Racism is a charge often levelled against Odinism and Odinists from those ignorant of the Faith and its concept of Folk. There have been many among us who have answered this charge with simple eloquence. In this article I take the charge and apply it to Christianity during the formation of that religion, using as my source, the writings of the early Christians as revealed in the collection of writings we call the Bible.
I will consider three main areas of these writings. Firstly there are the recorded words of Jesus. Jesus is usually presented as a kind of Socialist reformer, an enlightened being who is no respecter of persons. Yet examination of some of the interactions between Jesus and non-Jews tell us much of the incredible racist attitude held by Jews of that time. Secondly I will look at the early Christian church in the years following the death of Jesus. Thirdly I will examine the things written by the Apostle Paul and show why I believe Paul to have been an example of the Eternal Jew.
In a modern day context whenever Jews and racism are mentioned side by side the effects of the Jewish-controlled media would have us believe that racism is something suffered by Jews. Those of us who are racially aware and are able to discern truth from propaganda, and those of us with an understanding of the Talmud understand that the real truth is far different. Jews can without doubt be the most racist individuals on the face of our Earth. The writings of the early Christians show this very clearly and show how the religion that dominates Europe today was birthed in an environment of hatred for non-Jews. The majority of Christians today are not Jewish by race, yet do they fully understand how their ancestors were so despised and hated by the founders of their religion?
Jesus and Racism
First let us turn to the person of Jesus. The historical reality of this man's life may differ radically from that presented in the four Gospels, yet I will look only to these writings for my sources. Written some thirty years after his death, they are nevertheless relevant because the words in his mouth are those the propagandists for the faith known as Christianity wanted the people of the time to hear.
John 4:7–9 "A woman came out of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, Give Me to drink. For His disciples had gone away into the city that they might buy provisions. Then the Samaritan woman said to Him, ‘How do you, being a Jew, ask to drink from me. I being a Samaritan woman? For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.'
In this story, Jesus goes on to minister to this woman, but the general racism of the Jews is well illustrated here. Clearly the woman was shocked that a Jew would even be asking for water from her, despite the fact that in Middle-Eastern tradition of that era it was a woman's job to fetch water from the well. The Samaritan woman is genuinely shocked that a Jew is talking civilly to her.
In the parable of the Good Samaritan, which Jesus tells to a doctor of the law, he has three figures pass by the wounded traveller: a priest, a Levite, and finally the Samaritan who tends to the man. The inference here is very clear, that the Samaritan is considered the lowest by far of these three individuals and at face value is not the one who the doctor of law would tend to think of as showing the kindness and concern for a traveller. Here you have the Jew-Samaritan divide again coming to the fore and being used in a parable.
One of the most interesting passages illustrating Jewish racism of the time is related in the books of Luke and John and has Jesus saying perhaps some of the most shocking words attributed to him; shocking if you are are Christian and not aware of the racism of the Jews of the time, and indeed of the founders of the Christian faith.
I quote from Mark Chapter 7, although the same story is related in Matthew 15. " And rising up from there, He went away unto the borders of Tyre and Sidon [an area of modern day Lebanon]. And entering into the house, He desired no one to know. But hearing about Him, a woman came up, one whose daughter had an unclean spirit. And she fell down at His feet. And the woman was a Greek, a Syro-phoenician by race. And she asked Him, that He would cast out the demon from her daughter. And Jewsus said to her, First allow the children to be satisfied; for it is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. But she answered and said to Him, Yes, Lord: for even the dogs under the table eat from the crumbs of the children. And He said to her, Because of this word, go. The demon has gone out from your daughter."
This is a stunning piece of racism. The children are Jews and the dogs are Gentiles. Jesus here is racially humiliating the woman, referring to her race as dogs. Yet the woman debases herself, admits to racially being one of the dogs and therefore Jesus tells her that her daughter is healed.
Let us look at this another way. If the woman had been racially proud and spoken sharply to Jesus for such blatant and offensive racism, would he have healed her daughter? It seems that the blessing of healing was dependent on the woman suffering the racial humiliation that he had thrown her way.
In the Matthew account, the writer has Jesus say, " I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. " In other words, Jesus makes it quite plain that there is a race barrier in his mission. He is concerned only with his own racial kin and does not consider it his mission to preach to or heal those who are not Israelites. Jesus was a racially conscious individual who was brought up in a society that was a hotbed of racism toward non-Jews. He was a product of his age and his environment.
The Racist Apostles
The early Christian church was exclusively Jewish. The adherents met in the Synagogue on a Sabbath, and so might best be considered as a Jewish heretical and messianic sect rather than a religion in their own right.
The Acts of the Apostles presents us with the time when Christianity began to open its doors to those who were non-Jewish. This is recorded in Chapter 10. The account begins by introducing Cornelius, a centurian of the Roman army who is presented as being Italian. This Cornelius is a "believer" and experiences a vision in which he is told to send representatives to the Apostle Peter, who at this time is the head of the Christian sect. While his men are on their journey, Peter himself has a vision. In this vision a great sheet comes down from heaven, full of all manner of living creatures.
The voice from heaven tells him to "Rise up, Peter, slay and eat. But Peter said, Not at all, Lord, because I never did eat anything common or unclean. And again a voice came to him a second time, What things God made clean, you do not make common. And this happened three times and the vessel was taken up into the heaven again." As Peter is pondering the meaning of this, so the representatives from Cornelius arrive.
Later in this account, Peter says, "You know how unlawful it is for a man, a Jew, to unite with or to come near to one of another race. Yet God showed to me not to call a man common or unclean" . Cornelius is then baptised and taken into the Christian faith and from that point on, Christianity ceased to be solely a Jewish faith.
This account, and what Peter says in the paragraph above, graphically illustrates the profound institutional racism of the Jewish people. For it to be unlawful to even eat with or come near to someone of another race is perhaps some of the most astounding racism seen in the history of mankind.
But this account raises one fundamental question. Peter and the other Apostles were taught personally by Jesus for three and a half years. If Jesus was the enlightened teacher that he is credited with being, why was it that Peter considered up until the time of this vision that it was unlawful for him as a Jew to socialise with non-Jews? Surely a racially enlightened Jesus would have taught him this at some time during those three and a half years? Or do we have to accept that the historical Jesus was as much an institutional racist as the rest of the Judaic tribe?
There is another oddity in the early Christian writings on the matter of conversion of non-Jews. In Acts Chapter 8 we have Philip, another of the Apostles, and disciple of Jesus, being prompted to meet an Ethiopian eunuch and to baptise him into the Christian faith. This predates Peter's astounding move to open the Christian faith to non-Jews and in the account with the Ethiopian, nowhere is the Jew-Gentile matter even mentioned. Must we conclude that Philip, one of the Apostles, was somehow not interested in the racial question? That seems doubtful. The Ethiopian is found by Philip reading from the book of Isaiah, presumably in Hebrew. The only serious conclusion I can draw from this is that this individual was a Falasha Jew, Black, but still Jewish, probably of a people who converted to Judaism around the time of King Solomon.
If we move on in time we see Paul, formerly known as Saul, convert to Christianity and become a major evangelist to Gentiles. Largely through his efforts Christianity undergoes a demographic change and from being an exclusively Jewish faith it becomes majority Gentile. Yet the twelve Apostles still consider their ministry to be to the House of Israel, and indeed there is an astonishing claim made by Paul in the second chapter of Galatians. Even after Peter's "conversion" through vision where he brings non-Jews into the faith, he still is a victim of his institutional racism.
" But when Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was to be blamed. For before some came from James [James was the Apostle stationed at Jerusalem, to these ‘some' would have been Jewish Christians], he ate with the Gentiles. But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, being afraid of those of the circumcision. And also the rest of the Jews dissembled with him, so as even Barnabas ws led away with their dissembling."
This is astounding because it shows that the ones from James clearly were used to keeping the racist Jewish laws of not eating with non-Jews. And so ingrained was this that Peter did not want to embarrass himself in front of them and so withdrew from his usual practise of eating with the non-Jewish Christians. One has to ask the question, how could the Jerusalem based Jewish Christians have possibly seen their non-Jewish brothers in faith as being anything other than second class spiritual citizens if they were not prepared to even eat in the same room as them? Christianity is presented as a religion of equality in these days, but in those days, when it was headed by Jews, what we see is classic Jewish racism coming to the fore. It was only when the Christian church ceased to be controlled by Jews that it lost its racism.
The Apostle Paul; the Eternal Jew?
The Apostle Paul can be considered the individual responsible for Christianity becoming a separate faith rather than a sect of Judaism. He, together with his crony Barnabus, took the gospel to the peoples of Asia Minor and Greece on grand preaching tours.
Of the original Apostles, Paul is the only one who had not been taught directly by Jesus. Paul's conversion came some twenty years after the death of Jesus following a profound spiritual experience while he was on the road to Damascus as a high-persecutor of the Christians.
He also had a very different background to the rest of the Apostles. They were tradesmen, by and large from the region of Galilee. Paul, however, was a Jew from Tarsus, an area within the Roman Empire and deeply Hellenic in its culture.
In his letter to the Christians at Philippians, Paul is proud to quote his racial and religious pedigree. " if any other thinks to trust in the flesh, I more—in circumcision, the eighth day [according to Hebraic law] of the race of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, according to the Law, a Pharisee ." Paul prided himself on being racially pure and identifies himself as a Pharisee, and therefore a Rabbi and a religious lawyer.
Elsewhere, Paul states his pedigree by naming his teacher, a certain Gamaliel, described in Acts 5:34 as. " a Pharisee….a teacher of the Law honoured by all the people ." And in Acts 22:3 Paul states that he is, " a Jew having been born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but having been brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel; having been trained according to the exactness of the ancestral law. "
At this point it is important to point out that the law would almost certainly have not just been the Mosaic law we are familiar with from the Old Testament, but also the many commentaries on this law and additions to it which we know today as the Talmud. These Jewish writings, shrouded in secrecy, reveal themselves to be deeply deeply racist to non-Jews and abhorrent to the majority of the people, particularly in the way they deal with such things as what is right and wrong to do to non-Jews. But it is beyond the scope of this article to go into the complexities of the Talmud.
If Paul was a Pharisee, taught by the ‘great' Gamaliel, then he would have been adept at all the ins and outs of Jewish law, and would have been adept at the manner of adhering to the letter of the law while getting around the spirit of law in the classic manner of the Eternal Jew.
Looking at this early Church we have to ask the question why only Paul considers it his mission to go to the Gentiles, while all the Apostles who studied directly with Jesus follow his mission of going to the House of Israel. One also has to wonder that if Jesus intended these new teachings to be spread beyond the racial boundaries of Israel, why it took twenty years and one who had not studied with him to do this. Yes, the incident with Cornelius shows that non-Jews did start to come into the Christian faith, but equally the disagreement between Peter and Paul as recorded in the book of Galatians showed that the Jewish Christians viewed the non-Jewish Christians as second class citizens.
The exchanges in the Book of Galatians also show that the Jewish Christians were forcing the non-Jewish Christians to effectively become Jews through being circumcised and through adhering to the Mosaic law over such things as clean and unclean meats.
Paul's great strategy was to remove the need for Judaizing in order to become a Christian. Read through the Acts of the Apostles and the writings of Paul and there seems to be very little in practical terms that new converts were required to do following baptism. Paul did not require non-Jews to become circumcised. There is no record of them having to give up the eating of unclean meats. They were not required to worship in synagogues. They largely kept their own cultures. Even in Acts 17, when at Athens, Paul points to an altar with the inscription, "To an unknown God" and reveals that this god is none-other than the Christian Lord of Heaven.
Does the above paragraph sound somewhat familiar to Odinists? Is this not a similar way in which our own ancestors were brought into Christianity? The wily Paul realised that as long as you changed very little and enabled the people to keep their same way of life then you could seduce them into the new religion. They didn't have to become Jews, and Christianity was about faith, not works. With this approach the converts grew and grew at a staggering rate.
Yet not all the Apostles seem to have agreed with Paul on the subject of faith versus works. The traditional Jewish way of righteousness was to keep a highly detailed code of law. James was the Apostle in charge of the headquarters church at Jerusalem. He seems to disagree with Paul when he writes in James 2:14, " My brethren, what is the gain if anyone says he has faith, but he does not have works. Is faith able to save him? " This is a very different teaching than that given by Paul to the Greeks of Ephesus when he writes (Chap 2:8) " For by grace you are being saved, through faith; and this is not of yourselves; it is the gift of God; not of works, that not anyone should boast. " And also in Galatians 2:16, " a man is not justified by works of law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. "
This is interesting because on one hand you have a an Apostle who almost exclusively ministers to Jews emphasising the traditional Jewish teaching that righteousness comes through the works of the law. On the other hand you have the religious lawyer Paul, preaching the exact opposite to the Hellenic peoples. His view is that you just have to believe, have faith, and then carry on with your own cultures. How easy, therefore, to become a Christian.
We as Odinists can look back to the days of Christian conversion in our lands and see how our ancestors were offered the stranger religion whilst being allowed to hang on to so much that was comforting and familiar. This is why at this time of Yule we see Christmas being presented as a Christian celebration yet wrapped in the trappings of heathenism.
Paul uses his new and revolutionary concept of faith to put a completely new spin on the old Jewish story of Abraham being prepared to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. This story is the first place we find the custom of Jewish Ritual Murder recorded. Paul siezes on this and claims that it was through faith that Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his own son to his tribal deity. For Millennia since that event children have been sacrificed in religious rituals by certain Jewish sects, but usually the children are non-Jewish. Jewish Ritual Murder was one of the main reasons for the expulsion of the Jews from England under Edward I and one of the main reasons for the expulsion from Spain in the latter part of the Fifteenth Century.
Paul is clearly a cunning individual and willing to present himself in different guises whenever he sees it is to his advantage. When faced with a flogging in Acts 22 he produces the fact that he is a Roman citizen and so escapes this punishment. He also uses his citizenship when being tried at the end of his life.
Paul's true approach is revealed in his words in 1 Corinthians 9:30, "And I became as a Jew to the Jews, that I might gain Jews; to those under the Law as under Law, that I might gain those under Law; to those without Law as being without Law—not being without the Law of God, but under the law of Christ—that I might gain those without Law.
How typical of the Eternal Jew. He presented himself as one person to those of his own race and as something else to non-Jews. In Paul's approach we see the same kind of dangerous characteristics which led Julius Streiker, Joseph Goebbels, and more at home, Arnold Leese, to give such stern warnings to our Folk about the nature of the Jewish mind in action.
Paul also takes the old Jewish racism and develops something new out of it, knowing that in the Hellenic world, such behaviour would be intolerable among the new converts. In 2 Corinthians 14–17 he writes, " Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership does righteousness have with lawlessness? And what fellowship does light have with darkness? And what agreement does Christ have with Belial? Or what part does a believer have with an unbeliever? And what agreement does a temple of God have with idols? ….. Because of this, come out from among them and be separated, says the Lord, and do not touch the unclean thing, and I will receive you. " The Jewish way would be to not marry non-Jews and not even socialise with them. Paul takes this approach and applies it not to Christians and non-Christians. His new converts now have to separate themselves from their kin and their community, although this time the discrimination is not racially based but religious in nature.
The Eternal Jew shifts his shape but spreads his same age old poison among the rest of humanity. Using his natural cunning he makes sure that this poison is given in a way that is palatable to the people he is amongst.
Paul may have been the Apostle to the Gentiles, but he was still the Eternal Jew, a product of the highest rabbinical training his race had to offer. His legacy was to spread division among the communities of the people he converted and ultimately is to blame for the conversion of our ancestors from their ancestral faith. For if there had been no Paul then Christianity might well have remained a largely Jewish faith, with perhaps the odd few non-Jews regarded as second class spiritual citizens and forced to Judaize in order to be accepted. Paul stands out as an enemy of our Faith and of our Folk.