web analytics

Category: Karlheinz Deschner

Categories
Judaism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Literature Old Testament

Christianity’s Criminal History, 74

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

 
Other forgeries in the Old Testament
Something analogous to the Pentateuch can be said about what the Holy Scriptures endorse regarding David and his son Solomon. Both had to live, reign and write around the year 1,000, but their alleged works are usually several more recent centuries.
The Jewish and Christian tradition of the Bible attributes to King David the entire Psalter and the book of Psalms, in total 150 psalms. In all likelihood, not a single one comes from him. However, according to the Bible, David has written them.
Under the slogan of ‘David as a singer’, the treatise Sachkunde zur Biblischen Geschichte (Expertise on Biblical History) describes in a relatively neat way the ‘harp player’ of that time. This implies real authorship in equal measure to M.A. Beek’s claim that tradition, which introduces David into history as a poet of psalms, has ‘surely a historical background’. But Beek said a few lines before that ‘outside of the Bible we do not know any text that sheds light on the reign of David or that merely cites his name’. This reminds us of Beek’s historical Moses! Of David, he says: ‘David played a stringed instrument that could be called more a lyre than a harp. The illustration of such a lyre appears in a container manufactured around 1000 BC’. If around the year 1000 there was a lyre that could be represented, why could not David have it, play it and also—among his raids, slaughters and actions related to the cutting of foreskins and roasting in ovens—have written the biblical book? The conclusion seems almost obligatory, especially since David really appears in the Old Testament as a poet and musician, specifically in the two books of his contemporary, the prophet and judge Samuel, an eyewitness and at the same time an auricular witness.
Anyway, as the research points out, the books ‘of Samuel’ appeared from a hundred to four hundred years after the death of Samuel, just as many of the ‘David’ psalms did not appear until the time of the second temple (after 516 BC): more than half a millennium after the death of David! The collected psalms had been constantly edited and elaborated. The selection of compilations may have lasted until the 2nd century BC. It is not excluded that incorporations were still made in the 1st century after Christ. Curiously, a radically different interpretation of the celestial chords of the royal court around the year 1000 BC is considered three thousand years later, and not without a solid base in the biblical text, by German poets such as Rilke and company who said that it is nothing but sexualisation. One of these poets unabashedly states that it was David’s ‘butt’, rather than his music, that ‘relieved’ King Saul.
Just as David, the ‘bloodthirsty dog’ became the ‘kind psalmist’, his son (begotten by Bathsheba, whose husband David had killed), the ‘wise king Solomon’ has become famous as the creator of religious songs. But it is totally unprovable if Solomon ever developed literary activity.
(Note of the editor: As in all art that Christian painters have produced throughout the centuries, in this engraving of Judgement of Solomon by Gustave Doré the characters have been completely Aryanised. If machines to see the past could be invented, white nationalists would be shocked to see the Semitic physiognomy of the main characters of the Bible, if they even existed.)
 
What is certain, on the contrary, is that by means of a coup d’état, allied with his mother, the priest Zadok, the prophet Nathan and the general Benaiah, Solomon seized the throne; that he executed part of his adversaries, banished others; that he demanded from his subjects very high taxes and forced provision of work, which led to a growing dissatisfaction and a general decline while, according to the Bible, it was to satisfy 700 principal wives and 300 concubines. This scenario does not allow us to deduce precisely a great literary production. But the Sacred Scriptures award him three books: Book of Proverbs, the Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. ‘I believe that for the most part, this is a premeditated deception and that it was also in its day’ (S.B. Frost).
The author of Solomon’s Ecclesiastes (in Hebrew Kohelet) expressly claims that the book is ‘the words of the preacher, the son of David, the king of Jerusalem’. It used to be generally considered that Solomon was its author and for that reason alone the work became part of the Bible. But the real author is not known, nor his name, nor when he lived. The truth is only that, as H. Grotius first put it clearly in 1644, Solomon did not write it, to whom the first verse intends to attribute.
By language, spirit, and reticence it seems more like a work that emerged in the 3rd century BC, from the Stoic and epicurean philosophy: the influences of the environment and the Hellenistic period. There is no other book of the Bible that is so non-conformist, so fatalistic; that invokes so insistently the vanity of the earth: ‘vanity of vanities and all is vanity’; wealth, wisdom, everything ‘under the Sun’, a book that never ceases to lament the brevity of life and disappointments, in which God himself stands hazy on his throne in the distance. It is therefore not strange that several times it has been modified, or that its canonicity was not definitively established until 96 AD.
An impressive Jewish fabrication, in any case, is the Song of Songs, which knows no resurrection and in whose last verses I always feel (uselessly) alluded: ‘And above all, my son, beware then, in the make books there is no end and much study exhaust the body’. Ergo: ‘Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, because with the dead towards whom you go there is neither thought nor knowledge’.
Let no one say that there is nothing worth reading in the Bible!
After the writing of the books of the kings, ‘Solomon’ also wrote three thousand sentences and one thousand five—according to other sources five thousand—songs: of the trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows from the wall. He also wrote of the animals of the earth, of the birds, of the worms and of the fish. The book of Proverbs was attributed to Solomon for a long time. Chapters 1 to 9 are now included in the Bible. But in reality, the structure of the book betrays various authors who wrote it in different times: chapters 1 to 9, for example, were written after the 5th century. In total, the appearance of sentences extends throughout the entire Old Testament era, and the final compilation may have been produced around 200 BC.
Also, the Wisdom of Solomon, admired by the early Christians, was considered his work, especially because the author is expressly named Solomon and chosen as king of the people of God. It was considered a prophetic and inspired book. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian and St. Hippolytus attest to its canonicity, as does St. Cyprian who cites him repeatedly as Holy Scripture. Most old exegetes believe it. And although a man like Jerome was more critical he continued to admit it as official reading. At any event, the book continues in the Bible of the Papal Church.
But in reality the Wisdom of Solomon is almost a millennium more recent than Solomon, the original language of the forgery was classical Greek; the author—many critics admit two—lived in Egypt, probably in the Hellenistic city of the wise, Alexandria, and wrote his work, which puts on the lips of the (presumably) wisest of the Israelites, in the 1st century before or after Christ.
The influence of this forgery has been enormous.

______ 卐 ______

Liked it? Take a second to support this site.

Categories
Bible Judaism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Literature Moses (fictional Hebrew lawgiver) Old Testament

Christianity’s Criminal History, 73

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

 
The five books of Moses, which Moses did not write
The Old Testament is a very random and very fragmentary selection of what was left of ancient transmission. The Bible itself quotes the titles of nineteen works that have been lost, among them The Book of the Wars of the Lord, The Story of the Prophet Iddo, The Book of the Good. However, the researchers believe that there were many other biblical texts that have not left us even the title. Have they also been holy, inspired and divine?
In any case the remains are enough, more than enough; especially of the so-called five books of Moses, presumably the oldest and most venerable, that is, the Torah, the Pentateuch (Greek pentáteuchos, the book ‘containing five’ because it consists of five rolls): a qualifier applied around 200 AD by Gnostic writers and Christians. Until the 16th century, it was unanimously believed that these texts were the oldest of the Old Testament and that they would therefore be counted among the first in a chronologically ordered Bible. That is something that today cannot even be considered. The Genesis, the first book, is without good reason at the head of this collection. And although still in the 19th century renowned biblical scholars believed they could reconstruct an ‘archetype’ of the Bible, an authentic original text, that opinion has been abandoned. Or even worse, ‘it is very likely that such an original text never existed’ (Comfeld / Botterweck).
The Old Testament was transmitted mostly anonymously, but the Pentateuch is attributed to Moses and the Christian churches have proclaimed his authorship until the 20th century. However, while the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the first Israelite fathers, must have lived between the 21st and the 15th centuries BC, or between 2000 and 1700 if they actually lived, Moses—‘a marshal, but at the bottom of his being with a rich emotional life’ (Cardinal Faulhaber)—must have lived in the 14th or 12th century BC, if he also lived.
In any case, nowhere outside the Bible the existence of these venerable figures, and others more recent, is ‘documented’. There is no proof of their existence. Nowhere have they left historical traces; neither in stone, bronze, rolls of papyrus, nor in tablets or cylinders of clay, even though they are more recent than, for example, many of the Egyptian sovereigns historically documented in the form of famous tombs, hieroglyphs or cuneiform texts: authentic certificates of life. Therefore, writes Ernest Garden, ‘either one is tempted to deny the existence of the great figures of the Bible or, in case of wishing to admit their historicity even with the lack of demonstrative material, it is supposed that their life and time they passed in the way described by the Bible… had circulated for many generations’.
For Judaism, Moses is the most important figure in the Old Testament. It is mentioned 750 times as a legislator; the New Testament does it 80 times. It is claimed that all the Laws were being handled as if Moses had received them at Sinai. In this way he acquired for Israel a ‘transcendental importance’ (Brockington). Each time he was increasingly glorified. He was considered the inspired author of the Pentateuch. It was attributed to him, the murderer (of an Egyptian because he had beaten a Hebrew), even a pre-existence. He became the forerunner of the Messiah, and the Messiah was considered a second Moses. Many legends about him emerged in the 1st century BC; a novel about Moses, and also a multitude of artistic representations. But the tomb of Moses is not known. In fact, the prophets of the Old Testament quote him five times.
Ezekiel never mentions him! And yet, these prophets evoke the time of Moses, but not him. In their ethical-religious proclamations they never rely on Moses. Neither the papyrus Salt 124 ‘has a testimony of any Moses’ (Cornelius). Nor does archaeology give any sign of Moses. The Syrian-Palestinian inscriptions barely quote him in as little measure as cuneiform texts or hieroglyphic and hieratic texts. Herodotus (5th century BC) knows nothing of Moses. In short, there is no non-Israelite proof of Moses, our only source of his existence is—as in the case of Jesus—the Bible.
There were already some who in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages doubted the unity and authorship of Moses in the Pentateuch. It was hardly believed that Moses himself could have reported on his own death, ‘an extraordinary question’ Shelley mocks, ‘almost as how to describe the creation of the world’ in Genesis. However, a deep criticism only came from the pen of Christian ‘heretics’, as the primitive Church saw no contradiction in the Old or New Testaments.
In the modern age Andreas Karlstadt was one of the first scholars in which some doubts were aroused when reading the Bible (1520). More doubts were raised by the Dutchman Andreas Masius, a Catholic jurist (1574). But if this pair, and shortly afterwards the Jesuits B. Pereira and J. Bonfrère, only declared some citations as post-Mosaic and continued to consider Moses the author of the whole text, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes declared that some paragraphs of the Pentateuch were Mosaics but post-Mosaic most of the text (Leviathan, 1651). In 1655 the reformed French writer I. de Peyrère went even further; and in 1670, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus Spinoza denied Mosaic authorship for the whole thing.
In the 20th century some scholars of religion, among them Eduard Meyer (‘it is not the mission of historical research to invent novels’), and Danek of the school of the Prague, have questioned the historical existence of Moses himself; but their adversaries have rejected such hypothesis.
It is curious that even the most illustrious minds, the greatest sceptics and scientists under whose daring intervention the sources of material are shelled so that there is little space left for the figure of Moses, present us again, as if by sleight of hand, Moses in all his greatness as the dominant figure of all Israelite history. Although everything around this character is too colourful or too obscure, the hero himself cannot be fictional they say. As much as the criticism of sources has reduced the historical value of these books, almost annulled it, ‘there remains a broad field of the possible’ (Jaspers). It is not surprising, then, that among some conservatives Moses is of greater importance than the Bible!
In short: after Auschwitz, Christian theology returns to win over the Jews. ‘Today again a more positive idea of ancient Israel and its religion is possible’. However, Moses is still ‘a problem’ for the researchers, ‘there is no light to illuminate his figure’ and the corresponding traditions remain ‘outside the capacity of historical control’ according to the Bibl. Hist. Handwörterbuch (Hist. Bibl. handwritten book). Although these scholars strongly refuse to ‘reduce Moses to a nebulous figure, known only to legends’, they admit at the same time that ‘Moses himself is faded’. They claim that ‘the uniqueness of the Sinai event cannot be denied’ but they add immediately ‘although the historical demonstration is difficult’. They find in the ‘stories about Moses a considerable historical background’ and some paragraphs later claim that this ‘can not be proved by facts’, that ‘it cannot be witnessed by historical facts’ (Cornfeld / Botterweck).
This is the method followed by those who do not deny the evidence itself, but neither do they want everything to collapse with a crash (No way!). For M.A. Beek, for example, there is no doubt that the patriarchs are ‘historical figures’. Although he only sees them ‘on a semi-dark background’ he considers them ‘human beings of great importance’. He himself admits: ‘To date we have not been able to find documentary evidence of the figure of Joshua in Egyptian literature’. He adds that, apart from the Bible, he does not know ‘a single document containing a clear and historically reliable reference to Moses’. And he continues that, if we do without the Bible, ‘no source is known about the expulsion from Egypt’. ‘The abundant literature of the Egyptian historiographers silences, with a worrying obstinacy, events that should have deeply impressed the Egyptians, if the account of the Exodus is based on facts’. Beek is also surprised that the Old Testament rejects

curiously enough, any data that would make possible a chronological fixation of the departure from Egypt. We do not see the name of the Pharaoh that Joshua knew, nor the one who oppressed Israel. This is all the more amazing because the Bible retains many other Egyptian names of people, places and offices.
Even more suspicious than the lack of chronological reference points in the Old Testament is the fact that none of the known Egyptian texts cites a catastrophe that affected a Pharaoh and his army while chasing the fleeing Semites. Since historical documents have an abundance of material on the epoch in question, at least some allusion would be expected. The silence of the Egyptian documents cannot be dismissed with the observation that court historiographers do not usually talk about defeats, since the events described in the Bible are too decisive for Egyptian historians to have overlooked them.

‘It is really curious’, this scholar continues, ‘that no tomb of Moses is known’. Thus, ‘the only proof of the historical truth of Moses’ is for him ‘the mention of a great-grandson in a later epoch’.
‘And Moses was 120 years old when he died’ says the Bible, although his eyes ‘had not weakened and his strength had not diminished’ and God himself buried him and ‘no one knows to this day where his tomb is’. A pretty weird end. According to Goethe, Moses committed suicide and according to Freud his own people killed him. The disputes were not rare, as with Aaron and Miriam. But as always, the closing of the fifth and last book of the Pentateuch significantly recalls ‘the acts of horror that Moses committed before the eyes of all Israel’. Every character always enters the history thanks to his terrifying feats, and this is so regardless if he lived or not really. But whatever the case may be with Moses, the investigation is divided.
The only thing that is clear today, as Spinoza saw it, is that the five books of Moses, which directly attribute to him the infallible word of God, do not come from him. This is the coincidental conclusion of the researchers.
Naturally, there are still enough people like Alois Stiefvater and enough little treatises such as Schlag-Wörter-Buch für katholische Christen types (Schlag Words Book for Catholic Christians) who continue to deceive the mass of believers by making them believe in the five books of Moses, that ‘although not all have been directly written by him, they are due to him’. How many, and which ones Moses wrote directly, Stiefvater and his accomplices do not dare to say. What remains true is that the Laws that were considered as written by the hand of Moses or even attributed to the ‘finger of God’ are also fabrications. (On the other hand, although God himself writes the Law on two tablets of stone, Moses had so little respect for them that in his anger against the golden calf he destroyed them.)
It is also clear that the writing of these five books was preceded by an oral transmission of many centuries, with constant changes. And then there were the editors, the authors, the biblical compilers who participated throughout many generations in the writing of the books by ‘Moses’, which is reflected in the different styles. It looks like a collection of different materials, such as the entire fourth book.
Thus arose a very diffuse collection lacking any systematic organisation, overflowing with motifs of widely spread legends, etiological and folkloristic myths, contradictions and duplications (which by themselves alone exclude the writing by a single author). Added to all this is a multitude of heterogeneous opinions that have been developed in a gradual way, even in the most important issues. Thus the idea of the resurrection arises very little by little in the Old Testament, and in the books Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes and Proverbs any testimony of beliefs in the resurrection is missing. In addition, the scribes and compilers have constantly modified, corrected and falsified the texts, which acquired new secondary extensions every time. And these processes went on for entire epochs.
The Decalogue or Ten Commandments, which Luther considered the supreme incarnation of the Old Testament, proceeds in its earliest form perhaps from the beginning of the age of kings. Many parts of the Pentateuch that must have been written by the man who lived, if he lived, in the 14th or 13th centuries BC—no less than sixty chapters of the second, third and fourth books—were not produced or collected by Jewish priests until the 5th century BC. Thus, the final redaction of the books awarded to Moses—I quote the Jesuit Norbert Lohfink—’took place some seven hundred years later’. And the composition of all the books of the Old Testament—I quote the Catholic Otto Stegmüller—was prolonged ‘for a period of approximately 1,200 years’.

Complete set of scrolls constituting the Hebrew Bible.
Research on the Old Testament has reached enormous dimensions and we cannot contemplate it here—saving the reader from the labyrinthic methodology: the ancient documentary hypotheses of the 18th century, the assumptions of fragments, complements, crystallisation and the important differentiation of a first Elohist, a second Elohist, a Jahwist or Yahwist (H. Hupfeld, 1835), the formal historical method (H. Gunkel, 1901), the various theories about the sources, the theory of two, three, four sources, the written sources of the ‘Jahwist’ (J), of the ‘Elohist’ (E), of the ‘writing of the priests’ (P), of ‘Deuteronomy’ (D), of the combined writing… We cannot get lost in all the threads of the story, the traditions, the plethora of additions, complements, inclusions, annexes, proliferations, textual modifications, the problem of the variants, the parallel versions, the duplications—in short, the enormous ‘secondary’ enlargement, and the history and the scrutiny of the texts. We cannot discuss either the reasons for the extension of the Pentateuch into a Hexateuch, Heptateuch or even Octateuch, or its limitation to a Tetrateuch however interesting these hypotheses may be within the context of our subject.
A simple overview of the critical comments, such as Martin Noth’s explanations of the Mosaic books, will show the reader its editors, redactors, compilers; of additions, extensions, later contributions, combinations of different states of incorporation, modifications, etc.: an old piece, an older one, a fairly recent one that is often called secondary, perhaps secondary, probably secondary, surely secondary. The word ‘secondary’ appears here in all conceivable associations. It seems to be a keyword, and even I would like to affirm without having made an exact analysis of its frequency: there is no other word that appears with greater assiduity in all these investigations of Noth and his work.
Recently Hans-Joachim Kraus has written Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments (The story of the historical-critical exploration of the Old Testament). Innovative and advanced for the 19th century was W.M.L. de Wette (died 1849) who perceived the many stories and traditions of these books and considered ‘David’, ‘Moses’ and ‘Solomon’ not as authors but as nominal symbols, such as collective names.
Due to the immense work of scholars in the course of the 19th century and the eventual debunking of biblical sacred history, Pope Leo XIII attempted to obstruct the freedom of research through his 1893 Encyclical Providentissimus Deus (The most provident God). A counteroffensive was opened also under his successor, Pius X, in a decree. From De Mosaica authentia Pentateuchi (Authentic Mosaic Pentateuch), June 27, 1906, Moses was considered an inspired author. Although on January 16, 1948 the secretary of the papal biblical commission declared in an official reply to Cardinal Suhard that the decisions of the commission ‘do not contradict with a later scientific analysis of these questions’, in Roman Catholicism ‘true’ always means: in the sense of Roman Catholicism. The final exhortation should be understood along the same lines: ‘That is why we invite Catholic scholars to study these problems from an impartial point of view, in the light of sound criticism’. But ‘from an impartial point of view’ means: from a partial point of view for the interests of the papacy. And with ‘sound criticism’ it is not meant to say anything other than a critique in favour of Rome.
The historical-scientific analysis of the writings of the Old Testament certainly did not provide a sure verdict about when the texts arose, although in some parts, as for example in the prophetic literature, the certainly about their antiquity is greater than, say, the religious lyrics. When it comes to the age of the Laws, there is less certainty. But historical-religious research with respect to the Tetrateuch (Moses 1-4) and the Deuteronomic historical work (Moses 5, Joshua, Judges, books of Samuel and the Kings) speaks of ‘epic works’, ‘mythological tales’, ‘legends’ and ‘myths’ (Nielsen).
The confusion that reigns in scholarship is manifest in the abundance of the repetitions: a double account of Creation, a double genealogy of Adam, a universal double flood (in one version the flood subsides after 150 days; according to other it lasts one year and ten days; and according to another, after raining forty days there are added another three weeks), in which Noah—then 600-years-old according to Genesis 7:6—took in the Ark seven pairs of pure animals and one of impure ones and, according to Genesis 6, 19 and 7, 16, there were a pair of pure and impure animals. But we would be very busy telling all the contradictions, inaccuracies, deviations with respect to a book inspired by God, in which there are a total of 250,000 textual variants.
In addition, the five books of Moses know a double Decalogue; a repeating legislation on slaves, the Passah, a loan, a double on the Sabbath, twice the entry of Noah into the Ark, twice the expulsion of Hagar by Abraham, twice the miracle of the manna and the quails, the election of Moses; three times the sins against the body and life, five times the catalogue of festivals, and are at least five legislations about the tenths, etc.

______ 卐 ______

Liked it? Take a second to support this site.

Categories
Bible Judaism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Literature Martin Luther

Christianity’s Criminal History, 72

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

 

Fabrications in the Old Testament

The boldest, daring and of greatest consequence of this type was to attribute to the spirit and dictation of God all the writings of the Old and New Testaments.

—Arnold Meyer

 
The bibles of the world and some peculiarities of the Christian Bible
The ‘book of books’ of Christians is the Bible. The German translation Bibel appears for the first time in the moral poem ‘The runner’ of Bamberg’s school teacher and verse builder, Hugo von Trimberg (born around 1230, he was also the author of a collection of homiletic fables and about two hundred hagiographic almanacs). The term coined by Hugo derives from the Latin biblia, which in turn has its origin in the neutral plural ta biblia (the books).
The Bible is a ‘sacred’ scripture and texts. Books and sacred writings form, in the history of religions, part of the trade, of the business on which it depends closely and not only the monetary but also the political and, ultimately, anyone sheltered by the human heart.
The bibles of mankind are therefore numerous: the three Vedas of ancient India, for example, the five Ching canonical books of the Chinese imperial religion, the Siddhanta of Jainism, the Typitakam of Theravada Buddhism, the Dharma of Mahayana Buddhism in India, the Tripitakam of Tibetan Buddhism, the Tao-tea-ching of Taoist monks, the Avesta of Persian Mazdaism, the Qur’an in Islam, the Granth of the Sikhs, the Gima of Mandeism. There were many sacred writings in the Hellenistic mysteries, which were already referred to in the pre-Christian era simply with the word ‘writing’, or with the formula ‘is written’ or ‘as written’. In Egypt the sacred writings go back to the most ancient times and a sacred text has already been cited in the 3rd millennium BC, Words of God (mdw ntr).
Of course, we know that the Bible is not just a book among other books but the book of books. It is not, therefore, a book that can be equated with Plato’s, the Qur’an or the old books of Indian wisdom. No, the Bible ‘is above them; it is unique and unrepeatable’ (Alois Stiefvater). In its exclusivity, the monotheistic religions insist with emphasis—and that is precisely why they are, so to speak, exclusively intolerant! ‘Just as the world cannot exist without wind, neither it can without Israel’ says the Talmud. In the Qur’an it is said: ‘You have chosen us from among all the peoples; you have raised us above all the nations’. And Luther also boasts: ‘We Christians are bigger and more than all creatures’.
In short, the Bible is something special. But Christianity did not have its own ‘Sacred Scripture’ in its first 150 years, and for that reason it assimilated the sacred book of the Jews, the Old Testament, which according to the Catholic faith precedes ‘the Sun of Christ’ as the ‘morning star’ (Nielen).
The name Old Testament (Greek diathéke, covenant) comes from Paul, who in 2 Cor. 3:14 talks about the Old Covenant. The synagogue, which naturally recognizes no New Testament, does not speak of the Old but of Tanakh, an artificial word formed by the initials of Torah, nevi’im and ketuvim: law, prophets, and remaining writings.
The Old Testament, as they were transmitted by the Hebrews are, to date, the Holy Scriptures of the Jews. The Palestinian Jews did not establish the final received texts until the Council of Jamnia, between the 90s and 100 AD: twenty-four texts, the same number as the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. (The Jewish bibles of the 15th century were the first that proceeded to a different division and gave rise to thirty-nine canonical books.) In any case, God, to whom these Sacred Scriptures refer and from which they come, needed more than a millennium to compile and finalise the Bible.
The unique thing about the Christian Bible is that each of the different confessions also has different bibles, which do not coincide as a whole; and what some consider sacred, to others seem suspicious.
The Catholic Church distinguishes between Protocanonical writings, that is, never discussed, and Deuterocanonical writings whose ‘inspiration’ was for some time ‘put into doubt’ or was considered uncertain. This Church has a much wider Old Testament than that of the Jews, from which it proceeds. Besides the Hebrew canon, it collected within its Holy Scriptures other titles. In total, according to the Council of Trent in its session of April 8, 1546, confirmed by Vatican I in 1879: forty-eight books, that is, in addition to the so-called Deuterocanonics, Tobias, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch and letters of Jeremiah, Maccabees I and II, Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Holy Children (Vulgate, Daniel 3:24–90), Story of Susanna, Bel and the Dragon (Vulgate Daniel 14; Septuagint epilogue), Esther 10, 4-16, 24.
On the contrary, Protestantism, which gives authority exclusively to the books that appear in the Hebrew canon, does not consider as canonical or manifested by God, the Deuterocanonics added by Catholicism. It grants them little value and calls them ‘apocryphal’, that is, that what Catholics call books never had canonical validity.
Luther, in defining what belonged to the canon, relies on the ‘inner spiritual testimony’ or the ‘internal sense’. He eliminates, for example, the second book of the Maccabees because Luther was disturbed by the passage on the purgatory, whose existence he denied. On that same book and also on that of Esther, Luther opined that ‘they have too many Jewish and pagan remnants’. Nevertheless, he considered the Deuterocanonical writings to be ‘useful and good to read’ although were not inspired by God, in any case by the ‘internal sense’ of the reformer.

An early German translation by Martin Luther.
His translation into the vernacular was highly influential.

In the Synod of Jerusalem, the Greek Church included, in 1672, among the divine word four other works that did not appear in the Council of Jamnia: Wisdom, Ecclesiastical, Tobias, and Judith.
Much broader than the Old Testament was the canon of Hellenistic Judaism, the Septuagint (abbreviated: LXX, the translation of the seventy men). It was elaborated for the Jews of the Diaspora in Alexandria by various translators in the 3rd century BC: the book for the Greek-speaking Jews, the oldest and most important transcription of the Old Testament into Greek, the language of the Hellenistic period, and the official Bible of Diaspora Judaism. It became part of the synagogue.
The Septuagint, however, collected more writings than the Hebrew canon and more also from those later considered valid by Catholics. The quotations of the Old Testament that appear in the New (with the allusions 270 to 350) come mostly from the Septuagint and it constituted for the Fathers of the Church, who used it with insistence, the Old Testament or Holy Writ.

______ 卐 ______

Liked it? Take a second to support this site.

Categories
Bible Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Literature

Christianity’s Criminal History, 71

Editor’s note:
Recently I have said that I was reviewing the syntax of the first seventy posts that, on this site, I have excerpted from the first volume of Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums by Karlheinz Deschner. It’s true, but now that I’ve been rereading volumes 2 and 3 of Deschner’s ten volume-series I’ve decided to make editorial changes to the first book of my translated extracts, which I plan to make it available through Lulu.
It seems to me that what Deschner says in some chapters of volumes 2 and 3, a critical approach to the historicity of the biblical narrative, should come at the beginning of the first book of my printed translations; for example, pseudepigraphy regarding the New Testament authors. The same can be said of Deschner’s chapters on the falsifications of non-biblical Christian texts in the first centuries of our era, including fabrications of the stories of the martyrs. Therefore, although these days I will continue reviewing the syntax of the previous seventy entries that have appeared on this site, which will appear, already corrected, in the aforementioned Lulu book, I’ll postpone its publication until I finish translating the mentioned passages from volumes 2 and 3.
Once the translation of these passages is finished, I will include them all under a single cover. Incidentally, from this entry, instead of the German title Kriminalgeschichte in each post, I’ll use the English translation: as can be seen above in this # 71 instalment of the series. The following passage is taken from volume 3 of Christianity’s Criminal History:

Christian Fabrications in Antiquity

Many people, perhaps most, are afraid to admit the grossest lie in the field to them ‘more sacred’. It seems inconceivable to them that those who give ocular and auricular testimony of the Lord can be no more than vulgar falsifiers. But it has never been lied and cheated as often and as unscrupulously as in the field of religion. And it is entirely in Christianity where taking us for a ride is the order of the day, where an almost infinite jungle of deceit is created since Antiquity and in the Middle Ages in particular.
But counterfeiting continues in the 20th century, massively and officially. Thus, J.A. Farrer asks himself almost desperate: ‘If we reflect on everything that has emerged from this systematic deception, all the struggles between popes and sovereigns, the dismissal of kings and emperors, excommunications, inquisitions, indulgences, acquittals, persecutions and cremations, etc., and it is considered that all this sad history was the immediate result of a series of falsifications, of which the Donatio Constantini (Donation of Constantine) and the False Decretals were not the first, although the most important, one feels obliged to ask if it has been more the lie than the truth that has permanently influenced the history of humanity’.
Of course, the most successful lie, the one that causes the most havoc among most souls, is certainly not a Christian invention. But it bears a close relationship with the religious pseudepigraphy. (A pseudepigrapha, anglicized pseudepigraph, is a text under a false name: a text that does not come from who, according to the title, content or transmission, has written it.) Both methods, fabrication and pseudepigraphy, were not Christian innovations. Literary falsification had already existed for a long time among the Greeks and the Romans; it has appeared in India, among the Egyptian priests, with the Persian kings and, also, in Judaism.

Categories
Karlheinz Deschner Racial right

Anglin’s playground

‘History is the mighty Tower of Experience, which Time has built amidst the endless fields of bygone ages. It is no easy task to reach the top of this ancient structure and get the benefit of the full view. There is no elevator, but young feet are strong and it can be done’, wrote Hendrik Willem van Loon in The Story of Mankind.
In theory, if there is anything that should matter those who want an Aryan nation, it is the facts. History should be considered the most important of the humanities, yes: the tower of experience. But I do not see much interest in the white nationalism forums for ancient historical facts in Europe, especially those facts that explain why the white race is going extinct. (What we see in most of the forums are opinions and news comments; these days for example, Trump meeting with Putin.)
When are they going to be interested in their roots, the old history of their race? What is it that prevents them from reading William Pierce’s only non-fiction book (and let’s not talk about heavy treatises like Deschner’s)? Could it be that both Pierce and Deschner were anti-Christians? Could it be that they are clinging to their parents’ religion like a baby with a pacifier? Are not yet prepared to digest strong meat? Will I continue to be talking to myself with these Deschner translations because they’re still in Anglin’s playground, like kids living in the present?

Categories
Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (book) Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Editor’s preface

Presently I am reviewing the syntax of the first seventy entries I have posted in this site of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums. Once I finish the review I’ll provide a PDF. The reviewed translation will also be available in book form under the title Christianity’s Criminal History.
 
The present book is an abridged translation of the first volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s ten-volume Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums. The original volume with hundreds of endnotes (every quotation is accompanied by the proper reference), and whose first chapter on the Old Testament is longer than our brief excerpts, was published in German in 1986. My hope is that this preliminary translation is only the first step for a more academic translation of Deschner’s magnum opus. Furthermore, in this translation I took the liberty to add several illustrations and even replace many instances of the author’s use of the word ‘pagan’, which is derogatory Christian Newspeak, with terms like ‘Hellenist’ or ‘advocate of Greco-Roman culture’.
But why reproduce excerpted passages from Deschner’s opus in the first place?
White nationalists are aware of the Jewish problem. But very few are aware that Jewish subversion is not the product of spontaneous generation but of a religion of Semitic origin: Christianity. Who among the white nationalists knows the real history of Christianity? Who is aware that Christian fanatics destroyed, literally, the Greco-Roman world? As Catherine Nixey put it in The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World:

In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and burned to the ground. A temple widely considered to be the most magnificent in the entire empire was levelled.
Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked, faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off and gods were decapitated. Some of the finest statues on the whole building were almost certainly smashed off then ground into rubble that was then used to build churches.
Books—which were often stored in temples—suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed in this way by Christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.

Most white nationalists ignore the ISIS-like history of early Christianity right after Constantine handed over the Roman Empire to his bishops. They know only the martyr myths, the pious legends and the lies they told us as children educated in the Christian faith.
Karlheinz Deschner (1924-2014) was a liberal German. He spent the first sixty years of his life investigating the history of the Catholic Church before starting the ten volumes of his Kriminalgeschichte series, which only ended at ninety. It is a more complete treatise, or encyclopaedia I would dare to say, about the real history of Christianity than Nixey’s The Darkening Age.
I started reading Deschner in 2002 when I was also a liberal. I would not wake on the Jewish question until 2010. But Deschner, like all Germans of our times who aspire to see their books in the bookstores, never woke up. He even criticised the most notorious ‘anti-Semites’ in early Church history. This said, the difference between Deschner and liberal theologians like Hans Küng (The Church) and conservative historians like Paul Johnson (A History of Christianity) is that Küng and Johnson concealed a great deal of Christianity’s criminal history. It is remarkable how a scholar who abandoned Christianity, like Deschner, was capable to criticise it in a way that Küng, Johnson, and the most prominent Christian intellectuals would never dream of.
After awakening to the realities of the Jewish problem I realised that Deschner’s information, despite his mistaken point of view, can be rescued. It only has to be processed through the filter of someone who has awakened on the Jewish question. Had Germany won the war, Deschner, who appears in a previous page in Nazi uniform, could have written his history from the National Socialist point of view.

C.T.
July of 2018

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evropa Soberana (webzine) Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Library of Alexandria

Nixey & Heisman

Today, as I finished reproducing my extracts from the first volume of Kriminalgeschichte, I would like to clarify something.
There was a time when I wanted to add to my excerpts the hundreds of footnotes that appear in Karlheinz Deschner’s book but I changed my mind: mere excerpts do not require the notes, especially in a blog. However, I must point out that there are bibliographical references in a book that the English speaker can read in his native language.
I am referring to Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World: an elegant book published last year in Britain and available this year, in addition, by an American publisher.
Deschner was an obsessive scholar who worked to the nitty-gritty, nose-to-the-grindstone level throughout his life. Although The Darkening Age is not as monumental as Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, I will reproduce Nixey’s preface and the third part of her Introduction. It is vital that English speakers know that we are not inventing a black history of Christianity. Some of the main references that support what we have been saying with the translations of Deschner and Evropa Soberana, also appear in Nixey’s book.
What is more, if you search you will find that even The Reader’s Digest which publishes copiously illustrated books for the simple, and very Christian, American families acknowledges the facts. For example, the image below shows a crowd of Christians who, encouraged by Pope Theophilus of Alexandria, destroyed the temple of Serapis in 391.

I scanned that image from pages 242-243 of the translation from English into Spanish of After Jesus (The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., 1992). What we see in the illustration represents the first dark hour of the West: the era that saw the destruction of ancient knowledge in the Library of Alexandria. Now we are living the second dark hour, when the enemy attacks directly your DNA so that the West cannot recover again, not even after a dark age as it did in the Renaissance.
That’s why I call ‘darkest hour’ to our times.
About the first dark hour, of the authors I have quoted and will continue to quote, Soberana, Deschner and Nixey are gentiles. But yesterday almost midnight a commenter called my attention to Suicide Note, a book of almost two thousand pages of Mitchell Heisman (1975-2010). I began to leaf through the Suicide Note chapter on how the Christians installed Semitic malware in the psyche of the Romans to move them to commit ethnic suicide.
I was fascinated and continued reading until almost two in the morning today. However, when I wanted to inquire about the author via Google, I discovered that Heisman was a Jew who committed suicide upon finishing the book!
Of the German Deschner, the English Nixey and the Spaniard Soberana, only the latter awoke about the Jewish question. It is really curious that, although neither Deschner nor Nixey took the red pill, an American Jew did take it.
The PDF of Suicide Note is available online for anyone who wants to read the whole thing. Tomorrow I’ll start reproducing those passages that elucidate what we have been saying about the Christian problem. Of course: I have to place the star of David after the author’s name. It is very rare for a Jew to say anything about the psyop that his tribe applied to the Aryan since the origins of Christianity. One of them is Heisman✡.
Trouble is that most white nationalists still don’t want to see what even a kike saw just before blowing his brains…

Categories
Ancient Rome Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Library of Alexandria

Nixey & Heisman

Today, as I finished reproducing my extracts from the first volume of Kriminalgeschichte, I would like to clarify something.

There was a time when I wanted to add to my excerpts the hundreds of footnotes that appear in Karlheinz Deschner’s book but I changed my mind: mere excerpts do not require the notes, especially in a blog. However, I must point out that there are bibliographical references in a book that the English speaker can read in his native language.

I am referring to Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World: an elegant book published last year in Britain and available this year, in addition, by an American publisher.

Deschner was an obsessive scholar who worked to the nitty-gritty, nose-to-the-grindstone level throughout his life. Although The Darkening Age is not as monumental as Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, I will reproduce Nixey’s preface and the third part of her Introduction. It is vital that English speakers know that we are not inventing a black history of Christianity. Some of the main references that support what we have been saying with the translations of Deschner and Evropa Soberana, also appear in Nixey’s book.

What is more, if you search you will find that even The Reader’s Digest which publishes copiously illustrated books for the simple, and very Christian, American families acknowledges the facts. For example, the image below shows a crowd of Christians who, encouraged by Pope Theophilus of Alexandria, destroyed the temple of Serapis in 391.

I scanned that image from pages 242-243 of the translation from English into Spanish of After Jesus (The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., 1992). What we see in the illustration represents the first dark hour of the West: the era that saw the destruction of ancient knowledge in the Library of Alexandria. Now we are living the second dark hour, when the enemy attacks directly your DNA so that the West cannot recover again, not even after a dark age as it did in the Renaissance.

That’s why I call ‘darkest hour’ to our times.

About the first dark hour, of the authors I have quoted and will continue to quote, Soberana, Deschner and Nixey are gentiles. But yesterday almost midnight a commenter called my attention to Suicide Note, a book of almost two thousand pages of Mitchell Heisman (1975-2010). I began to leaf through the Suicide Note chapter on how the Christians installed Semitic malware in the psyche of the Romans to move them to commit ethnic suicide.

I was fascinated and continued reading until almost two in the morning today. However, when I wanted to inquire about the author via Google, I discovered that Heisman was a Jew who committed suicide upon finishing the book!

Of the German Deschner, the English Nixey and the Spaniard Soberana, only the latter awoke about the Jewish question. It is really curious that, although neither Deschner nor Nixey took the red pill, an American Jew did take it.

The PDF of Suicide Note is available online for anyone who wants to read the whole thing. Tomorrow I’ll start reproducing those passages that elucidate what we have been saying about the Christian problem. Of course: I have to place the star of David after the author’s name. It is very rare for a Jew to say anything about the psyop that his tribe applied to the Aryan since the origins of Christianity. One of them is Heisman✡.

Trouble is that most white nationalists still don’t want to see what even a kike saw just before blowing his brains…

Categories
Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Old Testament Philosophy of history Theology Vegetarianism Welfare of animals

Kriminalgeschichte, 70

Below, an abridged translation from the first volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity). For a comprehensive text that explains the absolute need to destroy Judeo-Christianity, see: here. In a nutshell, any white person who worships the god of the Jews is, ultimately, ethnosuicidal.

 
Augustine sanctions the ‘holy war’
The amantissimus Domini sanctissimus, as the bishop Claudius of Turin of the 9th century called Augustine, recorded, like no one before him, the compatibility between service to war and the doctrine of Jesus.
The father of the Church Ambrose had already celebrated a pathetic instigation of war, and the father of the Church Athanasius had declared that in war it was ‘legal and praiseworthy to kill adversaries’. However, none of them admitted the bloody office with as few scruples and as the hypocrite ‘angel of heaven’ who looks ‘constantly to God’.
Certainly, Augustine did not share the optimism of an Eusebius or an Ambrose, who equated the hope of the pax romana with that of pax christiana as providential, since ‘The wars to the present are not only between empires but also between confessions, between truth and error’. By weaving his web of grace, predestination and angels, Augustine theoretically committed himself in an increasingly negative way before the Roman state.
Every State power based on the libido dominandi rests on sins and for that reason must submit to a Church based on grace, but in fact not free of sin either. This philosophy of the State, which constituted the historical-philosophical basis of the medieval power struggle between the popes and the emperors, was decisively influential until the times of Thomas Aquinas.
Until the year of his death, Augustine not only asked for the punishment of the murderers, but also to crush the uprisings and subdue the ‘barbarians’, taking it as a moral obligation. It was not difficult for him to consider the State malignant but he praised its bloody practices and, like everything else, also ‘attribute it to Divine Providence’ since ‘its way of proceeding’ is ‘to avoid human moral decay through wars’.
Whoever thinks so, in a childlike and cynical way at the same time, obviously interprets in the same sense the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’. That commandment should not be applied to the totality of nature and the animal kingdom. Augustine discusses with the Manichaeans that it does not include the prohibition of ‘pulling a bush’ or the ‘irrational animal world’ because such beings ‘must live and die to our advantage; submit them to you!’
‘Man owns animals’, complains Hans Henny Jahnn in his great trilogy Fluss ohne Ufer. ‘He does not need to try. He just has to be naive. Naive also in his anger. Brutal and naive. This is what God wants. Even if he hits the animals, he will go to heaven’.
Earlier, authors such as Theodor Lessing and Ludwig Klages had persuasively shown that, as the latter affirms, Christianity conceals something with its connotation of ‘humanity’. What it really means is that the rest of living beings lack value—unless they serve human beings! They write: ‘As is well known, Buddhism prohibits the killing of animals, because the animal is the same being as we are. Now, if one scolds an Italian with such a reproach when he torments an animal to death, he will claim that “senza anima” and “non è christiano” since for the Christian believer the right to exist lies only in the human beings’.
Augustine on the other hand believes that the human being ‘even in situations of sin is better than the animal’: the being ‘of lower rank’. And he treats vegetarianism as ‘impious heretic opinion’.
That God can be pleased with arms is shown by the example of David and that of ‘many other righteous’ of that time. Augustine quotes at least 13,276 times the Old Testament, about which he had previously written that he had always found it unpleasant!
But now it was useful. For example: ‘The just will rejoice when contemplating revenge; He will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked’. And of course all the ‘just’, logically, can make a ‘just war’ (bellum iustum).
It is a concept introduced by Augustine. No Christian had used it before, not even the easy-going Lactantius, whom he read carefully. Soon the whole Christian world made a iusta bella, based upon a ‘just’ reason for war any minimal deviation from the Roman liturgy. Augustine strongly recommends military service, and cites quite a few cases of ‘God-fearing warriors’ from the Bible; not only the ‘numerous righteous’ of the Old Testament, so rich in atrocities, but also a couple of the New Testament.
Augustine experienced the collapse of Roman rule in Africa, when the Vandal hordes invaded Mauritania and Numidia in the summer of 429 and in the spring of 430. He witnessed the annihilation of his life’s work: whole cities were grass of the flames and its inhabitants assassinated. Anywhere the Catholic communities, depleted by the Church and the State, opposed no resistance; at least there is no relation of it.
Augustine died on August 28, 430, and was buried that same day. A year later Hippo, retained by Boniface for fourteen months, was evacuated and partially burned. Augustine’s biographer, the holy bishop Possidius, who like the teacher was a fervent fighter against the ‘heretics’ and the ‘pagans’, still lived some years among the ruins.

 
 

END OF VOLUME I

 

______ 卐 ______

Liked it? Take a second to support this site.

Categories
Charlemagne Destruction of Greco-Roman world Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 69

A note of the Editor to those who tried
to defend the statue at Charlottesville:
Perhaps you ignore that removing the statues that represent the white and healthy part of a culture has been a practice that goes back to Antiquity.
As to why the non-white, African Augustine, considered the destruction of the Greco-Roman statues an act of devotion, recall what Evropa Soberana wrote in his essay on Judea against Rome: ‘To destroy a statue was to destroy the Hellenic human ideal: it was to sabotage the capacity of [Aryan] man to reach the very Divinity, from which He proceeds and to which He must return one day’.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Augustine attacks classical culture
Just as he repressed the ‘heretics’, evidently Augustine also repressed the so-called ‘pagans’.
The bishop fought against ‘the infamous gods of all kinds’, ‘the ungodly cults’, ‘the rabble of gods’, the ‘impure, abominable spirits’; ‘they are all bad’, ‘throw them away, despise them!’ Augustine insults Jupiter by calling him ‘seducer of women’, speaks of his ‘numerous and malignant acts of cruelty’, of the ‘irreverence of Venus’; defines the cult of the mother of the gods as ‘that epidemic, that crime, that ignominy’, to the great mother herself as ‘that monster’ who ‘through a multitude of public gallants gets the Earth dirty and offends the sky’, and says that Saturn surpasses them ‘in that shameless cruelty’.
Like Thomas Aquinas or Pope Pius II, Augustine defends the maintenance of prostitution so that ‘the violence of the passions’ does not ‘throw everything down’: the usual Catholic double standard. (Popes like Sixtus IV [1471-1484], creator of the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, and bishops, abbots and priors of honourable convents, kept profitable brothels!) Augustine repeats the already trite arguments against polytheism, from the matter and insensibility of the statues until the inability of the gods to help. And, like many others before him, he identifies them with demons.
The scope, the methods and the disrespectful mockery that the saint shows are evident, and extraordinarily detailed, in his magnum opus The City of God (413-426), directed specifically against the adepts of classical culture: twenty-two books that were one of Charlemagne’s favourite readings. In this work, as the Catholic Van der Meer ponders, Augustine ‘sets accounts, from a high point of view, with all the old culture of lies’, in favour of a new and far worse culture!
Augustine even resorts to counterfeiting, since in The City of God, in which the belief in the gods appears as the capital vice of the Romans; in which polytheism appears as the main cause of moral defeat as well as the fall of Rome in 410; as the main motive of all crimes, of all the mala, bella, discordiae of Roman history—in his masterpiece, then, Augustine does not hesitate to ‘discredit by means of conscious deformations’ (F.G. Maier) the world of the gods, allowing himself, when writing about the so-called pagans ‘any means’, even the ‘falsification of quotations’ (Andresen). ‘Lying and scandal are the two great things on which everything is based on the polytheistic faith’ (Schuitze).
At the beginning of his life as a bishop, Augustine had simply preached to use the wicked against the violence of the wicked. He soon fights the adepts of classical culture with the same lack of scruples as the ‘heretics’.
The Roman state itself is bad, a second Babylon, ‘condita est civitas Roma velut altera Babylon’. He justifies with resolution the eradication of the Old Faith; he orders the destruction of temples, centres of pilgrimage and images, the annihilation of all cults: a measure of reprisal against those who had previously killed Christians. He also affirmed that there was a common front of all those he condemned—heretics, adepts of classical culture and Jews—’against our unity’. Thus, around the year 400 he says triumphantly: ‘Throughout the Empire temples have been destroyed, idols are broken, sacrifices abolished, and those who worship the gods, punished’.
In response to Augustine’s phrase in which he says to welcome the Hellenists ‘with pastoral kindness and generosity’, the theologian Bernhard Kötting writes:

But he agrees with the laws and the measures of the emperor against the pagan cult and the sacrifices and the places where they are practiced, the temples. It is based on precepts of the Old Testament, where it is ordered to destroy the places of sacrifice to the idols, ‘as soon as the country is in your hands’.

As soon as one has power, annihilation follows ‘with pastoral goodness and generosity’! Several times Augustine rejected a literal understanding of the Old Testament in favour of an allegorical exegesis. However, the same as so many, other times he conveniently rejected the allegorical in favour of the literal.
As usual, the Catholic State fulfilled the requirements of the Catholic Church. Just as with the dispute with the ‘heretics’, in confrontations with the adepts of the classical culture there were first defamatory sermons by the clergy, strict canons, and then the corresponding civil laws. Then Greco-Roman culture in Africa was pushed back and annihilated.
In March of 399 the Gaudentius and Jovius committees profaned in Cartago the temples and the statues of the gods, according to Augustine, a milestone in the fight against the infernal cult. Later, Gaudentius and Jovius also destroyed the temples of the cities of the province, evidently with enormous satisfaction on the part of the holy bishop, for which the demolition of the idols already foreseen in the Old Testament is fulfilled. Augustine approves the decrees of 399 by the Christian emperor—who, based on Psalm 71: 11, finds justified—, in which he demands the destruction of idols and warns with the capital punishment those who worship them.
On June 16, 401, the fifth African synod decided to ask the emperor to demolish all the Greco-Roman shrines and temples that still remain ‘all over Africa’. The synod did not even allow so-called pagan banquets (convivio), because they performed ‘impure dances’, sometimes even in the days of the martyrs. The old Church again threatens Christians who participate in such meals with penances of several years or excommunication. There would be no communication with those who think differently.
At the time, in June 401, Augustine again incited the destructive rage. In a Sunday sermon in Carthage, he congratulated himself on the fervour against ‘idols’, and mocked them so primitively that the listeners laughed. At the foot of the golden-bearded statue of Hercules, we read: Herculi Deo. Who is? He should be able to say it. ‘But he can’t. He remains as silent as his sign!’ And when he remembers that even in Rome the temples have been closed and the idols have been thrown down, a clamour resounds throughout the church: ‘As in Rome, also in Carthage!’ Augustine continues to stir: the gods have fled Rome to come here. ‘Think about it, brothers, think about it! I already said it, apply it now you!’
Emperor Honorius (393-423), one of the sons of Theodosius I, made great concessions in his time to the Church. He was subject to both the influence of Ambrose and that of his pious sister Galla Placidia, founder of temples and persecutor of ‘heretics’ by legal means, which in turn influenced Saint Barbatian (festivity: December 31), his counsellor for many years and great miracle worker.
Thus, after repeated requests of the Church, the emperor, through a series of edicts promulgated in 399, 407, 408 and 415, ordered to remove in Africa the images of the temples, destroy the altars and close or confiscate the sanctuaries, assigning the goods for other purposes. When Augustine asked in court a more severe application of the laws, Honorius did so, threatening even to resort to the garrison. ‘The Government was increasingly inclined to meet the demands raised from the Christian side’ (Schulze).
With the support of the Church and the State, the Catholic hordes were no less brutal in the ‘cleansing’ of the rural properties of Greco-Roman gods than the Circumcellions were previously. At times, Augustine even established as a rule that those who converted to Christianity should destroy the temples and the images of the gods themselves. This happened in Calama, near Hippo, where Bishop St. Possidius, biographer and friend of Augustine, was so hated that neither the members of the curia, the councillors, protected him.
However, while they assaulted the monastery and beat a monk with blows, the prelate escaped. And when the Christians demolished the temple of Hercules in Sufes, a tumult arose such that Augustine, who denounced the government of the city, still of the old religion, had to mourn the loss of 60 slaughtered brothers of faith. He reports it with a strange mixture of indignation, hatred and sarcasm, without saying a single word about how many adepts of classical culture lost their lives in the uproar caused by the Christians. It should be noted that in Sufes, as a response from the Church, the temples and images of gods that were still preserved were destroyed, with bloody fights, partly in the sanctuaries themselves.
If out of fear of the fanaticism of their adversaries, the Hellenists abjured their faith—as a multitude of Christians once did in front of the pagans—Augustine mocks: ‘These are the servants that the devil has’. He considered the destruction of the Greco-Roman cult centres and their statues as an act of devotion. On the battlefield against the Hellenists he celebrated the final victory achieved. Is it surprising that, in a letter to the father of the Church, the Neo-Platonist Maximus called the saints knaves?
At the request of Augustine, his disciple Orosius, an Iberian priest, continued the disruption and defamation of classical culture. Following the tendency of his teacher he wrote Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri VII (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans). This apologetic, a sloppy and superficial product, became one of the most read works during the Middle Ages, perhaps the history book by antonomasia. It appeared in almost all clerical libraries and has completely contaminated historiography. Until the 12th century, this image of history manufactured by Augustine and Orosius predominated in the Christian world, and continued for a long time.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Note of the Ed.:
The complete title of Augustine’s magnum opus was The City of God Against the Pagans. His legacy was so influential that, as Deschner says above, Charlemagne (742-814) was a fan of The City of God Against the Pagans (emphasis added).
Charlemagne was the first European emperor since the fall of Rome, and he slaughtered thousands of those Germanics who were not Christians or refused to become Christians. The Nazis even created a stone memorial to those Saxon victims in 1935.
White nationalists still ignore the tragic history of those centuries when the last Germanics, who still resisted the enforced infection of an originally Semitic cult, fell.
 

Liked it? Take a second to support this site.