Greek effigy coin of
Antiochus IV Epiphanes
A couple of days ago I resuscitated the idea of adding here further excerpts from the monumental Criminal History of Christianity. Four years ago I purposely left those excerpts with a short entry because Deschner’s last sentence provided much food for thought: “If the stringent measures against the Jews by Antiochus IV had taken effect, it would not only have meant the end of Judaism, but also ‘would have prevented the rise of Christianity and Islam.’ Our imagination almost fails to conceive a world so different…”
It is a pity that the sources for understanding the revolt of the Maccabees are the Old Testament and Josephus: both Jewish sources. Even so, what happened 2183 years ago can be deduced from those texts.
Early in 167 BC, the Greek Hellenistic king Antiochus sent an army to Jerusalem. He did it on Saturday so the Jews could not carry weapons. Thus, the Hellenistic forces entered the Jewish city without finding opposition. The soldiers of Apollonius, the general of Antiochus, destroyed much of Jerusalem and set up camp on a hill from which the Temple was dominated. That hill would turn into a citadel: the stronghold of the white man in Jerusalem in the next quarter-century.
Antiochus then proceeded to act directly against the Jews. He ordered them to accept the Greek customs; to desecrate the Sabbath and the feasts, to build altars for the white man’s gods, and to immolate therein animals which the Jews considered impure. The decree of Antiochus ended with these words: “Whoever does not obey the orders of the king shall be put to death.”
The very Jewish law became the target of the decrees of Antiochus. “You could not observe the Sabbath, keep the country feasts, or even declare yourself a Jew.” The possession of the Scriptures was a capital offense, and members of a congregation who were caught secretly celebrating the Sabbath were burned alive. “Two women were denounced for having circumcised their children. They tied the children to their breasts, so they walked about the city and threw them down the wall. ”
On the occasion of the festival of Dionysius, orthodox Jews were forced to parade in the procession. In the middle of the drums and voices in honour of the Greek god of wine, they marched with wreaths of ivy, symbol of the foreign god. Later, the whole procession, under pain of death, was exhorted to eat pork.
The way the Jews first reacted was by writing the Book of Daniel. The authors deceived the Jerusalemites into believing it to be a remote text they had just unearthed. As literary criticism has revealed the Book of Daniel was a trick: a vaticinium ex eventu or foretelling after the event written during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes. It is from that book that the phrase of the abomination of desolation, desolating sacrilege, became famous.
Just compare how pre-Christian Aryans dealt with Jerusalem’s Jews with the standing ovations for Prime Minister Netanyahu in the American Congress last year! It is a pity that memes like “white sharia” are becoming popular among some white nationalists while the purely Aryan meme that should become popular is Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values” (see for example my post on Sweden I published today).
If nationalists transvalued Judaic values back to Aryan values, a new constellation of saints of the Ancient World would emerge. Not only the Judeo-Christian names would become gradually repudiated in the generations to come, they would even name their sons after Antiochus, Vercingetorix and Hermann.
Back in 2012 I asked in this blog, Why do we not celebrate the victory of Antiochus IV over the Jews, or Titus’ conquest of Jerusalem? The transvalued individual might well start calling the Hellenistic king as St Antiochus.