MAJOR SECTIONS

Do you really think it all began with a sanctimonious Jewish wonder-worker, strolling about 1st century Palestine? Prepare to be enlightened.

  Jesus – The Imaginary Friend

Christianity was the ultimate product of religious syncretism in the ancient world. Its emergence owed nothing to a holy carpenter. There were many Jesuses but the fable was a cultural construct. Nazareth did not exist in the 1st century AD – the area was a burial ground of rock-cut tombs. Following a star would lead you in circles. The 12 disciples are as fictitious as their master, invented to legitimise the claims of the early churches. The original Mary was not a virgin. That idea was borrowed from pagan goddesses.

Scholars have known all this for more than 200 years but priestcraft is a highly profitable business and finances an industry of deceit to keep the show on the road. "Jesus better documented than any other ancient figure" ? Don't believe a word of it. Unlike the mythical Jesus, a real historical figure like Julius Caesar has a mass of mutually supporting evidence.

Still holding to the idea that some sort of holy man lies behind the legend? Better check out

Godman – Gestation of a Superhero

It is intuitively satisfying to think that someone was behind the towering legend. Yet like the worship of Horus or Mithras a human life was neither necessary nor helpful. As it happens, we have an excellent witness to events in Judaea in the first half of the first century AD: Philo of Alexandria (c25 BC-47 AD). Yet Philo says not a word about Jesus or Christianity!

Nothing in the 'Christian message' was original. Brotherly love and compassion had been taught by the Stoics for centuries. The Christian faith was a vulgarised paganism, set to the theme of the Jewish prophets and debased by religious intolerance. The early Christian sects attacked each other as energetically as they attacked pagans. 1st century Palestine had rabbis, radicals and rebels in abundance. But a 'life' conjured up from mystical fantasy, a mass of borrowed quotations, copied story elements and a corpus of self-serving speculation, does not constitute an historical reality. The final defeat of militant Jewish nationalism and the eradication of the Jewish kingdom gave the incipient Christian churches the final uplift they required.

A closer look at the glib assertion that the Jesus story "got off the ground quickly and spread rapidly."

What DID the Early Christians Believe?

There never was just one Christianity. Out of the milieu of religiosity that infected the Roman world, dozens of competing and conflicting Jesus/Sun-god/Mystery cults emerged. The first believers in Jesus maintained he was an ethereal spirit, much like other sky/sun-gods. Only later did he acquire a human death, a human life and finally a human birth. The composite 'Jesus Christ' character – god, man, king, carpenter, conqueror, peace-maker, dispenser of justice, advocate of love – was assembled to try to unify a fragmented and fractious messianic religious movement. In the mid-2nd century the Jewishness of the faith was purged but apologists had little to say about a human Jesus. They took comfort in noting similarities between their own ideas and pagan myths. The Christians remained a minority until well after one particular faction formed a political alliance with the Roman State. The orthodox creed remained unpopular for centuries and persecution was necessary to impose its will.

Many currents fed the Jesus myth, like streams and tributaries joining to form a major river.

Sourcing the legend – The Syncretic Heritage of Christianity

Through the centuries, the Christian godman has been made and remade. Egypt provided many of the themes and much of the detail. From the age of the Ptolemies, Alexandria was the ancient cooking pot of religious fusion. Here, Hellenised Judaism influenced the early Christians. From Egypt, Catholicism copied its rituals and ceremonies, including relics, demonology, and monasticism. The Patriarchs of Alexandria wrote much of Catholic theology and it was probably in Alexandria that a profound and detailed Buddhist influence impressed itself upon the faith. From Persia, too, came a Saviour God and notions of rebirth, a Mithraic dress rehearsal for Christianity, triumphant in Rome but fatally weakened by its exclusion of women. In Judaea itself, hatred for the Roman conquerors bred a genre of apocalyptic curses, anticipating an end of the world.

Much of the mythology of Christianity is a rehash of an older and even more transparent fabrication – Judaism.

Jew Story – The Way of the Rabbi

The Israelites did not come from Egypt – a palpable myth – but emerged from the local population. There was no ancient 'Jewish Empire': the Jewish priests drew their inspiration from the empire of the Assyrians and "Judaism" was a reaction to the loss of the northern kingdom and an instructive period spent in Babylon. Jerusalem in 10th century BC had been barely a village of huts and cave dwellings. Kings David and Solomon are purely mythical characters – warrior/priest heroes, invented in the 6th century BC. Temples on the Mount? From "Threshing Floor" to "Noble Sanctuary". Persians and Greeks bearing gifts. Herod's Temple - Fact or Fantasy? Temple of Jupiter – Biggest and Best? Herod vs. Hadrian.

Herod the Great was a real king – but he did not massacre any babies. He was an astute and successful ruler. The Herodians and the Jewish elite became Romanised but religious fanatics led an armed resistance which ended in catastrophes under Titus, Trajan, and Hadrian. In the aftermath, a collaborationist revision of Judaism, later attributed to a 13th apostle "Paul", allegedly of impeccable Pharisaic credentials, competed fiercely with a reconstituted rabbinic Judaism which fused piety with mercantile success.

Eye Witness Reports?

Human ingenuity and cunning is matched by mankind's equally monumental credulity and wishful thinking.

Christianity's Fabrication Factory

There are actually some 200 gospels, epistles and other books concerning the life of Jesus Christ. Writing such material was a popular literary form, particularly in the 2nd century. The pious fantasies competed with Greek romantic fiction. Political considerations in the late 2nd century led to the selection of just four approved gospels and the rejection of others. After three centuries of wrangling 23 other books were accepted by the Church as divinely inspired. The rest were declared 'pious frauds'. In truth, the whole lot belongs to a genre of literary FICTION.

Would the Christians lie? They said it themselves – lying for God! And non-Christian testimony? – from the authentic pen of lying Christian scribes! Would the early believers have died for a lie? Consider the evidence for that supposed "persecution" – Holy Mother Church invented heroic origins!

Laugh or cry? The pork salesman who became England's patron saint - the fabrication of "Saint George". Shrouded in deceit – Leonardo da Vinci's Last Laugh. How a sacrilegious 'sorcerer' outwitted the priests!

Aelia Capitolina – Imposing the Christian Dreamscape on the city of Hadrian. A Jesus miracle at Siloam? – Negating Jewish magic. A Jesus miracle at Bethesda? – Stealing the magic of Asclepius!

Via Dolorosa – The Way of Sorrow? Jerusalem's bogus pilgrim trail. The Sepulchres of Deceit – empty tombs and empty tales of Nicodemus and Arimathea. The many tombs of Jesus – vacuous nonsense.

Resurrection fairy tale – Waking the Dead? Encounter at Emmaus?

Declared fake – Official! The "James Ossuary". How an Israeli entrepreneur outwitted the 'experts'. With multiple authors behind the original gospel story it is no surprise that the figure of "Jesus" is a mess of contradictions. Yet the story is so thinly drawn, that inventing alternative endings and conspiracy theories is a thriving industry.

Church organisation, authority and membership preceded rather than followed the justifying doctrine. As the organisation and its needs changed so has the ‘Testament of God’ adapted accordingly.

Dogma – The Word in all its Savage Glory

A triumphant Christianity was the active agent in destroying knowledge and access to learning. An ignorant and impoverished population was more readily subjugated by Princes of the Church. The "Word of God", far from being inerrant, has ever been a work in progress.

The Christian yarn began not with the testimony of a disciple but with the musings of someone who switched the Messiah from future hope to "historic past": "Mark": Bringing the Celestial Superjew Down to Earth. Vesta, Diana, Artemis, Isis – the pagan world knew all about virgins getting pregnant by randy gods: Copying the Competition – The Mythical "Virgin Mary". Ambitious bishops in Rome laid claim to a Palestinian fantasy: The Roman Church Asserts Authority – The Mythical "St Peter". Belt and braces. Adding a "royal genealogy" and "fulfillment of prophesy": "Matthew" – A Gospel for Messianic Jews. Playing to the gallery. Absolving Rome and embellishing the "birth" and "death" scenes: "Luke" – A Gospel for Credulous Pagans. Did Jesus have a brother? Throwing some light on the supposed sibling in the supposed ossuary: "Brother James" – Radical Jew Sanitized into Pious Christian Martyr. Mid-2nd century: the Catholic ecclesia write a rebuttal to the rival church of Valentinus: "John" – A Gospel to Silence the Gnostics

From religious policeman to grandee of the church, from beast fighter in Ephesus to beheading in Rome, Paul's story has more holes than a swiss cheese. A detailed study of the great missionary that some say "founded Christianity".

 St Paul the Apostle – Dead in the water?

The trail-blazing Christian missionary and apostle, St Paul, appears nowhere in the secular histories of his age. Ironically, though supposedly in Jerusalem at the right time, he can give no witness to a historical Jesus.

But was Paul himself a genuine historical figure? Viewed without the rose-tinted spectacles of Christian faith, the first voyage of Paul is as fanciful as the first voyage of Sinbad. Paul's presence in Philippi is decidedly dubious. Was it friction or fiction in Roman Greece? Corinthians. Man, Myth and Magic among the Galatians. The later Pauline journeys, including the supposed transportation of the apostle to Rome, are similarly bogus. The fishy tale of Paul's "shipwreck" on Malta. Characterized by incongruities, contradiction, and the absurd, they are a concocted fantasy.

In fact, no evidence links Paul to the major Christian churches – the story in the Acts of the Apostles is a ripping yarn. A phantom saint heads the list of "witnesses to witnesses", Ignatius the "God bearer".

Pauline letters certainly exist but the epistles, far from being genuine letters, originated in the acrimonious doctrinal battles of the 2nd century – a time when "pseudepigraphy" and forged apostolic writings were weapons in the war of "Christianities". Did Paul really invent Christianity? Theology Parts 1 and 2.

The invention of "St Paul" – Journey's End.

Orchestrated by ambitious Christian clerics, a cancer of superstition, fear and brutality was imposed across Europe.

Heart of Darkness – The Criminal History of the Christian Church

As it waited in the wings of pagan Rome, the Catholic Church was already marked by corruption, violence and sexual scandal. The fanatics of Christ proved useful to an ambitious prince who set his sights on absolute and undivided power.

The Church expropriated the resources – both human and material – which might have defended Roman civilization. While an indolent army of clerics lived on the state, the impoverished legions degenerated into a peasant militia. Once a particular Christianity – hierarchical and authoritarian – became wedded to the Roman state, it became a force of brutal repression. The "Church Fathers" transformed Romano-Hellenic culture by bigotry, anti-Semitism, censorship and intolerance. This so-called 'orthodoxy' suppressed and persecuted its 'heretical' opposition. The barbarian tribes that overran the weakened Roman Empire were, for the most part, Christianised; the forces that opposed them, pagan.

The Christian Heaven may have been a vain folly but the Christian Hell has been real enough.

Hell on Earth – A Brutal Superstition Spreads Across the World

The priestly "protection racket" required the criminalizing of the whole of humanity through the doctrine of Sin. In a world run by clerical gangsters, the writ of Holy Mother Church was enforced by sadism and torture. For more than a thousand years, the henchmen of Christ inflicted a cruel barbarism on every community they encountered. Law was replaced by Divine Right, scientific method criminalized, ancient medical knowledge lost for a millennium. Women, fortunate to be domestic slaves, might find themselves in enforced celibacy, joyless marriage or burnt as a witch. Roasting heretics became popular entertainment and a religious duty. 

Raised to the status of State religion the Christian Church reigned over the destruction of civilization. As the centuries passed religious barbarism grew ever more vicious.

Winter of the World – The Terrible Cost of "Christendom"

In their struggle for power, Christians waged their own "civil war". A Catholic trinitarian nonsense triumphed over Arianism. The intellectual centres of the empire were ruined by murder and prohibition and Europe sank into ignorance and superstition. The civilization that had stretched from the deserts of Arabia to the highlands of Scotland reverted to a primitive village subsistence. By aggressive warfare, Christianisation of the heathen tribes followed. In Spain, the German lands, Britain, and Ireland, the despots of the Church imposed their tyranny.

With a Jewish father (stern patriarch) and a Christian mother (obsession with guilt and heaven) it is not surprising that Islam grew up a bit of a tartar.

Islam's Desert Storm – 'Christendom' Reaps a Whirlwind

Early civilizations arose in many parts of Arabia, long before Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Islam arose as an adaptation of old ideas, not something new. Yet initially, far from imposing a severe theocracy, the early caliphs were tolerant, even urbane. Despite the mutual hostility of kindred monotheisms, Islam endorsed a great deal of Judeo-Christian theology and adopted many of its practices. In its heyday, from the Atlantic to central Asia, Islam produced scholars and refinement. Europe's recovery owed a huge debt to Islamic civilization. Battered by both East and West the enlightenment failed and theology triumphed.

Is it any surprise that organised religion draws into itself the lonely hearts and the abandoned? Jesus is not merely an imaginary friend, he is also a fantasy lover.

Those SEXUALLY hung-up Christians – Loved-up for Jesus

With God's blessing, misogynistic Jewish scribes encoded a raft of sex crimes which sanctified racial ambition. The sacred mission was to populate and subdue the earth. Judaism bequeathed its unfortunate mix of ignorance and intolerance to a wayward faction of heretics known to the world as Christians. The enthusiasts of Christ elaborated on the notion that the body was a source of shame and that women were an inferior breed. Mortification of the flesh became the path of 'spiritual purity'.

But a triumphant Catholicism happily compromised the fierce strictures of the founders for worldly advantage. The 'Gospel of Sin' became a source of wealth and power for the pimping priests. Predators replaced the puritans. The consequence is that for two millennia Christianity's anti-sexual, puritanical doctrines have inflicted untold damage on the mental, emotional and physical lives of countless millions of people.

Heaven help us. The richest, most powerful nation in history has a psychotic infatuation with Jay-a-sus the Lawd!

The Christianising of the Americas

And when you must have a laugh

Jesus Dress Up (A spanking good time!)

Landover Baptist Church

Jesus in Legoland (Brick Testament)

The Submissive Jesus
Prayer Answering Talking Head!

Enquiring Minds

On the web since December 4th 2001

Page loads since 18.08.06

THIS MONTH'S FEATURES