web analytics
Categories
3-eyed crow Racial right

Black bread

On my morning walk to buy a loaf of black bread to go with my salad at lunchtime (in my intermittent fasting I skip breakfasts), I had a thought.

The racial realism promoted by Jared Taylor is doomed to fail. As Michael O’Meara said years ago in one of the TOQ Online essays that were eventually published in Toward the White Republic, it is the poet, not the scientist, who makes nations. Taylor, and as we recently saw even the neo-Nazi G.L. Rockwell, didn’t question the American System. If Homer was the poet whose myth galvanised the Aryan psyche of other times, what would be the replacement myth for the Christian myth that is killing us?

I would like to quote what I wrote in the comments section of my post yesterday:

In one of his recent emails Gaedhal mentions that he went to mass for the death of a loved one and, although he is no longer the Christian he used to be, he still knelt and crossed himself. It is obvious that these are all parental introjects that are very difficult to exorcise despite the tons of rational thinking one throws at them in the process of (pseudo) apostasy. In other words, only by knowing yourself, as the Delphic Oracle commanded, could you really begin to detect the malware that our parents installed in us as children. But that means sitting down to write spiritual odysseys which in this shallow, consumerist age, no one will want to write or even read (except me).

In other words: an Enlightenment-style critique of Christianity will get us nowhere. It is a purely rationalistic critique that doesn’t go to the marrow of why we have believed such monstrous things as eternal damnation. Just as O’Meara is right that mythopoeia is what creates nations, it is also true that the myth in turn, a secular worship of the crucified (black, trans, migrant, etc.), has to be replaced by a new myth. Hitler had excellent instincts on how to create it, but the Christian forces of the Anglo-Americans, and neo-Christian forces of the Soviets, didn’t allow such a transvaluation.

Neither Taylor nor critics of Christianity like Gaedhal will succeed without understanding how the collective Aryan unconscious works. Although the neo-Christian Tom Holland is our ideological enemy, he is absolutely right to say that this collective unconscious is still held captive—possessed I dare to say!—to the archetype that the crucified is nobler than the crucifier. Even these days, on campuses, kids are siding with the crucified Palestinians in the face of Israel’s ethnic cleansing. They are all, of course, neo-Christians and the cross is still their emblem even though Jesus is no longer nailed to it.

This is Neo-Christianity.

I am not saying that this is altogether wrong, insofar as the reaction against Israel has opened a door to address the JQ that was previously closed. But Gaedhal’s approach in my quote yesterday implies that he still dwells under the sky of Christian morality. With the new myth, we would have a very different phenomenon on campuses. Let us imagine, and this is an experiment of the imagination, millions of kids wearing T-shirts of Himmler or other members of the SS who ordered the killing of millions of Untermenschen. In this Gedankenexperiment genocide is not something to be shocked by but to emulate as long as the genocided are non-Aryans.

But what do fans of Taylor and Rockwell do? The more conventional white nationalists simply ignore Hitler, and the neo-Nazis deny that millions of Untermenschen died under the orders of the Third Reich. From my vantage point in the cave, people like Taylor and Rockwell’s epigones seem to me to be very close to each other. To use the metaphor I have been using, they are both south of the Wall. Both ‘reek of summer’ we read in George R.R. Martin’s prose. In fact, they haven’t even crossed it, let alone looked for the raven’s cave far north of the Wall.

I still think Holland’s book (excerpts here) is fundamental to grasping the POV of this site although, of course, unlike Holland, we—Hitler, Himmler, Savitri Devi and I—have transvalued values to how they were thought of before Christian malware took hold of the Aryan collective unconscious. If anyone keeps in mind Eduardo Velasco’s essay on Rome vs. Judea, he will recall that pre-Christian Greeks and Romans didn’t give a damn that Jews were being genocided in 70 c.e. Compare this indifference to today’s holocaust deniers. They are neo-Christian, faux-National Socialists who won’t cross the Wall because they are still adoring the crucified, whether Jesus is present or not on their cross.

Categories
3-eyed crow

Cold

As I came down with the flu three days ago, I have postponed for a while resuming my series on Simms’ revisionist book on Hitler, since it requires special attention. On this day, when I am still suffering from cold symptoms, I prefer to quote what our friend Gaedhal tells us in his latest email:

If Apologetics is lies and distortion—and it is—then that makes apologists liars and distortors.

In my view, Apologists are essentially drug dealers. They supply the brain chemicals that desperate people need, so as to stay sane in this cruel life. Apologists sell dopamine, and other pleasant brain chemicals. Apologetics is not a respectable profession, in my view.

In the same way that there will be an illicit drug trade for as long as people need to self medicate, likewise, religion will exist so long as people think that they need assistance from beyond the veil. Apologists sell a comforting delusion to desperate people. The way to ultimately put apologists out of business is to make people less desperate. As people become less desperate, they become less religious. We see this in Japan, and Scandanavia. However, America is a predatory capitalist hellscape, and so it is no wonder why Americans feel that they need help from an imaginary Celestial Zion.

I saw Michael Heiser doing genocide apologetics… and yet Tabor and Derek Lambert had a memorial service for this scoundrel. The Jewish exceptionalism that we see, today, in Palestine, would not be possible were it not for Christian genocide apologists like Craig, Copan and Heiser.

The fact—as we well know—is that Yahweh deposed Saul because he did allow some goyim to live. David was a man after Yahweh’s own heart, because he would always exterminate the goyim thoroughly. But no: we are fedora-wearing village atheists—according to Heiser’s thumbnail—if we insist on this. Fuck this guy—even if he did die of cancer. Biblical Genocide apologists are the scum of the earth. Heiser’s career translates into real human suffering in places like Gaza.

As Captain Cassidy might put it: if Christianity is an abusive and harmful scam then that makes Christian apologists abusive and harm-causing scam artists.

Technically, I don’t object to what Gaedhal says, but there is something I must clarify.

For a guy who was mistreated by his parents since his teenage years to such an extent that he was left unable to have a career, a good job or even a partner, and who as a defence mechanism decided (to use George R.R. Martin’s fiction) to go into a cave on the other side of the Wall to retrocognitively see the past—his and his parents’ past to understand the tragedy—and to do this until he was half a century old, and only in his fifty-first year to discover white nationalism, it should be obvious that his POV won’t resemble what can be seen on racialist (or non-racialist) forums.

The passion to see the past as it really happened and to let, over the decades, the branches of the Weirwood envelop you to understand not only one’s biographical past but the historical past of Westeros (a metaphor for the West) produces a kind of mutant.

That is why, although technically what Gaedhal tells us is true, I find a fundamental flaw. Gaedhal’s emails will never explain why Christians, or former Christians, have believed such things. Only when one writes one’s psychological autobiography in thousands of pages does one discover why.

I have said that as soon as I finish revising my last book (to which I’ve added a chapter about my mother’s death), I will begin to translate into English what is missing from that psychological autobiography that I have just finished. It is only when someone writes it over the decades that he realises, like the three-eyed raven (‘Bloodraven’), that our parents literally programmed our minds with Christian software.

If those on the racial right weren’t so programmed, but came of age and were made to choose a religion good for Aryan preservation, would the reader believe that these Jew-wise racialists would choose the religion whose holy scriptures were written by Jews for goyim consumption?

Just to ask this question is to answer it! But without a cave on the other side of the Wall, without that long and painful process of initiation into the art of retrocognition, where you virtually leave your humanity behind, without knowing yourself to know the universe and the true Gods, there can be no true wisdom; only mere Gaedhal-like common sense.

In other words, only by knowing ourselves as deeply as this imaginary Bloodraven could one apostatise from the demented religion of our parents. Otherwise, all we have are the semi-apostasies or pseudo-apostasies of liberals (and even Woke folk!) that lead nowhere because they fail to get to the heart of the matter: the structure of the inner Self.

Categories
Axiology Liberalism

Who’s neo-Christian?

He is the unwary pseudo-apostate, deist or even atheist, who hasn’t realised that by rejecting the ‘all are equal in the eyes of God’ of his Christian parents, and transmuting that doctrine to ‘all are equal before the law’, he is axiologically still a Christian.—C.T.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) French Revolution Racial right

Hitler, 5

The normie biographer Simms writes:

The ‘Gemlich’ letter, which is the first surviving longer political text by Hitler, defined the Jewish ‘problem’ partly as a medical issue. Hitler dubbed the Jews the ‘racial tuberculosis of the peoples’. Partly, the ‘problem’ was defined in political terms, with the Jews cast as the ‘driving forces of the revolution’, which had laid Germany low. Here he was referring not to the events of 1917 in Petrograd but to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils of 1918 in Germany.

The above quote seems to suggest that this young Hitler’s view of the Jews is identical to that of contemporary white nationalism. Since my approach is different, what can I reply? Let’s summarise my view.

Christianity fried the Aryan’s brains with the doctrine that ‘all are equal in the eyes of God’ (the New Testament message of the rabbis who wrote it for us Gentiles). Yesterday, when talking about some films and the subject of the French Revolution came up (and I suggest you watch Danton instead of the crap that Ridley Scott filmed), it reminded me that the secularisation of that Christian doctrine aggravated the matter. I mean that after the French Revolution, the psyche of the Aryan went from all are equal in the eyes of God to all are equal before the law (for new visitors, see what Tom Holland says in this featured PDF to understand the process of how it went from ‘in the eyes of God’ to ‘before the law’).

Following this secularised principle originally inspired by Christianity, France was the first European country to grant civil equality to Jews. Indeed, the legal position of Jews in France was widely envied by Jews in other countries. As a result of the so-called Jewish emancipation, and because of the high IQ of the Jew compared to the common Gentile, the first thing Jewry did, courtesy of Napoleon, was to take over the media in the 19th century. Otto Glagau, who led a journal, Der Kulturkämpfer, complained: ‘No longer can we suffer to see the Jews push themselves everywhere to the front, everywhere seize leadership and dominate public opinion’.

An 1806 French print of Napoleon empowering the Jews.

The secularisation of the Christian principle was catastrophic. Kevin MacDonald makes a point in the second book of his trilogy on Jewry when he says that Christendom defended itself against Jewish subversion based on the Christian myth. But that went into crisis, as the new God of the French Revolution still rules the scale of values in the West today. While it is true, as American southern nationalist Hunter Wallace has seen, that modernity uncovered Pandora’s box, neither Wallace nor MacDonald has the meta-perspective of Tom Holland (cf. the PDF linked above).

The Christian Question (CQ) is not to be underestimated. Before modernity, when the Inquisition ruled and 16th-century Spain was wiser about the Jewish Question (JQ) than 19th-century Europe, Iberian whites committed ethno-suicide in the Americas by intermarrying with Amerinds. This historical fact is nothing less than a ‘checkmate’ to the Judeo-reductionism of the typical white nationalist. And even forgetting the miscegenation perpetrated by the Spanish and Portuguese and focusing on the history of Austria and Germany, it’s clear that Christianity is responsible for the empowerment of Jewry.

For example, many pan-Germanists were imprisoned in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and the League Against Anti-Semitism was founded in 1891 by a pacifist who was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize, Bertha von Suttner.

This wanker attracted a wide membership, mostly members of the educated and Gentile bourgeoisie and even aristocrats who were so scandalised by pan-Germanism that they denounced it as ‘the narrow beer-hall politics of the unshaven’. Quite a few Protestant clergymen and Catholic intellectuals subscribed to the League Against Anti-Semitism. As devout Christians, Bertha von Suttner and her husband Arthur founded the League in response to the growing ‘anti-Semitism’ across Europe (cf. Otto Glagau’s quote above). So this cancellation of the healthy mind represented by 19th-century pan-Germanism also came from Christians and their Christian principles of equality. That’s why, addressing today’s nationalists, Robert Morgan recently said: ‘These ignorant imbeciles complain endlessly about Jews, but who let the Jews into white society?’

In the next entry we will see that even this very young Hitler, before he became aware of the CQ, was much more mature than the white nationalists of today in that he saw that the JQ was interwoven with the most bestial of Anglo-American capitalism.

Categories
New Testament Racial right Richard Carrier

Medieval racists

This interview uploaded yesterday is fascinating, and the very fact that none of the mainstream forums of the racial right touch on the subject of textual criticism of the New Testament is symptomatic of a wilful ignorance that is deeply rooted in the movement.

Richard Miller makes a point that is obvious to me. Serious New Testament scholarship is divided into two camps: (1) those who believe that most of the NT narrative is fictional but that there is a residue that could be historical, and (2) those who maintain that it was all literary fiction from the beginning. Miller belongs to the first group and another Richard, Richard Carrier, to the second group. But the dialogue between these two camps is quite cordial, academic and respectful.

On the other hand, there are the pseudo-scholars, the fundamentalist Christians who study the NT but begin their ‘research’ with pre-established conclusions (Jesus was resurrected from the dead, etc.). Their scholarship reminds me of the medieval university in Paris where philosophy was allowed to exist but only as a handmaiden of theology. Miller has said that serious NT scholars no longer pay attention to this apologetic posturing.

The racial right, I said, as well as fundamentalists ignore serious NT scholarship: scholarship that doesn’t start from the catechism we were taught as children but uses the methodologies of contemporary historiography to evaluate New Testament texts. This became clear the last time Kevin MacDonald published an article by a fundamentalist Christian in The Occidental Observer, as I told the author himself.

Taking into account that, concerning the NT, white nationalism is still medieval and that we must ignore not only the scholarly authors (such as the apologist in MacDonald’s webzine) but the Christian commentariat of that webzine and other racialist webzines, it is more interesting to ponder who, of the two Richards, is right: the mythicist or the historicist.

It seems to me that Miller, although I have infinite respect for his work, still suffers from what in a 2012 post on this site we called the ‘Platonic fallacy’.

And incidentally, I see these two camps, represented by the two Richards, from a very different angle to their point of view: the Delphic Oracle maxim. Given that deep autobiography is my forte, and that in my life I have gone through all three stages—from traditional Christian (1960s-1980s) to secular historicist (1990s-2018), and from secular historicist to mythicist (2018 to date)—I venture to conjecture that Miller’s stance, as well as the stance of his interviewer, represent a residue of parental introjects (see my post ‘Slaves of parental introjects’).

It is so disturbing to our egos to conceive of the whole Jesus story as mere literary fiction from the pen of Jews for Aryan consumption that even accomplished rationalists like Miller, and his young interviewer, are unable to take the final step.

But as I said, the issue of which of the two Richards is right isn’t so important. What is important is that Christians on the racial right are, as far as textual criticism of the NT is concerned, in the Middle Ages. And there is little point in trying to rescue them. That’s as fool errand as wanting American evangelicals, the source of the power of the American Jewish lobby, to read Kevin MacDonald’s webzine and stop supporting Israel in the current Palestinian conflict!

The West’s Darkest Hour is not for white nationalists. It is for people honest enough to assimilate the splendid work of Miller, or Carrier. As I said, the distinction between secular historicists and mythicists is not as serious as it is when we encounter the fundamentalists, who abound on the so-called racial right, and still believe that a Jew isn’t only risen but is our Saviour.

Categories
Heinrich Himmler

Himmler on Christianity

A visitor of this site brought my attention to this document by Heinrich Himmler on the occasion of Reinhard Heydrich’s funeral:

We will have to deal with Christianity in a tougher way than hitherto. We must settle accounts with this Christianity, this greatest of plagues that could have happened to us in our history, which has weakened us in every conflict. If our generation does not do it then it will, I think, drag on for a long time. We must overcome it within ourselves.

Today at Heydrich’s funeral I intentionally expressed in my oration from my deepest conviction a belief in God, a belief in fate, in the ancient one as I called him—that is the old Germanic word: Wralda.

We shall once again have to find a new scale of values for our people: the scale of the macrocosm and the microcosm, the starry sky above us and the world in us, the world that we see in the microscope.

The essence of these megalomaniacs, these Christians who talk of men ruling this world, must stop and be put back in its proper proportion. Man is nothing special at all. He is an insignificant part of this earth. If a big thunderstorm comes, he can do nothing about it. He cannot even predict it. He has no idea how a fly is constructed—however unpleasant, it is a miracle—or how a blossom is constructed. He must once again look with deep reverence into this world. Then he will acquire the right sense of proportion about what is above us, about how we are woven into this cycle.

Then, on a different plane, something else must happen: we must once again be rooted in our ancestors and grandchildren, in this eternal chain and eternal sequence. […] By rooting our people in a deep ideological awareness of ancestors and grandchildren we must once more persuade them that they must have sons. We can do a very great deal. But everything that we do must be justifiable vis-à-vis the clan, our ancestors.

If we do not secure this moral foundation which is the deepest and best because the most natural, we will not be able to overcome Christianity on this plane and create the Germanic Reich which will be a blessing for the earth. That is our mission as a nation on this earth. For thousands of years, it has been the mission of this blond race to rule the earth and again and again to bring it happiness and culture.

The quote above is only part of the document of Heydrich’s funeral. As the visitor says in his article, these Germans fantasised about a ‘final solution of the church question’ (just compare it with the BS we read these days in white nationalist forums!).

Categories
Catholic Church Deranged altruism

Catechetical lunacy

by Gaedhal

According to Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), paragraph 1935:

The equality of men rests essentially on their dignity as persons and the rights that flow from it: ‘Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design.’

The above statement is as woke and as DIE [Diversity Equity and Inclusion] as one can get. Absent the talk concerning a mythical Jewish god, the above statement could easily be stated by Joe Biden, Alexandria Occasio Cortez, Michelle Obama or Kamala Harris.

The above statement does not merely seek to ‘eradicate’ inequalities in opportunity, but also inequalities in outcome. If we all had identical ‘social conditions’ then that is ‘equity’. If we all had identical ‘social conditions’ then that is ‘equality of outcome’.

In my view, depopulation and eugenics are a path, eventually, to all humans having prosperous and peaceful social conditions.

It is Christian axiology that renders so much of Western Society so crime-ridden and so needlessly miserable. Christianity is a sect of ‘the least of these’, and so it is anti-eugenic i.e. dysgenic in its foundations. As Saul puts it: Christianity is a sect of the foolish—i.e. those of low IQ—and not of the wise. Christianity is a sect of ‘the off-scourings of this earth’. As the parable says: the rich, and the well-educated did not want to attend Jesus’ wedding feast, so he brought in all the tramps and misfits from ‘the highways and byways’ instead. In its foundation, Christianity is a sect for the mob; for the rout; and not for the aristocrat, the gentleman, the man who is refined in his bearing. As Richard Carrier puts it: Saul does not want you to read Euclid’s Elements lest you deconvert from Saul’s utterly foolish cult.

An absolute equality in social conditions? That is madness. That is Bolshevism. And the funny thing is that the above statement, which anticipates the DIE of modern times, was written in 1992 by the ‘conservatives’ Ratzinger—later Benedict XVI—Schönborn and Saint John Paul II. One of the reasons why I converted to traditionalist Catholicism is because I quickly found out that there was really no such thing as conservative post-conciliar Catholicism. They were all sell-outs and lunatics.

In my view, belief in human ontological equality is a superstition inherited from Christianity. If the Christian god does not exist, then there is no god up there magically making us all equal.

The virus with shoes that is destroying the planet, and swiftly rendering it uninhabitable is of ‘infinite value’ according to the Catechism. And it is not just humanity in sum that has infinite value, but each individual also! You can’t get depopulation done with beliefs like that! In my view, Christian axiology—which carries over into many forms of atheism—is the number one existential threat that humanity faces. Humanity is a petard that can hoist itself through overpopulation, the carbonisation of our atmospheres and our seas, and other threats. If Humanity is a pest, then viewing each specimen of such a pest as ‘infinitely valuable’—as the Catholic Church does—is a harmful delusion.

Categories
Psychology Racial right

Christian cup

Kevin MacDonald’s most recent article, ‘Will the Gaza War Threaten Jewish Power in the U.S. and Their Status as Occupying the Moral High Ground?’, caught my attention.

KevinMac is probably the most respected figure in American white nationalism, whose message is that Jewish subversion is the primary cause of white decline. I have mentioned in the past that Thomas Kuhn used the Rubin vase to illustrate how a paradigm shift works: the experience of seeing either a vase or two faces before exactly the same image engages a subject’s subjectivity. For example, KevinMac tells us at the beginning of his article: ‘The Gaza war is bringing us an awesome display of Jewish power over the US media and political culture’.

I would have said: ‘The Gaza war is giving us an astonishing demonstration of the hypnotic power of Judeo-Christianity in the political culture of the United States’, in the sense that if this continent hadn’t been conquered by Christians (let’s say it had been conquered by the Vikings), the Jews wouldn’t have the power they now have in the US.

KevinMac is seeing the faces of Jewry in Rubin’s vase. I am seeing the Christian cup whose ‘Kool-Aid’ turned many Americans into demented fanatics of the state of Israel (to a certain degree, Ben Klassen had already detected this psychological phenomenon in the US decades ago). Exactly the same information, the same ‘vase’, is being processed by me and white nationalists in a radically different way.

Update of November 10:

Mark Weber, the head of the INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW, in his address at a London Forum meeting also viewed exclusively the faces, not the cup!

Categories
Christian art

Non-Aryan Jesus

‘By making a man of another race into your God, obviously you are denigrating your own’. —Robert Morgan

Just for the record, the first image is a close-up of Jesus’ face in a painting of the Last Supper from the Museum of Art of Catalonia and comes from the Sigena monastery, Spain.

The second image is another close-up of the resurrection of Christ by an unknown painter belonging to the last decade of the 15th century, in the Segorobe Cathedral Museum in Castellón, also in Spain.

Categories
New Testament Racial right Richard Carrier

Update

I am surprised that the Christian author of The Occidental Observer (TOO) article I was talking about yesterday responded to me in several TOO comments. Generally, white nationalist Christians have simply ignored me. For example, I have said countless times that the fact that the Spanish and the Portuguese mixed their blood in Latin America since the centuries when Christianity was in good shape means that the problem of Aryan ethnosuicide is more complex than what Judeo-reductionists claim, insofar in those times the Inquisition reigned in the Americas, an institution that controlled the Jews. The American racial right has ignored these facts so many times that I gave up and resigned myself to posting almost exclusively on this site, instead of trying to communicate with them on their forums, as I did quite often in the past. That’s why the Christian author’s several responses in the TOO discussion thread surprised me.

Below I not only quote my second retort, posted today, on TOO but some other things that I would like to respond to the Christians who are commenting in that thread.

RockaBoatus, the author of the article ‘A 2000-Year-Old Rabbinical Psyop: Did Jews Invent Christianity to Deceive Gentiles?’, told me:

What you’re reading today [textual criticism of the New TestamentEd.] are simply rehashed and outdated polemics that are about 150 years old with a new sophisticated twist. Conservative biblical scholars have refuted this nonsense…

By ‘conservative biblical scholars’ what you really mean is fundamentalist scholars.

Did you notice that above [i.e., in my first retort] I mentioned Ian Wilson, an English Catholic who has defended Christianity throughout his literary career? Unlike the list of fundamentalist Christians you cite, Wilson is honest enough to agree that what you call ‘outdated polemics that are about 150 years old’ are not outdated at all (cf. his book Jesus: The Evidence).

And Miller, whom I also mentioned above [again, in my first retort], is not anti-Christian like Carrier, who was never a Christian. Miller was a fundamentalist Christian who learned Greek, Latin, German and French to study the New Testament as a full-time scholar. Only when his research was advanced did he realise that there were serious problems with the so-called scholarship promulgated by his evangelical colleagues. This passage from a YouTube interview with Miller is vital to understanding his spiritual odyssey from traditional Christianity to apostasy. In fact, that YouTube channel, with its countless interviews with other NT scholars, can serve wonderfully to answer you (which I can’t do point by point because, as I said, it would take me days).

Regarding the rest of what you say, as well as what Pierre de Craon tells me about the evangelist John, in order not to overwhelm this discussion thread I think I’ll answer it in the next entry of my blog.

The only thing I would like to clarify now is that the thesis that Judeo-Christianity is a Jewish psyop is not exactly my thesis, but Skrbina’s. Rather than blaming St Paul et al, I blame Constantine and the house of Constantine (except Julian) for using the most toxic religion of the Mediterranean, the one inspired by intolerant Judaism, to control the population of the empire. If you don’t want to read the mini-book by the Spaniard Velasco that I linked above, see at least these excerpts from Vlassis Rassias’ book about how the Judeo-Christians of the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries destroyed the temples, sculptures, art and books of the classical world.

That is the starting point to understand the darkest hour of the West.

______ 卐 ______

 
The above is what I posted today on TOO. In one of his several replies to my yesterday’s retort, RockaBoatus said: ‘Jews did NOT “invent” Christianity.’ But he omits that St Paul was Jewish. He omits that the rabid hatred of John of Patmos, the author of the last book of the Christian Bible, was anti-Roman and that the ‘Seven Churches’ to which he wrote (Book of Revelation, 1:11) were in towns replete with Jews. He also omits that even Christian theologians admit that evangelists like Matthew were Jewish, and also the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Another Christian, who has frequently commented on TOO discussion threads, Pierre de Craon, responded to me by claiming: ‘attributing Revelation to John the Apostle is a sound judgment.’

That caught my attention since the consensus of New Testament scholarship is that the Book of Revelation dates from the end of the first century c.e., and a putative apostle from the beginning of the 1st century wouldn’t have lived that long. But to understand cultured Christians like Pierre de Craon I would like to digress a bit.

NT scholars can be classified into three groups: fundamentalists (there are also Catholic fundamentalists, not just Protestants, who believe in the historicity of the Garden of Eden, etc.), liberal Christians and non-Christians.

Since I come from a very Catholic family, in the 1980s I began to read liberal theologians, such as Hans Küng, who unlike the fundamentalists incorporated, to a certain extent, the textual criticism of the NT that has been doing since the Enlightenment, sometimes admirably summarised by Christians such as Albert Schweitzer’s classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus.

Fundamentalists haven’t responded honestly to this textual criticism which, I insist, sometimes comes from exegetes who have not apostatised from Christianity. And exactly the same can be said of the racial right.

Generally, Christians on the racial right as Pierre de Craon belong to the first group: that of Catholic and Protestant traditionalists. They haven’t even managed to assimilate what the liberal Christians have conceded long ago (e.g., Schweitzer’s 1906 classic). In my first retort I mentioned Ian Wilson, who with his books on the Shroud of Turin has even tried to create a kind of contemporary apologetics to support the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. But many of the Christians who comment these days in the discussion thread of the aforementioned TOO article don’t even know that a textual criticism of the NT exists: criticism that Christians like Wilson have already incorporated, for so many decades, into their way of seeing the world.

And what about the third group: the non-Christian scholars who dedicate themselves to studying the NT? What does one of them say about the book of Revelation, say, Carrier?

Revelation was written in the reign of Domitian (the 80s or 90s AD) and used Matthew as its base text. It is indeed an anti-Pauline document, but so is Matthew. And both were written in Greek, and thus for audiences outside Palestine. There is no evidence anyone was alive at that time who would know anything first-hand about the origins of Christianity, least of all the Pillars (they would be two generations gone by then), much less any who would ever have even heard of, much less read, Revelation (or Matthew for that matter). We also have no reactions to Revelation’s publication, so we have no idea how anyone responded to it anyway.

Revelation references no sources; in fact, it claims to have all its information from mystical visions, not any objective evidence at all. Someone, in other words, just dreamed all this (or was claiming to). And so far as we know it had no sources, other than “The Gospel according to Matthew,” which was simply an expanded redaction of the “Gospel according to Mark.” Revelation is therefore derivative and thus cannot corroborate anything. All it does is prove Matthew’s historicism existed at that time. Which we already know—from Matthew (and Mark, whose text is even earlier). It therefore can have no effect on the probability of historicity. Once the Gospels exist, it is already 100% expected there will exist texts expanding and riffing on them, like this, regardless of whether Jesus existed or not. So we are back to simply assessing the probability of the Gospels.

Nevertheless, Revelation is actually a little cagey about whether historicity is actually true, rather than symbolically represented. In Rev. 11 it sufficiently implies Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem; but in Rev. 12, Jesus is born in a lower heaven (in the vicinity of the moon), and soon whisked away to even higher levels of heaven, and seems never to leave there (in a manner that fits the Star Gospel that in OHJ I find in Ignatius and the Ascension of Isaiah). So it’s unclear which version of events the author believed actual and which merely allegorical. It could be both, depending on one’s level of initiation at the time, just as was the case for Osiris cult.

But regardless, since the author shows no sign of having any sources of information other than the Gospels we already know about, and his own imagination, it doesn’t matter. We can’t use it to prove anything in the Gospels is true. We can only use it to prove they were circulating by then, which we already knew, and thus already accounted for.

Based on what I said recently about my autobiographical work and how I can recover my previous Christian selves in exercises of the imagination, people like Miller and I are capable of psychically ‘encompassing’ folks like the Christians who comment in TOO. But they cannot return the favour because they have never experienced any apostasy in their minds (let’s say, that an apostate like Miller returned to the shelter of fundamentalist Christianity).

Update of November 6th

My last comment in that TOO thread was posted today.