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Category: Karlheinz Deschner

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Constantine Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Evil Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Libanius Library of Alexandria Porphyry of Tyre Roman Catholic popes St Paul

Christianity’s Criminal History, 101

 

Editors’ note:

To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, see the abridged translation of Volume I (here).

 

The Christian Book Burning
and the Annihilation of Classical Culture

Where is the wise person? Where is the educated one? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

—St. Paul, I Corinthians 1:20

Charlatanism is initiated among you by the schoolteacher, and as you have divided the science into parts [sacred & profane], you have moved away from the only true one.

—Tatian

After Jesus Christ, all research is already pointless. If we believe, we no longer demand anything that goes beyond our faith.

—Tertullian

If you want to read historical narratives, there you have the Book of The Kings. If, on the contrary, you want to read the wise men and philosophers, you have the prophets… And if you long for the hymns, you also have the psalms of David.

—Apostolic Constitution (3rd Century)

Religion is, therefore, the central core of the entire educational process and must permeate all educational measures.

—Lexicon for Catholic Life (1952)

 
Constantine ordered to burn the fifteen books of the work Against the Christians written by Porphyry, the most astute of the opponents of Christianity in the pre-Constantinian era: ‘The first state prohibition of books decreed in favour of the Church’ (Hamack). And his successors, Theodosius II and Valentinian III, condemned Porphyry’s work again to the bonfire, in 448. This happened after Eusebius of Caesarea had written twenty-five books against this work and the doctor of the Church Cyril nothing less than thirty.

Towards the end of the 4th century, during the reign of Emperor Valens, there was a great burning of books, accompanied by many executions. That Christian regent gave free rein to his fury for almost two years, behaving like ‘a wild beast’, torturing, strangulating, burning people alive, and beheading. The innumerable records allowed to find the traces of many books that were destroyed, especially in the field of law and the liberal arts. Entire libraries went to the fire in the East. Sometimes they were eliminated by their owners under the effect of panic.

On the occasion of the assaults on the temples, the Christians destroyed, especially in the East, not only the images of the gods but also the liturgical books and those of the oracles. The Catholic Emperor Jovian (363-364) had the Antioch library destroyed by fire: the same library installed there by his predecessor Julian the Apostate. Following the assault on the Serapis in 391, during which the sinister Patriarch Theophilus himself destroyed, axe in hand, the colossal statue of Serapis carved by the great Athenian artist Bryaxis, the library was consumed by flames.

After the library of the Museum of Alexandria, which already had 700,000 rolls, was consumed by a casual fire during the siege war by Cesar (48-47 BC), the fame of Alexandria as a city possessing the most numerous and precious bibliographic treasures only lasted thanks to the library of the Serapis, since the supposed intention of Antony to give Cleopatra, as compensation for the loss of the library of the museum, the entire library of Pergamum, with 200,000 rolls , does not seem to have come to fruition. The burning of libraries on the occasion of the assault on the temples was indeed something frequent, especially in the East.

It happened once again under the responsibility of Theophilus, following the destruction of an Egyptian sanctuary in Canopus and that of the Marneion of Gaza in 402.

At the beginning of the 5th century, Stilicho burned in the West—with great dismay on the part of the Roman aristocracy faithful to the religion of his elders—the books of the Sibyl, the immortal mother of the world, as Rutilius Claudius Namatianus complained. To him, the Christian sect seemed worse than the poison of Circe.

In the last decades of the 5th century, the libelli found there (‘these were an abomination in the eyes of God’—Rhetor Zacharias)—were burnt in Beirut before the church of St. Mary. The ecclesiastical writer Zacharias, who was then studying law in Beirut, played a leading role in this action supported by the bishop and state authorities. And in the year 562 Emperor Justinian, who had ‘pagan’ philosophers, rectors, jurists and physicians persecuted, ordered the burning of Greco-Roman images and books in the Kynegion of Constantinople, where the criminals were liquidated.

Apparently, already at the borderline of the Middle Ages, Pope Gregory I the Great, a fanatical enemy of everything classical, burned books in Rome. And this celebrity—the only one, together with Leo I, in gathering in his person the double distinction of Pope and Doctor of the Church—seems to have been the one who destroyed the books that are missing in the work of Titus Livy. It is not even implausible that it was he who ordered the demolition of the imperial library on the Palatine. In any case, the English scholastic John of Salisbury, bishop of Chartres, asserts that Pope Gregory intentionally destroyed manuscripts of classical authors of Roman libraries.

Everything indicates that many adepts of the Greco-Roman culture converted to Christianity had to prove to have really moved their convictions by burning their books in full view. Also, in some hagiographic narratives, both false and authentic, there is that commonplace of the burning of books as a symbol, so to speak, of a conversion story.

It was not always forced to go to the bonfire. Already in the first half of the 3rd century, Origen, very close in this regard to Pope Gregory, ‘desisted from teaching grammar as being worthless and contrary to sacred science and, calculating coldly and wisely, he sold all his works of the ancients authors with whom he had occupied until then in order not to need help from others for the sustenance of his life’ (Eusebius).

There is hardly anything left of the scientific critique of Christianity on the part of adherents to classical culture. The emperor and the Church took care of it. Even many Christian responses to it disappeared! (probably because there was still too much ‘pagan poison’ on its pages). But it was the classical culture itself on which the time came for its disappearance under the Roman Empire.
 

The annihilation of the Greco-Roman world

The last emperor of classical antiquity, the great Julian, certainly favoured the adherents of the old culture, but simultaneously tolerated the Christians: ‘It is, by the gods, my will that the Galileans not be killed, that they are not beaten unjustly or suffer any other type of injustice. I declare, however, that the worshipers of the gods will have a clear preference in front of them. For the madness of the Galileans was about to overthrow everything, while the veneration of the gods saved us all. That is why we have to honour the gods and the people and communities that venerate them’.

After Julian’s death, to whom the orator Libanius felt united by faith and friendship, Libanius complains deeply, moved by the triumph of Christianity and by its barbarous attacks on the old religion.

Oh! What a great sorrow took hold not only of the land of the Achaeans, but of the entire empire… The honours of which the good ones participated have disappeared; the friendship of the wicked and unbridled enjoys great prestige. Laws, repressive of evil, have already been repealed or are about to be. Those that remain are barely fulfilled in practice.

Full of bitterness, Libanius continues to address his co-religionists:

That faith, which until now was the object of mockery and that fought against you so fierce and untiring, has proved to be the strongest. It has extinguished the sacred fire, the joy of sacrifices, has ordered to savagely neat [its adversaries] and demolish the altars. It has locked the shrines and temples, if not destroyed them or turned them into brothels after declaring them impious. It has abrogated any activity with your faith…

In that final assault on the Greco-Roman world, the Christian emperors were mostly and for a long time less aggressive than the Christian Church. Under Jovian (363-364), the first successor of Julian, Hellenism does not seem to have suffered major damage except the closure and demolition of some temples. Also the successors of Jovian, Valentinian I and Valens, during whose government appears for the first time the term pagani referring the faithful of the old polytheism, maintained an attitude of relative tolerance toward them.

The Catholic Valentinian with plenty of reasons, because his interest was in the army and needed inner peace, tried to avoid religious conflicts. He still covered the high positions of the government almost evenly, even with a slight predominance of the believers in the gods.

Under Valens, nevertheless, the high Christian officials already constituted a majority before the Hellenes. Yet he fought the Catholics, even using the help of the Hellenes for reasons, of course, purely opportunistic.

Although the emperor Gratian, for continuing the rather liberal religious policy of his father Valentinian I, had promised tolerance to almost all the confessions of the empire by an edict promulgated in 378, in practice soon followed an opposite behaviour, for he was strongly influenced by the bishop of Milan, Ambrose.

Under Valentinian II, brother of Gratian, things really turned around and the relationship between high Christian officials and the adherents of the old culture was again balanced and the army chiefs, two polytheists, played a decisive role in the court. Even in Rome two other Hellenes of great prestige, Praetextatus and Symmachus, exerted the charges of praetorian and urban prefect respectively.

Gradually, however, Valentinian, as his brother once did, fell under the disastrous influence of the resident bishop of Milan, Ambrose. Something similar to what would happen later with Theodosius I. Ambrose lived according to his motto: ‘For the “gods of the heathen are but devils” as the Holy Scripture says; therefore, anyone who is a soldier of this true God must not give proof of tolerance and condescension, but of zeal for faith and religion’.

And indeed, the powerful Theodosius ruled during the last years of his term, at least as far as religious policy was concerned, strictly following Ambrose’s wishes. First, the rites of non-Christians were definitively banned at the beginning of 391. Later the temples and sanctuaries of Serapis in Alexandria were closed, which soon would be destroyed. In 393 the Olympic games were prohibited. The infant emperors of the 5th century [1] were puppets in the hands of the Church. That is why the court also committed itself more and more intensely in the struggle against classical culture, a struggle that the Church had already vehemently fuelled in the 4th century and that led gradually to the systematic extermination of the old faith.

The best-known bishops took part in this extermination, which intensified after the Council of Constantinople (381), with Rome and the East, especially Egypt, as the most notorious battlefields of the conflict between the Hellenes and the Christians.
 
___________

[1] Deschner is referring to emperors Arcadius, Theodosius II and Honorius whose reigns will be described in other translations of his books.

Categories
Christendom Daybreak Publishing Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Finally

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Christianity’s Criminal History

Editor’s preface

Introduction

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

The bibles and some peculiarities of the Christian Bible

The five books of Moses, which Moses did not write

David and Solomon

Joshua and Isaiah

Ezekiel and Daniel

The Jewish apocalyptic

Portrayals of the biblical female world

Opposition to the Old Testament

Forgeries in diaspora Judaism

 
Forgeries in the New Testament

The error of Jesus

The ‘Holy Scriptures’ are piled up

God as the author?

Christians forged more consciously than Jews

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

Forged ‘epistles of Paul’

The Second Epistle to the Thessalonians

Colossians, Ephesians and Hebrews

Forged epistles of Peter

Forged John and others

Interpolations in the New Testament

 
The invention of Popes

Neither Jesus instituted the papacy nor Peter was bishop of Rome

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

The story of the discovery of Peter’s tomb

The list of fabricated Roman bishops

 
Background in the Old Testament

Moses and the Book of Judges

The ravages of David and the modern translators

The sacred warmongering of the Maccabees

The Jewish War (66-70)

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

The Jewish religion, tolerated by the pagan state

 
Early Christianity

Interpretatio Christiana

‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’

First ‘heretics’ in the New Testament

Thirteen good Christians

Saint Jerome and Origen

 
The persecution of the Christians

Anti-Hellene hatred in the New Testament

The defamation of the Greco-Roman religion

Celsus and Porphyry

The persecution of the Christians

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

The Roman emperors viewed retrospectively

 
Saint Constantine: The First Christian Emperor

War against Maxentius

War against Maximinus

War against Licinius

The Catholic clergy, increasingly favoured

Constantine as saviour, deliverer, and vicar of God

No more a pacifist Church

Christian family life and savage criminal practices

Constantine against Jews and ‘heretics’

Constantine against the Greco-Roman culture

 
Interim report

Persia, Armenia and Christianity

 
Constantine’s successors

The first Christian dynasty founded on family extermination

First wars among devout Christians

Constantius and his Christian-style government

A father of the Church who preaches looting and killing

First assaults on the temples

 
Julian

Hecatombs under the pious Gallus

Emperor Julian

Christian tall stories

 
After Julian

Rivers of blood under the Catholic Valentinian

Trembling and gnashing of teeth under the Arian Valens

 
Athanasius, Doctor of the Church

The complicated nature of God

It was not fought for faith but for power

The Council of Nicaea

Character and tactics of a Father of the Church

The death of Arius

The ‘battlefield’ of Alexandria

Antioch and Constantinople

Shelter with a twenty-year-old beauty

 
Ambrose, doctor of the Church

Non-white Ambrose drives the annihilation of the Goths

Emperor Theodosius ‘the Great’

Against the Hellenist religion

 
The Father of the Church Augustine

‘Genius in all fields of Christian doctrine’

Augustine’s campaign against the Donatists

The overthrow of Pelagius

Augustine attacks Greco-Roman culture

Augustine sanctions the ‘holy war’

Categories
Aryan beauty Eschatology Karlheinz Deschner New Testament St Paul

First Epistle to the Corinthians

Or

Antimalware software

In a program for Japanese television Jared Taylor said in Japanese, ‘Koreans, Japanese, Chinese for those reasons are superior to White people in terms of IQ, in my view’. A genuine priest of the 14 words would never say such a thing in a public space. Just look at the faces of Taylor and the Asian interviewer and tell me if, from the esthetical viewpoint, he’s not far superior to the Jap (who beside Jared looks like a Neanderthal)?

But Taylor is the typical Neochristian. The son of very pious parents who moved to Japan to preach the Word to the heathens, once he distanced himself from religion he maintained in his mind residual malware that Christianity implanted in our psyches millennia ago. So let’s talk about the original virus.

As we said in the previous entry of this series, it was Saul/Paul the one who first preached about how there should be no distinctions between the peoples of the Roman Empire, Hellenes (whites) and Jews included. We have also linked to the conference by Marcus Borg about the zeitgeist of the first Christians, ‘thoroughgoing eschatology’ as Schweitzer put it or ‘apocalyptic eschatology’ as exegetes call it today. When the eschaton failed to occur—which means that both Jesus and the early Paul (the Paul of 1 Corinthians) failed—, Paul started to rationalise the failure in subsequent epistles (see Paul’s apocalyptic eschatology in chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians). As Karlheinz Deschner noted in Christianity’s Criminal History:

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.

(((Paul))) preaching to non-Jews by Renaissance painter Raphael. 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.

This was Pauline Christianity’s gigantic fraud: selling to us gentiles a salvation Christology when the original Yeshua cult—thoroughgoing eschatology—was something altogether different. (As a defence mechanism before the Roman occupation, the Jesus cult immersed themselves in apocalyptic imaginary: believing that the kingdom would come within their lifespan, something that still lingers in 1 Corinthians.)

But there is something more serious than selling us a religion that had very little to do with the original Yeshua cult. Once again, see the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. In a chronologically ordered New Testament it was Paul the first major writer who sold us the inversion of Greco-Roman values. If accepted by whites, this ideology would be the original virus for Aryan decline: that the strong should be considered evil and the weak good:

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?… God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe… but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God.

So that no white man may boast before the Jewish god, Paul would have written today. No wonder why Nietzsche wanted to transvalue back these values that Paul had inverted! By the end of chapter 3 Paul reiterates ‘For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God’. In verse 13 of chapter 4 he adds ‘we have become as the scum of the world, the dregs of all things, even until now…’

Preaching inversions of values could be interpreted as slogans based on Semite envy before the handsome Roman world. In my Saturday entry I quoted Catherine Nixey’s book about how the scum of the world, once in power, rationalised their drive to destroy the handsome Greco-Roman sculptures: by claiming that they were demons! It was that tiny seed, Paul, the one who first sowed such attitude in his letters. In chapter 10 he says:

I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God; and I do not want you to become sharers in demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.

Incidentally, it was in this long epistle where Paul wrote his famous words, ‘When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things’.

I wonder when will American racists do away with their childish Xtianity? Or do you believe you can save the race with this malware still installed? Why don’t you see this site as a sort of antimalware software for your minds?

Categories
Karlheinz Deschner New Testament Newspeak

Book of James

Disclaimer of September 12, 2018. In the below post mistakenly I used a fundamentalist order of the New Testament. In the new incarnation of this site I’ll be using Marcus Borg’s order of the 27 books of the New Testament. The earliest book in the New Testament according to more serious scholarship is not the Epistle of James but 1 Thessalonians, an original letter of Paul’s. The last book in the New Testament is 2nd Peter.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

 
Author

As noted by Karlheinz Deschner, although this book claims ‘to have been written by James, brother of the Lord, many important reasons exclude this possibility’.

Date

There are indications that the Book of James was written before 50 CE. Its distinctively Jewish nature suggests that it was composed when the church was still predominantly Jewish. If this early dating is correct, this letter is the earliest of all the New Testament writings, with the possible exception of Galatians.
 
Semitic recipients

The recipients are identified in 1:1: ‘the twelve tribes scattered among the nations’. The epistle breathes an unmistakably Jewish air. The term ‘twelve tribes’ would naturally apply to Jewish Christians. For example, in 2:21 the author calls Abraham ‘our father’; he also uses of the Hebrew title for God, kyrios sabaoth, ‘Lord Almighty’ in 5:4. The letter, written in excellent Greek, is also similar to Old Testament wisdom writings such as Proverbs. In 2:1-9 of the Book of James we can read:

My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favouritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, ‘Have a seat here, please’, while to the one who is poor you say, ‘Stand there’, or, ‘Sit at my feet’, have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonoured the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you? You do well if you really fulfil the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’. But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.

If exported to the gentiles, this is Jesus’ toxic love: what the thoroughly Judaised West is currently doing with non-white immigrants, right?

Although the author of the Book of James does not specify it, given his Semitic background we may surmise that in his diatribes against the ‘rich’ (see esp. 5:1-6) he may refer to the ‘Hellenes’.

Always keep in mind this paragraph from my preface to the forthcoming PDF/printed book of Deschner’s first volume: ‘Before the introduction of the pejorative term “pagan” the non-Christians of the Roman Empire were called héllenes and éthne by the treatise writers of the 4th century. The expression hellénon éthne can be translated into modern English as “the Greek races,” that is, the white peoples. Therefore, instead of the author’s textual “pagan” I chose the pre-derogatory term in the vernacular of the 4th century, “Hellenes,” right before the status of the white peoples was demoted unless they started to worship a Semitic god’.

Categories
Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 100

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

Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (7 of 7)

Although the number of Christian martyrs in the first three centuries could be calculated at 1,500 (a figure certainly problematic), although of the 250 Greek martyrs in 250 years only 20 are historical, although only written news of a couple of dozen martyrs remain and although the greatest theologian of the pre-Constantine era, Origen, says that the number of Christian martyrs is ‘small and easy to tell’, in 1959, the Catholic theologian Stockmeier continues writing:

For three centuries they were persecuted to death.

Also in the middle of the 20th century, the Jesuit Hertling writes:

It is necessary to assume a six-digit number.

Is it really necessary? Why? He himself says it: ‘The historian who critically analyses the sources and wants to relate things as they have been, constantly runs the risk of hurting pious feelings—if he does not reach the result that there were millions of martyrs’.

But the Church has not only criminally exaggerated the number of martyrs, but also its description. Still in the middle of the 20th century, the Catholic Johannes Schuck boasts (with double imprimatur), as if the history of the Church by Eusebius of the 4th century continued:

It was a fight! On the one hand the beasts of the circus, the bonfire that burns the throbbing limbs, the torture, the cross and all the torments that seemed to come out of hell like a dirty sewer. On the other hand, the unwavering strength with which Christians faced the whole world, helpless… with the heart already under the first glows of eternity.

Schuck himself rejoices that the cruel persecutions against Christians ‘produced a great benefit to the kingdom of God’, and that ‘the Church only won’. While ‘the blood of their martyrs’ deprived ‘the Church from its most valuable souls’, these, who were the best, ‘passed into the fold of the Lord by faith and the spirit of sacrifice, love and nobility of the Christians’.

And with a tide of fabrications.

Fabrications of this kind were also found in another very different, though interdependent, field of ecclesiastical politics. Just as in order to increase the faith the written statements about false martyrs were created to increase the clerical power, false catalogues of bishops were made. That is, little by little an apostolic origin was attributed to all episcopal sees.

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Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 99

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

Most of the written statements about the martyrs are falsified, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (6 of 7)

It only remains to say that we are not talking about pious legends, but about written statements, of historical stories; that these documents also expressly claim to be the ‘correct notes’ where we can read, ‘The exact history of those who were before us has been written down by the lips of elders and reliable bishops and priests who love the truth. They saw it with their own eyes in their day’.

The Christians gave testimony of their faith with their blood in increasing groups, that in such quantities and so heroically died that the executioners ended up exhausted from the massacres. On one occasion they die with their sixteen bishops, on another 128 martyrs; then 111 men and nine women, then 275, then 8,940, then they cannot be counted since their number is greater than several thousand.

In fact, there were far fewer Christian martyrs than the world was led to believe over the centuries. Some of the true ones disappeared without a trace, their ashes were thrown into the rivers or scattered by the wind.

There were vast regions in which the martyrs were scarce or nonexistent, and as relics began to be placed in the altars, pilgrimages to distant places were organised and painful travels were carried out, if indeed they were made. The remains of known martyrs reached a high price, but the demand of pieces of martyrs was excessive, whether or not their names were known. Group martyrs enjoyed special preference:

• The 18 of Zaragoza,

• The 40 of Sebaste, all the ‘servants of arms’,

• The 70 companions of the holy monk Athanasius,

• Those who were drowned in a river, the 99 executed with St. Nicon in Caesarea/Palestine,

• The 128 who died with the holy Bishop Sadoth under the Persian King Shapur;

• The nearly two-dozen bishops and 250 clerics who reached martyrdom also in Persia,

• The 200 men and 70 women who suffered heroic martyrdom under Diocletian on the island of Palmaris,

• The 300 suicides that Prudentius invented (the most admired and read Christian author in the Middle Ages), who, to avoid being slaughtered under Valerian, threw themselves into a pit of quicklime,

• The—more stories of falsehood!—1,525 martyred saints of Umbria, the Theban legion,

• No less than 6,600 men who were apparently martyred in Switzerland (probably they alone more than all the Christian martyrs in all of antiquity),

• The thousands of martyrs that Emperor Diocletian burned alive in a church because they refused to do any ‘offering to idols’ (Roman Martyrology),

• The 10,000 Christians crucified on Mount Ararat or the 24,000 Catholic companions of St. Pappus, who under Licinius died for Christ in Antioch.

Afterwards even the figures are left untold, speaking of ‘innumerable’ martyrs. The deaths of ‘many martyred saints’ are stereotyped as ‘almost all the flock’. There are accounts of ‘the suffering of many holy women who out of love for the Christian faith were martyred in the cruelest way’. The following can be read in the Roman Martyrology:

Record of all Christians crowned with holiness and death in martyrdom, whose life, written statements and heroic deaths the Roman Catholic Church has compiled from the most secure sources and which it records and preserves for their eternal commemorative memory; with added summaries of the highlights of their lives, the reason for their conversion, their acts and their painful death.

It is understandable that very often the relics were designated with the formula: ‘whose name God knows’.

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Ancient Rome Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 98

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

 
Most of the martyrs’ acts are falsified, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (5 of 7)

Following the above examples, as many Christian heroes could have died as the writer wanted. Let us compare the martyrdom of Mar Jacob in Persia with that of St. Arcadius in North Africa, which is still honoured by the Catholic Church on January 12, and also recorded in the Roman martyrology.

Like St. Jacob, Saint Arcadius is a hero and a Christian from the top of his head to the soles of his feet, that is, literally unbreakable. Confronted finally with the instruments of torment by the rabid consul, he only scoffs: ‘Do you order that I have to undress?’ And he listens to the sentence to cut him slowly one member after another with ‘happy mood’. The text continues: ‘Now the executioners rush on him and cut off the joints of his fingers, arms and shoulders, and crush the toes, feet and legs. The martyr voluntarily offered one member after another, swimming in his blood, praying aloud:

‘Lord, my God! All these members you have given me, I offer them all to you’, etcetera. And all those present swim in tears just as the saint does in blood. Even the executioners curse the day they were born.

Only the wicked Roman consul remains undaunted. When the holy confessor had cut off all the lesser members, he ordered the elders to cut off the larger members with blunt axes, so that only the trunk remained. The holy Arcadius, still alive (!) offered God his scattered limbs and shouted: ‘Happy members!’ after which—as has been said, ‘nothing but the trunk’—it followed an ardent religious sermon to the adepts of the classical world…

The editor of the gigantic Catholic work cited, which in the prologue assures us that he only wishes to ‘offer facts founded on the place (!) of the so-called legends’, and ‘only facts that are true and historically proven’, offers in this work an infinity of horrifying stories.

And starting from such horrible coarseness, still in the 20th century—with multiple authorisations of superiority—the government of the Catholic souls extracts the ‘doctrine’ with the words of none other than St. Arcadius: ‘To die for Him is to live! Suffering for Him is the greatest joy! Support, oh Christ, the hardships and adversities of this life and do not let anything divert you from the service of God. The heaven is a worthy reward for everything’.

For those who do not have enough wonder even with the martyrdom of Mar Jacob—supernatural things happen as well.

To a Christian who owes and wants to kill another Christian, the ‘strength of God’ raises him twice and almost throws him to the ground; three hours is as dead.

Saint Nerses’ head could not be cut off, not even with eighteen swords; only with a knife.

And where these heroes die, since they must die, ‘often at night armies of angels ascend and descend’. And indeed, there is no doubt about the story, as even some ‘pagan’ shepherds saw that ‘three nights the armies of angels were floating above the place of death and praising God’.

Acts of martyrs!

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Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 97

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

 

Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (4 of 7)

Mar Jacob, the one tear into pieces, after the ten fingers of the hands and three of the feet have been torn off, smiling, makes deep comparisons: ‘Third toe, follow your companions and do not worry. For the same as the wheat that falls to the earth and in the spring makes your companions grow, you too will be reunited in an instant with your companions on the day of the resurrection’. Is not this well said? But after dropping the fifth toe, he cries out for vengeance: ‘Oh God, direct my punishment and make my revenge fall on the ruthless people’.

Often these saints become rude and insult their impious torturers or judges according to all the rules of the religion of love; they augur them ‘gnashing of teeth for eternity’, insult them by calling them ‘impure, dirty, blood lickers’, ‘lewd ravens, who rest on corpses’, ‘a snake of a thirst-eater’, ‘greens’ of hatred ‘like a bad viper’, a lascivious looking for ‘women in the bedroom’, an ‘impure dog’. Saint Aitillah tells his executioner: ‘You really are an irrational animal’. And St. Joseph does not think precisely of loving his enemy, of offering him the other cheek. The writer says: ‘Joseph filled his mouth with saliva and suddenly spit on his face and said: “You, impure and stained, you are not ashamed”.’

After Mar Jacob had been cut one by one all fingers and toes, accompanied each time by a noble or poisonous sentence against the ‘butcher wolves’, he remains firm in the faith and ready for more torture. ‘Why are you lounging?’ he asks impatiently. ‘Don’t forgive your eyes. For my heart rejoices in the Lord and my soul rises up to him, who loves the mortified’.

Thus, after the ten fingers and toes, the executioner’s helpers systematically cut, with grinding teeth, new members and with each of those who fall, the holy man makes comments with a pious sentence. After losing his right foot, he says: ‘Every limb you cut off from me will be a sacrifice to the king of heaven’.

They cut off his left foot and he said: ‘Hear me, O Lord, for You are good and great is Your goodness for all. They call you’. They cut off his right hand and he shouts: ‘The grace of God was great with me; free my soul from the deep realm of the dead’. They cut off his left hand and he said: ‘Look, you did miracles with the dead’. They approached and cut off his right arm and he spoke again: ‘I want to praise the Lord in my life and sing hymns of praise to my God as long as I exist; He likes my praise; I want to rejoice in the Lord’.

The perverse ‘pagans’ cut off his left arm, tear off the right leg of the knee… and finally ‘the glorious’ is reduced to ‘head, thorax and abdomen’. Then he reflects briefly on the situation and ‘opens again the mouth’ to tell God a brief speech. It is already daring to talk in such a reduced state—he has lost everything for Him!:

Lord, God, merciful and compassionate. I beg you, listen to my prayer and listen to my pleas. Here I am without my members. I’m here in half body and I’m silent. I have nothing, Lord, I do not have fingers to implore you; nor have the persecutors left me hands to extend them toward You. They have cut my feet off, my knees have been ripped off, the arms are away, the legs are cut. Here I am before You as a destroyed house, of which only a crown of tiles remains. I beg you. Lord, God…

And at night the Christians stole the corpse, or rather, ‘picked up the twenty-eight dismembered members’ and the rest. And then fire fell from heaven that ‘licked the blood from the straw until the members of the saint blushed and became like a ripe rose’.

Acts of martyrs!

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Catholic Church Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 96

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

 
Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (3 of 7)

But precisely the bishops—whose martyrdom was considered ‘something special’ before that of ordinary Christians—very rarely were martyrs. They fled en masse, sometimes from one country to another, to the limits of the Roman Empire, naturally at the behest of God and without forgetting to send from a safe place letters of support to the lesser faithful who were left imprisoned. In the old Church this was so well known that even in numerous spurious accounts of martyrs there are few bishops who figure as martyrs! (The patriarch of Alexandria, Dionysus, was in such a hurry when a local pogrom broke out that he fled on the back of a cavalry devoid of a chair—he rightly bears the nickname ‘the Great’.)

But practically all of the ‘saints’ of the first centuries were later declared martyrs, ‘even if they had died peacefully. Anyone worthy of the veneration of Constantine had to be a martyr ‘(Kötting). Therefore, ‘very few’ of the Acta Martyrum are ‘true or based on real documentary material’ (Syme).

And especially after the 4th century Catholic Christians had records and accounts of martyrs that seemed forged by the ‘heretics’, so they ‘purified’ them by counterfeiting. Although they admitted the miracles of the apostles that the accounts related, they did not want to consider valid the ‘false doctrines’ that accompanied them.

In this way, orthodox counterfeiters such as the so-called Pseudo-Melitus, the Pseudo-Jerome, the Pseudo-Obadiah and others, provided counter-falsifications. Christian ‘martyrs’ acts did not recoil at any exaggeration, no lack of truth, no kitsch. Since the Church made no use of the martyrdom of the woman of the apostle and first pope, St. Peter, a tale transmitted by a Father of the Church, St. Thecla is considered the first martyr, although it is said that she escaped martyrdom by a miracle.

Giovanni Battista: St. Thecla Liberating a City from the Plague, 1759.

But Catholic martyrology is strictly documented with the martyrdom of Polycarp, even knowing the hour of his death, something almost unique in proto-Christian literature. However, the date is unknown. It is unknown either if it was under Marcus Aurelius or Antoninus Pius. In this ocular testimony of the death of a Christian martyr—the oldest text: a throughout falsified text with revisions and interpolations with pre-Eusebian and a post-Eusebian false annexes—, the holy bishop knows in advance the type of his death.

Upon entering the stadium he is encouraged by a voice from the sky: ‘Stand firm, Polycarp!’ Miraculously he is not burned at the stake, to which ‘especially the Jews’ throw firewood. All the flames burn in vain. The executioner must then finish him off, his blood extinguishes the fire and from the saint’s wound a pigeon ascends to the sky… These acts ‘arose little by little and in a fragmentary way’ (Kraft).

However, even in the 20th century, in the Catholic Lexikonfür Theologie und Kirche (Encyclopaedia of Theology and the Church) this story shines as ‘the most valuable testimony for the Catholic worship of saints and relics’. Even today, the brave martyr continues to be venerated, who, as befits a bishop, had previously fled several times and changed his hiding place: the Byzantine and Syrian Churches celebrate it on February 23, the Melkites on the 25th and the Catholics on January 26, and Polycarp continues to act as ‘patron saint against the pain of ears’.

Let us take a look at the Acts of the Persian Martyrs.

The Christians are heading en masse towards their execution ‘singing the psalms of David’. They smile as the executioner lifts the sword. All the teeth are ripped out and all the bones are grounded. New whips are bought on purpose. They are hit until only pulp is left of their bodies. Their joints are broken, they are skinned from head to toe, they are cut slowly from the middle of the neck to the skull, their noses and ears are cut, burning needles are stuck into their eyes, they are stoned, they are cut with a saw, they are left to starve until the skin falls from their bones. Once sixteen elephants step on the heroes…

But whatever it is, the martyrs tolerate almost everything for a surprisingly long time and with good cheer, so to speak, with joy. Being only blood and shredded flesh, they launch the most edifying discourses. They shout with joy: ‘My heart rejoices in the Lord and my soul rejoices in its bliss’. Or they recognise: ‘This suffering is only relief’.

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Ancient Rome Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 95

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

 
Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (2 of 7)

The tolerance of the Romans in religious matters was generally great. They had it before the Jews, guaranteeing their freedom of worship, and even after the wars fought against the Jews, they were not forced to worship the gods of the state and released from the obligatory offerings to the emperors.

Until the beginning of the 3rd century, the hatred against Christians—who considered themselves exclusive; who, with all humility (!) thought of themselves as special, like the ‘God of Israel’, ‘chosen people’, ‘holy people’ who felt themselves as the ‘golden part’—came mostly from the common peoples. For a long time the emperors imagined themselves too strong before this dark sect to intervene seriously. ‘They avoided whenever possible’ the trials against Christians (Eduard Schwartz).

For two hundred years they were not subjected to any ‘persecution’. Emperor Commodus had a Christian favourite. In Nicomedia, the main Christian church was in front of Diocletian’s residence. Also his preceptor of rhetoric, the Father of the Church Lactantius, remained safe in the vicinity of the sovereign during the toughest persecutions against the Christians. Lactantius never appeared before the courts or went to jail.

Almost everyone knew Christians, but they did not like to get their hands dirty by persecuting them. When it was necessary because the adepts of the Greco-Roman culture were furious, the officials did everything possible to release the imprisoned. The Christians only had to renounce their faith—and they did it massively, it was the general rule—and nobody bothered them again.

During the most intense persecution, that of Diocletian, the state only demanded the fulfilment of the offering of sacrifices that the law imposed on all citizens. Non-compliance was punished, but in no case the practice of the Christian religion. Even during the persecution of Diocletian, the churches were able to dispose of their property.

Even with Emperor Decius, in the year 250, we cannot speak of a general and planned persecution of Christians. At that time the first Roman bishop is killed in a persecution. Fabian died in prison; there was no death sentence on him. But up to that date, the ancient Church already considered as ‘martyrs’ eleven of the seventeen Roman bishops, although none of them had been martyrs! For two hundred years Christianity had lived side by side with the emperors. And in spite of that, on the Catholic side they still lie—with ecclesiastical imprimatur (and dedication: ‘To the beloved mother of God’)—in the mid-20th century: ‘Most of the popes of that time died as martyrs’ (Rüger).

(Cornelius by Master of Meßkirch.) The ‘pope’ Cornelius, who died peacefully in 253 in Civitavecchia, appears as beheaded in the acts of the martyrs. Also falsified are those that make the Roman bishop Stephen I (254-257) victim of the persecutions of Valerian. Pope St. Eutychian (275-283) even buried ‘with his own hands’ 342 martyrs, before following them himself.

The Church tried to cover up the apostasy of several popes at the beginning of the 4th century by falsifying the documents. The Liber Pontificalis, the official list of the papacy, points out that the Roman bishop Marcellinus (296-304), who had made sacrifices to the gods and had delivered the ‘sacred’ books, soon repented and died martyred: a complete forgery.

In the Roman martyrology, one pope after another gain the crown of martyrdom—almost everything is pure deception. (Interestingly, until the end of the 3rd century the cult of the martyrs had not begun in Rome.)

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