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. Nazareth did
not exist in the 1st century AD – the area
was a burial ground of rock-cut tombs. Following
a star would lead you in circles.
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.
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.
Still
holding to the idea that some sort of holy man lies
behind the legend? Better check out
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. 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."
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 and 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 was necessary
to impose its will.
Many
currents fed the Jesus myth, like streams and tributaries
joining to form a major river.
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,
Hellenized
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 apocolyptic
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.
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. 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. 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
Romanized but religious fanatics led an armed
resistance which ended in catastrophies 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.
There are actually some
200 gospels, epistles and other books 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! Declared
fake – Official! The "James
Ossuary". How
an Israeli entrepreneur outwitted the 'experts'. 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 inventing alternative
endings and conspiracy theories is a thriving industry
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.
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".
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. 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. The
Pauline
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".
Orchestrated
by ambitious Christian clerics, a cancer of superstition,
fear and brutality was imposed across Europe.
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. 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. Romano-Hellenic culture was transformed
by the "Church Fathers" by bigotry,
anti-Semitism, censorship and intolerance.
This so-called 'orthodoxy' suppressed
and persecuted its 'heretical' opposition.
The barbarian
tribes that overran the weakened Roman Empire
were, for the most part, Christianised; the forces
that opposed them, pagan.
The
Christian Heaven may have been a vain folly but the
Christian Hell has been real enough.
The priestly "protection
racket" required the criminalizing
of the whole of humanity through the doctrine
of Sin. In a world run by clerical gangsters, the
writ of Holy Mother Church was enforced by sadism
and torture. For more than a
thousand years,
the henchmen of Christ inflicted a cruel barbarism
on every community they encountered. Law
was replaced by Divine
Right, scientific method criminalized,
ancient medical knowledge lost
for a millennium. 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.
Illuminating
the terrifying history of a morbid
cult that destroyed the ancient world
Raised
to the status of State religion the Christian
Church reigned over the destruction of civilization.
As the centuries passed religious barbarism grew
ever more vicious.
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.
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.
Grown into a world
power, without precedent either for its wealth
or military prowess, the USA strives to remake the
world in its own image. The Bush dynasty, encouraged
by the Christian Right – Israel alliance, is
on a Mission. God help us.
The
cost to humanity of fifteen centuries of Christian savagery – of
hundreds of millions of lives brutalised and truncated,
sacrificed to war, torture, pogrom, burning, pestilence
and plague – is incalculable.
Christianity
is the worst disaster in human history
Abraxas
