Experts have unquestioning faith in their own pronouncements no matter how arbitrary they may be. Yet we accept them.

Who Lies Sleeping?

From Judaism to Christianity 3

Popular Belief
Stephen as Christ
Lies and Conspiracy

Abstract

Christians believe the Jewish scriptures prophesy Jesus, whom they call Christ, the Greek word for messiah. The Christ Myth of the Christians was devised to create a christ, necessarily Jewish, potentially acceptable to non-Jews, and the Jesus Myth was crudely refashioned for that purpose. What was its origins? As shown by the presence of Magi at the nativity, the Persian religion influenced the notion of a Saviour (Saoshyant) delivering the world from evil, and the shepherds at the nativity of Jesus copied the shepherds at the earthly birth of the Persian God, Mithras. Jewish prophets indeed pictured a God-sent warrior king leading the Jews to leadership of the world, but the Christian messiah is depicted as meek and pacific. Messianic prophecies, read them in their full context, either do not pertain to a pacific teacher or are not messianic!

Persian Magi with Phrygian Caps: Mature, Young, Old!

Popular Belief

Tertullian, to show that Romans persecuted Christians for their piety, claimed in 197 AD that the younger Pliny had written a letter to Trajan about a Christian sect in Bithynia, c 112 AD, who were suspected of conspiracy, but convinced Pliny they were innocent. Pliny’s letter was “discovered” by a Dominican holy man, Iucundus of Verona, at the very end of the fifteenth century AD. It was “lost” a decade later in 1508! What we have of it now are copies made from this uncertain manuscript.

Though the letter is probably a forgery or grossly interpolated by the Christian monks who were famous for such inventions, as scholars concur, the Christians’ apologies for their cult are what they would say in such circumstances. If they had secrets, they were able to prevent Pliny from finding them. Gospels cannot have been in general circulation until after this date, unless they were able to keep them from Pliny’s policemen. If they were the gospels we now have, they would certainly not have produced them in support of their claim that they were just innocent, law-abiding, innocuous members of the lower classes. Modern Christians see them as utterly innocent, as we know, but they actually tell the story of a rebel against civic order who was crucified for his presumption. Pliny must have taken a dim view of that had he found them.

Pliny was a kindly man, who liked to think the best of everyone, and his Christians succeeded in convincing him they were guilty of nothing but a silly superstition, beneath the notice of a Roman government. These Christians sang hymns to the rising sun, sounding more like Mithraists than Christians, showing perhaps a common root, but also that those Christians were not the same as they now are. He was glad that the cult lost its popularity after he took judicial notice of it. His letter is the earliest historical evidence for the existence of Christians as distinguished form “Christiani”, messianic Jews.

In his reply to Pliny’s letter, Trajan thinks that the Christian cult is indeed a subversive conspiracy, but that most of the Christians are just ignorant and inoffensive proletarians who will come to their senses and leave the cult, if governmental action is directed only against the leaders, who were the conscious conspirators.

Tertullian also used the trick common these days among conspiracy theorists that certain documents exist in the appropriate archives revealing all. The whistle blower, Tertullian here, claimed that Pilate’s records could still be consulted in the Imperial archives, and they proved the story in the gospels. The point of such claims is that when the documents never existed, and so no one could find them, a cover up is proved! Alternatively, the documents are indeed found and tell quite a different tale, again proving a cover up, and forgery! Among certain gullible personalities, especially where suspicions have been already planted against officialdom, there is no way of convincing such people they are being tricked. On the contrary, every attempt to show they are wrong looks to them like trickery.

Tertullian like Paul had supernatural advisors. The ghost of a woman martyred in the arena advised Tertullian, but she was a male ghost because Jesus had equipped her with masculine organs so that she, for her faith, would be accepted in an all-male heaven.

In 135 AD, Simon Bar Kosiba was brutally defeated as the latest Messiah, after a long rebellion that tied down twelve legions. Many Jews in the empire were killed in mob riots, and the promotion of Christianity seriously began, perhaps because gentiles now had good direct evidence that they had had nothing to do with the insurgent, nor with the Jews because they were a non-Jewish group, a fact that previously had looked unlikely whatever they had pleaded.

Marcion was a wealthy shipowner at Sinope, now the Turkish town of Sinop on the south shore of the Black Sea, but then the largest port and commercial center east of Byzantium. Sinope was founded as a Greek colony and long remained a Greek city, but there had been a continuous influx of other peoples.

When Christian propaganda reached him, he saw, as all reasonable men must, that the ferocious, vindictive, and cruel god of the Jewish scriptures was utterly incompatible with the god of mercy and love of Pauline Christianity, and he accordingly decided that Yehouah was only the Demiurge, creator of the material world, but inferior to the good and supreme god who sent his Son (an avatar of himself) to save mankind from the Demiurge.

A consequence of this theory was a dichotomy between the body (material and therefore subject to the Demiurge) and a soul (purely spiritual and so in the domain of the Supreme God). That led to the asceticism and denial of nature that characterized most of the Christian sects and makes them so repulsive to healthy men.

In Marcion’s view, the avatar, Jesus, appeared in the guise of a man of about thirty, but the ignorant apostles mistook him for a Jewish warrior christ, and the Jews showed their irremediable perversity by crucifying a supernatural imitation of him—because a god could not be killed. He had, however, been recognized by Paul. Marcion had a version of the gospel attributed to “a man from Lucania”, “Luke” in English, as though it were a man’s name, and a collection of letters attributed to Paul that justified Marcion’s theology. He may have had other holy books, and he wrote a work, Antitheses, conclusively proving that Yehouah was the antithesis of the Pauline god, and that the Old Testament was incompatible with Christianity.

He went to Rome, then the capital of the civilized world, but found Christians already established there. He founded his own church (c 150 AD), which naturally appealed to those who disliked the Jewish baggage that the religion carried, especially in the aftermath of the Bar Kosiba rebellion. So, Marcion’s Church attracted a good following and it may have been, for a time, the largest Christian sect, with congregations throughout the Empire.

The Fathers of the Church, who were determined to keep the Old Testament as the basis of their cult targeted the Marcionites with bitter animosity, and so they declined in the third and fourth centuries. But they survived even after the Fathers of the Church were at last able to start persecuting with the police powers of the state at their disposal. Why the Church Fathers wanted to burden their cult with the fictions of the Old Testament, which blatantly contradicted their own doctrine, seems peculiar.

The Marcionists were absorbed by the more drastic and ascetic church founded by “Manichaeus, the disciple of Jesus Christ” but Prudentius, a Christian poet, writing at the opening of the fifth century, could lament that the secular powers had not yet killed all the vile heretics who had been trapped by Marcion’s evil insanity. Modern holy men like to pretend that Mani was not a Christian, forgetting that he has as much right to the title as they have, especially since many evangelical sects have re-instituted Gnosticism.

Stephen as Christ

N Carter presents a different theory about the origins of Christianity sometime in the first century. He takes his departure from the Stephen who appears in Acts 6:5-7:60, and is mentioned occasionally in subsequent chapters. The man’s Greek name suggests he was a Hellenistic Jew, and since he did great wonders and miracles among the people, he sounds as though he were just another of the “goëtae” who swarmed through Asia Minor at that time, acording to professor Morton Smith in Jesus the Magician.

In Acts, Stephen delivers a summary of the Jewish tradition about Abraham and his successors, and then upbraids the orthodox for their rejection of Jesus. His speech receives divine approval, for, looking up through a rift in the atmosphere, he sees God with Jesus at his right hand. The Sanhedrin, however, condemn him and the mob stones him, the punishment for blasphemy.

Carter dismisses the story in Acts as a Christian concoction. He believes that Stephen and his companions, all of whom bear Greek names, were members of the “New Letzim,” who had assimilated the Stoic doctrine with its emphasis on all humanity and wished to bring Judaism into accord with it, insisting that the One God of the Universe is everybody’s God.

Carter thinks these Letzim came to see Stephen as a messianic figure, resulting in “the transformation of the martyred Stephen into both a Jesus and a Christ in the minds of his worshippers, by at least the turn of the second century”. “Jesus” was not the name of the man, but his title, meaning “saviour”.

In The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, John Allegro argues Christians made abundant use of Amanita muscaria, portrayed in some early Christian frescoes as the Tree of Life.

Amanita Muscaria. The Fly Agaric Magic Mushroom

Amanita muscaria induces vivid hallucinations. Its psychedelia yielded the images of the supernatural in much of the ancient world, and, according to R Gordon Wasson, inspired the religions of India and Persia. It was most likely the soma of the Vedas and perhaps the haoma of the Persians. The preoccupations of the tripper condition the divine revelations produced by the drug, by recombining and magnifying them in the mind and projecting them into the perceived world. The active principle, muscarine, easily extracted by chemistry, alone is almost always deadly, unless atropine is promptly administered as an antidote. But infusions of the fungus are not lethal even in large doses because they contain both muscarine and atropine.

Ornaments shown as decorating Christmas trees in Bavaria are really pictures of the Amanita muscaria, suggesting that some Christians knew why the sacred mushroom was sacred in the Middle Ages. The sacred mushroom is called the flesh of the gods by many primitive peoples. Infusing the eucharistic wine with the sacred mushroom would have given communicants pleasant or monstrous visions that the priests would have suggested were visions of the communicant’s post-mortum fate caused by the flesh of their god, Jesus.

Despite the objections of modern Christians, the Romans of the early empire saw Christians as conspirators who used parables to hide their conspiracies against the Roman Empire. The earliest datable reference to a Christian “love feast” or agape, was made by Tertullian in his Apologeticum written around 197 AD precisely to show that Christians were innocent and not political conspirators, as the Romans suspected. Amanita muscaria was likely to have been used in the love feasts.

Lies and Conspiracy

Christianity was spread as a conspiracy against the Roman Empire, as the historical evidence has always indicated. The Romans were a practical people who tried to disturb the native cultures of their subjects as little as possible and were not interested in whatever superstitions the natives believed. They tolerated all sorts of cults as absurd as Christianity and would have tolerated it too, if they had not had good grounds for believing it to be politically subversive. Most of the evidence for the conspiratorial activities of the Christians has been destroyed together with the historical works in which it was recorded, by the Fathers of the Church as soon as they had climbed to political power.

Had Christianity been what it has become, a belief in a personal but invisible friend helping the believer find their way to immortality, when it was being peddled to the proletariat in the Roman Empire, intelligent Greeks and Romans would have been amused by it—a god who stupidly got himself crucified and then arose from the dead and sneaked off to become an invisible companion to everyone who felt they needed one! That is not how the Greek and Roman rulers saw Christianity.

The brand of Christianity that the Fathers put over stole the Old Testament and identified the Christian god as the Jewish god, Yehouah. The first concern of the fathers, as soon as they got their hands on governmental power, was to exterminate the Marcionists, the Manichaeans, and all the Christian sects that refused to accept Yehouah as their god.

After the Christian triumph, its most pervasive arguments became the monuments of Pagan greatness that the sect had not destroyed—feats of engineering like roads, bridges and aqueducts, amphitheatres, baths and other public buildings, sculpture and painting that had escaped proletarian righteousness, delightful literature, sensible laws and social organizations, and the tactics and discipline that made formidable armies of Germanic barbarians. All these achievements the marvelling invaders credited to the Christians, who also adapted ancient showmanship to their own impressive ceremonies.

The Christian bible seemed to be true history, and it referred to places in the real world, such as Rome and Egypt, of which the Germans had heard, and to historical persons, such as Augustus, who had ruled the empire that had once ruled the world. If the terrible god whose deeds were recorded in imperishable writing by eye-witnesses, behaved capriciously, unjustly, and brutally, so, according to traditions that had been handed down by word of mouth in many versions, had Odin, a god of the northern barbarians before they became Christians.

If the Christians’ old god had an eccentric son, who chose to sacrifice himself to himself, why Odin had done that, too—so some poet said, though he did not name a time and place, as the Christian history did so precisely! If this son was born of a virgin, there was nothing unusual in it, for Heimdall had been born of nine virgins, plainly the ennead that represented the original Goddess. Simple-minded people mortgaged their future and never suspected what they had done. Christianity was imposed on the converts gradually. Established customs and conventions were not radically changed but slowly eroded.

It was the new religion that was barbaric. There was no honour in it, merely lies. It hated the mores and standards of civilization itself. Professional holy men appealed to the proletariat of the empire with talk of love and brotherhood, to make “foolish the wisdom of this world”, (1 Cor 1:20), thus negating all learning, all culture, and repudiating reason itself.

Clement in a frank admission, in a letter preserved and discovered in a remote monastery by professor Morton Smith, says that “we holy men have a duty to conceal the facts and lie to our congregations, under oath if necessary, perjuring ourselves to help disseminate the True Faith”. Eusebius was another scoundrel whether he was convinced of his own righteousness or not. Concerning Eusebius, the Victorian Christian scholar, J B Lightfoot thought the execution of his church history fell short of its conception, its faults obscuring its merits. It is in some ways like the bible itself in that Eusebius had no predecessor and no successor, so his work stands alone, uncriticized and unverifiable. None of Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret ventured to check what Eusebius had said. So throughout the years of Christendom, what little was known about the early years of Christianity came only from Eusebius. Typically, he did not argue with the words of those who he disagreed with but simply cited their opponents’ refutations. Nor did he know much about important figures of the early church who lived only a few years before he lived himself, like Tertullian, citing only the Apologeticum from a poor Greek version. He knew little about Hippolytus, even the name of his bishopric, and Cyprian, a prominent Christian who died (258 AD) not long before his own birth, and even the popes. Gibbon did not trust him:

The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius himself, indirectly confesses [HE 8:2; Mart Pal 12] that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace of religion. Such an acknowledgment will naturally excite a suspicion that a writer who has so openly violated one of the fundamental laws of history, has not paid a very strict regard to the observance of the other.
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 16

He did observe on the “evil piled upon evil” which disgraced the church—ambitions, intriguing for office, factious quarrels, cowardly denials and shipwrecks of the faith—and considered the persecution under Diocletian as retribution for them, but he merely condemned them in general terms, without entering into details, restricting himself to “profitable” topics. It discredits his conception of history, and casts doubt on his intellectual honesty. Gibbon noted his credulity as being artful, like a lawyer’s cunning. Another serious impediment to him as a historian is the loose and uncritical way he used his materials, not always discriminating good and bad among his documentary sources. Christian eulogizing of him is simply their normal illusion that all Christians are saints. Real life does not bear it out.

Pious dolts imagine themselves faithful servants of a god with cruel fates for unbelievers, who has instructed them to preach the gospel and thus make the whole world conform to their will, which happens to be God’s too. Preaching is their way of getting what they want in society instead of by politics. Since their aims are supposedly the will of god, evangelism is righteous, and resistance to them is Satanic and must be crushed.

The righteousness syndrome is characteristic of Christians. They often describe it in terms of love, supposedly an unnatural fondness for those you would otherwise despise, but nonetheless a holy gift of God. In ordinary non-righteous use, love is a special fondness one person feels for another, usually intimate friend or relative. From an ignorant or wilful disregard for its original meaning, which was to love others of the same persuasion in the small groups Jews had divided themselves into, and hate others, especially the Romans and their collaborators, Christians go about telling us we must love our enemies. No one requires a PhD to recognize that this is not only impossible, but no modern Christian ever seriously practices it.

Those who have been grievously wronged by someone might voice the righteous thought that they forgive their enemies, but they would need a lifetime of Couéism to truly remove any doubt they had about their sincerity. Idiotic falsehoods like love your enemies lead nowhere because few, even Christians, believe it. What we have to do is to live with our enemies as civilized people, each respecting the other and not turning to robbery and murder to solve disputes. It is not love, but a practical rule for living with others. The truth about Christians in practice is that they love their co-religionists so much that they want to rip the innards from everybody who rejects their odious God and His double standards.

Among the worst of the Christian double standards is the simultaneous acceptance of Jewish scriptures and the New Testament. The Jewish scriptures, supposedly the early part of God’s word, showing how he got His plan of salvation all wrong at the start, is filled with the foulest crimes, from treacherous assassinations to insane butchery and rape, repugnant to civilized people, but approved by the Christian god, who commanded much of it. Judging by the record of the Jewish scriptures, S Thomas Aquinas had to admit that it is entirely proper and right to murder innocent people, rob people of their property, and rape women, if God commanded it. William of Occam and the Nominalists could only conclude that, because what God commanded was often manifestly unjust, whatever God commanded must be just however it might seem to us.

This must be the basis of the awful crimes committed by Christians throughout the history of Christendom. Popes and bishops asked themselves, “What would God do here?” They answered, “He would burn them alive in Hell”, so they saved God a modicum of the trouble by beginning the process here on earth. The bible has suggested and thus instigated many appalling crimes and is among the most morally corrupting books ever printed.

Christian morality provides a perfect disguise for any scoundrel who simulates belief in the superstition to fleece the sheep. Surrounded by like-minded people, it is usually impossible to determine whether or not he actually believes all or part of the nonsense he professes, but either way the sheep are easily fleeced.