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Category: Jerusalem

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Ancient Rome Antiochus IV Epiphanes Final solution Hadrian Horace Jerusalem Judaism Old Testament Seneca The Jesus Hoax (book) Vespasian and Titus

The Jesus Hoax, 4

 
CHAPTER 4: ONE AGAINST ALL

If the Jews are chosen by God, then everyone else is, of necessity, not chosen. If Jews are first class humans in the eyes of God, everyone else is second-class at best. And indeed, Jews do view themselves as distinct, special, and superior to others. As Exodus states, “We are distinct from all other people that are upon the face of the earth” (33:16). Similarly, the Hebrew tribe is “a people dwelling alone, and not reckoning itself among the nations” (Numbers 23:9).

Moses adds that “you shall rule over many nations” (15:6)… you shall eat the wealth of the nations” (61:5-6).

Clearly, when other people began to encounter these ideas and the attitudes that derived from them, one would expect a backlash. And there was. Hence we find a consistent thread of opinions from non-Jewish observers, for centuries, who are repelled by such arrogance…

The earliest direct references come from Aristotle’s star pupil Theophrastus. He had a concern about one of their customs: “the Syrians, of whom the Jews (Ioudaioi) constitute a part, also now sacrifice live victims… They were the first to institute sacrifices both of other living beings and of themselves”. The Greeks, he added, would have “recoiled from the entire business.” The victims—animal and human —were not eaten, but burnt as “whole offerings” to their God, and were “quickly destroyed.” The philosopher was clearly repelled by this Jewish tradition.

Egyptian high priest Manetho (ca. 250 BC) tells of a group of “lepers and other polluted persons,” 80,000 in number, who were exiled from Egypt and found residence in Judea… When in power they treated the natives “impiously and savagely,” “setting towns and villages on fire, pillaging the temples and mutilating images of the gods without restraint,” and roasting the animals held sacred by the locals. This is a very different version than we read in the Jewish Bible…

The decline of the Seleucids coincided with Roman ascent. Rome was still technically a republic in the second century BC, but its power and influence were rapidly growing. Jews were attracted to the seat of power, and travelled to Rome in significant numbers. As before, they grew to be hated. By 139 BC, the Roman praetor Hispalus found it necessary to expel them from the city: “The same Hispalus banished the Jews from Rome, who were attempting to hand over their own rites to the Romans, and he cast down their private alters from public places”. In even this short passage, one senses a Roman Jewry who were disproportionately prominent, obtrusive, even ‘pushy.’

Perhaps in part because of this incident, and in light of the Maccabean revolt some 30 years earlier, the Seleucid king Antiochus VII Sidetes was advised in 134 BC to exterminate the Jews… Apollonius Molon wrote the first book to explicitly confront the Hebrew tribe, Against the Jews.

The rhetoric is clearly heating up. In 63 BC, as we know, Roman general Pompey took Palestine. In the year 59 BC Cicero gave a speech, now titled Pro Flacco. The Jewish religion is “at variance with the glory of our empire, the dignity of our name, the customs of our ancestors.” That the gods stand opposed to this tribe “is shown by the fact that it has been conquered, let out for taxes, made a slave.”

Ten years later Diodorus Siculus wrote his Historical Library. Among other things, it again recounts the Exodus: “The refugees had occupied the territory round about Jerusalem, and having organized the nation of Jews had made their hatred of mankind into a tradition” (34, 1).

Here, though, it is Antiochus Epiphanes, not his successor Sidetes, that was urged “to wipe out completely the race of Jews, since they alone of all nations avoided dealings with any other people and looked upon all men as their enemies”.

The great lyric poet Horace wrote his Satires in 35 BC, exploring Epicurean philosophy and the meaning of happiness. At one point, though, he makes a passing comment on the apparently notorious proselytizing ability of the Roman Jews—in particular their tenaciousness in winning over others. Horace is in the midst of attempting to persuade the reader of his point of view: “and if you do not wish to yield, then a great band of poets will come to my aid, and, just like the Jews, we will compel you to concede to our crowd” (I.4.143). Their power must have been legendary, or he would not have made such an allusion.

The last commentator of the pre-Christian era was Lysimachus. Writing circa 20 BC, he offers another variation on the Exodus story. The exiled ones, led by Moses, were instructed to “show goodwill to no man,” to offer “the worst advice” to others, and to overthrow any temples or sanctuaries they might come upon. Arriving in Judea, “they maltreated the population, and plundered and set fire to the local temples.” They then built a town called Hierosolyma (Jerusalem), and referred to themselves as Hierosolymites.

The charge of misanthropy, or hatred of mankind, is significant and merits further discussion, especially in light of the Christian story.

 

Romans of the Christian Era

Emperor Tiberius expelled them in the year 19 AD. The expulsion did not succeed. Eleven years later, as we recall from chapter two, Sejanus found reason to oppose them again.

Anti-Jewish actions continued. In 49, Claudius once again had to expel them. In a fascinating line from Suetonius circa the year 120, we find mention of one ‘Chrestus’ (Latin: Chresto) as the leader of the rabble; this would be perhaps the fourth non-Jewish references to Jesus. “Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, [Claudius] expelled them from Rome”. This is an important observation that, even at that late date, the Romans still identified Christianity with the Jews.

Despite all this, the beleaguered tribe still earned no sympathy. The great philosopher Seneca commented on them in his work On Superstition, circa 60. He was appalled not only by their ‘superstitious’ religious beliefs, but more pragmatically with their astonishing influence in Rome and around the known world, despite repeated pogroms and banishments. Seneca adds: “The customs of this accursed race (sceleratissima gens) have gained such influence that they are now received throughout all the world. The vanquished have given laws to their victors.”

Seneca is clearly indignant at their reach. Then came the historic Jewish revolt in Judea, during the years 66 to 70. The Romans were surely gratified; to their mind, the Jews received their just deserts.

In besieging Jerusalem, and consequently the mighty Jewish temple, Titus had the Jews trapped. There was thought of sparing the temple, but Titus opposed this option. For him, “the destruction of this temple was a prime necessity in order to wipe out more completely the religion of the Jews and the Christians.” These two religions, “although hostile to each other, nevertheless sprang from the same sources; the Christians had grown out of the Jews: if the root were destroyed, the stock would easily perish”. The passage closes by noting that 600,000 Jews were killed in the war.

The third and final Jewish uprising occurred just a few years later, in 132. The reasons for this were many, but two stand out: the construction of a Roman city on the ruins of Jerusalem, and Emperor Hadrian’s banning of circumcision: “At this time the Jews began war, because they were forbidden to practice genital mutilation (mutilare genitalia)”. Dio describes the conflict in detail. “Jews everywhere were showing signs of hostility to the Romans, partly by secret and partly overt acts”. They were able to bribe others to join in the uprising: “many outside nations, too, were joining them through eagerness for gain, and the whole earth, one might almost say, was being stirred up over the matter.” For those today who argue that Jews were perennially the cause of wars, this would provide some early evidence. Hadrian sent one of his best generals, Severus, to put down the insurgency. Through a slow war of attrition, “he was able to crush, exhaust, and exterminate them. Very few of them in fact survived.”

Finally we have Celsus, a Greek philosopher who composed a text, The True Word, sometime around 178. The piece is striking as an extended and scathing critique of the increasingly prominent Christian sect.

 

Conclusions

So what can we conclude from this brief overview of some 600 years of the ancient world? To say that the Jews were disliked is an understatement. The critiques come from all around the Mediterranean region, and from a wide variety of cultural perspectives. And they are uniformly negative. I note here that it’s not a case of ‘cherry-picking’ the worst comments and ignoring the good ones. The remarks are all negative; there simply are no positive opinions on the Jews or early Christians. A reasonable conclusion is that there is something about the Jewish culture that inspires disgust and hatred.

In any case, it’s clear that the Jews had few if any friends in the ancient world. Their religion instructed them to despise others (Gentiles), and others in turn despised them. But the originating source was the Jews themselves: their religion, their worldview, their values. They were willing to use and exploit non-Jews for their own ends. They were willing to kill, and to die.

This situation feeds directly into the circumstances of the Roman occupation and Paul’s reaction. The preceding analysis suggests that Paul was interested in nothing other than saving ‘Israel,’ the Jewish people. We have seen a few textual clues indicating that he was willing even to commit murder in order to further his ends. Surely he hated the Romans with a vengeance, and yet he also could see the futility of confronting them directly.

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Aelia Capitolina

Or:

Jew-wise priests vs mere anti-Semites

Imagine what would happen if an ethnostate wiped Israel off the map and in the place of Tel-Aviv founded a new city filled with statues depicting the beauty of the Aryan race: a city that Jews would be forbidden to enter. What astronomical levels of resentment would diaspora Jews engender? What would be their verbal, or rather textual, response in the world of the Gentiles now that they have been defeated by arms?

In actual history this happened when Rome destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, forbade the Jews to enter Jerusalem, and founded a new city on its ruins: Aelia Capitolina (those who haven’t read the masthead of this site, ‘Rome vs Judea; Judea vs Rome’, should do so now).

The point is that the original gospel of the Bible was written immediately after the catastrophe that 70 c.e. represented for Jewry! (Matthew and Luke would later edit Mark’s gospel—and even later John, who knew his predecessors’ texts, spun even more tales for his own gospel.)

Let’s not forget, as I have so often pointed out on this site by quoting Richard Carrier’s book on the sidebar, that Mark, the author of the original gospel that would inspire the other evangelists, attempted to transvalue Roman values through the fictional figure of Jesus by tracing the exploits of Romulus, the founding God of Rome, but twisting them in that all the heroes of his new gospel were Jewish.

What is really impressive is the chronology: the first gospel was written just after the fall of Jerusalem, which must have been truly apocalyptic for the Jewish mentality of the time.

If the alt-right, white nationalists, race realists or whatever you want to call them were honest, they wouldn’t overlook how the Jew’s endless hatred of the white man arose, and the way they tried to poison the soul of the Aryan through their gospels.

The anti-Semites aren’t Jew-wise. They are just anti-Semites, plain and simple. Savitri Devi was Jew-wise. She was aware of the level of subversion it meant, to the soul of the Aryans, for the latter to drink all the Kool-Aid [1] the Jew offered them starting with the stories that Mark invented.

__________

[1] An American term for blind adherence to a bad idea.

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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.

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Ancient Rome Christendom Degeneracy Egalitarianism Evropa Soberana (webzine) Geography Jerusalem Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Nero Slavery

Apocalypse for whites • XXIX

by Evropa Soberana

 
Christianity takes hold outside Judea
As soon as the Jews learn about the events in Rome with the Christians, they begin to plan an uprising and, perfectly coordinated, rebel throughout the Roman Empire. Thus, in the year 66, in a rapid and well-planned coup d’état, they put to the knife all the non-Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem except the slaves. Nero uses his legions to crush the revolt harshly in the rest of the Empire, but in their capital the Jews become strong. In the year 68, just as General Vespasian left to take Jerusalem, Nero is mysteriously murdered.
Vespasian, then, becomes emperor and sends his son Titus to the front of the X Legio, with the aim of crushing the Jews. The year 70 Rome triumphs; Jerusalem is devastated and sacked by the Roman legionaries and it is said that in the process a million Jews died under Roman arms (only in Jerusalem the town had accumulated, during the siege, three million Jews). This year 70, fateful, traumatizing, outrageous and key for Jewry, sees the enslavement and dispersion of Jews throughout the Mediterranean (Diaspora), greatly enhancing the growth of Christianity.
There are successive emperors (Trajan, Hadrian) very aware of the Jewish problem, who do not pay much attention to Christians, mainly because they are too busy with the Judaic puzzle in ‘holy land’, repressing the Jews again and again, without destroying them completely.
In this time, the new religion grows little by little, gaining followers among the enslaved masses thanks to its egalitarian ideology and also in high positions of the administration: among an increasingly decadent and materialist bureaucracy. Christianity glorified misfortune instead of glorifying the struggle against it; considered suffering as a merit that dignifies itself and proclaimed that Paradise awaits anyone who behaves well. (Remember how the pagans taught that only fighters entered the Valhalla.)
It is the religion of the slaves, and they willingly subscribe to it. Early Christianity played a very similar role to that of the later Freemasonry: it was a Jewish strategy dressed up using weak and ambitious characters, fascinating them with a sinister ritualism. The result was like a communism for the Roman Empire, even favouring the ‘emancipation’ and independence of women from their husbands by capturing them with a strange and novel Christian liturgy, and urging them to donate their own money to the cause (a scam quite similar in its essence to the current New Age cults).

This map in Spanish shows the extension of Christianity around the year 100. The Roman Empire is represented in a lighter shade than the barbarian territories. Note that the areas of Christian preaching
coincide exactly with the densest Jewish settlement areas.

It is at the beginning of the second century that the figure of Christian fat cats called ‘bishops’ begins to take on importance. Saint Ignatius of Antioch wrote in the year 107, in the most corny way: ‘It is obvious that we must look to a bishop like the Lord in person. His clerics are in harmony with their bishop like the strings of a harp, and the result is a hymn of praise to Jesus Christ of minds that feel in unison’. St. Ignatius is captured by the Roman authorities, and thrown to the lions in 107. (It is interesting to pay attention to the names of the preachers, since they always come from eastern mestizo and Judaized areas; in this case, Syria.)
Around the year 150, the Greek Marcion tries to form a kind of ‘de-Judaised’ purification in Christianity, rejecting the Old Testament; giving pre-eminent importance to the Gospel of St. Luke and adopting a Gnostic worldview with Orphic and Manichean airs. This is the first attempt of reform or Europeanization of Christianity: trying to deprive it from its obvious Jewish roots.[1] Marcion’s followers, the Marcionites, who professed a Gnostic creed, are classified as heretics by mainstream Christianity.

This map shows the general expansion of Christianity in 185. Note the great difference with respect to the previous map and note also that the area most influenced by Christianity is still the Eastern
Mediterranean: a highly Semitic zone.

Sometime after the year 200, in view of the incorporation into Christianity of great new masses that did not speak Greek but Latin, a Latin translation of the Gospels began to circulate in most western Christian centres.
The emperor Diocletian (reigned 284-305) divided the Empire into two halves to make it more governable. He keeps the eastern part and hands over the western part to Maximian, a former comrade in arms. He establishes a rigid bureaucracy, and these measures smell like irremediable decadence. Despite this, Diocletian is a just and realistic veteran. He allows its Christian legionaries to be absent from pagan ceremonies, provided they maintain their military discipline.
But this was precisely the trickiest issue, where the bishops insolently defy the authority of the emperor. Diocletian, however, is benevolent and only one Christian pacifist is executed. However, he now insists that Christians participate in state ceremonies of a religious nature, and the Christian response to this decision is growing pride and arrogance, with numerous revolts and provocations.
But even at this point, Diocletian renounces to apply the death penalty, contenting himself with making slaves of the rebels that he captured. The answer to this are more riots and a fire in the imperial palace itself, and provocations and Christian insolence occur throughout the Empire. But the most Diocletian does is to execute nine rebellious bishops and eighty rebels in Palestine, the area most troubled by Christian rebellions.
One of these rebels was a spawn named St. Procopius of Scythopolis. To get an idea of which kind of creature Procopius was, let’s see the words of a contemporary, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea: ‘He had tamed his body until turning it, so to speak, into a corpse; but the strength that his soul found in the word of God gave strength to his body… He only studied the word of God and had little knowledge of the profane sciences’. That is to say, this sub-man was a sick body and a crushed and resentful spirit, moved away from all the natural goods of the world, and who only knows the Bible and the speeches of the bishops.
In the beginning Christianity was nourished of similar men: Jewish practitioners of an asceticism bordering on sadomasochism who turned their bodies into a wreck, and their spirits into tyrannical and resentful shepherds.
Despite the softness of these persecutions, Diocletian goes down in history as a monster thirsting for Christian blood (history is written by the victors). The certain thing is that, after emperor Diocletian’s reign, Rome entered frank decay.
 
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[1] Note of the Editor: In our times, adepts of Christian Identity also desperately try to square the circle by claiming that Aryans descend from the biblical characters.

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Ancient Rome Christendom Evropa Soberana (webzine) Jerusalem Jesus Judaism Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Miscegenation Slavery St Paul

Apocalypse for whites • XXVII

by Evropa Soberana

 
A Jewish sect appears
The story starts in the year 33: the date on which a Jewish rebel named Yeshua or Jesus, who had proclaimed himself the Messiah of the Jews and King of Israel, was crucified at the hands of the Romans. In this first expansive phase of Christianity, Sha’ul of Tarsus (for posterity, Saint Paul), a Jew with Roman citizenship of Hellenistic and cosmopolitan education, although brought up under the most recalcitrant Jewish fundamentalism, takes on special importance.
At first, this character had been dedicated to persecuting Christians (which, let’s not forget, were all Jews) in the name of the authorities of official Judaism. At a given moment in his life, he falls off the horse—literally, it is said—and tells himself that a doctrine that has had such a hippiesque effect among the Jews themselves, would cause a terrible devastation in Rome: hated to death by both he as almost all the Jews of his time.
After his great revelation, Saint Paul decides that Christianity is a valid doctrine to be preached to Gentiles, that is, to non-Jews. With that intelligent diplomatic skill for business and subversive movements, St. Paul establishes numerous Christian communities in Asia Minor and the Aegean, from which the ‘good news’ will be hyper-actively preached.
Subsequently, numerous preaching centres are founded in North Africa, Syria and Palestine, inevitably going to Greece and Rome itself. Christianity ran like wildfire through the most humble layers of the population of the Empire, which were the most ethnically orientalised layers.
It then passes to the Roman Empire through the Jews, headed by St. Paul, St. Peter and other preachers. Its nature, based on the sinister Syrian-Phoenician mysteries that presupposed the sinfulness and impurity of the being who practiced them, is attractive to the immense mestizo masses: Rome’s slaves.

Note of the Editor: See my hatnote to Kriminalgeschichte 47. These are the type of mudbloods and sandniggers that composed the first Christians. The image is taken from funerary portraits of faithful resemblance to Greek-speaking people residing in Egypt. The portraits survived thanks to the dryness of the Egyptian climate. Although it is impossible to say who these men or women were, all were early Christians according to the book where I scanned the image (page 109 of an English-Spanish translation of After Jesus, 1992, The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.).

______ ______

The first Christian meetings in Rome are carried out secretly, in the underground Jewish catacombs; and in the Jewish synagogues Christian discourses and sermons are delivered: very different from those that will take place in later Christian Europe.
St. Paul’s speeches are political cries: intelligent, virulent and fanatical harangues that urge the faithful to accept Jesus Christ to achieve redemption. The book of John of Patmos[1] is a mixed incendiary formula like delirious visions of the Apocalypse, the fall of Rome or Babylon, the New Jerusalem, the slaughter of the infidels, the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven, the eternal salvation through Jesus Christ, the horrendous condemnation of pagan sinners and all those strange oriental ideas.
Another key point that must be recognised as very skilful by the first preachers was to take advantage of the affinity for the poor, the dispossessed, the abandoned, the vagabonds and those who cannot help themselves; and the establishment of institutions of charity, relief and assistance. All this is clearly a forerunner of the social fighters that we see today, and that had never been seen before in the pagan world. It is easy to see that these measures had the effect of attracting to themselves all the scum from the streets of Rome, in addition to preserving and increasing it.
Since its members refuse to serve in the legions and pay homage to the emperor, Christianity is immediately persecuted by the Empire in an intermittent and sporadic manner. Although the Roman persecutions have been greatly exaggerated by the victimisers, the moderate oppression suffered by the Christians was essentially for political and not religious reasons.
The Roman Empire always tolerated different religions, but its authorities saw in Christianity a subversive sect, a cover of that Judaism which had caused so many headaches in the East. Moreover, the Roman politicians of the time did not even distinguish between Jews and Christians, and not without reason saw in Christianity a tool for the revenge of the Jew against Rome, since they considered Christianity as a religious movement of many from the heart of the Jewish quarter (Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots).
 
_____________________
[1] The words in this paragraph have been modified by the Editor.

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Apocalypse for whites • XXIII

by Evropa Soberana

 
Consequences of the Palestinian revolt
The revolt had paramount consequences both for Rome and for Jewry. To begin with, the Roman losses were such that, in addition to Hadrian’s refusing to say in the military offices to the Senate that everything was going well, he was the only Roman leader in history who, after a great victory, refused to return to Rome celebrating a triumph. Titus Vespasianus had only rejected a crown of laurels in his day; Hadrian took it to the next step.
However, if the Roman losses were considerable, the Jewish losses were huge. According to Cassius Dio, 580,000 Jews were killed, 50 cities and 985 Jewish villages were completely destroyed—and they were not rebuilt—and hundreds of thousands of Jews sold as slaves throughout the Empire.
It is not surprising that the Talmud called this process ‘the war of extermination’, and that it even made outrageous statements to mythologize the conflict, such as ‘Sixteen million Jews were wrapped in parchments and burned alive by the Romans’ (Gittin, 58-A). The Jews, in any case, were definitively deprived of the will to rise against Rome by force of arms. On the other hand the Jewish threat, which had caused so many headaches to Rome, was going to increase throughout the Mediterranean due to the greater extension of the Diaspora and the ideal breeding ground that this meant for the expansion of another anti-Roman rebellion: Christianity.
The conditions of the defeat imposed on the Jews were even harsher than the triumph of Titus in the year 70. As measures against the Jewish religion, Hadrian prohibited the Jewish courts, the meetings in synagogues, the Jewish calendar, the study of the religious writings and Judaism itself as a religion! He executed numerous rabbis and burned masses of sacred scrolls at a ceremony on the Temple Mount. He tried to eradicate the very Jewish identity and Judaism itself, sending them into exile, enslaving them and dispersing them away from Judea. This persecution against all forms of Jewish religiosity, including Christianity, would continue until the death of the emperor in 138.
Furthermore, in another attempt to obliterate Jewish identity and dismantle its centre of power, the eastern provinces were restructured, forming three Syrian provinces: Syria Palestina (named in honour of the Philistines: a people of European origin and enemies of Jewry who had inhabited the area); Phoenicia under Roman rule and Coele-Syria.
In the new territorial order decreed by Hadrian, Judea became Syria Palestina, and Jerusalem was turned into Aelia Capitolina: a Greek and Roman city in which the Jews were proscribed. The three Syrias form the Levant: an extremely active and conflictive strip in history, to this day. From there came the Neolithic, the Phoenicians, Judaism and Christianity, and practically all the civilizations of antiquity, creating an ethnic chaos that always ended up in conflicts. Centuries later, these areas would see the establishment of European Crusader States.
As for the city of Jerusalem, Hadrian carried out with it the plans that had unleashed the revolt: the Jewish capital was demolished and destroyed, and the Romans ploughed over the ruins to symbolize its ‘purification’ and its return to the earth. Hadrian finally built the projected Aelia Capitolina over the ruins, introducing a new urban planning, so that even today the old city of Jerusalem coincides with the one built by the Romans.

In the centre of the city a forum was established, which contained a temple dedicated to Venus. In the place of the temple Hadrian had two statues erected, one of Jupiter and another of himself, although he respected the Wailing Wall.
Also, next to Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified, Hadrian placed a statue of Aphrodite. This was intended to symbolize the triumph of Rome over Orthodox Judaism and over Christianity, considered a Jewish sect like so many: another sect that in Rome was persecuted without distinguishing it from official Judaism. For the Greeks and Romans, the statues of their gods were representatives of the divine, solar, luminous and Olympic spirit on earth, while for the Jews, including the Christians, nothing stirred their stomach more than a naked, strong statue, beautiful, of Nordic features and invincible aspect.

To top off the de-Judaization of the city, Hadrian prohibited any Jew from settling in Aelia Capitolina, on pain of death. (This law would only be revoked two centuries later by Constantine, the first Christian emperor.)

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Apocalypse for whites • XXII

by Evropa Soberana

 

Third Jewish-Roman War:
The Palestinian Revolt or
Rebellion of Bar Kokhba (132-135)

Hadrian at first had been minimally conciliatory with the province of Judea. He allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem, began rebuilding the city as a gift from Rome and even gave them permission to rebuild the Temple. However, after a visit to the ‘Holy Land’, he had a sudden change of mind and began again to make Roman authority felt in the troubled province.
While the Jewish quarter was preparing the construction of the Temple, Hadrian ordered it to be built in a different place from the original, and then began deporting Jews to North Africa. Planning the complete transfiguration of Judea, its de-Judaization, its repopulation with Roman legionaries and its impregnation of Greco-Roman culture, he ordered the foundation, on Jerusalem, of a new Roman city, called Aelia Capitolina.
This implied the massive irruption of the classic art, extremely hated by the Jews, besides the construction of numerous Roman buildings—and the construction of a Roman building necessarily went through a ceremony of consecration of religious character that, according to the Talmudic mentality, polluted the Holy Land for being a pagan ritual. Jerusalem, before the nervous eyes of Jewry, was going to become the scene of a highly ‘profane’, ‘impure’ and ‘pagan’ place for their mentality, such as streets decorated with naked statues with a prepuce!
The Jews, again indignant, prepared for a rebellion, but Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah calmed them down, so they were content to prepare themselves clandestinely in case they had to rebel in the future, which seemed every time most likely. They built caches in caves and began to accumulate weapons and supplies. Although they did not carry out an open rebellion, in 123 terrorist actions began to take place against the Roman forces of occupation.

The Hellenistic education of Hadrian is evident in his beard. The Romans, a people of soldiers, like the Macedonians, had the deep-rooted habit of facial shaving. Although Nero brought partial beard at some moments of his life, it was Hadrian the first emperor to leave it permanently. Such a man would naturally be more inclined to take a stand for the ethnically Greek populations of the Eastern Mediterranean against his main rivals: the Jews, especially Alexandrians.

Hadrian, who was increasingly regretting his previous indulgence for the Jewish quarter, brought the Legio VI Ferrata to act as a police force. To make matters worse, the emperor was a man of Hellenistic education. In addition to the anti-Judaism traditionally associated with it, the Greek formation considered circumcision as a barbaric act of mutilation.
Although they admired the nakedness of a beautiful human body, the Greeks, who in Judea formed the most influential social sector after the Romans, considered it an act of extreme bad education to show the glans in public (for which those who had too short a foreskin from birth, had to cover the glans with some accessory). Instead, according to Jewish tradition, Adam and Moses were born without foreskin, and the Messiah will also be born circumcised. The Jews were not the only people to practice circumcision: it was also practiced by other Semitic peoples such as the Syrians and the Arabs. But in the case of the Jews it was a religious matter: a sign of covenant between them and Jehovah. To make matters worse, Hadrian also decided to prohibit the observance of the Sabbath, which forced the Jews not to work and practically do nothing on Saturdays.
The year 131, after an inauguration ceremony by the governor Quintus Tineius Rufus, began the works of Aelia Capitolina, and the following year coinage was minted with the new name of the city and works were begun on a Temple dedicated to Jupiter in the location of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem. Rabbi Akiva ben Yosef convinced the Sanhedrin to proclaim as Messiah and commander of the coming rebellion Simon Bar Kokhba (‘Son of a star’): a cunning, bloodthirsty and shrewd leader. Bar Kokhba must have planned carefully, noting the issues where previous rebellions had failed.
Instantly, as soon as Hadrian left Judea, that same year of 132, the Jewish quarter rose, attacked the Roman detachments and annihilated the Legio X (Legio VI was encamped watching the passage of Megiddo). The Jews from all the provinces of the Empire and beyond began to attend, and also obtained the support of many Syrian and Arab tribes.
With their fundamentalist Semitic hordes—supposedly 400,000 men, of whom it was said to have been started by cutting off a finger or plucking a cedar from the roots—they stormed 50 fortified plazas and 985 defenceless towns (including Jerusalem), exterminating the Greek communities, the Roman detachments and all the opponents they encountered; atrocities being common. Later, they dedicated themselves to the construction of walls and underground passages; in short, to entrench themselves in each square.
After these fleeting victories, the Jewish state in the area was reorganized. In Betar, a mighty fortress in the mountains, Bar Kokhba was crowned Messiah in a solemn ceremony. During the years of the revolt, Ben Yosef and Bar Kokhba reigned together, one as a dictator and the other as a religious ‘pontiff’ who proclaimed the ‘era of the redemption of Israel’ and even minted their own coins.
General Publicius Marcellus, governor of Syria, was sent to support Quintus Tineius Rufus; but both Romans were defeated by forces vastly superior in number, which also invaded the coastal areas, forcing the Romans to fight with them in naval battles. At this moment so worrying for Rome, Hadrian called Sextus Julius Severus, who at that time was governor of the province of Britain. He also required a former governor of Germania, Quintus Lollius Urbicus. With them, he gathered an army even greater than the one that Titus had gathered last century, a total of perhaps twelve legions: from one third to half of all the military troops of the Empire.
In view of the vast number of enemies and the desperation with which they acted, the Romans avoided open battles; limited themselves to attacking scattered groups and destroying the populations where they could find sustenance: the tactics of anti-partisan warfare. The Jews had fairly well entrenched themselves in some 50 fortified cities, many of them truly impregnable complexes in the mountains, so the Romans advanced slowly by besieging the squares, cutting off supplies and entering when the defenders were weak.
This painful tactic, which also required long journeys through hostile areas, cost the Romans innumerable deaths—in fact, it seems that the Jews annihilated, or at least caused very heavy losses, to the Legio XXII Deiotariana which had come from Egypt. To confirm the hardships passed by the legions, Hadrian eliminated from his military reports to the Senate and the people of Rome the traditional opening formula ‘I and the legions are fine’ for the simple reason that the legions… were not fine.
After enormous sacrifices and waste of discipline and feeling of duty, the Romans were triumphing little by little. In the year 134 the Betar fortress remained, where Bar Kokhba had become strong with the Sanhedrin; his most loyal followers, and thousands of Jews who had come as refugees. The same day of the anniversary of the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem, the fortress fell into the hands of the Roman soldiers, who put the entire population to the sword and did not allow the dead to be buried for six days.

‘Even if they swear to become good Roman citizens and worship Jupiter and our other gods, kill them, if you do not want them to destroy Rome or conquer it by the secret and cowardly means that they usually do’.

—Emperor Hadrian to his legions

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Ancient Rome Architecture Civil war Evropa Soberana (webzine) Jerusalem Josephus Judaism Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Vespasian and Titus

Apocalypse for whites • XVIII

by Evropa Soberana

 
Siege and fall of Jerusalem: the destruction of the Second Temple
That same year, 68, Nero was killed in Rome and a civil war broke out. The whole Roman Empire was in check. On the one hand, the numerous Jewish masses, in full boiling mode, challenged the Roman power in Judea and on the other, they did it in the bosom of Rome itself. If the Roman power in the East faltered, the Parthians would have been able to take advantage quickly to conquer Asia Minor and fortify themselves in the area, which would have been a huge catastrophe for Rome.
The government was staggering gently, but Vespasian returned to Rome and fought against Vitellius, who claimed to be Nero’s successor. After defeating the fat Vitellius, Vespasian was named emperor and entrusted his 26-year-old son Titus with the military operations of repression and the siege of the Jewish capital.
Titus surrounded Jerusalem with the four legions, cutting off supplies of water and food. Also, he increased the pressures on the needs of the city by allowing the pilgrims to enter to celebrate the Passover and then preventing them from leaving.

Statue of Titus modelled after the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, 79-81 CE, Vatican Museum. As can be seen, an anti-Hellenist Pope ordered
this and many other Greco-Roman statues to be ‘castrated’
centuries after they were sculpted.

In besieged Jerusalem with famine and epidemics, thousands and thousands of lives were claimed. The Jews who constituted the hard core of the rebellion—the Zealots and the Sicarii—threw down the wall the pacifists or the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ suspected of not communing with the Zionist cause, or of seeking an understanding with Rome to obtain favourable conditions for their people. According to some passages of the very Talmud, the Sicarii and Zealots (leaders such as Menahem ben Ya’ir, Eleazar ben Ya’ir, and Simon Bar Giora) came to commit atrocities against the Jewish civilian population, even preventing them from receiving food, to force them to be obedient and commit to the cause.
The defenders that constituted the active element of the resistance must have been about 60,000 men. They were divided into: the Zealots under the command of Eleazar ben Simon who occupied the Antonia Fortress and the Temple; the Sicarii under the command of Bar Giora, centered in the high city; and the Idumeans and others under John of Giscala. There was an obvious rivalry between the combatant factions, which erupted from time to time in open fighting. The population of the fortified Jerusalem exceeded three million people, of whom most were willing to fight, hoping that their god would lend a hand against the infidels.
While the Romans attacked again and again the fortifications with immense casualties on their part, the Zealots occasionally left the ramparts to make raids in which they managed to assassinate unsuspecting Roman soldiers.
After one of these actions, Titus, using very clear tactics of intimidation, made deploy at the foot of the city his entire army with the aim of intimidating the besieged, and appealed to Josephus, who yelled at the beleaguered a quite reasonable speech. Apparently, for the ears of the Jews dominated by their superstitions and surely awaiting any moment for an intervention of Yahweh, Josephus only managed to get them angrier and was shot with an arrow that wounded his arm.
Josephus descended from a long Sadduceean priestly line related to the Hasmonean dynasty of pre-Roman times. During the Great Jewish Revolt, the Sanhedrin made him governor of Galilee. After defending the Yodfat fortress for three weeks, he surrendered to the Romans who killed almost all of his men. Josephus, who was hid in a cistern with another Jew, was saved by demonstrating his great training and intelligence, and predicting to the general his future appointment as emperor of Rome. Later, he would accompany Titus and the Romans who used him to try to negotiate with the Sanhedrin.
After this, the Jews launched another sudden raid in which they almost succeeded in capturing Titus himself. The Romans were trained for frontal clashes with enemy armies; they were unaccustomed to the dirty fight of guerrilla warfare, in which the chivalry of combat is totally nullified. In May of 70 the Romans opened with their battering rams a breach in the third wall of Jerusalem, after which they also broke the second wall and penetrated like a swarm of wasps into the city.
Titus’s intention was to go to the Antonia Fortress, which was next to the Temple: a vital strategic point of the Jewish defence. But as soon as the Roman troops surpassed the second wall, they were engaged in violent street fighting against the Zealots and the civil population mobilized by them, and despite losing thousands of men to the superiority of legionary training in body to body combat they continued to attack, until they were ordered to retreat to the Temple to avoid useless casualties.
Josephus tried, once again unsuccessfully, to negotiate with the besieged authorities to prevent the bloodbath from continuing to grow. The Antonia Fortress had been built by Herod in honour of Mark Antony, who had supported him. The legions of Titus, faced with a building built with Roman efficiency, had to overcome a thousand calamities to take it.
Several times the Romans tried to break or climb the walls of the fortress without success. Finally, they managed to take it in an undercover assault, during which a small Roman party silently assassinated the Zealot guards who were sleeping. The fortress was then filled with legionaries. Although Titus planned to use the fortress as a base to breach the walls of the Temple and take it, a Roman soldier (according to Josephus, the Romans were enraged against the Jews for their treacherous attacks) threw a torch that set the wall on fire.
The Second Temple was levelled, and to top it all for the Jewish quarter, the flames quickly spread to other residential areas of Jerusalem. When they saw their Temple being burned many Jews committed suicide, thinking that Yahweh had become angry with them, had abandoned them and was sending them to a kind of apocalypse.
At this time the legions quickly crushed the resistance, while some Jews escaped through underground tunnels, and others, the more fanatical ones, barricaded themselves in the high city and Herod’s citadel. After building siege towers, what remained of the combative element was massacred by Roman pilum and gladius, and the city came under effective Roman control on September 8.
 
_________
Editor’s note: Once again, if white nationalists were historically self-conscious (as Jews are), every year they would celebrate this date.

Categories
Civil war Evropa Soberana (webzine) Jerusalem Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Nero Tacitus

Apocalypse for whites • XVI

by Evropa Soberana

‘The East wants to rebel and Judas
wants to take over world dominion’.

—Tacitus

 
First Judeo-Roman war: The Great Jewish revolt (66-73 CE)
In the year 66, Florus arrived in Jerusalem, where he demanded a tribute of seventeen talents from the temple treasury. Eleazar ben Hanania, the son of the high priest, reacted by stopping the prayers and sacrifices in honour of the emperor of Rome, and ordered to attack the Roman garrison. The garrison responded by killing around 3,600 Jews, looting the market, entering homes, arresting many of the Jewish leaders, whipping them in public and make them crucified. The next day, however, the concentration of rebellious Jews had increased. A civil war was about to explode.
On August 8, 66 CE the Zealots and Sicarii struck a quick blow in Jerusalem: they murdered the Roman detachment and put all the Greeks to the sword. In a synchronized way, the Jews from all provinces and Roman colonies rose up. In Jerusalem a council was formed that sent sixty emissaries throughout the Empire with the goal to trigger the various Jewish quarters. Each one of these emissaries declared himself the Messiah and proclaimed the beginning of a sort of ‘new order’. Herod Agrippa, the ethnarch of Judea, in view of the fact that the popular masses were in full boiling, chose to take his suitcases and leave the province for a good season.
The outcome was the return of Jewish uprisings and, in reaction, more anti-Jewish pogroms in Caesarea, Damascus and Alexandria, not counting the intervention of the Roman legions, which harshly repressed the Jewish quarters of the aforementioned cities and also in Ashkelon, Hippos, Tire and Ptolemaida. The more moderate and sensible Jewish sectors advised to immediately reach an agreement with Rome, but the criterion that was going to prevail among Jewry was that of the Sicarii and Zealots who, fanatically, vowed to fight to the death, entrenching themselves in the impregnable fortresses of Jerusalem, fortifying the walls of the city and mobilizing the entire population.
Under the command of Nero, Cestius Gallus, the Roman legate in Syria, concentrated troops in Acre (a square that would be many centuries later an important strategic centre of the European Crusaders) with the aim of marching to Jerusalem, devastate the Jewish populations found on his way and crush the revolt. Gallus took the city of Jaffa, killing 8,400 Jews. Later the refugees would regroup in the city and devote themselves to banditry and piracy, attracting a second Roman intervention, in which the city would be definitely razed and another 2,400 Jews killed.
After encountering the solid fortifications of Jerusalem, Gallus’ forces withdrew, and were intercepted by the Jewish fanatics in an ambush directed by elements from the Zealots and the Sicarii, who massacred 6,000 Romans in the same place in which the Maccabees had defeated the Macedonians centuries before. The Jews, excited by the symbolic repetition of the event, formed a government led by the most fundamentalist elements, and minted coins with the inscription ‘Zion’s freedom’.
This tragic disaster undoubtedly moved the Roman authorities to take more seriously the rebellion’s operations. Nero put General Vespasian in charge of the repression. With four legions—the Legio V Macedonica, the Legio X Fretensis , the Legio XII Fulminata and the Legio XV Apollinaris, a total of 70,000 soldiers, that is to say, a formidable force, although it faced an enemy far superior in number—Vespasian quelled the Jewish revolt in the north of the province, re-conquering Galilee in the year 67, capturing there Josephus, the famous historian and Samaria and Idumea in 68.
The Jewish leaders John of Giscala (Zealot) and Simon bar Giora (Sicarii) fled to the fortified Jerusalem.

Categories
Christendom Evropa Soberana (webzine) Jerusalem Jesus Judaism Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Nero New Testament St Paul Tacitus

Apocalypse for whites • XII

by Evropa Soberana [1]

 

‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel’.

—Matthew, 2:6

‘…which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel’.

—Luke 2: 31

‘You worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews’.

— John 4:22

‘Christus, from whom the name [Christians] had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular’.

—Tacitus, Annals, 15: 44, about the persecution decreed by Nero.

 
Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm
Yosef (a.k.a. Joseph), Jesus’ father, was a Jew from the House of David. But since Yosef supposedly did not intervene in the Virgin’s pregnancy, we will go on to examine the lineage of Miriam (a.k.a. Mary).
Luke the Evangelist was an individual from Antioch, in present-day Turkey. According to him, this woman was from the family of David and the tribe of Judah, and the angel who appeared to her predicted that a son would be born to whom Jehovah ‘will give him the throne of David, his father, and he will reign in the house of Jacob’.
According to the gospel story, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. In the Gospel of Matthew (1: 1) he is associated with Abraham and David, and in that same gospel (21: 9) it is described how the Jewish crowds in Jerusalem acclaim Jesus by shouting ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ without mentioning, of course, the ‘wizards of the East’ who visited the Messiah by following a star and asking ‘Where is the king of the Jews who was born?’ (Matthew, 2: 1-2).
Jesus, who never intended to found a new religion but to preserve pure the Orthodox Judaism made it clear, ‘I have not come to repeal the Law [of Moses, the Torah] but to fulfil it’ and, enraged to see that the Jerusalem temple was being desecrated by merchants, he threw them with blows. This Jewish agitator, like an Ayatollah, did not hesitate to face—with the authority given to him by being called rabbi—the other Jewish factions of his time, especially the Sadducees.[2]
Jesus surrounded himself with a circle of disciples among whom we could highlight the mentioned Simon the Zealot, Bartholomew (of whom Jesus himself says in the Gospel of John, where he is called Nathanael, ‘here is a true Israelite’); Judas Iscariot (who betrayed him to the Sadducees for money), Peter, John and Matthew.[3] Although there is not much information about the rest of the Apostles, it is necessary to remember that, until the trip of Paul (also Jewish) to Damascus after the death of Jesus, in order to be a Christian it was essential to be a circumcised, orthodox and observant Jew.
That the doctrine of Jesus was addressed to the Jews is evident in Matt. 10:6, when he says to the twelve apostles: ‘Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel’. The phrase implies to rescue those Jews who have strayed from the Law of Moses. This was because ‘if you believed in Moses you would believe me’ (John, 5:46).
In the year 26, Tiberius, who had expelled the Jews from Rome seven years before in times when the zeitgeist was fully anti-Semitic, appointed Pontius Pilate as a procurator of Judea, a Spaniard born in Tarragona or Astorga: the only decent character of the New Testament according to Nietzsche.
After the incident with the banners of Pompey, the Jews had obtained from previous emperors the promise not to enter Jerusalem with the displayed banners, but Pilate enters parading in the city, showing high the standards with the image of the emperor. This, the golden shields placed in the residence of the governor, and the use of the money of the temple to construct an aqueduct for Jerusalem (that transported water from a distance of 40 km), provoked an angry Jewish reaction. To suppress the insurrection, Pilate infiltrated the soldiers among the crowds and, when he visited the city, gave a signal for the infiltrated legionaries to take out the swords and start a carnage.
In the year 33, after various skirmishes of the Jesus gang with rival factions—particularly with the Sadducees, who at that time held religious power and saw with discomfort how a new vigorous faction arose—, Pontius Pilate orders the punishment of Jesus, at the request of the Sadducees. Jesus is scourged and the Roman legionaries, who must have had a somewhat macabre sense of humour and who knew that Yeshua proclaimed himself Messiah, put a crown of thorns and a reed in his right hand, and shout at him with sarcasm ‘Hail, king of the Jews!’ (Matthew 27: 26-31 and Mark 15: 15-20). When they crucified him they placed the inscription I.N.R.I. at the top of the cross: IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM (Jesus Nazarene King of the Jews).
Yeshua of Nazareth, known to posterity as Jesus, was one of many Jewish agitators who were in Judea during the turbulent Roman occupation. Executed around the year 33 during the reign of Tiberius, his figure would be taken by Saul of Tarsus (a.k.a. Paul): a Jewish Pharisee marvelled at the power of subversion that enclosed the sect founded by Jesus.
Jesus was, then, one of many Jewish preachers who, before him and after him, proclaimed themselves Messiah. Only that, in his case, Saul of Tarsus (now Turkey) would soon call him, instead of masiah, Christus: the Greek equivalent of ‘Messiah’. After changing his name to Paul he preached the figure of ‘Christ’, indissolubly linked to the rebellion against Rome, throughout the empire, deciding that Christianity should be spread out of its narrow Jewish circle and introduced in Rome.
 
________________
[1] Slightly modified by the Editor of this site.
[2] Note of the Ed.: The split of early Christianity and Judaism took place during the first century CE. Traditional Christian doctrine aside, it is more likely that the point of conflict between Jesus and the religious authorities was political rather than religious. It had its roots right after the driving of the traders from the Temple of Jerusalem. Jesus thus came into direct conflict with the High Priest, a Sadducee: the one who officiated the Temple.
The texts known as the ‘New Testament’, written not in Jesus’ Aramaic but in Greek, are Christian propaganda when, later, the early church entered in conflict with the Pharisees. (At the time that the gospels were edited the Sadducees had lost their leadership and the Pharisees were the sole repository of religious authority.) Although the evangelists specifically mention the Pharisees as those who Jesus scolds—even the author of this essay (which is why I modified his text)—, modern scholars postulate that the fight of the historical Jesus was with the Sadducee faction of Judaism: the bourgoise priesthood that represented the Temple, the collaborators with Rome.
On the other hand Talmudic Judaism, as known today, is the offshoot of Pharisee theology with Jews already in the Diaspora.
No Sadducee documents survived Titus’ conquest of Jerusalem. It is likely that, by editorial intervention, the name ‘Pharisees’ was substituted for the original ‘Sadducees’ in several gospel verses, in times that early Christians clashed with the Pharisees. In future instalments of the Kriminalgeschichte series (Volume III) we will see the extent of the tampering of gospel verses by the early Church.
[3] Note of the Ed.: Not to be confused with Matthew the Evangelist, a Greek-speaking author who never met Jesus in the flesh.