Category: Theology

The Yankee problem enabled the Jewish problem

Post author By C .T.
Post date March 22, 2013
15 Comments on The Yankee problem enabled the Jewish problem

“There is no human as willfully, malignantly, and self-destructively stupid as a White person in the throes of a moral panic.”

—Matt Parrott

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.

Tags Axiology, Christian question (CQ), Germany, Jewish question (JQ), National Socialism, Religion, United States

Christendom New Testament Theology

The fallibility of the Gospels (4)

Post author By C .T.
Post date July 6, 2012

A chapter from Ian Wilson’s
Jesus: The Evidence

In turn the John gospel came under similar scrutiny. The long speeches in fluent Greek attributed to Jesus were considered by German theologians to be Hellenistic in character, compatible with the gospel’s traditional provenance, the Hellenistic city of Ephesus in Asia Minor. Since even Church tradition acknowledged the John gospel to have been written later than the rest, it was thought to be most likely to date from close to the end of the second century. However, the one apparent crumb of comfort, that the Mark gospel, despite its geographical flaws, seemed to offer a less fanciful version of Jesus’ life than the rest, was in turn swept away with the publication, in 1901, of Breslau professor Wilhelm Wrede’s The Secret of the Messiahship.

Wrede argued powerfully that whoever wrote Mark tried to present Jesus as having deliberately made a secret of his Messiahship during his lifetime, and that most of his disciples failed to recognize him as the Messiah until after his death. While not necessarily giving this idea their full endorsement, most modern scholars acknowledge Wrede’s insight in establishing one fundamental truth—that even the purportedly ‘primitive’ Mark gospel was more concerned with theology, with putting over a predetermined theological viewpoint, than with providing a straight historical narrative.

Five years after Wrede’s publication, in a closely written treatise From Reimarus to Wrede, translated into English as The Quest for the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer (pic), later to become the world-famous Lambarene missionary, summarized the work of his fellow German theological predecessors in these terms:

There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence… This image has not been destroyed from without, it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to the surface one after another…

(To be continued…)

Christendom New Testament Theology

The fallibility of the Gospels (3)

Post author By C .T.
Post date July 4, 2012

A chapter from Ian Wilson’s
Jesus: The Evidence

But the incursion into theology of the increasingly scientific outlook of the age was not to be checked so easily, particularly among Protestants. Under the professorship of the redoubtable Ferdinand Christian Baur, a prodigiously productive theologian who was at his desk by four o’clock each morning, Tübingen University in particular acquired a reputation for a ruthlessly iconoclastic approach to the New Testament, an approach which spread not only throughout Germany, but also into the universities of other predominantly Protestant countries. Traditionally the Matthew gospel had been regarded as the earliest of the four New Testament gospels, and it went virtually unquestioned that its author was Matthew, the tax-collector disciple of Jesus.

Tübingen University Library

In 1835 Berlin philologist Karl Lachmann argued forcefully that the Mark gospel, simpler and more primitive, was the earliest of the three synoptics. Lachmann became swiftly followed by scholars Weisse and Wilke, later in the century the argument was taken up by Heidelberg theologian Heinrich Holtzmann, and by the end of the century Mark’s priority (even though not without challengers to this day) had become the most universally accepted theological discovery of the age. And this raised immediate problems concerning the authorship of Matthew. The Mark gospel, which from internal and external clues was almost certainly written in Rome, ostensibly offers the least claim of all the synoptics to eyewitness reporting. Traditionally, Mark is claimed to have been at best some sort of secretary or interpreter for Peter. The connection with Peter, if it existed at all, cannot have been that close, however, for the Mark gospel exhibits a lamentable ignorance of Palestinian geography. In the seventh chapter, for instance, Jesus is reported as going through Sidon on his way to Tyre to the Sea of Galilee. Not only is Sidon in the opposite direction, but there was in fact no road from Sidon to the Sea of Galilee in the first century AD, only one from Tyre.

Similarly the fifth chapter refers to the Sea of Galilee’s eastern shore as the country of the Gerasenes, yet Gerasa, today Jerash, is more than thirty miles to the south-east, too far away for a story whose setting requires a nearby city with a steep slope down to the sea. Aside from geography, Mark represents Jesus as saying, ‘If a woman divorces her husband and marries another she is guilty of adultery’ (Mark 10:12), a precept which would have been meaningless in the Jewish world, where women had no rights of divorce. The author of the Mark gospel must have attributed the remark to Jesus for the benefit of Gentile readers.

Since it is demonstrable that the author of Matthew drew a substantial amount of his material from the Mark gospel, is virtually impossible to believe that the original tax-collector Matthew, represented as having known Jesus at first hand, and having travelled with him, would have based his gospel on an inaccurate work whose author clearly had no such advantages. Bluntly, the original disciple Matthew could not have written the gospel that bears his name. Whoever wrote it must have been later than Mark. As a result of such reasoning, the German theologians began increasingly to date the origination of all three synoptic gospels to well into the second century AD.

(To be continued…)

Christendom New Testament Old Testament Theology

Gospel Fictions, 2

Post author By C .T.
Post date May 14, 2012

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.

Jesus New Testament Theology

The Platonic fallacy

This is Joseph Hoffmann’s response to the Jesus
Seminar & the quest of the historical Jesus:

Crouching somewhere between esthetic sound byte and historical detail is Michelangelo’s famous statement about sculpture. “The job of the sculptor,” Vasari attributes to il Divino,” is to set free the forms that are within the stone.” It’s a lovely thought—poetic, in fact. If you accept the theory of Renaissance Platonism, as Michelangelo embodies it, you also have to believe that “Moses” and “David” were encased in stone, yearning to be released—as the soul yearns to be set free from the flesh in the theology of salvation. You will however be left wondering why such a theory required human models with strong arms and firm thighs, and why the finished product bears no more resemblance to real or imagined historical figures than a drawing that any one of us could produce. We may lack Michelangelo’s skill and his deft way with a rasp and chisel, but we can easily imagine more probable first millennium BC heroes—in form, stature, skin-tone, and body type—than the Italian beauties he released from their marble prisons. In fact, the more we know about the second millennia BC, the more likely we are to be right. And alas, Michelangelo didn’t know very much about history at all. And what’s more, it made no difference to his art, his success, or to his reputation. That is why idealism and imagination are sometimes at odds with history, or put bluntly, why history acts as a control on our ability to imagine or idealize anything, often profoundly wrong things.

If we apply the same logic to the New Testament, we stumble over what I have (once or twice) called the Platonic Fallacy in Jesus research. Like it or not, the New Testament is still the primary artifact of the literature that permits us to understand the origins of Christianity. It’s the stone, if not the only stone. If we possessed only gnostic and apocryphal sources as documentary curiosities and no movement that preserved them, we would be hard-pressed to say anything other than that at some time in the first and second century a short-lived and highly incoherent religious movement fluoresced and faded (many did) in the night sky of Hellenistic antiquity. The Jesus we would know from these sources would be an odd co-mixture of insufferable infant a la the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a hell-robber, like the liberator of the Gospel of Nicodemus, a mysterious cipher, like the unnamed hero of the Hymn of the Pearl, or an impenetrable guru, like the Jesus of the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Despite the now-yellowed axiom we all learned as first year divinity students of a certain generation and later in graduate school (the one where we are taught that “no picture of early Christianity is complete without availing ourselves of all the sources”), I will climb out on a limb to say that these sources are not so much integral to a coherent picture of early Christianity as they are pebbles in orbit around the gravitational center we call the canon. They are interesting—fascinating even—in showing us how uniformity of opinion and belief can wriggle out of a chaos of alterative visions (maybe the closest analogues are in constitutional history), but they are not the stone that the most familiar form of Christianity was made from. That recognition is as important as it is increasingly irrelevant to modern New Testament discussion.

So, how do we approach the New Testament? What kind of rock is it? We know (to stay with the metaphor) that it’s “metamorphic”—made of bits and pieces formed under pressure—in the case of the New Testament, doctrinal and political pressure to define the difference between majority and minority views and impressions, once but now unfashionably called “orthodoxy” and “heresy.”

Whatever the root-causes of canon-formation, canon we have. The Platonic Fallacy comes into play when New Testament scholarship labors under assumptions that emanated from the literary praxis of Renaissance humanists and then (in methodized form) fueled the theological faculties of Germany well into the twentieth century (before a staggering retreat from “higher criticism” by neo-orthodox, and then existentialist, postmodern, and correctness theologians).

The sequence of Jesus-quests that began before Schweitzer (who thought he was writing a retrospective!)—and the succession of theories they produced were honest in their understanding of the metamorphic nature of the canon and the textual complexity of the individual books that composed it. The legacy, at least a legacy of method, of the early quests was a healthy skepticism that sometimes spilled over into Hegelianism, as with F. C. Baur, or mischievous ingenuity, as with Bruno Bauer. But what Left and Right Hegelians and their successors—from Harnack to Bultmann to the most radical of their pupils—had in common was a strong disposition to approach the canon with a chisel, assuming that if the historical accretions, misrepresentations, and conscious embellishment could be stripped away, beneath it all lay the figure of a comprehensible Galilean prophet whose life and message could be used to understand the “essence” (the nineteenth-century buzzword) of Christianity.

Whether the program was demythologizing or structuralist exegesis, the methods seemed to chase forgone conclusions about what the Gospels were and what the protagonist must “really” have been like. Judged by the standards of the chisel-bearers of the Tübingen school, Schweitzer’s caution that the Jesus of history would remain a mystery (“He comes to us as one unknown…”) was both prophetic and merely an interlude in the effort to excavate the historical Jesus. If it was meant to be dissuasive, it was instead a battle cry for better chisels and more theorists. In the latter part of the twentieth century, it has involved a demand for more sources as well—not to mention cycles of translations, each purporting to be “definitive” and thus able to shed light on a historical puzzle that the previous translation did not touch or failed to express. Judas, Philip, and Mary Magdalene have achieved a star-status far out of proportion to anything they can tell us about the historical Jesus, let alone consideration of literary merit or influence on tradition. When I say this, I am not asking modern scholarship to embrace the opinions of “dead orthodox bishops” or “winners,” but to get behind the choices the church’s first intellectuals made and their reasons for making them. The politicization of sources, the uninformative vivisection of historically important theological disputes into a discussion of outcomes (winners, losers) may make great stuff for the Discovery channel or the Easter edition of Time, but it is shamelessly Hollywood and depends on a culture of like-minded footnotes and a troubling disingenuousness with regard to what scholars know to be true and what they claim to be true.

Moreover, it is one of the reasons (I’m loathe to say) why a hundred years after the heyday of the “Radical School” of New Testament scholarship—which certainly had its warts—the questions of “total spuriousness” (as of Paul’s letters) and the “non-historicity of Jesus” are still considered risible or taboo. They are taboo because of the working postulate that has dominated New Testament scholarship for two centuries and more: that conclusions depend on the uncovering of a kernel of truth at the center of a religious movement, a historical center, and, desirably, a historical person resembling, if not in every detail, the protagonist described in the Gospels. This working postulate is formed by scholars perfectly aware that no similar imperative exists to corroborate the existence (or sayings) of the “historical” Adam, the historical Abraham, or Moses, or David—or indeed the prophets—or any equivalent effort to explain the evolution of Judaism on the basis of such inquiry.

The Platonic Fallacy depends on the “true story” being revealed through the disaggregation of traditions: dismantle the canon, factor and multiply the sources of the Gospels, marginalize the orthodox settlement as one among dozens of possible outcomes affecting the growth of the church, incorporate all the materials the church fathers sent to the bin or caused to be hidden away. Now we’re getting somewhere. It shuns the possibility that the aggregation of traditions begins with something historical, but not with a historical individual—which even if it turns out to be false, is a real possibility. Even the most ardent historicists of the twentieth century anticipated a “revelation” available through historical research; thus Harnack could dismiss most of the miracles of the Gospels, argue for absolute freedom of inquiry in gospels-research (a theme Bultmann would take up), insist that “historical knowledge is necessary for every Christian and not just for the historian,” all however in order to winnow “the timeless nucleus of Christianity from its various time bound trappings.”

The Jesus Seminar was perhaps the last gasp of the Platonic Fallacy in action. Formed to “get at” the authentic sayings of Jesus, it suffered from the conventional hammer and chisel approach to the sources that has characterized every similar venture since the nineteenth century, missing only the idealistic and theological motives for sweeping up afterward. It will remain famous primarily for its eccentricity, its claim to be a kind of Jesus-vetting jury and to establish through a consensus (never reached) what has evaded lonelier scholarship for centuries.

The Seminar was happy with a miracle-free Jesus, a fictional resurrection, a Jesus whose sayings were as remarkable as “And how are you today, Mrs. Jones?” It used and disused standard forms of biblical criticism selectively and often inexplicably to offer readers a “Jesus they never knew,” a Galilean peasant, a cynic, a de-eschatologized prophet, a craftsman whose dad was a day-laborer in nearby Sepphoris (never mind the Nazareth issue, or the Joseph issue). These purportedly “historical” Jesuses were meant to be more plausible than the Jesus whose DNA lived on in the fantasies of Dan Brown and Nikos Kazantzakis. But, in fact, they began to blur. It betimes took sources too literally and not literally enough, and when it became clear that the star system it evoked was resulting in something like a Catherine Wheel rather than a conclusion, it changed the subject. As long ago as 1993, it became clear that the Jesus Seminar was yet another attempt to break open the tomb where once Jesus lay—I’m reminded of a student’s gospel paraphrase of Luke 24.5, with 24.42 [“They gave him a piece of cooked fish…”] in view—to find a note that read “Gone Fishing,” in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. It was then that I commented in a popular journal that “The Jesus of the Westar Project is a talking doll with a questionable repertoire of thirty-one sayings. Pull a string and he blesses the poor.” I was anticipated in this by none other than John Dominic Crossan (a Seminar founder) who wrote in 1991, having produced his own minority opinion concerning Jesus, “It seems we can have as many Jesuses as there are exegetes… exhibiting a stunning diversity that is an academic embarrassment.” And Crossan’s caveat had been expressed more trenchantly a hundred years before by the German scholar Martin Kaehler: “The entire life of the Jesus movement,” he argued, was based on misperceptions “and is bound to end in a blind alley… Christian faith and the history of Jesus repel each other like oil and water.”

If we add these to the work of the Jesus Seminar, the “extra-Seminar Jesuses,” magicians, insurgents, bandits [the author is probably referring to the work of Morton Smith and Hyam Maccoby], we end up with a multiplicity that “makes the prospect that Jesus never existed a welcome relief.”

Bruce Chilton is one of a number of scholars who comes away from the Jesus Seminar sadder but wiser and hopes that the Jesus Project will not be another stuttering attempt to break rocks and piece them back together to create plausible Jesuses, as Michelangelo created a plausible Moses for the Italians of the sixteenth century. His challenge to the Project is fair enough. In fact, one of the benefits we inherit from the Seminar is a record of success and failure. It raised the question of methodology in a way that can no longer be ignored, without however providing a map for further study. Its legacy is primarily a cautionary tale concerning the limits of “doing” history collectively, and sometimes theologically, and the Jesus Project must take this seriously.

Let me add to this commentary a special concern as I watch the Project unfold. Jesus-research—biblical research in general—through the end of the twentieth century was exciting stuff. The death of one of the great Albright students last year, and a former boss of mine at the University of Michigan, David Noel Freedman, reminds us that we may be at the end of the road. Albright’s careful scholarship and research, and his general refusal to shy away from the “results” of archaeology, were accompanied by a certain optimism in terms of how archaeology could be used to “prove” the Bible. In its general outline, the Bible was true; there was no reason (for example) to doubt the essential biographical details of the story of Abraham in Genesis. Albright’s pupils were less confident of the biblical record as William Dever observed in a classic 1995 article in The Biblical Archaeologist. His central theses have all been overturned, partly by further advances in Biblical criticism, but mostly by the continuing archaeological research of younger Americans and Israelis to whom he himself gave encouragement and momentum. The irony is that, in the long run, it will have been the newer “secular” archaeology that contributed the most to Biblical studies, not “Biblical archaeology.” New Testament archaeology is a different house, built with different stones. To be perfectly fair, the biblical appendix lacks the geographical markers and vivid information that suffuse the Hebrew Bible. If the Old Testament landscape is real geography populated by mythical heroes, the New Testament trends in the opposite direction. For that reason, New Testament scholars in my opinion have tried to develop an ersatz- “archaeology of sources” to match the more impressive gains in Old Testament studies.

The reasons for the “new sources” trend in New Testament research are multiple, but the one I fear the most is Jesus-fatigue. There is a sense that prior to 1980 New Testament scholarship was stuck in the mire of post-Bultmannian ennui. Jesus Seminars and Jesus Projects have been in part a response to a particular historical situation. Five gospels are better than four. The more sources we have the more we know about Jesus. Source “Q” (a) did exist, (b) did not exist, or (c) is far more layered and interesting than used to be thought. Judas was actually the primary apostle. No, it was Mary Magdalene.

When we considered developing the Jesus Project, it was not out of any malignant attempt to “prove” that Jesus did not exist. (The press releases have done an immeasurable disservice by harping on this as the agenda). As a Christian origins scholar by training, I am not even sure how one would go about such a task, or be taken seriously if it were undertaken. Yet the possibility that Christianity arose from causes that have little to do with a historical founder is one among many other questions the Project should take seriously. Inevitably, scholars and critics (if not always the same people) will ask, And just how do you go about doing that?, and neither the answer “Differently” or “Better” will suffice. The demon crouching at the door, however, is not criticism of its intent nor skepticism about its outcome, but the sense that biblical scholarship in the twentieth century will not be greeted with the same excitement as it was in Albright’s day. Outside America, where the landscape is also changing, fewer people have any interest in the outcomes of biblical research, whether it involves Jericho or Jesus. The secularization of world culture, which will eventually reach even into the Muslim heartlands, encourages us to value what matters here and now. As one of our members, Arthur Droge (Toronto) mentioned at the recent meeting of the Project in Amherst, NY, most of us were trained in a generation “that believed certain questions were inherently interesting.” But fewer and fewer people do. Jesus-fatigue—the sort of despair that can only be compared to a police investigation gone cold—is the result of a certain resignation to the unimportance of historical conclusions.

Reaching for the stars and reaching back into history have in common the fact that their objects are distant and sometimes unimaginably hard to see. What I personally hope the Project will achieve is to eschew breaking rocks, and instead learning to train our lens in the right direction. Part of that process is to respond to Droge’s challenge: Why is this important? And I have the sense that in trying to answer that question, we will be answering bigger questions as well.

Tags History

Christendom Hojas Susurrantes (Whispering Leaves - book) Kenneth Clark Matthias Grünewald Theology

On Erasmus

When I was a boy I heard of Erasmus and imagined that his famous book was about something like praising so-called “mad” people in a world gone mad. Later, still before reading him, I imagined Erasmus was a great humanist who saw the madness of the religious wars of his time.

I was not prepared in the slightest to find out that Erasmus himself was pretty much part of civilizational madness. When in 1996 I hit Kenneth Clark’s page 146 of his illustrated book Civilisation I was moved to purchase the excellent 1993 Penguin edition of Praise of Folly totally unsuspecting of what the contents really were. A few days after I wrote on the book’s inside cover that Erasmus disappointed me; that, contrary to what I had expected, he did not see the folly of his age but was a fool himself.

A.H.T. Levi’s Penguin introduction to Praise of Folly is worth reading, and precisely on page xlii of the long introduction I was shocked to learn that no one in the whole Middle Ages had questioned Christian “truths.” Instead of challenging the accepted wisdom, I found in the introduction to Erasmus’ other works scholastic discussions about whether or not the ancient Greeks and Romans would be saved—from eternal damnation!

Erasmus is truly an alien for the people of our time. The problems he struggled with in his soul—he never considered his Praise of Folly his most important book—are infinitely distant from the problems that overwhelm us today. His worldview is dead except for those who, like me, were tormented by our parents with doctrines of eternal punishment.

Erasmus was the most famous humanist of the so-called “Northern Renaissance,” a man in touch with all leading princes and scholars of the time. Many consider him the central figure of the intellectual world of what, to my mind, was a pseudo-Renaissance (the real intellectual Renaissance would only begin with Montaigne). How could the “Northern Renaissance” be compared to the Italian Renaissance when its most emblematic intellectual, like Thomas à Kempis, was an Augustinian canon that took Pauline folly as a panegyric to Christian piety? Erasmus, who was deeply shocked before the pagan atmosphere of Julius II’s Rome, probably decided to publish Praise of Folly precisely to support the growing opposition to Julius in France. When the art of Michelangelo and Raphael were conquering the soul of Rome, Erasmus went as far as recommending a return to scripture and the so-called “Fathers”: Origen, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine, and Erasmus’ Greek New Testament was in fact more feared by the Church than his Praise of Folly.

Now that I am talking of Clark’s Civilisation, let us remember the image that Clark chose to depict St Francis: Jacquemart de Hesdin’s The Fool. In Erasmus’ most famous book, women, “admittedly stupid and foolish creatures,” are Folly’s pride. Erasmus takes a surprisingly modern, “liberal” position about the role of women in society. Since Folly praises ignorance and lunacy, Erasmus reasons, women must be instrumental for the Christian cause. In his book Folly is only interested in following the example of Jesus, the exemplar of charitable simplicity against the budding intellectualism of the sixteenth century. The fact that Erasmus took St Paul’s “praise of folly” against the best minds St Paul encountered in Athens speaks for itself and needs no further comment.

It doesn’t take a great intellectual effort to recognize that the so-called Northern Renaissance was set against the real Renaissance of Italy, which had fallen in love with our genuine, Greco-Roman roots. Erasmus et al’s “optimist” discussions around the subject of the predestination of both the elect and the damned represent the medieval mind. How could Erasmus’ work that discusses whether or not a personal God “predestined” some of us to an eternity of torture be called “Renaissance” by any stretch of imagination? It is true that, in Erasmus’ century, the current theology was Pelagian rather than Augustinian, in the sense that we were supposed to be allowed to earn salvation by our own efforts. But this is altogether medieval, not modern, thinking.

To understand Erasmus one must remember the bestsellers of his time. The Pseudo- Gregorian Dialogues, composed in 680 C.E. and translated to all known vernaculars, reinforced in the faithful what priests used to call “a salutary fear of hell.” The book clearly implied that hell was eternal and that the soul, though spiritual, suffered physically from burning. Dante himself drew heavily from the Dialogues “and its influence on popular piety was greater that that of any other single work of piety in the history of western Christendom.”

(Detail of a Grüenwald painting. Grüenwald’s Isenheim Altarpiece painting in the times when Erasmus published his book depicts the spirit of those still dark ages far better than any scholastic treatise.)

Visualize yourself one moment living under the sky of Erasmus’ age. Visualize yourself trapped in the Church dogma and struggling with the terrible discussion about whether the ancient Greeks could possibly be “justified”—a nasty Lutheran word inspired in Augustine—and thus saved from the eternal flames.

For the so-called humanists of Erasmus’ time this dilemma was all too serious theological business, and they rationalized their wishes to save the “pagans” after the recent discoveries of Indian “souls” in America, who had no opportunity to receive the gospel through no fault of their own. That such doctrines represented a slight advance from Augustine’s “pessimism” (cf. Erasmus’ treatise against Luther, On Free Will and Luther’s reply, On Unfree Will) will never refute the fact that Erasmus and his ilk were chained in the trappings of medieval thought.

I was moved to write this article because all westerners, including white nationalists, have forgotten what living under Christendom was like. With the exception of the final section of my Hojas Susurrantes, no contemporary writer that I know—no one—has said something real about the horrors of the infinitely evil doctrine of eternal damnation, and how that fear was so central in Christendom. On the contrary, modern westerners seem to retroproject their own healthy psychoclass and never wonder about the subjective horrors that millions upon millions of whites endured during the Dark Ages as a result of such doctrine.

Christendom St Paul Theology

On St. Paul

I have just reread chapters 13 and 14 of The Myth-Maker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity by New Testament scholar Hyam Maccoby, after twenty-four years that I read the whole book, and I still find them fascinating. He wrote:

As we have seen, the purposes of the book of Acts is to minimize the conflict between Paul and the leaders of the ‘Jerusalem Church,’ James and Peter.

Peter and Paul, in later Christian tradition, became twin saints, brothers in faith, and the idea that they were historically bitter opponents standing for irreconcilable religious standpoints would have been repudiated with horror. The work of the author of Acts was well done; he rescued Christianity from the imputation of being the individual creation of Paul…

Yet, for all his efforts, the truth of the matter is not hard to recover, if we examine the New Testament evidence with an eye to tell-tale inconsistencies and confusions, rather than with the determination to gloss over and harmonize all difficulties in the interests of an orthodox interpretation.

Tags Christian question (CQ)