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Category: Judaism

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Ancient Rome Judaism Judea v. Rome

How Yahweh conquered Rome, 1

Editor’s note: With the subtitle ‘Christianity and the Big Lie’, this 12,400-word essay by Laurent Guyénot was published in The Unz Review at Christmas 2020. It will be republished here, excerpted, in five parts.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
The People of the Lie

Primo Levi, Italian author of If this is a man (1947)—‘a pillar of Holocaust literature’ according to Wikipedia—, wrote a short fictional story titled Un testamento, consisting of the last recommendation of a member of the guild of the ‘tooth-pullers’ to his son. Its ends with these words:

From all that you have just read you can deduce that lying is a sin for others, and for us a virtue. Lying is one with our job: we should lie by words, by eyes, by smile, by clothing. Not only to deceive patients; as you know, our purpose is higher, and the lie, not the twist of hand, makes our real strength. With the lie, patiently learned and piously exercised, if God helps us we will come to dominate this country and perhaps the world: but this can only be done on the condition of having been able to lie better and longer than our enemies. I will not see that day, but you will see it: it will be a new golden age, when only the last resorts will force us to pluck out teeth again, while it will be enough for us to govern the State and administer public affairs, to lavish the pious lies that we have learned to bring to perfection. If we prove ourselves capable of this, the empire of the tooth-pullers will extend from East to West until the most distant islands, and it will have no end.[1]

There is no literary value in this prose. Its only interest is the question it begs: Who does Levi mean by this society of professional liars, whose trade is passed on from father to son, and whose plan is to conquer the world? Of whom are they the metaphor? And perhaps this other question: What is this ‘testament’ of theirs?

Even if we didn’t know what gang of professional liars Levi belonged to, their ‘God’ would give them away: there is only one god who trained his people to lie and promised them world domination, and that is the god of Israel. ‘Israel,’ remember, is the name Yahweh gave to Jacob, after Jacob lied to his aging father Isaac, by words and by clothing: ‘I am Esau your first-born,’ he said, dressed up in ‘Esau’s best clothes,’ in order to cheat Esau out of his birthright (Genesis 27:15-19). This is, in the literal—and literary—sense, the founding story of Israel. As long as Christians fail to see the malice of it, and its correlation with Jewish behavior, they will continue to play the part of Esau.

What is the biggest Jewish lie in history? Without contest, it is the claim that Jews, of all the nations inhabiting this earth, were once ‘chosen’ by the almighty Creator of the Universe to enlighten and rule over mankind—while all their enemies were cursed by the same Creator. What is truly bewildering is not the enormity of the lie: many individuals may feel chosen by God, and even nations have done so. But only the Jews have managed to convince billions of non-Jews (Christians and Muslims) of their chosenness. How did they do it? ‘Almost by accident,’ wrote Jewish author Marcus Eli Ravage in his must-read 1928 article ‘A real case against the Jews.’ I think the accidental factor was rather minor. [Editor’s note: Remember the article by Marcus Eli Ravage published in The Fair Race: the only article by a Jew to appear in that anthology. Even the Nazis translated it for the Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung.]

The Christians’ theory that, after choosing the Jews, God cursed them for their rejection of Christ doesn’t contradict, but rather validates the Jews’ claim that they are the only ethnic group that God chose, loved exclusively and guided personally through his prophets for thousands of years.

I have argued in ‘The Holy Hook’ that this has given the Jews an ambivalent but decisive spiritual authority over Gentiles. In fact, even the Jews’ ‘cursedness’ that goes with their chosenness in the Christian view has been beneficial to them, because Jewishness cannot survive without hostility to and from the Gentile world; that’s part of its biblical DNA. Jesus saved the Jews in the sense that their hatred of Christianity preserved their identity, which might otherwise have perished without the Temple. According to Jacob Neusner ‘Judaism as we know it was born in the encounter with triumphant Christianity.’[2] Christian Judeophobia had an advantage over Pagan Judeophobia: with Christianity, the Jews were not just hated as atavistically antisocial (i.e., Tacitus’ Histories v, 3-5), but as God’s once chosen people, and their Torah became the world bestseller. [Editor’s note: Compare this with Kevin MacDonald’s ‘adaptive Christianity’: a supposedly good Christianity. In our view, all Christianity was bad for Aryan DNA. Tom Sunic in Homo Americanus blames American Christianity for the crime they committed against the Germans in the last century.]

Chosenness is an unbeatable trump card in the game of nations. If you doubt its power, just ask yourself: would the Jews have gotten Palestine in 1948 without that card? The Holocaust joker alone would not have done it!

As I have become increasingly aware of the resonance between the spiritual and the genetic, as well as of the Jewish war against White identity, I have come to wonder if the revealed notion of Jewish divine preference and predestination has not been a slow debilitating poison injected into our collective soul. Jewish chosenness means a metaphysical superiority that makes us, non-Jews, God’s second choice at best.

Sure, this is not an explicit dogma of Christianity—the Credo doesn’t include ‘I believe that God chose the Jews’—, but only an underlying postulate of Christology. Does that make it less, or more efficient against our rational immune system? It is hard to tell. I believe that Jews have carried their chosenness by the Jealous One as a kind of spooky aura not unlike the mark of Cain that says, ‘Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance’ (Genesis 4:15). (It is appropriate to mention here that Cain is the eponymous ancestor of the Kenites, a Midianite tribe allied to the Israelites during the conquest of Canaan, and that according to the scholarly ‘Kenite hypothesis,’ the Yahwist cult is of Kenite origin.)[3]

How did they do it? How did the Jews manage to smuggle their Big Lie into the exclusive religion of European nations? That is a legitimate and important question, isn’t it? From a purely historical perspective, it remains one of the greatest puzzles; one that secular historians prefer to leave to Church historians, who are comfortable with Constantine hearing voices near the Milvius Bridge. [Editor’s Note: The exception is David Skrbina. See the excerpts we recently published from his book The Jesus Hoax.]

The question is, very simply: How is it that Rome ended up adopting as its spiritual foundation a doctrine and a book claiming that God chose the Jews, at a period of widespread Roman Judeophobia? And how is it possible, that, less than two centuries after turning Jerusalem into a Greek city named Aelia Capitolina, where Jews were forbidden to enter, Rome adopted officially a religion that announced the fall of Rome and a new Jerusalem?

One part of the answer is that uniting the Empire under a common religion has been a major concern of Roman emperors from the very beginning. Before Christianity, it was not a question of eliminating local religions, but of creating a common cult to give a divine legitimacy and a religious bond to the Empire. When they searched for religious inspiration, the Romans generally turned to Egypt. The cults of Osiris (or Serapis, as he came to be called from the third century BC), of his sister-spouse Isis, and of their son Horus (or Harpocrates, Horus the Child) were extremely popular all around the Mediterranean, and provided the Romans with the closest thing to an international religion.

Hadrian (117-138) gave Osiris the features of Antinous, to whom he also dedicated a new city, new games, and a constellation. The origin of Antinous is unclear. The Augustan History tells us that he was the gay lover (eromenos) of Emperor Hadrian, and many historians still reproduce that story, even though the Augustan History has been exposed as the work of an impostor. In all likelihood this story is a Christian propaganda against a competing religion.

Antinous, whose name is formed of anti, ‘like’, and nous, ‘spirit’, is supposed to have drowned in the Nile on a 24th of October, just like Osiris, and his death was interpreted as a sacrifice. As a divinity, Antinous was assimilated to Osiris, and by extension to Hermes, Dionysos and Bacchus, all divinities of the Afterworld. On a monolithic obelisque found in Rome but built in Antinopolis, Antinous is designated as Osiris Antinous. His cult must therefore be seen as a new expression of the cult of Osiris sponsored by the Empire. Antinous’ face and body, sculpted in thousands of copies, were a self-celebration of the White race that then dominated the world, from Anatolia to Spain, and from Great Britain to Egypt.[4] [Color emphasis by Editor.]

(Left, Antinous as Bacchus, colossal sculpture presumed to have been from Hadrian’s villa in Palestrina.) What a contrast with its competitor, the cult of the Crucified! The question, then, becomes: Why did Christ ultimately supplant Osiris, even absorbing the cult of Isis? How is it that the glorious and self-confident Roman Empire converted to the cult of a Jewish healer tortured and executed by Roman authorities for sedition? This is the Jewish question that few people want to ask. Assuming that Christianity is a human creation—and that’s my premise—, it is obviously a Jewish creation to a large extent. How did Jews manage to create a religion for Gentiles that would ultimately eradicate all other religions in the Empire—beginning with the imperial cult?

A full understanding of this question will probably never be reached, but with what we have learned about Jewish ways in the last hundred years, we can try to formulate some reasonable scenario, one that doesn’t involve God talking to emperors, but another talking device—money—as well as political leverage by a Jewish transgenerational network determined to seize control of the religious policy of the Empire. We, today, know that such Jewish transgenerational networks, capable of driving their host Empires or nations to their ruin, do exist. We also know that they are good at fabricating and promoting their Judeocentric macabre religion for the Goyim.

____________

[1] Translated from the French: Primo Levi, Lilith et autres nouvelles, Le Livre de Poche, 1989.

[2] Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine: History, Messiah, Israel, and the Initial Confrontation, University of Chicago Press, 1987 , pp. ix-xi.

[3] Read Thomas Römer, The Invention of God, Harvard UP, 2015, pp. 137-138, or Hyam Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner, Thames & Hudson, 1982, pp. 13-51. I broached on this topic in my book ‘Our God Is Your God Too, But He Has Chosen Us’: Essays on Jewish Power, AFNIL, 2020, pp. 42-45.

[4] Royston Lambert, Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous, Phoenix Giant, 1984; Christopher Jones, New Heroes in Antiquity, op. cit., pp. 75-83.

Categories
Arthur Schopenhauer Friedrich Nietzsche Joseph Goebbels Judaism Judea v. Rome Martin Luther New Testament St Paul Voltaire

The Jesus Hoax, 5

CHAPTER 5: RECONSTRUCTING THE TRUTH

To recap, I am reconstructing the likely sequence of events, based on a total picture and complete analysis of the situation.

Just as Paul’s life was ending, war broke out and the great Temple was destroyed. We can only imagine the distress and outrage of the Jewish community. Their hatred of Rome must have reached atmospheric heights. If the Jews had any illusions about peaceful coexistence, those were crushed. Military responses were no longer an option. Perhaps Paul’s ‘psychological’ ploy, the Jesus hoax, would work after all. But it would have to be taken to the next level.

(Note of the Ed.: Left, representation of Mark the Evangelist.) Thus it was that Paul’s surviving followers—perhaps Mark, Luke, Peter, John, and Matthew—decided to pick up the game. This band of “little ultra-Jews”[1] needed a more detailed story of Jesus’ life; Paul’s vague allusions to a real man would no longer suffice. Someone—“Mark”—thus decided to quote Jesus extensively and directly. Unlike Paul’s letters, this “gospel” (Paul’s word) would be intended for mass consumption. It had to be impressive—lots of miracles from their miracle-man. It would end up with 19 Jesus miracles wedged into the smallest of the four Gospels. And there were several other firsts. Here we read, for the first time ever, about the 12 apostles, Jesus as a carpenter, and the concept of hell. Here too Jesus makes a clever “prophecy” that the Jewish temple would be ruined (13:1-2)—an easy call to make, given that the temple was just actually destroyed!

It seems that Mark’s anger against his fellow Jews, however, got the better of him; for centuries afterward, Christians would blame the Jews for killing Christ, not realizing that the whole tale was a Jewish construction in the first place. Perhaps there’s a kind of justice in that irony after all.

The Gospel of Mark evidently sufficed for some 15 years. It must have been effective at drawing in Gentiles and building a functioning church. But then perhaps things stalled a bit. Maybe the little Jewish band got impatient. Maybe they splintered over tactical issues. Whatever the reason, some time around the year 85, two of the group—“Luke” and “Matthew”—decided that they needed to write an even more detailed account of Jesus’ life. But evidently the two couldn’t agree on a single plan, so they worked apart, drawing from Mark’s story while weaving in other new ideas they had jointly invented. Each man went off on his own, drafting his own new gospel.

The new documents had much more detail than Mark; in fact, both were nearly twice as long as their predecessor. They had to keep the same basic story line, of course, but each man added his own embellishments. What was new? The virgin birth in Bethlehem, for one, and the whole manger scene. These now appeared, for the first time ever, some 85 years after the alleged event. We scarcely need to ask how much truth is in them. (I note as an aside that Matthew included the bit about the star, whereas that was apparently an unimportant detail to Luke, since he omitted it completely.) Luke included a vignette about Jesus as a 12-year-old (2:41-51), something utterly lacking in the other three Gospels. The Sermon on the Mount appears for the first time, though Matthew has a much longer version than Luke. In the sermon we find a number of famous sayings, all of which were never seen before: “the meek shall inherit the earth” (Mt 5:5), “you are the light of the world” (Mt 5:14), turn the other cheek (Mt 5:39; Lk 6:29), love thy enemies (Mt 5:44; Lk 6:27), “cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt 6:24), “judge not” (Mt 7:1; Lk 6:37)—all now recorded, for the first time, some 50 years after they supposedly occurred.

Followers must now virtually abandon their families for the cause. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26). These are remarkably cult-like dictates, but perhaps appropriate for the Jewish-led Christian movement.

Then we have passages of outright militancy. In Matthew, Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (10:34)—how very un-Christ-like! Luke has Jesus say, “I came to cast fire upon the earth… Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division” (12:49-51). Every man must do his part: “let him who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one” (Lk 22:36). Jesus becomes downright ruthless: “as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them before me” (Lk 19:27). All this is necessary because “the devil” rules all the kingdoms of the world (Lk 4:5-6). But not to worry; if we all stick to the plan, and “this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world,” then “the end will come” (Mt 24:14). And so, sometime around the year 85, two new Gospels were released into the world.

Once again, these apparently sufficed for a good decade or so. But then one more member of the cabal, “John,” breaks rank and moves in yet a different direction. He feels the need for an intellectual and esoteric Jesus story, and so constructs a gospel using abstract, almost philosophical terms and concepts. It ends up as mid-length essay, between the short Mark and the longer Matt/Luke. Miracles are still there, but they are now down-played— just eight appear. We can imagine that John understood that his new, more intellectual audience would likely not be taken in by such nonsense…

“Saint” Paul and his Jewish cabal turn out to be blatant liars. In fact, the epic liars of all recorded history.

Recall my explanation above, regarding how Paul and the Gospel writers had two sets of enemies: the Romans and their fellow elite Jews. In fact, they had a third enemy: the truth. Paul and crew knew they were lying to the masses, but they didn’t care. The Gentiles were always treated by the Jews with contempt, as I showed in chapter four. They could be manipulated, harassed, assaulted, beaten, even killed, if it served Jewish ends. This was not a problem for them…

In the early 1500s Martin Luther—founder of the Lutheran church—wrote a rather infamous book titled On the Jews and their Lies. There he declared that “they have not acquired a perfect mastery of the art of lying; they lie so clumsily and ineptly that anyone who is just a little observant can easily detect it”—a statement that could well be a motto for the present work. I also note the striking irony of a man like Luther who was so opposed to Jewish lies, even as he himself fell for the greatest Jewish lie of all.

In 1798, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant called the Jews “a nation of deceivers,” and in a later lecture he added that “the Jews…are permitted by the Talmud to practice deceit”. In his final book, Arthur Schopenhauer made some extended observations on Judeo-Christianity. He wrote, “We see from [Tacitus and Justinus] how much the Jews were at all times and by all nations loathed and despised.” This was due in large part, he says, to the fact that the Jewish people were considered grosse Meister im Lügen—“great master of lies”. Employing his usual blunt but elegant terminology, Nietzsche saw it in this way:

In Christianity all of Judaism, a several-century-old Jewish preparatory training and technique of the most serious kind, attains its ultimate mastery as the art of lying in a holy manner. The Christian, this ultima ratio of the lie, is the Jew once more—even three times a Jew.

Similar comments came from express anti-Semites. Hitler called the Jews “artful liars” and a “race of dialectical liars,” adding that “existence compels the Jew to lie, and to lie systematically”. And Joseph Goebbels, in his personal diary, wrote: “The Jew was also the first to introduce the lie into politics as a weapon… He can therefore be regarded not only as the carrier but even the inventor of the lie among human beings”.

Finally, a remark by Voltaire seems relevant here. The Jews, he said, “are, all of them, born with a raging fanaticism in their hearts… I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not someday become deadly to the human race”. If a Jewish lie were to spread throughout the Earth, eventually drawing in more than 2 billion people, becoming the enemy of truth and reason, and causing the deaths of millions of human beings via inquisitions, witch burnings, crusades, and other religious atrocities—well, that could be considered a mortal threat, I think.

This, then, is my “Antagonism thesis”: Paul and his cabal [2] deliberately lied to the masses, with no concern for their true well-being, simply to undermine Roman rule. This little group tempted innocent people with a promise of heaven, and frightened them with the threat of hell. This psychological ploy was part of a long-term plan to weaken and, in a sense, morally corrupt the masses by drawing them away from the potent and successful Greco-Roman worldview and more toward an oriental, Judaic view.

As we know, it took some time but the new Christian religion did spread, eventually permeating the Roman world. In the year 315, the emperor himself, Constantine, converted to Christianity. In 380, Emperor Theodosius declared it the official state religion.

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[1] Nietzsche, The Antichrist (sec 44). In German kleine Superlativ Juden.

[2] I’ve been using cabal throughout the present text. It is, I think, precisely the right word. A cabal is “a small number of persons secretly united to bring about an overturn or usurpation, especially in public affairs.” That’s a perfect description of Paul and his band.

Categories
Ancient Rome Antiochus IV Epiphanes Final solution Hadrian Horace Jerusalem Judaism Old Testament

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.

Categories
Bible Friedrich Nietzsche Jesus Judaism New Testament

The Jesus Hoax, 1

Editor’s note: This Monday I begin quoting excerpts from The Jesus Hoax by American professor David Skrbina. As his book is six chapters long, unless something unforeseen comes up I will finish quoting these excerpts from his book on Saturday.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

CHAPTER 1: SETTING THE STAGE

There are about 2.1 billion Christians on Earth today, roughly 1/3 of the planet, making Christianity the #1 religion globally. The United States is strongly Christian; about 77% of Americans call themselves Christians.

But some historians and researchers have made a startling claim: that Jesus, the Son of God, never existed. They say that Jesus Christ was a pure myth. Is that even possible? Surely not, we reply. This most-influential founder of the most-influential religion of Christianity surely had to exist. And he surely had to be the miracle-working Son of God that is proclaimed in the Bible. How could it be otherwise? we ask. How could a venerable, two thousand-year-old religion, with billions of followers throughout history, be based on someone who never existed? Impossible! Or so we say.

If that were the case, if Jesus never existed, imagine the consequences: an entire religion, and the active beliefs of billions of people, all in vain. All of Christianity based on a myth, a fable, even—as I will argue—a lie. Why, that would be catastrophic…

Note that it’s very important to distinguish between the two conceptions of ‘Jesus.’ If someone asks, “Did Jesus exist?” we need to know if they mean (a) the divine, miracle-working, resurrected Son of God (sometimes called the biblical Jesus), or (b) the ordinary man and Jewish preacher who died a mortal death (sometimes called the historical Jesus). Christianity requires a biblical Jesus, but the skeptics argue either for simply an historical Jesus—which would mean the end of Christianity—or worse, no Jesus at all.

I will, however, accept the historical Jesus…
 

Another Jesus Skeptic?

So, why this book? Why do we need yet another Jesus skeptic?

To answer this question, let me give a brief overview of some of the prominent skeptics and their views. I will argue that their ideas, though on the right track, are woefully short of the truth. They lack the courage or the will to look hard at the evidence, and to envision a more likely conclusion: that Jesus was a deliberately constructed myth, by a specific group of people, with a specific end in mind. None of the Christ mythicists or atheist writers have, to my knowledge, articulated the view that I defend here.

But first a quick recap of the background and context for the idea of a mythological Jesus. The earliest modern critic was German scholar Hermann Reimarus, who published a multi-part work, Fragments, in the late 1770s. Strikingly, his view is one of the closest to my own thesis of any skeptic. For Reimarus, Jesus was the militant leader of a group of Jewish rebels who were fighting against oppressive Roman rule. Eventually he got himself crucified. His followers then constructed a miraculous religion-story around Jesus, in order to carry on his cause. They lied about his miracles, and they stole his body from the grave so that they could claim a bodily resurrection. This is quite close to what I will call the ‘Antagonism thesis’—that a group of Jews constructed a false Jesus story, based on a real man, in order to undermine Roman rule. But there is much more to the story, far beyond that which Reimarus himself was able to articulate.

In the 1820s and 30s, Ferdinand Baur published a number of works that emphasized the conflict between the early Jewish-Christians—significantly, all the early Christians were Jews—and the somewhat later Gentile-Christians. This again is a key part of the story, but we need to know the details; we need to know why the conflict arose, and what were its ends.

In 1835, David Strauss published the two-volume work Das Leben Jesu—“The Life of Jesus.” He was the first to argue, correctly, that none of the gospel writers knew Jesus personally. He disavowed all claims of miracles, and argued that the Gospel of John was, in essence, an outright lie with no basis in reality.

German philosopher Bruno Bauer wrote a number of important books, including Criticism of the Gospel History (1841), The Jewish Question (1843), Criticism of the Gospels (1851), Criticism of the Pauline Epistles (1852), and Christ and the Caesars (1877). Bauer held that there was no historical Jesus and that the entire New Testament was a literary construction, utterly devoid of historical content. Shortly thereafter, James Frazer published The Golden Bough (1890), arguing for a connection between all religion—Christianity included—and ancient mythological concepts.

It was about at this time that another famous Christian skeptic emerged: Friedrich Nietzsche. In his books Daybreak (1881), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), and Antichrist (1888) he provides a potent critique of Christianity and Christian morality. Nietzsche always accepted the historical Jesus, and even had good things to say about him.

 

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Editor’s note: I think I am a better scholar of Nietzsche than Skrbina. In one of his excellent translations of Nietzsche’s books, the Spaniard Andrés Sánchez Pascual quoted a passage in which Nietzsche said that Jesus was an idiot. Seven years ago I quoted Nietzsche’s posthumous fragment here.

I first read that fragment from the isolated manuscripts left by Nietzsche in one of the books published in Spain by Alianza Editorial, but I haven’t heard of English speakers quoting it. I refer to page 132 of El Anticristo, which I read in 1976, where Sánchez Pascual speaks of Nietzsche’s criticism of Renan regarding Jesus’ alleged ‘genius’ and ‘heroism’. Skrbina continues:

 

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But he was devastating in his attack on Paul and the later writers of the New Testament. He viewed Christian morality as a lowly, life-denying form of slave morality, attributed not to Jesus but to the actions of Paul and the other Jewish followers. Along with Reimarus, Nietzsche provides the most inspiration for my own analysis.

Into the 20th century, we find such books as The Christ Myth (1909) and The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus (1926), both by Arthur Drews, and The Enigma of Jesus (1923) by Paul-Louis Chouchoud. All these continued to attack the literal truth claimed of the Bible.

More recently, we have critics such as the historian George Wells and his book Did Jesus Exist? (1975). Here he assembles an impressive amount of evidence against an historical Jesus. Bart Ehrman has called Wells “the best-known mythicist of modern times,” though in later years Wells softened his stance somewhat; he accepted that there may have been an historical Jesus, although we know almost nothing about him. Wells died in 2017 at the age of 90.

Similar arguments were offered by philosopher Michael Martin in his 1991 book, The Case against Christianity. Though a wide-ranging critique, he dedicated one chapter to the idea that Jesus never existed. Martin died in 2015.

Among living critics, we have such men as Thomas Thompson, who wrote The Messiah Myth (2005); he is agnostic about an historical Jesus, but argues against historical truth in the Bible. By contrast, Earl Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle, 1999), Tom Harpur (The Pagan Christ, 2004), and Thomas Brodie (Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus, 2012) all deny that any such Jesus of Nazareth ever existed. Richard Carrier, in his book On the Historicity of Jesus (2014), finds it highly unlikely that any historical Jesus lived.

Perhaps the most vociferous and prolific Jesus skeptic today is Robert Price, a man with two doctorates in theology and a deep knowledge of the Bible. Price’s central points can be summarized as follows:

1) The miracle stories have no independent verification from unbiased contemporaries.

2) The characteristics of Jesus are all drawn from much older mythologies and other pagan sources.

3) The earliest documents, the letters of Paul, point to an esoteric, abstract, ethereal Jesus—a “mythic hero archetype”—not an actual man who died on a cross.

4) The later documents, the Gospels, turned the Jesus-concept into an actual man, a literal Son of God, who died and was risen…

With the exception of Nietzsche, all of the above individuals exhibit a glaring weakness: they are loathe to criticize anyone. No one comes in for condemnation, no one is guilty, no one is to blame for anything. For the earliest writers, I think this is due primarily to an insecurity about their ideas and a general lack of clarity about what likely occurred. For the more recent individuals, it’s probably attributable to an in-bred political correctness, to a weakness of moral backbone, or to sheer self-interest. In recent years, academics in particular are highly reticent to affix blame on individuals, even those long-dead. This is somehow seen as a violation of academic neutrality or professional integrity. But when the facts line up against someone or some group, then we must be honest with ourselves. There are truly guilty parties all throughout history, and when we come upon them, they must be called out…

For now I simply note that none of our brave critics, our Jesus mythicists, seem willing to pinpoint anyone: not Paul, not his Jewish colleagues, not the early Christian fathers —no one. A colossal story has been laid out about the Son of God come to Earth, performing miracles, and being risen from the dead, and yet—no one lied? Really? Can we believe that? Was it all just a big misunderstanding? Honest errors? No thinking person could accept this. Someone, somewhere in the past, constructed a gigantic lie and then passed it around the ancient world as a cosmic truth. The guilty parties need to be exposed. Only then can we truly understand this ancient religion, and begin to move forward.

Categories
Bible Day of Wrath (book) Human sacrifice Judaism Psychohistory Racial right

On blood libel

One of the problems I see in white nationalist forums, something that can also be said of the literature for the German people that came out of the printing presses of the Third Reich, is that by focusing on Jewry the historical perspective is lost: a perspective that only appears when Hitler was talking to people he trusted; only then did he also blame Christianity (remember Hitler’s Religion).

The difference between American white nationalism and German National Socialism is that, in the absence of a Führer, there is no canon of writings to follow, only a diversity of views (‘Let a thousand flowers bloom’, a white nationalist, Trainspotter, once said). Worse, after the deaths of Revilo Oliver in 1994 and William Pierce in 2002, it could be said that the historical perspective is over and we are left with provincialisms in which only Jewry is discussed in these forums.

That provincialism distinguishes me from the American racialists of today, in that it seems obvious to me that only minds like Hitler’s, or Pierce’s on this side of the Atlantic, could provide the historical perspective to understand what is going on. From this angle, I would like to respond to Gaedhal’s interesting letter to us today:

I am not at my desktop. I don’t want to trawl through hours of stuff. However, this guy [YouTube interview: here], an atheist Jewish Rabbi, makes the same points that Bible Skeptic did. There are clues in the text of the Book of Genesis as we have it today that there was an earlier source in which Abraham went ahead with sacrificing Isaac to Yahweh.

During the time of the Babylonian exile, attitudes to human sacrifice changed. This is why in the Book of Ezekiel, Yahweh essentially apologises to the Jews for giving them ‘evil laws’ which included child sacrifice. Perhaps in the time of the exile, the story of Abraham and Isaac was altered such that Abraham no longer went through with the sacrifice.

In an earlier mail Gaedhal had said:

There is a reason why these people have been accused of ‘blood libel’ for 3,000 years… Yahweh, the Jewish god, in the Old Testament says that he will make people eat their own children. In my view, there is nothing libellous about ‘blood libel’.

There is a lot to talk about here! But as I said, it requires a historical perspective. It is a pity that at the moment not all the PDFs of our books are linked in the current featured post. As you know, although I am reviewing the books, my mother tongue isn’t English. I’m using a program that allows me to change the syntax I used when writing some of them to a syntax that sounds less strange to the native reader (the same program I’m using to write this very post). The problem is that it’s very time-consuming, and at the moment even The Fair Race, the only book linked in the featured post, isn’t syntax-checked with this program in the translated articles written by a Spaniard.

However, to answer Gaedhal you should read pages 183-192 of my Day of Wrath (provisional PDF, before the syntax check: here). Once you read those pages, it becomes clear how the historical perspective makes us understand much better the sacrificial practice of the early Hebrews before the Torah was edited right down to the ‘emasculated’ text, so to speak, that came down to us in the Bibles.

The key word is perspective. In Mexico where I live, for example, the learned indigenistas get very angry when a foreigner tells them about sacrifices—including ritual child sacrifice—in the pre-Hispanic world. It doesn’t occur to them that the simplest thing to do would be to point out that other cultures also sacrificed their children. I don’t like to defend Mexican indigenistas from such accusations, nor the Jews Gaedhal is talking about. But I insist: the historical perspective says it all, as I tried to show in the central part of Day of Wrath.

Regarding Jewry, it is clear that there was a change after the Babylonian exile: captivity at the hands of gentiles civilised them somewhat. But once the story of Abraham was modified so that the angel prevented him from sacrificing Isaac, my guess is that they abandoned those practices. Here in Mexico, the same thing happened with the ‘captivity’, so to speak, that the Mesoamerican Amerindians suffered at the hands of Europeans from 1521 to 1821, when the mestizos gained independence from the crown of Spain. Once independent, not even the Indians returned to their sacrificial practices (the sons of bitches do continue to ritually sacrifice animals, which is why I still hate them).

But my point is clear, and only those who have read Day of Wrath could get it. Historically, there are quantum leaps in psychogenesis, in the sense that there is more empathy now towards children than in the remote historical past. Infant sacrifice in Judaism is a thing of the past. Despite what many white nationalists believe, there is no forensic evidence that rituals such as the one represented by the oil painting at the top of this entry continue into our century.

Categories
Judaism

Commissary to the Gentiles, 3

by (((Marcus Eli Ravage)))

The upshot, then, of Jesus’ mission was a new sect in Judea. It was neither the first nor the last. Judea, like modern America, was a fertile soil for strange creeds. The Ebionim—the paupers, as they called themselves—did not regard their beliefs as a new religion. Jews they had been born, and Jews they remained. The teachings of their master were rather in the nature of a social philosophy, an ethic of conduct, a way of life.

To modern Christians, who never tire of asking why the Jews did not accept Jesus and his teachings, I can only answer that for a long time none but Jews did. To be surprised that the whole Jewish people did not turn Ebionim is about as intelligent as to expect all Americans to join the Unitarians or the Baptists or the Christian Scientists.

In ordinary times little attention would have been paid to the ragged brotherhood. Slaves and laborers for the most part, their meekness might even have been encouraged by the solider classes.

But with the country in the midst of a struggle with a foreign foe, the unworldly philosophy took on a dangerous aspect. It was a creed of disillusion, resignation and defeat. It threatened to undermine the morale of the nation’s fighting men in time of war. This blessing of the peacemakers, this turning of the other cheek, this non-resistance, this love your enemy, looked like a deliberate attempt to paralyze the national will in a crisis and assure victory to the foe.

So it is not surprising that the Jewish authorities began persecuting the Ebionim. Their meetings were invaded and dispersed, their leaders were clapped into jail, their doctrines were proscribed. It looked for awhile as if the sect would be speedily wiped out.

Then, unexpectedly, the curtain rose on act three, and events look a sudden new turn.

Categories
Catholic Church Christendom Jesus Judaism Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) New Testament St Paul Theology

Christianity’s Criminal History, 81

Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 

Fabrications in the New Testament

‘Forgeries begin in the New Testament era and have never ceased’.

—Carl Schneider, evangelical theologian

 
The error of Jesus
At the beginning of Christianity there are hardly any falsifications, assuming that Jesus of Nazareth is historical and not the myth of a god transported to the human being. However, historicity is merely presupposed here; it is, independently from some exceptions, the communis opinio (common opinion) of the 20th century. But there is no actual demonstration. The hundreds of apologetic nonsense in circulation, such as that of the Jesuit F.X. Brors (with imprimatur), are as gratuitous as brazen: ‘But where is a personality somewhere whose existence is historically guaranteed as the person of Christ? We can also mythologize a Cicero, a Caesar, even Frederick the Great and a Napoleon: but more guaranteed that the existence of Christ is not theirs’.
On the contrary, what is clear is that there is no demonstrative testimony of the historical existence of Jesus in the so-called profane literature. All extra-Christian sources do not say anything about Jesus: Suetonius and Pliny the Younger on the Roman side, Philo and, especially important, Justus of Tiberias on the Jewish side. Or they do not take into consideration, as the Testimonia (Testimony) of Tacitus and Flavius Josephus, what even many Catholic theologians admit today. Even a well-known Catholic like Romano Guardini knew why he wrote: ‘The New Testament is the only source that reports on Jesus’.
Insofar as the judgment that the New Testament and its reliability deserves, critical historical theology has shown, in a way as broad as precise, a largely negative result. According to critical Christian theologians the biblical books ‘are not interested in history’ (M. Dibelius), ‘they are only a collection of anecdotes’ (M. Werner), ‘should be used only with extreme caution’ (M. Goguel), are full of ‘religious legends’ (Von Soden), ‘stories of devotions and entertainment’ (C. Schneider), full of propaganda, apologetics, polemics and tendentious ideas. In short: here everything is faith, history is nothing.
This is also true, precisely, about the sources that speak almost exclusively of the life and doctrine of the Nazarene, the Gospels. All the stories of Jesus’ life are, as its best scholar, Albert Schweitzer, wrote, ‘hypothetical constructions’. And consequently, even modern Christian theology, all of which is critical and does not cling to dogmatism, puts into question the historical credibility of the Gospels; arriving unanimously at the conclusion that, regarding the life of Jesus, we can find practically nothing. The Gospels do not reflect, in any way, history but faith: the common theology, the common fantasy of the end of the 1st century.
Therefore, in the beginnings of Christianity there is neither history nor literary fabrications but, as the central issue, its true motive, error. And this error goes back to none other than Jesus.
We know that the Jesus of the Bible, especially the Synoptic, is fully within the Jewish tradition. He is much more Jewish than Christian. As to the others, the members of the primitive community were called ‘Hebrews’. Only the most recent research calls them ‘Judeo-Christian’ but their lives were hardly different from that of the other Jews. They also considered the sacred Jewish Scriptures as mandatory and remained members of the synagogue for many generations.
Jesus propagated a mission only among Jews. He was strongly influenced by the Jewish apocalyptic—and this influenced Christianity mightily. Not in vain does Bultmann has one of his studies with the title Ist die Apokalyptik die Mutter der christlichen Theologie? (Is the apocalyptic the mother of Christian theology?). In any case, the New Testament is full of apocalyptic ideas and such influence has its mark in all its steps. ‘There can be no doubt that it was an apocalyptic Judaism in which the Christian faith acquired its first and basic form’ (Cornfeld / Botterweck).
But the germ of this faith is Jesus’ error about the imminent end of the world. Those beliefs were frequent. It did not always mean that the world would end, but perhaps it was the beginning of a new period. Similar ideas were known in Iran, in Babylon, Assyria and Egypt. The Jews took them from paganism and incorporated them into the Old Testament as the idea of the Messiah. Jesus was one of the many prophets—like those of the Jewish apocalypses, the Essenes, John the Baptist—who announced that his generation was the last one. He preached that the present time was over and that some of his disciples ‘would not taste death until they saw the kingdom of God coming’; that they would not end the mission in Israel ‘until the Son of Man arrives’; that the final judgment of God would take place ‘in this same generation’ which would not cease ‘until all this has happened’.
Although all this was in the Bible for a millennium and a half, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the Hamburg Orientalist who died in 1768 (whose extensive work, which occupied more than 1,400 pages, was later published in parts by Lessing), was the first to recognise the error of Jesus. But until the beginning of the 20th century the theologian Johannes Weiss did not show the discovery of Reimarus. It was developed by the theologian Albert Schweitzer.
The recognition of Jesus’ fundamental error is considered the Copernican moment of modern theology and is generally defended by the critical representatives of history and the anti-dogmatics. For the theologian Bultmann it is necessary ‘to say that Jesus was wrong in waiting for the end of the world’. And according to the theologian Heiler ‘a serious researcher discusses the firm conviction of Jesus in the early arrival of the final judgment and the end’.
But not only Jesus was wrong but also all Christendom since, as the archbishop of Freiburg, Conrad Gröber (a member promoter of the SS) admits, ‘it was contemplated the return of the Lord as imminent, as is testified not only in different passages in the epistles of St. Paul, St. Peter, James and in the Book of Revelation; but also by the literature of the Apostolic Fathers and the Proto-Christian life’.
(Note of the Ed.: The face that Richard Neave constructed from skulls of typical 1st century Palestinian Jews suggests that Jesus, if he existed, must have differed significantly from the traditional depictions in Western art, which invariably ‘Nordicize’ the Semites.)
Marana tha (‘Come, Lord’) was the prayer of the first Christians. But as time passed without the Lord coming; when doubts, resignation, ridicule and discord were increasing, the radicalism of Jesus’ affirmations had to be gradually softened. And after decades and centuries, when the Lord finally did not arrive, the Church converted what in Jesus was a distant hope, his idea of the Kingdom of God, into the idea of ‘the Church’. The oldest Christian belief was thus replaced by the Kingdom of Heaven: a gigantic falsification; within Christian dogma, the most serious one.
The belief in the proximity of the end decisively conditioned the later appearance of the Proto-Christian writings in the second half of the 1st century and in the course of the 2nd century. Jesus and his disciples—who expected no hereafter and no state of transcendental bliss but the immediate intervention of God from heaven and a total change of all things on Earth—naturally had no interest in taking notes, writings, or books; for whose writing they were not even trained.
And when the New Testament authors began to write, they softened the prophecies of Jesus of a very imminent end of the world. The Christians did not live that end and this is why questions arise in all ancient literature. Scepticism and indignation spread: ‘Where, then, is his announced second coming?’ says the second Epistle of Peter. ‘Since the parents died, everything is as it has been since the beginning of creation’. And also in Clement’s first epistle the complaint arises: ‘We have already heard this in the days of our fathers, and look, we have aged and none of that has happened to us’.
Voices of that style arise shortly after the death of Jesus. And they are multiplied in the course of the centuries. And here there is how the oldest Christian author, the apostle of the peoples, Paul, reacts. If he first explained to the Corinthians that the term ‘had been set short’ and the ‘world is heading to the sunset’, ‘we will not all die, but we will all be transformed’—later he spiritualised the faith about the final times that, from year to year, became increasingly suspicious. Paul thus made the faithful internally assume the great renewal of the world, the longing for a change of eons, was fulfilled through the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Instead of the preaching of the kingdom of God, instead of the promise that this kingdom would soon emerge on Earth, Paul thus introduced individualistic ideas of the afterlife, the vita aeterna (eternal life). Christ no longer comes to the world but the believing Christian goes to him in heaven! Similarly, the gospel authors who write later soften Jesus’ prophecies about the end of the world and make the convenient corrections in the sense of a postponement. The one that goes further is Luke, who substitutes the hopeful belief for a history of divine salvation with the notion of previous stages or intermediate steps.

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Judaism Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Old Testament Theology

Christianity’s Criminal History, 79

Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
Opposition to the Old Testament
In the 2nd century, when Christians were still not exercising war as they would do permanently a little later, among them there were perhaps more opponents of the Old Testament than defenders. And none of them saw more clearly their incompatibility with the biblical Jesus doctrine than the ‘heretic’ Marcion, at least none of them derived consequences of such premise and with such success. In his Antitheses (lost) Marcion showed the contradictions and elaborated the first canon of Christian writings, based on the Gospel of Luke, the one with the least Hebrew influence, and in the letters of Paul.
Apostle John (left) and Marcion of Sinope (right), from Morgan Library MS 748, 11th century.
Seventeen, eighteen centuries later, theologians weave wreaths of praise towards the outlaw, from Harnack to Nigg; the theologian Overbeck, friend of Nietzsche (‘the God of Christianity is the God of the Old Testament’!) states that he has correctly understood this Testament; for the Catholic theologian Buonaiuti ‘it is the most dense and insightful enemy’ of ‘ecclesiastical orthodoxy’.
It is precisely the ‘heretical’ circles that have fought the Old Testament. Many Christian Gnostics condemned it globally. Two hundred years later, the Visigothic apostle Ulfilas, an Arian of pacifist sentiments, was shocked by the contrast between Yahweh and Jesus. In his version of the Bible to the Gothic he made around the year 370, which is the oldest German literary monument, the bishop did not translate any of the Old Testament history books.
After the century of the Enlightenment, criticism intensified again. The perceptive Lessing, who also considers the historical foundations of Christianity precarious, exclaims at the sight of the old book of the Jews: ‘On this clay, on this clay, great God! If you had mixed a couple of gold nuggets…!’
With greater passion Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) scourges the ‘unprecedented blasphemy’: to claim that the Almighty God had expressly ordered Moses to attack a defenceless people and because of their different beliefs to completely annihilate all living beings; to assassinate in cold blood all the children and the unarmed men, to slaughter the prisoners, to tear apart the married women and to respect only the young girls for carnal commerce and rape. Mark Twain (1835-1910) could not help but comment caustically that the Old Testament is essentially concerned with blood and sensuality; the New with salvation and redemption through fire.
Theologians have also rejected the Old Testament as the foundation of life and doctrine, among them some as renowned as Schleiermacher and Harnack, who strongly opposed that this book

be preserved as a canonical document in Protestantism. We must make a clean slate and honour the truth in worship and teaching. This is the act of courage demanded today—almost too late—to Protestantism.

But what good would it do? The masses would continue to be deceived by the New Testament and its dogmas. But the Catholic Wörterbuch christlicher Ethik (Dictionary of Christian ethics) still finds, in 1975, ‘the roots of the ethos of the Old Testament’ in ‘the decisive personal attention’ of Yahweh ‘to the world and to man’, found in the Old Testament ‘fundamentally and to the defence of what we call human rights; behind its humanum there is Yahweh with all of his divine weight’ (Deissler).

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Catholic Church Christendom Judaism Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Old Testament

Christianity’s Criminal History, 78

Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
Portrayals of the biblical female world
Among the singularities of the Old Testament lies the more or less strong opposition, that it always found a place in Christianity, about this section of the ‘Word of the Lord’: the most extensive. It not only was full of enormous warlike cruelty, but also consecrated deceit, hypocrisy and treacherous murder. For example, the heroic deeds of Phinehas, who sneaks into the tent and pierces a couple of lovers with a sword; the bloodthirsty actions of Judith, who enters the camp of the Assyrians and treacherously murders General Holofernes; the fatal blow of Jael, who amicably attracts Sisera, the fugitive captain of the king of Hazor, who is exhausted, and murders him from the back.
These and other similar acts have more than two thousand years and not only do they appear in the Bible: they have been justified and exalted through the ages. Even in the 20th century the cardinal archbishop of Munich and expert in the Old Testament, Michael Faulhaber, military prior of the emperor, follower of Hitler and post festum of resistance, pompously praises ‘the act of Judith’: the action of a woman that, according to Faulhaber, has ‘lied’ first, then ‘woven a network of conscious lies’ and finally ‘killed a sleeper in a treacherous way’. However, ‘as a warrior of the Most High, Judith felt she was the depository of a divine mission. The struggle for the walls of Betulia was ultimately a war of religion’.
If something ‘sacred’ is at stake, the Church hierarchs always consider any diabolical action valid provided that it is in the interest of the Church; that is, of their own. Consequently Christian Friedrich Hebbel, a vehement detractor of Christianity (‘the root of all discord’, ‘the smallpox virus of mankind’) with his Judith (1840), which made him famous, is disqualified for presenting only one ‘sad caricature of the Biblical Judith’.
Another poet deserved a much more favourable opinion from the same ecclesiastical prince. After Faulhaber reminded us the feat of Jael with the words of the Bible (‘Her right hand to the workman’s hammer, And she smote Sisera; she crushed his head, She crashed through and transfixed his temples’), he says nonetheless that this is ‘unworthy, perfidious, hypocritical and murder’. But the Bible glorifies this woman as a ‘national heroine’ through the hymn of the prophetess and Judge Deborah. And so the entire Catholic world celebrates her for two millennia and also her most famous author, Calderón de la Barca:

In one of his sacramental plays he provided Judge Deborah with the allegorical figures of prudence and justice; and Jael the other two cardinal virtues, temperance and strength. Jael, who destroys the head of the enemies of the revelation, becomes a projection of the Immaculate, who, according to the words of the Latin Bible, crushes the head of the old serpent. Hence Calderón’s words while destroying the head of Sisera: ‘Die, tyrant, to arms’. Under the pen of Calderón the whole story of Deborah becomes a little Marian doctrine.

Nice expression that of the ‘little Marian doctrine’!
At least for those who know—because the great mass of Catholics are ignorant—, Mary is not only the Immaculate, the caste, the queen, the triumphant dominator of the impulses: but the successor in the head of Janus of her ancient predecessor, Ishtar, the virgin Athena, the virgin Artemis, also the great Christian goddess of blood and war; not only ‘our beloved Lady of the Linden’, ‘of the green forest’ but also of murder and massacres, from the beginning of the Middle Ages until the First World War.
Faulhaber published on August 1, 1916, ‘the day of commemoration of the mother of the Maccabees’, in ‘war edition’, the 3rd revised edition of his Charakterbilder der biblischen Frauenweit (Portrayals of the Biblical Female World) to ‘bring to the German feminine world in bloody and seriousness the days and the examples still alive of biblical wisdom: the sources that still emanate spiritual strength and altars still flaming above-earthly consolations’. Women could ‘learn much war wisdom’ from these biblical women; ‘much sense of courage’, ‘much spirit of sacrifice’. ‘Even in the days of the war the Word of the Lord is still a light in our path’. And in the 6th edition, Cardinal Faulhaber presents his Portrayals in 1935, the Hitler era, and praises Deborah as ‘a heroine of ardent patriotism’, ‘which makes in her people a rebirth of freedom and a new national life’.

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Judaism Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Literature Old Testament

Christianity’s Criminal History, 77

Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
The Jewish apocalyptic
The apocalyptic genre (from the Greek apokálypsis) plays an important role, a kind of transitional role from the Old to the New Testament, especially in the epoch that goes from the 3rd century BC to the 2nd century AD.
In the apocalyptic genre one can see a kind of Jewish eschatology, so to speak, an unofficial eschatology which extends to the cosmic: beyond the official national eschatology of the rabbis. Unlike the latter, the apocalyptic literature was universalistic. It encompassed Earth, heaven and hell. However, their followers carried rather an existence of secret meetings, similar to what happens today in many sects and their relations with the churches.
As stated above, the research sees in these writings a ‘link’ between the Old and New Testaments and assigns the apocalyptic genre an intermediate period between the two. This is all the more logical because the apocalyptic authors—Jews whose exact origin (Essenes, Pharisees) is difficult to establish—are falsifiers: people who did not write under their own names but with pseudonyms; who attribute their revelations of a primordial time, from the last hour, from the beyond, its mysterious manifestations of the future, of dreams, states of ecstasy (sometimes to heaven as, among others, Enoch and also the Christian apocalyptic writer John of Patmos) to ‘visions’ while the prophets are generally based on ‘auditions’. Often, the enlightened ones who have to illuminate us are accompanied by a revealing intermediary, an angelus interpres (exegete angel) who explains to the author what happened and, of course, to us.
Typical of this sort of prayer-ridden counterfeits is their dualistic concept of the world, deeply influenced by Iranian ideas, and their theory of the two eons, one temporary and the other eternal. Typical is that the seen events are about the end of times and the ‘pains of the Messiah’ are described as imminent. All this goes from horrible human and cosmic catastrophes (women stop giving birth, the earth becomes sterile, stars collide) to the Last Judgment and a messianic splendour painted full of fantasy. Of course, the sufferings of the wicked are included, which provided a strong consolation to the righteous, together with imperious warnings of penance and conversion.
The expectation of the proximity of the end is just as typical as the hope in the hereafter and there is determinism, since ‘God has everything planned’ (4 Ezra 6): the beginning and the end. ‘This world has been created by the Highest for many, but the future only for a few’ (4 Ezra 8, 1): a novel manifestation of his Summa Misericordiae (the sum of His mercy). It is also characteristic of these intermediate testamentaries that they introduce many mysterious figures (animals, clouds, mountains) and a complicated numerical symbolism: a religious coryphaeus of earlier times in the form of Adam, Enoch, Abraham, Ezra, Moses, Isaiah, Elijah, Daniel. Theirs is an occult writing known only by a group of the elect, but now God wants to spread it.
The imposters often represent their visions of history as prophecies, in future form. Naturally, writing generally many centuries after the events and having placed their omens on their lips, they predict everything with great precision.
Their readers are amazed. So predisposed, they believe everything that they prophesied for a distant future about the horrors of the end and its magnificence. This pia fraus (loving fraud), this ‘representation of history as a vaticinium ex eventu’ (Vielhauer), has distant Old Testament parallelisms in the Pentateuch itself (Gen 49, Num 23 et seq., Deut 33) but its authentic model is, perhaps, in the oracle sibylline literature of the Hellenistic-Roman era.
In addition to the biblical falsification of the book of Daniel that we have already seen, there is also the book of Baruch [left: Gustave Doré’s illustration], presumably written by Baruch ben Neriah: the scribe, companion and friend of the prophet Jeremiah.
‘Baruch’, who appears as a messenger of God and experiences a multitude of visions, claims to have written his own book in Babylon, after the destruction of Jerusalem. He also says he knows and means much more than the prophets; and still in 1931 the Lexikonfür Theologie und Kirche did not ‘see any reason to doubt the authorship of Baruch’.
Today there are very few who claim the authenticity for this work of the Old Testament (as well as the book of ‘Daniel’) insofar as it was written half a millennium after Baruch: the first part perhaps in the 1st century BC (the farthest moment), the second part probably in the middle of the 1st century AD.
The forgeries almost always emerged as an internal necessity of the apocalyptic genre. They were widely used by the Christians and became typical of them. The easy way was simply to believe in the ‘works’ of ancient authorities—those of the twelve patriarchs; Daniel and Enoch, whose authenticity already Origen doubted, as well as the ‘works’ of Abraham, Moses, Isaiah and Ezra; in total a list of twenty names—, as their ‘prophecies’ and ‘revelations’ were being ‘fulfilled’.

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