The Businessmen of God

by Revilo P. Oliver

LIBERTY BELL is not the only periodical to bring out an Anniversary Issue at this time (Aug./Sept. 1983 issue). The Christian Century has published a special anniversary issue that contains an article by the Reverend Mr. Peter Fleck, from which a fairly long excerpt was reproduced in the Christian News for 17 October. The holy man asks, “Isn’t Christianity the gentile version of Judaism? Among those who would say so is Pope Pius XI, who proclaimed in 1938: ‘Through Christ and in Christ we descend spiritually from Abraham …. Christians are spiritually Semites.’ Krister Stendahl has called gentile Christians ‘honorary Jews.'”

Fleck answers his own question by concluding that Christians must “recognize the early church as the Jewish sect it was, whose separation from Judaism resulted not from Jesus’ teachings but from doctrines defined and promulgated by Paul and the church fathers.” He goes on to argue that the Jews were entirely justified in refusing to recognize a christ who didn’t put over the revolution he attempted, and quotes writers in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies to that effect.

Catholics who believe that the capture of their church began only after the death of Pius XII in 1958 should note the statement attributed to his predecessor. I need not remark again on the absurdity of treating the word ‘christ’ as a personal name instead of a title assumed by would-be kings of the Jews.

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A DESPATCH from the Associated Press that appeared on the first page of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat for 15-16 October 1983, and was doubtless printed in many other newspapers, reminded me of an article by Ralph Perier that was published in the Liberty Bell in 1980 and reprinted as a small booklet, Religion and Race. In that booklet, the author suggests that an enterprising evangelist in the salvation-business could make hay out of one of the early Christian gospels which contains the revelation that the Holy Ghost is a female who engendered the Christians’ Jesus by infusing milk from her breast into Mary’s womb.

So far as I know, none of the many competing promoters has taken up that suggestion, which should be a sure-fire hit at the present time, when screeching Jewesses are inciting in unattractive women an hysterical demand for repeal of the laws of biology, but, according to the Globe-Democrat‘s article, the wily National Council of Churches is trying to tap that market with a “series of Bible readings” in which “God is portrayed as both Father and Mother.” The National Council of Churches, cynically aware that they are dealing only with a collection of Jewish myths, had no hesitation in falsifying the text of a book that Christians must believe to be of divine authority and “inerrant,” if their minds are capable of thought. The newspaper article (confirmed by Newsweek, 24 October) gives examples of the brash revisions by which the National Council tries to capitalize on the current vogue of silliness. One example is the well-known passage that declared that Jesus was Yahweh’s only son; it now reads, “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only child,” etc.

This revision of the text creates problems that the theologians of the National Council have not yet solved. How does a god who is both Mother and Father procreate a child who, it would seem, is neither male nor female? I can offer them only one suggestion.

Although the Jews (as shown by the Elephantine papyri) had goddesses in their pantheon in the fifth century B.C., they later concentrated their religion on Yahweh, who was originally only the chief of their gods, and when they had the happy idea of appropriating the Stoics’ monotheism, they identified the Stoics’ animus mundi, which was not anthropomorphic and was therefore sexless, with their male god. This created a difficulty which the Talmudists solved by imagining an archetypal being who was an exact duplicate of their god and existed before the creation of the world. This archetype, the “original man” (Adam Kadmoni, who is called the “heavenly man” in Philo Judaeus and the later Kabbalah), was the model copied when Yahweh created the first human being, and since Adam was an hermaphrodite, the earthly Adam must also have been an hermaphrodite — at least until Yahweh performed a sex operation on him to produce the first female, with the disastrous consequences described later in Genesis.

Now several Christian gospels, notably the Clementine Recognitiones, one of the most important of the gospels that were overlooked or excluded when the “New Testament” was put together, specifically declares that Jesus was Adam returned to earth, and since we may assume that Adam in that epiphany was in his pristine and perfect state, it would follow that Jesus was an hermaphrodite. [In 2012, Oliver’s partly satirical prediction came true when a British “theologian” stated that “It is not possible to assert with any degree of certainty that Jesus was male as we now define maleness. There is no way of knowing for sure that Jesus did not have one of the intersex conditions which would give him a body which appeared externally to be unremarkably male, but which might nonetheless have had some ‘hidden’ female physical features.” — Ed.]

I think that if the National Council would thus clarify their new doctrine, they could go to town with it, taking advantage of the latest trend in one of America’s most profitable businesses. Pornography has been suffering from a mild recession, since there are only two kinds of sexual organs and the limited number of possible combinations of them has been exhausted to satiety. The leaders in the business have now turned to the fresh and exciting subject of hermaphrodites and they have discovered a number of creatures (chiefly androgynes, it seems) whom nature has endowed with the requisites for stardom in films which have the great appeal of novelty to connoisseurs of such matters. A little cooperation between the National Council and the more progressive pornographers could produce substantiation of the new “Bible readings” by similarly revising the old cinema, “Sign of the Cross,” to produce a version that would surely wow our contemporary audiences.

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Source: Liberty Bell magazine, November 1983