Revilo Oliver’s Reflections on the Christ Myth, part 3

American Dissident Voices broadcast of 31 August, 2024

introduced by Kevin Alfred Strom

TODAY IN PART THREE of Revilo Pendleton Oliver’s “Reflections on the Christ Myth,” we are presented with two stark alternatives as to the origins of Christianity — one, that offered by Dr. Oliver himself, the other that of author Nicholas Carter.

Both men agree that the Christ myth is not true, but is a fabulous concoction borrowing freely from other traditions — especially various strains of Judaism and the Stoicism that was the faith, or philosophy, of many Aryans during the Classical age. Both men agree that the ideas of certain Hellenized Jews, the Letzim, were instrumental in laying the groundwork upon which the Christ myth was built. Both men agree that, once successfully launched, the new religion took on a life of its own and split into innumerable sects as it grew, many of which were led by non-Jews. Both men agree that Christianity’s hold on the minds of millions of our people has led Europe to ‘crucify itself.’

But Carter sees the sect that grabbed state power for itself in Rome as entirely a Gentile creation, and absolves the Jews of any guilt. Oliver, in contrast, holds out the possibility that this stunting of our morals and gutting of our values and weakening of our spirit, resulting ultimately in the suppression of our very will to live, were the purposes of the Jewish controllers of the cult early on, if not from the very beginning.

Which of these men is correct, or if both points of view need to be harmonized in order to see the true picture, is something the reader will have to decide for himself.

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

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Reflections on the Christ Myth, part 3
by Revilo P. Oliver

One Hypothesis

WHEN, HOWEVER, we try to determine the purposes of those Letzim, we must choose between two almost antithetical theories.

Relations between Jews and goyim outside Judaea have always been strained and precarious, except when one has attained such complete dominance as to force the other into hypocritical submission. The Jews, in their scattered colonies throughout the civilized world, needed to ensure themselves against resentment, and this need became urgent after the decisive failure to take over the world by force with the putative assistance of a Yahweh who always ran when there was danger.

In the simplest terms, making Judaism respectable in the eyes of their “pagan” neighbors was no longer a matter of inventing sons of Abraham who had been companions of Hercules or of forging letters from a Lacedaemonian king to prove that the Spartans were really a “lost tribe” of Jews. What could be more effective than a christ sent by Yahweh to save the souls of Gentiles?

And if the stupid goyim could be made to believe that a Jewish god was the animus mundi of the Stoic monotheism, and that he had sent his Jewish son into the world to bring salvation to the lesser breeds “outside the Law,” this notion could be made the basis of a theology that would sap the virility and rationality of the more intelligent goyim and destroy their ability to detect and resent the depredations of their parasites and their own gradual descent into slavery. The new religion, which would, of course, have to be distinguished sharply from the racial exclusiveness and arrogance of the Judaism with which everyone was then familiar, could be made an hallucinatory drug, an enslaving opiate, that would eventually make its addicts helpless sheep, to be herded for the profit of their shepherds.

If the inventors of Christianity did not envisage this use of it with a foresight and cunning that may seem superhuman, they must have realized in subsequent centuries what a marvelous weapon they had inadvertently forged. This is a drastic hypothesis and will seem novel and implausible to many, but it can be supported by one datum for which it would be hard to suggest another explanation. Once Christianity was launched, the Jews were evidently determined to retain control of it.

That is the most reasonable explanation of the eventual failure of the Marcionist Church, which was a form of Christianity far more plausible than the doctrine that finally triumphed.

Marcion was a wealthy shipowner at Sinope, now the Turkish town of Sinop on the south shore of the Black Sea, but then the largest port and commercial center east of Byzantium. Sinope was founded as a Greek colony and long remained a Greek city, but there had been a continuous influx of other peoples. We have no information about Marcion’s ancestors.

When Christian propaganda reached him, he saw, as all reasonable men must, that the ferocious, vindictive, and cruel god of the “Old Testament” was utterly incompatible with the god of mercy and love preconized by Pauline Christianity, and he accordingly decided that Yahweh was only the Demiurge, creator of the material world, but inferior to the good and supreme god who sent his son (an avatar of himself) to save mankind from the Demiurge. (34)

Jesus made his appearance in the guise of a man of about thirty, but the ignorant apostles mistook him for a Jewish christ, and the Jews showed their irremediable perversity by crucifying a simulacrum of him (of course, a god could not be killed). He had, however, been recognized by Paul. Marcion had a version of the gospel attributed to “a man from Lucania” (Greek Lonkej, Latin Lucanus, commonly ‘Luke’ in English, as though it were a man’s name), and a collection of letters attributed to Paul that justified Marcion’s theology. He may have had other holy books, and he wrote a work, Antitheses, conclusively proving that Yahweh was the very antithesis of the Pauline god, and that the “Old Testament” was incompatible with Christianity.

He went to Rome, then the capital of the civilized world, but found Judaizing Christians already established there. He founded his own church (c. 150), which naturally appealed to persons susceptible to the new religion but not incapable of thought. His was a comparatively innocuous form of Christianity — one that the late Dr. Hamblin, an erudite and highly intelligent man, tried to revive in our time to provide for the populace a form of Christianity that was not culturally and racially poisonous.

Marcion’s Church did attract a numerous following and it may have been, for a time, the largest Christian sect, with congregations throughout the Empire, but it was the target of the most bitter animosity of the well-financed gang known as Fathers of the Church, who were determined to keep the “Old Testament” as the basis of their cult. The Marcionist Churches declined in the third and fourth centuries, perhaps because they were not sufficiently fanatical and skilled in intrigue, but they survived even after the Fathers of the Church were at last able to start persecuting with the police powers of the captive state at their disposal. (35)

Why the Fathers should have chosen to burden their cult with the onerous and malodorous bundle of fictions of the “Old Testament,” which blatantly contradicted the very doctrine they were peddling, is almost inexplicable, except on the assumption that it was made profitable for them. And we must not forget that, with very few exceptions, we really do not know which early Christian theologians were “converted” Jews or stooges for the Jews, like the contemptible hirelings who now misgovern Germany.

So much for one interpretation of the admittedly fragmentary evidence (as distinct from inferences).

Notes to One Hypothesis

34. One unfortunate consequence of this theory was a dichotomy between the body (material and therefore subject to the Demiurge) and a soul (purely spiritual and so in the domain of the Supreme God). That led to the asceticism and denial of nature that characterized most of the Christian sects and makes them so repulsive to healthy men.

35. The Marcionists were gradually absorbed by the more drastic (and ascetic) church founded by “Manichaeus, the disciple of Jesus Christ,” but Prudentius, a Christian versifier of some talent, writing at the opening of the fifth century, could lament in his Hamartigenia that the secular powers had not yet killed all the vile heretics who had been trapped by Marcion’s evil insanity (attoniti phrenesis manifesta cerebri). Modern holy men like to pretend that Mani was not a “Christian,” forgetting that he has as much right to the title as they have.

An Alternative

MR. CARTER PRESENTS a radically different theory about the origins of Christianity sometime in the first century.

He takes his departure from the Stephen who appears in Acts, 6, 5-7, 60, and is mentioned occasionally in subsequent chapters. The man’s Greek name does not prove that he was a Hellenistic Jew, and we are told that he “did great wonders and miracles among the people,” which sounds as though he were just another of the goëtae [itinerant magicians who wowed the rubes with their tricks and claimed to be holy men] who swarmed through Asia Minor at that time. (36)

In Acts, Stephen delivers a summary of the Jewish tradition about Abraham and his successors, and then upbraids the orthodox for their rejection of Jesus. His speech receives divine approval, for, looking up through a rift in the atmosphere, he sees God with Jesus at his right hand. The Sanhedrin, however, condemn him and the mob stones him, a particularly brutal form of killing, which they enjoyed on the pretense that it did not involve bloodshed.

Mr. Carter dismisses the story in Acts as a Christian concoction. He believes that Stephen and his companions (all of whom bear Greek names) were members of the “New Letzim,” who had assimilated the Stoic doctrine with its emphasis on all humanity and wished to bring Judaism into accord with it, insisting that “the One God of the Universe is everybody’s God.” And he composes (p. 79) the speech that Stephen would have uttered, if he could, before he finally died. It is worthy of Epictetus.

Saul-Paul was a man who first approved the murder of Stephen, but reconsidered and joined the “New Letzim,” whose doctrines, a fusion of Judaism with Stoicism, Mr. Carter adumbrates with the proviso that “the Mystic Gospel of Jewish Hellenists” cannot be reconstructed in detail. “We cannot measure the complexity of the involvement of the protagonists — the degree, that is, to which the Hellenic Jews may have tried to fuse Greek and Jewish speculations. For the purpose of this study it is enough to conclude that Gentile ethics were the driving force behind the activities of the Letzim.”

These Letzim may have come to regard Stephen as a messianic figure, thus resulting in “the transformation of the martyred Stephen into both a Jesus (37) and a Christ in the minds of his worshipers, by at least the turn of the second century.”

There was really no reason why the Letzim should not have sponsored such a novel cult. For one thing, the real center of Jewish power was not in Judaea, but in Babylon, which, except for a very brief time, was outside the borders of the Graeco-Roman world, which was increasingly centered in Rome. The greater part of the wealthy Jewish colony in Babylon in 538 BC had never thought of migrating to Judaea, and their opulent descendants continued to flourish in the city. (38) For another, despite what the Jews want us to believe today, Judaism in the first century was not a unified set of doctrines, but included many groups of Jews who were heretics according to the standards of the Pharisees, but whom the rabbinate dared not suppress. (39) And finally, archaeological excavations have shown that opulent synagogues in Asia outside Judaea took their orthodoxy lightly, ignoring even the famous injunction about not worshiping other deities in the presence of Yahweh. If Greek gods were not worshiped in those synagogues, and there is at least one example of a prayer to Helios, composed in Greek but written in the Hebrew alphabet, they were at least sufficiently venerated to be given iconic representation.

Everyone was astonished when the excavations at Dura-Europos reached the remains of a monumental third-century synagogue in which at least two Greek deities were portrayed on the walls. More recently and more astonishingly, a synagogue built, regardless of cost, in the fourth century at Tiberias, on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee and hence in Judaea itself, had a finely-wrought central mosaic, in which Helios is encircled by the zodiac, with its constellations represented by the customary figures. (40) Three of the four corners of the mosaic are preserved. In one corner is the head of a woman wearing a radiant crown (hence a goddess), holding a sickle; in the opposite corner a maiden with the white headdress of a virgin is pouring water from an ewer; in the third corner, a woman, perhaps garlanded, seems to be holding up a bowl of some fruit. (41)

Finally, we may note that some scholars believe that “Hellenistic Jews” were the creators of Gnosticism as a Jewish heresy from which the Christian Gnosticism was derived. (42)

We have therefore no reason to doubt the possibility that a group of “New Letzim” — necessarily a tiny minority, as Mr. Carter points out — did exist and flourish with impunity in Graeco-Roman territory so long as they kept themselves out of the power of the Jewish priesthood.

I cannot here do justice to the argument that occupies a large part of this book, and I must limit myself to noticing his conclusion that “Beginning around eighteen hundred years ago, a cabal of power-hungry Gentile churchmen labored to bring forth upon the land of western Asia a mystical system destined to crucify the whole of the Western world for centuries to come.”

This cabal saw an opportunity in the fact that “there was no place in the significant Gentile religions, or in Judaism, for the common people, or for the lowest of the low, the Am-ha-aretz, as the Judaeans characterized those who worked with their hands… or for slaves… or for the diseased, the crippled, the feeble, and the old… or for the blind and dumb.” There was therefore a huge market for “a salvation religion that might appeal to the masses.”

“The scheme they [the cabal] decided upon was both shrewd and unique. They would fuse Gentile and Jewish religious speculations by assimilating a Jewish messianic figure [Stephen] to the savior gods of Asia; they would validate his existence with ‘prophecies’ culled from the ancient and sacred writings of the Israelites; and they would promise to open the temples of holiness to everyone, including the unholy — thereby providing the masses with a broader-based creed than any existing in western Asia.”

He discusses the way in which the conspirators selected from various mythologies the elements of the religion they were concocting, and the points on which they had to decide and about which they quarreled, thus precipitating the wild squabbles of the ninety Christian sects that were in existence in the fourth century. And he reviews summarily the Christians’ unparalleled achievement as habitual Liars for the Lord and incorrigible forgers. (43)

Mr. Carter therefore vindicates the Jews from any imputation of guilt, and indicts the presumably non-Jewish Christians: “The Catholic Christians are guilty of committing the moral crime of appropriating the sacred writings of another people in order to validate the existence of their divine hero; they forged and otherwise fabricated the entire literature of their church in order to provide an historical foundation for their faith; and along with their fellow Christians (Protestants, Episcopalians, et al.) they have corrupted the minds of countless millions over the centuries.”

You may not accept Mr. Carter’s thesis, but you must accept his demonstration that the authors or redactors of the tales about Jesus in the “New Testament” had only a superficial knowledge of conditions in Judaea at the long past time at which the fictitious events were supposed to take place.

Notes to An Alternative

36. On these, see Professor Morton Smith’s Jesus the Magician (New York, Harper & Row, 1978), especially Chapters 6 and 7. He concentrates on their psychological tricks; the mechanical tricks can be explained by any competent magician.

37. He regards ‘Jesus’ as being, in this connection, not the name of a man, but a descriptive term, meaning ‘savior.’

38. See especially Jacob Neusner, “The Jews East of the Euphrates and the Roman Empire: I, lst-3rd Centuries AD,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, Band IX, Halbband 1, pp.46-69.

39. For a very quick summary, adequate for our purposes here, see Michael E. Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ,” Scientific American, CCXXVIII (1973) #1, pp. 80-87.

40. See the photograph in the Biblical Archaeology Review, July-August 1993, pp. 28-29.

41. Each figure is identified by a word in an alphabet that is evolving toward the Hebrew letters with which we are all familiar. The characters are too small and, in the photograph, not sufficiently distinct for my aged eyes to read them.

42. See R.E. Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity (Oxford University Press, 1959); R.M. Wilson, The Gnostic Problem (London, Mowbrey, 1958). Both authors sedulously avoid offending Christian theologians.

43. For a fuller conspectus of this flagitious record, see Joseph Wheless, Forgery in Christianity (New York, Knopf, 1930).

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