“BAD” 

King Herod the mass child-killer

Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men.

*

“GOOD”

Jews on their way to captivity in Babylon dream of mass child-killing

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

*

“GOOD” 

God the mass child-killer

Thus saith the Lord, “About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt:  And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first born of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts. And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more.”

*

No religion can argue with any other religion about the truth of its doctrine because none can prove its truth. There’s no point in opposing one irrationality with another irrationality.

There’s little enough point in anyone’s trying to reason with the religious, since they haven’t come to their beliefs by reason.

The logic of any religious belief can only be that any other religious belief is wrong. To pretend otherwise is foolish. If a person of some particular faith says that other faiths are also true and that he respects them equally with his own, he’s either lying or he’s an idiot. Why does he believe what he believes if all other faiths are equally true? Perhaps only because his daddy told him to – the amazing excuse that the otherwise really impressive and amusing philosopher Kierkegaard gives for believing in (a personalized version of) Christianity.

There can be no wonder that Christians and Jews who live in Muslim lands are persecuted. The Muslim faith includes commandments to make life hell for Christians and Jews, by taxing them exorbitantly and murdering them at will.

The same must be said about Jews living in the old Christian lands. Christians were terrible persecutors, almost every branch of the Christian Church as intolerant and cruel as every other, until in very recent times – since the Second World War – Christianity began to bore most people in the West.

The ancient Jews, according to their own mythology, were intensely intolerant – far more than were the Greek and Roman pagans. What’s remarkable is that in the modern Jewish state, Christians and Muslims are not persecuted. (No, despite the propaganda, Muslims are NOT persecuted in Israel in any way whatsoever, and that eccentric break with custom is an historical anomaly, bound to irritate world opinion.)

Of course we sympathize with the unjustly persecuted, even though we think they should know it’s coming to them; and, in the case of Christians, even though their own doctrine reveres suffering.

This is from Front Page, by Raymond Ibrahim:

No matter how violent or ugly, no matter how many Islamic slogans are shrieked — thus placing their behavior in a purely Islamic context — Muslim violence against the West and Israel will always be dismissed as a product of the weak and outnumbered status of Muslims — their status as underdogs, which the West tends to romanticize. …

They may be screaming and rioting, firing rockets and destroying property — all while calling for the death and destruction of the “infidel” West and/or Israel to cries of “Allahu Akbar!” Still, no problem. According to the aforementioned array of pundits, apologists, academics, and politicians, such bloodlust is a natural byproduct of the frustration Muslims feel as an oppressed minority, “rightfully” angry with the “colonial” West and its Israeli proxy.

Indeed, that is precisely how even the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. by al-Qaeda were rationalized away by many “experts” — even as al-Qaeda’s own words exposed their animus as a direct product of Muslim doctrine not temporal grievances.

Most recently, the New York Times, in the context of the rocket attacks on Tel Aviv, asserted that Israel “needs a different approach to Hamas and the Palestinians based more on acknowledging historic grievances,” thus taking all blame off the “aggrieved” and “underdog” Muslims and Palestinians.

But if Muslims get a free pass when their violence is directed against those currently stronger than them, how does one rationalize away their violence when it is directed against those weaker than them, those who have no political influence whatsoever? Consider the most obvious of these scenarios, the growing epidemic of Muslim persecution of Christians. From one end of the Islamic world to the other — whether in Arab lands, African lands, Asian lands, or Sinic lands, wherever Muslims are a majority — the largest non-Muslim religious group, Christians, suffer untold atrocities.

These Christians are often identical to their Muslim co-citizens in race, ethnicity, national identity, and language; there is no political dispute, no land dispute. The only problem is that they are Christian—they are the other—and so must be subjugated, according to Sharia’s position for all “others,” for all infidels—including Israel and the West.

Such is the true nature of Muslim rage throughout the world: it is a byproduct of doctrinal intolerance if not downright hatred for the other, who must always be kept in a state of subjugation and humiliation, according to the letter of the Quran. …

Consider: Christians and Jews are both constantly castigated in the Quran: Muslims are admonished not to befriend either of them (5:51) and to fight and subjugate them “until they pay tribute with willing submission and feel themselves brought low” (9:29). Christians under Islam are suffering accordingly—as despised dhimmis, abused and “brought low,” routinely plundered of their lives, dignity, and possessions.

[But] Israel — the dhimmi that got away—actually has authority and power over Muslims. Now, if dhimmis are supposed to be kept in total submission to Muslims, how then when one of them actually lords it over Muslims? Hence Islam’s immense and existential rage against the Jewish state.

It could hardly be more obvious that if organized religion were to be universally abandoned, a major cause of human strife and misery would be removed. Which isn’t to say that strife and misery would cease. There will always be a rich store of other causes. But few as superfluous and absurd as religion.

In the light of all this, the efforts of some non-Muslim believers to make peace between religions, to bring sweetness and light where there there has always inevitably been hatred, fury, disgust and fear, strikes us as a particularly futile endeavor. It can only be attempted by clergymen keeping themselves in the rankest ignorance of what “the other’s” faith teaches.

This is also from Front Page, by Hillel Zaremba, who has become understandably exasperated with such efforts:

While it is all well and good to encourage the commonalities that unite Americans of all faiths –

What commonalities would those be, we wonder? We’ve not been able to discover any (unless secular values and loyalties are meant).

– it is equally important to inquire into the bona fides of organizations that only claim to promote tolerance. Philadelphia presents a sorry but enlightening example of how groups whose agendas directly challenge American values get a free pass from the interfaith establishment due largely to the firmly held belief that “diverse” (and disquieting) viewpoints must be respected — as long as they are Muslim.

A prime example of this is the Mayor’s Office of Faith-based Initiatives (MOFI), “the primary liaison between the Office of the Mayor and Philadelphia’s diverse communities of faith and their leaders.” Despite being provided with evidence of the U.S. government’s case against one of its partners, the terror-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the office’s interim director, Reverend Malcolm Byrd, declared: “We will engage with CAIR. … We don’t have to endorse you to work with you.” After reviewing the evidence, MOFI decided to maintain the relationship. According to this twisted logic, MOFI [welcomes] the Nation of Islam, whose leader Louis Farrakhan unabashedly declares Jews to be part of “the Synagogue of Satan.”

A similar approach is exhibited by the Interfaith Center of Greater Philadelphia (ICGP), “dedicated to interreligious dialogue, education, and community building.” It seemed reasonable to assume that the organization would want to vet its members to some degree, to be sure they truly embrace tolerance and respect for diversity. The ICGP … soon disabused us of that notion.

By ignoring the ideologies held by Muslim groups, the ICGP and others afford cover for those whose beliefs would otherwise be abhorrent to them, like the Villanova-based Foundation for Islamic Education (FIE) … [whose] leaders and faculty have sanctioned suicide attacks against Israeli civilians, defended the execution of Muslims who convert out of their faith, and threatened Copts for questioning the Qur’an. …

Another Walk congregation is the Quba Institute (QI), aka the “International Muslim Brotherhood, Inc.” (IMB). … According to QI’s old website …  the IMB “forged partnerships with the Muslim Student Associations [MSA] of local Universities” in the late 1960s, an organization identified by federal investigators as subscribing to the goal of teaching Muslims “that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands.”

This interfaith partner has hosted major Brotherhood ideologues … An older version of the mosque’s website referenced the congregation’s core principles [as] including a commitment to U.S. law and rejection of terrorism … with one important caveat: armed jihad is permitted “in the context of self-defense or guarding the sacred, holy lands of Islam.” This is the same rationale used by Hamas to target Israel since it considers the entire state’s territory to be sacred to Islam. Bin Laden similarly justified his attacks against the U.S. in this way, viewing any American presence in Islamic lands as a form of infidel “occupation.” …

Interfaith organizations ought to, at the very least, probe the statements and associations of their constituent members or facilitate others’ attempts to do so.

The same admonition should be heeded by the Religious Leaders Council of Greater Philadelphia (RLCGP), another interfaith group which includes important Christian and non-Christian clergy, such as the archbishop of Philadelphia, the head of the Southeastern PA Lutheran Synod, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania … , [and which] welcomes into its fellowship … Imam Isa Abdulmateen …. [who has said]:

“Today, Arabs, Pakistanis… and other immigrants use the Qur’an [and] they tell us “Islam means peace” because they are afraid to upset the status quo, so we abandon jihad. … Our great leaders have become tame after 9/11. … When black men think of homos we think of weak, effeminate, flaming fags who disgust our sensibilities but are relatively harmless to all except themselves. Wrong! Homosexuality for whites is their heritage. … For blacks, homosexuality is crippling. … A black homosexual will never support revolution against the capitalist, racist republic because the capitalist, racist republic protects his homosexual lifestyle. …”

… What is particularly maddening is that key players in these interfaith groups were presented with this information and the best they could muster was a vague assurance that they would look into it.

The moral bankruptcy at the heart of such feel-good organizations is clearly on display. Like their fellow travelers in government and the mainstream media who ignore all available evidence, the collegial world of interfaith do-gooders burnish the credentials of bad actors, in an increasingly one-sided sense of tolerance, embracing the very haters they would otherwise oppose.

Our advice to all these feel-good organizations is, give it up. Interfaith dialogue never has, never will, never can achieve anything worth achieving.

And don’t say that ignorance of this or that faith breeds intolerance of it. The more a reasonable person knows about any religion, the less tolerable he is sure to find it.

“We are living in a time of Christian persecution unparalleled since the days of Hitler and the Soviet Gulag,” Ken Blackwell writes at Townhall.

It is true that Christians are being persecuted with a persistence and viciousness that may in fact be wholly unparalleled in the history of Christendom. The persecutors are Muslims, chiefly in the Islamic states.

Yet the few Christian leaders who can bring themselves to speak out against the discrimination, threats, violence, forced conversions and murders, blame the Jews. (See here and here and here.)

Are any Muslims being persecuted, tortured, murdered? Yes – not by Christians or Jews, but by other Muslims.

The European once-Christian nations grovel before Islam. Muslims carry out terrorist attacks against the indigenous people, rape insult assault and murder them – and cowardly European governments protect them, even from justified criticism. [See our posts:  The West on trial (December 16, 2009); Freedom versus Islam (January 20, 2010); Civilization on trial (October 11, 2010); An honest confession of hypocrisy (October 23, 2010); The new heresy (January 11, 2011); Darkness descending – again (February 7, 2011);  Protecting Islam from criticism (December 18, 2011); Sharia is the law in Austria (December 25, 2011); Only the gagged may speak freely (December 26, 2011); Darkness imminent (January 8, 2012); The most important struggle of our time (April16, 2012); Marked for death (May 10, 2012); The last days of Europe, (June 9, 2012)]

But the Jews … They may be unjustly criticized, condemned, and reviled. For what? The Jews may have given more (see here and here) to the world proportionate to their numbers than any other nation, but in Europe they are not to be endured. Why? For no other reason (though many more are concocted) than that they have continued maddeningly to exist ever since and despite the advent of Christianity.* Christian belief may fade, but its savage hatred of the Jews lives on. The once-Christian states of Europe, keeping up the venerable tradition even though they have largely given up the faith, continue to persecute them.

This is from Front Page by Giulio Meotti:

While the U.S. is home to many Christian supporters of Israel, the Christian groups more closely linked to global public opinion, bureaucracy, media and legal forums are all violently anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. This month, for example, the Church of England voted to support the boycott movement against Israel.

A special report by the Israeli watchdog NGO Monitor, revealed the huge flux of money that is being provided by European governments for the Church-based efforts to destroy Israel. This development is paving the way for a new Jewish bloodbath through the vehicle of excluding Israel’s Jews from the family of nations.

The Dutch government, for example, grants millions of euros to organizations such as Kerk in Aktie and the Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation, which support a “general boycott” of Israeli products as per the policy of the Protestant Church of the Netherlands. The Interchurch Organization also received money from the European Union (€5.3 million).

Diakonia, Sweden’s largest humanitarian NGO founded by five Swedish churches (the Alliance Mission, the Baptist Union, InterAct, the Methodist Church and Mission Covenant Church), financed programs “to commemorate the Nakba,” the Palestinian term for “catastrophe” which indicates Israel’s foundation in 1948.

The UK’s Christian Aid and Finland’s FinnChurchAid received millions from the EU to propagate the worst anti-Israel blood libels, including starving, torture, dispossession and siege.

The World Council of Churches, which plays a pivotal role in mobilizing churches in the boycott against Israel, gets annually millions from European taxpayers.

European taxes are used in several ways to fund anti-Semitism of an intensity unseen since Nazi Germany. …

The Palestinian Authority has reported that the EU (41.4 million euros), France (19 million euros) Ireland (5 million euros), Norway (53 million dollars) and the World Bank (40 million dollars) have all given funds to the Palestinian budget, used to pay the families of the “martyrs” (read: suicide bombers) and the 5.500 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

Europe is financing Israel’s destruction also by channeling millions of euros to secular and leftist NGOs. These are just some: Addameer (207.000 $ from Sweden), Al Haq (426.000 $ from Holland, 88.000 $ from bailout-needing Ireland and 156.000 $ from Norway), Al Mezan (105.000 $ from Sweden), Applied Research Institute (374.000 $ from the European Union and 98.000$ from bankrupt Spain), Coalition of Women for Peace (247.000 $ from the European Union) and Troicare (2.000.000 $ from Brussels and 640.000 $ from UK).

There is a fourth way Europe funds Palestinian terrorism and anti-Semitism: books, school textbooks, documentaries, tv channels. This is a kind of “software” of the holy war against the Jews.

According to a report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, the Palestinian textbooks funded by the European Union incite hatred against Israel: “Palestine” is shown to encompass all the Jewish State, Judaism’s most holy sites (such as the Temple Mount and Rachel’s Tomb) have been erased, the Jews are demonized and Arab “martyrdom” is praised. In these texts, Jews are described as “cunning,” “locusts” and “wild animals.”

Thanks to Arab satellite channels, Hizbullah’s al-Manar and Hamas’s al-Aqsa TV stations can beam their hatred into European living rooms, radicalizing Muslim immigrants throughout the continent. Brussels has never tried to stop this European Jihad TV, ignoring even the massacre of four Jews in southern France last spring by a French Muslim. …

Seventy years ago the Europeans had to round up the Jews and take them to the nearest railway station. Now they just need to finance a textbook, fund a television show and draw a check at a distance of 3.299 km (that between Brussels and Jerusalem). It’s a cleaner and more comfortable anti-Jewish policy that resists any rational exorcism.

We will not be surprised if one day, under the Eurabian banner, the new Europeans will try to expel the descendants of the Holocaust from the land of Israel. This second Shoah will be called “Peace and Love for Palestine.”

*There are Christians who are fully aware that Christianity itself is the root cause of the persistent irrational hatred which came eventually, in the late 19th century, to be called “anti-Semitism”. For example, Professor William Nicholls, an Anglican minister and founder of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia, wrote in his book Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate:

No amount of tolerance and goodwill can obscure the fundamental threat to the Jewish people contained in the heart of traditional Christian belief … [Because] the very presence of the Jewish people in the world… puts a great question mark against Christian belief in a new covenant …

A reviewer of the book, Dave Turner, writes that Nicholls could see no remedy:

Even were all branches of Christianity to agree to somehow moderate the anti-Judaism of the gospels and Paul, is this even possible? These documents … are, after all, considered the inerrant word of God. Unanimity over violating God’s inspired words just for the sake of saving the Jews yet another Holocaust? And assuming a wave of remorse, a universal need to express penance, what then would remain of Christianity if indeed it did agree to do so? According to Nicholls, “Once all the anti-Jewish elements have been removed from Christianity, what is left turns out to be Judaism.”

Which strangely adds up to mean that Christianity is Judaism plus hatred of the Jews!

Dave Turner concludes:

Dr. Nicholls’ book is unrelentingly honest and powerful, a carefully constructed and well-written indictment of a religion that sees itself as embodying the high ideals of “Love, Charity and Forgiveness.” … These ideals … as Dr. Nicholls describes in this volume, clearly … do not apply to the Jews.

A Jewish organization caved to Muslim pressure and cancelled a talk to be given by Pamela Geller, who is one of the bravest warriors against Islam in America.

It was a cowardly and stupid thing to do.

Also, it means that law-enforcement is not trusted as it used to be in the US.

The videos come from Atlas Shrugs:

 

She gave her banned speech elsewhere:

The English author Wyndham Lewis wrote this (in a Foreword to Rotting Hill, a book of his stories published in 1951):

Socialism as a final product of bible-religion.

Conscience is at the root of the principle of Social Justice – without it what would be there? … It is all that remains of Protestant Christianity …

Let me try and show in a few words how absolutely impossible socialism would have been without the Christian religion. … Liberalism was an early stage of socialism. … The logical conclusion of … [the] preachers of social fair play, of social justice, was for the classes possessed of money and power to surrender them, and, of course, for England itself as a nation owning a quarter of the globe to surrender everything – as has recently been done in the case of England’s greatest possession, India – except this island; and even that must in the end not be looked upon with too possessive an eye.

Now, without the teaching of the New Testament – and we must not forget the Old, and that the Jews were the most moral nation the world has ever seen – or some similar teaching such as Stoicism (and there are exceedingly few teachings of this type), no man gives up anything he has acquired whether it be wealth or land or goods. Why should he? He will fight to defend them with desperation. If you informed him that “Property is theft” he would laugh at you. Such a saying, in the first instance, to be successful, had to appear with a supernatural sanction. To test the accuracy of what I am saying, you only have to consider whether you would give up anything but a small fraction of your property in order to share it with your less fortunate fellows. There are very few of us who would willingly do so. But a long process of religious conditioning (latterly operating through such words as “decency”, “fair play”, etc. etc.) has led us to a point at which we empower the State to deprive us of practically everything. This is the work of Jesus.

Actually, no, not Jesus. Though we agree with his point that Christianity bred socialism, we need to correct him there. It is the work of St. Paul.

St. Paul invented the sentimental morality of Christianity.

St. Paul invented Christianity.

St. Paul invented Jesus.

(See our ongoing series of essays on the origins and early history of Christianity: A man named Jesus or something like that (September 23, 2011); The invention of Christianity (October 28, 2011); Tread on me: the making of Christian morality (December 22, 2011); St.Paul: portrait of a sick genius (January 7, 2012); Pauline Christianity: a mystical salad (February 26, 2012); The fictitious life of Jesus Christ (April 7, 2012).)

The video (from this source) is long but we think it is worth the time it takes to watch it. What the two atheist professors, Richard Dawkins the biologist and Laurence Krauss the physicist, say about science is fascinating to us.

For instance, Dawkins says that the hippo is more closely related to the whale than to the pig.

They talk about how counter-intuitive science is. They discuss the question of whether something can come out of nothing – by accident. (Krauss insists that the laws of physics are an accident.)

They both maintain that religion should be subject to criticism like all other ideas. And urge that religious ideas be ridiculed – out of respect for those who hold them.

There  are points that we disagree with. As usual with Richard Dawkins, we are irritated by his ill-reasoned and ill-informed political remarks. There aren’t many of them, but among them we count the  astounding statement that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is intelligent – no doubt because he is a lefty. (For our take on this question, see our post Intellectuals and the law, March 18, 2010.)

And Krauss is a warmist. “Vast” numbers of people, he says, “will lose their land” because of global warming. He despises the majority of his fellow Americans for thinking that manmade global warming is a hoax, declaring that they only believe it because much money has been spent (by unnamed sinister powers) to convince them of this. No proof adduced. Not the way a scientist should think.

Dawkins doesn’t say what he thinks about that, but does say mankind may be doomed in this century by weapons of mass destruction.

Considering whether religion can be rational, he says that religions can have an “internal consistency”. Perhaps they could have, but they don’t. Christianity is notably lacking internal consistency, as Christians themselves demonstrate by arguing with each other over the “logic” of their beliefs through all the centuries of their existence.

In answer to one of the several not-very-good-to-positively-imbecile questions put to them, Dawkins reveals that he values and often reads two books of  the Bible for their  beauty  – but only in the King James Version: The Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes (traditionally said to be the Atheist’s favorite). On this we wholly agree with him.

Perhaps there is too little science in the hour and a half. But we were informed and entertained.

See what you think.

Our post today –  Easter Sunday, 2012 –  is the next in our series of essays on the invention and early history of Christianity, following A man named Jesus or something like that (September 23, 2011); The invention of Christianity (October 28, 2011); Tread on me: the making of Christian morality (December 22, 2011); St.Paul: portrait of a sick genius (January 7, 2012); Pauline Christianity: a mystical salad (February 26, 2012).

This essay is about the gospels. Christians often say that atheists don’t know much about Christianity and don’t read the bible. In our case they are wrong.

*

 The gospel stories of Jesus’s life – almost everything they tell about the man whom St. Paul deified except the manner of his death – are fictions of laughable transparency.

All religions need their myths, usually set in a distant past. The gospel-writers had to invent historical facts of their own era. In other words, to spin tendentious lies, addressed to gullibility and ignorance, around events within living memory.

Their stories had to achieve three main ends: to prove that Jesus was the prophesied Messiah; to establish that he was the divine Son of God; and to shift the blame for his execution from the Romans to the Jews.

Paul converted dozens, or hundreds, perhaps even a few thousand to his new religion, Christianity. The Romans classed them as a Jewish sect. After 70 CE when the uprising in Judea was crushed and the Temple destroyed by Titus, the Christians felt an urgent need to put not just distance but implacable enmity between themselves and the Jews. Titus’s triumphal parade through Rome, with his loot from the Temple and his Jewish captives, was probably the event that prompted “Mark”, a man or group of Christians living in Rome, to set about composing, in haste and fear, an account of Jesus’s life and teaching that would dissociate Christianity from Judaism and distinguish the Christians from the Jews.

Mark’s was the first gospel, started some twenty years after Paul had begun to preach. Matthew’s and then Luke’s followed, about ten and fifteen years later, taking much of their material from Mark. [1] Over the next hundred years they were all subjected to revision and interpolation. They are supremely malicious documents, grounding the myths of the new religion in the false inculpation of the race to which the man had belonged whom the authors worshiped as their god. That the Christians felt this to be an existential necessity may explain, but hardly excuse, the immorality of their ploy: making a ransom bid for their own security at the expense of the Jews. Nothing more thoroughly exposes the shallowness of the Christian commitment to love, than this demonizing of the people out of whose religion theirs  was born. When it came to ferocious denunciation, the acolytes of the new God of Love were a match for the prophets of the old God of Vengeance. The hatred would be sustained throughout the history of Christianity.

St. Paul wanted the Church to repudiate the Jewish scriptures, insisting that the Law had been superseded by the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus Christ. But the Church fathers found it impossible to relinquish them as the pre-history of Christianity. They found they could not, after all, do without the old moral law. And they needed the prophecies in order to claim the title of Messiah for their Christ.

The life they made up for Jesus fulfilled all relevant prophecies. An example of how they worked this is the story of the Birth. Although one of the few things known about the crucified man is that he had lived in Nazareth in the Galilee, Matthew and Luke assert that he was born in Bethlehem, and Luke spins a tale to explain how it happened, so as to fulfill a prophesy in the Book of Micah [2]. He explains that Augustus Caesar ordered a census to be taken throughout the empire, and the rules of the census required every head of a household to return to the place of his birth for the period being surveyed. [3] This is patent nonsense. The whole point of a census is for the ruling authority to know where its subjects are and what is their standing at a particular moment. Re-arranging everything, having families travel hither and thither, scurrying about all over an empire before they provide information, would defeat the purpose. But Luke alleges such a rule, has the husband of Jesus’s mother be a native of Bethlehem, and so has him return there with his pregnant wife. On the night they arrive Jesus is born. Prophecy fulfilled.

To shift the blame for the crucifixion from the Romans who did the deed to the Jews who did not, the story tellers have the High Priest find Jesus guilty of blasphemy for not denying that he called himself the king of the Jews (though if he had called himself that it would not have been blasphemous) and hand him over to the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, to be executed for it. [4] The procurator is made extremely reluctant to condemn him to death, but “the Jews” insist that he must be crucified. Matthew even has a crowd of Jews – speaking for all Jews, it is implied – vow to bear the guilt of his execution forever: “his blood be upon us and our children”. [5] (There lies the root of the Holocaust.)

In particular, those Jews who had been the companions of the executed man had to be discredited. They were still annoyingly hanging about after his death, holding on to their belief that he was the Messiah (but not divine), and that he would return to complete his political mission. They formed a sect among many sects within Judaism. [6] Nothing they believed was considered blasphemous – which a belief in the divinity of Jesus would have been. Although they were dispersed after the fall of the Temple, ceased to proselytize (as the Jews did generally), and so became less of a living threat to Christian credibility, explanation was still needed for the Christian record as to why they had not recognized Jesus as God in his lifetime. So the writers of the gospels show them to have been too stupid to understand what Jesus revealed to them – without apparently considering why Jesus chose disciples who were such dunces, setting himself up to be frustrated and let down time after time by their incomprehension, cowardice and treachery. [7]

It is in John’s gospel that Jesus most insistently declares that he is the Son of God, and he is made to be in constant bitter conflict with “the Jews”. This gospel was written at the earliest near the end of the first century and more probably in the second century. It is a mystical disquisition consisting largely of tales of miracles, denigration of the Jews, and tendentious discourses bearing on controversy within the Church. John’s Jesus is a long-winded bore, repetitively explaining that he could only perform his miracles because God the Father gave him the power; an indication that Christian theologians must have been arguing about whether Jesus, being God, was omnipotent while he was on earth. It is one of the many questions that the extra-absurd theology of Christianity inevitably gave rise to and cannot be answered.

The gospels were written to solve problems, not to record facts. As difficulties were perceived they were dealt with. The popular cult of John the Baptist was a stumbling block to the followers of Jesus, so a story was devised in which John baptizes Jesus and recognizes him as one who is far above him. This is so important to Mark that he begins his story with it. [8] The wide appeal of Zoroastrianism in the eastern Roman Empire had to be similarly appeased, so three Zoroastrian priests, or Magi, travel from the East to pay homage to the newborn Jesus. [9] To prove that Jesus had divine powers – whether his own or worked through him by “the Father” – he had to perform miracles: so in the stories he calms tumultuous seas, heals the sick, cures blindness and deafness, raises the dead, casts out evil spirits, works success with getting food, feeds multitudes – the usual sort of miracles found in the legends of numerous magicians. [10]

The gospels had to say what the fictitious Jesus taught. The writers cannot be blamed for creating a God-man who said nothing original or profound, since they themselves were not specially gifted men. They were not highly educated: they wrote in demotic Greek. The transparency of their contrivances suggests that they were not even very intelligent. To invent a great thinker one has to be a great thinker, and none of them was.

They lifted some of his wisdom from the rabbinical stock: gnomic wise-saws and injunctions against showing off your virtue and piety. [11] Much was adapted or freshly composed to promote the Pauline Christian values of self-abnegation, meekness, other-worldliness, poverty, continence, the glorification of suffering. Revisions presented in the form “You have heard it said … but I say unto you…”, were to establish that the new religion of Jesus Christ was doctrinally different from the old, superseded it, and was morally superiority to it.

New was the creation of Hell. Again one notices the hypocrisy of a religion that preaches forgiveness, love, and mercy, yet invents an eternal punishment of unremitting agony for those whom Christ rejects.

But rejects on what grounds? The gospels have Jesus teach tolerance of evil; not only must you appease evil by passively enduring persecution and practicing forgiveness, you must permit it by abandoning moral judgment and putting up no resistance to it. Forgive, judge not, and “Resist not evil.”  [12]

Among Jesus’s messages, there are sayings that go against the drift and purposes of the gospel-writers. These may well have been words spoken by the real man, remembered and repeated by word of mouth, and well enough known to the converts that their omission could have roused doubt over the authenticity of everything the writers claimed to be recording about Jesus. They include a firm statement that the Law will never be superseded: “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” [13] And he orders his followers not to preach to the Gentiles but only to “the lost sheep of Israel”. [14] Yet that is the very thing Paul did: preach to the Gentiles. And what he preached was that the Law was obsolete.

And there is this: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” [15] It is one of the few hints in the gospels that all was not peaceful in Judea in Jesus’s lifetime. Another sign is the presence of at least one dagger-wielding Zealot among Jesus Christ’s own followers. [16] It is notable that this rebel, Judas Iscariot (Judah the dagger-man), is the same character who is made to betray Jesus to the Romans, so that his evil violence contrasts with Jesus’s implied peacefulness. Judas Iscariot may well have been one of the real Jesus’s band. Behind the fictional teacher, preacher, healer, miracle worker and God, a shadowy figure of no use to Christianity can be glimpsed: a man who claimed his mission was not to send peace but a sword.

This shadowy figure had a cause to fight for. It could only have been the liberation of his people from Roman rule, which was the task of the Messiah. He came to believe that that was who he was, that he would free Judea and be crowned king. The defeat of the Romans would happen by means of a miracle, worked by his God through him. He had only to pray, take certain ritual actions, and the Romans would go. How? Sicken and die, or convert en masse to Judaism, or sail away, or vanish into the air perhaps? This was no common religious fanaticism. It was insane delusion.

What sort of man can believe such a thing? A madman.

In the Christian story, Jesus tells his disciples to arm themselves; if necessary, to sell a garment and use the money to buy a sword. [17] Only two of them do it. They all go with him to the foot of the Mount of Olives. He prays fervently. [18] What next?

Taking as a starting point the fairly certain fact that Jesus was executed as a rebel leader, and reasoning plausibly as to what might have led up to that event, this was the probable sequence of events: Jesus sends one of his band to raise alarm – by reporting a disturbance, perhaps – and bring a contingent of the enemy to the chosen place. He and the rest of the band wait, convinced that when the Romans come they will need only the two swords they have [19], a blow or two will be struck, and God will do the rest. [20]

The Roman guards approach. Those of the Jesus band who have swords strike at random, and that’s enough of the rough stuff. The moment has arrived. The miracle must happen now!

But no miracle happens. Jesus is disappointed, but is sure it will yet happen, because he is insane. And he goes on expecting it until he is nailed to a cross as a rebel leader. [21] Only when he is nearly dead he despairs and asks his God why he has forsaken him – quoting Psalm 22, being a Pharisee well versed in the Jewish scriptures. [22]

His disciples must also have been insane to believe he would bring off the miraculous liberation. Irrationally if not insanely, they went on believing he would yet make it happen even after he had been executed. If they had not, Paul would probably not have heard of him, and the history of the last 2,000 years would have been entirely different.

 

Jillian Becker   April 8, 2012

*

NOTES

 [1] Many (mostly German) scholars say that the information in Mark (the first gospel), and so in Matthew and Luke, derived from a lost source they label “Q”.  It stands for “Quelle”, the German for “source”. There is no evidence that “Q” existed, and whether it did or not makes no difference to what is known: that, following Paul’s preaching about a Savior-God who lived for a while on earth as a man, a number of people wrote stories about his life.

[2] Micah 5:2.   

[3] Luke 2:1-6. A census was ordered in 6 CE, when Quirinius, the governor of Syria mentioned by Luke, was appointed. It was in preparation for imposing new taxes, and marked the beginning of the Zealots’ rebellion in Judea against direct Roman rule. It did not require people to give their information from the place where they were born.

[4] Matth 26:59-66

[5] Matth 27: 11-25

[6] Jesus’s brother James – according to both St. Paul and Josephus – was the leader of this Jewish sect after Jesus’s crucifixion. He believed what Jesus had believed, and far from being accused of blasphemy, he was held in high esteem and prayed often in the Temple. The sect, known as the Nazarenes or Ebionites, was still in existence in the fourth century.

[7]  Luke 20:2-8, 22:45, 24:13-27;  Matth 26:40-50;  Mark 14: 66-72; John 8:27-28,  12:37-40

[8] Mark 1:4-11

[9] Matth 2:1-2

[10] See for instance The Myth of the Magus by E.M Butler Cambridge Univ. Press 1948, which traces the repeated pattern of the Magician figure – among whom he includes Christ – from ancient to modern times.  Among the most frequently related magical or “miraculous” deeds of the hero/sage/god/magus are: calming tumultuous seas; healing disease and curing blindness/deafness; raising the dead; casting out evil spirits; success with hunting and fishing; feeding multitudes.

[11] Most of the teaching of the biblical Jesus summed up in this essay is to be found in Matth 5,6,7

[12] Matth 5:39.  Yet according to a parable in Matth 22, a man is rightly cast into outer darkness for not being properly dressed when he has been rounded up in a random crowd and made to attend a wedding. And in Matth 5:22 Jesus says that if you call your brother a fool you will be in danger of hell fire.

[13] Matth 5:18

[14] Matth 10:5-6

[15]  Matth 10:34

[16] See note 3. According to Hyam Maccoby in Revolution in Judea, Ocean Books London 1973 page 159, no fewer than five of Jesus’s closest followers named in the gospels were probably real men and Zealots: Simon the Zealot, Judas Iscariot, James and John known as Boanerges (“sons of thunder”), and Simon known as Barjonah [“outlaw” or “rebel”]. The last is the Simon whom Matthew (16:18) has Jesus rename Peter, meaning “rock”, because he says he is the rock on whom he will build his church.

[17] Luke 22:36

[18] Luke 22:44 “He prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were drops of blood falling to the ground.”

[19] Luke 22.23

[20] Hyam Maccoby, in Revolution in Judea, also theorizes that the real Jesus expected God to work a miracle through him that night to liberate the Jews from Roman rule, but does not believe that he was mad. He believes he was accepted by many Jews as their king, that a coronation was enacted, he was ceremonially anointed, and was hailed as king by a vast crowd when he rode into Jerusalem. But if that had happened, Josephus would surely have written about it, as he wrote about other leaders who were believed by large numbers of people to be the Messiah, each in his turn.

[21] Matth 27:35-37. The inscription on the cross “King of the Jews’’ was an explanation of why he was executed: for attempting to overthrow the Roman government of Judea, for which crucifixion was the prescribed penalty.

[22] Matth  27:46

Continuing our series on the beginnings and early development of Christianity, we look in this essay for possible and plausible sources of the Idea that launched the new religion.

The first four essays are: A man named Jesus or something like that (September 23, 2011); The invention of Christianity (October 28, 2011); Tread on me: the making of Christian morality (December 22, 2011); St.Paul: portrait of a sick genius, (January 7, 2012).

Our contention is that the whole vast, towering, ornate, gorgeous, powerful, many-winged edifice of Christianity was started on the flimsiest of foundations: the fantasies of an obscure, wandering, sex-obsessed liar and genius whose real name nobody knows.

*

The seed that grew into the Christian religion was the Idea that a certain crucified Judean rebel leader [1], whom a sect of Jews claimed was the prophesied Messiah (Christ in Greek), was a divine redeemer, Son of the One God worshipped by the Jews.

By “redeemer” was meant one who had died for the benefit of mankind, but rose again bodily and reigns forever with his Father in heaven, thus composing a deity consisting of two gods in One.

The earliest known documents that tell us where the Idea came from are the letters of St. Paul, so it may be assumed that he thought of it himself. Of course he might have picked it up from someone else, but it was he who posted about the Roman Empire trying to convince as many people as he could that the Idea was true. And he claimed it as his own, that it had come to him as a revelation from the resurrected divine redeemer himself [2].

But, granted it was his confection, from what sources might its elements really have derived? 

His birthplace, Tarsus [3], the capital of Cilicia, was a splendid pagan city where Persian emperors had built a magnificent palace [4]. It had a school of philosophy that “surpassed those of Athens and Alexandria”. [5]. It was also an important center of trade and religion. Unless Paul had left it when he was a mere infant, he would inevitably have witnessed pagan rites that were publicly and grandly celebrated there.

The city was named for Baal-Taraz, a god who annually died and rose again. Iconic representations of the Baal of Tarsus show that “there was a pair of deities, a divine Father and a divine Son“. [6]

Also in Tarsus, in the first century, the death and resurrection of the god Attis was ritually enacted every year. Attis – the son of a virgin mother – “died” in a ceremony of pain and blood. He was hung in effigy on a pine tree at Eastertide, the spring equinox, and priests sacrificed to him by castrating themselves. After three days his return to life was joyously celebrated. Both Baal-Taraz and Attis were fertility gods whose death and resurrection were believed to be for the good of humanity in that they ensured the rebirth of nature. In this sense they could be said to have suffered and died for mankind.

Nowhere in his known letters [7], or in the putatively biographical Book of Acts, is it recorded that Paul himself actively participated in these rites. (He claimed to have been born a Jew, but was more probably a convert to Judaism. [8]) But the religious belief that a god – Attis – came to earth in the form of a man, suffered execution by being hung on a tree for the good of humanity, and rose again, must have been familiar to him; and it is highly likely that it influenced his thinking about the crucified man he called “Jesus”, and whom a sect of Jews believed had risen bodily from the dead. [9] The Father and Son pair of deities worshipped in Tarsus may also have been in Paul’s thoughts when he called him “the Son of God”. (But when, later on, Christians endowed Jesus with a virgin mother, Paul had nothing to do with it. He never mentions Jesus’s birth. If the birth-myth of Attis influenced Christian thinking at all, it was almost certainly not through Paul.)

Ever since Alexander the Great conquered (between 334 and 323 BCE) most of the world known to the Greeks, goods of all sorts including ideas had moved freely about the lands of his empire. Greek culture continued to flourish after the Romans conquered Greece in the second century BCE. Religions and philosophies from Persia, North Africa, Asia Minor, Greece itself, even from as far away as India into which Alexander had briefly penetrated, were by that time gloriously intermingled in what one might call a salad of ideas. (The French word for a salad, macédoine, derives from the name of Alexander’s home state, Macedon, perhaps because his empire was a colorful mixture of cultures.)

Paul was literate and to an extent educated, and would have been aware of, if not well-informed about, many of those ideas. Philosophies and religions, both the popular and the esoteric, borrowed myths, rites, and beliefs from one another. So while the Attis cult may have been most vivid in his memory, and Judaism was the faith he was instructed in, other religions from near and far could have contributed to Paul’s invention. Some certainly did. They have left their traces in his writing.

There can be no doubt that Gnostic ideas were in his head. Most of the known Gnostic cults arose after Paul, and though deriving their elaborate cosmogonies in the first place from Greek philosophy, were also strongly affected by Christian theology; but one Gnostic cult at least was contemporaneous with him, the one that the Church Fathers believed to have been the first: that of Simon Magus, whom they called “the father of all heresies”. The Gnostic elements in St. Paul’s mysticism may have come from Simon, though it is possible there was a common source which both Paul and Simon knew but is entirely lost.

What are these Gnostic elements in St. Paul’s writings? Paul lamented that to live in this world was to be condemned to exist in spiritual darkness, and to be oppressed by “principalities and powers” (10]; and he spoke of a multiplicity of heavens [11], and “the god of this world” [12] –  all of which chimes with Gnostic doctrine.

Gnostics held that a lesser god, a “demiurge” who was just but not merciful, had created, and continued to rule over, the material universe and mankind. St. Paul does not assert this, nor does he echo the Gnostic belief that the great true God, the Primal Father who was all good, was too far off in his highest heaven to be known to mortals, except by a small minority gifted with intuitive knowledge (“the gnosis”). However, in Simon Magus’s system, a divine redeemer descended to earth from the highest heaven on a mission of salvation. Paul might well have heard Simon Magus preach that he, Simon himself, was the divine redeemer through whom alone mankind could hope for spiritual salvation.

Simon claimed that his own divine origin was the Godhead, the Source of all things. His lady consort too, he taught, derived from there. She was Ennoia, the First Thought of the Source, incarnate on earth as Helen of Troy. As Helen she had been suffering for long ages, but now that Simon had descended to redeem all mankind from this evil world, she would be restored to her place in the highest heaven. All this Simon spun from Greek philosophy, which had long before him conceived of a Godhead consisting of three beings, or “hypostases’, variously named; for instance, an unknowable source of all things called the Depth, Bythos in Greek; his First Thought, the Nous or Ennoia; and his Word, the Logos.

Was this the origin of “the Trinity”, the three-in-one god of Christianity? Probably – but not through St. Paul. It is found in the gospel of “Matthew”, probably as a late addition to the original text. [13] And the writer of the first verse of the gospel of “John” declares that “the Logos” – the Word – was the beginning of creation. [14] It is a direct borrowing from Greek philosophy, and inseparable from the philosophical idea of a triune Godhead. It was written some forty to sixty years after St. Paul’s letters, and cannot be traced back to him. Nothing in the letters, or in anecdotes in the Book of Acts, distinctly shows Paul to have conceived a Trinitarian God. As he did not explicitly formulate the idea of a Christian three-person Godhead, he cannot be either credited with or accused of the invention of “the Trinity”. [15]

Paul’s Idea was One God, Two Persons, and though it makes no rational sense, it was the idea that began Christianity. By the time the Christian God came to be described as a three-person deity, two-in-one had already been swallowed, and it could not have been much harder for the same people to accept three-in-one, however illogical and even downright insane it strikes non-believers. (But the idea of the “Holy Trinity”, did in fact remain a difficult one for believers to grapple with, giving rise to tortuous intellectual puzzles that have pestered Christian theologians right up to the present day.)

Numerous notions from pagan and heretical sources accumulated in the mythology and doctrines of the Christian Church after St. Paul’s time. [16] But a centrally important doctrine and ritual that began with him was the eucharist (meaning the “thanksgiving”), a rite in which “Christ’s flesh” is devoured and “his blood” is drunk. From where (other than by revelation from Christ as he claimed [17]) did Paul derive it? Did he invent it in the hope of winning over worshippers of Dionysus? If the savage Dionysian rite of intoxicated acolytes eating raw flesh and drinking blood in order to get the incarnated god inside them [18] was still being practiced in Paul’s time, it was surely not by such large numbers that he felt compelled to find a way to draw them into his faith. Yet to do so would have been consistent with his proselytizing method: to integrate ideas already sacred to his audiences and adapt them to his evolving doctrine.

What is certain is that Greek religion and philosophy were brought to bear, in the first instance through the mind of one man, on events of the Jewish rebellion, and on Jewish beliefs and Jewish prophecy, to bring a new, initially passive, ominously sentimental religion into the world. Christianity was fathered by a vulgarized Hellenism upon a demoralized Judaism.

Despite his awareness of how his Roman-Greek contemporaries thought and felt, Paul offered them a religion that fitted poorly with the virile values of the age, and its appeal was chiefly to women and slaves. It might have faded away quite soon had not a volcanically disruptive historical event helped to sustain it: the fall of the Temple in 70 CE, a climax of the war the Judeans had been fighting against the Romans. The probability is that no one remained in Jerusalem after that who could actually remember the executed rebel leader and what he taught; no one who could credibly contradict Paul’s and the gospel-writers’ fictions. Paul could allege anything he liked about Jesus’s chosen disciples “Peter” and “John” and “James”; that they encouraged him to be Jesus’s “apostle to the gentiles”; that “Peter” allowed the dietary laws to be considered outdated; that converts need not be circumcised. He was rid of the bothersome need to deceive and conciliate the old men who constituted the Jewish connection with the man he called “Jesus” (though Jewish sects – Nazarenes and/or Ebionites – that believed he was the Messiah and would return to complete his earthly mission, continued to exist in lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean for some centuries).

Within a hundred years after the destruction of the Temple, the greater part of the Jewish nation was scattered through the world. Bound together only by their religion, they held to an adjusted orthodoxy, it being impossible any longer to obey all the 613 laws of their Temple-centered faith. Jewish proselytizing ceased, while Christian proselytizing intensified. So the historic catastrophe of the Jews allowed Pauline Christianity to outlive its inventor; and as it rolled on it gathered myths and legends, doctrines and rituals, institutions of administration, and eventually power.

By the beginning of the 4th century, about 10% of the people under Roman rule had been drawn into the new religion. By then Christians were no longer thought of by the Roman rulers as a sub-sect of the Jews. When the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 as a result of a superstitious bargain [19], strong-minded men began to look hard at the religion and find formidable intellectual difficulties in what it claimed for its truths. They felt a yearning for orthodoxy; a need to straighten it all out, clarify the muddles it was born with, lay down a correct dogma. But that was to prove an endless, arduous, emotionally charged, utterly impossible task. It was to extend combatively through centuries, darkening them with ignorance, fear, and intense suffering, while uncountable numbers of lives were destroyed in Christian wars, massacres, martyrdoms, and persecutions.

 

Jillian Becker   February 26, 2012

*

NOTES

[1]  It is a curious fact that scholarship cannot discover the parent-given names of either the inventor of Christianity who became “St. Paul”, or his Jewish “Christ” whom he called by the Greek name “Jesus”.

[2] Acts 9:3-5

[3] St. Paul claimed to come from Tarsus, and there is no obvious way in which his lying about this would have served any purpose.

[4] The city and palace are described appreciatively in Xenophon’s Anabasis.

[5] & [6] J.G.Frazer, The Golden Bough: Adonis, Attis, Osiris Volume 1

[7] Most scholars now believe that only 7 of the 13 letters attributed in the New Testament to the authorship of St. Paul were written (at least for the most part) by him: Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon.

[8] Apart from persuasive evidence deducible from his letters and the Book of Acts that he was not born a Jew, there is an apparent confession that he only pretended to be one in 1 Cor 9:20, “And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews.”

[9] As on other subjects in Paul’s writings, there is an ambiguity to be found in what he says about bodily resurrection. He certainly believed that “Christ” had “risen”, and that the “redeemed” would “live” with God, but whether in the body or the spirit he was not clear. Attempting explanation, he confounds confusion (1 Cor 15).

[10] Rom 8:38

[11] 2 Cor 12:2

[12] 2 Cor 4:4

[13] Matth 28:19

[14] John 1:1

[15] St. Paul spoke of the Holy Spirit as something that a human being could be filled with or accompanied by: a spirit of holiness, eg. “Do you not know that that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God …?” (1 Cor 6:19); “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” [ 2 Cor 3:14]. And when he says, “They that are in the flesh cannot please God, but ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you” (Rom 8:9 ), the “Spirit” has more in common with the inner spark of holiness which is cognate with “the gnosis” in the Gnostic systems, the spark by which a mortal might be saved from his entombment in the flesh, than with the Greek philosophical idea of a divine hypostasis.

[16] Among such alleged influences is the cult of Mithraism, centered in Rome and popular with the Roman army in Paul’s lifetime. Although it took the name of its god Mithras from the Persian god Mithra, it developed its own arcane rites. Little is known about its doctrines or practice. Some theologians, mythologists, and historians of religion assert that Mithra/Mithras had a virgin mother (though others say that icons prove he was born out of a rock); that three Magi (Zoroastrian grandees or priests) brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh for the new-born god; that Mithras celebrated a “last supper” with twelve disciples; that he was crucified, laid in a rock tomb, and rose again at the spring equinox. It is not known when these stories were attached to Mithraism, but it is most probable that they were taken over from Christian beliefs, rather than that the borrowing happened the other way about. It is possible that the choice of Sunday as the Christian Sabbath was taken from Mithraism. The only certain borrowing was the choice of December 25th as the birthday of Christ on earth. The date was deliberately chosen by the Catholic Church towards the end of the second century, because it was already being celebrated as the birthday of Mithras. In any case, of the alleged similarities in the two mythologies only a “last supper” (1 Cor 11:23-26), crucifixion and resurrection were included in Paul’s teaching; the rest came into Christianity years later.

[17] 1 Cor 11:23-25

[18] From Wikipedia: “Cultic rites associated with worship of the Greek god of wine, Dionysus (or Bacchus in Roman mythology), were allegedly characterized by maniacal dancing to the sound of loud music and crashing cymbals, in which the revellers screamed, became drunk and incited one another to greater and greater ecstasy [a state of being outside oneself]. The goal was to achieve a state of enthusiasm [the god being inside one] in which the celebrants’ souls were temporarily freed from their earthly bodies and were able to commune with Bacchus/Dionysus and gain a glimpse of and a preparation for what they would someday experience in eternity. The rite climaxed in a performance of frenzied feats of strength and madness, such as uprooting trees, tearing a bull (the symbol of Dionysus) apart with their bare hands, an act called sparagmos, and eating its flesh raw, an act called omophagia. This latter rite was a sacrament akin to communion in which the participants assumed the strength and character of the god by symbolically eating the raw flesh and drinking the blood of his symbolic incarnation. Having symbolically eaten his body and drunk his blood, the celebrants became possessed by Dionysus.”

[19] Just before a clash of arms known as the Battle of Milvian Bridge in a war with his co-emperor Maxentius, Constantine saw a light in the sky in the form of a cross. He swore that if he won the battle he would convert to Christianity. Tragically, he won.

This is from the Washington Post:

Nobel-laureate Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and a top official from the Simon Wiesenthal Center said Tuesday that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney should use his stature in the Mormon Church to block its members from posthumously baptizing Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Their comments followed reports that Mormons had baptized the deceased parents of Wiesenthal, the late Holocaust survivor and Nazi-hunter. Wiesel appeared in a church database used to identify potential subjects of baptisms. …

Posthumous baptisms of non-Mormons are a regular practice in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Members believe the ritual creates the possibility for the deceased to enter their conception of Heaven.

Individual members can submit names, usually of deceased relatives, for proxy baptisms. The church has tried to improve its technology to block the process from including Jewish Holocaust victims. … [as it ] has long been offensive to Jews.

How is all this absurd?

Let us list the ways. They are too numerous to count.

• The absurdity of worshipping “Jesus Christ”.
• The stacks of absurdities in Mormonism.
• The absurdity of baptism.
• The extra-hilarious absurdity of baptizing the dead.
• The extra-extra-absurdity of baptizing dead Jews.
• The absurdity of Jews complaining to the Mormon church about dead Jews being baptized. Do they fear it will turn dead Jews into Mormons?
• The absurdity of Mormons not getting their “technology” good enough to exclude Jews from their posthumous baptismal rites.
• The absurdity of expecting Mitt Romney to bring that mysterious technology up to scratch.

And there are probably more that we’ve missed.

Ah, well! Bring on the figurative corpses. It’s all good clean fun at the virtual baptismal font.

Perhaps the Jews could get their revenge by posthumously circumcising dead Mormons.

 

This essay follows A man named Jesus or something like that (September 23, 2011) and The invention of Christianity (October 28, 2011) in our series outlining the early history of the Christian religion.

*

St. Paul is one of very few persons who have single-handedly set the course of history. In the last two thousand years, human affairs have been to a large extent shaped by what he thought and said. Yet very little is known about him: his background, his birth-name, the religion he was raised in. Those are subjects for a later essay. What is known is that he invented a new god, a new religion, and a new morality.

He gave out his moral instructions in letters to congregations of Greeks in the eastern Roman Empire. How many letters he wrote is not known. Of the thirteen letters ascribed to him in the Christian bible, only seven [1] are believed by most contemporary scholars to have actually been written by him. From these seven we learn how Paul wanted followers of his Christ Jesus to live and behave.

It must be remembered that Paul started spreading his new religion and writing his letters before the gospels were composed to narrate a life story of Jesus of Nazareth and report what he said. Paul himself shows little or no interest in Jesus’s life before the crucifixion. He says that “he was rich and became poor for your sake”. [2] But he claims to be repeating actual words of Jesus only when he tells the story of “The Last Supper”, in which he has Jesus breaking bread and instructing his disciples that it is his body, and taking a cup of wine and instructing them that the wine is his blood, and bidding them eat his body and drink his blood in memory of him. But that event and those words, Paul admits or boasts, were made known to him by revelation [3] in the same mystical way that his apostolic appointment and Jesus’s divinity were made known to him. In other words, he made up the whole thing; the entire dramatic episode and the commandments in obedience to which the rite of the Eucharist was instituted by the Christian church.

What Paul taught was his own prescription for how human beings should live and conduct their relations with others. He wanted his converts to believe that it was what Jesus asked of them, implying in his letters that that was the case. [4] But it is his own, original, moral teaching that founded and formed the greater part of what came to be known as “Christian morality”. [5]

Briefly, but including all salient points, here is Paul’s moral teaching:

We are the filth of the world, the scum, the muck that is scoured from things. [6] The lowest of the low. [7]

Let us abase ourselves; be fools [8]; be humble, and associate with the lowly. [9]

Do only the most menial work for a living. [10]

Bear affliction with patience [11], even with joy. [12]

You must consider all others to be greater than yourselves. [13]

Love one another, love all. [14] Then you will be harmless and blameless. [15] That is what I ask you to do to make me proud of you. [16]

Present your bodies as a living sacrifice. [17] Bless those who persecute you. [18] Let them do the most evil things to you, and return only good to them. [19] We glory in our suffering. [20] However hard your life is, rejoice and give thanks. [21] Never seek revenge. [22]

Obey the government. [23] Pay your taxes. [24]

Women, be silent in church. [25]

Marry if you must, but I would rather you remained unmarried and chaste as I am. [26] All of you should imitate me, as I imitate Christ. [27]

No matter how poor you are, no matter how hard you must toil, give all you can to me to take to the saints in Jerusalem. [28] Remember that when I was with you I worked night and day so as not to be a burden to any of you. [29]

Pray constantly. [30] Never feast or carouse, and stay sober. [31] Do not commit sexual immorality. [32] Attend quietly to what you must do, and mind your own business. [33] Be patient always, even when you need to admonish those among you who do not work hard enough. [34]

Share all you have so that you’ll all be equal in worldly possessions. [35]

Do all this for the sake of Christ. Because he died for you, because he suffered on the cross for you, you must bear all things for his sake. You belong to him because he bought you for a price. [36]

It is a morality that demands and glorifies self-abasement and self-abnegation, as a perpetual repayment of a debt imposed on all humanity by Jesus’s “self-sacrifice”.

It scorns talent, disregards personal ambition, forbids individual self-fulfillment.

So when conservative Christians claim – as they often do – that Christianity initiated and promotes individualism, they are plainly wrong. To the contrary: from its inception Christianity has been the enemy of individualism.

It planted the perverse value of subservience in Western culture; a value that was to re-emerge as an ideal in other collectivist ideologies. Paul’s idea that it was greatly good for the individual to subjugate himself to the community contributed even more profoundly to the ideology of Communism than did his doctrine of sharing and equality.

A morality that makes cruel and unnatural demands on human nature will nurture hypocrisy and breed despair: hypocrisy because sustained self-denial is impossible, so lip-service is substituted for obedience; and despair because to strive for the impossible is to ensure failure.

How then did a moral philosophy that requires men and women to be as worms in the dust succeed in attracting throngs of enthusiastic followers? That is a question for another essay on Paul and Christian morality.

 

Jillian Becker    December 22, 2011

*

[1] Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon

[2] 2 Cor 8:9

[3] 1 Cor 11:23-26

[4] Rom 15:15, 1 Cor 14:37, 1 Thess 4:2, 5:18

[5] Paul’s morality, but Jewish moral law remains in the background, with a shift of emphasis towards the sentimental, as in Rom 13:9

[6] 1 Cor 4:13

[7] Phili 2:3

[8] 1 Cor 4:10

[9] Rom 12:16

[10] 1 Thess 4:11, 1 Cor 4:12

[11] Rom 12:12-14

[12] 1 Thess  5:16,18

[13] Phili 2:3

[14] 1 Thess 4:9 , Rom 13:8, 1 Cor 13

[15] Phili 2:15

[16] Phili 2:16

[17] Rom 12:12

[18] Rom 12:14, 1 Cor 4:12

[19] 1 Thess 5:15, 1 Cor 4:12-13

[20] Rom 5:3

[21] 1 Thess 5:16-18, Rom 5:3

[22] Rom 12:19-21

[23] Rom 13:1-5

[24] Rom 13:6

[25] 1Cor 14:34,35

[26] 1 Cor 7:1-9.

[27] 1 Cor 4: 6 & 11:1

[28] 2 Cor 8:1-7 & 9:5-13, 1 Cor 16:1-3

[29] 1 Thess 2:9

[30] Rom 12:12

[31] 1 Thess 5:8, Rom 13:13

[32] 1 Cor 6:18

[33] 1 Thess 4:11,12

[34] 1 Thess 5:14

[35] 2 Cor 8:14, Rom 12:13

[36] 1 Cor 6:20