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Category: Josephus

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Ancient Rome Catholic Church Josephus Judaism Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Laurent Guyénot Nero New Testament Vespasian and Titus

How Yahweh conquered Rome, 4

by Laurent Guyénot

 

The foundation of the Roman church under the Flavian dynasty

In 70, newly proclaimed emperor Vespasian and his son Titus brought to Rome about 97,000 Jewish captives (Josephus, Jewish War vi, 9), as well as members of the Jewish nobility rewarded for their support in the war in Judea—Josephus being the most famous of them.

Soon after, as Josephus started working on his Antiquities of the Jews in 20 volumes, we are told that the Gospels were written.[11]

In the same period, according to standard Church history, we already have in Rome a Christian church, headed by a certain Clement of Rome (88-99). Clement must have been an educated Jew like Josephus, because his only genuine epistle is characterized by numerous Hebraisms, abundant references to the Old Testament, and a Levitical mindset. An ancient and credible tradition makes him a freedman of consul Titus Flavius Clemens, a cousin of the Flavian emperors. We learn from Cassius Dio that Flavius Clemens was executed by Domitian, brother and successor of Titus, for ‘atheism’ and ‘deviation toward Judaic customs.’ His wife Flavia Domitilla was banished to the island of Pandateria (Ventotene). Over time, Flavius Clemens came to be regarded as a Christian martyr, and this gave rise to the idea of Domitian’s persecution of Christians. But historians now dismiss this notion (there is no clearly attested persecution of Christians prior to the middle of the third century),[12] and assume that Flavius Clemens and Flavia Domitilla were simply accused of Judaizing, and the former perhaps of circumcising himself.[13] One of Domitian’s assassins in 96 was a steward of Domitilla named Stephanus, which may suggests a Jewish vengeance.

The attitude of the Flavians towards the Jews was apparently twofold. On the one hand, they seemed determined to do away with the Jewish religion, which they saw, correctly, as the source of Jewish separatism. Not content with having destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, Vespasian also ordered the destruction of the one in Leontopolis, Egypt. In general, the Romans used to integrate the vanquished gods with a ceremony of evocatio deorum, by which the god was granted a sanctuary in Rome. But the god Yahweh was considered inassimilable, which is why his objects of worship were treated as mere booty, according to Emily Schmidt: ‘The treatment of the Jewish god can be seen as an inversion of the typical Roman treatment of or attitude towards foreign gods, perhaps as an anti-evocatio.’[14]

On the other hand, Josephus’ biography shows that Vespasian and Titus were not just merciful, but even grateful to the Jews who had rallied to them in Judea. There is no contradiction between those two aspects of the Flavians’ Jewish policy: they repressed Jewish separatism and forbade Jewish proselytizing but encouraged Jewish assimilation. Assimilationist Jews abandoned circumcision and had no objection to the syncretic assimilation of Yahweh with Zeus or Jupiter. The same basic twofold policy was followed by the Flavians’ successors Trajan (98-117) and Hadrian (117-138).[15]

From these basic facts, and keeping in mind the pattern set by Ezra’s priestly circle in Babylon, it is not difficult to imagine what was going on in Rome in the first century. The theory I’m going to discuss now goes like this. The cornerstone of the Roman Catholic Church was first laid by a secret brotherhood of priestly Jews, who had been brought to Rome by Vespasian and Titus in the aftermath of the Jewish War that destroyed their Temple in 70 AD. Some had gained Vespasian’s favor and protection by handing him the fabulous Temple treasure that made possible his ascension to the imperial throne. Flavius Josephus, who had defected to the Romans in Galilee and was rewarded beyond measure by Vespasian, may have been an influential member of that Jewish circle. Those powerful, wealthy and self-conscious Jews, using assimilation for dissimulation, had the motive, the means and the opportunity to fabricate the syncretic religion that could serve as their Trojan horse.

I borrow this theory from Flavio Barbiero’s book The Secret Society of Moses: The Mosaic Bloodline and a Conspiracy Spanning Three Millennia (2010). The author is not a trained historian, but a scientist with a sharp inquisitive and logical mind combined with a great imagination and a taste for sweeping theories. There is a great deal of speculation in the grand story he unfolds, from Moses to modern times, but it is insightful and consistent. At least it is a good starting point for trying to answer the question of how the Jews created Christianity.

According to that thesis, these priestly Jews brought to Rome by Vespasian and Titus had come to terms with the ruin of their nation and Temple, but they had not given up on their biblical program of Jewish supremacy; they simply reinterpreted it from their new vantage point inside the Empire’s capital. Still jealous of their birth and strictly endogamous, they retained and passed on to their progeny a sense of mission to pave for Israel a new road towards its destiny. Can we not even assume that, under their apparent loyalty to the Emperor, they shared the same hatred of Rome that inspired first-century Jewish texts like the Apocalypses of Ezra and of Baruch?

In Ezra, the roar of the Lion of Judah makes the Roman eagle bursts into flame, and a reunited and free Israel is gathered in Palestine. In Baruch, the Messiah routs and destroys the Roman armies, then brings the Roman emperor in chains to Mount Zion and puts him to death.[16] The same hatred of Rome permeates the Book of Revelation, where Rome, under the thin veil of Babylon, is called the Great Harlot, whose flesh will be consumed by God’s wrath, to make way for a brand new Jerusalem.
 

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Editor’s note: Already from Nietzsche’s texts it was clear that the author of the Book of Revelation was a Jew who hated Rome in a hellish way. If there is one overtly anti-Roman text in the New Testament it is the one attributed to the Jew John of Patmos (not to be confused with John the Evangelist, let alone the fictional figure of John the Apostle).

It was a book written after the destruction of Jerusalem. No wonder the Jew John of Patmos dreamed of a ‘New Jerusalem’ in the final book of the Bible!

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Let us consider, as a working hypothesis, that these Jewish priests had a plan. They adopted the network strategy that had allowed their distant ancestors to infiltrate the Persian court and thereby regain their lost power under the patronage of Ezra. Their goal, according to Flavio Barbiero, was ‘taking possession of the newborn Christian religion and transforming it into a solid power basis for the priestly family’ (p. 146). There existed already a cult of Christ, attested by Paul’s epistles written in the 50s, but the Gospels gave it a completely different orientation in the decades following the destruction of the Temple. The Law-abiding Peter, presented as the head of the Jerusalem Church by the Gospel of Matthew, was made the founder of the Roman papacy in the literature attributed to Clement of Rome, thus establishing a spiritual bond between Rome and Jerusalem.

To get a better understanding of the Jewish community that elaborated these traditions, we must take a closer look at the first Jewish war. In 67, emperor Nero sent his army commander Vespasian to crush the rebellion of the priestly Sadducees who had defied Roman power by banning from the Temple the daily sacrifices offered in the name and at the expense of the Emperor. When, after Nero’s death, Vespasian was declared emperor in December 69, his son Titus was left in Judea to finish putting down the rebellion.

In Book vi of Josephus’ Jewish War we learn that, from the early stage of Titus’ siege of Jerusalem, many Jews went over to the Romans, including ‘heads of the priestly families.’ Titus ‘not only received these men very kindly in other respects, but […] told them, that when he was gotten clear of this war, he would restore each of them to their possessions again.’ Until the last days of the siege, Josephus informs us, some priests obtained safe conduct under the condition that they handed to Titus some of the Temple’s wealth.

One, named Jesus, delivered ‘two candlesticks similar to those that were deposited in the Temple, some tables, some drinking chalices and cups, all of solid gold. He also handed over the curtains [those that were torn as Jesus expired according to Matthew 27:51], the robes of the high priest, with the precious stones and many other objects used for sacrifices.’ Another, named Phineas, introduced by Josephus as ‘the guardian of the Temple treasure,’ handed over ‘the priests’ tunics and belts, a large quantity of purple and scarlet cloth […] and a large quantity of the sacred ornaments, thanks to which, even if he was a prisoner of war, he obtained the amnesty reserved for deserters.’

Those priests obviously bargained their lives and their freedom with parts of the Temple treasure. The Temple was not just a religious sanctuary, it was, in a real sense, a central bank and a giant vault, harboring enormous quantities of gold, silver, and precious artifacts financed by tithes from around the world. One of the purposes of the Temple, we could say, was to satisfy Yahweh’s greed: ‘I shall fill this Temple with glory, says Yahweh Sabaoth. Mine is the silver, mine the gold!’ (Haggai 2:7).[17] According to the Copper Scroll found near the Dead Sea in 1952, the Temple treasure, amounting to tons of gold, silver, and precious items, had been hidden during the siege in 64 locations.[18] So it is logical to assume, as Barbiero does, that Titus and Vespasian were only able to get their hands on it with the help of high-ranking priests.

This huge booty, of which the symbolic centerpiece was the enormous menorah depicted on the Arch of Titus (opening picture), certainly helped Vespasian to earn the acclamation of his troops as emperor, and then to convince the Senate. The construction of the Coliseum, between 70 and 80, was entirely financed by this booty.

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[11] The earliest gospel, the Gospel of Mark, is commonly dated in the late 60s, but that date is much too early, especially since it mentions the destruction of the Temple.

[12] Tacitus wrote in the Annals (xv, 44) that Nero accused Christians of starting the great fire of Rome in 64, and had many of them ‘thrown to the beasts, crucified, and burned alive.’ But this is the only attestation of that story, and some modern scholars have cast doubt on its credibility. Richard Carrier sees it as a later Christian interpolation, and Brent Shaw argues that Nero’s persecution is a myth. There is one other mention of persecution against Christians before the third century, in a letter written to Trajan by Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia (north of Asia Minor). But this letter is of dubious authenticity as well, belonging to a book of 121 letters found in the 16th century, copied, and lost again.

[13] Paul Mattei, Le Christianisme antique: De Jésus à Constantin, Armand Colin, 2011, p. 119.

[14] Emily A. Schmidt, ‘The Flavian Triumph and the Arch of Titus: The Jewish God in Flavian Rome,’ UC Santa Barbara: Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group, 2010.

[15] Trajan is said to have had a pro-Jewish wife, Pompeia Plotina, and he once sentenced to death a Greek dignitary named Hermaiskos for having complained that the emperor’s entourage was ‘full of impious Jews.’ (Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt – From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 193-196). But Hadrian is credited for having banned circumcision, and, when faced in 132 with a new anti-Roman Jewish uprising in Judea, led by Simon bar Kokhba, he destroyed Jerusalem once more, converted it into a Greek city named Aelia Capitolina, and forbade Jews to enter it.

[16] Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Essential Books, 1957, p. 4.

[17] According to 1Kings 10:14, the amount of gold hoarded each year into Salomon’s temple was ‘666 talents of gold’ (1 talent = 30kg). Salomon’s treasure may be legendary, but it illustrates what the Jerusalem Temple still meant for the priests of the first century AD.

[18] Because the Copper Scroll is part of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, which have been wrongly assigned an Essenian origin for decades, its content was long considered fictional. The revision of this misguided theory, pioneered by Norman Golb in Who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls?: The search for the secret of Qumran, Scribner, 1995, has corrected that bias.

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Josephus New Testament Richard Carrier Tacitus The Jesus Hoax (book)

The Jesus Hoax, 3

CHAPTER 3: WHY THE JESUS STORY IS FALSE

The point bears repeating. During Jesus’ entire lifetime, from, say 3 BC to 30 AD, not one person—not a Christian, not a Jew, not a Roman, not a Greek—wrote anything about the miracles, what Jesus said, or what his followers did. No one wrote anything. It’s as if nothing extraordinary happened at all…

The Romans were excellent record-keepers; surely any such astonishing letters would have survived. And yet we have not one.

At the same time there lived a famous Jewish philosopher, Philo. He was born around 20 BC, and thus was an adult at the time of the Bethlehem star. He lived well past the crucifixion, dying about the year 50 AD. He would have been the ideal man to record everything about a Jewish miracleworker and savior. He wrote about 40 individual essays, which now fill seven volumes. Yet he says not one word about Jesus or the Christian movement.

It gets worse. For the next 20 years after the crucifixion, we still have no evidence. From the years 30 to 50 AD, not one thing has survived that documents Jesus or his miracles: not a letter, not a book, not an engraving, nothing. Nothing by Jews, nothing by Christians, nothing by Romans—nothing.

And yet, it’s worse still. We know that, from the year 50, we have a few letters by Paul. These letters are finished when Paul dies around the year 70. Now, of course, his letters cannot count as evidence, because it is exactly his accounts of Jesus that we are trying to validate. Apart from Paul’s letters, from the years 50 to 70, we still have no evidence. Nothing by other Christians, nothing by Jews, nothing by Romans—nothing.

And still it gets worse. The Gospels appeared between 70 and the mid-90s. But they, too, cannot count as evidence because it is precisely these documents that need confirmation. Apart from the four Gospels, from 70 to the mid-90s, we still have no evidence.

In sum: for the entire period of the early Christian era—that is, from say 3 BC to the mid-90s AD—we have no corroborating evidence from anyone who was not party to the new religion. Not a shred of anything exists: documents, letters, stone carvings—nothing at all. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this problem…

Men such as Petronius, Seneca, Martial, and Quintillian all lived in the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion and would have been ideally situated to write about Jesus’ extraordinary life. So too with Philo, the Jewish philosopher, as I noted above. And yet not one of these men wrote a single word about him…

The Roman perspective

Josephus is important because he is the first non-Christian to confirm that a Christian movement existed, at least by the late first century AD. But what about the Romans?

 

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Editor’s note: Remember that the NT scholar who has most influenced me is Richard Carrier, who believes that Josephus’ couple of brief mentions of ‘Christ’ were later interpolations by Christians. For apologetic reasons, they put words into Josephus’ mouth. Skrbina continues:
 

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Tacitus was born in the year 58 to an aristocratic family. Between 98 and 105 AD he wrote four books, including the highly important work Histories. As it happens, not one of them so much as mentions Jesus or the Christians.

But his final work, Annals, which dates circa 115 AD, does include two sentences on them. In section 44 of Book 15 we read the following:

…a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace… a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, 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.

The passage is likely authentic but yet odd in that we have no other reference to Christians in Rome at the time of Nero. But this is not relevant here. What matters is the stunning fact that it took until the year 115—80 years after the crucifixion, nearly 120 years after the miracle birth—for the first Roman to document the Christians. And even then, he grants them all of two sentences.

A second Roman reference—and the third non-Christian [Ed. note: Remember that Skrbina is taking one of the brief paragraphs in Josephus’ book as legit]—comes from Pliny. Like Tacitus, Pliny was an educated and highly literate aristocrat. By the year 110, at around age 50, he had assumed the position of imperial governor of a province in the north of present-day Turkey. In a letter to Emperor Trajan, from about the same time as Tacitus’ Annals, he writes an extended critique of the Christian movement. Over the course of about five paragraphs, Pliny explains his need to repress the Christians, including executing the non-citizens and shipping citizens to Rome for punishment. Christianity is described as a “depraved, excessive superstition,” and Pliny is worried that the “contagion of this superstition” is spreading. But still, he thinks it “possible to check and cure it.”

Pliny’s suggestions aside, what we find here is a fascinating account of a growing but troublesome new religion. The Romans were generally tolerant of other religions, and thus we must conclude that there was something uniquely problematic about this group. It may perhaps have been their Jewish origins, or the fact that they embodied particularly repellent values. We lack the details here to determine the cause of the enmity. But in any case, it seems clear that the early Christians were not simple apostles of love. Something else was going on with this group that the Romans found truly galling and, indeed, a kind of threat to the social or moral order.

And yet, something happened. We know for certain that by the mid-90s or early 100s latest, Christians were becoming noticed and causing trouble for the empire. We are fairly sure that Paul lived and wrote between the mid- 30s and late-60s, and that the Gospels first appeared between 70 and 95.

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Josephus Richard Carrier

On mythicism and Luke

Watching the video that a commenter recently suggested to me I made a discovery.

The atheist Richard Carrier (pic) is one of the foremost exponents of the Christ myth theory or mythicism. He has even responded to what I consider the strongest argument on the part of secular exegetes about the existence of the historical Jesus.

Remember that we have said that there are seven genuine epistles of Paul. In one of the oldest Paul speaks of the ‘brother of the Lord’. Based on what Paul says in Galatians 1:19 another atheist exegete, Bart Ehrman, believes that this is the strongest argument for thinking about the historicity of a historical Jesus (that is, a Jesus without miracles to distinguish him from the Christ of dogma). Before reading Carrier, I did not know that the mythicists had answers to this argument.

Regardless of who is right, Ehrman or Carrier regarding Galatians 1:19, what impressed me most about one of the conferences of Carrier was what he says about Luke the Evangelist.

From our point of view, it is essential to know if the writers of the New Testament were Hellenized Jews or not. We have already seen that it is highly suspicious that the first gospel from the point of view of chronology, that of Mark, was written right after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. In case Mark was a Hellenized Jew, this smells like a Jewish psyop or subtle revenge on the Hellenes (whites in the Roman Empire).

Yesterday that I watched Carrier’s YouTube lecture ‘Acts as Historical Fiction’, in 23:49 I came across this quote from Steve Mason, a specialist on Josephus, who wrote his history of Judea before Luke wrote his gospel. Mason tells us:

Almost every incident [of Judean history] that [Luke] mentions turns up somewhere in Josephus’ narratives… [And the] coincidence… of aims, themes and vocabulary… seems to suggest that Luke-Acts is building its case on the foundation of Josephus’ defense of Judaism.

Since the gospels claim that Holy Family were Jews, and Paul was a Jew, finding out the ethnicity of the evangelists ought to be fundamental for us (as is finding out the ethnicity of the bishops of Constantine and the bishops of the following Roman emperors that destroyed the Aryan culture).

For a single video of Carrier explaining his work, see: here.

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Ancient Rome Evropa Soberana (webzine) Josephus Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Nero Seneca St Paul Tacitus

Apocalypse for whites • XXVIII

by Evropa Soberana

 
The case of Nero as an example of historical distortion
The perfect example of Christian victimhood is found in the figure of Nero. Nero has gone down in history as a cruel, tyrannical, perverted, capricious emperor given to excesses, and it is really incredible the amount of trash that Christians poured into his biography, to such an extent that the name of Nero is already synonymous with tyranny, caprice and depravity.
The problem of Nero, we are led to believe, is that he did not tolerate Judaism or Christianity; and that not a few Jews and Christians found their bones in the Colosseum, in the jaws of some lion, under the thunderous applause of the people of Rome by his express mandate.
The reality is that, in the year 64, there is a great fire in Rome that destroys many districts and leaves the city in a state of emergency. Nero welcomes the victims of the fire, opening the doors of his palaces so that the town’s people have a place to stay. In addition, he pays from his own private funds the reconstruction of the city.
What the emperor did do was take action against the Christians. In the words of the famous Roman historian Tacitus (55-120), ‘Nero blamed and inflicted the most cruel tortures on a class hated for its abominations, called Christians by the populace’. He orders to arrest them ‘not so much because of arsonists but because of their hatred of the human race’. Nero, then, does the following with the captured Christians: covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn to pieces by the dogs, or nailed to the crosses, or condemned to the flames.
Another issue is the wife of Nero, Poppaea Sabina. She is an interesting figure as a beautiful woman, ambitious, unscrupulous and immoral, conspiratorial, manipulative and typical of a society too civilized—a real harpy. Having already married twice, and because of her influences as a lover, Poppaea convinces Nero himself to dispatch of his own mother and divorce his own wife—after which she is exiled and forced to cut her veins, her corpse is beheaded and her head presented to Poppaea.
With such free way, Poppaea marries Nero and breaks into high Roman society with excesses in regard to coquetry, extravagances and high-handedness. Precisely at the instigation of her intrigues, the famous Spanish philosopher Seneca is pushed to suicide.
Poppaea openly sympathized with the Jew and the Christian cause, favouring them through palace conspiracies behind the emperor’s back. Nero, already tired of having the conspiracy near him, kills her supposedly with a kick on the stomach.
The year 65 runs. It follows an anti-Jewish repression from Nero, in which future Christian saints fall, such as the Jew Peter, and Paul himself: another Jew who had turned out to be so unruly. Paul is beheaded for being a Roman citizen. Peter, an unregulated immigrant with no Roman citizenship, is crucified. According to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, crucifying in uncomfortable positions was a common practice among Roman soldiers to have fun in a macabre manner.
Nero, despite having shown himself to be magnanimous and generous to the people, passed into modern history as the Antichrist, a ruthless killer of Christians who murdered his own wife on a whim, and who for fear of conspiracy surrounded himself with a personal guard of praetorians of German origin—the only ones he considered sufficiently loyal.
Nero has also passed to the popular mind as the perpetrator of the arson in Rome while he played the lyre, singing a song before the flames; when in real history Nero was not even in Rome when the fire started.

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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.
 
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Editor’s note: Once again, if white nationalists were historically self-conscious (as Jews are), every year they would celebrate this date.

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Alexandria Civil war Evropa Soberana (webzine) Josephus Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site)

Apocalypse for whites • XVII

by Evropa Soberana

 
Ethnic disturbances in Egypt
In Alexandria, the Greeks organised a public assembly in the amphitheatre to send an embassy to the emperor. The Jews, who were interested in parleying with Nero, came in large crowds, and as soon as the Greeks saw them, they began to shout, called them enemies, accused them of being spies, ran towards them and attacked them (according to Josephus’ version of the event).
Other Jews were killed while fleeing, and three were captured and burned alive. The rest of the Jews soon arrived to defend their coreligionists, beginning to throw stones at the Greeks and then threatening to set fire to the amphitheatre.

Tiberius Julius Alexander, the governor of the city, tried to convince the Jews not to provoke the Roman army, but this advice was taken as a threat: the tumults continued and, consequently, the governor, without patience, introduced two legions in the city, the Legio III Cyrenaica and the Legio XXII Deiotariana, to punish the Jewish quarter.
The legions were given carte blanche to kill the Jews and also to loot their property, whereupon the soldiers entered the ghetto and, according to Jewish sources, burned houses with Jews inside, also killing women, children and the elderly until the whole neighbourhood was full of blood and 50,000 people were dead.
The survivors, desperate, begged Alexander for mercy, and the governor took pity on them. He ordered the legions to cease the massacre, and they obeyed in the act. Alexander would later participate in the siege of Jerusalem.

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Civil war Ethnic cleansing Evropa Soberana (webzine) Josephus Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Nero

Apocalypse for whites • XV

by Evropa Soberana

Chapter 2

 
The Jewish-Roman wars
In the previous chapter we discussed an anti-Semitic (anti-Jewish and anti-Christian) repression that the Roman Emperor Nero ordered in the year 62. Now we will see how all the previous events evolved into an escalation of ethnic violence, which will culminate with the unleashing of three immense wars in which, for the first time, we will see the eradication of the Greek ethnic communities of Asia Minor and North Africa at the hands of the Jewish uprisings.
In 64, Nero sends Gessius Florus as procurator to the province of Judea. The historian Josephus blames Florus for all the tumults that happened in the area, but the truth is that, as we have seen, they did not start with him—and, because he was a Jew and a Sadducee, the works of Josephus must always be read with caution (for example, he has a writing called Against the Greeks, in which he makes apology for Judaism).
In Caesarea, a Jewish sympathizer of Hellenism sacrificed several birds in front of the synagogue, which, in the traditional Jewish mentality, ‘contaminated’ the building, as we have seen several times before. With this precedent, but with a long history of previous hostility, the Greek and Jewish communities of Caesarea became entangled in a judicial dispute in which, with Roman mediation, the Greeks won. Under the advice of Gessius Florus, Nero revoked the citizenship of the Jews of the city—which left them at the mercy of the very anti-Jewish population of Greece.

Nero Claudius Caesar
Augustus Germanicus

The Greeks soon began a massive pogrom during which they massacred thousands of Jews. Florus and the Roman military—who logically identified with the Greeks rather than with the Jews, and perhaps even planned to use the Greeks as the vanguard of ethnic cleansing in the area—did not intervene to protect the Jewry or pacify the city, allowing Jews to be murdered and synagogues to be profaned on port and starboard.
According to Josephus, when the rabbis took away the sacred scrolls to save them from being burned by the flames, Florus ordered them to be thrown into dungeons. This was too much for a group as cohesive as the Jews, and they reacted with more violence, which only intensified the pogrom and made it spread to other populations, with the consequent Roman reprisals.
Jerusalem, then, began to fill with Jewish refugees from Caesarea and other areas whose houses had been burned and whose property had been confiscated by the Romans, claiming vengeance and oozing resentment from all pores. The massacre of Jews in Caesarea turned out to be the trigger of a great war that, in any case, had been taking place for some time.

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Caesar Augustus Evropa Soberana (webzine) Josephus Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Tiberius

Apocalypse for whites • XI

by Evropa Soberana

 
Herod the Great
Augustus (born Gaius Octavius), successor of Julius Caesar at the head of the Roman Empire, appointed Herod, son of Antipater, as king of Judea, and financed his army with Roman money. Herod was a capable, brutal, competent and unscrupulous leader (he practically dispatched his entire family), as well as an excellent warrior, hunter and archer. He expelled the Judean Parthians; protected Jerusalem from pillage, persecuted the bandits and highwaymen and executed the Jews who had supported the Parthian marionette regime, consolidating himself in 37 BCE as king of Judea.
Although Herod is portrayed by history as a ruthless, cruel and selfish king, the reality is that, as hard as it may seem to believe, as a sovereign he was one of the best that this land ever had. Even in 25 BCE he sacrificed important personal wealth to import large quantities of grain from Egypt, with the aim of fighting a famine that was spreading misery in his country.
Despite this and everything he did for Israel, Herod is viewed with antipathy by the Jews, for having been a pro-Roman, pro-Greek sovereign and, above all, because his Jewishness was questioned: Herod descended from his father’s side of Antipater (the one who supported Cassius), who in turn descended from those Idumeans (or Edomites) forced to convert to Judaism when John Hyrcanus, a Hasmonean king, conquered Idumea (or Edom) around 135 BCE.
On the maternal side Herod descended from the Arabs, and the transmission of the Jewish condition is matrilineal. Therefore, although Herod identified himself as a Jew and was considered a Jew by most authorities, the masses of the Jewish people, especially the most orthodox, systematically distrusted the king: especially in view of the opulent and luxurious life he imposed on his court, and held for him a contempt perhaps comparable to the one that the Spaniards of the 16th century felt by the Marranos or Jews converted to Christianity.
For his education and Greco-Roman inclinations, it is more likely that this king felt less Jewish, although he certainly wanted to please Jewry and be an effective sovereign by the prosperity that he brought to them. More rational than his fundamentalist subjects, Herod understood that enraging Rome was not good business.
Herod gave Israel a splendour that it had never known, not even under David or Solomon. He embellished Jerusalem with Hellenistic architecture and sculpture; carried out an ambitious program of public works, and in 19 BCE demolished and rebuilt the very Temple in Jerusalem, considering it too small and mediocre.
This angered the Jews, who hated Herod for being a protégée of the Romans, whom cordially they hated even more. Undoubtedly, the most orthodox sectors of the Jewish quarter were happy with the Temple as it was, and they must have seen as bad its conversion in a more Roman-looking building, especially when the king ordered to decorate the entrance with a golden imperial eagle. (Paradoxically, the Jews would later mourn the destruction of this same Temple at the hands of the Romans.)
Herod was continually involved in conspiracies by his family, much of which, including his own wife and two of his children, was executed at his request. As he was getting old, he developed ulcers and convulsions. He died in 4 BCE, at the age of 69. Eventually it was said that he had ‘ascended to the throne like a fox; ruled like a tiger, and died like a dog’.

The first temple in Jerusalem was a very shabby building, as we have seen in a previous chapter. The second, similar to the first, was built under the protection of the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great in 515 BCE. In the year 19 BCE Herod proposed to renovate and enlarge it, for which he demolished the old temple; erecting, under Roman protection, a much grander one, although it continued to be called ‘Second Temple’ (or Temple of Herod). Although Jewry would abhor Herod, the truth is that he gave the temple a size and splendour that neither Solomon nor Zerubbabel could have imagined.

In that same year of 4 BCE, two Jewish Pharisees called Zadok (or Tsadoq) and Judas the Galilee (also called John of Gamala) called for not paying tribute to Rome. There was a Pharisee uprising, and the rabbis ordered to destroy the ‘idolatrous’ image of the imperial eagle that Herod had placed at the entrance to the Temple in Jerusalem. Herod Archelaus, the son of Herod, and Varus, a Roman commander, stifled the revolt harshly, and had nearly 3,000 Jews crucified.
It is thought that perhaps this first revolt is the origin of the Zealot movement, about which we will talk in the next section. Archelaus, despite having been proclaimed king by his army, did not assume the title until he had presented his respects, in Rome, to Augustus. He was made the Roman client king of Judea, Samaria and Idumea, despite of the sentiments of the Roman Jews, who feared him for the cruelty with which he had repressed the Pharisee uprising.
Archelaus is mentioned in the gospel of Matthew, since Yosef, Miriam and Yeshua—known as Joseph, Mary and Jesus—had escaped to Egypt to avoid the massacre of the innocents. (Supposedly, that year Herod Archelaus ordered the execution of all the firstborn of Bethlehem.) [1]
 
The Zealots
In the year 6 CE, after the complaints of the Jews, Augustus dismisses Archelaus, sending him to Gaul. Samaria, Judea and Idumea are formally annexed as a province of the Roman Empire, with the name of Judea. The Jews become governed by Roman ‘procurators’: a kind of governors who had to maintain peace, Romanize the area and exercise the fiscal policy of Rome by collecting taxes. They also arrogated to themselves the right to appoint the high priest of their choice.
The Jews hated the puppet kings despite the fact that they imposed order, developed the area and, in short, civilised the country. Paradoxically, from the beginning the Jewish quarter was also highly hostile to the Romans, whose intervention they had practically begged! Now, in addition to the Temple tribute, they also had to pay tribute to Caesar—and, by tradition, money was not something the Jews happily lavished.
That same year, the consul Publius Sulpicius Quirinius arrived in Syria to make a census in the name of Rome with the objective of establishing taxes. Since Judea had been annexed to Syria, Quirinius included the Jews in the census. As a result of this and of the new irruption of European culture in the area, the fundamentalist terrorist movement of the Zealots flourished.
Flavius Josephus considers the Zealots as the fourth Jewish sect together with—from least to greatest religious extremism—the Essenes, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Zealots were the most fundamentalists of all: they refused to pay taxes to the Roman Empire. For them, all other Jewish factions were heretical; any Jew who collaborated minimally with the Roman authorities was guilty of treason and should be executed. The armed struggle, the militarization of the Jewish people and the expulsion of the Romans, were the only way to achieve the redemption of Zion. According to the New Testament, the apostle Simon, one of the disciples of Jesus, belonged to this faction (Luke, 6:15).
Among the Zealots the Sicarii stood out, a faction even more fanatized, sectarian and radicalised, so called by the sica: a dagger that could be easily hidden and used to kill their enemies. The Zealots and Sicarii would form the hard core of the Great Jewish Revolt which we will see in another section. They were also the most active element of Judaism of the time, since at that time it is probable that most Jews, although they detested both Greeks and Romans cordially, would simply like to live and enrich themselves in peace, agreeing with whom it was necessary for it.
As it could not be otherwise, the Sicarii and zealots also fought among themselves. There were a total of twenty-four Jewish factions that generally fought against each other, in a very representative frame of what the rabbis called Sinat chinam, that is, ‘groundless hatred’ from Jew to Jew (maybe because hating non-Jews does make sense): an attitude that perhaps has been better caricatured in the movie Life of Brian.
In year 19, with Jewry in process of climbing to acquire influence at Rome itself, Tiberius expelled the Jews from the city, instigated by the Senate. Concerned about the popularity of Judaism among freed slaves, he forbids Jewish rites in the capital of the Empire, considering Jewry ‘a danger to Rome’ and ‘unworthy to remain within the walls of the City of the Legions’ according to Suetonius. That year, on the occasion of a famine in the province of Egypt, Tiberius denies to the Alexandrian Jews grain reserves, since he does not consider them his citizens.

Tiberius set in motion anti-Jewish measures during his reign, during which Jesus was executed.
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[1] Note of the Ed.: An obviously fictional gospel tale, as no Roman historian mentions it, not even the Jew Flavius Josephus.

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Ancient Rome Evropa Soberana (webzine) Josephus Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Julius Caesar Library of Alexandria

Apocalypse for whites • X

by Evropa Soberana

 

The Jews in the Roman Empire
Around 55 BCE the Republic, too large and militarized, was calling for a new form of government. And it was de facto governed by the so-called Triumvirate: an alliance of three great military commanders: Marcus Licinius Crassus—bust above: the one who crushed the Spartacus revolt in the year 74 BCE—, Pompey, the conqueror of Syria, and Julius Caesar, the conqueror of Gaul.
In 54 BCE, Crassus, then Roman governor of the province of Syria, while spending the winter in Judea decreed on the population a ‘war tax’ to finance his army, and also plundered the temple of Jerusalem, stealing its treasures (for value of ten thousand talents), causing a huge stir in the Jewish quarter. Crassus and the vast majority of his army would be massacred by the Parthians in the unfortunate Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE. [1]
Lucius Cassius Longinus, one of Crassus’ commanders who had managed to escape the Carrhae massacre with his 500 horsemen, returned to Syria to prepare for a counter-attack and re-establish the devalued Roman prestige in the province. After expelling the Parthians, Cassius had to face a rebellion of the Jewry, which had risen as soon as Jews learnt that the hated Crassus had been killed.
Cassius became an ally of Antipater and Hyrcanus II. After taking Tariquea, a Judean stronghold and execute one of the leaders of the rebellion who had ties with Aristobulus, Cassius captured 30,000 Jews. In the year 52 BCE he sold them as slaves in Rome.
This was the beginning of subversion within Rome itself, since these 30,000 Jews (later freed by Mark Antony and his descendants), dispersed throughout the Empire, would not cease henceforth to promote agitation against of the hated Roman authority. They would have an important role in the construction of the underground catacombs and synagogues, which were later the first preaching field of Christianity. Cassius would later be appointed governor of Syria.
In 49 BCE Crassus was killed and the Triumvirate broken. Civil war broke out between Pompey and Caesar: one of whom, inevitably, was to become the autocratic dictator of the entire empire. Hyrcanus II and Antipater decided to take sides with Caesar, who had Antipater as regent. Julius Caesar would soon take control of the situation, and Pompey was assassinated in Egypt by conspirators.
In 48 BCE, while the Roman and Ptolemaic fleets were engaged in a naval battle, an event was held to further tense the relations between Jews, Greeks and Egyptians: the burning of the library of Alexandria.
Of all the ethnic groups that were in the city, none could have anything against the library. The Greeks had founded it; the Egyptians had contributed much to it, and the Romans sincerely admired this Hellenistic legacy. The Jews, however, saw in the library an accumulation of ‘profane’ and ‘pagan’ wisdom, so that if there was a group suspected of the first burning of the library, logically it was the Jewish quarter, or the most orthodox and fundamentalists sectors. At least that’s what the inhabitants of Alexandria should have thought.
In 31 BCE, the year of a strong earthquake in Israel that killed thousands of people, Cleopatra and Mark Antony committed suicide after their fall from grace.
Flavius Josephus mentions, during the reign of Augustus, a judicial complaint in which 8,000 Jews supported one of the parties. These Jews were to be all adult males, and since a nuclear family used to be of four or five people, we may conclude that at the time of Augustus there were about 35,000 Jews in Rome.
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[1] Crassus, who committed a crass (hence the expression) blunder during the battle, was responsible for the massacre of 20,000 soldiers at the hands of the Parthians. Another 10,000 Roman soldiers were taken prisoners and sent to forced labour to what is now Afghanistan. Many ended up fighting, under Parthian control, against the Huns. We lose their trail onwards. Genetic analyses seem to indicate that this detachment, the famous ‘lost legion of Crassus’, ended in the current Chinese province of Liqian, where they are responsible for a greater frequency of ethnic European features in the native population.

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Ancient Rome Evropa Soberana (webzine) Jerusalem Josephus Judaism Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site)

Apocalypse for whites • VIII

by Evropa Soberana

 
The conquest of Pompey
This section will deal with the first direct intervention of the Roman authority on Jewish soil.
In Israel, on the death of Alexander Jannaeus (king of the Hasmonean dynasty, descendant of the Maccabees) in 76 BCE, his wife Salome Alexandra reigned as his successor. Unlike her husband—who, as a good pro-Sadducee, had severely repressed the Pharisees—Salome got on well with the Pharisee faction. When she died, her two sons, Hyrcanus II (associated with the Pharisees and supported by the Arab sheikh Aretas of Petra) and Aristobulus II (supported by the Sadducees) fought for power.
In 63 BCE, both Hasmoneans sought support from the Roman leader Pompey, whose victorious legions were already in Damascus after having deposed the last Macedonian king of Syria (the Seleucid Antigonus III) and now proposed to conquer Phoenicia and Judea, perhaps to incorporate them into the new Roman province of Syria. Pompey, who received money from both factions, finally decided in favour of Hyrcanus II, perhaps because the Pharisees represented the majority of the popular mass of Judea. Aristobulus II, refusing to accept the general’s decision, entrenched himself in Jerusalem with his men.
The Romans, therefore, besieged the capital. Aristobulus II and his followers held out for three months, while the Sadducee priests, in the temple, prayed and offered sacrifices to Yahweh. Taking advantage of the fact that on the Shabbat the Jews did not fight, the Romans undermined the walls of Jerusalem, after which they quickly penetrated the city, capturing Aristobulus and killing 12,000 Jews.[1]
Pompey himself entered the Temple of Jerusalem, curious to see the god of the Jews. Accustomed to seeing numerous temples of many different peoples, and educated in the European mentality according to which a god was to be represented in human form to receive the cult of mortals, he blinked in perplexity when he saw no statue, no relief, no idol, no image… only a candelabrum, vessels, a table of gold, two thousand talents of ‘sacred money’, spices and mountains of Torah scrolls.[2]

Pompey the Great

Did they not have god? Were the Jews atheists? Did they worship nothing? Money? Gold? A simple book, as if the soul, the feelings and the will of a people depended on an inert roll of paper? The confusion of the general, according to Flavius Josephus, must have been capitalised. The Roman had come across an abstract god.
For the Jewish mentality, Pompey committed a sacrilege, for he penetrated the most sacred precinct of the Temple, which only the High Priest could see. In addition, the legionaries made a sacrifice to their banners, ‘polluting’ the area again.
After the fall of Jerusalem, all the territory conquered by the Hasmonean or Maccabean dynasty was annexed by the Roman Empire. Hyrcanus II remained like governor of a district of Rome under the title of ethnarch, dominating everything that Rome was not annexed: that is to say, the territories of Galilee and Judea, that in future would pay taxes to Rome but would retain their independence. Hyrcanus was also made a High Priest, but in practice the power of Judea went to Antipater of Idumea, as a reward for having helped the Romans. Pompey annexed to Rome the most Hellenised areas of the Jewish territory, while Hyrcanus remained as a governor of a district of Rome until his death.
From the ethnic and cultural point of view, the Roman conquest foreshadowed new and profound changes in that area of conflict that is Near East. First of all, to the Jewish, Syrian, Arab and Greek ethnic strata a Roman aristocracy occupying a military character was going to be added.
For the Greeks, this was a source of joy: the decline of the Seleucid Empire had left them aside, and they also had Rome literally in their pocket since the Romans felt a deep and sincere admiration for the Hellenistic culture, not to mention that many of their rulers had a Greek education that predisposed them to be especially lenient with the Macedonian colonies.
Moreover, in Alexandria, it was to be expected that, in view of the disturbances with Jewry, the Romans would seize from the Jews the rights that Alexander the Great had granted them, thereby ceasing to be citizens on an equal footing with the Greeks, and the influence they exerted through trade and the accumulation of money would be uprooted.
For these reasons, it is not surprising that the Decapolis (set of Hellenised cities in the desert borders that also retained much autonomy, among which was Philadelphia, the current capital of Jordan, Amman), surrounded by Syrian tribes, Jews and Arabs—considered barbarians—received the Romans with open arms and began to count the years since the conquest of Pompey.
 
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[1] The figures of the dead given throughout the text come from the writings of Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews, as well as of Cassius Dio’s History of Rome. Most likely they are inflated to magnify the importance of events, something common in history.
[2] According to the Alexandrian authors (rabid anti-Semites who believed that the Jews performed human sacrifices), Pompey freed in the temple a Greek prisoner who was about to be sacrificed to Jehovah.