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Ancient Rome Ben-Hur Film

Messala to Sextus

I was one-year-old when Ben-Hur, the epic religious film directed and produced by the Jews William Wyler and Sam Zimbalist, and starring Charlton Heston as the title character, was premiered. I watched it about ten years later on the silver screen with my family.

The film made a huge impact in my life when I was a Christian. I must say that, even today, I can enjoy some scenes. The following is my favourite scene, with the old commander of the Roman garrison discussing with the new commander about the Jews:

Sextus: You can break a man’s skull, you can arrest him, you can throw him into a dungeon. But how do you control what’s up here? [taps his head] How do you fight an idea?

This happens while the Roman Messala is naively planning to use his childhood friend, the Jew Ben-Hur, to find the zealots who, as Sextus complains, ‘smash the statues of our gods, even those of our emperor’.

Messala: Sextus, you ask how to FIGHT [great emphasis in Messala’s voice] an idea. Well, I’ll tell you how… with another idea!


Presently the Roman-like idea is of course German National Socialism, not American white nationalism which through Christianity and Neochristianity is cucked to the core—as cucked as the 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Union general Lew Wallace.

Incidentally, in the 1959 film the Jews deceived us by using a Nordish-like actor for the title character. In the Judea of the 1st century a rich Jew should be looking more like the centurion of the above clip; and the centurion should look like Charlton Heston. But who’s really worse: the kikes who made the film or the Xtian general, a staunch supporter of the Union, who wrote the greatest religious bestseller of his time?

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Jesus St Paul

‘all of you Christ idiots…’

Editor’s note: In addition to the series ‘All Christians are cucks’, recently excerpted for this site, the blogger Axe of Perun wrote a couple of other articles containing the following quotable quotes:
 

Well, it is time to write a little something about Christians again. For those of you who haven’t yet, I advise you to check out the All Christians are Cucks series of articles. Once you digest the information there you should not be able, that is to say, you shouldn’t have the willpower, to call yourself a Christian Nationalist anymore…

Anyways, let us get several points here straight:

Jesus was a Jew. He was a Jew the same way that Paul, the Jew who brought you Christianity, was a Jew. Both were circumcised on their 8th day according to Jewish Law. Both were Hebrews, both knew how to read the Old Testament in Hebrew. Both were Israelites, both were Jews. It can’t get any more obvious than that. Jesus and the story about him claims that he is the Jewish Messiah, which is—who would have guessed it—a Jewish concept and finds its basis in the Old Testament. Jesus reads from the Old Testament. Jesus quotes about Yahweh, the Old Testament God.

Jesus observed all the Jewish ceremonies and holidays which celebrate the murder of non-Jews and are anti-Nature by their definition. Jesus praised Moses, the Jew. Jesus was a god damn Jewish Rabbi and the Book even calls him that.

For all you people out there who still refuse to accept this simple Truth—you have fattened just the way the Jews love you: You are the perfect sheep, in perfect form, with the perfect amount of fat and foolishness that another Bolshevik takeover seems to be imminent. Only a Nation of fools can be taken over by a small organized gang of criminals. And Christianity, when applied for long enough, turns that Nation into fools. If you don’t believe me, look around you and tell me if there is any real sanity to be found anywhere…

The biggest struggle of this century is not only the fight against the Jewish Race and their Biological weapons of mass destruction. It is the fight against the personal Jew which all of you Christ idiots have [red emphasis added]: the same Jew which all of the Liberals, Communists, Leftists, Marxists, etc., have. As long as this ridiculous mindset of Christianity exists among us we will never wake up, we will never be free and nothing will ever change.

____________

Read the articles: here and here.

Categories
Jesus St Paul

'all of you Christ idiots…'

Editor’s note: In addition to the series ‘All Christians are cucks’, recently excerpted for this site, the blogger Axe of Perun wrote a couple of other articles containing the following quotable quotes:
 
Well, it is time to write a little something about Christians again. For those of you who haven’t yet, I advise you to check out the All Christians are Cucks series of articles. Once you digest the information there you should not be able, that is to say, you shouldn’t have the willpower, to call yourself a Christian Nationalist anymore…
Anyways, let us get several points here straight:
Jesus was a Jew. He was a Jew the same way that Paul, the Jew who brought you Christianity, was a Jew. Both were circumcised on their 8th day according to Jewish Law. Both were Hebrews, both knew how to read the Old Testament in Hebrew. Both were Israelites, both were Jews. It can’t get any more obvious than that. Jesus and the story about him claims that he is the Jewish Messiah, which is—who would have guessed it—a Jewish concept and finds its basis in the Old Testament. Jesus reads from the Old Testament. Jesus quotes about Yahweh, the Old Testament God.
Jesus observed all the Jewish ceremonies and holidays which celebrate the murder of non-Jews and are anti-Nature by their definition. Jesus praised Moses, the Jew. Jesus was a god damn Jewish Rabbi and the Book even calls him that.
For all you people out there who still refuse to accept this simple Truth—you have fattened just the way the Jews love you: You are the perfect sheep, in perfect form, with the perfect amount of fat and foolishness that another Bolshevik takeover seems to be imminent. Only a Nation of fools can be taken over by a small organized gang of criminals. And Christianity, when applied for long enough, turns that Nation into fools. If you don’t believe me, look around you and tell me if there is any real sanity to be found anywhere…
The biggest struggle of this century is not only the fight against the Jewish Race and their Biological weapons of mass destruction. It is the fight against the personal Jew which all of you Christ idiots have [red emphasis added]: the same Jew which all of the Liberals, Communists, Leftists, Marxists, etc., have. As long as this ridiculous mindset of Christianity exists among us we will never wake up, we will never be free and nothing will ever change.
____________
Read the articles: here and here.

Categories
Alexandria Architecture Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil Library of Alexandria

Darkening Age, 9


Saint Apollonia destroys a Greco-Roman sculpture, Giovanni d’Alemagna, c. 1442-1445.
The saint calmly ascends to the ‘idol’, hammer in hand. Hagiographies frequently praised the flair with which saints smashed ancient temples and centuries-old statues.
In ‘The Most Magnificent Building in the World’, chapter six of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:
 
At the end of the first century of Christian rule, the Colosseum still dominated Rome and the Parthenon towered above Athens. Yet when writers of this period discuss architecture, these aren’t the buildings that impress them. Instead, their admiration is drawn by another structure in Egypt. This building was so fabulous that writers in the ancient world struggled to find ways to convey its beauty. ‘Its splendour is such that mere words can only do it an injustice,’ wrote the historian Ammianus Marcellinus. It was, another writer thought, ‘one of the most unique and uncommon sights in the world. For nowhere else on earth can one find such a building.’ Its great halls, its columns, its astonishing statues and its art all made it, outside Rome, ‘the most magnificent building in the whole world’. Everyone had heard of it.
No one has heard of it now. While tourists still toil up to the Parthenon, or look in awe at the Colosseum, outside academia few people know of the temple of Serapis. That is because in AD 392 a bishop, supported by a band of fanatical Christians, reduced it to rubble.
It is easy to see why this temple would have attracted the Christians’ attention. Standing at the top of a hundred or more marble steps, it had once towered over the startling white marble streets below, an object to incite not only wonder but envy. While Christians of the time crammed into insufficient numbers of small, cramped churches, this was a vast—and vastly superior—monument to the old gods. It was one of the first buildings you noticed as you sailed towards Alexandria, its roof looming above the others, and one that you were unlikely to forget.
Walk on and, just behind the porticoes of the inner court, you would have found yourself in a vast library—the remnants of the Great Library of Alexandria itself. The library’s collection was now stored here, within the temple precinct, for safekeeping. This had been the world’s first public library; and its holdings had, at its height, been staggering, running into hundreds of thousands of volumes. Like the city itself, the collection had taken several knocks over the years, but extensive collections remained.
Like all statues of this size, Serapis was made of a wooden structure overlaid with precious materials: the god’s profile was made of glowing white ivory; his enormous limbs were draped in robes of metal—very probably gold. The statue was so huge that his great hands almost touched either side of the room…
To the new generation of Christian clerics, however, Serapis was not a wonder of art; or a much-loved local god. Serapis was a demon… Fierce words—but Christians had been fulminating in this way for decades and polytheists had been able to ignore them. But the world was changing. It was now eighty years since a Christian had first sat on the throne of Rome and in the intervening decades the religion of the Lamb had taken an increasingly bullish attitude to all those who refused it…
One day, early in AD 392, a large crowd of Christians started to mass outside the temple, with Theophilus at its head. And then, to the distress of watching Alexandrians, this crowd had surged up the steps, into the sacred precinct and burst into the most beautiful building in the world.
And then they began to destroy it.
Theophilus’s righteous followers began to tear at those famous artworks, the lifelike statues and the gold-plated walls. There was a moment’s hesitation when they came to the massive statue of the god: rumour had it that if Serapis was harmed then the sky would fall in. Theophilus ordered a soldier to take his axe and hit it. The soldier struck Serapis’s face with a double-headed axe. The god’s great ivory profile, blackened by centuries of smoke, shattered.
The watching Christians roared with delight and then, emboldened, surged round to complete the job. Serapis’s head was wrenched from its neck; the feet and hands were chopped off with axes, dragged apart with ropes, then, for good measure, burned.
As one delighted Christian chronicler put it, the ‘decrepit, dotard’ Serapis ‘was burned to ashes before the eyes of the Alexandria which had worshipped him’. The giant torso of the god was saved for a more public humiliation: it was taken into the amphitheatre and burned in front of a great crowd. ‘And that,’ as our chronicler notes with satisfaction, ‘was the end of the vain superstition and ancient error of Serapis.’
A little later, a church housing the relics of St John the Baptist was built on the temple’s ruins, a final insult to the god—and to architecture. It was, naturally, an inferior structure. According to later Christian chronicles, this was a victory. According to a non-Christian account, it was a tragedy…
Nothing was left. Christians took apart the temple’s very stones, toppling the immense marble columns, causing the walls themselves to collapse. The entire sanctuary was demolished with astonishing rapidity; the greatest building in the world was ‘scattered to the winds’. [1]
The tens of thousands of books, the remnants of the greatest library in the world, were all lost, never to reappear…
Far more than a temple had gone. As the news of the destruction spread across the empire, something of the spirit of the old culture died too. As one Greek professor wrote in despair: ‘The dead used to leave the city alive behind them, but we living now carry the city to her grave.’
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[1] Note of the Ed.: See the remains today of the Serapeum of Alexandria: here.

Categories
Judaism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Literature Old Testament Porphyry of Tyre

Christianity’s Criminal History, 76

Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
The same as the work of Isaiah, the book of Ezekiel, written almost all in the first person, unites prophecies of misfortunes and beatitudes, reprimands and threats with tempting hymns and omens. For a long time it was considered the undisputed writing of the most symbolic Jewish prophet, the man who in the year 597 BC left Jerusalem with King Jehoiakim to exile in Babylon.
Until the beginning of the 20th century Ezekiel’s book was almost universally seen as a work of the prophet himself and of true authenticity. From the investigations of literary criticism by R. Kraetzschmars (1900) and even more by J. Herrmann (1908, 1924), the opinion prevailed that this presumably unitary book emerged in stages and that a subsequent hand reworked it. Some researchers even attribute to Ezekiel only the poetic parts, assigning to the compiler the texts in prose.
In this scenario the compiler would have designed at least the bulk of the work: no less than five-sixths. According to W.A. Irwin, of the total of 1,273 verses only 251 come from Ezekiel and according to G. Hölscher, 170. Although other authors accept the authenticity of the text, they admit several redactions and editors, who interspersed falsified passages among those considered authentic and also manipulated the rest at their discretion. It is very significant that the Jewish tradition does not attribute the work to Ezekiel, but to the ‘men of the great synagogue’.
The book of Daniel was clearly and completely fabricated: something that, surprisingly, already affirms Porphyry, the great adversary of the Christians, in the 3rd century. Although his fifteen books Against the Christians were targeted for destruction by the first Christian emperor, something has been preserved in excerpts and quotations, among them the following phrases of Jerome in the prologue of his comments on Daniel:

Porphyry has destined, against the prophet Daniel, the book XII of his work. He does not want to admit that the book was written by Daniel, whose name appears on the title, but by someone who lived in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes (that is, some 400 years later) in Judea, and maintains that Daniel did not predict anything of the future but simply told something of the past.

The book of Daniel would come from the prophet Daniel, who apparently lived in the 6th century BC in the royal court of Babylon and whose authorship has also been questioned in modern times by Thomas Hobbes. Critical research has long since stopped considering it an authentic book. But in 1931 the Catholic Lexikonfür Theologie und Kirche (Encyclopaedia for Theology and the Church) says: ‘The nucleus of the different episodes can reach very ancient times, even that of Daniel… Most of the Catholic exegetes essentially consider Daniel as the author of the book’.
The first-person form of the visions of chapters 7-12 and, of course, their place in the Holy Scriptures made the Christian tradition believe for a long time in the authorship of the book by Daniel: about whose life and acts they know only for his own work. It is probable that it was the last to reach the canon of the Old Testament and, from the traditionalist point of view, must be defended accordingly as authentic.
But it comes from the Revelations of the time of the Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, probably from the year of the revolt of the Maccabees, 164 BC. Ergo the author lived long after the events described in the historical part of his book written in the third person (chapters 1-6). In this way, the ‘prophet Daniel’, who four centuries before is the servant of King Nebuchadnezzar in ‘Babel’ and who understands ‘stories and dreams of all kinds’, can easily prophesy. This is what Porphyry had discovered.
Consequently, in the historical epoch of the book in which Daniel presumably lived and described, the ‘prophet’ mixes everything. Thus, Balthazar, the organiser of the famous banquet, although was a regent he was not ‘king’. Balthazar was not the son of Nebuchadnezzar but of Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king (555-539). Artaxerxes did not come before Xerxes but after him and ‘Darius the Mede’ is not a historical figure at all. In short, ‘Daniel’ knew more about visions than about the time he lived.
Special forgeries of the Septuagint are also some well-known pieces, which Catholics call Deuterocanonics and Protestants apocryphal: the story of the Three Boys in the Fiery Furnace [Left: Gustave Doré’s illustration], the story of Susanna and Bel and the Dragon. All these special fabrications appear today in the Catholic Bible.
The book of Daniel is the oldest apocalypse and, among all the apocalyptic literature. the only one that reaches the Old Testament and consequently becomes canonical. In the Catholic Bible there is another forgery, Baruch’s ‘Deuterocanonical’ book, with which we turn our attention to a special literary genre, made up of obvious falsifications, which later goes on in an organic and integral way into Christianity.

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Judaism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Literature Martin Luther Old Testament

Christianity’s Criminal History, 75

Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
In addition to the Old Testament books unjustly attributed to Moses, David, and Solomon, other earlier parts—Judges, Kings, Chronicles, etc.—are also the anonymous products of a much later period. And they were compiled in a definitive way long after the events they relate.
Many Bible scholars deny that the book of Joshua, which the Talmud, many Church Fathers, and most recent authors ascribe to Joshua himself, has any historical credibility. But even for those who view it with benevolence, as a historical source, ‘it must be used only with prudence’ (Hentschke). It is composed of a multitude of legends, myths and local transmissions that were completed at different times and arbitrarily linked and related to Joshua. Calvin already deduced that Joshua could not have written the book. The definitive edition comes from the 6th century BC, from the time of the exile in Babylon (which according to a Bible passage lasted 67 years, another passage says 73 years, and still another 49 years).
Much of the prophetic literature appears, consciously or by chance, under a pseudonym, although other parts come from the prophets under whose names the authors have visions and auditions, subjectively true, that could be ‘authentic’ disregarding the subsequent literary elaboration. This cannot be proven or discussed with certainty. But many things, even the prophetic books that rightly carry the name of their author, are difficult to delimit and have been altered in later periods; that is, passages have been added and the text modified, taken out of context; much of it has been falsified without generally knowing when and who did it.
This is especially true for the book of Isaiah, one of the longest and best-known books of the Bible. Luther already pointed out that Isaiah ben Amos did not write it.
The so-called great apocalypse of Isaiah (chapters 24-27), a collection of prophecies, songs, hymns, was added relatively later (its last form was received in the 3rd century BC or the beginning of 2nd BC), evidently trying to imitate the Isaiah style. And precisely chapter 53, the best known and most influential, does not proceed, like the rest of the 40-55 chapters, from Isaiah who had been considered the author (until Eichhorn, 1783). It is more likely that an unknown author wrote it two centuries later, in the time of the Babylonian exile: a man who probably appeared at the celebrations of the lamentations of the exiled Jews, between 546 and 538. This author is generally called Deutero-Isaiah (second Isaiah) and, in many ways, is more important than Isaiah himself.
But precisely this added text—in which the questioners of the historicity of Jesus (together with the figure of the ‘Just’ of the equally falsified Wisdom of Solomon) already see embryonically the figure of Jesus—was a broad and univocal example for the passion of Jesus.
(An idealised engraving of Isaiah by Gustave Doré.)
 
Chapter 53 tells how the servant of God, the Ebed-Yahweh, was despised and martyred and that for the forgiveness of sins he poured out his blood. The New Testament contains more than 150 allusions of it, and many early Christian writers quote the entire chapter 53 or in extracts. Luther also interpreted this ‘prophecy’ as referring to Jesus as it had really been fulfilled. Naturally, the papal biblical commission also confirmed this traditional point of view on June 29, 1908. However, almost all Catholic exegetes admit the Babylonian dating. And the last chapters of Isaiah (56 to 66) are from a much more recent period.
Since the times of Duhm in 1892 Scholars speak in a somewhat confused way about a Tritojesaja (Third Isaiah, chapters 56-66), which the research greets with an ironic vivat sequens (long live the pursuing). It is probable that these chapters come from several authors after the exile. In any case, Is. 56, 2-8, and 66, 16-24 are not from a Third Isaiah either; they were added later!
Up to 180 BC, the book of Isaiah did not appear ‘essentially in its current form’ according to the Biblisch-Historisches Handwörterbuch (Biblical-Historical Hand Dictionary).

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Judaism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Literature Old Testament

Christianity’s Criminal History, 74

Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
Other forgeries in the Old Testament
Something analogous to the Pentateuch can be said about what the Holy Scriptures endorse regarding David and his son Solomon. Both had to live, reign and write around the year 1,000, but their alleged works are usually several more recent centuries.
The Jewish and Christian tradition of the Bible attributes to King David the entire Psalter and the book of Psalms, in total 150 psalms. In all likelihood, not a single one comes from him. However, according to the Bible, David has written them.
Under the slogan of ‘David as a singer’, the treatise Sachkunde zur Biblischen Geschichte (Expertise on Biblical History) describes in a relatively neat way the ‘harp player’ of that time. This implies real authorship in equal measure to M.A. Beek’s claim that tradition, which introduces David into history as a poet of psalms, has ‘surely a historical background’. But Beek said a few lines before that ‘outside of the Bible we do not know any text that sheds light on the reign of David or that merely cites his name’. This reminds us of Beek’s historical Moses! Of David, he says: ‘David played a stringed instrument that could be called more a lyre than a harp. The illustration of such a lyre appears in a container manufactured around 1000 BC’. If around the year 1000 there was a lyre that could be represented, why could not David have it, play it and also—among his raids, slaughters and actions related to the cutting of foreskins and roasting in ovens—have written the biblical book? The conclusion seems almost obligatory, especially since David really appears in the Old Testament as a poet and musician, specifically in the two books of his contemporary, the prophet and judge Samuel, an eyewitness and at the same time an auricular witness.
Anyway, as the research points out, the books ‘of Samuel’ appeared from a hundred to four hundred years after the death of Samuel, just as many of the ‘David’ psalms did not appear until the time of the second temple (after 516 BC): more than half a millennium after the death of David! The collected psalms had been constantly edited and elaborated. The selection of compilations may have lasted until the 2nd century BC. It is not excluded that incorporations were still made in the 1st century after Christ. Curiously, a radically different interpretation of the celestial chords of the royal court around the year 1000 BC is considered three thousand years later, and not without a solid base in the biblical text, by German poets such as Rilke and company who said that it is nothing but sexualisation. One of these poets unabashedly states that it was David’s ‘butt’, rather than his music, that ‘relieved’ King Saul.
Just as David, the ‘bloodthirsty dog’ became the ‘kind psalmist’, his son (begotten by Bathsheba, whose husband David had killed), the ‘wise king Solomon’ has become famous as the creator of religious songs. But it is totally unprovable if Solomon ever developed literary activity.
(Note of the editor: As in all art that Christian painters have produced throughout the centuries, in this engraving of Judgement of Solomon by Gustave Doré the characters have been completely Aryanised. If machines to see the past could be invented, white nationalists would be shocked to see the Semitic physiognomy of the main characters of the Bible, if they even existed.)
 
What is certain, on the contrary, is that by means of a coup d’état, allied with his mother, the priest Zadok, the prophet Nathan and the general Benaiah, Solomon seized the throne; that he executed part of his adversaries, banished others; that he demanded from his subjects very high taxes and forced provision of work, which led to a growing dissatisfaction and a general decline while, according to the Bible, it was to satisfy 700 principal wives and 300 concubines. This scenario does not allow us to deduce precisely a great literary production. But the Sacred Scriptures award him three books: Book of Proverbs, the Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. ‘I believe that for the most part, this is a premeditated deception and that it was also in its day’ (S.B. Frost).
The author of Solomon’s Ecclesiastes (in Hebrew Kohelet) expressly claims that the book is ‘the words of the preacher, the son of David, the king of Jerusalem’. It used to be generally considered that Solomon was its author and for that reason alone the work became part of the Bible. But the real author is not known, nor his name, nor when he lived. The truth is only that, as H. Grotius first put it clearly in 1644, Solomon did not write it, to whom the first verse intends to attribute.
By language, spirit, and reticence it seems more like a work that emerged in the 3rd century BC, from the Stoic and epicurean philosophy: the influences of the environment and the Hellenistic period. There is no other book of the Bible that is so non-conformist, so fatalistic; that invokes so insistently the vanity of the earth: ‘vanity of vanities and all is vanity’; wealth, wisdom, everything ‘under the Sun’, a book that never ceases to lament the brevity of life and disappointments, in which God himself stands hazy on his throne in the distance. It is therefore not strange that several times it has been modified, or that its canonicity was not definitively established until 96 AD.
An impressive Jewish fabrication, in any case, is the Song of Songs, which knows no resurrection and in whose last verses I always feel (uselessly) alluded: ‘And above all, my son, beware then, in the make books there is no end and much study exhaust the body’. Ergo: ‘Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, because with the dead towards whom you go there is neither thought nor knowledge’.
Let no one say that there is nothing worth reading in the Bible!
After the writing of the books of the kings, ‘Solomon’ also wrote three thousand sentences and one thousand five—according to other sources five thousand—songs: of the trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows from the wall. He also wrote of the animals of the earth, of the birds, of the worms and of the fish. The book of Proverbs was attributed to Solomon for a long time. Chapters 1 to 9 are now included in the Bible. But in reality, the structure of the book betrays various authors who wrote it in different times: chapters 1 to 9, for example, were written after the 5th century. In total, the appearance of sentences extends throughout the entire Old Testament era, and the final compilation may have been produced around 200 BC.
Also, the Wisdom of Solomon, admired by the early Christians, was considered his work, especially because the author is expressly named Solomon and chosen as king of the people of God. It was considered a prophetic and inspired book. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian and St. Hippolytus attest to its canonicity, as does St. Cyprian who cites him repeatedly as Holy Scripture. Most old exegetes believe it. And although a man like Jerome was more critical he continued to admit it as official reading. At any event, the book continues in the Bible of the Papal Church.
But in reality the Wisdom of Solomon is almost a millennium more recent than Solomon, the original language of the forgery was classical Greek; the author—many critics admit two—lived in Egypt, probably in the Hellenistic city of the wise, Alexandria, and wrote his work, which puts on the lips of the (presumably) wisest of the Israelites, in the 1st century before or after Christ.
The influence of this forgery has been enormous.

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Harold Covington Obituaries

Harold Covington (1953-2018)


Like every Westerner, I used to be a eunuch, but the reading of Covington’s The Brigade made me grow my balls again.
Now that, last week, Uncle Harold left this world, the duty of every Aryan male is to obtain a copy of his best novel and grow a pair.
Goodbye Uncle Harold! We didn’t agree on everything but I’ll miss our correspondence. I wish you had seen our promised land…

Categories
Bible Judaism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Literature Moses (fictional Hebrew lawgiver) Old Testament

Christianity’s Criminal History, 73

Below, a translation from a section of the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
The five books of Moses, which Moses did not write
The Old Testament is a very random and very fragmentary selection of what was left of ancient transmission. The Bible itself quotes the titles of nineteen works that have been lost, among them The Book of the Wars of the Lord, The Story of the Prophet Iddo, The Book of the Good. However, the researchers believe that there were many other biblical texts that have not left us even the title. Have they also been holy, inspired and divine?
In any case the remains are enough, more than enough; especially of the so-called five books of Moses, presumably the oldest and most venerable, that is, the Torah, the Pentateuch (Greek pentáteuchos, the book ‘containing five’ because it consists of five rolls): a qualifier applied around 200 AD by Gnostic writers and Christians. Until the 16th century, it was unanimously believed that these texts were the oldest of the Old Testament and that they would therefore be counted among the first in a chronologically ordered Bible. That is something that today cannot even be considered. The Genesis, the first book, is without good reason at the head of this collection. And although still in the 19th century renowned biblical scholars believed they could reconstruct an ‘archetype’ of the Bible, an authentic original text, that opinion has been abandoned. Or even worse, ‘it is very likely that such an original text never existed’ (Comfeld / Botterweck).
The Old Testament was transmitted mostly anonymously, but the Pentateuch is attributed to Moses and the Christian churches have proclaimed his authorship until the 20th century. However, while the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the first Israelite fathers, must have lived between the 21st and the 15th centuries BC, or between 2000 and 1700 if they actually lived, Moses—‘a marshal, but at the bottom of his being with a rich emotional life’ (Cardinal Faulhaber)—must have lived in the 14th or 12th century BC, if he also lived.
In any case, nowhere outside the Bible the existence of these venerable figures, and others more recent, is ‘documented’. There is no proof of their existence. Nowhere have they left historical traces; neither in stone, bronze, rolls of papyrus, nor in tablets or cylinders of clay, even though they are more recent than, for example, many of the Egyptian sovereigns historically documented in the form of famous tombs, hieroglyphs or cuneiform texts: authentic certificates of life. Therefore, writes Ernest Garden, ‘either one is tempted to deny the existence of the great figures of the Bible or, in case of wishing to admit their historicity even with the lack of demonstrative material, it is supposed that their life and time they passed in the way described by the Bible… had circulated for many generations’.
For Judaism, Moses is the most important figure in the Old Testament. It is mentioned 750 times as a legislator; the New Testament does it 80 times. It is claimed that all the Laws were being handled as if Moses had received them at Sinai. In this way he acquired for Israel a ‘transcendental importance’ (Brockington). Each time he was increasingly glorified. He was considered the inspired author of the Pentateuch. It was attributed to him, the murderer (of an Egyptian because he had beaten a Hebrew), even a pre-existence. He became the forerunner of the Messiah, and the Messiah was considered a second Moses. Many legends about him emerged in the 1st century BC; a novel about Moses, and also a multitude of artistic representations. But the tomb of Moses is not known. In fact, the prophets of the Old Testament quote him five times.
Ezekiel never mentions him! And yet, these prophets evoke the time of Moses, but not him. In their ethical-religious proclamations they never rely on Moses. Neither the papyrus Salt 124 ‘has a testimony of any Moses’ (Cornelius). Nor does archaeology give any sign of Moses. The Syrian-Palestinian inscriptions barely quote him in as little measure as cuneiform texts or hieroglyphic and hieratic texts. Herodotus (5th century BC) knows nothing of Moses. In short, there is no non-Israelite proof of Moses, our only source of his existence is—as in the case of Jesus—the Bible.
There were already some who in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages doubted the unity and authorship of Moses in the Pentateuch. It was hardly believed that Moses himself could have reported on his own death, ‘an extraordinary question’ Shelley mocks, ‘almost as how to describe the creation of the world’ in Genesis. However, a deep criticism only came from the pen of Christian ‘heretics’, as the primitive Church saw no contradiction in the Old or New Testaments.
In the modern age Andreas Karlstadt was one of the first scholars in which some doubts were aroused when reading the Bible (1520). More doubts were raised by the Dutchman Andreas Masius, a Catholic jurist (1574). But if this pair, and shortly afterwards the Jesuits B. Pereira and J. Bonfrère, only declared some citations as post-Mosaic and continued to consider Moses the author of the whole text, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes declared that some paragraphs of the Pentateuch were Mosaics but post-Mosaic most of the text (Leviathan, 1651). In 1655 the reformed French writer I. de Peyrère went even further; and in 1670, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus Spinoza denied Mosaic authorship for the whole thing.
In the 20th century some scholars of religion, among them Eduard Meyer (‘it is not the mission of historical research to invent novels’), and Danek of the school of the Prague, have questioned the historical existence of Moses himself; but their adversaries have rejected such hypothesis.
It is curious that even the most illustrious minds, the greatest sceptics and scientists under whose daring intervention the sources of material are shelled so that there is little space left for the figure of Moses, present us again, as if by sleight of hand, Moses in all his greatness as the dominant figure of all Israelite history. Although everything around this character is too colourful or too obscure, the hero himself cannot be fictional they say. As much as the criticism of sources has reduced the historical value of these books, almost annulled it, ‘there remains a broad field of the possible’ (Jaspers). It is not surprising, then, that among some conservatives Moses is of greater importance than the Bible!
In short: after Auschwitz, Christian theology returns to win over the Jews. ‘Today again a more positive idea of ancient Israel and its religion is possible’. However, Moses is still ‘a problem’ for the researchers, ‘there is no light to illuminate his figure’ and the corresponding traditions remain ‘outside the capacity of historical control’ according to the Bibl. Hist. Handwörterbuch (Hist. Bibl. handwritten book). Although these scholars strongly refuse to ‘reduce Moses to a nebulous figure, known only to legends’, they admit at the same time that ‘Moses himself is faded’. They claim that ‘the uniqueness of the Sinai event cannot be denied’ but they add immediately ‘although the historical demonstration is difficult’. They find in the ‘stories about Moses a considerable historical background’ and some paragraphs later claim that this ‘can not be proved by facts’, that ‘it cannot be witnessed by historical facts’ (Cornfeld / Botterweck).
This is the method followed by those who do not deny the evidence itself, but neither do they want everything to collapse with a crash (No way!). For M.A. Beek, for example, there is no doubt that the patriarchs are ‘historical figures’. Although he only sees them ‘on a semi-dark background’ he considers them ‘human beings of great importance’. He himself admits: ‘To date we have not been able to find documentary evidence of the figure of Joshua in Egyptian literature’. He adds that, apart from the Bible, he does not know ‘a single document containing a clear and historically reliable reference to Moses’. And he continues that, if we do without the Bible, ‘no source is known about the expulsion from Egypt’. ‘The abundant literature of the Egyptian historiographers silences, with a worrying obstinacy, events that should have deeply impressed the Egyptians, if the account of the Exodus is based on facts’. Beek is also surprised that the Old Testament rejects

curiously enough, any data that would make possible a chronological fixation of the departure from Egypt. We do not see the name of the Pharaoh that Joshua knew, nor the one who oppressed Israel. This is all the more amazing because the Bible retains many other Egyptian names of people, places and offices.
Even more suspicious than the lack of chronological reference points in the Old Testament is the fact that none of the known Egyptian texts cites a catastrophe that affected a Pharaoh and his army while chasing the fleeing Semites. Since historical documents have an abundance of material on the epoch in question, at least some allusion would be expected. The silence of the Egyptian documents cannot be dismissed with the observation that court historiographers do not usually talk about defeats, since the events described in the Bible are too decisive for Egyptian historians to have overlooked them.

‘It is really curious’, this scholar continues, ‘that no tomb of Moses is known’. Thus, ‘the only proof of the historical truth of Moses’ is for him ‘the mention of a great-grandson in a later epoch’.
‘And Moses was 120 years old when he died’ says the Bible, although his eyes ‘had not weakened and his strength had not diminished’ and God himself buried him and ‘no one knows to this day where his tomb is’. A pretty weird end. According to Goethe, Moses committed suicide and according to Freud his own people killed him. The disputes were not rare, as with Aaron and Miriam. But as always, the closing of the fifth and last book of the Pentateuch significantly recalls ‘the acts of horror that Moses committed before the eyes of all Israel’. Every character always enters the history thanks to his terrifying feats, and this is so regardless if he lived or not really. But whatever the case may be with Moses, the investigation is divided.
The only thing that is clear today, as Spinoza saw it, is that the five books of Moses, which directly attribute to him the infallible word of God, do not come from him. This is the coincidental conclusion of the researchers.
Naturally, there are still enough people like Alois Stiefvater and enough little treatises such as Schlag-Wörter-Buch für katholische Christen types (Schlag Words Book for Catholic Christians) who continue to deceive the mass of believers by making them believe in the five books of Moses, that ‘although not all have been directly written by him, they are due to him’. How many, and which ones Moses wrote directly, Stiefvater and his accomplices do not dare to say. What remains true is that the Laws that were considered as written by the hand of Moses or even attributed to the ‘finger of God’ are also fabrications. (On the other hand, although God himself writes the Law on two tablets of stone, Moses had so little respect for them that in his anger against the golden calf he destroyed them.)
It is also clear that the writing of these five books was preceded by an oral transmission of many centuries, with constant changes. And then there were the editors, the authors, the biblical compilers who participated throughout many generations in the writing of the books by ‘Moses’, which is reflected in the different styles. It looks like a collection of different materials, such as the entire fourth book.
Thus arose a very diffuse collection lacking any systematic organisation, overflowing with motifs of widely spread legends, etiological and folkloristic myths, contradictions and duplications (which by themselves alone exclude the writing by a single author). Added to all this is a multitude of heterogeneous opinions that have been developed in a gradual way, even in the most important issues. Thus the idea of the resurrection arises very little by little in the Old Testament, and in the books Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes and Proverbs any testimony of beliefs in the resurrection is missing. In addition, the scribes and compilers have constantly modified, corrected and falsified the texts, which acquired new secondary extensions every time. And these processes went on for entire epochs.
The Decalogue or Ten Commandments, which Luther considered the supreme incarnation of the Old Testament, proceeds in its earliest form perhaps from the beginning of the age of kings. Many parts of the Pentateuch that must have been written by the man who lived, if he lived, in the 14th or 13th centuries BC—no less than sixty chapters of the second, third and fourth books—were not produced or collected by Jewish priests until the 5th century BC. Thus, the final redaction of the books awarded to Moses—I quote the Jesuit Norbert Lohfink—’took place some seven hundred years later’. And the composition of all the books of the Old Testament—I quote the Catholic Otto Stegmüller—was prolonged ‘for a period of approximately 1,200 years’.

Complete set of scrolls constituting the Hebrew Bible.
Research on the Old Testament has reached enormous dimensions and we cannot contemplate it here—saving the reader from the labyrinthic methodology: the ancient documentary hypotheses of the 18th century, the assumptions of fragments, complements, crystallisation and the important differentiation of a first Elohist, a second Elohist, a Jahwist or Yahwist (H. Hupfeld, 1835), the formal historical method (H. Gunkel, 1901), the various theories about the sources, the theory of two, three, four sources, the written sources of the ‘Jahwist’ (J), of the ‘Elohist’ (E), of the ‘writing of the priests’ (P), of ‘Deuteronomy’ (D), of the combined writing… We cannot get lost in all the threads of the story, the traditions, the plethora of additions, complements, inclusions, annexes, proliferations, textual modifications, the problem of the variants, the parallel versions, the duplications—in short, the enormous ‘secondary’ enlargement, and the history and the scrutiny of the texts. We cannot discuss either the reasons for the extension of the Pentateuch into a Hexateuch, Heptateuch or even Octateuch, or its limitation to a Tetrateuch however interesting these hypotheses may be within the context of our subject.
A simple overview of the critical comments, such as Martin Noth’s explanations of the Mosaic books, will show the reader its editors, redactors, compilers; of additions, extensions, later contributions, combinations of different states of incorporation, modifications, etc.: an old piece, an older one, a fairly recent one that is often called secondary, perhaps secondary, probably secondary, surely secondary. The word ‘secondary’ appears here in all conceivable associations. It seems to be a keyword, and even I would like to affirm without having made an exact analysis of its frequency: there is no other word that appears with greater assiduity in all these investigations of Noth and his work.
Recently Hans-Joachim Kraus has written Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments (The story of the historical-critical exploration of the Old Testament). Innovative and advanced for the 19th century was W.M.L. de Wette (died 1849) who perceived the many stories and traditions of these books and considered ‘David’, ‘Moses’ and ‘Solomon’ not as authors but as nominal symbols, such as collective names.
Due to the immense work of scholars in the course of the 19th century and the eventual debunking of biblical sacred history, Pope Leo XIII attempted to obstruct the freedom of research through his 1893 Encyclical Providentissimus Deus (The most provident God). A counteroffensive was opened also under his successor, Pius X, in a decree. From De Mosaica authentia Pentateuchi (Authentic Mosaic Pentateuch), June 27, 1906, Moses was considered an inspired author. Although on January 16, 1948 the secretary of the papal biblical commission declared in an official reply to Cardinal Suhard that the decisions of the commission ‘do not contradict with a later scientific analysis of these questions’, in Roman Catholicism ‘true’ always means: in the sense of Roman Catholicism. The final exhortation should be understood along the same lines: ‘That is why we invite Catholic scholars to study these problems from an impartial point of view, in the light of sound criticism’. But ‘from an impartial point of view’ means: from a partial point of view for the interests of the papacy. And with ‘sound criticism’ it is not meant to say anything other than a critique in favour of Rome.
The historical-scientific analysis of the writings of the Old Testament certainly did not provide a sure verdict about when the texts arose, although in some parts, as for example in the prophetic literature, the certainly about their antiquity is greater than, say, the religious lyrics. When it comes to the age of the Laws, there is less certainty. But historical-religious research with respect to the Tetrateuch (Moses 1-4) and the Deuteronomic historical work (Moses 5, Joshua, Judges, books of Samuel and the Kings) speaks of ‘epic works’, ‘mythological tales’, ‘legends’ and ‘myths’ (Nielsen).
The confusion that reigns in scholarship is manifest in the abundance of the repetitions: a double account of Creation, a double genealogy of Adam, a universal double flood (in one version the flood subsides after 150 days; according to other it lasts one year and ten days; and according to another, after raining forty days there are added another three weeks), in which Noah—then 600-years-old according to Genesis 7:6—took in the Ark seven pairs of pure animals and one of impure ones and, according to Genesis 6, 19 and 7, 16, there were a pair of pure and impure animals. But we would be very busy telling all the contradictions, inaccuracies, deviations with respect to a book inspired by God, in which there are a total of 250,000 textual variants.
In addition, the five books of Moses know a double Decalogue; a repeating legislation on slaves, the Passah, a loan, a double on the Sabbath, twice the entry of Noah into the Ark, twice the expulsion of Hagar by Abraham, twice the miracle of the manna and the quails, the election of Moses; three times the sins against the body and life, five times the catalogue of festivals, and are at least five legislations about the tenths, etc.

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Julian (novel) Literature

Julian, 37

Julian presiding at a conference of Sectarians
(Edward Armitage, 1875)

 
Priscus: I always thought Julian might have been a happier man had he been a bit more like Gallus. No one can say that Gallus did not enjoy himself. His was an exemplary life of complete self-indulgence. I could not be more envious of him.
 
Libanius: Obviously Priscus has found his ideal.
Within months of the state visit to Pergamon, Gallus fell. For two years the Emperor had been receiving disquieting reports about Gallus. Nebridius had told him bluntly that if Gallus were not removed as Caesar there would be civil war in Syria. In his last letter to Constantius, Thalassios had said much the same thing.
One final incident brought matters to a head. The food shortage had grown worse. The lower classes were rioting. Having failed at price fixing, Gallus determined to leave Antioch as quickly as possible. As pretext, he announced that he was planning to invade Persia (though he did not have sufficient troops to conquer a mud village on the Nile).
The day Gallus left the city, the senate met him in front of the memorial to Julius Caesar. A considerable crowd had also turned out to see him, but they were not interested in saying farewell to their Caesar. They wanted food, and they said so. They made the most terrible racket. I know. I was there. I have never seen such an angry mob. Behind a row of household troops with drawn swords, the Caesar and the senate exchanged formalities while all around us the mob roared, pressing closer and closer to where we stood. Even Gallus was alarmed.
Then Theophilus, the governor of Syria, came forward to make a speech to the Caesar. Now Theophilus was an excellent official but he was not popular. Why? Who knows? The Antiochenes are completely frivolous in public matters. If a cruel tyrant is witty, they will adore him. But if their ruler is a good man, slow of speech, they will despise him. They despised Theophilus. They jeered his speech. Then the mob began to shout: “Food! Food!”
During this, I watched Gallus. At first he looked baffled; then alarmed; then—one could observe his very thought-crafty. He raised his hand for silence. But the shouting continued. So Theophilus motioned to the drummers, who set up an ominous rolling. The crowd fell silent.
Gallus spoke. “My good people, the heart of your Caesar grieves for you. Yet he is puzzled. You say you lack food. But why? There is food in Antioch. There is plenty of grain in the warehouses. Your Caesar put it there for you.”
“Then give it to us!” A voice rang out.
Gallus shook his head. “But it is yours already. Your governor knows this.” He turned to the stunned governor. “Theophilus, I have told you to feed the people. Why have you disobeyed me? Why have you been so cruel? Even if you are in league with the speculators, you must take pity on the people. The poor are hungry, Theophilus. Feed them!”
In all my long life I have never witnessed such a vicious scene. Gallus deliberately incited the people against his own governor. Then he rode off at the head of the legions, leaving us to the now violent mob. Like the rest of the senate, I bolted. Fortunately no one was hurt except Theophilus, who was torn to pieces. That day Gallus lost what small support he had among us.
When Constantius received news of the Theophilus affair, he realized at last that Gallus must be recalled. But it is easier to create a Caesar than to destroy one. Constantius knew that if he were to move against Gallus, there would be civil war. So Constantius proceeded cautiously. His first move was to order Gallus’s army to rendezvous in Serbia, preparatory to a campaign on the Danube. Inactive troops, said Constantius in a diplomatic letter to the Caesar, are prone to mutiny. So Gallus was left with only his personal guard and a single detachment of targeteers. Then Constantius instructed the prefect Domitian (until recently Count of the Sacred Largesse and a financial expert) to proceed to Syria, as though on a routine tour of the provinces. At Antioch, Domitian was to persuade Gallus to obey the Emperor’s order to come to Milan “for consultation”. Unfortunately, Domitian was vain and overbearing and perfectly confident that no one was so clever as he. I don’t know why, but this seems to be a common trait of finance ministers.
Domitian arrived at Antioch to find Gallus again in residence, after a month’s campaign on the Persian border. But instead of going first to the Caesar’s palace as protocol requires, Domitian proceeded to military headquarters, announcing that he was too ill to come to court. For several weeks Domitian remained at headquarters, plotting against Gallus and sending back highly coloured reports to the Emperor concerning the Caesar’s doings. At last Gallus ordered Domitian to present himself at a meeting of the consistory. He did, and in a scene of unrivalled insolence Domitian told Gallus that if he did not immediately obey the Emperor and go to Milan, “I shall personally order your supplies cut off.” He then marched out of the palace and returned to headquarters, where he thought he was safe.
I was not present at that historic meeting of the Caesar’s consistory, but I have been told by those who were there that it was an astonishing confrontation and that for once all sympathy was with the Caesar who had been insulted.
Gallus promptly struck back. He ordered Domitian arrested on a charge of lèse majesté. To give the gloss of legitimacy to this arrest, he sent his legal adviser, the quaestor Montius, to instruct the troops in how to behave.
Montius was an elderly man, with a passion for correct procedure. He told Gallus bluntly that the Caesar had no authority over a prefect engaged on the Emperor’s business. Gallus ignored this advice. Montius then appeared before the troops who had been called to assembly, and he told them that what Gallus intended to do was not only illegal but highly dangerous and that any soldier who obeyed the Caesar would be committing treason. “But should you decide to arrest the Emperor’s prefect then I advise you first to overthrow the Emperor’s statues, so that your revolt will at least be honest.”
The troops were confused, to say the least. But not for long. When Gallus heard what Montius had done, he rushed to the assembly ground and harangued the troops as only he knew how to do.
“I am in danger. You are in danger. We are all in danger because of would-be usurpers, some of whom sit in my own consistory.” And he turned fiercely on the courageous old Montius. “Yes, even the quaestor Montius is involved in this conspiracy. He plots against me, as well as against Constantius. He tells you that I may not arrest an insolent prefect because he is on imperial business. But I have the right to discipline any official in the East. I would be untrue to my oath to Constantius if I did not keep order in Antioch.” And so on.
By the time Gallus had finished, the troops were with him. While he stood by, they murdered Montius. Next they marched on military headquarters. No attempt was made to resist them. They found Domitian in the commandant’s private office on the second floor. They threw the wretched prefect down the stairs (which are very steep: I once badly twisted my ankle going up them). Then they dragged the bodies of Domitian and Montius side by side through the streets of Antioch.
Gallus was now thoroughly frightened. Though his troops were adequate for controlling Antioch, he was in no position to resist Constantius, and it was perfectly plain that the two would soon be in open conflict. Yet Gallus still pretended to be carrying out the Emperor’s orders when he declared martial law and arrested those whom he suspected of plotting against him. This turned out to be half the senate. I withdrew to Daphne during this troubled time.
Gallus set up a military tribunal and arraigned before it all those who had been accused of treason. During the trials Constantia sat behind a curtain listening to the testimony; every now and then she would poke her head into the courtroom to ask a question or to give an opinion. It was a ludicrous display. Hearsay was now accepted as fact, and no one was safe.
In a dyeshop a secret agent noticed a purple robe of the sort only an emperor may wear. It was immediately assumed that the cloak had been ordered by a would-be usurper. The shopowner wisely vanished but they found his files. Although there was no mention of a purple cloak having been ordered, the secret service did come up with a letter from a deacon inquiring when “the work will be ready”. That was enough. “The work” was the purple cloak, according to the secret service, which had no other evidence. The guiltless deacon was arrested, tortured, tried, and put to death. This was typical of the “justice” at Gallus’s court.
Having failed to persuade Gallus to come to Milan, Constantius ordered his sister Constantia to attend him. Confident that she could patch up the differences between her husband and her brother, she set out for Milan. But en route the lady died of fever, and that was the end for Gallus. Though he was by now perfectly willing to declare himself Augustus in the East, he lacked the military power to withstand Constantius. He was in a quandary.
Finally a letter arrived from Constantius that was most amiable in tone. The Emperor reminded Gallus that under Diocletian a Caesar always obeyed his Augustus, citing the famous case of the Caesar Galerius who walked a mile on foot because the Augustus Diocletian was displeased with him. This letter was delivered by Scudilo, a master diplomatist who told Gallus privately that Constantius wished him no harm.
Did Gallus believe this? It seems impossible. But he was by now a desperate man. He was also completely demoralized by his wife’s death. To everyone’s amazement, he agreed to go to Milan. However, he insisted on travelling by way of Constantinople, where as the reigning Caesar he presided over the games in the Hippodrome. But Julian describes this scene.