Revilo Oliver’s Reflections on the Christ Myth, part 2

American Dissident Voices broadcast of 24 August, 2024

introduced by Kevin Alfred Strom

TODAY WE CONTINUE one of the great works of Dr. Revilo Pendleton Oliver, “Reflections on the Christ Myth,” delivered for the first time in Dr. Oliver’s own voice, generated by training Artificial Intelligence on his actual recorded voice.

When we left off last week, Dr. Oliver was discussing the conflict between Hellenized Jews and more traditional Jews in the aftermath of Alexander’s conquests, and how this relates to the emergence of Christianity — the Semitic religion that invaded and eventually came to dominate Europe, and which still, tragically, has a hold on the minds of hundreds of millions of our people.

And so we present part two of “Reflections on the Christ Myth” by Dr. Revilo P. Oliver. Listen…

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Reflections on the Christ Myth, part 2
by Revilo P. Oliver

Heroic Failure

PHILO AND all of the Letzim we have mentioned thus far differ radically from other Letzim, whom we must now consider.

It is the great virtue of Mr. Carter’s book that he forces us to consider critically a Jewish and Christian generalization about the history of Judaea in the second century BC. He makes us aware that it is highly probable that, besides the Letzim mentioned above, who tried to salvage Judaism by forgery, hoaxes, and sciolistic distortions of evidence, there were educated and enlightened Jews who faced the problem candidly and saw that the only solution was to abandon Jewish claims to immeasurable racial superiority, to jettison the barbaric cult, and to adopt civilization wholeheartedly.

The detailed history of this period is a Gordian knot, depending principally on Josephus (Antiquitates) and the second book of Maccabees (which is found in some Christian Bibles); both were bitter enemies of the Hellenizing faction, but contradict each other and are also at variance with the few indications to be derived from trustworthy historical sources. (20) What is clear, however, is that, as a result of one of the continual upheavals in Judaea, a Jew named Jesus, who had adopted a civilized name, Jason, became the high priest in Jerusalem, probably in 173 B.C. although possibly several years earlier. He represented Letzim who wanted to introduce Greek culture into Jerusalem, and he evidently cleared an area in the city and founded what seems to have been a kind of Greek-style gymnasium, serving both for athletics (which orthodox Jews abominated) and as a kind of open club in which educated men could meet for intelligent and often philosophical discussion (which the orthodox also abominated).

In 171 and for reasons which are not quite clear but may be related to family feuds, Jesus-Jason was succeeded by a man who may have been a relative and who changed his name to Menelaus. (21) He is the focus of Mr. Carter’s cogent revision of the Jewish and Christian story which had never been effectually challenged.

According to that story, Menelaus was a Jew so wicked that he became the instrument of the awful pagan king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who wanted to persecute God’s sweet little lambs and suppress worship of the One True God (beastly old Yahweh). That is patently absurd. Although it is true that the Seleucids, descendants of one of Alexander’s generals, were not only cultivated men themselves, but doubtless perceived the value of a dominant civilization in promoting some sort of unity among their multi-racial subjects, Antiochus, as a prudent ruler, was primarily interested in finding a way to end the perpetual turmoil in Judaea, where normal communications along the major trade routes were often made almost impossible because the sweet little lambs were perpetually rioting and killing one another, using religious pretexts to justify a perpetual succession of petty but destructive civil wars. And the attribution of wicked “pagan” purposes to Antiochus becomes absurd when the enemies of Menelaus charge that he was so corrupt that he bought the support of Antiochus with an enormous bribe. That sufficiently shows who took the initiative and vindicates Menelaus’s sincerity.

Mr. Carter’s work reminds us that we have no reason to doubt that Menelaus was a cultivated and highly intelligent Jew who saw that the only remedy for barbarism is civilization, and that the only way to civilize the Jews was to abolish their disgusting superstition. That attitude won him the sympathy of Antiochus and a measure of support that was soon greatly increased.

Antiochus was at war with Ptolemaic Egypt and invaded that country. In 168 a rumour reached Palestine that Antiochus had been defeated and killed. Menelaus was expelled by Jesus-Jason and his faction, who had been engaged in treasonable intrigues with the Egyptians, in preparation for an Egyptian occupation of Jerusalem.

What had really happened, however, was that Antiochus had won what should have been a decisive victory, but had been prevented from following it up by the intervention of an envoy from the Roman Senate, Popillius Laenas, who, in effect, made Egypt a Roman protectorate. (22)

As soon as the truth was known, Jason fled and Menelaus was restored to his priestly dignity. We should note, however, that both Hellenizers had large popular followings.

The net effect of this was to make Antiochus, who had been humiliated by the Romans and prevented from ending the menace to his kingdom from Egypt, willing to use his army to support Menelaus, who, officially the high priest of the Jews, proceeded to abolish all the innumerable and vulgar regulations of “the Law, ” the superstition about the Sabbath, and, above all, the savage sexual mutilation by which the Jews differentiated themselves physically from civilized mankind. Menelaus was undoubtedly supported by a sizeable minority of educated Jews, many or most of whom engaged surgeons to uncircumcize them.

He is a man whom we should honor and whose failure we must regret.

It is hard to say in what proportion piety and political ambition dominated the wealthy Jewish clan who were descended from a man whose name, passing through Greek, was Hasmonaeus (Asamonaeus in some sources). A member of this clan murdered a priest who was about to perform a sacrifice in accordance with the new rule, and fled to the wilderness, where he organized gangs of bandits who flourished by raiding towns, slaying educated Jews, and grabbing their property.

They won the support of the lower classes, already jealous of their betters, and, as you know, it is almost impossible to suppress such banditry without helicopters.

Antiochus’ governor, Lysias, underestimated the difficulty and made ineffectual attempts to suppress them, which the Jewish writers have naturally magnified into great victories for Yahweh’s people. These Hasmonaeans, now more commonly known as Maccabees from the epithet given them, derived from an Aramaic word meaning ‘hammer, mace,’ were for a considerable time merely outlaws and pests.

There can be no doubt but that Antiochus was now prepared to give Menelaus full support, and there is no doubt but that no amount of barbarous fanaticism could have prevailed against an army that was still organized with Macedonian tactics and discipline. The Jewish problem would have been solved forever if Antiochus had not been distracted by the need to protect his eastern borders against the Parthians, and not even then, if he had not died, evidently from poison or a contagious fever, at Gabae, in or near what is now Afghanistan.

Lysias, Antiochus’s governor of Syria, was evidently a mediocre man. When he failed to suppress the bandits, he had the foolish idea that he could end his troubles by forcing on Menelaus a compromise. The bandits were given amnesty; the Hasmonaeans were admitted to the city; the traditional rites of Yahweh were largely restored with only an addition to content the Hellenizers; and, of course, the situation became more intolerable than ever, since the Hasmonaeans used their new position for aggression on the civilized minority everywhere.

When Lysias finally saw the consequences of his folly, he took the requisite action. He mobilized his army, occupied Jerusalem and other cities, and restored order. (23) He would probably have solved the Jewish problem permanently, if the barbarian rabble had not again been saved by a perverse fate. Antiochus’s heir was a boy of ten (24) who had been left in the care of Lysias, but Antiochus, shortly before his death, discontented with Lysias’s blundering, named one of his friends, Philip, the regent for the boy and governor of Syria. The news of Philip’s advent reached Lysias in Jerusalem and, in a panic, he negotiated another shameful compromise with the Hasmonaeans and their rabble, sacrificing even Menelaus to their hatred, and hastened home in a vain attempt to retain his governorship and take the regency for himself.

Thus ended one of the great tragedies of history with a catastrophe from which we still suffer today. (25)

We need not linger over the intricate history of what followed. The Hasmonaeans ruled Judaea, profited from the weakening of the Seleucid Empire to make their country independent, and occupied themselves with wars of aggression against their neighbours to increase the territory under their rule. (26) It is noteworthy that they soon assumed Greek names, from Hyrcanus and Aristobulus to the last of the line, Antiochus. (27)

The surviving Hellenizers either escaped from Judaea or became Sadducees, who observed the Jews’ “Law,” at least outwardly, but intelligently refused to believe in immortal spooks or the other superstitions dear to the Pharisees, who eventually attained complete dominion over the Jews.

We have now sketched, as summarily as I could, the antecedents requisite for an understanding of our problem.

Notes to Heroic Failure

20. I limit myself here to the bare essentials, wasting no time on problematic details. If you have nothing to do for the next few years, I suggest that you collect all available information about the history of the Seleucid Empire in the second century BC and then sit down to winnow the stories in Josephus and Maccabees in hope of extracting a fairly plausible resolution of all the conflicts in untrustworthy narratives — if you think that worth having.

21. Josephus says that he was Onias, the brother of Onias. Such duplication of personal names within a family seems unlikely and suggests confusion in either Josephus’s mind or the extant text. The man’s Jewish name may have been Matthew.

22. It would be vain to speculate to what extent the Senate had been covertly influenced by the large colony of Jews who had planted themselves in Rome, many of whom had become very wealthy. When Cn. Cornelius Scipio Hispallus was the Praetor Peregrinus in 179, he tried to run all the offensive aliens out of town, but was, of course, powerless against Jews who had taken the precaution of buying themselves Roman citizenship by having a fellow Jew who was a slave dealer “sell” them to some venal and well-paid Roman, who then emancipated them, making them legally members of his own polluted family. The other Jews, we may be sure, crawled back into Rome as soon as Hispallus’s term of office was ended.

23. The Jews never miss an opportunity for Holohoaxing, so they produced lurid accounts of the thousands and thousands of Yahweh’s darlings who were martyrs to the True Faith and slain by the awful “pagans.” See especially the later part of Book IV of Maccabees. Book III, incidentally, is a gospel about a wicked Egyptian king who wanted to oppress God’s Own and mobilized his army for that purpose, but Yahweh sent a couple of angels who made the war elephants trample the soldiers to death. The author of the gospel does not explain why Yahweh never despatches a bevy of angels to protect his darlings in historical situations. For True Believers, that is still a problem; see Dr. Charles E. Weber’s review of Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? in Liberty Bell, March 1989, pp. 36-41.

24. The minority of Antiochus V also gave an opportunity to his uncle, Demetrius, to claim the throne with Roman support, thus initiating a series of civil wars that fatally weakened the Seleucid Empire and led to its downfall.

25. The world had another chance during the short reign (138-129) of Antiochus VII (son of Demetrius), but the Jews’ were saved, first, by the naïf young king’s refusal to heed the advice of his wise councillors and his older wife (Cleopatra Thea, who, in her previous marriages, had acquired political experience), and then by a Parthian invasion of his diminished realm.

26. Cf. Christianity Today (reprinted from Liberty Bell, November 1987), pp. 3-7.

27. Incidentally, the author of Book II of Maccabees was another Jesus who had changed his name to Jason!

The New Age

WE HAVE ALSO reached the beginning of the historical era established by a Scythian monk who had come to Rome, Dionysius Exiguus, c. A.D. 540. According to his calculations, the supposed birth of Jesus marked the beginning of the First Century (28) in the era now in common use.

Mr. Carter disposes of that century correctly: “There were no Christians, either Gentile or Jewish, living during the First Century.” (29)

In fact, we have no secure traces of Christians before 135, the year in which the last christ of any importance, Shimeon ben Kosiba, commonly called Bar-Kokhba, was suppressed. (30) His failure conclusively proved to intelligent Jews that while their god might help them treacherously attack unsuspecting goyim and torture them to death, old Yahweh always skedaddled when the Roman legions moved in. Whether it is more than a coincidence that, so far as we know, the promotion of Christianity began soon after 135, is anybody’s guess

Christianity presupposes the Christ Myth, which must, therefore, have been invented shortly after 135, if not before. What can have been the origin of that amazing myth? It cannot have been derived from any Jewish sect, least of all, from that of the Essenes. (31) While it is likely that at least one of the figures that contributed to the composite hero of the Jesus Myth was an Essene, who denounced the Pharisees, the Essenes, as Mr. Carter has shown, were fanatically and exclusively Jewish, and would no more have thought of saving the souls (if any) of goyim than they would have banqueted on roast pig.

The very foundation of the Christ Myth was borrowed from India. It created a christ who was modeled on Krishna (Krsna) who was the eighth avatar of Vishnu (Visnu). This presupposes the Hindu doctrine that gods may become incarnate as mortals to act as Saviours of mankind — a notion that every religious Jew would have rejected with horror. The Hindu concept also includes metempsychosis, and pious Jews would have been made furious by a suggestion that men have souls that survive death by being reincarnated. As shown by the presence of Magi at the birth of the christ intended for non-Jews, there was also an influence of the Zoroastrian cult, which by that time had assimilated both astrology and the notion that a Saviour (Saosyant) would come to deliver the world from evil; and, as everyone knows, the shepherds who witnessed the Nativity of Jesus were copies of the shepherds who witnessed the earthly birth of the Zoroastrian Son of God, Mithra. A god who could be concerned with anyone but the Chosen was utterly repugnant to the Jewish mind and a christ who could interest himself in goyim was an abomination as well as an impossibility.

The Christ Myth was obviously invented to create a christ (necessarily Jewish) who could be made acceptable to non-Jews, and the Jesus Myth was crudely amended and refashioned for that purpose.

That brings us to another puzzle. Once devised, the Christ Myth spread with amazing rapidity. Thirty years after 135 we find little groups of Christians all over the landscape, and by the end of the Second Century they are divided into large sects, furiously damning one another to Hell, scribbling innumerable gospels and forged documents (32), and even able to exert some influence in the tolerant Roman Empire and to concoct lurid tales about the persecutions which they, like the Jews, liked to pretend they had suffered. That rapid spread of a strange superstition required intensive and expensive promotion.

Christian tradition speaks of a Jew named Saul, who must have been in some way regarded as an innovator, since many of the Christian sects produced letters attributed to him to attest their orthodoxy. And a book included in the “New Testament,” Acts (Acta Apostolorum), contains stories about itinerant evangelists which, though displaced chronologically, may correspond roughly to part of the promotion. But that promotion obviously required organization — and money. We are asked to suppose that hordes of proletarians and a few eccentrics flocked to the “glad tidings” because they were so charming. That is fiction. Millions of dollars have been spent to promote L. Ron Hubbard’s invention, Scientology, but despite all the facilities for almost world-wide propaganda provided by the press, radio, and rapid travel, the cult still has only a small and scattered band of converts.

Yet it is not more alien to the general tenor of American society or more dissident from the beliefs of all the current religious sects than the cult of a Jewish christ was alien to the tenor of society in every part of the Roman Empire or more strongly opposed to the religion and superstition of every region in it. Even the Christian evangelists, who can use the boob-tubes to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars from superstitious suckers, have to be lavishly financed before they can begin operations. (33)

The promotion of Christianity must have required, as I have said, a fairly large organization and ample resources. But cui bono? Who stood to profit in one way or another from that effort to impose an alien superstition on the population of the Roman Empire?

Mr. Carter has the first plausible answer that I have seen: the Letzim, that is, the Jews living in their colonies outside Judaea and in Hellenistic cities. This is certainly an adequate and attractive explanation. We must, I think, accept it.

Notes to The New Age

28. I think it best to capitalize such terms when they refer specifically to the era fixed by Dionysius, especially when “A.D. ” (anno Domini or, if you prefer, [anno] apud [= secundum] Dionysium) is omitted.

29. There is no historically valid evidence for the existence of such beings during the First Century. The arsonists executed by Nero were, of course, Jewish Bolsheviks, followers of an agitator and, no doubt, would-be christ, who bore the extremely common name of Chrestus; they tried to burn Rome to validate one of the prophecies in the Pseudo-Sibylline Oracles, which had been forged to demoralize the hated goyim. As for the famous letter of the younger Pliny, if it is not a forgery or grossly interpolated by Christians, as some scholars believe, it refers to a sect in Bithynia, c. 112, who were suspected of being members of a criminal organization, but convinced Pliny they were innocent heliolaters. As such, they cannot have been Christians in the accepted sense of that word. As Mr. Carter remarks, there were many would-be christs.

The text of Pliny’s letter depends on copies made from a manuscript of uncertain date, discovered by a Dominican holy man, Iucundus of Verona, at the very end of the Fifteenth Century; it disappeared in 1508, so we cannot examine it now. The cardinal evidence for the authenticity of the letter is a statement by Tertullian in 197 that Pliny had written such a letter, which was proof that the wicked Romans had persecuted Christian lambs for their piety. Tertullian also glibly refers to an imaginary document which he said was in the Imperial archives at Rome (where, he knew, no one who could obtain access to the archives would have the patience to look for it). Tertullian also had an interesting conversation with a ghost who had come down from Heaven to give him valuable information. The ghost had been a woman so staunch in the True Faith that the vile “pagans” made a martyr of her in the arena, but as soon as her soul left her body, Jesus equipped it with male sexual organs, so that she, become he, would feel at ease in an all-male Heaven.

30. For the real name of this christ, recently ascertained from documents found near the Dead Sea, see Yigael Yadin, Bar-Kokhba (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971). He called himself ‘Son of the Star’ to suggest his divine mission as the long-awaited christ. He made his last stand in the little town of Bethar, where, as you will remember from the admirable book by Professor Butz (The Hoax of the Twentieth Century), if not from other sources, occurred a really great “Holocaust.” We are solemnly assured in the Talmud that the wicked Romans mercilessly slew in Bethar, a town which had an area about equal to that of five city blocks, a total of eight hundred million (800,000,000) of God’s Masterpieces.

31. It is a curious fact that no one has found a Hebrew or Aramaic equivalent of the name of this sect (variously spelled in Greek). The derivation of the word is unknown; for a variety of guesses, including a rather startling new one, see the little book by Allen H. Jones, Essenes: the Elect of Israel and the Priests of Artemis (Lanham, Maryland; University Press, 1985). The absence of an Aramaic equivalent is not really remarkable, however, since the Jews did not begin to revive use of that language until the last quarter of the First Century, when the ruling rabbis even tried to forbid Jews to learn Greek which was like trying to order Jews in this country not to learn English! Some Jews did learn the sacred languages, much as some Jews in Israel today use a simplification of Hebrew called ‘Modern Hebrew,’ but around 200, when the Christians began to use some readings in the Septuagint as confirmation of their doctrines, the ruling Jews had to provide two translations of their revised scriptures into a kind of pidgin Greek for the benefit of the many Jews who refused to learn the Semitic languages.

32. I have always wondered why the salvation-mongers who put together the “New Testament” in the Fifth Century overlooked such gems as Agbar’s letter to Jesus and the latter’s reply (proving that he was literate) and Paul’s rather extensive correspondence with Seneca.

33. A journalist with whom I was acquainted years ago claimed to have proof that the famous hokum-peddler, Billy Graham, was financed by the Mafia as a good investment (i.e., for a percentage of the take).

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