Do
you really think it all began with a sanctimonious Jewish
wonder-worker, strolling about 1st century Palestine? Prepare to be
enlightened.
Jesus – The Imaginary Friend
Christianity was the ultimate product of religious syncretism in the ancient world. Its emergence owed nothing to a holy carpenter. There were many Jesuses but the fable was a cultural construct.
The nativity yarn is a concatenation of nonsense. The genealogies of Jesus, both Matthew's version and Luke's, are pious fiction. Nazareth did not exist in the 1st century AD – the area was a burial ground of rock-cut tombs.
With multiple authors behind the original gospel story it is no surprise that the figure of "Jesus" is a mess of contradictions. Yet the story is so thinly drawn that being a "good Christian" might mean almost anything.
The 12 disciples are as fictitious as their master, invented to legitimise the claims of the early churches. The original Mary was not a virgin, that idea was borrowed from pagan goddesses. The pagan world knew all about virgins getting pregnant by randy gods: The Mythical "Virgin Mother".
Scholars have known all this for more than 200 years but priestcraft is a highly profitable business and finances an industry of deceit to keep the show on the road.
"Jesus better documented than any other ancient figure"? Don't believe a word of it. Unlike the mythical Jesus, a real historical figure like Julius Caesar has a mass of mutually supporting evidence.
The case for a mythical Jesus – Nailing Jesus. Book review: Ehrman - Did Jesus Exist? Popular scholar recoils from the abyss. A rescue mission for the "Jesus of history" – The New Apologists.
Still holding to the idea that some sort of holy man lies behind the legend? Better check out
Godman – Gestation of a Superhero
It is intuitively satisfying to think that someone was behind the towering legend. Yet like the worship of Horus or Mithras a human life was neither necessary nor helpful.
As it happens, we have an excellent witness to events in Judaea in the first half of the first century AD: Philo of Alexandria (c. 25 BC-47 AD). Yet Philo says not a word about Jesus or Christianity!
Nothing in the 'Christian message' was original. Brotherly love and compassion had been taught by the Stoics for centuries. The Christian faith was a vulgarised paganism, set to the theme of the Jewish prophets and debased by religious intolerance.
The early Christian sects attacked each other as energetically as they attacked pagans. 1st century Palestine had rabbis, radicals and rebels in abundance. But a 'life' conjured up from mystical fantasy, a mass of borrowed quotations, copied story elements and a corpus of self-serving speculation, does not constitute an historical reality.
The final defeat of militant Jewish nationalism and the eradication of the Jewish kingdom gave the incipient Christian churches the final uplift they required.
A closer look at the glib assertion that the Jesus story "got off the ground quickly and spread rapidly."
What DID the Early Christians Believe?
There never was just one Christianity. Out of the milieu of religiosity that infected the Roman world, dozens of competing and conflicting Jesus/Sun-god/Mystery cults emerged.
The first believers in Jesus maintained he was an ethereal spirit, much like other sky/sun-gods. Only later did he acquire a human death, a human life and finally a human birth.
The composite 'Jesus Christ' character – god, man, king, carpenter, conqueror, peace-maker, dispenser of justice, advocate of love – was assembled to try to unify a fragmented and fractious messianic religious movement.
In the mid-2nd century the Jewishness of the faith was purged but apologists had little to say about a human Jesus. They took comfort in noting similarities between their own ideas and pagan myths.
The Christians remained a minority until well after one particular faction formed a political alliance with the Roman State.
The orthodox creed remained unpopular for centuries and persecution of its critics was necessary to impose its will.Many currents fed the Jesus myth, like streams and tributaries joining to form a major river.
Sourcing the legend – The Syncretic Heritage of Christianity
Through the centuries, the Christian godman has been made and remade.
Egypt provided many of the themes and much of the detail. From the age of the Ptolemies, Alexandria was the ancient cooking pot of religious fusion. Here, Hellenised Judaism influenced the early Christians. From Egypt, Catholicism copied its rituals and ceremonies, including relics, demonology, and monasticism. The Patriarchs of Alexandria wrote much of Catholic theology and it was probably in Alexandria that a profound and detailed Buddhist influence impressed itself upon the faith.
From Persia, too, came a Saviour God and notions of rebirth, a Mithraic dress rehearsal for Christianity, triumphant in Rome but fatally weakened by its exclusion of women. In Judaea itself, hatred for the Roman conquerors bred a genre of apocalyptic curses, anticipating an end of the world.
Much of the mythology of Christianity is a rehash of an older and even more transparent fabrication – Judaism.
Jew Story – The Way of the Rabbi
The Israelites did not come from Egypt – a palpable myth – but emerged from the local population. There was no ancient 'Jewish Empire': the Jewish priests drew their inspiration from the empire of the Assyrians and "Judaism" was a reaction to the loss of the northern kingdom and an instructive period spent in Babylon. Yahweh, the god fashioned by the Jews, was a brutal tyrant, a being with a humanoid personality and a disturbing blood-lust. Say hello to G-D!
With God's blessing, misogynistic Jewish scribes encoded a raft of sex crimes which sanctified racial ambition. The sacred mission was to populate and subdue the earth. Judaism bequeathed its unfortunate mix of ignorance and intolerance to a wayward faction of heretics known to the world as Christians.
Jerusalem in 10th century BC had been barely a village of huts and cave dwellings. Kings David and Solomon are purely mythical characters – warrior/priest heroes, invented in the 6th century BC. Temples on the Mount? From "Threshing Floor" to "Noble Sanctuary". Persians and Greeks bearing gifts. Herod's Temple - Fact or Fantasy? Temple of Jupiter – Biggest and Best? Herod vs. Hadrian. Herod's trademark city of Caesarea actually owes more to Hadrian than it does to the Jewish king.
Herod the Great was a real king – but he did not massacre any babies. He was an astute and successful ruler. The Herodians and the Jewish elite became Romanised but religious fanatics led an armed resistance which ended in catastrophes under Titus, Trajan, and Hadrian.
In the aftermath, a collaborationist revision of Judaism, later attributed to a 13th apostle "Paul", allegedly of impeccable Pharisaic credentials, competed fiercely with a reconstituted rabbinic Judaism which fused piety with mercantile success. Eye Witness Reports?
Human ingenuity and cunning is matched by mankind's equally monumental credulity and wishful thinking.
Christianity's Fabrication Factory
There are actually some 200 gospels, epistles and other ancient documents concerning the life of Jesus Christ. Writing such material was a popular literary form, particularly in the 2nd century. The pious fantasies competed with Greek romantic fiction. Political considerations in the late 2nd century led to the selection of just four approved gospels and the rejection of others. After three centuries of wrangling 23 other books were accepted by the Church as divinely inspired. The rest were declared 'pious frauds'. In truth, the whole lot belongs to a genre of literary FICTION.
Would the Christians lie? They said it themselves – lying for God! And non-Christian testimony? – from the authentic pen of lying Christian scribes! Would the early believers have died for a lie? Consider the evidence for that supposed "persecution" – Holy Mother Church invented heroic origins!
Laugh or cry? The pork salesman who became England's patron saint - the fabrication of "Saint George". Shrouded in deceit – Leonardo da Vinci's Last Laugh. How a sacrilegious 'sorcerer' outwitted the priests!
Aelia Capitolina – Imposing the Christian Dreamscape on the city of Hadrian. A Jesus miracle at Siloam? – Negating Jewish magic. A Jesus miracle at Bethesda? – Stealing the magic of Asclepius!
Via Dolorosa – The Way of Sorrow? Jerusalem's bogus pilgrim trail. The Sepulchres of Deceit – empty tombs and empty tales of Nicodemus and Arimathea. The empty tombs of Jesus – vacuous nonsense.
Did Jesus really "raise" anyone? Waking the Dead?
Resurrection fairy tale: A Risen Lord?
Who saw what when? Encounter at Emmaus?
Does a word of it make sense?
Declared fake – Official! The "James Ossuary". How an Israeli entrepreneur outwitted the 'experts'.
Church organisation, authority and membership preceded rather than followed the justifying doctrine. As the organisation and its needs changed so has the ‘Testament of God’ adapted accordingly.
Dogma – Endless revision of the divine plan
The "Word of God", far from being inerrant, has ever been a work in progress. Biblical morality is archaic and savage. It reflects a barbarous, pitiless age.
The priestly "protection racket" required the criminalizing of the whole of humanity through the doctrine of Sin.
The gospel yarn began not with the testimony of a disciple but with the musings of someone who switched the anticipated Jewish Messiah from future hope to "historic past": "Mark": Bringing the Celestial Superjew Down to Earth.
Matthew revised Mark's story, grounding the holy hero firmly in a Jewish milieu by adding a "royal genealogy" and "fulfillment of prophecy". "Matthew" – A Gospel for Messianic Jews.
Ambitious bishops in Rome asserted their authority and laid claim to the Palestinian fantasy with The Mythical "St Peter".
Absolving Rome and embellishing the "birth" and "death" scenes: "Luke" – A Gospel for Credulous Pagans. From the same pen, Caesarea, became the focus for the 'Acts of the Apostles'.
Did Jesus have a brother? Throwing some light on the supposed sibling in the supposed ossuary: "Brother James" – Radical Jew Sanitized into Pious Christian Martyr. Mid-2nd century: the Catholic ecclesia write a rebuttal to the rival church of Valentinus: "John" – A Gospel to Silence the Gnostics
From religious policeman to grandee of the church, from beast fighter in Ephesus to beheading in Rome, Paul's story has more holes than a swiss cheese. A detailed study of the great missionary that some say "founded Christianity".
St Paul the Apostle – Dead in the water?
The trail-blazing Christian missionary and apostle, St Paul, appears nowhere in the secular histories of his age. Ironically, though supposedly in Jerusalem at the right time, he can give no witness to a historical Jesus.
But was Paul himself a genuine historical figure? Viewed without the rose-tinted spectacles of Christian faith, the first voyage of Paul is as fanciful as the first voyage of Sinbad.
Man, Myth and Magic. Did Paul really visit the Galatians? Paul's presence in Philippi is decidedly dubious. Rome's imperial command post in Greece was Corinth – but was it Paul's?
Journeys with an Apostle – a Greek Odyssey? Derring-do or hocus pocus? Paul at Ephesus. Escaping murderous Jews – three times? Paul in Jerusalem.
Paul in Caesarea? – Trial and Error. Only in the Christian dreamscape are its fabricated heroes always the centre of attention.
The later Pauline journeys, including the supposed transportation of the apostle to Rome, are similarly bogus. Characterized by incongruities, contradiction, and the absurd, they are a concocted fantasy. Most notable among them, the fishy tale of Paul's "shipwreck" on Malta.
In fact, no evidence links Paul to the major Christian churches – the story in the Acts of the Apostles is a ripping yarn.
Pauline letters certainly exist, but the epistles, far from being genuine letters, originated in the acrimonious doctrinal battles of the 2nd century – a time when "pseudepigraphy" and forged apostolic writings were weapons in the war of "Christianities".
Did Paul really invent Christianity? His theology of Christ, Parts 1 and 2.
And who is a witness to Paul? A phantom saint heads the list of "witnesses to witnesses", Ignatius the "God bearer".
The invention of "St Paul" – Journey's End.
Orchestrated by ambitious Christian clerics, a cancer of superstition, fear and brutality was imposed across Europe.
The Criminal History of the Christian Church
As it waited in the wings of pagan Rome, the Catholic Church was already marked by corruption, violence and sexual scandal.
The fanatics of Christ proved useful to an ambitious prince who set his sights on absolute and undivided power.
In their struggle for power, Christians waged their own "civil war" in which a Catholic trinitarian nonsense triumphed over Arianism. This so-called 'orthodoxy' suppressed and persecuted its 'heretical' opposition.
The intellectual centres of the empire were ruined by murder and prohibition and the Roman world sank into ignorance and superstition.
The Church expropriated the resources – both human and material – which might have defended Roman civilization. While an indolent army of clerics lived on the state, the impoverished legions degenerated into a peasant militia.
Once a particular Christianity – hierarchical and authoritarian – became wedded to the Roman state, it became a force of brutal repression.
The "Church Fathers" transformed Romano-Hellenic culture by bigotry, anti-Semitism, censorship and intolerance.
Law was replaced by Divine Right, scientific method criminalized, ancient medical knowledge lost for a millennium.
The barbarian tribes that overran the weakened Roman Empire were, for the most part, Christianized; the forces that opposed them, pagan.
The Christian Heaven may have been a vain folly but the Christian Hell has been real enough. The Terrible Cost of "Christendom"
A Brutal Superstition Spreads Across Europe
The Rackets – Seven "Sacraments" of the Church.
Mortification of the flesh – the path of 'spiritual purity'
The extortions of the Church grew into racketeering on an Imperial scale. Predators replaced the puritans.
By aggressive warfare, Christianisation of the heathen tribes followed. In Spain, the German lands, Britain, and Ireland, the despots of the Church imposed their tyranny.
A triumphant Christianity was the active agent in destroying knowledge and access to learning. An ignorant and impoverished population was more readily subjugated by Princes of the Church. The civilization that had stretched from the deserts of Arabia to the highlands of Scotland reverted to a primitive village subsistence.
Remarkably, the last pagan kingdom was eradicated as late as the 15th century.
In a world run by clerical gangsters, the writ of Holy Mother Church was enforced by sadism and torture (take a peek at a noble archbishop's Tariff for Torture, 1757.)
For more than a thousand years, the henchmen of Christ inflicted a cruel barbarism on every community they encountered.
Women, fortunate to be domestic slaves, might find themselves in enforced celibacy, joyless marriage or burnt as a witch. Roasting heretics became popular entertainment and a religious duty. Fancy dress is an essential element of the religious circus.
With a Jewish father (stern patriarch) and a Christian mother (obsession with guilt and heaven) it is not surprising that Islam grew up a bit of a tartar.
Desert Storm – The challenge of Islam
Early civilizations arose in many parts of Arabia, long before Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Islam arose as an adaptation of old ideas, not something new.
Yet initially, far from imposing a severe theocracy, the early caliphs were tolerant, even urbane.
Despite the mutual hostility of kindred monotheisms, Islam endorsed a great deal of Judeo-Christian theology and adopted many of its practices. In its heyday, from the Atlantic to central Asia, Islam produced scholars and refinement.
Europe's recovery owed a huge debt to Islamic civilization. Battered by both East and West the enlightenment failed and theology triumphed.
Heaven help us. The richest, most powerful nation in history has a psychotic infatuation with Jay-a-sus the Lawd!
The Christianizing of the Americas
Christian knights brought savagery and racism to a whole new world.
When gentle Jesus arrived in England's North American colonies, a motley crew of venture capitalists, criminals and self-righteous fanatics established a precarious existence. But a stolen land, worked by an enslaved labour force, cultivating drug crops, could not fail to enrich the colonial elite.
Jesus was there when the American republic built the foundations of its economy on slavery and was re-packaged into a convenience Christianity suited to dreams of vast personal wealth.
Today a bunch of crooks and hucksters, womanising egotists and dangerous megalomaniacs choreograph extravaganzas of Jesus frenzy. Alarmingly, they have serious political influence and an agenda for Armageddon.
Jesus – The Imaginary Friend
Christianity was the ultimate product of religious syncretism in the ancient world. Its emergence owed nothing to a holy carpenter. There were many Jesuses but the fable was a cultural construct.
The nativity yarn is a concatenation of nonsense. The genealogies of Jesus, both Matthew's version and Luke's, are pious fiction. Nazareth did not exist in the 1st century AD – the area was a burial ground of rock-cut tombs.
With multiple authors behind the original gospel story it is no surprise that the figure of "Jesus" is a mess of contradictions. Yet the story is so thinly drawn that being a "good Christian" might mean almost anything.
The 12 disciples are as fictitious as their master, invented to legitimise the claims of the early churches. The original Mary was not a virgin, that idea was borrowed from pagan goddesses. The pagan world knew all about virgins getting pregnant by randy gods: The Mythical "Virgin Mother".
Scholars have known all this for more than 200 years but priestcraft is a highly profitable business and finances an industry of deceit to keep the show on the road.
"Jesus better documented than any other ancient figure"? Don't believe a word of it. Unlike the mythical Jesus, a real historical figure like Julius Caesar has a mass of mutually supporting evidence.
The case for a mythical Jesus – Nailing Jesus. Book review: Ehrman - Did Jesus Exist? Popular scholar recoils from the abyss. A rescue mission for the "Jesus of history" – The New Apologists.
Still holding to the idea that some sort of holy man lies behind the legend? Better check out
Godman – Gestation of a Superhero
It is intuitively satisfying to think that someone was behind the towering legend. Yet like the worship of Horus or Mithras a human life was neither necessary nor helpful.
As it happens, we have an excellent witness to events in Judaea in the first half of the first century AD: Philo of Alexandria (c. 25 BC-47 AD). Yet Philo says not a word about Jesus or Christianity!
Nothing in the 'Christian message' was original. Brotherly love and compassion had been taught by the Stoics for centuries. The Christian faith was a vulgarised paganism, set to the theme of the Jewish prophets and debased by religious intolerance.
The early Christian sects attacked each other as energetically as they attacked pagans. 1st century Palestine had rabbis, radicals and rebels in abundance. But a 'life' conjured up from mystical fantasy, a mass of borrowed quotations, copied story elements and a corpus of self-serving speculation, does not constitute an historical reality.
The final defeat of militant Jewish nationalism and the eradication of the Jewish kingdom gave the incipient Christian churches the final uplift they required.
A closer look at the glib assertion that the Jesus story "got off the ground quickly and spread rapidly."
What DID the Early Christians Believe?
There never was just one Christianity. Out of the milieu of religiosity that infected the Roman world, dozens of competing and conflicting Jesus/Sun-god/Mystery cults emerged.
The first believers in Jesus maintained he was an ethereal spirit, much like other sky/sun-gods. Only later did he acquire a human death, a human life and finally a human birth.
The composite 'Jesus Christ' character – god, man, king, carpenter, conqueror, peace-maker, dispenser of justice, advocate of love – was assembled to try to unify a fragmented and fractious messianic religious movement.
In the mid-2nd century the Jewishness of the faith was purged but apologists had little to say about a human Jesus. They took comfort in noting similarities between their own ideas and pagan myths.
The Christians remained a minority until well after one particular faction formed a political alliance with the Roman State.
The orthodox creed remained unpopular for centuries and persecution of its critics was necessary to impose its will.Many currents fed the Jesus myth, like streams and tributaries joining to form a major river.
Sourcing the legend – The Syncretic Heritage of Christianity
Through the centuries, the Christian godman has been made and remade.
Egypt provided many of the themes and much of the detail. From the age of the Ptolemies, Alexandria was the ancient cooking pot of religious fusion. Here, Hellenised Judaism influenced the early Christians. From Egypt, Catholicism copied its rituals and ceremonies, including relics, demonology, and monasticism. The Patriarchs of Alexandria wrote much of Catholic theology and it was probably in Alexandria that a profound and detailed Buddhist influence impressed itself upon the faith.
From Persia, too, came a Saviour God and notions of rebirth, a Mithraic dress rehearsal for Christianity, triumphant in Rome but fatally weakened by its exclusion of women. In Judaea itself, hatred for the Roman conquerors bred a genre of apocalyptic curses, anticipating an end of the world.
Much of the mythology of Christianity is a rehash of an older and even more transparent fabrication – Judaism.
Jew Story – The Way of the Rabbi
The Israelites did not come from Egypt – a palpable myth – but emerged from the local population. There was no ancient 'Jewish Empire': the Jewish priests drew their inspiration from the empire of the Assyrians and "Judaism" was a reaction to the loss of the northern kingdom and an instructive period spent in Babylon. Yahweh, the god fashioned by the Jews, was a brutal tyrant, a being with a humanoid personality and a disturbing blood-lust. Say hello to G-D!
With God's blessing, misogynistic Jewish scribes encoded a raft of sex crimes which sanctified racial ambition. The sacred mission was to populate and subdue the earth. Judaism bequeathed its unfortunate mix of ignorance and intolerance to a wayward faction of heretics known to the world as Christians.
Jerusalem in 10th century BC had been barely a village of huts and cave dwellings. Kings David and Solomon are purely mythical characters – warrior/priest heroes, invented in the 6th century BC. Temples on the Mount? From "Threshing Floor" to "Noble Sanctuary". Persians and Greeks bearing gifts. Herod's Temple - Fact or Fantasy? Temple of Jupiter – Biggest and Best? Herod vs. Hadrian. Herod's trademark city of Caesarea actually owes more to Hadrian than it does to the Jewish king.
Herod the Great was a real king – but he did not massacre any babies. He was an astute and successful ruler. The Herodians and the Jewish elite became Romanised but religious fanatics led an armed resistance which ended in catastrophes under Titus, Trajan, and Hadrian.
In the aftermath, a collaborationist revision of Judaism, later attributed to a 13th apostle "Paul", allegedly of impeccable Pharisaic credentials, competed fiercely with a reconstituted rabbinic Judaism which fused piety with mercantile success. Eye Witness Reports?
Human ingenuity and cunning is matched by mankind's equally monumental credulity and wishful thinking.
Christianity's Fabrication Factory
There are actually some 200 gospels, epistles and other ancient documents concerning the life of Jesus Christ. Writing such material was a popular literary form, particularly in the 2nd century. The pious fantasies competed with Greek romantic fiction. Political considerations in the late 2nd century led to the selection of just four approved gospels and the rejection of others. After three centuries of wrangling 23 other books were accepted by the Church as divinely inspired. The rest were declared 'pious frauds'. In truth, the whole lot belongs to a genre of literary FICTION.
Would the Christians lie? They said it themselves – lying for God! And non-Christian testimony? – from the authentic pen of lying Christian scribes! Would the early believers have died for a lie? Consider the evidence for that supposed "persecution" – Holy Mother Church invented heroic origins!
Laugh or cry? The pork salesman who became England's patron saint - the fabrication of "Saint George". Shrouded in deceit – Leonardo da Vinci's Last Laugh. How a sacrilegious 'sorcerer' outwitted the priests!
Aelia Capitolina – Imposing the Christian Dreamscape on the city of Hadrian. A Jesus miracle at Siloam? – Negating Jewish magic. A Jesus miracle at Bethesda? – Stealing the magic of Asclepius!
Via Dolorosa – The Way of Sorrow? Jerusalem's bogus pilgrim trail. The Sepulchres of Deceit – empty tombs and empty tales of Nicodemus and Arimathea. The empty tombs of Jesus – vacuous nonsense.
Did Jesus really "raise" anyone? Waking the Dead?
Resurrection fairy tale: A Risen Lord?
Who saw what when? Encounter at Emmaus?
Does a word of it make sense?
Declared fake – Official! The "James Ossuary". How an Israeli entrepreneur outwitted the 'experts'.
Church organisation, authority and membership preceded rather than followed the justifying doctrine. As the organisation and its needs changed so has the ‘Testament of God’ adapted accordingly.
Dogma – Endless revision of the divine plan
The "Word of God", far from being inerrant, has ever been a work in progress. Biblical morality is archaic and savage. It reflects a barbarous, pitiless age.
The priestly "protection racket" required the criminalizing of the whole of humanity through the doctrine of Sin.
The gospel yarn began not with the testimony of a disciple but with the musings of someone who switched the anticipated Jewish Messiah from future hope to "historic past": "Mark": Bringing the Celestial Superjew Down to Earth.
Matthew revised Mark's story, grounding the holy hero firmly in a Jewish milieu by adding a "royal genealogy" and "fulfillment of prophecy". "Matthew" – A Gospel for Messianic Jews.
Ambitious bishops in Rome asserted their authority and laid claim to the Palestinian fantasy with The Mythical "St Peter".
Absolving Rome and embellishing the "birth" and "death" scenes: "Luke" – A Gospel for Credulous Pagans. From the same pen, Caesarea, became the focus for the 'Acts of the Apostles'.
Did Jesus have a brother? Throwing some light on the supposed sibling in the supposed ossuary: "Brother James" – Radical Jew Sanitized into Pious Christian Martyr. Mid-2nd century: the Catholic ecclesia write a rebuttal to the rival church of Valentinus: "John" – A Gospel to Silence the Gnostics
From religious policeman to grandee of the church, from beast fighter in Ephesus to beheading in Rome, Paul's story has more holes than a swiss cheese. A detailed study of the great missionary that some say "founded Christianity".
St Paul the Apostle – Dead in the water?
The trail-blazing Christian missionary and apostle, St Paul, appears nowhere in the secular histories of his age. Ironically, though supposedly in Jerusalem at the right time, he can give no witness to a historical Jesus.
But was Paul himself a genuine historical figure? Viewed without the rose-tinted spectacles of Christian faith, the first voyage of Paul is as fanciful as the first voyage of Sinbad.
Man, Myth and Magic. Did Paul really visit the Galatians? Paul's presence in Philippi is decidedly dubious. Rome's imperial command post in Greece was Corinth – but was it Paul's?
Journeys with an Apostle – a Greek Odyssey? Derring-do or hocus pocus? Paul at Ephesus. Escaping murderous Jews – three times? Paul in Jerusalem.
Paul in Caesarea? – Trial and Error. Only in the Christian dreamscape are its fabricated heroes always the centre of attention.
The later Pauline journeys, including the supposed transportation of the apostle to Rome, are similarly bogus. Characterized by incongruities, contradiction, and the absurd, they are a concocted fantasy. Most notable among them, the fishy tale of Paul's "shipwreck" on Malta.
In fact, no evidence links Paul to the major Christian churches – the story in the Acts of the Apostles is a ripping yarn.
Pauline letters certainly exist, but the epistles, far from being genuine letters, originated in the acrimonious doctrinal battles of the 2nd century – a time when "pseudepigraphy" and forged apostolic writings were weapons in the war of "Christianities".
Did Paul really invent Christianity? His theology of Christ, Parts 1 and 2.
And who is a witness to Paul? A phantom saint heads the list of "witnesses to witnesses", Ignatius the "God bearer".
The invention of "St Paul" – Journey's End.
Orchestrated by ambitious Christian clerics, a cancer of superstition, fear and brutality was imposed across Europe.
The Criminal History of the Christian Church
As it waited in the wings of pagan Rome, the Catholic Church was already marked by corruption, violence and sexual scandal.
The fanatics of Christ proved useful to an ambitious prince who set his sights on absolute and undivided power.
In their struggle for power, Christians waged their own "civil war" in which a Catholic trinitarian nonsense triumphed over Arianism. This so-called 'orthodoxy' suppressed and persecuted its 'heretical' opposition.
The intellectual centres of the empire were ruined by murder and prohibition and the Roman world sank into ignorance and superstition.
The Church expropriated the resources – both human and material – which might have defended Roman civilization. While an indolent army of clerics lived on the state, the impoverished legions degenerated into a peasant militia.
Once a particular Christianity – hierarchical and authoritarian – became wedded to the Roman state, it became a force of brutal repression.
The "Church Fathers" transformed Romano-Hellenic culture by bigotry, anti-Semitism, censorship and intolerance.
Law was replaced by Divine Right, scientific method criminalized, ancient medical knowledge lost for a millennium.
The barbarian tribes that overran the weakened Roman Empire were, for the most part, Christianized; the forces that opposed them, pagan.
The Christian Heaven may have been a vain folly but the Christian Hell has been real enough. The Terrible Cost of "Christendom"
A Brutal Superstition Spreads Across Europe
The Rackets – Seven "Sacraments" of the Church.
Mortification of the flesh – the path of 'spiritual purity'
The extortions of the Church grew into racketeering on an Imperial scale. Predators replaced the puritans.
By aggressive warfare, Christianisation of the heathen tribes followed. In Spain, the German lands, Britain, and Ireland, the despots of the Church imposed their tyranny.
A triumphant Christianity was the active agent in destroying knowledge and access to learning. An ignorant and impoverished population was more readily subjugated by Princes of the Church. The civilization that had stretched from the deserts of Arabia to the highlands of Scotland reverted to a primitive village subsistence.
Remarkably, the last pagan kingdom was eradicated as late as the 15th century.
In a world run by clerical gangsters, the writ of Holy Mother Church was enforced by sadism and torture (take a peek at a noble archbishop's Tariff for Torture, 1757.)
For more than a thousand years, the henchmen of Christ inflicted a cruel barbarism on every community they encountered.
Women, fortunate to be domestic slaves, might find themselves in enforced celibacy, joyless marriage or burnt as a witch. Roasting heretics became popular entertainment and a religious duty. Fancy dress is an essential element of the religious circus.
With a Jewish father (stern patriarch) and a Christian mother (obsession with guilt and heaven) it is not surprising that Islam grew up a bit of a tartar.
Desert Storm – The challenge of Islam
Early civilizations arose in many parts of Arabia, long before Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Islam arose as an adaptation of old ideas, not something new.
Yet initially, far from imposing a severe theocracy, the early caliphs were tolerant, even urbane.
Despite the mutual hostility of kindred monotheisms, Islam endorsed a great deal of Judeo-Christian theology and adopted many of its practices. In its heyday, from the Atlantic to central Asia, Islam produced scholars and refinement.
Europe's recovery owed a huge debt to Islamic civilization. Battered by both East and West the enlightenment failed and theology triumphed.
Heaven help us. The richest, most powerful nation in history has a psychotic infatuation with Jay-a-sus the Lawd!
The Christianizing of the Americas
Christian knights brought savagery and racism to a whole new world.
When gentle Jesus arrived in England's North American colonies, a motley crew of venture capitalists, criminals and self-righteous fanatics established a precarious existence. But a stolen land, worked by an enslaved labour force, cultivating drug crops, could not fail to enrich the colonial elite.
Jesus was there when the American republic built the foundations of its economy on slavery and was re-packaged into a convenience Christianity suited to dreams of vast personal wealth.
Today a bunch of crooks and hucksters, womanising egotists and dangerous megalomaniacs choreograph extravaganzas of Jesus frenzy. Alarmingly, they have serious political influence and an agenda for Armageddon.
No comments:
Post a Comment