of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated’. He warmed to the theme in another sermon: ‘Where is Plato? Nowhere! Where Paul? In the mouths of all!’

The fifth-century writer Theodoret of Cyrrhus observed the decline of Greek literature with similar enthusiasm. ‘Those elaborately decorated fables have been utterly banned,’ he gloated. ‘Who is today’s head of the Stoic heresy? Who is safeguarding the teachings of the Peripatetics?’ No one, evidently, for Theodoret concludes this homily with the observation that ‘the whole earth under the sun has been filled with sermons’.

Augustine contentedly observed the rapid decline of the atomist philosophy in the first century of Christian rule. By his time, he recorded, Epicurean and Stoic philosophy had been ‘suppressed’—the word is his. The opinions of such philosophers ‘have been so completely eradicated and suppressed… that if any school of error now emerged against the truth, that is, against the Church of Christ, it would not dare to step forth for battle if it were not covered under the Christian name’…

Much was preserved. Much, much more was destroyed. It has been estimated that less than ten per cent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era. For Latin, the figure is even worse: it is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains. If this was ‘preservation’—as it is often claimed to be—then it was astonishingly incompetent. If it was censorship, it was brilliantly effective. The ebullient, argumentative classical world was, quite literally, being erased.

Categories
Christendom Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (book) Judea v. Rome St Paul

Commissary to the Gentiles, 5

by (((Marcus Eli Ravage)))

If Paul’s own writings fail to convince you of this interpretation of his activities, I invite your attention to his more candid associate John. Where Paul, operating within the shadow of the imperial palace and half the time a prisoner in Roman jails, is obliged to deal in parable and veiled hints, John, addressing himself to disaffected Asiatics, can afford the luxury of plain speaking. At any rate, his pamphlet entitled “Revelation” is, in truth, a revelation of what the whole astonishing business is about.

Rome, fancifully called Babylon, is minutely described in the language of sputtering hate, as the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth, as the woman drunken with the blood of saints (Christians and Jews), as the oppressor of “peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues” and—to remove all doubt of her identity—as “that great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” An angel triumphantly cries, “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen.” Then follows an orgiastic picture of ruin. Commerce and industry and maritime trade are at an end. Art and music and “the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride” are silenced. Darkness and desolation lie like a pall upon the scene. The gentle Christian conquerors wallow in blood up to the bridles of their horses. “Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her.”

And what is the end and purpose of all this chaos and devastation? John is not too reticent to tell us. For he closes his pious prophecy with a vision of the glories of the new—that is, the restored—Jerusalem: not any allegorical fantasy, I pray you, but literally Jerusalem, the capital of a great reunited kingdom of “the twelve tribes of the children of Israel.”

Could any one ask for anything plainer?

Of course, no civilization could forever hold out against this kind of assault. By the year 200 the efforts of Paul and John and their successors had made such headway among all classes of Roman society that Christianity had become the dominant cult throughout the empire. Meantime, as Paul had shrewdly foreseen, Roman morale and discipline had quite broken down, so that more and more the imperial legions, once the terror of the world and the backbone of Western culture, went down to defeat before barbarian invaders. In the year 326 the emperor Constantine, hoping to check the insidious malady, submitted to conversion and proclaimed Christianity the official religion. It was too late. After him the emperor Julian tried to resort once more to suppression. But neither resistance nor concession were of any use. The Roman body politic had become thoroughly worm-eaten with Palestinian propaganda. Paul had triumphed.

This at least is how, were I an anti-Semite in search of a credible sample of subversive Jewish conspiracy, I would interpret the advent of a modified Jewish creed into the Western world.

______ 卐 ______

Editor’s note: This final instalment of Ravage’s essay says exactly the same that Evropa Soberana says in his ‘Judea vs. Rome’essay—but from the other side!

Some time ago a correspondent in Germany told me that he missed, in the later editions, the Conservative Swede essay that, on pages 77-88 of the 2014 edition of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, appears as ‘The historical demise of Christianity’ (and on this site as ‘The Red Giant’).The reason I eliminated that essay from the print edition was the author’s behaviour.

Ten years ago, Conservative Swede was furious when I mentioned the Third Reich at the anti-jihad site Gates of Vienna. Then he invited me to read an essay on his blog on the subject and asked me if I wanted to eliminate the Jews. Already in 2010, in the now defunct blog Mangan’s, I mentioned two books to awaken visitors to the Jewish question: MacDonald’s and Lindemann’s. Faced with that awakening of mine to the Jewish question, the Swede replied that he would retire from blogging: which he definitely did. I was stupefied but years later I suspected that Conservative Swede could have, in his bloodline, Jewish background.

That’s how ‘The Red Giant’ was eliminated in the most recent editions. Now, to the 2019 edition of The Fair Race that will soon be available, I’ve added the essay by Marcus Eli Ravage that concludes with the entry above. It is the only essay by a Jew in the 2019 edition: an essay that can also be read as a PDF (here).

Categories
Catholic Church Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 113


 Editors’ note:To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translationof Volume I.

The Catholic ‘children emperors’

‘These sovereigns followed the examples of the great Theodosius’. —Cardinal Hergenrother, Church Historian

‘The emperors were also pious Catholics’. —Peter Brown

‘The world is sinking’. —St Jerome

 
The division of the Empire: two forced Catholic states emerge

The year in which Augustine was named bishop (395), Emperor Theodosius I died in Milan. Clerical leaders had repeatedly incited him against the ‘pagans’, Jews and ‘heretics’, and saints Ambrose and Augustine had glorified him. Already in the 5th century, ecclesiastical circles gave the nickname of ‘the Great’ to this man who could pour blood like water. After his death, the Roman Empire was divided between his two sons. The Empire of the West disappeared in 476, while that of the East, as the Byzantine Empire, lasted until 1453.

From the times of this division, no other monarch ever brought the Empire under his command. In Constantinople, Arcadius (395-408), of seventeen years of age, ruled over the East, which remained a gigantic territory: all that would later be Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor with the Crimean peninsula, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Lower Libya and Pentapolis. In Milan, Honorius (395-423), eleven years of age, ruled over the West, which was even larger and richer but politically not as important as the East.

Both ‘emperors’, taught by the Church and famous for their piety, continued the religious policies of their father. If Theodosius had fought alone against ‘heresy’—one of the main targets of his attacks—with more than twenty provisions, his sons and successors supported Catholicism with a multitude of new laws. They favoured the Catholic Church legally and financially; increased their possessions, dispensed the clergy from certain jobs, some taxes and military service. Thus the State of Catholic confession terrorised more and more those who had a different faith, although the adepts of Greco-Roman culture would continue to exist, even in high positions.

It is true that in primitive Christianity hatred of the mundane was widespread; that in the New Testament the State is called ‘great whore’ and ‘horror of the Earth’, and that the emperor was considered a servant of the devil. However, since Paul there was also a sector prone to the State, a sector that consciously adapted to the circumstances and that imposed itself, little by little.

In the East and in the West, the Christian government centres presented the same image: ceaseless palace intrigues, struggles for power, crises of ministers and murders. The Catholic ‘children emperors’—Arcadius, Honorius, later also Valentinian III and Theodosius II—lacked independence. They were crowned nullities unable to make decisions, surrounded by a swarm of greedy courtiers, high dignitaries, Germanic generals and, also, eunuchs.

And as often happens in times of ‘decadence’, we cannot overlook some of the women of the imperial house; behind them was an intriguing clergy. The bishops also continued to mingle in the affairs of the officials; already during the 4th century and still more in the 5th, they usurped their faculties. They managed above all to extend the scope of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the episcopalis audientia, the episcopale iudicium, the ‘arbitral functions’ of the bishops.

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Jerusalem St Paul

Commissary to the Gentiles, 4

by (((Marcus Eli Ravage)))

Perhaps the bitterest foe of the sectaries was one Saul, a maker of tents. A native of Tarsus and thus a man of some education in Greek culture, he despised the new teachings for their unworldliness and their remoteness from life. A patriotic Jew, he dreaded their effect on the national cause. A traveled man, versed in several languages, he was ideally suited for the task of going about among the scattered Jewish communities to counteract the spread of their socialistic pacifistic doctrines. The leaders in Jerusalem appointed him chief persecutor to the Ebionim.

He was on his way to Damascus one day to arrest a group of the sectaries when a novel idea came to him. In the quaint phrase of the Book of Acts he saw a vision. He saw as a matter of fact, two.

He perceived, to begin with, how utterly hopeless were the chances of little Judea winning out in an armed conflict against the greatest military power in the world. Second, and more important, it came to him that the vagabond creed which he had been repressing might be forged into an irresistible weapon against the formidable foe.

Pacifism, non-resistance, resignation, love, were dangerous teachings at home. Spread among the enemy’s legions, they might break down their discipline and thus yet bring victory to Jerusalem. Saul, in a word, was probably the first man to see the possibilities of conducting war by propaganda.

He journeyed on to Damascus, and there to the amazement alike of his friends and of those he had gone to suppress, he announced his conversion to the faith and applied for admission to the brotherhood.

On his return to Jerusalem he laid his new strategy before the startled Elders of Zion. After much debate and searching of souls, it was adopted. More resistance was offered by the leaders of the Ebionim of the capital. They were mistrustful of his motives, and they feared that his proposal to strip the faith of its ancient Jewish observances and practices so as to make it acceptable to Gentiles would fill the fraternity with alien half-converts, and dilute its strength. But in the end he won them over, too. And so Saul, the fiercest persecutor of Jesus’ followers, became Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles. And so, incidentally, began the spread into the pagan lands of the West, an entirely new Oriental religion.

Unfortunately for Paul’s plan, the new strategy worked much too well. His revamped and rather alluring theology made converts faster than he had dared hope, or than he even wished. His idea, it should be kept in mind, was at this stage purely defensive. He had as yet no thought of evangelizing the world; he only hoped to discourage the enemy. With that accomplished, and the Roman garrisons out of Palestine, he was prepared to call a truce.

But the slaves and oppressed of the Empire, the wretched conscripts, and the starving proletariat of the capital itself, found as much solace in the adapted Pauline version of the creed as the poor Jews before them had found in the original teachings of their crucified master. The result of this unforeseen success was to open the enemy’s eyes to what was going on.

Disturbing reports of insubordination among the troops began pouring into Rome from the army chiefs in Palestine and elsewhere. Instead of giving the imperial authorities pause, the new tactics only stiffened their determination. Rome swooped down upon Jerusalem with fire and sword, and after a fierce siege which lasted four years, she destroyed the nest of the agitation (70 a.d.). At least she thought she had destroyed it.

The historians of the time leave us in no doubt as to the aims of Rome. They tell us that Nero sent Vespasian and his son Titus with definite and explicit orders to annihilate Palestine and Christianity together. To the Romans, Christianity meant nothing more than Judaism militant, anyhow, an interpretation which does not seem far from the facts. As to Nero’s wish, he had at least half of it realized for him. Palestine was so thoroughly annihilated that it has remained a political ruin to this day. But Christianity was not so easily destroyed.

Indeed, it was only after the fall of Jerusalem that Paul’s program developed to the full. Hitherto, as I have said, his tactic had been merely to frighten off the conqueror, in the manner of Moses plaguing the Pharaohs. He had gone along cautiously and hesitantly, taking care not to arouse the powerful foe. He was willing to dangle his novel weapon before the foe’s nose, and let him feel its edge, but he shrank from thrusting it in full force.

Now that the worst had happened and Judea had nothing further to lose, he flung scruples to the wind and carried the war into the enemy’s country. The goal now was nothing less than to humble Rome as she had humbled Jerusalem, to wipe her off the map as she had wiped out Judea.

Categories
Christendom Jesus Neanderthalism New Testament Parapsychology Richard Carrier

On Richard Carrier

A depiction of Ecce Homo, as Pontius Pilate
delivers Jesus to the crowd (Antonio Ciseri, 1862).

Before reading Carrier, I imagined that there was a historical Jesus crucified by Pilate if we only eliminated all the legendary tales, miracles and resurrection stories that appear in the Gospels. As I have already said, it was not until the end of last year that I changed my mind.

Discovering the mythicists reminded me strongly of what happened to me in the 1990s with CSI literature, and especially when I read a book by Robert Sheafferthat made me doubt, for the first time, of the existence of ‘psi’. The fact is that the exegetes of the New Testament, starting with Albert Schweitzer, have been in bondage of the introjects of their parents. They could never encapsulate the viruses and malwares as I have done in my mentality.

All the liberal and even secular exegetes of the New Testament that I read since the 1980s were in bondage of parental introjects. The simplest hypothesis should have been, from the beginning, the theory of a mythical Christ because no single contemporary witness outside the Bible ever bothered to write about Jesus.

None. Zilch. Zero. Plenty of people, long after Jesus supposedly died, claimed he was real but outside the Bible, sorry: it is a tall tale. It is the same as happens with parapsychologists: they cannot conceive the inexistence of psi. By force of deep parental introjects the historicist exegetes (those who believe in a historical Jesus) cannot conceive the nonexistence of Jesus (which includes those who believe in the historicity of an ordinary, non-miraculous Jesus).

The implications of my finding of the last days of last year are tremendous. Now I see the tragedy of the West (and the demographic bubble that Christianity caused) in another way as I saw it before my December discovery. The nonexistence of Jesus crushes all Christianity and neo-Christianity in a most forceful way. Or rather, I can use Carrier et al for the thesis I’ve been advancing in this blog.

The Christian bug is incredibly stupider—stupid indeed was believing in the Gospels in the first place—than I previously thought. If what Carrier et al say is true, the result would be that the white race is even more ‘Neanderthal’ than I imagined before my December 28 discovery.

Richard Carrier may be a blue-pilled liberal as foolish as those at Columbia University where he studied. But just as we cannot dispatch the findings in physics or medicine of those who graduated there, neither can we reject what Carrier says in his book that, perhaps, I’ll start to review on Mondays.

Categories
Christendom Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Hypatia of Alexandria Literature

Darkening Age, 20

In chapter 10 of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:

In Alexandria, Cyril conducted house searches to hunt out works by the loather pagan emperor Julian ‘the Apostate’…

This was a new literary world and a newly serious one. ‘The extent to which this new Christian story both displaced and substituted for all others is breathtaking,’ writes the modern academic Brent D. Shaw… And in the place of humour, came fear. Christian congregations found themselves rained on by oratorical fire and brimstone. For their own good, of course. As Chrysostom observed with pleasure: ‘in our churches we hear countless discourses on eternal punishment, on rivers of fire, on the venomous worm, on bonds that cannot be burst, on exterior darkness’…

Less than a hundred years after the first Christian emperor, the intellectual landscape was changing. In the third century, there had been twenty-eight public libraries in Rome and many private ones. By the end of the fourth they were, as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus observed with sorrow, ‘like tombs, permanently shut’…

As a law of AD 388 announced: ‘There shall be no opportunity for any man to go out to the public and to argue about religion or to discuss it or to give any counsel.’ If anyone with ‘damnable audacity’ attempted to then, the law announced with a threat no less ominous for being vague, ‘he shall be restrained with a due penalty and proper punishment’…

In Athens, some decades after Hypatia’s death, a resolutely pagan philosopher found himself exiled for a year…

What was not ‘of profit ‘ could easily fade from view. The shocking death of Hypatia ought to have merited a good deal of attention in the histories of the period. Instead it is treated lightly and obliquely, if at all. In history, as in life, no one in Alexandria was punished for her murder. There was a cover-up. Some writers were highly critical—even to fervent Christian eyes this was an appalling act.

But not all: as one Christian bishop later recorded with admiration, once the satanic woman had been destroyed, then all the people surrounded Cyril in acclamation for he had ‘destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city.’ The affected myopia of Christian historians could be magnificent: as the historian Ramsay MacMullen has put it, ‘Hostile writings and discarded views were not recopied or passed on, or they were actively suppressed.’

The Church acted as a great and, at times, fierce filter on all written material, the centuries of its control as ‘a differentially permeable membrane’ that ‘allowed the writings of Christianity to pass through but not of Christianity’s enemies.’

Categories
Christendom Destruction of Greco-Roman world Julian (novel) Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Libanius Literature Science

Christianity’s Criminal History, 112

Editor’s note: Here we see once again some passages on the historical Libanius: a central character in Gore Vidal’s Julian. What Deschner says here about Libanius is splendidly novelized by Vidal in the very final paragraph of his novel.

To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.
 

The Western world darkens more and more

Culture was highly esteemed in the 4th and 5th centuries. It was one of the legacies of antiquity and enjoyed an ‘almost religious veneration’ (Dannenbauer). Still in the year 360 a law of the emperor Constantius could declare that education was the supreme virtue. And really many noble families of that time, Gallic and Roman, were consecrated to it and particularly in the bosom of the Senatorial proceedings.

But they were already simple custodians of the culture, to which they did not enrich. And everywhere there were circles and social forces of a very different kind, even in the highest positions. The Christian king Theodoric the Great was no longer able to write his own name on the documents: neither could most of the Christian princes. Theodoric wrote the four letters LEGI (‘I read it’) by means of an aureus mold expressly forged for him. The instruction of the Goth children was practically forbidden by him, since, as he seems to have said, he who trembled before the master’s blows would never know how to despise the cuts and rushes of the sword in battle.

In Gaul, apparently, where the school system had flourished from the beginning of the 2nd century until the end of the 4th century, public schools are disappearing over the course of the next century, no matter how much here and there, in Lyon, Vienne, Bordeaux and Clermont there still are schools of grammar and rhetoric in addition to, naturally, the private ones. But all the teachings, at least the literary, served exclusively for the collection of material for sermons and treatises, to deal with the Bible and for the consolidation of the faith. Scientific inquiry was already a thing of the past: it no longer counted or was appreciated. The knowledge of Greek, which for centuries was the requirement of every authentic culture, became a rarity. Even the Roman classics, such as Horace, Ovid and Catullus, were cited less and less.

Libanius, the champion of Hellenistic culture, the most famous professor of rhetoric of the century, complains about the aversion aroused by that profession. ‘They see’, he says, referring to his students, ‘that this cause is despised and thrown on the floor; that does not bring fame, power or wealth but a painful servitude under many lords, parents, mothers, pedagogues and other students, who put things upside down and believe that it is the teacher who needs them. When they see all this they avoid this depreciated profession like a boat the pitfalls’.

In the time of Augustine there are hardly any schools of philosophy in the West. Philosophy is frowned upon, it is a thing of the devil, the original father of all ‘heresy’, and it causes fear to the pious. Even in a centre of culture as important as Bordeaux philosophy is no longer taught. And even in the East, the largest and most important of the universities of the Roman Empire, that of Constantinople, has only one chair of philosophy out of a total of 31.

The knowledge of something that had existed for a long time was lost in almost all areas. The spiritual horizon became increasingly narrower. Ancient culture languished from Gaul to Africa, while in Italy it practically disappeared. The interest in natural science vanished. Also jurisprudence, at least in the West, suffers ‘havoc’, an ‘astonishing demolition’ (Wieacker).

The bishop Paulinus of Nola, who died in 431, never read a historian: a typical attitude of the moment. Whole eras fall in the oblivion, for example, the time of the Roman emperors. The only renowned historian in the late 4th century is Ammianus Marcellinus, a non-Christian. Entire synods forbid the bishops to read ‘pagan’ books. In short: scientific research ceases; experimental testing stops; people think increasingly with less autonomy.

A few decades later no doctor could heal Bishop Gregory de Tours, a man with a mind full of superstitions, but he could miraculously be healed through a drink of water with some dust taken from the tomb of St. Martin.

Only clerics will still read.

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Destruction of Greco-Roman world Jesus Reformation

Commissary to the Gentiles, 2

by (((Marcus Eli Ravage)))

But even these plots and revolutions are as nothing compared with the great conspiracy which we engineered at the beginning of this era and which was destined to make the creed of a Jewish sect the religion of the Western world. The Reformation was not designed in malice purely. It squared us with an ancient enemy and restored our Bible to its place of honor in Christendom. The Republican revolutions of the eighteenth century freed us of our age-long political and social disabilities. They benefited us, but they did you no harm. On the contrary, they prospered and expanded you. You owe your preeminence in the world to them.

But the upheaval which brought Christianity into Europe was—or at least may easily be shown to have been—planned and executed by Jews as an act of revenge against a great Gentile state. And when you talk about Jewish conspiracies I cannot for the world understand why you do not mention the destruction of Rome and the whole civilization of antiquity concentrated under her banners, at the hands of Jewish Christianity.

It is unbelievable, but you Christians do not seem to know where your religion came from, nor how, nor why. Your historians, with one great exception, do not tell you. The documents in the case, which are part of your Bible, you chant over but do not read. We have done our work too thoroughly; you believe our propaganda too implicitly. The coming of Christianity is to you not an ordinary historical event growing out of other events of the time; it is the fulfilment of a divine Jewish prophecy—with suitable amendments of your own. It did not, as you see it, destroy a great Gentile civilization and a great Gentile empire with which Jewry was at war; it did not plunge mankind into barbarism and darkness for a thousand years; it came to bring salvation to the Gentile world!

Yet here, if ever, was a great subversive movement, hatched in Palestine, spread by Jewish agitators, financed by Jewish money, taught in Jewish pamphlets and broadsides, at a time when Jewry and Rome were in a death-struggle, and ending in the collapse of the great Gentile empire. You do not even see it, though an intelligent child, unbefuddled by theological magic, could tell you what it is all about after a hasty reading of the simple record. And then you go on prattling of Jewish conspiracies and cite as instances the Great War and the Russian Revolution! Can you wonder that we Jews have always taken your anti-Semites rather lightly, as long as they did not resort to violence?

And, mind you, no less an authority than Gibbon long ago tried to enlighten you. It is now a century and a half since The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire let the cat out of the bag. Gibbon, not being a parson dabbling in history, did not try to account for the end of a great era by inventing fatuous nonsense about the vice and degradation of Rome, about the decay of morals and faith in an empire which was at that very time in the midst of its most glorious creative period. How could he? He was living in the Augustan Age in London which—in spite of nearly two thousand years since the coming of Christian salvation—was as good a replica of Augustan Rome in the matter of refined lewdness as the foggy islanders could make it.

No, Gibbon was a race-conscious Gentile and an admirer of the culture of the pagan West, as well as a historian with brains and eyes. Therefore he had no difficulty laying his finger on the malady that had rotted and wasted away the noble edifice of antique civilization. He put Christianity down—the law which went forth from Zion and the word of God from Jerusalem—as the central cause of the decline and fall of Rome and all she represented.

So far so good. But Gibbon did not go far enough. He was born and died, you see, a century before the invention of scientific anti-Semitism. He left wholly out of account the element of deliberation. He saw an alien creed sweeping out of the East and overwhelming the fair lands of the West. It never occurred to him that it was precisely to this destructive end that the whole scheme of salvation was dedicated. Yet the facts are as plain as you please.

Let me in very brief recount the tale, unembroidered by miracle, prophecy or magic.

For a good perspective, I shall have to go back a space. The action conveniently falls into four parts, rising to a climax in the third. The time, when the first curtain rises, is roughly 65 B.C. Dramatis persona; are, minor parts aside, Judea and Rome. Judea is a tiny kingdom off the Eastern Mediterranean. For five centuries it has been hardly more than a geographical expression. Again and again it has been overrun and destroyed and its population carried into exile or slavery by its powerful neighbors. Nominally independent, it is now as unstable as ever and on the edge of civil war. The empire of the West, with her nucleus in the City Republic of Rome, while not yet mistress of the world, is speedily heading that way. She is acknowledged the one great military power of the time as well as the heir of Greece and the center of civilization.

Up to the present the two states have had little or no contact with one another. Then without solicitation on her part Rome was suddenly asked to take a hand in Judean affairs. A dispute had arisen between two brothers over the succession to the petty throne, and the Roman general Pompey, who happened to be in Damascus winding up bigger matters, was called upon to arbitrate between the claimants. With the simple directness of a republican soldier, Pompey exiled one of the brothers, tossed the chief priesthood to his rival, and abolished the kingly dignity altogether. Not to put too fine a point on it, Pompey’s mediation amounted in effect to making Judea a Roman dependency.

The Jews, not unnaturally perhaps, objected; and Rome, to conciliate them and to conform to local prejudice, restored the royal office. She appointed, that is, a king of her own choosing. He was the son of an exciseman, an Idumean by race, named Herod. But the Jews were not placated, and continued making trouble. Rome thought it very ungrateful of them.

All this is merely a prelude, and is introduced into the action to make clear what follows. Jewish discontent grew to disaffection and open revolt when their Gentile masters began importing into Jerusalem the blessings of Western culture. Graven images, athletic games, Greek drama, and gladiatorial shows were not to the Jewish taste. The pious resented them as an offense in the nostrils of Jehovah, even though the resident officials patiently explained they were meant for the entertainment and edification of the non-Jewish garrison. The Judeans resisted with especial strenuousness the advent of the efficient Roman tax-gatherer. Above all, they wanted back a king of their own race and their own royal line.

Among the masses the rebellion took the form of a revival of the old belief in a Messiah, a divinely appointed savior who was to redeem his people from the foreign yoke and make Judea supreme among the nations. Claimants to the mission were not wanting. In Galilee, one Judas led a rather formidable insurrection, which enlisted much popular support. John, called the Baptist, operated in the Jordan country. He was followed by another north-country man, Jesus of Nazareth. All three were masters of the technique of couching incendiary political sedition in harmless theological phrases. All three used the same signal of revolt—“The time is at hand.” And all three were speedily apprehended and executed, both Galileans by crucifixion.

Personal qualities aside, Jesus of Nazareth was, like his predecessors, a political agitator engaged in liberating his country from the foreign oppressor. There is even considerable evidence that he entertained an ambition to become king of an independent Judea. He claimed, or his biographers later claimed for him, descent from the ancient royal line of David. But his paternity is somewhat confused. The same writers who traced the origin of his mother’s husband back to the psalmist-king also pictured Jesus as the son of Jehovah, and admitted that Joseph was not his father.

It seems, however, that Jesus before long realized the hopelessness of his political mission and turned his oratorical gifts and his great popularity with the masses in quite another direction. He began preaching a primitive form of populism, socialism and pacifism. The effect of this change in his program was to gain him the hostility of the substantial, propertied classes, the priests and patriots generally, and to reduce his following to the poor, the laboring mass and the slaves.

After his death these lowly disciples formed themselves into a communistic brotherhood. A sermon their late leader had once delivered upon a hillside summed up for them the essence of his teachings, and they made it their rule of life. It was a philosophy calculated to appeal profoundly to humble people. It comforted those who suffered here on earth with promised rewards beyond the grave. It made virtues of the necessities of the weak. Men without hope in the future were admonished to take no thought for the morrow. Men too helpless to resent insult or injury were taught to resist not evil. Men condemned to lifelong drudgery and indigence were assured of the dignity of labor and of poverty.

The meek, the despised, the disinherited, the downtrodden, were—in the hereafter—to be the elect and favored of God. The worldly, the ambitious, the rich and powerful, were to be denied admission to heaven.

Categories
Christendom Jesus New Testament Richard Carrier

Law’s article

Further to my previous post. I’ve now read the article by philosopher Stephen Law (pic) and largely agree with the two principles he discusses. However, Law is wrong that Carl Sagan invented the principle ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. I discovered such principle in the writings of CSICOP writers before Sagan became famous. The second principle however is an original of Law:

Where testimony/documents weave together a narrative that combines mundane claims with a significant proportion of extraordinary claims, and there is good reason to be sceptical about those extraordinary claims, then there is good reason to be sceptical about the mundane claims, at least until we possess good independent evidence of their truth. [emphasis added]

Those who watched Carrier’s lecture embedded in the previous post will remember his presentation of the field of New Testament studies as divided into three competing viewpoints:

(1) Christian historicity: Jesus was an amazing famous superman who could walk on water and shit—the majority of so-called biblical scholars in the US believe this.

(2) Secular historicity: Jesus was an ordinary nobody, whom no one noted but a few fanatical observers. The Gospels are mostly fiction, but there are kernels of historical truth in them. This is what I used to believe up to the last week, when I discovered mythicism or:

(3) Secular non-historicity: Jesus was the name of a celestial being, subordinate to god, with whom Saul/Paul hallucinated conversations. The Gospel began as a mythic allegory about the celestial Jesus, set on earth, as most myths then were (e.g., the god Osiris).

Law elaborates his second principle in the context of the three competing theories to explain the origins of Christianity. His conclusion is that secular non-historicity is the best approach to explain it.

Regular visitors of this site will remember that I have mentioned the work of Albert Schweitzer while discussing the (quixotic) quest of the historical Jesus. Yesterday I was struggling with myself as to who was right, Schweitzer or Carrier. Schweitzer’s view was that the apocalyptic Jesus makes historical sense from the viewpoint of secular historicity because his prophecy was unfulfilled (‘Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God’).

Law’s piece resolved my doubts in a more parsimonious way than Schweitzer because the New Testament ‘is a story developed by myth-makers who had certain radical ethical and other views (e.g. the Kingdom of God being imminent) that they wanted others to accept’. Since those who advanced apocalyptic eschatology were Paul (in his very first epistles), Mark and Matthew, it is unnecessary to postulate a historical Jesus in the secular historicity sense.

I was raised as a Catholic in the 1960s and 70s and then became an eschatologist (William Walter’s ‘Eschatology’ is a schismatic cult originated in Christian Science). After I left the cult, since the middle 1980s through the middle 1990s I became interested in secular historicity and did not change my views on the so-called historical Jesus until last week. However, I doubt that those who have not struggled with religious parental introjects will find this post interesting.

My biography aside, I believe that the ultimate truth about the origins of Christianity is pivotal to save the white race from extinction. Those white nationalists who are traditional Christians have stagnated in Christian historicity, and many secular WNsts assume that the second stage, secular historicity, is the most plausible one. What whites need is a complete rejection of the New Testament, even the notion of a non-miraculous historical Jesus, as the NT was largely written by men of Semitic origin.

If universal, Christian-inspired love, is murdering the Aryan race what we need is full apostasy from Judeo-Christianity. This means that we should consider secular non-historicity seriously.