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Category: Nero

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Ancient Rome Catholic Church Josephus Judaism Judea v. Rome Nero New Testament

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
Ancient Rome Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Nero Tacitus

Christianity’s Criminal History, 94

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

 
Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (1 of 7)

The Christians first falsified, from the 2nd century, the emperor’s edicts of tolerance: for example that of Antoninus Pius (about 180), or a Marcus Aurelius writing to the Senate a letter in which the emperor testifies about the salvation of the Roman troops from thirst thanks to the Christians.

They also falsified an epistle of the Tiberian proconsul to Trajan with the supposed imperial order to end the bloody persecution.

An edict of Nerva was falsified which revokes the harsh measures of Domitian against the apostle John. Indeed, Domitian himself, informs the historian of the Church Eusebius—relying on the Eastern Christian (((Hegesippus)))[1], the author of the five books of Hypomnemata (Memories)—, after having imprisoned ‘the relatives of the Lord’ as the successors of David, he released them and ordered to ‘cease the persecution of the Church’.

If the Christians began falsifying documents so that the emperor exonerated them, when the persecutions were a thing of the past, they began to persecute the adherents of classical culture. They ended up falsifying documents to accuse the Hellene sovereigns; they falsified, in series, a large number of anti-Christian edicts and letters of the sovereigns and consuls (especially by the end of the 3rd century): supposed records of non-historical martyrdoms, and also an infinity of martyrdoms. The Christians who appear as witnesses to these false biographies are countless.

Already the first of the presumed persecutions under Nero—which, for two millennia, made this emperor a monster without equal for Christians—was not a persecution against Christians but a process for arson. Even historians Tacitus and Suetonius, hostile to Nero, judged the process as just and reasonable. ‘Christianity was not discussed’, writes the evangelical theologian Carl Schneider. Also, the history of Christianity of the Catholic theologian Michel Clévenot establishes ‘that neither Nero, nor the police nor the Romans must have known that they were Christians; they were still moving too far in the dark and their number was still too small for their executions to have been a matter of public interest’.

But since the logic of Catholic theologians is rarely brilliant, Clévenot finishes his chapter on the fire of Rome in July of the year 64, not without having first recorded the ‘surprisingly’ good memory about Emperor Nero among the Romans. Among the Christians, he is still considered a bloodthirsty madman. And according to Clévenot this would be ‘perhaps (!) the best demonstration that Christians were really the victims of the horrible massacre of July 64’.

It is significant that religious motives did not play any role in the process, or at most a very accessory one. Significantly, Nero confined himself to the Christians of Rome. Although the acts were later falsified to locate martyrs elsewhere in Italy and in Gaul, according to the Catholic theologian Ehrhard: ‘All these acts of martyrdom have no historical value’.

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[1] Editor’s note: The triple parentheses are mine. Hegesippus, a chronicler of the early Church, was a Jewish convert. One wonders how many of the Christians that Deschner has been mentioning also had Jewish ancestry.

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Ancient Rome Christendom Eduardo Velasco Egalitarianism Jerusalem Judea v. Rome Nero Slavery

Apocalypse for whites • XXIX

by Evropa Soberana

 
Christianity takes hold outside Judea
As soon as the Jews learn about the events in Rome with the Christians, they begin to plan an uprising and, perfectly coordinated, rebel throughout the Roman Empire. Thus, in the year 66, in a rapid and well-planned coup d’état, they put to the knife all the non-Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem except the slaves. Nero uses his legions to crush the revolt harshly in the rest of the Empire, but in their capital the Jews become strong. In the year 68, just as General Vespasian left to take Jerusalem, Nero is mysteriously murdered.
Vespasian, then, becomes emperor and sends his son Titus to the front of the X Legio, with the aim of crushing the Jews. The year 70 Rome triumphs; Jerusalem is devastated and sacked by the Roman legionaries and it is said that in the process a million Jews died under Roman arms (only in Jerusalem the town had accumulated, during the siege, three million Jews). This year 70, fateful, traumatizing, outrageous and key for Jewry, sees the enslavement and dispersion of Jews throughout the Mediterranean (Diaspora), greatly enhancing the growth of Christianity.
There are successive emperors (Trajan, Hadrian) very aware of the Jewish problem, who do not pay much attention to Christians, mainly because they are too busy with the Judaic puzzle in ‘holy land’, repressing the Jews again and again, without destroying them completely.
In this time, the new religion grows little by little, gaining followers among the enslaved masses thanks to its egalitarian ideology and also in high positions of the administration: among an increasingly decadent and materialist bureaucracy. Christianity glorified misfortune instead of glorifying the struggle against it; considered suffering as a merit that dignifies itself and proclaimed that Paradise awaits anyone who behaves well. (Remember how the pagans taught that only fighters entered the Valhalla.)
It is the religion of the slaves, and they willingly subscribe to it. Early Christianity played a very similar role to that of the later Freemasonry: it was a Jewish strategy dressed up using weak and ambitious characters, fascinating them with a sinister ritualism. The result was like a communism for the Roman Empire, even favouring the ‘emancipation’ and independence of women from their husbands by capturing them with a strange and novel Christian liturgy, and urging them to donate their own money to the cause (a scam quite similar in its essence to the current New Age cults).

This map in Spanish shows the extension of Christianity around the year 100. The Roman Empire is represented in a lighter shade than the barbarian territories. Note that the areas of Christian preaching
coincide exactly with the densest Jewish settlement areas.

It is at the beginning of the second century that the figure of Christian fat cats called ‘bishops’ begins to take on importance. Saint Ignatius of Antioch wrote in the year 107, in the most corny way: ‘It is obvious that we must look to a bishop like the Lord in person. His clerics are in harmony with their bishop like the strings of a harp, and the result is a hymn of praise to Jesus Christ of minds that feel in unison’. St. Ignatius is captured by the Roman authorities, and thrown to the lions in 107. (It is interesting to pay attention to the names of the preachers, since they always come from eastern mestizo and Judaized areas; in this case, Syria.)
Around the year 150, the Greek Marcion tries to form a kind of ‘de-Judaised’ purification in Christianity, rejecting the Old Testament; giving pre-eminent importance to the Gospel of St. Luke and adopting a Gnostic worldview with Orphic and Manichean airs. This is the first attempt of reform or Europeanization of Christianity: trying to deprive it from its obvious Jewish roots.[1] Marcion’s followers, the Marcionites, who professed a Gnostic creed, are classified as heretics by mainstream Christianity.

This map shows the general expansion of Christianity in 185. Note the great difference with respect to the previous map and note also that the area most influenced by Christianity is still the Eastern
Mediterranean: a highly Semitic zone.

Sometime after the year 200, in view of the incorporation into Christianity of great new masses that did not speak Greek but Latin, a Latin translation of the Gospels began to circulate in most western Christian centres.
The emperor Diocletian (reigned 284-305) divided the Empire into two halves to make it more governable. He keeps the eastern part and hands over the western part to Maximian, a former comrade in arms. He establishes a rigid bureaucracy, and these measures smell like irremediable decadence. Despite this, Diocletian is a just and realistic veteran. He allows its Christian legionaries to be absent from pagan ceremonies, provided they maintain their military discipline.
But this was precisely the trickiest issue, where the bishops insolently defy the authority of the emperor. Diocletian, however, is benevolent and only one Christian pacifist is executed. However, he now insists that Christians participate in state ceremonies of a religious nature, and the Christian response to this decision is growing pride and arrogance, with numerous revolts and provocations.
But even at this point, Diocletian renounces to apply the death penalty, contenting himself with making slaves of the rebels that he captured. The answer to this are more riots and a fire in the imperial palace itself, and provocations and Christian insolence occur throughout the Empire. But the most Diocletian does is to execute nine rebellious bishops and eighty rebels in Palestine, the area most troubled by Christian rebellions.
One of these rebels was a spawn named St. Procopius of Scythopolis. To get an idea of which kind of creature Procopius was, let’s see the words of a contemporary, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea: ‘He had tamed his body until turning it, so to speak, into a corpse; but the strength that his soul found in the word of God gave strength to his body… He only studied the word of God and had little knowledge of the profane sciences’. That is to say, this sub-man was a sick body and a crushed and resentful spirit, moved away from all the natural goods of the world, and who only knows the Bible and the speeches of the bishops.
In the beginning Christianity was nourished of similar men: Jewish practitioners of an asceticism bordering on sadomasochism who turned their bodies into a wreck, and their spirits into tyrannical and resentful shepherds.
Despite the softness of these persecutions, Diocletian goes down in history as a monster thirsting for Christian blood (history is written by the victors). The certain thing is that, after emperor Diocletian’s reign, Rome entered frank decay.
 
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[1] Note of the Editor: In our times, adepts of Christian Identity also desperately try to square the circle by claiming that Aryans descend from the biblical characters.

Categories
Ancient Rome Eduardo Velasco Josephus Judea v. Rome Nero St Paul Tacitus

Apocalypse for whites • XXVIII

by Evropa Soberana

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

Categories
Civil war Eduardo Velasco Jerusalem Judea v. Rome Nero Tacitus

Apocalypse for whites • XVI

by Evropa Soberana

‘The East wants to rebel and Judas
wants to take over world dominion’.

—Tacitus

 
First Judeo-Roman war: The Great Jewish revolt (66-73 CE)
In the year 66, Florus arrived in Jerusalem, where he demanded a tribute of seventeen talents from the temple treasury. Eleazar ben Hanania, the son of the high priest, reacted by stopping the prayers and sacrifices in honour of the emperor of Rome, and ordered to attack the Roman garrison. The garrison responded by killing around 3,600 Jews, looting the market, entering homes, arresting many of the Jewish leaders, whipping them in public and make them crucified. The next day, however, the concentration of rebellious Jews had increased. A civil war was about to explode.
On August 8, 66 CE the Zealots and Sicarii struck a quick blow in Jerusalem: they murdered the Roman detachment and put all the Greeks to the sword. In a synchronized way, the Jews from all provinces and Roman colonies rose up. In Jerusalem a council was formed that sent sixty emissaries throughout the Empire with the goal to trigger the various Jewish quarters. Each one of these emissaries declared himself the Messiah and proclaimed the beginning of a sort of ‘new order’. Herod Agrippa, the ethnarch of Judea, in view of the fact that the popular masses were in full boiling, chose to take his suitcases and leave the province for a good season.
The outcome was the return of Jewish uprisings and, in reaction, more anti-Jewish pogroms in Caesarea, Damascus and Alexandria, not counting the intervention of the Roman legions, which harshly repressed the Jewish quarters of the aforementioned cities and also in Ashkelon, Hippos, Tire and Ptolemaida. The more moderate and sensible Jewish sectors advised to immediately reach an agreement with Rome, but the criterion that was going to prevail among Jewry was that of the Sicarii and Zealots who, fanatically, vowed to fight to the death, entrenching themselves in the impregnable fortresses of Jerusalem, fortifying the walls of the city and mobilizing the entire population.
Under the command of Nero, Cestius Gallus, the Roman legate in Syria, concentrated troops in Acre (a square that would be many centuries later an important strategic centre of the European Crusaders) with the aim of marching to Jerusalem, devastate the Jewish populations found on his way and crush the revolt. Gallus took the city of Jaffa, killing 8,400 Jews. Later the refugees would regroup in the city and devote themselves to banditry and piracy, attracting a second Roman intervention, in which the city would be definitely razed and another 2,400 Jews killed.
After encountering the solid fortifications of Jerusalem, Gallus’ forces withdrew, and were intercepted by the Jewish fanatics in an ambush directed by elements from the Zealots and the Sicarii, who massacred 6,000 Romans in the same place in which the Maccabees had defeated the Macedonians centuries before. The Jews, excited by the symbolic repetition of the event, formed a government led by the most fundamentalist elements, and minted coins with the inscription ‘Zion’s freedom’.
This tragic disaster undoubtedly moved the Roman authorities to take more seriously the rebellion’s operations. Nero put General Vespasian in charge of the repression. With four legions—the Legio V Macedonica, the Legio X Fretensis , the Legio XII Fulminata and the Legio XV Apollinaris, a total of 70,000 soldiers, that is to say, a formidable force, although it faced an enemy far superior in number—Vespasian quelled the Jewish revolt in the north of the province, re-conquering Galilee in the year 67, capturing there Josephus, the famous historian and Samaria and Idumea in 68.
The Jewish leaders John of Giscala (Zealot) and Simon bar Giora (Sicarii) fled to the fortified Jerusalem.

Categories
Civil war Eduardo Velasco Ethnic cleansing Josephus Judea v. Rome Nero

Apocalypse for whites • XV

by Evropa Soberana

Chapter 2

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

Nero Claudius Caesar
Augustus Germanicus

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

Categories
Ancient Rome Claudius Eduardo Velasco Judea v. Rome Nero St Paul

Apocalypse for whites • XIV

by Evropa Soberana

 
Claudius and Nero
In the year 49, Claudius, who was fed up with the conflict of the Alexandrian Jewish lobby wrote:

Wherefore, once again I conjure you that, on the one hand, the Alexandrians show themselves forbearing and kindly towards the Jews who for many years have dwelt in the same city, and dishonour none of the rites observed by them in the worship of their god, but allow them to observe their customs as in the time of the Deified Augustus, which customs I also, after hearing both sides, have sanctioned.
(Bust of Emperor Claudius.) And on the other hand, I explicitly order the Jews not to agitate for more privileges than they formerly possessed, and not in the future to send out a separate embassy as though they lived in a separate city (a thing unprecedented), and not to force their way into gymnasiarchic or cosmetic games, while enjoying their own privileges and sharing a great abundance of advantages in a city not their own, and not to bring in or admit Jews who come down the river from Egypt or from Syria, a proceeding which will compel me to conceive serious suspicions.
Otherwise I will by all means take vengeance on them as fomenters of which is a general plague infecting the whole world.

Claudius expelled all Jews from Rome in the year 50 (apparently, according to Suetonius, ‘they acted without ceasing at the instigation of Chrestus’) and, as Pontifex Maximus, tried to stop the expansion of Eastern cults, including Christianity and Judaism, into the Empire.
Year 50. Judea is already part of the Roman Empire, but its Romanisation will never materialise; on the contrary, the Judaisation of Rome itself will be achieved.
Of Nero we will talk in the article on Christianity. His wife, an idle harlot named Poppaea Sabina, was openly sympathetic to Jews and Christians, and conspired behind the emperor’s back to favour them. Thus, for example, through Poppaea Sabina, Flavius Josephus himself was freed, who had been sent to Rome in order to negotiate better conditions for his people.
The Roman minister Sextus Afranius Burrus was assassinated in the year 62 by orders of Poppaea Sabina, or perhaps by Jews, after he denied them Roman citizenship in Greece. The emperor, tired of having the conspiracy near him, had his wife executed. The official version is that he kicked her on the belly while she was pregnant. The problem is that those who divulged this version had a strong enmity with the emperor, so it should be taken with caution.
This was followed by a bloodthirsty Roman repression against Jews and Christians, in which Jewish ‘revolutionaries’ like Saint Paul and Saint Peter fell. This execution of key characters in the Jewish strategic movement to infect the Roman foundations, along with some other factors, would be the trigger for a massive Jewish revolt, which we will deal with in the next article.

Categories
Christendom Eduardo Velasco Jerusalem Jesus Judaism Judea v. Rome Nero New Testament St Paul Tacitus

Apocalypse for whites • XII

by Evropa Soberana [1]

 

‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel’.

—Matthew, 2:6

‘…which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel’.

—Luke 2: 31

‘You worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews’.

— John 4:22

‘Christus, from whom the name [Christians] had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular’.

—Tacitus, Annals, 15: 44, about the persecution decreed by Nero.

 
Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm
Yosef (a.k.a. Joseph), Jesus’ father, was a Jew from the House of David. But since Yosef supposedly did not intervene in the Virgin’s pregnancy, we will go on to examine the lineage of Miriam (a.k.a. Mary).
Luke the Evangelist was an individual from Antioch, in present-day Turkey. According to him, this woman was from the family of David and the tribe of Judah, and the angel who appeared to her predicted that a son would be born to whom Jehovah ‘will give him the throne of David, his father, and he will reign in the house of Jacob’.
According to the gospel story, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. In the Gospel of Matthew (1: 1) he is associated with Abraham and David, and in that same gospel (21: 9) it is described how the Jewish crowds in Jerusalem acclaim Jesus by shouting ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ without mentioning, of course, the ‘wizards of the East’ who visited the Messiah by following a star and asking ‘Where is the king of the Jews who was born?’ (Matthew, 2: 1-2).
Jesus, who never intended to found a new religion but to preserve pure the Orthodox Judaism made it clear, ‘I have not come to repeal the Law [of Moses, the Torah] but to fulfil it’ and, enraged to see that the Jerusalem temple was being desecrated by merchants, he threw them with blows. This Jewish agitator, like an Ayatollah, did not hesitate to face—with the authority given to him by being called rabbi—the other Jewish factions of his time, especially the Sadducees.[2]
Jesus surrounded himself with a circle of disciples among whom we could highlight the mentioned Simon the Zealot, Bartholomew (of whom Jesus himself says in the Gospel of John, where he is called Nathanael, ‘here is a true Israelite’); Judas Iscariot (who betrayed him to the Sadducees for money), Peter, John and Matthew.[3] Although there is not much information about the rest of the Apostles, it is necessary to remember that, until the trip of Paul (also Jewish) to Damascus after the death of Jesus, in order to be a Christian it was essential to be a circumcised, orthodox and observant Jew.
That the doctrine of Jesus was addressed to the Jews is evident in Matt. 10:6, when he says to the twelve apostles: ‘Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel’. The phrase implies to rescue those Jews who have strayed from the Law of Moses. This was because ‘if you believed in Moses you would believe me’ (John, 5:46).
In the year 26, Tiberius, who had expelled the Jews from Rome seven years before in times when the zeitgeist was fully anti-Semitic, appointed Pontius Pilate as a procurator of Judea, a Spaniard born in Tarragona or Astorga: the only decent character of the New Testament according to Nietzsche.
After the incident with the banners of Pompey, the Jews had obtained from previous emperors the promise not to enter Jerusalem with the displayed banners, but Pilate enters parading in the city, showing high the standards with the image of the emperor. This, the golden shields placed in the residence of the governor, and the use of the money of the temple to construct an aqueduct for Jerusalem (that transported water from a distance of 40 km), provoked an angry Jewish reaction. To suppress the insurrection, Pilate infiltrated the soldiers among the crowds and, when he visited the city, gave a signal for the infiltrated legionaries to take out the swords and start a carnage.
In the year 33, after various skirmishes of the Jesus gang with rival factions—particularly with the Sadducees, who at that time held religious power and saw with discomfort how a new vigorous faction arose—, Pontius Pilate orders the punishment of Jesus, at the request of the Sadducees. Jesus is scourged and the Roman legionaries, who must have had a somewhat macabre sense of humour and who knew that Yeshua proclaimed himself Messiah, put a crown of thorns and a reed in his right hand, and shout at him with sarcasm ‘Hail, king of the Jews!’ (Matthew 27: 26-31 and Mark 15: 15-20). When they crucified him they placed the inscription I.N.R.I. at the top of the cross: IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM (Jesus Nazarene King of the Jews).
Yeshua of Nazareth, known to posterity as Jesus, was one of many Jewish agitators who were in Judea during the turbulent Roman occupation. Executed around the year 33 during the reign of Tiberius, his figure would be taken by Saul of Tarsus (a.k.a. Paul): a Jewish Pharisee marvelled at the power of subversion that enclosed the sect founded by Jesus.
Jesus was, then, one of many Jewish preachers who, before him and after him, proclaimed themselves Messiah. Only that, in his case, Saul of Tarsus (now Turkey) would soon call him, instead of masiah, Christus: the Greek equivalent of ‘Messiah’. After changing his name to Paul he preached the figure of ‘Christ’, indissolubly linked to the rebellion against Rome, throughout the empire, deciding that Christianity should be spread out of its narrow Jewish circle and introduced in Rome.
 
________________
[1] Slightly modified by the Editor of this site.
[2] Note of the Ed.: The split of early Christianity and Judaism took place during the first century CE. Traditional Christian doctrine aside, it is more likely that the point of conflict between Jesus and the religious authorities was political rather than religious. It had its roots right after the driving of the traders from the Temple of Jerusalem. Jesus thus came into direct conflict with the High Priest, a Sadducee: the one who officiated the Temple.
The texts known as the ‘New Testament’, written not in Jesus’ Aramaic but in Greek, are Christian propaganda when, later, the early church entered in conflict with the Pharisees. (At the time that the gospels were edited the Sadducees had lost their leadership and the Pharisees were the sole repository of religious authority.) Although the evangelists specifically mention the Pharisees as those who Jesus scolds—even the author of this essay (which is why I modified his text)—, modern scholars postulate that the fight of the historical Jesus was with the Sadducee faction of Judaism: the bourgoise priesthood that represented the Temple, the collaborators with Rome.
On the other hand Talmudic Judaism, as known today, is the offshoot of Pharisee theology with Jews already in the Diaspora.
No Sadducee documents survived Titus’ conquest of Jerusalem. It is likely that, by editorial intervention, the name ‘Pharisees’ was substituted for the original ‘Sadducees’ in several gospel verses, in times that early Christians clashed with the Pharisees. In future instalments of the Kriminalgeschichte series (Volume III) we will see the extent of the tampering of gospel verses by the early Church.
[3] Note of the Ed.: Not to be confused with Matthew the Evangelist, a Greek-speaking author who never met Jesus in the flesh.

Categories
Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Nero

Kriminalgeschichte, 21

Editor’s note: Volume 3 of Deschner’s opus deals with forgery and brainwashing in the Ancient Church.
But since Volume 1 we get a taste of the flavour of how the early Christians grossly exaggerated the ‘gentile’ sins (see my hatnote on the previous instalment of this series), just as presently the fate of the Jews in World War II has been grossly exaggerated.
In the hostile takeover of Aryan civilisation, be the Ancient World or today, the art of making whitey feel guilty has been a formidable weapon. No wonder why Hitler called Christianity ‘the Bolshevism of the Ancient World’.
 

A Christian Dirce, by Henryk Siemiradzki. A Christian woman is martyred under Nero in this re-enactment of the myth of Dirce.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Below, abridged translation from the first volume of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(Criminal History of Christianity)

 
The persecutions against Christians in the mirror of ecclesiastical historiography
The accusations against the pagans began, precisely because of these persecutions, presented with enormous exaggeration. And in that vein we have followed well into the 20th century, when it is still written that during the 1st century Christianity was ‘bathed in its own blood’, ‘innumerable hosts of heroic characters’ are weighed, and ‘the second century is recalled by the procession of those bearing on the forehead the bloody mark of martyrdom’ (Daniel Rops); although, at times, it must be confessed that ‘they were not millions’ (Ziegler).
The most serious and undisputed investigations estimate the number of Christian victims sometimes at 3,000, others at 1,500 for the total of three centuries of persecution. A Christian as worthy of respect as Origen, who died in 254 and whose father was a martyr, and who suffered torture himself, says that the number of witnesses of blood of Christianity was ‘small and easily re-countable’.
In effect, it happens that most of the ‘martyrs’ acts are forgeries, that many pagan emperors never persecuted Christianity, and that the State did not meddle with Christians because of their religion. In fact, the civil service of the old regime treated them with enough tolerance. They granted them deferrals, they ignored the edicts; tolerated deceptions, set them free, or taught them the legal arguments with which they could free themselves from persecution without abjuring their faith. Those who denounced themselves were sent home, and even often they indifferently endured the provocations.
In the first half of the 4th century, however, Bishop Eusebius, ‘father of ecclesial historiography’, is inexhaustible in inventing stories about the wicked pagans, the terrible persecutors of Christianity. To this theme he devotes the whole eighth book of his Ecclesiastical History, from which surely one can affirm what a scholar of the 9th and 10th volumes of this work said (which is almost the only available source on the history of the Church in the antiquity): ‘Emphasis, periphrasis, omissions, half truths, and even falsification of the originals replace the scientific interpretation of reliable documents’ (Morreau).
We see there how, again and again, the wicked pagans—actually our bishop Eusebius—torture Christians with lashes, ‘those really admirable fighters’; they rip their flesh out, break their legs, cut their noses, ears, hands and other members. Eusebius throws vinegar and salt in the wounds, heaves sharpened reeds under the nails, burns backs with molten lead, fries the martyrs in grills ‘to prolong the torment’. In all these situations and many more, the victims retain their integrity, even their good humour: ‘They sang praises to the God of heaven and gave thanks to their torturers, to the last breath.’
Other believers, Eusebius informs us, were drowned in the sea ‘by order of the servants of the devil’, or crucified, or beheaded ‘sometimes in number of up to a hundred men, young children [!] and women in a single day… The executioner’s sword mended, and the tired executioners were forced to relieve themselves’.
Others were thrown ‘at the anthropophagous beasts’, to be devoured by wild boars, bears, panthers. ‘We have been eyewitnesses [!] and we have seen how, by the divine grace of our Redeemer Jesus Christ, of whom they bear witness, when the beast was ready to leap it receded again and again, as repulsed by a supernatural force’.
The bishop tells of the Christians (five in all) who were to be ‘shattered by an enraged bull’: ‘As much as he dug with its hooves and delivered goring from one side to the other, spurred by red irons, snorting with rage, the Divine Providence did not allow any harm on them’.
Christian historiography!
In one passage, Eusebius mentions ‘a whole village of Phrygia inhabited by Christians’, whose inhabitants, ‘including women and children’, were burned alive… but unfortunately he forgot to tell us the name of the village in question.
It is a habitual feature of Eusebius to get by without the details despite having been, as he says, an eyewitness. He prefers to speak of ‘innumerable legions’, of ‘great masses’ exterminated partly by the sword, sometimes by fire, ‘countless men and women and children’ who died ‘in various ways by the doctrine of our Redeemer’. ‘Their display of heroism defy description’.
During the persecution of 177 in Gaul under Marcus Aurelius (161-180), the philosopher-emperor whose Meditations Frederick II of Prussia admired, Eusebius tells us that there were ‘tens of thousands of martyrs’. However, the martyrology of the Gallic persecution under Marcus Aurelius totals… 48 victims. Of all these, the so-quoted Lexikonfür Theologie und Kirche only recounts eight, ‘St Blandina with Bishop Photinus and six of his followers’. On the contrary, the number of pagan victims in Gaul was, in later centuries, ‘far superior’ (C. Schneider).
On the persecution by Diocletian, the bloodiest (against the express will of this remarkable emperor), Eusebius could not regret—or perhaps it would be better to say to celebrate, since the leaders of the Church always considered providential the persecutions, and popes of our 20th century have affirmed it—that the victims would have counted by tens of thousands, since many eyewitnesses still lived. Persecutions are a stimulus. They foster the unity of the persecuted and are the best propaganda imaginable of all time. Eusebius, author of a chronicle ‘on the martyrs of Palestine’ wrote in his Ecclesiastical History: ‘We know the names of those who stood out in Palestine’ and cites a total of 91 martyrs, and not ‘tens of thousands’.
In 1954, De Ste Croix reviewed for the Harvard Theological Review the figures of the ‘father of Christian historiography’ and only sixteen Palestinian martyrs were found, and that for the worst of the persecutions, which lasted there ten years, bringing the average not even two victims a year. In spite of all this, one of Eusebius’s modern panegyrists rejects the conclusion that Eusebius lacked ‘scientific scrupulousness’ (Wallace-Hadrill).

Categories
Ancient Rome Arthur Schopenhauer Augustus Claudius Hadrian Judaism Julius Caesar Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Nero Old Testament

Kriminalgeschichte, 9

Below, a translated passage from the first volume of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”)

 
The Jewish religion, tolerated by the pagan state

But even the masters of Rome were tolerant of the Jews (in whom they found peasants, artisans, workers—at that time they were not yet characterised as merchants), and in some cases showed some sympathy for them. They enjoyed some special privileges, especially in the East, such as Sabbath observance. They had their own jurisdiction and were not obliged to submit to Roman jurisdiction.

Caesar supported them in many ways. Augustus generously endowed the Temple of Jerusalem. According to the terms of the imperial donation, a bull and two lambs were sacrificed there every day “to the highest God.” Agrippa, an intimate friend of Augustus, also favoured the Jews.

On the other hand, Emperor Caligula (37-41)—somewhat eccentric and aspiring to have his own temple, appeared in public clothed with the attributes of various divinities, even female, and lived married to his sister Drusilla and intended that an image of him be erected even in the Holy of Holies of Jerusalem—expelled the Jews of the main cities of Parthia, where they were especially numerous.

But even the emperor Claudius, before persecuting the Jews of Rome, had issued a decree in their favour, in the year 42, granting them a special jurisdiction valid throughout the empire, but at the same time warned them not to abuse imperial magnanimity and that they did not despise the customs of other peoples. Nero’s wife, Poppaea Sabina, was a great protector of Judaism. In general terms, the Roman administration was always ready “to accommodate as much as possible, and even more, with all the demands of the Jews, justified or not” (Mommsen).

Not even after the conquest of Jerusalem did the emperors harass the Jewish faith, which for them was religio licita. Vespasian and his successors corroborated the privileges already granted by Caesar and Augustus. Jews could marry, sign contracts, acquire property, hold public office, possess slaves, and many other things, like any Roman citizen. Jewish communities could manage their own goods and had their own, albeit limited, jurisdiction.

Even after Bar Kokhba’s insurrection, Emperor Hadrian and his successors consented to the public celebration of Jewish cults, and granted the dispensation of common obligations which were incompatible with their religion. Even in the provinces there were almost no restrictions against them; they built synagogues, appointed their trustees, and were exempt from military service in accordance with their beliefs.

And all this because, just as today the primitive peoples do not know, in their beliefs, the claim of exclusiveness of a “superior being,” also the old Hellenism was characteristically tolerant. In polytheism, no deity can claim the exclusive. The native cults amalgamated without problems with the imported ones. In the ancient pantheon prevailed a kind of collegiality or friendly companionship; the faithful could pray to the god they preferred, believed to recognize their own gods under the appearances of others, and certainly did not bother trying to “convert” anyone. Schopenhauer says that intolerance is an essential characteristic of monotheism, that only the one God is

by its nature, a jealous god, that does not want to consent the subsistence of any other. On the other hand, the gods of polytheism are by nature tolerant; Live and let live, and in principle tolerate their colleagues, the gods of the same religion. Later on, that tolerance extends equally to foreign deities.

To the pagans, the belief in a unique God seems to them a poverty of concepts; uniformity, un-sacralisation of the universe, atheism. Nothing more foreign to their way of thinking than the idea that the foreigners’ gods are idols. Nothing sounds to them as incomprehensible as the “thou shalt have no other God but Me” of the Jews; “I am the Lord,” “I am the Lord your God,” an expression that is repeated up to sixteen times in the 19th chapter of Leviticus, to give but one example and not the longest. Paganism knows nothing comparable to the covenant of blood between Yahweh and his “chosen people.” And nothing excited more the antipathy against the Jews than their behaviour on account of their beliefs.