Volume I, Judaism and Christianity (Summary copyright 2011, G.R. Hume)
The Birth of Judaism
Deus makes the case that "Aristotle purported to prove the existence of a Supreme Cause, of all things, by arguing that 'whatever exists for a useful purpose must be the work of an intelligence' and that this intelligence can only be one: the Supreme Being. Heaven was set in motion by that being. However, Aristotle viewed the world as eternal, and he did not reflect on an original creation. It is quite obvious that history takes a different path, whether Aristotle’s idea of a Supreme Being found its way to Jerusalem or the Jewish idea of one God made it to Greece." The centrality of this question leads Deus to be on alert for biblical references that hint at the time of their creation. In working through and explaining the scripture, Deus highlights how the Judaic religion manages to have people tremble before God. He points at the early establishment of a privileged family of high-priests, the Korahite-Levites, who were to receive taxes from the population, and at the various exterminations of others in the name of God. Deus' analysis includes a comparison of the biblical stories to pre-existing histories that may have been utilized for a rapid deployment of the Judaic scripture and a critique of modern missionaries, who seem to downplay the brutality of the biblical text. For example, when it comes to the story of Noah, where all life was destroyed, D. James Kennedy in Why the Ten Commandments Matter thinks that modern missionaries are cynical. “But what God was revealing about Himself here is something quite the opposite of the small-minded, mean little tyrant. He was showing the Israelites that within Him burns the jealousy of the loving parent who sees beauty, possibility, and value in a son or daughter, and who is brokenhearted to see a child wasting all of these gifts.” Eradicating the offspring in the name of love makes no sense to Deus and he seeks the explanation for God’s anger issue in a real world purpose that can be achieved only with the gravest of threats. This purpose is to establish God’s standing mandate to possess the land of Canaan, which was much larger than today’s Israel. This mandate is not only imprinted in the Torah but it is carried forth through all Jewish generations and is at the heart of the Middle Eastern conflict in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This mandate includes the command not to enter treaties with anyone who lived in the land of Canaan (Exodus 23:32), which explains why peace negotiations with Israel have stalled for decades. As long as the Torah guides the Jews, the Palestinians are on their extermination list. Deus argues that the Korahite Levites will ensure new aggressions even at the expense of lives from ordinary Jews only to expand Israel until the land of Canaan is in their possession. In his exploration, Deus makes it clear why the Israelites pose a clear and present danger in the neighboring Islamic minds. The “Promised Land” includes today’s Sinai in the south, most of Jordan in the east, Lebanon, most of Syria in the north and much of Iraq. The motif for the creation of the Jewish religion was a land grab from the Palestinians and their neighbors.
In terms of social economics, Deus carves out that the concept of serving God in poverty was anathema to the Torah. It was an idea that found its origin in the prophetic writings of the Hebrew Bible and was pushed to the extreme only in the Apocrypha and the New Testament.
Given the importance of the Torah in Islam, Deus lays the groundwork for understanding the religious evolution. Abraham's first-born, Ishmael, emerged in the family linage of Muhammad’s Islam as the Ishmaelites, and Ishmael’s firstborn son Nebaioth became the leader of the Nabataeans. The Israelites descend from Abraham’s second-born son, Isaac, from the elderly Sarah. Abraham was to have more descendants from a third wife, Keturah, called the Keturahns or also known in history as Saracens. Because the term “Saracens” means “not from Sarah,” Ishmaelites and Keturahns are often confused by historians as one. In order to understand the evolution of the Judaic religions, Israelites, Ishmaelites, and Keturahns must be kept distinct. A second point of historical confusion is the meaning of the word “Messiah”. Firstly, the Hebrew word mashiah means the “anointed” (of the Lord): “This is the word rendered in Septuagint as Greek Khristos. In Old Testament prophetic writing, it was used of an expected deliverer of the Jewish nation.” (etymonline.com) The Septuagint was the first Greek translation of the scripture. There, the word Khristos, or Christ, means “Messiah.” They are one and the same. This overlap created ample room for confusion or even outright misinterpretation when it came to early Christianity.
In its research, Deus points out that some historians believe that the biblical King Xerxes was mistaken for King Artaxerxes; some Greek translations referred to Artaxerxes and not to Xerxes. He concludes that the kings of the scripture are those from the end of the Persian rule of Artaxerxes III, around 338 BC, to the end of Darius III, in 330 BC. The first Persian King Cyrus (Cyrus Cylinder, 539 BC) had overthrown the Chaldeans. The sixth century BC Nabonidus Cylinder (ca. 540s BC) provides for clues that the stories of the temple restorations of Harran and Sippar may have found its way to Jerusalem. Nabonidus was the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Chaldeans. In his account, Sin was the Creator, counting back 3,200 years from the Nabonidus' time. The Chaldaen count coincides with the Jewish calculation of the Creation to 3760 BC. If the Chaldaen Temple of Sippar was indeed viewed as the place of the Creation and possibly the Garden of Eden, then this site might one day rise to an archaeological treasure chest. The Torah itself also confirms that Chaldea is the original home of the Jews: "Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldees." (Genesis 11:28) Biblical scholars view ‘Chaldees’ as a later edition to clarify Ur. Instead, it is part of the Jewish Torah, which was hardly edited by the Christians, and it might be real evidence to a fraud, mistakenly left behind.
The origins of the Torah
Volume I of the Great Leap-Fraud looks into the evolution of faith and examines how the ideas of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah fit into the religious ideas in the surrounding cultures and which religion may have influenced the other. Historical and archaeological evidence provide for the pointers that the prophet Jeremiah must be out of order and that his placement needs exploring. His writings reflect Hellenistic moral virtues of Aristotle that had been carried to the Jews with the conquest of Canaan by Alexander the Great. Other ideas were adopted by the Jews from their former Persian host. The economic messages in the background of the Torah push the timeframe for the creation of the original scripture into the late fourth century BC, shortly after Alexander’s death. Seemingly later writings come across as being unaware of the details of the Torah, pointing at a concentrated effort of multiple teams that were working under time constraints for a purpose. (Josephus, Antiquities (93 AD), XII:2) The Torah and the Hebrew Bible were likely written for the Library of Alexandria in order to establish the land claim to Israel and to defraud the Palestinians of their home. It is in the context of the efforts by the Alexandrian library to collect all books ever written that Judaism first appears in the historic evidence. (Ibid.)
It seems to be generally overlooked in the Torah that the text systematically works its way through eradicating one tribe after another, until the musical chair ends with only one tribe left, the Jews, intent to grab the land of Canaan. As the tribes were terminated, no evidence of their existence was ever asked for. The motifs and methods of the Torah point to the establishment of everlasting leadership through a theocratic form of governmental organization by the Jewish Levite tribe, the descendants of Moses, his brother Aaron, the Korahites and a few other tribes. The absence of archaeological findings needs to be viewed in context with a path of destruction of evidence in the narrative of the Torah. Rather than coming up with forged evidence, the Torah repeatedly states how the evidence got lost, burnt, and eaten, or vanished. Evidence that should have immediately led to the creation of shrines and temples was simply forgotten with or without mention. Mount Sinai that was never identified and the missing tombs of Moses and Aaron are only two of the most immediate examples. These initial five books of the scripture were largely transformed from earlier historic documents and other religions into which the Jewish story was inserted or made up over significant stretches. The Torah is probably the oldest evidence of plagiarism with the intent to provide for an intellectual framework that justifies all means for the end of Israel. This includes genocide and ethnic cleansing, mass murdering of women and children, destruction of entire cities, and, first and foremost, the rooting out of the Palestinians.
In the historic context, the Ten Commandments come across as a “criminal code” with odd priorities. The Second Commandment, which prohibits idolatry, has a specific purpose that is more important than any other, lest the first that restricts believers to one god. As the literal “evidence of evidence”, it delivers an explanation as to why there is no evidence. However, according to their own scripture, the Jews had fallen off their faith repeatedly. Hence, if any of their stories held any grain of truth, there would still be ample evidence of Jewish idols across the land of Canaan. That of course is not so. The scripture provides for the clues that the Jews were originally star worshippers. It is likely that the Jews had incorporated star and stone worshipping rituals, most visibly the ceremonial walk around an object, the circumambulation, and the foundation stone of their temple. This stone, a rock, plays also an important role in Christianity when Jesus proclaims to build his church on “this rock”, a saying that only makes sense after the Jewish temple was razed.
Critical pieces of evidence are to be found in the scripture and are important building blocks for the emergence of Islam. The Muslims incorporated pre-existing Jewish rituals into their traditions, while the Rabbinic Jews had lost them due to the demolition of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem in the first century. With the loss of the temple and the transformation to Rabbinic Judaism, the rituals were also lost. Because of the transformation of the Rabbinic Judaism that spread through the Roman Empire, the “star worshipers” were not recognized as Jewish by writers accustomed to the Rabbinic culture. The path of destruction of evidence makes it impossible to verify the Jewish biblical claims. All that remains of their ancient history is the scripture itself, a text that merits distrust in regards to the non-spiritual messages. Unfortunately, being embedded in plagiarism and serial fraud doesn’t make the spiritual messages look too trustworthy either. While the spiritual component of the Judaic religions is not the target of this work, the inventions include the Genesis, Exodus, David or Salomon, the first temple, the prophets and the divine inspiration of the Levites. These tales were constructed around pre-existing histories, leading to the greatest fraud ever committed upon human kind by a people dedicated to their land: Israel. Listening to what modern Jews and Christians have to say about the meaning of the Commandments and comparing their opinions with what the scripture says about them reveals that modern societies have lost the historic connection to these laws. The confusions with the Jewish Messiah and the Christian Messiah rest on the Greek word “Khristos”, which provides for an important clue to the evolution of early Christianity. The two messiahs boil down to one identity, the Khristos, who was used differently for Jews and Christians for the same purpose: the redemption of Israel. With that goal in mind, some of the most “beautiful” stories in the Torah are in fact cruel acts of genocide with an intolerable hatred towards mankind, most notably represented by the doomed Palestinians. It is a fight of the Jews to grab the land of the Palestinians that has been going on for 2300 years and continues today. For eternity, the Palestinians find themselves on a Jewish death-list, the Jewish scripture, which is deployed to every Jewish child from kindergarden. This hatred unfortunately survives when the Jews finally accepted natural born Israelites into their nation. The Palestinians were excluded. This biblical hatred is the foundation of a culture of terrorism towards each other up until today. The promise of the land of Canaan by the God of the Israelites lies at the heart of the Israeli conflicts since World War II.
A central question is who may have been those that directed the effort to create the scripture and how they may have organized the fraud. Two Jewish career politicians with a hidden agenda had made it to top government ranks in the Persian Empire of the late fourth century BC, Mordecai and Nehemiah. Together with the “prophet” Ezra, these two directed the effort to father the Torah and most of the Hebrew Bible. Three Jewish sects with opposing world views had worked on the scripture within a time frame of only months, not enough time to weed out inconsistencies and contradictions. Its composition, looking like a draft, boiled down to inventing a Jewish religion out of fragments of others that ensured them the claim to their own land for eternity. The Israelites combined and “retold” various stories from a 1000 year old “memory” that wasn’t theirs. From the beginning, a fourth group, the Samaritans, rejected the story of the others outright and thought that the Torah and the Temple Mount were a fraud. The social and economic messages in the Hebrew Bible provide for a strong intellectual framework for industriousness, but they take a turn towards modesty and progressively shift away from wealth creation. This shift of heart is due to the three sects with differing credos that had shared in the work. Their credos are reflected in their sections of the result. The Torah was in the name of success and sheer determination, the last ones of the Hebrew Bible in the name of spiritual beings.
The Apocrypha, which means something like “the secret books that are only available to insiders,” contains those books that were written before the advent of Jesus Christ and were used by the Catholic Church but not by most Jewish sects and also not by the Protestants or the Orthodox Christians. The books of the Apocrypha glorify poverty in increasing intensity. The idea of glorifying poverty in Christianity wasn’t born out of spiritualism but out of the intention to wash under the foundation of the Roman Empire. To reach their end, the Jews, more precisely the Levites, hi-jacked the doctrines of the Essens sect, a marginal spiritual group that was amongst the founders of the biblical writings. Then they deployed missionaries and prophets to spread the message amongst those most susceptible, the poor and disadvantaged. Likewise, the Apocrypha increasingly rejected everything dear to Romans. Even the oldest books of Christianity turned their backs on wealth to the point where money and God were irreconcilable.
Ultimately, the Jewish strategy to rejecting everything Roman worked. The fall of the western Roman Empire and the succeeding Dark Ages were a product of a sudden invasion of the Arian Christian faith into the West, preceded by centuries of sectarian unrest in the East, costing humanity 1200 years of progress and millions of lives. The Arian teachings in the West rested on the Paulinic letters and in particular on the book of Romans, the book that stands out in the scripture as entertaining the most rejectionist messages. These teachings of hatred against mankind did not only trigger a social revolution but also a succession of humanitarian disasters. It shows a direct connection between the teachings of both Judaic faiths and modern terrorism.
Confusions About Khristos
During the Herodian period, the Jews refused to submit to Roman rule but engaged in terrorism instead. The historian Flavius Josephus seems to have been one of the Jewish leaders of the revolt that led to the First Jewish-Roman War between 66 and 70 AD. The assessment of his version of history reveals passages about Jesus Christ that had been fraudulently added to the original text a few hundred years later. The origin of those texts was communicated unintentionally through ideas that can be pinned down to specific eras or people of the forth century. Josephus is clear about the Roman custom to crucify rebels and criminals alike, at the time of the Jewish-Roman Wars – by the thousands. The search for Jesus’ historicity uncovered a number of surprises. Firstly, Messianic confusions during the first and into the second century may mislead later interpreters. Secondly, the Gospel may have had a much different purpose than what the consensus is: rejecting the Roman Empire through a refusal to participate in its economy and society. Thirdly, the New Testament may have been fraudulently built unto the historic text of Josephus around the turn of the second century, in particular when it comes to the rescue of a crucified friend of his.
The Gospel was written from a point of view when the Temple of Jerusalem had already been destroyed. Likewise, the role of the Apostle Peter, who was handed the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, was not only different from the Christian consensus, but also astonishingly obvious once the dots are connected: Peter and Jesus were standing beside the Foundation Stone of the destroyed Holy Temple of Jerusalem, the only “church” that was supposed to exist. Jesus handed over the keys for the temple to Peter. The latter never visited Rome, but he was instead supposed to be the apostle that represented Jerusalem, the city the Jews had been banned from by the Romans. Saint Paul (Paul of Tarsus/Saulus), in turn, may have been a member of the Agrippa family with an agenda in mind: the redemption of Israel by rejecting Roman society altogether. He went even further than the Gospel, rejecting friends, wives and children. The Gospel may have been commissioned in a Jewish kick-off meeting in Jamnia in 93 AD to Saint Paul, who seems to have maintained connections to the exiled Jews in the Arab Peninsula. The authors of the Gospel had the same goal in mind as the writers of the Old Testament: the redemption of Israel.
Despite the alleged persecution of Christians in Rome under Nero, both Jesus and Christianity, as we understand the religion today, did not exist during the first century. In contrary, the evidence points at a fire that broke out in the Jewish business quarter in Rome, possibly as a carefully orchestrated terrorist attack by the Jews. Even if the Christians had existed, they had no business to attend to in the shop district of Rome, where the fire started. Instead, no means was too great to achieve the Jewish goal. In this environment, the Jewish terrorist cells, the Zealots and Sicarii, were role models on how to fight a war without an army. While these terrorists were carried by the Jewish population, nobody ever admitted publicly to be part of them. Like the Taliban today, they were protected, hidden and provisioned by the public. They struck out of nowhere and vanished into the crowd unseen as heroes, the al-Qaeda of the time.
The Bar Kokhba revolt (Third Jewish-Roman War) may have played a pivotal role in the rise of Christianity. As the Jews lost their last stance, they were in search for a new identity and the former teachers of Judaism turned into the teachers of the new Christianity. Jewish leaders that had been relocated from Jerusalem into the Roman Empire in the wake of the various conflicts may have established centers of dissent in the West and they may have acted as door openers for invaders into the Roman territories. A relocation of the Agrippas to Cologne could have provided an open door for the invasion of the Goths and Franks into the Roman Empire by invitation of the Jews later down the road. The Jews’ hatred for the Roman Empire and their persistent rebellious nature and terrorism provides for the background of them being singled out and persecuted through the ages. Logically, the Roman Empire looked at Christianity and its scripture as a danger to humanity, and it is this reasoning that is missing in most history books. The Roman conviction that Christianity represented hatred towards mankind may have led to spot persecutions, but it is important to distinguish between persecutions of Jews that believed in a Khristos to come or “Christians” that believed in Jesus Christ. Some of the reports about persecutions coincide with places where Jewish leaders had been relocated, in particular Vienne in present day France.
Christianity, as a rebel faith that rejected Roman society, had a strong appeal for the disadvantaged in the empire throughout the East. The Jewish and Christian sectarian conflicts finally put an end to the expansion of the Roman Empire. The persecutions of the first and early second century were against the Jews as enemies of the empire, not against modern Christians. There was much less penetration of Christianity in the western Roman Empire than is generally believed, even up to the fourth century. However, the city of Rome stood as the Christian symbol for everything evil in society. The new faith had been “imported” into the West from North Africa during the persecutions of the late third century and early fourth. Before, the language barrier and Western Paganism provided for an impenetrable barrier.
The East had an entirely different religious evolution. It was marked by Jewish sectarian conflicts, terrorism and rebellions even before the advent of the Messiah, and the Jews only intensified the resistance over time. The birth place of modern Christianity was neither Jerusalem nor Rome. Instead, it was either in Nicomedia (near Constantinople) or in the cities of Alexandria and Carthage in North Africa. Even deep into the second century it is unclear whether Christianity, as we come to understand it, had actually split off from the Jews because the early reports suggest a Messiah to come and not one that had already arrived. Due to their persecution, there is a high probability that many Jews morphed into the foundation of the early Christian church. After all, every Christian bishop in the East traced his lineage to one of the twelve apostles – the non-existing Jewish apostles that is. While the empire’s society was not unlike ours, drowned in rampant debt and submitting to a lifestyle of excess and indecency, it underwent two shifts of paradigm all at once: the swing from expansion to preservation and a shift from glorification of wealth to glorification of poverty.
After first problems with “Christians” surfaced in the army, a smallpox outbreak that raked away millions of lives led to the decline of the city of Rome. The Jews were believed to be responsible for the calamity. On the other hand, the rampant corruption in the empire, which was finally auctioned off by the Praetorian Guard may have been a result of the anarchy that followed the disaster. However, soon thereafter “Christianity” was looked at as a danger for society by the emperors. By the time of the “Plague of Cyprian” in 251, the world of thought had changed for a sizable portion of the disadvantaged masses in the East. The Jewish subversion, structural weaknesses, the drying up of the flow of loot from the expansionist era, outside aggressions, civil war, a smallpox pandemic, and the successive economic contraction opened a new chapter for the Romans: The Crisis of the Third Century almost brought the empire to its knees and the Jews were close to achieving their goal. For the Christians, a simple message proved attractive that the world was about to come to an end and that the only way for salvation was through Jesus Christ, in absolute poverty.
The emperors recognized a Christian threat, but they may not have recognized the drivers behind it. Emperor Diocletian decided to persecute Christians and Manichaeans and allowed the Jews to regain status. In the absence of Christian disturbances not much was going on in the West, but spot-persecutions were executed in the East. The incarceration, torture and execution of Christian and Manichean leaders, who refused to recant, would later be magnified by Christian writers into the Great Persecution between 303 and 312 as if there was a mass execution in the style of the Jewish Holocaust. In reality, Emperor Galerius worked on a large-scale effort to revive the traditional Roman religions and to restore the temples across his domain in the East. The evidence of those leaders that recanted and survived is much stronger than the evidence of those that may have stubbornly perished. The West was busy restoring the borders in Gaul along the Rhine River and east along the Danube River against the Goths immigrations.
Pretend Christians constituted a strong portion of the population in the eastern Roman Empire. Those concealed Jews continued to reject the Apocrypha and only accepted the Gospel of Matthew according to the Hebrews and their Jewish base scripture. This led to an entirely different message that was closer to Hellenistic ideals than the Christian Doomsday outlook. Yet, they still rejected the Roman way of life. A group of Christians and Manichaeans fled from North Africa by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar into Spanish Andalusia. The persecutions on the Black Continent were the cause why Christianity came upon the West, and they had absorbed the Manichaean idea of Jesus being a divinity. It is also in the context of the persecutions that historic evidence about a divine Jesus emerges. Emperor Galerius finally changed his strategy and proclaimed a general toleration of Christians during the spring of 311. Everything conceivable had been tried from oppression to freedom to leading the faith. Oppression and persecution triggered compassion and an apologetic imperial behavior for a century to come.
Constantine the Great
There were many more Pagan emperors in the succession than what the consensus might suggest, first and foremost Constantine the Great. Without a solid understanding of the emperors’ religious positions, the decisions by Roman emperors for or against the further advance of Christianity are impossible to be understood, in particular in light of most emperors of the forth century still holding the title of the Pagan pontiff, the equivalent to the Catholic pope. However, there is evidence from rulers outside of the empire that it was common that appointments for leaders of any religion had to be approved by the authorities or the head of the state himself. Likewise, the empire may have changed its strategy from persecution to trying to control the Christians where the election of leaders and internal regulations had to be approved by the emperor. Hence, it can not be entirely refuted that Constantine may have had a hand in some of the less understandable decisions, if only by appointment of a bishop of the Divine Trinity over the First Council of Nicea in 325 AD, however, not as a Christian but as a Pagan ruler. It is all important whether a law was issued from the point of view of a Christian or from a Pagan leader. The understanding of what a superstition or magic is, for example, depends on the view of the issuer of a law and on the dominant culture of a country. Constantine had provided for religious freedom for all faiths. However, only those few sects that survived are telling the stories for posterity. Instead of a senseless demolition and looting of Pagan temples, the events point at a relocation of Pagan temples as part of the construction of the new capital in Constantinople. In fact, Pagan temples were still being built elsewhere. To commemorate the foundation of the city of Constantinople, the Column of Constantine was erected and crowned by a statue of Constantine depicting the Pagan god Apollo. Amongst a long list that was evaluated, a Pagan statue, an idol, is one of the pieces of evidence that demonstrate a mismatch of historical consensus with imperial actions. Under the same imperial pretence of religious freedom, the Jews’ situation had also changed for the better and they regained their freedom.
The main difference between East and West was the absence of Christian sectarian groups in the West. There was a first failed attempt to establish a papacy in the city of Rome during Constantine’s reign. However, the episode had everything to do with the usurper Maxentius in Rome and nothing with Constantine. It was a period of high “creativity” in producing “evidence” for the early existence of Christianity under the guiding hand of Eusebius, a notorius inventor of church history and serial forger. The forgeries may include pretty much everything that we know today about the “historic” Jesus in Jerusalem, about Peter and Paul in Rome as well as church history during the second and third centuries. To put in perspectdive to what extent the Christian forgeries were driven, they went as far as signing over the entire Western Empire as a gift to the Christians even before Constantine had built his New Rome, the city of Constantinople. The universal church was now strengthening through alliances of various sects and agreements under one doctrine and one “official” Gospel that resembled the Protestant version of todays’ Bible. The newfound religious freedom triggered a missionary race into the West. However, the period also brought to life the all dividing question whether Jesus was God or mere man. Western Europe remained silent and Christianity may have advanced quietly and very slowly under one doctrine of Jesus being God while the East plunged deeper into sectarian conflicts.
The doctrinal decision had come about through a backroom deal with Bishop Hosius, who had been leading the North African refugees across the Strait of Gibraltar. Christianity’s dark past must have somehow been exposed: The Levite Jews were in “control” of Christianity but had lost leadership in the First Council of Nicea. The decision that the “official” Christianity submitted to a creed that Jesus was God amounted to a coup d’état, which was later responded to with an attempted counter coup under the leadership of Eusebius. How the former could have happened remains a mystery, but it almost seems as if we look at a fraudulent merger of events into a fiction. It is otherwise almost inexplicable that a minority that was 50-fold outnumbred could have imposed its doctrines on the majority, assuming that the Arians were present in the respective councils to begin with. This last thought opens the prospect, left unexplored as inconsequential for the goals of this book, that three entirely different Christianities were at work, firstly the older Jewish Arian Christianity, secondly the relatively new Christianity of the Divine Trinity having been born in North Africa, and the Paulinic Christianity, morphed and launched by Eusebius, a “Doctor of the Church”.
Theodosius the Great
In the last quarter of the fourth century, Christianity of the Divine Trinity was determined to shake off its connection to the Jews and deliberately changed rituals and customs to be different from theirs. The Roman approach of self-determination was ever more replaced with the Christian concept of fate, the will of God. As the vaults of the empire emptied, the churches were filling with treasures up to their roofs. The Germanic Goths that had recently converted to Eusebius’ Paulinic Christianity were pressing harder across the Danube River from around the second half of the fourth century. They caused chaos in the area and a series of Roman humiliations. The Goths brought along the strongest glorification of poverty of all the Christian sects, fitting to their traditional lifestyle. They were able to build a bridgehead that formed what is here called the “Bulgarian Wedge”. Most surprisingly, the humiliations happened under the military leadership of the future Emperor Theodosius the Great, while the consensus is that Theodosius was in retirement. He is mistakenly attributed to having lifted Christianity to the exclusive state religion. His respective laws were part of an imperial strategy against the Arian Goths in the Balkan region, the same Goths that had brought humiliating defeats to Theodosius as a military commander. Meanwhile, he had co-signed a law that declared Christianity in the city of Rome a heresy. It may not have been the all loving doctrine of Christianity that had overwhelmed an unsuccessful Theodosius. Instead, he may have opened one of the darkest eras of the Roman Empire that also marks its end as a union: ethnic cleansing of the Arian Christian Goths with the help and under the mantle of the Christianity of the Divine Trinity.
The rising paradox of the Roman Empire under Theodosius was that it could no longer restore peace from within. It could also not keep aggressions at bay from the northeast or the east. The northern and western flanks of the empire at the Danube and Rhine Rivers were unprotected against invaders of the same ethnic background as the Roman mercenaries. Soon after Theodosius’ death, the consequences of the culmination of the French Wedge, the Bulgarian Wedge, a boy emperor in the West, a Pagan city of Rome amongst others, continued sectarian conflicts in the East financial ruin, and enriched friends of Theodosius in Spain brought the empire to its knees. After the emperor’s failed strategy against the Goths, both, the West and the East were up for grasp, literally. The West was “conquered” by a walk in the park and the East was saved by the walls of Constantinople. In the “conquest” of the West by the Goths, two generals of the Roman Empire, one a Goth and the other a Vandal, pulled the strings from within East and West. Even Alaric, the new King of the Goths was an insider. He had been trained at the imperial court in Constantinople under Theodosius. Consequently, the Goths could simply walk about the empire as far down as to Spain and up to England after having bounced off the walls of Constantinople.
When the Romans realized that they had fallen prey to a conspiracy, they went after family members of the Gothic mercenaries, which led to the desertion of the Roman mercenary troops and also of hordes of slaves, culminating in the sack of Rome in 410. Rome was taken literally overnight with an onlooking Roman army. Now the West was suddenly Christianized, but in much different ways than what the consensus suggests. It was the “wrong” belief where Jesus was mere man. In the wake of the fall of the city of Rome, as many as 800,000 Pagans and Jews were allowed to flee but went “missing”. In all likelyhood, they moved further west into Spain, bringing unprecedented prosperity to the Iberian Peninsula.
As the societal structures of East and West had been turned upside down, an entirely new kind of society was about to emerge in the West, one that glorified death over life on earth. The ideas of Augustine of Hippo’s The City of God made all the difference in the West and helped plunge society into what we come to know as the Dark Age, which was rather an age of a Papal Kingdom in control of life and information. It was The City of God that was experimentally diffused by the clergy in the West, dedicated to the Paulinic letters of the Gospel and wiping out all competing thought. The East was untouched by Augustine’s ideas and remained comparatively wealthy, although on a much lower level than under the Roman high culture.
The former trap of the Jews to wash under the empire turned against them as they were now branded murderers of Jesus. Luckily for them, Augustine didn’t call for their persecution. Life on earth was punishment enough for them. They had to adapt to the new realities quickly. They were now fully exposed to the wrath of the Christians throughout the territory of the former empire. Hence many left East and West for places where business was better.