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Christendom Destruction of Greco-Roman world Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 107


 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.

 

The theatre, ‘The temple of the devil’

Almost unanimously (with very few exceptions, such as those of Victorinus of Pettau and Gaius Marius Victorinus), the Fathers of the Church denigrated the spectacles: this constituted an important component in their anti-Hellenic polemic. The shows really reflected to them all the iniquity of the Greco-Roman world.

The Father of the Church Salvian of Marseilles, who in the 5th century considered the visit to spectacles by Christians a crime and also sought to know that God hates these amusements, informs us that when an ecclesiastical festival coincided with the games, most of the spectators were sitting in the theatre. The suaviludii (fans of shows) used all kinds of arguments to defend theatre attendance and their censors tried to refute them. At the indication, for example, that there was no express prohibition in Sacred Scripture, Tertullian replies with Psalm I, 1, ‘Avoid the meetings of the ungodly’.

The theatre happened to be a domain of the devil, of the evil spirits, and the ‘Fathers’ almost whipped it up, giving it attributes such as ‘immoral’ (turpis), obscene (obscoenus), ‘repulsive’ (foedus) and many other similar epithets. It was, however, ‘very infrequent’ the case that the theatre was attacked because of its—still then current—cultic meaning, the veneration of the gods. In this sense, only Irenaeus, Tertullian, and the Syrian bishop Jacob did it; and Sarug (451-452), who stated that ‘Satan tries to restore paganism through comedy’. All others demonized the theatre for reasons of an almost exclusively moral nature.

The Philippic of Tatian Oratio ad Graecos, an authentic invective against Greek culture, gives us an idea of the poisonous bile that those paladins of the anti-dramaturgy of primitive Christianity were spewing. The actor appears in it as

boastful and dissolute ruffian without restraint, who as soon as he looks with sparkling eyes as he moves waving his hands, delirious under his clay mask, it assumes the role of Aphrodite, followed by that of Apollo… And such a scoundrel is applauded by all!

Many pious ‘Fathers’ saw how the vices penetrated the hearts of the spectators through their eyes and ears as if they were open windows. According to St. Ambrose (introibit mors) ‘death will penetrate through the window of your eyes’ and the stage choir is ‘lethal’. For Jerome, theatrical music also threatens morals. Moreover, the very critical mention of representations was sinful, said Salvian. Even married women, according to Augustine, ‘take home new knowledge’ learned from that ‘lascivious bustle’.

It was necessary to wait for Theodosius I so that, in 392, the careers of cars were prohibited; a prohibition that in 399 was extended to all the spectacles during Sundays, but with so scarce success that in the year 401 the Synod of Carthage requested that the measures already adopted were intensified.

The Church, since Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian, considered attendance at shows incompatible with Christianity, and ended up strictly prohibiting it to priests and laymen in the III and IV Council of Carthage, threatening the transgressors with excommunication. The bishop of Rome, Eusebius, did not allow the performance of comedians even in the banquets of homage.

The First Council of Arles denies the charioteers and all the theatre staff permission to receive Communion while they are holding shows. The VII Council of Carthage prohibits all actors in 419 from filing complaints against clerics. If an actor, a ‘flute of Satan’ (Jacob of Sarug), wanted to convert to Christianity, the old ecclesiastical constitutions and the councils generally demanded the abandonment of his profession.

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Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 106


 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.

 

The hostility to classic culture in early Christian Latin writers

The fact that also ecclesiastical authors imbued with philosophy disqualify or hate the latter is something that is revealed in Marcus Minucius Felix and Tertullian, within the Latin Patristic.

Minucius, a Roman lawyer, who ‘rose from the deep darkness to the light of truth and wisdom’ when he was old enough, fully connects, as regards his dialogue Octavius, probably written around the year 200, with Greco-Roman culture and especially with Plato, Cicero, Seneca and Virgil. However, he abhors most, if not all of it, and especially everything that tends to scepticism. Socrates is for him ‘the crazy attic’, the philosophy itself ‘superstitious madness’, enemy of the ‘true religion’. Philosophers are seducers, adulterers, tyrants. The poets, Homer included, thoroughly mislaid the youth ‘with lies of mere seduction’, while the strength of Christians ‘is not based on words, but on their behaviour’.

Also Tertullian, authentic father of western Christianity (called founder of Catholicism because of his enormous influence on theologians such as Cyprian, Jerome, Augustine; for the Trinitarian doctrine, Christology and doctrine of sin and grace, baptism and penance), mistreats the Greco-Roman culture. And certainly he, who despises the simplices et idiotae does not stop from judging that, when that culture approaches the truth, it is due to chance or plagiarism. Tertullian, in fact, goes back to Moses for the totality of Greek science!

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem, the Academy with the Church?, asks Tertullian, referring to Solomon. If a Christian believes, he no longer wants anything that goes beyond that faith. ‘For this is the first thing we believe: hence there is nothing else that we should believe beyond our faith’. He calls Plato, whose importance for ancient Christianity is barely possible to ponder, ‘spice with which all heretics spice’. He stigmatises the questions about the physical world as impious. By expressly referring to Jesus and Paul, he strongly disapproves of science and art: human teachings of evil spirits, pure tingling for the ears, rejected by the Lord and described by him as madness. ‘We, on the other hand, who read the Sacred Scriptures, are in possession of universal history from the very beginning of the world’. Typical Christian modesty!

At the beginning of the 4th century, Arnobius mounts an attack against classical culture with a controversial writing that covers seven books, Adversus gentes. This happened at the urging of his bishop. His work had to depict, in the metropolitan sceptic, the sincerity of his conversion. Of course, Arnobius does not know well that Christianity in whose defence he writes. He barely quotes the New Testament and mentions Jupiter much more often than Christ.

Arnobius condemns not only all the myths about the gods, but also mythological poetry. With the same resolution he rejects the pantomime, the dramatic and the musical representations linked to the mysteries. He condemns all the conceptual constructions of the Greco-Roman religion and the art where these are embodied. Moreover, he considers all worldly professions to be worthless, any human activity whatsoever. It should not be surprising, then, that this new-birthing Christian, out of respect for the Sacred Scriptures, despises almost all of science, rhetoric, grammar, philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine.

Latin paleo-Christian literature closes ranks more unanimously than the literature in Greek versus classic culture. Dramatic poetry is totally disqualified for religious and moral reasons, as the epic in most cases; also rhetoric, which is usually considered harmful. Philosophy by itself cannot provide any authentically true knowledge. For these authors, Christianity constitutes the only security, the full truth.

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Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 105


 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.
 

The hostility to the classic culture of the first Greco-Christian writers

We already showed above how decidedly, with what resolutely rude expressions, Tatian, the ‘philosopher of the barbarians’, the self-proclaimed Herald of Truth, about the year 172 and against everything that had rank and renown in Greco-Roman culture vilified philosophy, poetry, rhetoric and the school.

The writer Hermas inserts at the very beginning of his jibe of the non-Christian philosophers the words of Paul, ‘The wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God’ without allowing another truth to prevail than that of the Gospel. In a rather coarse way, ignorant of any deep and superficial sense, Hermas describes philosophy as ‘lacking in foundation and utility’, of ‘pure adventurous, absurd, chimerical and abstruse speculation’, even though he only knows his victims through mere readings of compendiums.

The same with the majority of Christian authors. Ignatius of Antioch, a fanatical adversary of Christians from other orientations to his (‘beasts with human figure’) and first in using the term ‘catholic’, repudiates almost the entire teaching school, and any contact with Greco-Roman literature, which he apostrophises as ‘ignorance’, ‘foolishness’, its representatives being ‘rather lawyers of death than of truth’. And while he affirms that ‘the end of time has come’, ‘nothing of what is visible here is good’ and sarcastically asks, ‘where is the boasting of those who are called wise?’, he affirms that Christianity has overcome all this and has ‘eradicated ignorance’. He is considered ‘one of the great peaks of early Christian literature’ (Bardenhewer).

Towards 180, Bishop Theophilus of Antioch decrees in his three books Apologia ad Autolycum (Apology to Autolycus) that all the philosophy and art, mythology and historiography of the Greeks are despicable, contradictory and immoral. Moreover, he rejects in principle all worldly knowledge and refers to the Old Testament praiseworthy, ‘lacking in science, shepherds and uneducated people’. Incidentally, Theophilus, who did not become a Christian and a bishop until he was an adult, owed his education to the classical world. That world whose representatives, of course, ‘have raised and continue to falsely pose the questions when, instead of speaking of God, they do it about vain and useless things’; authors who, not possessing ‘an iota of truth’ are all of them possessed by evil spirits. It is evident, then, that ‘all others are in error and that only Christians possess the truth, having been indoctrinated by the Holy Spirit, who spoke through the prophets and announced everything in advance’.

Apart from Tatian, Ignatius and Theophilus of Antioch, also Polycarp and the Didache radically repudiate ancient literature. The Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Letter of Barnabas and the Letters to Diognetus do not mention it. The Syrian Didascalia (complete title: Catholic Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles and Holy Disciples of our Redeemer), falsified by a bishop, says: ‘Get away from all the writings of the pagans, for what have you to do with foreign words and laws?… What do you miss in the word of God, that you throw yourself to devour those stories by pagans?’

Only the Father of the Church Irenaeus and the ‘heretic’ Origen, among Christians who write in Greek during the first centuries, lend almost full recognition to all branches of knowledge. However, Irenaeus disapproves almost the totality of Greek philosophy, to which he does not grant a single true knowledge. And Origen, who precisely makes very wide use of it, rejects the rhetoric as useless. All the Greco-Christian writers agree, however, on one point: all place the New Testament far above all the literature of Antiquity.

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Alexandria Art Christendom Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil

Darkening Age, 14

In chapter eight of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:
 
Further south, the firebrand preacher John Chrysostom—John ‘Goldenmouth’—weighed in. This man was so charismatic that crowds of Christians would pack into Antioch’s Great Church to hear him speak, his eyes flashing, then leave as soon as he was finished, ‘as if’, he observed, with a distinct want of monkish humility, ‘I were a concert performance.’ Chrysostom was nothing if not zealous.

Hearing that Phoenicia was still ‘suffering from the madness of the demons’ rites’, he sent violent bands of monks, funded by the faithful women in his congregation, to destroy the shrines in the area. ‘Thus,’ concludes the historian Theodoret, ‘the remaining shrines of the demons were utterly destroyed.’ A papyrus fragment shows Bishop Theophilus standing triumphantly over an image of Serapis, Bible in hand, while on the right-hand side monks can be seen attacking the temple. St Benedict, St Martin, St John Chrysostom; the men leading these campaigns of violence were not embarrassing eccentrics but men at the very heart of the Church.

Augustine evidently assumed his congregants would be taking part in the violence—and implied that they were right to do so: throwing down temples, idols and groves was, he said, no less than ‘clear proof of our not honouring, but rather abhorring, these things’. Such destruction, he reminded his flock, was the express commandment of God. In AD 401, Augustine told Christians in Carthage to smash pagan objects because, he said, that was what God wanted and commanded. It has been said that sixty died in riots inflamed by this burst of oratorical fire. A little earlier a congregation of Augustine’s, eager to sack the temples of Carthage, had started reciting Psalm 83. ‘Let them be humiliated and be downcast forever,’ they chanted with grim significance. ‘Let them perish in disgrace.’

It is obvious that this violence was not only one’s Christian duty; it was also, for many; a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. Those carrying out the attacks sang as they smashed the ancient marble and roared with laughter as they destroyed statues. In Alexandria, ‘idolatrous’ images were taken from private houses and baths, then burned and mutilated in a jubilant public demonstration. Once the assault was complete, the Christians ‘all went off, praising God for the destruction of such error of demons and idolatry’.

Broken statues themselves were another cause for hilarity; their fragmented remains an occasion for ‘laughter and scorn’.

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Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Literature Matthias Grünewald

Christianity’s Criminal History, 104


 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.
 

The great Christian ideal:
The inversion of Greco-Roman values

Already at the end of the 4th century and only in the desert regions of Egypt, there were apparently 24,000 ascetics. They were buried in subterranean places, ‘like the dead in their graves’, they dwelt in huts of branches, in hollows with no other opening than a hole to creep up to them. They squatted like troglodytes on large rocks, on steep slopes, in grottos, in tiny cells, in cages, in dens of beasts and in trunks of dry trees, or else they were placed on columns.

In a word, they lived like wild animals because Saint Anthony, the first Christian monk known to history, had ordered ‘to lead an animal life’: a mandate that also the so often praised Benedict of Nursia adopted in his rule. And according to the currency of the ancient ascetics, ‘the true fast consists of permanent hunger’ and ‘the more opulent the body, the more minute the soul; and vice versa’. They limited themselves to picking out a grain of barley from the camel dung with their fingers, remaining, for the rest days or even whole weeks, in total abstinence.

Surely we should not always give credence to what the Christian chroniclers wrote. Some of these saints did not even exist. Some of these stories are of analogous nature of the ‘ancient Egyptian novels adapted to new ideas’ (Amélineau). Other stories, despite their propensity for hyperbole, are touching. Macarius of Alexandria, for example, kills a horsefly on a certain day and punishes himself. For six months he lies on the ground from which he would not move, in a wasteland ‘in which there are big gadflies like wasps, with stingers that pierce the skin of boars. His body is in such a state that when he returns to his cell they all take him for a leper and only recognise the saint by his voice’.

Whatever the degree of veracity of these stories, from them it clearly transcends everything that influenced, mislead and annoyed the Christians of that time and those of subsequent centuries: the sublime ‘ideal’ by which they had to abide. Those lunatics were idolised, celebrated, consulted and they and their peers passed for saints.

The Temptation of St. Anthony
by Matthias Grünewald.

Anthony wandered from one hiding place to another along the Libyan desert, attracting other anchorites, attracting demons and angels, having full visions of lascivious women, earning more and more the fame of sanctity, of the ideal (Christian) hero. Towards the end of his long life his stature literally grows, with so many miracles and visions, to enter heaven.

In relation to all this, the Vita Antonii (Life of Anthony) of that old forger that was Athanasius, exerted a most than nefarious influence. Written in Greek towards 360 and promptly translated into Latin, it became a popular success; even more, a paradigm of Greek and Latin hagiography.

And it is quite possible that, as Hertling praises, this fable of Anthony has been ‘one of those books that decide the fate of humanity’, since, according to Hartnack, ‘no other written work has had a more stunning effect on Egypt, Western Asia and Europe ‘that that despicable product which emerged from the pen of St. Athanasius the Great’, ‘perhaps the most fateful book of all that have ever been written’. That work is ‘the ultimate piece responsible for which demons, miracle stories and all kinds of goblins found their accommodation in the Church’ (Lexicon of Concepts for Antiquity and Christianity).

Throughout those centuries, most authors of primitive Christianity resolutely reject Greco-Roman culture, philosophy, poetry and art. In the face of all this, they maintained an attitude of profound distrust, of declared hostility: an attitude determined both by the resentment and the anti-Hellenic hatred of the more or less cultured Christians.

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Ancient Rome Architecture Christendom Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Evil Libanius

Darkening Age, 12

In chapter eight of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:
 
In Palmyra, what remains of the statue of Athena shows that one single, furious sword-blow had been enough to decapitate her. Though often one blow was not felt to be sufficient. In Germany, a statue of the goddess Minerva was smashed into six pieces. Her head has never been found. In France, a relief of Mithras was smashed into more than three hundred pieces.

Christian writers applauded such destruction—and egged their rulers on to greater acts of violence. One gleefully observed that the Christian emperors now ‘spit in the faces of dead idols, trample on the lawless rites of demons, and laugh at the old lies’. An infamous early text instructed emperors to wash away this ‘filth’ and ‘take away, yes, calmly take away… the adornments of the temples. Let the fire of the mint or the blaze of the smelters melt them down.’

This was nothing to be ashamed of. The first Commandment could not have been clearer. ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,’ it said. ‘Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them,’ it continued, ‘nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.’ The Greek and Roman temples, no matter how ancient or beautiful, were the homes of false gods and they had to be destroyed. This was not vandalism: it was God’s will. The good Christian had a duty to do nothing less.

The speed with which toleration slipped into intolerance and then downright suppression shocked non-Christian observer. The emperor Julian later acerbically observed that, while Constantine robbed the temples his sons overthrew them. In AD 356, it became illegal—on pain of death—to worship images. The law adopted a tone of hitherto unseen aggression. ‘Pagans’ began to be described as ‘madmen’ whose beliefs must be ‘completely eradicated’…

But Julian’s reign was brief and, just half a century after Constantine, it was already too late to reverse the attrition that had begun. Julian, one Christian would tell his flock, was ‘but a cloud which will speedily be dispersed’. He was right.

By the time Theophilus attacked Serapis the laws were on his side. But many other Christians were so keen to attack the demonic temples that they didn’t wait for legal approval. Decades before the laws of the land permitted them to, zealous Christians began to indulge in acts of violent vandalism against their ‘pagan’ neighbours…

Libanius, the Greek orator from Antioch, was revolted by the destruction that he witnessed. ‘These people,’ he wrote, ‘hasten to attack the temples with sticks and stones and bars of iron, and in some cases, disdaining these, with hands and feet. Then utter desolation follows, with the stripping of roofs, demolition of walls, the tearing down of statues, and the overthrow of altars, and the priests must either keep quiet or die… So they sweep across the countryside like rivers in spate.’

Libanius spoke elegiacally of a huge temple on the frontier with Persia, a magnificent building with a beautiful ceiling, in whose cool shadows had stood numerous statues. Now, he said, ‘it is vanished and gone, to the grief of those who had seen it’—and the grief of those who now never would. This temple had been so striking, he said, that there were even those who argued that it was as great as the temple of Serapis—which, he added with an irony not lost on later historians, ‘I pray may never suffer the same fate.’

Not only were the monks vulgar, stinking, ill-educated and violent they were also, said their critics, phoneys. They pretended to adopt lives of austere self-denial but actually they were no better than drunken thugs, a black-robed tribe ‘who eat more than elephants and, by the quantities of drink they consume, weary those that accompany their drinking with the singing of hymns’…

Then, in 399, a new and more terrible law came. It was announced that ‘if there should be any temples in the country districts, they shall be torn down without disturbance or tumult. For when they are torn down and removed, the material basis for all superstition will be destroyed.’

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Bible Christendom Eschatology Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Pedagogy Theology

Christianity’s Criminal History, 102

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. In the previous chapter, not translated for this site, the author describes the high level of education in the Greco-Roman world before the Christians burned entire libraries and destroyed an amazing quantity of classical art.

 
Since the time of Jesus Christianity has taught to hate everything that is not at God’s service

The Gospel was originally an apocalyptic, eschatological message, a preaching of the imminent end of the world. The faith of Jesus and his disciples was, in this respect, firm as a rock, so that any pedagogical question lacked any relevance for them. They did not show the slightest interest in education or culture. Science and philosophy, as well as art, did not bother them at all.

We had to wait no less than three centuries to have a Christian art. The ecclesiastical dispositions, even those enacted in later times, measure artists, comedians, brothel owners and other types with the same theological standard.

Soon it was the case that the ‘fisherman’s language’ (especially, it seems, that of the Latin Bibles) provoked mockery throughout all the centuries, although the Christians defend it ostensibly. This, in despite Jerome and Augustine confess on more than one occasion how much horror is caused by the strange, clumsy and often false style of the Bible. Augustine even said it sounded like stories of old women! (In the 4th century some biblical texts were poured into Virgil hexameters, without making them any less painful.) Homines sine litteris et idiotae (illiterate and ignorant men), thus the Jewish priests describe the apostles of Jesus in the Latin version of the Bible.

As the Kingdom of God did not come upon the Earth, the Church replaced it with the Kingdom of Heaven to which the believers had to orient their entire lives. This meant according the plans of the Church; for the benefit of the Church, and in the interest of the high clergy. For whenever and wherever this clergy speaks of the Church, of Christ, of God and of eternity, it does so solely and exclusively for their own benefit. Pretending to advocate for the health of the believer’s soul, they thought only of their own health. All the virtues of which Christianity made special propaganda, that is, humility, faith, hope, charity, and more, lead to that final goal.

In the New Testament it is no longer human pedagogy what matters, which is barely addressed. What is at stake is the pedagogy of divine redemption.

In the work of Irenaeus, creator of a first theological pedagogy, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa, the idea of a divine pedagogy is often discussed and God becomes the proper educator. Ergo all education must, in turn, be engaged in the first and last line of God and this must be his role.

That is why Origen teaches that ‘we disdain everything that is chaotic, transient and apparent and we must do everything possible to access life with God’. Hence, John Chrysostom requires parents to educate ‘champions of Christ’ and that they should demand the early and persistent reading of the Bible. Hence, Jerome, who once called a little girl a recruit and a fighter for God, wrote that ‘we do not want to divide equally between Christ and the world’.

‘All education is subject to Christianization’ (Ballauf). Nor does the Doctor of the Church Basil consider ‘an authentic good he who only provides earthly enjoyment’. What was encouraged is the ‘attainment of another life’. That is ‘the only thing that, in our opinion, we should love and pursue with all our strength. All that is not oriented to that goal we must dismiss as lacking in value’.

Such educational principles that are considered chimerical, or ‘worthless’ (everything that does not relate to a supposed life after death), find their foundation even in Jesus himself: ‘If someone comes to me and does not hate his father, his mother, his wife, his children, his brothers, his sisters and even his own life, he can not be my disciple’.

How many misfortunes such words have been sowing for two thousand years…

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Christendom Daybreak Publishing Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Finally

Finally, the abridged translation of Karlheinz Deschner’s book on the history of Christianity is available in printed form (here).

This January, in a discussion thread at The Occidental Observer, Karl Nemmersdorf, the Christian author of the featured article, told me ‘Um… no, I don’t follow your blog. Please let me know, however, if you supersede St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Aquinas…’

In other words, these guys are so giants that I could not possibly mess with their divine wisdom. But however erudite Nemmersdorf may be in traditional Catholic literature, he is ignorant about the real story of his religion. His ignorance is explainable because only until very recently did someone turn his life into the encyclopaedic mission of uncovering the criminal history of Christianity. Apparently, white people had been unable to read an encyclopaedic work about real Church history for the simple reason that it didn’t exist before Deschner.

The fact is that the Big Guys mentioned by Nemmersdorf, Paul (recently discussed in this site in several posts), Augustine and Aquinas, were evil men. And evil men were also the church doctors in Augustine’s times, Athanasius and Ambrose, as demonstrated by Deschner.

Remember that I offered my opinion on a recent article by Andrew Joyce about Jewish psy-ops: they have infiltrated our educational system in order to brainwash generations of white children. Well, although Ambrose probably was not Jewish he was not white either, as can be seen in this ancient mosaic. In a passage from this first translated volume, Deschner talks about the psy-ops that this non-white doctor used to brainwash the Roman princes:

Bishop Ambrose saw the sovereigns daily. Since when Valentinian II was proclaimed Augustus (375) he was barely five years old, his tutor and half-brother Gratian had just turned sixteen and the Spanish Theodosius was at least a very determined Catholic, the illustrious disciple of Jesus could handle perfectly their majesties. Valentinian I died a few years after Ambrose’s inauguration. His son Gratian (375-383), of just sixteen years of age, succeeded him on the throne.

The emperor, blond, beautiful and athletic had no interest in politics. ‘I have never learned what it means to govern and be governed’ (Eunapius). He was a passionate runner, javelin thrower, fighter, rider, but what he liked most was killing animals. Neglecting the affairs of state, every day he killed countless of them, with an almost ‘supernatural’ ability, even lions, with a single arrow.

Note how this is eerily similar to contemporary Aryan frivolity in extreme sports—at the same time that the Jews plot how to exterminate them! (which is why we speak about an ‘Aryan question’ beside the ‘Jewish question’).

In any case, he also prayed every day and was ‘pious and clean of hearing’, as Ambrose affirmed: ‘His virtues would have been complete had he also learned the art of politics’. However, this art was practiced by Ambrose for him. Not only did he personally guide the young sovereign, effectively since 378: he also influenced his government measures. At that time the sovereign had promulgated, by an edict, precisely tolerance towards all confessions, except a few extremist sects. However, Ambrose, who four years before was still unbaptized, hastened to write a statement, De fide ad Gratianum Augustum (Faith for Gratian), which he quickly understood.

As soon as Gratian himself arrived at the end of July 379 in Milan, neutral as he was from the point of view of religious policy, he annulled on August 3, after an interview with Ambrose, the edict of tolerance promulgated the year before.

The Greco-Roman religion, reviled as ‘pagan’ by Christian Newspeak, was a religion originated by pure whites (see the articles of Evropa Soberana in The Fair Race). Eventually, the white religion was prohibited and the Jewish god imposed on all Roman citizens. A few pages later, Deschner tells us:

The young Gratian at first had given a good treatment to the ‘pagans’, but he learned from his spiritual mentor ‘to feel the Christian Empire as an obligation to repress the old religion of the state’ (Caspar).

Other early Christian writers were most likely ethnic Jews, as can be guessed when pondering on how they avenged the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem a few centuries earlier:

Lactantius [an early Christian author who became an advisor to the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine I] is the one who then states that the sovereigns of the gentiles [emphasis added] were ‘criminals before God’, and he celebrates that they have been ‘exterminated from the root with all their type’. ‘Now those who pretended to defy God are laid prostrate on the ground; those who knocked down the Temple were slow to fall, but they fell much lower and had the end they deserved’.

Judeo-Christianity conquered the Roman Empire because the empire had become the melting-pot for non-white peoples, Jews included, who took advantage of the Roman upward mobility after the old religion became obsolete. This site, The West’s Darkest Hour is based on a passage from William Pierce’s Who We Are: that the ancient Greeks and Romans should have gotten rid of non-whites instead of using them as slaves or second-class citizens. If pre-Christian emperors had taken heed of a Cassandra prophecy, what Deschner says would not have occurred:

Constantine dedicated ten years to rearmament and propaganda in favour of Christianity as in the East; for example in Asia Minor, half of the population was already Christian in some areas [i.e., non-white]. After those ten years he rose again in search of the ‘final solution’.

That the earliest Christians were not white but fully Semitic is apparent in the footnotes below these maps provided by Evropa Soberana. We can assume that by the time of Constantine most Christians were also non-white, as Christians preached slave morality, blessed are the poor, etc. But I would like to continue to respond to the erudite Christian authors and commenters at The Occidental Observer. Not only St. Ambrose was non-white but St. Augustine was not white either (scholars generally agree that Augustine’s parents were Berbers), and probably the other great Church doctor of the time, St. Athanasius, was another non-white. Deschner wrote:

Probably like Paul and like Gregory VII, Athanasius was short and weak; Julian calls him homunculus. However, like Paul and Gregory, each one of them was a genius of hatred.

This suggest that Athanasius did not belong to the handsome Latin race (‘Aryan race’ the Nazis would say) to which Emperor Julian belonged. Like Nemmersdorf , Lew Wallace, author of the huge bestseller Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, did not admire Julian but the Christian emperors. What white nationalists ignore is that, without millions of useful idiots like this pair, the Jews would never have taken over the United States. These are the final words of Ben-Hur:

If any of my readers, visiting Rome, will make the short journey to the Catacomb of San Calixto, which is more ancient than that of San Sebastiano, he will see what became of the fortune of Ben-Hur, and give him thanks. Out of that vast tomb Christianity issued to supersede the Caesars.

The reading of Deschner’s books, and I mean not only this first translated volume but the next ones, will convince the honest reader that—contra Wallace—compared to the monstrous Christian emperors, the pagan Caesars were almost saints. If life allows, we will reach the pages where Deschner debunks the last doctor of the church mentioned by Nemmersdorf, Thomas Aquinas, but that is still too many books ahead.

For the moment, this is the Contents page of our first translation of:

 

Christianity’s Criminal History

Editor’s preface

Introduction

 
The Early Period: from Old Testament origins to the death of Saint Augustine
 
Forgeries in the Old Testament

The bibles and some peculiarities of the Christian Bible

The five books of Moses, which Moses did not write

David and Solomon

Joshua and Isaiah

Ezekiel and Daniel

The Jewish apocalyptic

Portrayals of the biblical female world

Opposition to the Old Testament

Forgeries in diaspora Judaism

 
Forgeries in the New Testament

The error of Jesus

The ‘Holy Scriptures’ are piled up

God as the author?

Christians forged more consciously than Jews

Neither the Gospel of Matthew, nor the Gospel of John, nor John’s Book of Revelation come from the apostles to whom the Church attributes them

Forged ‘epistles of Paul’

The Second Epistle to the Thessalonians

Colossians, Ephesians and Hebrews

Forged epistles of Peter

Forged John and others

Interpolations in the New Testament

 
The invention of Popes

Neither Jesus instituted the papacy nor Peter was bishop of Rome

There is no evidence of Peter’s stay and death in Rome

The story of the discovery of Peter’s tomb

The list of fabricated Roman bishops

 
Background in the Old Testament

Moses and the Book of Judges

The ravages of David and the modern translators

The sacred warmongering of the Maccabees

The Jewish War (66-70)

Bar Kokhba and the ‘Last War of God’ (131-136)

The Jewish religion, tolerated by the pagan state

 
Early Christianity

Interpretatio Christiana

‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’

First ‘heretics’ in the New Testament

Thirteen good Christians

Saint Jerome and Origen

 
The persecution of the Christians

Anti-Hellene hatred in the New Testament

The defamation of the Greco-Roman religion

Celsus and Porphyry

The persecution of the Christians

Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents

The Roman emperors viewed retrospectively

 
Saint Constantine: The First Christian Emperor

War against Maxentius

War against Maximinus

War against Licinius

The Catholic clergy, increasingly favoured

Constantine as saviour, deliverer, and vicar of God

No more a pacifist Church

Christian family life and savage criminal practices

Constantine against Jews and ‘heretics’

Constantine against the Greco-Roman culture

 
Interim report

Persia, Armenia and Christianity

 
Constantine’s successors

The first Christian dynasty founded on family extermination

First wars among devout Christians

Constantius and his Christian-style government

A father of the Church who preaches looting and killing

First assaults on the temples

 
Julian

Hecatombs under the pious Gallus

Emperor Julian

Christian tall stories

 
After Julian

Rivers of blood under the Catholic Valentinian

Trembling and gnashing of teeth under the Arian Valens

 
Athanasius, Doctor of the Church

The complicated nature of God

It was not fought for faith but for power

The Council of Nicaea

Character and tactics of a Father of the Church

The death of Arius

The ‘battlefield’ of Alexandria

Antioch and Constantinople

Shelter with a twenty-year-old beauty

 
Ambrose, doctor of the Church

Non-white Ambrose drives the annihilation of the Goths

Emperor Theodosius ‘the Great’

Against the Hellenist religion

 
The Father of the Church Augustine

‘Genius in all fields of Christian doctrine’

Augustine’s campaign against the Donatists

The overthrow of Pelagius

Augustine attacks Greco-Roman culture

Augustine sanctions the ‘holy war’

Categories
Art Christendom Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil

Darkening Age, 11

As the epigraph of ‘How to Destroy a Demon’, chapter eight of The Darkening Age: The Christian
Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey chose a passage from an hagiography of a so-called saint, The Life of Martin: ‘He completely demolished the temple belonging to the false religion and reduced all the altars and statues to dust’.

The pages of history might overlook this destruction, but stone is less forgetful. Go to Room 18 in the British Museum in London and you will find yourself in front of the Parthenon Marbles, taken from Greece by Lord Elgin in the nineteenth century.

The astonishingly lifelike statues are, today, in a sorry state: many are mutilated or missing limbs. This, it is often assumed, was the fault of Lord Elgin’s clumsy workmen or fighting during the Ottoman occupation. And indeed some of this was—but not all. Much was the work of zealous Christians who set about the temple with blunt instruments, attacking the ‘demonic’ gods, mutilating some of the finest statuary Greece had ever produced.

The East Pediment fared particularly badly. Hands, feet, even whole limbs have gone—almost certainly smashed off by Christians trying to incapacitate the demons within. The vast majority of the gods have been decapitated—again, almost certainly the work of Christians. The great central figures of the Pediment, that would have shown the birth of Athena, were the most sacred—and thus to the Christians the most demonic. They therefore suffered most: it is likely that they were pushed off the Pediment—and smashed on the ground below, their fragmented remains ground down and used for mortar for a Christian church.

The same tale is told by objects in museums and archaeological sites across the world. Near the Marbles in the same museum is a basalt bust of Germanicus. Two blows have hacked off his nose and a cross has been cut in his forehead. In Athens, a larger­than-life statue of Aphrodite has been disfigured by a crude cross carved on her brow; her eyes have been defaced and her nose is missing. In Cyrene, the eyes have been gouged out of a life-sized bust in a sanctuary of Demeter, and the nose removed; in Tuscany a slender statue of Bacchus has been decapitated.

In the Sparta Archaeological Museum, a colossal statue of the goddess Hera looks blindly out, her eyes disfigured by crosses. A beautiful statue of Apollo from Salamis has been castrated and then struck, hard, in the face, shearing off the god’s nose. Across his neck are scars indicating that Christians attempted to decapitate him but failed.

In Palmyra Museum there stood, at least until the city’s recent occupation by Islamic State, the mutilated and reconstructed figure of the once-great figure of Athena that had dominated a temple there. A huge dent in her once-handsome face was all that remained when her nose was smashed off. A recent book on the Christian destruction of statues focusing just on Egypt and the Near East runs to almost three hundred pages, dense with pictures of mutilation.

But while some evidence remains, much has gone entirely. The point of destruction is, after all, that it destroys. If effective, it more than merely defaces something. It obliterates all evidence that the object ever existed. We will never know quite how much was wiped out. Many statues were pulverized, shattered, scattered, burned and melted into absence. Tiny piles of charred ivory and gold are all that remain of some. Others were so well disposed of that they will probably not be found: they were thrown into rivers, sewers and wells, never to be seen again. The destruction of other sacred objects is, because of the nature of the object, all but impossible to detect.

The sacred groves of the old gods for example, those tranquil natural shrines like the one Pliny had so admired, were set about with axes and their ancient trees hacked down. Pictures, books, ribbons even, could be seen as the work of the devil and thus removed and destroyed. Certain sorts of musical instruments were censured and stopped: as one Christian preacher boasted; the Christians smashed the flutes of the ‘musicians of the demons’ to pieces. Some of the demolition, such as that of the temple of Serapis, was so terrible that several authors recorded it.

Other moments of vandalism were immortalized in glowing terms in Christian hagiographies. Though these are the exceptions. Far more violence was buried in silence.

Categories
Christendom New Testament St Paul

Epistle to the Galatians

The Epistle to the Galatians is the second book in a chronologically ordered New Testament. If you are still a Christian that reads the Bible in the traditional way, take a good look at the first chapters of Marcus Borg’s Evolution of the Word, which includes the New Testament in the order the books were written.

Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by a man, but by Yeshua the anointed and god the father, who raised him from the dead—and all the brothers and sisters with me, to the churches in Galatia: Grace and peace to you from god our father and the lord Yeshua the anointed who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age…

My italicized words in Paul’s opening sentence to the Galatians evoke what I said about Paul last Friday in the context of how the Attis cult might have influenced the Semite Saul (a.k.a ‘Paul’) in his native town of Tarsus.

Many of those educated in the Christian faith are still unable to distinguish between the Christ of dogma and the Jesus of history. As we have already noted about the oldest New Testament books, in the genuine Pauline letters the details about the historical Jesus (in contrast to Paul’s mythical ‘Christ’) are surprisingly absent. But what is most conspicuous in an ordered reading of the New Testament is that, for example, Paul’s letter to the Galatians:

(1) does not mention the Empty Tomb,

(2) does not mention the Apparitions of the Risen Jesus,

(3) does not mention the Ascension of Jesus,

(4) does not mention Pentecost,

(5) does not hint any allusion toward the story we all heard as children: that, after the above extraordinary events, the Apostles were catapulted with such a fire of enthusiasm that they preached the gospel to the point of martyrdom.

Regarding (2), New Testament writers were not biographers as the word ‘biography’ is understood in our modern world. Paul would certainly mention Yeshua’s apparitions in later epistles when his Christology was more developed not from a historical, but from a theological point of view.

The following are my impressions of my most recent reading of the letter to the Galatians.

In the first seventeen verses it is surprising to learn that Paul says that his vocation to preach the word of the lord had begun before (!) his meeting with the apostles. Then, in Gal. 1: 18-19 Paul confesses that three years after his great religious conversion he finally decided to visit Peter and James, and that fourteen years later he visited the Jerusalem Church again, to inform them he would preach to the gentiles (Gal. chapter 2).

All of this smells that it was Paul’s zeal, not the true apostles, what ignited the movement that became known as Christianity.

Then I read in that same chapter 2 that Paul had an incident with Peter because Peter and the Jerusalem Church had not broken away from Jewish practices. I immediately realised that this story could be used as a powerful weapon against those who believe in the historicity of the Empty Tomb, the Apparitions of the Risen Jesus, the Ascension and the spiritual fire of the Pentecost that, according to tradition—rather than the impression from a chronological reading of the NT—ignited Christianity.

We can imagine a Judaea in which all these Resurrection stories had really happened. How on earth those who received the tongues of fire on their heads to preach with euphoria the Good News could have regressed to the rancid practices of Judaism, something that can be surmised in this early Pauline epistle? We are talking about elemental Judaic stuff, such as circumcision and the diet prescribed by the Torah against which Paul preaches not only in Galatians but in other letters.

The Galatians letter does not reflect the theology of the Jewish Jerusalem Church. It reflects the incipient theology of the ‘apostle to the Gentiles’.

In the third chapter of Galatians Paul laid out the foundations of his new cult, rehabilitating man by ‘faith’ instead of the observance of Jewish law: observances that those who had really known Jesus were still practising. It is in that chapter that Paul pronounces his famous words, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Yeshua the anointed one’.

It is also interesting that in chapter 4 Paul mentions that god sent this Yeshua ‘born of a woman and subject to the law’—that is, Jesus was a Jew—‘to rescue those who were subject to the law’, that is to rescue the Jews. In that verse it is not implied that we gentiles would also be rescued in the original Yeshua cult. In that chapter Paul also scolds the Christian community that had not given up Jewish practises.

Again, that alone suggests that the legends of the Resurrection listed in the numbered paragraph above, or at least the thoroughgoing embellished stories as understood in later Christendom, had not yet emerged when the second book of the New Testament was written. Even in the postscript and farewell of his letter to the Galatians Paul continues to talk against circumcision repeatedly.

Certainly, reading the New Testament in the order the books were written and from a strictly rational viewpoint—i.e., with an exegetical eye to distinguish who might the ‘historical Jesus’ have been—make a fresh reading of the ‘book of books’.