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Category: New Testament

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Eduardo Velasco New Testament

David Skrbina’s book

David Skrbina published his book The Jesus Hoax in 2019. Evropa Soberana re-published Rome v. Judea; Judea v. Rome in 2013 (it seems that his previous site, where he first published it, was suspended). The similarities between the two books are striking (remember that Soberana’s is the most recommended essay in The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour), although Soberana wrote his book in Spanish and Skrbina in English.

In a new series I’ll quote some passages from Skrbina’s The Jesus Hoax. What struck me most about this book, published in Detroit by Creative Fire Press, is that Skrbina quotes Hitler favourably and accuses first-century Jews of mythmakers! Except for the book by Soberana that we translated for The Fair Race, I was unaware of any other recent attempt to blame the Jewish authors of the New Testament (NT) for the brainwashing that their work represented for the West.

Recall that Soberana’s site was cancelled by Blogger last December. I don’t know if this Spaniard died because I haven’t received a reply since that month, when I sent him an email. Be that as it may, I saved his posts and will be uploading PDFs of them, in the original language in which they were written, once a year has passed since the site ‘Evropa Soberana’ was cancelled.

But not even this Spaniard was the first to discover that the gospel message was a psyop of Jewry to corrupt the Greco-Roman world. The first to say so in the modern world was Nietzsche, whom both Soberana and Skrbina quote (we ignore whether Celsus or Porphyry also said so because Constantine had their books burned).

While I agree with both of them that the NT has been a psyop to tame us, I disagree with both of them on the existence of Jesus. Until November 2018 (I was very influenced by NT scholar Morton Smith) I believed there was a historical Jesus if only we ignore the miracles the evangelists tell us about. I had to make an effort to digest Richard Carrier’s work to realise that even that human Jesus didn’t exist (watch this lecture by Carrier, though I studied his thick treatise on the non-existence of Jesus).

The issue is important because, as we saw in my Daybreak’s featured essay, it is not the same thing for a human Jesus to have existed as for the tale about his life to have been a hundred per cent the literary fiction of the Jew Mark, who was extremely pissed off about the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans.

The other big difference between me and Skrbina is that, since now I don’t believe Jesus existed, I give more weight to the one who penned the elaborate tale—Mark the evangelist—than to St Paul. While potentially subversive, Paul’s theology, the first Christian author, is too esoteric and only the literary genius of Mark could paint for us a flesh-and-blood Jesus who spoke in parables and sat down to eat with publicans and sinners. Paul’s cryptic theology wouldn’t have conquered the white man’s soul unless it was transformed into an entertaining story, which is what the first evangelist did (the Jews Matthew and Luke only added verses of their own inventiveness to Mark’s original gospel).

I also disagree with Skrbina in that, unlike Nietzsche and Soberana, he doesn’t seem to realise that the egalitarian and pro-poor ideas of the NT were poison to the ancient Romans. Although Skrbina is white he doesn’t seem to be a racialist, and has barely glimpsed what his predecessors, Nietzsche and Soberana, saw more clearly.

But as I said, I am impressed that someone has published a book whose thesis is analogous to Soberana’s, which I have called the ‘masthead’ of The West’s Darkest Hour. Next week I’ll start posting excerpts from The Jesus Hoax.

Categories
Daybreak (book) Jesus Judea v. Rome New Testament Romulus

The most recommended article on ‘Daybreak’

This Monday I am still in the process of correcting the syntax of Daybreak, a task I will finish this week.

Just as the previous collection of essays, The Fair Race, has a ‘masthead’—the struggle between Judea and Rome that a Spaniard wrote and we translated for this site—so Daybreak has its central essay.

I refer to ‘Romulus & Jesus’. Anyone who has assimilated the essay by the Spaniard will understand the implications of this article, which I reproduce below after having used DeepL Translator to modify its syntax. The difference is that the Spaniard’s essay is very long and the following one very short, but they are complementary.
 

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Romulus & Jesus
[pages 141-143 of Daybreak]

In The Fair Race I mentioned the work of Richard Carrier. ‘All the evidence we have’, Carrier said in a public debate with an American Christian, ‘strongly supports the conclusion that there were actually literal rabbis that originated the sect’ (Christianity). They simply used the story of the Hero-God founder of the Romans: Romulus. The idea of those who wrote the New Testament was simply to use the mythological biography of the white God to convince the Romans to worship, instead, the god of the Jews. The parallels between the old Romulus and the new Jesus invented by the rabbis are so obvious that it is worth mentioning some of them.

Both are sons of God; their deaths are accompanied by wonders and the earth is covered with darkness; both corpses disappear; both receive a new immortal body superior to the one they had; their resurrected bodies were sometimes luminous and shining in appearance; after their resurrection they meet a follower on a city road; a speech is given from a high place before the ‘translation to heaven’; there is a ‘great commission’ or instruction to future followers; they physically ascend to heaven and, finally, are taken up into a cloud.

Everyone in the West has heard the story that the New Testament authors invented about Jesus. But who knows the original legend, that of the white Hero-God Romulus? It really seems that the Gospel writers plagiarised the founding myth of Rome to sell us another founding myth. But the new Christian myth did more than just substitute the Aryan Romulus for the Jewish Jesus, something infinitely more subversive as we shall see.

In the draft of ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ I had said that all whites are heading for Jerusalem, a metaphor to be understood in the context of my essay ‘Ethnosuicidal Nationalists’ (also in this book). How did Christianity manage to reverse the moral compass of the Aryans from pointing to Rome to pointing to Jerusalem? Remember: according to Richard Carrier in his magnum opus On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, there is no historical Jesus, but rather authors of the Gospels. Also, keep in mind what we have been saying on this website about the inversion of values that occurred in the West when whites, including atheists, took the axiological message of the Gospels very seriously. Building on this and the crucial part of Evropa Soberana’s essay on Judea vs. Rome in The Fair Race, let us look at what Carrier says at the beginning of chapter 4 of On the Historicity of Jesus.

Romulus appears to Proculus Julius.

In Plutarch’s book on Romulus, the founder of Rome, we are told that Romulus was the son of God, born of a Virgin, and that there were attempts to kill him as a baby. As an adult, the elites finally killed him and the sun went dark, but Romulus’ body disappeared. Then he rises from the dead. Some doubted and, along the way, Romulus appears to a friend to pass on the Good News to his people (see image above). It is revealed that, despite his human appearance, Romulus had always been a God and had become incarnate to establish a great kingdom on earth (note these italicised words in the context of the indented quote on the next page). Romulus then ascends to heaven to reign from there. Before Christianity, the Romans celebrated the day Romulus ascended to heaven. Plutarch recounts that at the annual Ascension ceremony the names of those who were afraid because they had witnessed the feat were recited, something that reminds me of the true ending of Mark’s Gospel (Mk 16:8) before Christians added more verses. Carrier comments that it seems as if Mark is adding a Semitic spin to the original story of Romulus: an Aryan story that seems to be the skeleton on which the evangelist would add the Semitic flesh of his literary fiction. Carrier’s sentence in bold has convinced me that his treatise On the Historicity of Jesus deserves our attention.

There are many differences in the two stories, surely. But the similarities are too numerous to be a coincidence—and the differences are likely deliberate. For instance, Romulus’ material kingdom favoring the mighty is transformed into a spiritual one favoring the humble. It certainly looks like the Christian passion narrative is an intentional transvaluation of the Roman Empire’s ceremony of their own founding savior’s incarnation, death and resurrection. [page 58]

The implications are enormous. It does seem that the Gospel writers, presumably Jews, thoroughly plagiarised the founding myth of Rome to sell us another myth. This new myth not only involved the substitution of an Aryan hero (Romulus) for a Jewish hero (Jesus). It did something infinitely more subversive, what Nietzsche called the transvaluation of values.

It is becoming increasingly clear: Not only Jesus of Nazareth didn’t exist. The evangelist Mark stole the myth of the Aryan God Romulus for incredibly subversive purposes (see my boldface above). That is why they tried to erase any trace of the Romulus festivals when they destroyed almost all the Latin books, from the 4th to the 6th century. It cannot be a coincidence that Mark wrote his gospel in 70 c.e.—chronologically, the first gospel of the New Testament ever written—right after the Romans destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem!

____________

Posted in two entries (‘The resurrected Jew’ and ‘Unhistorical Jesus’) on September and October 2019. In addition to Carrier’s scholarly volume, see Catherine Nixey: The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World.

Categories
New Testament

David Skrbina

Today I discovered this author and just requested his book The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years.

In a nutshell, he says that Jews figured out the best way to undermine the power of Rome and created the New Testament. You heard it right: Skrbina claims that Christianity was not only a myth but was deliberately produced by Jews to harm or destroy the Romans (see for example this interview).

Skrbina calls this the ‘Antagonism Thesis’, which he believes has more explanatory power than the ‘Mythicist Thesis’ because it ‘addresses the question of motive… The mythicists and other skeptics have no good account of a motive’.

Last year Counter-Currents published an article by Skrbina and I will be reviewing his book as soon as it reaches me (as you know, the masthead of this site is the essay of Judea vs. Rome in The Fair Race).

Categories
New Testament Racial studies Schutzstaffel (SS) Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Third Reich Tom Sunic

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 74

One of the earliest epigraphically attested reference to the word
arya occurs in the 6th-century b.c.e. Behistun inscription.

Moreover, it was not only with the initiates of the Forbidden City of Lhasa (and perhaps with the Dalai Lama himself) that the spiritual elite of the SS Order—which was that of a new traditional civilisation in the making, if not currently in gestation—sought contact. To my humble knowledge, there were also similar meetings in India: meetings that few people in the West suspect, quite apart from the political conversations that may have taken place with certain Hindu leaders, such as Subhas Chandra Bose, in India and Germany before and during the Second World War.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note: With the benefit of hindsight, it is relatively easy to see that this esoteric search was a fool’s errand. Given what happened in real history, what the Nazi elite ought to have studied was already written in the German language. I refer to the texts by Nietzsche that we quote at the appendix to the masthead of this site (pages 84-90, here).

Now that Christian axiology has reached its apex, albeit in secularised form, it is clear that Evil, with a capital ‘E’, always came from Judeo-Christian ethical injunctions in secularised form.

It is not that the 21st-century priest of the sacred words is feeling superior to the Nazis of the previous century. Rather, they lacked the perspective that we have so far. For example, what we said last November about the evangelist Mark, who invented the fictitious figure of Jesus just after the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, is something that no German Nazi ever thought of.

The exegesis of the New Testament had to develop to the degree that it has developed today—and I am referring to the non-existence of the historical Jesus—for us to realise that the whole New Testament thing was, from the beginning, a very subversive text aimed against Rome (this is very clear in the last book of the Bible).

There was nothing to be looking for in Tibet or India. The Third Reich would have done well to take New Testament studies where Richard Carrier has recently taken them. But as the Irish commenter Gaedhal said on this site, American racialists are even more primitive than liberal Christians in that they don’t even want to know that the New Testament has been subjected to rigorous scrutiny since the German Enlightenment (cf. what we have been saying about Reimarus). Apparently, I am the only one who has pointed out these studies in the racialist forums of the new century. But let’s move on to Savitri….
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Since 1935, a cultural magazine, The New Mercury, had been published in Calcutta, very ably edited by Sri Asit Krishna Mukherji, in collaboration with Sri Vinaya Datta and some others. The Fuhrer’s speeches, of which the official press, both in English and Bengali, reported only excerpts, were spread in extenso, especially if they were, as was often the case, of interest beyond ‘politics’. One of them, which particularly caught my attention at the time, was on the subject of ‘Architecture and the Nation’. But the said journal also published studies on everything that could tend to bring to light a deep, non-political connection, going back very far and very high, between the traditional Hindu civilisation as it has never ceased to exist, and the traditional Germanic civilisation, as it had existed, long before Christianity, and aspired to be reborn. These studies revealed in their authors, in addition to the indispensable archaeological erudition, serious knowledge of cosmic symbolism. Several of them were, needless to say, centred on the Swastika.

They seemed to show, indirectly, the exceptional character of a great modern state which recognised as its own a sign of such universal significance; engraved it on all its public monuments, and printed it on all its banners. At the same time, they suggested the aspiration of this great State to renew contact with the primordial Tradition, from which Europe had already detached itself for centuries, but of which India had kept the invaluable deposit.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: Let me clarify this matter a little more. All this searching for India’s Aryan roots is good. What was wrong is not seeing the Christian enemy next door: the Anglo-American slaves of Judeo-Christian ethics, who would murder this revived Aryan baby through the Hellstorm Holocaust (read Tom Sunic’s Homo Americanus). In other words: the priority should have been to know their fanatic enemy, the Judaized Anglo-Americans, and looking for the Aryan roots should’ve been a secondary matter. Savitri continues:

______ 卐 ______

 
I have no evidence that the Ahnenerbe played any part in the publication of the New Mercury. This seems to me all the less likely as this special section of the SS was itself only founded in 1935, the same year as the said magazine. But I know that the latter was at least partly financially supported by the government of the Third Reich. Germans, and representatives—German or not—of German firms in India were supposed to subscribe to it. And at least one of them, to my knowledge, was recalled to Germany, having been dismissed from the direction of the branch which he governed for years, for having refused to do so and declaring that ‘this new-style propaganda’ (sic) did not interest him.

The founder and editor of the periodical, Sri A. K. Mukherji, remained in close contact with Herr von Selzam, the German Consul General in Calcutta, as long as he remained in that post. And this official representative of Adolf Hitler gave him, on the eve of his departure, a document addressed to the German authorities, in which it was specified in no uncertain terms that ‘no one in Asia had rendered the Reich services comparable to his’. I saw this document. I read it again and again, with joy, with pride, as an Aryan and a Hitlerite, and as the wife of Sri A. K. Mukherji. I have already alluded to it in these reflections.

I can’t say whether or not the services referred to therein went beyond the rather narrow confines of Sri A. K. Mukherji’s activities as editor of a fortnightly, traditionalist journal, both Hindu and pro-German. It would seem that they had outgrown them, for the journal had lasted only two years; the British authorities having banned it towards the end of 1937, shortly after the definitive ‘turning point’ in the evolution of British policy towards the Reich. In any case, I didn’t know Sri A. K. Mukherji personally at that time: his name only evoked, for me, the existence of the only magazine of distinctly Hitlerian tendencies that I knew in India. But one thing leads me to believe that his knowledge of esoteric Hitlerism, i.e. of the deep connection of the Führer’s secret doctrine with the eternal tradition, was in no way comparable to the vague impressions I might have had on the same subject. In the very first conversation I had with him, after having had the honour of being introduced to him—on 9 January 1938—, less than two years later, he was destined to give me his name and his protection, and asked me incidentally what I thought of Dietrich Eckart.

I knew that this was the author of the famous poem Deutschland erwache, the fighter of the very first days of the Kampfzeit, who died a few weeks after the failed putsch of 9 November 1923 at the age of fifty-five: the comrade to whom Adolf Hitler had dedicated the second part of Mein Kampf. I was still unaware of the existence of the Thülegesellschaft, and was therefore far from suspecting the role that the poet of the national revolution had played with the Führer.

I enthusiastically displayed my pitifully little erudition. My interlocutor, who had rendered, and would soon render, to the Third Reich (and later to its Japanese allies) ‘services comparable to those of no other’, smiled and moved on to another subject.

Categories
Exterminationism Jesus New Testament On the Historicity of Jesus (book) Richard Carrier

Jesus – triple homonym

The impossibility of speaking with normies about Hitler lies in the fact that the word ‘Hitler’ is, in reality, a double homonym. When we use it we refer to the ‘historical Hitler’ (cf. David Irving’s books). The normie, on the other hand, believes in the ‘Hitler of dogma’: a propaganda figure created by Anglo-Americans and Jews after World War II to demoralise the Aryan. One need only glance at the book I quoted in my previous post to realise that the Hitler of dogma never existed.

This is best illustrated by the figure through whom our civilisation betrayed itself: Jesus of Nazareth. But here we encounter not a double but a triple homonym!

For the ordinary Christian, Jesus rose from the dead. To the ordinary secular man, Jesus was a mortal whose ethical system, despite the mythical miracles attributed to him, remains exemplary. But to the priest of sacred words Jesus not only didn’t exist. The ethical system sold to us by the imaginative writer who created this fictional character, the evangelist Mark, was the apple of discord whose ingestion brought about the downfall not only of the Roman Empire, but of the white race. (Remember that, according to Jung, an archetype can literally take possession of human souls. If I could relaunch Daybreak Press, I would publish another book collecting several entries on the Christian question.)

If the word ‘Hitler’ is a double homonym, from this angle the word ‘Jesus’ is a triple homonym in the sense that the word ‘bank’ is also a triple homonym: it can mean (1) a financial institution, (2) land at river’s edge, or (3) a panel in the sense, for example, that ‘the bank of switches for controlling the lighting is over there’.

Let’s now imagine a room with three men: a traditional Christian, a secular humanist and a priest of the sacred words. Common sense might lead us to believe that both the atheist and I could team up against the Christian. But this is not so. The Christian and the atheist will team up against me as soon as they learn that, in my scale of values, exterminationism à la Turner Diaries are the new tablets of law. And it is exactly at this point that we see that the expression ‘secular Christian’ or ‘neochristian’ is most apt to refer to today’s ‘atheists’.

Pre-Christian Aryans would have gladly used technological weapons of mass destruction to exterminate their enemies. It was Christian ethics that inculcated the notion of the sanctity of human life. An example from the country where I live will exemplify this.

In the summer of 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a few months before the dissolution of the USSR, an extraordinary event took place in Mexico City: intellectuals from all over the world gathered to talk about it. I was following them closely, although at the time I was a normie of the secular humanist type. A few years ago, in the comments section of The Occidental Observer, I put the list of the participants in the various panel discussions at that event, which lasted a couple of weeks, but there is no need to put it here. Suffice it to say that, at the panel discussion ‘Nationalist and religious tensions’, the Mexican Octavio Paz—a secular humanist who would go on to win that year’s Nobel Prize for literature—concluded the discussion with these words (my translation):

We owe religions the inquisitors, we owe them many wars, we owe them many crimes, crusades, human sacrifices. But we also owe them essential things that we cannot renounce: for example Christ, for example Buddha. Thank you. [see YouTube clip: here]

Octavio Paz (1914-1998), who had repudiated his mother’s Catholicism at an early age, was in fact a typical neochristian. If it were possible to locate the three men of our example geographically, the Christian and the atheist would be almost side by side. The real eccentric would be the priest of the sacred words, who would be far removed from the Christian and the atheist insofar as the scale of values is concerned. (I am more like the Romans who left no stone unturned of the Semitic civilisation of Carthage than like the secular whites who are still under the spell of the Jesus archetype.)

There is indeed a gulf not only in believing that Jesus didn’t exist, but—contra Paz & secular company—in openly proclaiming that the message of this mythical ‘Christ’ is pure poison for the fourteen words: a psyop by Mark and his Semitic followers Matthew, Luke and eventually John, to brainwash the white man.

Although Richard Carrier is, like Octavio Paz, a typical neochristian, to racially conscious conservatives who still cling to the religion of their parents I suggest that they, at least, read the Amazon Books starred reviews of On the Historicity of Jesus.

Categories
Jerusalem Judea v. Rome New Testament Racial right Richard Carrier

Aelia Capitolina

Or:

Jew-wise priests vs mere anti-Semites

Imagine what would happen if an ethnostate wiped Israel off the map and in the place of Tel-Aviv founded a new city filled with statues depicting the beauty of the Aryan race: a city that Jews would be forbidden to enter. What astronomical levels of resentment would diaspora Jews engender? What would be their verbal, or rather textual, response in the world of the Gentiles now that they have been defeated by arms?

In actual history this happened when Rome destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, forbade the Jews to enter Jerusalem, and founded a new city on its ruins: Aelia Capitolina (those who haven’t read the masthead of this site, ‘Rome vs Judea; Judea vs Rome’, should do so now).

The point is that the original gospel of the Bible was written immediately after the catastrophe that 70 c.e. represented for Jewry! (Matthew and Luke would later edit Mark’s gospel—and even later John, who knew his predecessors’ texts, spun even more tales for his own gospel.)

Let’s not forget, as I have so often pointed out on this site by quoting Richard Carrier’s book on the sidebar, that Mark, the author of the original gospel that would inspire the other evangelists, attempted to transvalue Roman values through the fictional figure of Jesus by tracing the exploits of Romulus, the founding God of Rome, but twisting them in that all the heroes of his new gospel were Jewish.

What is really impressive is the chronology: the first gospel was written just after the fall of Jerusalem, which must have been truly apocalyptic for the Jewish mentality of the time.

If the alt-right, white nationalists, race realists or whatever you want to call them were honest, they wouldn’t overlook how the Jew’s endless hatred of the white man arose, and the way they tried to poison the soul of the Aryan through their gospels.

The anti-Semites aren’t Jew-wise. They are just anti-Semites, plain and simple. Savitri Devi was Jew-wise. She was aware of the level of subversion it meant, to the soul of the Aryans, for the latter to drink all the Kool-Aid [1] the Jew offered them starting with the stories that Mark invented.

__________

[1] An American term for blind adherence to a bad idea.

Categories
New Testament

Home

‘Home’ is the second episode of the sixth season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 52nd overall. By now, it should be clear that the show is just a series that stands out from other television series simply because Martin writes well. But it is feminist propaganda of the worst kind: the retro-projective as I have said.

For example, the day after Euron kills his older brother, King Balon Geyjoy, in the rainy passage of the castle of the Iron Islands, the Drowned Priest Aeron tells Yara: ‘Perhaps you’ll be the first woman in history to rule the iron born’, which is true, as we will see in the eighth season, after Euron’s death.

The form of Martin’s prose, as well as the visual artistry in some of the directors’ shots, places this series above the others. But I use it to criticise the madness of the West. For example, on DVD it is worth watching the final eight minutes of the episode, from when Davos talks to Melisandre until Jon Snow is resurrected.

Melisandre, Davos, Edd and Tormund before Jon’s corpse.

Gaedhal recently told me something in the comments section that I hadn’t thought of. White nationalists are, on the subject of New Testament exegesis, much more primitive than liberal Christians insofar as the latter at least acknowledge that the gospels are full of problems. Read Albert Schweitzer’s classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus or, for someone completely unfamiliar with the subject, the didactic book of another Christian (excerpts: here).

But once we abandon liberal exegesis from the pen of Christians and read the exegesis of an atheist, we are faced with a completely different approach to the New Testament, insofar as there is no evidence that Jesus even existed (let alone risen from the dead).

The resurrection of Jon Snow at the end of this episode is no more fictitious than the resurrection of Jesus at the end of the Gospel of Mark (a text that would later be used by Matthew and Luke for further equally fictitious narratives). If it were possible to make white nationalists understand that what they believe is no more historical than the ritual that Melisandre practices when reviving Jon, they would find themselves halfway into the psychological Rubicon and not just three steps away from Normieland, although with their feet already wet.

I would suggest new visitors watch the video on the sidebar of Richard Carrier’s conference. The only historical difference between the resurrection of Jon Snow and that of Jesus is that millions of whites have believed the story that some Jews wrote two thousand years ago.

Categories
Arthur Schopenhauer Autobiography New Testament Racial right

Whipping the fog and pride

‘It was as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog’.

—George Elliot, Middlemarch

Throughout the first decades of my life I was very naive. I believed that it was possible to reason with people simply by citing facts and solid arguments based on those facts. I hadn’t realised that humanity is a failed species, and that throughout civilisations humans have believed simply what they want to believe, even if they are the most horrible and cruel religions or secular ideologies.

After reading Schopenhauer I realised that everything has to do with the will, and that it is impossible to change the worldview of an ordinary human unless one first gains his will.

When I learned in my twenties of liberal Christian criticism about the historicity of New Testament accounts, in my infinite naivety I believed that I could use that knowledge to argue with my father. For example, I once told him that Herod’s massacre of the innocents could not be historical since Flavius Josephus, the historian of the 1st century of our era, would not have overlooked it in his famous history of Jewry. But Josephus doesn’t mention it. The only thing my father did was get angry, and of course my solid argument didn’t make the slightest dent in his traditional Catholic worldview.

The same I came to observe with the people of the left whom I dealt with. As my visitors know, I grew up in a country in Latin America. In the days before the internet, my acquaintances were not interested in what could be accessed through the cultural magazines of the country, for example, the magazine Vuelta by Octavio Paz: who criticised Marxism-Leninism. The left-wing people whom I dealt with weren’t interested in Paz’s magazine, even though he was the Spanish speaker whose prose was the most lyrical in his day.

(Left, Juan del Río and his wife, who invited me to enter Eschatology in December 1978. Both have already died.) Likewise, when I began to apostatise from Eschatology, a cult of the New Age type in which I spent some years of my life (see the first of my essays in Daybreak), my teacher Juan del Río didn’t answer any of my arguments even when I sent them in writing. Juan died because eschatologists believe that all diseases have a psychosomatic aetiology, and despite having the financial means, a colon cancer that tormented him for years wasn’t properly treated. In his book-review ‘Do not rely on “mental healing”, scepticism is healthy’, the American S. Currie tells about a similar case:

My mother left leather-bound editions of The Sickle (1918) and The Sharp Sickle (1938) [the textbooks of Eschatology] to me before she passed away. She used to read to me from these books on Sundays when I was young. I believe her mother, my grandmother, originally introduced her to these books when she was a young woman. Both my mother and grandmother died of colon cancer. My father was a physician. In my mother’s case, she kept her early symptoms secret from my Dad and everyone else so that she could work on them via ‘mental healing’. When at last she did tell my Dad and she went to her doctor, it was too late. I both love these books as my mother’s close possessions, and despise them for encouraging her to ignore modern medicine. I will not leave them to my children.

Some time later, now with the advantage of the internet, I discovered the forums of white nationalists, and it happened exactly the same that had happened to me with my father, the Latin American leftists and the eschatologists: they don’t tolerate cognitive dissonance. If they tolerated it the first thing they would do would be a severe examination of conscience of how it is possible to be Jew-wise and at the same time bend the knee before the god of the Jews. It took me a few years to realise that white nationalists are as closed-minded as my father, the people of the old left that I dealt with, and the eschatologists.

For the record, I have been in this world for over sixty years, and this has been my experience with the common human. Trying to fight ignorance with all of them has been like whipping the fog: a pointless experience. I’m not referring to one hundred percent of Christians, leftists or white nationalists because it is obvious that there are exceptions. I mean the bulk of the population.

What they all lack is a little humility. I abandoned Christianity, leftist ideologies, Eschatology and White Nationalism out of humility (now I don’t consider myself a white nationalist but rather a ‘priest of the 14 words’ to distinguish myself from them): humility to face tough or ugly facts. What all these people suffer from is pride, the original sin to quote their own vocabulary.

Categories
Conspiracy theories New Testament Richard Carrier

Atwill’s cranked-up Jesus

by Richard Carrier

Joseph Atwill is one of those crank mythers I often get conflated with. Mythicists like him make the job of serious scholars like me so much harder because people see, hear, or read them and think their nonsense is what mythicism is. They make mythicism look ridiculous. So I have to waste time (oh by the gods, so much time) explaining how I am not arguing anything like their theories or using anything like their terrible methods, and unlike them I actually know what I am talking about, and have an actual Ph.D. in a relevant subject from a real university.

Note that I have divided this article into two parts, the second (titled ‘Our Long Conversation’) is something you can easily skip (see the intro there for whether reading it will be of any interest to you). So although this post looks extraordinarily long, it’s really that second part that gives it such length. You can just read up to the beginning of that section though. You don’t have to continue beyond that to get the overall point.
 

Atwill who?

Atwill is the one dude I get asked about most often. And now apparently even Dawkins is tweeting about Atwill, thanks to his upcoming venture into England later this month to sell his weird Roman Conspiracy variety of Jesus mythicism. To get the gist you can check out his PR puff piece. Thomas Verenna has already written a deconstruction of that. Notably even D.M. Murdock doesn’t buy Atwill’s thesis, declaring that she does not concur with Atwill’s Josephus/Flavian thesis and that ‘the Flavians, including Josephus, did not compose the canonical gospels as we have them’. Robert Price has similarly soundly debunked his book, even after strongly wanting to like it.

Atwill is best known as the author of Caesar’s Messiah (subtitle: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus, Roman meaning the Roman imperial family… yeah). In this Atwill argues ‘Jesus [is] the invention of a Roman emperor’ and that the entire New Testament was written by ‘the first-century historian Flavius Josephus’ who left clues to his scheme by littering secret hidden coded ‘parallels’ in his book The Jewish War. Atwill claims to prove ‘the Romans directed the writing of both’ the JW and the NT, in order ‘to offer a vision of a “peaceful Messiah” who would serve as an alternative to the revolutionary leaders who were rocking first-century Israel and threatening Rome’…

Notice his theory entails a massive and weirdly erudite conspiracy of truly bizarre scope and pedigree, to achieve a truly Quixotic aim that hardly makes sense coming from any half-intelligent elite of the era (even after adjusting for the Flynn effect), all to posit that the entire Christian religion was created by the Romans (and then immediately opposed by them?), who somehow got hundreds of Jews to abandon their religion and join a cult that simply appeared suddenly without explanation on the Palestinian book market without endorsement.

I honestly shouldn’t have to explain why this is absurd. But I’ll hit some highlights. Then I’ll reveal the reasons why I think Atwill is a total crank, and his work should be ignored—indeed everywhere warned against as among the worst of mythicism, not representative of any serious argument that Jesus didn’t exist. And that’s coming from me, someone who believes Jesus didn’t exist.

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The rest of Carrier’s long piece with hundreds of comments in the comments section of his website can be read: here. It is a pity that quite a few commenters in the racialist right promote Atwill’s conspiracy theory.

Categories
Homer New Testament Richard Carrier

Mark transvaluing Homer

Note of the Editor:

Those familiar with the critical literature of the New Testament know that there is only one original gospel, that of Mark. Luke and Matthew copied and pasted a bunch of verses from Mark’s gospel to add even more literary fiction from the pen of these two Synoptics (John the Evangelist would later do the same).

Richard Carrier needs no introduction on this site. The new visitor who is unfamiliar with his work can consult the links about Carrier on the sidebar. Precisely because Carrier is a typical left-wing scholar, the exact opposite of post-Nietzscheans like us, I am struck by how he talks about how the evangelist Mark transvalued—the word he uses—the axiology of the Greco-Roman world.

In his most recent debate, uploaded this morning, with Dennis R. MacDonald, the author of the book he reviews below, Carrier used again the word transvaluation a couple of times right at the beginning of the YouTube debate (just don’t pay attention to the degenerate music that their host chose).

The following is Carrier’s ‘Review of The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark’, a book-review of the MacDonald book, Yale University, 2000 (bold-type added by me):

 

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This is an incredible book that must be read by everyone with an interest in Christianity. MacDonald’s shocking thesis is that the Gospel of Mark is a deliberate and conscious anti-epic, an inversion of the Greek ‘Bible’ of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which in a sense ‘updates’ and Judaizes the outdated heroic values presented by Homer, in the figure of a new hero, Jesus (whose name, of course, means ‘Savior’). When I first heard of this I assumed it would be yet another intriguing but only barely defensible search for parallels, stretching the evidence a little too far-tantalizing, but inconclusive. What I found was exactly the opposite. MacDonald’s case is thorough, and though many of his points are not as conclusive as he makes them out to be, when taken as a cumulative whole the evidence is so abundant and clear it cannot be denied. And being a skeptic to the thick, I would never say this lightly. Several scholars who reviewed or commented on it have said this book will revolutionize the field of Gospel studies and profoundly affect our understanding of the origins of Christianity, and though I had taken this for hype, after reading the book I now echo that very sentiment myself.

 
Background and purpose of Mark

MacDonald begins by describing what scholars of antiquity take for granted: anyone who learned to write Greek in the ancient world learned from Homer. Homer was the textbook. Students were taught to imitate Homer, even when writing on other subjects, or to rewrite passages of Homer in prose, using different vocabulary. Thus, we can know for certain that the author of Mark’s Gospel was thoroughly familiar with the works of Homer and well-trained in recasting Homeric verse into new prose tales. The status of Homer in basic education remained throughout antiquity, despite the fact that popular and intellectual sentiment had been sternly against the ethics and theology of his epics since the age of Classical Greece. Authors from Plato (400 b.c.e) to Plutarch (c. 100 c.e.) sought to resolve this problem by ‘reinterpreting’ Homer as allegory, or by expunging or avoiding offensive passages, neither of which was a perfect solution.

For the Latin language, the opportunity was afforded for Virgil to solve this problem by recasting the Homeric epic into Roman form, exhibiting Roman ideals and creating more virtuous heroes and gods. Likewise, borrowing and recasting from Homer is evident in numerous works of fiction, which often had a religious flavour, and were proliferating in the very same period as the Gospels. One prominent example (mentioned but not emphasised by MacDonald) is the Satyricon of Petronius, which can be decisively dated prior to 66 A.D. and thus is most likely earlier than any known Gospel, and since this novel was in Latin (and a satire), it is almost certain that many undatable Greek novels, which surely originated the form, long precede this. So rewriting Homer to depict new religious ideas and values was a standard phenomenon. In MacDonald’s words, ‘Homer was in the air that Mark’s readers breathed’ (p. 8), and all the more so among Mark’s Gentile audience. But to smartly recast Homer into a new Greek form, reflecting contemporary Graeco-Jewish ideals, was a task simply waiting to be done. If MacDonald is right, this is what Mark set out to do. So much is clear: the motive, ability, and inspiration were certainly present, and MacDonald rapidly presents all the evidence, backing it up with copious and scholarly endnotes in chapter 1.

Why? In MacDonald’s words, Mark ‘thoroughly, cleverly, and strategically emulated’ stories in Homer and the Old Testament, merging two great cultural classics, in order ‘to depict Jesus as more compassionate, powerful, noble, and inured to suffering than Odysseus’ (p. 6), and hence ‘the earliest evangelist was not writing a historical biography, as many interpreters suppose, but a novel, a prose anti-epic of sorts’ (p. 7). In particular, the differences between Mark and Homer need no explanation: the differences are the point, the very objective of the later author. Some of those differences are also the obvious result of a change of scene from the ancient Mediterranean to near-contemporary, Roman-occupied Judaea, or of literary borrowing from Jewish texts. Some may reflect some sort of traditional or historical core story, though it is almost impossible to tell when. Instead, it is the similarities that ‘cry out for explanation’, and contemporary apologists must now begin to address this issue.

Of particular use, for all those who want to develop (or attack) theories of literary borrowing—in the Gospels or elsewhere—is the set of six criteria for identifying textual influence outlined by MacDonald at the end of his first chapter, and demonstrated quite effectively on a passage in Acts. Though no one of these criteria alone carries very much weight, the more criteria that are met in a single instance, the stronger the case. However, one caveat MacDonald does not provide is in regard to his criterion of order. In many cases, matching sequences of passages or themes is indeed significant. However, some cases of matching sequence are such that any other sequence would be logically impossible. Therefore, correlation of this kind can in some cases be coincidence. Nevertheless, even engaging this caution, the sequential evidence MacDonald presents is very often, taken as a whole, not coincidental. Likewise, it should be known that much of Mark’s use of Homer is to shape and detail an otherwise non-Homeric story, and the task of deciding what that core story is, or whether this core story in any given case is a Biblical emulation, or a historical fact, or a legend, or something of the author’s deliberate creation, or any combination thereof, is not something MacDonald even intends to undertake in this book, although he makes some suggestions in his concluding paragraphs.

 
Modeling Odysseus

The Odyssey is rife with the theme of the suffering hero, and MacDonald builds a solid case in chapter 2 for the philosophical veneration of Odysseus as the best example of a man. If Jesus could be made to one-up and even replace Odysseus, Mark would achieve a literary and moral coup. And there are in the overall story obvious if not overly-telling similarities: ‘Both [men] faced supernatural opposition… Each travelled with companions unable to endure the hardships of the journey, and each returned to a home infested with rivals who would attempt to kill him as soon as they recognised him’, and ‘both heroes returned from Hades alive’ (p. 17). Some parallels are a little more startling but less significant to the historian than to the literary critic: the parable of the Wicked Tenants (Mk. 12:1-12), and the passage capturing the famous phrase ‘for you do not know when the master of the house will come’ (Mk. 13:34-5), both evoke the image of Odysseus returning in disguise to surprise the suitors who have turned his house into a den of sin (MacDonald develops this theme further in chapter 5, and again in chapter 14, and in the conclusion). Do not be like them, Mark is saying to his readers. But of course Jesus himself could have said that, intending the very same allusion. Examples like these can make good material for sermons, and serve well the connoisseurs of visionary prose, yet don’t really prove whether Mark has himself deliberately crafted the story. But in conjunction with what follows, this becomes part of a cumulative case for Mark’s inversion of Homer.

Who knew, for instance, that Odysseus was also a carpenter? The companions are another general link with the Odyssey. MacDonald points out how Mark is the harshest evangelist in his treatment of the disciples, while the others sometimes go out of their way to omit or alter this disparagement when they borrow from Mark. Why were the disciples such embarrassing nitwits, ‘greedy, cowardly, potentially treacherous, and above all foolish’ (p. 20)? As history, it is hardly credible. As a play on Homer, it makes perfect sense: for the companions of Odysseus were exactly like this. Homer cleverly employed the ineptitudes of the crew to highlight the virtues of Odysseus, making him appear even more the hero, enhancing his ‘wisdom, courage, and self-control’ (p. 23). MacDonald briefly explores five other general similarities between the two ‘entourages’ in chapter 3, including the fact that in the one story we have sailors, while in the other, fishermen-who do a lot of going about in boats, even though the vast majority of Judaea is dry land.

Chief among these similarities is the comparison between Peter and Eurylochus. Both spoke on behalf of all the followers, both challenged the ‘doomsday predictions’ of their master to their own peril, both were accused by their leader of being under the influence of an evil demon, and both ‘broke their vows to the hero in the face of suffering’—in effect, both ‘represent[ed] the craven attitude toward life’ (p. 22-3). Again, this could be a mere veneer woven through an otherwise true story by Mark, and some of MacDonald’s ideas (such as developed in chapter 4) are intriguing but too weak to do much with. But it is true that both epics announce from the start a focus on a single individual, both center on a king and his son reestablishing authority over a kingdom, both involve an inordinate amount of events and travel at sea. Both works begin by summoning their own Muse: Homer, the Muse herself; Mark, the Prophet Isaiah. In both stories, the son’s patrimony is confirmed by a god in the form of a bird, and this confirmation prepares the hero to face an enemy in the very next scene: Telemachus, the suitors; Jesus, Satan. And eventually the odd links keep accumulating, and compel one to question the whole thing.
 

Stark examples

‘Once the evangelist linked the sufferings of Jesus to those of Odysseus, he found in the epic a reservoir of landscapes, characterisations, type-scenes, and plot devices useful for crafting his narrative’ (p. 19). Of course, all throughout MacDonald points out coinciding parallels with the Old Testament and other Jewish literature, but even these parallels have been moulded according to a Homeric model in every case he examines. Consider two of the many mysteries MacDonald’s theory explains, and these are even among the weakest parallels that he identifies in the book:

Why do the chief priests need Judas to identify Jesus in order to arrest him? This makes absolutely no sense, since many of their number had debated him in person, and his face, after a triumphal entry and a violent tirade in the temple square, could hardly have been more public. But MacDonald’s theory that Judas is a type of Melanthius solves this puzzle: Melanthius is the servant who betrays Odysseus and even fetches arms for the suitors to fight Odysseus—just as Judas brings armed guards to arrest Jesus—and since none of the suitors knew Odysseus, it required Melanthius to finally identify him. MacDonald also develops several points of comparison between the suitors and the Jewish authorities. Thus, this theme of ‘recognition’ stayed in the story even at the cost of self-contradiction. Of note is the fact that Homer names Melanthius with a literary point in mind: for his name means ‘The Black One’, whereas Mark seems to be maligning the Jews by associating Melanthius with Judas, whose name is simply ‘Judah’, i.e. the kingdom of the Jews, after which the Jews as a people, and the region of Judaea, were named.

Why does Pilate agree to free a prisoner as if it were a tradition to do so? Such a practice could hardly have been approved by Rome, since any popular rebel leader who happened to be in custody during the festival would always escape justice. And given Pilate’s reputation for callous ruthlessness and disregard for Jewish interests, it is most implausible to have him participating in such a self-defeating tradition—a tradition for which there is no other evidence of any kind, not even a precedent or similar practice elsewhere. But if Barabbas is understood as the type of Irus, Odysseus’ panhandling competitor in the hall of the suitors, the story makes sense as a clever fiction. Both Irus and Barabbas were scoundrels, both were competing with the story’s hero for the attention of the enemy (the suitors in one case, the Jews in the other), and both are symbolic of the enemy’s culpability.

Of course, Barabbas means ‘son of the father’ and thus is an obvious pun on Christ himself. He also represents the violent revolutionary, as opposed to the very different kind of saviour in Jesus (the real ‘Saviour’). On the other hand, Irus was a nickname derived from a goddess (Iris), and MacDonald fails to point out that her name means ‘rainbow’, which to Mark would have meant the sign from God that there would never again be a flood (Ge. 9:12-13). Moreover, Irus’ real name was Arnaeus, ‘the Lamb’. What more perfect model for Mark? The Jews thus choose the wrong ‘son of the father’ who represents the Old Covenant (symbolised by the rainbow, and represented by the ideal of the military messiah freeing Israel), as well as the scapegoat (the lamb) sent off, bearing the people’s sins into the wilderness, while its twin is sacrificed (Lev. 16:8-10, 23:27-32, Heb. 8-9). MacDonald’s own analysis is actually confirmed by this additional parallel that he missed, and that is impressive.

MacDonald goes on to develop many similar points that not only scream of Homer being on Mark’s mind, but also explain strange features of Mark. The list is surprisingly long:

Why did Jesus, who nevertheless taught openly and performed miracles everywhere, try to keep everything a secret? Why did Jesus stay asleep in a boat during a deadly storm? Why did Jesus drown two thousand pigs? Why does Mark invent a false story about John the Baptist’s execution, one that implicates women? Why are the disciples surprised that Jesus can multiply food even when they had already seen him do it before? Why does Jesus curse a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season? How does Mark know what Jesus said when he was alone at Gethsemane? What is the meaning of the mysterious naked boy at Jesus’ arrest? Why does Jesus, knowing full well God’s plan, still ask why God forsook him on the cross? Why does Mark never once mention Mary Magdalene, or the other two women at the crucifixion, or even Joseph of Arimathea, until after Jesus has died? Why is the temple veil specifically torn ‘top to bottom’ at Jesus’ death? Why is Joseph of Arimathea able to procure the body of a convict so soon from Pilate? Why do we never hear of Joseph of Arimathea again? Why does Jesus die so quickly? Why do the women go to anoint Jesus after he is buried? Why do they go at dawn, rather than the previous night when the Sabbath had already ended?

All these mysteries are explained by the same, single thesis. This is a sign of a good theory. With one theoretical concept, not only countless parallels are identified, but numerous oddities are explained. That is very unlikely to be due to chance. And there is evidence of so many plausible connections, that even though any one of them could perhaps with effort be argued away, the fact that there are so many more makes it increasingly unlikely that MacDonald is seeing an illusion. Finally, his entire theory is plausible within the context of what we can deduce to have been Mark’s cultural and educational background.

 
Crescendo of doom

MacDonald’s book is built like a crescendo: as one reads on, the cases not only accumulate, they actually get better and better, clearer and clearer. In the story of the Gerasene swine (Mk. 5:1ff) MacDonald finds that 18 verses have thematic parallels in the Odyssey, 13 of those in exactly the same order! And even with some of those out of order the order is not random but is inverted, and thus a connection remains evident. In the story of Salome and the execution of John, MacDonald finds seven thematic parallels with the Murder of Agamemnon, all of them in the same order, and on top of that he details two other general parallels. And the two food miracles, forming a doublet in Mark, contain details that match a similar doublet of feasts in the Odyssey, and contain them in the same respective order: ‘Details in the [first] story of Nestor’s feast not found in the [second] story of Menelaus appear in the [first] feeding of the five thousand and not in its twin’ while ‘details in the [second] story of Menelaus not found in the [first] story of Nestor appear in the [second] feeding of the four thousand and not in the first story’ so that ‘the chances of these correspondences deriving from accident are slim’ (p. 85).

(Editor’s interpolated note: A mosaic depicting Odysseus, from the villa of La Olmeda, Pedrosa de la Vega, Spain, late 4th-5th centuries c.e. Both he and Homer are always depicted as whites.)

These examples of a connection between Mark and Homer are far denser than the two examples I detailed earlier, and cannot be explained away even by the most agile of thinkers. Consider the last case, which even has the fewest parallels relative to the other two: in the first feasts, the main characters go by sea, but in the second, by land; in the first, only men attend (even though there is no explanation in Mark of why this should be), but in the second there is no distinction; in the first, the masses assemble into smaller groups, and lie on soft spots, but not in the second; more attend the first than the second (and the numbers are about the same: 5000 in Mark, 4500 in Homer).

On the other hand, in the second feasts, unlike the first, someone asks the host a discouraging question and yet the host shows compassion anyway—in Mark, this is particularly strange, since after the first miracle the disciples have no excuse to be surprised that Jesus can multiply food, so the doubting question can only be explained by the Homeric parallel; finally, in the second feasts, as opposed to the first, there are two sequential courses—bread, then meat. In both authors, the feasts serve an overt educational role: in the one case to educate the hero’s son about hospitality, in the other to educate the disciples about Jesus’ power and compassion, drawing attention to the difference in each story’s moral values. There are even linguistic parallels—Homer’s feasts were called ‘symposia’ (drinking parties) even though that word usually referred to smaller gatherings; likewise, Mark writes that the first feast was organised by ‘symposia’, despite the fact that only food is mentioned, not water or wine. Several of these details in Mark, as noted, are simply odd by themselves, yet make perfect sense when we see the Homeric model, and therein again lies the power of MacDonald’s thesis.

MacDonald does similar work illuminating the Transfiguration, the healing of Bartimaeus, the Hydropatesis (water-walk), the Marcan Apocalypse, the Triumphal Entry, the Anointing, the Passover Feast (including a definite connection with cannibalism that offers a possible ideological origin for the Eucharist as a transvaluation of Homer), the Prayer and Arrest at Gethsemane, the Crucifixion, the Burial, and some details of the Empty Tomb narrative. His theory provides an excellent reason to suppose that the naked boy at Jesus’ arrest is the same as the boy the women find in the empty tomb—and he is a marker of resurrection: a type of the ill-fated Elpenor. Likewise, his theory puts a serious damper on the historicity of Joseph of Arimathea and the burial account in Mark: Joseph is a type of Priam, who rescued the body of Hector for burial in a similar way.

What I found additionally worthwhile is how MacDonald’s theory illuminates the theme of ‘reversal of expectation’ which so thoroughly characterises the Gospels—not only in the parables of Jesus, where the theme is obvious, but in the very story itself. Though MacDonald himself does not pursue this in any detail, his book helped me to see it even more clearly. James and John, who ask to sit at the right and left of Jesus in his glory, are replaced by the two thieves at Jesus’ crucifixion: Simon Peter, Jesus’ right-hand man who was told he had to ‘deny himself and take up his cross and follow’ (8:34), is replaced by Simon of Cyrene when it comes time to truly bear the cross; Jesus is anointed for burial before he dies; and when the women go to anoint him after his death, their expectations are reversed in finding his body missing.

Later Gospels added even more of these reversals: for instance in Matthew Jesus’ father, Joseph, is replaced by Joseph of Arimathea when the duty of burial arose—a duty that should have been fulfilled by the father; likewise, contrary to expectation, the Mary who laments his death and visits his tomb is not Mary his mother, but a prostitute; and while the Jews attack Jesus for healing and doing good on the Sabbath, they in turn hold an illegal meeting, set an illegal guard, and plot evil on the Sabbath, and then break the ninth commandment the next day. This theme occurs far too often to have been in every case historical, and its didactic meaning is made clear in the very parables of reversal told by Jesus himself, as well as, for instance, his teachings about family, or hypocrisy, and so on. These stories were crafted to show that what Jesus preached applied to the real world, real events, ‘the word made flesh’.
 

Death and resurrection

MacDonald’s book concludes with an analysis of how Jesus as a character in Mark is also an inversion of Hector and Achilles in the Iliad. Both Jesus and Achilles knew they were fated to die and spoke of this fate often, but whereas Achilles chose his fate in exchange for ‘eternal fame’, and for himself alone, Jesus chose it in exchange for ‘eternal life’, for all humankind. This is one among many examples of how Mark has updated the values in Homer, highlighting this fact by crafting his narrative in deliberate imitation of Homer’s epics. In a similar fashion, while the death of Hector doomed Troy to destruction, Jesus’ death doomed the Temple to destruction. According to MacDonald, these themes and others guide Mark’s construction of the passion narrative, and though borrowing from the Old Testament and other Jewish texts in the passion account is far more prevalent than anywhere else in his Gospel, there is still a play on the Iliad evident in various details.

For example, MacDonald finds more than 11 parallels between Mark’s account of the crucifixion and the death of Hector, all but one of those in the same order (and that one exception is in inverted order), and 11 more parallels between Mark’s account of the burial of Jesus and Homer’s account of the burial of Hector, all in the same order. It is notable that resurrection, anastasia, was a theme in the Iliad: the concept appears three times, twice in declarations of its impossibility, once in a metaphor for Hector’s survival of certain death. It thus contained a fitting challenge that Mark was happy to answer with a simple prose epic that everywhere flaunted the fact that anastasia was indeed possible, and real. While Hector, Elpenor, and Patroclus were all burned and buried at dawn, the tomb of Jesus was empty at dawn; while the Iliad and Odyssey were epics about mortality, the Gospel was an epic about immortality.

 
The ending of Mark

I have one point of criticism for chapter 21, where MacDonald diverges from his central thesis to explain why Mark ends his Gospel as he does. MacDonald proposes an explanation from the historical context of the author. It is quite likely that many Christians were killed, and the original Jerusalem church destroyed, in the Jewish War of 66-70 A.D. MacDonald in several places relates how Mark most likely wrote his Gospel after the conclusion of the war (there are, to be sure, ample references that assume this, as well as that the world would end soon thereafter—cf. especially MacDonald’s third appendix). So Mark, MacDonald argues, was faced with explaining why Jesus had not forewarned his disciples to evacuate Judaea. Mark’s explanation, so the theory goes, is that Jesus did warn them, but they never heard the warning—in particular, they were supposed to go to Galilee after the resurrection to see Jesus, but the women failed to report this to the disciples and so they never went (and this tactic also allows the disciples to get off the hook: those at fault were mere fickle women).

The problem with this theory should be obvious: it is not the fact that it fails to explain how Mark could know the story if no one told it—for this did not stop him from relating what Jesus said in private when no witnesses were at hand, nor did it stop Matthew from relating secret conversations of the Jews; rather, the problem is that it fails to explain how Christianity started. Even assuming Mark is inventing this account apologetically, how did Mark imagine that the resurrection ever began to be preached if no one was ever told about the empty tomb and no one saw the risen Jesus, even in visions or dreams? Since the earliest accounts, in Paul, clearly suggest post mortem sightings of Jesus, and even tie these to the origin of the Gospel itself (and I have in mind the revelation to Paul mentioned in Galatians, and the visions to Peter and the others mentioned in 1 Corinthians), it does not seem plausible for Mark to expect his readers to reject this tradition, as would be required for his alleged hidden point even to be noticed, much less understood. I thus cannot buy MacDonald’s theory on this point.

(Editor’s interpolated note: An icon of Saint Mark the Evangelist, 1657. Note that he’s depicted as swarthy.)

My own hypothesis is that Mark ended the Gospel thus in order to set up a pretext for why little of his particular story had been heard in the Christian community until he wrote it down. If we suppose that the resurrection as preached by Paul was of a spiritual nature, and therefore had nothing to do with empty tombs, then to suddenly disseminate such a story would raise eyebrows unless the author were ready with an explanation. And by building an explanation into his story he essentially covers himself. It is possible that Mark originally concluded his tale with an assertion that the women later reported the story to him, an ending that would be struck out and replaced to suit the new physicalist Christology that would follow, as well as in support of the new reliance on apostolic authority which seems never to have been a concern for Mark.

But it is also possible that this would not have mattered. The faithful would not necessarily be too bothered about Mark’s sources, since Revelation itself could always provide (in his letter to the Galatians, Paul himself claimed he learned the Gospel through direct revelation from God). Even if they were to ask, Mark or the sellers of his story could easily have provided persuasive oral explanations to satisfy any believer, who would be more than ready to believe anything that agreed with their values and doctrine and glorified and magnified the power of their beloved Lord. Ultimately, if Mark invented the empty tomb, he may also have inadvertently caused the invention of a physical resurrection—since an empty tomb, though meant as a symbol, if taken as a fact could imply a physical resurrection, leaving room for future evangelists to spin the yarn further still.

 
Conclusion

What is especially impressive is the vast quantity of cases of direct and indirect borrowing from Homer that can be found in Mark. One or two would be interesting, several would be significant. But we are presented with countless examples, and this is as cumulative as a case can get.

In the end, I came away from this book with a new appreciation for Mark, whose Gospel tends to be derided as the work of a rather poor, simple Greek author. Though Mark’s Greek is extremely colloquial, not at all in high literary style, this itself is surely a grand and ingenious transvaluation of Homer: whereas the great epics were archaic and difficult, only to be mastered by the educated elites, only to be understood completely by those with access to glossaries and commentaries and marked-up critical editions, Mark not only updated Homer’s values and theology, but inverted its entire character as an elite masterpiece, by making his own epic simple, thoroughly understandable by the common, the poor, the masses, and lacking in the overt pretension and cleverness of poetic verse, written in plain, ordinary language. The scope of genius evident in Mark’s reconstruction of Homeric motifs is undeniable and has convinced me that Mark was no simpleton: he was a literary master, whose achievement is all the greater in his choice of idiom-his ‘poor Greek’ was deliberate and artful, as was his story.

Another theme that becomes apparent throughout this book is how quickly Christians lost touch with this allegorical meaning. Even the other Evangelists, when borrowing from Mark, stripped out the key and telling details and thus obviously missed the point; and only one other author, that of the Acts of Andrew, did anything overtly comparable in comprehensively recrafting Homer. By itself, this might be evidence against such a meaning actually being in Mark. But the evidence that this meaning is present is overwhelming on its own terms, and we can only conclude of early Christian ignorance, instead, that the real origins and message of the earliest Christians was all but lost even to the second or third generation. By the time there was a church in a significant sense, Christianity had been radically changed by the throngs of its converts, and, amidst the din of outsiders who stole the reigns, the very essence of that original Church of Jerusalem faded, powerless to survive under the mass of superstition and arrogance.

Having read this book, I am now certain that the historicity of the Gospels and Acts is almost impossible to establish. The didactic objectives and methods of the authors have so clouded the truth with literary motifs and allusions and parabolic tales that we cannot know what is fact and what fiction. I do not believe that this entails that Jesus was a myth, however—and MacDonald himself is not a mythicist, but assumes that something of a historical Jesus lies behind the fictions of Mark. Although MacDonald’s book could be used to contribute to a mythicist’s case, everything this book proves about Mark is still compatible with there having been a real man, a teacher, even a real ‘miracle worker’ in a subjective sense, or a real event that inspired belief in some kind of resurrection, and so on, which was then suitably dressed up in allegory and symbol.

However, the inevitable conclusion is that we have all but lost this history forever. The Gospels can no longer support a rational belief in anything they allege to have occurred, at least not without external, unbiased corroboration, which we do not have for any of the essential, much less supernatural details of the story. And if Alvar Ellegård is right (Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ, Overlook, 1999), Mark was almost entirely fiction, written after the sack of Jerusalem to freeze in symbolic prose the metaphorical message of Christianity, a faith which began with a Jesus executed long before the Roman conquest, who then appeared in visions (like that which converted Paul) a century later, in the time of Pilate, to inspire the new creed.

What is important is not that this can be decisively proven—nothing can, as our information is too thin, too scarce, too unreliable to decisively prove anything about the origins of Christianity. What is important is that theories like Ellegård’s can’t be disproven, either—it is one among many distinctly possible accounts of what really happened at the dawn of Christianity, which MacDonald’s book now makes even more plausible. And so long as it remains possible, even plausible, that the bulk of Mark is fiction, the contrary belief that it is fact can never be secure.