I’m taking two months off in order to get some rest, turn my research on the Christianization (started one year ago with this post) into a book, and find fresh ideas.

Tomorrow, I will click on “pause billing”, which should have as consequence that the remaining time on all paid subscriptions is frozen, until I press unpause in September.

Before leaving, however, here is a short article that wraps up my review of Gmirkin’s books, summarizing some arguments that I have made before but recent subscribers may not have read. Enjoy the Summer.

The Curse of the Burning Bush

If we follow the argument of Gmirkin’s first book, the Hebrew’s Exodus from Egypt is a complete fabrication. Not everything in the book of Exodus, however, was made up in the Hellenistic period. The legend of the conquest of Canaan from the land of Midian is probably based on some pre-Hellenistic tradition. According to the “Midianite Hypothesis” (or “Kenite Hypothesis”), this legend gives us the most plausible origin of Mosaic Yahwism. To make a long story short, Moses is the son-in-law of a Midianite priest (kohen) of Yahweh (called Hobab in Judges 1:16, but Jethro in Numbers 18:1 and in most of Exodus, except in Exodus 2:18 where he is called Reuel). The “holy ground” (Ex 3:5) where Moses first meets Yahweh is in Jethro’s territory. Jethro “offered a burnt offering” to Yahweh (Ex 18:12), and instructed Moses how to organize the tribes politically (Ex 18:19-25). It was Jethro’s daughter Zipporah (Moses’s wife) who performed circumcision on their newborn son, to appease Yahweh’s wrath (Ex 4:24-26). The mount Horeb which Moses climbs to receive Yahweh’s commandments is rumbling and spitting fire, just like a volcano (Ex 19:16-19). This is consistent with Yahweh’s “volcanic” character. Midian is located in the northwest Arabian Peninsula, on the east shore of the Gulf of Aqaba, which happens to be an ancient volcanic area (unlike the Egyptian peninsula later mistakenly named Sinai).

Moses’ father-in-law is called a Midianite in Exodus, but a Kenite in Judges 1:16. The scholarly assumption is that the Kenites were a semi-nomadic people living in the region of Midian. The name of the Kenites (Qayn) means “blacksmith” or “metal-worker”. Midian is a region rich in copper, and copper was mined there by the Egyptians from the end of the 14th century bce. The Kenites’ trade in copper or bronze metallurgy is consistent with their worshipping a volcano god. The Israelites apparently had a special alliance with the Kenites, but not with the rest of the Midianites, who were supposedly exterminated on Moses’ order in Numbers 31. Since Cain and Kenite are one and the same word, it is most likely that the story of Cain and Abel was borrowed from a Kenite etiologic tale attributing the Kenites’ nomadic lifestyle to a divine punishment for an ancestral fratricide. This legend indicates that the Kenites, or tribe of Cain, inspired fear to their neighbors for their law of sevenfold vengeance.

In this hypothesis, Moses’s major innovation to the Kenites’ religion was to make their volcano god portable by putting him (in the form of stone tablets) in a wooden chest (the Ark) carried in battle, and a golden tent (the Tabernacle).

Whether you believe that the volcanic demon named Yahweh is real, not real, or something in between, that’s his origin. How he came to be regarded as “God” is another story. It is the story of “the Great Metaphysical Lie by which the Jews have bewitched half of the planet,” as I called it.

The conspiracy of Ezra

Although Gmirkin dates that deception in the Hellenistic period, most “minimalists” still believe that the brillant idea of turning the jealous god of the Jews into the Cosmic God of humankind (who prefers Jews) first came up to the Babylonian exiles during the Persian period, when they were living under the monotheistic Achaemenids, worshippers of Ahura Mazda, the “God of Heaven”.

Although the books of Ezra and Nehemiah (originally one book) were certainly composed after the Persian period, they shed some light on that process. The book of Ezra contains extracts from several edicts attributed to succeeding Persian kings to allow the Judean (Jewish) exiles to return to Palestine and rebuild the Jerusalem Temple. They are certainly not genuine documents, but their content reveals the politico-religious strategy deployed by those who forged them (my Catholic “Jerusalem Bible” calls them “proto-Zionists”). In the first edict, Cyrus the Great calls Yahweh both “the God of Heaven” and “the god of Israel, who is the god in Jerusalem” (Ezra 1:2–3). We find the same duality God of Heaven/god of Israel in the next edict by King Artaxerxes who allows “the priest Ezra, Secretary of the Law of the God of Heaven,” to offer a gigantic holocaust to “the god of Israel who resides in Jerusalem” (7:12-15). We later find twice the same expression “God of Heaven” (Elah Shemaiya) interspersed with seven references to “your god,” that is, “the god of Israel”. “God of Heaven” appears once more in an edict signed by the Persian king Darius to confirm Cyrus’ prior edict and recommend that the Israelites “offer sacrifices acceptable to the God of Heaven and pray for the life of the king and his sons” (6:10). The expression appears one more time, when the Judeans tell the local Persian governor who disputes their right to build the temple: “We are the servants of the God of Heaven and Earth” (5:11). When no Persian is involved, the book of Ezra only refers to the “god of Israel” (four times), “Yahweh, the god of your fathers” (once), and “our god” (ten times). In other words, in the thinking of the biblical author, only the Persians are supposed to believe that Yahweh is “the God of Heaven”. In the book of Nehemiah, when Nehemiah wants to convince the Persian king let him go to Judea to oversee the rebuilding of Jerusalem, he offers a prayer “to the God of Heaven” (Nehemiah 2:4); but once in Jerusalem, he asks his fellow Jews to swear allegiance to “Yahweh our god” (10:30).

This unmistakable pattern unlocks the deepest secret of Judaism, and exposes the real nature of “Jewish universalism”: for the Jews, Yahweh is the god of the Jews,[1] whereas Gentiles should be told, again and again, that he is the supreme and universal God—who happens to love Jews and hate their enemies.

This dialectical relationship between Jewish monolatry and Mesopotamian monotheism also shows up in the book of Daniel, written in the same Hellenistic period. The eponymous hero is selected from the Judean exiles in Babylon to be educated by the chief eunuch of King Nebuchadnezzar. When he proves capable of interpreting the dreams of the king, the latter falls at his feet and says: “Your god is indeed the god of gods, the Master of kings” (2:47).

The expression “the god of gods” echoes the expression “king of kings” by which the Persian emperor designated himself. The parallel between the two expressions perfectly represents the way the Jews relate to the various empires who conquered them: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Lagids, the Seleucids, and later the Romans may have the king of kings, but they, the Jews, have something better: the god of gods, whom they ultimately imposed on those empires.

The prostitute of Jericho

The book of Joshua, written in the Persian or Hellenistic periods according to the “minimalists”, reflects the same conscious ambiguity. It never refers to Yahweh simply as “God,” but always as “Yahweh the god of Israel”,[2] “Yahweh my god” or “our god” when Israelites are talking,[3] or “Yahweh your god” when the Israelites are talked to.[4] The only explicit profession that Yahweh is the supreme God, in the whole Book of Joshua, comes from the mouth of Rahab, a prostitute who hides two Israeli spies for the night inside Jericho’s walls, and later lets the Israelites into the city in exchange for being spared with her family during the massacre that follows. As justification for betraying her own people, she tells the Israelites that “Yahweh your god is God both in Heaven above and on Earth beneath” (2:11), something that neither the narrator, nor Yahweh, nor any Israelite in the book ever claims. This story, which likens the prostitute of Jericho to the Trojan Horse, illustrates that the Israelites are satisfied with the belief that Yahweh is their god, while Gentiles will be conquered by the belief that Yahweh is the God of Heaven and Earth—who happens to love Israel and hate all Israel’s enemies.

My French Catholic Bible (published by the Dominicans of the École Biblique de Jérusalem) adds a footnote to that passage, saying that Rahab’s “profession of faith to the God of Israel … made Rahab, in the eyes of more than one Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.” I find this footnote, likening the Gentile Church to the prostitute of Jericho, emblematic of the true role of Christianity. For it is indeed the Church that, by acknowledging the god of Israel as the universal God, introduced the Jews into the heart of the Gentile city and, over the centuries, allowed them to seize power.

[1] “In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew,” writes Maurice Samuel in You Gentiles (1924), pp. 74-75.

[2] Joshua 7:13, 9:18, 13:14, 13:33, 14:14, 22:16.

[3] Joshua 9:23, 14:8, 22:19.

[4] Joshua 1:11, 1:12, 1:15, 3:3, 3:9, 4:5, 4:23-24, 8:7, 9:9, 22:3-4, 22:5, 23:3,5,8,11, 24:2.

Yahweh the son of El

The most ancient version of the Hebrew Bible that we have, the Masoretic Text, was edited between the 7th and the 10th centuries ce. The Greek version known as the Septuagint, made around 170 bce, shows internal evidence of having been translated from a different Hebrew original that is lost. Some parts of that Hebrew original are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in the middle of the 20th century. For example, one fragment from the manuscript referenced as 4QDeuteronomy, dated to the 1st century bce, gives this reading for Deuteronomy 32:8-9:

When the Most High (Elyôn) gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated humanity, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God (bene Elohim). For Yahweh’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.

The Masoretic text has “sons of Israel” (bene Yisrael) instead of “sons of God”, which makes little sense. The Septuagint has “angels of God” (aggelon theou), which is a standard Greek translation for “sons of God.” Bible translators today agree that “sons of God” is the original reading, although they generally place it in a footnote.

The original Deuteronomy 32:8-9 casts Yahweh in the role of one of the sons of El, here called Elyôn. Each of El’s sons receives one nation, and Yahweh receives Israel. According to Old Testament scholar Mark S. Smith, author of The Early History of God (first published in 1990), this reflects an ancient conception that was not specific to Israel, but echoes an ancient theology of the Near East. Some of the Ugaritic texts written in northern Syria in the 13th and 12th centuries bce, and discovered in 1928, call the supreme god El, and the other gods “sons of El.”

Some of the oldest Psalms preserve that ancient conception of a cosmic god El assisted by his offspring for terrestrial matters, and of Yahweh as one of those “sons of El”. In Psalm 82 the supreme God presides over a great assembly: “in the midst of the gods (elohim) he holds judgement, telling them ‘you are gods [elohim], sons of the Most High [elyown], all of you.’” Other psalms present Yahweh as one of the sons of God (bene elim), albeit the best of them: “Give Yahweh his due, sons of God, give Yahweh his due of glory and strength” (Psalm 29:1); “Who in the skies can compare with Yahweh? Who among the sons of God can rival him?” (Psalm 89:6).

According to Smith, the “el” in Israel “suggests that El was the original chief god of the group named Israel”.[1] Judah, on the other hand, is linguistically connected to Yahweh. 2Kings 10 tells that Israel was “converted” to the cult of Yahweh when in 842 BCE a Judean general by the name of Jehu overthrew King Omri, and slaughtered “all his leading men, his close friends, his priests; he did not leave a single one alive” (10:11).

The process of merging Yahweh with El, thus promoting Yahweh from national god to cosmic Creator, took much longer. In the 8th century BCE, Yahweh is still described as just a national god in Micah 4:5: “For all peoples go forward, each in the name of its god (elohim), while we go forward in the name of Yahweh our God for ever and ever.” In Judges 11:24, the Israelites declare to the Moabites: “Will you not keep as your possession whatever Chemosh, your god, has given you? And, just the same, we shall keep as ours whatever Yahweh our god has given us, to inherit from those who were before us!”

Before Yahwistic monotheism, historians of Israel identify a stage of Yahwistic monolatry, meaning the exclusive worship of Yahweh. This is when Yahweh became the “jealous god”—his jealousy implying the existence of other gods—and the cult of other gods assimilated to adultery or prostitution, as in Exodus 34:11-16:

Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Take heed to yourself, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you are going, lest it become a snare in the midst of you. You shall break down their altars, and break their pillars, and cut down their asherim (for you shall worship no other god, for Yahweh, whose name is jealous, is a jealous God), lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and when they play the harlot after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and one invites you, you eat of his sacrifice, and you take of their daughters for your sons, and their daughters play the harlot after their gods and make your sons play the harlot after their gods.

“The passage asserts four points about Israel,” comments Mark Smith in The Early History of God. “First, Israel’s ethnic identity was originally separate from other peoples of the land. Second, Israel was not originally among the peoples in the land. Third, specific cultic objects were alien to Israel. Finally, Yahweh was the only deity of Israel.” Exodus is here warning the Israelites against syncretism. But, Smith argues, since we now know that the conquest of Canaan is a literary construction, the Exodus narrative must be read as an inversion of the historical process: “the process of the emergence of Israelite monolatry was an issue of Israel’s breaking with its own ‘Canaanite’ past and not simply one of avoiding ‘Canaanite’ neighbors.”[2]

The aggressive monolatry of the jealous god is hardly compatible with the ancient Near Eastern notion of a “council of the gods” (as I mentioned earlier, some Egyptians recognized the god of the Jews as Seth, the evil god banned from the council of the gods). The shift from monolatry to monotheism is easy to implement: when the people are only allowed to worship one god in one temple, they are easily persuaded that this god is the only real god, and therefore God. As Mark Smith remarks: “if ancient Israelite religion is to be viewed primarily as a matter of practice, then the modern distinction between monotheism and monolatry is problematic.”[3]

The explicit identification of Yahweh with the supreme God El was conceptualized during the Hellenistic period, and probably even finalized in the Hasmonean kingdom: “I am Yahweh who created the heaven and the earth,” we read in the Book of Jubilees (32:18), a text of Hasmonean propaganda affirming the supranational destiny of Israel.

Russell Gmirkin quotes abundantly from Mark Smith in his third and last book, Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts: Cosmic Monotheism and Terrestrial Polytheism in the Primordial History (Routledge 2022): His main thesis is that “Jewish monotheism was first introduced at a relatively late date, in the early Hellenistic Era, under the influence of Plato’s Timaeus.”[4] He is not the first scholar to tread on this path,[5] but has perfected the comparative analysis between the cosmogony of Genesis 1 and the cosmogony of Plato’s Timaeus. In my view, however, the most interesting part of his book is not the comparative arguments, but rather Gmirkin’s perspective on the development, from the Presocratics to Plato, of a Greek theology combining “Cosmic Monotheism and Terrestrial Polytheism.”

Because the Abrahamic religions define themselves as monotheism, they define the religions they supplanted as polytheism. This is a polemical perspective that historians are now challenging. Two collections of essays have recently been devoted to “pagan monotheism”, published respectively by Oxford UP and Cambridge UP.[6] John North writes in One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire: “throughout the classical period and far earlier in the Near East, monotheistic assumptions are quite commonly found, without apparently raising any fears of weakening polytheistic practice.”[7] Such concept of the divine realm as a “family of gods” (a cosmic god and his terrestrial offspring), or as one God in multiple forms, may be called “inclusive monotheism”, and contrasted with the Jewish “exclusive monotheism” that rejects the existence of any god but the supreme God. As we saw above, that exclusive monotheism is the result of promoting “Yahweh the god of Israel” to the throne of the supreme creator of heaven and earth. The jealous god ends up negating the very existence of all his competitors, thereby affirming that he is the only real god, therefore God. Yahweh’s promotion is an usurpation, however, in the sense that the supreme God is now regarded an a personal and rather crude entity with an exclusive love for one particular people. Jewish exclusive monotheism, therefore, is in reality a grossly deceptive form of polytheism: the monolatry of the ethnic jealous god who thinks he is God.

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Under the reign of King Josiah (639–609 BCE), during repair work in the Temple, the high priest Hilkiah discovered a “scroll of the Torah”. Il was brought and read to the king, who then convened all his subjects, “priests, prophets and the whole populace,” and read to them aloud “the entire contents of the Book of the Covenant discovered in the Temple of Yahweh.” The king made this book the Law of the kingdom, and, to fufill its most important commandment, ordered the priests “to remove all the cult objects which had been made for Baal, Asherah and the whole array of heaven.”

That story is told in chapters 22 and 23 of the second book of Kings. Most scholars today regard it as a piece of propaganda engineered by royal and priestly powers to present their new law code, formalized mostly in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, as the restoration of an old, lost one. The conservative scholarly consensus is that the Torah was not “discovered” but written or at least edited during the reign of Josiah. Since the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel I and II, Kings I and II are framed in the same ideology as Deuteronomy, it is assumed that they were compiled and edited during the same period.

More skeptical scholars, however, point to a serious problem with that theory: it is inconceivable that Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic history were written and promoted under a monarchy, because they belittle the royal institution. The king is entirely absent from the Pentateuch except in Deuteronomy 17, only to have limits imposed on his power, his accoutrements, his wealth, his horses and his harem. The idea that a king would sanction a law code and a national historiography presenting royalty as only grudgingly conceded by God to an unfaithful people (in 1Samuel 8:7), makes no sense at all. The Deuteronomic ideology better fits the theocratic regime envisioned by Ezra and Nehemiah: the rule of a caste of priests, with a weak king or no king at all. In the words of Philip R. Davies, author of In Search of “Ancient Israel” (1992), “the ideological structure of the biblical literature can only be explained in the last analysis as a product of the Persian period.” It means that the “reform of Josiah” itself, and not just the staged discovery of the Torah, is “bound to be regarded as a pious legend, just about possible perhaps, but extremely improbable.”[1] This Torah supposedly written by Moses, abandoned and then revived two centuries later by Josiah, then turned obsolete again as the country was ravaged, and finally returned from Babylon to a people who no longer remembered it — this Torah had in fact never been known before Ezra made it up. It is a lie within a lie within a lie.

Philip Davies may be called a “low minimalist”, compared to Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson, the founders of the Copenhagen International Seminar, who go one step beyond and theorize that the Torah was written after the Persian period, in the Hellenistic period. The Dominican priest Étienne Nodet has joined their ranks, and suggests that “the final shape of most of the Hebrew Bible was carried out at the library of Alexandria, in two major steps: first the Pentateuch in the third century bce for all the Israelites, and then a Jewish library including the Prophets and many writings in the second century bce.”[2]

Another important contributor to the movement is Philippe Wajdenbaum, with his book Argonauts of the Desert (2011), a minute account of the similarities between the Bible and Greek literature, which can only be explained by Greek influence during the Hellenistic period. Wajdenbaum finds that the most significant influence was from Plato’s Laws, and he writes:

According to the results of my analysis, the Bible’s author(s) wanted to transpose—in the form of their own national epic—the Ideal State of Plato’s Laws, a political and theological project initiated in the Republic. The biblical story, recalling the foundation of a twelve-tribe State that is endowed with divine laws which enable it to live ideally, seems to be inspired by Plato’s Laws … In Genesis–Kings there exists an opposition between the twelve-tribe Ideal State—a State governed only by laws, for which the plan is given by God to Moses and which is founded by Joshua—and the monarchy. The monarchy of the nations in Genesis and Exodus, and that of Israel in the books of Samuel and Kings, is one whose excesses will first bring Israel to division, and then to its eventual downfall.[3]

Wajdenbaum recalls “[his] astonishment that a complete and neutral comparative study of the Bible with Plato had not been done before,” but, reflecting on the backlash that he received from the academic community, he concludes: “This resistance, this rejection a priori of the thesis, coming both from believers and non-believers, is a testament to the total success of the biblical project and the deep attachment of Westerners to the sacredness of the text.”[4]

Russell Gmirkin has built upon the works of Wajdenbaum and others. In his first book, which I discussed in two previous articles, he attempted to prove that Genesis 1-11 and Exodus borrowed from histories of Babylon and Egypt written in the 270s and 280s. In his second book, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible (Routledge, 2017), he looks at the legislative sections of the Pentateuch (the Hebrew Torah) and argues that it emulates the Greek ideal, albeit with a few national idiosyncrasies: a society of free and equal citizens, all landowners (except for the itinerant Levites), ruled by law, where offices (including that of king) were available to all. Gmirkin points to striking parallels between biblical and Greek constitutional institutions, laws, law collections, and legends about law enactments, that are for the most part absent from Ancient Near Eastern legal tradition. Specifically, he argues that the Pentateuch writers borrowed directly from Plato’s Laws.

Since Greek literature only became known to the Jewish world after Alexander the Great, an unmistakable influence of Greek legal and political philosophy would confirm the Hellenistic date of the Pentateuch that Gmirkin has already defended on other grounds in his first book.

Such parallels are exceedingly difficult to explain under the hypothesis that biblical legal traditions developed in the Persian Era or earlier, when direct Athenian influence on Jewish legal writings can be ruled out, even under the theory of an Eastern Mediterranean cultural sphere. However, Jewish access to the legal collections found in the Great Library of Alexandria provides a direct mechanism whereby the biblical authors could have become familiar with both Athenian laws and with Plato’s Laws.[5]

The implications are enormous. If the Bible is inspired by Plato, then it is not inspired by God in the way it claims to be. If the Bible authors adapted Plato, then the allegations made by Philo of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus and so many others that Plato plagiarized Moses is a blatant Jewish lie. We don’t know of any Greek who believed that lie, and we know of one, Apion from Alexandria, who wrote a book (lost, of course) to expose it. It took the forced conversion of the Romans to Christianity for the Romans to start believing in the Jewish lie. Church Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, Origen and Eusebius repeated Philo and Josephus’s charge of “theft by the Greeks.”[6] The Church vouched for the priority of the Bible. Until Voltaire ridiculed that claim, it was commonly believed that the Bible was the first book ever in human history; it was “the Book”. And since the Bible’s claim to antiquity is the preamble to the Jews’ claim to chosenness, Christians became the Jews’ best advocate, the witness to God’s special infatuation with them, the guardians of the Temple (the Bible being the Jews’ portable temple since 70 CE).

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To examine the Exodus story, we must start with its prologue, the story of Joseph in Genesis 47. Having risen from the status of a slave to that of chancellor of Pharaoh, Joseph favors his kinsmen (despite having been sold into slavery by his brothers) and obtains for them “land holdings in Egypt, in the best part of the country.” In charge of the national grain reserves, he stores large amounts during the years of plenty; then, when famine strikes, he sells it at a high price and thus “accumulated all the money to be found in Egypt and Canaan.” The following year, having created a monetary shortage, he forces the peasants to relinquish their herds in exchange for grain: “Hand over your livestock and I shall issue you food in exchange for your livestock.” One year later, the peasants complain that they have nothing left “except our bodies and our land,” and so are reduced to begging, then have to sell themselves in order to survive: “Take us and our land in exchange for food, and we with our land will become Pharaoh’s serfs; only give us seed, so that we can survive and not die and the land not revert to desert!” And so the Hebrews, after settling in Egypt, “acquired property there; they were fruitful and grew very numerous” (Genesis 47:11-27), a sure sign of God’s blessing.

Although it is situated in pre-Mosaic times, Joseph’s story has a recognizable Hellenistic background. It reflects the very favorable condition of the Jews under the early Ptolemies, Greek pharaohs who had little concern for the Egyptian peasantry. The biblical Joseph is actually very similar to another Joseph whose story is told by Flavius Josephus (Jewish Antiquities 12.4) and explicitly set under the Ptolemies. This Joseph, a man “of great reputation among the people of Jerusalem, for gravity, prudence, and justice,” was appointed as Judea’s tax collector by Ptolemy after promising to bring back double the tax revenues of his competitors. “The king was pleased to hear that offer; and, because it augmented his revenues, said he would confirm the sale of the taxes to him.” Joseph fulfilled his contract by murdering several prominent citizens and confiscating their property. He became extremely rich and was thus able to help his coreligionists. Therefore, concludes the Jewish historian, Joseph “was a good man, and of great magnanimity; and brought the Jews out of a state of poverty and meanness, to one that was more splendid.” The proximity of the two Joseph narratives suggests that they derive from the same matrix. It is also worth noting that Josephus believed that the Jewish community in Alexandria had been brought there as slaves from Judaea and Samaria several hundred years before his time and that 200,000 had been liberated by Ptolemy II” (Jewish Antiquities 12.7-11). Historians are not exactly sure about the origin of the Jewish population in Egypt, but agree that there were about one million Jews in Alexandria, with privileges and wealth that even angered the Greeks.

The story of the biblical Joseph, ending with his tribe becoming rich and numerous, is echoed in Exodus 1:7-10:

But the Israelites were fruitful and prolific; they became so numerous and powerful that eventually the whole land was full of them. Then there came to power in Egypt a new king who had never heard of Joseph. “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites are now more numerous and stronger than we are. We must take precautions to stop them from increasing any further, or if war should break out, they might join the ranks of our enemies. They might take arms against us and then escape from the country.”

Pharaoh then subjected the Israelites to forced labor until Moses came to lead them out of Egypt.

Before fleeing Egypt, “the Israelites … asked the Egyptians for silver and golden jewelry, and clothing. Yahweh made the Egyptians so much impressed with the people that they gave them what they asked. So they despoiled the Egyptians” (Ex 12:35-36). That is rather peculiar, isn’t it? Why would the Egyptians entrust their valuables to an enslaved and destitute people on the run? Were the Egyptians that stupid, and the Israelites such expert conmen?

Or did the story here collide with another one, in which the Israelites were not forced laborers, but pawnbrokers and moneylenders? That other story would dovetail well with the Joseph prologue. It also has a familiar ring: medieval history is full of episodes of Jews gaining inordinate power by financial and political intrigues, until a king expels them to protect his people. In England, for example, Jews had become wealthy and influential by the 12th century—with one of them, Aaron of Lincoln, becoming the richest man in England—, until king Edward I expelled them in 1290 for their abuse of usury.[1]

We’ll never know exactly the pre-biblical story behind the biblical story, if there is one. But we do know that the Egyptians of the Hellenistic period had alternative versions of the Exodus. In all their versions, the Jews were expelled from Egypt, for spreading some kind of contagious disease and/or offending the gods.

As long as the biblical Exodus was believed to have been written before 500 bce, it was assumed that those late alternative versions were malicious distortions of it. As the age of the Torah is now being revised downward by the “minimalists” of the Copenhagen School, that interpretation is called into question. Is Exodus the Jewish rewriting of a story of Jewish expulsion from Egypt? For a probe into this question, we shall turn again to Russell Gmirkin’s book Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch (T&T Clark, 2006). We have followed in the previous article his argument that Genesis 1-11 used Berossus’s Babyloniaca written in the 3rd century bce; let us turn now to his second claim: that Exodus uses Manetho’s Aegyptiaca written in the same period.

But let me first underline the liberating potential of Gmirkin’s radical biblical revisionism. It is said that history is written by the victor. But the Bible teaches us a more profound truth: he who writes history is the ultimate victor, regardless of whether he won any battle at all. He is the conqueror of the minds. The Israelites were beaten by the Babylonians, yet they have imposed their narrative to the world, in which they are the holy goodies and the Babylonians the satanic baddies. The Israelites didn’t need to beat the Egyptians militarily to beat them in the “war of books”: Manetho’s Aegyptiaca disappeared but for a few bits and pieces, while its plagiarized version in Exodus conquered (and enslaved) more than half of humankind.

The Jews’ false narratives are the sources of their power, and the biblical narrative is the matrix of them all. Russell Gmirkin’s biblical minimalism is the Good News that will set us free: it proves that the Pentateuch was written in the 3rd century bce by plagiarizing the Greek literature (Berossus, Manetho, Plato, etc.). It proves that the People of the Book didn’t have a book when there were already more than 200,000 books in the Library of Alexandria. It proves that the “inventors of monotheism” had just recently become monotheists when every philosopher had been talking about the cosmic God.

How liberating it is, therefore, to get a few faint echoes of the voice of the ancient Egyptians. Their take on the Jews deserves to be heard and vindicated. In the early 2nd century ce, Plutarch wrote a treaty On Isis and Osiris, in which he presents various esoteric interpretations of the myth, that he heard from Egyptians. While Isis and Osiris are the divine founders of Egyptian civilization, Osiris’s jealous brother Seth, who treacherously murdered and dismembered Osiris, is the enemy of civilization, the god of nomadic raiders, of confusion, deception, civil war, famine and sickness. He is the nearest thing to the devil in Egyptian religion. In chapter 31, Plutarch mentions that some Egyptians believed that, after being banished from Egypt by the council of the gods, Seth wandered in Palestine where he fathered two sons, Hierosolymos and Youdaios (Jerusalem and Judean or Jew). Seth, in other words, is the divine ancestor of the Jews, and the other name of Yahweh (this is the likely origin of the rumor that the Holy of Holies contained a donkey’s head, the zoomorphic symbol of Seth). Had we inherited the worldview of the ancient Egyptians rather than the Jews’, we might have come out a bit smarter.

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I’ve heard about Russell Gmirkin’s work for a few years, but it is only very recently that I decided to give it a try (thanks to Brado, Rurik and a few others). What I had heard of his theories sounded so extravagant that I had assumed it couldn’t possibly be serious scholarship. Well, serious scholarship it is, I can now report. Cutting edge, and groundbreaking. I became so absorbed that I read his three books in a row, took notes, and will now try my very best to give you a digest. The material is so rich and the implications so vast that I will need four parts: two parts for his first book, and one part for each of his second and third books.

The Copenhagen School of Biblical Criticism

Gmirkin’s theory didn’t come out of nowhere. Its seminal intuition and its arguments developed in an academic milieu known as “biblical minimalism”, regrouping scholars who go one step further than their peers in revising downward the age of the Hebrew Bible. Those biblical minimalists are also known as the Copenhagen school, because in 1993 two of them, the Danish Niels Peter Lemche and the American-born (now Danish) Thomas L. Thompson, founded the Copenhagen International Seminar, hosted by the University of Copenhagen. This Seminar, in partnership with the British academic publisher Routledge, is now a major forum of discussion for Old Testament scholars.

A word on Thomas Thompson: Before being recruited by the Copenhagen University, he had faced a lot of opposition and ostracizing, because of the controversies surrounding his first book in 1974, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham — a quest that ends nowhere, since, according to Thompson, the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are complete fabrications. This book and another one published the following year, Abraham in History and Tradition by the Canadian John Van Seters, marked a paradigm shift that was resisted by the old guard of biblical scholarship, but progressively gained wide acceptance.

Controversy, however, did not stop. When Thompson published The Bible in History: How Writers Create A Past in 1999, Ha’aretz printed an attack by Hershel Shanks, the editor of The Biblical Archaeology Review, accusing him and other “minimalist” scholars of being “anti-Zionist,” “anti-Bible” and “anti-Israel,” adding: “At the extreme, they can even be viewed as anti-Semitic.” As Thompson himself relates with more amusement than indignation, The Jerusalem Post quoted the former director of the Israel Department of Antiquities saying: “A mutual acquaintance told me that Thompson confided in him that he is a staunch believer in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”[1]

Why the outrage? Because the biblical narrative is the foundation of Jewish identity, as well as the justification for the existence of Israel. Minimalists are not only saying that the Bible contains very little real history; they also expose the deliberate deception of its special claim to antiquity. For if they are right, the people of the Book didn’t have a book yet when they could find more than 200,000 books in one single library. If the minimalists are right, then the Jews “invented” God at a time when every “pagan” philosopher was talking about Him. Worse, the minimalists uncover plenty of evidence that those Jewish scholars who were writing under the name of Moses were in fact using Greek literature as a model.

This is where Russell Gmirkin excels. Using the academic disciplines of comparative studies and source criticism, he argues that the Hebrew Pentateuch was composed in its entirety about 273-272 bce, and that its authors borrowed extensively from works that they most probably read in the great Library of Alexandria: these works included histories of Egypt and Babylon in Greek, as well as Greek cosmogonies and legal treaties, notably the most famous ones by Plato. The spread of Hellenistic culture, and the foundation of the Library of Alexandria in particular, created a great incentive for the writing, copying, compiling and translating of books from all corners of the world, including nationalistic accounts of the past glories of the civilizations of Egypt (by Hecataeus of Abdera and Manetho) and Babylon (by Berossus). This intense competition, described by one author as a “war of books,”[2] was the context for the creation of the Jewish scriptures. It has always been known to have been the context for the Greek version, the so-called Septuagint, but Gmirkin argues that the Hebrew version was written around the same time, probably by the same group. Here is Gmirkin’s take on the most likely scenario:

The financing of a translation of Hebrew legislation into Greek by Ptolemy II Philadelphus was seen by Jewish scholars as a golden opportunity to present a comprehensive account of Jewish origins to the Greek world. This ambitious account was intended to demonstrate that the Jews, like the Egyptians and the Babylonians, had traditions that ran back to the beginning of time.[3]

The creation of the Hebrew Pentateuch was disguised as being simply the translation (by seventy scholars), of long-existing Mosaic laws and traditions. While many preexisting chronicles were probably incorporated in the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, the bulk of the Pentateuch (Torah) was mostly invented from scratch, borrowing from Greek sources (in fields of law, cosmogony, and narrative history), but rephrasing them sufficiently to make them appear more ancient than the Greek.

The presentation of the Torah as the traditional laws of the ancestral generation necessitated the rejection of any connection with Greek literary or legislative traditions, despite the creation of the Torah at the leading center of Greek learning, Alexandria.[4]

As far as I know, this kind of deceptive scholarly practice is quite unique to the Jews, in the ancient world. In the same period, a Jew wrote the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates, pretending to be a Greek philosopher singing the praises of the ancient wisdom of the Jews. This text, quoted by Flavius Josephus in Jewish Antiquities, is the earliest source of the legend of the Seventy Jewish translators working at the invitation of the Greek king Ptolemy Philadelphus. It tells how, upon reading the result of their work, Ptolemy swooned in ecstasy and exclaimed that it “comes from God.” We can mention at least two more books written by Jews under false Greek authorship to praise the Jews: On the Jews by the pseudo-Hecataeus (2nd or 1st century bce), quoted by Josephus,[5] and the third book of the Sibylline Oracles (middle of the 2nd century bce), that makes the oracle of Delphi glorify the Jewish people and promise them the world.

Gmirkin refrains from calling the Pentateuch authors plagiarists, but I think that is a fair and objective description of the evidence he provides. For these authors didn’t simply recycle Greek sources; they pretended that their copy was older than the original. As if by tacit agreement, this claim was repeated in all Jewish literature. The Jew Aristobulus of Paneas, in his Explanations of the Scripture of Moses (around 170 bce), insisted that Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato had been inspired by Moses. Around the same time, the Jew Artapanus of Alexandria, in On the Jews, presents Joseph and Moses as the “first inventors” who taught the Egyptians everything they knew, from astronomy and agriculture to philosophy and religion.[6] In the early 1st century ce, Philo of Alexandria asserted that Greek legislators actually plagiarized Mosaic Law, and that Heraclitus stole his theory of opposites from Moses. Flavius Josephus repeated similar lies in the 1st century ce, in response to the Hellenized Egyptian named Apion who contested the antiquity of the Jewish people and their scriptures. Josephus actually used parallels between Plato’s legislative works (Laws and Republic) and Mosaic Laws to argue that Plato “imitated” Moses (Against Apion 2.257).

In his second book, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, Gmirkin reverses the argument and proves Apion right: “it now appears evident that the Mosaic writings were informed by those of Plato and not the reverse.”[7] As Brado puts it: “Just as Jacob deceived his brother of a birthright, so too have we been deceived in regards to the seniority of the Hebrew people in antiquity.” And by the way, if that Jacob-and-Esau story was invented in the 3rd century bce, then Esau, aka Edom, represents the Idumeans, the Arabian people who founded Petra (hardly distinguishable from the later Nabateans), and we have here an allegory of the Israelites (Jews) deceptively beating the Idumeans (Arabs) to their claim to antiquity, chosenness, and all the rest.

But let’s proceed in order and start with Gmirkin’s first book, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch (T&T Clark, 2006).

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Dear subscribers,

If you appreciate and support my work, you will surely appreciate the fact that Nick Fuentes named me as a source for his long talk on the Kennedy assassination aired in January (I only became aware of it a month ago). If you haven’t listened to the full podcast, I can only recommend it (here on X). Fuentes has shortcomings, but he has also a lot of talent. His presentation, lasting 1 hour and 40 minutes and apparently filmed without any cut, is in my view a masterpiece. He concluded with: “Case closed: Israel did it.” And then he went on to mention his sources: Michael Collins Piper, Ron Unz, and myself. It definitely makes me feel useful.

And two more pieces of news:

On the Jewish/Christian question: Kevin MacDonald posted my article titled “The crucifixion of the Logos: a Jewish coup on the Roman mind” (reposted here on unz.com). It is mostly made of material already posted and emailed on this Substack: “The Christianization of knowledge” (Mar 16, 2026); “Hacking the Logos” (Feb 11, 2026); and “Resurrection: flesh and blood of the Christian faith” (Jan 27, 2026).

On chronological revisionism: Ron Unz posted a long article of mine: “Chronological revisionism revised: a review of Emmet Sweeney’s Guide to the Phantom Dark Age.” I explain why, after studying Late Antiquity for a year, I give up on Gunnar Heinsohn’s extreme theory (cutting off 7 centuries from the first millennium AD) , but still view the more moderate theory of Heribert Illig, as presented by Emmet Sweeney (cutting off the 3 Dark Age centuries), as a reasonable working hypothesis. Following this article, I exchanged with Emmet by email and today Emmet and I discussed on the Var Valley YouTube Channel.

This article is posted simultaneously on
https://www.unz.com/article/deep-trump-the-conman-who-saved-america-from-the-thucydides-trap/

Tucker Carlson recently confessed: “I’ll be tormented for a long time by the fact that I played a role in getting Donald Trump elected. And I want to say that I’m sorry for misleading people.” How can one not feel sorry and ashamed today for having believed in Trump? I’ll be honest: although I hold no responsibility in Trump’s election, I feel ashamed for having placed any hope in him.

The Trump phenomenon resembles a form of collective hypnosis. It has a religious dimension that makes it unique in American political history. For the believer, every failure, every scandal, every lie is proof that Trump is fighting against the Deep State, the Fake News, the Swamp, the Washington elite, the Democrats, the New World Order, the FBI, and who knows what else. The Q psy-op was particularly successful in tapping into the religious imagination of Americans who were distrustful of the government. This is well explained by Marjorie Taylor Green, who admits she “fell for that in late 2017 and 2018”:

it’s basically a cult. … What it does, it takes a layer of truth and then it twists it into a lie. … Q was very successful. It was probably one of the most successful psychological operations I’ve ever seen because it did use the layer of truth and the things that people were most passionate about and was able to use that and twist their belief to pull their full faith and trust into … an anonymous person or an anonymous entity.

This was political propaganda on a deeper level than ever experimented before. I have analyzed the methods of manipulation used by Q and other pro-Trump groups in “DARK PILL: How Satan-Worshipping Pedophiles have taken over Conspiracyland” and in “The Satanic False Flag: Dark-pilling, conspiracy cults, pied-piper operations, and Zionist spiritual warfare”.

The strangest thing, looking back, is that radical Zionists made no secret about their own quasi-religious adoration for Trump. In May 2018, commenting on Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, Netanyahu himself compared him to Cyrus the Great[1] .

There is no shame in being betrayed. No one blames Jesus for having trusted Judas. But there is shame in being fooled. And the truth about Trump is not that he has betrayed his supporters in 2025; it is that he has fooled them in 2016. Those who believed he would MAGA did so despite so many red flags.

The art of being bought

The first key to unlock Trump was his prose. A man who writes books should be measured by his books, before anything else. In that case, one look at the titles was enough:
- The Art of the Deal (1987)
- How to Get Rich (2004)
- The Way to the Top (2004)
- Think like a Billionaire (2004)
- How to Build a Fortune (2006)
- Think Big and Kick Ass (2007)
- Think Like a Champion (2009).

Trump believes that everything can be bought, that society is purely transactional, and that cunning is the keys to success. He wrote in The Art of the Deal, his 1987 bestseller:

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.”[2]

There is no trace in his books of a word of wisdom or a touch of humor. In fact, Trump has no literary or philosophical culture, and it shows.

What is also clear in Trump’s books is his narcissism. Every sentence comes down to: “I’m the best and I know everything about everything.” Trump isn’t just a salesman; he’s also the product.

Following the opening of Trump Tower in Manhattan in 1983, the massive promotion of his book The Art of the Deal turned Trump into a celebrity. Tony Schwartz, the book’s co-author—who, according to Schwartz, actually wrote the entire book (with Trump’s contribution limited to deleting the least flattering passages)—has said since 2016 that he is haunted by guilt for having helped Trump become president. Trump, he says, lies constantly without the slightest inhibition or guilt. “There is an emptiness inside Trump. There’s an absence of a soul. There’s an absence of a heart.”

The third element that helped craft Trump’s image as a billionaire hero—the equivalent of a saint in the religion of money—is the reality TV show The Apprentice, co-produced by Trump himself and airing since 2004, in which Trump essentially sells himself.

The second standard by which Trump should have been measured was his business record. Is Trump the artist of the deal and the winner he claims to be? No. The advertising is deceptive. Trump is not a self-made man, but a self-made myth.[3] While he has always claimed to have received a single million dollars from his father to start his business, a 2018 New York Times investigation revealed that “he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.”

Not only did he inherit this initial fortune without lifting a finger, but he invested it in failed ventures. Trump has filed for bankruptcy six times in his career. His Taj Mahal casino filed for bankruptcy just 15 months after opening—how a casino can go bankrupt? Other bankruptcies followed in the 1990s and 2000s: the Trump Castle and Trump Plaza Hotel in 1992, then Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts in 2004, with $1.8 billion in debt, and finally Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009 and 2014.

By the 1990s, Trump was in debt to the tune of $5 billion, including $1 billion personally—a negative billionaire. That’s when a group of bankers led by Wilbur Ross, former director of Rothschild Inc., decided to bail him out (Trump would reward Wilbur Ross with the position of Secretary of Commerce in 2016). According to remarks made by real estate attorney Alan Pomerantz on CNN in 2016, speaking on behalf of the bankers: “We made the decision that he would be worth more alive to us than dead—dead meaning in bankruptcy… We kept him alive to help us” (more on John Hankey’s investigation and the Forbes magazine article).

The Roy Cohn Method

If he is a failed casino tycoon, is Trump at least an honest one? Obviously not. Trump has been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits. His first lawsuit dates back to 1973. Trump was accused by the federal government of racial discrimination in the leasing of buildings constructed with public funds. He hired attorney Roy Cohn, who taught him life. In the words of Greg Reese:

The unwritten rules that Roy Cohn helped instill into the character of Donald Trump are, one: Never Apologize. Never Admit Wrongdoing. Two: Always Counterattack and Hit Back Harder. Three: Use the Legal System as a Weapon. Four: Manipulate the Media. Five: Use Fear as Both Shield and Sword. And six: Build a Fortress of Loyalty and Punish Disloyalty Absolutely. Cohn’s playbook didn’t just work on business rivals and judges, it scaled to con millions of people.

The “art of the lie,” not the art of the deal, is the essence of Trump. Trump spouts enormous lies about everything and repeats his lies tirelessly. Persons close to Trump, such as his former communications director Stephanie Grisham, have reported that Trump believes that simply repeating something thousands of times makes it the truth.

Trump’s big lies are numerous. For example: “I ended eight wars” (and therefore “I deserve the Nobel Peace Prize”). In 2024, Trump declared: “I’m the only president in modern history who left office with a smaller national debt than when I came into office.” In reality, under his presidency, the debt increased by 7.8 trillion, a record 40 percent increase.[4] Lying and then calling liars those who expose his lies, is Trump’s instinctual pattern of behavior. Here is a nice example, posted April 20, 2026.

Had Trump read Mein Kampf, he would have recognized the truth of the große Lüge theorem:

in the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of a people, … in the primitive simplicity of their minds, will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one, for the reason that they themselves also lie sometimes in little things, but would be too much ashamed of making too great lies. … Therefore they are unable to believe in the possibility of the enormous impudence of the most infamous distortion in others; … for this reason alone, some part of the most impudent lie will remain and stick; a fact which all great lying artists and societies in this world know only too well and therefore villainously employ. Those who know best this truth…, however, were at all time the Jews.

One of Trump’s biggest lies is the staged event of July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania (watch John Hankey’s film “Trump in the Crosshairs?” if you haven’t). It is such a colossal lie that no one dared to denounce it, because the very idea of such a lie seems unbearably obscene. Everyone would rather pretend to believe it than risk making such a serious accusation. Nine months later, however, the idea of a fake attack is gaining traction among the disappointed MAGA, especially since Joe Kent’s revelation on the FBI’s obstruction to the investigation (see the discussion started by Trisha Hope and shared by Marjorie Taylor Green, or this post mentioning Tim Dillon and Emerald Robinson).

The Roy Cohn method is how Trump dealt with the Epstein problem. It is no coincidence that the Q psy-op, portraying Trump as the Angel of Justice against the Satan-worshipping pedophiles (all Democrats), gained momentum just as the Epstein scandal was making its first headlines in the mainstream press. Now we know why: his name appears more than 38,000 times in the declassified documents so far. Among these documents are allegations against him of raping girls aged 13 to 15 at his golf club in California.

But there is a moral to the story: Trump fell into his own trap. He had bolstered the public rage and generated an uncontainable demand for the release of the Epstein files. Now he fiercely opposes the release, referring to the Epstein files as a “Democrat hoax.” “This will hurt my friends,” Trump reportedly told Marjorie Taylor Greene to dissuade her from joining the Democrats in a resolution calling for declassification. Taylor Greene makes yet another stunning revelation: “Trump texted me that if my son gets killed, I deserve it because I was a traitor to him.”

We should have known. As early as 2002, Trump had told New York magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” There are numerous photos of Trump with Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, as well as a video footage of a party organized by Epstein in 1992 at Mar-a-Lago (Trump’s estate in Palm Beach), featuring young inebriated teenage girls.

Trump is a known sex offender who has faced 28 complaints of harassment or rape. He has bragged about sneaking into the dressing rooms of young girls competing in the beauty pageants he owns. And don’t forget: “When you’re a star,” he bragged, you can just “grab them by the pussy!” In an audio recording from 2006, Trump states that his minimum age limit for sleeping with a girl is twelve.

The narcissistic con artist

Trump is a con artist. He fits the profile analyzed by Maria Konnikova in The Confidence Game, where she writes: “The true con artist doesn’t force us to do anything; he makes us complicit in our own undoing. He doesn’t steal. We give.” In his interview with The New York Times published on May 2, Tucker Carlson mentions Trump’s “spellbinding” quality, that can “weaken people around him and make them more compliant and more confused. I’ve experienced it myself. You spend a day with Trump and you’re in this kind of dreamland, like smoking hash or something… and there may be a supernatural component to it.”

In 2019, George Conway wrote an article for The Atlantic making this diagnosis of malignant narcissism, backed by numerous testimonies. Rereading his article today, one is struck by the obviousness of it all—an obviousness we refused to see because it was presented to us by the Democrats, whom we deemed completely unworthy of attention. Experts define the narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, a need for admiration, a lack of empathy, and a heightened sense of self-importance. Individuals with NPD may present to others as boastful, arrogant, or even unlikeable.”

Trump’s narcissism, probably overlapping with psychopathy, makes him the ideal proxy for his sponsors—always for sale, devoid of any moral inhibitions, and easily manipulated by flattery. Benjamin Disraeli once explained his influence on Queen Victoria with these words: “Everyone likes flattery, and when it comes to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”[5] So with Trump: tell him he’s the greatest man in history, and he will sign your bill. Better still, have his spiritual advisor Paula White tell him he is Jesus.

Lying takes mental energy, even for a seasoned liar like Trump, because a man who lies as he breathes must constantly recall the lies he has already told so as not to contradict himself. Aging brings with it a decline in mental energy, and Trump no longer has the vigilance needed to know when to stop. He lies out of habit. Not only has he lost mastery of the art of lying, but he has lost the ability to disguise his narcissistic pathology. In January of this year, a New York Times correspondent asked Trump if he saw any limits to the exercise of his power on a global scale. “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” On April 13, Trump posted an image of himself as Jesus on Truth Social.

Trump’s megalomaniacal narcissism is now apparent in his plans for monuments to his own glory. He has announced the construction in Washington of “the GREATEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL Triumphal Arch anywhere in the World” (three times taller than Napoleon’s in Paris). Shortly before that, he unveiled his plans for the Trump Presidential Library in Miami, a gigantic skyscraper that would also serve as a hotel, featuring Air Force One on display in the lobby and including a massive auditorium with a gigantic golden statue of Trump (see the parody here). His megalomaniacal projects also include the construction of a $400 million ballroom in the East Wing of the White House (the cost has now been upgraded to $1 billion). Add to that Trump’s decision to attach his name to the Kennedy Center’s arts complex and concert hall, renamed the Trump Kennedy Center. He has also put his name on the Palm Beach airport, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the boulevard leading to Mar-a-Lago, and he plans to put his signature on the new U.S. currency, and his photo and signature in gold letters on U.S. passports.

Trump’s pathology is now a mainstream topic, and not just among Democrats. A former Trump lawyer, Ty Cobb, who served as a special counsel for Trump during his first term, has publicly stated that “his mental condition has deteriorated substantially” to the point where he was now unfit to serve.” The Atlantic reports the testimony of a longtime Trump associate who wished to remain anonymous: “He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live. He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.”[6] On April 17, the Washington Examiner ran the headline “Donald Trump Is Losing His Mind”:

A 79-year-old man who has long dealt in chaos is now being consumed by that chaos. His episodes are becoming more frequent, his good days further apart. What he has lost is not a sense of decency or decorum — he never had those — but any remaining sense of self-control. Everyone around him can see it. Yet, whether from ambition, cowardice, or weary acceptance, they keep looking for ways to rationalize his behavior. The tragedy is no longer Trump’s. It is now America’s.[7]

The Deep State, a shallow concept

The Trump persona some of us believed in was nothing but an image, a fiction manufactured by a powerful propaganda machine. We were sold not only a character, but a story in which he was backed by a secret group of high-level virtuous patriots ready to unleash “the storm” against the secret group of high-level pedophile globalists known as the Deep State, and conspiring to enslave us in their “New World Order.” Alexander Dugin, who seems to still be thinking along these lines, called those two groups the Deep State and “the Deeper State”.

The Deep State is a concept that has some utility as a general metaphor for the mechanisms of power in liberal democracies, but as a real entity, it remains forever elusive. It is like the Freudian unconscious, which we see only when it resurfaces into consciousness. The Deep State is such a vague concept that it lends itself to any definition. There are all kinds of “deep powers”, if you like, but they don’t constitute an entity.

And no deep power is stronger than Israel in America. Consider how the decision to bomb Iran was made last February, as explained by the New York Times in an April 7 article: “How Trump took the U.S. to War with Iran.” On February 11, a meeting was held in the White House Situation Room (a crisis room equipped with secure communications equipment, managed by the National Security Council) attended by Benjamin Netanyahu, accompanied by Israeli intelligence officers. Standing before a screen showing Mossad Director David Barnea and Israeli military officials, Netanyahu presented his case for bombing Iran with the aid of a PowerPoint presentation, demonstrating that it would bring down the Iranian regime and thus resolve instantly all the problems in the Middle East in one fell swoop, while making Trump the greatest man in history. Seated across from him were President Trump, Secretary of War Peter Hegseth, Chief of Staff Dan Caine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliff, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, as well as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, unofficial negotiators. After Netanyahu’s presentation, Trump nodded and said, “It sounds good to me.”

The same group met again the next day, without Netanyahu but with Vice President JD Vance, who had just returned from Azerbaijan. Hegseth was on board; Ratcliff, Vance, and Rubio were skeptical; Caine was undecided and Wiles remained on the sidelines. A final meeting took place on February 26, including a few other people, such as advisor David Warrington, who discussed the legality of such an intervention. Trump concluded the meeting with these words: “I think we need to do it.” In the meantime, he had had several phone conversations with Netanyahu, who was urging him to act quickly. The next day, February 27, Trump sent the following message from Air Force One: “Operation Epic Fury is approved. No aborts. Good luck.”

Question: Given that it was the Deep State that dragged the United States into the war against Iran, identify the Deep State based on this account. Additional clue: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reported that, during the negotiations held on April 11 and 12 in Islamabad (Pakistan), where Kushner and Wilkoff were present, JD Vance abruptly interrupted the negotiations after receiving a call from Netanyahu.

“The first Jewish President”?

MAGA was MIGA all along, just like the neocons’ PNAC had been a Project for a New Israeli Century.

Trump betrayed his voters, but not his donors. Trump stated in December 2025 at the White House that “Miriam gave my campaign, indirectly and directly, $250 million.” Speaking before the Israeli parliament in October of that same year, he acknowledged the role of Sheldon and Miriam Adelson in shaping his foreign policy.

Since January 2025, Netanyahu has visited the White House seven times. On February 5, 2025, he presented Trump with a gold pager, commemorating the murder by booby-trapped pagers committed by Israel against members of Hezbollah or their relatives (including children) on September 23, 2024. In exchange, Trump gave him a signed and autographed photo of himself with the words: “To Bibi, a great leader.”

On September 15, 2025, Netanyahu stated at a press conference in Jerusalem, alongside Marco Rubio, that: “Donald Trump is the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.” Trump has implemented the foreign policy dictated by Netanyahu so effectively that Netanyahu had to publicly defend himself against accusations of controlling Trump: “Trump is the most independent leader I’ve ever seen. The idea that I control Trump is a lie.”

In December 2025, during a Hanukkah celebration at the White House, media personality Mark Levin, a fervent Zionist who is part of Trump’s inner circle, put his arm around Trump’s neck and introduced him to the television cameras as “The first Jewish president,” and Trump replied: “It’s true.” Was he telling the truth, for once? There is a persistent rumor that he has secretly converted to Judaism. But I do not believe that Trump is connected to Israel by moral or religious convictions. It is transactional, like everything else in Trump’s mind. When Trump calls Thomas Massie a loser, one must understand that, for him, anyone who opposes Israel is by definition a loser, because you cannot win against Israel, while with Israel you can get very rich.

Epic corruption

President Trump told the American people that he was launching a historic campaign to combat fraud. He appointed JD Vance as “anti-fraud czar.” But it is a fraud of biblical proportions that Trump and his family are scheming in plain sight. According to The New Republic, barely halfway through his second presidential term, Trump has already tripled his fortune—now estimated at $6.5 billion. Trump’s latest financial disclosure to the US Office of Government Ethics shows that Trump made more than 3,700 trades in the first three months of 2026, with companies that have dealings with his administration, for a volume between $220 million and $750 million. The list of his insider trades keeps growing every day. Meanwhile, Trump has so far pardoned—for a fee—more than 70 convicted fraudsters.

The real-estate mafia of the Trumps, the Kushners and the Witkoffs treat the destruction of Gaza as a real estate opportunity. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, they unveiled their $25 billion project for “New Gaza,” along with a construction timeline.

The New York Times reports that in February 2025, Jared Kushner used his position as an unofficial mediator to ask the Saudis to invest $5 billion in his investment firm, Affinity Partners. He reportedly approached Mohammed bin Salman (MSB) directly for this purpose. He had already secured $2 billion from the Saudis in 2022. The Senate Committee on Finance has launched an investigation into this blatant conflict of interest.

The Trump and Witkoff families have also taken advantage of their position to make shady investments in cryptocurrencies. In September 2024, two months before the election, Trump launched World Liberty Financial—a decentralized finance protocol—with his sons and the Witkoff family, selling tokens that buyers later realized were non-transferable and therefore of no real value. Chinese entrepreneur Justin Sun, who invested tens of millions of dollars in the venture, is now suing the Trump family for fraud. On January 17, 2025, three days before his inauguration, Trump organized a promotional sale of a memecoin called $Trump, attracting a slew of courtiers ready to buy his presidential favors. Of the twelve figures leading this operation, four are from the Trump family (Donald and his three sons) and three are from the Witkoff family (Steven and his two sons). They pocket $350 million in investment fees, according to the Financial Times. Two days after the launch of $Trump, Trump’s wife launches her own memecoin, $Melania. It is estimated that the Trump family has amassed over $1 billion through their various cryptocurrency ventures.

Senate and House Democrats launched an investigation on the suspicion that Trump used these operations to barter his presidential pardons with convicted fraudsters. From January to July 2025, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people, many of them financiers who would pay him back. Joseph Schwartz, a nursing home owner sentenced to three years in prison for a $5 million fraud, was pardoned after only three months in prison in exchange for a $1 million donation to Trump’s lobbyists, while the plaintiffs against him did not receive a single cent. David Gentile, convicted of a $1.6 billion fraud, was pardoned 12 days into his 7-year sentence. Among the pardoned are also many Zionist Jews, such as Philip Esformes, Sholom Weiss, Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin, Eliyahu Weinstein, Drew “Bo” Brownstein. Trump also pardoned his former spiritual advisor, Robert Morris, sentenced to twenty years in prison for sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl, and released after only six months. Trump once mentioned the possibility of pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell.

Inevitably, the Trump family is at the forefront of war profiteering. According to Bloomberg, a few days before the attack on Iran on February 28, 2026, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump invested in a company producing armed drones, Powerus, to which the Department of Defense subsequently placed a $1.1 billion order. In April 1, just as Trump had announced that Gulf States should not count on the U.S. to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Powerus met with officials in Abu Dhabi to showcase its products. Donald Jr. has also invested in a startup called Vulcan Elements specializing in rare-earth magnets, and has just secured a $620 million contract with the Department of Defense. We have also learned from the Financial Times that in August 2025, Trump’s sons made an investment, through a shell company, in a firm called Skyline Builders, which is likely to receive $1.6 billion from the U.S. government.

It was reported to the U.S. Congress that President Trump had launched a paid newsletter titled “Private Security Briefing,” selling confidential information related to national security to investors.

Trump is suing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for $10 billion following the disclosure of his tax returns by a contractor (tax returns he had promised to make public during his campaign). Yet Trump controls the very government he is suing. “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he noted wryly. No U.S. president has ever used his position to enrich himself to this extent.

But the most scandalous case of insider trading, reported even by the British BBC and the French Figaro, took place between March 22 and 24. On Saturday 22, Trump issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to destroy all of its power plants. Iran immediately responded that if Trump carried out his threats, Iran would respond in kind against American infrastructures in the Gulf states. The price of oil rose and energy-related stock prices plummeted as the deadline approached. Then, on Monday at 7:04 a.m., Trump announced on Truth Social that negotiations were underway with Iran (Iran denied). Fourteen minutes earlier, “there were an unusually high number of bets on the US oil price” totaling more than $1.5 billion in profit. No investigation has determined who pulled off the stock market coup of the century.

And let us not forget the way the sons of Howard Lutnick cashed in on his unlawful tariffs predictably overturned by Supreme Court. The House of Representatives has questioned Lutnick about it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the White House has been taken over by the most shallow, the most deranged, and the most corrupt individual.

His unintended merit, however, is to have exposed to the world the true ugly face of 21st-century America. The very fact that Trump was elected president is the clearest indication of how dysfunctional “American democracy” has become.

Trump has also made Israel’s control on U.S. foreign policy totally transparent. Think of the change from twenty years ago, when the idea that the U.S. had been dragged into war against Iraq by Israel was still confidential. Mearsheimer and Walt couldn’t even find an American publisher for The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Today, it’s a commonly accepted fact, and that’s a good thing.

Trump’s unprovoked aggression on Iran has not only deteriorated America’s image in the world. It has also been a total failure in terms of its stated objectives, despite Trump’s bragging victory on Truth Social. Iran comes out not only with a clear moral superiority, but with an undeniable strategic victory. That’s another good thing, because that war was for Israel, and so is the defeat. Iran is our only hope to prevent the psychopathic state from achieving its goal of becoming the regional super-power.

America’s humiliating failure has ruined America’s reputation of military invincibility. Taking note of the U.S.’s incapacity to protect their own military bases, the Gulf States will reconsider their alliance.

And the most happy result of it all is that the danger of America and China falling into the Thucydides Trap, that Graham Allison considered very great ten years ago, has now receded. Xi Jinping’s reference to the Thucydides Trap in his speech on May 14 has been widely recognized as highly significant: “The whole world is watching our meeting,” he said. “The International situation is turbulent. The world is at a new crossroads: Can China and the US overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm to meet global challenges together?”

For the anecdote, when explained what the Thucydides Trap meant after Xi’s speech, Trump posted this typically trumpish note:

Although I have zero expertise in military matters, it seems quite clear to me that, under Trump, the U.S. has wasted its capacity to stop China from becoming the world’s economic superpower, which will inevitably collapse the dollar’s gigantic Ponzi scheme. It is highly unlikely that, after the damage caused by Trump and his grotesque Secretary of War to the American military machine—and to its self-confidence—, the U.S. can ever feel tempted to confront China. It is significant that, in his interview with Fox News from China before heading back to Washington, he stated unequivocally that Taiwan is “a place” too far away for the U.S. to fight for. Japan and South Korea will soon come to terms with this new reality.

Trump is a malignant narcissist. But look at the bright side: had he really cared to Make America Great Again, he might have dragged the US into the Thucydides Trap with China. But Trump is all about Making Trump Great (and Rich), and his Israeli handlers are all about Making Greater Israel. Neither of them really care for the American empire, except as a tool for their own aggrandizement.

And so Trump may have saved the world after all.

[1] “Jeanine Pirro’s exclusive interview with Netanyahu” on YouTube.

[2] Quoted in Thom Hartmann, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink, Berrett-Koehler, 2025.

[3] As David Cay Johnston wrote in The Making of Donald Trump, Melville House, 2016.

[4] Hartmann, The Last American President, op. cit.

[5] Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, 1993, pp. 579, 547.

[6] Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, “The Yolo Presidency,” The Atlantic, April 29, 2026.

[7] Dan Hannan, “Donald Trump is losing his mind,” Washington Examiner, April 17, 2026.

Kevin Barrett is one of the most active and insightful (and funny) thinkers on Israel and Jewish power. His Substack newsletter is often featured on the Unz Review. He is also a convert to Islam, holds a PhD in Islamic studies, and lives in Morocco with his family. A polyglot who studied in Paris, he speaks excellent French. He was kind enough to visit me in the French Alps in January 2025. Between two outings, we recorded a long conversation in French.

I am publishing here a condensed and edited transcript of the first part of this conversation, which focuses on philosophy. I intend to delve deeper into the topics we discussed and will certainly return to them once I have read the 2,000 pages of the collective work History of Islamic Philosophy (edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Olivier Leaman, and published by Routledge in 1996), which Kevin recommended to me.

My main interest is the relationship between philosophy and religion. In the Christian world, this relationship has been highly contentious from the outset. The Christianization can be seen as a religious war against Roman religious traditions, which included philosophy. The jealous God of Christianity hated the God of the philosophers as much as the gods of the temples. In this conflict, which has never truly ended, I stand on the side of philosophy, with a particular affinity for Stoicism, considered the most accomplished synthesis during the Roman Empire’s most glorious period, spanning from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius. Philosophy was then synonymous with high culture and formed the basis of ethics as well as science and political ideas, much like Confucianism in imperial China, with the difference that there was never a formal alliance between the State and any particular philosophical school.

In the ancient world, metaphysical questions about God and the Cosmos, or about the fate of the soul fell within the realm of philosophy and not of religion. However, even though truces and even alliances were forged during the Middle Ages between Christian theology and Greek philosophy, the long-term result of their struggle was to strip philosophy of the right to address metaphysical questions autonomously. Philosophy responded by going to war, not only against theology, but against the very idea of God. Yet, in my view, philosophy has meaning and value only on the condition that it helps humanity to reflect on its participation in the divine order. Consequently, as a Neo-Roman (not a Neo-pagan), I aspire to the revitalization of genuine Greco-Roman philosophical thought, reconciled with transcendence. In its revolt against God, modern Western philosophy has killed the spirit of Greco-Roman philosophy, and is thus nothing more than the carcass that theologians love to display as proof of their superiority. This is, in my view, one of the great tragedies of the West.

To better understand the problem and its possible solution, it is worth comparing the historical attitudes of Christianity and Islam toward philosophy. Is Islam, in essence—that is, in its historical foundations—more open to philosophy than Christianity? Has Islamic philosophy preserved and built upon the authentic legacy of Greek philosophy? The well-known fact that it was Muslims who, beginning in the 10th century, taught the West that Aristotle was compatible with monotheism, seems to point in this direction. But what does the Islamic tradition itself tell us about this question? And what is the situation today? How is philosophy (falsafa) faring in Islam? Can we hope that Islamic civilization will help the West reconnect with its own philosophical heritage, as it once did in the past? This conversation with Kevin Barrett offers some answers.

Laurent: Without necessarily denying the role of divine inspiration, philosophy posits that reason is man’s highest faculty, his God-given compass in his quest for the truth. Inevitably, philosophy thus finds itself in conflict with Revelation, which demands an act of faith from man. There were efforts at some dialogue between philosophy and religion, but the general impression I take away from my readings on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages is that the relationship was extremely violent, with philosophers frequently ending up in the same dungeons or on the same pyres as heretics. When one reads Tertullian or even Augustine, one senses Christianity’s deep hostility toward philosophers’ claim to be able to understand the nature of the world and human nature through reason alone. What is the situation in the Islamic world?

Kevin: Throughout the history of thought in Muslim countries, there has always been a dialogue between religion and philosophy, and I think this dialogue has been less violent in Muslim countries than in Christian ones. One reason for this is that there is no church in the Muslim world, and therefore no central authority to decide what is orthodox and what is heretical. In the Muslim world, the process of selecting good ideas and rejecting bad ones works somewhat like it does in the modern university, through debate and consensus. It is the thinkers themselves who govern their community. Of course, the dialogue is sometimes heated, and there are thinkers who are hostile to philosophy. For example, the Persian Al-Ghazali (c. 1058–1111), the greatest anti-philosopher in the Muslim world, wrote The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroes (1126–1198), responded with The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Generally speaking, the Muslim world is not obsessed with orthodoxy (correct belief) as the Christian world is, and emphasizes orthopraxy (correct action). Consequently, philosophers there enjoy relative freedom.

Laurent: When we talk about philosophy, we must also consider science, which is, in fact, the origin of philosophy, since the first pre-Socratic philosophers were mathematicians. Historically, Christianity has had a very tense relationship with science, which I believe can be explained quite simply: Christian revelation is based on the premise of a colossal miracle that upends human history. And even two miracles: the Incarnation and the Resurrection. Christian tradition has made the miracle (more precisely, the miracle narrative) the argument for its truth, and this colors all its literature: the lives of the saints are catalogs of miracles. This foundation in the miraculous naturally goes hand in hand with a suspicious view of science, because science does not like miracles. Science, which was still called “natural philosophy” until the 18th century, is the study of natural laws. Just as every miracle is a challenge to natural laws, every natural law is a challenge to the miracle, and thus to the Christian faith. It seems to me that Islam, unlike Christianity, is not based on belief in a miracle, but only in a revelation, and a revelation does not violate the natural laws of the physical world. I suppose this is one cause of Islam’s greater tolerance toward science. I read somewhere that science is even considered in Islam as a religious path, because seeking to understand how God makes the world go round is an expression of love for God. Am I mistaken?

Kevin: There is some truth to that statement. It is true that Islam places great emphasis on reason, referred to as al-Aql in the Quran. Thought, reason, and the capacity for reflection are among the greatest qualities. So Islam is not at all hostile toward free thought or the pursuit of truth through scientific means. There has been no real conflict on this ground in Muslim history. I cannot think of a single example of a scientist being persecuted for his science. Of course, thinkers have been persecuted from time to time. A well-known example is Mansur al-Hallaj (858–922). He was crucified for saying, “I am the Truth.” And Truth, with a capital T, is one of the names of God. It was therefore blasphemous, like saying “I am God.” He said this in a state of ecstasy, being a Sufi mystic. But a political enemy accused him of claiming to be God and had him executed. There are examples of this kind, but not in the case of scholars.

As far as miracles are concerned, I need to correct what you said just a little bit. It’s true that in the Islamic world, there isn’t the same emphasis on miracles as there is in Christianity, where you have to believe in miracles—otherwise, you’re a heretic. However, miracles do occur. For example, we read in the Quran that Moses crossed the Red Sea miraculously, or that Jesus spoke when he was still a baby to defend his mother from the Jews. There are other examples. But this does not form a major part of the religion. The great miracle is the Quran, it is the revelation, it is the message.

Generally speaking, Islam is not hostile to miracles. There are the mu’jizahs, the miracles of the prophets, which are somewhat the hallmark of the prophets. There are also many stories about the karamat al-awliya, the “miracles of the saints.” I worked on this for my thesis.

Fundamentally, there is a conception of the world that differs somewhat from the Western conception. The Arabic word for “reality” is wujud. Now, wujud means “found.” Reality is therefore not something that exists in and of itself, but something that is found. This implies that the laws of science, the laws of nature, are not absolute. Nature has patterns, but there can be exceptions: these are the miracles.

It’s a bit like Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas and that school of thought on supernatural events. There’s no problem with that in Muslim culture. Today, for example in Morocco, the vast majority of people—even the well-educated—believe that magic can perform miracles. Everyone knows that magic exists, and that it works. In fact, there are Western scientists today who agree. I’ve conducted several interviews with Dean Radin, a leading scientist in the field of parapsychology. And so, as a Muslim, and from experience, I agree with what I’ve read about the science of parapsychology, and even with certain popular beliefs based on experience, such as the premonition that the phone is going to ring. I think these small miracles are a part of life. Consequently, major miracles don’t pose a problem for me either. Islam is not against miracles.

Laurent: What you say about parapsychology and small miracles or paranormal phenomena is interesting, because among Christians, this is generally seen as inherently diabolical. There is a very strong dichotomy between divine miracles, which must be authenticated by the hierarchy, and the diabolical supernatural.

If I summarize your position: Islam is not against miracles, but Islam does not make belief in miracles the foundation of faith, except for the miracle of the Quranic revelation. But in my view, revelation is not a miracle in the strict sense of the term, because it is not an event that violates the laws of nature. A revelation does not entail matter behaving in a manner contrary to the laws of nature.

What I wanted to emphasize is that in Christianity, belief in the miracles of the Incarnation and the Resurrection is so fundamental that it creates a natural—and legitimate—suspicion that science will harm faith. What is quite striking in the Christian world in general, especially in Latin Christianity, is that there has been an undeniable regression in science after the Christianization. And this does not seem to have been the case in the Muslim world. On the contrary, there has been a very clear advancement of science in the Muslim world, which, incidentally, enabled a revival several centuries later in the West, since a large part of Greek science was rediscovered thanks to Muslim scholars.

I would also like to emphasize that authentic philosophy is not fundamentally hostile to the notion of revelation, since Greek reason includes the notion of intuition. Greek reason is humanity’s capacity to connect directly to the divine Logos, that is, the word of God.

There is no problem with the idea of God in Greco-Roman thought, at least for philosophers. If reason is sufficient, it is because God guides humanity through reason. Some philosophers might even go so far as to say that when we think, it is God who thinks within us. Does that make sense to you, as a Muslim?

Kevin: In the ongoing dialogue between the proponents of revelation and the proponents of reason throughout the history of Muslim thought, a key reference point is Ibn Tufayl’s book Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, written in the 12th century. It is a philosophical novel that later inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Following a shipwreck, a child finds himself alone on a desert island and, with the help of a gazelle, reaches adulthood. He has no revelation, only his reason and nature. Through the exploration of nature and through reason, he arrives at the same conclusions as the theologian who lands on the island later. So the book’s argument is that reason is capable of reaching the same truths as those given to us by revelation. The author of this book was not burned, nor was his book. We find many ideas of this kind in Islam. Even though Islam and the majority of Muslim thinkers insist on the necessity of revelation, they also encourage the use of reason. But this is not sterile reason—reason without intuition, without depth.

According to the Quran, human nature is good; it is not corrupted by original sin. Everyone is born with the fitra, that is, good human nature. And if we are properly guided by this fitra that God has given us, we can arrive at the same understanding as we would with the help of revelation. This is the message of Ibn Tufayl. Of course, this is a somewhat extreme position, but one that is not in contradiction with Islam. All Muslim theologians acknowledge that human nature is good, and that humans can discover on their own many of the eternal truths that are also found in revelation. However, they still insist on the necessity of revelation, because not everyone is capable of discovering all truths on their own. Revelation is like a user’s manual. Theoretically, if you’re brilliant, you might be able to figure out on your own how this computer works. But it’s still easier if you have the user’s manual. Revelation is the user’s manual.

Laurent: If I understand correctly, philosophy can lead to the truth, but not everyone is a philosopher, which is why we need the revelation. This is a position that, to my knowledge, does not exist among traditional Christian theologians.

You mentioned original sin. It is true that in the Christian tradition, and especially in the Latin tradition under the influence of Augustine, original sin is a very important concept. Saint Augustine developed his theory of original sin in his debate with Pelagius, a Breton monk who emphasized human freedom and man’s ability to discern good and evil through his own reason, which, according to him, was not corrupted by original sin. Pelagius’s position seems close to that of Islam. So, the concept of original sin is absent from Islam, isn’t it?

Kevin: Yes. There is no such idea of the Fall, of a human nature that has been destroyed and turned evil. Moreover, the Quranic version of the story of Adam and Eve does not speak of a horrible and irreparable Fall. Adam and Eve committed a mistake, a sin, but they were forgiven. For Muslims, Adam is a prophet, a pure prophet, the first prophet. The Quranic version does not blame the sin on Eve, as Jewish and Christian versions do. Both Adam and Eve are seen as individuals responsible for their own actions. Each made a mistake. Each was forgiven. For Muslims, the story serves as an example of individual responsibility: Each individual will be judged with perfect justice on the basis of his or her own actions. Nobody can save us from responsibility for our actions, including our sins. When I taught Islam 101 I used to play Patti Smith singing “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” to illustrate that basic difference from Christianity. So neither Adam’s nor Eve’s mistakes implicate the rest of us, nor do we need any cosmic “get out of jail free” card. We just need to do our best, try to make sure our good actions outweigh our bad ones by as much as possible, and hope and pray that God’s all-encompassing mercy will encompass us. This is another area where Islam’s approach seems more rational, and perhaps more compatible with philosophy, than Christian ideas about original sin and the need for vicarious redemption through Jesus’s death and resurrection.

… to be continued.

“If we ask ourselves the question, ‘What were Germanic kings converted from?’ we have to confess that we don’t know much about it and never will,” wrote Richard Fletcher in The Conversion of Europe.[1] That’s an abrupt but honest statement about the state of our knowledge of Germanic religion. We used to know a lot about it but, just like the technology to go to the moon, it seems that we have lost this knowledge (I’ll explain how in a minute).

This will come as a disappointment to all neo-worshippers of Odin or Thor. Nor will they will be happy with the recent news that those German barbarians dreamed of nothing but to become Roman. Some succeeded beautifully. Take the Gothic king Theoderic the Great, for example: “Theoderic was never emperor of the Romans, but in word, deed, habit, culture, and impact on his world, he was one of the very best of them.”[2] Before their contacts with Romans, German societies were tribal, agricultural and egalitarian, and probably didn’t have much of a sense of nationality, let alone a state. In fact, according to Patrick Geary:

The Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political military genius. That this offspring came in time to replace its creator should not obscure the fact that it owed its very existence to Roman initiative, to the patient efforts of centuries of Roman emperors, generals, soldiers, landlords, slave traders, and simple merchants to mold the (to Roman eyes) chaos of barbarian reality into forms of political, social, and economic activity which they could understand and, perhaps, control. The barbarians themselves were for the most part particularly eager to participate in this process, to become “authentic” peoples, that is, to achieve structures which made sense within the seductive orbit of classical civilization. So successful was this effort that already from late antiquity it was impossible for the Goths, Burgundians, Franks, and other “peoples” who had become masters in the Western Roman Empire to understand themselves and their past apart from Roman categories of ethnography, politics, and custom, just as it was impossible for them to prosper apart from Roman traditions of agriculture and commerce or to exercise power apart from Roman traditions of politics and law.[3]

Read more

This article was posted on Kevin MacDonald’s website www.theoccidentalobserver on April 5. I reproduce it here with a postscriptum.

Introduction

In recent posts, I have made a series of arguments that the Christianization of the Roman Empire has been good for the Jews (here and here) and bad for the Gentiles (here and here), and that it has paved the way for the subversion and subjugation of Western civilization by Jewish Power. Since Christianity is a Jewish invention, it is hard to resist the theory that it was part of a grand Jewish conspiracy (that “aggressive and vindictive conspiracy … against the rest of the world” that is written “plain and clear” in the Hebrew Bible, as H. G. Wells tried to warn us about in The Fate of Homo Sapiens, 1939). However, no matter how hard I look for some clue that Christianity was from the start a Jewish psy-op to alienate the Romans rather than to save them, I do not find it. The vast number of Jews (mostly Hellenized Jews from the Diaspora) who converted to Christianity in the first century runs contrary to that theory. I find no reason for suspecting Paul, the real founder of Gentile Christianity, of being some sort of Israeli asset trying to deceive the gullible Goyim into believing things that he didn’t believe himself. The fact that he wrote “This is the truth” (Romans 9:1) doesn’t mean he’s lying. Yet, we do find in his letters the conviction that with the massive conversion of Gentiles to Christ, “all will be restored to [the Jews]” in the end (Romans 11:12).

So we are left with the firm conclusion that Christianity provided a decisive selective advantage to Israel in its millennia-long war against Rome, but no proof that it was secretly manufactured for that purpose. It is time, therefore, to call on professor Kevin MacDonald to help us solve this riddle. I will here discuss whether Christianity can fit within the general theory that he has developed in A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, With Diaspora Peoples (1994) and his subsequent volumes.

The great advantage of MacDonald’s evolutionary psychology approach is that it bypasses the question of intentionality, and therefore allows us to study “group evolutionary strategies” without having to look for evidence of a conspiracy. Evolutionary psychology postulates that the various strategies that kin groups (clans, tribes, nations) develop for survival, reproduction, expansion and dominance in a competitive environment can be, at least in part, subconscious rather than clearly articulated. There is, in any ethnic group, a collective, transgenerational will to power operating below the threshold of individual consciousness. The group’s collective mentality is not purely the product of biology, but involves ideology: through generations, culture becomes a second nature.

These assumptions coincide with the conclusions of sociology (Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, Le Bon), that the average cognitions, emotions and behaviors of individuals are subconsciously determined by some form of group mind. To some extent which depends on the cohesion of the group, when individuals think, feel and want, it is the group that thinks, feels and wants through them. In the case of a highly sophisticated group such as the Jewish community, this principle works in highly sophisticated ways, but it still applies at some level. The paradigm of evolutionary psychology therefore makes it possible to understand Jewish strategies as involving a fair amount of self-deception, rather than mere deception.

As a national group, the Jews have two distinctive features. One is that they are a worldwide community. In their vast majority, they have lived and strived in the midst of foreign nations for more than two thousand years (since the Hellenistic period). For this, they have elaborated unique strategies that have become part of their ancestral cognitive habits. It is almost like they have developed a dual personality: a core personality for their Jewish environment, and a more flexible one for their Gentile environment. They do not necessarily experience this complexity as inconsistency or hypocrisy.

The other special feature of the Jews is that they are both an ethnic and a religious community, with the unique advantage that their most essential strategy for survival in foreign environments is also the central commandment of their religious scripture: strict endogamy.[1] In From Yahweh to Zion, I have argued that the Jews’ peculiar collective behavior is not genetically determined, but culturally programmed. Their Bible tells the Jews that what is good for the Jews is good in absolute terms, and therefore must be good for the Gentiles too, even when they don’t like it. The mission of the Jews is to obey the Jews’ god by destroying the Gentiles’ gods, meaning whatever is sacred to them, including their ethnic or national identities, because these gods are either evil or fake, contrary to the Jews’ god who is the one and only true God.

Beside the elementary strategy of endogamy, MacDonald distinguishes two major sets of group strategies among Diaspora Jews: strategies by which they adapt to their environment, and strategies by which they modify their environment. The first kind of strategies is akin to the methods of crypsis or mimesis that can be observed in the animal world. The second kind has no equivalent in the animal world, and can even be considered a special faculty of the Jews.

I will show that, if we analyze the early diffusion of Christianity as a Jewish “group evolutionary strategy”, it fits both categories: Jews who converted to Christianity were adapting to their dangerously “anti-Semitic” environment, by making themselves less Jewish and more Graeco-Roman (Christianity being, to some degree, an imitation of mystery cults), while preserving their core belief in Jewish chosenness and their primal hatred of the pagan gods. And Jews who converted Gentiles to Christianity during the same period altered their environment by making Roman society more Jewish and less pagan, and, above all, more credulous of the Jews’ central role in God’s providence. In a very deep sense, Christianity has convinced Romans that “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22), an idea that Hellenistic Jews like Philo of Alexandria were already promoting one century earlier, preaching that “the Jewish nation is to the whole world what the priest is to the state.”[2] Arguably, “saving the Gentiles” (from their anti-Semitism, mainly) remains the mission of “assimilated” Jews to this day.

How Jewish is Christianity ?

Obviously, the theory that Christianity was a Jewish evolutionary strategy can only apply to the Christianity of the first centuries, when Jews were creating and leading Christianity. Jews cannot reasonably be held responsible for the conversion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, let alone the conversion of the barbarians. By the time Christianity became Rome’s official religion, Jews were not in charge of it. We are entitled to suspect a number of influential crypto-Jews in the courts of the Constantinian and Theodosian dynasties, but no case can be brought to light. Without doubt, the Church was then predominantly of Gentile extraction, and Gentile Christianity had taken a life of its own. The Jews only provided the initial impetus.

But it is important to realize that the leadership of Jews on Gentile Christianity was much more intense and enduring than Church historians have led us to believe. Let’s break down the state of our knowledge on that matter.

The first thing to recognize is the importance of the Jewish population in the megacities of the Roman Empire, where Christianity first thrived. In the first century, it is assumed that there were a million Jews in Palestine and about five million in the Diaspora, particularly in big cities such as Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome. A part of Rome’s Jewish population descended from the thousands of Jewish captives that Pompey brought after capturing Jerusalem in 63 BCE, and their number increased in 70 CE, when Vespasian and Titus brought to Rome an additional 97,000 Jewish captives, according to Flavius Josephus (Jewish War VI,9). Many of them would be freed, as was Josephus, who worked tirelessly to promote his nation to Gentiles. There is debate about the reality and extent of Jewish proselytism in the first and second century, but we know from Cassius Dio that a member of the imperial family, Flavius Clemens, was executed by the emperor Domitian for “atheism” and “deviation toward Judaic customs” (Jews were regarded as atheists for their contempt of the gods), while his wife Flavia Domitilla was banished.

The next fact to consider is that we have very little information about the way Christianity spread in Roman cities from the time of Paul to the middle of second century. In fact, as Bart Ehrman noted in The Triumph of Christianity: “outside of Paul’s work itself, we do not know of any organized Christian missionary work—not just for the first century, but for any century prior to the conversion of most of the empire. … That may be hard to believe, but in fact, if you were to count every Christian missionary about whom even a single story is told, from the period after the New Testament up through the first four centuries, you would not need all the digits on one hand.”[3] This is remarkable in itself.

As Rodney Stark argues in The Rise of Christianity, there are many reasons to believe that Jews, who were highly mobile and interconnected, were the main propagators of the gospels throughout the Empire, even after the second century.[4] Archaeology confirms that Christian churches and artefacts are always found in Jewish quarters. Eric Meyers reports that data from Rome and Venosa show that “Jewish and Christian burials reflect an interdependent and closely related community of Jews and Christians in which clear marks of demarcation were blurred until the third and fourth centuries C.E.”[5]

In the second half of the second century, both Jews and Christians were only beginning to see each other as belonging to different religions, and the first known apologists, though Gentiles, were still engaged in dialog with Jews, as illustrated by Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, Aristo of Pella’s Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus (now lost), or later Origen’s mention of having taken part in a theological debate with Jews before “umpires”.[6]

In support of his view that Christianity was predominantly controlled by Jews until the mid-second century and beyond, Rodney Stark mentions the defeat of the Marcionites, who wanted to discard the Old Testament:

Indeed, the speed with which Marcion built a substantial movement suggests that his solution pleased many. But the crucial point is this: the traditional Christian faction seems to have easily ousted Marcion and successfully condemned Antitheses as heresy. I do not believe that the traditionalists won out because of superior theology. Rather, the whole affair suggests to me that in the middle of the second century the church still was dominated by people with Jewish roots and strong current ties to the Jewish world. Notice that this was after the Bar-Kokhba revolt.[7]

Stark suggests that the final break between Jews and Christians happened under Constantine, and didn’t go without resistance. When in the 390s John Chrysostom complains that many Christians “join the Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts” (First Homily i,5), or even get circumcised (Second Homily ii,4), we should see him as “an early leader in the movement to separate a church and synagogue that were still greatly intertwined.”[8]

Having established that Christianity was a Jewish movement targeting both Jews and Gentiles during the first and second centuries, and was still under strong Jewish influence during the third and fourth centuries, we can examine if it fits MacDonald’s criteria for a Jewish “group evolutionary strategy”.

Christianity good for the Jews

Jews who converted to Christianity in the early centuries were very much comparable to those who converted in later centuries, while remaining attached to the purity of their Jewish blood. MacDonald makes the following remark, that highlights the premise of evolutionary psychology:

Indeed, one might note that New Christians who maintained group separatism while sincerely accepting Christianity were really engaging in a very interesting evolutionary strategy—a true case of crypsis entirely analogous to crypsis in the natural world. Such people would be even more invisible to the surrounding society than crypto-Jews, because they would attend church regularly, not circumcise themselves, eat pork, etc., and have no psychological qualms about doing so. … Psychological acceptance of Christianity may have been the best possible means of continuing Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy during the period of the Inquisition.[9]

Whether sincere, duplicitous, or something in-between, Jews who converted to Christianity in the Middle Ages reaped immediate social advantages. In the eyes of the Gentiles, they could hope to be seen as equals, while in no obligation to marry their offsprings to non-Jews. The same applies to the early days of Pauline Christianity (as opposed to the Jewish Jesus movement that evolved from the Jerusalem church), which portrayed itself as breaking the barriers between Jews and Gentiles. Claiming that “there is neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28) was especially useful for Jewish converts.

Pauline Christianity is best understood as an extension of Hellenistic Judaism, which was already engaged in weakening the barriers between Jews and Greeks. Before, during and after the devastating Jewish Wars (66-135 CE), most Hellenistic Jews, especially in Alexandria, took their distance from the messianic fever of Jewish nationalism and tried to make their tradition look as Greek as possible. Flavius Josephus’s obsequious theory that the nationalist Jews failed to understand that their own prophecies were actually pointing to Vespasian as the true Messiah (Jewish War IV), is a good example. Christianity is another. According to Rodney Stark, “many Hellenized Jews of the diaspora found Christianity so appealing precisely because it freed them from an ethnic identity with which they had become uncomfortable.”[10] This is why “a steady and significant flow of Hellenized Jewish converts to Christianity probably continued into the late fourth or early fifth century.”[11] Jews who converted to Christianity were not converting out of Judaism entirely, as long as Christianity was still connected to its Jewish matrix, and they were emphatically not converting to another God, but simply to a new, flexible Jewish identity with a universalist claim.

By spreading Christianity among Gentiles, Jewish Christians were also contributing to the general effort of Hellenistic Judaism to make Gentile society more accepting of the Jews’ uniquely positive contribution to the world. Ultimately, the conversion of the Roman Empire would imply the sacralization of the Jewish nation as the once-chosen people of God. Judaism became the only legal non-Christian religion. By the “witness theory”, the Church declared that the Jewish nation had a divine right to exist until the end of days, and that Church and Empire shared a divine responsibility to protect them. This was a radical improvement compared to the repeated attempts by Roman emperors, from Vespasian to Hadrian, to eradicate Jewish nationality altogether. This witness theory was enshrined in Catholic soteriology by Augustine, and repeatedly reaffirmed to combat anti-Jewish popular sentiments. When informed of persecutions of Jews in Cologne and Mainz during his campaign for the second crusade, saint Bernard of Clairvaux protested: “The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered. They are dispersed all over the world so that by expiating their crime they may be everywhere the living witnesses of our redemption. … If the Jews are utterly wiped out, what will become of our hope for their promised salvation, their eventual conversion?”[12]

Certainly, the Church also gave Gentiles a new reason to hate the Jews as Christ-killers. And Christianity didn’t make Romans less “anti-Semitic” than they had been as pagans. But from an evolutionary strategic viewpoint, this was not a negative, for Gentile hostility has always been the best incentive for Jewish cohesion. Diaspora Jews need to feel “chosen for universal hatred” (Leo Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation, 1882) as much as they need to feel chosen by God. The ideal situation, from an adaptative point of view, is a Gentile society that makes Jews feel excluded while minimizing the violence against them. Church policy was actually very supportive of the Jewish ethnic interest by forbidding Gentiles to intermarry with non-baptized Jews, while at the same time forbidding Gentiles to force Jews into baptism.

All in all, the Christianization of the Roman Empire has been very favorable to the development of the Jewish community, from a demographic as well as an economic point of view. The great historian of Late Antiquity Peter Brown writes:

In the legislation of the period, rhetorical humiliation of Judaism as a religion coexisted with extensive corporate privileges for Jewish leaders and for Jewish synagogues. Although Judaism was repeatedly branded as a “mad impiety” (Codex Theodosianus xv.5.5), the leaders of the Jewish community — a succession of patriarchs in Palestine, and other groups of representatives in other provinces — received from all Christian emperors repeated reassurance that Judaism, unlike polytheism and many forms of heretical Christianity, was “not a sect prohibited by the laws” (C. Th. xvi.8.9). Jewish synagogues enjoyed the exemptions associated with “holy places” (C. Th. vii.8.2). The personnel of the synagogues enjoyed the same privileges as did the Christian clergy: for they also were persons “truly devoted to the service of God” (C. Th. xii.1.99).[13]

A case can even be made that the prohibition of usury for Gentiles provided a tremendous selective advantage to Jews, and this is exactly what the Fourth Lateran Council admitted in 1215, in its Constitution 67, “On Jewish usuries”: “The more Christians are restrained from the practice of usury, the more are they oppressed in this matter by the treachery of the Jews, so that in a short time they exhaust the resources of the Christians.”[14]

Christianity bad for the Gentiles

The Roman Empire was an extensive network of cities connected by nearly 200,000 miles of roads, in addition to navigation across the sea medius terra. In The First Urban Christians, Wayne Meeks writes that “the people of the Roman Empire traveled more extensively and more easily than anyone before them did or would again until the nineteenth century,” and reports a merchant’s grave inscription in Phrygia attributing to him seventy-two trips to Rome, a distance of well over a thousand miles. This high mobility created a cosmopolitan urban population of uprooted individuals suffering from “status inconsistency”. It was among them, Meeks believes, that most converts to Pauline Christianity originated. In the Church they found a family of substitution, brothers and sisters to care for each other. “The natural kinship structure into which the person has been born and which previously defined his place and connections with the society is here supplanted by a new set of relationships.”[15]

The back side of this is that Christianity contributed in no small manner to desacralize and destabilize the traditional Roman family. This is a well-discussed issue, on which I have written before. One need only recall Matthew 10:35-37: “For I have come to set son against father, daughter against mother, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law; a person’s enemies will be the members of his own household. No one who prefers father or mother to me is worthy of me. No one who prefers son or daughter to me is worthy of me.” Here you have the essence of what E. Michael Jones calls “the Jewish revolutionary spirit.” Pitting sons against fathers, and wives against husbands, is exactly what the Jewish “culture of critique” has been doing in recent decades, as MacDonald has abundantly documented in The Culture of Critique.

As much as it attracted desocialized individuals to resocialize them by conversion, Christianity aggravated the desocialization that it fed upon. As a salvation religion, Christianity taught that man was not primarily a social being who found fulfillment in the city, as Aristotle had taught, but a spiritual being who longed for the “city of God”, where kinship counts for nothing. Roman religion was family-centered as much as city-centered. There were domestic cults of Vesta (who symbolized the continuity of the family life), of di penates (who expressed the continuity of the household’s means of subsistence), of di Manes (the ancestral dead), and of the genius of the paterfamilias.[16] But Christianity called these cults demonic, and in 391, Emperor Theodosius enacted a law forbidding them even in the privacy of the home.[17]

It may be counter-intuitive to blame Christianity for the loss of kinship bonds, since today’s practicing Christians are the defenders of family values in the West. That is because of the paradox that Christianity is both revolutionary and conservative. It was revolutionary at the beginning, and conservative at the end. All established religions are conservative. But Western Christianity’s conservatism is about preserving what little kinship structure it didn’t destroy in its revolutionary phase: the nuclear family, the final stage before complete social disintegration.[18] In a very fundamental way, Christian individualism competes with blood kinship. The Christian morality of universal altruism is also inherently hostile to the values of race, kinship, genealogy and procreation. This hostility translated in the Church’s social policy. As Jack Goody has documented[19] and as Kevin MacDonald has himself recognized in Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, the influence of the Catholic Church “was directed at altering Western culture away from extended kinship networks and other collectivist institutions.”[20] Thus the Christianization has progressively created the psychological and sociological vulnerability that later Jewish intellectuals and activists would exploit to weaken the syngeneic cohesion of White nations. If “making the United States into a multicultural society has been a major Jewish goal beginning in the nineteenth century,”[21] then it is logical to recognize the same Jewish goal in the foundation of Gentile Christianity by Paul of Tarsus. Again, this is not to say that Paul and his associates were conspiring against the Romans. Because Diaspora Jews feel safer in a multicultural society with individualistic and universalist values, they sincerely think that such a society is healthier—as long as Jews can keep the upper hand. From that point of view, Christianity was definitely helpful.

Conclusion

MacDonald wrote: “Any discussion of Jews and Judaism has to start and probably end with this incredibly strong bond that Jews have among each other—a bond that is created by their close genetic relationship and by the intensification of the psychological mechanisms underlying group cohesion. This powerful rapport among Jews translates into a heightened ability to cooperate in highly focused groups.”[22] If we ask ourselves what Christianity has done to weaken this incredibly strong bond of Jewry, the obvious answer is: absolutely nothing. On the contrary, it has provided the ideal environment for the sustainment and reinforcement of this bond. And while no educated pagan Roman had ever taken seriously the Jews’ ridiculous claim of being specially loved by the Creator of the Universe, Christians have been compelled to believe the truth of that claim. The Jews had written a book saying that God chose the Jews, and Christians have accepted it as God’s word. By so doing, Christians have not only paid tribute to the Jews; they have comforted them in their delusion. A strong argument can be made that without Christianity, the Jewish nationality would have effectively dissolved in the fourth or fifth century.

In short, Christianity introduced in the operating system (the dominant cognitive paradigm) of Roman society two trojan horses that both give the Jewish nation a decisive selective advantage: it has taught Gentiles that, by virtue of their divine chosenness, the Jewish nation is uniquely qualified to remain distinct, separate, and in many ways privileged; and it has taught Gentiles that, contrary to the Jews, they have no ethnic identity of any spiritual value. On the one hand, it has been assumed that the Jews are one nation and will be saved collectively at some point, and on the other hand, it has been affirmed that nationality is irrelevant for the Gentiles, since their salvation is strictly individual. The Jews can continue to sacralize the purity of their blood, while Gentiles are told every Sunday that only the (Jewish) blood of Christ will save them. Christians have given a handle to the Jews for driving them to their doom.

Seen in this light, Christianity surely looks like a Jewish conspiracy. But it is not a conspiracy in the traditional sense: rather, it is a Jewish group evolutionary strategy.

Post scriptum

For reasons explained here, I do not believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution — the theory that all species, from bacteria to mammals, evolved from one another merely by random or accidental genetic mutations sorted by natural selection. Therefore, I do not subscribe to the theoretical underpinning of evolutionary psychology. Yet I believe that MacDonald’s approach has much explanatory power on some general level (just like, say, Newtonian physics is good enough at the macroscopic level).

In fact, most of MacDonald’s arguments are independent from Darwin’s theory, since they deal exclusively with human groups—who, needless to say, all belong to the same species. Although MacDonald claims to document the “evolutionary strategies” of the Jewish nation, the alternative expression “adaptative strategies”, which MacDonald occasionally uses, is more appropriate, since those strategies are not aiming at creating a new species, and are therefore not evolutionary in the Darwinian sense.

The only assumption needed to follow MacDonald’s arguments is that kin groups evolve various strategies in their struggle for survival. This is a self-evident notion bordering on tautology. The 14th-century historian Ibn Khaldun did not need Darwin to understand that the strength of the desert Bedouins resided in the fact that “each fighter has only one thought, that of protecting his tribe and his family,” that is, on their collective solidarity.[23]

As a matter of fact, it has been argued that the notion of group selection contradicts Darwinian dogma, since individuals with a predisposition for sacrificing themselves for the group have less chance to survive and to procreate. Darwinian theorists deny that there is any contradiction there, and Richard Dawkins claims to have solved it with his theory of the “selfish gene”—which is in reality, as he himself admits, only a metaphor. Maybe.

But in my view, the evolution of collective mentalities cannot be explained by a purely Darwinian mechanism of natural selection, but requires some degree of Lamarckism. A group mind is constituted of the accumulation over many generations of acquired characteristics. Since Jewishness has much to do with a transgenerational trauma, I can do no better than quote Sigmund Freud on that matter:

When we study the reactions to early traumas, we are quite often surprised to find that they are not strictly limited to what the subject himself has really experienced but diverge from it in a way that fits in much better with the model of a phylogenetic event and, in general, can only be explained by such an influence. … On further reflection I must admit that I have behaved for a long time as though the inheritance of memory-traces of the experience of our ancestors, independently of direct communication and of the influence of education by the setting of an example, were established beyond question. When I spoke of the survival of a tradition among a people or of the formation of a people’s character, I had mostly in mind an inherited tradition of this kind and not one transmitted by communication. … My position, no doubt, is made more difficult by the present attitude of biological science, which refuses to hear of the inheritance of acquired characters by succeeding generations. … If we assume the survival of these memory-traces in the archaic heritage, we have bridged the gulf between individual and group psychology: we can deal with peoples as we do with an individual neurotic.[24]

The new science of epigenetics has also reintroduced a Larmackian factor, undermining the necessity of resorting only to “natural selection”—whatever that means—to explain the evolutionary nature of the collective psychology and psychopathology of human groups.

[1] The commandment of eighth-day circumcision is also a powerful, because traumatic, factor of cohesion and separation.

[2] Scot McKnight, A Light Among the Gentiles: Jewish missionary activity in the Second Temple period, Fortress Press, 1991, pp. 39, 46, quoted in Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples, Praeger, 1994, p. 63.

[3] Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity, Simon & Schuster, 2018, p. 99.

[4] Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History, Princeton UP, 1996.

[5] Graydon F. Snyder, Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine, Mercer UP, 1985, p. 2, and Eric M. Meyers, “Early Judaism and Christianity in the Light of Archaeology,” Biblical Archaeologist 51, pp. 69-79, quoted in Stark, The Rise of Christianity, op. cit., p. 9.

[6] Stark, The Rise of Christianity, op. cit., p. 70.

[7] Stark, The Rise of Christianity, op. cit., p. 64.

[8] Stark, The Rise of Christianity, op. cit., p. 66.

[9] Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, p. 277.

[10] Stark, The Rise of Christianity, op. cit., p. 214.

[11] Stark, The Rise of Christianity, op. cit., p. 138.

[12] Leonard B. Glick, Abraham’s Heirs: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe, Syracuse UP, 1999, p. 122.

[13] Peter Brown, “Christianization and religious conflict”, in Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey, eds., The Late Empire (The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII), Cambridge UP, 2008, p. 632.

[14] John Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages, MacMillan, 1969, p. 182, quoted in MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone, op. cit, p. 243.

[15] Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, Yale UP, 1983, pp. 17, 88.

[16] William Warde Fowler, Roman Ideas of Deity in the Last Century before the Christian Era, MacMillan, 1914.

[17] Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World, Oneworld Publications, 2018, p. 252.

[18] David Brooks, “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake,” March 2020, www.theatlantic.com

[19] Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, Cambridge UP, 1983. Joseph Henrich builds up on Goody’s work in The WEIRDest People on the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2020.

[20] Kevin MacDonald, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future, rev. ed., KDP, 2023, p. 159.

[21] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, Praeger, 1998, p. 259.

[22] Kevin MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilizations, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism, The Occidental Press, 2007, p. 34.

[23] Ibn Khaldoun, Les Prolégomènes, traduits en français et commentés par William MacGuckin, 1863, part I, pp. 281-283, read on http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/Ibn_Khaldoun/Ibn_Khaldoun.html

[24] Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. James Strachey, in The Origins of Religion, 1986, pp. 344-345.

Cambridge University Press published in 2023 an insightful book by young professor Mark Letteney, titled The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations. It deals with the influence of the radical Christian faction led by Athanasius of Alexandria, who prevailed at the council of Nicaea in 325. They were later marginalized by the aging Constantine, his sons and their successors, only to win back imperial favor under Gratian and Theodosius, after forty years of battling with the moderate, anti-Nicene bishops who insisted on the subordination of the Son to the Father. Ultimately, they were able to purge the Church of their enemies and to impose, not only their dogma, but their concept of truth and their method for pursuing it: “a set of scholarly practices contrived for theological disputation became generalized and central during the late fourth through the mid-5th century as a result of Nicene Christian dominance.”[1] The aggregation and distillation of authoritative traditions based on the scriptures became the standard procedure for achieving knowledge even in secular matters, leading to a sterilization of the inquisitive spirit of Hellenism for a millennium—until the Renaissance.

Letteney notes in passing that the new paradigmatic concept and practice of truth are strikingly similar to the Talmudic mindset that triumphed simultaneously in the Jewish world (the Palestinian Talmud was compiled in Galilee between the late 4th century and the early 5th century). Letteney interprets that resonance as evidence of “ways in which a peculiarly Theodosian structure of knowledge inflects the Palestinian Talmud.”[2] This is not impossible, since according to Jacob Neusner, “Judaism as we know it was born in the encounter with triumphant Christianity.”[3] However, Letteney is referring here to a Jewish literary tradition known as the midrash, which was fully developed in the early 2nd century. In that period, it was Christianity that was just beginning to extract itself from its Jewish matrix, and the process was still not over in the Theodosian age. John Chrysostom, who became archbishop of Constantinople in 397, complained bitterly that Christians were still imitating the Jews. So if the argumentative method of the Nicene intelligentsia is so similar to the Talmud, it only confirms that Christianity was not only born, but grew up in a Jewish environment, and that the “Christianization of knowledge” was in fact a Judaization of the Western spirit.

To clarify that process, we must first recap how the Christianization proceeded from Constantine.

Homoousios and the crazies

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Nietzsche compared the early Christians to the anarchists of his time: “both are decadents; both are incapable of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating, blood-sucking; both have an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands up, and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future. … Christianity was the vampire of the Imperium Romanum” (The Antichrist §58).

Nietzsche may have borrowed the vampire metaphor from Ernest Renan, who had used it a few years earlier: “During the third century, Christianity sucked like a vampire on ancient society, draining all its strength and bringing about a general unrest against which the patriotic emperors fought in vain.” The Church, he wrote, “exhausted civil society, and bled it dry.”[1]

The point that Christianity was draining Roman society of its energy and its self-esteem, was already made by Celsus in the late 2nd century, and in the early 5th century by the Roman pagans to whom Augustine responded in the first book of his City of God. The idea became taboo until the new freedom of speech of the Renaissance, when Machiavelli expressed it again, with due reserve, in his Discourses on Livy (II,2): Christianity, he wrote, had eroded the Roman’s love of Liberty (by which he meant not individual freedom, but national sovereignty): “Our Religion has glorified more humble and contemplative men rather than men of action. It also places the highest good in humility, lowliness, and contempt of human things,” whereas the religion of the ancients “places it in the greatness of soul, the strength of body, and all the other things which make men very brave.”

Then came the Enlightenment, when Voltaire stated, in his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756) : “Le christianisme ouvrait le ciel, mais il perdait l’empire.” Then came Edward Gibbon and his monumental History of the Decline and Fall on the Roman Empire (1819):

This indolent, or even criminal disregard to the public welfare, exposed [the Christians] to the contempt and reproaches of the Pagans who very frequently asked, what must be the fate of the empire, attacked on every side by the barbarians, if all mankind should adopt the pusillanimous sentiments of the new sect. To this insulting question the Christian apologists returned obscure and ambiguous answers, as they were unwilling to reveal the secret cause of their security; the expectation that, before the conversion of mankind was accomplished, war, government, the Roman empire, and the world itself, would be no more.[2]

More recently, a thorough argument to that effect has been made by French scholar Louis Rougier, a student of Renan, in a passionate essay on Celsus published in 1925 (my translation):

Christians were certainly not rebels conspiring to establish a separate kingdom here on earth. ... But by their detachment from public affairs, they formed a party of deserters. The homeland and civil laws are the mother and father that the true gnostic, according to Clement of Alexandria, must despise in order to sit at the right hand of God (Stomata 4.4). “For us,” Tertullian wrote, “nothing is so foreign as the republic... one must live, they say, for the homeland, for the Empire, for one’s own people. That was the opinion of old. No one is born for others, since we die for ourselves alone” (Apology 38.3). To proclaim that only one thing is necessary, that of ensuring one’s personal salvation, is an individualistic principle, antisocial in the first place, which transforms the worldview and the economy of society. There is more: Christians must wish for and call for the end of this world, the great catastrophe that will bring down the Urbs and the Empire, to make way for “a Jerusalem from above, made by God and coming from heaven.” The sooner the hour of Rome’s fall comes, the happier Christians should consider themselves. “We must desire the coming of our reign and not the prolongation of our slavery,” Tertullian writes. “Lord, may Your reign come as soon as possible! Such is the wish of Christians, such is the confusion of the Gentiles, such is the triumph of the angels. It is for Your reign that we suffer, it is for Your reign that we pray” (De Corona 13). Public disasters do not affect Christians in any way; they see them as a confirmation of the prophecies that condemn the world to perish by the barbarians and by fire. The City of God, formed by the communion of the faithful and the elect, takes man away from his earthly homeland, whose passions and interests he ceases to embrace.

However, the political realities, which Christians disregard as foreign matters of no importance to salvation, are, in the time of Marcus Aurelius, after forty years of Roman peace, on the banks of the Rhine and the Danube, the formidable pressure of the Barbarians who are pushing as far as Aquileia, while in the East the borders are buckling under the pressure of the Parthians. A duty imposed itself on all clear-sighted minds: to contain the Barbarians, whose threat was growing daily. This was not only a matter of ensuring the material security of the Empire, but also of preserving humanity’s most precious heritage from irreparable disaster. ... Around the great emperors of the 2nd century, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, and later around Diocletian, all intellectuals and patricians banded together to ward off the common peril. ...

To ward off the danger to civilization, the Empire needed the active dedication of all citizens, magistrates, and soldiers, not idealists “above the fray.” But who, according to Tertullian, responded to the emperor’s urgent call at a time when barbarians, slaves, and brigands were being enlisted in the army? “The help we give to the state when necessary is divine help, being equipped with all the weapons of God... The more pious we are, the more we help our sovereign with our prayers; and this support is much more effective than that of soldiers who go to war and kill as many enemies as possible. Is it not right that, when other men take up arms, Christians should take them up only as ministers and servants of God? When our prayers put to flight the demons who stir up wars and incite the violation of treaties, we render much greater service to princes than the troops who seem to wage war for them” (De Oratione 5). ...

Celsus was not wrong in discerning in Christianity a ferment of dissolution of the Empire and seeing in the possibility of its triumph the signal for great invasions and the collapse of civilization: “If everyone imitated you, the emperor would soon be left alone and abandoned, so that the whole Empire would fall into the hands of ferocious and savage barbarians, and the worship of your religion, like the glory of true wisdom, would disappear from the earth.”[3]

As we see, the thesis that the Romans were first defeated by Christianity has never lacked supporters. Yet, if the argument is a psychological one—the loss of motivation to fight for the Empire—, it remains questionable and inconclusive. It also faces the objection that the eastern half of the Empire outlasted the western half by one millennium, despite being more thoroughly Christianized.

What can be argued on the basis of historical facts, however, is that the fall of the Western Empire was primarily a consequence of the civil wars of the 4th and 5th centuries, which were, to a great extent, religious wars waged by the Christianizing emperors against the pagan resistance. Since I have defended this theory in a previous post, I have found that Peter Brown, the most widely acclaimed historian of Late Antiquity, laid great emphasis on the devastation of the civil wars, in The Rise of Western Christendom:

Again and again—indeed nine times in 83 years (from 312 to 395)—Roman soldiers had butchered their colleagues in murderous civil wars. Emperors wept (or, at least, made sure that everybody believed that they had wept) as they viewed the piles of Roman corpses that strewed the battlefield after such engagements. As Brent Shaw has shown [in Sacred Violence], the true “killing fields” of the fourth century were not along the frontiers. They were in northern Italy and the Balkans, where sanguinary battles were regularly fought between rival emperors.

What happened in the fifth century was that civil war expanded to include “proxy war” through the use of barbarian groups. Careful studies of the chronology and logistics of the civil wars of the early fifth century have shown that all the major breakthroughs by the barbarians either were part of maneuvers directly connected with civil wars, or at least were made possible by the distraction caused by civil wars. Far from rushing headlong from the woods of Germany to the heart of the Mediterranean, most barbarians were as good as “bussed” there by rival Roman usurpers—first to southwest Gaul and then across the Pyrenees into Spain. It was not the barbarian invasions in themselves that changed the face of Europe. It was the synergy between barbarian groups, the long Roman practice of civil war, and the opportunism with which local Romans exploited both barbarians and civil war conditions for their own purposes.[4]

As Brown sees it, the massive influx of barbarian warriors in the Empire was a consequence, and not a cause, of the civil wars.

The emperors always needed troops to fight the bitter civil wars which characterized the third and fourth centuries. This need for soldiers to fight in civil wars sucked Germans across the frontier into wars where, at regular intervals, Romans set about killing Romans, in the deadly clash of fully professional armies, in far greater numbers than they ever expected to kill or to be killed when fighting “barbarians.”[5]

I have also discovered an additional argument that the civil wars of the 4th century were religious wars from the very first one fought by Constantine against Maxentius. Modern historians generally ignore the religious factor in that war, because they believe that Constantine had not yet made his Christian coming-out, and because Maxentius was not a persecutor of Christians. But in 312, when Constantine and Licinius made common cause, Maxentius allied himself with Maximinus Daza, another member of the Tetrarchy, who was a committed traditionalist, that is a “pagan”, who issued a rescript against the Christians who, he declared, “with their ignorant and futile beliefs, have come to afflict almost the entire world with their shameful practices.”[6] Maximinus summoned an army of 70,000 men but, six months after Maxentius’s defeat at the Milvian Bridge, sustained a crushing defeat at the Battle of Tzirallum by Licinius’s army. A little more than a month later, the victorious Licinius and Constantine co-signed the Edict of Milan that legalized Christianity.

If, as I think can be established, the civil wars of the 4th and 5th centuries were primarily the religious wars of the Christianization, then it can be said that the Christianization caused the structural failure of the Empire, and the breaches that allowed the barbarians to flood in. The Christianization did not make Romans too weak to fight, but made them fight for God instead of Rome. Rather than fighting for the city of men, Christian emperors started fighting more and more obsessively for the city of God, turning the legions away from the frontiers, against the enemies of “the Truth” within, mobilizing even barbarians against Romans in the process.

Wars of religion—unknown in the pagan world—are programmed in the genetic makeup of Christianity, because they are the essence of the Jealous God. Although having a Son may have softened the biblical God’s character in some ways, His jealousy was not tamed—quite the opposite. That is why, as soon as Christians ran out of pagan enemies, they turned their wrath against each other, in civil wars between Christians of different creeds (as discussed before here). This culminated in the 6th century, when the fanatical Justinian ravaged Italy and caused the real collapse of Roman order in the West, as new historians are now arguing (and as discussed before here). The reason why Justinian is commonly regarded as the restorer of the Empire’s unity, rather than as its destroyer is simply that the victor gets to write history. The unity of the Church, which Constantine had tried (but failed) to achieve for the sake of the Empire, had become an end in itself, at the expense of the Empire, and of Roman civilization. The Church killed the Empire.

The day the prefect of Rome, Gregorius Anicius, became Pope Gregory I (590-604), marks the beginning of the papacy as “the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof,” in the words of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, chapter 47). Under Gregory’s successor Honorius (625-638), the Senate House was turned into a church, the imperial residence of the Lateran became the seat of the papacy, and all imperial buildings became Church property.[7] Thus began what Renaissance historians would call the medium ævum, our “Middle Ages”. During this period, the papacy held firmly to the imperial mantle it had captured, while preventing its competitor, the Germanic Roman Empire, from achieving the political unification of Europe, thereby leading to the fragmentation of Europe in nation-states constantly at war with each other. This is the story told in my book The Papal Curse, a completely revised edition of the previous The Pope’s Curse, now published by Arktos with a foreword by Alain de Benoist.

Christianity is praised for being the foundation of Western civilization, although I fail to grasp what Western civilization owes it in terms of science, philosophy, art, and political tradition (read my article “The Renaissance Genius”). People often tell me: what about the cathedrals? I answer: Do you mean those built by churchmen, or those built by the guilds of free masons, for I have never heard of the former? One person recently pointed to Gregorian chant. Certainly, I replied: Gregorian chant is the best you can do when the Church bans instruments and forbid polyphony. Scholasticism? The most sterile intellectual experiment ever, as Louis Rougier argued in one of his books.

In my view, the most important legacy of Christianity to European civilization is religious wars.

[1] Ernest Renan, Marc-Aurèle et la fin du monde antique (Histoire des origines du christianisme, livre VII), 4^ème éd., Calmann Lévy, 1882, pp. 589-590.

[2] Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall on the Roman Empire, 1819, volume I, Chapter XV, part V, Grand Rapids, pp. 480-481.

[3] Louis Rougier, Celse contre les Chrétiens, 1925, Le Labyrinthe, 1997, pp. 96-99.

[4] Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000, Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Revised Edition, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, p. XXXIII.

[5] Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, op. cit., p. 49.

[6] Richard Gordon, “The Roman Imperial Cult and the Question of Power”, in J.A. North and S.R.F. Price, The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 37-70 (p. 50).

[7] Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 321-1308, Princeton UP, 1980, pp. 71-72.

Somewhere in Asia Minor in the late 1st century CE, two philosophers, a Stoic and a Platonist, were sitting on the edge of a marketplace, surrounded by a dozen bystanders. They were debating about the Logos, the divine Intelligence that rules heaven and earth. The Platonist conceived the Logos as an intermediary principle between God and the physical universe. The Logos, he said, is the Mind of God, or the totality of the existing Forms or Ideas. The Stoic considered these distinctions as arbitrary. Since God is by definition infinite, nothing is outside of Him. Therefore the Logos is not distinct from God, and neither is it distinct from the order or harmony (kosmos) of the world. He quoted Seneca’s On Benefits (IV,7): “what is Nature (Phusis) but God and divine reason, which pervades the universe and all its parts.” Therefore Theos, Logos and Kosmos are three different aspects, or just different names, of the same reality.

At this point, a Jew among the listeners interrupted the philosophers to inform them that the Logos had actually come down from heaven in the form of the king of the Jews, crucified and resurrected in Jerusalem. Everyone burst out laughing.

The Jew’s name was Yohanan. He went on writing a scroll that started with: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:1-3).

Never in their wildest nightmares could our two philosophers imagine that, two centuries later, this scroll would become holy scripture, and the belief that the Logos was “made flesh” as a Jew made compulsory throughout the Roman Empire, under penalty of death.

But such is the story of the Christianization in a nutshell. Here is how it happened.

How the Logos was made flesh

In my previous article, I showed that the promise of sharing in Christ’s resurrection by consuming his flesh and blood in an ambiance of Mystery Cult, sums up what the converts were offered by Paul and later missionaries of the Pauline tradition. As far as we know, this attracted mostly the poor and downtrodden, at least until the middle of the second century. The resurrection of rotting corpses was a grotesque idea for any philosophically-minded Roman. Even in 410, when bishops were recruited among the upper class, Synesios of Cyrene, a skilled Neoplatonist philosopher (and a student of the mathematician Hypatia, lynched by a Christian mob in Alexandria in 415),[1] stated in an open letter before his ordination: “This resurrection, which is an object of common belief, is nothing for me but a sacred and mysterious allegory, and I am far from sharing the views of the vulgar crowd thereon” (Letter 105). We must assume that many of his class expressed similar reservations in private, while starting a career in the Church.

What did give Christianity an air of philosophical respectability was the high Christology of the Logos. If believing in Christ meant believing in the Logos, then educated Romans could choose conversion over social marginalization, without losing face.

Logos was originally a Stoic concept. It is translated in Christian literature as “the Word,” but the Greek word logos, from which our word “logic” derives, is closer to “reason”. Logos stands in Stoic philosophy for the rational principle governing all things. It is the World Soul, the Anima Mundi. It is practically synonymous with Cosmos, since kosmos means “order” or “harmony”, as opposed to chaos. As Hans-Josef Klauck notes in The Religious Context of Early Christianity, in the second century, “certain essential Stoic ideas had become commonplaces and had entered the underlying structure of ethical thought.”[2] The Logos was such a commonplace. Any vaguely cultivated man understood what it meant. The Logos had found its way into what scholars today call Middle Platonism. But for the Platonists, who make a sharper distinction between God and the World than the Stoics, Logos came to be understood as an intermediate principle. It is the Thought of God, the sum total of Forms or Ideas projected by God.

Whether Stoics or Platonists, philosophers firmly believed that the Logos was present in every man’s rational soul, which is why men have the ability to study how the Cosmos works. But before the 4th century, no Greek or Roman in his right mind could have come up with the crazy idea that the Logos was “made flesh” in the form of one particular man, let alone a Jew crucified under Roman Law. By the end of the century, however, every Roman was instructed by imperial law to believe it.

The idea did not originate from Paul, although 1Corinthians 8:6 may allude to it (Colossians 1:15-17 too, but Paul’s authorship of that letter is disputed). The Logos is also absent from the synoptic gospels. Its first known appearance in Christian literature is in the “prologue” of the Fourth Gospel, consisting of the first 18 verses, starting with: “In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things came into being, not one thing came into being except through him” (John 1:1-3). The consensus is that the Gospel of John was written in the last decade of the 1st century, though some scholars date it from the early 2nd century. In any case, Logos theology was fully developed in the second half of the 2nd century, the age of Christian apologists. Irenaeus, who died around 200, says that Christians must believe in

the Logos of God, Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord, Who was manifested to the prophets accord­ing to the form of their prophesying and according to the method of the Father’s dispensation; through Whom (i.e. the Logos) all things were made; Who also, at the end of the age, to complete and gather up all things, was made man among men, visible and tangible, in order to abolish death and show forth life and produce perfect reconciliation between God and man. (Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, VI)[3]

There is a disturbing irony in the Christian appropriation of the Logos, for logos basically means “reason” for the philosophers. When early Christian apologists blamed philosophers for putting their faith in “reason” rather than God, and even of worshipping “Reason”, they used the word logos in Greek (Justin Martyr, Tatian, Theophilus of Antioch). But the same authors worshipped Jesus, whom they claimed was the true Logos. They changed the meaning of Logos so radically as to claim that being saved by the Logos required faith rather than reason, to the point of writing, like Tertullian, “it is straightforwardly credible because it is senseless … it is certain because it is impossible” (De Carne Christi 5.4). The Logos, the divine source of man’s reason, has been hijacked by a religion that requires men to surrender their reason to blind faith in impossible things.

It is generally assumed that the Christian authors who forged the Logos Christology, starting with the author of the Gospel of John, were students of the Greek philosophers. This is not the case: they were students of a Jewish philosopher, namely Philo of Alexandria. It was Philo who first Judaized the Logos and laid the ground for the high Christology that would lead to the full identification of Jesus with God.

Philo of Alexandria

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In this post, I focus on the core belief that early Christians were converted to: the resurrection of the dead inaugurated by the resurrection of Christ.

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To the Western modern man whose concept of religion is shaped by Christianity, Roman “paganism”—whatever he thinks he knows about it—seems bizarre and deficient. He is therefore easily convinced that the Romans were easily convinced by the superiority of Christianity. This is a skewed perspective. As Larry Hurtado writes in Destroyer of the Gods. Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World:

In the eyes of many of that time, early Christianity was odd, bizarre, in some ways even dangerous. For one thing, it did not fit what “religion” was for people then. Indicative of this, Roman-era critics designated it as a perverse “superstition.” Yet the very features of early Christianity that made it odd and objectionable in the ancient Roman setting have become now unquestioned assumptions about religion in much of the modern world.[1]

If Christianity was so bizarre, then how did it win converts? For even if we accept Peter Heather’s estimation of merely 2 percent of Christians at the time of Constantine, concentrated in the big cities, that is still quite a lot.

In the post-Constantinian era, the ruling class lined up for baptism, because they had most to gain from embracing the Emperor’s faith. But before the great Constantinian divide, Christian recruits came mostly from the lower urban classes, with poor social capital and little to lose from conversion. Around 178 CE, the philosopher Celsus wrote that Christian missionaries could “convince only the foolish, dishonorable, and stupid, and only slaves, women, and little children.” Preachers “display their secret lore in the market-places,” he added, but “would never enter a gathering of intelligent men, nor would they dare to reveal their noble beliefs in their presence; but when they see adolescent boys and a crowd of slaves and a company of fools they push themselves in and show off” (Origen, Against Celsus III, 49-50). That is certainly exaggerated, yet Origen, from whose refutation we know about Celsus’s book, did not dispute the point, instead quoting Paul to the effect that: “God chose those who by human standards are fools to shame the wise” (1Corinthians 1:27).

What exactly did those missionaries, nameless to us except for a handful, teach on the market-places? In one word: resurrection (anastasis). That is the essence of Pauline Christianity. “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1Corinthians 15:13-14). To grasp what “resurrection” meant for Paul, we first need to replace it in the context of Pharisaic Judaism.

Overcoming death by resurrection

Toward the end of the 1st century BCE, erudite Diaspora Jews developed an allegorical interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. However, the vast majority of Jews understood that story literally, and therefore believed that death was the result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, rather than a part of human “nature” as intended by God. The Torah does not account for an immortal soul surviving the death of the body: men and women were created by God physically immortal, but became mortal by the first ancestors’ transgression, and no spiritual immortality was introduced to make up for physical mortality. Death simply means breathing your last and “returning to dust” (Genesis 3:19).

It follows that life after death can only be imagined as a resurrection of the body. This will happen in the Last Days, when the curse of the Garden of Eden will be reversed, and death conquered. That motif nowhere appears in Hebrew scriptures before the 2nd century BCE. It is first hinted in the Book of Daniel, in ambiguous terms: “Of those who are sleeping in the land of dust, many will awaken, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting disgrace. Those who are wise will shine as brightly as the expanse of the heavens…” (12:2-3). Resurrection at the end of days became a central motif of the apocalyptic literature that flourished after the closure of the Hebrew canon, and would take center stage in Christianity (the genre takes its name from the first word of the last book of the New Testament: “The revelation [Greek: apokalypsis] of Jesus Christ”.

Not all Jews interpreted Daniel literally and shared the hope in a future resurrection. As we learn from a discussion between Jesus and Sadducees in the Gospels (Mark 12), the Pharisees did, while the Sadducees did not, but both adhered to the non-dualist Hebraic anthropology.

Paul was a Pharisee. Although he wrote in Greek, using Greek concepts, he understood Genesis 3 literally: “it was through one man that sin came into the world, and through sin death, and thus death has spread through the whole human race” (Romans 5:12). Paul proclaimed that Jesus had overcome death by his resurrection, and that Christians would also be resurrected when Christ returns. Since he expected that to happen very soon, he guaranteed his converts that, if they were still alive by then, they would simply live forever. His most explicit statement on that matter is in 1Thessalonians 4:14-17:

We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and that in the same way God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. We can tell you this from the Lord’s own teaching, that we who are still alive for the Lord’s coming will not have any advantage over those who have fallen asleep. At the signal given by the voice of the Archangel and the trumpet of God, the Lord himself will come down from heaven; those who have died in Christ will be the first to rise, and only after that shall we who remain alive be taken up in the clouds, together with them, to meet the Lord in the air. This is the way we shall be with the Lord forever.

In a nutshell, Paul preached salvation from death. What you needed to be saved was to “confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead” (Romans 10:9). Adam’s sin caused death at the beginning, but that will be corrected at the end, which is near because Christ, the new sinless Adam, has now been resurrected from the dead, and you will be too if you believe it.

You also needed to be baptized: “all of us, when we were baptized into Christ Jesus, were baptized into his death … If we have been joined to him by dying a death like his, so we shall be by a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:3-5). Finally, you needed to partake regularly in the Eucharist, or “Lord’s Supper”: “Whenever you eat this bread, then, and drink this cup, you are proclaiming the Lord’s death until he comes” (1Cor 11:26). The importance of this sacrament is echoed in the Gospel of John, written around 90 CE: “Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life, and I shall raise that person up on the last day” (John 6:54).[2]

During the first two centuries at least, the promise of physical immortality, either before or after death depending on your state when Christ returns, was the essence of the Christian faith. In the late 2nd century, the satirist Lucian of Samosata could still mock Christians in those terms: “The poor wretches have convinced themselves, first and foremost, that they are going to be immortal and live for all time” (The Passing of Peregrinus, 13).

It bears repeating that the Christian faith was then based on a literal, materialistic understanding of Genesis 3, combined with the apocalyptic expectation of a great reset that would restore man’s original immortality for those ready for Christ. The Apostolic Fathers, like Irenaeus, Justin, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria, adhered to that Jewish paradigm, based on the Hebrew, non-dualistic anthropology. That is because, as noted by John Kelly, author of the authoritative book on Early Christian Doctrines, “Until the middle of the second century, … Christian theology was taking shape in predominantly Judaistic moulds.”[3]

At the same time, the symbolic consumption of the flesh and blood of Christ to gain immortality—giving rise to rumors of cannibalism—was strongly suggestive of “mystery cults”. Paul often uses the term mysterion, which had the meaning of “revealed secret” (for example Ephesians 3:4 and Colossians 4:3). But whereas the Mysteries of Isis, for example, prepared your spirit for a good afterlife when it departs your body, Christianity was emphatically about bodily immortality. As another advantage, it was open to all, while Graeco-Roman mysteries were elitists (Mithraic associations, in particular, were a kind of freemasonry or men’s club).[4] Justin Martyr, who so firmly believed in the resurrection of the body that he longed for martyrdom—and got it in 165—claimed that, although mystery cults predated Christianity, they were “demonic imitations” of the true faith (First Apology).[5]

The immortal soul and original sin

The promise of resurrection, however, became less and less persuasive as decades and then centuries passed without Christ coming down from the clouds. By a simultaneous process, it became more and more ambiguous as Christianity severed its umbilical cord with its Jewish matrix, and adapted itself to a Hellenistic, dualistic anthropology. The resurrection of the body clashed with the immortality of the soul. But it could not be done away entirely, for it was firmly recorded in the New Testament and patristic literature. And so the Christian promise of “eternal life” remained stuck in an unsurmountable ambiguity. That was not totally new: Hellenistic Judaism had already been permeated by the concept of the immortal soul (in the Book of Wisdom or Wisdom of Solomon, for example), and a few passages in the Gospels can be interpreted in that way (for example, when Jesus promises the good thief hanging on the cross that, “today you will be with me in Paradise,” Luke 23:43).

Nevertheless, the “clash of anthropologies” was internalized by Christianity and could never be resolved, since Hellenistic dualism cannot be reconciled with Hebraic materialism: if the soul is immortal, why would it want to get back into its resurrected corpse? Theologians and exegetes have wrestled with that incompatibility until today. Some, like the Lutheran Oscar Cullmann, are adamant that the immortality of the soul is unscriptural and should be discarded,[6] while others, like the Catholic Marie-Émile Boismard, advocate for abandoning the problematic term of “resurrection”.[7] In the faith of most ordinary Christians, with the exception of evangelical fundamentalists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, the resurrection has receded into the distant and hazy horizon of the Last Days (with the question of how God will resurrect dry bones left pending).

The immortal soul had long entered Christian discourse in the 4th century, the period of mass Christianization. Baptism and the Eucharist were now proclaimed for the immediate salvation of souls, rather than for the future resurrection of bodies. You had to be saved, not from physical death, but from spiritual, eternal damnation. The theory that Adam’s sin brought bodily death to humankind gave way to the theory that Adam’s sin itself was passed on to the souls of all their descendants. This is the doctrine of original sin, first mentioned by Basil (329–379) and Ambrose (340–397), then fully developed by Augustine (354-430), in the context of his dispute with Pelagius. Pelagius was a British monk who asserted that moral perfection was attainable through the practice of virtue, because man’s freedom resides in his reason, which “is not vitiated by original sin.” In On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin, Augustine retorted that “through the sin of the first man, which came from his free will, our nature became corrupted and ruined; and nothing but God’s grace alone, through Him who is the Mediator between God and men, and our Almighty Physician, succors it.” Original sin gets passed down to all human beings primarily through sex, Augustine further explained in The City of God, chapter XIV. Because sex involves concupiscence, and therefore separation from God, a child created through this act is corrupted. It follows that Christ can save us, not only because he was resurrected after death, but also because he was conceived without sex, a belief that was absent from Paul’s epistles as well as from the earliest Gospel of Mark.

For proclaiming that all mankind needed to be cured from an imaginary genetic disease, Augustine deserved to be called the Dr. Knock of theology.

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You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods, on high mountains, on hills, under any spreading tree; you must tear down their altars, smash their sacred stones, burn their sacred poles, hack to bits the statues of their gods and obliterate their name from that place.

Thus spoke Yahweh to the Israelites, about the peoples they were to dispossess in the land of Canaan (Deuteronomy 12:2-3). If there had been any doubt before Constantine the Great, it quickly became apparent thereafter that the god of Christianity was indeed the same jealous god Yahweh. To the peoples living within the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the Christianization meant the destroying, tearing down, smashing, burning, hacking to bits, and obliterating of anything consecrated to any other divinity, male or female, great or small, urban or rustic. Since all divinities were considered demons from hell, the Christianization was essentially a campaign of global exorcism; and since Christians believed, like the unsophisticated pagans they despised, that the gods inhabited their temples and even their statues, exorcism meant demolition.

Demolition is obviously difficult to document archaeologically. A statue that has been smashed into pieces is hard to find, and will not make it into a museum unless most of the pieces can be found, identified, and nicely glued together. Yet, the “archaeology of destruction”, though a frustrating endeavor, is the most informative kind of archaeology for the Christianization of the Roman Empire. And according to Eberhard Sauer, author of The Archaeology of Religious Hatred in the Roman and Early Medieval World, “There can be no doubt on the basis of the written and archaeological evidence that the Christianization of the Roman Empire and early medieval Europe involved the destruction of works of art on a scale never before seen in human history.”[1]

Destruction of temples became a compulsory mission of governors under Theodosius the Great (379-95). Saint Martin, bishop of Tours, is one of the famous destroyers of temples of that period. In the Vita Martini written by his disciple Sulpicius Severus, every destruction is a show of supernatural power. When Martin set fire to a temple and the flames are driven to an adjacent house, for example, Martin repels them with the sign of the cross. In another episode, armed angels protect his demotion team from the angry rustici, after he had first been repelled:

Then suddenly two angels stood before him, looking like heavenly warriors, with spears and shields. They said that the Lord had sent them to rout the rustic host and give Martin protection, so that no one should hinder the destruction of the temple. He was to go back, therefore, and carry out faithfully the work he had undertaken. So he returned to the village and, while crowds of pagans watched in silence, the heathen sanctuary was razed to its foundations and all its altars and images reduced to powder?[2]

In the wonderful world of hagiography, demolition produces instant conversion: “The sight convinced the rustics that it was by divine decree that they had been stupefied and overcome with dread, so as to offer no resistance to the bishop; and nearly all of them made profession of faith in the Lord Jesus, proclaiming with shouts before all that Martin’s God should be worshipped and the idols ignored, which could neither save themselves nor anyone else.”

The Temple of Artemis

Soon after the year 400, during the reign of Theodosius’ sons, the temple of Artemis in Ephesus was razed to the ground. Ephesus was an ancient Greek city on the Ionian coast, which the Romans had made the capital of their province of Asia. It had a magnificent library. Artemis, the city’s main divinity, was identified with the Italian Diana. She was a virgin goddess, yet she was also a mother. Her temple (the Artemision), comprising more than a hundred huge pillars, was listed among the seven wonders of the world by the poet Antipater of Sidon around 100 BCE. The temple complex included a gymnasium, a theater and a banquet hall, and attracted pilgrims from all over the Empire. According to Guy MacLean Rogers, author of The Mysteries of Artemis of Ephesos, “worship of the Ephesian goddess have been found in many, if not in quite all, of the approximately two thousand towns and cities of the Roman empire.”[3]

Ephesus harbored an important Jewish population and was one of the first epicenters of the propagation of Christianity. Paul reportedly lived there for three years. We read in the Acts of the Apostles how some of his converts “collected their books and made a bonfire of them in public. The value of these was calculated to be fifty thousand silver pieces” (Acts 19:19). We will never know what books were lost forever on that occasion. Acts also mentions a “serious disturbance” that happened when “a silversmith called Demetrius” complained about Paul’s preaching which threatened to “take away the prestige of a goddess venerated all over Asia, and indeed all over the world” (Acts 19:23-28).[4]

The apocryphal Acts of John contain a story about the son of Zebedee preaching to the devotees of Artemis in Ephesus. As he is praying that the deity yield to the true God, the altar of Artemis splits apart, half of the temple crumbles, and the priest of Artemis is killed in the collapse. Naturally, the pagans are converted on the spot by the miracle, and rush to destroy what is left of Artemis’s temple, crying out, “We know that the God of John is the only one, and henceforth we worship him, since we have obtained mercy from him. … We have seen that our gods were erected in vain.”[5]

The actual destruction of the temple Artemis happened in the early years of the fifth century, and is credited to the bishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom. Virtually nothing has been recovered of this impressive building, whose stones were reused in other buildings, such as the basilica of St. John. Other temples of Artemis were destroyed around the same time, including one in Gerasa (modern Jerash, in Jordan). According to sources quoted by Peter Brown, “despoiled fragments … were deliberately arranged in the neighboring church of Saint Theodore as if in a theme park. Christian worshippers who entered the church could see with their own eyes ‘representations of a disfigured past’ put in place so as to enhance the success of a ‘sanctified present.’”[6]

The Christianized Goddess

Strangely, less than thirty years after the destruction of the Ephesian temple of Artemis, it was also in Ephesus that the cult of the Virgin Mary was officially made a central tenet of Christian faith; against the protests of the bishop of Constantinople Nestorius, who was then deposed and exiled, Mary was declared Theotokos (mother or bearer of God) in a council convened by Theodosius II, grandson of Theodosius the Great, in 431. As if to underscore the substitution of Artemis by Mary, a tradition later arose that Mary had retired to Ephesus in her later years, together with the apostle John, and ascended to heaven from there.[7] The celebration of Mary’s ascent to heaven (Assumption) was made to coincide with the Nemoralia, the three-day festival celebrated by the Romans on the Ides of August (August 13-15) in honor of Diana, the Roman name of Artemis.

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In The Final Pagan Generation, Edward J. Watts examines the religious life of the Romans on the eve of the Christianization.

The Roman Empire was full of gods in 310. Their temples, statues, and images filled its cities, towns, farms, and wildernesses. Whether they willed it or not, people living within the empire regularly experienced the sight, sound, smell, and taste of the gods’ celebration. Traditional divinities also dominated the spiritual space of the empire as figures whose presence could not be sensed but whose actions many felt they could discern.[1]

The empire of the first decades of the fourth century contained millions of religious structures, artifacts, and materials that cities and individuals had fashioned over the past millennia to honor the traditional gods. Festivals honoring the gods crowded the calendar, and fragrant smells connected to their worship filled the air of cities.[2]

An illustrated calendar listing the holidays and festivals celebrated in Rome in the year 354 … classifies fully 177 days of the year as holidays or festivals. … Overall the calendar marks the public celebrations of the cults of thirty-three different gods and goddesses—and this does not account for the various commemorations of imperial birthdays and divinized emperors.[3]

Imagine the state of constant angst of Christians living in Roman cities then. The gods—all of them demons from hell—were floating around and lurking at every street corner. Watts explains how Tertullian of Carthage helped his fellow Christians survive in this demon-infested world:

His On Idolatry (De idolatria) tried to show Christians how to recognize the traditional religious elements in daily life and separate them from normal social, commercial, and familial activities. Idolatry, he claims, is “a crime so widespread, . . . [that] it subverts the servants of God.” While most people simply “regard idolatry as interpreted by the senses alone, as for example, if one burns incense,” Tertullian warns that Christians must be “fore-fortified against the abundance of idolatry” and not just its obvious manifestations. He then walks the readers through all of the unnoticed places where idolatry exists. He points to those who make and sell idols, the astrologers and teachers who practice in the presence of idols, and the other trades that tainted Christians by bringing them into contact with idols. Tertullian then considers the various aspects of daily life that one must avoid in order not to be tainted by “idolatry.” This comprehensive list includes festivals and holidays, military service, the swearing of oaths, the acceptance of blessings in the name of the gods, and even certain types of clothing. … Tertullian’s text shows just how daunting a prospect it was to try to disentangle one’s daily activities from the gods and their presence. He wrote in order to point out all the places where the gods lurked because most people, both pagan and Christian, likely did not notice them. Their children and grandchildren would not either.[4]

The Roman Empire was a collection of nationalities, but more importantly it was a network of cities, each with its own religious traditions and festivals. The city of Rome had four colleges of priests, headed by a pontifex maximus. From 17 to 23 December, the Romans celebrated the Saturnalia, centered in the Temple of Saturn in the Roman forum. The civic cults of Rome obviously held a special prestige beyond Italy, but they were not “the religion of the Empire”. The Empire, in fact, didn’t have a religio universalis until the emperors thought of giving it one. In the second century, the emperors of the Antonine dynasty determined to revive Hellenism, and Hadrian sponsored the cult of Antinous as a new Osiris, with a success attested by the great number of statues found throughout the empire. Later on, the Severan emperors (193-235), who had Syrian family ties, promoted an oriental cult of the Sun; one of them, Heliogabalus (218-22), had been a priest of that cult in Emesa (modern Homs in Syria). Finally, Aurelian (270-75) promoted a more Helleno-Roman form of Sun worship: Sol Invictus (the Invincible Sun). It was not a new invention, since sol invictus already had two temples in Rome and appeared on coinage from the time of Antonius Pius (138-161). But Aurelian endowed him with a bigger temple and a priestly college, and inaugurated the festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (“birthday of the Invincible Sun”) on 25 December, the day of the winter solstice in the Roman calendar, with pan-Roman games to be held every four years.

There was always a syncretistic approach in the Empire’s religious policy. The solar deity was commonly identified with Apollo, sometimes called Apollo Helios. The adepts of Mithra also recognized their own god in Sol Invictus. He was also Horus, the son of Isis, whose cult had spread from Egypt to every province of the Empire. Known to the Greeks as Harpocrates (from the Egyptian Har pa khrad, “Horus the child”), Horus was identified in Egypt to the solar god Ra and celebrated on his birthday, 25 December. In fact, long before the appearance of heliocentrism in astronomy, it is appropriate to speak of an imperial attempt at creating an heliocentric religious system, in which all gods revolved, at various distances, around the Sun, understood as the Theos Hypsistos, “the Highest God”, and the divine companion of the emperor.

In January 250, the newly acclaimed emperor, Decius, issued a decree that everyone in the empire must sacrifice to the emperor. The compulsory character of the imperial cult was later reinforced by Diocletian (284-305). It was a means of fostering political and social cohesion, after a period of chronic instability following the fall of the Severan dynasty. Many emperors had been posthumously deified before, but the divinity of the living emperor was a relative novelty. The imperial cult was addressed to the genius of the emperor, rather than to his person, at a time when the Neoplatonic theory of genii (the Latin equivalent of daimones) was commonly accepted. Genii could be understood as either Platonic ideas, or lesser gods. The emperor had his own genius, the “Roman people” had its own genius, and so did the city of Rome, and so did the Empire, all these genii being interconnected. The new imperial cult did not supplant, but was added to the cult of Sol Invictus, the emperor being honored as some kind of son of the Sun God.

We should resist judging that religious system with our own Christian concepts of religion (implying a canon of sacred scriptures, a set of beliefs, a promise of salvation, and a contract of exclusivity). Those concepts simply did not exist back then, and many questions that we now regard as “religious” were considered “philosophical”. Accomplishing the simple symbolic gestures of the imperial cult, or participating in the festival of Sol Invictus were social and political activities that did not imply any kind of religious “faith”, beyond the general understanding that the gods existed, and that their benevolent power was both manifested and increased by human cultic activity.

Besides its political message, the cult of Sol Invictus had the advantage of being acceptable to the philosophically-minded who disapproved of the anthropomorphism of the gods in poetry and visual arts. In the Platonic paradigm, the sun was the best possible symbol of the One God, or the Cosmic Logos. In truth, it is hard to find a more natural and universal symbol of the divine. Therefore Michael Grant could write in The Climax of Rome: “Sun-worship, at that moment, was the state-cult of the Roman world, and the god was accepted by millions of its inhabitants. If the solar cult had not succumbed to Christianity a few years later, it could well have become the permanent religion of the Mediterranean area.”[5]

Constantine himself was a strong supporter of the solar cult until the last decade of his life, as I mentioned in “The Cross Superimposed on the Sun.” In 321, he decreed dies solis (Sunday) a day of rest, and in 330, he dedicated a 100-feet-high column in Constantinople, topped by a statue of himself as Apollo with a solar crown. Michael Grant assumes that “the solar cult acted as a bridge by which many people were converted to Christianity,”[6] but the bridge did not exist until Christian authorities built the appropriate bridgehead on their side of the river, by endowing Christ with solar attributes. The key, obviously, was to declare that Jesus was born on December 25, which was done in the late 330s. Around the same time, the “day of the Sun” was declared the “day of the Lord”. Saint Jerome, who was born 26 years after Constantine made Sunday a day of rest, said: “If pagans call the Lord’s Day the ‘day of the sun,’ we willingly agree, for today the light of the world is raised, today is revealed the sun of justice with healing in his rays.”

To think that Sun worship was a transition from polytheism to Christianity is to think teleologically, something that historians are not supposed to do. It is more appropriate to say that Christianity absorbed or hijacked Sun worship.

Christmas is the clearest case—and probably the earliest one—of a Christianized “pagan” festival. It is the exception to the rule that prevailed from around 350 to 450: the destruction of temples and the prohibition of festivals. Conciliatory strategies of assimilation became more common later, when bishops were faced with the difficulty of eradicating ritual traditions connected not to temples but to natural sites. A good example is told by Gregory of Tours about a bishop who, around the year 500 in central Gaul, wanted to stop the rustici from offering libations to a god in a lake: “with the inspiration of the Divinity this bishop of God built a church in honor of the blessed Hilary of Poitiers at a distance from the banks of the lake.” His preaching did the rest, allegedly: “The men were stung in their hearts and converted. They left the lake and brought everything they usually threw into it to the holy church instead.”[7] The transformation of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti into the celebration of Jesus’ birth followed the same principle.

Does all of this matter? Only if you’re interested in the question “Why are we Christian?” “Why do we celebrate Christmas?” is part of that question. In my view, it is important to study the Christianization of the Roman Empire because we are now experiencing the final stage of the dechristianization of our civilization. The dechristianization leaves us spiritually naked and starving, and that is because the Christianization had meant the complete depaganization. Before Constantine, Christians advocated tolerance: “it is a characteristic feature of human law—and, indeed, it is an expression of our innate ability to determine what we want—that each of us worships how we see fit,” wrote Tertullian.[8] After Constantine, Christians changed their tune: tolerance for me, not for thee. Christianity therefore created a spiritual desert around itself, and now that Christianity has shrunk to insignificance, only the desert remains.

The dechristianization is itself the unstoppable result of the Christianization. Why? Because Christianity is inherently irrational, requiring the belief (the “creed”) in impossible things (lies, actually). Rationally mature adults cannot be true believers in the Christian dogma. Apart from some pockets of diehards, dogmatic Christianity will survive only to the extent it will serve Zionism. For those two reasons, what we need is not to reverse the dechristianization, but to reverse the Christianization.

Let’s make Rome great again!

But don’t tell your children that Jesus was not born at Christmas. Rather teach them that Baby Jesus is the Sun God.

[1] Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, University of California Press, 2015, p. 17.

[2] Ibid., p. 12.

[3] Ibid., p. 24.

[4] Ibid., p. 36.

[5] Michael Grant, The Climax of Rome. The Final Achievements of the Ancient World AD 161-337, London, 1968, p. 224.

[6] Ibid., p. 234.

[7] Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors II, quoted by Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity 371-1386 AD, HarperPress, 2012, p. 70.

[8] Tertullian, To Scapula, quoted in Douglas Boin, Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar’s Empire, Bloomsbury Press, 2015.

Who bears witness to whom?

As Christianity became the official and exclusive religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine’s successors, while all traditional cults were banned, and temples expropriated or destroyed, Romans couldn’t fail but notice that only one non-Christian religion remained legal and protected: Judaism, the religion of those held responsible for the death of Christ. What a strange situation! Augustine justified it by his “witness theory”:

The Jews who killed him and who refused to believe in him ... were dispersed all over the world ... and thus by the evidence of their own Scriptures they bear witness for us that we have not fabricated the prophecies about Christ... It follows that when the Jews do not believe in our Scriptures, their own Scriptures are fulfilled in them, while they read them with blind eyes. . . . It is in order to give this testimony which, in spite of themselves, they supply for our benefit by their possession and preservation of those books, that they themselves are dispersed among all nations, wherever the Christian Church spreads. (City of God xviii,46)

Like Cain who murdered his brother Abel, Augustine added, the Jews are under the protection of God, who vows seven-fold vengeance on their murderers. Thus until the end of time, “the continued preservation of the Jews will be a proof to believing Christians of the subjection merited by those who, in the pride of their kingdom, put the Lord to death” (xii,12).[1]

Augustine’s “witness theory” is convoluted. It is easy to understand the argument that the Jewish scriptures bear witness to the truth of Christianity. But how do the Jewish people bear witness to the Christian truth, when they reject it on the ground of their scriptures? Would not the disappearance of the Jews as a nation be a better proof that God has shifted his providence to the “New Israel”?

Augustine is a trained sophist. What he is doing here is obfuscating the obvious opposite reality : it is Christianity which bears witness to the Jews’ outlandish claim of being chosen by God as the instrument of the world’s salvation. No educated Roman ever took that claim seriously before Christianity endorsed it. That Jews, by their very existence, bear witness to the truth of Christianity is a disputable claim at best. That Christians bear witness to the truth of Biblical Judaism is more than an indisputable claim: it is a premise of Christianity. Christ means Messiah, and presupposes Israel’s special role in God’s dispensation. So while Jews tell Christians that they are wrong, Christians tell Jews that they were right.

The rise of Jewish Power in Christendom

As the only people allowed to have their own non-Christian religion in the Roman Empire from the time of Theodosius (379-95), the Jews survived and multiplied as a nation dispersed throughout the Roman world, amid Christian hostility but under government protection. Laws forbidding Christians to marry them or even to eat at their table (Council of Elvira in the early 4th century) reinforced Jewish identity and cohesion, because endogamy and ritual purity are the most important commandments in the Torah. In return, hostility to Christ and Christianity was a fundamental tenet of Rabbinic Judaism from the third century CE, and this antagonism between the only two lawful religions within Christendom became a structural character of both. The great Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner goes so far as to claim that “Judaism as we know it was born in the encounter with triumphant Christianity” (“encounter” is a euphemism) and suggested that Jewish identity would likely have disappeared without its Christian nemesis.[2] Christendom, therefore, fully deserves to be called Judeo-Christian in the sense that Judaism and Christianity were the only two legal religions, and existed in a kind of dialectical opposition necessary for both: Jews were the witness people for Christians, and Christians were the witness people to Jews, as well as the new face of Haman. Islam was never allowed to be part of the game in Western Europe until the eighteenth century: synagogues yes, mosques no.

Forced baptism of Jews was theoretically forbidden, although it happened in times of crisis. Gratian of Bologna, in his collection of “canon” law compiled in the 1140s (the Decretum), cites a letter of Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) and a decree of the Fourth Council of Toledo (633), confirming that Jews were not to be forcibly converted but only persuaded “by gentle means rather than by harsh means lest adversity alienate the mind of those whom a reasonable argument would have been able to attract.”[3] Voluntary conversion of Jews to Christianity happened on an individual basis, but remained rare.

Unlike Christian heretics, Jews were never chased by the Inquisition and never tortured or burned on the stake—unless they had received baptism and became suspected of still “Judaizing” in secret. This happened, of course, since Jews who converted (generally to avoid exile) were asked to stop being Jews but not to stop reading their Bible. They moved into the Church with their Jewish cultural luggage, while being freed from all the civil restrictions imposed on their non-converted brethren. And when they rose in Church hierarchy, as did the bishop of Burgos Alonso Cartagena (1384-1456), son of the great rabbi of the same city, they bragged that they were better Christians than Gentiles because they shared Jesus’ Jewish blood, and they claimed that they did not really convert but only deepened their Jewish faith.[4]

The Christian sanctification of the Jewish Tanakh has discouraged Jews from questioning their scriptures and breaking free from its mental conditioning. Any Jew who rejected the divine inspiration of the Torah was not only banned from his Jewish community, but found no shelter among Christians: this happened to Baruch Spinoza and many others. Christians have prayed that the Jews would open their heart to Christ, but they have done nothing to free them from Yahweh.

John Chrysostom (c. 346-407), the most influential Greek theologian of his time (as important to the Orthodox as Augustine to the Catholics), blamed the Jews for not following their Torah enough when they should have, and for following it now that they shouldn’t:

When there was need to observe the Law, they trampled it under foot. Now that the Law has ceased to bind, they obstinately strive to observe it. What could be more pitiable that those who provoke God not only by transgressing the Law but also by keeping it? (First Homily Against the Jews ii,3)

Such “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” kind of argument could only confirm to the Jews that Christianity is absurd. More importantly, it is a great deception played on Christians, who are thus prevented from understanding the root of Jewish antisocial behaviors. On the one hand, the Jews are told that their Yahweh is the true God and that their Bible is holy, but on the other hand, they are criticized for behaviors they have learned precisely from Yahweh and their Bible. They are accused of plotting to rule the world, although it is the very promise that Yahweh made to them: “Yahweh your God will raise you higher than every other nation in the world” (Deuteronomy 28:1). They are seen as having only contempt for others’ nationalities, but they have learned that contempt from their god: “All the nations are as nothing before Him, for Him they count as nothingness and emptiness” (Isaiah 40:17). They are blamed for their materialism and their greed, but in that also they imitate Yahweh, who dreams only of plunder: “I shall shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations will flow in” (Haggai 2:7). Above all, they are rebuked for their separatism, although this is the very essence of Yahweh’s message to them: “I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26).

Worst of all, the sanctification of the Old Testament and of ancient Israel has led Christians to look up to the Jews as a metaphysically superior race, and to Judaism as God’s original religion. The same John Chrysostom complained that many Christians “join the Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts” (First Homily i,5).

Is it not strange that those who worship the Crucified keep common festival with those who crucified him? Is it not a sign of folly and the worst madness? … For when they see that you, who worship the Christ whom they crucified, are reverently following their rituals, how can they fail to think that the rites they have performed are the best and that our ceremonies are worthless?” (First Homily v,1-7).

To John’s horror, some Christians even get circumcised. “Do not tell me,” he warns them, “that circumcision is just a single command; it is that very command which imposes on you the entire yoke of the Law” (Second Homily ii,4).

Christianity has granted the Jews an extraordinary symbolic power, which they transformed into effective power. There were periods when Jewish prestige was very high among the ruling elite, and the Jewish lobby had great political influence. In the mid-9th century, the bishop of Lyon Agobard complained to the emperor Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son, that the Jews produce “signed ordinances of your name with golden seals” guaranteeing them outrageous advantages, and that the envoys of the Emperor are “terrible toward Christians and gentle towards Jews” (On the insolence of the Jews). Agobard even complained of an imperial edict imposing Sunday rather than Saturday as market day in order to please the Jews. In another letter, he complained of an edict forbidding anyone to baptize the slaves of the Jews without the permission of their masters. Jews were so highly regarded in at the court of Louis the Pious that some, like the deacon Bodo, converted to Judaism.[5]

Certainly, in the following centuries, Jews were expelled from one Christian kingdom after another. But each of these expulsions was a reaction to a situation unknown in pre-Christian Antiquity: Jewish commu­nities gaining inordinate economic power, under the protection of a royal administration (Jews served as the kings’ tax collectors and moneylenders in times of war), until this economic power, yielding political and social power, reaches a point of saturation, causes pogroms and forces the king to take measures. The Jews in England, brought as administrators and usurers by William of Normandy, had become very powerful by the 12th century, with one of them in particular, Aaron of Lincoln, being “perhaps the richest man in England”, until king Edward I, failing to force them to give up usury, expelled them in 1290.[6] The Jews would come back in force in the 17th century, first as Marranos, when, according to Jewish historian Cecil Roth, “Puritanism represented above all a return to the Bible, and this automatically fostered a more favourable frame of mind towards the people of the Old Testament.”[7]

Because it is written right under their nose in their Holy Book, Christians have never come to the realization that the Mosaic contract is nothing but a program for world domination by the Jewish nation, fraudulently presented as a license from God to steal and murder. The vulnerability of Christian societies to Jewish Power is directly related to this blindness inflicted on them by the Church. In 1236, Pope Gregory IX publicly condemned the Talmud as “the first cause that keeps the Jews stubborn in their perfidy,” as E. Michael Jones reminds us.[8] And so the Talmud was burnt. But the Talmud is nothing but a series of commentaries on the Tanakh. Many Christians continue to blame the Talmud for Jewish misanthropy, when in fact the Talmud has little influence today beyond Jewish orthodox circles. Zionism was founded on the rejection of the Talmud and a return to the Biblical project. Israeli leaders, from Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu, explicitly justify their contempt for International Law by the Bible, not the Talmud. It is a fatal and unforgivable mistake not to recognize that the Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Old Testament, is the textbook of Israel’s demonic behavior on the international scene. As H. G. Wells once wrote, the Bible spells out “a conspiracy against the rest of the world.” In the Bible, “you have the conspiracy plain and clear, … an aggressive and vindictive conspiracy. … It is not tolerance but stupidity to shut our eyes to their quality.”[9]

Why Christian Zionists have a point

When anti-Zionist Christians claim that the term “Judeo-Christianity” is a misnomer, I beg to differ. In “The myth of a ‘Judeo-Christian’ West: Why the label doesn’t hold up”, Lorenzo Maria Pacini complains that the term “is a contradiction in theological terms.” Christianity, he says, “is based on the belief that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and the savior of humanity. Judaism explicitly rejects Jesus as the Messiah, considers him a false prophet, and, in many rabbinical texts, denigrates him harshly.” He misses the point: the very notion of Messiah is Jewish, and presupposes that Israel is God’s chosen nation. From the Jewish point of view, Christianity is a heretical Judaism. Christians agree with Jews that God had revealed Himself uniquely to Abraham, Jacob and Moses—while all other civilizations, Romans included, were devil-worshippers—, and that God planned to send the Messiah to Israel. The only disagreement is about the Messiah. If Jesus Christ, besides being the Son of God, is Israel’s Messiah, then truly, “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22).

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t support the idea that our civilization is Judeo-Christian, let alone that “it all began at Mount Sinai,” as Josh Hammer writes in his grotesque Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West. On the contrary, I have argued (here and here) that the real genius of our civilization in art, science and philosophy is Helleno-Roman, and flourished despite Christianity rather than because of it. I’m not even willing to credit the cathedrals to Christianity, for they were built by guilds of “free masons” whose Christian faith is irrelevant to their craft. What I’m saying is that, to the extent that we are Christians, we are Judeo-Christians. The only Christians who were not Judeo- were those who rejected the Old Testament, like the Manichean Faustus who called Augustine a half-Christian because he worshipped the Jewish god (Augustine, Contra Faustus i,2).

To say, as I hear often, that the problem is that Christianity has been infiltrated by Jews (through Calvinism, the Jesuits, Scofield’s Bible, Vatican II or whatever else) is absurd. Or rather, it is a tautology: Christianity is Jewish infiltration of Roman civilization from the start. Anti-Zionist Christians claim that Christian Zionism is based on the false doctrine of dispensationalism, which claims that God’s promise to Israel is still valid. That’s partially true (only partially, because not every Zionist Christian is a dispensationalist). But let’s see if that is un-Christian.

In his Epistle to the Romans, certainly one the most influential texts in the New Testament, Paul asserts that God’s promise to Israel is eternal and that the Jews “are still well loved for the sake of their ancestors. There is no change of mind on God’s part about the gifts he has made or of his choice” (11:28-29). What Paul is saying to the Gentiles, essentially, is that the Israelites are still God’s chosen people. The contract still holds. The Jews have not been unchosen. God had to work through the Gentiles because of the Jews’ rejection of Christ, Paul explains, but in the end, “all will be restored to them [the Jews]” (11:12). “Part of Israel had its mind hardened, but only until the gentiles have wholly come in; and this is how all Israel will be saved” (11:25-26). In Paul’s famous metaphor of the grafting, Israel is like a good olive tree planted by God, and gentile Christians are like branches cut off from wild olive trees and grafted into Israel (11:17). Paul then warns those converted Gentiles not to feel superior: “if you start feeling proud, think: it is not you that sustain the root, but the root that sustains you” (11:18). The grafted branches can be cut off if they fail, while it will be easy for “the branches that naturally belong there, to be grafted on to the olive tree which is their own” (11:24).

Paul was a cosmopolitan Jew trying to find a way for his nation to progress toward its ultimate destiny through the Roman Empire rather than against it. His mindset is very similar to that of Flavius Josephus who, in The Jewish War (vi,5), reinterpreted the Jewish messianic prophecies as referring to Vespasian. What moved the Judeans to revolt against Rome, he writes, “was an ambiguous prophecy from their Scripture that ‘one from their country should rule the entire world.’” But they were wrong in their interpretation of this prophecy, because it applied in reality to Vespasian, “who was appointed emperor in Judea.” By turning Jewish prophecy on its head, Josephus was not giving up on the destiny of the Jews to rule the world; he was elaborating a Plan B, one that relied on using the strength of the Roman Empire rather than opposing it. Like Philo of Alexandria before him, but in a different way, he was trying to convert Rome to the Jewish worldview. By recognizing Vespasian as the Messiah, he was considering Rome as the instrument of the Jewish conquest of the world, just as Second Isaiah had been considering Persia when he called Cyrus the Great the Messiah (Isaiah 45:1). Josephus’ reinterpretation of Jewish prophecies didn’t start a religion, but Paul’s did, and ultimately conquered Rome.

The irresistible Zionization of Christianity

It is a delusion to think that the Christian responsibility in the Jewish stranglehold on the West is restricted to Christian Zionism, and that Christian Zionists can be defeated by anti-Zionist Christians. When Tucker Carlson refutes the idea that “God prefers some people based on their DNA” as a “Christian heresy” because “the whole point of Christianity is that it is no longer true,” we should recognize that Christianity is on the losing side of history. What is implicit here is that it used to be true. The Christian God literally chose a people based on their DNA (Abraham, then Isaac, then Jacob, aka Israel). Carlson cannot deny that without stepping outside Christianity. Christianity is irrational in any version of it, but let’s be objective: between “God chose the Jews but no longer” (Carlson), and “God chose the Jews forever” (Huckabee), the second proposition is not the least rational.

Whether the old covenant is obsolete or still valid is a matter of dispute between Christians, and I’m not taking part in it. Every Christian believes his brand of Christianity is the true Christianity, the one that Jesus wanted. But for the outside observer, there is no true, eternal Christianity: Christianity is whatever Christianity is at any given time. And if one looks at the current debate between Christian Zionists and anti-Zionist Christians from outside Christianity, as I do, then it is far from evident that the latter can win the debate. Rather, I think that more and more anti-Zionist Christians will find themselves forced to choose between being anti-Zionists or being Christians, realizing that you cannot defeat Jewish Power by telling Jews that they “used to” be chosen by their DNA, but “no longer”.

On the other hand, Christian Zionism will continue to grow, as more and more influential Jews will invest in it. Christian Zionism is gaining ground, not losing it, and Israel is doing what it takes for that. Catholicism itself has been Zionized since Vatican II, and that was just the beginning. From Sinai to Rome: Jewish Identity in the Catholic Church is a recent book addressed to Catholics, “concerned with recovering the Jewish dimensions of the Gospel and the Church so that Catholicism may recover its full ecclesial dimensions as consisting of Jews and gentiles under the Messiah of Israel.” The authors, including Catholic priests with names like Elias Friedman and Antoine Levy, “argue that it is only in taking seriously the Jewish context of Jesus and his disciples and teachings that we come to see the Church for what it is: a Jewish covenantal community established in Abraham and welcoming the gentiles, the nations, to share this great promise and gift from God.” Echoing Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Catholic Hebrew scholar Angela Costley claims that “we should see the gentile church as an insertion into Israel,” and that “Israel is not rejected for not accepting Jesus as the Messiah as previously thought, but that gentiles are instead incorporated into Israel.”

I am not saying that Christian Zionism is a good thing, I’m saying that Christianity has a backdoor, an embedded device designed for Judaism to take control of it. The Old Testament is a Jewish Trojan Horse into the Roman city. Although there will always remain some anti-Zionist Christians, mainstream Christianity is being taken over by Jews. In France, the most publicized defender of the Catholic faith is Eric Zemmour, a Jew who privately hangs out with the most despicable anti-Christian Zionists after debating them on TV. Are Catholics duped? Yes they are, massively.

The best metaphor for what is happening is in the Book of Joshua. While the Israelites are besieging Jericho, two Israeli spies enter the city and spend the night with a prostitute named Rahab, who hides them in exchange for being spared, together with her family, when the Israelites will take over the city. Then she provides the means for the Israelite warriors to enter the city and slaughter everyone, “men and women, young and old” (6:21). As justification for betraying her own people, she tells the Israelites that “Yahweh your god is God both in Heaven above and on Earth beneath” (2:11), something that neither the narrator, nor Yahweh, nor any Israelite in the Book of Joshua ever claims (Yahweh is systematically designated as “the god of Israel” in that book). My French Catholic Bible (La Bible de Jérusalem published by the Dominican École Biblique) adds a footnote to Rahab’s “profession of faith to the God of Israel”, saying it “made Rahab, in the eyes of more than one Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.” I find this footnote, likening the Church to the whore of Jericho, emblematic of the true role of Christianity. For it is indeed the Church that, by acknowledging the god of Israel as the universal God, introduced the Jews into the heart of the Gentile city and, over the centuries, allowed them to seize power.

[1] Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism, Yale UP, 2010.

[2] Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine, University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. ix.

[3] Richard Huscroft, Expulsion: England’s Jewish Solution, The History Press, 2006, p. 29.

[4] Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 76, 122.

[5] Louis the Pious was said to be under the influence of his wife Judith—a name that translates as “Jewess”. She was so friendly to Jews that the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz hypothesizes that she was a secret Jewess, in the manner of the biblical Esther (Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891, vol. III, ch. VI, p. 162).

[6] Richard Huscroft, Expulsion: England’s Jewish Solution, The History Press, 2006, pp. 41-45

[7] Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (1941), Clarendon Press, 1964, p. 148.

[8] E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, Fidelity Press, 2008, pp. 118–123.

[9] Herbert George Wells, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, 1939 (archive.org), p. 128.

In a recent short video, we see Benjamin Netanyahu being asked what book he is reading now, and answering with a satisfied look that he is reading Jews vs. Rome by Barry Strauss. Asked why he picked it up, he says: “Well we lost that one, I think we have to win the next one.”

This video has circulated widely (as it was meant to), because it is telling of the way Israel relates to ancient history. This is not the first time Netanyahu shows that he views the history of modern Israel through the lens of ancient history. He does this for the benefit of Israelis (for example when referring to the Palestinians of Gaza as Amalek in October 2023) as well as Gentiles (for example when comparing Trump to Cyrus for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in March 2018). Zionists like Netanyahu are genuinely obsessed by what they think happened to ancient Israel two or three thousand years ago in their struggles with various empires. This obsession is shared virtually by all Zionists since David Ben-Gurion, who had changed his name Grün to that of a Jewish general fighting the Romans. Dan Kurzman writes in his biography Prophet of Fire: “Ben-Gurion was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah.” In his view, the rebirth of Israel in 1948 “paralleled the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest of the land by Joshua, the Maccabean revolt.” Ben-Gurion was not religious at all, yet he was thoroughly biblical.

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The wars between Jews and Rome that Barry Strauss covers in the book cited by Netanyahu (the Jewish War from 66 to 74 CE, the Diaspora Revolt from 116 to 117, and the Bar Kokhba Revolt from 132 to 136), happened after biblical times, but they carry the same weight in Zionists’ mind. The Zionist movement was inspired by Heinrich Graetz’s multi-volume History of the Jews published in German between 1853 and 1891, with the fourth volume, on the period following the destruction of Jerusalem, published first. Zionism is rooted in history, or, more properly, in memory, which fluctuates somewhere between history and mythology (the wailing wall, for example, belongs to memory but not to history, being part of the Antonia Fortress and not of Herod’s Temple). “Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people,” wrote Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982). By “Israel”, he meant not only Israelis, but Jews worldwide.

Jewish Memory is the essence of Jewishness, and the ultimate source of Jewish Power. We tend to think that the main divide within the Jewish world is between religious Jews and secular Jews, but that is not the most important criterion. The span of their national memory is the fundamental difference between Jews. For shallow or peripheral Jews (people who do not consider their Jewishness as the most essential part of their identity), the Holocaust is the main point of reference. To the question “What’s essential to being Jewish?” 73 percent of Jewish Americans gave as first choice “Remembering the Holocaust” in a 2013 Pew Research poll. But deeper Jews have deeper roots, reaching back more than two thousand years. They feel the trauma of 70 CE as if they had been there. These are the leading Jews, who occupy the center and pull the community together by their memory field. It makes little difference whether they present themselves as secular or religious Jews, whether they think of God or the Jewish mind as the driving force behind world history—many probably think that God and the Jewish mind are one and the same. Netanyahu is supposedly a secular Jew, but his thinking is not very different from Ben-Gvir’s: it is a matter of nuance. Whether religious or secular, Jews in general are rooted in the memory of their nation. The longer their memory, the more intense their Jewishness.

All peoples are rooted in their collective memory, you may say. True, but Israel operates with a totally different time scale from other nations. Israel defines itself by a panoramic vision that scans millennia into the past. It holds on to a vivid memory of its beginnings 3000 years ago, and it looks with anticipation to the fulfillment of its prophetic destiny at the end of times. Jewish Memory is incommensurable with any other national memory, in terms of both focus and depth. Only the Chinese can perhaps compete. The key difference, though, is that no one cares for Chinese history but the Chinese, whereas the Jews have made their self-crafted miraculous history the world best-seller.

Contractual theology

In the ancient world, when two nations were at war, they thought their national gods were at war. Therefore, the victor’s god was believed to be the more powerful—a concept known as the “theology of victory”. Christian historians of the first six centuries still thought like this. According to Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine adopted Christianity because Christ gave him victory against Maxentius. According to Gregory of Tour, Clovis converted because Christ put the Alamanni to flight. At first, when his wife Clotilde had urged him to believe in the Son of God, Clovis “merely replied that his gods were more powerful.” But in the middle of a decisive battle, he prayed in desperation to Jesus Christ: “If you deign to grant me victory over these enemies, ... I will believe in you.” And so it happened (History of the Frankish Kings II,1).

Jews are different. They have been defeated again and again, but they emerged each time more convinced that their god is the strongest and will soon wipe out their enemies. After the Israelites were crushed and scattered to the winds by the Assyrians, Yahweh was still bragging that his victory was only postponed:

Yahweh Sabaoth has sworn it, “Yes, what I have planned will take place, what I have decided will be so: I shall break Assur in my country, I shall trample on him on my mountains. Then his yoke will slip off them, his burden will slip from their shoulders. This is the decision taken in defiance of the whole world; this, the hand outstretched in defiance of all nations. Once Yahweh Sabaoth has decided, who will stop him? Once he stretches out his hand, who can withdraw it?” (Isaiah 14:24-27).

That stubbornness—that madness—is the strength of the Jewish people: no matter how many times they lose, they get more determined to “win the next one.” Listen to Yahweh throwing a tantrum after his defeat by Marduk: “By my own self I swear it; what comes from my mouth is saving justice, it is an irrevocable word: All shall bend the knee to me, by me every tongue shall swear” (Isaiah 45:23). There is something childish there, but let’s admit it: there also something heroic. Leo Strauss, the neocons’ mentor, said that Judaism is a “heroic delusion”.[1]

The essence of that delusion is, of course, the Jews’ belief that the “god of Israel” is none other than God Himself, who by definition, is stronger than all the gods. He is the jealous God, which means that other gods don’t matter or don’t exist. In the Jews’ holy book, God did two important things: He created the Universe, and he made a deal with the Jews.

Jews have a covenant theology, which means they think they have contract with God, a contract binding to God himself. Their history is a contractual claim. The point is well made by substacker Brado. The Torah, he writes, must be understood primarily “as a means to fabricate a claim to inheritance, to primacy and precedence, assembled to leverage position under Macedonian and Roman arbitration.” This is according to the hypothesis that the final redaction of the Torah is from the Hellenistic period, “when the Macedonians and Romans began arbitrating property disputes in Egypt, Syria and Palestine, and the Torah was quite intentionally designed to secure advantages for this purpose.” But even if we attribute the Torah to the Babylonian school of Ezra, the aim was the same: “It is not concerned with communicating insight, truth or understanding. It is about staking claims to precedence or primacy. It is evidence to be presented in a courtroom. It is history as a grievance or inheritance to be arbitrated before God. This is not God the Almighty, but God the Assessor, the Arbitrator, the Justiciar. The settler of accounts.”

For Jews like Netanyahu, settling accounts means taking revenge, as it had been for the great Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508), whose biblical exegeses are filled with the expectation of God’s vengeance against Esau (a code name for Rome): “at the precise moment the Lord takes vengeance on the nations, Israel will then go from darkness to light and out of bondage,” and “nothing will survive of the house of Esau.” “Indeed, any deliverance promised Israel is associated with the fall of Edom.”[2] The reason I quote Abravanel is that Netanyahu’s father was a great admirer of him and the author of his laudatory biography.

Biblical history is either heavily biased or completely fabricated. After two centuries of digging, archaeologists have come to the conclusion that Solomon’s kingdom, the basis for the Greater Israel claim, has less reality than Arthur’s Camelot.[3] At the supposed time of Solomon, Jerusalem was a big village. The Exodus—so central to Zionist mythology that a film on the founding of Israel was named Exodus—is just as fake. There is no archeological trace of a massive exodus from Egypt through Sinai to Canaan, and the evidence is that the twelve tribes were indigenous (only their religion was not). The best that Richard Friedman can come up with in The Exodus: How it Happened and Why it Matters (HarperOne, 2017) is the theory that a few thousand aggressive Habiru (nomadic raiders), escaped from forced labor in Egypt, invaded the land of Canaan and imposed on some local tribes the cult of their jealous god and the obligation to pay tribute to them (read my review here).

Biblical history is not only self-aggrandizing mythology, it is framed into a fraudulent contract penned under the name of God. It is the most daring forgery imaginable. In comparison, the false Donation of Constantine, by which the popes claimed to have been given the empire by Constantine, is an innocent prank.

Western man has been fooled by that forgery. For two thousand years we have swallowed the Jews’ fake history hook, line and sinker. This is why Christianity is an integral part of the Jewish Question. Jewish Memory is the ultimate source of Jewish Power, and Christianity has converted Roman civilization to Jewish Memory. In our Holy Book, Israel is the hero and the innocent victim of one evil empire after another, no matter how much they steal, destroy, rape, slaughter, and commit genocide.

The winner gets to write history, but the reverse is also true: the one who writes history and imposes his narrative will be the winner in the end. The Jews are the people of the Book, and with the Book, they conquered our minds. Ancient history from Noah to Cyrus the Great has been written for us by the Jews. That’s why the baddies are the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians—not to mention the Amalekites or the Midianites, who obviously deserved to be eradicated.

Netanyahu has some good reasons to be confident that the Jews will “win the next one.” Jews don’t win on the battlefield, but they are the undisputed masters of information war, and they can ruin an empire from within, with good coordination and enough time. We are Rome, now. So if Netanyahu studies the history of “Jews vs. Rome” with the premise that the war is not over, then we should too.

Israel against Rome

The Romans were notoriously welcoming to foreign gods. Evocatio deorum is an ancient Roman ritual that involved calling the enemy’s gods out of cities besieged by Roman forces with the promise of a new temple and better worship in Rome.[4] But the Romans understood that the god of Israel is unlike any other national god. His hatred of other gods made him unassimilable. That’s why his sacred objects were treated as mere booty in 70 CE. “The treatment of the Jewish god,” wrote Emily Schmidt, “can be seen as an inversion of the typical Roman treatment of or attitude towards foreign gods, perhaps as an anti-evocatio.”[5] Since Jews throughout the world used to pay two drachmas (silver coins) a year for their temple, Vespasian now compelled them to pay that tax to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill (the fiscus Iudaicus). That was appropriate since the Jews hypocritically pretended that they were worshipping the supreme god.

Later on, Trajan, whose father had commanded the Tenth Legion during the Jewish War under Vespasian, had to put down Jewish insurrections throughout the Diaspora, and especially in Egypt (115-117). The insurrection coincided with Trajan’s war against Parthia, in which many Babylonian Jews were fighting on the Parthians’ side, so there was certainly some coordination there. According to Arrian, a soldier-politician-historian who wrote about Trajan’s wars, “Trajan was determined above all, if it were possible, to destroy the [Jewish] nation utterly, but if not, at least to crush it and stop its presumptuous wickedness.”[6]

His successor Hadrian faced a new messianic uprising in Jerusalem, led by self-proclaimed messiah Shimon Bar Kochba, who managed to establish an independent state for three years (132-135). The Roman military campaign left 580,000 dead according to Cassius Dio, who adds: “At Jerusalem, Hadrian founded a city in place of the one which had been razed to the ground, naming it Aelia Capitolina, and on the site of the temple of the god he raised a new temple to Jupiter.” Jews were banned from the city. The name of Israel was erased and the new province was renamed Syria Palæstina (in remembrance of the long gone Philistines, of Greek descent). Circumcision was again declared illegal. As Martin Goodman comments in Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations: “In the eyes of Rome and at the behest of Hadrian, the Jews had ceased to exist as a nation in their own land.”[7]

These wars are the subject of Barry Strauss’s book Jews vs. Rome. It is a pretty good book for basic information, but it is purely narrative, and Strauss writes the story as he finds it in his sources, without much critical perspective. The almost unique source for the Jewish War of 66-74 is Flavius Josephus, who was a Jew writing for the glory of his nation. Strauss has a similar pro-Jewish viewpoint. Here are a couple of paragraphs from his introduction, to show you why Netanyahu likes it:

For Jewish history, the rebellions against Rome mark a major turning point. They cost hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives and sent many of the survivors into slavery and exile. They reduced the Jewish people to secondary status in their own homeland. Indeed, the revolts put the future of Jewish survival there in question, although they did not end it. It’s a common misconception to think that the Romans finished the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. They did not, but they did do an enormous amount of damage. Rome destroyed the Jewish capital, Jerusalem, and its crowning glory, the Temple. Rome ended the daily sacrifices that marked the heart of Judaism and ruined the priesthood who carried them out. Rome decimated the largest and most prestigious Jewish Diaspora community in the Roman Empire, the Jews of Egypt. As if to add insult to injury, the Romans changed the name of the country from Judea (“land of the Jews”) to Syria Palaestina, or simply Palestine (“land of the Philistines”). In no other case did the Romans punish a rebellious province by changing its name. Then again, no people had rebelled as often as the Jews.

There is a holy fire, burning in the hearts of warriors, that leads to glory or oblivion. For two centuries it burned in the hearts of the nation that is the subject of this book, the Jewish people. Messiahs added to the conflagration. Even priests, resistant at first, grew dazzled by the white-hot light. Sober men saw the fire’s destructiveness and tried to douse the flames. None succeeded. It was left to the Romans to drown the blaze in rivers of blood. Only then did a new generation of rabbis emerge from the ruins and turn the fire into light. At the same time, another offshoot from the Jewish experience of this turbulent era also began to grow: Christianity. The Jewish people survived, learning how to become a religion without a state. Then, twenty centuries later, they created a sovereign state in their ancestral homeland, Israel. The survival of the Jews is one of history’s great cases of resilience.

“It is my hope,” Strauss writes, “that the history of this period, these people and these struggles, will offer context for the clash of civilizations we are witnessing today and forge a deeper understanding of the forces that propel them.”[8] The book does that, at least for readers like Netanyahu. Strauss’s underlying premise is that the story is all about Israel’s struggle for its national independence from an oppressive imperial power.

The Romans certainly made mistakes in their dealing with the Jews. They thought they could solve their Judean problem as they had solved their Carthaginian problem three centuries earlier, but they failed to understand that, precisely, their Carthaginian problem had only morphed into a more complex Judean problem (read Ron Unz’s take on the Punic hypothesis). On the other hand, from the Romans’ perspective, their rule over Judea was generous. It was not incorporated into the empire, but became a semi-autonomous kingdom, while enjoying all the benefits of Roman civilization. What the Romans did for the Jews is as notorious as the Jews ungratefulness for it (and the subject of a good Monty Python sketch). Herod the Great, the choice of both Octavian and Anthony, was the son of an Idumean father and a Nabatean mother, therefore not an ethnic Jew, but he tried to be as Jewish as Roman, and he built for the Jews the most magnificent temple they could dream of. He was a great king by the standards of the time.

But Jewish Memory is not objective history, it is an eternal present of Jewish victimhood. From the Jewish point of view, all empires that ruled over Judea at one point or another are just more of the same: either obstacles or instruments on the way to the ultimate rule of Israel over all nations, as promised by God to his people, when the kings of the world “will fall prostrate before you [the Israelites], faces to the ground, and lick the dust at your feet” (Isaiah 49:23). In the Book of Daniel, written in the 2nd century BCE but set four centuries earlier, the four evil kingdoms that Daniel foresees in his interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream were the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Greeks. But later the traditional interpretation was that Rome was the fourth beast with ten horns, “devouring and crushing with its iron teeth and bronze claws, and trampling with its feet what was left” (7:19-20).

Israel inside Rome

What about us, non-Jews, whose side are we on in this fight? Are we on the side of the Jews, or on the side of Rome? That should be an easy choice: we are Rome. We are the heirs of Roman civilization, the Western version of Hellenistic civilization. We are also the heirs of the Roman Church, who has breastfed us from our medieval infancy. Thomas Hobbes famously said that the papacy was “the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof” (Leviathan, chapter 47). In the High Middle Ages, the pope was the verus imperator (in the words of Gervase of Tilbury); he could make and unmake kings, and treated them as vassals. For the Netanyahus of this world, Christian Rome is still Rome, and so is Western civilization today.

But here is where it gets complicated: the Church is also the new Israel. And the holy story of Israel is the biggest part of the Christian Bible. The Book of Revelation that closes it is an apocalyptic text in the filiation of the Book of Daniel. Rome is designated there as “Babylon the Great, the mother of all the prostitutes,” “riding a scarlet beast which had seven heads and ten horns and had blasphemous titles written all over it” (17:3-5); “within a single day, the plagues will fall on her: disease and mourning and famine. She will be burnt right up” (18:2-8). This is followed by a vision of the rebirth of “Jerusalem, the holy city, coming down from God out of heaven” (21:10).

The end of Rome and the new beginning of Jerusalem are key prophetic themes in early Christianity. Justin Martyr, who died in Rome in 165, believed that after the imminent end of the world and the resurrection : “for me and for Christians whose doctrine is pure on all points, … we will spend a thousand years in Jerusalem rebuilt, embellished, enlarged, as Isaiah, Ezekiel, and other prophets acknowledge” (Dialog with Trypho lxx,4).

Rome, then, didn’t like people like Justin, which is how he got his posthumous nickname. The problem was not that Christians were casting spells on the eternal city, for they did this cryptically. The problem was that they ostentatiously refused to participate in the basic formality of the imperial cult. According to Candida Moss, Christians were not persecuted, but prosecuted; “the traditional history of Christian martyrdom is mistaken. Christians were not constantly persecuted, hounded, or targeted by the Romans. Very few Christians died, and when they did, they were often executed for what we in the modern world would call political reasons.”[9] The sources, concurs Bart D. Ehrman, show that “magistrates were not out for blood. They wanted to keep the peace and much preferred for Christians to come to their senses and perform simple cultic acts.”[10] Refusal to pay homage to the genius of the emperor was a political act, comparable to burning the national flag today.[11]

How can we explain, then, that under Constantine and his successors, Rome converted to Christianity, a religion hostile to the gods of Rome, whose programmatic prophecy was the revenge of Jerusalem over Rome, in the spirit of Jewish apocalypses? This is a great paradox and a great mystery. Some Romans did smell a Jewish conspiracy there, and warned that Christianity was leading Rome to its downfall. One of them was Ammianus Marcellinus, the last non-Christian Roman historian. In the 380s, he traced the decline in civic virtues back to the court of the first Christian emperors, and blamed the senatorial landowners who had converted to Christianity out of opportunism, such as Petronius Probus, whom he portrays as a vain and rapacious man, a pernicious schemer, servile to those more powerful than him and pitiless to those weaker, who craved office and exercised enormous influence through his wealth (xxvii,11). After the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, Augustine wrote the first book of The City of God in response to similar accusations that Christians had brought a curse on Rome, by ruining the patriotic spirit. He didn’t deny that Christians couldn’t care less for the earthly city of Rome, being devoted exclusively to their eternal city in heaven. But he wanted the Romans to know that whatever they suffered during the bloody sack of their city—loss of property or loved ones—was for their good, since it brought them closer to God.

This idea would not be lost on the Christian West. If wrecking your cities is good for your soul, then “we’ll save the shit out of you!”

[1] Leo Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews: Can Jewish Faith and History Still Speak to Us?” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green, State University of New York Press, 1997, pp. 311-356, online here. An audio recording is accessible here.

[2] Jean-Christophe Attias, Isaac Abravanel, la mémoire et l’espérance, Cerf, 1992, pp. 140, 111, 269, 276.

[3] Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, S&S International, 2007.

[4] Jodi Magness, “The Arch of Titus and the Fate of the God of Israel,” Journal of Jewish Studies, 2008, vol. 59, n°2, pp. 201-217.

[5] Emily A. Schmidt, “The Flavian Triumph and the Arch of Titus: The Jewish God in Flavian Rome,” on escholarship.org; also Jodi Magness, “The Arch of Titus and the Fate of the God of Israel,” Journal of Jewish Studies, 2008, vol. 59, n°2, pp. 201-217.

[6] Barry Strauss, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World Mightiest Empire, Simon & Schuster, 2025, p. 234. Arrian’s book is lost, and there is no certainty that the “nation” mentioned in this preserved line is the Jewish nation, but that is the opinion of Menahem Stern in Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, vol. 2, 1976, pp. 152-155.

[7] Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations, Penguin, 2007, p. 494.

[8] Strauss, Jews vs. Rome, op. cit., pp. 1, 3.

[9] Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, HarperOne, 2013, pp. 14-15.

[10] Bart D. Ehrman concurs in The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018, pp. 130, 161.

[11] The targeting of Christians in Rome under Nero in 64, as told by Tacitus 50 years later, probably never happened, as Christians were then indistinguishable from Jews, but if some people were burned alive then, that was because the penalty for arson was to be burnt alive.

This post is based on my book The Pope’s Curse, which is currently not available but will appear in a revised edition in February. This is the last installment of the series titled “Why are we Christians?” summarizing the events that made Western Europeans Roman Catholics. This is not, however, my last post on the Christianization of Roman civilization.

The Franks

The election of the prefect of Rome, Gregorius Anicius, as pope Gregory I (590-604), called “the Great”, can be regarded as the beginning of the medieval papacy as the main governing body of the city of Rome, whose Senate became increasingly irrelevant. For the next fifty years, 13 out of 15 popes were from the Roman landowning class. The Roman (Byzantine) legions that had devastated Italy during Justinian’s Gothic War (535-554) were now busy in the east, and could do little to protect the city from the Lombards, who had already conquered southern Italy. Constans II failed to eject them in 662-8, and was the last Byzantine emperor to visit Rome.[1]

The first breaking point in the relationship between Rome and Constantinople came in 722, when emperor Leo III announced important tax increases to compensate from the loss of Egypt and Syria to the Arabs. Led by Pope Gregory II, the citizens of Rome refused to pay. Three years later, the exarch of Ravenna, the chief imperial representative in the entire Italian peninsula, approached Rome with every troops he could muster, but he was forced to retreat at the Milvian Bridge. “At this moment, more than in any other,” Peter Heather writes, “the independent Republic of St Peter was born: the direct progenitor of the papal states which would finally be dismantled in the nineteenth century.”[2] By the late eighth century, popes issued their own coins.

After Ravenna fell to the Lombards in 751, the popes appealed to the Franks. I have barely mentioned them before, so here is some background. In the late fifth and early sixth century, the Franks had united northern Gaul and part of Germania (from Paris and Orléans, through Reims and Metz, to Cologne). The marriage of the Ostrogothic king Theoderic with Clovis’s sister in 493 had not put an end to the latter’s ambition to get his own access to the Mediterranean. In 507, Clovis attacked the Visigoths, and drove them out of Gaul. Theoderic reacted by occupying Visigothic Spain, nominally ruling for Alaric’s son Amalaric (511–31). Before attacking the Visigoths, Clovis officially converted to Nicene (Trinitarian) Christianity. According to Gregory of Tours (our only source on Gaul for this period), the Franks were still pagans until then, but modern historians are not sure what this really means. At any rate, according to Heather: “The new Frankish king of Gaul’s opting for Nicene Christianity over Homoean Christianity … must be understood in a broader diplomatic context: Clovis’s decision to seek East Roman assistance as he challenged Theoderic in the west.”[3] This is the context for Theoderic’s difficulty with the Byzantine emperor Anastasius, in which the pope was inevitably drawn, as the representative of both the Emperor’s and the Franks’ orthodoxy. Theoderic was able to contain Frankish expansion, but it began in earnest after his death in 526. Clovis’s sons took over the Burgundian kingdom in 534. Then the Ostrogothic kingdom disappeared during Justinian’s Gothic War (535-554).

Fast forward two centuries, and that’s when the popes turned to the Franks for protection. Charles Martel, Duke of the Franks and Mayor of the Palace, had re-established Frankish power on most of Gaul and repelled the Arabs at the Battle of Poitiers in 732. The crowning of his son Pepin the Short as king of the Franks marks the end the “Byzantine papacy” and the beginning of what might be called the “Frankish papacy.” In 774, Pepin’s son Charlemagne beat the Lombards and declared himself king of both the Franks and of the Lombards. With Italy and the united Frankish kingdom, soon including Saxony and other German lands, Charlemagne was reigning on a territory that was almost equivalent in size to the old Western Roman Empire.

The alliance between the Frankish king and the pope was of immense consequence for both. Given the scarcity of sources, it is difficult to interpret the nature of their relationship. But modern historians are not buying the version of Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, according to whom Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Leo III almost by surprise. Charlemagne had imperial ambitions and maneuvered Leo accordingly. He had already proclaimed himself priest and head of Christendom at the Council of Frankfurt in 794, over the pope’s head. Having commissioned from his own theologians the Libri Carolini, a vehemently anti-Byzantine piece of propaganda comparing Constantinople to biblical Babylon, he used a minor variation in the Nicene creed to initiate a doctrinal quarrel, overruling the pope in the process. The issue, this time, was not whether the Son and the Father were “consubstantial” (homoousios) or just “similar” (homoios), but whether the Holy Spirit proceeded “from the Father” (ex Patre), or “from the Father and the Son” (ex Patre Filioque). Finally, taking pretext that the Eastern Empire was headed by a woman (empress Irene of Athens), Charlemagne declared the throne vacant and arranged for Pope Leo to crown him emperor in Rome on Christmas Eve 800, in exchange for escorting him back to Rome from where he had been expelled by the citizens under accusations of adultery and perjury.

While the Franks were the military protectors of the Roman Church, in return Latin churchmen administrated their kingdom, the Carolingians having no civil administration of their own. Practically, the personnel of the government and of the Church was indistinguishable. Charlemagne made important donations of land to Church institutions, including the papacy, developed the parish system, and made tithing compulsory by civil law. Northern bishops, particularly of Reims and Mainz, were closer to the center of power than the pope, and yielded as much influence, if not more.

In the end, despite ecclesiastical support, the Carolingian Empire was, in the words of Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, “a Roman Empire without the Roman law and without the Roman legions, without the City and without the Senate. It was a shapeless and unorganised mass with no urban nerve centres and no circulation of economic life.”[4] To explain why it didn’t last more than half a century, Philippe Wolff points to another weakness: Charlemagne “tried in his own way—the heavy handed way—to play the part of a Christian emperor as it had been envisaged since Constantine, but he was unable to divest himself of the Frankish custom of dividing up his inheritance, and distributed his possessions among his sons as if he were dealing with a family estate rather than the res publica.” Although by chance Louis the Pious inherited the whole, he repeated the mistake. “The ensuing squabbles and divisions were one cause of the Carolingian decline.”[5] In other words, the Carolingians were always more Frankish kings than Roman emperors, and their “Roman Empire” was more a useful fiction than a reality. The fiction outlasted the reality because Charlemagne became the object of a cult under Otto III, who miraculously “discovered” his tomb in Aachen in the year 1000, and Frederick Barbarossa had him canonized in 1165. The myth of Charlemagne’s “Roman Empire” contributed to the persistence of the imperial ideal. Throughout the Middle Ages, sovereigns, intellectuals and peoples aspired to this ideal, synonymous in their eyes with peace and prosperity, as Robert Folz documents in The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century.[6]

The popes’ imperial hubris

Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that “the papacy is not other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof” (Leviathan, chapter 47). But the papacy emerged from the Carolingian episode as a fully incarnated political body, ruling over a couple of duchies (the Papal States). During the next two centuries the popes will gain increasing control over the imperial institution. They achieved a major propaganda coup with the famous forgery known as the Donation of Constantine. By this document, Constantine the Great, out of gratitude for having been miraculously cured of leprosy by the water of baptism, allegedly ceded “to Sylvester the universal pontiff and to all his successors until the end of the world” the imperial insignia, and “the glory of our power,” as well as “both our [Lateran] palace and the city of Rome and all the provinces, localities and cities of Italy or the Western regions.” On this basis, for more than half a millennium, the popes would claim to have received full imperial authority and the right to bestow it on the man of their choice, or to take it away from him if he falls short of their expectation. It is assumed that the Donation was forged in the Carolingian era, sometimes between 750 and 850. But it really became influential during the Gregorian Reform of the 11th century.

Robert Moore described the Gregorian Reform as the “first European revolution”—meaning a radical, global and irreversible transformation of society, with a permanent impact in the collective psyche. What the popes accomplished in the two centuries leading to the Fourth Council of Lateran (1215) was the creation of “an entirely different world—a world pervaded and increasingly molded by the well-drilled piety and obedience associated with the traditional vision of ‘the age of faith’, or of medieval Christianity.”[7]

The Gregorian Reform takes its name from the Cluniac monk Hildebrand, who became pope under the name of Gregory VII in 1073. The outlines of his program are contained in the 27 propositions of his famous Dictatus Papae, where one can read: “Only the Pope can with right be called universal. … He alone may use the imperial Insignia. … All princes shall kiss the feet of the Pope alone. … He may depose emperors.” The climax of his power struggle with the German emperor Henry IV took place at the castle of Canosa in northern Italy, where the emperor saved his crown by begging the pope to lift the excommunication. If we are to believe the monk Lambert of Hersfeld, a fervent supporter of the pope and enemy of the emperor, Henry crossed the Alps in the middle of winter and implored, as a penitent, the forgiveness of Gregory VII, who let him wait three days and three nights, barefoot in the snow, in front of the castle of Canossa. That story is now considered a piece of papal propaganda, aiming to show how the vicar of Christ can crush a German king into the dust, and then raise him up again by grace. Nevertheless, the pope gained the high ground in the struggle that would prevent three dynasties of Germanic “Roman emperors” from uniting Germany and Italy.

One hundred and thirty years after Gregory VII, Innocent III (1198-1216) declared that he sat “above kings on the throne of God’s glory” because “The Lord gave to Peter not only the lordship over the universal Church, but also over the whole world.” To subdue the sovereigns who resisted his suzerainty, the pope had two swords: by the “spiritual sword”, he could excommunicate his enemy, which amounted to canceling any loyalty sworn to him; and by the “temporal sword”, he could mobilize armies against him. Innocent III’s record includes the excommunication of one emperor, seven kings and countless lords. He did appear to his contemporary Gervase of Tilbury as the verus imperator, the true emperor above the nominal one. Innocent III was the first pope to wear the three-crown tiara (Paul VI, 1963-1978, was the last), symbolizing his triple authority as “father of kings, regent of the world, and vicar of Jesus-Christ.”

However, when pope Boniface VII declared ego sum Caesar, ego imperator in 1303, it was too much for the French king Philip the Fair, who broke the pope’s political and economic power and moved the papacy to Avignon. Two centuries later, the Protestant Reformation put an end to the pope’s imperial hubris, but the Catholic doctrine of the two swords was never abandoned. Orthodox Christians traditionally regard it as satanic, and no one has better expressed that view than Fyodor Dostoevsky, when he wrote that Roman Catholicism “has proclaimed a new Christ, not like the former one, but one who has been seduced by the third temptation of the devil—the temptation of the kingdoms of the world: ‘All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me!’”[8]

The Second Coming of Yahweh

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Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

In 461, eight-year-old Theoderic, from the Gothic Amal dynasty, was sent as a royal hostage to Constantinople—a common and efficient guarantee for the respect of treaties in the ancient world. Theoderic’s uncle was the king of the Goths settled in Pannonia, allied to the Romans as a foederatus (from foedus, “treaty”). He had just forged a new diplomatic agreement with the then Eastern emperor Leo, which included a foreign aid of 300 pounds of gold a year in exchange for military service. Theoderic grew up close to the imperial court for the next ten years, and received the best education that was the essence of Romanitas (which in Constantinople meant Hellenism). In 471, he succeeded his uncle as king of the Pannonian Goths, with Roman approval, and occasionally led his troops (approximately ten thousand warriors) in military campaigns against Rome’s enemies. In 475, he helped restore the emperor Zeno to his throne after he had been deposed by a “usurper”. The following year, a grateful Zeno made Theoderic high military commander (magister militum), proclaimed him a friend (amicus) of the Romans, and adopted him personally as is son-in-arms. There were occasional tensions between Romans and Theoderic’s Goths, but in 484, Zeno granted Theoderic the supreme honor of the consulship. In 488 he sent him to depose Odoacer in Italy.

Odoacer was a German military commander who had deposed the child emperor Romulus Augustus in 476 and sent to Constantinople the imperial ornamenta (the symbols of the emperor’s power, including scepter and purple mantle), with an embassy informing Zeno that he recognized him as sole emperor over East and West. Some historians therefore argue, quite logically, that 476 marked not the “fall of the Roman Empire”, but its reunification.[1] However, if Odoacer had no need for a Western emperor—especially a child—it was because he intended to rule over Italy as king (rex) or commander (dux) with as little imperial interference as possible. After twelve-years and many complaints from the Roman Senate, Zeno had had enough of him, and sent Theoderic’s army against him.

Theoderic’s restoration of the Western Roman Empire

Unlike Odoacer, Theoderic took possession of Italy as a legitimate representative of the Eastern emperor. Yet Theoderic’ administration was so successful, and so “Roman”, that he became much more than a governor in the eyes of his subjects: “within less than a decade of his triumph over Odoacer, Theoderic would be hailed as a new Trajan and Valentinian; would honor the Senate and people; and would begin a series of massive renovation projects hailed by contemporary Italo-Romans as ‘surpassing ancient wonders.’”[2] So writes Jonathan Arnold in Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration, published in 2014.

Theoderic waited until Zeno’s death in 491 to declare himself rex Italiae, a title he held until his death in 526. He made Ravenna his capital and enriched it with splendid buildings, including the Sant’Apollinare Nuovo cathedral (top picture). His relationship with the new Eastern emperor Anastasius went through a period of trial. But a source known as the Anonymus Valesianus claims that an embassy sent by Rome’s Senate to Constantinople in 497 won the emperor’s favor for Theoderic: “Peace was made with Emperor Anastasius, and he returned all the ornamenta of the palace which Odoacer had sent to Constantinople.”[3] The Western Empire was officially back.

It had not really disappeared during the 21 years of absence of the ornamenta. As far as Italo-Romans were concerned, “the Roman Empire, reduced to Italy, simply languished from one fifth-century ruler to another, until Theoderic, a kind of savior, assumed command.”[4] By 511, some fifteen years after the beginning of Theoderic’s rule, “the western Roman Empire appeared to be resurging and reclaiming its rightful place.”[5] Theoderic ruled over most of the Roman West north of the Mediterranean, directly over Italy and indirectly over the South of Gaul, as regent for his Visigothic son-in-law Eutharic. The king of Burgundy was also his son-in-law, and the king of the Vandals in Carthage was his brother-in-law, making Theoderic the most powerful man in all of Western Europe, with his influence extending over Central Europe. In 493, Theoderic had contracted a diplomatic marriage with the sister of the king of the Franks, Clovis, but the relationship deteriorated as Clovis’s expansionism became more aggressive (more on the Franks in the next chapter).

Jonathan Arnold’s book, on which much of this article is based, exemplifies a revisionist perspective on Late Antiquity that has now gained wide acceptance. Arnold presents his book as “a study of Romanness and the Roman Empire that fully accepts Theoderic’s reign (489/93-526) as a continuation of Roman history,” and explains “the continuities and changes, all overwhelmingly Roman and imperial in nature, of the Theoderican era.” According to Arnold,

“Ostrogothic Italy” … is a misnomer, an unfortunate but convenient inaccuracy that renders “barbarian” an Italy that remained proudly Roman in its self-identification, regardless of external perceptions. … Theoderic and his Goths not only fit within these understandings of Romanness and a Roman Empire, but were also essential to it, their unique roles contributing to the contemporary beliefs of imperial resurgence, blessedness, and a golden age already encountered earlier. Theoderic’s Italy, then, was not a mistake; nor were the Romans of Italy yearning to be liberated by the only real Roman Empire, based in Constantinople. It was a true Roman Empire that presented itself as such and exceeded the expectations of many of its Roman inhabitants; and it would have persisted in its Roman identity, had it not been for the unforeseeable intervention of the east Roman state.[6]

The paradigm shift is so radical that it makes us wonder how our traditional historiography could be so wrong. The answer is simple: history is written by the winner, as a continuation of his war propaganda. The winner, in this case, was Justinian, who destroyed the Ostrogothic kingdom with his Gothic War (535-554) against Theoderic’s successors Theodahad, Vitiges and Totila. Justinian was a fervent Nicene Christian and the first emperor to organize a global and systematic persecution of heretics, the alleged Ariani in particular. Theoderic and his Goths were heretics, and as such enemies of God, who needed to be destroyed at any cost (we’ll get to the cost). The winner’s historiography is what our Catholic tradition has handed us.

The loser doesn’t get to write history, if he survives at all—and the Ostrogoths didn’t survive as a people or as a political entity. However, modern historians like Jonathan Arnold can still use the detailed testimony of a couple of Italo-Romans living under Theoderic’s rule: Magnus Felix Ennodius, a north Italian churchman, and Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, a southern Italian bureaucrat.

The same year as Cambridge University Press published Arnold’s book, Oxford University Press published Peter Heather’ book titled The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes & Imperial Pretenders, that draws on the same sources. Like Arnold, Heather emphasizes that Theoderic was perceived as fully Roman:

Ennodius’ panegyric … observed that ius and civilitas presided in Theoderic’s palace, ius designating the fundamentals of Roman law, civilitas, as we have seen, the state of higher civilization that written law generated. … A whole battery of means was deployed, then, to get over the message that Theoderic’s regime was ‘Roman’ in that most fundamental of ideological senses: it was in tune with God’s plans for humankind. Panegyrics, official letters, coinage (some of Theoderic’s coins proclaimed invicta Roma), visual representations and buildings were all used to sustain this claim and its supporting pillars: reverence for Roman law and classical education.[7]

Not long after his death, Cassiodorus, one of the chief officers of Theoderic’s later years, penned the portrait of one who, “by his diligent investigations into the nature of things, seemed to be a philosopher wearing the purple”—somewhat like Marcus Aurelius.[8]

While claiming full participation in Romanitas, Theoderic’s Goths were also jealous of their Gothic identity. Unlike many peoples incorporated into the Empire before them, they were proudly unconquered. How they balanced their Gothicness and their Romanness could vary. Disputes arising after Theoderic’s death concerning the education of his young grandson and heir suggest that there were Gothic identitarians hostile to assimilation.

Romans also had diverging views of the Ostrogoths. Because they kept their language and traditions—down to their long hair and moustache—they remained Barbarians. But in their barbarity, paradoxically, “Goths and Gothicness represented martialism, the old Roman virtue of virtus, … meaning ‘manliness’ or ‘courage’.”[9]

And then, there was the religious divide. Most ethnic Romans shared the faith of the emperor, the Nicene creed, and therefore were under the spiritual care of the bishop of Rome, one of the five patriarchates with Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem. The Goths had their own church, which some official documents refer to as “the church of Gothic law”.[10] They had their Gothic Bible, and their Gothic liturgy. They were Homoians, and their enemies in the East called them “Arians”.

However, contrary to the Vandal kings who sporadically persecuted Catholics in North Africa, Theoderic extended his full protection to the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church, in return, fully recognized his authority. Peter Heather writes:

For the vast majority of his reign, Theoderic and the Catholic establishment treated one another with the greatest respect. On his great ceremonial adventus into Rome in 500, for instance, Theoderic greeted the Pope ‘as if he were St Peter himself’. The compliment was duly returned. The king’s good offices were sought by the Church of Rome itself when it was divided down the middle by a disputed papal succession: the so-called Laurentian schism, named after Laurentius, one of the participants (along with Pope Symmachus) and the eventual loser, destined to go down in history therefore as an antipope. … the best and most recent scholarly study of the dispute (from which extensive documentation survives) has come to the conclusion that the king went out of his way to operate evenhandedly and according to established procedures, and to do his best to bring about a speedy and conciliatory resolution. The dispute still took eight years to work its way to a conclusion, but it remains a striking testimony to the level of de facto recognition given by the Catholic Church to Theoderic’s legitimacy.[11]

In other words, there was no religious war between the Gothic church and the Nicene church headed in the West by the pope. “The religious divide only became an issue, however, when the regime of Justin and Justinian chose to make it so.”[12]

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