September 2017 AD
Grand Mother
of all
Conspiracies
Saint Paul
Agent Provocateur
We will discuss the one grand conspiracy no one will discuss.
And then make comments.
Do Jews really plot to take over the world?
Jews always mock and make fun of Christians who say that Jews are trying to take over the world.
But what if a Jew came forward and said, "Yes, it's all true! Indeed,
Jews have already taken over the world and you don't even know the half
of it".
What if a Jew were to tell you that Saul of Tarsus became frustrated in
his inability to wipe out Christianity by force from the outside and
came to a revelation on the Road to Damascus that the best way to fight
Christians is to infiltrate them and become one of them?
What if this Jew were to say that this renamed Paul would try to
corrupt the Christian faith by removing it from it Jewish heritage, so
as to discredit the movement as heretics in the eyes of Jews, with the
secondary intent of Christianizing a large quantity of Gentile Romans
in order to threaten their empire and engulf the Roman Empire and the
Christian faith into a destructive war of attrition where both sides
lose?
Well, in the boxed quote at the end, this is what is proposed as real Christian history.
For good or for evil, no one on either side can argue after this article that Jewish ideas have not taken over the world.
Since we already know Jews have the capacity to take over the world for
good with Christianity; then, Jews certainly have the capability and
drive to do so again for evil.
Settled then. Jewish ideas, plotted into the minds of others, have in the past and can in the future take over the world.
Did the Jews create Christianity?
Yes, of course Christianity derives from Judaism.
But I have never fully thought out the implications as laid out below, have you?
We cite Marcus Eli Ravage, this proud writer of Jewish conspiracies
from 1928, discussing Jewish influence in the world, as he boastfully
states:
- You resent the Jew not because, as some of you seem to think, he
crucified Jesus -- but because -- Jews gave him birth.
- Your real quarrel with Jews is not that we have rejected Christianity -- but that we have imposed
it upon you!
- We
undoubtedly had a sizeable finger in the Lutheran Rebellion. The
Reformation was not designed in malice purely. It squared us with
an ancient enemy (Roman Catholicism) and restored our Bible to it’s
place of honour in
Christendom (Protestant emphasis on Old Testament).
- And it
is simply a fact that we were the prime movers in the bourgeois
democratic revolutions of the century before the last, both in France
and America. If we were not, we did not know our own interests. The Republican revolutions of the Eighteenth century freed
us (Jews) of our age-long political and social disabilities. They benefited
us, but they did you no harm. On the contrary, they prospered and
expanded you. You owe your pre-eminence in the world to them. But do
you point your accusing finger at us and charge us with these heinous
and recorded crimes? Not at all?
- (Yet) you "fantastically" lay at our door the
recent Great War (WW1) and the upheaval in Russia (Communist Revolution).
- What use is it wasting words on the alleged control of your public
opinion by Jewish financiers, newspaper owners and movie magnates, when
you might as well justly accuse us of the proved control of your whole
civilization by the Jewish Gospels?
- We conquered you as no empire of yours ever subjugated Africa or Asia.
- And we did it all without armies, without bullets, without blood or
turmoil, without force of any kind.
- We did it solely by the
irresistible might of our spirit, with ideas, with propaganda.
- Without fully understanding what we were doing to you, you became the
agents at large of our racial tradition, carrying our gospel to the
unexplored ends of the earth.
- Our tribal customs have become the core of your moral code.
- Our tribal
laws have furnished the basic groundwork of all your august
constitutions and legal systems.
- Our legends and our folk-tales are the
sacred lore which you croon to your infants.
- Our poets have filled your
hymnals and your prayer-books.
- Our national history has become an
indispensable part of the learning of your pastors and priests and
scholars.
- Our kings, our statesmen, our prophets, our warriors are your
heroes.
- Our ancient little country is your Holy Land.
- Our national
literature is your Holy Bible.
- What our people thought and taught has
become inextricably woven into your very speech and tradition, until no
one among you can be called educated who is not familiar with our
racial heritage.
- Jewish artisans and Jewish fishermen are your teachers and your saints,
with countless statues carved in their image and innumerable cathedrals
raised to their memories.
- A Jewish maiden is your ideal of motherhood
and womanhood.
- A Jewish rebel-prophet is the central figure in your
religious worship.
- We have pulled down your idols, cast aside your
racial inheritance, and substituted for them our God and our
traditions.
- No conquest in history can even remotely compare with this
clean sweep of our conquest over you.
- Why throw up to us a patent and a clumsy forgery such as the Protocols
of the Elders Zion when you might as well confront us with the
Revelation of St. John?
- Why talk about Marx and Trotski when you have
Jesus of Nazereth and Paul of Tarsus to confound us with?
How was Christinity born?
- The time, when the first curtain rises, is roughly 65 B.C. Dramatis
personae are, minor parts aside, Judea and Rome.
- Judea is a tiny
kingdom off the Eastern Mediterranean. For five centuries it has been
hardly more than a geographical expression. Again and again it has been
overrun and destroyed and its population carried into exile or slavery
by its powerful neighbours. Nominally independent, it is now as
unstable as ever and on the edge of civil war.
- The empire of the West,
with her nucleus in the City Republic of Rome, while not yet mistress
of the world, is speedily heading that way. She is acknowledged the
one great military power of the time as well as the heir of Greece and
the centre of civilization.
- Up to the present the two states have had little or no contact with one
another. Then without solicitation on her part Rome was suddenly asked
take a hand in Judean affairs. A dispute had arisen between two
brothers over the succession to the petty throne, and the Roman general
Pompey, who happened to be in Damascus winding up bigger matters, was
called upon to arbitrate between the claimants. With the simple
directness of a republican soldier, Pompey exiled one of the brothers,
tossed the chief priesthood to his rival, and abolished the kingly
dignity altogether. Not to put too fine a point on it, Pompey’s
mediation amounted in effect to making Judea a Roman dependency.
- The
Jews, not unnaturally, objected; and Rome, to conciliate them and to
conform to local prejudice, restored the royal office. She appointed,
that is, a king of her own choosing. He was the son of an excise-man,
an Idumean by race, named Herod. But the Jews were not placated, and
continued making trouble. Rome thought it very ungrateful of them.
- All this is merely a prelude, and is introduced into the action to make
clear what follows. Jewish discontent grew to disaffection and open
revolt when their Gentile masters began importing into Jerusalem the
blessings of Western culture.
- Graven images, athletic games, Greek
drama, and gladiatorial shows were not to the Jewish taste.
- The pious
resented them as an offence in the nostrils of Jehovah, even though the
resident officials patiently explained they were meant for the
entertainment and edification of the non-Jewish garrison.
- The Judeans
resisted with especial strenuousness the advent of the efficient Roman
tax-gatherer. Above all, they wanted back a king of their own royal
line.
- Among the masses the rebellion took the form of a revival of the old
belief in a Messiah, a divinely appointed saviour who was to redeem his
people from the foreign yoke and make Judea supreme among the nations.
- Claimants to the mission were not wanting.
- In Galilee, one Judas led a
rather formidable insurrection, which enlisted much popular support.
- John, called the Baptist, operated in the Jordan country. He was
followed by another north-country man, Jesus of Nazareth.
- All three
were masters of the technique of couching incendiary political sedition
in harmless theological phrases. All three used the same signal of
revolt – “the time is at hand”. And three were speedily apprehended and
executed , both Galileans by crucifixion.
- The upheaval which brought Christianity into Europe was – or at
least may easily be shown to have been – planned and executed by Jews
as an act revenge against a great Gentile state (The Roman Empire). And when you talk
about Jewish conspiracies I cannot for the world understand why you do
not mention the destruction of Rome and the whole civilization of
antiquity concentrated under her banners, at the hands of Jewish
Christianity.
- We have done our work too thoroughly; you believe our propaganda too
implicitly.
- The coming of Christianity is to you not an ordinary
historical event growing out of other events of the time, it is the
fulfilment of a divine Jewish prophecy – with suitable amendments of
your own.
- It did not, as you see it, destroy a great Gentile
civilization and a great Gentile empire with which Jewry was at war;
- It
did not plunge mankind into barbarism and darkness for a thousand
years;
- It came to bring salvation to the Gentile world!
- Yet here, if ever, was a great subversive movement, hatched in
Palestine, spread by Jewish agitators, financed by Jewish money, taught
in Jewish pamphlets and broadsides, at a time when Jewry and Rome were
in a death struggle, and ending in the collapse of the great Gentile
empire.
- You do not even see it -- though an intelligent child, unfuddled
by theological magic, could tell you what it is all about after a hasty
reading of the simple record.
- And then you go on prattling of Jewish
conspiracies. Can you wonder that we Jews have always taken your
anti-Semites rather lightly -- as long as they did not resort to violence?
- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire let the cat out of the bag,
Gibbon, not being a parson dabbling in history, did not try to account
for the end of a great era by inventing fatuous nonsense about the vice
and degradation of Rome, about the decay of morals and faith in an
empire which was at that very time in the midst of its most glorious
creative period.
- Gibbon had no difficulty laying his finger on the malady that had rotted
and wasted away the noble edifice of antique civilization. He put
Christianity down – the law which went forth from Zion and the word of
God from Jerusalem – as the central cause of the decline and fall of
Rome and all she represented.
How did
Jews bring
Christianity to Jerusalem?
- But Gibbon did not go far enough.
- He left
wholly out of account the element of deliberation.
- He saw an alien
creed sweeping out of the East and overwhelming the fair lands of the
West.
- It never occurred to him that the whole scheme of salvation was
dedicated (i.e., done by Jewish design against Pagan Rome).
- Yet the facts are as plain as you please.
- Jesus began preaching a primitive form of populism, socialism and
pacificism.
- The effect was to gain him
the hostility of the substantial, propertied classes, the priest and
patriots generally, and to reduce his following to the poor, labouring
mass and the slaves.
- A sermon their late leader had once delivered upon a hillside summed up
for them the essence of his teachings, and they made it their rule of
life.
- It was a philosophy calculated to appeal profoundly to humble
people.
- It comforted those who suffered here on earth with promised
rewards beyond the grave.
- It made virtues of necessities of the weak.
- Men without hope in the future were admonished to take no thought for
the morrow.
- Men too helpless to resent insult or injury were taught to
resist not evil.
- Men condemned to lifelong drudgery and indigence were
assured of the dignity of labour and of poverty.
- The meek, the
despised, the disinherited, the downtrodden, were – in the hereafter –
to be the elect and favoured of God.
- The worldly, the ambitious, the
rich and powerful, were to be denied admission to heaven.
- The Ebionim – the paupers, as they called themselves – did not regard
their beliefs as a new religion.
- Jews they had been born, and Jews they
remained.
- The teachings of their master were rather in nature of a
social philosophy, an ethic of conduct, a way of life.
- To modern
Christians, who never tire of asking why the Jews did not accept Jesus
and his teachings, I can only answer that for a long time none but the
Jews did.
- To be surprised that the whole Jewish people did not turn
Ebionim is about as intelligent as to expect all Americans to join the
Unitarians or the Baptists or the Christian Scientists.
- In ordinary times little attention would have been paid to the ragged
brotherhood.
- Slaves and labourers for the most part, their meekness
might even have been encouraged by the soldier class.
- But with the
country in the midst of a struggle with a foreign foe, the unworldly
philosophy took on a dangerous aspect.
- It was a creed of disillusion,
resignation and defeat.
- It threatened to undermine the morale of the
nation’s fighting men in time of war.
- This blessing of the peacemakers,
this turning of the other cheek, this non-resistance, this love your
enemy, looked like a deliberate attempt to paralyse the national will
in a crisis and assure victory to the foe.
- So it is not surprising that the Jewish authorities began persecuting
the Ebionim.
- Their meetings were invaded and dispersed, their leaders
were clapped into jail, their doctrines were proscribed.
- It looked for
awhile as if the sect would be speedily wiped out.
- Then, unexpected,
the curtain rose on act three, and events took a sudden new turn.
Here is why and how
Jews brought
Christianity to the Gentiles?
- Perhaps the bitterest foe of the sectaries was one Saul, a maker of
tents.
- A native of Tarsus and thus a man of some education in Greek
culture, he despised the new teachings for their unworldliness and
their remoteness from life.
- A patriotic Jew, he dreaded their effect on
the national cause.
- A travelled man, versed in several languages, he
was ideally suited for the task of going about among the scattered
Jewish communities to counteract the spread of their socialistic
pacifistic doctrines.
- The leaders in Jerusalem appointed him chief
persecutor to the Christian.
- He was on his way to Damascus one day to arrest a group of the
sectaries when a novel idea came to him.
- In the quaint phrase of the
book of Acts he saw a vision.
- He saw as a matter of fact, two.
- He
perceived, to begin with, how utterly hopeless were the chances of
little Judea winning out in an armed conflict against the greatest
military power in the world.
- Second, and more important, it came to him
that the vagabond creed which he had been repressing might be forged
into an irresistible weapon against the formidable foe.
- Pacifism,
non-resistance, resignation, love, were dangerous teachings at home in Judea.
- HOWEVER: spread among the enemy’s legions, they might brake down their
discipline and thus yet bring victory to Jerusalem.
- Saul, in a word,
was probably the first man to see the possibilities of conducting war
by propaganda.
- He journeyed on to Damascus, and there, to the amazement alike of his
friends and of those he had gone to suppress, he announced his
conversion to the faith and applied for admission to the brotherhood.
- On his return to Jerusalem he laid his new strategy before the startled
Elders of Zion.
- After much debate and searching of souls, it was
adopted.
- More resistance was offered by the Christian leaders (Ebionim) of the
capital.
- They were mistrustful of his motives, and they feared that his
proposal to strip the faith of its ancient Jewish observances and
practices so as to make it acceptable to Gentiles would fill the
fraternity with alien half- converts, and dilute its strength.
- But in
the end he won them over, too.
- And so Saul, the fiercest persecutor of
Jesus’ followers, became Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles.
- And so,
incidentally, began the spread into pagan lands of the West, an
entirely new Oriental religion.
- Unfortunately for Paul’s plan, the new strategy worked much too well.
- His revamped and rather alluring theology made converts faster than he
had dared hope, or than he even wished.
- His idea, it should be kept in
mind, was at this stage purely defensive.
- He had as yet no thought of
evangelizing the world; he only hoped to discourage the enemy.
- With
that accomplished, and the Roman garrisons out of Palestine, he was
prepared to call a truce.
- But the slaves and oppressed of the Empire,
the wretched conscripts, and the starving proletariat of the capital
itself, found as much solace in the adapted Pauline version of the
creed as the poor Jews before them had found in the original teachings
of their crucified master.
- The result of this unforeseen success was to
open the enemy’s eyes to what was going on.
- Disturbing reports of
insubordination among the troops began pouring into Rome from the army
chiefs in Palestine and elsewhere.
- Instead of giving the imperial
authorities pause, the new tactics only stiffened their determination.
- Rome swooped down upon Jerusalem with fire and sword, and after a
fierce siege which lasted four years, she destroyed the nest of the
agitation (70 A.D.).
- At least she thought she had destroyed it.
- To the Romans, Christianity meant nothing more than Judaism militant,
anyhow, an interpretation which does not seem far from the facts.
- As to
Nero’s wish, he had at least half of it realized for him. Palestine was
so thoroughly annihilated that it has remained a political ruin to this
day (1928 AD).
-
- But Christianity was not so easily destroyed.
- Indeed, it was only after the fall of Jerusalem that Paul’s program
developed to the full.
- Hitherto, as I have said, his tactic had been
merely to frighten the conqueror, in the manner of Moses plaguing the
Pharaos.
- He had gone along cautious and hesitantly, taking care not to
arouse the powerful foe.
- He was willing to dangle his novel weapon
before the foe’s nose, and let him feel it’s edge, but he shrank from
thrusting it in full force.
- Now that the worst had happened and Judea
had nothing further to lose, he flung scruples to the wind and carried
the war into the enemy’s country.
- The goal now was nothing less than to
humble Rome as she had humbled Jerusalem, to wipe her off the map as
she had wiped out Judea.
- If Paul’s own writings fail to convince you of this interpretation of
his activities, I invite your attention to his more candid associate
John.
- Where Paul, operating within the shadow of the imperial palace
and half the time a prisoner in Roman jails, is obliged to deal in
parable and veiled hints, John, addressing himself to disaffected
Asiatics, can afford the luxury of plain speaking.
- At any rate, his
pamphlet entitled “Revelation” is, in truth, a revelation of what the
whole astonishing business is about.
- Rome, fancifully called Babylon, is minutely described in the language
of sputtering hate, as the mother of harlots and abominations of the
earth, as the woman drunken with the blood of the saints (Christians
and Jews), as the oppressor of “peoples and multitudes and nations and
tongues” and – to remove all doubt of her identity – as “that great
city which reigned over the Kings of the earth”.
- An Angel triumphantly
cries, Babylon the great is fallen” Then follows an orgiastic picture
of ruin.
- Commerce and industry and maritime trade are at an end.
- Art
and music and “the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride” are
silenced.
- The gentle Christian conquerors wallow in blood up to the
bridles of their horses.
- “Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy
apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her.”
- And what is the end and purpose of all this chaos and devastation?
- John
is not too reticent to tell us.
- For he closes his pious prophecy with a
vision of the glories of the new – that is, the restored – Jerusalem:
not any allegorical fantasy, I pray you, but literally Jerusalem, the
capital of a great reunited kingdom of “the twelve tribes of the
children of Israel”.
- Could any one ask for anything plainer?
- By the year 200 the efforts of Paul and John and their successors had
made such headway among all classes of Roman society that Christianity
had become the dominant cult throughout the empire.
- Meantime, as Paul
had shrewdly foreseen, Roman morale and discipline had quite broken
down, so that more and more the imperial legions, once the terror of
the world and the backbone of Western culture, went down to defeat
before barbarian invaders.
- In the year 326 the emperor Constantine,
hoping to check the insidious malady, submitted to conversion and
proclaimed Christianity the official religion. It was too late.
- After
him the emperor Julian tried to resort once more to suppression.
- But
neither resistance nor concession were of any use.
- The Roman body
politic has become thoroughly worm-eaten with Palestinian propaganda.
- Paul had triumphed.
- This at least is how, were I an anti-Semite in search of a credible
sample of subversive Jewish conspiracy, I would interpret the event of
a modified Jewish creed into the Western world.
Rebuttal from
The Christian Solution
Basically, Marcus Eli Ravage compares Jews to early American settlers,
weak and defenseless against an entire continent of dangerous savages,
and yet, having a secret weapon.
The smallpox virus infecting them in their own country, would become a
major plague to native Indians whom had never encountered this dread
disease, allowing the early settlers to thrive in the new land they had
just invaded without worrying about being overcome by massive
resistance from the natives.
Saint Paul, Christian Apostle to the Gentiles is repainted by Marcus
Eli Ravage as Jewish, uber-patriot, agent-provocateur, Saul of the
Jews, conspiratorially infecting the Roman Empire with the Jewish
disease of Christianity, which would prove devastating when unleashed
upon "the masses" in the Roman Empire, who had only previously been
exposed to backwards pagan worship and therefore having no defenses
against a real religion.
Per Ravage's own account, Paul was as Spain would later call Jews such
as him, a converso, because he only converted to Christianity in order
to use Christianity to advance Jewish interests; to use Christianity as
a deadly tool to destroy the Roman Empire from within.
I have to say, I'm impressed with the argument.
We have long held that Jews had already shown such nation destroying and nation building abilities:
- Been brought in as slaves to the 3,000 year old
Egyptian empire, Jews through God helping Moses, destroyed Egypt from
within, and Moses was able to lead his people to the Promised Land.
(This seems to have established the modus operandi of Judaism)
- Been brought in as slaves to the 1,000-year-old
Babylonian Empire, Jews destroyed Babylon from within in a manner of 60
year, such that Cyrus the Great invaded from Persia with barely a drop
of blood spilled.
- Been brought in as slaves to the then 500-year-old
Roman Empire, Jews encouraged the Roman masses to revolt against the
Roman Senate, such that the Roman masses aligned with the dictatorship
of Julius Caesar just a few years after the arrival of the Jews, having
Julius Caesar put down Pompey, the very Roman who had seized Jerusalem.
(The Roman Republic died under Caesar, but the Roman Empire lasted
another 500 years, so this was not the cause of the demise of the Roman
Empire. Jews needed another more potent tool)
- Aligned again with Persia in 614 AD to invade in a reconquest of Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire.
- Aligned with a man named Mohammad, son of an Arab
chieftain father and a Jewish mother, to again invade with a new
Jewish-inspired religion called Islam, in a reconquest of Jerusalem
from the Byzantine Empire in 637 AD and within 100 years, conquered
Spain to free the Sephardic Jews exiled there by Emperor Titus.
- Aligned with former Germanic people in the 1500's,
using the newly invented printing press, to create the Protestant
Reformation and to instill the Fake History of the Black Legend of the
Spanish Inquisition upon the strongest Catholic country of the day.
- Aligned with Germany to defeat the Christian Czar,
who had ambitions of invading the failing Ottoman Empire to retake
Constantinople and the Holy Lands for Christianity. When the Czar
was defeated, turning Russia into a communist hellhole, flipped support
away from Germany, by then aligning with England with a promise to
obtain British possession of Palestine by having Jews drag America into
WW1 under the Balfour Declaration.
- Aligned with everyone, even Stalin and Mao, to defeat
the one guy Jews hated more than anyone else, Hitler, who then created
the Black Legend of the Holocaust.
- Through the World Wars, completely destroyed the
Christian New World of the Renaissance, turning Christian Europe from
colonizers of the world to colonized by the EU under the UN.
Paul's hidden Jewish heritage
Paul the Apostle used his Latin name of Paul, most likely to hide his
Jewish identity of Saul, in order to be taken seriously by the Romans.
That is certainly a very common Jewish tactic.
In addition, much as Mohammad was taken seriously by the Arabs because his father
was an Arab chieftain, while being Jewish because his mother was Jewish;
much as Obama was taken seriously by blacks and Muslims alike because
his father was a black Muslim, while being Jewish because his mother
was Jewish; so too was Paul the Apostle taken seriously because his
father was a Roman citizen, while being Jewish because his mother was
Jewish.
It has been popularly assumed that Saul's name was changed when he
converted from Judaism to Christianity, but that is not the case.
His Jewish name was "Saul" (Hebrew: שָׁאוּל, Modern Sha'ul, Tiberian Šāʼűl; "asked for, prayed for, borrowed"), perhaps after the biblical King Saul, a fellow Benjamite
and the first king of Israel.
According to the Book of Acts, he
inherited Roman citizenship from his father. As a Roman citizen, he also
bore the Latin name of "Paul"—in biblical Greek: Παῦλος (Paulos), and in Latin: Paul. It was quite usual for the Jews of that time to have two names, one Hebrew, the other Latin or Greek.
Adopting his Roman name was typical of Paul's missionary style. His
method was to put people at their ease and to approach them with his
message in a language and style to which they could relate, as in 1 Cor
9:19–23
-- Wikipedia - Paul the Apostle
Paul was the one who De-Judified Christianity
Paul does seem to be the primary reason why Jewish-born Christians were
being asked to be "more tolerant and inclusive" of outsiders called
Gentiles.
The effect here could be double-edged if Paul was indeed an agent provocateur.
He could be innocently and honestly spreading Christianity to the
world, or devilishly and dishonestly spreading Christianity to a harsh
pagan-ruled world to corrupt them, both tactics needing to be far less
"Jewish" to be sold to outsiders.
While at the same time, Paul could be devilishly pursuing the converse
goal of corrupting the Jewish faith of the Jewish Christians so
that they would never again be accepted by Jesus-denying Jews for the
unacceptable sin of accepting non-circumcised gentiles.
A vital meeting between Paul and the Jerusalem church took place some time in the years 50–51, described in Acts 15:2 and usually seen as the same event mentioned by Paul in Galatians 2:1. The key question raised was whether Gentile converts needed to be circumcised. At this meeting, Paul states in his letter to the Galatians that Peter, James, and John accepted Paul's mission to the Gentiles.
Despite the agreement achieved at the Council of Jerusalem, Paul
recounts how he later publicly confronted Peter in a dispute sometimes
called the "Incident at Antioch",
over Peter's reluctance to share a meal with Gentile Christians in
Antioch because they did not strictly adhere to Jewish customs.
Writing later of the incident, Paul recounts, "I opposed [Peter] to
his face, because he was clearly in the wrong", and says he told Peter,
"You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?
-- Wikipedia : Paul the Apostle
And how did Paul sell this idea of allowing impure Gentiles into the
pure Christian Church? -- Through his revelation from God of
course.
"My brothers, you are well aware that from early days God made his
choice among you that through my mouth the Gentiles would hear the word
of the gospel and believe. And God, who knows the heart, bore witness
by granting them the Holy Spirit just as he did us. He made no
distinction between us and them, for by faith he purified their hearts.
Why, then, are you now putting God to the test by placing on the
shoulders of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we
have been able to bear? On the contrary, we believe that we are saved
through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they."
— Acts 15:7–11
"It is my
judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the
Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead we should write to them,
telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual
immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood."
— Acts 15:19–20
Paul has to be the real deal or Christianity is not
Since Paul wrote fully half the books of the New Testament, to say he
was illegitimate is tantamount to saying Christianity is illegitimate.
God made a new covenant with those who follow Christ. The Jewish people who rejected him Christ broke their covenant with God.
Christianity is the new Jewish religion starting in 33 AD and he gave Jews 37 years to repent.
By 70 AD, Rome destroyed Jerusalem along with the temple, exactly as
Christ predicted and not done by Christians or Christian conspirators,
but done by stiff necked Jews who could not assimulate into the
tolerant, inclusive, diverse, equal under God, people of the world,
whom Christ came to save.
Subversion complete?
Then why not stop??
You see, the words Jews liked to bandy about 100-years-ago in their
destroying of Christian kings, to be replaced by non-religious,
secular, democratic governments, and still bandy about today for use in
favor of minorities, strongly utilize the fundamental beliefs of
Christians, NOT Jews. That is, Jews have highjacked the Christian words
of tolerance, inclusive, diverse, equal under God. And they have
highjacked those Christian principles, not for Christian purposes, but
for Jewish purposes -- i.e., to make themselves included, and equal,
and tolerated, even though Christ specifically excluded Jews for not
being inclusive, for not being diverse, for not being tolerant, and
especially, for not believing in Jesus Christ.
In the final analysis, Marcus Eli Ravage would be more convincing if he
had said, "Our work of subverting the Roman Empire to a more peaceful
religion toward the Jews, to the Jew-friendly religion of Christianity,
is done, we have our country back thank you very much, and now we can
rest."
But no....
The same Jesus-denying Jews who rebelled against the ungodly acts of
the pagan Roman Empire, who sought revenge for subjugating the nation
of Israel, having succeeded in converting the Roman Empire to
Christianity, is now trying to re-convert those areas back to the
former ungodly Roman Empire they rebelled against 2,000 years ago; with
pornography, homosexuality, bread and circuses, the state sanctified
killing of abortion, Christianity prohibited in the public square, in
politics, in schools, in hospitals, all trying to recreate the pagan
One World Government the Romans were striving so hard to achieve for
themselves.
No thanks to Christian nations for having helped Jews regain Jerusalem
after 2,000 years (even if it were all due to Jewish manipulation of
the good nature of Christians.)
Part I: A Real Case Against the Jews
OF COURSE, YOU DO RESENT US. It is no good telling me you don’t. So let
us not waste any time on denials and alibis. You know you do, and I
know it, and we understand each other. To be sure, some of your best
friends are Jews, and all that. I have heard that before once or twice,
I think. And I know, too, that you do not include me personally—”me”
being any particular individual Jew—when you fling out at us in your
wholesale fashion, because I am, well, so different, don’t you know,
almost as good as one of yourselves. That little exemption does not,
somehow, move me to gratitude; but never mind that now. It is the
aggressive, climbing, pushing, materialistic sort you dislike—those, in
a word, who remind you so much of your own up-and-coming brethren. We
understand each other perfectly. I don’t hold it against you.
Bless my soul, I do not blame anybody for disliking anybody. The thing
that intrigues me about this anti-Jewish business, as you play at it,
is your total lack of grit. You are so indirect and roundabout with it,
you make such fantastic and transparent excuses, you seem to be
suffering from self-consciousness so horribly, that if the performance
were not grotesque it would be irritating.
It is not as if you were amateurs: you have been at it for over fifteen
centuries. Yet watching you and hearing your childish pretexts, one
might get the impression that you did not know yourselves what it is
all about. You resent us, but you cannot clearly say why. You think up
a new excuse—a “reason” is what you call it—every other day. You have
been piling up justifications for yourselves these many hundreds of
years and each new invention is more laughable than the last and each
new excuse contradicts and annihilates the last.
Not so many years ago I used to hear that we were money-grubbers and
commercial materialists; now the complaint is being whispered around
that no art and no profession is safe against Jewish invasion.
We are, if you are to be believed, at once clannish and exclusive and
unassimilable because we won’t intermarry with you, and we are also
climbers and pushers and a menace to your racial integrity.
Our standard of living is so low that we create your slums and sweated
industries, and so high that we crowd you out of your best residential
sections.
We shirk our patriotic duty in wartime because we are pacifists by
nature and tradition, and we are the arch-plotters of universal wars
and the chief beneficiaries of those wars (see the late “Dearborn
Independent,” passim, and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”).
We are at once the founders and leading adherents of capitalism and the chief perpetrators of the rebellion against capitalism.
Surely, history has nothing like us for versatility!
And, oh! I almost forgot the reason of reasons. We are the stiff-necked
people who never accepted Christianity, and we are the criminal people
who crucified its founder.
But I tell you, you are self-deceivers. You lack either the
self-knowledge or the mettle to face the facts squarely and own up to
the truth. You resent the Jew not because, as some of you seem to
think, he crucified Jesus but because he gave him birth. Your real
quarrel with us is not that we have rejected Christianity but that we
have imposed it upon you!
Your loose, contradictory charges against us are not a patch on the
blackness of our proved historic offense. You accuse us of stirring up
revolution in Moscow. Suppose we admit the charge. What of it? Compared
with what Paul the Jew of Tarsus accomplished in Rome, the Russian
upheaval is a mere street brawl.
You make much noise and fury about the undue Jewish influence in your
theaters and movie palaces. Very good; granted your complaint is
well-founded. But what is that compared to our staggering influence in
your churches, your schools, your laws and your governments, and the
very thoughts you think every day?
A clumsy Russian forges a set of papers and publishes them in a book
called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which shows that we
plotted to bring on the late World War. You believe that book: All
right. For the sake of argument we will underwrite every word of it. It
is genuine and authentic. But what is that beside the unquestionable
historical conspiracy which we have carried out, which we have never
denied because you never had the courage to charge us with it, and of
which the full record is extant for anybody to read?
If you really are serious when you talk of Jewish plots, may I not
direct your attention to one worth talking about? What use is it
wasting words on the alleged control of your public opinion by Jewish
financiers, newspaper owners and movie magnates, when you might as well
justly accuse us of the proved control of your whole civilization by
the Jewish Gospels?
You have not begun to appreciate the real depth of our guilt. We are
intruders. We are disturbers. We are subverters. We have taken your
natural world, your ideals, your destiny, and played havoc with them.
We have been at the bottom not merely of the latest great war but of
nearly all your wars, not only of the Russian but of every other major
revolution in your history. We have brought discord and confusion and
frustration into your personal and public life. We are still doing it.
No one can tell how long we shall go on doing it.
Look back a little and see what has happened. Nineteen hundred years
ago you were an innocent, carefree, pagan race. You worshipped
countless gods and goddesses, the spirits of the air, of the running
streams and of the woodland. You took unblushing pride in the glory of
your naked bodies. You carved images of your gods and of the
tantalizing human figure. You delighted in the combats of the field,
the arena and the battle-ground. War and slavery were fixed
institutions in your systems. Disporting yourselves on the hillsides
and in the valleys of the great outdoors, you took to speculating on
the wonder and mystery of life and laid the foundations of natural
science and philosophy. Yours was a noble, sensual culture, unirked by
the prickings of a social conscience or by any sentimental questionings
about human equality. Who knows what great and glorious destiny might
have been yours if we had left you alone.
But we did not leave you alone. We took you in hand and pulled down the
beautiful and generous structure you had reared, and changed the whole
course of your history. We conquered you as no empire of yours ever
subjugated Africa or Asia. And we did it all without armies, without
bullets, without blood or turmoil, without force of any kind. We did it
solely by the irresistible might of our spirit, with ideas, with
propaganda.
We made you the willing and unconscious bearers of our mission to the
whole world, to the barbarous races of the earth, to the countless
unborn generations. Without fully understanding what we were doing to
you, you became the agents at large of our racial tradition, carrying
our gospel to the unexplored ends of the earth.
Our tribal customs have become the core of your moral code. Our tribal
laws have furnished the basic groundwork of all your august
constitutions and legal systems. Our legends and our folk-tales are the
sacred lore which you croon to your infants. Our poets have filled your
hymnals and your prayer-books. Our national history has become an
indispensable part of the learning of your pastors and priests and
scholars. Our kings, our statesmen, our prophets, our warriors are your
heroes. Our ancient little country is your Holy Land. Our national
literature is your Holy Bible. What our people thought and taught has
become inextricably woven into your very speech and tradition, until no
one among you can be called educated who is not familiar with our
racial heritage.
Jewish artisans and Jewish fishermen are your teachers and your saints,
with countless statues carved in their image and innumerable cathedrals
raised to their memories. A Jewish maiden is your ideal of motherhood
and womanhood. A Jewish rebel-prophet is the central figure in your
religious worship. We have pulled down your idols, cast aside your
racial inheritance, and substituted for them our God and our
traditions. No conquest in history can even remotely compare with this
clean sweep of our conquest over you.
How did we do it? Almost by accident. Two thousand years ago nearly, in
far-off Palestine, our religion had fallen into decay and materialism.
Money-changers were in possession of the temple. Degenerate, selfish
priests mulcted our people and grew fat. Then a young patriot-idealist
arose and went about the land calling for a revival of faith. He had no
thought of setting up a new church. Like all the prophets before him,
his only aim was to purify and revitalize the old creed. He attacked
the priests and drove the money-changers from the temple. This brought
him into conflict with the established order and its supporting
pillars. The Roman authorities, who were in occupation of the country,
fearing his revolutionary agitation as a political effort to oust them,
arrested him, tried him and condemned him to death by crucifixion, a
common form of execution at that time.
The followers of Jesus of Nazareth, mainly slaves and poor workmen, in
their bereavement and disappointment, turned away from the world and
formed themselves into a brotherhood of pacifist non-resisters, sharing
the memory of their crucified leader and living together
communistically. They were merely a new sect in Judea, without power or
consequence, neither the first nor the last.
Only after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans did the new creed
come into prominence. Then a patriotic Jew named Paul or Saul conceived
the idea of humbling the Roman power by destroying the morale of its
soldiery with the doctrines of love and non-resistance preached by the
little sect of Jewish Christians. He became the Apostle to the
Gentiles, he who hitherto had been one of the most active persecutors
of the band. And so well did Paul do his work that within four
centuries the great empire which had subjugated Palestine along with
half of the world, was a heap of ruins. And the law which went forth
from Zion became the official religion of Rome.
This was the beginning of our dominance in your world. But it was only
a beginning. From this time forth your history is little more than a
struggle for mastery between your own old pagan spirit and our Jewish
spirit. Half your wars, great and little, are religious wars, fought
over the interpretation of one thing or another in our teachings. You
no sooner broke free from your primitive religious simplicity and
attempted the practice of the pagan Roman learning than Luther armed
with our gospels arose to down you and re-enthrone our heritage. Take
the three principal revolutions in modern times—the French, the
American and the Russian. What are they but the triumph of the Jewish
idea of social, political and economic justice?
And the end is still a long way off. We still dominate you. At this
very moment your churches are torn asunder by a civil war between
Fundamentalists and Modernists, that is to say between those who cling
to our teachings and traditions literally and those who are striving by
slow steps to dispossess us. In Dayton, Tennessee, a Bible-bred
community forbids the teaching of your science because it conflicts
with our ancient Jewish account of the origin of life; and Mr. Bryan,
the leader of the anti-Jewish Ku Klux Klan in the Democratic National
Convention, makes the supreme fight of his life in our behalf, without
noticing the contradiction. Again and again the Puritan heritage of
Judea breaks out in waves of stage censorship, Sunday blue laws and
national prohibition acts. And while these things are happening you
twaddle about Jewish influence in the movies!
Is it any wonder you resent us? We have put a clog upon your progress.
We have imposed upon you an alien book and an alien faith which you
cannot swallow or digest, which is at cross-purposes with your native
spirit, which keeps you ever-lastingly ill-at-ease, and which you lack
the spirit either to reject or to accept in full.
In full, of course, you never have accepted our Christian teachings. In
your hearts you still are pagans. You still love war and graven images
and strife. You still take pride in the glory of the nude human figure.
Your social conscience, in spite of all democracy and all your social
revolutions, is still a pitifully imperfect thing. We have merely
divided your soul, confused your impulses, paralyzed your desires. In
the midst of battle you are obliged to kneel down to him who commanded
you to turn the other cheek, who said “Resist not evil” and “Blessed
are the peace-makers.” In your lust for gain you are suddenly disturbed
by a memory from your Sunday-school days about taking no thought for
the morrow. In your industrial struggles, when you would smash a strike
without compunction, you are suddenly reminded that the poor are
blessed and that men are brothers in the Fatherhood of the Lord. And as
you are about to yield to temptation, your Jewish training puts a
deterrent hand on your shoulder and dashes the brimming cup from your
lips. You Christians have never become Christianized. To that extent we
have failed with you. But we have forever spoiled the fun of paganism
for you.
So why should you not resent us? If we were in your place we should
probably dislike you more cordially than you do us. But we should make
no bones about telling you why. We should not resort to subterfuges and
transparent pretexts. With millions of painfully respectable Jewish
shopkeepers all about us we should not insult your intelligence and our
own honesty by talking about communism as a Jewish philosophy. And with
millions of hard-working impecunious Jewish peddlers and laborers we
should not make ourselves ridiculous by talking about international
capitalism as a Jewish monopoly. No, we should go straight to the
point. We should contemplate this confused, ineffectual muddle which we
call civilization, this half-Christian half-pagan medley, and—were our
places reversed—we should say to you point-blank: “For this mess thanks
to you, to your prophets and to your Bible.”
Part II: Commissary to the Gentiles
You Christians worry and complain about the Jew’s influence in your
civilization. We are, you say, an international people, a compact
minority in your midst, with traditions, interests, aspirations and
objectives distinct from your own. And you declare that this state of
affairs is a menace to your orderly development; it confuses your
impulses; it defeats your purposes; it muddles up your destiny. I do
not altogether see the danger. Your world has always been ruled by
minorities; and it seems to me a matter of indifference what the remote
origin and professed creed of the governing clique is. The influence,
on the other hand, is certainly there, and it is vastly greater and
more insidious than you appear to realize.
That is what puzzles and amuses and sometimes exasperates us about your
game of Jew-baiting. It sounds so portentous. You go about whispering
terrifyingly of the Jew in this and that and the other thing. It makes
us quake. We are conscious of the injury we did you when we imposed
upon you our alien faith and traditions. Suppose, we say trembling, you
should wake up to the fact that your religion, your education, your
morals, your social, governmental and legal systems are fundamentally
of our making! And then you specify, and talk vaguely of Jewish
financiers and Jewish motion-picture promoters, and our terror
dissolves in laughter. The Goi, we see with relief, will never know the
real blackness of our crimes.
We cannot make it out. Either you do not know or you have not the
courage to charge us with those deeds for which there is at least a
shadow of evidence and which an intelligent judge and jury could
examine without impatience. Why bandy about unconvincing trifles when
you might so easily indict us for serious and provable offences? Why
throw up to us a patent and a clumsy forgery such as the Protocols of
the Elders Zion when you might as well confront us with the Revelation
of St. John? Why talk about Marx and Trotski when you have Jesus of
Nazereth and Paul of Tarsus to confound us with?
You call us subverters, agitators, revolution-mongers. It is the truth,
and I cower at your discovery. It could be shown with only the
slightest straining and juggling of the facts that we have been at the
bottom of all the major revolutions in your history. We undoubtedly had
a sizeable finger in the Lutheran Rebellion, and it is simply a fact
that we were the prime movers in the bourgeois democratic revolutions
of the century before the last, both in France and America. If we were
not, we did not know our own interests. But do you point your accusing
finger at us and charge us with these heinous and recorded crimes? Not
at all? You fantastically lay at our door the recent great War and the
upheaval in Russia, which have done not only the most injury to the
Jews themselves but which a school-boy could have foreseen would have
that result.
But even these plots and revolutions are as nothing compared with the
great conspiracy which we engineered at the beginning of this era and
which was destined to make the creed of a Jewish sect the religion of
the Western world. The Reformation was not designed in malice purely.
It squared us with an ancient enemy and restored our Bible to it’s
place of honour in Christendom, The Republican revolutions of the
Eighteenth century freed us of our age-long political and social
disabilities. They benefited us, but they did you no harm. On the
contrary, they prospered and expanded you. You owe your pre-eminence in
the world to them. But the upheaval which brought Christianity into
Europe was – or at least may easily be shown to have been – planned and
executed by Jews as an act revenge against a great Gentile state. And
when you talk about Jewish conspiracies I cannot for the world
understand why you do not mention the destruction of Rome and the whole
civilization of antiquity concentrated under her banners, at the hands
of Jewish Christianity.
It is unbelievable, but you Christians do not seem to know where your
religion came from, nor how, nor why. Your historians, with one great
exception, do not tell you. The documents in these case, which are part
of your Bible, you chant over but do not read. We have done our work
too thoroughly; you believe our propaganda too implicitly. The coming
of Christianity is to you not an ordinary historical event growing out
of other events of the time, it is the fulfilment of a divine Jewish
prophecy – with suitable amendments of your own. It did not, as you see
it, destroy a great Gentile civilization and a great Gentile empire
with which Jewry was at war; it did not plunge mankind into barbarism
and darkness for a thousand years; it came to bring salvation to the
Gentile world!
Yet here, if ever, was a great subversive movement, hatched in
Palestine, spread by Jewish agitators, financed by Jewish money, taught
in Jewish pamphlets and broadsides, at a time when Jewry and Rome were
in a death struggle, and ending in the collapse of the great Gentile
empire. You do not even see it, though an intelligent child, unfuddled
by theological magic, could tell you what it is all about after a hasty
reading of the simple record. And then you go on prattling of Jewish
conspiracies and cite as instances the Great War and the Russian
Revolution! Can you wonder that we Jews have always taken your
anti-Semites rather lightly, as long as they did not resort to violence?
And mind you, no less an authority than Gibbon long ago tried to
enlighten you. It is now a century and a half since The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire let the cat out of the bag, Gibbon, not being
a parson dabbling in history, did not try to account for the end of a
great era by inventing fatuous nonsense about the vice and degradation
of Rome, about the decay of morals and faith in an empire which was at
that very time in the midst of its most glorious creative period. How
could he? He was living in the Augustan Age in London which – in spite
of nearly two thousand years since the coming of Christian salvation –
was a good replica of Augustan Rome in the matter of refined lewdness
as the foggy islanders could make it. No, Gibbons was a race-conscious
Gentile and an admirer of the culture of the pagan West, as well as an
historian with brains and eyes. Therefore he had no difficulty laying
his finger on the malady that had rotted and wasted away the noble
edifice of antique civilization. He put Christianity down – the law
which went forth from Zion and the word of God from Jerusalem – as the
central cause of the decline and fall of Rome and all she represented.
So far so good. But Gibbon did not go far enough. He was born and died,
you see, a century before the invention of scientific anti-Semitism. He
left wholly out of account the element of deliberation. He saw an alien
creed sweeping out of the East and overwhelming the fair lands of the
West. It never occurred to him that the whole scheme of salvation was
dedicated. Yet the facts are as plain as you please.
Let me in very brief recount the tale, unembroidered by miracle, prophecy or magic.
For a good perspective, I shall have to go back a space. The action
conveniently falls into four parts, rising to a climax in the third.
The time, when the first curtain rises, is roughly 65 B.C. Dramatis
personae are, minor parts aside, Judea and Rome. Judea is a tiny
kingdom off the Eastern Mediterranean. For five centuries it has been
hardly more than a geographical expression. Again and again it has been
overrun and destroyed and its population carried into exile or slavery
by its powerful neighbours. Nominally independent, it is now as
unstable as ever and on the edge of civil war. The empire of the West,
with her nucleus in the City Republic of Rome, while not yet mistress
of the world, is speedily heading that way . She is acknowledged the
one great military power of the time as well as the heir of Greece and
the centre of civilization.
Up to the present the two states have had little or no contact with one
another. Then without solicitation on her part Rome was suddenly asked
take a hand in Judean affairs. A dispute had arisen between two
brothers over the succession to the petty throne, and the Roman general
Pompey, who happened to be in Damascus winding up bigger matters, was
called upon to arbitrate between the claimants. With the simple
directness of a republican soldier, Pompey exiled one of the brothers,
tossed the chief priesthood to his rival, and abolished the kingly
dignity altogether. Not to put too fine a point on it, Pompey’s
mediation amounted in effect to making Judea a Roman dependency. The
Jews, not unnaturally, objected; and Rome, to conciliate them and to
conform to local prejudice, restored the royal office. She appointed,
that is, a king of her own choosing. He was the son of an excise-man,
an Idumean by race, named Herod. But the Jews were not placated, and
continued making trouble. Rome thought it very ungrateful of them.
All this is merely a prelude, and is introduced into the action to make
clear what follows. Jewish discontent grew to disaffection and open
revolt when their Gentile masters began importing into Jerusalem the
blessings of Western culture. Graven images, athletic games, Greek
drama, and gladiatorial shows were not to the Jewish taste. The pious
resented them as an offence in the nostrils of Jehovah, even though the
resident officials patiently explained they were meant for the
entertainment and edification of the non-Jewish garrison. The Judeans
resisted with especial strenuousness the advent of the efficient Roman
tax-gatherer. Above all, they wanted back a king of their own royal
line.
Among the masses the rebellion took the form of a revival of the old
belief in a Messiah, a divinely appointed saviour who was to redeem his
people from the foreign yoke and make Judea supreme among the nations.
Claimants to the mission were not wanting. In Galilee, one Judas led a
rather formidable insurrection, which enlisted much popular support.
John, called the Baptist, operated in the Jordan country. He was
followed by another north-country man, Jesus of Nazareth. All three
were masters of the technique of couching incendiary political sedition
in harmless theological phrases. All three used the same signal of
revolt – “the time is at hand”. And three were speedily apprehended and
executed , both Galileans by crucifixion.
Personal qualities aside, Jesus of Nazareth was, like his predecessors,
a political agitator engaged in liberating his country from the foreign
oppressor. There is even considerable evidence that he entertained an
ambition to become king of an independent Judea. He claimed, or his
biographers later claimed for him, descent from the ancient royal line
of David. But his paternity is somewhat confused. The same writers who
traced the origin of his mother’s husband back to the psalmist-king
also pictured Jesus as the son of Jehovah, and admitted that Joseph was
not his father.
It seems, however, that Jesus before long realized the hopelessness of
his political mission and turned his oratorical gifts and his great
popularity with masses in quite another direction. He began preaching a
primitive form of populism, socialism and pacificism. The effect of
this change in his program was to gain him the hostility of the
substantial, propertied classes, the priest and patriots generally, and
to reduce his following to the poor, labouring mass and the slaves.
After his death these lowly disciples formed themselves into a
communistic brotherhood. A sermon their late leader had once delivered
upon a hillside summed up for them the essence of his teachings, and
they made it their rule of life. It was a philosophy calculated to
appeal profoundly to humble people. It comforted those who suffered
here on earth with promised rewards beyond the grave. It made virtues
of necessities of the weak. Men without hope in the future were
admonished to take no thought for the morrow. Men too helpless to
resent insult or injury were taught to resist not evil. Men condemned
to lifelong drudgery and indigence were assured of the dignity of
labour and of poverty. The meek, the despised, the disinherited, the
downtrodden, were – in the hereafter – to be the elect and favoured of
God. The worldly, the ambitious, the rich and powerful, were to be
denied admission to heaven.
The upshot, then, of Jesus’ mission was a new sect in Judea. It was
neither the first nor the last. Judea, like modern America, was a
fertile soil for strange creeds. The Ebionim – the paupers, as they
called themselves – did not regard their beliefs as a new religion.
Jews they had been born, and Jews they remained. The teachings of their
master were rather in nature of a social philosophy, an ethic of
conduct, a way of life. To modern Christians, who never tire of asking
why the Jews did not accept Jesus and his teachings, I can only answer
that for a long time none but the Jews did. To be surprised that the
whole Jewish people did not turn Ebionim is about as intelligent as to
expect all Americans to join the Unitarians or the Baptists or the
Christian Scientists.
In ordinary times little attention would have been paid to the ragged
brotherhood. Slaves and labourers for the most part, their meekness
might even have been encouraged by the soldier class. But with the
country in the midst of a struggle with a foreign foe, the unworldly
philosophy took on a dangerous aspect. It was a creed of disillusion,
resignation and defeat. It threatened to undermine the morale of the
nation’s fighting men in time of war. This blessing of the peacemakers,
this turning of the other cheek, this non-resistance, this love your
enemy, looked like a deliberate attempt to paralyse the national will
in a crisis and assure victory to the foe.
So it is not surprising that the Jewish authorities began persecuting
the Ebionim. Their meetings were invaded and dispersed, their leaders
were clapped into jail, their doctrines were proscribed. It looked for
awhile as if the sect would be speedily wiped out. Then, unexpected,
the curtain rose on act three, and events took a sudden new turn.
Perhaps the bitterest foe of the sectaries was one Saul, a maker of
tents. A native of Tarsus and thus a man of some education in Greek
culture, he despised the new teachings for their unworldliness and
their remoteness from life. A patriotic Jew, he dreaded their effect on
the national cause. A travelled man, versed in several languages, he
was ideally suited for the task of going about among the scattered
Jewish communities to counteract the spread of their socialistic
pacifistic doctrines. The leaders in Jerusalem appointed him chief
persecutor to the Ebionim.
He was on his way to Damascus one day to arrest a group of the
sectaries when a novel idea came to him. In the quaint phrase of the
book of Acts he saw a vision. He saw as a matter of fact, two. He
perceived, to begin with, how utterly hopeless were the chances of
little Judea winning out in an armed conflict against the greatest
military power in the world. Second, and more important, it came to him
that the vagabond creed which he had been repressing might be forged
into an irresistible weapon against the formidable foe. Pacifism,
non-resistance, resignation, love, were dangerous teachings at home.
Spread among the enemy’s legions, they might brake down their
discipline and thus yet bring victory to Jerusalem. Saul, in a word,
was probably the first man to see the possibilities of conducting war
by propaganda.
He journeyed on to Damascus, and there, to the amazement alike of his
friends and of those he had gone to suppress, he announced his
conversion to the faith and applied for admission to the brotherhood.
On his return to Jerusalem he laid his new strategy before the startled
Elders of Zion. After much debate and searching of souls, it was
adopted. More resistance was offered by the leaders Ebionim of the
capital. They were mistrustful of his motives, and they feared that his
proposal to strip the faith of its ancient Jewish observances and
practices so as to make it acceptable to Gentiles would fill the
fraternity with alien half- converts, and dilute its strength. But in
the end he won them over, too. And so Saul, the fiercest persecutor of
Jesus’ followers, became Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles. And so,
incidentally, began the spread into pagan lands of the West, an
entirely new Oriental religion.
Unfortunately for Paul’s plan, the new strategy worked much too well.
His revamped and rather alluring theology made converts faster than he
had dared hope, or than he even wished. His idea, it should be kept in
mind, was at this stage purely defensive. He had as yet no thought of
evangelizing the world; he only hoped to discourage the enemy. With
that accomplished, and the Roman garrisons out of Palestine, he was
prepared to call a truce. But the slaves and oppressed of the Empire,
the wretched conscripts, and the starving proletariat of the capital
itself, found as much solace in the adapted Pauline version of the
creed as the poor Jews before them had found in the original teachings
of their crucified master. The result of this unforeseen success was to
open the enemy’s eyes to what was going on. Disturbing reports of
insubordination among the troops began pouring into Rome from the army
chiefs in Palestine and elsewhere. Instead of giving the imperial
authorities pause, the new tactics only stiffened their determination.
Rome swooped down upon Jerusalem with fire and sword, and after a
fierce siege which lasted four years, she destroyed the nest of the
agitation (70 A.D.). At least she thought she had destroyed it.
The historians of the time leave us in no doubt as to the aims of Rome.
They tell us that Nero sent Vespasian and his son Titus with definite
and explicit orders to annihilate Palestine and Christianity together.
To the Romans, Christianity meant nothing more than Judaism militant,
anyhow, an interpretation which does not seem far from the facts. As to
Nero’s wish, he had at least half of it realized for him. Palestine was
so thoroughly annihilated that it has remained a political ruin to this
day. But Christianity was not so easily destroyed.
Indeed, it was only after the fall of Jerusalem that Paul’s program
developed to the full. Hitherto, as I have said, his tactic had been
merely to frighten the conqueror, in the manner of Moses plaguing the
Pharaos. He had gone along cautious and hesitantly, taking care not to
arouse the powerful foe. He was willing to dangle his novel weapon
before the foe’s nose, and let him feel it’s edge, but he shrank from
thrusting it in full force. Now that the worst had happened and Judea
had nothing further to lose, he flung scruples to the wind and carried
the war into the enemy’s country. The goal now was nothing less than to
humble Rome as she had humbled Jerusalem, to wipe her off the map as
she had wiped out Judea.
If Paul’s own writings fail to convince you of this interpretation of
his activities, I invite your attention to his more candid associate
John. Where Paul, operating within the shadow of the imperial palace
and half the time a prisoner in Roman jails, is obliged to deal in
parable and veiled hints, John, addressing himself to disaffected
Asiatics, can afford the luxury of plain speaking. At any rate, his
pamphlet entitled “Revelation” is, in truth, a revelation of what the
whole astonishing business is about.
Rome, fancifully called Babylon, is minutely described in the language
of sputtering hate, as the mother of harlots and abominations of the
earth, as the woman drunken with the blood of the saints (Christians
and Jews), as the oppressor of “peoples and multitudes and nations and
tongues” and – to remove all doubt of her identity – as “that great
city which reigned over the Kings of the earth”. An Angel triumphantly
cries, Babylon the great is fallen” Then follows an orgiastic picture
of ruin. Commerce and industry and maritime trade are at an end. Art
and music and “the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride” are
silenced. The gentle Christian conquerors wallow in blood up to the
bridles of their horses. “Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy
apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her.”
And what is the end and purpose of all this chaos and devastation? John
is not too reticent to tell us. For he closes his pious prophecy with a
vision of the glories of the new – that is, the restored – Jerusalem:
not any allegorical fantasy, I pray you, but literally Jerusalem, the
capital of a great reunited kingdom of “the twelve tribes of the
children of Israel”.
Could any one ask for anything plainer?
Of course, no civilization could forever hold out against this kind of
assault . By the year 200 the efforts of Paul and John and their
successors had made such headway among all classes of Roman society
that Christianity had become the dominant cult throughout the empire.
Meantime, as Paul had shrewdly foreseen, Roman morale and discipline
had quite broken down, so that more and more the imperial legions, once
the terror of the world and the backbone of Western culture, went down
to defeat before barbarian invaders. In the year 326 the emperor
Constantine, hoping to check the insidious malady, submitted to
conversion and proclaimed Christianity the official religion. It was
too late. After him the emperor Julian tried to resort once more to
suppression. But neither resistance nor concession were of any use. The
Roman body politic has become thoroughly worm-eaten with Palestinian
propaganda. Paul had triumphed.
This at least is how, were I an anti-Semite in search of a credible
sample of subversive Jewish conspiracy, I would interpret the event of
a modified Jewish creed into the Western world.
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http://www.thechristiansolution.com/doc2017/835_GreatLegend.html
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Last Hope for America
Christian Libertarian: Harmonious Union
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