The Great Revilo Oliver: The Jewish Plague, part 9

A rational look at the Jewish Question: What was the real, hidden origin of Christianity?

American Dissident Voices broadcast of October 7, 2017

by Kevin Alfred Strom

WHAT WAS THE REAL, hidden origin of Christianity? What was the Jewish connection to the many early Christian sects? — many of which were explicitly Jewish supremacist, and which had doctrines and practices that can only be described as perverted and bizarre.

No man is better qualified to increase our understanding of these questions than the late, great Professor Revilo Pendleton Oliver — classicist, linguist, scholar, and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. This week we continue our excerpts from his insightful work on the subject, under the title, “The Jewish Plague, part 9.” I give you the words of Revilo P. Oliver:

* * *

The Jewish Plague
part 9

by Revilo P. Oliver

CHRISTIANITY, cont’d.

THE Carpocratians, who seem to have been a numerous and powerful [Christian] sect in their day, admitted goyim on equal terms, since Salvation was for all those who had been ‘redeemed by Christ’ from servitude to man-made laws and materialism. Christ [they said] had come to free mankind from oppression and to bestow on the righteous a new freedom: What matters is spiritual salvation, and we must show our emancipation from material things by recognizing no human law whatsoever and by feeling free to indulge any lust and perform any act to which the spirit may move us.

Like the Ebionites, the Carpocratians preached a total communism, with all property and women to be for the use of everyone. They admitted women for the sake of general promiscuity in the modern manner, and although they had no objection to homosexuality, they thus differed from some other brands of Christians, who excluded females as “unworthy of the Kingdom of God” and practiced only male homosexuality.

There were many other Christian sects, each with its own revelations from God via Jesus, such as the Naasenes, who worshipped snakes as symbols and incarnations of divine power because snakes shed their skins periodically and so are born again and live forever; the Adamites, whose specialty was going nude in public to show that they had been redeemed by Christ from original sin and were thereby emancipated from all the laws of sinful man; and scores of others.

My guess is that the Carpocratians and similar canaille were the dominant sects of Christianity until the persecutions by the wicked pagan emperors in the Third Century made those forms of Christianity unpopular because likely to be unhealthy. The tales of the martyrs are all fiction, of course, (Jerome, in a letter that was included, doubtless by oversight, in the official collection of his correspondence, boasts of his skill in inventing martyr stories to edify the faithful), but some Roman emperors did make systematic attempts to enforce respect for law and accepted morality by trying to excise the Christian tumor on the state, and I think it likely that these persecutions were sufficiently successful to leave the Gospel-business open to sects that at least professed the relatively innocuous doctrines that finally became “orthodox.”

Our holy men try to dodge the facts of early Christianity by calling “gnostic” all the sects that weren’t “orthodox” by standards that were not devised before the Fourth Century. This, of course, is sheer dishonesty. A “Gnosticism” is a religious sect that claims to have a gnosis, a knowledge of supernatural things, revealed to them by some Savior who was either an incarnate god or a divinely-inspired superman. Obviously, all Christian sects are Gnostic in that sense, because they all claim to be based on revelations made by Christ, who, in the various sects, was regarded as having been either an incarnation of a god or a man whom John the Baptist or some other prophet had pumped full of Holy Spirit.

In the first four centuries A.D. the world was full of Gnostics peddling special revelations, and, of course, Christ was only one of the Saviors: others were Baruch, Gamaliel, Tat (also known as the Egyptian god Toth), Seth (an Egyptian god), Balaam, Ezechiel, Adam (whose “books” had just been “discovered”), Moses, Enoch, Marsanes, Nicotheus, Phosilampes, Mithra, Zoroaster, Zervan, et al., et al. In the early centuries of our era, the Near East was a Bedlam filled with the insane ravings of fakirs peddling their Saviors and their forged Gospels, and at this distance it is impossible to tell the difference between madmen, hallucinés who got visions of god from eating the sacred mushroom, Amanita muscaria, and shysters fleecing the yokels with mystic gabble.

(One cannot read much of the gibberish without feeling queasy and dizzy, but for a quick survey of the stuff that our holy men want to sweep under the rug, see Jean Doresse, Les livres secrets des Gnostiques d’Egypte, Paris, 1959, which surveys the books found at Chenoboskion a few years before.)

The one significant thing is that the peddlers of all forms of Gnosticism (including Christian cults before the Third Century) were almost all Jews. If you will look in your Scientific American for January 1973, pp. 80-87, you will note that the author has to admit that “it becomes increasingly evident that much of Gnosticism is probably of Jewish origin.” He is naturally cautious, wary of offending God’s Peculiar People. Although I admit that one cannot identify the race of some of the more prominent Salvation-hucksters, I think it significant that those whom one can identify racially always turn out to be Jews, and I would delete “much of” and “probably” in the author’s statement.

There can be no question but that Christianity was originally a Jewish promotion, and it is noteworthy that the Christians who try to make their cult respectable in the Third Century claim that they repudiate the Jews. One of the earliest to do this was Tertullian, a Carthaginian shyster, whose Apologeticum, a defense of Christianity, was written at the very beginning of the Third Century. He asserts that Christianity is not a conspiracy of revolutionaries and degenerates, as was commonly believed, and claims that it is an association of loving brothers who have preserved the faith that the Jews forsook — which has been the common story ever since. Our holy men salvage Tertullian by claiming that he was “orthodox” in his early writings, but then, alas! became a Montanist heretic, poor fellow.

Tertullian is the author of the famous dictum that he believes the impossible because it is absurd (credo quia absurdum), so he is naturally dear to the hearts of the pious. How much Jerome and other saints have tampered with the facts to make Tertullian seem “orthodox” in his early works has been most fully shown by Timothy Barnes in his Tertullian (Oxford, 1971), but even he spends a hundred pages pawing over chronological difficulties that can be reconciled by what seems to me the simple and obvious solution: Tertullian, who was evidently a pettifogging lawyer before he got into the Gospel-business, had sense enough to eliminate from his brief for the Christians facts that would have displeased the pagans whom he was trying to convince that Christians represented no threat to civilized society; he accordingly concealed in his apologetic works the peculiar doctrines of the Christian sect to which he had been originally “converted,” but he naturally expounded those doctrines in writings intended, not for the eyes of wicked pagans, but for other brands of Christians, whom he wished to convert to his own sect, which was that of Montanus, a very Holy Prophet (divinely inspired, of course) who was a Phrygian, not a Jew, and who had learned from chats with God that since the Jews had muffed their big opportunity at the time of the Crucifixion, Jesus, when he returned next year or the year after that, was going to set up his New Jerusalem in Phrygia after he had raised hell with the pagans and tormented and butchered them in all of the delightful ways so lovingly described in the Apocalypse, the Hymn of Hate that still soothes the souls of “fundamentalist” Christians today.

If, in his Apologeticum and similar works, Tertullian had told the stupid pagans that they were going to be tortured and exterminated in a year or two, they might have doubted that Christians were the innocent little lambs that Tertullian claimed they were.

Tertullian writes semi-literate bombast. The first Christian who can write decent Latin is Minucius Felix, whose Octavius, written in the first half (possibly the first quarter) of the Third Century must have done much to make Christianity respectable. He concentrates on ridiculing pagan myths that no educated man believed anyway and on denying that Christians (he means his kind, of course!) practice incest (a favorite recreation of many sects that had been saved by Christ from the tyranny of human laws) or cut the throats of children to obtain blood for Holy Communion (as some groups undoubtedly did). He argues for a monotheism that is indistinguishable from the Stoic except that the One God is identified as the Christian deity, from whose worship the sinful Jews are apostates, and insists that Christians have nothing to do with the Jews, whom God is going to punish.

What is interesting is that Minucius has nothing to say about any specifically Christian doctrine, and that the names of Jesus or Christ do not appear in his work. There is just one allusion: The pagans say that Christianity was founded by a felon (unnamed) who was crucified. That, says Minucius, is absurd: No criminal ever deserved, nor did a man of this world have the power, to be believed to be a god (erratis, qui putatis deum credi aut meruisse noxium aut potuisse terrenum). That ambiguous reference is all that he has to say about it; he turns at once to condemning the Egyptians for worshipping a mortal man, and then he argues that the sign of the cross represents (a) the mast and yard of a ship under sail, and (b) the position of man who is worshipping God properly, i.e. standing with outstretched arms.

If Minucius is not merely trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible pagans, it certainly sounds as though this Christian were denying the divinity of Christ, either regarding him, as did many of the early Christians, as a man who was inspired but was not to be identified with God, or claiming, as did a number of later sects, that what appeared on earth and was crucified was merely a ghost, an insubstantial apparition sent by Christ, who himself prudently stayed in his heaven above the clouds and laughed at the fools who thought they could kill a phantom. Of course, our holy men are quite sure that he was “orthodox.”

Whether the Christians, of whom there is no certain historical trace before c. 112, were simply a modified or disguised continuation of the Chrestiani (i.e., the followers of a Jewish christ who, under the assumed name of Chrestus, evidently persuaded at least the rabble of the huge Jewish colony planted in Rome that the time to start butchering the goyim had come) cannot be determined. The word that Tacitus used, and the accuracy of that spelling, is guaranteed by the fact that Tertullian complains in 197 A.D. and later that the members of his sect are called Chrestiani by the wicked pagans, which isn’t right at all, because the correct word is Christiani. This is significant because Chrestus, meaning ‘useful, serviceable, good,’ is a common Greek word and was a name frequently given to slaves of Oriental origin (and retained by them when they were emancipated) and was also commonly taken as a name by persons of the lower classes in Asia Minor who wanted to be known by an intelligible Greek name in place of the outlandish Semitic or other native name that was properly theirs (much as Chinese in this country call themselves ‘Charlie’ or ‘Mike’).

Cicero’s friend, Curio, for example, had a slave or freedman named Chrestus, whom he employed as a kind of journalist to draw up summaries of daily events in Rome for transmission as news to his friends who were out of Italy. Many persons of that name are known. One of them was a Jewish revolutionary agitator, Chrestus, who was regarded as the leader of one of the big Jewish outbreaks in Rome, which, as we know from Suetonius (Claud. 25.4), was accompanied by rioting and outrages so gross that Claudius ran all the Jews (except, of course, those who had bought citizenship) out of the city. (It did not work, of course, for while he was having one thrown out of the front door, two were probably crawling in the back windows, and a few years later Rome was more crowded with Jews than ever, and Claudius, when they again made themselves more obnoxious than usual, decided they were too numerous and too deeply entrenched in the economic life of the city to be expelled, and tried to control them by suppressing their synagogues in the city (Cassius Dio, LX.6.8).

* * *

 You’ve been listening to “The Jewish Plague, part 9,” written by Professor Revilo Pendleton Oliver and presented by your host, Kevin Alfred Strom. Next week we’ll continue this eye-opening account of the real origins of Christianity — the ones they never told you about in Sunday school.

To read more of Dr. Oliver’s works, visit https://nationalvanguard.org/oliver.

We’ll continue this important discussion of the Jewish Question by classicist, scholar, and teacher Dr. Revilo P. Oliver, next week on American Dissident Voices.

* * *

You’ve been listening to American Dissident Voices, the radio program of the National Alliance. The National Alliance is working to educate White men and women around the world as to the nature of the reality we must face — and organizing our people to ensure our survival and advancement. To help us, send donations to National Alliance, Box 4, Mountain City, TN 37683 USA. For free fliers to spread the truth in your community, visit natall.com/fliers. Once again, our postal address is Box 4, Mountain City, TN 37683 USA. Until next week, this is Kevin Alfred Strom reminding you of the words of Richard Berkeley Cotten: Freedom is not free; free men are not equal; and equal men are not free.