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Category: New Testament

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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):

 

______ 卐 ______

 

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anti-epic, an inversion of the Greek ‘Bible’ of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which in a sense ‘updates’ and Judaizes the outdated heroic values presented by Homer, in the figure of a new hero, Jesus (whose name, of course, means ‘Savior’).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.

Categories
Aryan beauty New Testament

Merrie Melodies

If we remember a passage in The Fair Race (‘The Arab historian Ibn Fadlan, ambassador of Baghdad to the Bulgarians of the Volga, says of the Vikings: “I have never seen physical specimens so perfect, tall as palm trees, blond and ruddy-skinned”’) it is obvious that the other human races should not exist. If they exist for billions it is due to the counterproductive greed of the white man, so well portrayed in The Man Who Would Be King, where the inhabitants of Kafiristan seem apes compared to Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Both white greed and Christian ethics are behind the creation of the billions of non-whites currently flooding the globe.

Those who are familiar with Richard Carrier’s work will know that the strongest point of his argument is his analysis of the epistles of St Paul. The oldest texts of the New Testament, the Pauline epistles, do not mention an earthly Jesus but an exclusively heavenly one. St. Paul does not even locate the crucifixion of Jesus on earth! In recent days I have continued reading Carrier’s book and I came across a chapter on Clement of Rome and his epistle, which may have been written in the first century. Surprise: Clement also fails to speak, in so early writing, of an earthly Jesus. Apparently the stories that Mark and the other evangelists would write had not yet reached Clement’s ears.

The evidence that the central character of the New Testament is fictional is overwhelming to anyone who has read Carrier’s book, or seen the YouTube videos where he discusses with theologians who believe Jesus was a historical figure. How was it that, instead of the religion of the beautiful Hellenes, whites submitted to the Semitic religion of eternal fire for whites? (In the representations of old paintings of hell I do not see gooks or blacks but whites.) This reminds me that I took the expression ‘Fruitcake Hospital’, which I used in my previous article, from a program that I saw in the early 1970s in The Porky Pig Show, although I don’t remember which character was sent to the psychiatric hospital (huge buildings in those times, like the one we saw in Joker).

Many whites who have abandoned Christianity maintain in their minds a Christian residue, the belief in the immortality of the human soul. They do not seem to notice that, in doing so, they inadvertently join blacks and gooks as long as ‘Man is special’ and the rest of creation is treated as despicable creatures—as if a camel were the same as a spider! Such is the axiological by-product of those who maintain that only Man possesses a soul that survives death: the ultimate brotherhood with other races. (*)

Some white nationalists argue that the white race has always had a belief in personal immortality. What they fail to realise is that the obsession to save themselves from the eternal fire caused an unhealthy focus with the beyond that didn’t exist in the Ancient World, at least not among whites. The complete apostasy of Christianity not only implies abandoning Christian ethics, the crux of this site, but abandoning the obsession with the hereafter as well. Otherwise whites seem to me like that character from Merrie Melodies I saw as a kid who was sent to the Fruitcake Hospital.

_______

(*) Oliver Sacks’ books are hilarious and also explain how the faculties of the supposed ‘soul’ can be damaged simply by accidentally injuring the human brain.

Categories
Christian art New Testament

Spanish Renaissance painter

In previous entries of Christian art we have seen how literary fiction was growing within the New Testament itself; how, from St. Paul who did not mention the empty tomb in his epistles (the oldest texts of the New Testament), the evangelist Mark did mention it but only with a ‘young man’. Matthew, who wrote after Mark, used the latter’s story and, in his own literary fiction, transfigured the young man into an ‘angel’. Luke and John, who knew Matthew’s text, added another angel to their gospels.

This is how the four gospels were created, each late gospel making the miracle bigger. But the story of how fiction grew does not end in the New Testament. Just as the so-called apocryphal gospels devised additional stories that do not appear in the so-called canonical gospels (e.g., passages from the childhood of Jesus), the popular imagery would invent stories that do not even appear in the apocrypha.

For example, the gospels do not tell that the risen Jesus appeared to his mother. But artists and Christian piety could not help imagining the encounter. This can be seen in Appearance of the Risen Christ to the Virgin (1515, above), a work by Hernando Yáñez de la Adelina, a Spanish Renaissance painter and introducer of the Italian quattrocentist formulas in Valencia and Castile.

Categories
Christian art New Testament

How the myth developed

Next to the already empty tomb, this Italian work by Andrea Orcagna (1370, preserved in the National Gallery of London) shows a dialogue between a couple of angels and the three Marys.

In the earliest gospel, Mark (16:5) describes that the women enter the tomb and meet ‘one young man’.

A later evangelist, Matthew (28:2), who used Mark’s gospel, embellished Mark’s literary fiction a little further. He changed the ‘one young man’ to an ‘angel’ that arrives during an earthquake and rolls the stone away.

Luke and John, who wrote their gospels even after Matthew, add another angel to the story that greet the women. So there are two angels now, like the blond ones represented by the delicate paintbrush of Orcagna. (I really love how medieval painters used the pink colour…)

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Christian art New Testament

The empty tomb

For Christians, the empty tomb is the great proof that the Jew they worship had risen. In this detail from The Polyptych of the Misericordia that a disciple of Piero della Francesca painted in the 15th century, the women ‘prove the truth’ of the central miracle in Christendom.

Today’s Christians do not seem bothered by the fact that the oldest texts of the New Testament, seven Pauline epistles, do not mention the empty tomb at all. Obviously, the story was invented after Paul by the gospel authors.

Categories
Deranged altruism New Testament Old Testament Racial right

Morgan vs. Ryckaert

 
Franklin Ryckaert: Racism= harming people of another race because of their race. Race realism = realizing that races are inherently different and avoiding risky situations with people of other races.

Robert Morgan: Or in other words, racists do what ‘race realists’ would do if they had the courage.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s note: Franklin Ryckaert exemplifies what is wrong with white nationalism and the alt-right.

Per the Old Testament and the Talmud, Jews must exterminate the Gentiles.

Per the New Testament, Gentiles are commanded, instead, to love the Other including Jews and non-whites.

White nationalists and alt-righters don’t obey the Führer. They obey the Jew who wrote the New Testament: prolefeed for us Gentiles.

It is just that simple.

Whites are condemned to become extinct unless they transvalue Ryckaert’s et al values back to pre-Christian mores. But nationalists won’t do it. They’re self-righteously addicted to their (((drug)))…

Categories
Christian art Deranged altruism Miscegenation New Testament Universalism Vikings

Veritas odium parit, 6

The blood of Christ, the subject of inexhaustible meditation for the believer, is visible in a detail of this Crucifixion by Fra Angelico in which a monk appears contemplating the bloodied feet of his Lord. In the detail of this painting, which is located in the Florentine Convent of St. Mark, it can also be seen how such blood flows from the cross to the truncated tree.

A guilt-tripped man at the feet of the crucified rabbi is the archetypal antithesis of the proud Aryan Berserker of other times: to whom the morbid fascination of Judeo-Christians seemed unhealthy, bizarre and even inexplicable. In ‘The Saxon Savior: Converting Northern Europe’ Ash Donaldson said:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

The Saxon savior

The author of the ninth-century Saxon gospel known as the Heliand undertook much more than a translation, as difficult as that task has proven for missionaries. In his harmonization of the four Gospels into a single narrative, he presented Christ as an Odinic wizard-chieftain, with the apostles as his war-band. Consider the episode of St. Peter cutting off the ear of the Roman soldier arresting Jesus. While it takes up only two verses in John (the other Gospels do not even mention that it was Peter), in the Heliand, Christ’s foremost “swordsman” flies into a berserker rage:

Then Simon Peter, the mighty, the noble swordsman flew into a rage; his mind was in such turmoil that he could not speak a single word. His heart became intensely bitter because they wanted to tie up his Lord there. So he strode over angrily, that very daring thane, to stand in front of his Commander, right in front of his Lord. No doubting in his mind, no fearful hesitation in his chest, he drew his blade and struck straight ahead at the first man of the enemy with all the strength in his hands, so that Malchus was cut and wounded on the right side by the sword! Blood gushed out, pouring from the wound! The cheek of the enemy’s first man had been cut open. The men stood back—they were afraid of the slash of the sword.

Similarly, the author of the Heliand knew that the episode of Joseph and the pregnant Mary searching in vain for a place to stay for the night would be incomprehensible to the Germanic peoples, whose valuation of hospitality is clear from the Hávamál. So when the parents of Jesus arrive at the “hill-fort” of their clan, they are tended to by horse-guards, not shepherds, the former being suitable representatives of the warrior class, while the infant Jesus is placed among jewels.

There is more at work here than cultural transplantation, or even such ambitious modifications as moving the Last Supper to a mead hall or having Satan don a Germanic cap of invisibility to deceive Pilate’s wife. There is little to no valorization of victimhood in the Heliand, and the Beatitudes are reworked as praises of warrior endurance.

Sin, fate, and even generosity are all revised to fit a Germanic hero such as Christ is made out to be (problems which the sympathetic Jesuit who translated it into modern English is at great pains to square with orthodoxy). The author of the Heliand even seems to imply that the twelve members of the apostolic war-band might not even be Jewish, and hail instead from a northern people.

Notably absent from the Heliand gospel, moreover, are two famous parables that would not have sat well with a Germanic audience. The events described in the story of the Prodigal Son would have been unthinkable to a society in which kinship was paramount. The absence of the Good Samaritan parable is even more suggestive, since in the original, Christ uses it to introduce a universal moral obligation to treat strangers and foreigners as one would kin. Such an idea was foreign to the free peoples of the North, and one that Aristotle rejected as well.

And here we come to the nub of the problem. The Mediterranean audience for the Gospels and missionary work of St. Paul had been subjected to a political unification across ethnic and racial lines. [emphasis by Ed.]

Long before its decline, the Roman Empire displayed ample signs of declining civic engagement and social trust, qualities Harvard Professor Robert Putnam has statistically linked to diversity. What kept everyone’s Fagin-like concern for “number one” from pulling the whole thing apart was both the iron fist of Rome and the emperors’ insistence on public worship of the state.

Political universalism was thus reinforced by religious universalism, and Christianity proved more determined and well-equipped to insist upon that universalism than any of the pagan emperors had. Thus, either individualistic hedonism, or some variety of universalism, seemed the only choices to a people who had lost all of the intermediate institutions that tribe and kin provide.

The free peoples of Northern Europe, in contrast, maintained all of the strong links Aristotle identified as natural to our condition. As a result, they rejected individualistic hedonism quite readily and had no concept of universalism or of out-group obligations.

The sagas instead teem with people who have clear obligations framed by ties of kinship and friendship. Had the author of the Heliand presented the parable of the Good Samaritan, his Saxon audience would have incredulously asked, “Where were this man’s kinfolk?” Having no notion that mere physical proximity implied extra-tribal duties—an idea originating in the ethnic melting pot of Mediterranean cities—they would have difficulties extending that concept universally, as the parable seeks to do. That would require centuries of patient indoctrination.

Through syncretism and outright omission, Christianity was presented as—and ultimately became—something less foreign and less threatening to the peoples of the North. A faith that was Semitic in origin won only by becoming partially Europeanized, as James Russell describes in The Germanization of Medieval Christianity. (The Greek language has an admirable way of expressing this phenomenon: in addition to the active and passive voices of verbs, it also has a middle voice, in which the agent is both acting and acted upon.)

Yet today, the Völkerwanderung of Third World peoples is a reminder that this syncretism has gone on throughout the world, giving us such bizarre phenomena as the wildly popular cult of Santa Muerte, reviving the worship of the Aztec queen of the underworld trussed up as a skeletal Catholic saint.

Many tradition-minded people seem to be calling for a revival of Victorian “muscular Christianity,” yet the muscles have always been provided by the pre-Christian elements in this amalgamation, which tends to downplay the very things that the Heliand left out altogether. It is as if such people are trying to work their way back to something more familiar and more intuitive without sacrificing orthodoxy. Yet beyond the trappings of old-school Europeanized Christianity lies a core message that, of necessity, consigns ethnic identity, ancestral traditions, and ultimately this life itself to irrelevance in the face of our ultimate unity with God.

Categories
Bible Deranged altruism New Testament Universalism

How Christianity harms the race

by Michael Masters (1997)

Christianity, which many believe to be the noblest moral system ever conceived, must now share blame for the dissolution of the West. A faith that once served as an anchor for Western civilization has become a source for the same self-flagellating guilt that typifies liberalism. Today, Christianity’s public expression differs only cosmetically from Marxism in its attitudes towards economic redistribution, equality, and racial integration.

How has Christianity sunk so low—and our people with it? The answer is that it has subverted inbred traits of altruism that help family and tribe survive, and has transmuted those traits into agents of passivity and surrender. Christianity has universalized altruism, thus stripping us of our defense against multiracialism. Today’s Christianity drives us to betray our own interests to whoever asks. At the same time, a preoccupation with eternal reward in the world to come blinds some Christians to the consequences of their actions today.
 

Christianity’s decline

Loss of racial loyalty is recent. For centuries, race consciousness posed no moral dilemma to Christians. That “old-time religion” was good enough for Charles Martel when he smashed the Muslim invasion of Europe in 732 at Tours. It was good enough for Pope Urban II when he launched the Crusades in 1095. It was good enough for Columbus and Magellan, who claimed newly-discovered lands in the name of both king and faith. It was good enough for European colonial masters who ruled millions of non-Whites, untroubled by egalitarian scruples.

Christianity’s divorce from racial consciousness was both sudden and recent. Only in the 20th century did [anti-racial “morality”] infiltrate virtually every mainline Christian organization. By the 1960s, organized Christianity was working hand in hand with organized Judaism to dismantle the South’s self-protective wall of racial hierarchy.

What transformed the church? The problem is that Christian dogma has always contained dangerous moral precepts that undermine the natural instinct for group preservation. These precepts may be summarized thus: Sacrifice yourself today for the benefit of others, buoyed by faith in an “eternal reward.”

In earlier times, this idea posed little danger to White survival because it was preached by Whites living in an almost all-White world. Today, on a crowded planet filled with envious Third World peoples, its consequences are lethal. The mentality of sacrifice has resulted in an inability to assert the imperative of survival—an imperative that puts family, tribe, and nation at the center of moral life.

Christianity must therefore share a major part of the blame for the abnormal belief that we must commit racial suicide in order to be “moral.” This is not, of course, to lay blame solely on Christianity, but neither should Christianity escape examination solely because it has long been the guardian of the moral beliefs of Western peoples.

What then, are the beliefs that characterize today’s self-destructive Christianity? They are altruism and universalism. These two beliefs so dominate public Christian discourse that they are contradicted from no more than a handful of pulpits—even in the American South, where ministers once invoked God in defense of segregation.
 

Altruism

Let us first consider altruism, the Good Samaritan reflex. The Golden Rule—which is the ideal of Christian conduct—exalts altruism, or acts beneficial to others without regard for one’s own interests. If followed by everyone, surely the Golden Rule would produce world peace and harmony.

In fact, universal altruism has unintended consequences, some of which are shocking to Christian sensibilities. Biologist and human ecologist Garrett Hardin first makes his point with respect to voluntary birth control, then generalizes it:

People vary. Confronted with appeals to limited breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences … The argument here has been stated in the context of the population problem, but it applies equally well to any instance in which society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for the general good—by means of his conscience. To make such an appeal is to set up a selective system that works toward the elimination of conscience from the race.

Conscience is eliminated because it is not randomly distributed in a population but is to some degree inherited from parents. Even if willingness to restrict breeding for the good of all is only slightly heritable, an appeal to conscience will steadily remove it from the population. The fact that self-sacrificing conscience, or in a broader sense, unfettered altruism, is self-eliminating is a fundamental truth with which any lasting moral order must contend.

There must be a dual code of morality—one for one’s own group and another for everyone else. Harsh as this may sound both to Christians and non-Christians, Nature will inexorably eliminate the flawed genes of any group that fails to make this distinction.

In fact, we take the dual code for granted. We devote much of our lives to rearing our own children but we ignore the children of strangers—an obvious double standard. We save the lives of our comrades in battle but we kill the enemy—another double standard. The universal altruism of the Golden Rule undercuts both forms of group loyalty. After all, we might well wish that strangers would devote themselves to our children. If we took the Golden Rule seriously we might then devote ourselves to the children of others and neglect our own. Likewise the Golden Rule might require us to betray our own side to the enemy, inasmuch as that is what we might want done for us. Clearly, groups and individuals that behaved this way would not pass on their perverted morality to many descendants.

Some will object that Professor Hardin’s prediction about the self-elimination of conscience is demonstrably false, since it still exists. No: What matters is the time scale. Conscience-obsessed Western man is declining in numbers, and his morality and behavior are declining with him.
 

Universalism

Today’s Christians have confused the Biblical injunction to be our “brother’s keeper”—a moral code based on blood kinship—with the opposite notion that every human on Earth is our brother. More than a century ago, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon observed, “If everyone is my brother, I have no brothers.” Professor Hardin adds: “Universalism is altruism practiced without discrimination of kinship, acquaintanceship, shared values, or propinquity in time or space.”

Biblical testimony on universalism is, in fact, mixed. The Old Testament praises altruism only within the community, and commands the Children of Israel to shun other peoples. For example, Deuteronomy 7:2-3 reads:

2 When the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them; 3 Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son…

One finds national and presumably racial separatism in the New Testament as well. Acts 17:26 reads,

[He] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the Earth, and hath determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation.

Matthew 25:31-32, in which Christ speaks of his future reign, adds:

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations; and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats.

But all too often the New Testament, particularly in the letters of Paul, promotes universalism. Today’s Christians love to cite passages such as Galatians 3:28-29:

28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond or free, male or female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if ye be Christ’s then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.

 

Christianity today

It is on the basis of passages like this that Christianity has abandoned the defense of our people and has become an accomplice of those who would displace us. The National Council of Churches donated money to Marxist revolutionaries in Africa—revolutionaries who sometimes murdered White missionaries. The Southern Baptist Convention’s leadership recently bowed before its one Black member, apologizing for slavery and racism. Typically, the Black member showed little gratitude for the gesture, complaining that not nearly enough had been done to alleviate the lingering effects of slavery.

Like their atheist counterparts, Christian trend-setters preach what amounts to the dissolution of the White race. Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson supports more immigration from “south of the border” because the newcomers are nominally “Christian,” support “family values,” and are “our kind of voters.”

Mr. Robertson seems not to realize that Mestizo Christianity is often based on “revolution theology,” and its symbol is a Christ-figure with arms upraised, brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle. Revolution theology will help create “Aztlan,” the Bronze Continent, the new home of La Raza—literally, “the race.” Even a nominally Christian Aztlan would effectively decapitate Christianity as Mr. Robertson understands it, since altruistic universalist Christianity is largely a habit of Western people.
 

Too much sacrifice

Billy Graham goes one further and says that the only solution to our race problem is for us to breed with non-Whites until human differences disappear. He says we must take alien peoples into our hearts and our homes and, yes, “into our marriages.”

With ministers preaching racial suicide, Christianity may now be more of a threat to our survival than liberalism. At least with liberalism, one recognizes the enemy. But when Christian leaders take liberal positions, they leave the flock defenseless. Ralph Reed and Billy Graham are our opponents, no less than Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a front page story titled “Racial Reconciliation Becomes a Priority For the Religious Right”:

[T]he most energetic element of society [today] addressing racial divisions may also seem the most unlikely: the religious right. Across the country, conservative congregations and denominations, while sticking to other stringent principles of conservative religious thinking such as the proscription of homosexuality and abortion, are embracing a concept called “biblical racial reconciliation”—a belief that as part of their efforts to please God, they are required by Scripture to work for racial harmony.

If even “the Christian right” has become part of the rout of traditional Christianity; it is because the New Testament opens the door to universalism. Oswald Spengler wrote that “Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism,” and indeed, ministers routinely preach the “social” gospel, invoking a universalism that differs little from the agenda of the radical left.
 

A chimera

Yet ironically, the universalist goal is a chimera. Since those who displace us do not, by definition, maintain our moral standards—for if they did they would not be replacing us—our flawed moral system will vanish with us. As Professor Hardin explains in his 1982 essay, “Discriminating Altruisms,” “[universalism] cannot survive in competition with discrimination.” A group that practices universal altruism—and Whites are the only group that does—cannot compete against groups that do not.

Some Christians would say that none of this matters because believers will one day ascend to their reward in Heaven. However, the vision of Heaven can subvert the imperative of survival. If, in their fervor to enter Heaven, Christians fail to have children or to build a nation in which their children can maintain their way of life, the race will not continue. It is worth noting that Heaven is an entirely personal reward, which can be pursued at the expense of family, tribe or race. Selfishness thus joins universalism in modern Christianity, completely inverting Nature’s design of loyalty to family and tribe.

Christianity’s flaws did not threaten us until technology and ideology made their consequences felt on a world-wide scale. Now, our moral code must renounce universalism and emphasize our own survival. Unless we adopt moral beliefs in keeping with the realities of today’s demographics, we will not survive the mounting wave of Third World immigration, procreation, and miscegenation. It is in this sense that, as Jean Raspail says, “Christian charity will prove itself powerless.” Christian charity can hardly stop a demographic displacement that it helped set in motion.

Categories
Christian art Exterminationism Friedrich Nietzsche Matthias Grünewald New Testament Old Testament Racial right Technology

Prostrated anti-Semites


Sometimes it is important to focus on a detail of a masterpiece of Christian art; for example, close-ups of Jesus’ feet and hands nailed to the cross. Here we see the contorted feet of Grünewald: a painter of the badly named ‘German Renaissance’. Grünewald ignored the Greco-Roman world of the Italian Renaissance to continue the style of late Central European medieval art.

In the Gates of Vienna discussion forum, ten years ago a Swede commented that all Westerners are now either Christians or liberals. I would paraphrase that statement by saying that every white is either Christian or neo-Christian. This includes the alt-right atheists, unable to let Christian ethics go. Even most anti-Semites remain prostrated before the contorted feet of the crucified Jew.

For that reason I do not even comment on The Occidental Observer anymore. But I am very amused that a few who have broken away with such ethics try to argue with Christians and neo-Christians on The Occidental Observer and Unz Review. In this site I have collected many comments from Robert Morgan, but I have also expressed my differences with him regarding technology.

Well: a regular visitor to The West’s Darkest Hour has been discussing technology with Morgan (here). Morgan is anti-Christian. Adunai, another anti-Christian, has also discussed with others in that webzine. What Adunai replied to one of these Christians reminds me of something that caught my attention from the first time I read Nietzsche, more than forty years ago.

Nietzsche said that while he rejected the universal love ethic that the New Testament preached, he loved the Old Testament because, unlike the gospel, the ancient Hebrews fulfilled Darwinian laws.

Obviously I’m rephrasing Nietzsche, but in essence he said that. What now has piqued my attention is that white nationalists who have not broken with the religion of their parents see things the other way around: they accept the New Testament and reject the Old. They do not realise that, with this, they have fallen into the trap that the Semitic authors of the New Testament set up for them: to use the fairness of the fair race to invert the values of that race. I refer to the transit from a culture when handsome Greco-Roman statues were so much admired to Grünewald’s feet.

Next, Adunai’s responses to Morgan and others on Unz Review:
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Robert Morgan said: Civilization too is a revolt against Nature.

Adunai responded: How so? The very definition of humans is a bit anti-Nature, but nothing’s wrong with that. Man invented fire and scorched woods with it—like any other form of life, he wants to kill everything around himself. Humans destroy species in Amazonia, they breed out pathetic mutants such as dogs, cows and wheat—all to consume and to enslave, in order to ensure their own survival.

The problem only arises when their super-animal intelligence bugs out and accepts the anti-Nature inside themselves, the anti-human suicide—see Christianity. No other animal would fall for the schizophrenia of a virgin mother of a resurrected corpse, and for a god that gives ‘life’ as a reward for death. But no other animal has invented a space rocket either.

It’s just hard for humans to accept a science-inspired atheist Darwinian worldview. But I believe it to be possible—see the DPR of Korea.

P.S. It’s a shame Laurent Guyénot is a 9/11 truther. How can one see through the madness of Christianity, and yet swallow the lies of truthers?
 

A commenter said: It is obvious that the OT is just Jew mystical garbage filled with tribal hate.

Adunai responded: You are so Christian, you see the good part of the Bible as the bad one. That tribal hate you speak of is precisely what we need! What we must admire and put into myth! What every single healthy nation has lived with.

Currently, you hate Jews for being racist. That’s insane. No wonder Jews despise Christians—just like a scientist ‘despises’ the poison he has created, he will not drink it himself. Think War—Harm Your Enemies—Produce Children.
 

Robert Morgan said: ‘Technological innovation tore those barriers down. With the barriers down and races mingling freely, discrete human races and discrete cultures are doomed’.

Adunai responded: I never understood this position. Hadn’t it be for the Christian axiology, the White race would have cleansed all of Africa, Asia and America of the non-White nations as early as in the 1890s. Or for sure in the 1950s, with the advent of atomic weapons.

Why do you focus so firmly on the technologies failing to see it as a tool Whites have used as they have seen fit? The problem is not the technology, it is purely the axiology. Technology only allowed the HIV to transition into the AIDS.

But for all I care, it’s only for the better. Better to deal with this menace sooner than later. Europe had little hope in 317, even less in 732 and 800 (when the Franks failed to kill the Church). The French, industrial and green revolutions do not change that.

In short, I disagree with your pessimism concerning technology.
 

Robert Morgan said: ‘Further, you seem to be very much in the “free will” / man is a special creation camp (basically a Biblical point of view), and as I said above, I’m a determinist, so I believe free will is an illusion’.

Adunai responded: So, you believe the Whites’ conversion to Christianity to have been unavoidable? That is pessimistic.

Of course, there is something in the Aryan’s psyche that has failed him—see Buddhism in India. There is also the deep contradiction that I see between man as an animal and his newfound intelligence and introspection, his ability to commit suicide, his ability to hate all life. It is in our Nature to destroy Nature, and that is healthy, but can inspire Christianity as a side-effect.

But I am an optimist and I disagree that the White man was born irredeemably defective, that the Jew is our perfect parasite. Because if it is so, or at least cannot be fought against, then all hope is lost, or worse yet, never existed to begin with.
 

Robert Morgan said: ‘Therefore, when you say something like “whites could have” done this, that, or the other thing, it makes no sense to me. They had what they thought were very good reasons for not doing it, or in effect had no choice’.

Adunai responded: Whites could have made a party that tried to curtail the destruction by technology. Oh wait, they did—namely, the NSDAP. Even the last anti-Christian emperor was born after 317.

What I’m saying is that Whites could have denied Christianity in the 4th, 8th, 16th or 20th century, but chose not to. They could have mastered technology, for with the right axiology, it would have spelled certain doom for all non-White nations on Earth, and not at all led to any race-mixing—but under Christianity, it did provoke suicide. You can only see technology under Christianity, and you think it’s the only way [red emphasis by Ed.].

When you see a car, you see a Negro arriving in Finland. When I see a car, I see Whites arriving in Egypt in 1910 and genociding all the locals. We had the first shot.
 

A commenter said: ‘Given the US Constitution, Eisenhower’s desegregation orders made sense’.

Adunai responded: Yes… Then why won’t you tear down that stupid White-hating Christian document? Why are you trying to rationalize it?

Desegregation is diametrically opposite of the genocide of blacks. Desegregation = death of Whites. Desegregation makes sense due to the Constitution and its idealist Christian egalitarianism… To hell with the Constitution!
 

A comemnter said: ‘Congo Rats are rated as repugnant in reliable tests of racial attractiveness’.

Adunai responded: Who cares how attractive Negroes are? Are you a faggot? Because only faggot feminists think in this way.

The real culprit is White men, and White men alone. It is the White men that allow their daughters marry non-Whites. Not women. Not the attractiveness of said non-Whites. It’s the Christian malware in your head.
 

Robert Morgan said: ‘In the context of your example, what I’ve said is that if the negroes had had no way to get to Finland, they wouldn’t be there, and this seems to me inarguable’.

Adunai responded: It is not. Because a non-Christian technological civilization would not have given Negroes access to their technology to begin with. And would have exterminated them in a short while, as predicted by Darwin.
 

Robert Morgan said: ‘I agree that in your imaginary world…’

Adunai responded: The world without Christianity. It happened in a localized version in Germany.
 

Robert Morgan said: ‘The struggle for survival and human nature determine how it will be employed’.

Adunai responded: No, they don’t. The White race does not struggle for survival. The reason is still unclear, but I blame Christianity first and foremost. You don’t have an issue with doing likewise when it’s about the 1860s America, but when it’s about more recent times, it’s suddenly technology. I fail to see the connection.
 

Robert Morgan said: ‘…and almost never have they been killed off completely, even in non-Christian societies. They have usually been assimilated into the conquering race’.

Adunai responded: There were different kinds of conquest in history. The conquest of Europe by Aryans, by Rome, by Mongols. Some were genocidal, others not. Some were empires, others loose confederations of savages.

What is different now? Science. Knowledge of the world. Materialist philosophy that clearly states the supremacy of genetics in the genesis of culture. The issue is not technology—it would only have helped the extermination. The issue is that the idealist poison of Christianity seeped so deep into the Aryan soul that any hope for the materialist worldview was vanquished in 1945 under the double sign of Christianity and Bolshevism.
 

Robert Morgan said: ‘The struggle for survival will force this outcome, because if you don’t use slaves in this way, then your enemies that do will become wealthier than you, more powerful, and eventually overwhelm you. This is how, in the real world, human nature and the struggle for survival determine outcomes’.

Adunai responded: I don’t deny it. But how does the industrial civilization relate to it? I say that its advances in sciences would have made race-mixing the highest taboo and race war the noblest goal in any non-Christian society. Industry would only have amplified the desire to healthy life in a population. But in our case, technology has amplified the death wish.

You want to remove industry—then what? A return to pre-industrial society will not bar crude empires from spawning that can and will race-mix anyway. Too rotten to keep healthy values, yet not bright enough to develop racial science and fission weapons. Where’s a good future in that?

Do you put all your hope on the hypothetical barbarians that will burn Rome time and time again? Our pre-industrial Rome ate a good chunk of Europe, mind you—and even all of central Germany might have been romanized and judaized. Mongols and Turks demolished all Aryan culture in Kazakhstan. Vikings interbred with Eskimos in Iceland. What would stop Aryans from perishing in a non-technological world? I posit that only the power of chemical and atomic bonds can assure the existence of the European race once and for all.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: Morgan is obviously violating Occam’s razor by multiplying entities (technology) when the Xtian inversion of values alone explains the West’s darkest hour beautifully.

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

Unhistorical Jesus, 2

An icon of Saint Mark the Evangelist

 
How we know Mark was the earliest Gospel

How did students of the four Gospels determine that the earliest of them is Mark? The answer is fairly simple and the case is overwhelmingly clear. How certain is the conclusion? It is so certain that only a small percentage of scholars hold to any other theory. The large agreement among different interpreters of the Gospels that Mark came first is for a simply reason. That reason is what happens when you lay side by side the three “Synoptic” Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

These three Gospels have been called “Synoptic,” a word which means “seeing together,” because they share in common a large amount of material, follow the same basic order, and stand apart from John, whose Gospel is unique among the four.

Long ago people realized you could display the text of the three Synoptic Gospels side by side in columns to form a synopsis or parallel Gospel or a harmony. When you do this you find that a large percentage of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are parallel. They share a large amount of verbatim agreement, though each of the three has unique ways of diverging from each other in small and large matters. Much is the same and some is different.

For a long time, people who have studied the Gospels in synopsis (parallel columns) have referred to “the Synoptic Problem.” That problem is: how do we account for the agreements and differences in the parallel accounts and in the other material in the Gospels? Many of the observations I will share here come from a book that I think is the simplest and best-explained handbook on the topic, by Mark Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze.
 

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Editor’s note: The rest of the above article may be read: here.

I must refer again to the bold-typed words in the first instalment of this series. For those priests of the 14 words who are knowledgeable about the secular approaches to the New Testament, the implications of those bolded words are enormous. But for white nationalists who are not so educated in this matter, before you continue reading my Mondays’ essay-review of Carrier’s book, I would recommend a little online research to become familiar with the evidence that Mark was the earliest of the four canonical gospels.

This is fundamental, as the other gospels are mere re-writings of the original Mark gospel, where the authors added fictional material of their own to an already fictional talltale.