Deeper Societal Trends Predating the Central Banks: Part 1
Deeper Societal Trends Predating the Central Banks: Part 1
An exploration of a two thousand year old conflict
Continued from Goals, Motivations and Strategies of the Owners of Modern Society: Part 3…
This part argues that Christianity was a revenge strategy concocted by Jews against Rome for their destruction of the Second Temple. It was successfully deployed in order to rile up the poor, the slaves, the unwanted against Roman society, serving as the blueprint for future egalitarian leftist movements.
THE GREATEST META-NARRATIVE IN WORLD HISTORY: SPIRITUAL BOLSHEVISM
The question arises: what is it about the nature of society that allowed the Rothschilds and their allies to first establish widespread influence and control over European kings, and then enact and control the central banks that so heavily dominate society to this day? What was it about the nature of Christian Europe that allowed carve-outs for money-lenders to create a situation that they could exploit and leverage to control Europe as a whole?
To address this question, let’s go way back in time and consider a theory of an early meta-narrative from two thousand years ago - an example that changed the world forever.
The example of Christianity and spiritual bolshevism.
As a preface, establishment propagation of meta-narratives are not conclusive of either the veracity of underlying source material used in their narratives, nor the results of how the meta-narrative ultimately develops. In this case, the theory that will be advanced is that Paul of Tarsus developed and spread Christianity as a weapon of war against Rome, by far the dominant military power in the world, because they were too weak to win against them by force of arms. Paul’s intent was to transvalue, per Nietzsche, Roman warrior values and turn them into priestly values, and by doing so rile up the Roman slaves, women, and other low-status minority groups and use them as a cudgel to smash their Hellenist enemies. They also hoped to do it in such a way that, if it was victorious, the masses of the world would no longer consider the Jewish people as one ordinary sect among a multitude, deserving of no special consideration, but instead that they were the Chosen People (or at least, former Chosen People) and deserving of a permanent special place in their new religion.
With that said, to emphasize: this theory does not speak to the actual historical figure of Jesus, who stood up to the Pharisees for interpreting the Torah via the Oral Law in ways which contradicted its underlying intent, or for bitterly opposing usury and paying the ultimate price as a result. Per Rene Girard, Jesus’s sacrifice - a stunning and unprecedented act - overturned the scapegoat mechanism that lies at the heart of human nature, and this makes Christianity unique among modern religions in the empathy it gives to victims of mob behavior. Nor does the theory being presented speak to the spiritual strength of the hierarchical Catholic Church which eventually arose from this narrative.
With that in mind, let’s begin. Unlike previous Sections, this Section will start off in the form of a historical story.
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In the 1st century AD the Romans engaged in two long, brutal wars with Israel, known as the Roman-Israeli wars. The Jews wanted independence, they wouldn’t accept Roman rule, and they hated sharing space with polytheistic Hellenists. Writers as diverse as Cicero (106-43 BC), Horace (65-8 BC), Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD), Seneca (4-65 AD), Quintilian (30-100 AD), Martial (40-105 AD) Tacitus (56-120 AD), Juvenal (55-130 AD) and Marcus Aurelius (121-180AD) heavily criticized the Jews for their stubborn ideology and subversion, as well as their militant zealotry.1 Tacitus, the famous historian who praised the Germans, held them in particularly low standing: “For the Jews, everything that is sacred to us is despicable, and what is repugnant to us is lawful. The Jews reveal a stubborn bond with one another…Those who embrace their religion practice the same thing and the first thing they are taught is to despise the Gods.”2
According to Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
“From the reign of Nero to that of Antoninus Pius, the Jews discovered a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome, which repeatedly broke out in the most furious massacres and insurrections. Humanity is shocked at the recital of the horrid cruelties which they committed in the cities of Egypt, of Cyprus, and of Cyrene, where they dwelt in treacherous friendship with the unsuspecting natives; and we are tempted to applaud the severe retaliation which was exercised by the arms of the legions against a race of fanatics whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but of humankind. The enthusiasm of the Jews was supported by the opinion that it was unlawful for them to pay taxes to an idolatrous master; and by the flattering promise which they derived from their ancient oracles, that a conquering Messiah would soon arise, destined to break their fetters, and to invest the favorites of heaven with the empire of the earth.”3
The behavior of the Jews toward Rome and their attempts at Hellenization flabbergasted the Romans, according to blogger Europa Soberana:
Only naive men could think of forbidding the Torah, the Shabbat or the Brit Milah without realizing that the whole of Jewry would prefer to die rather than renouncing their traditions. The Greeks and the Romans, from their Olympic naivete, were too myopic in their approach to the Jewish problem. They ignored the particularities that differentiated the Jews from the rest of the Semitic peoples of the Near East, and thought that they could place their temples and statues there as if the Jews were nothing more than another Arab or Syrian province, either Hellenised or Persianised. The persistent identity that Jewry had shown did not motivate the carefree Romans to sufficiently wrap their heads around the problem. The conviction that the Greco-Romans had of being carriers of a superior culture made them fall into a fateful error: to think that a culture can be valid for all humanity and exported to peoples of different ethnicity. The Hellenisation and Romanisation of the East and North Africa had only one effect: ethnic chaos, the balkanization of Rome itself, ethnic struggles and finally, the appearance of Christianity.
Even using the brute force of her legions Rome was slow to realize that the Jews, in their resentment and their desire for revenge, did not care to sacrifice waves upon waves of individuals if they managed to annihilate a single Roman detachment. This fundamentalist fanaticism, which went beyond the rational, must have left the Romans speechless, who were not accustomed to seeing an ill-equipped military people immolate themselves in that convinced manner, with a mind full of blind faith coming from a jealous, vengeful, abstract and tyrannical god. Jehovah is, without a doubt, an extremely real will, and also a force clearly opposed to the Olympian and solar gods of the European peoples, whose height was the Greco-Roman Zeus-Jupiter.4
Ultimately Rome won these wars with extremely high military losses; Jerusalem was destroyed and an enormous number of Jews were killed - ancient sources say 1,100,000 from the Great Jewish Revolt5 and Cassius Dio say as high as 580,000 from the later Bar Kokhba Rebellion, astronomical figures for that time period.
The Jewish nation was scattered to the winds, creating a Jewish diaspora that would last almost 2,000 years. But Gibbon argues that the Romans were thereafter lenient with the Jews and let them rebuild outside of Jerusalem:
“Notwithstanding these repeated provocations, the resentment of the Roman princes expired after the victory, nor were their apprehensions continued beyond the period of war and danger. By the general indulgence of Polytheism, and by the mild temper of Antoninus Pius, the Jews were restored to their ancient privileges and once more obtained the permission of circumcising their children…New synagogues were frequently erected in the principal cities of the empire; and the sabbaths, the fasts, and the festivals, which were either commanded by the Mosaic law or enjoyed by the traditions of the Rabbis, were celebrated in the most solemn and public manner…their irreconcilable hatred of mankind, instead of flaming out in acts of blood and violence, evaporated in less dangerous gratifications…”6
In the buildup to these Jewish/Roman wars and associated social upheavals, Saul of Tarsus, better known as Saint Paul, a man who had never met Jesus, had a vision of Jesus three years after his death and converted to the religion. This conversion virtually coincided with the initial outbreak of Jewish-Roman antipathy during Pilate’s reign and occurred just prior to the major break in relations attributed to Caligula, suggesting some causal link.
Until the trip of Paul to Damascus, in order to be a Christian it was essential to be a circumcised, orthodox and observant Jew. That the doctrine of Jesus was addressed to the Jews is evident in Matt. 10:6, when he says to the twelve Apostles: ‘Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel’. The phrase implies that the purpose was to rescue those Jews who have strayed from the Law of Moses. This was because ‘if you believed in Moses you would believe me’ (John, 5:46).7 Indeed, Jesus was Jewish, his parents were Jewish, all of the Disciples were Jewish, all the early converts were Jewish, and the three other main figures of the New Testament, Mark, Luke and Paul were also all Jews. This is why Nietzsche stated, “The first thing to be remembered [about Christianity], if we do not wish to lose the scent here, is that we are among Jews.”8
Once Paul got involved in Christianity, he decided to re-tailor its messaging to appeal to non-Jews and spread its message from its narrow Jewish circle and introduce it to the Hellenists. As an elite Pharisee Jew, Paul likely resented the incursion of the Roman Empire into Israel in the decades prior to his birth. He also likely shared the long-standing Jewish antipathy for his neighboring Hellenists. Seeing the futility of violent resistance to the militarily dominant Rome, the greatest martial force on the planet, Paul was likely searching for nonviolent, indirect, psychological or moral means of undermining his enemy. Under this theory, he decided to play up the alleged divinity of a recently-crucified Jewish Rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, and turn him into the savior of humanity.9 According to Jewish tradition Peter knowingly assisted in this process.10
In his 1928 tract “Commissary to the Gentiles: The First to See the Possibilities of War by Propaganda”, Marcus Eli Ravage, a Jew, makes the argument that Christianity was deliberately crafted as a weapon against Rome (later echoed by others such as Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz11):
[Saul had] 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…
[Paul’s idea] 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.12
Paul cleverly tailored his religious arguments to attract the masses of urban poor, those dispossessed and unhappy with the power of Rome, including women, children and slaves: “Paul’s speeches are political cries: intelligent, virulent and fanatical harangues that urge the faithful to accept Jesus Christ to achieve redemption…Another key point that must be recognized as very skillful by the first preachers was to take advantage of the affinity for the poor, the dispossessed, the abandoned, the vagabonds and those who cannot help themselves; and the establishment of institutions of charity, relief and assistance.” 13
By claiming that converts to Christianity were morally superior to Romans in the eyes of God so long as they believed in Christ, and by creating Heaven and Hell as a massive carrot and stick that Hellenist religions lacked (Hades wasn’t much of a motivator for anyone as everyone ended up there), with an all-seeing spying God that constantly watched and judged your every action14, Paul created a supercharged spiritual bolshevism to challenge the foundation of Rome itself. Polytheistic, pluralistic, decentralized Hellenism would have no chance against a universalist, equality-obsessed, intolerant religion which centralized power via regional Bishops (Julian the Apostate planned to centralize Hellenism to compete via the creation of provincial High Priests, as well as to have Hellenist temples provide charity to the masses, but was likely murdered by a Christian soldier before he could). Christianity had too many memetic evolutionary improvements over Hellenism not to eventually spread.
Nietzsche called the creation of Christianity an attempt to transvalue the core values of society by turning it from a warrior to a priestly society — pre-Christianity, the Roman elite used a “good versus bad” system to judge behavior: what was elite, what was strong, what was powerful, what was noble, what was robust, what involved self-determination and personal excellence, what could be achieved in this lifetime and in the here and now was considered good and life-affirming; to be weak, to be like the masses, deferring gratification indefinitely was considered bad or life-denying. After Christianity transformed Roman society, the population looked at things as “good versus evil”: what was good was the inversion of Roman values, i.e. “the meek shall inherit the earth”, “turn the other cheek”, “love your enemies”15, and to wait for justice in the afterlife (a lifetime delayed gratification) was considered saintly, and to be aggressive, to be strong, to be dominant was considered to be “evil”. It was a total transformation of society from top to bottom. Nietzsche claimed, “This is precisely why the Jews are the most disastrous people in world history: they have left such a falsified humanity in their wake that even today Christians can think of themselves as anti-Jewish without understanding that they are the ultimate conclusion of Judaism.”16 17
Christianity was hugely revolutionary, because if a slave or an ultra poor urbanite was equal to the Emperor in the eyes of God, or superior!, then why should the Emperor rule over them?
Historian Tom Holland discusses Christianity’s original transvaluation of values in this clip.
Christians superficially endorsed earthy hierarchy with the phrase, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21) and “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established” (Romans 13) to quell Roman trepidation about the radical nature of the religion. Christians could point to it and say “oh, we aren’t trying to overthrow Rome after all!” But when compared to the core of the religion — spiritual equality for all as long as one had faith in Christ — it was a flimsy response. Additionally, these early Christians parried criticisms that the religion was simply Jewish subversion by ideologically separating it from Judaism, even including a moderate element of hostility to it.
Christianity initially had only middling success. Jesus lived for 30-some years; 20 years then passed with no written record at all; and for 20 more years we have only the Pauline epistles. So 70 years gone by, and the sum total of recorded history for this group of Christian Jews is a handful of letters by their leader, Paul. Paul then dies in 66, apparently executed in Rome, and the first Jewish Revolt begins, lasting four years until Rome’s victory in 70 AD which cumulated in the destruction of the Jewish temple.
After this, something changes, the reasons for which can only be inferred — within a year of the destruction of the temple, the first Gospel appears, the Gospel of Mark, and it is written explicitly for the Hellenist masses (Jewish terms and concepts are explained in 5:41, 7:1, 13:46, 14:12, 15:42; miracles abound from the first page (6:13)) and a full-court press is made to spread it. This time it is quite successful.18 19
Marcus Eli Ravage argues that the Gospel of Mark came out immediately after the temple’s destruction because the Jews had nothing more to lose:
“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.
If Paul’s own writings fail to convince you of this interpretation of his activities, I invite your attention to his more candid associate John. Where Paul, operating within the shadow of the imperial palace and half the time a prisoner in Roman jails, is obliged to deal in parable and veiled hints, John, addressing himself to disaffected Asiatics, can afford the luxury of plain speaking. At any rate, his pamphlet entitled “Revelation” is, in truth, a revelation of what the whole astonishing business is about. Rome, fancifully called Babylon, is minutely described in the language of sputtering hate, as the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth, as the woman drunken with the blood of saints (Christians and Jews), as the oppressor of “peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues” and—to remove all doubt of her identity—as “‘that great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” An angel triumphantly cries, “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen.” Then follows an orgiastic picture of ruin. Commerce and industry and maritime trade are at an end, Art and music and “the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride” are silenced. Darkness and desolation lie like a pall upon the scene. The gentle Christian conquerors wallow in blood up to the bridles of their horses. “Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her.” And what is the end and purpose of all this chaos and devastation? John is not too reticent to tell us. For he closes his pious prophecy with a vision of the glories of the new—that is, the restored—Jerusalem: not any allegorical fantasy, I pray you, but literally Jerusalem, the capital of a great reunited kingdom of “the twelve tribes of the children of Israel.” Could any one ask for anything plainer?”
As Christianity spread among the underclasses, then, per its claims of spiritual superiority to the Hellenists, it led to massive social unrest against Hellenists and the loss of the strength and cohesiveness of Rome. This strategy is called spiritual bolshevism, and riling up the masses in order to smash the existing order and seize power served as the precursor to economic bolshevism in the Soviet Union and biological bolshevism in America.
The Spread of Christianity and the Decline of Hellenism
In 170 AD a Greek intellectual named Celsus launched an intense, vitriolic attack against Christianity in a book called On the True Doctrine, focusing on its theological foundations, its contradictions and its hypocrisy. His works and almost all information about the author have not survived to the modern era, and we only know about it because a Christian named Origen quoted his work in a lengthy counter-attack. Celsus thought Christians were not just ignorant about philosophy but that they deliberately reveled in their ignorance. He accused Christians of targeting the uneducated, unintelligent masses in their recruitment: “Their injunctions are like this,” he wrote. “Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near. For these abilities are thought by us to be evils.” He went on that Christians “are able to convince only the foolish, dishonorable and stupid, and only slaves, women and little children.” Christians “do not want to give or to receive a reason for what they believe, and use such expressions as ‘Do not ask questions; just believe,’ and ‘Thy faith will save thee.’”20 He further stated that Christians claim “Wisdom in this life is evil, but foolishness is good”, an almost precise quote from Corinthians. In other words, Christians pursued a strategy of spiritual bolshevism, riling up the underclass against society’s Hellenist rulers.
Even Origen, Celsus’s great adversary, admitted that “the stupidity of some Christians is heavier than the sand of the sea.”21 Paul of Tarsus had argued “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” Blind obedience and faith was both expected and demanded of followers: one Christian writer railed furiously at those who “put aside the sacred word of God, and devote themselves to geometry…some of them give all their energies to the study of Euclidian geometry, and treat Aristotle…with reverent awe; to some of them Galen [a famous surgeon] is almost an object of worship.”22 These Christians argued deontologically23 instead of consequentially; they believed that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under the rules of Christianity, rather than on the consequences of their actions on the strength and cohesiveness of Rome or its ability to provide a decent material quality of life for its citizens.24
Christian observers looked on the tolerance of their non-Christian neighbors with astonishment. Augustine marveled at the fact that the Hellenists were able to worship many different Gods without discord while the Christians, who worshipped only one, splintered into countless warring factions. A major example is the Arian crisis, which was an intra-Christian dispute over whether Jesus was fully God or just partially God and which resulted in an enormous number of dead believers. Many Hellenists like Celsus actively praised plurality while the Christians did the opposite: Christ was the way, the truth and the light, and every other religion was not merely wrong but plunged its followers into a demonic darkness and risked them eternal damnation. To allow someone to continue in an alternative form of worship or a heretical form of Christianity was not to allow religious freedom; it was to allow Satan to thrive.25
With each individual soul the battlefield between Heaven and Hell, John Chrysostom preached that Christians should spy on each other and everyone else to root out sin. They should watch their fellow congregation and when they found them sinning, they should hound them, shun them, report them. Nowhere was to be beyond the gaze of the good Christian informer, even private homes. “Let us be meddlesome and search out those who had fallen,” he advised in a sermon that encouraged Christians to hunt out those who were lapsing from true Christian ritual. “Even if we must enter into the fallen one’s home, let us not shrink back from it.” Lest any of his flock felt awkward about such an intrusion, Chrysostom reassured them that what they were doing was not done to harm others but to help them. To turn on, hound and hunt their fellows in this way was not to harm them — it was to save them.26
Over time, as Christianity strengthened its hold on power, its followers began to discriminate heavily against Hellenists (who they called “pagans”, which was a epithet meaning “rural” or “rustic”, akin to a “country bumpkin” today). The first Christian Emperor Constantine (who murdered his wife — he allegedly boiled her in a bath because of a suspected affair with his son and converted to Christianity because the priests of the old Gods said he was too polluted to be purified of these crimes27) decided to penalize Hellenists in numerous ways, including raiding their temples. He turned to “those accursed and foul people” who had chosen to stubbornly “hold themselves back” from Christianity and continue visiting their “sanctuaries of falsehood” and demanded that the statues be taken from their temples. The Great Roman and Greek temples were broken open and their statues brought out and mutilated. A recent book on the Christian desecration of statues focusing just on Egypt and the Near East runs to almost three hundred pages, dense with pictures of mutilation.28 After all, the first Commandment stated: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”, “thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” It was not vandalism; it was God’s will. The good Christian had a duty to do nothing less.29 The temples themselves were attacked: their doors were removed at Constantine’s order; others had their roofs stripped, “others were neglected, allowed to fall into ruin, or destroyed.”…many objects were shipped back as prize baubles for the emperor’s new city, Constantinople. Constantine, as his nephew Julian the “apostate” wrote, was a “tyrant with the mind of a banker.” The desecration and destruction continued for centuries.30
Christian preachers reminded their flocks that anything that saved a soul, even if it did so at the expense of law, order or even the body that the soul inhabited, was acceptable. To attack the houses, bodies and temples of those affiliated by the “pagan error” was not to harm these sinners but to help them. This was not brutality - it was kindness, education, reformation.31 They even inverted the definition of the Greek term “Logos” to mean its opposite, then made it one of the key terms of the religion.32
The Greek writer Eunapius, commenting on the destruction of the temple of Serapis — whose architecture was considered to be greater than the Parthenon or the Colosseum — felt the destruction was done out of avarice. As he wrote with scorn, “these warlike and honorable men” had destroyed this incredible temple out of “greed”, yet once they had finished their vandalism they “boasted that they had overcome the gods, and reckoned their sacrilege and impiety a thing to glory in.” Nothing was left — the Christians stole everything but the floor, toppling the immense marble columns. The tens of thousands of books, the remnants of the great Library of Alexandria, were all lost forever. Perhaps they were burned — Luciano Canford observed “the burning of books was part of the advent and imposition of Christianity.”
A war against Hellenist temples was also a war against the books that had all too often been stored outside them for safekeeping. Canford called this moment “the melancholy experiences of the war waged by Christianity against the old culture and its sanctuaries: which meant, against the libraries.”33 Indeed, in the third century there had been 28 public libraries in Rome and many private ones; by the end of the fourth century they were, as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus observed with sorrow, “like tombs, permanently shut.”34 In Alexandria, Antioch and Rome bonfires of Hellenist books blazed and Christian officials looked on in satisfaction. Book-burning was approved of and even recommended by Church authorities. “Search out the books of the heretics…in every place” said the 5th century Syrian bishop Rabbula, and “wherever you can, either bring them to us or burn them in the fire.”35 Ammianus Marcellinus writes with distaste that “innumerable books and whole heaps of documents, which had been routed out from various houses, were piled up and burnt under the eyes of the judges. They were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various literal arts and on jurisprudence.”36
Christian historians refused to cover much of the negativity associated with the religion. The Christian writer Eusebius - the “father of Church history” - wrote that the job of the historian was not to record everything but instead only those things that would do a Christian good to read. He stated, “I am determined therefore to say nothing even about those [abuses]…I shall include in my overall account only those things by which first we ourselves, then later generations may benefit.”37
A little over ten years after the newly Christian Constantine took power, laws began to be passed restricting “the pollutions of idolatry.” During his reign it was decreed that “no one should presume to set up cult-objects, or practice divination or other occult arts, or even to sacrifice at all.” Under Constantine’s son it was ordered that the temples were to be closed. In AD 356 it became illegal on pain of death to worship images. “Pagans” began to be described as “madmen” whose beliefs must be “completely eradicated.”38 Less than fifty years after Constantine, the death penalty was announced for any who dared to sacrifice. In AD 399 the Christian emperor Theodosius announced that “if there should be any temples in the country districts, they shall be torn down without disturbance or tumult. For when they are torn down and removed, the material basis for all superstition will be destroyed.”39 In AD 423, the Christian government announced that any Hellenists who still survived were to be suppressed. Though, it added confidently and ominously: “We now believe that there are none.”40 The last Hellenist philosopher Damascius, who was the head of the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens, fled to Persia with seven followers under fear of death from the Christians, but life there was unbearable and he and his followers eventually returned, where they faded into obscurity.
The fall of Rome and the elimination of Hellenist knowledge
Ultimately, Paul’s strategy succeeded beautifully and resulted in Rome's destruction only 100 years after the total victory of Christianity: Theodosius made Christianity the official state religion in 380 and Rome was destroyed in 476 or, arguably as early as 385. According to Gibbon, Christianity had a substantial role in Rome’s fall:
“As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that the introduction, or at least the abuse of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity. Faith, zeal, curiosity, and more earthly passions of malice and ambition, kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country.”41
It’s success caused the complete destruction of the Hellenist way of life. 90-99% of Hellenist knowledge is estimated to have been destroyed by Christians, including books, art, history, temples, scientific knowledge, philosophy and statues, and the polytheistic, tolerant religions of the Romans were wiped from the planet. Incidentally, the only religion other than Christianity that was not deliberately destroyed was Judaism. In this sense, Nietzsche said, the slave had defeated the master: Judea had defeated Rome. This “victory” in turn led directly to the Dark Ages.
Of the Hellenist knowledge that the Christians did not deliberately destroy, an almost wholesale policy of neglect destroyed most of the rest. To survive, manuscripts needed to be cared for and recopied. Classical ones were not. Medieval monks, at a time when parchment was expensive and classical learning wasn’t valued, simply took pumice stones and scrubbed the last copies of classical works from the page. Rohmann pointed out that there is even evidence to suggest that in some cases “whole groups of classical works were deliberately selected to be deleted and overwritten in around AD 700, often with texts authored by [the fathers of the Church or by] legal texts that criticized or banned pagan literature.” Pliny, Plautus, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Livy and many more were scrubbed away by Christian believers. The Christians delighted in it: John Chrysostom bragged that the writings “of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated”, and that “Where is Plato? Nowhere! Where Paul? In the mouths of all!”42
An example of lost Hellenist knowledge is as follows. The Greek philosopher Democritus was a polymath who had written works on a breathless array of topics, a far from complete list of his titles includes On History, On Nature, The Science of Medicine, On the Tangents of the Circle and the Sphere, On Irrational Lines and Solids, On the Causes of Celestial Phenomena, On the Causes of Atmospheric Phenomena, On Reflected Images… The list goes on. Today Democritus’s most famous theory is the theory of atomism, which stated that everything in the world was made not by any divine being but by the collision and combination of atoms. According to this school of thought, these particles were invisible to the naked eye but they had their own structure and could not be cut (temno) into any smaller particles: they are a-temnos - “the uncuttable thing”: the atom. The Christians hated this theory because, as the Christian apologist Minucius Felix stated, if everything in the universe had been “formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, what God is the architect?” Augustine disliked atomism for precisely the same reason that atomists liked it: it weakens mankind’s terror of divine punishment and Hell. Every single one of Democritus’s works were lost during the decline of Rome, and as the eminent physicist Carlo Rovelli said, “the loss of the works of Democritus in their entirety is the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of the old classical civilization.” The atomic theory came down on only a single slender thread: it was contained in one single volume of Lucretius’s great poem, which was held in one single German library, which one single intrepid book hunter would find and save from extinction. That single volume became a literary sensation, returned atomism to European thought and influenced Newton, Galileo and later Einstein.43
Another example of lost Hellenist knowledge is its infrastructure marvels. Around a million people lived on Rome seven hills and they walked among world-famous monuments of awesome beauty and size. Towering aqueducts disgorged millions of gallons of water a day, filling the city’s drinking-water basins, its baths and even a massive fake lake on which mock naval battles could be staged. A million cubic meters of water flowed into the city every day - a thousand liters per head, double the amount available to those living in modern Rome. After Rome fell, no city in Europe would come close to matching its magnificence - and certainly not its plumbing, whose sewer tunnels were so massive that a man might ride a fully laden wagon along them - for well over a millennium.44
Vast troves of classical texts were also purged. The writings of the Greeks “have all perished and are obliterated”: that was what John Chrysostom had said. Monasteries erased the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Archimedes. Pliny was scraped from the page. An Arab traveler, Al Mas’udi, stated centuries later, “During the early days of the [Roman] empire…the sciences were honored and enjoyed universal respect. From an already solid and grandiose foundation, they were raised to greater heights every day, until the Christian religion made its appearance among the [Romans]; this was a fatal blow to the edifice of learning; its traces disappeared and its pathways were effaced.”45 Imagine where mankind would be today if thousands of years of history, science, and math had not been lost?
Nietzsche’s overall perspective of the clash of values between Judaism, its Christian offshoot and Hellenist Rome is summarized as follows:
Let’s bring this to a conclusion. The two opposing values “good and bad,” “good and evil” have fought a fearful battle on earth for thousands of years. …The symbol of this battle, written in a script which has remained legible through all human history up to the present, is called “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome.” To this point there has been no greater event than this war, this posing of a question, this contradiction between deadly enemies. Rome felt that the Jew was like something contrary to nature itself, its monstrous polar opposite, as it were. In Rome the Jew was considered “guilty of hatred against the entire human race.” And that view was correct, to the extent that we are right to link the health and the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, the Roman values.
By contrast, how did the Jews feel about Rome? We can guess that from a thousand signs, but it is sufficient to treat ourselves again to the Apocalypse of St. John, that wildest of all written outbursts which vengeance has on its conscience…
The Romans were indeed strong and noble men, stronger and nobler than any people who had lived on earth up until then or even than any people who had ever been dreamed up. Everything they left as remains, every inscription, is delightful, provided that we can guess what is doing the writing there. By contrast, the Jews were par excellence that priestly people of ressentiment, who possessed an unparalleled genius for popular morality…
Which of them has proved victorious for the time being, Rome or Judea? Surely there’s not the slightest doubt. Just think of who it is that people bow down to today in Rome itself, as the personification of all the highest values — and not only in Rome, but in almost half the earth, all the places where people have become merely tame or want to become tame — in front of three Jews, as we know, and one Jewess (in front of Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the carpet maker Paul, and the mother of the first-mentioned Jesus, named Mary). This is very remarkable: without doubt Rome has been conquered.46
HOW DID TENSION BETWEEN JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY ORIGINALLY ARISE, AND HOW DO THEY RELATE TO ISLAM?
If the spread of Christianity was a Paul-inspired revenge plot as this theory alleges, why does the religion have a love-hate relationship with Jews and Judaism, and why in turn do Jews generally have such distaste for Christianity itself? How did this develop?
Christianity had early on developed a self-conception that was different from Judaism, which was necessary for its propagation among the anti-Jewish Hellenist masses. While Jesus, Mary, Paul, Peter, and the disciples were all Jews, Jews never did accept Jesus as their savior, they agitated for the Romans to execute him, and Jews still practiced exclusive customs and social mores. Melito of Sardis made anti-Jewish comments in 160 AD; Tertullian too in 200 AD and Hippolytus in 220 AD, and they become explicit and harsh around 375 AD with Gregory of Nyssa, Chrysostom, and Jerome. Additionally, as the Catholic Church developed it established a rigid hierarchy that, by its very nature, became reactive against external pressures (such as financial and media pressures by non-believers) and one that served to check and limit the textual radical egalitarianism in the New Testament itself.
On the other hand, the Talmud is quite negative in its characterization of Jesus and Mary. Many prominent Jews in the modern era (especially secular leftist ones) have what seems to be a visceral hatred toward white Christians. What is interesting is that they don’t seem to feel such extreme emotions toward Islam and Muslims today; in fact they appear more or less neutral toward them, except perhaps to fear physical violence from them, to encourage them to vote Democrat for mutual political gain, and to calculate their impact in relation to Israel’s security (ultra-conservative Wahhabi Saudi Arabia is a close ally of Israel). So to compare the Jewish approach to the two religions may offer insight into this question.
Historically, while Jews lived under Islamic lands in the Middle East for 1,300 years, they were discriminated against as Dhimmis (i.e. treated as second class citizens) to the point where the famous Jewish Rabbi Maimonidies exclaimed, “God has entangled us with this people, the nation of Ishmael, who treat us so prejudicially and who legislate our harm and hatred…. No nation has ever arisen more harmful than they, nor has anyone done more to humiliate us, degrade us, and consolidate hatred against us.” And Jews were expelled from all Middle Eastern Muslim countries between 1948 and the early 1970s. On the other hand, during many periods of Jewish life under Islamic rule, they experienced toleration (per many Jewish historians) and they were, per historian Mark R. Cohen, generally physically safer than under Christian rule.
Here are some possible explanations:
Intermarriage and conversions threatens Judaism’s longterm outlook: One possible explanation is that European culture and Christianity proved to be enticing for Jewish conversions and intermarriages in a way that Islam later was not. Just as the Jews had bitterly fought the Romans and the non-Roman Jewish Hellenists in order to preserve their way of life, they ultimately came to see Christianity, so useful for the pressing purpose of revenge against Rome, as immensely threatening to the longterm continued existence of the Jewish community — they call it the “silent Holocaust” as it caused so many to abandon their community, intermarry and convert. As Joseph Sobran said:
“Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation. The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And, superiority excites envy. Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call minorities.”
That is quite possibly the reason why many Jews feel negatively about Christians, as western civilization is so awe-inspiring and attractive that it serves as a self-preservation technique for community preservation.
Commonality between the Koran and Old Testament: Both Islam and Judaism are religions which regulate to minute detail every aspect of a believer’s life with their respective Sharia and Halakhah systems. Both traditions contain detailed legal and ethical instructions for both religious and social life. Unlike Christianity, which relies on councils or synods to rule on doctrine, ethics and behavior, the laws and beliefs in Islam and Judaism are derived through a process of debate. In fact the two religions are so close in terms of their structure that the tenth-century rabbinic leader Saadia Gaon unselfconsciously referred to Jewish law as shar’ia, the prayer leader in a synagogue as an imam and the direction Jews faced when praying as qibla. Both religions emphasize correct action (orthopractic belief), versus the Christian focus on prayer/repentance for salvation and an emphasis on correct belief (orthodoxy). Per Israel Shahak, Jews view Christianity as idolatrous but not Islam.47
Christian Tolerance in America Undermines Jewish Desire to Feel Oppressed: Jews are used to living in environments of outright repression and hostility, which Islamic countries provide by enforcing Sharia and Dhimmitude. It feeds into the Jewish identity as persecuted victims. According to this theory, Jews cannot function in a society in which they are not oppressed by a stronger tribe, because they live and breath perceived oppression, perceived slights, which they never forgive and never forget. Kevin MacDonald confirmed this point when discussing Jewish communal memory: “Non-Jews have a difficult time fathoming Jewish communal memory. For strongly identified Jews, the “vilely discriminatory” actions of immigration restrictionists are part of the lachrymose history of the Jewish people. Immigration restriction from 1924–1965 is in the same category as the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., the marauding Crusaders of the Middle Ages, the horrors of the Inquisition, the evil of the Russian Czar, and the rationally incomprehensible calamity of Nazism. These events are not just images drawn from the dustbin of history. They are deeply felt images and potent motivators of contemporary behavior. As Michael Walzer noted, “I was taught Jewish history as a long tale of exile and persecution—Holocaust history read backwards.” From this perspective, the immigration restriction of 1924–1965 is an important part of the Holocaust because it prevented the emigration of Jews who ultimately died in the Holocaust—a point that Steinlight dwells on at length.”48
On the other hand, modern Christian Americans are not in a position of domination, and they offer forgiveness freely as a condition of their faith, living lives unmarred by obsession over who wronged them generations ago. Mercy, grace and forgiveness appear confounding to the psyche of those who live and breath perceived oppression; it appears beyond their understanding, and it both terrifies and enrages them.
Christian Faith in God Prevents Ideological Indoctrination: A theory which serves as a corollary to #3 in that the Christian focus on God and on judgment in the afterlife, that this world is fallen and cannot be perfected, prevents true-believing Christians from wholeheartedly adopting the secular ideologies de jure, whether that is communism or critical race theory. This in turn gives those who are obsessed with creating heaven on earth through endless ideological tinkering significant consternation. People only have room in their hearts for one core belief, and if that belief is a religious God then there isn’t room in it for a secular ideology.
The Jewish/Christian conflict is a false dichotomy and Christianity serves as false opposition: Under the theory advanced by Adam Green, by Christians buying into the notion that Jews were originally the Chosen People, by adopting their Old Testament as a cornerstone of their belief system, and by adopting the Jewish God, Christians elevated Jews to a special position which they never possessed among the Hellenists; Romans had treated Judaism as an unexceptional sect among a multitude of sects that the Roman Empire managed without special status or preferment. Adam Green posts many videos of Orthodox Jewish rabbis who publicly argue this point: they state, in a semi-conspiratorial tone, that Peter and Paul were Jewish double agents sent to convert Hellenists to Christianity so they would obey the Noahide laws and worship the Jewish God. Therefore Christian antagonism is half-hearted and it serves Jewish purposes by preventing assimilation. The same argument would apply to Islam, which is another religion “of the Book”. Green further argues that the stories about Jesus were deliberately crafted by early converts to fulfill the requirements in Old Testament scripture pertaining to the arrival of a sacrificial Messiah to encourage Jewish conversion into the sect.
Whatever the reason(s) are will continue to be long debated.
***
This brings us to the end of Part 1 of “Deeper Societal Trends Predating the Central Banks.” In Part 2, we will review what happened in the aftermath of the victory of spiritual bolshevism against Rome, how what we think of as secular liberalism arose, and explore how the echoes of this ancient conflict continue to affect us today.
Europa Soberana, Rome Against Judea; Judea Against Rome, 10-11.
Rome Against Judea, 10.
Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Vol. 1), p. 207.
Rome Against Judea, 51-52.
Rome Against Judea, 46.
Gibbon, p. 208.
Rome Against Judea, 27.
Nietzsche, The Antichrist, section 44.
Per Adam Green, "The Eastern Orthodox Church venerates Gamaliel as a saint. In the Talmud, Gamaliel is a top Pharisee, Jerusalem Sanhedrin leader, and one of the greatest Rabbis of all time. Acts says Saul the Pharisee/Saint Paul was trained by Gamaliel. Very suspicious to say the least.”
Acts 22:3 "I am verily a man which am a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city in Clicia, yet brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel…”. "Gamaliel holds a reputation in the Mishnah for being one of the greatest teachers in all the annals of Judaism”; see here.
“According to an old Jewish tradition, Simon Peter joined the early Christians at the decision of the rabbis. Worried that early Christianity's similarity to Judaism would lead people to mistake it for a branch of Judaism, he was chosen to join them. As he moved up in rank, he would be able to lead them into forming their own, distinct belief system. Despite this, he was said to remain a practicing Jew, and is ascribed with the authorship of the Nishmas prayer.” Per here, also see here.
"Defeat led to Jewish dispersion. From that dispersed seemingly hopeless position, the descendants of the Jews began to wage, in Graetz's words, "a new kind of warfare against long-established Roman institutions" which would ultimately "modify or partly destroy them." Graetz is referring to Christianity - the most successful Jewish sect, in his view. To conquer Rome from within, Judaism had to be modified, however, and it "became estranged from and placed itself in harsh antagonism to the parent source." E. Micahel Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History, page 28. Greatz wiki here.
Rome Against Judea; 58. Or see Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, section 51: "Christianity was not "national," it was not based on race--it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core--the instinct against the healthy, against health. Everything that is well--constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offense to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul's priceless saying: "And God hath chosen the weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base things of the world, and things which are despised": this was the formula; in hoc signo the decadence triumphed.”
“Roman and Greek intellectuals had shown profound distaste for such an involved deity. The idea that a divine being was watching every move of every human being was, to these observers, not a sign of great love but a ‘monstrous' absurdity. The Christian God in their writings was frequently described as a prurient busybody, a peculiar ‘nuisance' who was 'restless, shamelessly curious, being present at man’s every act.’ Why was he so interested in the every doing of mere mortals? Even before Christianity, sophisticated Roman thinkers had poured scorn on such an idea. As Pliny the Elder had put it: ‘that [a] supreme being, whatever it be, pays heed to man’s affairs is a ridiculous notion. Can we believe that it would not be defied by so gloomy and so multifarious a duty?’ Didn’t a god have better things to do?” - Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, 182.
Although the interpretation of this particular phrase may be grossly misconstrued in the modern era. Per Schmitt in Concept of the Political, section 3: "As German and other languages do not distinguish between the private and political enemy, many misconceptions and falsifications are possible. The often quoted “Love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) reads “diligite inimicos vestros", and not "diligite hostes vestros". No mention is made of the political enemy. Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one's enemy, i.e., one's adversary. The Bible quotation touches the political antithesis even less than it intends to dissolve, for example, the antithesis of good and evil or beautiful and ugly. It certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one's own people."
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, section 24. Nietzsche was the last philosopher. This is because he is the first one who recognized the core egalitarian values that underlay society, that they had been transvalued by Jews looking to undermine Rome after the destruction of the second temple as a revenge strategy, and that only a transvaluation of core values back to greatness, strength, individuality, self-determination, immediacy of purpose, honor, acceptance of hierarchy and nobility could move humanity forward. A rebirth of philosophy is only possible after a society-wise transvaluation of core values occurs, which could then generate and build fresh philosophical world-views on the basis of those new values. Until then, porn and Netflix will have to suffice as we hurtle toward civilizational and possible species-level collapse.
Nietzsche also described the Jews as incredibly powerful but hiding behind the guise of slave morality as a sword-and-shield strategy, i.e. they loudly claim they are victims even as they aggressively rile up the underclass masses in order to seize power; this confuses their enemies who can’t imagine acts so spiteful and underhanded:
“The Jews, a people “born for slavery”, “the chosen people among peoples,” as they themselves said and believed, achieved the amazing feat of inverting values, thanks to which life on earth for two millennia has possessed a new and dangerous appeal. Their prophets fused “rich,” “godless,” “evil,” “violent,” and “sensuous” into a unity. In this inversion of values (to which belongs the use of the word for “poor” as a synonym for “holy” and “friend”) lies the significance of the Jewish people: with them begins the slave rebellion in morality. [BGE 195]”
Here is a representative quotation from Beyond Good and Evil:
“The Jews, however, are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe.”[BGE 251]. Here is another, from The Antichrist: “Psychologically considered, the Jewish people are a people endowed with the toughest vital energy, who, placed in impossible circumstances . . . divined a power in these instincts with which one could prevail against ‘the world.’”[A 24]. He again praises the Jews for having the strength to rule Europe if they chose to: “That the Jews, if they wanted it—or if they were forced into it, which seems to be what the anti-Semites want—could even now have preponderance, indeed quite literally mastery over Europe, that is certain”[BGE 251]
Richard Carrier argues in On the Historicity of Jesus, page 156-159, that "A spiritual solution to the physical conundrum of the Jews would have been a natural and easy thing to conceive at the time. Those Jews who believed they could physically retake control of the temple naturally pinned their hopes on military messianism (as exemplified by the Zealots and the Sicarii, and everyone who led actual rebellions against Rome, from Judas the Galilean to Bar Kochba). But if any Jews had realized that such a reconquest was impossible (as some must [given the long-standing overwhelming military might of Rome]) but still sought a means to escape their cognitive dissonance without denying the evident facts or abandoning deep-stated religious beliefs (and it is reasonable to assume at least some Jews did seek such means without going to such ends), then for them only one solution remained: to deny the physical importance of the temple at Jerusalem itself.
That would require replacing it, and not with another temple (as that would only recreate the same problem all over again and thus not in fact solve it, as was evident in the fate of the Samaritan messianic uprising at Gerizim), but with something intangible, which neither the Romans nor the corrupt Jewish elite could control (as the intangible cannot be seized or occupied), and which required neither money nor material power to bring about or maintain (the two factors perceived to have corrupted the original temple cult - and to always favor the Romans, who alone had boundless quantities of both), and whose ruler was himself incapable of corruption (and there was only one who was truly incapable of corruption: God).
This does not entail that anyone did think this, only that it would have been an easy and natural progression of thought from problem to solution, and therefore not implausible. It fit the political and religious context and our understanding of human nature and ingenuity. Therefore, if any religious innovator had proposed that God had arranged a supreme sacrifice capable of cleansing all once and for all (such as, e.g., through the ritual atoning sacrifice of his firstborn son), and further arranged that God’s spirit would, as a result, dwell forever within each individual who pledged himself to him (and thus no longer dwell, or dwell only, within the temple at Jerusalem), then his message would resonate among many Jews as an ingenious and attractive solution to the problem of Jewish elite corruption and Roman invincibility, by eliminating the relevance of the temple to messianic hopes, and thus eliminating the basis for any doomed military conflict with Rome, and further eliminating the problem of the corrupt Jewish elite by simply disinheriting them from God’s kingdom and removing them as middlemen between the people and their God - all without requiring the deployment of any physical or military resources. One simply had to declare that it had been done. God’s will. Sorted.
The basic Christian gospel - imagining that the death of a messiah had conclusively atoned for all sins (as the OT could already be understood to say), and that by joining with him (through adoption by baptism; and through symbolic consumption of his body and blood) God would dwell in us (instead of the temple) - would thus be recognized by many Jews as an ingenious and attractive idea. Especially since the end result would be that instead of taking orders from the Jewish elite, we would have as our sovereign no fallible men but Christ himself, God’s appointed Lord, directly speaking to his subjects from the right hand of God in heaven (by spirit and angelic communication, and secret messages planted in scripture). Thus the problem of elite corruption is seemingly removed without requiring violence or money or diplomacy or military victory. God has his victory; and all cognitive dissonance is resolved…
The only sacred space this doctrine required one to physically control was one’s own body, a notion already popularized by philosophical sects such as the Stoics, who taught that nothing external can conquer a man who in his wisdom remains internally free. Not death, nor imprisonment, nor torture represented any victory over him. This was therefore a battle one could always win, even against the ‘invincible’ Romans. One merely had to believe it, to feel it was true, that God now lived in you. No other evidence was required. Thus it should not surprise us that Christianity converted all the military imagery of popular messianism into spiritual metaphor, to represent what we would now call a cultural war. This aligns perfectly with the notion of a spiritual transfer of authority to the people, negating the relevance of the temple and the Jewish elite, while retaining the most fundamental requirements of being Jewish (namely, faith and obedience to the commandments of God; though even that would later be done away with).
The relevance of this observation is that the earliest Christian gospel makes far more sense as a product of its political context than it does when completely divorced from that context…The centrality of the temple was a continual problem for the Jews. A physical location requiring political control entailed military domination. So long as the Romans had the latter, the Jews would never have the former. The Zealots took the logical option of attempting to remove the Romans and restore Jewish control. But the Christians took the only other available option: removing the temple from their entire soteriological (or ‘salvation’) scheme.
Christians could then just await God’s wrath to come from heaven, while in the meantime, God’s promise could be delivered unto the kingdom they had spiritually created (Rom. 14.17-18; 1 Cor. 4.19-20), first in an anticipatory way (in the moral and ‘supernatural’ success of the Christian community), and then in the most final way (in the apocalypse itself: e.g. 1 Cor. 15.24, 50; 6.9-10; Gal. 5.19-25; 1 Thess. 4.10-5.15). That the Christians and the Zealots both may have come from the same sectarian background, and pursued collectively the only two possible solutions to the problem facing the Jews at the time, reveals Christianity to be more akin to something inevitable than something surprising.”
Ravage.
Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, 40-41.
Nixey, 41.
Nixey, 158.
The concept of deontological belief is explained by Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ, section 50: “It appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, that there prevails among Christians a sort of criterion of truth that is called "proof by power." Faith makes blessed: therefore it is true."--It might be objected right here that blessedness is not demonstrated, it is merely promised: it hangs upon "faith" as a condition--one shall be blessed because one believes. But what of the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the wholly transcendental "beyond"--how is that to be demonstrated?--The "proof by power," thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith promises will not fail to appear. In a formula: "I believe that faith makes for blessedness-- therefore, it is true." But this is as far as we may go. This "therefore" would be absurdum itself as a criterion of truth.--But let us admit, for the sake of politeness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated (--not merely hoped for, and not merely promised by the suspicious lips of a priest): even so, could blessedness--in a technical term, pleasure--ever be a proof of truth? So little is this true that it is almost a proof against truth when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the question "What is true?" or, at all events, it is enough to make that "truth" highly suspicious. The proof by "pleasure" is a proof of "pleasure--nothing more; why in the world should it be assumed that true judgments give more pleasure than false ones, and that, in conformity to some pre-established harmony, they necessarily bring agreeable feelings in their train?--The experience of all disciplined and profound minds teaches the contrary. Man has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to. Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is the hardest of all services.”
Per Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ, section 49: “At the opening of the Bible there is the whole psychology of the priest. The priest knows of only one great danger: that is science, the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions--a man must have time, he must have an overflowing intellect, in order to "know." . . ."Therefore, man must be made unhappy,"--this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest. It is easy to see just what, by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world: "sin." The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of the world," was set up against science--against the deliverance of man from priests. Man must not look outward; he must look inward. He must not look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must suffer. And he must suffer so much that he is always in need of the priest… The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of "grace," of "salvation," of "forgiveness"--lies through and through, and absolutely without psychological reality--were devised to destroy man's sense of causality: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect. When the natural consequences of an act are no longer "natural," but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of superstition--by "God," by "spirits," by "souls"--and reckoned as merely "moral" consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed--then the greatest of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated.--I repeat that sin, man's self-desecration par excellence, was invented in order to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest rules through the invention of sin.”
Nixey, 48.
Nixey, 221.
Nixey, 100.
Nixey, 114.
Nixey, 116.
Nixey, 101-105.
Nixey, 239.
The term Logos is one of the main concepts of Greek philosophy — “a term whose original meaning was universal law.” “Logos in Greek and Hebrew means Metaphysics, the unifying principle of the world.” It is a common term in ancient philosophy and theology “expressing an idea of immanent reason in the world, under various modifications.” Plato and Aristotle understood Logos as “a law of being and principle of logic.” Among the Stoics, the term “Logos, denoted the law of physical and spiritual worlds in so far as they merged in a pantheistic unity.” To them God was immanent in the world constituting its vitalizing force and the law guiding the universe, which they called Logos; insofar all things develop from this force, they called it spermaticos Logos.” The profound modifications of Logos by John in the Gospel are i) the Logos becomes fully personified, ii) the spiritual life resides in the Logos and is communicated to men, and iii) the idea of Logos as reason becomes subordinate to the idea of Logos as word, the expression of God’s will and power, divine energy, life, love, and light. Per here.
Nixey, 94.
Nixey, 162.
Nixey, 168.
Nixey, 173.
Nixey 163-164.
Nixey, 117.
Nixey, 119.
Nixey, 86.
Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 38, part VI of Volume 3.
Nixey, 175-176.
Nixey, 40.
Nixey, 56.
Nixey, 258.
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, I,16.
Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, 82-83: “According to the Talmud, Jesus was executed by a proper rabbinical court for idolatry, inciting other Jews to idolatry, and contempt of rabbinical authority. All classical Jewish sources which mention his execution are quite happy to take responsibility for it; in the talmudic account the Romans are not even mentioned. The more popular accounts - which were nevertheless taken quite seriously - such as the notorious Toldot Yeshu are even worse, for in addition to the above crimes they accuse him of witchcraft. The very name 'Jesus' was for Jews a symbol of all that is abominable, and this popular tradition still persists. The Gospels are equally detested, and they are not allowed to be quoted (let alone taught) even in modern Israeli Jewish schools.
Secondly, for theological reasons, mostly rooted in ignorance, Christianity as a religion is classed by rabbinical teaching as idolatry. This is based on a crude interpretation of the Christian doctrines on the Trinity and Incarnation. All the Christian emblems and pictorial representations are regarded as 'idols' - even by those Jews who literally worship scrolls, stones or personal belongings of 'Holy Men'.
The attitude of Judaism towards Islam is, in contrast, relatively mild. Although the stock epithet given to Muhammad is 'madman' (meshugga), this was not nearly as offensive as it may sound now, and in any case it pales before the abusive terms applied to Jesus. Similarly, the Qur'an - unlike the New Testament - is not condemned to burning. It is not honored in the same way as Islamic law honors the Jewish sacred scrolls, but is treated as an ordinary book. Most rabbinical authorities agree that Islam is not idolatry (although some leaders of Gush Emunim now choose to ignore this). Therefore the Halakhah decrees that Muslims should not be treated by Jews any worse than 'ordinary' Gentiles. But also no better. Again, Maimonides can serve as an illustration. He explicitly states that Islam is not idolatry, and in his philosophical works he quotes, with great respect, many Islamic philosophical authorities. He was, as I have mentioned before, personal physician to Saladin and his family, and by Saladin's order he was appointed Chief over all Egypt's Jews. Yet, the rules he lays down against saving a Gentile's life (except in order to avert danger to Jews) apply equally to Muslims.”
MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, 16.
This is interesting, because it's delving into the same sort of scenario as Islam.
The idea being that Muhammad created a religion, and a following, simply to conquer his enemies. In the case of Islam we know this to be true, because that's literally how things went down in rather short order.
I'm looking forward to part 2!
Powerful and persuasive essay.