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Category: New Testament

Categories
New Testament Racial right Richard Carrier

Medieval racists

This interview uploaded yesterday is fascinating, and the very fact that none of the mainstream forums of the racial right touch on the subject of textual criticism of the New Testament is symptomatic of a wilful ignorance that is deeply rooted in the movement.

Richard Miller makes a point that is obvious to me. Serious New Testament scholarship is divided into two camps: (1) those who believe that most of the NT narrative is fictional but that there is a residue that could be historical, and (2) those who maintain that it was all literary fiction from the beginning. Miller belongs to the first group and another Richard, Richard Carrier, to the second group. But the dialogue between these two camps is quite cordial, academic and respectful.

On the other hand, there are the pseudo-scholars, the fundamentalist Christians who study the NT but begin their ‘research’ with pre-established conclusions (Jesus was resurrected from the dead, etc.). Their scholarship reminds me of the medieval university in Paris where philosophy was allowed to exist but only as a handmaiden of theology. Miller has said that serious NT scholars no longer pay attention to this apologetic posturing.

The racial right, I said, as well as fundamentalists ignore serious NT scholarship: scholarship that doesn’t start from the catechism we were taught as children but uses the methodologies of contemporary historiography to evaluate New Testament texts. This became clear the last time Kevin MacDonald published an article by a fundamentalist Christian in The Occidental Observer, as I told the author himself.

Taking into account that, concerning the NT, white nationalism is still medieval and that we must ignore not only the scholarly authors (such as the apologist in MacDonald’s webzine) but the Christian commentariat of that webzine and other racialist webzines, it is more interesting to ponder who, of the two Richards, is right: the mythicist or the historicist.

It seems to me that Miller, although I have infinite respect for his work, still suffers from what in a 2012 post on this site we called the ‘Platonic fallacy’.

And incidentally, I see these two camps, represented by the two Richards, from a very different angle to their point of view: the Delphic Oracle maxim. Given that deep autobiography is my forte, and that in my life I have gone through all three stages—from traditional Christian (1960s-1980s) to secular historicist (1990s-2018), and from secular historicist to mythicist (2018 to date)—I venture to conjecture that Miller’s stance, as well as the stance of his interviewer, represent a residue of parental introjects (see my post ‘Slaves of parental introjects’).

It is so disturbing to our egos to conceive of the whole Jesus story as mere literary fiction from the pen of Jews for Aryan consumption that even accomplished rationalists like Miller, and his young interviewer, are unable to take the final step.

But as I said, the issue of which of the two Richards is right isn’t so important. What is important is that Christians on the racial right are, as far as textual criticism of the NT is concerned, in the Middle Ages. And there is little point in trying to rescue them. That’s as fool errand as wanting American evangelicals, the source of the power of the American Jewish lobby, to read Kevin MacDonald’s webzine and stop supporting Israel in the current Palestinian conflict!

The West’s Darkest Hour is not for white nationalists. It is for people honest enough to assimilate the splendid work of Miller, or Carrier. As I said, the distinction between secular historicists and mythicists is not as serious as it is when we encounter the fundamentalists, who abound on the so-called racial right, and still believe that a Jew isn’t only risen but is our Saviour.

Categories
New Testament Psychology

Fundamentalist scholars

Regarding my recent exchange with RockaBoatus in The Occidental Observer, I would like to add to what I already said this moment—just two minutes from a long interview with Richard Miller about fundamentalist scholars.

Categories
New Testament Racial right Richard Carrier

Update

I am surprised that the Christian author of The Occidental Observer (TOO) article I was talking about yesterday responded to me in several TOO comments. Generally, white nationalist Christians have simply ignored me. For example, I have said countless times that the fact that the Spanish and the Portuguese mixed their blood in Latin America since the centuries when Christianity was in good shape means that the problem of Aryan ethnosuicide is more complex than what Judeo-reductionists claim, insofar in those times the Inquisition reigned in the Americas, an institution that controlled the Jews. The American racial right has ignored these facts so many times that I gave up and resigned myself to posting almost exclusively on this site, instead of trying to communicate with them on their forums, as I did quite often in the past. That’s why the Christian author’s several responses in the TOO discussion thread surprised me.

Below I not only quote my second retort, posted today, on TOO but some other things that I would like to respond to the Christians who are commenting in that thread.

RockaBoatus, the author of the article ‘A 2000-Year-Old Rabbinical Psyop: Did Jews Invent Christianity to Deceive Gentiles?’, told me:

What you’re reading today [textual criticism of the New Testament—Ed.] are simply rehashed and outdated polemics that are about 150 years old with a new sophisticated twist. Conservative biblical scholars have refuted this nonsense…

By ‘conservative biblical scholars’ what you really mean is fundamentalist scholars.

Did you notice that above [i.e., in my first retort] I mentioned Ian Wilson, an English Catholic who has defended Christianity throughout his literary career? Unlike the list of fundamentalist Christians you cite, Wilson is honest enough to agree that what you call ‘outdated polemics that are about 150 years old’ are not outdated at all (cf. his book Jesus: The Evidence).

And Miller, whom I also mentioned above [again, in my first retort], is not anti-Christian like Carrier, who was never a Christian. Miller was a fundamentalist Christian who learned Greek, Latin, German and French to study the New Testament as a full-time scholar. Only when his research was advanced did he realise that there were serious problems with the so-called scholarship promulgated by his evangelical colleagues. This passage from a YouTube interview with Miller is vital to understanding his spiritual odyssey from traditional Christianity to apostasy. In fact, that YouTube channel, with its countless interviews with other NT scholars, can serve wonderfully to answer you (which I can’t do point by point because, as I said, it would take me days).

Regarding the rest of what you say, as well as what Pierre de Craon tells me about the evangelist John, in order not to overwhelm this discussion thread I think I’ll answer it in the next entry of my blog.

The only thing I would like to clarify now is that the thesis that Judeo-Christianity is a Jewish psyop is not exactly my thesis, but Skrbina’s. Rather than blaming St Paul et al, I blame Constantine and the house of Constantine (except Julian) for using the most toxic religion of the Mediterranean, the one inspired by intolerant Judaism, to control the population of the empire. If you don’t want to read the mini-book by the Spaniard Velasco that I linked above, see at least these excerpts from Vlassis Rassias’ book about how the Judeo-Christians of the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries destroyed the temples, sculptures, art and books of the classical world.

That is the starting point to understand the darkest hour of the West.

______ 卐 ______

 
The above is what I posted today on TOO. In one of his several replies to my yesterday’s retort, RockaBoatus said: ‘Jews did NOT “invent” Christianity.’ But he omits that St Paul was Jewish. He omits that the rabid hatred of John of Patmos, the author of the last book of the Christian Bible, was anti-Roman and that the ‘Seven Churches’ to which he wrote (Book of Revelation, 1:11) were in towns replete with Jews. He also omits that even Christian theologians admit that evangelists like Matthew were Jewish, and also the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Another Christian, who has frequently commented on TOO discussion threads, Pierre de Craon, responded to me by claiming: ‘attributing Revelation to John the Apostle is a sound judgment.’

That caught my attention since the consensus of New Testament scholarship is that the Book of Revelation dates from the end of the first century c.e., and a putative apostle from the beginning of the 1st century wouldn’t have lived that long. But to understand cultured Christians like Pierre de Craon I would like to digress a bit.

NT scholars can be classified into three groups: fundamentalists (there are also Catholic fundamentalists, not just Protestants, who believe in the historicity of the Garden of Eden, etc.), liberal Christians and non-Christians.

Since I come from a very Catholic family, in the 1980s I began to read liberal theologians, such as Hans Küng, who unlike the fundamentalists incorporated, to a certain extent, the textual criticism of the NT that has been doing since the Enlightenment, sometimes admirably summarised by Christians such as Albert Schweitzer’s classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus.

Fundamentalists haven’t responded honestly to this textual criticism which, I insist, sometimes comes from exegetes who have not apostatised from Christianity. And exactly the same can be said of the racial right.

Generally, Christians on the racial right as Pierre de Craon belong to the first group: that of Catholic and Protestant traditionalists. They haven’t even managed to assimilate what the liberal Christians have conceded long ago (e.g., Schweitzer’s 1906 classic). In my first retort I mentioned Ian Wilson, who with his books on the Shroud of Turin has even tried to create a kind of contemporary apologetics to support the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. But many of the Christians who comment these days in the discussion thread of the aforementioned TOO article don’t even know that a textual criticism of the NT exists: criticism that Christians like Wilson have already incorporated, for so many decades, into their way of seeing the world.

And what about the third group: the non-Christian scholars who dedicate themselves to studying the NT? What does one of them say about the book of Revelation, say, Carrier?

Revelation was written in the reign of Domitian (the 80s or 90s AD) and used Matthew as its base text. It is indeed an anti-Pauline document, but so is Matthew. And both were written in Greek, and thus for audiences outside Palestine. There is no evidence anyone was alive at that time who would know anything first-hand about the origins of Christianity, least of all the Pillars (they would be two generations gone by then), much less any who would ever have even heard of, much less read, Revelation (or Matthew for that matter). We also have no reactions to Revelation’s publication, so we have no idea how anyone responded to it anyway.

Revelation references no sources; in fact, it claims to have all its information from mystical visions, not any objective evidence at all. Someone, in other words, just dreamed all this (or was claiming to). And so far as we know it had no sources, other than “The Gospel according to Matthew,” which was simply an expanded redaction of the “Gospel according to Mark.” Revelation is therefore derivative and thus cannot corroborate anything. All it does is prove Matthew’s historicism existed at that time. Which we already know—from Matthew (and Mark, whose text is even earlier). It therefore can have no effect on the probability of historicity. Once the Gospels exist, it is already 100% expected there will exist texts expanding and riffing on them, like this, regardless of whether Jesus existed or not. So we are back to simply assessing the probability of the Gospels.

Nevertheless, Revelation is actually a little cagey about whether historicity is actually true, rather than symbolically represented. In Rev. 11 it sufficiently implies Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem; but in Rev. 12, Jesus is born in a lower heaven (in the vicinity of the moon), and soon whisked away to even higher levels of heaven, and seems never to leave there (in a manner that fits the Star Gospel that in OHJ I find in Ignatius and the Ascension of Isaiah). So it’s unclear which version of events the author believed actual and which merely allegorical. It could be both, depending on one’s level of initiation at the time, just as was the case for Osiris cult.

But regardless, since the author shows no sign of having any sources of information other than the Gospels we already know about, and his own imagination, it doesn’t matter. We can’t use it to prove anything in the Gospels is true. We can only use it to prove they were circulating by then, which we already knew, and thus already accounted for.

Based on what I said recently about my autobiographical work and how I can recover my previous Christian selves in exercises of the imagination, people like Miller and I are capable of psychically ‘encompassing’ folks like the Christians who comment in TOO. But they cannot return the favour because they have never experienced any apostasy in their minds (let’s say, that an apostate like Miller returned to the shelter of fundamentalist Christianity).

Update of November 6th

My last comment in that TOO thread was posted today.

Categories
New Testament Racial right

TOO article

The entire RockaBoatus article published yesterday on The Occidental Observer (‘A 2000-Year-Old Rabbinical Psyop: Did Jews Invent Christianity to Deceive Gentiles?’) smacks of apologetics, and answering it point by point would take me days. It’s better to focus on a few passages.

It seems to me, however, that when addressing Christianity and the problems of Jewish cultural subversion, these esteemed writers [Oliver, Pierce, Dalton, Rockwell] have over-reached in their criticisms. Their zeal to vanquish Christianity has not always been grounded on a true knowledge of Christian theology and history. They have often appealed to outdated liberal higher-critical arguments…

The trick with this passage is that none of the racialists mentioned are New Testament scholars, like the recent work of Richard Carrier or Richard Miller, to whom I have dedicated several entries.

In Revelation 3:9, the apostle John records…

RockaBoatus is obviously ignorant not only of recent studies by non-Christians like those of Carrier and Miller on how the New Testament originated. He also ignores old Christian studies that say the author of the book of Revelation has nothing to do with an apostle. Is RockaBoatus unaware of the literary criticism that has been levelled at the NT since Reimarus, which even Christians like Ian Wilson have popularized?

Gentile Christians in the New Testament are described as a people on par with Jewish believers. Together, both Jews and Greeks (gentiles) are described as one in Christ.

But that’s precisely the psyop! The Greco-Romans perceived themselves as superiors to the ugly Semites of Palestine (remember how the sculptures of Aelia Capitolina, which the Romans raised over ancient Jerusalem, showed Aryan beauty humiliating the conquered Jews). Putting them as equals is precisely what it was about for the Aryans to stop feeling superior to the mudbloods!

Historically, and particularly in modern times, Jews have worked feverishly to undermine and ultimately destroy Christianity.

This may seem true in modern times, but there are certainly historical facts that are never discussed on the racial right, and I would like to quote a translation from Spanish to English of the master essay on this site, written by Eduardo Velasco:

Judaea, victorious

In the eyar 435 occurred the most significant action on the part of Emperor Theodosius II. He openly proclaims that the only legal religion in Rome apart from Christianity is Judaism!

Through a bizarre, subterranean and astonishing struggle, Judaism has not only persecuted the old culture, and Rome, its mortal archenemy, adopts a Jewish creed—but the Jewish religion itself, so despised and insulted by the old Romans, is now elevated as the only official religion of Rome along with Christianity!

We must recognise the conspiratorial astuteness and the implacable permanence of objectives of the original Judeo-Christian nucleus! What they did was literally turn the tables on their favour: turn Rome into anti-Rome; place at the service of Jewry everything that the Jews so hated; take advantage of the strength of Rome and its state apparatus to have Rome against Rome itself in a sinister political-spiritual jiu-jitsu—from spitted slaves, trampled, insulted, despised and looked down, to absolute spiritual masters of the Roman Empire!

In a nutshell, Christianity was a subversive movement of agitation against Rome, against Greece and, ultimately, against the European world. As already stated, we have to assume that what has come down to us from the Greco-Roman world is only a tiny part of what was really there and that it was taken away by the Judeo-Christian destruction. Christianity, as a slave rebellion devised and led by Jews with the aim of destroying Roman power—and, ultimately, all European power—was and is a doctrine aimed at converting vigorous peoples into a domesticated flock of sheep. Nietzsche understood it perfectly, but when will we be able to fully assimilate what this meant and what it still means today?

Saint Peter, likewise, commands his readers to “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human institution whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers” (vv.13-14). If that’s not clear enough, he further urges them to “honor the king” (v.17). We are compelled to ask: Why would a group of “pro-Jewish” writers say such things especially when their primary purpose is to deceive gentiles so that they become just as “anti-Roman” as themselves?

The answer appears in David Skbina’s book, The Jesus Hoax, which Prof. Kevin MacDonald reviewed for TOO: a book that alleges that the entire New Testament was written by Jews, and precisely that the idea was to perpetrate a psyop. At the end of the book Skrbina wrote: ‘This is the “peaceable Jesus” reply. We all know those famous lines, and they get repeated ad nauseum. My general reply is (a) the Jewish cabal was compelled to insert such lines for cover; too much explicit talk of rebellion was dangerous. Also (b) these relatively few lines are outnumbered by far more that imply rebellion and war—see my discussion in chapter five. And in any case, “rendering to Caesar” says nothing about not also working for his downfall. And sure, you may perish by the sword, but that’s what happens in war. I particularly appreciate “love thy neighbor”: Who, after all, was “the neighbor” if not the Jew?’

Finally, although one may claim that Paul was a deceiver and allege that he “made it all up,” this is not the kind of character we find depicted in his epistles. Instead, we find a person who seems devoted to truth…

Paul truthful? Really? I think every visitor to The Occidental Observer should read Skbina’s book, as it answers the kind of arguments we see about Paul in the TOO article (excerpts from his book can be read on pages 11-36 here).

Categories
Homer Literature New Testament

Resistance to NT criticism

See the video uploaded today interviewing Richard C. Miller here.

Mimesis criticism is a method of interpreting texts in relation to their literary or cultural models. Mimesis, or imitation (imitatio), was a widely used rhetorical tool in antiquity. Mimesis criticism looks to identify intertextual relationships between two texts that go beyond simple echoes, allusions, citations or redactions. The effects of imitation are usually manifested in the later text by means of distinct characterisation, motifs, and/or plot structure.

As a critical method, mimesis criticism has been pioneered by Dennis MacDonald, especially in relation to the New Testament and other early Christian narratives imitating the ‘canonical’ works of Classical Greek literature.

Categories
Child abuse New Testament

The will not to know


Mexican José Barba Martín, born in 1937, spent two decades studying philology in the United States. He earned a master’s degree in Romance languages at Tufts University, a doctorate in Romance languages at Boston College and, finally, a doctorate at Harvard University in Hispanic literature. Barba was one of the victims of the powerful Catholic paedophile Marcial Maciel. Decades after Maciel abused him, Barba, along with other victims, began a campaign to expose the abuses. Because of his persistent activism, he has been called ‘José Barba: the man who defied two popes’.

Yesterday I saw a video interviewing Barba where he said, at this point in the interview (my translation), that the abuses committed by Maciel were not only sexual, ‘that he did not abuse only through the body, but through the soul: through a system that will take over the psyche; from children, adolescents, young people until the moment when one is no longer master of one’s own words, and then not even of one’s thoughts’.

Barba is not an apostate from Christianity; just a critic of the Catholic Church, even critical of two popes—John Paul II and Benedict XVI—who protected paedophiles in the Church. But what strikes me about Barba is his almost complete lack of insight into his words I have just translated. Barba has failed to realise that the very teaching of the doctrine of eternal damnation, which comes right from the Gospels, is abusive to the souls of children. (Those who have seen the film Angela’s Ashes, or read the autobiographical memoir of the same title, remember that class in which a priest terrorises Irish children with horrific hellish imagery.)

Since I have spoken to Barba several times in Mexico City, I would like to add something to what I wrote about him in my January 2022 article, ‘On Alberto Athié’. As an autobiographer, I keep records of a few encounters with acquaintances. Little of my many diaries appear in my eleven autobiographical books. But from time to time I can exhume, from those diaries, some anecdotes for publication on this site.

On 30 March 2018 Barba came to my house and what I told about him in the article ‘About Alberto Athié’ happened. The following year, on 2 November 2019 to be exact, I met Barba in the café of the old Librería Gandhi that the intellectuals of the Mexican capital used to frequent (now the old bookstore is closed). Barba was talking, in Latin, to one of my chess-playing friends but when I sat down at their table they switched languages and spoke to me in Spanish. As the Gandhi Café closed relatively early, we then moved on to a restaurant.

Barba mentioned the book I had lent him the previous year when he visited my house, Summer 1945 by Tom Goodrich, but didn’t say a peep about its contents. Apparently, the erudite man didn’t experience the slightest cognitive dissonance with the holocaust perpetrated by the Allies, as narrated by Goodrich. Although he mentioned nothing of the book’s content, he commented, as a good thing, the impeachment of Donald Trump planned by the Democrats.

The Catholic Barba is a liberal philo-Semite even though he has no Jewish background, and that night he called Dutch politician Geert Wilders an ‘extremist’. When I pointed out that, according to the Jew Ron Unz, a whole constellation of conservative authors on the Second World War had been cancelled, Barba said that perhaps these authors had been victims of McCarthyism! (and recommended me a book on McCarthyism). I was flabbergasted. Unlike the chess-playing friend who accompanied us, Barba couldn’t even conceive that he had in front of him an Other ideologically speaking: someone who was reasoning from a completely different POV.

In the Gandhi Café, before going to the restaurant, I told Barba about Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together; then, at the restaurant, I told him about the contents of the book. When I got home, I sent him an email with the link to 200 Years Together, as well as a link to Unz’s article.

On June 4, 2022, I saw my chess friend and Barba again, this time near the park where, as a young man, I used to play chess. I talked to him for a long time but I was shocked that, once again, Barba couldn’t conceive of the existence of a creature ideologically different from him. Barba is one of those old-fashioned men who believe that we younger people see them as repositories of ancestral wisdom. But I don’t see him that way. The religious manner in which he spoke to those present, without first inquiring whether they were atheists or not, could only mean that he was treating us as if we were his pupils. There was a moment when Barba mentioned the alleged deeds of Jesus’ apostles, and I replied that to me that was literary fiction.

Barba reacted by saying that this was extreme scepticism, and I was perplexed because Barba had read Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart Ehrman. How could Barba have been unaware that the fundamentalist Christian Ehrman became an atheist after his New Testament research? The fact that Barba gave four copies of Ehrman’s book to his Catholic friends, in another occasion, gave the impression that he wanted to convince them of a more sceptical approach to the historical Jesus. But Barba not only swallowed the aforementioned story from Luke’s book as real history, he did something that puzzled me even more.

When I asked him if he was familiar with the field of critical NT studies that started in the Enlightenment, he said he was (Ehrman himself is part of that field). But Barba didn’t seem to realise that New Testament studies had moved several exegetes to lose faith since the seminal works of Reimarus, who flourished in the 18th century, and David Friedrich Strauss, who flourished in the 19th century. I could not believe that the very learned Barba, who reads the NT in the original Greek, would ignore facts relating to authors whose books he has given as presents!

And it is not a case of senility, for when I last saw him near the park of old chess friends, Barba was perfectly lucid. It is a matter of being locked in a theological bubble to the extent of being unable to hold a friendly discussion with the unbeliever in front of him. In ‘On Alberto Athié’ I omitted that Barba ignored my argument that women have less cranial mass than men—and that’s why, in chess, they compete against each other, parallel to the men’s tournaments so that men don’t massacre them in the science-game. Similarly, Barba ignored or didn’t know, that there are scholars who believe that the Acts of the Apostles is a religious novel rather than real history.

I could write pages and pages about my latest disagreement with Barba. But I don’t think I need to. Perhaps I will do so in the comments section if someone asks me for more detailed information about those disappointing meetings. What I am getting at is that scholarship is not wisdom and that someone can be highly respected in the media—like Barba—and yet be enclosed in such a bubble that he dissociates the existence of the dissenter in front of him. It is not that I want to convince Christians like Barba that the NT is fiction. It is simply the inability to communicate the fact that there are scholars who believe it is fiction that alarms me!

All this sheds light on what I was saying about the holocaust perpetrated by the Allies: something that normies, even when confronted, are unwilling to know as Barba did when I lent him, for a year, Goodrich’s book.

Alberto Athié, Barba and Fernando González wrote the book La voluntad de no saber: Lo que sí se conocía sobre Maciel en los archivos secretos del Vaticano desde 1944 (The Will Not to Know: What was Known about Maciel in the Vatican’s Secret Archives since 1944). Published in the context of Benedict XVI’s visit to Mexico, this book reveals the Vatican’s documents on the Maciel case demonstrating that, for more than sixty years, the highest authorities of the Catholic Church knew about the criminal conduct of the founder of the Legionaries of Christ.

But these guys have another kind of will not to know. They lack the will to know that several New Testament scholars say that the NT accounts are pure fiction, including the Acts of the Apostles, or that what the Establishment would have us believe about WW2 is rubbish. Likewise, millions of Westerners don’t want to know that the fact that we have different brains from women refutes feminism and the dogma of equality.

The way Barba treated me the few times I saw him is the way the normie treats the dissident: simply ignoring everything he says.

Categories
New Testament

Parallel universe

I hate living in a parallel universe next to the white nationalist universe. If I am wrong about the central premise of this site, that Judeo-Christian morality is responsible for our misfortunes (white nationalists would simply say ‘Judeo’, omitting the ‘Christian’ part), they should refute me. But they don’t: they simply ignore me.

Among the racial right folk I know online, Irishman Gaedhal has been the most erudite on the subject of Christian theology. He once said that white nationalists were more primitive than liberal Christians when it came to New Testament knowledge. Gaedhal’s words came as a surprise to me. It was so obvious, but it was only when he wrote it that I realised it.

Even a famous writer who believes in the resurrection of Jesus, the Englishman Ian Wilson, is familiar with the criticism of the New Testament since the rise of biblical criticism in the Enlightenment. The white nationalists whose comments I have seen on the racial right discussion forums seem to ignore this textual criticism of the NT that began in the late 18th century (see these excerpts from Catholic Ian Wilson’s book for example).

But of course: Wilson’s book is only the first step in continuing to cross what I call the psychological Rubicon. If the white nationalist who holds to the faith of his parents is an honest fellow, he would not only read Wilson’s introductory book, an author who remains a Christian, but those who have devoted their lives to studying the New Testament and have taken steps beyond mere Christian apologetics.

To the honest Christian who wants to save his race from extinction I would suggest, in addition to Wilson’s book, to begin to familiarise himself with the videos interviewing Richard Miller (e.g., this one uploaded a couple of weeks ago), and pay attention to how the story of the Ascension to Heaven didn’t originate with the pen of an evangelist, but particularly in the story of the founding God of Rome: Romulus.

For the honest Christian, these would be the first steps across the river.

The way I see the world, it is impossible to save the white race if a considerable number of whites fail to cross this Rubicon.

Categories
New Testament

Imitatio Romuli

I would like to add something to what I said a week ago about Richard Miller’s Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity. Just before the section on the author’s conclusions, we read this paragraph:

Those properly comprehending, yet prone to resist the present thesis then must answer: How might a Judaized, Christianized adaptation of the “translation fable,” particularly one mimetically following that of Romulus, have appeared, if not more or less precisely as one finds crafted in the postmortem narratives of the New Testament Gospels? [page 177]

Miller is talking about how the Four Evangelists plagiarised the stories about the old God of the Romans when it came to the missing body, prodigies, darkness over the land, meeting on the road, eyewitness testimony, mountaintop speech and great commission, son of a god, ascension, taken away in a cloud and deification (classical sources about the Romulus story: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Ovid, Livy and Cicero).

Categories
Jesus New Testament

Unhistorical Jesus

by María [1]

The historicity of Jesus is a touchy subject. Talk about it on social media and you’re sure to attract both historicists and mythicists with strong views. New Testament scholars who dissent from the consensus suddenly find they’re unemployable in university religious studies departments, ridiculed online and occasionally by New Testament scholars who hold the line.

I stumbled into this topic during a period of binge-watching YouTube videos featuring New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, a former fundamentalist Christian whose studies eventually turned him into an agnostic atheist. In one of these, Ehrman referred to a ‘fringe’ view among some that Jesus never existed, and quickly dismissed it.

Like many Christians, my first reaction was amazed disbelief that such a wackadoodle theory could be taken seriously. I watched some videos online and some debates. I occasionally fact-checked the refutations and found that in fact, opponents of Richard Carrier often misrepresented or got their facts wrong.

The Trent Horn debate in particular amazed me because Horn insisted that something was written in a text, but when I checked, it wasn’t. (Horn claimed that the Life of Adam[2] showed Adam being buried on Earth; Carrier said the text has him buried in the third heaven. Both were insistent, because a lot hangs on it, believe it or not. I checked. Carrier was right.)

Wow – what was going on? How could something I had believed all my life to be a historic fact is a myth? Why couldn’t any of these experts demolish Carrier’s argument, as I’d expected them to do?

So—I read it for myself [Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus].

Slowly and carefully, often looking up the footnote references. Every serious argument from scriptures (e.g. Acts, Gospels, Epistles) and from the historical record (Josephus, Tacitus etc.) was examined, dissected and evaluated according to Bayes’ theorem, using the following method:

  • how likely is it that this text would look like this if Jesus was a historical figure?

against

  • how likely is it that this text would look like this if Jesus began as a myth?

The chapter on the evidence from the gospels is particularly fascinating: a summary of recent scholarship that shows the brilliance of the four evangelists as myth-creators and propagandists. In the end I was convinced—on the historicity of Jesus, there is indeed reason to doubt.

__________

[1] Posted on Amazon Books reviews by a United Kingdom reviewer on February 28, 2019.

[2] The Life of Adam and Eve, also known in its Greek version as the Apocalypse of Moses, is a Jewish apocryphal group of writings. While the surviving versions were composed from the early 3rd to the 5th century c.e., there is wide agreement among scholars that the original was composed in the 1st century c.e.

Categories
New Testament Videos

For Christians

Or:

The literary rosetta stone
that explains the gospels

‘Christianity is just one participant in a broader set of phenomenology that needed to be understood across the board, and not just studied in some kind of isolationism.’

—Richard Miller

Derek Lambert and Dr Richard C. Miller

This site is dedicated to those who want to know the basic aetiology of white ethnosuicide (and who want to do something to counteract this mental illness). It is not a site for Christians. But this post is for them.

Last month I posted a couple of entries about New Testament scholar Richard Miller (here and here). But his book, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity only reached me on Tuesday and I’ve started reading it.

It is a book for seasoned scholars: it contains quotations in Greek, Latin, French and German; and the English translations of quoted paragraphs are by the author. By ‘translation fables’ Miller means innumerable fables of Greco-Roman gods, demigods and mortals who, for their deeds, were translated to, let us say, a cloud in the heavens after their deaths and, in the case of Romulus, the legend even speaks of apparitions and a Great Commission (see the second chapter of Resurrection and Reception).

It is a perfect book for Christians because, unlike Richard Carrier who was never a Christian, despite his very gradual and agonic apostasy Miller maintains a positive image of the religion of his parents. He shows us a gallery of the Greco-Roman myths of the resurrection or translation of so many heroes, and then does a rigorous exegesis of what it all means. The connections between Greco-Roman apotheosis narratives and the gospels, originally written in Greek, make Miller’s work an important contribution to contextualising Jesus’ resurrection narratives.

The honest Christian who approaches Miller’s work will be confronted with the same dilemmas that this scholar confronted as he devoted his whole life to New Testament studies. If you don’t want to read his book, just watch this interview.