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Laurent Guyénot: The West is Not Based on Christianity | Jerm Warfare · UK Column Radio

0:30
Speaker 1: My name is Jim.
0:31
Speaker 2: This is Germ warfare, the battle of ideas.
0:34
Speaker 1: And I have a strong feeling that you and I
0:37
Speaker 1: are going to become friends because there's so much work
0:40
Speaker 1: that you've done that I find fascinating and I'm going
0:43
Speaker 1: to keep inviting you back for more.
0:44
Speaker 2: Great I need friends. I have a lot of enemies.
0:50
Speaker 1: Join the club, all right. So you've written extensively on
0:58
Speaker 1: kind of the history of Christianity and how it links
1:04
Speaker 1: to the West and how it links to the Roman Empire.
1:07
Speaker 1: And I'm trying to think of a of a place
1:09
Speaker 1: to start, and I think perhaps a foundational place actually
1:14
Speaker 1: is what is the Torah?
1:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good good place to start, because obviously
1:22
Speaker 3: Christianity is coming from the Judeo, you know, the Abrahamic tradition.
1:30
Speaker 3: So let's call it the Jewish tradition, even though we
1:34
Speaker 3: could prefer to call it the Ibraic tradition or whatever.
1:38
Speaker 2: But so, yeah, the.
1:42
Speaker 3: To if I if we start with the Torah, I
1:46
Speaker 3: would say the basic definition for me of the Torah
1:49
Speaker 3: would be to say it's a book written by the
1:52
Speaker 3: Jews claiming that God shows the Jews. I mean, that's
1:56
Speaker 3: the light motive of the Torah. You know, God to
1:59
Speaker 3: create of the universe, you know, choose one people.
2:04
Speaker 2: You know, they might not have been called the Jews
2:06
Speaker 2: originally you.
2:09
Speaker 3: Originally in a Greek means Judaea, and people of Judaea
2:13
Speaker 3: or people of the tribe of Judea are so the
2:17
Speaker 3: tribe of was only one of the twelve tribes. But
2:20
Speaker 3: you know, Israel anyway, maybe we will not get too
2:23
Speaker 3: much into the history of Israel because everybody knows it
2:27
Speaker 3: and anyway, I have no special nothing to contradict to
2:34
Speaker 3: the you know, the mainstream history of Israel. But if
2:38
Speaker 3: you look at it from the outside, from if you
2:40
Speaker 3: look at the trial from outside of the Christian tradition.
2:43
Speaker 3: Of course, if you look at it from inside the
2:45
Speaker 3: Christian tradition, then you have a different outlook because you
2:48
Speaker 3: basically believe it's basically true that.
2:51
Speaker 2: God shows one people.
2:53
Speaker 3: But if you step out of which is the position
2:56
Speaker 3: I take, You know, I clearly say take stay. I'm
3:00
Speaker 3: not a Christian. I'm not talking from within the Christian tradition.
3:03
Speaker 3: I have no problem with Jesus, I have no problem
3:06
Speaker 3: with the story of Christ itself. But Christianity is a
3:10
Speaker 3: completely different subject. So I'm talking from outside. I don't
3:14
Speaker 3: believe that God shows the Jews. So for me, it's
3:17
Speaker 3: a book that says that pretends that claims God shows
3:21
Speaker 3: the Jews. You know, that's and then the and then
3:23
Speaker 3: it's a history. The Torah is the law that God
3:26
Speaker 3: gave the Jews and the history of the relationship between
3:30
Speaker 3: God and his people and the relationship between Israel and
3:36
Speaker 3: the other nations. That's a Torah. So we could talk
3:39
Speaker 3: about when when was it treaten. There's a lot of
3:42
Speaker 3: debate about that. I'm more I more agree with the
3:46
Speaker 3: recent scholarship that tend to say that the Torah as
3:50
Speaker 3: we as we have it today is much less old
3:55
Speaker 3: than we used to think, even though some parts of
3:57
Speaker 3: it may be very old.
3:59
Speaker 2: But the the.
4:00
Speaker 3: Editorial process that and the ideology that that you know,
4:07
Speaker 3: is consistent from one book to the other dates from
4:10
Speaker 3: the Elenistic period. Most scholars are seeing today would agree
4:15
Speaker 3: with the fact that it's dates either from the very
4:18
Speaker 3: beginning of the Ellenistic period or the person period or
4:22
Speaker 3: the Babylonian period. You know, most people would not say
4:26
Speaker 3: dates before the Babylonian exile. So some people would say
4:29
Speaker 3: it was basically crafted by Estras who was, you know,
4:36
Speaker 3: kind of leading the priests the Sacerdotal cast in Babylonian
4:41
Speaker 3: in the fifth century BC. You know, that was that
4:45
Speaker 3: was the theory of already of Barruckspinoza. But most people
4:48
Speaker 3: now tend to think that the way we have it
4:50
Speaker 3: is actually much less, is much younger. It was written
4:56
Speaker 3: more in the Alingistic period, so uh, you know, it's
5:01
Speaker 3: a book that claims that God gave God shows one people,
5:05
Speaker 3: and God gave them this land, you know, and then
5:09
Speaker 3: God ordered them to fight their enemies to the death,
5:12
Speaker 3: you know, and God gave them also a destiny to
5:15
Speaker 3: control the world basically. You know, if you look at
5:18
Speaker 3: there are a lot of passages in the Deuteronomy that
5:21
Speaker 3: says basically, Israel will will prevail over all other nations
5:28
Speaker 3: and will rule over all other nations of the world,
5:32
Speaker 3: the world being, of course at that time more than
5:35
Speaker 3: you know, the Mediterranean and and until until Persia. That
5:40
Speaker 3: would be my basic definition of the Torah.
5:45
Speaker 1: Do you think there's a meaningful difference between the Jewish
5:49
Speaker 1: religion and Jewish identity.
5:53
Speaker 3: Well, that's a whole that's a very difficult topic. But
5:57
Speaker 3: by the way, we talked about the Toro. I was
5:59
Speaker 3: actually more talking about the Tannac, because the Toa is
6:01
Speaker 3: a panatok the five books of Moses and then the
6:04
Speaker 3: history and then the prophetic books. So if we put
6:07
Speaker 3: all that together, the Jews call it the tanac. Sometimes
6:10
Speaker 3: they use the Torah for the tannak, but the Torah
6:13
Speaker 3: to be precise, with more than five books of Moses. Well,
6:18
Speaker 3: Jews obviously are both, you know, people in a sense
6:25
Speaker 3: of a nation, nation being etymologically means you know, genetic,
6:31
Speaker 3: an ethnic entity, and religion. But obviously they are both.
6:35
Speaker 3: So sometimes they would more define themselves as a religion.
6:38
Speaker 3: Sometimes they would more define themselves as a nation. And
6:41
Speaker 3: that's the.
6:42
Speaker 2: Whole debate within the Jewish community. Are we more people
6:46
Speaker 2: or are we more religion?
6:47
Speaker 3: You know, in the nineteenth century or the early nineteenth century,
6:51
Speaker 3: at the time of Napoleon, they would claim, we are people,
6:54
Speaker 3: we are religions, so we ask for the same rights
6:57
Speaker 3: other religions. And that's how they get They go, you know,
7:00
Speaker 3: the rights to be citizens of friends, because they say
7:03
Speaker 3: we're not We're not a separate people, We're just a
7:06
Speaker 3: separate religion. But then design and then that became the
7:10
Speaker 3: main identity of reform Judaism. You know, Jews claim to
7:16
Speaker 3: be just a religion and wherever you leave you are
7:19
Speaker 3: a citizens of that. But then the Zionists reacted against
7:23
Speaker 3: that and say, no, we're not a religion, We're fundamentally
7:25
Speaker 3: a nation and we want our land and we want
7:28
Speaker 3: our own state and so on. So they rejected the
7:31
Speaker 3: idea that Jews are a religion. They say, you know,
7:34
Speaker 3: so it's always you know, it's always both depends on
7:39
Speaker 3: the viewpoint, but fundamentally it's the same. If you realize
7:43
Speaker 3: that the most fundamental commandment in the Torra is endogamy,
7:50
Speaker 3: is you know, not mix up with other nations. So
7:54
Speaker 3: the religious, the fundamental religious commandment is to be to
7:59
Speaker 3: be an So you know, that's why there's no real
8:03
Speaker 3: contradiction between being a religion and because it's a religion
8:07
Speaker 3: based on the fundamental commandment not to mix up with
8:12
Speaker 3: other races, not to intermarry with other nations. Of course
8:17
Speaker 3: they do, you know in history, their perials, where they
8:21
Speaker 3: would you know, intermarry with other nations and proselytizes. But fundamentally,
8:30
Speaker 3: you know, there is no contradiction between the religious identity
8:32
Speaker 3: and the ethnic identity.
8:36
Speaker 1: The reason why I ask that is because that kind
8:40
Speaker 1: of forms the basis of what it means to be
8:44
Speaker 1: Western or what Western society is. And you argue that
8:50
Speaker 1: the West is fundamentally Greek Roman and not Judeo Christian.
8:54
Speaker 2: Is that right?
8:56
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, yeah, I came to that conclusion after studying,
9:00
Speaker 3: you know, after studying different periods of history. But if
9:07
Speaker 3: I look, for example, at the Renaissance, if we look
9:09
Speaker 3: at our civilization today and everything we admire in our civilization,
9:14
Speaker 3: everything we are proud of, well we would we would
9:17
Speaker 3: think about art, you know, like sculptures, paintings, music, We
9:23
Speaker 3: would think about science. We would think about philosophy, you
9:27
Speaker 3: know science, you know, mathematics and mechanics and all, and
9:32
Speaker 3: we would think about philosophy. Maybe we would think also
9:35
Speaker 3: about political science and so on.
9:37
Speaker 2: And all the things.
9:38
Speaker 3: If we are if we study historically, they came through
9:43
Speaker 3: from the Renaissance. They did not really exist before the Renaissance,
9:47
Speaker 3: if you take art. That's that's one thing that struck
9:49
Speaker 3: me on day one day almost I mean not one day,
9:52
Speaker 3: but I mean it became very clear suddenly to me
9:56
Speaker 3: that we tend to idealize the Middle Age before the Renaissance.
10:01
Speaker 3: But if we really look, what did the Middle Ages
10:04
Speaker 3: gave us except a nice mythology, accept a lot of literature,
10:10
Speaker 3: you know, the King Arthur, accept the narrative about the Crusades,
10:15
Speaker 3: and all these ideal ideals about chivalry, you know, and
10:19
Speaker 3: the knights and so on. What did you know, we
10:23
Speaker 3: didn't get art from the Middle Ages. You know, there
10:30
Speaker 3: was an incredible creativity in the Renaissance compared to the
10:34
Speaker 3: Middle Age.
10:35
Speaker 2: It was.
10:35
Speaker 3: It was a tremendous advancement. Science was almost non existent
10:41
Speaker 3: in the in the Middle Age. Of course, the Middle
10:43
Speaker 3: Age is one thousand years So if I say that
10:45
Speaker 3: to you know, we should We could get into the
10:47
Speaker 3: details and basically what was the Renaissance. It was a
10:52
Speaker 3: rediscovery of the Greek Roman world. Fundamentally, everybody agrees that's
10:59
Speaker 3: almost a definition of a Renaissance, the rebirth of the
11:03
Speaker 3: pre Christian tradition.
11:05
Speaker 2: And that's very true.
11:06
Speaker 3: You know, the Renaissance people were just falling in love
11:10
Speaker 3: rediscovering the Greeks and the Romans, mostly the Greeks, but
11:14
Speaker 3: the Romans also Roman technology, Roman architecture, Greek philosophy, Greek science.
11:21
Speaker 3: Sometimes they rediscovered it before the Renaissance, they were already
11:26
Speaker 3: kind of rediscovering it a little bit through the Arabs.
11:29
Speaker 3: You know, it did not happen all at once, but
11:33
Speaker 3: it happens quite suddenly in Italy, in Florence. You know,
11:37
Speaker 3: it was really a movement that started. It is one
11:40
Speaker 3: city in Florence, in Italy, and that was really the
11:45
Speaker 3: birth of what we imagine today as a greatness of
11:48
Speaker 3: our civilization. If you realistically think what is the greatness
11:52
Speaker 3: of our civilization, then it really started in the Renaissance.
11:55
Speaker 3: And the Renaissance was basically a rediscovery. Of course, they
11:59
Speaker 3: added a lot of things, but it was a rediscovery
12:02
Speaker 3: of the of the Greek science, the rediscovery of Plato,
12:07
Speaker 3: rediscovery of the Presocratic uh, you know, mathematicians and so on.
12:12
Speaker 3: We could get into the details, but that's that's something
12:15
Speaker 3: that of course can be can be debated. But if
12:18
Speaker 3: you accept that that analysis, then of course, uh, that
12:24
Speaker 3: means our civilization is fundamentally Greek or Roman from intellectual viewpoint,
12:32
Speaker 3: artistic viewpoint, our our vision of human beings, our vision, you.
12:40
Speaker 2: Know, uh, you know, our.
12:42
Speaker 3: Our attachment to our fundamental trust in reason. You know,
12:50
Speaker 3: it is definitely not coming from Christianity. So Christianity, of
12:54
Speaker 3: course is part of our civilization. I'm not I'm not
12:57
Speaker 3: saying it counts for nothing, but it doesn't count for
12:59
Speaker 3: that in my opinion.
13:01
Speaker 2: So if I say that, I ask people where am
13:05
Speaker 2: I wrong here?
13:07
Speaker 3: What in our civilization would come directly from Christianity instead
13:12
Speaker 3: of coming from and always people come to, for example,
13:15
Speaker 3: well what about the cathedrals? You know they always try
13:19
Speaker 3: to search. Oh yeah, the cathedrals. That's not Greek or Romans,
13:22
Speaker 3: that's typical Christian civil And I say, yes, of course,
13:25
Speaker 3: the cathedral is something very special. We love it. We
13:30
Speaker 3: love them today. We started loving them in the nineteenth century.
13:34
Speaker 3: Before that, you know, after during the Renaissance, they didn't
13:38
Speaker 3: like this style so much. They called it Gothic. I mean,
13:41
Speaker 3: the Renaissance started to call it Gothic because the goat
13:45
Speaker 3: are the barbarians, so it was a barbarian art.
13:47
Speaker 2: But basically, let's say it's great, But who build a cathedral?
13:50
Speaker 3: Not Christian monks, not Christian bishops, not the pope, you know,
13:56
Speaker 3: people who had some deep knowledge of construction action. And
14:01
Speaker 3: the funny thing is we call them free we call
14:04
Speaker 3: them freemasons. You know, the people who build the cathedrals.
14:09
Speaker 3: They were kind of funny Christians, you know, they were
14:13
Speaker 3: not really your typical kind of Christians. They had their
14:15
Speaker 3: secret knowledge, they had their mathematics and so on, and
14:19
Speaker 3: they were an international trade. So you know, so if
14:23
Speaker 3: you think realistically, what's Christian about the cathedrals, really, you know,
14:29
Speaker 3: it's not.
14:30
Speaker 2: It's not.
14:31
Speaker 3: The technology is not coming from Christianity at all. So
14:35
Speaker 3: you know, it's a special kind of thing that belongs
14:39
Speaker 3: to Christian dumb but it's not Christian. It has nothing
14:43
Speaker 3: to do with Christian doctrine, it has nothing to do
14:45
Speaker 3: with you know, Christian beliefs in the afterlife in hell
14:49
Speaker 3: in the original scenes, absolutely nothing to do. And then
14:52
Speaker 3: people come with all kinds of other things. They come
14:54
Speaker 3: with with, Well, what about Gregorian chant, I say, well,
14:58
Speaker 3: Gregorian chant is great, great music. When you when you're
15:02
Speaker 3: not allowed to use instrument, you're not allowed to use polyphony,
15:06
Speaker 3: you do. But music was much more developed before Gregorian chant,
15:10
Speaker 3: and it when it became liberated from church, you know, taboos,
15:16
Speaker 3: different taboos, and it developed. So classical music, of course,
15:20
Speaker 3: was nonexistent in the Middle Age, the earliest, the earliest
15:24
Speaker 3: classical music we have today. Sometimes we call it medieval music.
15:29
Speaker 3: It's not medieval music, it's Renaissance music. We don't normost
15:33
Speaker 3: we know almost nothing about music. So yeah, that's that's
15:37
Speaker 3: I think a point that needs to be discussed. But
15:40
Speaker 3: for me, it's it was a kind of breakthrough in
15:42
Speaker 3: my vision, in my in my to build, to feel
15:45
Speaker 3: free to criticize christian to analyze Christianity critically because I
15:51
Speaker 3: feel I'm not attacking our civilization when I'm trying to
15:55
Speaker 3: find out what Christianity did to us, because in fact,
15:59
Speaker 3: Christianity did not. It's not the source of greatness of
16:03
Speaker 3: our civilization. And when I understood that, and then I've
16:07
Speaker 3: kind of overcame, overcame the you know, the kind of
16:10
Speaker 3: dilemma I should Is it good to criticize Christianity because Christianity?
16:13
Speaker 3: Because our civilization is built on Christianity. So if if
16:17
Speaker 3: I criticized Christianity, am I not undermining or you know?
16:21
Speaker 3: Then I realized, no, not at all. You know, the
16:24
Speaker 3: foundation of our civilization is not Christianity.
16:30
Speaker 1: The term judio christian in itself is contradictory, isn't it.
16:35
Speaker 2: Well, it depends how you look at it. I mean
16:37
Speaker 2: It's just a term.
16:37
Speaker 3: So it depends how you define it in a sense
16:41
Speaker 3: I would claim not, it's not that contradictory from my viewpoint.
16:46
Speaker 2: Depends how you look at it.
16:47
Speaker 3: But you know, we we could say if our civilization
16:54
Speaker 3: is you know, I would say our civilization is definitely
16:57
Speaker 3: not Judeo Christian. It's fundamentally we called Roman. So if
17:01
Speaker 3: you want to add Christianity in there, you would say
17:03
Speaker 3: it's Greek. Call Eleno Christian. You know, okay, helen No
17:08
Speaker 3: Christian is Allenistic. Roman civilization is basically Allenistic. So inside
17:14
Speaker 3: Leno you have the Roman civilization because Roman civilization fundamentally
17:19
Speaker 3: is the Western extension of Ellenistic civilization, Ellenistic civilization being
17:25
Speaker 3: the civilization the Eleentic civilization spread by Alexander the Great,
17:30
Speaker 3: you know who.
17:31
Speaker 2: He died before he went to West.
17:33
Speaker 3: But basically Roman civilization is Greek, so you can say
17:38
Speaker 3: it's Eleno Christians. So yes, I would say our civilizing
17:41
Speaker 3: cannot be defined as Judeo Christian. On the other hand,
17:45
Speaker 3: to me, as I study and as I analyzed Christianity,
17:49
Speaker 3: I realized it's much more Jewish than we think. Christianity
17:53
Speaker 3: is very Jewish that's my analysis, you know, looking at
17:56
Speaker 3: different aspects. So I would say Christianity is Judeo Christian fundamentally,
18:01
Speaker 3: and one fundamental way our civilization is somehow still Judeo Christian.
18:11
Speaker 3: Is that the Christianization from the time of Constantine the
18:16
Speaker 3: Great and his sons and then the Theo Dosian dynasty
18:20
Speaker 3: and so on, finally declare that there's only two religions
18:25
Speaker 3: which are allowed, you know, not one, you know, there
18:30
Speaker 3: are two. All non Christian religion were banned. You know,
18:35
Speaker 3: it took took basically one century. Constantine did not ban them,
18:40
Speaker 3: but he favored Christianity. He the deep platform would say,
18:45
Speaker 3: definance pagan cult and so on. But in the end
18:50
Speaker 3: there was only two religions allowed, Christianity and Judaism. Judaism
18:54
Speaker 3: was never forbidden, never banned, it was protected. It was
18:58
Speaker 3: it had a lot of free villaged. The people don't
19:01
Speaker 3: know and don't think like this, but in fact that's
19:04
Speaker 3: the reality that people who have studied this period called
19:08
Speaker 3: late antiquity, you know period of course, the period of
19:11
Speaker 3: Christianization is what we call latent antiquity. Like Ramsey McMullen,
19:17
Speaker 3: like Peter Header All I've read all the books. I
19:19
Speaker 3: spent you know, a year reading all the books I could.
19:22
Speaker 3: It's fascinating late antiquity. It's fascinating because it's kind of
19:25
Speaker 3: a period that became a subject of deep interest only
19:32
Speaker 3: in the nineteen nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties, so it's kind
19:36
Speaker 3: of almost a new you know, not so many people
19:39
Speaker 3: who are focusing on this period.
19:40
Speaker 2: It's supposed to be a little bit dark.
19:43
Speaker 3: But finally, people who study the time that period agree
19:49
Speaker 3: that fundamentally, Judaism received a lot of privilege at that period,
19:57
Speaker 3: I mean compared to Pagans. Of course, Pagans were persecuted
20:01
Speaker 3: and their temples were destroyed, but Jews were preserved under
20:06
Speaker 3: the justification. The fundamental justification was provided by Saint Augustine,
20:13
Speaker 3: and then it was always repeated. Of course, people a
20:17
Speaker 3: lot of a lot of there were a lot of trouble,
20:22
Speaker 3: a lot of programs, a lot of movements where the
20:25
Speaker 3: population kind of you know, went against the Jews. But
20:30
Speaker 3: that happened already before Christianity. There was nothing new, you know,
20:35
Speaker 3: there were always anti Semitism long before Christianity. So Christianity
20:40
Speaker 3: did not create the hostility of the people, but the
20:43
Speaker 3: Church hierarchy and the royal power basically protected the Jews
20:48
Speaker 3: and used them and even gave them the privilege of
20:51
Speaker 3: being the only population allowed to lend money. For example,
20:56
Speaker 3: if you look at it this way, Christians were not
20:58
Speaker 3: allowed to do it, but Jews were allowed to do it.
21:00
Speaker 3: That gave them an incredible privilege. They became the moneylenders
21:04
Speaker 3: to the king and so on. They had a lot
21:07
Speaker 3: of privilege and that that started in late antiquity, and
21:11
Speaker 3: that continued even under Charlemagne. Books about Charlemagne's period and
21:17
Speaker 3: especially Charlemagne's son, insist on the fact that Jews were very,
21:22
Speaker 3: very privileged at that time as long distant merchants who
21:27
Speaker 3: had monopoly on many different you know, trades, even the
21:32
Speaker 3: slave trades.
21:33
Speaker 2: Were they were they were the.
21:34
Speaker 3: Best at slave trades at that time. So so from
21:38
Speaker 3: that point of view, if you study from if you
21:41
Speaker 3: step outside of Christianity and you look you look at
21:44
Speaker 3: the development of Christiandom, you can see there are only
21:47
Speaker 3: two religions there, Christianity and Judaism. And of course they
21:51
Speaker 3: are they are competing with each other, they are all
21:53
Speaker 3: style to each other. But the Church declared the Jews
21:57
Speaker 3: have to be protected because they are the Witness as people.
22:01
Speaker 3: You know, we should keep the Jews, so we should
22:07
Speaker 3: allow the jew to persevere as a people, and we
22:10
Speaker 3: should not force force them to be we should not
22:14
Speaker 3: compel them to be baptized, you know. So in fact,
22:19
Speaker 3: you know from from let's say, the one of the
22:23
Speaker 3: latest the latest articles I wrote was on Kevin McDonald's website,
22:30
Speaker 3: and it's called Jewish Christianity as a Jewish group evolutionary strategy.
22:38
Speaker 3: So from the point of view of a group evolutionary
22:40
Speaker 3: strategy in the you know, in the tradition of Kevin McDonald,
22:45
Speaker 3: Christianity was excellent for the Jews and on the other hand,
22:49
Speaker 3: pretty bad for the going for the Gentiles for different reasons.
22:53
Speaker 2: For other reasons.
22:55
Speaker 1: You mentioned pagan earlier, and you also speak about Hellenistic
22:59
Speaker 1: or Heleen's.
23:00
Speaker 2: What are the.
23:01
Speaker 4: Difference, Oh well, pagan, say, is a word that basically
23:07
Speaker 4: there's debate on where it comes from, but basically it
23:10
Speaker 4: means country people.
23:12
Speaker 2: Pagan is.
23:15
Speaker 3: In French, it's almost the same word payan and peyson,
23:18
Speaker 3: you know, the country people peasants basically, so there's debate
23:22
Speaker 3: does it mean pagan or just country people as opposed
23:25
Speaker 3: to people of the city or as opposed to people
23:29
Speaker 3: coming from you know, Roman soldiers you know, coming to
23:34
Speaker 3: the country and the local people. But basically it came
23:38
Speaker 3: up as derogatory term, you know, to criticize people who
23:45
Speaker 3: just count adapt to Christianity and continue to do their
23:49
Speaker 3: ancient rituals in the countryside, because of course the countryside
23:53
Speaker 3: was Christianized much later. You know, it all started in
23:56
Speaker 3: the city, started in big cities. Christianity spread through big
24:00
Speaker 3: cities in the Eastern you know, Alexandria, an Choke, Rome
24:05
Speaker 3: and so on. So country people were the last to
24:08
Speaker 3: be converted, so they were called pagans. So it was
24:12
Speaker 3: no pagan ever called himself a pagan. In fact, except today,
24:16
Speaker 3: no pagans call them you know, but no. But in
24:19
Speaker 3: the East it was different because the East had always
24:23
Speaker 3: preserved even during the Christianization, they never really rejected the
24:28
Speaker 3: Greek philosophy, and in the Greek there was a.
24:33
Speaker 2: Well. Even in Rome.
24:34
Speaker 3: Actually, the elite, the city elite who resisted against Christianity.
24:40
Speaker 3: Christianity called themselves Ellens a lens, you know, like Elenic,
24:45
Speaker 3: because they were attacked attached to the Ellenic tradition. They
24:49
Speaker 3: had to find a term to define themselves, because before
24:52
Speaker 3: Christianity they didn't need a term to define themselves.
24:55
Speaker 2: They were all kinds of religion. They didn't have one religion.
24:58
Speaker 3: They had freedom of really, you know, So the struggle
25:02
Speaker 3: between Christianity and Pagans was not the struggle between one
25:05
Speaker 3: religion against another. It was the struggle of one religion
25:09
Speaker 3: against all others except Judaism and all other religions were
25:14
Speaker 3: all kinds of things. But finally in the East they
25:17
Speaker 3: used they like to call themselves a Leen's because.
25:20
Speaker 2: They were attached to the higher religion.
25:23
Speaker 3: The higher religion, of course, in the pagan world was philosophy.
25:27
Speaker 3: That's another thing that should be clarified because when we
25:33
Speaker 3: look at pagan religions we have we have generally a
25:36
Speaker 3: vision of you know, the popular cults, the city curls,
25:41
Speaker 3: the temples, but we forget that basically, the higher the
25:45
Speaker 3: metaphysical thinking, the questions about God, the questions about life
25:49
Speaker 3: after death, questions about the good life, good and ego,
25:52
Speaker 3: that what that belonged to philosophy, not to not to
25:55
Speaker 3: the pagan curls, you know. So we we have a
25:59
Speaker 3: with and to forget you know that the religious what
26:03
Speaker 3: we today called religion, we should include philosophy inside it.
26:08
Speaker 3: But because theology kind of took over philosophy, you know,
26:13
Speaker 3: so we are a bit confused about what philosophy is.
26:15
Speaker 3: But all what we think about, or even what we
26:20
Speaker 3: think today of a religious man, a man who is
26:23
Speaker 3: very religious, who thinks about God, who thinks about doing good.
26:27
Speaker 3: In the ancient world, such a man would be called
26:31
Speaker 3: a philosopher.
26:33
Speaker 4: You know.
26:34
Speaker 3: He might be pious, go to the temple, make offerings
26:37
Speaker 3: or not, but he was religious in a sense of
26:40
Speaker 3: being thinking about God, thinking about living a good life,
26:45
Speaker 3: thinking about life after death, and thinking about the universe
26:49
Speaker 3: and so on.
26:51
Speaker 1: How is this related to quote unquote the Roman religion,
26:55
Speaker 1: which has been written out of our cultural memory.
27:00
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, that's a difficult topic.
27:02
Speaker 3: Christian Pagan religion, or religions in general in the Roman
27:07
Speaker 3: world before Christianity is a very complex thing. First of all,
27:12
Speaker 3: we need to realize that the religions of Rome, the
27:16
Speaker 3: city of Rome, was something very special. But then when
27:20
Speaker 3: Rome extended into an empire, there were many other religions
27:25
Speaker 3: that came into the Roman world, and the Romans were
27:28
Speaker 3: basically very very welcoming to religions even the Romans from Rome,
27:33
Speaker 3: the city, they would easily accept a new temple to
27:38
Speaker 3: a new god. And they were always also interested in
27:41
Speaker 3: other religions. That's why what kind of new religions came
27:44
Speaker 3: to Rome, like the religions of Vizzists from Egypt, religions
27:48
Speaker 3: of Mitra.
27:50
Speaker 2: And many others.
27:51
Speaker 3: So there were many, many different religions. Some people from
27:58
Speaker 3: that time distinct which three different If we want to simplify,
28:02
Speaker 3: you know, to get a basic idea of what was
28:05
Speaker 3: going on, we can distinguish the cults, the rituals, you know.
28:13
Speaker 3: So religion from that point of view, was part of
28:16
Speaker 3: the social life, even the political life. If you were
28:18
Speaker 3: a citizen of one city, you had to basically you
28:22
Speaker 3: had to go to the festivals of that city, the
28:25
Speaker 3: gods of that city, the temple, make some offering, contribute
28:28
Speaker 3: to participate to the city life. The city life was
28:31
Speaker 3: centered around the different They were all kinds of holidays,
28:35
Speaker 3: you know, much more than today in fact. And you
28:38
Speaker 3: could also go to the festivals of another city and travel.
28:42
Speaker 3: People traveled a lot on pilgrimages to different the world.
28:46
Speaker 3: So some festivals were also like the Olympic Games, every festival,
28:52
Speaker 3: every social activity was basically connected to the gods. You know,
28:58
Speaker 3: the gods were invited. In fact, you know, you would
29:01
Speaker 3: not have a meal with meat without inviting the gods,
29:06
Speaker 3: because meat would not be would have always to be
29:09
Speaker 3: sacrificed more or less. Of course, some people would maybe
29:12
Speaker 3: not chicken and sal but basically most occasions where people
29:17
Speaker 3: ate meat was you know, religious occasions. So that was
29:21
Speaker 3: the ritual. But that all this ritual life did not
29:25
Speaker 3: involve any special belief. It was not a question whether
29:29
Speaker 3: you believe this god exists or not. I mean, of
29:32
Speaker 3: course he exists because he has a house, he has
29:34
Speaker 3: a temple, and you know, but that was not part.
29:37
Speaker 3: There was no special doctrine connected to that at all.
29:42
Speaker 3: You didn't have to be asked what do you believe?
29:45
Speaker 3: You know, it was just participating in the In the
29:49
Speaker 3: it was assumed that the gods exist, but many people
29:52
Speaker 3: would say.
29:52
Speaker 2: Well, I'm not sure, but anyway they would go to
29:55
Speaker 2: you know.
29:55
Speaker 3: It was so that part of religion was basically a
29:58
Speaker 3: part of social life, political life even and then you
30:04
Speaker 3: had the stories, the myaths.
30:08
Speaker 2: You know, about the gods. They were all kinds of
30:10
Speaker 2: meat about the gods.
30:12
Speaker 3: They were not they were of course connected, but basically
30:15
Speaker 3: these were also just stories that people told. They told
30:19
Speaker 3: them in verse. It was poetry. Most of it was poetry,
30:23
Speaker 3: so it was made for poetry, for theater. You know,
30:25
Speaker 3: this was the subject of tragedies, and so this was entertainment.
30:30
Speaker 3: And again, did people believe in it and not? Well,
30:34
Speaker 3: you know, it depends. Children surely believed in it like
30:36
Speaker 3: they believe in Santa Claus. Maybe you know, you cannot
30:40
Speaker 3: you cannot make a systematic rule because there was no doctrine.
30:44
Speaker 3: It was just a story, and there were different versions
30:47
Speaker 3: of the same story, so there was not one standard
30:49
Speaker 3: story that everybody has to believe. You could rewrite it
30:53
Speaker 3: or as you wanted. But that was part of the
30:56
Speaker 3: religious life because that those stories were about the gods
31:01
Speaker 3: and about the.
31:01
Speaker 2: Heroes and so on.
31:03
Speaker 3: And then finally you have philosophy, and that was in
31:07
Speaker 3: fact the highest, the higher religion, because as I said,
31:12
Speaker 3: theology was part of philosophy, the science of God. Who
31:16
Speaker 3: are the gods? What are the gods? And philosophers sometimes
31:20
Speaker 3: so there was a tension between the philosophers and the ritual.
31:23
Speaker 3: Philosophers sometimes look down on the rituals and they didn't
31:27
Speaker 3: like so much to the idea to represent the gods
31:31
Speaker 3: as statues. And you know, there was a lot of
31:33
Speaker 3: criticism from the philosophers against popular religion. But on the
31:37
Speaker 3: other hand, they also recognized you know, if you look
31:40
Speaker 3: at Cicero for example, you read Cicero, he was very
31:42
Speaker 3: much into philosophy, but he also recognized the value of
31:47
Speaker 3: popular religion and civic religion, as you know, as a
31:50
Speaker 3: part of the civic spirits. So you know, so it's
31:54
Speaker 3: very difficult to define the Roman religion because when we
31:58
Speaker 3: think religion today, with think Christianity, and we think a
32:03
Speaker 3: religion of salivation, a religion to save my soul. So
32:07
Speaker 3: that also existed existed in the Roman world, but in philosophy,
32:12
Speaker 3: you know, if you wanted to save your soul, you've
32:14
Speaker 3: become a philosopher. There were also a different mystery curl.
32:17
Speaker 3: There were also other things that had to do with
32:20
Speaker 3: you know, trying to connect to the higher round, you know,
32:24
Speaker 3: the mystery cult because of East and so these were
32:28
Speaker 3: also a little bit different things.
32:31
Speaker 2: So it's a it's a vast world, but it's a mistake.
32:35
Speaker 3: And that's an important point because most people used to
32:38
Speaker 3: think there are two assumptions that I discovered. I thought
32:42
Speaker 3: they were true originally, and I studied I realized they
32:44
Speaker 3: are false. The one of the assumptions is that Christianity,
32:48
Speaker 3: the Christianization, was a natural process because Paganism was dying,
32:53
Speaker 3: so the Romans needed something new, They needed something, you know,
32:58
Speaker 3: they were they were fed up with their God. That's
33:00
Speaker 3: not true at all. People the historians of today say
33:03
Speaker 3: not at all. You know, it was very it was moving.
33:07
Speaker 3: The Roman Empire was like every society evolving. Something were changing,
33:11
Speaker 3: some people were some things were coming out of fashion,
33:14
Speaker 3: and some new religion were appearing. But it was a
33:18
Speaker 3: very Roman people who were extremely religious, and there was
33:21
Speaker 3: no nothing was dying there. There was tension there, there
33:26
Speaker 3: were you know, controversies, conflicts and so on, but.
33:30
Speaker 2: And so it did not happen. It was a religious war.
33:35
Speaker 3: The Christianization fundamentally was a religious war of two centuries.
33:40
Speaker 3: Lasted two centuries basically very bloody, very based on terror,
33:46
Speaker 3: based on persecution, based on civil war.
33:52
Speaker 2: There were civil.
33:53
Speaker 3: Wars also that weakened the Roman Empire to the point
33:56
Speaker 3: that it's possible to argue that the civil war between
34:00
Speaker 3: Christians and Pagans were the main reason of the fall
34:05
Speaker 3: of the Roman Empire. It considerably weakened the military capacity
34:13
Speaker 3: of Rome. So it was a very very bloody process.
34:18
Speaker 3: But Christians have written you know, as always, the history
34:21
Speaker 3: is written by the victors, and the victors are the Christians.
34:25
Speaker 3: In fact, one of the reasons that late Antiquity was
34:29
Speaker 3: not very much studied is that we have almost only
34:33
Speaker 3: we have very few pagan sources. The history of that
34:36
Speaker 3: period has been told to us by Christian authors, and
34:40
Speaker 3: they told us that paganism was satanic and any way
34:45
Speaker 3: of dying, and everybody was so happy to become Christian,
34:48
Speaker 3: you know, they gave us. But historians today who can
34:53
Speaker 3: also you know, the purpose of historians to also revise
34:56
Speaker 3: the standard history. They realize if you look at it
34:59
Speaker 3: from the pagan side, it was a very bloody.
35:05
Speaker 2: Civil war, religious war.
35:07
Speaker 1: Speaking of religious wars, walk me through the Jewish wars
35:12
Speaker 1: against Rome.
35:15
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, okay, Well that's an interesting yeah, that's an
35:18
Speaker 3: interesting aspect which connects with to that, because it's interesting
35:23
Speaker 3: to know that the Romans had a very big problem
35:28
Speaker 3: with the Jewish nation, you know, and even before the Romans,
35:35
Speaker 3: you know, and even before the Romans, the the Ptolemaic
35:41
Speaker 3: dynasty of Egypt and the CID the you know, the
35:45
Speaker 3: hairs of Alexander the Great always had difficulty with the
35:52
Speaker 3: Jewish nation uh and the Romans. When POMPEII, POMPEII conquered Palestine,
36:05
Speaker 3: which was not yet not really called Palestini yet, but anyway,
36:09
Speaker 3: he finally wager war against Jerusalem. He conquered Jerusalem, he
36:14
Speaker 3: brought a lot of Jewish captives to Rome. That's how
36:17
Speaker 3: many Jews came to Rome in the beginning, and then
36:22
Speaker 3: again in the sixties we have the Jewish wars. We
36:28
Speaker 3: know of them based on the chronicles of the histories
36:33
Speaker 3: of Flavius Josephus, and that led to the destruction of
36:38
Speaker 3: the Jewish Temple, which had been built by Herod the Great.
36:42
Speaker 3: So Herold the Great was actually the king that the
36:46
Speaker 3: Romans had put in charge. He was not a full
36:49
Speaker 3: blooded Jew, but he was a Romanized half Jew and
36:56
Speaker 3: he built, you know, he rebuilt Jerusalem. He built news
37:00
Speaker 3: cities like Cesare and but you know they were there
37:05
Speaker 3: was always in the history of Israel. The history of
37:09
Speaker 3: Israel is always characterized by the internal struggle between Jews
37:14
Speaker 3: who want to assimilate to assimilate to the Heleenistic culture.
37:19
Speaker 3: You know, they love Greek, they learn Greek, they want
37:21
Speaker 3: to be part of this Greek culture. And a core
37:25
Speaker 3: of nationalists who want to stick to the Trauer and
37:29
Speaker 3: preserve the Jewish nation, preserve the rituals of circumcision eight
37:34
Speaker 3: days a concision, and.
37:37
Speaker 2: The band forbid the Jews to intermar and so on.
37:41
Speaker 3: So the Jewish Wars was part of Like this started
37:45
Speaker 3: as a civil war between the Hellenistic Jews and the
37:50
Speaker 3: anti Hellenistic Jews, and that led to the destruction of
37:55
Speaker 3: the Jewish Temple. But that was not the end of it,
37:58
Speaker 3: because they were still in the early second century new
38:04
Speaker 3: revolt of the Jews in Alexandria, in North Africa, North Africa,
38:10
Speaker 3: because actually I think more than two thirds of the
38:15
Speaker 3: Jews lived outside of Israel in the big cities like
38:21
Speaker 3: Alexandria are Kartars and so so they rebelled, you know,
38:26
Speaker 3: in the second century. And then I think the most
38:29
Speaker 3: important theory to focus on, I think the best illustration
38:33
Speaker 3: of the problem is to focus on the time of
38:36
Speaker 3: Emperor Adrian.
38:37
Speaker 2: Adrian. Adrian, I think.
38:41
Speaker 3: In one hundred and thirty and something, Okay, Adrian was
38:45
Speaker 3: determined basically to get rid of the Jews as a nation.
38:51
Speaker 3: So it was not determined to exterminate the Jews, but
38:54
Speaker 3: he was determined to force them to assimilate completely. So
38:59
Speaker 3: he forbade and he was not the first to do that,
39:01
Speaker 3: but he forbads circumcision. He understood that a concision is
39:07
Speaker 3: the key or even the lack of Jewishness, you know,
39:12
Speaker 3: if Jews are not allowed to do that. For Romans,
39:15
Speaker 3: this this was you know, Romans were very tolerant about religion,
39:21
Speaker 3: but one thing they never tolerated was human sacrifices and
39:26
Speaker 3: ritual mutilation, you know. So it was not only against
39:30
Speaker 3: the Jews. They just felt this is really evil. So
39:33
Speaker 3: he forbade circumsition. He destroyed Jerusalem, he renamed he built
39:38
Speaker 3: a new city on just nearby. He called it by
39:42
Speaker 3: his own name, and he rebaptized Israel as Palestine. It
39:48
Speaker 3: was actually Adrian who gave this name Palestine. Sometimes the
39:53
Speaker 3: Jews say, no, it was not, it's not Palestine, it's
39:56
Speaker 3: a Roman called it Palestine.
39:58
Speaker 2: They're right.
39:59
Speaker 3: Actually, it's a who gave the name Palestine in memory
40:03
Speaker 3: of the Greek people called the Philistine, who were Greek
40:06
Speaker 3: people who lived there for some time, so he was
40:10
Speaker 3: really That shows how upset, how fed up the Romans
40:15
Speaker 3: were with the Jews, you know, for two centuries, let's say,
40:20
Speaker 3: from the very beginning from the first century BC to
40:24
Speaker 3: the late second century AD, that actually three centuries. You know,
40:31
Speaker 3: Romans were constantly struggling with this nation, which had an
40:38
Speaker 3: inherent incapacity to assimilate because of their religious tradition, because
40:42
Speaker 3: their god forbade them to assimilate, because their God told
40:47
Speaker 3: them that all of the gods are demons, you know,
40:51
Speaker 3: and that was Romans understood very well that we are
40:55
Speaker 3: tolerant people. You know, all gods are you know, okay,
40:58
Speaker 3: we don't. Everybody can worship the gods they want. If
41:02
Speaker 3: you live in one city, you worshiped your city gods,
41:05
Speaker 3: but you can also worship any other god you want.
41:09
Speaker 2: You may like some god, but you know, the god
41:12
Speaker 2: of the Jews.
41:14
Speaker 3: And that's why the Jews were called atheists actually, because
41:17
Speaker 3: they rejected the gods.
41:18
Speaker 2: They refused to even if they go.
41:19
Speaker 3: To a city, they refuse to, you know, to make
41:22
Speaker 3: the basic offerings to the gods of the cities. And
41:26
Speaker 3: of course, but because they were powerful, they had sometimes
41:30
Speaker 3: some privileges. But that shows that that's an important point
41:35
Speaker 3: because if we compare the situation, if we compare how
41:41
Speaker 3: the Romans saw the Jews before Christianity. First of all,
41:46
Speaker 3: they never took seriously, you know, the Jews idea that
41:49
Speaker 3: they were chosen by God. I mean, you cannot find
41:52
Speaker 3: even one Roman intellectual. Of course, some people would maybe
41:57
Speaker 3: join the Jews and believe them, but you cannot and
42:00
Speaker 3: even one philosopher intellectual who took that seriously. You know,
42:05
Speaker 3: no Roman, no Greek ever ever believed it makes sense
42:09
Speaker 3: that the God or the creator of the universe chose
42:11
Speaker 3: one people among others, and if he you know, so
42:16
Speaker 3: that from that point of view, the situation of the
42:20
Speaker 3: Jews changed completely because basically Christianity accept that claim that
42:28
Speaker 3: God chose the Jews, even though Christians would say, well, yes,
42:32
Speaker 3: but you know, then you messed up, so he chose you.
42:35
Speaker 3: But you know, there's something radically pro Jewish in Christianity
42:42
Speaker 3: if we compare it to the Roman civilization.
42:47
Speaker 1: You've described the emergence of Christianity from Judaism as something
42:55
Speaker 1: that lends credence.
42:58
Speaker 2: I think you said to this.
43:01
Speaker 1: That it was effectively created as a virus targeted at
43:06
Speaker 1: the Romans.
43:07
Speaker 2: Well, there is a theory.
43:10
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, Nietzsche, for example, almost said that,
43:15
Speaker 3: but I don't think he considered it was it was
43:19
Speaker 3: a trick, an invention of the Jews to conquered Romes.
43:23
Speaker 3: But he would say, well, the result he left, the
43:25
Speaker 3: Jews conquered Rome. Yeah, they conquered Rome. The Jews conquered
43:29
Speaker 3: Rome through Christianity. So then, and that's true in many
43:34
Speaker 3: ways if you look at the influence of Christianity. You know,
43:39
Speaker 3: I came to the point that if you really study
43:43
Speaker 3: what happened, you can see you can see that Christianity
43:47
Speaker 3: really judaized Urcils. But now was it a was it
43:52
Speaker 3: a conspiracy?
43:54
Speaker 2: I don't believe it.
43:55
Speaker 3: That's why I took the approach of Kevin McDonalds a
44:00
Speaker 3: group evolutionary strategy, which doesn't mean it was a strategy.
44:03
Speaker 2: Which might mean it.
44:04
Speaker 3: Was a calculated strategy, But that's still ambivaliant. If we
44:09
Speaker 3: look at Paul, because Paul is basically the inventor of
44:12
Speaker 3: Gentile Christianity, if we look at the Jews in the
44:18
Speaker 3: Christian the Jewish Christian in Jerusalem, that's another question, because
44:22
Speaker 3: it was just a Jewish sect. They had no intention
44:25
Speaker 3: to convert the Romans. But Paul came out and say, well,
44:28
Speaker 3: let's convert the Romans with that. So if you look
44:31
Speaker 3: at him, it's a little bit difficult, but to conclude
44:36
Speaker 3: he might be completely lying. He might have had this idea, well,
44:39
Speaker 3: that's a great religion. With that, we're going to we're
44:42
Speaker 3: going to conquer Roman and then finally lead the lead
44:47
Speaker 3: Rome to rebuild the Temple, which is happening now two
44:52
Speaker 3: thousand years but exactly what's happening now. But there's no
44:55
Speaker 3: evidence that Paul was, you know, involved in in this
45:00
Speaker 3: kind of deception. It's more, in my view, it's more
45:05
Speaker 3: that we have to understand that Jews like Paul, had
45:11
Speaker 3: a very deep sense that the Jews are the superior
45:15
Speaker 3: people who are destined to save the world. You know,
45:21
Speaker 3: Jews always want to save the gentiles from their own
45:26
Speaker 3: narrow mindedness, from their own you know, that's a fundamental
45:33
Speaker 3: impulse of the Jews in the nations. They are everywhere
45:37
Speaker 3: and everywhere. They feel they are superior. So they have
45:39
Speaker 3: to teach the rest of the world, you know, what
45:42
Speaker 3: they know, and so they have to save the world.
45:45
Speaker 3: So Paul was like this. You know, he wants to
45:48
Speaker 3: save the Roman world as a Jew. And if you look,
45:52
Speaker 3: if you read Romance his Epistle to the Romans, chapter eleven,
45:56
Speaker 3: he say, well, because the Jews rejected Jesus, doesn't matter.
46:01
Speaker 3: We're going to convert the whole Roman Empire and at
46:03
Speaker 3: the end it will all come down to come back
46:06
Speaker 3: to the Jews. So in the end, the prophecies will
46:10
Speaker 3: be true. The prophecies that the Jewish people will rule
46:13
Speaker 3: over the world will be true. So he had this
46:15
Speaker 3: idea that well, we're going to go, you know, this
46:19
Speaker 3: long road, but it will always come down to the
46:22
Speaker 3: same to the accomplishment of the prophecies in a Jewish talak,
46:26
Speaker 3: which say that the Jewish people will rule the world. So,
46:30
Speaker 3: you know, it's difficult to think to understand, you know,
46:34
Speaker 3: the way of his mental the way his mind is
46:39
Speaker 3: traveling in this way, and the whole logic.
46:42
Speaker 2: But it's not also maybe not so complicated.
46:46
Speaker 3: So I believe I don't believe Jewish Christianity was a Jewish.
46:50
Speaker 2: Conspiracy, but I believe it was.
46:54
Speaker 3: After the after everything the Jews went through, after the
46:58
Speaker 3: destruction of their temple in in seventy and after the
47:04
Speaker 3: Wars of Adrian against Jerusalem again, because actually, before before
47:10
Speaker 3: one thirty, we don't know anything about Christianity, so it
47:13
Speaker 3: really really started. It started on the pole maybe, but
47:17
Speaker 3: it really became Christians suddenly appeared on the historical scene
47:23
Speaker 3: in the second part of the second century. Before that,
47:27
Speaker 3: we almost know nothing. So we can imagine a lot
47:31
Speaker 3: of Jews in the world understood that nationalism failed, the
47:37
Speaker 3: Messianic Judaism failed, you know, so let's find another way,
47:46
Speaker 3: because our destinies anyway to convert the Roman Empire.
47:49
Speaker 2: So they used.
47:53
Speaker 3: All the Hellenistic, the Jewish Hellenistic thinking of people like
47:59
Speaker 3: Philo of alexand Andrea. There had been already a lot
48:02
Speaker 3: of a lot of Hellenistic Jews who had, you know,
48:08
Speaker 3: made bridges between Judaism and Elenistic culture.
48:12
Speaker 2: So they used that.
48:14
Speaker 3: They used Philo of Alexandria a lot, especially his theory
48:17
Speaker 3: of the logos. That's how that's how they declare, Oh yeah,
48:21
Speaker 3: let's say Genus is the logos.
48:24
Speaker 2: That's that's the bridge. You know.
48:25
Speaker 3: The logos is a philosophical concept coming from Stoicism, and
48:30
Speaker 3: Philo of Alexandria I had already built a bridge. So
48:33
Speaker 3: they Christianity used that bridge and declared Glus is the logos, okay,
48:38
Speaker 3: and Jesus is the logos. Then we can we can
48:41
Speaker 3: talk to the Romans about the logos and we can.
48:44
Speaker 3: So they build different kind of bridges like this to
48:48
Speaker 3: convert the Romans to Christianity. But fundamentally Christianity in the
48:55
Speaker 3: very very early the fundamental doctrine of Christianity, if you
48:59
Speaker 3: read Paul, the fundamental doctrine of Christianity in Pault is
49:03
Speaker 3: one hundred percent Jewish, you know, because it's based on
49:07
Speaker 3: the idea that that God created man immortal, and then
49:15
Speaker 3: men committed the original sin, whether you call it original sin,
49:20
Speaker 3: it doesn't matter. Then death came into the world, and
49:24
Speaker 3: then in the Jewish cripture, then you have this idea
49:26
Speaker 3: that there is some resurrection at the end of the day,
49:29
Speaker 3: at the end of the day somehow, you know. So
49:32
Speaker 3: the Christianities said, yeah, they adopted that kind of paradigm,
49:37
Speaker 3: and they say Jesus is resurrected from the dead. So
49:41
Speaker 3: he's the first resurrected from the dead. So this is
49:44
Speaker 3: the time of the resurrection. Now Jesus is the first
49:46
Speaker 3: one who are all going to follow and so the
49:50
Speaker 3: end of days are coming soon. And even though you
49:53
Speaker 3: know Christ Christs will come come back and pick up
49:56
Speaker 3: everybody and resurrected, resurrect the dead, and those who are
49:59
Speaker 3: not dead will be uplifted. That's directly coming from the Torah,
50:03
Speaker 3: from the Genesis story, Genesis chapter three. You know it's
50:08
Speaker 3: but you know, they mixed that with the logos christology.
50:13
Speaker 3: They mixed that also they introduce you know, life after death,
50:17
Speaker 3: the immortal soul and soul. It was a kind of mixture.
50:22
Speaker 1: You were making the point earlier that the West is
50:26
Speaker 1: fundamentally not rooted in Christianity, and then you you also
50:30
Speaker 1: in your work have made the point that Christianity didn't
50:35
Speaker 1: win eventually one Europe, but it didn't win Europe on
50:40
Speaker 1: its merits. It won Europe through state terrorism.
50:44
Speaker 3: What do you mean by that, Well, what I mean
50:48
Speaker 3: is that historically, if you study the period of the Christianization,
51:00
Speaker 3: what happened. Basically, Constantine the Great declared after he went
51:06
Speaker 3: through two civil wars, he defeated two competitors until he
51:12
Speaker 3: became the ruler of the whole empire East and West.
51:17
Speaker 3: Before that, there had been you know, different empress for
51:21
Speaker 3: the east and west, and he united the whole thing,
51:24
Speaker 3: and he declared himself a Christian, and he promoted sponsored,
51:33
Speaker 3: you know, finance Christianity, tremendously built churches, and he built.
51:39
Speaker 3: He decided to build a new capital city, Constantinople, which
51:43
Speaker 3: in his mind became a Christian city. In fact he was.
51:47
Speaker 3: He was very much disliked in Rome. He when he
51:53
Speaker 3: uh defeated Maxanchius. For example, Maxanchius was very much loved
51:58
Speaker 3: in Rome. He was a Roman, a real women, and
52:01
Speaker 3: so Constantine did not like Rome, the city of Rome.
52:06
Speaker 3: He didn't feel welcome there also because he refused when
52:09
Speaker 3: he went there. He went there only two times. He
52:11
Speaker 3: refused to go and you know, worship the miner, to
52:15
Speaker 3: go to the temple and pay or pay tribute to
52:19
Speaker 3: the gods and soul as a Christians. So there was
52:21
Speaker 3: a lot of tension with the Romans. The Roman aristocracy resisted,
52:27
Speaker 3: resisted the longest against the Christian the Christianization, you know,
52:31
Speaker 3: until until the end of the fourth century, even longer.
52:38
Speaker 3: So he built this capitol which was a Christian There
52:42
Speaker 3: were no temples in Constantinople. There were statues because he
52:46
Speaker 3: looted the statutes from the pagan temples. So he persecuted
52:52
Speaker 3: paganism and he sponsored Christianity, but he did not ban
52:57
Speaker 3: he did not forbid people to go to the temple.
53:00
Speaker 3: He just declared no more because the temples were financed
53:03
Speaker 3: by the states, by the cities, so no more money.
53:06
Speaker 3: So of course, but then his son increased the pressure
53:13
Speaker 3: against paganism, forbade the sacrifices, the animal sacrifice, and every
53:21
Speaker 3: celebration was an animal sacrifice. But the Christians say, oh,
53:25
Speaker 3: that's terrible animal sacrifice. I don't see why it's terrible,
53:28
Speaker 3: because you know, we kill animals. They were killed, you know,
53:33
Speaker 3: just it was part of the ritual. So people saw it.
53:35
Speaker 3: So they were blood, a lot of blood, and it
53:38
Speaker 3: was in the understanding Christians say, well, it's wrong to
53:42
Speaker 3: offer animals to the gods. In fact, the animals were
53:46
Speaker 3: not really offered to the god. It's more the gods
53:48
Speaker 3: were invited to the banquet. It's more like the gods
53:51
Speaker 3: were part because when you kill an animal, you don't
53:54
Speaker 3: do something it's something special. You have to you have
53:56
Speaker 3: to you know. It was not like the gods need blood.
54:00
Speaker 3: It was not the understanding of the Romans that the
54:02
Speaker 3: gods need blood. It was not like this. It was
54:07
Speaker 3: just like eating meat is something that that requires some
54:11
Speaker 3: kind of religious celebration. So anyway, the sacrifices were forbidden.
54:20
Speaker 3: Then little by little going to the temples was forbidden.
54:25
Speaker 3: Then there were persecutions. Some priests were killed, you would
54:29
Speaker 3: go to prison. They were very intense persecution. We think
54:32
Speaker 3: that the Christians were persecuted by the Pagans before Constantine,
54:36
Speaker 3: but in fact, if we compare the persecution of Pagans
54:39
Speaker 3: by the Christians, ten times more severe. And then there
54:46
Speaker 3: were civil wars because in fact it didn't go so easily.
54:50
Speaker 3: So there were a series of civil wars where, especially
54:55
Speaker 3: in the west, the western people of the Roman Empire,
55:00
Speaker 3: including the Romans from Rome, chose a pagan emperor, and
55:09
Speaker 3: that actually started Wisconsin with Maxantius. Maxaantius was at that
55:13
Speaker 3: time Constantine was not he had not declared himself Christian,
55:17
Speaker 3: but that was already some kind of religious war between
55:20
Speaker 3: Constantine Maxantius. Maxachius was defeated, so Constantinus came out victory victorious.
55:27
Speaker 2: But there were other.
55:30
Speaker 3: Civil There were a lot of civil wars during this
55:32
Speaker 3: whole period between Constantine and but most of the time,
55:37
Speaker 3: and there are too many to even count. You know,
55:40
Speaker 3: civil wars that means, generally wars between one emperor and another.
55:45
Speaker 3: And of course the loser is called the usurper because
55:48
Speaker 3: he lost, you know, but if he had won, the
55:50
Speaker 3: other one would have been.
55:51
Speaker 2: Called the usurper.
55:52
Speaker 3: And in most cases it was really it was a
55:56
Speaker 3: war between a Christian and a pagan, or at least
55:59
Speaker 3: between a Christian fanatic emperor and an emperor who wanted
56:03
Speaker 3: at least to keep religious freedom and to allow people
56:07
Speaker 3: to continue. So these civil wars, from the point of
56:13
Speaker 3: view of several historians, were the major cause of the
56:17
Speaker 3: fall of the fall of the Roman Empire. We could
56:21
Speaker 3: discuss when and if it really fell, but and and
56:26
Speaker 3: one of the reasons is that actually during those civil wars,
56:31
Speaker 3: even the barbarians were hired our mercenaries by one side
56:37
Speaker 3: or the other. So in fact, those civil wars kind
56:41
Speaker 3: of already triggered started the barbarian invasions, you know, all
56:48
Speaker 3: those barbarians, before they became invaders, there had been mercenaries
56:53
Speaker 3: used by some emperors against another. The god, especially especially
56:58
Speaker 3: the god where the god of Alaric were used in
57:02
Speaker 3: the battle which is considered the decisive battle between the
57:08
Speaker 3: Christians and the Pagans. It was the Battle of the Frijudics.
57:12
Speaker 3: It's a river I think in Italy and the god
57:17
Speaker 3: who actually were Christian, not exactly the same kind of
57:20
Speaker 3: Christian as that they were Christians, so they fought on
57:25
Speaker 3: the side of They were hired by tel Doozeus, the
57:28
Speaker 3: Christian emperor, to defeat the Pagans. So that's how Alaric started.
57:35
Speaker 3: And then later Alaric sacked the city of Rome because
57:38
Speaker 3: he felt he felt reasonful for having not been rewarded
57:45
Speaker 3: enough for his contribution to defeat the Pagans. So the
57:49
Speaker 3: paradox is that Alaric was a Christian who sacked the
57:53
Speaker 3: city of Rome, which was still actually very much a
57:56
Speaker 3: Pagan city. So you know, the funny thing is that
58:00
Speaker 3: we imagine Aleric as a barbarian destroying the city of Rome,
58:04
Speaker 3: but in fact Aleric was a Christian who destroyed the
58:07
Speaker 3: Pagan city. So you see, thats just an example that
58:10
Speaker 3: show that if we studied that period with a little
58:14
Speaker 3: bit of a revisionist attitude, we come up with a
58:17
Speaker 3: very different picture, and we come with the understanding that
58:20
Speaker 3: all the civil wars were part of a religious war.
58:24
Speaker 3: Not all of them, of course, had a religious motivation,
58:27
Speaker 3: but many of them had a religious motivation.
58:33
Speaker 1: I'm only halfway through what I wanted to chat to
58:35
Speaker 1: you about, so I think let's call this part one
58:40
Speaker 1: and will continue this. And in the meantime, could you
58:43
Speaker 1: tell me how I can follow your work?
58:47
Speaker 3: Well, all these articles I'm writing at this moment are
58:50
Speaker 3: on my substack. It's called Ragbod's Lament. Ragbird's Lament. I
58:56
Speaker 3: called it Ragbird's Lament because Ragbod is a just a
59:01
Speaker 3: short story. He is a king of the prisons in
59:05
Speaker 3: North Europe who was so at the time of Charlemayne.
59:12
Speaker 3: He was about to be converted. He had been defeated
59:14
Speaker 3: by Charlemagne, and he accepted to be baptized. And then
59:18
Speaker 3: he went to be baptized. And then it's a story
59:20
Speaker 3: told in the life of the bishop who baptized who
59:24
Speaker 3: wanted to baptize him. And so Radbot came and put
59:27
Speaker 3: one foot in a baptist small pool, whatever you call it.
59:32
Speaker 3: And then he had second thought, and he asked, well,
59:34
Speaker 3: if I get baptized, and after I die, should I
59:37
Speaker 3: go and meet my ancestors. And then the bishops said
59:40
Speaker 3: no of the question, because your ancestors are in Hell
59:44
Speaker 3: and you're going to go to heaven. Then he took
59:46
Speaker 3: his feet out, his foot out, and he said, well,
59:48
Speaker 3: I prefer to go with my ancestors even in Hell.
59:50
Speaker 2: I don't care.
59:51
Speaker 3: And so Radbot's Lament is a kind of a I
59:54
Speaker 3: like this story because it's it's a story that illustrated
59:58
Speaker 3: was fundamental difference between traditional pre Christian religion, which was
1:00:03
Speaker 3: very much centered on you know, ancestor veneration and Christianity,
1:00:09
Speaker 3: and so all these articles out there and I hope
1:00:11
Speaker 3: to make a book out of them soon, in a
1:00:15
Speaker 3: few months.
1:00:15
Speaker 1: Maybe, Lauren Guino, thank you for joining me in the trenches.
1:00:20
Speaker 2: Thanks you, jerm