Old Testament + New Testament → Christianity
Old Testament + New Testament → White suicide
Therefore,
Christianity → White suicide
Categories
Category: Old Testament
Now that I have been translating articles and letters of the Spanish blogger Manu Rodríguez for The West’s Darkest Hour a thought arrived to my mind today.
Couldn’t the Protestant, specifically the Puritanical version of Christianity that the Early Founding Fathers brought to this continent be the perfect operating system, complete with an in-built bug, to undermine the Aryan spirit?
Judge it by yourselves my dear readers. It was the Yankees sans Jews the ones who horribly betrayed their kinsmen during the American Civil War on behalf of the Negroes: the seeds of what would happen big time in the next century with American betrayal of Germany on behalf of the Jews.
After all it was the American Puritans, as Tom Sunic demonstrated in his latest book, the ones who introduced Old Testament (OT) values in the Low Culture: something that explains the runaway Zionism in the contemporary evangelical scene. If in addition to the Holy Book of the Jews subtly introduced to the Aryan psyche after the Reformation you add the New Testament’s (NT) non-ethnic but universal message, Love your neighbor, help the poor and disadvantaged, etc., the perfect recipe for Indo-European suicide has been formulated, right?
OT + NT = White suicide
If this interpretation of Western history is correct, Christianity in general, and Murka in particular, must burn to save whites from extinction.
Any objection to this reading of Western history (before jumping to the below thread please read at least this text by Sunic and this one by Rodríguez)?
by Manu Rodríguez
You speak of the West, of the decline of the West, of the end of West… But it is the White West the only in danger of disappearing. The White West, the Aryan Nations: Europe and Magna Europe. Our West: our strength, our efforts, our work. Multiculturalism and immigration are causing the dissolution of our Nations. Our countries are filled of sub-Saharans, Asians and Africans (the most numerous), and of Chinese… In due time we will be a minority in our own lands.
Aryan Nation? We are not yet an Aryan Nation. We cannot constitute a “League” of Aryan Nations. We cannot come to our own defense. We are bound, and unarmed. First we have to free ourselves. For millennia we have been alienated peoples, alienated nations. The Jewish-Christian-Muslim and Semitic tradition dominates us completely. They are, ultimately, Semitic traditions instructing us and conforming us (or rather deforming and destroying us) since we are born—from the cradle to the grave.
We are not ourselves; we cannot speak out as long as we try to speak from that space: the Jewish-Christian-Muslim milieu. Within these traditions we are not ourselves, we disappear.
* * *
Christianity was for us a Horse of Troy, a poisoned gift, for us. It was the weapon used by the Jews to softly introduce their world into our minds and hearts and to assert their cause (they’re the “chosen” people); to undermine our confidence in ourselves and sow the doubt and bad conscience about our traditions; to dissolve our cultural identity, divide us, weaken us, deconstruct us. This was the strategy of Saul, the Apostle of the “gentiles.” Yes, it had its risks and disadvantages for themselves, but it was a worth try. They achieved their purposes. Ultimately, the Jewish tradition was imposed on our peoples.
With the New Testament came also the Old Testament, the whole Jewish world—which ended up devouring us. The “good news,” the “gospel” was the “luminous” lure. Christianity is a Judaism for the gentiles: a half-Judaism, a decaffeinated Judaism, a castrated and castrating Judaism; an ideology for slaves, servants, and subordinates.
The anti-Judaism or criticism of the Jews in the gospels, or Saul, is a smokescreen. This is what managed to introduce the new Christian order in our European lands: a new and unique god, the god of the Jews; a new and unique sacred land, Israel, the land of the Jews; a new and unique sacred history, the Jewish scriptures (Jewish writings and Judeo-messianic—Christian—writings); a single sacred language (Hebrew); a single chosen people… And let us not forget that “salvation comes from the Jews” (in the New Testament). Meanwhile, our people, lands, histories, and identities were desacralized, desecrated, and banned (our ancestors, temples, sacred places, various traditions, books…).
The Christianization of our people ended up destroying our ancestral identities, our genuine signs of identity, our collective ancestral memory. It was a violent process of acculturation and enculturation. There we died—there our peoples were killed, or transformed into something else. There our alienation began, our alienated life, our alienated history.
After the several Christianizations our people ceased to exist. No more Greeks, Romans, Goths, Gauls, or Slavs: for these peoples no identity was left other that being Christians or not. The various not yet Christianized peoples of Europe were made to “disappear,” they were agglutinated and blurred out under the term pagan, which means rural or rustic. The term referred to Roman peasant cults, but also had connotations for the uneducated, the not cultivated or civilized. It was (and is) a derogatory term. Like the term goyim, also derogatory, applied to us by the Jews (or the kafir which would use the Muslims—the other Jewish offspring, the second spawn).
Incidentally, the holy book of the Jews (and Christians) is a real protocol of action regarding the Other, the goyim, the peoples, the gentiles: a strategy of domain by the Jews (and Christians) against the Other. It points out, for example, the technique of slandering and the undermining of the towns or cities’ morale, which destruction or conquest is intended; it’s about what they envy, lust after or fear: Egypt, Canaan, Jericho, the Philistines, Sodom, Babylon… Rome! (the whole West today). Furious anathemas they throw on them. See the picture they make about their populations, their customs (their decadence and everything else). It is libel and slander of the other people. The Muslims have in addition to this a supplementary text, the Koran. Both in the Old Testament and in the Koran literal and allegorical directions are prescribed to conquer, destroy, or simply how to treat the goyim or the kafir and the follow-up steps. They are “arts of war,” strategy manuals for every time and place. Such strategies of control are included in what is properly defined as “group evolutionary strategies” (MacDonald).
We, the Aryan peoples, the White West, lack such patently manifest “group evolutionary strategies” (the Semitic way). We are not, however, lacking of advice and warnings, wise judgments, illuminated books; wisdom. We also have our myths, legends, and wonderful stories, the old pre-Christian story which provides us with the weapons and strategies we need; our own language, our heroic and epic language. They belong to the time when we had group consciousness, when this feeling of belonging to a people was still alive (early Romans, Germans, Celts…); the story of threats, for example, that affects the group or the entire kingdom. Those are stories in allegorical or figurative language, and could be applied in appropriate circumstances.
The evolutionary strategy of Jews, Christians, and Muslims exists, therefore, in their sacred books. They do not need other “protocols” or roadmaps. Such sacred texts are naturally untouchable. The supremacist (megalomaniac) or cruel side implicit and explicit in these texts is usually explained away (because of their archaic and religious nature, they say). Moreover, these “holy” books are universally praised for their humanity and high morals. In certain circles they are considered no longer fashionable, innocuous, harmless.
There can be no greater confusion regarding this issue—no more self-deception. We cannot blame the enemy for his cunning. If their narratives are accepted (if we play their game) their supremacy and our submission are accepted as well. It’s that simple. And this is true for the Jewish, Christian or Muslim narratives. “I give eternal life if you leave everything you have (or you deny yourself) and follow me.” In this manner they present their claims. And so they depart, well equipped of bait, fishing and capture to see who bites, who falls. So they spend their days and survive. We cannot blame the cheater because we, or our ancestors, have fallen into their traps. In our power lies not to be tricked. It was us, the naive, the well-intentioned, the unwarned, confident and silly whites the only responsible for our clumsiness.
It must be said that in this Fall we lost our light and our freedom. That step was a mistake, a mistake that present and future generations must repair.
We were naive, stupid, indifferent, complicit, coward, venal. Everything happened in that Fall, that death, that oblivion. It is good to keep memory of this painful Fall. The cheater is not a thing of the past, he’s still among us.
* * *
Since the last century we have had a new batch of Jewish instigators (Adorno, Marcuse…) and, more recently, Muslim (Said, Rauf, Ramadan—Islam continues, since its inception, the strategy of the Jews and they even have improved it). Their drive is to criticize, censure, and undermine the economic, political, social, or cultural foundations of our contemporary world and at the same time advocate a multiracial and multicultural society in our lands. (With which right do these aliens propose any social model in our lands?) They bring both the disease and the remedy; they both diagnose and prescribe as the old Christians did (with their original sin, which affects all mankind and their restoring baptism) or the modern psychoanalysts (with their unhealthy complexes, more or less innate and universal, and their corresponding “analytic” cure): the machinations and artful trickery of the enemy. Today as yesterday. These misérables are again among us with impunity and with their venomous narratives staining, sickening our past and our present; conditioning, and endangering our future with their insidious socio-cultural proposals, their malicious social therapies (with renewed hooks).
The brand new testament that these new apostles of our gentility preach (newly reclaimed after the fall of the Ancient Regime) is a new attack adapted to the times, a new threat; a new prison, a new shame and a new exile they have prepared for us.
They are building for us a West (a home) that’s vague, diffuse, fuzzy; of open borders, tolerant, pluralistic; multiracial, multicultural, cosmopolitan. A utopia, they tell us, a paradise. They are building our ruin, our hell; they’re reducing our vital space; destroying us slowly, coldly, and systematically. In our own home, these guests.
It is a collective brainwashing what we suffer under these new narratives of “salvation”: narratives from our governments, media, and educational institutions. They have managed to capture the attention and sympathy from the population (the “good” ones, the well-intentioned Left). There are also the miserable converts (the convinced, the deceived, the confused, the unconscious traitors). Both become part of the ranks of the enemy in war against their own race, their own people, and their own cultural traditions: damaging, doing wrong, hurting their own. These rouges know well where to cast the nets. Now as then.
It is a multiple and highly dangerous attack what we suffer today—demographic and ideological. Those are the last battles of a cold war that will soon become hot and which purpose is none other than ending the ancestral, cultural and racial homogeneity of our States, nations or peoples. Undermine our continent, our ancient and millenarian human geography. Destroy us racially and culturally, turning us into a minority in this land of ours, in the land of our ancestors. It is the perfect revenge, the consummate revenge. Finally dispossessed of our lands and our skies we will have no other skies than the Semitic; we will lose everything.
We are disadvantaged before this offensive. Feet and hands bound; morally disarmed, with borrowed, alien, enemy language. The Christian or pseudo-Christian language that is imposed on us (all men are equal, universal human rights, you must tolerate and suffer, love the enemy…) invalidates us, paralyzes us, mutes us, stops us. With this language we shall never defeat our enemies, those who seek our evil. It is a language forged and still shaped for us by the enemies of our being, the “moral” weapon that they leave us to disarm us absolutely. It is the art of transforming wolves and bears into kids and lambs, the poisoned gifts of the enemy.
We cannot reproach the enemy for his strategy or will to power. He does what he can. I would only say that our strategy and our will to power, our light and our will of future must far exceed that of the enemy. Liberate us, recover us, purge us. Get rid of ’em all! Sweat them like a bad fever! Expel them!, throw them out of us; from our lands, our lives. Purify us. Deliver us from our evil! Heal.
It will not be so much an exit, an exodus, as an expulsion: a purification.
* * *
Zeus is the god father of our peoples, Zeus / Dyaus. All Aryan peoples call upon him. Zeus is the god of our genius. It is a diurnal, bright, solar god. We love the clarity, truth, justice, wisdom.
We also love drunkenness, divine intoxication: what brings joy. Zeus / Dyaus is our Soma, our Dionysus, our Balder, our Lugh. We owe him the clarity without shadow, the vigor, and the enthusiasm.
We are a people in motion, never still, never stopped. Always forward, always in progress, advancing, going. Behind we have many stories, many rebirths, many auroras. We are a people that are reborn.
We are also a people with memory, a people that does not forget the past, the former transformations since the Paleolithic to the present day: a people with a memory connected to all of our past lives. The people with the longer memory are the people with the longest future.
That memory is received as a holy gift. It is the memory of my people, of all the avatars, of all time. It is the heavens of my people; the spiritual, symbolic heritage of the Aryans. Only my people have the right and the privilege to receive this legacy. No other has the right to our history, our memory, or our heaven.
Europa Aryana. The mother earth of the European Aryans, the metropolis; our sacred land. The land of our ancestors and the spirit, the genius of our ancestors. This we must protect and bequeath for the future.
The present and future generations of Aryans have a serious responsibility. This is the harshest hand we have been dealt, the most needed for the minds of us all. In this trance either everyone is saved or none. We must reconstitute the Tree in its fullness. We cannot let down any of our peoples in the hands of the Semites (Jews, Christians or Muslims). All of us have to leave this night, this death, this abyss where we have been detained for hundreds of years.
My friend: in combat light and freedom meet. I wish you clarity, vigor, and enthusiasm. May the god who unleashes and liberates be with us all.
“There is no human as willfully, malignantly, and self-destructively stupid as a White person in the throes of a moral panic.”
After summarizing the Jewish problem in the foreword to Tomislav Sunić’s Homo Americanus, Kevin MacDonald wrote:
But the other side of the equation must also be examined—the traits that predispose Westerners to willingly accept their own oblivion as a moral necessity. Here Sunić emphasizes the heritage of Christian universalism and, especially, in the case of America, the heritage of Puritan moralism. [page xxxiii]
However, for most white nationalists it is unthinkable that the primary cause of our woes is White pathology—Judeo-Christianity and its secular version of egalitarianism—, not the Jewish problem, which according to Sunić is only a secondary infection.
Below I’ve typed directly from my copy of Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, published in 2007. In the third chapter, “The origins of political correctness and America’s role in its perfection,” Sunić wrote:
“Political correctness” is a euphemism for intellectual censorship whose legal and cultural origins can be traced to America and Europe, immediately after the Second World War. For the first time in European history, a large scale attempt was made by the victorious United States of America, the Soviet Union and their allies, to condemn a large number of thinkers and writers from defeated Germany and its allies to intellectual oblivion… Any criticism—however mild it may be—of egalitarianism and multiculturalism can earn the author or politician the stigma of “fascism,” or even worse, of “anti-Semitism”… How did this happen and who introduced this climate of intellectual censorship and self-censorship in America and Europe at the beginning of the third millennium?
Brainwashing the Germans
In the aftermath of World War II, the role of the American-based Frankfurt School scholars and European Marxist intellectuals was decisive in shaping the new European cultural scene. Scores of American left-leaning psychoanalysts—under the auspices of the Truman government—swarmed over Germany in an attempt to rectify not just the German mind but also change the brains of all Europeans. Frankfurt School activists were mostly of German-Jewish extraction who had been expelled by the German authorities during National Socialist rule and who, after the Second World War, came back to Europe and began laying the foundations for a new approach in the study of humanities.
But there were also a considerable number of WASP Puritan-minded scholars and military men active in post-war Germany, such as Major General McClure, the poet Archibald MacLeish, the political scientist Harold Laswell, the jurist Robert Jackson and the philosopher John Dewey, who had envisaged copying the American way of democracy into the European public scene. They thought of themselves as divinely chosen people called to preach American democracy—a procedure which would be used by American elites in the decades to come of each occasion and in every spot of the world. It never crossed the mind of American post-war educators that their actions would facilitate the rise of Marxist cultural hegemony in Europe and lead to the prolongation of the Cold War.
As a result of Frankfurt School reeducational endeavors in Germany, thousands of book titles in the fields of genetics and anthropology were removed from library shelves and thousands of museum artifacts were, if not destroyed in the preceding Allied fire bombing, shipped to the USA and the Soviet Union. The liberal and communist tenets of free speech and freedom of expression did not apply at all to the defeated side which had earlier been branded as “the enemy of humanity.”
Particularly harsh was the Allied treatment of German teachers and academics. Since National Socialist Germany had significant support among German teachers and university professors, it was to be expected that the US reeducational authorities would start screening German intellectuals, writers, journalists and film makers. Having destroyed dozens of major libraries in Germany, with millions of volumes gone up in flames, the American occupying powers resorted to improvising measures in order to give some semblance of normalcy in what later became “the democratic Germany.” The occupying powers realized that universities and other places of higher learning could always turn into centers of civil unrest, and therefore, their attempts at denazification were first focused on German teachers and academics…
Among the new American educators, the opinion prevailed that the allegedly repressive European family was the breeding ground of political neurosis, xenophobia, and racism among young children… Therefore, in the eyes of the American reeducational authorities, the old fashioned European family needed to be removed and with it some of its Christian trappings. Similar antifascist approaches to cultural purges were in full swing in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, but as subsequent events showed, the Western version of political correctness proved to be far more effective.
In the early postwar years the Americans and their war allies carried out large scale intellectual purges in the media, notably with issuing special licenses to newly launched newspaper outlets in Germany. The words “Nazism” and “Fascism” gradually lost their original meaning and turned, instead, into synonyms of evil. The new educational principle of reduction ad hitlerum became a new paradigm for studying social sciences. A scholar who would slightly diverge from these newly installed antifascist pedagogical methods would have meager chances for career advancement if not outright fired. In some cases, even sixty years after the end of World War II, he would have to face stiff penalties, including jail term. During the same postwar period in communist Eastern Europe, Soviet-led cultural repression was far more severe, but, ironically, its vulgar transparency, as seen in previous chapters, gave its victims an aura of martyrdom…
The ideology of antifascism became by the late 20th century a form of negative legitimacy for the entire West… Western European political elites went a step further; in order to show to their American sponsors democratic credentials and their philo-Semitic attitudes, they introduced strict legislation forbidding historical revisionism of the Second World War and any critical study of mass immigration into Western Europe…
At the beginning of the 21st century, the whole intellectual climate in America and especially in Europe came to resemble the medieval period by forbidding critical inquiry into “self-evident truths”… The German Criminal Code appears in substance more repressive than the former Soviet Criminal Code… Day after day Germany has to prove that it can perform self-educational tasks better than its American tutor. It must show signs of being the most servile disciple of the American hegemon, given that the “transformation of the German mind (was) the main home work of the military regime.” If one wishes to grasp the concept of modern political correctness, one must study in detail the political psychology of the traumatized German people…
Given that all signs of nationalism, let alone racialism, are reprimanded in Germany… it is considered legally desirable to hunt down European heretics… Germany, along with other European countries, has now evolved into a “secular theocracy”… Similar to Communism, historical truth in Western Europe is not established by an open academic debate but by state legislation… The entire West, including America itself, has become a victim of collective guilt… Thus the ruling class in America and Europe successfully resorts to the scarecrow of debate stopping words, such as “anti-Semitism” and “Neo-Nazism,” as an alibi for legitimizing its perpetual status quo.
The specter of a projected catastrophic scenario must silence all free spirits. Naturally, if fascism is legally decreed as absolute evil, any aberration in the liberal system will automatically appear as a lesser evil. The modern liberal system, which originated in America, functions as a self-perpetuating machine of total mind control.
The proportion of writers and journalists who were shot, imprisoned, and barred from their profession surpasses all other professional categories. Do we need to be reminded of the assassination of Albert Clément, Philippe Henriot, Robert Denoël, of the suicide of Drieu La Rochelle, of the death of Paul Allard in prison prior to court hearings and of the executions of Georges Suarez, Robert Brasillach, Jean Luchaire… the death sentence pronounced in absentia or a commuted prison sentence for Lucien Rebatet, Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, etc.? The targets were the providers of the ideas more than the entrepreneurs who had contributed to the German war industry. By 1944 the professional interdiction by the CNE (Comité nationale des écrivains) targeted approximately 160 journalists and writers. [Dominique Venner, Historie de la Collaboration (Paris: Pygmalion, 2000), pp. 515-516]
After the Second World War, an ex post facto law was adopted in France, making some political opinions a crime… The defendants are not blamed for their acts—provided there were any—but for their ideas. At the beginning of the 21st century, as a result of this repressive intellectual climate of Europe, hundreds of French and German authors showing sympathies for anti-liberal authors or who voice criticism of multicultural experiments in postmodern Europe or America are subject to legal sanctions and public ostracism…
It is true that Western Europe, unlike Eastern Europe, could escape the naked terror of communism, although Western Europe’s own subspecies, the antifascist homunculi, as German scholar Günther Maschke derogatorily calls modern Americanized opinion makers in Europe, tirelessly watch for any sign of nationalist revival… One wonders, why does not the Communist criminal legacy trigger a similar negative outcry in the wider public as the fascist legacy? Why must the public stay tuned to endless recitals of National Socialist crimes, whereas rarely ever does it have an opportunity to hear something about Communist horrors?…
The larger public in America and Europe have little knowledge that in Germany alone, in the last decade of the 20th century, thousands of individuals, ranging from German youngsters cracking jokes about non-European immigrants, to scholars dealing critically with the Jewish Holocaust, have been sentenced to either fines or to considerable prison terms. In the political and academic environment, writes the modern German heretic Germar Rudolf, it must, therefore, not come as a surprise that “political scientists, sociologists and historians do not wish to call things by their names”…
The spiral of intellectual cowardice only reinforces the Americanized system’s thought control. The silence of American academics and prominent human rights advocates, following the arrest of Rudolf in America, proves time and again that American intellectuals realize that there must be limits to their freedom of speech… The American brain child, the post-war Federal Republic of Germany, might enter some day into history books as the most bizarre system ever seen in Europe.
Chapter IV: The Biblical origins of American fundamentalism
America is a land of the Bible. In America, it is virtually unheard of to openly declare oneself an agnostic or an atheist and to aspire at the same time to some high political office. No country on earth has ever known such a high degree of Biblical influence as the United States of America…
The legacy of Biblical Puritanism lost its original theological God-fearing message and adopted, at the turn of the 20th century, a secular neo-liberal form of the human rights gospel. Subsequently, by a bizarre twist of fate, the Calvinist legacy of Puritanism that had been chased from Europe by the end of the 17th century started its journey back home to Europe—particularly after America came out victorious after the Second World War. Although Europe remains a much less Bible-oriented society than America, the moralistic message, as an old Bible derivative, is making strong headways in the postmodern European social arena. However much the surface of America shows everywhere signs of secularism, rejecting the Christian dogma and diverse religious paraphernalia, in the background of American political thought always looms the mark of the Bible.
In hindsight, the British context of the 17th century, the strongest political standard bearer of Puritanism, Oliver Cromwell, appears as a passing figure who did not leave a lasting political impact on the future of the United Kingdom or on the rest of continental Europe. Yet Cromwell’s unwitting political legacy had more influence on the American mindset than Lenin’s rhetoric did on the future of communized Russia…
In contrast to European Catholicism and Lutheranism, Calvinist Puritanism managed to strip Christianity of pagan elements regarding the transcendental and the sacred, and reduced the Christian message solely to the basic ethical precepts of good behavior. American Puritanism deprived Christianity of its aesthetic connotations and symbolism, thereby alienating American Christians as well as American cultural life in general, further from its European origins. In this way, Americans became ripe for modernism in architecture and new approaches in social science… This hypertrophy of moralism had its birth place in New England during the early reign of the Pilgrim fathers, which only proves our thesis that New England and not Washington D.C. was the birth place of Americanism…
It was to be expected with the Puritans’ idea of self-chosenness that Americans took a special delight in the Old Testament. From it, almost exclusively, they drew their texts, and it never failed to provide them with justification for their most inhuman and bloodthirsty acts. Their God was the God of the Old Testament; their laws were the laws of the Old Testament. Their Sabbath was Jewish, not Christian…
“Judeo-American” monotheism
American founding myths drew their inspiration from Hebrew thought. The notion of the “City on the Hill” and “God’s own country” were borrowed from the Old Testament and the Jewish people… Of all Christian denominations, Calvinism was the closest to the Jewish religion and as some authors have noted, the United States owes its very existence to the Jews. “For what we call Americanism,” writes Werner Sombart, “is nothing else than the Jewish spirit distilled.” Sombart further writes that “the United States is filled to the brain with the Jewish spirit”…
Very early on America’s founding fathers, pioneers, and politicians identified themselves as Jews who had come to the new American Canaan from the pestilence of Europe. In a postmodern Freudian twist, these pilgrims and these new American pioneers were obliged to kill their European fathers [the Germans] in order to facilitate the spreading of American democracy world-wide. “Heaven has placed our country in this situation to try us; to see whether we would faithfully use the incalculable power in our hands for spreading forward the world’s regeneration”…
Does that, therefore, mean that our proverbial Homo americanus is a universal carbon copy of Homo judaicus? The word “anti-Semite” will likely be studied one day as a telling example of postmodern political discourse, i.e. as a signifier for somebody who advocates the reign of demonology… How does one dare critically talk about the predominance of the Judeo-American spirit in America without running the risk of social opprobrium or of landing into psychiatric asylum, as Ezra Pound once did?…
Eventually, both American Jews and American Gentiles will be pitted into an ugly clash from which there will be no escape for any of them… It is the lack of open discussion about the topic of the Jews that confirms how Jews play a crucial role in American conscience building, and by extension, in the entire West… But contrary to classical anti-Semitic arguments, strong Jewish influence in America is not only the product of Jews; it is the logical result of Gentiles’ acceptance of the Jewish founding myths that have seeped over centuries into Europe and America in their diverse Christian modalities. Postmodern Americanism is just the latest secular version of the Judean mindset… Blaming American Jews for extraterrestrial powers and their purported conspiracy to subvert gentile culture borders on delusion and only reflects the absence of dialogue…
One can naturally concur that Americans are influenced by Jews, but then the question arises as to how did it happen?… Jews in America did not drop from the moon. Jewish social prominence, both in Europe and America, has been the direct result of the white Gentile’s acceptance of Jewish apostles—an event which was brought to its perfection in America by early Puritan Pilgrim Founding Fathers. Be it in Europe or in the USA, Christian religious denominations are differentiated versions of Jewish monotheism. Therefore, the whole history of philo-Semitism, or anti-Semitism in America and in Europe, verges on serious social neurosis.
American pro-Jewish or “Jewified” intellectuals often show signs of being more Jewish than Jews themselves… As the latest version of Christianized and secularized monotheism, Judeo-Americanism represents the most radical departure from the ancient European pre-Christian genius loci… Christian anti-Semites in America often forget, in their endless lamentation about the changing racial structure of America, that Christianity is by definition a universal religion aiming to achieve a pan-racial system of governance. Therefore, Christians, regardless whether they are hypermoralistic Puritans or more authority prone Catholics, are in no position to found an ethnically and racially all white Gentile society while adhering at the same time to the Christian dogma of pan-racial universalism…
The West, and particularly America, will cease to be Israelite once it leaves this neurosis, once it returns to its own local myths… Many Jewish scholars rightly acknowledge deep theological links between Americanism and Judaism. Also, American traditionalists and conservatives are correct in denouncing secular myths, such as Freudism, Marxism, and neo-liberalism which they see as ideologies concocted by Jewish and pro-Jewish thinkers. They fail to go a step further and examine the Judaic origins of Christianity and mutual proximity of these two monotheist religions that make up the foundations of the modern West. Only within the framework of Judeo-Christianity can one understand modern democratic aberrations and the proliferation of new civic religions in postmodernity…
Also, the reason America has been so protective of the state of Israel has little to do with America’s geopolitical security. Rather, Israel is an archetype and a pseudo-spiritual receptacle of American ideology and its Puritan founding fathers. Israel must function as America’s democratic Super-Ego…
Modern individuals who reject Jewish influence in America often forget that much of their neurosis would disappear if their Biblical fundamentalism was abandoned. One may contend that the rejection of monotheism does not imply a return to the worship of ancient Indo-European deities or the veneration of some exotic gods and goddesses. It means forging another civilization, or rather, a modernized version of scientific and cultural Hellenism, considered once as a common receptacle of all European peoples…
In short, Judeo-Christian universalism, practiced in America with its various multicultural and secular offshoots, set the stage for the rise of postmodern egalitarian aberrations and the complete promiscuity of all values. That Americanism can also be a fanatical and intolerant system “without God,” is quite obvious. This system, nonetheless, is the inheritor of a Christian thought in the sense in which Carl Schmitt demonstrated that the majority of modern political principles are secularized theological principles…
America is bound to become more and more a racial pluriverse… Guilt feelings inspired in the Bible, along with the belief in economic progress and the system of big business, pushed America onto a different historical path of no return…
Undoubtedly, many American atheists and agnostics also admit that in the realm of ethics all men and women of the world are the children of Abraham. Indeed even the bolder ones who somewhat self-righteously claim to have rejected Christian or Jewish theologies, and who claim to have replaced them with “secular humanism,” frequently ignore the fact that their self-styled secular beliefs are also grounded in Judeo-Christian ethics. Abraham, Jesus and Moses may be dethroned today, but their moral edicts and spiritual ordinances are much alive in American foreign policy. “The pathologies of the modern world are genuine, albeit illegitimate daughters of Christian theology,” writes De Benoist…
Who can dispute the fact that Athens was the homeland of European America before Jerusalem became its painful edifice?
Chapter V: In Yahweh we trust: A divine foreign policy
It was largely the Biblical message which stood as the origin of America’s endeavor to “make the world safe for democracy.” Contrary to many European observers critical of America, American military interventions have never had as a sole objective economic imperialism but rather the desire to spread American democracy around the world…
American involvement in Europe during World War II and the later occupation of Germany were motivated by America’s self-appointed do-gooding efforts and the belief that Evil in its fascist form had to be removed, whatever the costs might be. Clearly, Hitler declared war on “neutral” America, but Germany’s act of belligerence against America needs to be put into perspective. An objective scholar must examine America’s previous illegal supplying of war material to the Soviet Union and Great Britain. Equally illegal under international law was America’s engaging German submarines in the Atlantic prior to the German declaration of war, which was accompanied by incessant anti-German media hectoring by American Jews—a strategy carried out in the name of a divine mission of “making the world safe for democracy.”
“The crisis of Americanism in our epoch,” wrote a German scholar, Giselher Wirsing, who had close ties with propaganda officials in the Third Reich, “falls short of degeneracy of the Puritan mindset. In degenerated Puritanism lies, side by side with Judaism, America’s inborn danger”…
A war crime of the Bible
In the first half of the 20th century American Biblical fundamentalism resulted in military behavior that American postmodern elites are not very fond of discussing in a public forum. It is common place in American academia and the film industry to criticize National Socialism for its real or alleged terror. But the American way of conducting World War II—under the guise of democracy and world peace—was just as violent if not even worse.
Puritanism had given birth to a distinctive type of American fanaticism which does not have parallels anywhere else in the world. Just as in 17th century England, Cromwell was persuaded that he had been sent by God Almighty to purge England of its enemies; so did his American liberal successors by the end of the 20th century think themselves elected in order to impose their own code of military and political conduct in both domestic and foreign affairs. M.E. Bradford notes that this type of Puritan self-righteousness could be easily observed from Monroe to Lincoln and Lincoln’s lieutenants Sherman and Grant…
Whereas everybody in American and European postmodern political establishment are obliged to know by heart the body count of Fascist and National Socialist victims, nobody still knows the exact number of Germans killed by American forces during and after World War II. Worse, as noted earlier, a different perspective in describing the US post-war foreign policy toward Europe and Germany is not considered politically correct… [in spite of the fact that] the American mistreatment of German POWs and civilians during World War II must have been far worse than that on Iraq after 2003.
Just as communism, following the Second World War, used large scale terror in the implementation of its foreign policy goals in Eastern Europe, so did America use its own type of repression to silence heretics in the occupied parts of postwar Europe… The American crusade to extirpate evil was felt by Germans in full force in the aftermath of World War II. Freda Utley, an English-American writer depicts graphically in her books the barbaric methods applied by American military authorities against German civilians and prisoners in war ravaged Germany. Although Utley enjoyed popularity among American conservatives, her name and her works fell quickly into oblivion…
In hindsight one wonders whether there was any substantive difference between warmongering Americanism and Communism? If one takes into account the behavior of American military authorities in Germany after World War II, it becomes clear why American elites, half a century later, were unwilling to initiate a process of decommunisation in Eastern Europe, 
as well as the process of demarxisation in American and European higher education. After all, were not Roosevelt and Stalin war time allies? Were not American and Soviet soldiers fighting the same “Nazi evil”?
It was the inhumane behavior of the American military interrogators that left deep scars on the German psyche and which explains why Germans, and by extension all Europeans, act today in foreign affairs like scared lackeys of American geopolitical interests…
A whole fleet of aircraft was used by General Eisenhower to bring journalists, Congressmen, and churchmen to see the concentration camps; the idea being that the sight of Hitler’s starved victims would obliterate consciousness of our own guilt. Certainly it worked out that way. No American newspaper of large circulation in those days wrote up the horror of our bombing or described the ghastly conditions in which the survivors were living in the corpse-filled ruins. American readers sipped their fill only of German atrocities. [Freda Utley, The High Cost of Vengeance (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co. 1949), p. 183]
Utley’s work is today unknown in American higher education although her prose constitutes a valuable document in studying the crusading and inquisitorial character of Americanism in Europe.
There are legions of similar revisionist books on the topic describing the plight of Germans and Europeans after the Second World War, but due to academic silence and self-censorship of many scholars, these books do not reach mainstream political and academic circles. Moreover, both American and European historians still seem to be light years away from historicizing contemporary history and its aftermath. This is understandable, in view of the fact that acting and writing otherwise would throw an ugly light on crimes committed by the Americans in Germany during and after the second World War and would substantially ruin antifascist victimology, including the Holocaust narrative.
American crimes in Europe, committed in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, included extra-killings of countless German civilians and disarmed soldiers, while tacitly approving serial Soviet genocides and mass expulsions of the German civilian population in Eastern Europe… As years and decades went by, crimes committed by the Americans against the Germans were either whitewashed or ascribed to the defeated Germans…
The exact number of German causalities during and after the Second World War remains unknown. The number of German dead varies wildly, ranging from 6 to 16 million Germans, including civilians and soldiers… It is only the fascist criminology of World War II, along with the rhetorical projection of the evil side of the Holocaust that modern historiographers like to repeat, with Jewish American historians and commentators being at the helm of this narrative. Other victimhoods and other victimologies, notably those people who suffered under communism, are rarely mentioned… According to some German historians over a million and a half of German soldiers died after the end of hostilities in American and Soviet-run prison camps…
The masters of discourse in postmodern America have powerful means to decide the meaning of historical truth and provide the meaning with their own historical context. Mentioning extensively Germany’s war loses runs the risk of eclipsing the scope of Jewish war loses, which makes many Jewish intellectuals exceedingly nervous. Every nation likes to see its own sacred victimhood on the top of the list of global suffering. Moreover, if critical revisionist literature were ever to gain a mainstream foothold in America and Europe, it would render a serious blow to the ideology of Americanism and would dramatically change the course of history in the coming decades.
It seems to me that the etiology of Western malaise is more complicated than what the average nationalist has imagined. While reading MacDonald’s first trilogy study on Jewry I thought that the etiology was, at least, threefold.
First: the hardware. As MacDonald and many others have pointed out, whites “have some unique characteristics such as individualism, abstract idealism and universal moralism” that are apparently genetic (precisely the characteristics that presently are being exploited by the tribe).
Second: the software. If the above is a problem in the hardware (something like whites being wired the wrong way when dealing with other races), these hardware characteristics were augumented after a Catholic cult, which means “universal” including all ethnic groups in the world, took over the Roman Empire.
Third: the virus. Paradoxically, once Christianity starts to be abandoned by the white people, our universalist-individualist-idealistic frame of mind, taken to its ultimate logic naturally results in liberalism, a “virus” of the mind operating within the white psyche.
If our diagnosis of the West’s darkest hour is correct, then the Jewish Problem is an epiphenomenon of the deranged altruism resulting from the secular fulfillment of universal Christian values. (Proof of it is that Muslims don’t allow the suicidal empowerment of Jews in their nations.) It also means that both our hardware wiring and our Judeo-Christian software must be understood before we can grasp the whys of the psycho-ethical structure that is preventing us from taking elemental action (e.g., disempowering the Jews). For the Christian that I was, and this is purely anecdotal (others may find different venues), the first step to understand the virus was starting to question the historicity of the gospel narratives.
Thus I typed many passages from Helms’ book in honor of Porphyry, the first man to write a prolegomena of what fifteen centuries later started to be called “higher criticism” of the Bible.
Mary Baker Eddy
This piece was chosen for my collection of the 2014 edition of Day of Wrath, and I discarded it for the 2017 edition of the same book. However, it can still be read as a PDF: pages that I stole from the now unavailable edition of Day of Wrath:
https://westsdarkesthour.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/eschatology.pdf
Categories
Gospel Fictions, 5
Below, part of Gospel Fictions’ fifth chapter, “Miracles (II): The Fourth Gospel” by Randel Helms (ellipsis omitted):
The Fourth Gospel presents an understanding of miracles quite different from that in the Synoptics, and even uses a word for miracle—sign (semeion)—which the others explicitly reject. The understanding of “signs” in the Fourth Gospel, indeed the word itself, stems from the Septuagint: Moses “wrought the signs [semeia] before the people. And the people believed” (Ex. 4:30-31 LXX).
Mark 6:5 claims (though Matthew and Luke refuse to repeat the verse) that in cases of weak faith, Jesus “could work no miracle.” Nowhere in John is faith the precondition of miracle. In the Synoptics, faith precedes the miracle; in John, the miracle precedes faith. John’s uneasiness about miracle-engendered faith, blending uncomfortably with the conviction that this was the way Jesus chose to reveal himself, may lie behind the strange fact that there are so few miracles in the Fourth Gospel: seven, compared to twenty in Matthew and twenty-one in Luke. John’s way of accounting for the paucity of his miracle stories is to declare that he has written only a selection of a much larger number available to him:
There were indeed many other signs [semeia] that Jesus performed in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. Those here written have been recorded in order that you may hold the faith that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through this faith you may possess life by his name. (John 20:31-31)
The water made wine in Cana
An examination of the account of Elisha’s providing flour and oil in III Kings LXX reveals some direct verbal sources for the story of Jesus’ miracle at Cana.
One of the most puzzling aspects of this first miracle in the Fourth Gospel is Jesus’ rudeness to his mother: “Woman, what have I to do with you? [Ti emoi kai soi, gunai].” As has been seen before, the statement is here not a historical report but an antitype of Elijah: for the woman (gune) in need of food says to the prophet, “What have I to do with thee? [ti emoi kai soi]” (III [I] Kings 17:18 LXX).
(Archaeologists at modern-day Cana found pieces of stone jars, including the one shown here, that date to the time of Jesus and appear to be the same type of jar mentioned in the water-to-wine story.)
But as it happens, Elijah’s miracle provides flour, not wine. Why the change?
It appears that this miracle story in the Fourth Gospel was not only mediated through the story of Moses, where it picked up the concept of “sign,” before it reached John; it also went through one other transformation, influenced by the mythology of Dionysius. As Bultmann has pointed out:
On the festival day of Dionysus the temple springs at Andros and Teos were supposed every year to yield wine instead of water. In Elis on the eve of the feast, three empty pitchers were put into the temple and in the morning they were full of wine.
In other words the miracle story had an extensive history before it reached the author of the Fourth Gospel. Neither he nor anyone he knew attended a wedding at Cana-in-Galilee at which Jesus provided a hundred and twenty gallons of wine to those who had already drunk so freely they had exhausted the day’s provisions; the story is fiction and has a clearly traceable literary lineage.
Below, part of Gospel Fictions’ fourth chapter, “Miracles I (The Synoptic Narratives)” by Randel Helms (ellipsis omitted):
Käsemann’s judgment is that the “great majority of the Gospel miracle stories must be regarded as legends.” The kind of incidents which in fact commend themselves as being historically credible are “harmless episodes such as the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law from a fever and the healing of so-called possessed persons.”
The next two chapters will examine the thirty-odd narratives in the Gospels which depict the Synoptic and Johannine attitudes toward miracles, demonstrating their literary lineage, and discuss how these fictional or legendary stories came to be composed.
Narratives about Jesus’ performing miracles were virtual requirements, given first-century Christianity’s understanding of the Old Testament. Matthew 11:2-5 makes this quite clear:
John, who was in prison, heard what Christ was doing, and sent his own disciples to him with this message: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to expect some other?” Jesus answered, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind recover their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, the poor are hearing the good news.”
Matthew has Jesus list what are, in fact, signs of the advent of the New Age, as Isaiah had predicted: “The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall hear. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart” (Isa. 35:5 LXX). Matthew combined Second Isaiah’s declaration using that prophet’s very words from the Septuagint.
The resurrection of a dead son
Both Elijah and Elisha mediate two striking miracles, the creation of abundance from little and the resurrection of a dead son. If these sound familiar to a reader of the Gospels, we should not be surprised.
Since Luke’s account of the raising of the widow of Nain’s son so clearly betrays its literary origins in the Septuagint, I shall begin with it:
And it came to pass [kai egeneto] afterwards that Jesus went to a town called Nain, accompanied by his disciples and a large crowd. As he approached the gate of the town he met a funeral. The dead man was the only son of his widowed mother; and many of the townspeople were there with her. When the Lord saw her his heart went out to her, and he said, “Weep no more.” With that he stepped forward and laid upon the bier; and the bearers halted. Then he spoke: “Young man, rise up!” The dead man sat up and began to speak; and Jesus gave him back to his mother. Deep awe fell upon them all, and they praised God. “A great prophet has arisen among us,” they said. (Luke 7:11-16)
Either Luke or some Greek-speaking Christian behind Luke composed this story on the basis of the account in the Septuagint version of Kings depicting the raising of the dead son of the widow of Sarapeta (III, [I] Kings 17:8-10, 17, 19-23 LXX). Both stories begin with a favorite Septuagintal formula, “And it came to pass.” Both concern the dead son of a widow (chera). In both the prophet “went” (eporeuthe) to the town, where he met a woman at the “gate of the city” (ton pylona tes poleos—LXX; te pyle te poleos—Luke), even though archaeological study has shown that the village of Nain in Galilee never had a wall. Nain’s fictional gate is there for literary reasons: Sarepta’s gate transferred. In both stories the prophets speak and touch the dead son, who then raises and speaks. In both stories it is declared that the miracle certifies the prophet (“Behold, I know that thou art a man of God”—LXX; “A great prophet has arisen”—Luke). And both stories conclude with precisely the same words: “and he gave him to his mother” (kai edoken auton te metri autou).
The raising of Jairus’ daughter
Early Christians knew, on the basis of Isaiah 26:19, that raising of the dead was to be one of the signs of the advent of God’s kingdom. The only Old Testament narratives of resurrection are in the stories of Elijah and Elisha. In Mark 5, Matthew 9, and Luke 8, the president of an unnamed synagogue, one Jairus (whose name, “He will awaken,” betrays the representative and fictional nature of the account), comes to Jesus. Like the Shunnamite woman to Elisha, “falls at his feet and entreats him many times,” saying, in both Mark and Luke, that his only daughter was dying. In Matthew, to align more closely with the story’s Old Testament source—as is typical of the careful and knowledgeable first evangelist—the child is already dead.
The story stays close to the Old Testament original. In both, the prophet, on the way to the child, receives a message that it is dead, but continues resolutely. In both stories the prophet seeks privacy for the miracle: “After turning all the others out, Jesus took the child’s father and mother and his own companions and went in where the child was lying,” just as Elisha shut the door upon himself and the child. And in both, the prophet touches the child and speaks, and the child awakes. In Mark, the parents were “ecstatic with great ecstasy” (exestesan… ekstasei megale—Mark 5:42); in Kings, the mother of the child is “ecstatic with all this ecstasy” (exestesas… pasan ten ekstasin tauten—IV Kings 4:31 LXX). Just as the widow of Nain’s son began as the widow of Sarepta’s son, so the daughter of Jairus began as the dead child of Shunnam.
* * *
The other process, the heightening of the miraculous and the elimination of hints about the limitation of Jesus’ power to work miracles, is evident in later treatments of Mark’s account of Jesus at Nazareth. There in his own town, says Mark, he was not notably successful:
Jesus said to them, “A prophet will always be held in honour except in his home town, and among his kinsmen and family.” He could work no miracle there, except that he put hands on a few sick people and healed them, and he was taken aback by their want of faith. (Mark 6:4-6)
Matthew, with a more “advanced” theology and a more fully deified Jesus, could not accept Mark’s assertion, so he treated it as fiction, untrue; it was not that Jesus could not perform great miracles in the face of lack of faith in him, rather he chose not to do so. Bearing this in mind, we may more readily grasp why Matthew and Luke chose to leave out altogether two of Mark’s miracle stories. Jesus is asked to heal a deaf mute:
He took the man aside, away from the crowd, put his fingers into his [the man’s] ears, spat, and touched his tongue. Then, looking up to heaven, he sighted, and said to him, “Ephphatha,” which means, “Be opened.” With that his ears were opened and at the same time the impediment was removed and he spoke plainly. (Mark 7:33-35)
In the next chapter, Jesus is asked to cure a blind man:
He spat on his eyes, and laid his hands upon him, and asked whether he could see any thing. The blind man’s sight began to come back, and he said, “I see men; they look like trees, but they are walking about.” Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; he looked hard, and now he was cured so that he saw everything clearly. (Mark 8:23-25)
For Matthew and Luke, who eliminated both these stories from their revisions of Mark, the notion that Jesus needed any kind of ritual (magic word) or medicinal (spittle) help, or even that he needed a little time and repetition of the treatment, was unthinkable. (Matthew characteristically depicts Jesus’ miracle-working powers as instantaneous.)
A Romanized Jesus in this painting found in a Christian catacomb in Rome. The beardless Jesus (Romans regarded the beard as a feature of the Barbarians) also has short hair and is wearing a Roman tunic.
Matthew ensures his story replaces the two he removed from Mark by depicting the man as both mute and blind.
Then they brought him a man who was possessed. He was blind and dumb, and Jesus cured him, restoring both speech and sight… But when the pharisees heard it, they said, “It is only by Beelzebub prince of devils that this man drives the devils out.” (Matt. 12:22-24).
A miracle story grows here before our eyes. Luke’s mute becoming mute and blind.
Food miracles
Like so many of the other miracle stories, these too have their origins in the Old Testament.
The disciples, though they have presumably just witnessed Jesus feed five thousand with five loaves, naively ask, “How can anyone provide all these people with bred in this lonely place?” —Mk. 8:14. Mark obviously found two stories in unrelated layers of oral tradition and, failing to grasp that they were different versions of the same story, put them into narrative sequence, making the disciples appear unbelievable stupid.
In any event, both narratives stem from IV [II] Kings 4:42-44 read as a typological foreshadowing of the career of Jesus. Both Testaments specify the number of hungry persons (one hundred in the Old; four and five thousand—much greater miracles!—in the New); both specify the inadequate amount of food available (twenty loaves in the Old Testament; five and four loaves—again greater miracles—in the New). In both the prophets instruct their disciples to feed the people, and in both the disciples protest the inadequacy: Elisha’s disciple complains, “I cannot set this before a hundred men” (IV [II] Kings 4:43); while Jesus’ disciple asks “How can anyone provide all these people with bread?” (Mark 8:5). Finally, in both stories, the meager loaves are miraculously amplified to feed all present and more: “And they ate, and left some over” (IV [II] Kings 4:44); “They all ate to their heart’s content, and seven baskets were filled with the scraps that were left” (Mark 8:9).
Interestingly, the miracle of the loaves and fishes is one of the very few Synoptic miracle stories which have also been used in the Fourth Gospel.
Stilling the storm; walking on the sea
Jesus also showed his power over nature in fictions about water. The ancients knew from Psalm 107 what power Yahweh has over the sea (Ps. 107:25-30). In Jonah, the sailors “called on the Lord and said, ‘O Lord, do not let us perish’” (1:14); in the Psalm, “They cried to the Lord in their trouble.” As a consequence, Jonah says, the “sea stopped raging” (1:15); the psalmist, “the storm sank to a murmur, and the waves of the sea were stilled.”
Matthew knew, unlike Mark, that the stilling of the storm was based in part one on the Book of Jonah, for again he rewrote his version of Mark’s narrative. Taking key words from Jonah—“Lord,” “save us,” “we perish”—Matthew rewrites Mark: a fictional correction of a fictional account, each of which is based in its own way on the Old Testament.
With this in mind, the nature of the rest of the miracle story as Mark first wrote it is more easily grasped. If it seems strange that Jesus could sleep in the stern of a small open fishing-boat in the middle of a storm so violent that waves were breaking over the vessel and filling it with water, Jesus’ sleep should be seen not as a description of an event but as a literary necessity.
Jesus also showed his power over the sea by walking on it (Matt. 14; Mark 6; John 6); a variant of the stilling of the storm.
Both versions reveal their origin in the same part of the Old Testament, Psalm 106 of the Septuagint (107 Heb.), with perhaps additional influence from the Book of Job. Early Christians knew from Job 9:8 that the Lord “walks on the sea [peripaton epi tes thalasses] as on dry ground”; thus they also presented Jesus “walking upon the sea” (peripaton epi tes thalasses—Mark 6: 48). But for the basis of their narrative about this “predicted” event, they went to the Septuagint Psalms, as may best be seen by comparing Mark’s and John’s versions of the pericope. Matthew enriches his account with a fascinating addition about Peter’s effort to copy his Lord.
Categories
Gospel Fictions, 3
Below, part of Gospel Fictions’ third chapter, “Nativity legends” by Randel Helms (ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages):
Two of the four canonical Gospels—Matthew and Luke—give accounts of the conception and birth of Jesus. John tells us only of the Incarnation—that the Logos “became flesh”—while Mark says nothing at all about Jesus until his baptism as a man of perhaps thirty. Either Mark and John know nothing about Jesus’ background and birth, or they regard them as unremarkable.
Certainly Mark, the earliest Gospel, knows nothing of the Annunciation or the Virgin Birth. It is clear from 3:20-21 that in Mark’s view the conception of Jesus was accompanied by no angelic announcement to Mary that her son was to be (in Luke’s words) “Son of the Most High” and possessor of the “throne of David” (Luke 1:32 NEB [New English Bible]).
According to Mark, after Jesus had openly declared himself Son of Man (a heavenly being, according to Daniel 7:13), his family on hearing of this “set out to take charge of him. ‘He is out of his mind,’ they said.” Surely Jesus’ mother and brothers (so identified in Mark 3:31) would not have regarded Jesus’ acts as signs of insanity if Mark’s Mary, like Luke’s, had been told by the angel Gabriel that her son would be the Messiah.
But Mark’s ignorance of Jesus’ conception, birth, and background was no hindrance to the first-century imagination. Many first-century Jewish Christians did feel a need for a Davidic messiah, and at least two separate groups responded by producing Davidic genealogies for Jesus, both to a considerable extent imaginary and each largely inconsistent with the other. One of each was latter appropriated by Matthew and Luke and repeated, with minor but necessary changes, in their Gospels. Each genealogy uses Old Testament as its source of names until it stops supplying them or until the supposed messianic line diverges from the biblical. After that point the Christian imaginations supplied two different lists of ancestors of Jesus.
Why, to show that Jesus is “the son of David,” trace the ancestry of a man who is not his father? The obvious answer is that the list of names was constructed not by the author of Matthew but by earlier Jewish Christians who believed in all sincerity that Jesus had a human father. Such Jewish Christians were perhaps the forbears of the group known in the second century as the Ebionites.
The two genealogies in fact diverge after David (c. 1000 B.C.) and do not again converge until Joseph. It is obvious that another Christian group, separate from the one supplying Mathew’s list but feeling an equal need for a messiah descended from David, complied its own genealogy, as imaginary as Mathew’s in its last third. And like Mathew’s genealogy, it traces the Davidic ancestry of the man who, Luke insists, is not Jesus’ father anyway, and thus is rendered pointless.
Moreover, according to Luke’s genealogy (3:23-31) there are forty-one generations between David and Jesus; whereas according to Mathew’s, there are but twenty seven. Part of the difference stems from Mathew’s remarkably careless treatment of his appropriated list of names.
Thus we have a fascinating picture of four separate Christian communities in the first century. Two of them, Jewish-Christian, were determined to have a messiah with Davidic ancestry and constructed genealogies to prove it, never dreaming that Jesus could be thought of as having no human father.
But gentile Christians in the first century, who came into the new religion directly from paganism and were already infected with myths about licentious deities, had a much different understanding of what divine paternity meant. Plutarch speaks for the entire pagan world when he writes, in Convivial Disputations, “The fact of the intercourse of a male with mortal women is conceded by all,” though he admits that such relations might be spiritual, not carnal. Such mythology came with pagans converted to Christianity, and by the middle of the first century, Joseph’s paternity of Jesus was being replaced by God’s all over the gentile world.
“The virgin will conceive and bear a son, and he shall be called Emmanuel,” a name which means “God is with us.” (Matthew 1:20-23)
The Septuagint, from which Matthew quotes, uses, at Isaiah 7:14, parthenos (physical virgin) for the Hebrew almah (young woman) as well as the future tense, “will conceive,” though Hebrew has no future tense as such. Modern English translations are probably more accurate in reading (as does the New English Bible), “A young woman is with child.” We can scarcely blame the author of Matthew for being misguided by his translation (though Jews frequently ridiculed early Christians for their dependence on the often-inaccurate Septuagint rather than the Hebrew). We can, however, fault him for reading Isaiah 7:14 quite without reference to its context—an interpretative method used by many in his time and ours, but a foolish one nonetheless. Any sensible reading of Isaiah, chapter seven, reveals its concern with the Syrio-Israelite crisis of 734 B.C. (the history of which appears in I Kings 16:1-20).
(Jesus’ real father? According to a malicious, early Jewish story, Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier called Pantera. The name is so unusual that it was thought to be an invention until this first-century tombstone came to light in 1859; for the Latin inscription see below.)
It is clear, however, that though the mistranslated and misunderstood passage in Isaiah was Matthew’s biblical justification for the Virgin Birth, it was not the source of the belief (indeed Luke presents the Virgin Birth without reference to Isaiah). The doctrine originated in the widespread pagan belief in the divine conception upon various virgins of a number of mythic heroes and famous persons in the ancient world, such as Plato, Alexander, Perseus, Asclepius and the Dioscuri.
Matthew writes that Joseph, having been informed in his dream, “had no intercourse with her until her son was born” (Matt. 1:25). Luke gives us a different myth about the conception of Jesus, in which the Annunciation that the messiah is to be fathered by God, not Joseph, is made to Mary rather than to her betrothed. Embarrassed by the story’s clear implicit denial of the Virgin Birth notion, Luke or a later Christian inserted Mary’s odd question [“How can this be, since I know not a man?”], but the clumsy interpolation makes hash of Jesus’ royal ancestry.
(The inscription reads: “Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera of Sidon, aged 62, a soldier of 40 years’ service, of the 1st cohort of archers, lies here”; only “Abdes” is a Semitic name.)
In due course, Jesus was born, growing up in Nazareth of Galilee, a nationality different from the Judean inhabitants of Jerusalem and its near neighbor, Bethlehem. After Jesus’ death, those of his followers interested in finding proof of his messiahnship in the Old Testament worked a Christian reinterpretation of Micah 5:2 concerning the importance of Bethlehem as the birthplace of David and his dynasty:
You, Bethlehem in Ephrathah, small as you are to be among Judah’s clans, out of you shall come forth a governor for Israel, one whose roots are far back in the past, in days gone by.
That is, the one who restores the dynasty will have the same roots, be of the same ancestry, as David of Bethlehem. Prophesying, it would appear, during the Babylonian exile, Micah (or actually a sixth-century B.C. interpolator whose words were included in the book of the eight-century B.C. prophet) hoped for the restoration of the Judaean monarchy destroyed in 586 B.C.
But since some first-century Christians did read Micah 5:2 as a prediction of the birthplace of Jesus, it became necessary to explain why he grew up in Nazareth, in another country, rather than Bethlehem. At least two different and mutually exclusive narratives explaining this were produced: one appears in Matthew, the other in Luke.
Matthew has it that Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem when Jesus was born, and continued there for about two years, fleeing then to Egypt. They returned to Palestine only after Herod’s death. For fear of Herod’s son, they did not resettle in Bethlehem. But moved rather to another country, Galilee, finding a new home in Nazareth.
Luke, on the other hand, writes that Mary and apparently Joseph lived in Nazareth, traveling to Bethlehem just before Jesus’ birth to register for a tax census. They left Bethlehem forty days later to visit the temple in Jerusalem for the required ritual of the first-born, returning then to their hometown of Nazareth.
Examination of these two irreconcilable accounts will give us a good picture of the creative imaginations of Luke, Matthew, and their Christian sources.
In most of Matthew’s Gospel, the major source of information about Jesus is the Gospel of Mark (all but fifty-five of Mark’s verses appear in Matthew, either word-for-word or with deliberate changes). But Mark says nothing about Jesus’ birth. When one favorite source fails him, Matthew inventively turns to another—this time to the Old Testament, read with a particular interpretative slant, and to oral tradition about Jesus, combining the two in a noticeably uneasy way.
We must remember that for the Christian generation that produced our Gospels, the Bible consisted only of what Christians now called the Old Testament, and a particular version thereof, the Greek Septuagint. But before they wrote the New Testament, Christians created another entirely new book, the Old Testament, turning the Septuagint into a book about Jesus by remarkably audacious and creative interpretation. Meanings it had held for generations of Jews, its historical and poetic content especially, ceased to exist; it became not a book about the past but about its own future.
Of course, other groups such as the Qumran sect also read the Bible oracularly, but Christians specialized this technique, finding oracles about Jesus of Nazareth. If a passage in the Septuagint could be read as a prediction of an event in the life of Jesus, then the event must have happened. Thus, if Micah were understood to mean that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem, then Jesus must have been born there, no matter what his real hometown. But as it happens, the Bethlehem birth story, dependent upon the Christian interpretation of Micah, and the magi-and-star legend, dependent upon Hellenistic and Jewish oral tradition, fit together very uneasily. The story of the magi (“astrologers” is a more meaningful translation) says that “the star which they had seen at its rising went ahead of them until it stopped above the place where the child lay” (Matt 2:9).
In all the stories, the astrologers point to a special star, symbol of the arrival of the new force (Israel, Abraham, Jesus). Says Balaam: “A star shall rise [anatelei astron] out of Jacob, a man shall spring out of Israel, and shall crush the princes of Moab” (Num. 24:17 LXX). The astrologers in Matthew likewise point to a star: “We observed the rising of his star” (Matt. 2.2).
Now the source of the story of the king (Nimrod, Herod) who wants to kill the infant leader of Israel (Abraham, Jesus) shifts to the account of Moses in Exodus, the classic biblical legend of the wicked king (Pharaoh) who wants to slay the new leader of Israel (Moses). Indeed, the story of Moses in the Septuagint provided Matthew with a direct verbal source for his story of the flight into Egypt. As Pharaoh wants to kill Moses, who then flees the country, so Herod wants to kill Jesus, who is then carried away by his parents. After a period of hiding for the hero in both stories, the wicked king dies:
And the Lord said unto Moses in Midian, “Go, depart into Egypt, for all that sought thy life are dead” (tethnekasi gar pantes hoi zetountes sou ten psychen—Ex: 4:19 LXX).
When Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel for those who sought the child’s life are dead” (tethnekasin gar hoi zetountes ten psychen tou paidiou—Matt 2:20).
Of course, Moses flies from Egypt to Midian, while the Holy Family flees to Egypt through Midian.
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“This was to fulfill the words spoken through the prophets: ‘He shall be called a Nazarene’” (Matt. 2:23). There is, however, no such passage in all the Old Testament. Matthew had apparently vaguely heard that such a verse was in the “prophets,” and since he really needed to get the Holy Family from the supposed birthplace to the known hometown, he reported the fulfillment but left the biblical reference unspecified.
Like Matthew, Luke faced the same problem of reconciling known Nazarene upbringing with supposed Bethlehem birth. His solution, however, was entirely different, and even less convincing. Whereas Matthew has the Holy Family living in Bethlehem at the time of the birth and traveling to Nazareth, Luke has them living in Nazareth and traveling to Bethlehem in the very last stages of Mary’s pregnancy. Though Luke 1:5 dates the birth of Jesus in the “days of Herod, king of Judaea,” who died in 4 B.C., he wants the journey from Galilee to Bethlehem to have occurred in response to a census called when “Quirinius was governor of Syria.”
As historians know, the one and only census conducted while Quirinius was legate in Syria affected only Judaea, not Galilee, and took place in A.D. 6-7, a good ten years after the death of Herod the Great. In his anxiety to relate the Galilean upbringing with the supposed Bethlehem birth, Luke confused his facts. Indeed, Luke’s anxiety has involved him in some real absurdities, like the needless ninety-mile journey of a woman in her last days of pregnancy—for it was the Davidic Joseph who supposedly had to be registered in the ancestral village, not the Levitical Mary.
Worse yet, Luke has been forced to contrive a universal dislocation for a simple tax registration. Who could imagine the efficient Romans requiring millions in the empire to journey scores of hundreds of miles to the villages of millennium-old ancestors merely to sign a tax form!
Needless to say, no such event ever happened in the history of the Roman Empire.
Below, part of Gospel Fictions’ second chapter, “How to begin a Gospel” by Randel Helms (ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages):
A central working hypothesis of this book and one of the most widely held findings in modern New Testament study is that Mark was the first canonical Gospel to be composed and that the authors of Matthew and Luke (and possibly John) used Mark’s Gospel as a written source. As B.H. Streeter has said of this view of Mark:
Its full force can only be realized by one who will take the trouble to go carefully through the immense mass of details which Sir John Hawkins has collected, analyzed, and tabulated (pp. 114-153 of his classic Horae Synopticae). How anyone who has worked through those pages with a synopsis of the Greek text can retain the slightest doubt of the original and primitive character of Mark, I am unable to comprehend… The facts seem only explicable on the theory that each author had before him the Marcan material already embodied in a single document.
When the author of Mark set about writing his Gospel, circa 70 A.D., he did not have to work in an intellectual or literary vacuum. The concept of mythical biography was basic to the thought-process of his world, both Jewish and Graeco-Roman, with an outline and a vocabulary already universally accepted: a heavenly figure becomes incarnate as a man and the son of a deity, enters the world to perform saving acts, and then returns to heaven. In Greek, the lingua franca of the Mediterranean world, such a figure was called a “savior” (soter), and the statement of his coming was called “gospel” or “good news” (euangelion). For example, a few years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the Provincial Assembly of Asia Minor passed a resolution in honor of Caesar Augustus:
…in giving to us Augustus Caesar, whom it [Providence] filled with virtue [arete] for the welfare of mankind, and who, being sent to us and to our descendents as a savior [soter]… and whereas, finally that the birthday of the God (viz, Caesar Augustus) has been for the whole world the beginning of the gospel [euangelion] concerning him, therefore, let all reckon a new era beginning from the date of his birth.
A few years earlier, Horace wrote an ode in honor of the same Caesar Augustus which presents him as an incarnation of the god Mercury and outlines the typical pattern of mythical biography: Descent as a son of a god appointed by the chief deity [Jupiter] to become incarnate as a man, atonement, restoration of sovereignty, ascension to heaven—a gospel indeed, and so the pattern of the Christian Gospels!
(The divine emperor. When a Roman emperor died he was traditionally regarded as having become god. Here Claudius, in life a timid man with a stutter and a limp, has been transformed into Jupiter, Vatican Museum, Rome.)
The standard phrase “the beginning of the gospel” (arche tou euangeliu) of Caesar (or whomever) seems to have been widespread in the Greco-Roman world. A stone from the marketplace of Priene in Asia Minor reads: “The birthday of the god (Augustus) was for the world the beginning of euangelion because of him.” Mark uses the same formula to open his book: “The beginning of the gospel (arche tou euangeliu) of Jesus Christ the son of God [theou hyios].” Even the Greek phrase “son of god” was commonly used for Augustus. On a marble pedestal from Pergamum is craved: “The Emperor Caesar, son of God [theou hyios], god Augustus.” Mark begins his mythical biography of Jesus with ready-made language and concepts, intending perhaps a challenge: euangelion is not of Caesar but of Christ!
The early Christians could have found out what we would call historical information about Jesus, but in fact they did not. Neither Mark nor anyone else in the Christian community (perhaps circa 70 A.D. Rome) had been in Palestine at the time; all the participants were now dead, and Mark had a book to write.
Certainly, there lived a Jesus of Nazareth, who was baptized in the Jordan by John, who taught, in imitation of John, that “the kingdom of God is upon you” (Mark, 1:15); and who was killed by the Romans as a potentially dangerous fomentor of revolution. Of the outline of Jesus’ life itself, this is just about all that Mark knew. Mark possessed a good many fictional (and some non-fictional) stories about Jesus and a small stock of sayings attributed to him, and he incorporated them in his Gospel; but he had no idea of their chronological order beyond the reasonable surmise that the baptism came at the beginning of the ministry and the crucifixion at the end. Mark is, in other words, not a biography; its outline of Jesus’ career is fictional and the sequence has thematic and theological significance only. As Norman Perrin bluntly puts it, “The outline of the Gospel of Mark has no historical value.”
Mark certainly knew what to put first: “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). But Mark’s beginning comes when Jesus is already a grown man only a few months away from death. His Gospel says nothing about Jesus’ birth or childhood, has almost no meaningful chronology, presents very little of Jesus’ moral teaching (no Sermon of the Mount, no parables of the Prodigal Son or Good Samaritan), and has a spectacularly disappointed ending: the Resurrection, announced only by a youth, is witnessed by no one, and the women who were told about it “say nothing to anybody, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). End of Gospel.
Mark wrote some forty years after the Crucifixion, when Jesus was already rapidly becoming a figure of legend. John the Baptist presented genuine problems. Since the baptism made John look like the mentor of Jesus and the initiator of his career, the Baptist had to be demoted, but not too much; the initiator became the forerunner. Mark’s method of performing that demotion is fascinating because, paradoxically, it does in fact the opposite, and had to be corrected, three different ways, by the other three evangelists.
The baptism itself was the first awkward fact. Ordinarily, John’s baptism stood as a sign that one had repented of sin: “A baptism in token of repentance, for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4). It appears not to have troubled Mark that he presented Jesus as a repentant sinner. There is no hint in Mark’s first chapter that Jesus was in any way the Son of God before his baptism; indeed, there is the clear hint that at least Mark’s source, if not Mark himself, held the “adoptionist” theology.
(Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist, from a fifth century mosaic in Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Ravenna. Note Jesus’ nudity and his youthful, beardless face.)
All things considered, Mark does not begin his story of Jesus very satisfactorily. Indeed, within two or three decades of Mark’s completion, there were at least two, and perhaps three, different writers (or Christian groups) who felt the need to produce an expanded and corrected version. Viewed from their perspective, the Gospel of Mark has some major shortcomings: It contains no birth narrative, it implies that Jesus, a repentant sinner, became the Son of God only at his baptism; it recounts no resurrection appearances; and it ends with the very unsatisfactory notion that the women who found the Empty Tomb were too afraid to speak to anyone about it.
Moreover, Mark includes very little of Jesus’ teachings; worse yet (from Matthew’s point of view), he even misunderstood totally the purpose of Jesus’ use of parables [see below]. Indeed, by the last two decades of the first century, Mark’s theology seemed already old-fashioned and even slightly suggestive of heresy. So, working apparently without knowledge of each other, within perhaps twenty or thirty years after Mark, two authors (or Christian groups), now known to us as “Mathew” and “Luke” (and even a third, in the view of some—“John”) set about rewriting and correcting the first unsatisfactory Gospel. In their respective treatments of the baptism one obtains a good sense of their methods.
Mark had used his source uncritically, not bothering to check its scriptural accuracy. But Mathew used his source—the Gospel of Mark—with a close critical eye, almost always checking its references to the Old Testament and changing them when necessary, in this case dropping the verse from Malachi wrongly attributed to Isaiah and keeping only what was truly Isaianic. [Mark writes as if he quotes Isaiah 40:3 but his verse is a misquotation of Malachi 3:1]
Mathew disliked Mark’s perhaps careless implication that Jesus was just another repentant sinner, so he carefully tones it down, inventing a little dramatic scene. When Jesus
came to John to be baptized by him, John tried to dissuade him. “Do you come to me?” he said. “I need rather to be baptized by you.” Jesus replied, “Let it be so for the present; it is suitable to conform in this way all that God requires.” John then allowed him come. (Matt. 3:13-15)
This scene is found in no other Gospel and indeed contains two words (diekoluen, “dissuade”; prepon, “suitable”) found nowhere else in the New Testament. The verses are Matthew’s own composition, created to deal with his unease at Mark’s implication about the reason Jesus was baptized—not as a repentant sinner but to fulfill a divine requirement. Why God should require Jesus to be baptized, Mathew does not say.
Like Mathew, Luke was also unhappy with Mark’s account of the baptism and made, in his own way, similar changes. The Fourth Gospel takes an extreme way of dealing with the embarrassment of Jesus’ baptism by John: you will find there no statement that Jesus ever was baptized.
Developing theology creates fictions. Moreover, each gospel implicitly argues the fictitiousness of the others. As Joseph Hoffman has put it, “Every gospel is tendentious in relation to any other.” This is especially true with regard to Mark and the Gospels—Mathew and Luke in particular—intended to render Mark obsolete. The fictionalizing of Mark is one of the implicit purposes of the First and Third Gospels, whose writers used what were probably, in their communities, rare or even unique copies of Mark and who clearly expected that no more would be heard of Mark after their own Gospels were circulated. We do an injustice, Hoffman notes, “to the integrity of the Gospels when we imagine that these four ever intended to move into the same neighborhood.”
This becomes quite clear, for example, in two synoptic scenes describing Jesus’ telling the parable of the sower and the seed:
When he was alone, the Twelve and others who were round him questioned him about the parables. He replied, “To you the secret of the kingdom of God has been given; but to those who are outside, everything comes by way of parables, so that (as Scripture says) they may look and look, but see nothing. They may hear and hear, but understand nothing; otherwise they might turn to God and be forgiven.” (Mark 4:10-12)
It is not difficult to imagine Mathew reading this passage, scratching his head, and wondering how Mark could so totally misunderstood the purpose of a parable—a small story intended to illuminate an idea, not obscure it. But Mark was a gentile, living perhaps in Rome; and though he clearly knew little of the tradition of Jewish rabbinic parabolic teaching, he was familiar with Greek allegorical writing, which was often used to present esoteric ideas in mystifying form. Mathew, on the other hand, was a Hellenistic Jewish Christian who knew perfectly well that a rabbi’s parables were intended to elucidate, not obfuscate. Yet, here was Mark clearly insisting that Jesus’ parables were meant to prevent people’s understanding his message or being forgiven by God: a passage, moreover, that cites Scripture to prove its point.
We can imagine Mathew’s relief when he checked the reference in the Old Testament and found that Mark had got it wrong. Actually, Mark’s citation of Isa. 6:9-10 agrees with the Aramaic version rather than with the Septuagint, but Mathew went to the latter for his quotation, which allowed him completely to change the point of Jesus’ statement. Jesus speaks in parables to enhance people’s understanding, insists Mathew, not to prevent it. That Mark’s account of the scene is simply wrong is Mathew’s implication [see Matt. 13:10-15].
Mathew and Luke found that one way of dealing with the Sonship question lay in the nativity legends already circulating about Jesus: he was the Son of God because God impregnated his mother. Both Mathew and Luke added birth narratives to their revisions of Mark, basing them on legends quite irreconcilable with each other. The next chapter examines these nativity legends.