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Kevin MacDonald Old Testament

On the Old Testament

opened-torah-scrolls

The Old Testament was by Jews, about Jews, for Jews. If you are not Jewish the Old Testament has nothing to do with you, never has and never will. (Read Kevin MacDonald’s first book of his trilogy about Judaism.)

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Old Testament

The New Covenant

On April 16, 2015 a commenter asked:

Jack Frost, on beliefs of the Church: Can you explain to me why the Bible includes the Old Testament at all?
 

Frost responded:

The Old Testament is included to provide context. Remember, according to the usual interpretation Jesus is supposed to be the Messiah foretold by the Jewish prophets.

New-Covenant

Also, his message of love and universal brotherhood (i.e., anti-racism) is revolutionary precisely because it is a New Covenant that replaces the old one described at length in the Old Testament. To accept the New Covenant message is to deny the importance of race, and even family. All are one in Jesus (see Galatians 3:28).

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Degenerate art Egalitarianism Old Testament Psychology William Pierce

By Way of Deception

Thou Shalt Do War

 

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by William Pierce

The motto of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, is, according to recently defected Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky: “By way of deception thou shalt do war.” That motto describes more than the modus operandi of the world’s most ruthless and feared organization of professional assassins and espionage agents; it really describes the modus vivendi of an entire race. It is necessary to understand that fact before one can hope to understand fully the role of the Jews in national and world affairs.

The concept of a race eternally at war with the rest of the world is alien to us. It is difficult to believe or even to grasp. When we examine such a concept and begin sifting the evidence it is easy to become confused. On the one hand we have the Old Testament injunctions to the Hebrews from their tribal god, speaking through their prophets, to annihilate every Gentile nation over which they gain power:

And thou shalt consume all the peoples which the Lord thy God shall deliver unto thee; thine eye shall not pity them… thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. (Deuteronomy 7:16, 20:16)

Similarly bloodthirsty, explicit injunctions are repeated so often in the Jews’ holy books that we can only assume that they are meant to be taken seriously. The historical evidence suggests that in ancient times the Jews did indeed take their religion seriously: they were notorious everywhere and at all times as implacable haters of humanity who in turn were thoroughly despised by every people among whom they lived.

Then on the other hand we have the modern, American Jew in the role of humanitarian, shunning the instruments of war and urging that all citizens, including himself, be disarmed, in order to make the streets of our cities kinder and gentler. Not only do the Jews provide the principal impetus to America’s gun-control effort, but they are found in the forefront of every other squishy, do-good movement, from those ostensibly aimed at reducing hostility between the races to those designed to increase tolerance of homosexuals and their practices.

How are we to make sense of this apparently conflicting evidence?

Is the Jew in the U.S. Congress who cites the rising murder statistics and then demands that the government confiscate all privately owned firearms trying to deceive us as to his intentions? When he talks peace and disarmament is he really thinking war against the Gentiles?

And what of the carefully cultivated media image of the Jew as a gentle, inoffensive victim of bigotry, always being persecuted but never persecuting others? Is that also deception? And even if it is, does it necessarily mean that beneath the Jew’s mask of benevolence and innocence hides the malevolent visage of a cunning predator? Perhaps for every bloodsucking Jewish swindler like Ivan Boesky or Michael Milken there is a Jewish benefactor of mankind like polio vaccine developer Jonas Salk, and for every bloody-handed Jewish gangster like Ariel Sharon, Meyer Lansky, or Yitzhak Shamir there is a Jewish Nobel Peace Prize winner like Menachem Begin, Henry Kissinger—or the appropriately named Elie Wiesel.

Or are we also being deceived when the Salks and the Kissingers are held up to us as reasons for not condemning all Jews for the transgressions of some?

By way of deception thou shalt do war.

Does that injunction mean: “If you must wage war—if it is impossible to avoid war—then you stand a better chance of winning by being tricky”? Or does it mean: “Thou shalt wage war, and thou shalt deceive”?

The answer to this question is important. If it is the former—if the Jews, as a whole, are not malevolent, if they have broken with their Old Testament tradition and no longer feel that their racial mission is to destroy all other peoples, but they merely feel that when forced to defend themselves they are justified in using all means, including deception, then we may be able to live on the same planet with them, at a distance. We don’t have to like them or agree with their policies, but we can see the possibility, at least, of some sort of peaceful coexistence, once a separation of peoples has been accomplished.

In seeking the answer we should keep in mind that deception is, in itself, hostile. A policy of systematic deception is tantamount to a policy of war. If we discover that the Jews (as a whole, not just a few swindlers among them) have been deceiving us deliberately and systematically over an extended period of time on any matter of substance, then we may infer that they regard the relationship between us as one of war, and we should respond accordingly.

The pursuit of this inference may be the only path to an unmuddied answer. After all, how do we know that someone is waging war against us? If he makes an open declaration of war and then begins shooting and bombing us, the matter is clear enough. But if, because he always follows a policy of deception, he declares that he is not at war with us and only has our best interests at heart, we may have difficulty in deciding whether the injury he causes us is deliberate or inadvertent.

Suppose he undertakes courses of action which damage us in ways somewhat less directly than shooting and bombing—ways such as bringing hordes of non-Whites across our borders, breaking down the barriers to racial mixing in our society, encouraging permissiveness, undermining our institutions, promoting cultural bolshevism—all the while claiming that he does not regard these things as harmful. If we were a more practical people we might pay less attention to what the Jew says and more to what he does; we might stop worrying about his motive, judge him on the basis of the effect his presence has had on us, and then act accordingly.

Unfortunately, there are many who cannot in good conscience take a stand against the Jew without knowing what is in his heart—and the Jew is aware of this. We must catch him deliberately lying to us, deceiving us systematically and massively, in order to infer that his intent is hostile.

That’s one reason why the unraveling of the “Holocaust” myth is so important to us—and why the Jew clings so desperately to every lie in its fabric.

We should draw some sort of conclusion from the consistency of the Jew’s actions. Virtually everything he does is harmful to us. Without much exaggeration we can say that whenever the Jew takes a stand on a new issue, the proper position for us is on the other side.

Everyone who has read any Jewish literature—i.e., literature by Jews about Jews—has encountered the traditional Jewish character who whenever he must make a decision about something the goyim have done asks himself: “Is it good for the Jews?” That’s an admirable trait in any person, Jew or Gentile: always being concerned first about the welfare of his community, of his tribe, of his race. The Jewish author more often than not sprinkles a bit of dissimulation over it, however, suggesting that it may be unfashionably parochial, but it is excusable on the grounds that the Jews have been obliged by bitter experience to be wary of anything the Gentile does.

It goes without saying, of course, that the same author would regard it as totally inexcusable for a Gentile to use a similar criterion: to ask himself about some policy or action of the Jews, “Is it good for the White race, for Gentiles?” Such a character could only be cast in the role of villain.

And what we never encounter in Jewish literature is a Jewish character weighing a Jewish policy by asking himself: “Is it bad for the goyim?” Unspoken though it may be, however, it seems that this criterion plays as large a role as the first in determining Jewish policies. Perhaps to them it is just another way of saying the same thing—although they are very careful not to phrase it that way. At least, they have been since the Second World War; before that they sometimes seemed to think that the goyim couldn’t read, and chutzpah got the better of discretion. In 1924, for example, the prominent Jewish publicist Maurice Samuel, author of a score of serious books on Jewish matters and recipient of numerous awards from Jewish organizations, wrote in his You Gentiles, a book addressed to his hosts:

We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands. We will forever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build.

Even here, however, there is deception, with the will to destroy masked as piety.

Think of the enormous demographic and social changes which have transformed our world since the Second World War. In 1941 the United States was for all practical purposes a White country. Blacks and other minorities existed, but they were not seen in White residential areas, White schools, White recreational facilities, or most White workplaces. They had a negligible influence on the political process, on public morality, and on the national culture. Racial intermarriage was illegal in most jurisdictions and extremely rare everywhere. America’s city streets were safe by night and by day. There was no drug problem; the use of marijuana, heroin, and other drugs was confined almost entirely to Blacks and mestizos, in their own, separate communities. Teenage pregnancy (among Whites) was as rare as a public display of homosexuality. Schools were orderly, disciplined, and safe.

America had its problems, of course. Whites, even when they are in control of their own destiny, are not angels. Greed, meanness, superstition, and stupidity were reflected in a thousand social and cultural ills. A thoroughly corrupt political system, inevitable in a democracy, provided the country with its top political leaders and public officials. Blacks and other racial minorities, though invisible and powerless, were a festering sore which eventually would have to be dealt with.

The country, however, was still White and gave every indication of staying that way; in the years immediately prior to the war immigration to the United States was predominantly White, with immigrants from Europe outnumbering those from Asia and Latin America combined by five to one. America’s problems were still soluble and Western civilization was still viable, still capable of being cleansed and renewed. Furthermore, in Germany a man was showing the race the way to save itself.

In response to that man’s efforts most of the Western world engaged in an all-out war to destroy him, his works, and his followers. His ideas and teachings became anathema, and the half-century which followed was dedicated to justifying the slaughter and destruction of the war by promoting the antitheses of those ideas and teachings.

He had taught that the White race is the most progressive race and is inherently superior to the non-White races in its civilization-building capacity, and so the elevation of the social and economic levels of non-Whites at the expense of Whites became the premier postwar goal.

He had taught that racial mixing is a crime against Nature, that our race must strive above all else to maintain the integrity of its gene pool, and so racial mixing became the postwar fashion: schoolchildren were bused to achieve mixing in the schools, forced housing laws were passed to achieve residential mixing, laws against miscegenation were struck down everywhere, and the immigration laws were changed to bring a new flood of non-Whites into the country.

He had taught that the building of self-discipline in young people, the strengthening of their will-power and of their ability for self-control, is the most important task of a nation’s educational system, and so in postwar America discipline became a dirty word, and permissiveness became the norm.

He had taught that, just as races differ in their innate abilities, so also do the individuals within a race, and that a healthy and progressive society must conform its institutions to this natural inequality among its members. Consequently, in postwar America egalitarianism became the new religion, and leveling the aim of government. To seek out the best and brightest, in our schools and elsewhere, and give them the recognition and the special training to enable them to move upward to positions of leadership—even to admit the possibility that some were better and brighter than others and could contribute more to civilization—became taboo.

He had taught a healthy, complementary relationship between men and women, with the former as providers and protectors and the latter as nurturers, and the new society he built in Germany was family centered, with laws and institutions aimed at strengthening the family and helping it to provide a sound environment for healthy children. Therefore, after his works were destroyed the victors denounced sexual complementarity as “repressive” and brought women out of the home and into the workforce by the millions, with children relegated to day-care centers. Every sex-role distinction was officially discouraged or outlawed, even to the point of bringing women into the armed forces on an equal footing with men. Feminism and homosexuality flourished with governmental protection.

Today we can see the consequences of these postwar policies all around us, and it is a matter of public record that the Jews have been the primary instigators and propagandists for each of these policies without exception.

They had non-Jewish collaborators in abundance, of course. The legislator primarily responsible for the change in postwar immigration patterns, the late Jewish Congressman from Brooklyn, Emanuel Celler, for many years chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, chose as a co-sponsor for his 1965 immigration bill the Gentile Senator from Massachusetts Edward (Teddy) Kennedy.

The “civil rights” revolutionaries who were organizing “sit-ins” and “freedom rides” during the 1950s and 1960s received their financing, their legal assistance, and their media support from Jews, but without an utterly corrupt and unprincipled Gentile collaborator in the form of Lyndon Johnson, first as Senate majority leader (1955–1961) and later as President (1963–1968), the series of legislative coups which made the agenda of the revolutionaries the law of the land would not have come so easily.

Collaboration has come from Blacks as well as Whites. Many of the organizations pushing for legislated “equality” between Blacks and Whites have been headed by Blacks in recent years. The most venerable of them, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was given its first Black president as long ago as 1975, after an unbroken succession of Jews (although the separate NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which bills itself as “the legal arm of the civil rights movement,” is still strictly kosher, with a Jewish chief).

In no area of endeavor have the Jews had more willing non-Jewish collaborators than in the postwar promotion of permissiveness. Jews Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin may have been the most flamboyant spokesmen for permissiveness during the 1960s with their “if it feels good, do it” and “kill your parents” maxims for young Americans, but dozens of well-known Gentiles were right on their coattails, from “New Age” guru Timothy Leary with his campaign to popularize LSD and other psychedelic drugs to soft-porn publisher Hugh Hefner and his advocacy of “the Playboy philosophy.”

It is, after all, hardly the case that Jewry forced its way into America with tanks and machine guns and compelled the unwilling Aryans to stand by and watch while their civilization was destroyed and their race corrupted by the Semitic invaders. From the beginning the prey collaborated with the predators at all levels: the primitive Bible-beaters who for generations have been taught by their own kind that the Jews are “God’s Chosen People” and that it’s bad luck to cross them; the jaded, self-indulgent great grandsons and great granddaughters of an earlier generation of hard-headed, hard-working pioneers and entrepreneurs, eager to be amused and titillated by every new fashion in ideology, art, music, or lifestyle dangled before them by wordy, alien hucksters; hungry opportunists in business, in education, and in the cultural establishment, ready to take the part of the obnoxiously pushy but admirably well-organized strangers, once those strangers had established sufficiently strong beachheads to be able to offer favors in return; and, of course, the politicians, democracy’s inevitable maggots, who are ready to ally themselves with the Devil himself if they think they can gain a temporary personal advantage by doing so.

It is clear that when cleanup time comes there’s as much weeding to be done in our own garden as in any other race’s. An inattentive observer might even conclude that the Jews are no more blameworthy for the bad directions taken by our society than our own worst elements are; that as opportunists they merely look for ways to turn the weaknesses they find in us to their own advantage.

Did they push for opening our borders to the Third World because they had a long-range plan to mongrelize us, or were they merely going along with greedy and irresponsible elements of our own race who wanted to keep the cost of labor down?

Have they been the principal promoters behind every destructive fashion in painting and music in order to cut us loose from our cultural moorings, thereby confusing our sense of identity and making us easier prey, or simply because they have recognized the lack of aesthetic discrimination on the part of our consuming masses and are as eager as the confidence men of any race to sell the suckers whatever they’ll buy?

Do they use their control of the entertainment industry to promote the acceptance—and in many cases the approval—of homosexuality, feminism, and interracial sex as a way of softening us up morally and preparing us for slaughter, or are they simply trying to please and thereby win as customers for their commercial sponsors the more degenerate elements of our population?

An inattentive observer might be stumped by such questions. A more attentive observer, however, will note the details, the specifics, as well as the generalities, and he will understand that those details, taken together, are not consistent with simple opportunism but only with war by way of deception.

Forcing the stream of immigration into America after the Second World War to change from White to Brown and Yellow has most notably kept the cost of farm labor down, but Jews are not farmers, and it is difficult to see how they could expect to benefit economically from this change. The influx of non-White immigrants also has kept the cost of certain other types of labor down—restaurant workers, unskilled construction workers—but the connection to any vital Jewish business interest is tenuous at best.

There can be no doubt that culture distortion has been enormously profitable for Jews. With a controlling economic interest in every facet of the popular-culture industry from art galleries to music records, tapes, and compact discs, they make money from nearly every product that the culture-consuming public can be persuaded to buy. And since no one has ever lost a nickel by underestimating the taste of the public, the deliberate Jewish debasement of art and music is understandable on the grounds of greed alone. But the specific directions are not.

In the production and promotion of what might be called “consumer music,” for example, the one great change which has taken place since the Second World War has been the ascendancy of African rhythm over European music. Fifty years ago one could walk into any record store catering to the general public and find 78-rpm phonograph discs with a number of different types of music: classical, hillbilly (a form of White American folk music known today as “bluegrass” and subsumed under the more general heading “country and western”), numerous samples of genuine folk music from Europe, the religious music of the more primitive Christian fundamentalists (“gospel”), and a wide-ranging selection of “popular” music. The last category contained everything from the songs of Stephen Foster to the vacuous, fluffy stuff of the musical comedies which were especially popular then.

Jews already had established a strong beachhead in popular music production—Sigmund Romberg, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin—but, at least, most popular music, even that composed by Jews, was still based on European forms. Jazz was for all practical purposes the only non-White music being peddled to White consumers, and it constituted a relatively small minority of the wares—although the “swing” and “big band” forms into which jazz evolved took a larger share of the market. Still, much of the available music was White in form and origin, with classical music still prominently represented.

By the end of the Second World War jazz-influenced popular music was evolving away from its Black roots into hybrid forms that most people considered more White than Black. The introduction of the long-playing record, which for the first time permitted people to listen to an entire symphony without changing records, and of high-fidelity sound systems even brought about a renewal of public interest in classical music. At this point the people controlling the music industry could have moved in any of a number of directions. They chose to put their heaviest promotional efforts behind another music form with Black roots: rock ‘n’ roll.

Rock also evolved, of course. Today in its many forms, some of which have moved rather far from their Black origins, it dominates consumer music. And the masters of the industry have begun pushing yet another non-White music form, more blatantly Negroid than anything heretofore: rap.

Today one must look hard to find even a handful of classical cassettes or compact discs in the music section of a K-Mart or other consumer emporium. European folk music can be had only from a few specialty stores. The majority of the music offered to the consuming public is in some significant sense non-White.

Economic democracy might be invoked to explain, at least in part, the displacement of structure by rhythm, as the taste of the average consumer has become more primitive. But it is clear that deliberate promotion has had much to do with this trend. Why have the promoters so consistently chosen directions which weaken and dilute the White cultural heritage?

Certainly, the feminists, homosexuals, and race-mixers are pleased to see themselves depicted on television and cinema screens as people of a morally superior sort, as role models for the younger generation of goyim. Perhaps they even show their appreciation by buying more of the products of the sponsors of Star Trek, True Colors, and other brave, new television productions. But feminists, queers, and interracial couples still make up only a rather small minority of the population, despite the best efforts of the media masters. Wouldn’t it make better economic sense to cater to the majority? There are as many approximately normal consumers who feel at least a twinge of disgust when a television program tries to persuade them that hard-drinking, hard-swearing female soldiers or cops are “normal” as there are bull-dykes who will run out and buy the sponsor’s brand of beer. And there certainly must be more healthy viewers who seethe with suppressed rage when they see a White woman kissing a Black man on the screen than there are avant-garde sickos who applaud such an abomination.

No, opportunism does not explain the Jews’ destructiveness. There is no doubt that they are opportunists. But their opportunism is too consistently destructive. They have too inerrant an instinct for what will be bad for the goyim.

Can their behavior be explained in terms of an alien brand of idealism—an idealism which evolved in the marketplaces and bazaars of the Middle East over the last five thousand years and is natural for them, but which leads to disaster when applied to European society and institutions? Was their support for communism from the middle of the last century up until its recent collapse really based on their sympathy for the oppressed proletariat and their desire for social and economic justice, as they claim? They themselves have been oppressed, they say, and so they have a natural sympathy for the underdog. They will tell you that the reason they promote feminism, argue for the acceptance of homosexuals, and demand the integration of Blacks into every facet of our lives is that their religion requires it of them; the ethics of Judaism is egalitarian, and it specifies that each man be judged only by his or her character.

Undoubtedly there have been naive, starry-eyed idealists among communism’s Gentile propagandists—at least, in those countries which had not yet experienced communism in practice; the great American writer Jack London was one, and there certainly may have been a few Jewish idealists of Marxism as well. But only a person who has no knowledge of communism in practice can believe that those who engineered its revolutionary triumph in Russia or commissared its institutions in Eastern Europe after the Second World War were seekers of justice for the workers.

As for the claim that Jews have an affection for justice and equality greater than that of other races, we only need to look at the ways in which this alleged affection manifests itself in that part of the world where it should be seen in its purest form: namely, Israel and the Israeli-occupied Arab territories. Ask any Palestinian about Jewish justice!

Judaism, of course, is unequivocally opposed to feminism and homosexuality—for Jews. Furthermore, it is a race-based religion, which defines its adherents in terms of their bloodline and declares them inherently superior to all other races. How does their promotion of feminism among the goyim, for instance, square with the well-known Jewish prayer, “I thank you, oh Lord, for not having made me a goy, a slave, or a woman,” which is recited every day by the Orthodox faithful?

In the Talmud, that authoritative compendium of the Jewish oral law, there are a thousand other reminders to the Jew that he is absolutely superior to all other life forms:

Heaven and earth were created only for the sake of the Jews. (Vayikra Rabba 36)

The Jews are human beings, but the goyim are not human beings; they are only beasts. (Baba Mezia 114)

Yahweh created the non-Jew in human form so that the Jew would not have to be served by beasts. The non-Jew is consequently an animal in human form and is condemned to serve the Jew day and night. (Midrash Talpioth 225)

So much for Jewish egalitarianism. Jewish solicitude for Blacks in America today is as much a fraud as was the claim of Jewish sympathy for the oppressed proletariat of Russia on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution.

What truly lies in the Jewish heart was revealed by an exceptional Jew, Baruch Spinoza (like Ostrovsky, a renegade), who wrote in the 17th century:

The love of the Hebrews for their country was not only patriotism but also piety and was cherished and nurtured by daily rites until, like their hatred of other nations, it was absolutely perverse… Such daily reprobation naturally gave rise to a lasting hatred, deeply implanted in the heart: for of all hatred, none is more deep and tenacious than that which springs from extreme devoutness or piety and is itself cherished as pious. (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Chapter 17)

The Jewish role in the non-Jewish world and the Jewish motivation for the policies pursued by the Jewish community would be much easier to perceive if the Jews acted in a more consistent and straightforward way: if they spoke with a single voice and spoke truly, saying what really was on their minds. But, then, consistency and straightforwardness would violate the cardinal rule: By way of deception thou shalt do war.

Nevertheless, on a somewhat higher plane of subtlety, there is a consistency in the Jews’ inconsistency. On virtually every major issue—political, social, cultural, moral, or what have you—where there are two principal sides or factions, Jews will be found pushing in both directions and serving as spokesmen for both factions—but with a difference.

Consider: For many years prior to Mikhail Gorbachev’s recent dismantling of the Soviet power bloc and the general recognition of Marxism as a fraudulent, unworkable system, communism’s principal apologists and apparatchiks in the West were Jews. So were a number of anti-communist spokesmen.

During the Second World War, of course, the communists could do no wrong in the eyes of the West’s controlled media, because they were helping to destroy the man about whom the Jewish media masters had nightmares. Thus, while Soviet butchers were torturing thousands of patriots to death in the police cellars of the Baltic countries and liquidating the Polish leadership stratum at the killing pits in the Katyn woods, Jewish communists in the United States were stealing the plans and test results from America’s atomic bomb program and sending them to their colleagues in the Soviet Union.

After the war was over, however, and a reaction began to set in among White Americans as they realized that the communist beast they had unleashed against Eastern Europe might end up devouring them too, it was time for Jews to begin hedging their bets: it was time for the media to begin quoting “responsible” anti-communists. (The “responsible” ones were those who failed to mention the Jewishness of the system they were speaking out against.)

While the memory of Jewish atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was still fresh and Jewish communist sympathizers such as Robert Oppenheimer were being weeded out of America’s atomic weapons program, Jewish scientist Edward Teller became the spokesman for anti-communist Americans who wanted a strong, nuclear-armed America able to stand up to the Soviet Union. Three decades later, after Jews had rooted for the Viet Cong communists throughout the war in Vietnam, Jews began flocking to the neoconservative movement to speak up for an America strong enough to defend Israel’s interests in the Middle East against the Soviet Union’s Arab clients there. Often they were the same Jews who had been cheering for the Reds a year or two earlier. That really confused the goyim.

Consider: Whenever a gaggle of eggheads gets together in some area to sponsor a classical-music FM radio station as a sole outpost of European culture in a sea of African rock-and-rap rhythm or sub-dimwit gospel bleating, there surely will be a Jew or two among them. And when they are interviewed by the local press, it surely will be one of those Jews who is quoted. That helps to spike any nasty rumors as to who’s behind all of the garbage-music programming at the other stations.

Consider: As I have demonstrated elsewhere, the madness of Political Correctness which has infected America’s colleges and universities is Jewish through and through. And many of those who are urging their colleagues to hold the line against Political Correctness also are Jews (at least, the ones appointed by the media to be spokesmen for academic freedom are). This not only ensures that the Jews manning the PC barricades won’t be criticized as Jews for wrecking our universities, but it preempts those who might try to swing things too far back toward academic freedom.

Consider: While Jew Howard Metzenbaum in the U.S. Senate and Jew Charles Schumer in the U.S. House of Representatives spearhead the legislative drive to strip Americans of their right to armed self-defense and are unanimously and vociferously supported in this effort by the Jewish media, a tiny, Milwaukee-based, Jewish pro-gun group calling itself Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO) manages to attract far more attention to itself than its size ordinarily would merit. JPFO is not just a group of pro-gun people who coincidentally happen to be Jews; it is a group of people who are shouting to the world: “Hey, look at me; I am a Jew, and I am in favor of gun ownership.” Whenever a JPFO spokesman is quoted in the news media—which is often enough to give the impression that his organization is right up there with the National Rifle Association, fighting for gun owners’ rights—he flaunts his Jewishness.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that in any contest it’s a good strategy to control your principal opposition. That way you can put on a great show of bad guys versus good guys struggling against each other, but you are always in a position to make the contest go in either direction you want and only as far as you want. Not only do you preempt any real opposition, but you keep the goyim fooled and deflect any criticism of your role in the affair.

By way of deception thou shalt do war.

The deception is masterfully done. It suffices to keep most of the people fooled most of the time. Only a careful study of the details of a number of different social phenomena in which Jews are involved parts the veil of lies and trickery sufficiently for us to see a clear pattern.

The pattern is this: Jews come into any homogeneous society—and such was America at the beginning of this century—as outsiders, as strangers. The society is effectively closed to them. They cannot easily penetrate its institutions. They cannot get their hands on the levers of power. If they try they are noticed, suspected, and resisted. And they always must try. In this they apparently cannot restrain themselves.

To make way for themselves, to open up possibilities for penetration and control, they must break down the structure of the society, corrupt its institutions, undermine its solidarity, weaken its sense of identity, obliterate its traditions, destroy its homogeneity. Thus they inevitably will be in favor of democracy, of permissiveness, of every form of self-indulgence and indiscipline. They will be proponents of cosmopolitanism, of egalitarianism, of multiculturalism. They will oppose patriotism (except when they are inciting their hosts to fight a war on behalf of Jewish interests). They will agitate endlessly for change, change, change, and they will call it progress.

And no matter what they are for or against they will have at least some of their number taking the opposite side: If they are promoting the public acceptance of homosexuality, they also will have a few prominent Jewish publicists bemoaning the downfall of traditional morality and warning of the consequences of the confusion of sexual roles. If their aim is to neutralize the universities as institutions for passing on the historical, intellectual, and cultural traditions of our people to a new generation of potential leaders, at the same time that they are organizing Red Guard brigades to enforce Political Correctness they will have a contingent beating the drums for tradition and free inquiry. If they are working feverishly to disarm White Americans in order to prevent the latter from exercising their right of revolution they will go to the Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership for a contrary statement now and then.

What does all of this prove? In the strictest sense of the word, nothing; it is only suggestive.

If you watch a person flip a penny five hundred times, and it always comes up tails, you cannot be absolutely certain that the penny has two tails. But you at least ought to suspect that someone has been working on that penny in his machine shop.

If you study the historical record and observe that every matter of importance in which the Jews have been involved turns out badly for us, even though there are usually a few Jews on our side of the matter, you cannot be absolutely certain that the game is rigged. But you at least ought to suspect that the Jews are following their ancient maxim and waging war against us by way of deception.

— February, 1992

Categories
Literature New Testament Old Testament St Paul Theology

Gospel Fictions, 7


 
Below, part of Gospel Fictions’ seventh chapter, “Resurrection fictions” by Randel Helms (ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages):


 
The earliest extended statement about the Easter experiences appears not in the Gospels but in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It dates from the early 50’s, some twenty years after the crucifixion. Paul’s statement is as interesting for what it does not say as for what it does:

I handed on to you the facts which had been imparted to me: that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the Scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised to life on the third day, according to the Scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas, and afterwards to the Twelve. Then he appeared to over five hundred of our brothers at once, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, and afterwards to all the apostles. (15:2-7)

None of these appearances, in anything like the sequence Paul lists, is depicted in the four Gospels. Moreover, not one of the Gospel resurrection appearances is identical to those listed by Paul. Paul did not know the Gospel resurrection stories, for the simple reason that they had not yet been invented, and the four evangelists, who wrote twenty to fifty years after Paul, either did not know his list of appearances or chose to ignore it.

Perhaps most surprising of all the differences is Paul’s failure to mention the legend of the empty tomb, which was, for the writer of the earliest Gospel (Mark), the only public, visible evidence for the resurrection. Though Paul vigorously attempts to convince the Christians at Corinth, some of whom apparently doubted, that Jesus indeed rose from the dead (“if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain”), he never mentions this most striking piece of evidence.

Indeed, he had probably never heard of it; it was a legend that grew up in Christian communities different from his own. It may even have post-dated his death, for Mark wrote almost twenty years after his letter to Corinth. Worse yet, Paul would not have agreed with Mark’s theology even had he known it; for Paul, resurrection meant not the resuscitation of a corpse involving the removal of a stone and the emptying of a tomb, but a transformation from a dead physical body to a living spiritual one. “Flesh and blood can never possess the kingdom of God” (I Cor. 15:50).

Not only is St Paul apparently unaware of the resurrection narratives recorded in the Gospels, but his own list of appearances is irreconcilable with those of the evangelists written later. Paul has it that the first appearance of the risen Lord was to Cephas (he always calls Peter by his Aramaic name, and apparently knows no stories about him in Greek). The Gospels describe no initial resurrection appearance to Peter (some women, the number varying from three to two to one, see him first), though Luke says that Peter did see him. According to equally irreconcilable accounts on the Gospels, the first appearance was to Mary Magdala alone (John), or to Mary Magdala and the other Mary (Mathew), or to Mary Magdala, Joanna, and Mary, the mother of James (Luke). Again, Paul declares that the second resurrection appearance was to the “twelve,” whereas both Mathew and Luke stress that the appearance before the disciples was to the “eleven,” Judas being dead. Either Paul did not know the story about the defection and suicide of Judas Iscariot or else the “twelve” meant something different to him.

In other words, different centers of early Christianity produced their own collections of evidence of Jesus’ resurrection; these grew up independently and had, in the cases considered so far, almost nothing to do with each other. Of course, the most famous of the stories appear in the Gospels. Already in the mid-first century A.D., when Paul first wrote to the Corinthians, the idea was well established that Jesus rose again “on the third day, according to the Scriptures” (15:34). That is to say, Christians had scoured the Old Testament for passages that could, out of context, be interpreted as ancient oracles about the career of Jesus.

This involved interpretative methods that to modern eyes seem bizarre. Matthew’s assertion, in 21:4-5, based on his failure to understand the parallelism in the language of Zech. 9:9, that Jesus rode into Jerusalem astride two animals at once, is such an example. Moreover, the length of Jesus’ stay in the tomb was computed by reading Hosea 6:1-2 out of context, it being the only passage in the Old Testament with an “on the third day” allusion:

Come, let us return to the Lord;
for he has torn us and will heal us,
he has struck us and he will bind up our wounds;
after two days he will revive us,
on the third day he will restore us,
that in his presence we may live.

Hosea is, in these verses, not discussing the career of a holy man seven hundred years in the future. He is addressing his own countrymen in his own time, calling upon a corrupt people for moral and religious reform, berating people of whom one could say:

Their deeds are outrageous.
At Israel’s sanctuary I have seen a horrible thing:
there Ephraim played the wanton
and Israel defiled himself. (Hos. 6:10)

Some early Christians were aware of the paucity of Old Testament predictions about the length of Jesus’ stay in the tomb, and set about to invent more. Matthew’s additional evidence contains a prophecy in conflict with his own resurrection narrative. According to this evangelist, Jesus was buried on Friday just before sundown, and the tomb was found empty at sunrise on Sunday; thus, Jesus was presumably in the tomb two nights and one day. Nonetheless, Matthew imputed to Jesus the following, composed out of the Book of Jonah: “Jonah was in the sea-monster’s belly for three days and three nights in the bowels of the earth” (Matt. 12:40).

The oldest Christian narratives describing the discovery of the empty tomb on the third day appears in the Gospel of Mark:

When the Sabbath was over, Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought aromatic oils intending to go and anoint him; and very early on the Sunday morning, just after sunrise, they came to the tomb. They were wondering among themselves who would roll away the stone for them from the entrance to the tomb, when they looked up and saw that the stone, huge as it was, had been rolled back already. They went into the tomb, where they saw a youth sitting on the right-hand side, wearing a white robe; and they were dumbfounded. But he said to them, “Fear nothing; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here; look, there is the place where they laid him. But go and give this message to his disciples and Peter: ‘He will go on before you into Galilee and you will see him there, as he told you’.” Then they went out and ran away from the tomb, beside themselves with terror. They said nothing to anybody, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:1-8).

The most ancient manuscripts of Mark end at this point, one of the strangest and most unsatisfying moments in all the Bible, depicting fear and silence on Easter morning and lacking a resurrection appearance. But within about fifty years, at least five separate attempts were made by various Christian imaginations to rewrite Mark’s bare and disappointing story; they appear in the Long Ending and the Short Ending of Mark, and in the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John.

The first two are second-century interpolations in some texts of Mark and are identified as such in any responsible modern text. They are Mark 16:9-20 (in the King James version and others based on late manuscripts), an unskillful paraphrase of resurrection appearances in other Gospels; and Mark 16:9 in few other late manuscripts, in which the women followed the youth’s instructions to tell the disciples, a statement that conflicts with verse 8 of the original text.

Probably the first large-scale effort to rewrite Mark’s account and make it more pleasing to the faithful took place when the Gospel of Mathew was written in the last two decades of the first century. Although the major written source information was the Gospel of Mark, Matthew made up striking changes in Mark’s resurrection narrative. Mark’s account ends with the women running away from the tomb in terror and in their fear say nothing to anybody. Matthew did not like this ending, however, so he changed it, consciously constructing a fictional narrative that more closely fit what he and his Christian community wanted to have happen on Easter morning: “They hurried away from the tomb in awe and great joy, and ran to tell the disciples” (Matt. 28:8). How did Matthew feel justified in making such a major change in Mark, a source he obviously regarded, for the most part, as authoritative?

The answer is that Matthew was a conscious literary artist who sincerely believed in the resurrection; moreover, he believed he had the authority, granted him by his church and by its interpretation of the Old Testament, to “correct” Mark’s Gospel and theology. Indeed, he had corrected Mark many times before, often doing so on the basis of what he regarded as his superior understanding of the oracles in the Old Testament. For since Jesus’ life happened “according to the Scriptures,” early Christians were confident that in order to find out about him, they did not need to engage in historical research or consult witness (in our understanding of these two approaches); they found detailed history in the ancient oracles of the Hebrew Bible, read as a book about Jesus.

Matthew was a careful student of both the Old Testament and of Mark, which in his time was not yet accepted as canonical Scripture and thus could be changed at need. His study revealed how frequently Mark’s Gospel was transparent upon Scripture (or based upon it), and in ways that Mark himself apparently did not recognize. Mark had composed his Gospel on the basis of earlier oral and written sources, which in turn had found much of their information about Jesus in the Old Testament. Though Mark seems not to have realized that this was so, Matthew readily recognized the relationships between Mark and the Old Testament, and even took it upon himself to extend and correct them.

In this case he saw Mark’s resurrection narrative as transparent upon de Book of Daniel, especially chapter 6, the story of the lion’s den. On recognizing the relationship, Matthew seems to have consulted the Septuagint version of Daniel and believed that he found there details of a more accurate account of the happenings of the Sunday morning than could be found in the pages of Mark; never mind that Daniel’s narrative is a story in the past tense about presumed events in the distant past. Matthew ignored its narrative and historical content and turned it into a prophetic oracle, as had the originators of Mark’s story.

It seems clear that in a literary sense at least, Matthew was right: the account of the empty tomb used by Mark was indeed structured on Daniel’s story of the lion’s den. In the 30’s and 40’s, the empty tomb story was not part of the tradition about the resurrection: Paul was unaware of it. The legend grew in Mark’s community, or one from which it borrowed, as part of its stock of evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. As Matthew was to do again nearly a generation later, certain Christians, perhaps in the 50’s and 60’s, searched the Old Testament, a major source of what was for them authoritative information about Jesus, in order to construct their account of the passion and resurrection, and found in the Book of Daniel much of what they needed. Consider the parallels. […]

[Helms’ text cannot be copied and pasted in the internet. Above I typed directly pages 129 to 135 from his book, Gospel Fictions, Prometheus Books, 1988. But I’ll omit Helms’ detailed account of these parallels and jump to page 142:]

In sum, we may say that Matthew’s account of the resurrection is a fictional enlargement of Mark’s fictional narrative, produced, at least in part, because of what he saw as the incomplete and inadequate nature of Mark’s last chapter. Certainly, Matthew sincerely believed in the resurrection; he also believed that his version of the story was more authoritative, more “scriptural,” than Mark’s, but his sincerity does not make the story less fictive. The same may be said of Luke’s enlargement of the Markan resurrection account.

The Gospel of Luke is, like that of Matthew, an expanded revision of Mark. Of Mark’s 661 verses, some 360 appear in Luke, either word-for-word or with deliberate changes. Some of the most dramatic of these changes appear in Luke’s version of Mark’s resurrection narrative.

Luke’s most significant change from Mark—the totally different angelic message at the tomb—finds its origin not in the Old Testament, however, but in Luke’s need to prepare his readers for the story of Pentecost in the Book of Acts, which he also wrote. In the version of the story Luke wishes to present, the disciples cannot be ordered, or even allowed, to leave Jerusalem for Galilee; they must remain for the all-important Pentecost experience.

Matthew composed a Galilee resurrection appearance using the Book of Daniel as the source of what Jesus would have said. But Luke eliminates the angels’ statement that the risen Jesus is going to Galilee; in contrast to Matthew, who composes a new statement for Jesus out of the youth’s speech in Mark (“take word to my brothers that they are to leave to Galilee”—Matt. 28:10), Luke imputes to Jesus a new saying that demands quite the opposite: “Stay here in this city until you are armed with the power from above” (Luke 24:49).

Luke thus presents resurrection appearances only in the vicinity of Jerusalem. Mark implies, and Matthew specifically declares, that Jesus, followed later by his disciples, left Jerusalem immediately after his resurrection and went to Galilee some eighty or ninety miles to the north, where they all met. Luke writes (Acts 1:3-4) that the risen Jesus “over a period of forty days… appeared to them and taught them about the kingdom of God. While he was in their company he told them not to leave Jerusalem.” For Luke, the story of Pentecost, described in the second chapter of Acts, overshadowed any assertion that the disciples were in Galilee meeting Jesus; they had to be in Jerusalem, so he placed them there and constructed a saying by Jesus to justify this change.

The fourth evangelist, John (who was not the Apostle, but a Christian who wrote at the very end of the first century), possessed a collection of resurrection narratives different from those used by Matthew and Luke, and irreconcilable with them.

In Luke, when the women returned to the disciples with the joyous news that the tomb was empty and that two angels had declared Jesus risen, “The story appeared to them to be nonsense, and they would not believe” (24:11); but in John, when Peter and the other disciples hear the women’s message, they run to the tomb and find it empty, whereat, says John, they “believed” (20:28). […]

The Gospel of John , as originally written (circa 100 A.D.), ended immediately after Jesus’ appearance before the doubting Thomas. Early in the second century, however, certain Christians to whom the gospels of Mathew and Luke were important, recognized that both these earlier works stress, in opposition to John, that the resurrection appearances occurred in Galilee as well as Jerusalem. They took it upon themselves to reconcile John with the others by adding a twenty-first chapter.

That this section is not by the author of the rest of the Gospel is clear from the prominence it gives to the “sons of Zebedee” (John 21:2), who are mentioned by this name nowhere else in the Fourth Gospel, though they are central figures in the Synoptics. A major propose of this addition, and another sign of its late date, is betrayed by the last saying attributed to Jesus in the chapter. For no reason apparent in the narrative, we are told that Peter “saw” an unnamed disciple, the one “whom Jesus loved,” and asked Jesus, “What will happen to him?” Jesus’ response was, “If it should be my will that he should wait until I come, what is that to you? Follow me.”

The saying of Jesus became current in the brotherhood, and was taken to mean that the disciple would not die. But in fact Jesus did not say that he would not die, he only said “If it should be my will that he should wait until I come, what is that to you?” (21:21-23)

Obviously, this disciple (in fact all the first-generation Christians) had long since died, and Jesus showed no signs of returning. The tradition persisted, however, that those were the words of Jesus, for the first generation indeed confidently expected the early return of their Lord (had he not said, in Mark 9:1, “There are some of those standing here who will not taste death before they have seen the kingdom of God already come”?). A saying had to be constructed that would not only demystify and reinterpret this persistent legend, so troubling to the faithful, but solve the apologetic problem it presented. Chapter 21 exists, in part, for this purpose; and though the attempt is an unconvincing quibble, it had to be made.

The resurrection narratives in the last chapters of the four Gospels are effective stories that have given solace and hope to millions of believers who have not read them carefully.

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Christendom Christian art New Testament Old Testament

Nativity fiction

This text can be seen in the original entry: here

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Child abuse Christendom Human sacrifice Islam Israel / Palestine Judaism Old Testament

Christians: clueless about Judaism

Below, “The Conspiracy of Man,” forward to The Tabernacle and its Sacrificial System, posted by Arch Stanton as a comment in this blog:


The problem with Christianity is that people do not understand the Jewish mind behind it. To understand the New Testament, one must understand Jewish culture, history and religion. Of course the Jews make no effort to enlighten the ignorant goyim on these subjects. In fact they prohibit the transference of their religious texts under penalty of death!

Long before the Temple came the era of the Tabernacle, where the sacrifice was ceremonial bloodlust. It was a place where priests butchered animals to atone for sins against their God, Yahweh.

The Torah originally referred to the first five books of the Old Testament. The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy are Levirate laws forming the basis for Judaism’s sacrificial system. This system is naturally founded on the sacrifice of both blood offerings, in the form of specified animals, and non-blood offerings in the form of specified grains. In the early days of the sacrificial system, the Tabernacle was nothing more than a moving slaughterhouse, a place where priests butchered animals. It is telling that only the best animals, the least “blemished,” could be offered for sacrifice.

The indication as to the true purpose of the sacrificial system lay in the fact that priests took ten percent of the choicest cuts of meat for themselves and burned only the fat and viscera upon the altar as “sweet savor” to the Lord. The remaining meat was then returned to the sinner. Think about this for a moment, the Lord preferred fat and viscera to the prime cuts commanded by the priests.

Imagine for a moment, your priest as a butcher. Imagine going to church on Sunday and seeing your priest at the altar slitting the throat of various parishioners’ pets, catching their blood in a golden bowl and then splashing it around the altar as he dances around in a trance-like state chanting pleas to God for the forgiveness of sins and begging for salvation. After the service, you say to your spouse, “Boy that certainly was a different sermon this week wasn’t it dear?” Your spouse replies, “Oh I don’t know, next week is communion, when we eat the body Christ and drink his blood. Speaking of that, let’s hurry to the restaurant before the church crowd gets there.”

marked-bloodAfter making their sacrifice, the Hebrew sinner was marked with blood, mixed with other bodily fluids, on either the forehead or the big toe. This mixture ensured longevity of the mark. The blood marking was visible proof that a tribesman had paid his “sin tax.” Later, this mark was washed off in a ritual purification bath called the Mikveh, at which time the sacrificial cycle began anew.

However, this marking system had one obvious, glaring drawback. Blood is a commonly available substance produced by the higher organisms. In their attempt to control the easily counterfeited blood marking, priests forbade their followers from butchering their own animals or even possessing the instruments for doing so. This was the primary reason for the kosher slaughter, a process where the living animal’s throat is slit to ensure the pumping heart will drain the blood as completely as possible. This also led to the prohibition of various implements and practices used in the butchering process. The priests defined these as “clean” or “unclean,” but think “legal” or “illegal,” as these are in fact legalistic dictates that have almost nothing to do with hygiene.

Any contact with blood was strictly prohibited, like that produced by menstruating women or “lepers,” which meant anyone with running sores. As a result, a Byzantine legal structure arose to control the minutiae of everyday life. There is a forgettable tract in the Mishna that elaborates on the cleanliness of a bowl. The upshot of this legal commandment is that if a bowl in intact, then it is unclean; but if the bowl is smashed into pieces of which the largest piece is no larger than the tip of a man’s finger, then it is clean. This makes absolutely no sense unless one understands the bowl in question can be used to hold and mix blood products.

Eventually the phylactery replaced the blood marking. This was a small box attached to the forehead or the back of the wrist holding a scroll with a passage from the Torah. The scroll changed in accordance with the sacrificial cycle; and like tabs on a license plate, it could be checked as proof that Temple followers were current on their sacrificial tribute. Despite this modification, Levirite laws concerning blood products remained in full force.

Imagine yourself as a very young child of a primitive, nomadic, tribesman. Having heard only stories, you are dimly aware of the importance of a much talked about, upcoming ritual. You are aware this ritual occurs on regular basis and the anxiousness of your parents is palpable when discussing the subject.

On the prescribed day, the day the ritual begins. You follow your parents down to a running stream. A man richly attired in strange garb stands in the middle of the stream. One by one, your neighbors walk into the stream where the man mutters strange words as he immerses them in the water while rubbing their forehead with the palm of his hand. After your father has undergone the ritual immersion, you note the red mark he always wears on is forehead has disappeared. The ritual continues until every adult in the village has undergone immersion. You hear someone nearby whispering that the sacred cycle has ended.

The following day, your mother wakes you earlier than usual and your family spends the morning in careful preparation for the day’s activities. You want to play with your friends, but your mother insists you attended to her demands. You accompany your father as he goes out among his meager collection of animals. He spends quite a bit of time inspecting the herd until he finally chooses a prized sheep. This animal happens to be one of your favorites. You have often played with the sheep, chasing them around the meadows and finally catching one, you buried your face in its soft wool. Your nose takes delight in the earthy smell of the sheep. It is the smell of life, and life seems to be everywhere among the hills where the herds roam.

tabernacleLater that morning, your father takes you by the hand and with animal in tow, you are dragged to a portable slaughterhouse your parents refer to as the “Tabernacle.” Here you are to witness the important ritual they have been discussing over the preceding weeks. You enter a large enclosure surrounded by a fence made of cloth. In the middle of the enclosure is an odd tent-like structure with rude wooden columns and entry doors. A number of wooden tables, sagging oddly along the longitudinal center line, are set up in the makeshift courtyard directly in front of the tent. Soon, other families begin arriving with their animals.

Finally, the ceremony begins. A neighbor of yours steps forward and presents a prized calf to one of several strangely dressed men, like the men you saw at the stream the day before. Your parents refer to these men as “priests.” One by one, the sinners step forward and present their animal to a priest who then hoists it upon one of the many tables. Your neighbor drops to his knees in front of the priest, closes his eyes and begins chanting something unintelligible. As you are witnessing this, your father grabs your hand and places it alongside his on the prized sheep. You can feel its heart racing. The animal transmits its terror though the palm of your hand. The priest takes hold of the struggling animal and with quick, practiced motion, slits its throat with a razor sharp knife. The animal struggles, kicking and bellowing in protest, as geysers of blood erupts from its jugular vein. A froth of blood spews forth, splattering you and everyone present. You can feel the spark of life draining through its hide as the stillness of death overcomes the animal. You look down at the viscous red fluid splattered on the front of your robe. You stare with revulsion at the red stains soaking into the fibers as the stench of death assaults your nostrils and addles your sense.

blood-sacrifice-covenant

Even before the animal has ceased struggling, you look up from your bloodstained robe to see the head priest/butcher moving quickly to catch the animal’s blood in a golden bowl. Now you realize the sagging tabletop forms a trough that allows the blood to flow from the end, where the priest awaits with his bowl. With eyelids half closed and muttering some strange incantation, he seems to be in a trance. Shouting, he lifts the golden bowl skyward at arms’ length before splashing the rapidly congealing blood over and around the base of the altar. The priest then comes out of his trance and begins eviscerating the animal. During this process, the animal’s bloody guts are laid aside so they can later be burned on the altar as sweet savor to the lord, who evidently has an abiding taste for burnt fat and viscera.

In just a few strokes, the priest/butcher finishes his gory task. Working rapidly, he begins cutting the animal’s joints. As he separates the portions of meat, he carefully lays aside a large portion of the best cuts for himself. He then returns the remaining meat to your neighbor, who by now has given the priest full admission of his sins.

After the sacrifice is complete, the priest produces a smaller bowl with a cupful of the animal’s blood. The priest mixes it with another bodily fluid that appears to be semen. He uses his thumb to smear a large daub of the mixture on the forehead of the entranced, chanting sinner kneeling before him with closed eyes. Then, with a loud shout, the priest/butcher declares that by this act, your neighbor’s sins have been atoned. Your neighbor staggers to his feet and like a drunk, lurches away from the butchering table with a beatific look on his face, even as the priest calls for the next sinner to step forward with his animal.

Suddenly you feel the full emotional horror of the fate awaiting the other animals brought to the ritual. All the while, these men called priests, howl, chant and dance about, reciting their ritualistic incantations that beg god’s forgiveness; it must have been a bloody spectacle. The bloodlust continues well into evening.

BundesladeWhat you never witness is the secret ceremony inside the Tabernacle’s tent where the high priest in a final act of crazed bloodlust drinks the sacrificial blood before the mercy seat. The Levirate injunction against consuming blood is a public admonishment to restrict the use of blood products. However, the priesthood exempted itself from its own laws and secretly does not observe such restrictions. This covert act, along with the acceptable act of consuming sacrificial meat, will later be replayed by Yeshu during his last supper, when he symbolically offers wine and bread representing his blood and body to his disciples.

yeshu A few days later the priests fold their Tabernacle tent and move on. They will move to the next tribe where the sacrificial cycle will be played out once again.

Consider the effect of this gruesome spectacle on a child. Blood spewing everywhere, chanting priests mesmerized in their crazed bloodlust, driven by the howling and grunting of animals bleeding out the last of their life on the ground. The restless bleating of animals, now aware of their fate. Sinners raising their hands towards the heavens as they cry out for god’s forgiveness. Imagine your parents continually consumed with the thought of blood and the avoidance of it, thoughts that translate into an unnatural obsession about the stuff.

Extrapolate this horror out over the generational millennium and you have the foundations of a psychopathic bloodlust that is not a preference, not a peculiar, incidental twist in a few exceptional personalities: it is a culturally inbred condition, one that can neither be altered nor escaped. This culture of blood has permeated the very core of Judaism until it has become a genetic component of their race.

The Bible is a book whose stories have influenced humanity in the most profound manner. Few would argue the statement that it has been the single most influential book in history. Yet few truly comprehend the true breadth and depth of its influence. Fewer still stop to consider why this ancient book has had such a powerful influence when other similar books of antiquity faded into complete obscurity; curious artifacts examined only by experts. What is it about the Bible that is different? Why is this particular book considered relevant to modern man, when its contemporaries are considered irrelevant, archaic works of ancient, primitive, tribes? What is it about these stories that drive modern man in the same manner as they drove the men of ancient times?

The original book was known to Jews as the Torah. These were the first five books attributed to Moses. “Torah” is an interesting word. Many words in Jewish culture have multiple constructs. Therefore, to understand the intent, such words must be taken within the frame of reference to the context in which they are used. To Jews, Torah can refer to anything from the first five books of Moses to the entire linage of Hebraic religious works, ranging from Genesis to the last volume of the Talmud. For our purpose, Torah will refer to those five books of the Old Testament attributed to Moses. This collection is commonly known to Christians as the “Pentateuch.”

Hyman-Bloom-Still

The actual definition of “Torah” is likewise interesting. Again, we find a double definition in that the word is defined as both “law or legal” as well as “instruction.” From this definition, we find the Torah is in fact books of legal instruction. The reader is asked to keep this definition in mind while reading this book.

The Torah spawned three of the most influential religions on the planet today: Judaism and her unwanted daughters, Islam and Christianity; unwanted because the Jews never intended their book or beliefs to be adopted by non-Jews. It is truly ironic how few Christians realize that these two daughters have far more in common with each other than they do with their mother religion. All three religions are based on the original stories found in the Torah. All three recognize and revere the ancient patriarchs of the Old Testament. All three pay tribute to these stories as their foundational beliefs about monotheism. All three base their concepts of God upon the descriptions found in these stories. One only needs to compare these three religions with a religion like Buddhism or Hinduism to find the close relationship of mother Judaism and her two daughters.

Yet, while Western civilization has been profoundly influenced by these stories, the book in fact addresses the issues of the ancient Jews. The Bible was written by Jews, about Jews, for Jews. The information in the Torah was never intended to play any part outside Jewish culture for as it is written in the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 59a, (“Gemara… Johanan said: A heathen who studies the Torah deserves death, for it is written, Moses commanded us a law for an inheritance; it is our inheritance, not theirs”).

cross-and-star-of-david-togetherIt has been written that the worst reference source for information about water is a fish, for a fish is immersed in the fluid. The immersion of the fish is so complete that it does not even perceive that water exists. Thus, the fish’s immersion and dependence on water precludes any objective analysis of the fluid by the fish and so is the case with the Bible. Western civilization has been so profoundly influenced by its immersion in these stories that it can no longer see the original, objective truths behind them. The Bible is not a book about the history of the Jews: it is a book about the culture and beliefs of a people instrumental in shaping our world. Essentially, the Torah is a cookbook that might well be titled in the same manner as the one in Rod Serling’s play, To Serve Man.

Throughout their history, Jews have been renowned storytellers. Much of their superior verbal skills are undoubtedly derived from the history of their religion’s long oral tradition. Storytelling has long been the common method used by primitive cultures to pass down traditional beliefs and law, but the Jews elevated storytelling to the highest level possible. For Jews, storytelling goes well beyond even an art form, it is in fact the very thread from which they weave the fabric of their culture.

From the first millennia of their existence, Hebrew law and religious beliefs were passed down in the form of storytelling. Around the time of Yeshu, heated debate arose among the Sadducees and Pharisees over whether or not to continue adhering to the oral tradition. By the time of the second Temple period, a major point of friction between the Pharisees and the Sadducees was the validity of the oral law, since the Sadducees only adhered to the written law. Attempts were made to codify a collection of rulings, but the Sadducees rejected the Pharisees’ notion of abiding by the Oral tradition before it was later committed to ink.

There are some interesting considerations inherent to this disagreement. First and foremost, an oral tradition can be much more closely controlled as to who is allowed to receive the information. By this, one can see that had these stories not been committed to the written form, modern Christians would have no more idea of their content than they have of the Hebrew language. Secondly, oral traditions lend themselves to modification far more easily than written traditions. Orwell pointed out this difficulty in his book 1984, where an entire ministry is devoted exclusively to changing the written history of a culture. The Pharisees eventually won the argument as the modern Talmud teaches “God made a covenant with Israel only for the sake of that which was transmitted orally.” Yet, to this day, Jewish boys devote much of their time memorizing and reciting long, torturous, Talmudic tracts and arguing the legal precedence set by these laws, doing so in the very same manner as their ancestors.

Today, Hollywood’s writers, producers, and directors are predominantly Jewish; so it comes as no surprise to find the Torah’s influence clearly visible throughout most Hollywood productions. This marvelous ability to fantasize and tell tall tales can be visibly witnessed in numerous Hollywood and TV shows written and produced by these Jews. While names like Spielberg, Lear and Katzenberg have replaced Biblical names like Moses, Ezekiel, and Saul, the same form of story telling is still much in evidence. When one examines the fantastic and fanciful stories written and produced by those like Spielberg or Serling, or morality plays written by Norman Lear, one has a direct window into the mind of the Biblical storyteller.

 

_________

My two cents:

The author of the above foreword restricts his critique to animal sacrifice. More recent scholarship has established that those sacrifices, which would be condemned by any animal rights advocate today, were the sublimation of the ancient Hebrews’ filicidal impulses toward their own children: sublimation of actual child sacrifices in even more ancient Israelite history. See the pages of my book where I address this extremely disturbing subject: here.

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Bible Jesus Kevin MacDonald New Testament Old Testament St Paul Universalism

The Bible in a nutshell

Kevin MacDonald’s first book of his trilogy opened the doors to my understanding of what the Christians call the “Old Testament,” the sacred book of the Jews. In a nutshell, the Old Testament message promises a strictly racial ethno-state for a Semitic tribe: a message by Semitic writers for a specific Semitic people.

In contrast, the New Testament message for the gentiles seems to say, also in a nutshell, An ethno-state for me but not for thee; your reign is not of this world.

Jesus (and by this I don’t mean the historical Jesus—whoever the hell he was, if he did exist after all—but the Jesus of the gospel) is presented to us as an universalist. At least that’s how the Jew Saul (the most influential author of the New Testament as far as the extent of his writing compared to the other apostles), called “Saint Paul” by the Christians, preached his good news. In Galatians for example he says: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

In other words, throughout the OT the Jews teach ethno-centricity for the Jewish people, but in the NT the Jew teaches universalism for us gentiles. Right? That’s the Holy Bible in a fucking little nutshell.

Below, a recent exchange on Christianity in a non-American, racialist blog:

saint-paul-preaching-in-athens


Saint Paul delivering the Areopagus Sermon in Athens, by Raphael, 1515.






aijahlon68 says…

I was banned for life from Stormfront.org by a Christian Identity zealot / moderator, for having the audacity to write a post saying that Yeshua was a Jew.

Christian Identity, and Christianity as a whole, represents the biggest disadvantage the white race has in overcoming the Jewish problem. Christianity (in any form) is nothing more than self-inflicted Jewish Supremacy. As a race, we will never overcome the Jewish problem, until the Christian problem is solved first. How does one battle against emotions fueled by religious devotion, which is the most dangerous kind of devotion, because it leaves no room for questions or common sense, and is devoid of truth.

Waking a race of people up from a deep dream state based on Jewish lies would truly be a miracle, but impossible as it seems, there must be a way, and those of us who are fully awake need to find it.


mk8 says…

Attacking Christianity is a bad idea before every other problem has been dealt with. Even Hitler said so, and we all like Hitler, don’t we? There would just be some form of spiritual vacuum which would soon be filled by Islam and various other dangerous cults. As it stands now Christianity is actually the least of all evils.

Varg Vikernes says…

No it is not a bad idea at all. Christianity is the problem we have today. Christianity is not the least of all evils; it is the indirect cause of all evils. The Christians allow their “chosen people” special rights to destroy us all. If it hadn’t been for the Christians the Jews would not have been able to do anything to us at all. Go to Thulean Perspective for more on that, and search for posts about Christianity.

Christians even revolted against the NS regime, in 1942, causing instability and many other problems too, so maybe Hitler should have dealt with them first?

If Europe had been Pagan we would not have had any of the serious problems we have today in the first place.

mk8 says…

Varg, you are right that much of the resistance against the Third Reich was by Christians, and their grip on the churches was not tight enough. Hitler was not that wrong about leaving Christianity alone though, as he saw what happened to the Alldeutsche Vereinigung in Austria-Hungary (a political party supporting the Anschluss of the German part of Austria to Germany). The movement fell apart soon after they started to openly attack the church, failing to reach the common people and losing most of their followers. Even if it was the right thing to do, it was a very bad strategic move in hindsight.

On a smaller scale, I’ll just assume the same thing happens in places like Stormfront.org. It’s an American site after all, it must reek of Christians. Confronting them with the truth about their religion is like a cold shower for them. Maybe it’s not so bad to be banned from there after all…

Categories
Ethnic cleansing Judaism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Moses (fictional Hebrew lawgiver) Old Testament

Kriminalgeschichte, 2

Below, translated excerpts from the first chapter of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums

(“Criminal History of Christianity”):

 
Moses and the book of Judges

But not even this was enough for Moses, a character that a tract of 1598, On the Three Great Liars, blamed for “the largest and most egregious crimes” (summa et gravissime Mosis crimina) insofar as when “angry with the commanders of the army” he asked how they had spared the women and children. “Therefore kill all those men, even the children, and cut the throat of the women that have known a man; keep only girls and all the maids… And it was found that the booty was taken by the army of six hundred and seventy-five thousand sheep, seventy-two thousand oxen, donkeys, seventy-one thousand, and thirty-two thousand female virgins”—tremendous killings and robberies that also were contrary to the fifth and seventh commandments by Moses himself.

In a word, they perpetrated the most horrible atrocities and praise themselves for it, and burned towns and villages to leave no stone unturned. Today, when excavating the ancient Canaanites doublings, it is common to find a thick layer of ash that confirms the destruction by fire. One of the most important Palestinian cities in late Chalcolithic, Tell-Isdud or Ashdod, located in the international route of the sea (via maris) and that would become the capital of the Philistine Pentapolis, disappeared, destroyed by fire in the thirteenth century B.C., like its neighbor Tell-Mor.

Sometimes exterminating whole tribes spread because it was common to throw at the enemy the most severe form of war decreed by the Lord, the accursed (Hebrew herám, which was the negation of life itself, and which root derives from a word meaning “sacred” to the Western Semites): something offered to Yahweh as a kind of vast hecatomb or “ritual sacrifice.” Not by chance the biblical descriptions of “settlement” have been compared with the later campaigns of Islam (not nearly as bloody as those), when it is said that the conquerors should truly feel “custodians of the word of God” and protagonists of a holy war. “Just these, not the profane wars, end the anathema which means the extermination of all living in the name of Yahweh” (Gamm). Precisely, the “destruction at the roots can only be explained by the religious fanaticism of the Israelites.”

Those are the cases where the Lord expressly commands: “For in the towns that you shall not leave a living soul, but without differentiation you shall kill by the sword, namely: the Hittites and the Alamorreo, and the Canaanites and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded you, lest they teach you to make all the abominations that they have used with their gods, and offend your Lord.”

Such excesses of faith had their origin, in the first place, in nationalism of that ancient people, undoubtedly one of the most extremist ever known, combined with the rigor of a monotheism unknown in those regions. Both elements mutually potentiated the claim to be the chosen people.

The Israelites of the pre-Davidic time committed the most terrible crimes, and celebrated the genocide as a pleasing action to the Lord’s eyes, almost as a symbol of faith. And that “holy war,” then and later was carried out with particular vehemence, without admitting negotiations or agreements. Only the extermination of the enemy, the uncircumcised (or unbaptized, the “heretic,” the “infidel”) is “a typically Israelite trait” (Ringgren).

In most respects, the description of the Old Testament book of Judges, dated between 1200 and 1050, i.e., a century and a half after the “settlement,” is a source of information if not entirely reliable, quite valid, and it barely mentions anything but “holy wars.” These always began with blessings, after a period of sexual continence, and usually ended with the total liquidation of the enemy: men, women and children. “The ruins of many villages and towns, repeatedly destroyed during the twelfth and eleventh centuries, provided the most graphic of archaeological commentaries” (Cornfeld / Botterweck).

The Ark of the Covenant, assurance of God’s presence, accompanied the massacres.

Categories
Free speech / association Jesus Martin Luther New Testament Old Testament Porphyry of Tyre Theology

Hermann Samuel Reimarus

The following is excerpted from a classic in New Testament studies, Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, published in 1906: a scholarly yet readable introduction to the field of NT studies from a modern viewpoint. Schweitzer’s second chapter is titled “Hermann Samuel Reimarus”:

Hermann_Samuel_Reimarus

“Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Junger.” Noch ein Fragment des Wolfenbuttelschen Ungenannten. Herausgegeben von Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Braun- schweig, 1778, 276 pp. (The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples: A further Instalment of the anonymous Woltenbiittel Fragments. Published by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Brunswick, 1778.)


Before Reimarus, no one had attempted to form a historical conception of the life of Jesus. Luther had not so much as felt that he cared to gain a clear idea of the order of the recorded events. Speaking of the chronology of the cleansing of the Temple, which in John falls at the beginning, in the Synoptists near the close, of Jesus’ public life, he remarks: “The Gospels follow no order in recording the acts and miracles of Jesus, and the matter is not, after all, of much importance. If a difficulty arises in regard to the Holy Scripture and we cannot solve it, we must just let it alone.”

When the Lutheran theologians began to consider the question of harmonising the events, things were still worse. Osiander (1498-1552), in his “Harmony of the Gospels,” maintained the principle that if an event is recorded more than once in the Gospels, in different connexions, it happened more than once and in different connexions. The daughter of Jairus was therefore raised from the dead several times; on one occasion Jesus allowed the devils whom He cast out of a single demoniac to enter into a herd of swine, on another occasion, those whom He cast out of two demoniacs; there were two cleansings of the Temple, and so forth. The correct view of the Synoptic Gospels as being interdependent was first formulated by Griesbach.

Thus there had been nothing to prepare the world for a work of such power as that of Reimarus. It is true, there had appeared earlier, in 1768, a Life of Jesus by Johann Jakob Hess (1741-1828), written from the standpoint of the older rationalism, but it retains so much supernaturalism and follows so much the lines of a paraphrase of the Gospels, that there was nothing to indicate to the world what a master-stroke the spirit of the time was preparing.

Not much is known about Reimarus. For his contemporaries he had no existence, and it was [David Friedrich] Strauss who first made his name known in literature. He was born in Hamburg on the 22nd of December, 1694, and spent his life there as a professor of Oriental Languages. He died in 1768. Several of his writings appeared during his lifetime, all of them asserting the claims of rational religion as against the faith of the Church; one of them, for example, being an essay on “The Leading Truths of Natural Religion.” His magnum opus, however, which laid the historic basis of his attacks, was only circulated, during his lifetime, among his acquaintances, as an anonymous manuscript.

In 1774 Lessing began to publish the most important portions of it, and up to 1778 had published seven fragments, thereby involving himself in a quarrel with Goetze, the Chief Pastor of Hamburg. The manuscript of the whole, which runs to 4000 pages, is preserved in the Hamburg municipal library.

The following are the titles of Fragments which he published:

• The Passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea
• Showing that the books of the Old Testament were
not written to reveal a Religion
• Concerning the story of the Resurrection
• The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples

The monograph on the passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea is one of the ablest, wittiest, and most acute which has ever been written. It exposes all the impossibilities of the narrative in the Priestly Codex.

To say that the fragment on “The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples” is a magnificent piece of work is barely to do it justice. This essay is not only one of the greatest events in the history of criticism, it is also a masterpiece of general literature. The language is as a rule crisp and terse, pointed and epigrammatic—the language of a man who is not “engaged in literary composition” but is wholly concerned with the facts. At times, however, it rises to heights of passionate feeling, and then it is as though the fires of a volcano were painting lurid pictures upon dark clouds. Seldom has there been a hate so eloquent, so lofty a scorn; but then it is seldom that a work has been written in the just consciousness of so absolute a superiority to contemporary opinion. And withal, there is dignity and serious purpose; Reimarus’ work is no pamphlet. This was the first time that a really historical mind, thoroughly conversant with the sources, had undertaken the criticism of the tradition.

[Editor’s note: Because the Christians destroyed all copies of Porphyry’s book, we don’t really know if Porphyry’s anti-Christian polemic was also “thoroughly conversant with the New Testament sources.” From a few fragments discovered by the end of the 20th century I believe it was. One could barely imagine the revolution in thought that could have occurred since the later phases of the Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages had Porphyry’s biblical criticism been allowed to survive 1,300 years before Reimarus…]

It was Lessing’s greatness that he grasped the significance of this criticism, and felt that it must lead either to the destruction or to the recasting of the idea of revelation. He recognised that the introduction of the historical element would transform and deepen rationalism. Convinced that the fateful moment had arrived, he disregarded the scruples of Reimarus’ family and the objections of Nicolai and Mendelssohn, and, though inwardly trembling for that which he himself held sacred, he flung the torch with his own hand.

Reimarus takes as his starting-point the question regarding the content of the preaching of Jesus. “We are justified,” he says, “in drawing an absolute distinction between the teaching of the Apostles in their writings and what Jesus Himself in His own lifetime proclaimed and taught.” What belongs to the preaching of Jesus is clearly to be recognised. It is contained in two phrases of identical meaning, “Repent, and believe the Gospel,” or, as it is put elsewhere, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

Jesus shared the Jewish racial exclusiveness wholly and unreservedly. According to Matt. x. 5 He forbade His disciples to declare to the Gentiles the coming of the Kingdom of God. Evidently, therefore, His purpose did not embrace them. Had it been otherwise, the hesitation of Peter in Acts x. and xi., and the necessity of justifying the conversion of Cornelius, would be incomprehensible.

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are no evidence that Jesus intended to found a new religion. In the first place the genuineness of the command to baptize in Matt. xxviii. 19 is questionable, not only as a saying ascribed to the risen Jesus, but also because it is universalistic in outlook, and because it implies the doctrine of the Trinity.

The “Lord’s Supper,” again, was no new institution, but merely an episode at the last Paschal Meal of the Kingdom which was passing away, and was intended “as an anticipatory celebration of the Passover of the New Kingdom.” A Lord’s Supper in our sense, “cut loose from the Passover,” would have been inconceivable to Jesus, and not less so to His disciples. Miracles have no basis in fact, but owe their place in the narrative to the feeling that the miracle-stories of the Old Testament must be repeated in the case of Jesus, but on a grander scale. It is useless to appeal to the miracles, any more than to the “Sacraments,” as evidence for the founding of a new religion…

For popular uprising, however, He waited in vain. Twice He believed that it was near at hand. The first time was when He was sending out the disciples and said to them: “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes” (Matt. x. 23). He thought that, at the preaching of the disciples, the people would flock to Him from every quarter and immediately proclaim Him Messiah; but His expectation was disappointed. The people in Jerusalem refused to rise, as the Galilaeans had refused at the time when the disciples were sent out to rouse them.

All this implies that the time of the fulfilment of these hopes was not thought of by Jesus and His disciples as at all remote. In Matt. xvi. 28, for example, He says: “Truly I say unto you there are some standing here who shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” There is no justification for twisting this about or explaining it away. It simply means that Jesus promises the fulfilment of all Messianic hopes before the end of the existing generation.

Thus the disciples were prepared for anything rather than that which actually happened. Jesus had never said a word to them about His dying and rising again, otherwise they would not have so played the coward at His death, nor have been so astonished at His “resurrection.” The three or four sayings referring to these events must therefore have been put into His mouth later, in order to make it appear that He had foreseen these events in His original plan.

Inasmuch as the non-fulfilment of its eschatology is not admitted, our Christianity rests upon a fraud.

Such is Reimarus’ reconstruction of the history. We can well understand that his work must have given offence when it appeared, for it is a polemic, not an objective historical study. But we have no right simply to dismiss it in a word, as a Deistic production, as Otto Schmiedel, for example, does; it is time that Reimarus came to his own, and that we should recognise a historical performance of no mean order in this piece of Deistic polemics. His work is perhaps the most splendid achievement in the whole course of the historical investigation of the life of Jesus, for he was the first to grasp the fact that the world of thought in which Jesus moved was essentially eschatological.

In the light of the clear perception of the elements of the problem which Reimarus had attained, the whole movement of theology, down to Johannes Weiss, appears retrograde. In all its work the thesis is ignored or obscured that Jesus, as a historical personality, is to be regarded, not as the founder of a new religion, but as the final product of the eschatological and apocalyptic thought of Late Judaism. Every sentence of Johannes Weiss’s Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (1892) is a vindication, a rehabilitation, of Reimarus as a historical thinker.

Even so the traveller on the plain sees from afar the distant range of mountains. Then he loses sight of them again. His way winds slowly upwards through the valleys, drawing ever nearer to the peaks, until at last, at a turn of the path, they stand before him, not in the shapes which they had seemed to take from the distant plain, but in their actual forms. Reimarus was the first, after eighteen centuries of misconception, to have an inkling of what eschatology really was.

The sole mistake of Reimarus—the assumption that the eschatology was earthly and political in character. Thus theology shared at least the error of the man whom it knew only as a Deist, not as an historian, and whose true greatness was not recognised even by Strauss, though he raised a literary monument to him.

The solution offered by Reimarus may be wrong; the data of observation from which he starts out are, beyond question, right, because the primary datum of all is genuinely historical. He recognised that two systems of Messianic expectation were present side by side in Late Judaism. But what matters the mistake in comparison with the fact that the problem was really grasped?

The attitude of Jesus towards the law, and the process by which the disciples came to take up a freer attitude, was grasped and explained by him so accurately that modern historical science does not need to add a word, but would be well pleased if at least half the theologians of the present day had got as far.

Further, he recognised that primitive Christianity was not something which grew, so to speak, out of the teaching of Jesus, but that it came into being as a new creation, in consequence of events and circumstances which added something to that preaching which it did not previously contain; and that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, in the historical sense of these terms, were not instituted by Jesus, but created by the early Church on the basis of certain historical assumptions.

Still more remarkable is his eye for exegetical detail. He has an unfailing instinct for pregnant passages like Matt. x. 23, xvi. 28, which are crucial for the interpretation of large masses of the history. The fact is there are some who are historians by the grace of God, who from their mother’s womb have an instinctive feeling for the real. They follow through all the intricacy and confusion of reported fact the pathway of reality, like a stream which, despite the rocks that encumber its course and the windings of its valley, finds its way inevitably to the sea. No erudition can supply the place of this historical instinct, but erudition sometimes serves a useful purpose, inasmuch as it produces in its possessors the pleasing belief that they are historians, and thus secures their services for the cause of history.

In truth they are at best merely doing the preliminary spade-work of history, collecting for a future historian the dry bones of fact, from which, with the aid of his natural gift, he can recall the past to life. More often, however, the way in which erudition seeks to serve history is by suppressing historical discoveries as long as possible, and leading out into the field to oppose the one true view an army of possibilities. By arraying these in support of one another it finally imagines that it has created out of possibilities a living reality. This obstructive erudition is the special prerogative of theology, in which, even at the present day, a truly marvellous scholarship often serves only to blind the eyes to elementary truths.

Reimarus’ work was neglected, and the stimulus which it was capable of imparting failed to take effect. He had no predecessors; neither had he any disciples. His work is one of those supremely great works which pass and leave no trace, because they are before their time; to which later generations pay a just tribute of admiration, but owe no gratitude.

Thus the magnificent overture in which are announced all the motifs of the future historical treatment of the life of Jesus breaks off with a sudden discord, remains isolated and incomplete, and leads to nothing further.

Categories
Bible Christendom Hojas Susurrantes (book) Infanticide Jesus New Testament Old Testament

Matthew Kersten’s hilarious review

Of the Holy Bible

1-First-Edition-King-James-Bible-1611

Poor editing, logical fallacies, one-dimensional characters, and narrative inconsistencies ruin an otherwise imaginative dystopian fantasy novel in which a vengeful deity enslaves humanity into worshipping him. The King James Bible has an extremely intriguing premise, but the execution of that premise is poor and doesn’t do it justice at all. Regardless, the King James Bible is one of the world’s bestselling books of all time and has garnered a massive cult following, and understandably so, as it comes with a provocative promise of eternal life after death for anyone who believes it to be true. After reading it for myself, I find belief in this book’s alleged validity to be impossible.

It is worth noting that the King James Bible is not simply one book but an anthology of books (which are categorized under two iterations labeled as the Old and New Testaments) spanning many generations, all written by different authors at different points in time. And it shows. Oftentimes books in this collection offer redundant information and, at other times, contradictory information. In fact, the very first two chapters of the first book, titled Genesis, which lays out the origins of the book’s fictional universe, heavily contradict each other, and it all goes downhill from that point on. The editing in this book is absolutely atrocious.

The story starts off simple enough. There’s an omniscient, omnipotent, immortal celestial entity that has existed before the universe even began. This being, known as God, is bored and lonely and decides to create the universe to amuse himself. He creates light, which he calls day, followed by darkness, which he calls night, before he creates the sun. He then creates a flat earth of water, followed by dry land, grass and plant life, two great lights (one to rule the day and one to rule the night, even though the latter of which—the moon—isn’t actually a light and the former of which—the sun—would have been vital to the survival of the previously created plant life); firmament through which precipitation may occasionally be allowed to pass, creatures, and man. There’s also a tree with fruit that gives knowledge to whoever eats it and a sneaky, malicious talking snake, so if you’re into fantasy novels, the creation story at the beginning of Genesis should hold your interest.

It doesn’t take long before things go awry. The talking snake convinces the first woman, Eve, to eat fruit from the knowledge tree. Eve then convinces Adam, the first man, to do the same. God, despite supposedly being omniscient, is shocked to learn that they have done this and starts laying down the law on them, saying that men will be forced to work all the days of their life and women will be subservient to men. (To add insult to injury, childbirth will also be painful.) He punishes all of humanity for the disobedience of the first humans.

It seems puzzling that an omniscient God couldn’t devise a better creation plan. Even more puzzling is that the humans who disobeyed him were punished, along with all future members of humanity, for what they did despite not having any knowledge of what the consequences would be beforehand. Besides, if a creation is bad, does the blame rest upon the creation or the creator? Still more puzzling is that God doesn’t bother to attempt to refine his human design but sticks with the original failed one.

Things get all screwed up and a few chapters later. God, despite being omniscient, comes to a realization that his creation plan was a massive failure and that most of humanity is a lost cause and decides to destroy the world in a giant flood. That’s right; the world is destroyed at the very beginning of the book, and only a select few of each species are allowed to survive, somehow all crammed into an ark made from gopher wood. (How the plant life survives is not explained, nor is it explained how aquatic life survives salt water and fresh water mixing together, nor is it explained where the excess water ends up after the flood is over.) Why this omnipotent God couldn’t just stop the hearts of all humans who displeased him is quite beyond me. This flood plan is remarkably inefficient and serves as filler material, as the surviving human family needs to engage in incest to repopulate the world just like the first humans needed to engage in incest to originally populate the world. It’s just the same scenario rehashed. I can’t help but feel as though the contrived flood account was interpolated into the beginning of Genesis to dress it up and make it appear more impressive. It might help hook some readers early on, but I found it to be unnecessary.

Through various semi-comical, semi-irritating mishaps involving a giant tower, a child sacrifice practical joke, and a sold birthright, a tribe known as Israel arises. Israel is the tribe that God favors over all others, though it doesn’t take long for the Israelites to become enslaved in Egypt despite possessing the guidance of this omniscient God.

The second installment in the anthology, Exodus, deals with their emancipation from Egypt. God decides to give this guy named Moses some cheat codes for the universe, so that he’ll be able to use them in an attempt to intimidate the Pharaoh into allowing the Israelites to go free. Whether or not this plan would have actually worked is anyone’s guess, as God decides to violate the Pharaoh’s free will to allow the Israelites to leave (Exodus 4:21, 7:3, 7:13, 7:22, 8:19, 9:7, 9:35, 10:1, 10:20, 10:27, 11:10, 14:4, and 14:8), giving himself an incredibly flimsy excuse to send ten plagues on all of the Egyptians, punishing them for the Pharaoh’s compulsory obstinacy, just to show off. After this fiasco, the Pharaoh is finally allowed to let the Israelites go. Very shortly thereafter, the Pharaoh changes his mind about letting them go and chases them with his army. He almost catches them, but Moses uses his magical powers that God gave him to divide the waters of the Red Sea so that the Israelites can walk through them. There’s also a pillar of fire separating the Egyptians from the Israelites. If you enjoy fantasy epics, Exodus should be right up your alley.

Once the Israelites are through, the fire pillar dissipates and the Egyptians very stupidly charge into the path between the parted waters. The waters collapse onto the Egyptians, drowning them, and the Israelites celebrate the grisly deaths of their enemies before setting up camp in the desert.

This is where the real fun begins. From the remainder of Exodus and all throughout Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the vindictive, tyrannical God establishes a delightfully sinister theocracy under which basic happiness is impossible. He endorses slavery (Exodus 21:2-27, Leviticus 25:44-46, and Deuteronomy 20:10-14), public execution by stoning for failure to worship him on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32-36), stoning of unruly children (Deuteronomy 21:18-21), and death as punishment for nearly every crime, usually by stoning. (Stoning seems to be his preferred method of execution.)

He also demands that virgin women who are raped marry their rapists (Deuteronomy 22:28-29), calls for genocide (Exodus 23:23-27, Leviticus 26:7-8, and Deuteronomy 7:1-5 and 12:2-3), and condones all sorts of other atrocities. The Israelites, who witnessed his power during the plagues and parting of the waters, have no choice but to submit to this new horrific celestial totalitarian regime.

After the death of Moses, Joshua takes over as leader of the Israelites. In Joshua, the sixth installment, the Israelites fulfill God’s call for genocide by fighting battles with other tribes all throughout the desert, winning them simply because God rigs them in their favor. After some initial victories, the Israelites forget about God’s power and start worshipping other gods.

In the next book, Judges, God, who freely admits to being jealous (according to Exodus 34:14, his very name is Jealous), punishes them for doing so and delivers them into bondage. When they repent, a “judge” is sent to free them. This happens multiple times throughout Judges, making for repetitive reading. (God also allows a man named Jephthah to sacrifice his daughter to him in exchange for a battle victory in Judges 11:30-40; a testament to how much he loves human death.)

After this nonsense goes on for awhile, delaying exposition, the Philistines arrive on the scene and pose a major threat to the Israelites. A guy named David scares them away by killing a Philistine giant by firing a rock at his head with a slingshot. He then becomes Israel’s king. (There’s also a disgusting yet somewhat amusing anecdote in which David slays two hundred Philistines, cuts off their foreskins, and gives them to Saul as a dowry for his daughter, Michal, in 1 Samuel 18:25-27. This seems like a very poor deal to me. I’ll bet that Saul later had buyer’s remorse.)

Some less important, not particularly memorable (save for God’s killing of King David’s illegitimate seven-day-old son in 2 Samuel 12:15-18, a census mishap in 2 Samuel 24:1-15, and an incident involving two she bears in 2 Kings 2:23-24) events take place throughout the next nine books before the reader is forced to trudge through 150 chapters of dull, repetitive, excessively slavish poetry written to God by one of his more abject followers in Psalms.

The author of that book has the audacity to claim that both God and his statutes are perfect (Psalms 119:142, 119:151, 119:160, and 119:172), even though this would mean that God would need to follow his own rules, which he doesn’t. It is also claimed in Psalms that happiness can be derived from bashing children’s heads against rocks (Psalms 137:9), which is a proclamation that thoroughly baffles me. I’m not sure what the author was going for here. Perhaps this verse is supposed to be some sort of black comedy joke intended to express the impaired judgment of those living under the theocratic dystopia depicted in this collection of books, or it might have been included to emphasize the ghastly nature of the aforementioned theocratic dystopia, or it might just be there for shock value.


[Chechar’s interpolated note: I think I have psychoanalyzed well those barbaric Semites in a passage of my book Hojas Susurrantes. Just click on this link and then scroll almost to the bottom of that entry until you hit the subtitle “The historical Israel”.]


Whatever the case may be, it’s far too mean-spirited. The author of Psalms also frequently and redundantly berates anyone who is not a member of the tribe(s) that God favors, making for tiresome and irritating reading.

The next three books provide even more dull reading material. After slogging through these books, the reader arrives at the writings of the Old Testament prophets.

Throughout Isaiah and Jeremiah, God ruthlessly annihilates entire nations that fail to submit to his terrorist demands. Isaiah also mentions unicorns (Isaiah 34:7), dragons (Isaiah 34:13), and satyrs (Isaiah 34:14) and identifies them as legitimate safety hazards, so if you enjoy fantasy novels, you should enjoy chapter 34 of Isaiah.

Furthermore, Jeremiah 10:1-5 forbids cutting trees out of the forest, adorning them with decorations, and displaying them as a holiday custom. A substantial portion of the cult followers who claim to live by this book’s teachings fail to uphold this passage, which is puzzling. (In fact, there are many passages that they fail to uphold.) It’s almost as if they don’t even realize that decorated trees are explicitly forbidden by their highly revered literary work, but that would mean that they haven’t actually read the entire book for themselves and are blindly accepting the subjective interpretations of others, which would be just plain absurd. Right?

The next book in the series is Lamentations, which is just as pathetic as it sounds. (The entire Old Testament is excellently summarized in one sentence by Lamentations 2:21.)

The celestial terrorism continues throughout Ezekiel, in which God sinks to a new low by demanding that Ezekiel eat cakes containing human excrement (Ezekiel 4:12). (The entire Old Testament is excellently summarized in one sentence in Ezekiel 25:17.) Ezekiel also sees creatures that each has four faces, four wings, and straight feet with calf’s soles in Ezekiel 1:5-28, so if you enjoy fantasy novels, you should enjoy that passage.

Some more less important events happen throughout the next ten books, which consist mainly of more divine terrorism and ultimatums. Jonah, in which a man survives being swallowed by a giant fish and is vomited up three days later, is amusing.


The second (much shorter) iteration of the King James Bible, the New Testament, starts off with this guy named Jesus, who is supposed to be God in human form, gathering followers on Earth and spreading his word to them.

Given how much of a tyrannical, ethnic-cleansing maniac God was in the Old Testament, one would most likely expect Jesus to be a Terminator-style infiltrator who goes on killing sprees, but instead he’s a hippie. This almost complete character reversal makes the main protagonist (I use that word loosely) seem even more contrived and unbelievable.

Granted though, traces of God’s evil do remain within Jesus, as he brings his followers the most horrendous news of all; that anyone who fails to accept him as his or her totalitarian slave master will be tortured for all eternity after death! It is the epitome of horror, revamping God’s vindictive, petty, unforgiving nature that was established in the Old Testament.

The inherent problem with the premise of the Jesus story is that a man who is an omniscient deity incarnate would have extremely advanced knowledge; knowledge far beyond that of the humans who wrote this collection of books, called gospels. However, the gospel authors were able to work around it in an extremely clever way. The four authors telling the story of Jesus and his time on Earth all pieced together a generalized account of his life from minor, disjointed details and the four resulting accounts all heavily contradict each other. Brilliant!

Some fans of this book claim that Jesus abolishes the atrocious laws established in the Old Testament, making up for them. This, however, is not the case, as Jesus himself states in Matthew 5:17-18 and Luke 16:17 that he came not to “destroy the law” but to fulfill it and that not “one tittle” of the law would fail until “heaven and earth pass.” Once again it seems as though those who claim to admire and adhere to this book don’t actually know it very well. Go figure.

Two of the gospel authors claim that Jesus was born to a virgin, which is rather far-fetched, but then again, it is a fantasy novel. Jesus also claims that anyone who has faith in him will be able to magically transfer mountains and trees into the sea (Matthew 17:20 and 21:21, Mark 11:23, and Luke 17:6), further emphasizing the alternate, fictional universe (where sorcery is possible) in which this story is set.

Also, in this universe, all ailments are caused by demons, which Jesus is able to cast out of the ill and physically deformed.

The end of the story of Jesus and his time on Earth, however, ruins the whole thing, as it is completely nonsensical. Jesus (also God) is there to die for the imperfect nature of all humans (in which God created them) as a blood sacrifice to God (also himself) simply so that he can ask God (also himself) to forgive all humans for involuntarily existing in an imperfect nature in which they were created by God. It is supposed to be a noble sacrifice, but it instead comes across as utterly absurd and obscene.

It isn’t even a sacrifice, because Jesus magically comes back to life three days later, which he knew ahead of time would happen. Besides, given the other resurrections throughout this anthology of books (1 Kings 17:21-22, Ezekiel 37:9-10, Matthew 27:51-53, Mark 5:41-42, Luke 8:54-55, and John 11:41-44), the Jesus resurrection doesn’t seem all that significant. It would have had greater effect if those other completely random resurrections had been omitted. As I’ve already stated, this book would have benefited tremendously from better editing.

The next 22 books describe the actions and teaching of the followers of Jesus. The writings of his followers contradict each other numerous times regarding what is required to attain salvation. (Is it faith or works or both?)

Most of these books are written by some guy named Paul and are comprised of rambling about how faith is the only way to attain salvation (even though Paul apparently was made witness to the spirit of Jesus in Acts 9:3-6, making faith for him impossible, making him a hypocrite) and how sex is evil and women are inferior and must be submissive to men and all kinds of other crap that Jesus doesn’t say in any of the gospels. The writings of Paul are irritating and dull. (Although 1 Corinthians 1:18-29 is good for a laugh.)

After these writings, the final book, Revelation, describes the end of the world when Jesus comes back to kill all nonbelievers. Revelation is replete with cartoonish imagery and prophecies more vague than an astrology horoscope. It feels to me as though it was tacked on as an afterthought so that the book could have a climactic ending, no matter how contrived. What exactly was the point of adding all of this extra material to the end of the book if the savior of humanity was already dead and resurrected?

As far as dystopian novels go, I prefer George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four by a long shot. That book isn’t self-contradictory, poorly written, fallacious, or outright absurd and it doesn’t insult the reader’s intelligence by claiming that Big Brother is good.