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By Root 1210 0

spoke as if they had the right, or even the obligation to destroy the churches, altars, and holy shrines of other people. This last point, as you might imagine, created an acute antagonism among Europeans toward Jewish religion quite different from their usual policy of tolerating all foreign religions they encountered. The way this story is often told, the Romans and Greeks are typically presented as the "bad guys" without ethics or moral values, while the Jews are presented as the "good guys" on the moral high ground. But any such analysis is much too simplistic. For such a view ignores the fact that the pagan Europeans of that era were outraged and offended by the same Jewish ideas and practices that many contemporary Christians object to even today. Had the average modern Christian been in Palestine in the first century AD, they would probably have had more sympathy for the Greek and Roman position than for the Jews. . . . The Greeks, and their successors, the Romans, would need to create some kind of a "social movement," presumably with a heavy religious content, that would counteract the aspects of Jewish culture they perceived as most problematic. Such a campaign would loudly denounce practices such as circumcision, ridicule the strict adherence to Jewish dietary laws, preach against divorce and for monogamous marriage. European propaganda would need to preach against rigid interpretations of Jewish law, dispense with Jewish rituals in favor of European ones, and work to make free associations between Jews and non-Jews acceptable. Most importantly, Greek and Roman propaganda efforts would need to find something that would make Jewish submission to foreign authority acceptable within a Jewish religious framework. And since at the center of this dispute lay Jewish concepts of a Messiah who would free Palestine from evil foreign rulers, even a century or two before Christ, it would have taken no great prophetic powers to have guessed that the European propaganda campaigns would eventually be intertwined with arguments about who was and who was not the genuine Messiah.34

Furthermore, as the author of the Epistle of Ignatius to the Magnesians says, "To profess Jesus Christ while continuing to follow Jewish customs is an absurdity. The Christian faith does not look to Judaism, but Judaism looks to Christianity, in which every other race and tongue that confesses a belief in God has now been comprehended."35 Thus, Ignatius's statements constitute an admission that orthodox Christianity was formulated to abrogate the Judean religion and to roll all the competing religions into one.

The motives of those who composed and spread the gospel story were not entirely suspect. In fact, the composers had in mind the termination of the recurrent sacred king sacrifice/ scapegoat ritual with the final blood atonement prescribed in the Christian myth, as is stated in the Letter to the Hebrews, for example. As Dujardin says, "The sacrifice was in decadence in the first century in the official cults, scorned by Graeco-Roman society, and disparaged by the Rationalism of the intellectuals."36 Walker elucidates the need for the Christian myth to change the habits of one of the last bastions of human sacrifice:

The Jews however did retain a custom of human sacrifice, for special occasions, longer than any other people in the sphere of influence in the Roman empire. Out of this tradition arose the figure of the dying Christos in Jerusalem.37

As noted, the results of this effort to end human sacrifice have been far from satisfactory, as millions of humans have been sacrificed in the name of Christianity. In addition, the dreary image of the suffering Jesus has served as a constant reminder of gloom and doom, casting a somber pall across the world. It would have been much better for the world if the gnosis, or esoteric knowledge, had been made known in the first place.

When the Romans pulled together their state religion, they no doubt had in front of them the words of Josephus regarding Moses: "Now when once he had brought them to submit