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Category: Laurent Guyénot

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse Laurent Guyénot

Don’t transfer your wrath onto Steve!

I have been reproducing most of the text of the article ‘The Holy Hook’.

‘Christianity without the Old Testament?’ is the last section of that essay by Laurent Guyénot. It consists of 900 words. I don’t want to reproduce it here but you can read it in The Unz Review.

In that last section, Guyénot falls into the same errors we have seen time and again in the racial right that desperately wants to save the religion of our parents despite its roots. Since, as we saw in David Skrbina’s book, the New Testament was written by Jews for Gentile consumption, it cannot be sanitised from the point of view of the fourteen words. However, what we have read in the previous instalments of ‘The Holy Hook’ is important to better understand the psyop represented by the forced conversion of the white race to the god of the Jews. But what Guyénot lacked, which Skrbina didn’t lack, was to assimilate the legacy of Nietzsche.

For the rest of this article I would like to talk about issues that I have touched on in recent posts. In the video Gonzalo uploaded today we no longer see him mocking with his typical black humour, because things are getting very ugly in Ukraine, where he is trapped, and perhaps we will see an October surprise before the US mid-term elections next month.
 

The Dahmer case—again!

Another issue I recently touched on and have given some more thought to is the Dahmer case. As you may recall, at the end of last month I confessed that I had watched the miniseries by pressing the forward button to avoid watching the morbid stuff Netflix shows us. But yesterday I saw, without pressing that button, a couple of scenes based on the real-life Dahmer family that caught my attention.

Jeffrey’s father, once with his new wife and the other time right after Jeff was sentenced, blames both his first wife—Jeff’s mother—and himself, for creating a monster because of how Jeff was mistreated as a child. And after the sentence, the mother writes a confession in which she feels guilty about the way she treated her son before turning on the gas tap in an attempt to kill herself. Having pressed the forward button so many times in the past month, I hadn’t thought about this pair of revealing scenes which, as I said, are apparently based on real-life anecdotes.

As a teenager I had, to some extent, a mother like Jeffrey’s, so I know how one internalises the verbal abuse of what Jung called ‘a dragon mother’. What hurt Jeff the most as a child is that his dad, who should’ve been the countervailing force, left him alone with the dragon and literally walked out of the home. It was in that house that Jeff committed his first murder and precisely when his young victim, Steven Mark Hicks (pictured below) wanted to leave the house.

After several hours of talking, drinking and listening to music, Steve ‘wanted to leave and I didn’t want him to leave’. Dahmer struck Steve from behind with the dumbbell while Steve was sitting in a chair. When he fell unconscious, Dahmer choked him to death with the barbell bar.

It seems obvious to me that the eighteen-year-old Jeff displaced pent-up anger towards the father in a sort of ‘Now you’re not leaving!’ From my own experience I know that resentment towards the passive father who didn’t stop the abuse is far more serious than resentment towards the dragon mother, insofar as he could have saved us and did nothing.

Of course, regarding his psychic wounds Jeff’s twist was very different from mine. He began to recreate his impotent rage with scapegoats, starting with Steve, and the betrayal he had been subjected to at home never crossed his conscience (transferred, unconscious hatred is infinite, since it’s not directed toward the real perp). I preferred to leave a legacy to humanity with my autobiographical confessions—see the only comment in the featured post.

Having been watching so many YouTube interviews with the real Jeff Dahmer, I realised that what trauma researchers say is true. To the extent that the subject doesn’t know himself—Jeff didn’t know himself—he will displace his unconscious rage on others. Bringing to consciousness the horrors of our childhoods (or adolescence in my case) prevents mental disorders, or our taking it out on innocent Steves.

Categories
Christendom Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Laurent Guyénot Psychohistory Psychology

The Holy Hook, 5

by Laurent Guyénot

Christianity as controlled opposition

‘Inside every Christian is a Jew,’ stated Pope Francis. That is the simplest and the deepest truth about Christianity. Most Christians are not aware of this Jew inside them, yet he commands a large part of their worldview.

Meditating on this truth can be a mind-opening experience, radiating in a multiplicity of questions. Should we use Sigmund Freud’s concept of ‘projection’ and say that most Christians who hate Jews hate the Jew inside them? Or is this Jew a self-hating Jew, like every Jew according to Theodor Lessing (Jewish Self-Hatred, Berlin, 1930)? Perhaps inside every Christian are two Jews, one hating the other, Moses and Jesus. From whichever side we want to look at it, the fact is that Christians are, by New Testament definition, the spiritual heirs of Yahweh’s promise to Israel. They are new branches grafted onto the trunk of Israel, according to Paul’s metaphor (Romans 11:16-24).

What still needs to be explained is how Paul and his followers succeeded in convincing tens of thousands of Gentiles to become a new synthetic Israel, at a time when the very name of Israel was hated all around the Mediterranean Sea? How is it that the Christian religion, which would convert the Roman Empire to the worship of a Jewish Messiah, was born at the time when the biggest wave of Judeophobia was sweeping across the Empire? To answer that question, let’s examine the context.
 

Rome against Judea; Judea against Rome—heading by Ed.

At the turn of the millennium, during the prosperous reign of Augustus, Jews had gained advantageous situations in many parts of the Empire. They enjoyed freedom of cult and judicial autonomy, and were exempted from the civil formality of emperor worship, from all obligations on the Sabbath, and from military service. Moreover, they were allowed to collect funds and send them to the Jerusalem Temple bureaucracy.[17]

As Jews abused of their privileges and conspired to increase them, Gentile resentment grew and anti-Jewish riots followed. In the year 38 CE, the Greeks of Alexandria sent a delegation to Rome, whose leader Isidoros complained that the Jews are ‘trying to stir up the entire world.’[18] The emperor issued an edict declaring that, if the Jews continued to sow dissent and ‘to agitate for more privileges than they formerly possessed, I will by all means take vengeance on them as fomenters of what is a general plague infecting the whole world.’ This edict was followed by another addressed to all the Jewish communities of the empire, asking them not to ‘behave with contempt towards the gods of other peoples.’[19]

Tensions were high in Jerusalem, where the pro-Roman Herodian dynasty faltered. It was at this time that a conspiracy of Pharisees and Sadducees denounced Jesus to the Romans as a seditious would-be king of the Jews, calculating, according to the Fourth Gospel, that ‘it is to [the Jews] advantage that one man should die for the people, rather than that the whole nation should perish’ (John 11:50). Flavius Josephus mentions several Jewish revolts in the same period, including one during the Passover of 48 or 49 CE, after a Roman soldier assigned to the entrance of the Temple committed the irreparable: ‘raising his robe, he stooped in an indecent attitude, so as to turn his backside to the Jews, and made a noise in keeping with this posture.’[20]

In 66 the Jewish War broke out, when the Sadducees defied Roman power by banning from the Temple the daily sacrifices offered in the name and at the expense of the Emperor. After the destruction of the Temple by the general and future emperor Titus in 70, the embers of Jewish messianism continued to hatch for 70 more years, and ignited Palestine for the last time with the revolt of Simon Bar Kochba, which provoked in retaliation the complete destruction of Jerusalem, its conversion into a Roman city renamed Aelia Capitolina, and the banning of Jews from it. By then, enmity against the Jews had reached a climax throughout the Empire.

This is precisely the time when Christian missionaries spread the cult of Christ in all the major urban centers of the Empire, starting with those inhabited by large Jewish communities, such as Antioch, Ephesus and Alexandria. A reasonable explanation for that synchronicity is that Christianity, in its Pauline version, is a fundamentally Judeophobic religion that surfed on the greatest wave of Judeophobia. As the cult of a demi-god victim of the Jews, it satisfied the general perception of Jews as a ‘race hated by the gods’ (Tacitus, Histories V.3).

But that explanation fails to account for the fact that the triumphant Judeophobic religion is not a pagan religion, but the fundamentally Jewish cult of a Jewish Messiah allegedly fulfilling Jewish prophecies. What we have here is a bizarre case of Hegelian dialectic, one in which the ‘antithesis’ is controlled by the ‘thesis’ and absorbed into it.
 

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Editor’s Note: Precisely what KevinMac and most white nationalists are unwilling to acknowledge. The enormity of the psyop is evident in the following passages of Laurent’s essay:
 

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Through Christianity, Roman Judeophobia became Judaized. The Gospel narrative makes the Jews the plotters against the Son of God, but this Son of God is a Jew, and soon the ‘Mother of God’—as Isis, Ishtar or Artemis were called—would be turned into a Jewess too. Most importantly, Judeophobic Christians will adopt the Tanakh and the bizarre Jewish paradigm of the ‘jealous god’ with his ‘chosen people’. From that point of view, it is as if Christ nailed on the Cross had been used as a bait to pull anti-Jewish Gentiles, by the line of the Old Testament, into worshipping Jewishness.

This process fits the concept of Jewish controlled opposition conceptualized by Gilad Atzmon in his book Being in Time. Whenever Jewish power becomes threatened by the Gentiles’ resentment against it, it produces ‘a satellite Jewish dissent’ designed to control and stir Gentile opposition. This Jewish dissent monopolizes the protest and keeps non-Jewish dissenters in line. According to a parable proposed by Atzmon, the purpose is to make sure that any Jewish problem suffered by the Gentiles is treated by Jewish doctors, whose fundamental interest is that the problem is not solved. By claiming to have the solution to the problem, dissident Jews deceive Gentiles on the nature of the problem, and ultimately aggravate the problem.

As Atzmon sees it, the process does not necessarily result from a secret agreement between Jewish power and Jewish dissent. The Jewish opposition intellectuals

are not necessarily consciously deceiving us; indeed, they may well be doing their best, within the context of a limited tribal mindset. The truth is, they cannot think out of the box, they cannot climb over the ghetto walls that enclose their own tribal beings.[21]

We can see this tribal mindset as a collective instinct of conservation that is part of the essence of Jewishness. Ideological quarrels between Jews are sincere, but they remain quarrels between Jews, who tacitly agree to speak louder than Gentiles and exclude from the discussion any radical criticism of Jewishness.

In the light of Atzmon’s analysis, it is conceivable that Christianity’s primary function was to absorb Greco-Roman Judeophobia into a movement that would ultimately reinforce the symbolic status of the Jews, by spreading the ‘chosen people’ propaganda myth fabricated five centuries earlier. Ezra had convinced the Persians that the Jews worshipped the God of Heaven like them; the Church went on convincing the Romans that, before Jesus, the Jews had been the only people worshipping the true God and loved by Him. Such creed from the Gentiles is worth a thousand Balfour declarations, in the march toward world domination by way of deception. In the Christian narrative that says, ‘God chose the Jewish people, but then rejected them,’ the benefit from the first part is much higher than the cost of the second, which hardly makes sense anyway.

If the Italian rabbi Elijah Benamozegh is right in saying that ‘The constitution of a universal religion is the ultimate goal of Judaism,’ then Christianity is a great step toward that glorious future: ‘In Heaven, one God of all men, and on earth a single family of peoples, among whom Israel is the eldest, responsible for the priestly function of teaching and the administration of the true religion of humanity.’[22] Christianity has prepared the way for the next stage: the cult of the crucified Jew is now being superseded by the cult of the exterminated Jews.

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[17] Michael Grant, Jews in the Roman World, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011, pp. 58–61.

[18] Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 178.

[19] Quoted in Michael Grant, Jews in the Roman World, op. cit., pp. 134–135.

[20] Flavius Josephus, Jewish War, II, 224, quoted in Michael Grant, Jews in the Roman World, op. cit., p. 148.

[21] Gilad Atzmon, Being in Time: A Post-Political Manifesto, Skyscraper, 2017, p. 208.

[22] Élie Benamozegh, Israël et l’humanité (1914), Albin Michel, 1980, pp. 28–29.

Categories
Judaism Laurent Guyénot Old Testament Plutarch Tacitus Theology

The Holy Hook, 4

by Laurent Guyénot

How Christianity reinforced Jewish alienation

Also to consider is the effect that the Christian sanctification of the Jewish Tanakh has had on Jews themselves. It has discouraged Jews from questioning their scriptures and freeing themselves from their psychopathic god. Any Jew who questioned the divine inspiration of the Torah was not only banned from his community, but found no shelter among Christians: this happened to Baruch Spinoza and many others. For two thousand years, Christians have prayed that the Jews would open their heart to Christ, but they have done nothing to free them from Yahweh.

Critics of Jews in pagan Antiquity had a simple logic: although Jews were considered an ethnos, it was commonly admitted that their misanthropy was due to their religion. It was the fault of Moses, who had taught them to scorn the gods and the traditions of others. Hecataeus of Abdera gives in his Aegyptiaca (around 300 BCE) an alternative version of the Exodus: to appease their gods during a plague, the Egyptians expelled from their lands the many tribes of migrants (those known in Acadian as habirus), and some of them settled in Judea under the conduct of their leader Moses who, ‘because of their expulsion, introduced a kind of misanthropic and inhospitable way of life’.[14]

The Roman historian Tacitus tells a similar story and also attributes to Moses the introduction of ‘new religious practices, quite opposed to those of all other religions. The Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred; on the other hand, they permit all that we abhor’ (Tacitus, Histories V,3-5).

Plutarch reports in his treatise on Isis and Osiris that some Egyptians believed the god of the Jews to be Seth, the murderer of Osiris, exiled by the council of the gods in the desert from where he periodically returns to bring famine and discord. This opinion was so widespread in the Greco-Roman world that many people believed that the Jews worshiped in their Temple the golden head of a donkey, symbol of Seth in the divine bestiary of Egypt. The Roman general Pompey is reported to have been surprised not to find this famous donkey head when he entered the Holy of Holies in 63 BCE.

Everything was simple, then: the Jews were not racially, but religiously degenerate. But the Christian Fathers, who held that only the Jews had worshiped the true God before the coming of Jesus Christ, had to elaborate a sophisticated explanation for the Jews’ asocial behavior, one which is so self-contradicting that its message to the Jews amounts to a ‘double bind’: on the one hand, the Jews are told that their Yahweh is the true God and that their Bible is holy, but on the other hand, they are criticized for behaviors they have learned precisely from Yahweh in their Bible.

They are accused of plotting to rule the world, although it is the very promise that Yahweh made to them: ‘Yahweh your God will raise you higher than every other nation in the world’ (Deuteronomy 28:1). They are blamed for their materialism and their greed, but that also they learned from Yahweh, who dreams only of plunder: ‘I shall shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations will flow in’ (Haggai 2:7).

Above all, they are rebuked for their separatism, although this is the very essence of Yahweh’s message to them: ‘I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine’ (Leviticus 20:26). Jews who want to break away from Jewish separatism deserve death, according to the lesson of the Bible. The Church Fathers have repeated Yahweh’s endless complaint against his people’s irrepressible tendency to compromise themselves with the gods of the nations by oaths, shared meals or—abomination of the abomination—marriages. But are not these ‘stiff-necked Jews’ who rebelled against the tyrannical yoke of the Levites, precisely those who sought to extricate themselves from the Jewish alienation by assimilating into the surrounding civilization? Were they not doing exactly what we would like them to do today? The contradiction is in many Christian writings. John Chrysostom, for example, writes in his First Homily Against the Jews (II,3):

Nothing is more miserable than those people who never failed to attack their own salvation. When there was need to observe the Law, they trampled it under foot. Now that the Law has ceased to bind, they obstinately strive to observe it. What could be more pitiable that those who provoke God not only by transgressing the Law but also by keeping it?

This amounts to telling the Jews: ‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’ Christians accuse them of having rebelled against Yahweh yesterday, and they accuse them of obeying Yahweh today, under the pretext that Yahweh’s orders no longer stand. How unconvincing to the Jews!

Anti-Yahwism is the only effective criticism of Israel because it is the only fair criticism. It cuts short the accusation of anti-Semitism, since it aims at liberating the Jews from the sociopathic god who has taken control of their destiny—and who is, of course, only the puppet of the Levites. A manifesto of anti-yahwism might begin with this statement by Samuel Roth from his book Jews Must Live:

Beginning with the Lord God of Israel Himself, it was the successive leaders of Israel who one by one foregathered and guided the tragic career of the Jews—tragic to the Jews and no less tragic to the neighboring nations who have suffered them. Despite our faults, we would never have done so much damage to the world if it had not been for our genius for evil leadership.[15]

Zionist pioneer Leo Pinsker wrote in his booklet Auto-Emancipation (1882), that the Jews are ‘the people chosen for universal hatred.’ They are indeed, but not because Gentiles are universally affected by a ‘psychic aberration,’ a ‘variety of demonopathy’ known as Judeophobia, as Pinsker believes, but rather because their covenant with Yahweh has programmed them to be hated wherever they go.[16]

It’s time to tell the Jews what Christians have been unable to tell them: You were never chosen by God. You have just been misled by your Levites to take your vindictive tribal god for the universal Father in Heaven. This cognitive short-circuit has caused in your collective psyche a grave narcissistic personality disorder. For our own misfortune, we Gentiles have been fooled by your self-delusion and have fallen, too, under the psychopathic bond of your leaders. But we are now waking up, and as soon as we recover our senses and our dignity, we’ll help you out of it too.

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[14] Peter Schäfer, Judéophobie: Attitudes à l’égard des Juifs dans le monde antique, Cerf, 2003, pp. 13-15.

[15] Samuel Roth, Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All the Frontiers of Civilization, 1934, (archive.org).

[16] Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew (1882).

Categories
Harold Covington Laurent Guyénot

Gonzalo & Harold’s CI

I read most of Freedom’s Sons in a home printout in 2011, when Harold Covington hadn’t yet finished it and sent me a PDF of the draft he had written. When I later acquired a hard copy of the final draft already edited by Covington, I wrote a critical review which I included in my anthology Daybreak (see featured post).

Yesterday, after eleven years of reading most of Freedom’s Sons, the quintet’s last novel, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at it at a time when a civil war is beginning to brew in the US. At the beginning of his novel Covington includes a glossary of unusual terms. One of them is an acronym:

Cl —Christian Identity. By the time of the writing of The Hill of the Ravens,[1] the predominant Christian religious movement in the Republic. The faith of Pastor Richard Butler, Robert Miles, and many others among the founding fathers of the Northwest American Republic. The essence of Christian Identity is the transfer of God’s Biblical covenant from the Jewish people to the Gentile or Aryan peoples through the medium of the Christ’s Passion and the Crucifixion. In most Christian Identity sects this transfer is accompanied by a very complex (sometimes downright tortuous) theological construct whereby white people are alleged to be racial descendants of the Israelites of the Bible through the alleged wanderings of the Lost Tribes through Europe, Denmark being descended from the tribe of Dan, etc. However tenuous the historical and theological basis for Christian Identity, there can be no doubt of the spiritual strength and personal integrity that the Cl faith imparts to its adherents. During the Time of Struggle and ever since, they have been the very backbone of the Northwest nation.

My italics!

When I read Covington’s quintet I hadn’t read Evropa Soberana’s essay on Judea’s psyop against Rome, a thesis that resonates with my recent posts in which I have been quoting David Skrbina and Laurent Guyénot. Now, after digesting all this information (and even more on the Christian question or CQ), I find it laughable how Covington imagined the Northwest American Republic.

CI is not remotely a force that can become the backbone of a Northwest nation. They don’t even have a single church where they profess their beliefs that I know of. Covington wasn’t a Christian, but like so many secular white nationalists, he didn’t repudiate our parents’ religion.

I’ve been blogging for a dozen years and, by saying these things in a very direct way, I see on my stats page that visitors don’t like it (after I went nuclear on the CQ, and therefore started to criticise WN, my stats plummeted).

If I could speak as fluent English as the Chilean Gonzalo Lira, educated in the US but now living in Ukraine (and whose YouTube channel I recently recommended), I would be talking about these things in an audio-visual medium. I am struck by the similarity between me and Gonzalo Lira’s black humour. Even in his mocking tone we are very similar, at least in character.

(Gonzalo Lira at the Premier Palace Hotel, Kiev, Ukraine. February 2022.)

I don’t think there is anyone who is talking about the CQ in the audiovisual media. Since I can’t speak fluent English, only write in English, I would make videos in which I would speak in my mother tongue and have a technician add English subtitles.

Audiovisual media is perhaps the most powerful medium to convey a radical message.
 
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[1] The Hill of the Ravens is the first novel in Covington’s quintet of novels about the creation of an ethnostate in the northwestern US, eventually including part of Canada.

Categories
Israel / Palestine Judaism Laurent Guyénot Old Testament Racial right Theology

The Holy Hook, 3

by Laurent Guyénot

Christians’ learned helplessness

It is beyond question that Christianity played a major role in the creation of Israel, and continues to play a major role in securing American and European support for its criminal enterprises. This has nothing to do with Jesus’ teaching or the example he set with his life and death, of course. Rather, this was due to the Od Testament, Israel’s Trojan Horse inside Christianity. By recognizing the Jews’ special status as the people of the Old Testament, Christians have granted them an extraordinary symbolic power that no other ethnic community can compete with.
 

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Editor’s note: Since he’s writing for The Unz Review, Laurent omits to add that white nationalism should be seen as a failed movement. Except for Hitler and his closest henchmen, every Jew-wise man knows about the Jewish problem but none wants to say who is responsible for their power.
 

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For two thousand years, Christianity has taught Gentiles to consent to the delusional claim of the Jews to divine election: are they not the first and only ethnic group whom the God of the universe has addressed personally, the people whom He has loved to the point of exterminating its enemies? It matters not that Christians tell the Jews that they have lost the election because they rejected Christ: the main price is theirs. To accept the biblical notion of ‘chosen people’, whatever the reservations, is to accept the metaphysical superiority of the Jews. If Christ is Israel’s Messiah, then truly, ‘salvation is from the Jews’ (John 4:22).

We are experiencing today the final consequences of this submission, which the peoples of Antiquity could never have imagined in their worst nightmares. The exalted status of the Jews and of their ‘holy history’ is the deeper reason for their influence on the affairs of the world. By accepting the triple biblical paradigm—Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land—, Christian Churches, Catholic and Protestant in particular, have become complicit with the imperialistic project of the Hebrew Bible. Therefore, there will be no definitive emancipation from Zion without mental and moral emancipation from the biblical matrix.

When reading the Book of Joshua, a Christian is supposed to approve, as a matter of principle, the extermination of the inhabitants of the cities of Canaan and the stealing of their land, since it was ordained by God. The editors of my Bible de Jérusalem explain in a footnote to chapter 3:

Joshua was considered by the Fathers as a figure of his namesake Jesus [their names are identical in Hebrew], and the Jordanian passage as a figure of Christian baptism.

How can Joshua be a figure of Jesus? What has Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount to do with Joshua’s bloodthirsty fanatism? How can the god of Joshua be the Father of Christ? A crippling cognitive dissonance has seized Christian peoples, causing a chronic inability to think intelligently about the divine, and to see and resist the violence of Israel. We can also compare the Christian world to a son who has been lied to all his life about his real father, and, on top of that, told that his father was a war criminal, when in fact he is the son of a loving father. The neurotic ailments that genealogical lies and secrets may cause over several generations, though largely mysterious, have been well documented in the last fifty years (particularly by French psychogenealogists), and I believe such considerations, applied to the usurpation of our Heavenly Parent’s identity by the psychopathic Yahweh, are relevant to the psychology of nations.
 

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Editor’s note: Unlike Laurent, we are not theists but pantheists (see the abridgement of Richard Weikart’s book on Hitler we made for this site).
 

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As a matter of principle, the Christian is supposed to approve Yahweh’s sentence on those who ate with the Moabites and took wives among them: ‘Yahweh said to Moses, “Take all the leaders of the people. Impale them facing the sun, for Yahweh, to deflect his burning anger from Israel”’ (Numbers 25:4). But then, why blame the Jerusalem priestly cast for sending Jesus to the torture? Explain to me in which way they were unfaithful to the Torah! Not to mention, of course, the inherent contradiction in blaming them for the Cross since, according to the Gospel, ‘the Son of man was destined to suffer grievously, and to be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and to be put to death, and after three days to rise again’ (Mark 8:31).

The sanctification of Yahweh’s bloody leadership during the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan has made Gentiles incapable of understanding the historical foundation of Jewishness, and helpless in the face of its intrinsic violence today. It has created a blind spot in Christians’ mind: they may see the effects of Zion’s evil power, but not its cause, falsely assuming that the moral corruption they see in Jews comes from the Talmud and the Kabbalah.

Christians cannot even see the Jewish plan for world domination that is written in plain language, right under their nose. If the Jewish Tanakh had not become the Christians’ Holy Book, it would have been exposed as the proof for Israel’s racist and supremacist ambitions long ago. But when it comes to the Old Testament, Christians are seized by a severe reading disorder: when the book says ‘Israel will conquer the world’, they read ‘the Church will convert the world’.

If the ‘Jewish question’ is about the inordinate power of Israeli elite networks within nations, then the Jewish question is also a Christian question: (emphasis by Ed.) it is about the built-in vulnerability of Christian societies to this power. Deep down, anyone who grew up a Christian knows that the chosen people will have the last word, because if Yahweh is God, his promise is eternal, as he himself declares, in his inimitable style: ‘By my own self I swear it; what comes from my mouth is saving justice, it is an irrevocable word’ (Isaiah 45:23). One can even speak of Christians’ ‘learned helplessness’ in front of Jewish power, since they are taught in their Scriptures that God has always guided Israel’s merciless slaughter of his enemies—no need for Scofield’s footnotes to know that. There is also learned helplessness in having as ultimate model a man crucified by the Jews: how can the ‘imitation of Christ’ save us from the high priests’ power to lobby and corrupt Pilatus?

The Judeo-Babylonian metaphysical hoax makes God not just ridiculously anthropomorphic, but Judeomorphic. To be fooled by it is to mistake the Creator of the Universe for a topical demon rumbling and spitting fire from a Midianite volcano (Exodus 19), adopted as tutelary deity by a confederation of Semitic nomadic tribes craving for a piece of the Fertile Crescent. It is to internalize an extremely primitive and unspiritual image of the divine that is obstructive of sound metaphysical thinking: the divorce between philosophy (the love of Wisdom) and theology (the science of God) is one manifestation of this cognitive dissonance in Western thought.

In the final analysis, the jealous Yahweh, destroyer of all pantheons, is so unconvincing in the garb of the Great universal God that he is fated to be discarded in his turn. Atheism is the end result of biblical monotheism: it is the rejection of the biblical God, mistaken for the true God. ‘If Yahweh is God, no thanks’ has been the simple rationale for atheism in Christendom since the Enlightenment: Voltaire, for example, scorned Christianity by quoting the Old Testament. Yahweh has ruined faith in a divine Creator.

Categories
Catholic Church Catholic religious orders Christendom England Franks Laurent Guyénot Old Testament Protestantism

The Holy Hook, 2

 
by Laurent Guyénot

 
The Old Testament as Israel’s Trojan Horse

In pre-Christian times, pagan scholars had shown little interest in the Hebrew Bible. Jewish writers (Aristobulus of Paneas, Artapan of Alexandria) had tried to bluff the Greeks on the antiquity of the Torah, claiming that Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato had been inspired by Moses, but no one before the Church Fathers seems to have taken them seriously. Jews had even produced fake Greek prophecies of their success under the title Sibylline Oracles, and written under a Greek pseudonym a Letter of Aristea to Philocrates praising Judaism, but again, it was not until the triumph of Christianity that these texts were met with Gentile gullibility.

Thanks to Christianity, the Jewish Tanakh was elevated to the status of authoritative history, and Jewish authors writing for pagans, such as Josephus and Philo, gained undeserved reputation—while being ignored by rabbinic Judaism. Christian academia uncritically tuned to the rigged history of the Jews. While Herodotus had crossed Syria-Palestine around 450 BCE without hearing about Judeans or Israelites, Christian historians decided that Jerusalem had been at that time the center of the world, and accepted as fact the totally fictitious empire of Solomon. Until the 19th century, world history was calibrated on a largely fanciful biblical chronology (Egyptology is now trying to recover from it).[4]

It can be argued, of course, that the Old Testament has served Christendom well: it was certainly not in the nonviolence of Christ that the Catholic Church found the energy and ideological means to impose its world order for nearly a thousand years on Western Europe. Yet for this glorious past, there was obviously a price to pay, a debt to the Jews that has to be paid one way or another. It is as if Christianity has sold its soul to the god of Israel, in exchange for its great accomplishment.

The Church has always advertised itself to the Jews as the gateway out of the prison of the Law, into the freedom of Christ. But it has never requested Jewish converts to leave their Torah on the doorstep. The Jews who entered the Church entered with their Bible, that is to say, with a big part of their Jewishness, while freeing themselves from all the civil restrictions imposed on their non-converted brethren.

When Jews were judged too slow to convert willingly, they were sometimes forced into baptism under threats of expulsion or death. The first documented case goes back to Clovis’ grandson, according to Bishop Gregory of Tours:

King Chilperic commanded that a large number of Jews be baptized, and he himself held several on the fonts. But many were baptized only in body and not in heart; they soon returned to their deceitful habits, for they really kept the Sabbath, and pretended to honour the Sunday (History of the Franks, chapter V).

Such collective forced conversions, producing only insincere and resentful Christians, were conducted throughout the Middle Ages. Hundreds of thousands of Spanish and Portuguese Jews were forced to convert at the end of the 15th century, before emigrating throughout Europe. Many of these ‘New Christians’ not only continued to ‘Judaize’ among themselves, but could now have greater influence on the ‘Old Christians’. The penetration of the Jewish spirit into the Roman Church, under the influence of these reluctantly converted Jews and their descendants, is a much more massive phenomenon than is generally admitted.

One case in point is the Jesuit Order, whose foundation coincided with the peak of the Spanish repression against Marranos, with the 1547 ‘purity-of-blood’ legislation issued by the Archbishop of Toledo and Inquisitor General of Spain. Of the seven founding members, four at least were of Jewish ancestry. The case of Loyola himself is unclear, but he was noted for his strong philo-Semitism. Robert Markys has demonstrated, in a groundbreaking study, how crypto-Jews infiltrated key positions in the Jesuit Order from its very beginning, resorting to nepotism in order to eventually establish a monopoly on top positions that extended to the Vatican. King Phillip II of Spain called the Order a ‘Synagogue of Hebrews.’[5]

Marranos established in the Spanish Netherlands played an important role in the Calvinist movement. According to Jewish historian Lucien Wolf,

The Marranos in Antwerp had taken an active part in the Reformation movement, and had given up their mask of Catholicism for a not less hollow pretense of Calvinism… The simulation of Calvinism brought them new friends, who, like them, were enemies of Rome, Spain and the Inquisition… Moreover, it was a form of Christianity which came nearer to their own simple Judaism.[6]

Calvin himself had learned Hebrew from rabbis and heaped praise on the Jewish people. He wrote in his commentary on Psalm 119: ‘Where did Our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles draw their doctrine, if not Moses? And when we peel off all the layers, we find that the Gospel is simply an exhibition of what Moses had already said.’ The Covenant of God with the Jewish people is irrevocable because ‘no promise of God can be undone.’ That Covenant, ‘in its substance and truth, is so similar to ours, that we can call them one. The only difference is the order in which they were given.’[7]

Within one century, Calvinism, or Puritanism, became a dominant cultural and political force in England. Jewish historian Cecil Roth explains:

The religious developments of the seventeenth century brought to its climax an unmistakable philo-semitic tendency in certain English circles. Puritanism represented above all a return to the Bible, and this automatically fostered a more favourable frame of mind towards the people of the Old Testament.[8]

Some British Puritans went so far as to consider the Leviticus as still in force; they circumcised their children and scrupulously respected the Sabbath. Under Charles I (1625–1649), wrote Isaac d’Israeli (father of Benjamin Disraeli), ‘it seemed that religion chiefly consisted of Sabbatarian rigours; and that a British senate had been transformed into a company of Hebrew Rabbis.’[9] Wealthy Jews started to marry their daughters into the British aristocracy, to the extent that, according to Hilaire Belloc’s estimate, ‘with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception.’[10]

The influence of Puritanism on many aspects of British society naturally extended to the United States. The national mythology of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ fleeing Egypt (Anglican England) and settling into the Promised Land as the new chosen people, sets the tone. However, the Judaization of American Christianity has not been a spontaneous process from within, but rather one controlled by skillful manipulations from outside. For the 19th century, a good example is the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909 by Oxford University Press, under the sponsorship of Samuel Untermeyer, a Wall Street lawyer, Federal Reserve co-founder, and devoted Zionist, who would become the herald of the ‘holy war’ against Germany in 1933. The Scofield Bible is loaded with highly tendentious footnotes. For example, Yahweh’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 gets a two-thirds-page footnote explaining that ‘God made an unconditional promise of blessings through Abram’s seed to the nation of Israel to inherit a specific territory forever’ (although Jacob, who first received the name Israel, was not yet born). The same note explains that ‘Both OT and NT are full of post-Sinaitic promises concerning Israel and the land which is to be Israel’s everlasting possession,’ accompanied by ‘a curse laid upon those who persecute the Jews,’ or ‘commit the sin of anti-Semitism.’[11]

As a result of this kind of gross propaganda, most American Evangelicals regard the creation of Israel in 1948 and its military victory in 1967 as miracles fulfilling biblical prophecies and heralding the second coming of Christ. Jerry Falwell declared, ‘Right at the very top of our priorities must be an unswerving commitment and devotion to the state of Israel,’ while Pat Robertson said ‘The future of this Nation [America] may be at stake, because God will bless those that bless Israel.’ As for John Hagee, chairman of Christians United for Israel, he once declared: ‘The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.’[12]

Gullible Christians not only see God’s hand whenever Israel advances in its self-prophesized destiny of world domination, but are ready to see Israeli leaders themselves as prophets when they announce their own false-flag crimes.[13]

________

[4] Read Gunnar Heinsohn, “The Restauration of Ancient History” (webpage), “The Revision of Ancient History – A Perspective” (webpage).

[5] Robert A. Markys, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus, Brill, 2009.

[6] Lucien Wolf, Report on the “Marranos” or Crypto-Jews of Portugal, Anglo-Jewish Association, 1926.

[7] Vincent Schmid, “Calvin et les Juifs : Prémices du dialogue judéo-chrétien chez Jean Calvin,” 2008, on www.racinesetsources.ch.

[8] Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (1941), Clarendon Press, 1964, p. 148.

[9] Isaac Disraeli, ‘Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, King of England’, 2 vols., 1851, quoted in Archibald Maule Ramsay, The Nameless War, 1952 (archive.org).

[10] Hilaire Belloc, The Jews, Constable & Co., 1922 (archive.org), p. 223.

[11] Joseph Canfield, The Incredible Scofield and His Book, Ross House Books, 2004, pp. 219–220.

[12] Jill Duchess of Hamilton, God, Guns and Israel: Britain, The First World War And The Jews in the Holy City, The History Press, 2009 , kindle, e. 414-417.

[13] Michael Evans, The American Prophecies, Terrorism and Mid-East Conflict Reveal a Nation’s Destiny.

Categories
Bible Carolingian dynasty Christendom Franks Judaism Kevin MacDonald Laurent Guyénot Merovingian dynasty Old Testament

The Holy Hook, 1

 
Editor’s note: With the subtitle of ‘Yahweh’s Trojan Horse into the Gentile City’, this essay by Laurent Guyénot was published, complete, on May 8, 2019, in The Unz Review.
 

Is the Church the whore of Yahweh?

I concluded an earlier article [‘Zionism, Crypto-Judaism, and the Biblical Hoax’ —Ed.] by what I regard as the most important ‘revelation’ of modern biblical scholarship, one that has the potential to free the Western world from a two-thousand-year-old psychopathic bond: the jealous Yahweh was originally just the national god of Israel, repackaged into ‘the God of Heaven and Earth’ during the Babylonian Exile, as part of a public relations campaign aimed at Persians, then Greeks and ultimately Romans. The resulting biblical notion that the universal Creator became Israel’s national god at the time of Moses, is thus exposed as a fictitious inversion of the historical process: in reality, it is the national god of Israel who, so to speak, impersonated the universal Creator at the time of Ezra—while remaining intensely ethnocentric.

The Book of Joshua is a good eye-opener to the biblical hoax, because its pre-exilic author never refers to Yahweh simply as ‘God,’ and never implies that he is anything but ‘the god of Israel,’ that is, ‘our god’ for the Israelites, and ‘your god’ for their enemies (25 times). Yahweh shows no interest in converting Canaanite peoples, whom he regards as worthless than their livestock. He doesn’t instruct Joshua to even try to convert them, but simply to exterminate them, in keeping with the war code he gave Moses in Deuteronomy 20.

However, we find in the Book of Joshua one isolated statement by a Canaanite woman that ‘Yahweh your god is God both in Heaven above and on Earth beneath’ (2:11). Rahab, a prostitute in Jericho, makes that statement to two Israeli spies who spend the night with her, and whom she hides in exchange for being spared, together with her family, when the Israelites will take over the city and slaughter everyone, ‘men and women, young and old’ (6:21). Rahab’s ‘profession of faith’ is probably a post-exilic insertion, because it doesn’t fit well with her other claim that she is motivated by fear, not by faith: ‘we are afraid of you and everyone living in this country has been seized with terror at your approach’ (2:9). Nevertheless, the combination of fear and faith is consistent with Yahweh’s ways.

The French Catholic Bible de Jérusalem—a scholarly translation by the Dominicans of the École Biblique, which served as guideline for the English Jerusalem Bible—adds a following footnote to Rahab’s ‘profession of faith to the God of Israel’, saying it ‘made Rahab, in the eyes of more than one Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.’

I find this footnote emblematic of the role of Christianity in propagating among Gentiles the Israelites’ outrageous metaphysical claim, that great deception that has remained, to this day, a source of tremendous symbolic power. By recognizing her own image in the prostitute of Jericho, the Church claims for herself the role that is exactly hers in history, while radically misleading Christians about the historical significance of that role. It is indeed the Church who, having acknowledged the god of Israel as the universal God, introduced the Jews into the heart of the Gentile city and, over the centuries, allowed them to seize power over Christendom. [Red emphasis by Ed.]

This thesis, which I am going to develop here, may seem fanciful, because we have been taught that Christianity was strongly Judeophobic from the start. And that’s true. For example, John Chrysostom, perhaps the most influential Greek theologian of the crucial 4th century, wrote several homilies ‘Against the Jews’. But what he is concerned about, precisely, is the nefarious influence of the Jews over Christians. Many Christians, he complains, ‘join the Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts’ and even believe that ‘they think as we do’ (First homily, I,5).

‘Is it not strange that those who worship the Crucified keep common festival with those who crucified him? Is it not a sign of folly and the worst madness?… For when they see that you, who worship the Christ whom they crucified, are reverently following their rituals, how can they fail to think that the rites they have performed are the best and that our ceremonies are worthless?’ (First Homily, V,1-7).

To John’s horror, some Christians even get circumcised. ‘Do not tell me,’ he warns them, ‘that circumcision is just a single command; it is that very command which imposes on you the entire yoke of the Law’ (Second Homily, II,4). And so, with all its Judeophobia (anachronistically renamed ‘anti-Semitism’ today), John Chrysostom’s homilies are a testimony to the strong influence that Jews have exerted on Gentile Christians in the early days of the triumphant, imperial Church. And no matter how much the Greek and Latin Fathers have tried to protect their flock from the influence of Jews, it has persisted as the Church expanded. It can even be argued that the history of Christianity is the history of its Judaization, from Constantinople to Rome, then from Rome to Amsterdam and to the New World.

______ 卐 ______

 
Note of the Editor: This is exactly what apologists of Christianity, like the secular Kevin MacDonald, fail to understand (see e.g., how he misunderstands John Chrysostom in his preface to Giles Corey’s The Sword of Christ).
 

______ 卐 ______

 
We commonly admit that the Church has always oppressed the Jews and prevented their integration unless they convert. Were they not expelled from one Christian kingdom after another in the Middle Ages? Again, this is true, but we must distinguish between the cause and the effect. Each of these expulsions has been a reaction to a situation unknown in pre-Christian Antiquity: Jewish communities gaining inordinate economic power, under the protection of a royal administration (Jews served as the kings’ tax collectors and moneylenders, and were particularly indispensable in times of war), until this economic power, yielding political power, reaches a point of saturation, causes pogroms and forces the king into taking measures.

Let us consider for example the influence of the Jews in Western Europe under the Carolingians. It reaches a climax under Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious. The bishop of Lyon Agobard (c. 769-840) left us five letters or treatises written to protest against the power granted to the Jews at the detriment of Christians. In On the insolence of the Jews, addressed to Louis the Pious in 826, Agobard complains that the Jews produce ‘signed ordinances of your name with golden seals’ guaranteeing them outrageous advantages, and that the envoys of the Emperor are ‘terrible towards Christians and gentle towards Jews.’ Agobard even complains of an imperial edict imposing Sunday rather than Saturday as market day, in order to please the Jews. In another letter, he complains of an edict forbidding anyone to baptize the slaves of the Jews without the permission of their masters.[1]

Louis the Pious was said to be under the influence of his wife, Queen Judith—a name that simply means ‘Jewess’. She was so friendly to Jews that the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz hypothesizes that she was a secret Jewess, in the manner of the biblical Esther. Graetz describes the reign of Louis and Judith (and ‘the treasurer Bernhard, the real ruler of the kingdom’ according to him) as a golden age for the Jews, and points out that in the emperor’s court, many regarded Judaism as the true religion. This is illustrated by the resounding conversion of Louis’ confessor, Bishop Bodo, who took the name of Eleazar, had himself circumcised, and married a Jewess. ‘Cultured Christians,’ writes Graetz, ‘refreshed themselves with the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus and the Jewish philosopher Philo, and read their works in preference to those of the apostles.’[2]

The Judaization of the Roman Church at this time is appropriately symbolized by the adoption of unleavened bread for communion, with no justification in the Gospel. I say ‘the Roman Church’, but perhaps it should be called the Frankish Church because, from the time of Charlemagne, it was taken over by ethnic Franks with geopolitical designs on Byzantium, as Orthodox theologian John Romanides has convincingly argued.[3]

The Old Testament was especially influential in the Frankish spheres of power. Popular piety focused on the Gospel narratives (canonical gospels, but also apocryphal ones like the immensely popular Gospel of Nicodemus), the worship of Mary, and the ubiquitous cults of the saints, but kings and popes relied on a political theology drawn from the Tanakh.

The Hebrew Bible had been a major part of Frankish propaganda from the late sixth century. Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, the primary—and mostly legendary—source for Merovingian history, is framed on the providential ideology of the Books of Kings: the good kings are those who support the Catholic Church, and the bad kings those who resist the growth of its power. Under Louis the Pious, the rite of anointment of the Frankish kings was designed after the model of the prophet Samuel’s anointment of King David in 1 Samuel 16.

__________

[1] Adrien Bressolles, ‘La question juive au temps de Louis le Pieux,’ in Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France, tome 28, n°113, 1942. pp. 51-64, on https://www.persee.fr

[2] Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891 (archive.org), vol. III, ch. VI, p. 162.

[3] John Romanides, Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine: An Interplay Between Theology and Society, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981.

Categories
Laurent Guyénot Literature New Testament Richard Carrier Romulus St Paul

How Yahweh conquered Rome, 5

by Laurent Guyénot

 

The Jesus question: How fake is the Good News?

I regard Barbiero’s book as a fruitful attempt to solve the mystery of how the Jews created Christianity and made it the Roman religion. But it certainly doesn’t give the full story. Much happened in the next three centuries that needs to be clarified. One important context, which is seldom considered, is the ‘Crisis of the Third Century’ (235-284), during which ‘the Roman Empire nearly collapsed under the combined pressures of barbarian invasions and migrations into the Roman territory, civil wars, peasant rebellions, political instability’ (Wikipedia), but also cataclysmic events and widespread diseases such as the Plague of Cyprian (c. 249-262), that was said to kill up to 5,000 people a day in Rome.[22] In such a context, the apocalyptic flavor of early Christianity must have been a key factor of its success. Interestingly, the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, the latest included into the Christian canon, is considered by some scholars to be a Christianized edition of a Jewish apocalypse, because, except for its prologue and epilogue (from 4:1 to 22:15), it contains no recognizable Christian motif.[23]

There are also two important building blocks of Christianity that Barbiero’s focus on Roman Mithraism leaves out: the Gospels’ life of Jesus, and Paul’s mystical Christ. How did they originate, and how were they integrated? The connection between them is one of the most difficult problems concerning the birth of Christianity. For, as Earl Doherty writes in The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity begin with a mythical Christ? (1999), a book that has sent a shockwave in Jesus scholarship (here quoted from this 600-page pdf): ‘Not once does Paul or any other first century epistle writer identify their divine Christ Jesus with the recent historical man known from the Gospels. Nor do they attribute the ethical teachings they put forward to such a man.’ Christ is simply for Paul a celestial deity who has endured an ordeal of incarnation, death, burial and resurrection, and who communicates to his devotees through dreams, visions and prophecies. Such gnostic Christology has roots in mystery religions long predating Jesus. It is difficult to explain how a human Jesus could be transformed into such a divine Christ in a few decades, during the lifetime of those who knew him.

The first difficulty is that the vast majority of the earliest Christians were, of course, Jews. ‘God is One,’ says the most fundamental of Jewish theological tenets. Moreover, the Jewish mind had an obsession against associating anything human with God. He could not be represented by even the suggestion of a human image, and Jews in their thousands had bared their necks before Pilate’s swords simply to protest against the mounting of military standards bearing Caesar’s image within sight of the Temple. The idea that a man was a literal part of God would have been met by any Jew with horror and apoplexy.

And yet we are to believe that Jews were immediately led to elevate Jesus of Nazareth to divine levels unprecedented in the entire history of human religion. We are to believe not only that they identified a crucified criminal with the ancient God of Abraham, but that they went about the empire and practically overnight converted huge numbers of other Jews to the same outrageous—and thoroughly blasphemous—proposition. Within a handful of years of Jesus’ supposed death, we know of Christian communities in many major cities of the empire, all presumably having accepted that a man they had never met, crucified as a political rebel on a hill outside Jerusalem, had risen from the dead and was in fact the pre-existent Son of God, creator, sustainer, and redeemer of the world. Since many of the Christian communities Paul worked in existed before he got there, and since Paul’s letters do not support the picture Acts paints of intense missionary activity on the part of the Jerusalem group around Peter and James, history does not record who performed this astounding feat.[24]

The simplest way to overcome this difficulty is to assume that the transformation of the human Jesus into the cosmic Christ (or the other way round, as Doherty suggests) didn’t happen spontaneously, but was engineered by connecting several elements, with the aim of fabricating a Judeo-Hellenistic syncretic religion.

Paul’s letters were first collected in the first half of the second century by Marcion of Sinope who also included in his canon a short evangelion (he was the first to use the term), but rejected the Jewish Tanakh. Around 208, Tertullian, a Carthaginian of probable Jewish origin, complained that ‘the heretical tradition of Marcion filled the universe’ (Against Marcion v, 19). He also tells us that, during the time of Marcion, another Gnostic teacher named Valentinus almost became bishop of Rome. In the third century AD appeared the Persian Mani, who called himself ‘apostle of Jesus Christ,’ but rejected any Jewish influence. Manicheans became the label pinned by the Catholic Church on all the Gnostic movements that came from the East, such as the Paulicians from Anatolia in the eighth century, or the Bogomils from Bulgaria in the ninth century, the ancestors of the Cathars who were eradicated from the south of France in the early thirteenth century. All these movements, which can be seen as successive waves of the same movement, venerated Paul and rejected the Torah, whose god they regarded either as an evil demiurge, a deceptive demon, or a malicious fiction.

In the fourth century, Gnostic Christianity was still alive and flourishing. The monastic library of the Egyptian Brotherhood of Saint Pachomius, the first known Christian monastery, contained a great wealth of Gnostic literature (including the Gospel of Thomas), amid Platonic, Hermetic, and Zoroastrian books. As New Testament scholar Robert Price tells in his fascinating book Deconstructing Jesus (2000):

Apparently when the monks received the Easter Letter from Athanasius in 367 C.E., which contains the first known listing of the canonical twenty-seven New Testament books, warning the faithful to read no others, the brethren must have decided to hide their cherished ‘heretical’ gospels, lest they fall into the hands of the ecclesiastical book burners.[25]

All these codices were hidden in a graveyard at Nag Hammadi, where they were discovered in 1945, revolutionizing our image of early Christianity. Scholars have since started to question the traditional view of Gnostics as dissenters who broke away from the Orthodox Church; rather, the Gnostics who never ceased claiming that Roman Catholics were corrupting the Gospel under Jewish influence, may have been right all along.

As I started delving into these questions, I discovered that a new school of New Testament exegesis, pioneered by Earl Doherty’s Jesus Puzzle, claims that Christianity was born in myth, not in history. I had always assumed that Jesus’ biography was too historically plausible to be a fiction. In my thirties, I had become fascinated by the quest for the historical Jesus and wrote a book on the ‘legendary’ relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist, which argued that the Gospel writers falsified the genuine prophecies of John, and forged spurious praises of Jesus by John, and that much of the sayings attributed to Jesus (from the hypothetical Q document) were originally attributed to John.[26] Nevertheless, I didn’t doubt the historicity of Jesus. But my recent journey into the ‘Christ Myth’ theory has convinced me that the historical Jesus is more elusive than I thought. The Gospels, for one thing, are not as old as generally admitted (between the 70s and the 90s), for, as Doherty points out:

Only in Justin Martyr, writing in the 150s, do we find the first identifiable quotations from some of the Gospels, though he calls them simply ‘memoirs of the Apostles,’ with no names. And those quotations usually do not agree with the texts of the canonical versions we now have, showing that such documents were still undergoing evolution and revision.[27]

A late second-century date for the first narrative about Jesus is consistent with the hypothesis—that goes contrary to Barbiero’s theory—that Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews originally contained a reference to John the Baptist and one to James the Just, but no reference to Jesus, who was later inserted between the two so that John could be presented as Jesus’ precursor and James as his brother and heir. There is much evidence that James, like John the Baptist before him, was a famous figure in his own right. According to biblical scholar Robert Eisenman, author of James, the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls, James is identical to ‘the Teacher of Righteousness’ mentioned in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which have been dated too early. Strangely,

The person of James is almost diametrically opposed to the Jesus of Scripture and our ordinary understanding of him. Whereas the Jesus of Scripture is anti-nationalist, cosmopolitan, antinomian—that is, against the direct application of Jewish Law—and accepting foreigners and other persons of perceived impurities, the Historical James will turn out to be zealous for the Law, and rejecting of foreigners and polluted persons generally.

His death by stoning in 62 ‘was connected in popular imagination with the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE in a way that Jesus’ death some four decades before could not have been.’

Variant manuscripts of the works of Josephus, reported by Church fathers like Origen, Eusebius and Jerome, all of whom at one time or another spent time in Palestine, contain materials associating the fall of Jerusalem with the death of James—not with the death of Jesus. Their shrill protests, particularly Origen’s and Eusebius’, have probably not a little to do with the disappearance of this passage from all manuscripts of the Jewish War that have come down to us.[28]

Jesus scholars of the ‘mythicist’ school—by opposition to ‘historicist’—refrain from expressing their conclusion in conspiratorial terms. In his book On the Historicity of Jesus, Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt, Richard Carrier writes: ‘the Jesus we know originated as a mythical character,’ and only ‘later, this myth was mistaken for history (or deliberately repackaged that way).’ But I find ‘mistaken’ very unlikely, and ‘deliberately repackaged’ much more probable. Carrier actually suggests that the fundamental structure of the narrative was borrowed from a well-established Roman mythical pattern:

In Plutarch’s biography of Romulus, the founder of Rome, we are told he was the son of god, born of a lowly shepherd; then as a man he becomes beloved by the people, hailed as king, and killed by the conniving elite; then he rises from the dead, appears to a friend to tell the good news to his people, and ascends to heaven to rule from on high. Just like Jesus.

Plutarch also tells us about annual public ceremonies that were still being performed, which celebrated the day Romulus ascended to heaven. The sacred story told at this event went basically as follows: at the end of his life, amid rumors he was murdered by a conspiracy of the Senate (just as Jesus was ‘murdered’ by a conspiracy of the Jews—in fact by the Sanhedrin, the Jewish equivalent of the Senate), the sun went dark (just as it did when Jesus died), and Romulus’s body vanished (just as Jesus’ did). The people wanted to search for him but the Senate told them not to, ‘for he had risen to join the gods’ (much as a mysterious young man tells the women in Mark’s Gospel). Most went away happy, hoping for good things from their new god, but ‘some doubted’ (just as all later Gospels say of Jesus: Mt 28.17; Lk 24.11; Jn 20.24-25; even Mk 16.8 implies this). Soon after, Proculus, a close friend of Romulus, reported that he met Romulus ‘on the road’ between Rome and a nearby town and asked him, ‘Why have you abandoned us?’, to which Romulus replied that he had been a god all along but had come down to earth and become incarnate to establish a great kingdom, and now had to return to his home in heaven (pretty much as happens to Cleopas in Lk 24.13-32). Then Romulus told his friend to tell the Romans that if they are virtuous they will have all worldly power.

Livy’s account [History 1.16], just like Mark’s, emphasizes that ‘fear and bereavement’ kept the people ‘silent for a long time’, and only later did they proclaim Romulus ‘God, Son of God, King, and Father’, thus matching Mark’s ‘they said nothing to anyone’, yet obviously assuming that somehow word got out.

It certainly seems as if Mark is fashioning Jesus into the new Romulus, with a new, superior message, establishing a new, superior kingdom. This Romulan tale looks a lot like a skeletal model for the passion narrative: a great man, founder of a great kingdom, despite coming from lowly origins and of suspect parentage, is actually an incarnated son of god, but dies as a result of a conspiracy of the ruling council, then a darkness covers the land at his death and his body vanishes, at which those who followed him flee in fear (just like the Gospel women, Mk 16.8; and men, Mk 14.50-52), and like them, too, we look for his body but are told he is not here, he has risen; and some doubt, but then the risen god ‘appears’ to select followers to deliver his gospel.

There are many differences in the two stories, surely. But the similarities are too numerous to be a coincidence—and the differences are likely deliberate. For instance, Romulus’s material kingdom favoring the mighty is transformed into a spiritual one favoring the humble. It certainly looks like the Christian passion narrative is an intentional transvaluation of the Roman Empire’s ceremony of their own founding savior’s incarnation, death and resurrection. Other elements have been added to the Gospels—the story heavily Judaized, and many other symbols and motifs pulled in to transform it—and the narrative has been modified, in structure and content, to suit the Christians’ own moral and spiritual agenda. But the basic structure is not original.[29]

Other scholars have long identified strong parallels between the life of Jesus and the legendary lives of holy men such as Pythagoras or Appolonius of Tyana. In the later, for example, we find that Appolonius, after a lifetime of doing miracles, healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead, was delivered by his enemies to the Roman authorities. ‘Still,’ according to Bart D. Ehrman’s summary, ‘after he left this world, he returned to meet his followers in order to convince them that he was not really dead but lived on in the heavenly realm.’[30]

Robert Price has pointed another likely source for the Gospel narratives: Greek novels such as Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, Xenophon’s Ephesian Tale, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story, Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, The Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre, Iamblichus’ Babylonian Story, and Petronius’ Satyricon.

Three major plot devices recur like clockwork in the ancient novels, which were usually about the adventures of star-crossed lovers, somewhat like modern soap operas. First, the heroine, a princess, collapses into a coma and is taken for dead. Prematurely buried, she awakens later in the darkness of the tomb. Ironically, she is discovered in the nick of time by grave robbers who have broken into the opulent mausoleum, looking for rich funerary tokens […]. The crooks save her life but also kidnap her, since they can’t afford to leave a witness behind. When her fiancé or husband comes to the tomb to mourn, he is stunned to find the tomb empty and first guesses that his beloved has been taken up to heaven because the gods envied her beauty. In one tale, the man sees the shroud left behind, just as in John 20:6-7.

The second stock plot device is that the hero, finally realizing what has happened, goes in search of the heroine and eventually runs afoul of a governor or king who wants her and, to get him out of the way, has the hero crucified. Of course, the hero always manages to get a last-minute pardon, even once affixed to the cross, or he survives crucifixion by some stroke of luck. Sometimes the heroine, too, appears to have been killed but winds up alive after all.

Third, we eventually have a joyous reunion of the two lovers, each of whom has despaired of ever seeing the other again. They at first cannot believe they are not seeing a ghost come to comfort them. Finally, disbelieving for joy, they are convinced that their loved one has survived in the flesh.

As I have noted in my article ‘The Crucifixion of the Goddess,’ the love romance pattern is still apparent in the Gospel, where the risen Jesus appears first to his longtime follower Mary Magdalene, who, perhaps for that reason, was regarded as Jesus’ soul mate by many Gnostics.[31]

Price quotes the following passage from Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, where Chaereas discovers the empty tomb of his beloved:

When he reached the tomb, he found that the stones had been moved and the entrance was open. [Cf. John 20:1] He was astonished at the sight and overcome by fearful perplexity at what had happened. [Cf. Mark 16:5] Rumor—a swift messenger—told the Syracusans this amazing news. They all quickly crowded round the tomb, but no one dared go inside until Hermocrates gave an order to do so. [Cf. John 20:4-6] The man who went in reported the whole situation accurately. [Cf. John 19:35; 21:24] It seemed incredible that even the corpse was not lying there. Then Chaereas himself determined to go in, in his desire to see Callirhoe again even dead; but though he hunted through the tomb, he could find nothing. Many people could not believe it and went in after him. They were all seized by helplessness. One of those standing there said, ‘The funeral offerings have been carried off [Cartlidge’s translation reads: ‘The shroud has been stripped off’—cf. John 20:6-7]—it is tomb robbers who have done that; but what about the corpse—where is it?’ Many different suggestions circulated in the crowd. Chaereas looked towards the heavens, stretched up his arms, and cried: ‘Which of the gods is it, then, who has become my rival in love and carried off Callirhoe and is now keeping her with him…?’

Later on, Callirhoe, reflecting on her vicissitudes, says, ‘I have died and come to life again.’ Later still, she laments, ‘I have died and been buried; I have been stolen from my tomb.’ In the meantime, poor Chaereas is condemned to the cross, which he has to carry himself. But in the last minute, just before being nailed, his sentence is commuted, and he is taken down from the cross. Here, then, comments Price, is a hero who went to the cross for his beloved and returned alive. In the same story, a villain is likewise crucified, though since he is gaining his just deserts, he is not reprieved. This is Theron, the pirate who carried poor Callirhoe into slavery. He was crucified in front of Callirhoe’s tomb.

Did some Jews, by some concerted and persistent Hasbara, brainwash the Romans with an unbelievable Jewish tale plagiarized from Greek novels, Roman myths, and Mithraic cult? Surely there are other ways to look at Christianity than as a Jewish trick. But I find the hypothesis worth considering. I hear on this webzine [Editor's Note: The Unz Review] a lot of complaint against Jewish cultural colonization. I am merely suggesting that it didn’t start yesterday.

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[22] Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Princeton UP, 2017.

[23] See for example James Charlesworth, Jesus within Judaism, SPCK, 1989.

[24] Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle: Was There no Historical Jesus? on this 600-page pdf, pp. 33 and 16.

[25] Robert Price, Deconstructing Jesus, Prometheus Book, 2000, archive.org, pp. 44-45.

[26] Recent scholars arguing along those lines include Karl H. Kraeling, John the Baptist, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951; Charles H. H. Scobie, John the Baptist, Fortress Press, 1964; W. Barnes Tatum, John the Baptist and Jesus: A Report of the Jesus Seminar, Polebridge Press, 1994; Joan Taylor, The Immerser: John the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism, Wm B. Eerdmans, 1996; Robert L. Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet: A Socio-Historical Study, Sheffield Academic Press, 1991; Walter Wink, John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition, Cambridge UP, 1968.

[27] Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle, op. cit., p. 52 .

[28] Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Viking Penguin, 1996.

[29] Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt, Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014, p. 56.

[30] Bart D. Ehrman Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, HarperCollins, USA. 2012, p. 208, quoted from Wikipedia.

[31] Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979.

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

How Yahweh conquered Rome, 4

by Laurent Guyénot

 

The foundation of the Roman church under the Flavian dynasty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Bible Final solution Judaism Laurent Guyénot Philosophy of history Racial right Who We Are (book)

How Yahweh conquered Rome, 3

Jews in Rome before the Jewish Wars

Long before it was repackaged for the Gentiles, the Big Lie was a Jewish self-delusion. As I have detailed at the end of my long article ‘Zionism, Crypto-Judaism and the Biblical Hoax,’ in the sixth and the fifth century BC in Babylon, a priestly elite from Jerusalem decided that Yahweh, the national god of Israel, although apparently vanquished, was in fact the only real god, and, by way of consequence, the Creator of Heaven and Earth. A laughable claim, but when the Persians conquered Babylon, those Jews, who found themselves in a favourable position after helping the Persians, set out to pretend that their theoclastic monotheism, based on the exclusion of all other gods, was identical to the tolerant monotheism of the Persians; in other words, that their tribal god Yahweh was Ahura Mazda, the God of Heaven. I have shown that the deception is clearly apparent in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, where only Persians are portrayed as believing that Yahweh is ‘the God of Heaven,’ while for the Israelites he is just ‘the god of Israel.’

What the priestly Jews achieved in Babylon in the fifth century BC was a preliminary stage for what another generation of the same priestly cast would start planning in the first century AD in Rome, after having been brought there in similar conditions of captivity. While Yahweh seemed again vanquished, he set out to conquer his victor from within. The conspiracy of Babylon’s Jews to fool the Persians with their phony monotheism was the blueprint for the more sophisticated conspiracy of Rome’s Jews to fool the Romans with Christianity.

Between those two stages, Jews seem to have convinced a portion of the Roman aristocracy that they were the first true monotheists, the worshipers of the true God. For Greeks and Romans, the supreme Creator was a philosophical concept, while religious cults were polytheistic by definition. That’s why, around 315 BC, the Aristotelian Theophrastus of Eresus thought of the Jews as ‘philosophers by birth,’ although he was troubled by their primitive holocausts. Some Jewish writers (Aristobulus of Paneas, Artapanos of Alexandria, or even Philo of Alexandria) had even succeeded in bluffing some Greeks with the wild claim that Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato had been inspired by Moses.[8]

Jews are mentioned in Rome as early as the second century BC. It has been surmised that they were mostly converted Phoenicians. Martin Bernal defends that thesis in Jews and Phoenicians, with the argument that ‘there is no evidence of Jews in the West Mediterranean before the destruction of Carthage [146 BC],’ but ‘after that date, they were widely reported there,’ while Phoenicians faded from the pages of history.

Phoenicians and Jews’ languages and cultures were virtually identical.[9] Peter Myers brings additional light in his well-sourced article ‘Carthaginians, Phoenicians & Berbers became Jews’, arguing that, ‘After the destruction of Carthage by Rome, many Carthaginians and Phoenicians converted to Judaism, because Jerusalem was the only remaining centre of West Semitic civilization.’

The Encyclopedia Judaica’s article on Carthage, quoted by Myers, supports that hypothesis, adding that the Phoenicians, by converting to Judaism after their political decline, ‘preserved their Semitic identity and were not assimilated by the Roman-Hellenistic culture which they hated.’ This theory, which also explains the mysterious origin of the Sephardim in Spain—a Carthaginian colony—, is of obvious importance to comprehend the attitude of Jews towards the Roman Empire, destroyer of the Phoenician civilization.

(Left, Flavius Josephus highlights the ancient affinity between Phoenicians and Jews.) In 63 BC, Rome’s Jewish community was enlarged with thousands of captives brought back from Judea by Pompey, and progressively freed (Philo of Alexandria, Legatio ad Caium, 156). It is believed that Julius Cesar introduced legislation to guarantee their religious liberty, and that the law was confirmed by Augustus, who also exempted them from military service. Emperor Claudius (41-54 AD) is said to have expelled the Jews from Rome (Suetonius, Claudius xv, 4; Acts 18:2), or at least forbidden them to congregate (Cassius Dio lx, 6). But they seem to have known favourable times under Nero (54-68), whose wife Poppaea Sabina is regarded as an Esther-type secret Jewess in Jewish tradition, because Jewish historian Flavius Josephus calls her ‘a God-worshipper’ (Antiquities of the Jews, xx, 195) and mentions her support for the release of Jewish priests prosecuted in Rome (Vita 16).[10]
 

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Editor’s note: When Greg Johnson criticised William Pierce’s Who We Are years ago, he argued that Pierce, with his suggestion that the ancient Aryans should have exterminated the non-Aryans, was saying something monstrous. Johnson even called ‘whites’ those mudblood Cauacsoids whom we now assume had Semitic, though not Jewish, blood.

White nationalism would be greatly enriched by admitting that the Judean war against Rome has been in reality a psychological war of the Semites (including non-Jews, such as the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians who survived the Third Punic War) against the Aryans. It is a great pathology that infects even white nationalism not want to see the macro-dynamics of the clash between Semites and Aryans that has been going on for millennia.

I blame Christian ethics for that. (Recall, for example, that a dozen years ago Johnson delivered homilies at his church in San Francisco. He has since abandoned Christianity and is now a pious neochristian—just read his The White Nationalist Manifesto.) If Christian ethics is to blame, for transvaluing Semitic values Pierce’s book should be the textbook of American racialists. But I understand that the copyright holders, the National Alliance, haven’t yet published it.

Or am I wrong?

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[8] Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 48-49, 66.

[9] Martin Bernal, Geography of a Life, chap. 45, ‘Jews and Phoenicians,’ pp. 386-394.

[10] Nahum Goldmann, Le Paradoxe juif. Conversations en français avec Léon Abramowicz, Stock, 1976, p. 36; Heinrich Graetz, Histoire des Juifs, A. Lévy, 1882 (on fr.wikisource.org), tome I, p. 413-428.