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Tag: Transvaluation of all values

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On the Historicity of Jesus (book) Richard Carrier Romulus

Unhistorical Jesus, 4

Editor’s note: Here I continue with some passages from Richard Carrier’s book On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, especially a follow-up of what Carrier says in my first instalment of the series.

It really looks like the authors of the Gospels, presumably Semites, thoroughly plagiarised the foundational myth of Rome in order to sell us another myth (compare this with what my sticky post’s hatnote links about toxic foundation myths). This new myth did not only involve replacing an Aryan hero (Romulus) for a Jewish hero (Jesus). It did something infinitely more subversive. As Carrier wrote, which I highlighted in bold in my first instalment of the series:

Romulus’ material kingdom favoring the mighty is transformed into a spiritual one favoring the humble. It certainly looks like the Christian passion narrative is an intentional transvaluation of the Roman Empire’s ceremony of their own founding savior’s incarnation, death and resurrection [reddish colour added].

On pages 225-229 of On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt we read (scholarly footnotes omitted):
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Element 47: Another model hero narrative, which pagans also revered and to which the Gospel Jesus also conforms, is the apotheosis, or ‘ascension to godhood’ tale, and of these the one to which the Gospels (and Acts) most conform is that of the Roman national hero Romulus. I discussed this already in Chapter 4 (§1), and the points made there should be considered a component of the element here.

The more general point is that this narrative concept of a ‘translation to heaven’ for a hero (often but not always a divine son of god) was very commonplace, and always centered around a peculiar fable about the disappearance of their body. All these fables were different from one another, and therefore those differences are irrelevant to the point: all still shared the same core features (see my discussion of how syncretism works in Element 11). And when it comes to the Romulus fable in particular, the evidence is unmistakable that Christianity conformed itself to it relatively quickly—even if all these attributes were accumulated over time and not all at once.

Romulus, of course, did not exist. He was invented, along with legends about him (largely put together from previous Greek and Etruscan mythology), much later in Roman history than he is supposed to have lived. His name was eponymous (essentially an early form of the word ‘Roman’), and his story was meant to exemplify ideal Roman aspirations and values, using a model similar to Greek tragedy, in which the hero sins in various ways but comes to self-understanding and achieves peace by the time of his death. He otherwise exhibits in his deeds the ‘exemplary qualities’ of Rome as a social entity, held up as a model for Roman leaders to emulate, such as ending ‘the cycle of violence’ initiated by his sin and pride by religiously expiating the sin of past national crimes in order to bring about a lasting peace. His successor, Numa, then exemplified the role of the ideal, sinless king, a religious man and performer of miracles whose tomb was found empty after his death, demonstrating that he, too, like his predecessor Romulus, rose from the dead and ascended to heaven.

The idea of the ‘translation to heaven’ of the body of a divine king was therefore adaptable and flexible, every myth being in various ways different but in certain core respects the same. But the Gospels conform to the Romulus model most specifically. There are twenty parallels, although not every story contained every one. In some cases that may simply be the result of selection or abbreviation in the sources we have (and therefore the silence of one source does not entail the element did not then exist or was not known to that author); and in some cases elements might have been deliberately removed (or even reversed) by an author who wanted to promote a different message (see discussion in Chapter 10, §2, of how myth­making operated in antiquity). For example, the ‘radiant resurrection body’ (probably the earlier version of Christian appearance narratives) was later transformed into a ‘hidden-god narrative’ (another common trope both in paganism and Judaism) as suited any given author.

But when taken altogether the Romulus and Jesus death-and-resurrection narratives contain all of the following parallels:

1. The hero is the son of God.
2. His death is accompanied by prodigies.
3. The land is covered in darkness.
4. The hero’s corpse goes missing.
5. The hero receives a new immortal body, superior to the one he had.
6. His resurrection body has on occasion a bright and shining appearance.
7. After his resurrection he meets with a follower on a road from the city.
8. A speech is given from a summit or high place prior to ascending.
9. An inspired message of resurrection or ‘translation to heaven’ is delivered to a witness.
10. There is a ‘great commission’ (an instruction to future followers).
11. The hero physically ascends to heaven in his new divine body.
12. He is taken up into a cloud.
13. There is an explicit role given to eyewitness testimony (even naming the witnesses).
14. Witnesses are frightened by his appearance and/or disappearance.
15. Some witnesses flee.
16. Claims are made of ‘dubious alternative accounts’ (which claims were obviously fabricated for Romulus, there never having been a true account to begin with).
17. All of this occurs outside of a nearby (but central) city.
18. His followers are initially in sorrow over the hero’s death.
19. But his post-resurrection story leads to eventual belief, homage and rejoicing.
20. The hero is deified and cult subsequently paid to him (in the same manner as a god).

Romulus, of course, was also unjustly killed by the authorities (and came from a humble background, beginning his career as an orphan and a shepherd, a nobody from the hill country), and thus also overlaps the Aesop/­Socratic type (see Element 46), and it’s easy to see that by combining the two, we end up with pretty much the Christian Gospel in outline (especially when we appropriately Judaize the result: Elements 3-7, 17-20, and 39-43). Some of the parallels could be coincidental (e.g. resurrected bodies being associated with radiance was itself a common trope, both within Judaism and paganism), but for all of them to be coincidental is extremely improbable. The Christian conception of Jesus’ death and resurrection appears to have been significantly influenced by the Roman conception of Romulus’s death and resurrection.

Even if we discounted that for any reason, the Romulus parallels definitely establish that all these components were already part of a recognized hero-type, and are therefore not surprising or unusual or unexpected. The story of Jesus would have looked familiar, not only in the same way all translation stories looked familiar even when different in many and profound ways, but also in the very specific way that among all such tales it looked the most like the story of Romulus, which was publicly acted out in passion plays every year. And this was the national founding hero of the Roman Empire. What better god’s tale to emulate or co-opt?

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Abraham Lincoln

Robert Morgan’s comment

In order for white people to revolt as a race, they’d have to reject a century and a half of their own history. They’d have to abandon Christianity, and ruthlessly purge its cultural residue, since even atheists nowadays embrace its fantasy of a “brotherhood of man”.

People such as Lincoln, who is now a hero to most whites, would have to be seen as a villain. Likewise with MLK and FDR. They’d have to admit to themselves that they’ve been fools all along, and their ancestors crazy; that all the blood and sacrifice to stamp out white supremacy in the Civil War and in WWII was for nothing, or even less than nothing. The cognitive dissonance alone would probably kill them or drive them insane.

Frankly, I don’t see it happening.

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Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche

The Antichrist § 15

In Christianity, morality and religion are both completely out of touch with reality. Completely imaginary causes (‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘free will’ – or even an ‘unfree’ one); completely imaginary effects (‘sin’, ‘redemption’, ‘grace’, ‘punishment’, ‘forgiveness of sins’). Contact between imaginary entities (‘God’, ‘spirits’, ‘souls’); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric; total absence of any concept of natural cause); an imaginary psychology (complete failure to understand oneself, interpretations of pleasant or unpleasant general sensations – for instance, the states of nervus sympathicus – using the sign language of religious-moral idiosyncrasy, – ‘repentance’, ‘the pangs of conscience’, ‘temptation by the devil’, ‘the presence of God’); an imaginary teleology (‘the kingdom of God’, ‘the Last Judgment’, ‘eternal life’). – This entirely fictitious world can be distinguished from the world of dreams (to the detriment of the former) in that dreams reflect reality while Christianity falsifies, devalues, and negates reality. Once the concept of ‘nature’ had been invented as a counter to the idea of ‘God’, ‘natural’ had to mean ‘reprehensible’ – that whole fictitious world is rooted in a hatred of the natural (of reality!), it is the expression of a profound sense of unease concerning reality… But this explains everything. Who are the only people motivated to lie their way out of reality? People who suffer from it. But to suffer from reality means that you are a piece of reality that has gone wrong… The preponderance of feelings of displeasure over feelings of pleasure is the cause of that fictitious morality and religion: but a preponderance like this provides the formula for decadence…

Satan

by Joseph Walsh

This is a long piece that I decided to write in response to a post of yours made a week or so ago. [Editor’s note: Walsh refers to ‘On empowering birds feeding on corpses’.] I remember you wrote, in response to what some woman said about Satan ruling the modern West, that it is not Satan that rules but Christ. That is quite correct.

In Judaism the god Satan is the enemy of Yahweh, the god of the Jews. The Hebrew name ‘Satan’ literally means Enemy, the Adversary, the Accuser etc. It is useful to think of Satan as the god of the Gentiles. According to the Jews Yahweh is the one true god and all the pagan gods of the Gentiles are false gods, idols. Collectively, all the heathen gods of the Gentiles could be described as ‘Satanic’ i.e. enemies of Yahweh and the Jewish people. This metaphysical dualism was inherited by the Jews disciples the Christians, who portrayed as ‘Satanic’ evil and demonic all the pagan gods of their enemies that they forcibly converted to Christianity or killed. The god of the Jews and the son of God Jesus became the only true God, and Jesus Christ’s enemy Satan the god that all the Pagans worshipped (including the Jews themselves, which creates the absurdity of the Jews being described as worshipping Satan, an absurdity that continues to this day. It is not Satan that the Jews worship but Yahweh!).

To put things into proper perspective before the ‘transvaluation of values’ done by the Judeo-Christians, the Ancient World was pagan and polytheistic and the Jews cut themselves off from the people around them. They not only saw themselves as unique and the rest of mankind as goyim, but metaphysically they viewed themselves as having knowledge of the one true god, a monotheistic god whose chosen people they were, in contrast to the false polytheistic gods of the pagan goyim around them, who their god YHWH-JHVH had given them dominion over.

Of all the Satan’s (i.e. enemies) that the Jews have ever faced, the greatest was Adolf Hitler. Moreover, just as Satan represents the Gods of the pagan Gentiles as a collective, it is the Gods of the Nordic-Aryan race who represent the biggest enemy of Yahweh and his children. Many have spoken about Hitler being an avatar of the Germanic god Wotan. To the Jews Wotan would be the same figure as Satan. So while Esoteric Hitlerists can talk about Hitler being an Avatar of Wotan, we could also say Hitler was an Avatar of Satan, the enemy of the Jews. For us Aryans, Yahweh, who doesn’t exist, can be viewed as the negative force that possesses the collective unconscious of the Jews while Satan can be viewed as the positive force that represents the collective unconscious of the Aryan race. The Judaized Christians in WN who say that Satan is the god of the Jews and Adolf Hitler is a good Christian man truly have things the wrong way round, brainwashed victims of the inversion of values that the Jews have brought into the world with Christianity.

Also, to look at things through the false perspective of the Christians, Adolf Hitler is The Anti-Christ, or at least an Antichrist figure, as He is the polar opposite of Jesus Christ. National Socialism is the polar opposite of Christianity. The Swastika symbolizes the opposite value system to that of the Crucifix. The morality of the Hitler and the Swastika is as Nietzschean morality system, basically one where the Christian Evil is recognized as what is actually Good, and the Christian ‘good’ recognized as that which is evil and harmful to the Aryan race. “And whoever wants to be a creator in good and evil, must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the greatest goodness: but this is—being creative.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, 34.)

It is also important that Nietzsche acted, through his character Zarathustra, as the Prophet of the Superman. He saw that his own people-Europeans, but more especially Germans, were in the process of becoming supermen and correctly stated the Superman would arise out of them. Arise he did in the form of the annihilator of Christianity and the creator of the New Order Adolf Hitler. It is also noteworthy that Nietzsche proclaimed himself as The Antichrist. As Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo: “You highest men whom my eyes have seen, this is my doubt about you and my secret laughter: I guess that you would call my overman—devil.”

How accurately that describes the Western Christian civilization in its modern (and final) stage. Hitler, the Superman, the Antichrist, is branded as the most evil man who ever lived for overcoming Christian values on a large scale.

To include some of my personal life story, I first became introduced to National Socialism through what came to be called National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM), a type of degenerate rock music. In the early 1990’s numerous Black Metal bands, particular those in the Nordic countries, began to introduce NS into their music due to its association with Evil as they were Satanic bands. Varg Vikernes was one of the pioneers in this respect. Many of them believed in the false Hollywood version of Nazism, but were attracted to it because its Nietzschean revaluation of all values made sense in their combat against Christianity (Black Metal is extremely anti-Christian). So they used the Swastika and integrated the pagan aspects of NS with Satanism. Eventually many of them replaced Satan with Wotan/Odin and The Antichrist with Hitler. So I read about Adolf Hitler being described as The Beast 666 from the Book of Revelation in the Bible and I began to embrace Nazism from then (2005) onward.

This embrace of Hitler as an anti-Christian figure was done earlier by, among others, the American white prison gang the Aryan Brotherhood. The Aryan Brotherhood formed in San Quentin Prison in California in the 1960’s in response to the aggressive attacks coming from Negroes who had formed their own prison gang the Black Guerrilla Family. During the 1960’s Black militancy was widespread across the USA with many riots carried out by niggers across the country throughout the decade. This race war was magnified inside integrated prisons in the US. A quote from a book on this racial war reads:

The racial turmoil in the world outside prison, where fires were burning in Watts, Detroit, and Chicago, was magnified in San Quentin. Blacks and whites were stabbing one another, not because of anything anyone had done, but simply because of their skin color. “Your hate was at peak” Scott recalled. “Your adrenaline was at a peak, everything was at a peak level all the time. It was like a jungle. You’d get yourself fired up, so by the time the cell doors opened, you’d be ready. You’d have a whole head of steam. You didn’t have time to analyze or rationalize or philosophize, you just got strapped (got yourself a knife) and went out of your cell and did what you had to.

So while misled, traitorous white youth outside prison were embracing Negroes as their “black brothers” the reality inside prison was hatred and race war. The Aryan Brotherhood used the symbol of the Swastika with 666 imposed on it to, according to one member, signify that they stood in complete opposition to the values of Christianity, and instead embraced paganism and pagan morality which had been demonised as ‘Satanism’ as well as Nazism which was also demonised as evil.

Simply put, in American prisons it is impossible for White Men to live according to anti-racist Christian morality. Prison populations are segregated by race and many white males who have been brainwashed anti-racists have suddenly come into contact with the stark reality of Nature when thrown into prison. One sticks with their own kind and the morality is fully anti-Christian. Those who have the highest kill counts rise to the top. Those who won’t fight or kill are turned into bitches and sexual toys for Negroes. Hence, White Men in US prisons tattoo themselves with symbols of their race like the Swastika as well as Germanic runes etc. Prison is one of the only places I can think of where White Men are still somewhat manly, and then that is only because they cannot escape fighting with their racial enemies.

Another thing I remember about NSBM was that The Holocaust was looked at as a Satanic genocide against God’s chosen people. That Aryans were the evil race and were genociding the holy race of the Jews. This interpretation is also upheld by Christians who say things like The Holocaust was an attack on God himself and an evil attempt to wipe out the Jews to prevent the Second Coming of Jesus. Of course it’s all rubbish as the Holocaust never happened but I just thought I’d include these lines of thinking to demonstrate this alternative perspective on WWII.

So in conclusion, yes today it is not Satan which rules the modern West for that would mean the spirit of Hitler had won over that of Christ. Instead it is the son of Yahweh Jesus Christ (who is the embodiment of the Jew as he is the ultimate deceiver) whose spirit fully dominates the white race and will soon achieve final victory if Aryans become extinct.

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Deranged altruism Name of the Rose (novel) St Francis

On empowering birds feeding on corpses

‘Christian ethics was like a time bomb ticking away in Europe, a Trojan horse waiting for its season’. —William L. Pierce

‘1945 was the year of the total inversion of Aryan values into Christian values’. —Joseph Walsh

The articles of The Occidental Observer are academic. But Tobias Langdon’s article yesterday on how the left has begun to devour itself is fascinating.

Yesterday I was also watching Monster Bug Wars. As I dream to exterminate all the arachnids in my Parrishesque paradise, it gives me pleasure to see fights to the death between them. The war that is currently waged on the left, as narrated in Langdon’s article, also gives me pleasure: it is like seeing two different species of spiders fighting to the death: whoever wins devours, still alive, the other.

Langdon’s article deals with the cultural war that transgender men are winning over radical feminists—including mulatto, lesbian and Jewish feminists that one would imagine are, in the inverted epoch of today, the most powerful.

Currently, trans men have begun to place themselves at the top of the pyramid thanks to Orwell’s observation: all men are equal but some are more equal than others. These men only have to declare themselves women and in several states of the US they are allowed to enter their bathrooms, changing rooms and showers. Langdon mentions a tranny, who still has a penis and a couple of balls, who is very interested in the feminine tampons that pubertal girls leave in the baths. Of course: in our sick society he’s untouchable…

Tucker Carlson and the radical feminists complain a lot that trans men are also beginning to dominate women’s sports. The most impressive phrase of the article by Langdon in the Observeris that ‘Stale pale males who were at the very bottom of the victimhood hierarchy have leapt to the very top of it in a single bound, thanks to the superpower of transgenderism’. So true: the radical feminists who dare to criticise these trans men are now being deplatformed from social media with typical accusations that their complaints are ‘hate’.

The whole freak show really looks like the videos of two arachnids fighting to the death with the fittest cocooning the other alive and, after injecting a poisonous cocktail into the beaten spider, sucking its body as a protein shake. Read Landon’s article and then watch a clip of Monster Bug Wars!

A woman commented about Langdon’s article at the Observer: ‘We need no further proof that Satan rules the world…’ I would argue the opposite: at last Christ rules. Why? Because white nationalists have a rather superficial idea of the history of Christianity. Their knowledge of our parents’ religion does not go beyond historical books at the level of those Reader’s Digest books for families of pious Christians that I find in the library my father left behind.

A deeper look beyond the Reader’s Digest level reveals that the reversal of the scale of values that has now maddened the West originated nothing less than in the Gospel. Every time some Christians wanted to apply the Gospel message in its purity, the medieval Church, in all its wisdom, crushed them: they knew how dangerous that would have been for the health of pre-Reformation Europe.

I am not asking white nationalists to read the ten volumes of Karlheinz Deschner on the history of Christianity. If they only read the best historical novel that has been written about the period to which I refer in the previous paragraph, they would realise what I mean. The Name of the Rose of Umberto Eco, contains a passage that throws great light on what happens today with the empowering of trans men: until recently, the most dispossessed creatures of the kingdom of God.

Adso: ‘But you were speaking of other outcasts; it isn’t lepers who form heretical movements’.

William of Baskerville: ‘The flock is like a series of concentric circles, from the broadest range of the flock to its immediate surroundings. The lepers are a sign of exclusion in general. Saint Francis understood that. He didn’t want only to help the lepers; if he had, his act would have been reduced to quite a poor and impotent act of charity. He wanted to signify something else. Have you been told about his preaching to the birds?’

Adso: ‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard that beautiful story, and I admired the saint who enjoyed the company of those tender creatures of God’, I said with great fervour.

William of Baskerville: ‘Well, what they told you was mistaken, or, rather, it’s a story the order has revised today. When Francis spoke to the people of the city and its magistrates and saw they didn’t understand him, he went out to the cemetery and began preaching to ravens and magpies, to hawks, to raptors feeding on corpses’.

Adso: ‘What a horrible thing! Then they were not good birds!’

William of Baskerville: ‘They were birds of prey, outcast birds, like the lepers. Francis was surely thinking of that verse of the Apocalypse that says: “I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven: Come and gather yourselves together at the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them…!’’’

Adso: ‘So Francis wanted to incite the outcasts to revolt?’

William of Baskerville: ‘No, that was what Fra Dolcino and his followers wanted [the violent and revolutionary wing of the Fraticelli], if anybody did. Francis wanted to call the outcast, ready to revolt, to be part of the people of God. If the flock was to be gathered again, the outcasts had to be found again. Francis didn’t succeed, and I say it with great bitterness. To recover the outcasts he had to act within the church; to act within the church he had to obtain the recognition of his rule, from which an order would emerge, and this order, as it emerged, would recompose the image of a circle, at whose margin the outcasts remain’.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

The dialogue between these two Franciscan monks of the 14th century hits the nail regarding the POV of this site: the two epigraphs that appear at the top of this entry.

The season of the horse of Troy of which Pierce wrote, that is to say the complete inversion of Aryan values into Gospel-inspired values such as those of a St. Francis, has finally arrived. Following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013, a papal conclave elected the Argentinean Jorge Mario Bergoglio as his successor. As Bergoglio chose Francis as his papal name in honour of St. Francis of Assisi, my father, a great fan of the saint of Assisi, expressed a few words of surprise. He wondered while watching the 2013 ceremony how it was possible that only until the 21st century did an elected pope choose the name of the most beloved saint for Catholics? Short answer: because the Catholic Church was not openly suicidal as it is today.

Since the native language of this Argentinean pope is Spanish, when I hear him speak I understand him better than those who don’t know the language. It really seems to me that, for the first time in the history of the Church, the purest message of the Gospel has reached the Vatican. I remember very well, for example, the occasion when Bergoglio, already Pope, declared that the theme of poverty (the lepers of yore) was at the very core of the Gospel. I also remember his words about homosexuals (Bergoglio is the first pope to use the Newspeak term ‘gay’: a word that was not used to designate them when he and I were children) and the trans men who visited him in the Vatican.

What they say in the forums of white nationalism is false: that the Pope has betrayed his principles. On the contrary: The dream of gathering again the ravens, magpies and birds feeding on corpses has been fulfilled.

When I discovered white nationalism the term used to designate the enemy was the very generic ‘liberalism’. In his Observer article Langdon uses the term currently in vogue, ‘cultural Marxism’. Recently I suggested that the most accurate term would be ‘neo-Christian’. This term covers the scale of values of both Christians and liberals: the last (e.g., the tranny) shall be the first and the first shall be the last. After all, Francis wanted to call the outcast, ready to revolt, to be part of the people of God. If the flock was to be gathered again, the outcasts had to be found again. Francis didn’t succeed, and I say it with great bitterness. To recover the outcasts he had to act within the church; to act within the church he had to obtain the recognition of his rule, from which an order would emerge, and this order, as it emerged, would recompose the image of a circle, at whose margin the outcasts remain. 

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Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche

The Antichrist § 14

We have changed our minds. We have become more modest in every way. We have stopped deriving humanity from ‘spirit’, from ‘divinity’, we have stuck human beings back among the animals. We see them as the strongest animals because they are the most cunning: one consequence of this is their spirituality. On the other hand, we are also opposed to a certain vanity that re-emerges here too, acting as if human beings were the great hidden goal of animal evolution. Humans are in no way the crown of creation, all beings occupy the same level of perfection…

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Ancient Rome Jesus On the Historicity of Jesus (book) Richard Carrier Romulus

Unhistorical Jesus, 1

Romulus appearing to Proculus Julius.

I have read the first three chapters of Richard Carrier’s book, On the Historicity of Jesus, in addition to the later chapter on Paul’s epistles. In my entry on Thursday, about the dark night of the soul suffered by the Aryans in general and the white nationalists in particular (including the so-called revolutionaries), I mentioned the finis Africae that was in the tower that housed a large library in Umberto Eco’s gothic novel. Following the plot of the novel,[1] if there is a book that a latter-day Jorge de Burgos would like to destroy, it is precisely that of Carrier.

Last Monday I said I was tempted to start reviewing On the Historicity of Jesus for this site. The first pages of chapter 4 convinced me that I should do it.

In ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ I said that all white people are heading to Jerusalem, a metaphor that must be understood in the context of the first paragraph of ‘Ethnosuicidal Nationalists’. How Christianity managed to invert the moral compass of the Aryans, from pointing at Rome to pointing at Jerusalem, is discovered by researching the motivations of those who wrote the Gospels (remember: there’s no historical Jesus, only gospel authors).

Keep in mind what we have been saying on this site about the inversion of values that happened in the West when whites, including atheists, took the axiological message of the gospels very seriously. Based on this and the crucial part of Evropa Soberana’s essay on Jerusalem and Rome, let’s see what Carrier says at the beginning of chapter 4 of On the Historicity of Jesus.

In Plutarch’s book about Romulus, the founder of Rome, we are told that Romulus was the son of god, born of a virgin, and that there were attempts to kill him as a baby.

As an adult the elites finally killed him and the sun darkened, but Romulus’ body disappeared. Then he rises from the dead.

Some people doubted and, on the road, Romulus appears to a friend to transmit the good news to his people (see image above). It is revealed that, despite his human appearance, Romulus had always been a god and was incarnated to establish a great kingdom on earth (keep these italicised words in mind in the context of the quotation below).

Then Romulus ascends to the heavens to reign from there. Before Christianity, the Romans celebrated the day when Romulus ascended into heaven. Plutarch tells us that the annual ceremony of the Ascension involved the recitation of the names of those who were afraid for having witnessed the feat, something that reminds us of the true end of the Gospel of Mark (Mk 16.8) before the Christians added more verses.

Carrier comments that it seems as if Mark was adding a Semitic garment onto Romulus’ original story: a Roman story that seems to be the skeleton on which the evangelist would add the flesh of his literary fiction. The phrase of Carrier that I put in bold letters convinced me that On the Historicity of Jesus deserves a review in several entries:

There are many differences in the two stories [the fictional stories about Romulus and Jesus], surely. But the similarities are too numerous to be a coincidence—and the differences are likely deliberate. For instance, Romulus’ material kingdom favoring the mighty is transformed into a spiritual one favoring the humble. It certainly looks like the Christian passion narrative is an intentional transvaluation of the Roman Empire’s ceremony of their own founding savior’s incarnation, death and resurrection [page 58].

My two cents: White nationalists are still reluctant to recognise that what they call ‘the Jewish problem’ should be renamed as ‘the Jewish-Christian problem’.

________

[1] The 1986 film The Name of the Rose featuring Sean Connery betrays the real plot of the novel. In the book the bad guy was the librarian Jorge de Burgos and the Inquisitor, Bernardo Gui, a secondary character. In the novel Gui burns the beautiful semi-feral peasant girl at the stake whereas in the Hollywood film the girl’s life is spared. In no way I recommend watching the movie unless the novel is read first (Umberto Eco’s only good novel in my humble opinion).

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Ancient Rome Christendom Jerusalem St Paul

Commissary to the Gentiles, 4

by (((Marcus Eli Ravage)))

Perhaps the bitterest foe of the sectaries was one Saul, a maker of tents. A native of Tarsus and thus a man of some education in Greek culture, he despised the new teachings for their unworldliness and their remoteness from life. A patriotic Jew, he dreaded their effect on the national cause. A traveled man, versed in several languages, he was ideally suited for the task of going about among the scattered Jewish communities to counteract the spread of their socialistic pacifistic doctrines. The leaders in Jerusalem appointed him chief persecutor to the Ebionim.

He was on his way to Damascus one day to arrest a group of the sectaries when a novel idea came to him. In the quaint phrase of the Book of Acts he saw a vision. He saw as a matter of fact, two.

He perceived, to begin with, how utterly hopeless were the chances of little Judea winning out in an armed conflict against the greatest military power in the world. Second, and more important, it came to him that the vagabond creed which he had been repressing might be forged into an irresistible weapon against the formidable foe.

Pacifism, non-resistance, resignation, love, were dangerous teachings at home. Spread among the enemy’s legions, they might break down their discipline and thus yet bring victory to Jerusalem. Saul, in a word, was probably the first man to see the possibilities of conducting war by propaganda.

He journeyed on to Damascus, and there to the amazement alike of his friends and of those he had gone to suppress, he announced his conversion to the faith and applied for admission to the brotherhood.

On his return to Jerusalem he laid his new strategy before the startled Elders of Zion. After much debate and searching of souls, it was adopted. More resistance was offered by the leaders of the Ebionim of the capital. They were mistrustful of his motives, and they feared that his proposal to strip the faith of its ancient Jewish observances and practices so as to make it acceptable to Gentiles would fill the fraternity with alien half-converts, and dilute its strength. But in the end he won them over, too. And so Saul, the fiercest persecutor of Jesus’ followers, became Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles. And so, incidentally, began the spread into the pagan lands of the West, an entirely new Oriental religion.

Unfortunately for Paul’s plan, the new strategy worked much too well. His revamped and rather alluring theology made converts faster than he had dared hope, or than he even wished. His idea, it should be kept in mind, was at this stage purely defensive. He had as yet no thought of evangelizing the world; he only hoped to discourage the enemy. With that accomplished, and the Roman garrisons out of Palestine, he was prepared to call a truce.

But the slaves and oppressed of the Empire, the wretched conscripts, and the starving proletariat of the capital itself, found as much solace in the adapted Pauline version of the creed as the poor Jews before them had found in the original teachings of their crucified master. The result of this unforeseen success was to open the enemy’s eyes to what was going on.

Disturbing reports of insubordination among the troops began pouring into Rome from the army chiefs in Palestine and elsewhere. Instead of giving the imperial authorities pause, the new tactics only stiffened their determination. Rome swooped down upon Jerusalem with fire and sword, and after a fierce siege which lasted four years, she destroyed the nest of the agitation (70 a.d.). At least she thought she had destroyed it.

The historians of the time leave us in no doubt as to the aims of Rome. They tell us that Nero sent Vespasian and his son Titus with definite and explicit orders to annihilate Palestine and Christianity together. To the Romans, Christianity meant nothing more than Judaism militant, anyhow, an interpretation which does not seem far from the facts. As to Nero’s wish, he had at least half of it realized for him. Palestine was so thoroughly annihilated that it has remained a political ruin to this day. But Christianity was not so easily destroyed.

Indeed, it was only after the fall of Jerusalem that Paul’s program developed to the full. Hitherto, as I have said, his tactic had been merely to frighten off the conqueror, in the manner of Moses plaguing the Pharaohs. He had gone along cautiously and hesitantly, taking care not to arouse the powerful foe. He was willing to dangle his novel weapon before the foe’s nose, and let him feel its edge, but he shrank from thrusting it in full force.

Now that the worst had happened and Judea had nothing further to lose, he flung scruples to the wind and carried the war into the enemy’s country. The goal now was nothing less than to humble Rome as she had humbled Jerusalem, to wipe her off the map as she had wiped out Judea.

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Jesus Reformation

Commissary to the Gentiles, 2

by (((Marcus Eli Ravage)))

But even these plots and revolutions are as nothing compared with the great conspiracy which we engineered at the beginning of this era and which was destined to make the creed of a Jewish sect the religion of the Western world. The Reformation was not designed in malice purely. It squared us with an ancient enemy and restored our Bible to its place of honor in Christendom. The Republican revolutions of the eighteenth century freed us of our age-long political and social disabilities. They benefited us, but they did you no harm. On the contrary, they prospered and expanded you. You owe your preeminence in the world to them.

But the upheaval which brought Christianity into Europe was—or at least may easily be shown to have been—planned and executed by Jews as an act of revenge against a great Gentile state. And when you talk about Jewish conspiracies I cannot for the world understand why you do not mention the destruction of Rome and the whole civilization of antiquity concentrated under her banners, at the hands of Jewish Christianity.

It is unbelievable, but you Christians do not seem to know where your religion came from, nor how, nor why. Your historians, with one great exception, do not tell you. The documents in the case, which are part of your Bible, you chant over but do not read. We have done our work too thoroughly; you believe our propaganda too implicitly. The coming of Christianity is to you not an ordinary historical event growing out of other events of the time; it is the fulfilment of a divine Jewish prophecy—with suitable amendments of your own. It did not, as you see it, destroy a great Gentile civilization and a great Gentile empire with which Jewry was at war; it did not plunge mankind into barbarism and darkness for a thousand years; it came to bring salvation to the Gentile world!

Yet here, if ever, was a great subversive movement, hatched in Palestine, spread by Jewish agitators, financed by Jewish money, taught in Jewish pamphlets and broadsides, at a time when Jewry and Rome were in a death-struggle, and ending in the collapse of the great Gentile empire. You do not even see it, though an intelligent child, unbefuddled by theological magic, could tell you what it is all about after a hasty reading of the simple record. And then you go on prattling of Jewish conspiracies and cite as instances the Great War and the Russian Revolution! Can you wonder that we Jews have always taken your anti-Semites rather lightly, as long as they did not resort to violence?

And, mind you, no less an authority than Gibbon long ago tried to enlighten you. It is now a century and a half since The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire let the cat out of the bag. Gibbon, not being a parson dabbling in history, did not try to account for the end of a great era by inventing fatuous nonsense about the vice and degradation of Rome, about the decay of morals and faith in an empire which was at that very time in the midst of its most glorious creative period. How could he? He was living in the Augustan Age in London which—in spite of nearly two thousand years since the coming of Christian salvation—was as good a replica of Augustan Rome in the matter of refined lewdness as the foggy islanders could make it.

No, Gibbon was a race-conscious Gentile and an admirer of the culture of the pagan West, as well as a historian with brains and eyes. Therefore he had no difficulty laying his finger on the malady that had rotted and wasted away the noble edifice of antique civilization. He put Christianity down—the law which went forth from Zion and the word of God from Jerusalem—as the central cause of the decline and fall of Rome and all she represented.

So far so good. But Gibbon did not go far enough. He was born and died, you see, a century before the invention of scientific anti-Semitism. He left wholly out of account the element of deliberation. He saw an alien creed sweeping out of the East and overwhelming the fair lands of the West. It never occurred to him that it was precisely to this destructive end that the whole scheme of salvation was dedicated. Yet the facts are as plain as you please.

Let me in very brief recount the tale, unembroidered by miracle, prophecy or magic.

For a good perspective, I shall have to go back a space. The action conveniently falls into four parts, rising to a climax in the third. The time, when the first curtain rises, is roughly 65 B.C. Dramatis persona; are, minor parts aside, Judea and Rome. Judea is a tiny kingdom off the Eastern Mediterranean. For five centuries it has been hardly more than a geographical expression. Again and again it has been overrun and destroyed and its population carried into exile or slavery by its powerful neighbors. Nominally independent, it is now as unstable as ever and on the edge of civil war. The empire of the West, with her nucleus in the City Republic of Rome, while not yet mistress of the world, is speedily heading that way. She is acknowledged the one great military power of the time as well as the heir of Greece and the center of civilization.

Up to the present the two states have had little or no contact with one another. Then without solicitation on her part Rome was suddenly asked to take a hand in Judean affairs. A dispute had arisen between two brothers over the succession to the petty throne, and the Roman general Pompey, who happened to be in Damascus winding up bigger matters, was called upon to arbitrate between the claimants. With the simple directness of a republican soldier, Pompey exiled one of the brothers, tossed the chief priesthood to his rival, and abolished the kingly dignity altogether. Not to put too fine a point on it, Pompey’s mediation amounted in effect to making Judea a Roman dependency.

The Jews, not unnaturally perhaps, objected; and Rome, to conciliate them and to conform to local prejudice, restored the royal office. She appointed, that is, a king of her own choosing. He was the son of an exciseman, an Idumean by race, named Herod. But the Jews were not placated, and continued making trouble. Rome thought it very ungrateful of them.

All this is merely a prelude, and is introduced into the action to make clear what follows. Jewish discontent grew to disaffection and open revolt when their Gentile masters began importing into Jerusalem the blessings of Western culture. Graven images, athletic games, Greek drama, and gladiatorial shows were not to the Jewish taste. The pious resented them as an offense in the nostrils of Jehovah, even though the resident officials patiently explained they were meant for the entertainment and edification of the non-Jewish garrison. The Judeans resisted with especial strenuousness the advent of the efficient Roman tax-gatherer. Above all, they wanted back a king of their own race and their own royal line.

Among the masses the rebellion took the form of a revival of the old belief in a Messiah, a divinely appointed savior who was to redeem his people from the foreign yoke and make Judea supreme among the nations. Claimants to the mission were not wanting. In Galilee, one Judas led a rather formidable insurrection, which enlisted much popular support. John, called the Baptist, operated in the Jordan country. He was followed by another north-country man, Jesus of Nazareth. All three were masters of the technique of couching incendiary political sedition in harmless theological phrases. All three used the same signal of revolt—“The time is at hand.” And all three were speedily apprehended and executed, both Galileans by crucifixion.

Personal qualities aside, Jesus of Nazareth was, like his predecessors, a political agitator engaged in liberating his country from the foreign oppressor. There is even considerable evidence that he entertained an ambition to become king of an independent Judea. He claimed, or his biographers later claimed for him, descent from the ancient royal line of David. But his paternity is somewhat confused. The same writers who traced the origin of his mother’s husband back to the psalmist-king also pictured Jesus as the son of Jehovah, and admitted that Joseph was not his father.

It seems, however, that Jesus before long realized the hopelessness of his political mission and turned his oratorical gifts and his great popularity with the masses in quite another direction. He began preaching a primitive form of populism, socialism and pacifism. The effect of this change in his program was to gain him the hostility of the substantial, propertied classes, the priests and patriots generally, and to reduce his following to the poor, the laboring mass and the slaves.

After his death these lowly disciples formed themselves into a communistic brotherhood. A sermon their late leader had once delivered upon a hillside summed up for them the essence of his teachings, and they made it their rule of life. It was a philosophy calculated to appeal profoundly to humble people. It comforted those who suffered here on earth with promised rewards beyond the grave. It made virtues of the necessities of the weak. Men without hope in the future were admonished to take no thought for the morrow. Men too helpless to resent insult or injury were taught to resist not evil. Men condemned to lifelong drudgery and indigence were assured of the dignity of labor and of poverty.

The meek, the despised, the disinherited, the downtrodden, were—in the hereafter—to be the elect and favored of God. The worldly, the ambitious, the rich and powerful, were to be denied admission to heaven.

The triumph of Christianity

These days, once again, the tragedy of James Watson, one of the most famous scientists in the world for having been one of the discoverers of the molecular structure of DNA, has come to public attention.

For having accepted that IQ is differential among human races, currently Watson is treated as a pariah in his country to the extent that he had to sell his gold medal awarded to him in the Nobel Prize ceremony of 1962.

I’ve talked about the Mexican film Roma, which is being hugely acclaimed in national and international film circles. Time magazine ranked the Mexican Indian as the best performance of 2018. This Indian woman whom the director Alfonso Cuarón used had no experience as an actress before Roma (she speaks the Mixtec language). But this Indian has been catapulted to fame by the mere fact of having starred in the Cuarón movie. She is even doing tours in the United States where, through a translator, they interview her.

In the words that the gospel attributes to Jesus, the last shall be the first and the first the last. When in 1968 I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey I imagined that in the world of the future only whites, like those that appear in the film, would conquer space and make the leap to overman (this is the message of the film that used the symphonic poem of Richard Strauss, Thus Spake Zarathustra, inspired in Nietzsche’s book of the same title). Who would have said that in the 21st century the exact opposite would occur!: the neighbouring country of the north would marginalise one of its best scientists to the degree that he suffers economic hardship and sold his medal, and it would catapult the career of a Mexican Indian whose mother tongue is not even Spanish.

The triumph of Christianity over the Aryan mind, the inversion of values that Nietzsche so much warned about, is now total: absolute.