In the preceding pages I have avoided specific consideration of Christianity, although, so far as I can judge from experience with my own writings, about 15% of the Christians are alert enough to see my implications.

I think I have a greater sympathy for Christianity than my readers imagine, for I not only recognize it as a belief that was for a long time part of our civilization and produced such splendid monuments as the great cathedrals, but I also regard it as having been a consolation and boon to the great majority of our own people and one that I am sorry so many must now do without. (This is something quite different from the social utility of supernatural sanctions that may be the indispensable basis of a generally accepted and observed morality.) My feeling for Christianity is, I think, expressed by what I consider one of the best poems of Sir William Watson, “The Churchyard.”

It is that infinite pathos that touches me deeply. Sunt lacrimae rerum, if you remember your Virgil.

Before we consider Christianity vis a vis the Jewish survival strategy, let me first make two generalizations:

(1) The power and value of a religion has nothing to do with the personality or probity of its founder. The best example of that is provided by the Mormons, who are today the most solid and stable cult in the United States, and who successfully resisted longer than any other large church the contagious decay that quickly reduced all others, with the exception of some small, scattered, and discordant Fundamentalist churches and some pockets of Traditionalist Catholics, to the contemptible quackery of a “social gospel” and hypocritical irrationality. This really astonishing and massive religious edifice was founded by one Joseph Smith, a petty swindler who began his career by fleecing suckers by means of a magic stone through which he could see treasure buried in the earth, but after he was arrested and got off with a promise not to do it again, turned to the safer and much more lucrative racket of swindling suckers with religion. He founded a great church, but there is reason to believe that he didn’t give a damn what happened to it after he was dead and probably didn’t expect it to last. Smith, of course, was a man about whom we have a great deal of information, both about his life and about his doctrines, whereas we know nothing whatsoever about Jesus except the myths associated with his name, and these are so various, contradictory, and late that he is, for all practical purposes, a mythical figure, like Adonis or Mithra, even if there was a man by that name (as is likely) about whom the myths were assembled. If it were possible to ascertain who he was and what he did, it would not in the least matter if he were found to be a character no more admirable than Joseph Smith.

(2) The Jesus-cults that existed in the Roman Empire are connected with Western Christianity only in that some of them provided a pseudo-historical story that was accepted by the West (our ancestors simply ignored the parts that our minds found distasteful), and a confused metaphysical doctrine expressed in words that our people misunderstood and progressively reinterpreted until the original meaning was completely forgotten. This is true not only of the rank jungle of Jesus cults that flourished in the Second Century and thereafter, but also of the “orthodox” Christianity which came into being under the successors of Constantine. As Spengler points out in the second volume of the Untergang, even the “orthodox” Christianity of the last days of the Roman Empire was still essentially a Magian cult and, as such, was unintelligible to the Faustian mind, and he observes that Augustine, though revered by the Western church, would have regarded the Christianity of Anselm or St. Thomas or Luther as an abominable and incomprehensible heresy – and so would the other supposed “Fathers of the Church.” They were fathers historically, of course, but had they known the Christianity of Mediaeval Europe, they would indignantly have repudiated it as a bastard with whom they had no connection.

There was no such thing as an ‘orthodox’ Christianity before the last two decades of the Fourth Century, when one bunch of holy men got hold of Theodosius (by explaining to him how advantageous it would be for him to coöperate with them) and so were able to use the police power of the state to repress and kill their competitors, the Arians, who had been the officially sanctioned brand of Christians (and so “orthodox”!) before that time. (The Arians, now called ‘heretics’ retrospectively, were guilty of being sufficiently logical to claim that a father was necessarily older than his son, and they naturally regarded as very stupid heretics the mystery-mongers who claimed that a father and his son had been born at the same time. The latter, however, were clever enough to back Theodosius before he pushed his way to the throne and to back Gratian against his father, and once they got their hands on the imperial power, they were clever enough to prevent potential competitors from muscling them out.) The neat trick that holy men use today is to describe as ‘heretics’ the innumerable Christian sects that did not have doctrines that can conveniently be twisted into conformity with what became ‘orthodox’ by decree of Theodosius in 381, thus leading the unwary layman to suppose that there was an ‘orthodox’ Christianity before that time. They also conceal the fact that if the brand that got power in 381 is orthodoxy, then all Western Christianity is a heresy, and they themselves are, by that definition, heretics.

The only honest thing to do is to apply the term ‘Christian’ to all the sects that claimed to be followers of a Jesus entitled ‘Christus,’ who was really or supposedly executed in Judaea in the time of Tiberius or thereabouts. When Christians become conspicuous, late in the Second Century, most of them were Jews, and it is probable that the numerous letters of Paul, including both those that were incorporated in the “New Testament” anthology when it was put together and those that were excluded for some reason, were manufactured at this time by Jews who wanted to take in goyim on easy terms. (These fabrications probably included the forged correspondence of Seneca with Paul, which seems to have been known to Tertullian.) This was a principal difference among the numerous Christian sects. The Nazarenes, whose holy book was a “Gospel According to the Hebrews,” of which fragments survive, and who spoke only Aramaic in their rites, held that only Jews by race could be Christians, since Christ, when he returned to butcher the hated goyim, naturally wanted only Jews to rule the world. A compromise was made by the Ebionites, who had, inter alia, a “Gospel of Matthew” that was certainly older than the diluted rifacimento that got into the “New Testament,” and who preached a perfect communism, with all property and women to belong to everyone in common; they held that goyim, if they were circumcised and went through ceremonies to purge them of their native vileness, could become Christians second-class, as I will show below. The Carpocratians, who seem to have been a numerous and powerful 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 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 prosecutions were sufficiency 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 (= the Egyptian god Toth), Seth (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’Égypte, 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 identity 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 heart 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 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, as shown by the original reading of the Medicean manuscript (which can still be seen beneath the erasure and “correction” by a later hand) was Chrestiani (“quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Chrestianos appellabat”), 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 χρηστόζ [Chrestus],* ‘useful, serviceable, good,’ is a common Greek word and was a name frequently given to slaves of Oriental origin (retained by them as a cognomen 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.) The date of the particular outbreak of which Chrestus was the leader is uncertain. It is assigned to 49-50 A.D. by Koestermann, who has a good article on this subject in Historia, XVI (1967), 456-469, but it could have been an outbreak of Jews six or seven years earlier. Accepting Koestermann’s date, it occurred between fourteen and fifteen years before the burning of Rome in 64 A.D., for which Nero blamed the Chrestiani, who were certainly regarded as a gang or rather horde of Jews who were trying to destroy civilization in the manner of Chrestus, whom they may have venerated as their Karl Marx or Trotsky (Bronstein).

What happened to Chrestus is not known, but it is not impossible he hid to avoid arrest, got out of Rome, and went back to Judaea, if he had been there before, or, if he had not, chose it as a good place to stir up more trouble for civilized men. If so, he could have been arrested and executed there by the Roman authorities. If so, he could have been the basis on which the later myths about Jesus (a very common Jewish name, which could well have been his) were constructed. It is a curious fact that one of the earliest Christian forgeries, known already to Tertullian and antedating most or all of the New Testament, is a supposed letter from Pontius Pilatus describing the Crucifixion, and exists in two versions that are addressed to Claudius as well as in the standard versions in which the reigning emperor is Tiberius. It is hard to see why any Christians should have seen an advantage in placing the Crucifixion so late, but it would be understandable if the story originally concerned Chrestus and the date was moved farther back when it was decided that it would be better to change the name to Christus and pretend that there was no connection. A change from Chrestus to Christus would have been easy to put over by the end of the Second Century, when the increasing itacism in Greek pronunciation gave eta and iota the same sound in popular speech. There would be the further advantage that the new name would be unique and unprecedented as a personal name, instead of being a very common name among the lower classes.

The word χριστόζ [Christus],* ‘salve, ointment,’ was naturally never a name given to persons, but in contemporary Yiddish (i.e., the Jewish dialect of Greek) it was for some reason used as an epithet applied to the Jewish kings who appear in stories in the Old Testament, implying that they had been ‘anointed’ and so were legitimate. It does occur in the Septuagint. It thus acquired among Jews a connotation that would have made it a logical title to be assumed by a revolutionary agitator who claimed to be a legitimate king of the Jews and also the Messiah whom the Jews had long been awaiting with the expectation that his supernatural powers would enable them to butcher the hated Indo-Europeans without fear of reprisals. It is entirely possible that there was such an agitator, distinct from Chrestus, in the time of Tiberius and that he was executed by the Roman governor of Judaea at that time. You will notice that the stories in the New Testament contain clear vestiges of a claim to be the ‘King of the Jews,’ which the authors of the stories find it necessary to explain away. In the absence of any historical record one can only speculate, of course, but on the whole I think it more likely that there was an agitator or thaumaturgist named Jesus (i.e. Yeshua’, a common contraction of Yehoshua’, like Jake for Jacob) in the time of Tiberius than that the whole story was reconstructed from the career of Chrestus. Palestine was full of goëtae, fakirs, peddling miracles and revelations to the multitude, and it would not be at all astonishing if one of them tried to set himself up in competition to the established Jewish priests with fatal results or even started a revolutionary movement of some sort that the Roman government nipped in the bud.

The foregoing will explain why it is nearly certain that the Chrestiani executed by Nero in 64 A.D. were a mob of Jewish revolutionaries, followers of the notorious Chrestus, who had led the destructive outbreak fourteen or more years before. There is thus no historical evidence for the existence of Christians at so early a date. (The term ‘Christian’ should obviously be applied only to sects that claim to be derived from a Christus distinct from Chrestus.) For further information on this subject, see the article by Koestermann cited above.

Pliny’s letter is our earliest historical evidence for Christians. Pliny was in Bithynia in 112 A.D., and at that time the Christians probably had not yet concocted any ‘gospels,’ although it is possible, of course, that they had some in secret and were able to conceal them from him. (There is a translation with the text of the letter in the Loeb series.) They convinced Pliny that they were just a bunch of ignorant and superstitious, but innoxious, fanatics, and, as is evident from the letter, Pliny was really astonished to find no evidence that they were guilty of the crimes (such as ritual murders) and anarchistic subversion that he naturally associated with the name. Since his is the only historical evidence for Christians at so early a date, we have no means of knowing whether he confused Christiani with Chrestiani (who may still have been active at that time – the Jews were always conspiring against civilization and may have kept the name) – a confusion that was particularly easy because a Roman would have thought it unlikely that a group would call itself ‘the people of the salve,’ which is all the name would mean to anyone who was not a Jew – or there were Christians (i.e., persons who claimed to be followers of a Christus, not Chrestus) who did practice ritual murders and the like. There were such later.

It is certain that the earliest known sects of “Christians,” i.e., followers of one or another of the agitators named Jesus, were enemies of, and probably conspirators against, the Graeco-Romans. The Nazarenes admitted only Jews; the Ebionites, in conformity with the doctrine stated explicitly in the “New Testament” (Marc. 7.27-29), although most Christians are too stupid to understand what they read, admitted goyim to the status of “whining dogs,” provided they had themselves circumcised and obeyed their divinely appointed masters, promising them that when Jesus returned with celestial reënforcements and inflicted on the hated Greeks and Romans all the slaughter and torment that is so enthusiastically described in the apocalypse that was included in the “New Testament,” the proselytes would be permitted to lie on the floor behind the tables at which the triumphant Jews banquet and to eat the table scraps thrown to them. This promise, however, understandably failed to attract large numbers of goyim, and the superstition got under way only when its doctrines had been modified to facilitate the “conversion” of large numbers of the mongrelized inhabitants of the once-Roman Empire. Many of the early Christian sects disclaimed in various ways a connection with the Jews, and it can scarcely be doubted that the anti-Jewish passages in the “New Testament” were designed to facilitate competition with those sects. It is, I think, most significant that the Christian sect which shrewdly made a deal with the despots of the decaying Roman Empire and thus acquired the legal and military power to exterminate its competitors was one which had assembled a hastily collected and slovenly edited anthology of a few of the numerous gospels and called it a “New Testament,” so that it could carry with it an “Old Testament” of Jewish tales to prove that the Jews were the Chosen Race of the tribal deity whom the Jews had impudently identified with the animus mundi of Stoic monotheism as well as with the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrian cult. It may also be significant that the Christians have always used the normal Jewish techniques of fraud and forgery, most obviously when they concocted gospels that purport to have been written by eyewitnesses of miraculous and impossible events. The evidence does not permit us to affirm that Christianity was cunningly invented by the Jews as a means of paralysing the healthy instincts of other races, but we can affirm that if the Jews did set out to devise a mental poison that would eventually be lethal to our race, they could have concocted no drug that was more efficacious in the circumstances.

I emphatically call your attention to the obvious fact that the primitive Christian doctrine is a specific demand for the suicide of our race, which survived from the end of the Roman Empire to the present only because our ancestors, of fresh barbarian stock, simply ignored in practice a large part of the pernicious doctrine, especially in northern Europe under essentially aristocratic régimes. Until the disintegration of Protestantism made it possible for any ambitious tailor, clever confidence man, or disgruntled housewife to have “revelations” and pitch the woo at lower classes to make themselves important or fleece the suckers, the professional holy men either contented themselves with telling our people they were “sinful” or used the common devices of theologians to conceal the import of the holy book. (Even so, however, the Catholic dervishes are obviously responsible for the eventual dominance of mestizos in “Latin” America, and many similar misfortunes.)

For the deplorable acceptance of Christianity by the ignorant barbarians of our race, I have tried to account in my book, Christianity and the Survival of the West. I would now change nothing in that discussion except to make it more emphatic, for in the years since I wrote it, I have come to the conclusion that, with only numerically insignificant exceptions, the Christians are useless in any effort to preserve our race, and that our domestic enemies are, from their standpoint, well advised to subsidize, as they are now doing, the ranting of evangelical shamans and the revival of menticidal superstitions by every means, including the hiring of technicians who can pose as “scientists” and “prove,” by subtle or impudent tricks, the “truth” of the flimsiest hoaxes and the most preposterous notions. The development of Christianity in all the sects of the Western world during the past two centuries has been the progressive elimination from all of them of the elements of our natively Aryan morality that were superimposed on the doctrine before and during the Middle Ages to make it acceptable to our race and so a religion that could not be exported as a whole to other races. With the progressive weakening of our racial instincts, all the cults have been restored to conformity with the “primitive” Christianity of the holy book, i.e., to the undiluted poison of the Jewish originals. I should, perhaps, have made it more explicit in my little book that the effective power of the alien cult is by no means confined to sects that affirm a belief in supernatural beings. As I have stressed in other writings, when the Christian myths became unbelievable, they left in the minds of even intelligent and educated men a residue, the detritus of the rejected mythology, in the form of superstitions about “all mankind,” “human rights,” and similar figments of the imagination that had gained currency only on the assumption that they had been decreed by an omnipotent deity, so that in practical terms we must regard as basically Christian and religious such irrational cults as Communism and the tangle of fancies that is called “Liberalism” and is the most widely accepted faith among our people today. I am a little encouraged that today some of the more intelligent “Liberals” are at last perceiving that their supposedly rational creed is simply based on the Christian myths they have consciously rejected. I note, for example, that Mary Kenny, who describes herself as “a former radical” (The Sunday Telegraph, 27 January 1980, pp. 8-9), has come to the realization that:

‘so many of the [“Liberals’”] political ideas... are religious at root. The search for equality in the secular sense is a replacement of the Judaeo-Christian idea that God loves every individual equally... The feelings of guilt or, indeed, pity, which once went into the religious drive, are being transferred to secular ideas to the ultimate destruction of our civilisation.’

So far as there is hope for us, it lies, I think, in this belated tendency take account of biological realities.