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But Hitler and the Church's behavior was not an aberration in the history of Christianity, as from its inception, the religion was intolerant, zealous and violent, with its adherents engaging in terrorism. For example, while blessing peacemakers and exhorting love and forgiveness of enemies and trespassers, the "gentle Jesus" also paradoxically declares:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's foes will be those of his own household. (Mt. 10:34)

Jesus further states that "nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom"; thus, with a few sentences, Jesus has seeded extreme division, sedition and enmity wherever Christianity is promulgated. In thus exhorting his followers to violence, however, Jesus himself was building on centuries-old Jewish thought that called for the "extermination" of non-Jews, i.e., "unbelievers," in Christian parlance. As an example of this Judeo-Christian fanaticism, the apostle Paul was a violent zealot who as a Jew first persecuted the Christians and as a Christian subsequently terrorized the Pagans. As Joseph Wheless says in Forgery in Christianity:

And )Paul], the tergiversant slaughter-breathing persecutor-forpay of the early Christians, now turned for profit their chief apostle of persecution, pronounces time and again the anathema of the new dispensation against all dissenters from his superstitious, tortuous doctrines and dogmas, all such "whom I have delivered unto Satan" (I Tim. i, 20), as he writes to advise his adjutant Timothy. He flings at the scoffing Hebrews this question: "He that despised Moses's law died without mercy ... : Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who bath trodden under foot the Son of God?" (Heb. x, 28, 29). All such "are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire" (Jude 7); "that they might all be damned who believed not the truth" (2 Thess. ii, 12); and even "he that doubteth is damned" (Rom. xiv, 23). This Paul, who with such bigoted presumption "deals damnation `round the land on all he deems the foe" of his dogmas, is first seen "consenting to the death" of the first martyr Stephen (Acts viii, 1); then he blusters through the country "breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord" (Acts ix, 1), the new converts to the new faith. Then, when he suddenly professed miraculous "conversion" himself, his old masters turned on him and sought to kill him, and he fled to these same disciples for safety, to their great alarm (Acts ix, 23-26), and straightway began to bully and threaten all who would not now believe his new preachments. To Elymas, who "withstood them," the doughty new dogmatist "set his eyes on him," and thus blasted him with inflated vituperation: "O full of all subtilty and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?" (Acts xiii, 8-10). Even the "meek and loving Jesus" is quoted as giving the fateful admonition: "Fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matt. x, 28)-here first invented and threatened by Jesus the Christ himself, for added terror unto belief. Paul climaxes the terror: "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God' (Heb. x, 31)."8

The Myth of Massive Martyrdom

Along with the tale that Christianity began with a "Prince of Peace" comes the myth that the early Christians were gentle "lambs" served up in large numbers as "martyrs for the faith" by the diabolical Romans. The myth of martyrdom starts with the purported passage of the Roman historian Tacitus in which he excoriated Nero for killing a "great multitude" of Christians at Rome in 64 CE; however, this passage is a forgery, one of many