‘The sacralisation of blacks in our culture is both the opposite of what blacks deserve, and the principal expression of white Americans’ will to national and racial suicide’. —Larry Auster
This Jew converted to Christianity forgot to blame his new religion for this mess!
Note of the Editor:
Those familiar with the critical literature of the New Testament know that there is only one original gospel, that of Mark. Luke and Matthew copied and pasted a bunch of verses from Mark’s gospel to add even more literary fiction from the pen of these two Synoptics (John the Evangelist would later do the same).
Richard Carrier needs no introduction on this site. The new visitor who is unfamiliar with his work can consult the links about Carrier on the sidebar. Precisely because Carrier is a typical left-wing scholar, the exact opposite of post-Nietzscheans like us, I am struck by how he talks about how the evangelist Mark transvalued—the word he uses—the axiology of the Greco-Roman world.
In his most recent debate, uploaded this morning, with Dennis R. MacDonald, the author of the book he reviews below, Carrier used again the word transvaluation a couple of times right at the beginning of the YouTube debate (just don’t pay attention to the degenerate music that their host chose).
The following is Carrier’s ‘Review of The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark’, a book-review of the MacDonald book, Yale University, 2000 (bold-type added by me):
______ 卐 ______
This is an incredible book that must be read by everyone with an interest in Christianity. MacDonald’s shocking thesis is that the Gospel of Mark is a deliberate and conscious anti-epic, an inversion of the Greek ‘Bible’ of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which in a sense ‘updates’ and Judaizes the outdated heroic values presented by Homer, in the figure of a new hero, Jesus (whose name, of course, means ‘Savior’). When I first heard of this I assumed it would be yet another intriguing but only barely defensible search for parallels, stretching the evidence a little too far-tantalizing, but inconclusive. What I found was exactly the opposite. MacDonald’s case is thorough, and though many of his points are not as conclusive as he makes them out to be, when taken as a cumulative whole the evidence is so abundant and clear it cannot be denied. And being a skeptic to the thick, I would never say this lightly. Several scholars who reviewed or commented on it have said this book will revolutionize the field of Gospel studies and profoundly affect our understanding of the origins of Christianity, and though I had taken this for hype, after reading the book I now echo that very sentiment myself.
Background and purpose of Mark
MacDonald begins by describing what scholars of antiquity take for granted: anyone who learned to write Greek in the ancient world learned from Homer. Homer was the textbook. Students were taught to imitate Homer, even when writing on other subjects, or to rewrite passages of Homer in prose, using different vocabulary. Thus, we can know for certain that the author of Mark’s Gospel was thoroughly familiar with the works of Homer and well-trained in recasting Homeric verse into new prose tales. The status of Homer in basic education remained throughout antiquity, despite the fact that popular and intellectual sentiment had been sternly against the ethics and theology of his epics since the age of Classical Greece. Authors from Plato (400 b.c.e) to Plutarch (c. 100 c.e.) sought to resolve this problem by ‘reinterpreting’ Homer as allegory, or by expunging or avoiding offensive passages, neither of which was a perfect solution.
For the Latin language, the opportunity was afforded for Virgil to solve this problem by recasting the Homeric epic into Roman form, exhibiting Roman ideals and creating more virtuous heroes and gods. Likewise, borrowing and recasting from Homer is evident in numerous works of fiction, which often had a religious flavour, and were proliferating in the very same period as the Gospels. One prominent example (mentioned but not emphasised by MacDonald) is the Satyricon of Petronius, which can be decisively dated prior to 66 A.D. and thus is most likely earlier than any known Gospel, and since this novel was in Latin (and a satire), it is almost certain that many undatable Greek novels, which surely originated the form, long precede this. So rewriting Homer to depict new religious ideas and values was a standard phenomenon. In MacDonald’s words, ‘Homer was in the air that Mark’s readers breathed’ (p. 8), and all the more so among Mark’s Gentile audience. But to smartly recast Homer into a new Greek form, reflecting contemporary Graeco-Jewish ideals, was a task simply waiting to be done. If MacDonald is right, this is what Mark set out to do. So much is clear: the motive, ability, and inspiration were certainly present, and MacDonald rapidly presents all the evidence, backing it up with copious and scholarly endnotes in chapter 1.
Why? In MacDonald’s words, Mark ‘thoroughly, cleverly, and strategically emulated’ stories in Homer and the Old Testament, merging two great cultural classics, in order ‘to depict Jesus as more compassionate, powerful, noble, and inured to suffering than Odysseus’ (p. 6), and hence ‘the earliest evangelist was not writing a historical biography, as many interpreters suppose, but a novel, a prose anti-epic of sorts’ (p. 7). In particular, the differences between Mark and Homer need no explanation: the differences are the point, the very objective of the later author. Some of those differences are also the obvious result of a change of scene from the ancient Mediterranean to near-contemporary, Roman-occupied Judaea, or of literary borrowing from Jewish texts. Some may reflect some sort of traditional or historical core story, though it is almost impossible to tell when. Instead, it is the similarities that ‘cry out for explanation’, and contemporary apologists must now begin to address this issue.
Of particular use, for all those who want to develop (or attack) theories of literary borrowing—in the Gospels or elsewhere—is the set of six criteria for identifying textual influence outlined by MacDonald at the end of his first chapter, and demonstrated quite effectively on a passage in Acts. Though no one of these criteria alone carries very much weight, the more criteria that are met in a single instance, the stronger the case. However, one caveat MacDonald does not provide is in regard to his criterion of order. In many cases, matching sequences of passages or themes is indeed significant. However, some cases of matching sequence are such that any other sequence would be logically impossible. Therefore, correlation of this kind can in some cases be coincidence. Nevertheless, even engaging this caution, the sequential evidence MacDonald presents is very often, taken as a whole, not coincidental. Likewise, it should be known that much of Mark’s use of Homer is to shape and detail an otherwise non-Homeric story, and the task of deciding what that core story is, or whether this core story in any given case is a Biblical emulation, or a historical fact, or a legend, or something of the author’s deliberate creation, or any combination thereof, is not something MacDonald even intends to undertake in this book, although he makes some suggestions in his concluding paragraphs.
Modeling Odysseus
The Odyssey is rife with the theme of the suffering hero, and MacDonald builds a solid case in chapter 2 for the philosophical veneration of Odysseus as the best example of a man. If Jesus could be made to one-up and even replace Odysseus, Mark would achieve a literary and moral coup. And there are in the overall story obvious if not overly-telling similarities: ‘Both [men] faced supernatural opposition… Each travelled with companions unable to endure the hardships of the journey, and each returned to a home infested with rivals who would attempt to kill him as soon as they recognised him’, and ‘both heroes returned from Hades alive’ (p. 17). Some parallels are a little more startling but less significant to the historian than to the literary critic: the parable of the Wicked Tenants (Mk. 12:1-12), and the passage capturing the famous phrase ‘for you do not know when the master of the house will come’ (Mk. 13:34-5), both evoke the image of Odysseus returning in disguise to surprise the suitors who have turned his house into a den of sin (MacDonald develops this theme further in chapter 5, and again in chapter 14, and in the conclusion). Do not be like them, Mark is saying to his readers. But of course Jesus himself could have said that, intending the very same allusion. Examples like these can make good material for sermons, and serve well the connoisseurs of visionary prose, yet don’t really prove whether Mark has himself deliberately crafted the story. But in conjunction with what follows, this becomes part of a cumulative case for Mark’s inversion of Homer.
Who knew, for instance, that Odysseus was also a carpenter? The companions are another general link with the Odyssey. MacDonald points out how Mark is the harshest evangelist in his treatment of the disciples, while the others sometimes go out of their way to omit or alter this disparagement when they borrow from Mark. Why were the disciples such embarrassing nitwits, ‘greedy, cowardly, potentially treacherous, and above all foolish’ (p. 20)? As history, it is hardly credible. As a play on Homer, it makes perfect sense: for the companions of Odysseus were exactly like this. Homer cleverly employed the ineptitudes of the crew to highlight the virtues of Odysseus, making him appear even more the hero, enhancing his ‘wisdom, courage, and self-control’ (p. 23). MacDonald briefly explores five other general similarities between the two ‘entourages’ in chapter 3, including the fact that in the one story we have sailors, while in the other, fishermen-who do a lot of going about in boats, even though the vast majority of Judaea is dry land.
Chief among these similarities is the comparison between Peter and Eurylochus. Both spoke on behalf of all the followers, both challenged the ‘doomsday predictions’ of their master to their own peril, both were accused by their leader of being under the influence of an evil demon, and both ‘broke their vows to the hero in the face of suffering’—in effect, both ‘represent[ed] the craven attitude toward life’ (p. 22-3). Again, this could be a mere veneer woven through an otherwise true story by Mark, and some of MacDonald’s ideas (such as developed in chapter 4) are intriguing but too weak to do much with. But it is true that both epics announce from the start a focus on a single individual, both center on a king and his son reestablishing authority over a kingdom, both involve an inordinate amount of events and travel at sea. Both works begin by summoning their own Muse: Homer, the Muse herself; Mark, the Prophet Isaiah. In both stories, the son’s patrimony is confirmed by a god in the form of a bird, and this confirmation prepares the hero to face an enemy in the very next scene: Telemachus, the suitors; Jesus, Satan. And eventually the odd links keep accumulating, and compel one to question the whole thing.
Stark examples
‘Once the evangelist linked the sufferings of Jesus to those of Odysseus, he found in the epic a reservoir of landscapes, characterisations, type-scenes, and plot devices useful for crafting his narrative’ (p. 19). Of course, all throughout MacDonald points out coinciding parallels with the Old Testament and other Jewish literature, but even these parallels have been moulded according to a Homeric model in every case he examines. Consider two of the many mysteries MacDonald’s theory explains, and these are even among the weakest parallels that he identifies in the book:
Why do the chief priests need Judas to identify Jesus in order to arrest him? This makes absolutely no sense, since many of their number had debated him in person, and his face, after a triumphal entry and a violent tirade in the temple square, could hardly have been more public. But MacDonald’s theory that Judas is a type of Melanthius solves this puzzle: Melanthius is the servant who betrays Odysseus and even fetches arms for the suitors to fight Odysseus—just as Judas brings armed guards to arrest Jesus—and since none of the suitors knew Odysseus, it required Melanthius to finally identify him. MacDonald also develops several points of comparison between the suitors and the Jewish authorities. Thus, this theme of ‘recognition’ stayed in the story even at the cost of self-contradiction. Of note is the fact that Homer names Melanthius with a literary point in mind: for his name means ‘The Black One’, whereas Mark seems to be maligning the Jews by associating Melanthius with Judas, whose name is simply ‘Judah’, i.e. the kingdom of the Jews, after which the Jews as a people, and the region of Judaea, were named.
Why does Pilate agree to free a prisoner as if it were a tradition to do so? Such a practice could hardly have been approved by Rome, since any popular rebel leader who happened to be in custody during the festival would always escape justice. And given Pilate’s reputation for callous ruthlessness and disregard for Jewish interests, it is most implausible to have him participating in such a self-defeating tradition—a tradition for which there is no other evidence of any kind, not even a precedent or similar practice elsewhere. But if Barabbas is understood as the type of Irus, Odysseus’ panhandling competitor in the hall of the suitors, the story makes sense as a clever fiction. Both Irus and Barabbas were scoundrels, both were competing with the story’s hero for the attention of the enemy (the suitors in one case, the Jews in the other), and both are symbolic of the enemy’s culpability.
Of course, Barabbas means ‘son of the father’ and thus is an obvious pun on Christ himself. He also represents the violent revolutionary, as opposed to the very different kind of saviour in Jesus (the real ‘Saviour’). On the other hand, Irus was a nickname derived from a goddess (Iris), and MacDonald fails to point out that her name means ‘rainbow’, which to Mark would have meant the sign from God that there would never again be a flood (Ge. 9:12-13). Moreover, Irus’ real name was Arnaeus, ‘the Lamb’. What more perfect model for Mark? The Jews thus choose the wrong ‘son of the father’ who represents the Old Covenant (symbolised by the rainbow, and represented by the ideal of the military messiah freeing Israel), as well as the scapegoat (the lamb) sent off, bearing the people’s sins into the wilderness, while its twin is sacrificed (Lev. 16:8-10, 23:27-32, Heb. 8-9). MacDonald’s own analysis is actually confirmed by this additional parallel that he missed, and that is impressive.
MacDonald goes on to develop many similar points that not only scream of Homer being on Mark’s mind, but also explain strange features of Mark. The list is surprisingly long:
Why did Jesus, who nevertheless taught openly and performed miracles everywhere, try to keep everything a secret? Why did Jesus stay asleep in a boat during a deadly storm? Why did Jesus drown two thousand pigs? Why does Mark invent a false story about John the Baptist’s execution, one that implicates women? Why are the disciples surprised that Jesus can multiply food even when they had already seen him do it before? Why does Jesus curse a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season? How does Mark know what Jesus said when he was alone at Gethsemane? What is the meaning of the mysterious naked boy at Jesus’ arrest? Why does Jesus, knowing full well God’s plan, still ask why God forsook him on the cross? Why does Mark never once mention Mary Magdalene, or the other two women at the crucifixion, or even Joseph of Arimathea, until after Jesus has died? Why is the temple veil specifically torn ‘top to bottom’ at Jesus’ death? Why is Joseph of Arimathea able to procure the body of a convict so soon from Pilate? Why do we never hear of Joseph of Arimathea again? Why does Jesus die so quickly? Why do the women go to anoint Jesus after he is buried? Why do they go at dawn, rather than the previous night when the Sabbath had already ended?
All these mysteries are explained by the same, single thesis. This is a sign of a good theory. With one theoretical concept, not only countless parallels are identified, but numerous oddities are explained. That is very unlikely to be due to chance. And there is evidence of so many plausible connections, that even though any one of them could perhaps with effort be argued away, the fact that there are so many more makes it increasingly unlikely that MacDonald is seeing an illusion. Finally, his entire theory is plausible within the context of what we can deduce to have been Mark’s cultural and educational background.
Crescendo of doom
MacDonald’s book is built like a crescendo: as one reads on, the cases not only accumulate, they actually get better and better, clearer and clearer. In the story of the Gerasene swine (Mk. 5:1ff) MacDonald finds that 18 verses have thematic parallels in the Odyssey, 13 of those in exactly the same order! And even with some of those out of order the order is not random but is inverted, and thus a connection remains evident. In the story of Salome and the execution of John, MacDonald finds seven thematic parallels with the Murder of Agamemnon, all of them in the same order, and on top of that he details two other general parallels. And the two food miracles, forming a doublet in Mark, contain details that match a similar doublet of feasts in the Odyssey, and contain them in the same respective order: ‘Details in the [first] story of Nestor’s feast not found in the [second] story of Menelaus appear in the [first] feeding of the five thousand and not in its twin’ while ‘details in the [second] story of Menelaus not found in the [first] story of Nestor appear in the [second] feeding of the four thousand and not in the first story’ so that ‘the chances of these correspondences deriving from accident are slim’ (p. 85).
(Editor’s interpolated note: A mosaic depicting Odysseus, from the villa of La Olmeda, Pedrosa de la Vega, Spain, late 4th-5th centuries c.e. Both he and Homer are always depicted as whites.)
These examples of a connection between Mark and Homer are far denser than the two examples I detailed earlier, and cannot be explained away even by the most agile of thinkers. Consider the last case, which even has the fewest parallels relative to the other two: in the first feasts, the main characters go by sea, but in the second, by land; in the first, only men attend (even though there is no explanation in Mark of why this should be), but in the second there is no distinction; in the first, the masses assemble into smaller groups, and lie on soft spots, but not in the second; more attend the first than the second (and the numbers are about the same: 5000 in Mark, 4500 in Homer).
On the other hand, in the second feasts, unlike the first, someone asks the host a discouraging question and yet the host shows compassion anyway—in Mark, this is particularly strange, since after the first miracle the disciples have no excuse to be surprised that Jesus can multiply food, so the doubting question can only be explained by the Homeric parallel; finally, in the second feasts, as opposed to the first, there are two sequential courses—bread, then meat. In both authors, the feasts serve an overt educational role: in the one case to educate the hero’s son about hospitality, in the other to educate the disciples about Jesus’ power and compassion, drawing attention to the difference in each story’s moral values. There are even linguistic parallels—Homer’s feasts were called ‘symposia’ (drinking parties) even though that word usually referred to smaller gatherings; likewise, Mark writes that the first feast was organised by ‘symposia’, despite the fact that only food is mentioned, not water or wine. Several of these details in Mark, as noted, are simply odd by themselves, yet make perfect sense when we see the Homeric model, and therein again lies the power of MacDonald’s thesis.
MacDonald does similar work illuminating the Transfiguration, the healing of Bartimaeus, the Hydropatesis (water-walk), the Marcan Apocalypse, the Triumphal Entry, the Anointing, the Passover Feast (including a definite connection with cannibalism that offers a possible ideological origin for the Eucharist as a transvaluation of Homer), the Prayer and Arrest at Gethsemane, the Crucifixion, the Burial, and some details of the Empty Tomb narrative. His theory provides an excellent reason to suppose that the naked boy at Jesus’ arrest is the same as the boy the women find in the empty tomb—and he is a marker of resurrection: a type of the ill-fated Elpenor. Likewise, his theory puts a serious damper on the historicity of Joseph of Arimathea and the burial account in Mark: Joseph is a type of Priam, who rescued the body of Hector for burial in a similar way.
What I found additionally worthwhile is how MacDonald’s theory illuminates the theme of ‘reversal of expectation’ which so thoroughly characterises the Gospels—not only in the parables of Jesus, where the theme is obvious, but in the very story itself. Though MacDonald himself does not pursue this in any detail, his book helped me to see it even more clearly. James and John, who ask to sit at the right and left of Jesus in his glory, are replaced by the two thieves at Jesus’ crucifixion: Simon Peter, Jesus’ right-hand man who was told he had to ‘deny himself and take up his cross and follow’ (8:34), is replaced by Simon of Cyrene when it comes time to truly bear the cross; Jesus is anointed for burial before he dies; and when the women go to anoint him after his death, their expectations are reversed in finding his body missing.
Later Gospels added even more of these reversals: for instance in Matthew Jesus’ father, Joseph, is replaced by Joseph of Arimathea when the duty of burial arose—a duty that should have been fulfilled by the father; likewise, contrary to expectation, the Mary who laments his death and visits his tomb is not Mary his mother, but a prostitute; and while the Jews attack Jesus for healing and doing good on the Sabbath, they in turn hold an illegal meeting, set an illegal guard, and plot evil on the Sabbath, and then break the ninth commandment the next day. This theme occurs far too often to have been in every case historical, and its didactic meaning is made clear in the very parables of reversal told by Jesus himself, as well as, for instance, his teachings about family, or hypocrisy, and so on. These stories were crafted to show that what Jesus preached applied to the real world, real events, ‘the word made flesh’.
Death and resurrection
MacDonald’s book concludes with an analysis of how Jesus as a character in Mark is also an inversion of Hector and Achilles in the Iliad. Both Jesus and Achilles knew they were fated to die and spoke of this fate often, but whereas Achilles chose his fate in exchange for ‘eternal fame’, and for himself alone, Jesus chose it in exchange for ‘eternal life’, for all humankind. This is one among many examples of how Mark has updated the values in Homer, highlighting this fact by crafting his narrative in deliberate imitation of Homer’s epics. In a similar fashion, while the death of Hector doomed Troy to destruction, Jesus’ death doomed the Temple to destruction. According to MacDonald, these themes and others guide Mark’s construction of the passion narrative, and though borrowing from the Old Testament and other Jewish texts in the passion account is far more prevalent than anywhere else in his Gospel, there is still a play on the Iliad evident in various details.
For example, MacDonald finds more than 11 parallels between Mark’s account of the crucifixion and the death of Hector, all but one of those in the same order (and that one exception is in inverted order), and 11 more parallels between Mark’s account of the burial of Jesus and Homer’s account of the burial of Hector, all in the same order. It is notable that resurrection, anastasia, was a theme in the Iliad: the concept appears three times, twice in declarations of its impossibility, once in a metaphor for Hector’s survival of certain death. It thus contained a fitting challenge that Mark was happy to answer with a simple prose epic that everywhere flaunted the fact that anastasia was indeed possible, and real. While Hector, Elpenor, and Patroclus were all burned and buried at dawn, the tomb of Jesus was empty at dawn; while the Iliad and Odyssey were epics about mortality, the Gospel was an epic about immortality.
The ending of Mark
I have one point of criticism for chapter 21, where MacDonald diverges from his central thesis to explain why Mark ends his Gospel as he does. MacDonald proposes an explanation from the historical context of the author. It is quite likely that many Christians were killed, and the original Jerusalem church destroyed, in the Jewish War of 66-70 A.D. MacDonald in several places relates how Mark most likely wrote his Gospel after the conclusion of the war (there are, to be sure, ample references that assume this, as well as that the world would end soon thereafter—cf. especially MacDonald’s third appendix). So Mark, MacDonald argues, was faced with explaining why Jesus had not forewarned his disciples to evacuate Judaea. Mark’s explanation, so the theory goes, is that Jesus did warn them, but they never heard the warning—in particular, they were supposed to go to Galilee after the resurrection to see Jesus, but the women failed to report this to the disciples and so they never went (and this tactic also allows the disciples to get off the hook: those at fault were mere fickle women).
The problem with this theory should be obvious: it is not the fact that it fails to explain how Mark could know the story if no one told it—for this did not stop him from relating what Jesus said in private when no witnesses were at hand, nor did it stop Matthew from relating secret conversations of the Jews; rather, the problem is that it fails to explain how Christianity started. Even assuming Mark is inventing this account apologetically, how did Mark imagine that the resurrection ever began to be preached if no one was ever told about the empty tomb and no one saw the risen Jesus, even in visions or dreams? Since the earliest accounts, in Paul, clearly suggest post mortem sightings of Jesus, and even tie these to the origin of the Gospel itself (and I have in mind the revelation to Paul mentioned in Galatians, and the visions to Peter and the others mentioned in 1 Corinthians), it does not seem plausible for Mark to expect his readers to reject this tradition, as would be required for his alleged hidden point even to be noticed, much less understood. I thus cannot buy MacDonald’s theory on this point.
(Editor’s interpolated note: An icon of Saint Mark the Evangelist, 1657. Note that he’s depicted as swarthy.)
My own hypothesis is that Mark ended the Gospel thus in order to set up a pretext for why little of his particular story had been heard in the Christian community until he wrote it down. If we suppose that the resurrection as preached by Paul was of a spiritual nature, and therefore had nothing to do with empty tombs, then to suddenly disseminate such a story would raise eyebrows unless the author were ready with an explanation. And by building an explanation into his story he essentially covers himself. It is possible that Mark originally concluded his tale with an assertion that the women later reported the story to him, an ending that would be struck out and replaced to suit the new physicalist Christology that would follow, as well as in support of the new reliance on apostolic authority which seems never to have been a concern for Mark.
But it is also possible that this would not have mattered. The faithful would not necessarily be too bothered about Mark’s sources, since Revelation itself could always provide (in his letter to the Galatians, Paul himself claimed he learned the Gospel through direct revelation from God). Even if they were to ask, Mark or the sellers of his story could easily have provided persuasive oral explanations to satisfy any believer, who would be more than ready to believe anything that agreed with their values and doctrine and glorified and magnified the power of their beloved Lord. Ultimately, if Mark invented the empty tomb, he may also have inadvertently caused the invention of a physical resurrection—since an empty tomb, though meant as a symbol, if taken as a fact could imply a physical resurrection, leaving room for future evangelists to spin the yarn further still.
Conclusion
What is especially impressive is the vast quantity of cases of direct and indirect borrowing from Homer that can be found in Mark. One or two would be interesting, several would be significant. But we are presented with countless examples, and this is as cumulative as a case can get.
In the end, I came away from this book with a new appreciation for Mark, whose Gospel tends to be derided as the work of a rather poor, simple Greek author. Though Mark’s Greek is extremely colloquial, not at all in high literary style, this itself is surely a grand and ingenious transvaluation of Homer: whereas the great epics were archaic and difficult, only to be mastered by the educated elites, only to be understood completely by those with access to glossaries and commentaries and marked-up critical editions, Mark not only updated Homer’s values and theology, but inverted its entire character as an elite masterpiece, by making his own epic simple, thoroughly understandable by the common, the poor, the masses, and lacking in the overt pretension and cleverness of poetic verse, written in plain, ordinary language. The scope of genius evident in Mark’s reconstruction of Homeric motifs is undeniable and has convinced me that Mark was no simpleton: he was a literary master, whose achievement is all the greater in his choice of idiom-his ‘poor Greek’ was deliberate and artful, as was his story.
Another theme that becomes apparent throughout this book is how quickly Christians lost touch with this allegorical meaning. Even the other Evangelists, when borrowing from Mark, stripped out the key and telling details and thus obviously missed the point; and only one other author, that of the Acts of Andrew, did anything overtly comparable in comprehensively recrafting Homer. By itself, this might be evidence against such a meaning actually being in Mark. But the evidence that this meaning is present is overwhelming on its own terms, and we can only conclude of early Christian ignorance, instead, that the real origins and message of the earliest Christians was all but lost even to the second or third generation. By the time there was a church in a significant sense, Christianity had been radically changed by the throngs of its converts, and, amidst the din of outsiders who stole the reigns, the very essence of that original Church of Jerusalem faded, powerless to survive under the mass of superstition and arrogance.
Having read this book, I am now certain that the historicity of the Gospels and Acts is almost impossible to establish. The didactic objectives and methods of the authors have so clouded the truth with literary motifs and allusions and parabolic tales that we cannot know what is fact and what fiction. I do not believe that this entails that Jesus was a myth, however—and MacDonald himself is not a mythicist, but assumes that something of a historical Jesus lies behind the fictions of Mark. Although MacDonald’s book could be used to contribute to a mythicist’s case, everything this book proves about Mark is still compatible with there having been a real man, a teacher, even a real ‘miracle worker’ in a subjective sense, or a real event that inspired belief in some kind of resurrection, and so on, which was then suitably dressed up in allegory and symbol.
However, the inevitable conclusion is that we have all but lost this history forever. The Gospels can no longer support a rational belief in anything they allege to have occurred, at least not without external, unbiased corroboration, which we do not have for any of the essential, much less supernatural details of the story. And if Alvar Ellegård is right (Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ, Overlook, 1999), Mark was almost entirely fiction, written after the sack of Jerusalem to freeze in symbolic prose the metaphorical message of Christianity, a faith which began with a Jesus executed long before the Roman conquest, who then appeared in visions (like that which converted Paul) a century later, in the time of Pilate, to inspire the new creed.
What is important is not that this can be decisively proven—nothing can, as our information is too thin, too scarce, too unreliable to decisively prove anything about the origins of Christianity. What is important is that theories like Ellegård’s can’t be disproven, either—it is one among many distinctly possible accounts of what really happened at the dawn of Christianity, which MacDonald’s book now makes even more plausible. And so long as it remains possible, even plausible, that the bulk of Mark is fiction, the contrary belief that it is fact can never be secure.
A generous sponsor has contributed the amount that Lightning Source demands to publish On Exterminationism. Still, I would like to wait until the first days of 2021 before making the expense in case Lulu responds earlier and solves the problem of the software that is preventing me from publishing it on their platform.
In the context of Aron Nelson’s YouTube series about the classification of life, yesterday I was talking about page 100 of On Exterminationism. I would like to add that Nelson has not responded to what I said, nor did any of his commenters.
Here is what appears on page one hundred, a quote from Nietzsche about the religion of the Aryans in India. We can already imagine what the West would be like today if an Aryan religion had taken over the imagination of whites instead of the Semitic bullshit that our asshole parents taught to us:
______ 卐 ______
My demand of the philosopher is well known: that he take his stand beyond good and evil and treat the illusion of moral judgment as beneath him. A first, tentative example: at all times morality has aimed to ‘improve’ men—this aim is above all what was called morality.
To call the taming of an animal its ‘improvement’ sounds almost like a joke to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in kennels doubts that dogs are ‘improved’ there. They are weakened, they are made less harmful, and through the depressive effect of fear, through pain, through wounds, and through hunger, they become sickly beasts. It is no different with the tamed man whom the priest has ‘improved’.
In the early Middle Ages, when the church was indeed, above all, a kennel, the most perfect specimens of the ‘blond beast’ were hunted down everywhere; and the noble Teutons, for example, were ‘improved’. But how did such an ‘improved’ Teuton look after he had been drawn into a monastery? Like a caricature of man, a miscarriage: he had become a ‘sinner’, he was stuck in a cage, tormented with all sorts of painful concepts. And there he lay, sick, miserable, hateful to himself, full of evil feelings against the impulses of his own life, full of suspicion against all that was still strong and happy. In short, a ‘Christian’…
Let us consider the other method for ‘improving’ mankind, the method of breeding a particular race or type of man. The most magnificent example of this is furnished by Indian morality, sanctioned as religion in the form of The law of Manu. Here the objective is to breed no less than four races within the same society: one priestly, one warlike, one for trade and agriculture, and finally a race of servants, the Sudras. Obviously, we are no longer dealing with animal tamers: a man that is a hundred times milder and more reasonable is the only one who could even conceive such a plan of breeding. One breathes a sigh of relief at leaving the Christian atmosphere of disease and dungeons for this healthier, higher, and wider world. How wretched is the New Testament compared to Manu, how foul it smells!
Yet this method also found it necessary to be terrible—not in the struggle against beasts, but against their equivalent—the ill-bred man, the mongrel man, the chandala. And again the breeder had no other means to fight against this large group of mongrel men than by making them sick and weak. Perhaps there is nothing that goes against our feelings more than these protective measures of Indian morality. Manu himself says: ‘The chandalas are the fruit of adultery, incest, and rape (crimes that follow from the fundamental concept of breeding)’. These regulations are instructive enough: we encounter Aryan humanity at its purest and most primordial; we learn that the concept of ‘pure blood’ is very far from being a harmless concept. On the other hand, it becomes obvious in which people the chandala hatred against this Aryan ‘humaneness’ has become a religion, eternalised itself, and become genius—primarily in the Gospels, even more so in the Book of Enoch.
Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity—the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favoured, against ‘race’: the undying chandala hatred is disguised as a religion of love. (Twilight of the Idols, section ‘The improvers of mankind’).
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‘The general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favoured, against race…’ This is why, according to a recent Amren article, BLM has received a billion dollars, and why LGBT has become also the neochristian religion of our times.
This is a postscript to my previous post ‘Classification of life’ where I wrote: ‘I recently debunked the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit showing that in the real world women cannot compete with men in chess (here, here and here)’. I failed to add to these links my December 1 entry, ‘A naked ape’ where I quote Desmond Morris’ book, which cover, incidentally, Aron Nelson shows in his series Systematic Classification of Life. Desmond Morris said:
Given this situation, one might very well expect to find some sort of frontal self-mimicry of the type seen in the gelada baboon. Can we, if we look at the frontal regions of the females of our species, see any structures that might possibly be mimics of the ancient genital display of hemispherical buttocks and red labia?
Lips on women’s mouths! Only until I read that book I understood why we want to kiss them! I quoted Morris in the context of what I had written in ‘On Beth’s cute tits’:
Decades ago, the biggest surprise I came across when reading The Naked Ape was discovering why men crave women. If we consider the shape of a baby bottle for milk, that is exactly the shape female teats would have if the objective were purely functional for baby sucking. But women’s breasts are completely different. Morris explains the phenomenon of self-imitation in other species of apes. In these species, natural selection favours females to imitate their buttocks with their coloured breasts, to shift the aggression of the males to a more erotic channelling.
I was shocked to discover that my species is a more aesthetic version of the same phenomenon of self-imitation! But that is exactly what it is when we see the ape we are with a naked eye: the needs of the baby are secondary to the trick that Nature does to us so that we impregnate our females. Nature makes them irresistible to our instincts for the human species to breed.
Except for Antinatalist44, no other commenter told me anything about it. I wonder if, unlike me, most white advocates aren’t interested in science, zoology, and physical anthropology. I find it fascinating, as science supports the thesis of this site that we are animals like any other, although with tremendously developed frontal lobes in the brain. Accepting who we are has a lot to do with saving the white man from extinction.
As I said yesterday, Aron Nelson was very scientific before arriving, in his final episode, at the appearance of the human races. But white nationalists too, like Nelson, resort to a pseudoscientific vision of the human being by continuing to believe in life after death or in a Christian or neochristian morality that prevents us from genociding our enemies.
I came up with the expression ‘the extermination of Neanderthals’ decades before I found out that Cro Magnon had perhaps exterminated the Neanderthals. In Nelson’s series for example, it is mentioned that Neanderthals fled as much as possible before the Cro Magnon advance in Europe until they had nowhere else to flee, thus becoming extinct. This is the attitude that the white man must have, once again, towards the more primitive versions of humans. And if he doesn’t have it, it is because he is still under the spell of the Jew who wrote the New Testament, with those commands of universal love, including our enemies, etcetera.
What I want to get to is that the fact that white nationalists don’t see Beth’s pretty boobs for what they really are, is the other side of the coin of accepting a Semitic code that cannot be more antithetical to the Laws of Manu that the Aryans developed when they conquered India (see page 100 of On Exterminationism). Seeing our women for what they actually are, and Neanderthals for what they are, a species that competes with our habitat that has to be expelled (and eventually exterminated) are, in effect, two sides of the same coin.
But when will white nationalists transvalue their values from Semitic values to Aryan values? The fact that only one commenter told me anything substantial about my article on Beth’s palatable boobs suggests that other commenters have not shaken the Christian vision of man. Or did they just not want to opine?
Whites who want to preserve their race are powerless in America, and they are powerless precisely because they are unwilling to inflict death upon their opponents.
Alden: ‘Whites have none of the essentials for a successful revolution or even to stop the ongoing racism against us’.
Yes, that’s true, and I agree with a lot of what you wrote. But my point was, the one most essential thing they’re lacking is the will to fight; the worldview that would allow them to celebrate the deaths of children, such as Breivik killed, or even of those mostly adult Muslims that Tarrant murdered. If they had the will to fight, they could, but they value civilised behaviour and the products of civilisation, and the sort of violence that would be needed to preserve themselves as a race would destroy all that. Their pride consists in being civilised in ‘law and order’, luxuriating in consumer goods and ease, getting fat.
Lavoisier: ‘Killing innocent civilians is never the way to win hearts and minds to a cause’.
Tell that to the killers of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. They weren’t looking to win anyone to their cause, and they were victorious. Or the Romans, who finally levelled Carthage, sold the population into slavery, and sowed the ground with salt. Total war requires such behaviour, and if you’re not willing to do it, you’re not serious. Trying to win hearts and minds is why the USA hasn’t won a war since WWII.
Kill their bodies, and their hearts and minds cease to be a problem.
* * *
The very name ‘Wokeism’ harkens back to the outbreaks of religious fervour referred to as the Great Awakenings of Christian America. By some accounts there have been four of them.
‘Wokeism’ is arguably a fifth wave, just Christian ethics in another form, where belief in Jesus and anything supernatural has become optional. The cultural triumph of Christianity has been so complete in the West that even atheists accept without question the so-called ‘brotherhood of man’, the existence and equality of ‘souls’, the wisdom of ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, etc. There’s no evidence for any of that stuff, of course. But does that make it a religion? I say no. Though there are still Christians involved in it, it’s mostly secular and just political.
Fanatic Christian abolitionist John Brown was the early prototype for today’s BLM and Antifa rioters. While ‘Wokeism’ is the cultural residue of 19th century American Christianity, it’s still political, not a competing religion.
I’m not done with what I said on Friday.
What is known in the United States as white nationalism is not white nationalism. If it were, the Americans who promote it would say that Leonidas, Hermann and Hitler are the heroes who would replace the faces carved at Mount Rushmore. This American provincialism is the great failure not only of ordinary white nationalists but of one of their best minds, the retired Michael O’Meara, who in one of his articles that I have been mentioning wrote:
If you want, then, to engage in discussions about race and racial differences, you bring in the geneticists and Darwinists. But if you want to build a nationalist movement to ensure the continuity of white America, you appeal to Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson, to the Battle of the Alamo and Kearney’s Workingmen, to the Stars and Bars and the sustaining voices of those quintessential representatives of America’s white culture, the Carter family.
Stars and Bars? Really? As Robert Morgan explained to us, the carved personalities at Mount Rushmore, including the Jefferson that O’Meara wanted to put on us as an inspiring figure, represent ideals that would eventually lead to white decline. Let’s compare what O’Meara wrote with what Mauricio recently told us responding to an objection about carving out the images of Leonidas and Hermann (‘We are unsure as to how they looked’):
We don’t need photos of them. The Christians didn’t need photos for Jesus, neither do we for our demigods’ iconography.
Leonidas looks like a veteran of a hundred battles. He is the wise old man of sixty years, husband, father, king. Long grizzled hair tied in braids. Cleft chin, scars across his cheeks and brow. His deep, sullen blue eyes observe the horizon fiercely, as the subhuman hordes approach. He grips his spear with his right hand and his Corinthian helmet under his left. Long red cape, shining bronze armour. Behind him, a wall of shields with the Lambda symbol. He is hopelessly outnumbered, and yet he knows no fear.
Hermann is a virile young man full of wit and brash confidence. Golden-blonde, bright blue eyes, very tall. He is the clever two-faced warrior. In one face, he is a gallant Roman commander, with steel armour, silvery helmet and blue cape, on horseback leading his cohort across the Rhine. He is the Eagle. In the other face, he is a muscular, bare-chested German warrior, with blue war-paint markings, leading a ferocious charge against the Roman shield-wall, roaring from top of his lungs: ‘TYR!’ He is the Wolf.
There is no image we cannot carve.
In short, what people on the internet call white nationalism, O’Meara included, is actually American nationalism. That should be obvious: as a legitimate white nationalism would imply a story that inspires all white Nordic types, not just those from a single country.
Tomorrow will mark three years of the event in Charlottesville. Just compare how the American government reacted to that big event with its reaction to BLM. The reversal of classical values to Christian values that Nietzsche so feared (‘last shall be first’, etc.) is now complete. The government of the United States is really Sauron. That non-revolutionary, law-abiding civilian white nationalists fail to propose the destruction of at least all of Lincoln’s symbols is so delusional that there is no point trying to argue with them.
America’s near future will disabuse them.
Or what does the word transvaluation mean in my mouth
There is something that I must add to what I said yesterday in the context of the current approach among race realists, which can be summed up in the already quoted words of Michael O’Meara, ‘The historical course offered by myth, in contrast to the inherently passive determinism of scientific rationalism, is a choice for heroes, not bookworms or computer hobbyists’.
But first of all I must say that the great failure of O’Meara was not seeing in Hitler the hero who created the new myth, the story that supplants the Christian one. Michael was simply unable to see the greatness of the Third Reich. Among Americans only George Lincoln Rockwell, after he finished reading Mein Kampf, saw that Hitlerism was a new religion. William Pierce got off to a good start, calling Hitler ‘our leader’ in National Socialist World in 1968. But then he got carried away by the American way and, instead of using the swastika for the new religion he wanted to create after Rockwell’s assassination, he devised another symbol (which nobody uses anymore).
The tremendous mistake I see here is that the American population cannot make contact with a higher archetype, as the Germans of the last century did. Americans are not the chosen people to create the new religion because their materialistic culture is completely uprooted from the history of their race, so well described by Pierce himself in Who We Are.
Yesterday I said that what is called history must be rewritten since, if it came from the pen of Christians or neochristians, the only value that history books can provide is raw material that must be relocated in the numinous context of the fourteen words.
To give just one example. Recall what I have made of the work of Karlheinz Deschner, his criminal history of Christianity. Although the late Deschner was antichristian, his scale of values was clearly liberal, that is, neochristian: a pseudo-apostate to use my neologism. Deschner’s encyclopaedic knowledge had to be appropriated to turn his legacy around our point of view: the POV of the transvalued man. And the same must be done with the rest of the other historians.
Yesterday I also said that what galvanised men in National Socialism were its marches and events in the streets. From this angle, the only thing that imitated them well, other than Rockwell when I was a kid, was the Charlottesville event three years ago. However, regardless of whether the government ambushed those who demonstrated, the demonstration was schizophrenic because of the American flags they carried. It is as if the Nazis of yore had carried the symbols of the degenerate Weimar Republic on their marches instead of coming up with a new flag.
That the racialist movement that raises the American flag is schizophrenic is seen in its inability to realise that, with its three anti-white wars—the 1860s, the 1940s, and today’s cold war that is already turning hot—the United States has become Mordor, and that using its symbols is mind splitting.
As far as I know, the only contemporary racialist who has understood that you have to hate the US to save the Anglo-German DNA is the Canadian Sebastian Ernst Ronin. Even at that Rockwell failed when trying to mix the swastika with the stars and stripes flag. Don’t be fooled, white nationalists: Since the United States was founded as a worshiping nation of Mammon and the god of the Jews, it is unreformable. The United States can only be repudiated and put an entirely different political animal in its place.
If the American racialist movement were not charlatanic, its proponents would not only begin to rewrite history from Who We Are, but reject both materialistic comfort and Yahweh. They would also begin to learn Germanic languages and would even try to change their American accent to how it sounded in England in Jane Austen’s time. Furthermore, after the Revolution bonfires would burn the books of accepted wisdom, including Bibles, degenerate music and Hollywood movies; in addition to the destruction of churches and the public lynching of those who oppose it.
Mount Rushmore will be nuked and another American mountain will boast colossal granite sculptures representing Leonidas, Hermann, Hitler and that of the new American messiah who led the racial revolution (a man whose name we still ignore).
For the transvaluation of all Christian values to Greco-Roman values to be complete, public opinion won’t give a damn if, instead of nymphs, one or two generals of the ethnostate have had ephebes as cute as Björn Andrésen or Max Born when he was a teenager. (On the other hand, having sex between same-sex adults will be frowned upon as it was frowned upon in Greece and Rome.)
Since that’s impossible given the level of the inflated ego in today’s American nationalist, only a convergence of catastrophes that kills vast numbers of whites around the world will straighten the ways of survivors.
Now that I saw the title of the latest article of The Occidental Observer I couldn’t contain the feeling of what O’Meara said about bookworms and computer hobbyists compared to the heroes we need, including the new messiah whose name we ignore. Without soldiers and transvalued heroes the academy is useless. In other words, the first rightful steps were made in Charlottesville, not in the pieces that Kevin MacDonald publishes. Now we would have to do the same but without the enemy flag, devising a swastika flag for American consumption.
But demonstrating in the streets will be impossible as long as Uncle Sam lives. If the US government didn’t exist, whites would easily win a war against BLM and (((those who finance it))). But killing Sam will be impossible as long as Christians and neochristians dominate both conservatism and white nationalism itself. Without infinite hatred there is no revolution. And with the psychic toll that Christianity bequeathed to us, there will be no place for infinite hatred.
Curiously, American racialists have already heard about the keys to save the race in both Who We Are (transvalued academy as opposed to KMD’s neochristian academy) and The Turner Diaries (bloodthirsty soldiers). But they follow a different path because they insist on being slaves of parental and societal introjects, including the enemy flag.
Although white advocates acknowledge that Jews hate, they are unable to link the info between two elemental neurons and imitate them. Being children of the Christian and liberal ethos they really believe, even many secularised racists, that we should solve our problems without violating the command to love our neighbour. Otherwise they would have already amalgamated their selves with the spirit of the Diaries.
Mine is constructive criticism of white nationalism insofar, unlike destructive criticism, I point out the way that could potentially save them.
Yesterday I changed the title of this site from ‘Christianity and the JQ are one and the same’ to ‘Only the transvaluation will save whites’ (not long ago the subtitle read ‘The site of a man fused to a weirwood).
We have been talking about the transvaluation for a long time. See for example what Jack Frost wrote five years ago in the comments section of The Occidental Observer.
But as Thomas Kuhn said, paradigms are not abandoned: they are replaced. And the only way to replace them is for those who currently believe that the JQ caused everything, to be dying and being replaced by those who know that it was Christianity and its secular epigone that empowered not only Jewry, but negroes, suicidal migration and even self-hatred. (Now that I finished reviewing the fifth book of my From Jesus to Hitler I stumbled again upon the terrible passages about the Christian views of hell: pure and demented self-hatred of whites by whites themselves.)
Frost was ignored by the Observer and is currently ignored, under another pen name, in the comments section of The Unz Review. What I fear is that, if it is true that those who believe in the old paradigm have to die, will there be time for those enlightened in the new paradigm to multiply to the extent of taking over the narrative?
There aren’t many people like me or Frost trying to enlighten others about the root cause of civilisation’s evil. Fortunately, unless the Chinese virus kills me (or something unforeseen) I will see the consequences of the dollar’s fall on the psyche of whites. Yesterday I was watching a couple of recent videos of Mike Maloney on the subject that I don’t want to bother linking to. But that calamity is our only hope. Only the extreme suffering of millions of whites around the world can lead them to straighten their sinful paths, so that at least some transvalue their values.
The fall of the dollar will mark the end of the grotesque, demented and infinitely malignant interregnum that gave not only political power to Mordor, but cultural and media power as well. But only the death of the US would be like watching Sauron’s tower collapse.
In diagnosing the white man, these days I have been using the ‘mental illness’ metaphor, the central metaphor of psychiatry: a pseudoscience. But if I think psychiatry is an inquisitorial pseudoscience why do I use the metaphor? For the simple fact that, once we realise that the medical model of mental disorders is pseudoscientific, the trauma model of mental disorders makes perfect sense. (Except the first and last articles, Day of Wrath explains my point didactically.)
This site has been visited by those racialists who subscribe to the madness called Christian Identity (CI), in which it is simply stated that the characters of the Bible were Aryans in order to convert, in a single blow with a magic wand, the holy book of the Jews into the holy book of the Aryans!
Although I had to ban a Christian Identitarian a few years ago, CI buffs still post from time to time their nonsense on this site as a certain Adam did today. If I allowed his comment it’s because I want to illustrate what mental illness is but not from the psychiatric POV. And to make things most unfair, if Adam wants to reply I won’t let it (let’s see if with such treatment they desist to post their CI stuff in The West’s Darkest Hour).
Day of Wrath, which explains mental illness from the trauma model, is a text that I usually don’t make changes to, as most of the book is only a translation of one of my eleven books in Spanish, El Retorno de Quetzalcóatl. For those who obtained a copy I must reiterate that in the last edition of Day of Wrath I added a very short piece that had already been published on this site. Those who have the edition before that brief addition must know the short piece that I added, reproduced below.
When I speak of ‘possession’ it must be understood phenomena such as the religious ‘great awakening’ that many secular whites have suffered in major western cities, especially the Americans (e.g., the negrolatres of Seattle and Portland). They have brought what I have been calling neofranciscanism to its logical conclusion: worshiping the most dispossessed race and feel good to humiliate and detest the superior race: the transvaluation of values in its purest form!
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Possessed whites
Jordan Peterson may be a sophist but he does well to remind us, quoting Jung, that the human being in general has no ideas: he is possessed by ideas.
Since the Imperial Church destroyed the Greco-Roman world [1], whites literally became possessed by Jewish ideas. Think about how many centuries the possessed ones bent their knees to deities like Yahweh and his son Yeshu.
Whites are so possessed that even the souls of the supposed rebels of the anti-white zeitgeist continue to be possessed by this idea. And I mean not only white nationalists who remain Christians [which includes the Christian Identitarians]. Every time I see more clearly that the fact that books like Who We Are remain unpublished, even by secular racialists, is because Pierce breaks away from Christian ethics by advising ‘extermination or expulsion’ of non-whites throughout his story of the white race.
Understand me well: like the normies, all racialists in today’s world are possessed by an unhealthy idea. And like the normies they will remain possessed until the day of their deaths, as Thomas Kuhn saw. There are exceptions of course, including some commenters who have visited this site. But in general what Jung said remains: human beings have no ideas: they are possessed by ideas. And the idea that in this age governs westerners, including secular white nationalists, remains Christian ethics.
It is true that white nationalists are not normies. But since they are unable to break openly with Christian ethics they are in no man’s land. The metaphor I have been using is that, although they left Normieland, while crossing the psychological Rubicon they stayed in the middle of the river. They are unable to continue crossing into the lands of National Socialism, and will remain unable to cross it until the day of their deaths. The magnet exercised by the precepts of Yahweh and his son Yeshu from the side of the river they left behind is irresistible. Our only hope is to appeal to the very young generations, perhaps teenagers or children, who in the future will read The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour.
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[1] See my 2020 translation of Christianity’s Criminal History by Karlheinz Deschner (links on the sidebar).
‘Traditional Christianity is mature viper venom that has settled, whereas liberal, enlightened Christianity is recycled and of equal effect’. —Albus
Neochristianity, or following Jesus through secular self-immolation—e.g., white fans of BLM—is today’s religion. But how did such florid psychosis originate? How did the tiny mustard seed grow into such a huge weed that it’s now covering the West? Let’s take a good look at the smallest seed…
Watch this homey interview of Richard Carrier.
At 14:48 Carrier comments about the intention of the evangelist Mark (the other evangelists built upon him): ‘It’s all part of the gospel’s model reversing the order of society’.
23: 10: ‘Homer is the Bible, essentially, of the pagans… So what they want to do is called transvaluation. “I am taking stories from the Homeric tales”, rewrite them so that the value message is the value Mark wants to sell, not the value message you get from Homer, so that this book would even replace Homer… for this new society they want to create’.
28:30: ‘And it is political for them [early Christians], but subversively political’.
Later, Carrier talks about why in New Testament studies, replete of Christians, it is so hard that the most parsimonious hypothesis—the nonexistence of Jesus—is taken seriously.
Many critics of Christianity focus on the Apostle Paul, but the one who really brought this Semitic folly to the Gentile quarter was Mark’s literary genius, even if it was all pure literary fiction from his pen.
