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Notes -
Let me clarify my point, regarding Stan Lee and Thor. My point was that just because Stan Lee used a large body of preexisting symbols and myths to craft them into contemporary cultural signals for receptive audiences does not mean he isn't a talented mythmaker, so your point "Judaism borrows from these other myths so we can't give them credit" doesn't hold. It's the mark of a talented mythmaker to take a symbol, change its meaning in subtle ways, and deliver it to the audience in a way that's compelling.
I don't doubt the success of Greek mythology, and it is another example of the sort of culture-creation I am talking about. I am not saying the Jews are the only ones capable of doing it. Greek mythology was intelligently formulated with a race consciousness. Modern Gentile mythology, like say George Lucas, can be potent and influential but it is not created with a race consciousness compared to, say, Superman whose creators crafted these myths with a Jewish race consciousness that someone like Hlynka could not understand. So the clueless Goy Zach Snyder makes Superman more Apollonian because he isn't in tune with the racial undertones of the character as understood by its creators and fellow, perceptive Jewish audiences. In contrast, with Wonder Woman, who is a Jewish Golem, the racial undertones in her character are much more closely adapted in her films.
I would view Greek mythology as the race-conscious counterpart to both ancient and contemporary Jewish mythology. There are some examples of race-conscious contemporary gentile mythology: Conan the Barbarian, 300, etc.
Can you imagine a world where Jews denounced the Hebrew god as a false demon, all the old laws as superstitious pagan nonsense and then zealously forced all their fellow Jews to convert to the worship of Apollo? I don't think you can imagine that. Even trying to fathom this alternate outcome shows who absorbed who. Of course there are Greek elements in Christianity, but they worship a Jewish god. In this alternate universe where Jews decided to denounce the Torah as Pagan sacrilege in submission to the true master of all Apollo, that cult would also likewise retain some Jewish elements, but there would be no mistake regarding who absorbed who. And the Jewish people, as a genetically identifiable people, would not exist today.
St. Paul, the OG "fellow white people, you must love your enemy and accept Jesus or else suffer eternal damnation by the wrath of Yahweh."
There is basically no distinction between the two. Their spiritual status is a blood covenant and membership is inherited. There was no knowledge of genetics in the ancient world, but the phenomenon was captured conceptually with a blood covenant and inherited ingroup status. It is exoterically "spiritual" but esoterically genetic, a similar pattern exists in Greek myth.
The notion that America was just conceived as some idea open to the entire world, rather than a people, is another example of a clever 20th century mythological revision. Americans make that claim you describe precisely because they have long been denied the ability to assert an ethnic particularity as Jews do. They instead have to embrace a conception of America as an idea rather than a people. I've already compared the sentiment to the rhetoric of the British Empire, which did assert an ethnic particularity and it is universally regarded as supremacist. The Aleinu asserts an ethnic particularity and supremacy, I am going to believe my lying eyes.
I guess that puts you in an odd position because you are left to explain the peculiarly disproportionate representation of Jews in these areas of culture creation, which cannot be explained only by IQ. I am suggesting that this is driven by merit, they are good at crafting these myths, propaganda, and social narratives and they often do so with a race-consciousness that most gentiles do not perceive.
Some certainly do, but others who think "Judaism is not about genetics it's about spirituality", no I actually do understand Judaism better than them and they are fish who cannot tell they are in water. They say that Tikkun Olam means dismantling whiteness and fiercely protecting Jews from any measure of criticism or negative sentiment, no actually, I understand Tikkun Olam better than they do. Believing your own myths doesn't mean you understand them, it usually means the opposite. Someone who truly believes "America has succeeded because it is an idea open to the whole world" does not actually understand the meaning of that myth consciously designed to separate American exceptionalism from racial connotations.
Oh, where to begin...
The problem is that you have defined 'myth-making' so widely as to allow you to declare any involvement of a Jew at any stage of a creative process as evidence that the Jews are uniquely talented myth-makers.
Thus if there's a story involving ideas related to ancient Israel, even if no Jews at all are involved in that story's production, this is for you an example of the pernicious influence of Jewish myth-making.
At the same time, if there's a story involving ideas related to ancient Greece (or any other culture), but a Jew was involved in telling it, this is also for you an example of the pernicious influence of Jewish myth-making.
There's no consistency here. Anything touched by a Jew or Judaism or Israel ancient or modern in any way is evidence for your hypothesis, in a way that you don't claim for other ethnicities or narratives or ideas. I am tempted to ask - is there anything Jews could do, any way that Jews could tell stories, that you would not see as evidence of their subtle infiltration and co-option of other cultures?
I have another take. It goes like this. Ideas created by Jews, both ancient and modern, are frequently taken and used by non-Jews in creative ways. Likewise ideas created by non-Jews, both ancient and modern, are frequently taken and used by Jews in creative ways. This is completely normal and a harmless process of cultural exchange and influence.
What on Earth are you talking about? Greek mythology was certainly not 'intelligently formulated with a race consciousness' - Homer or Hesiod or Pindar certainly had no concept of 'race' analogous to the one you're spruiking. The Theogony or the Iliad are not texts with a strong race consciousness in the sense in which you are using the term.
And I have no idea what you are talking about with Superman. Is it true that one of the influences on Superman was Siegel and Shuster thinking about the experience of Jewish immigrants in America? Yes, probably. To read that as 'created with a race consciousness' is simply dishonest.
Of course I can imagine that, because that has actually happened before. Back when the state of Israel was founded there was actually a small but real Jewish pagan movement, the Canaanites, who believed something like this. They were heavily influenced by Italian Fascism and wanted to restore an imagined past Canaanite identity. They felt that contemporary (i.e. 1940s) Jewish culture had become effeminate and weak due to centuries/millennia of oppression, and came to understand Judaism itself as an enervating parasite, sucking the spirit out of the Jewish people. They wanted to abandon Judaism, return to a sort of Canaanite paganism, and establish a multi-ethnic Middle Eastern empire along fascist lines ruled by a Jewish aristocracy. They wanted to discard Judaism as a religion in favour of a highly aggressive, masculinised concept of Jewish racial identity.
That movement wasn't successful, thank heavens, but the point is that I can very easily imagine Jews rejecting Judaism and attempting to zealously enforce some new religious or ideologial structure by force. Jews are a diverse group and some among them have flirted with such ideas in the past.
I think this is simplified to the point of nonsense, especially if you consider it in light of other cases where there's been substantial religious change in a society - take the Christianisation of the Roman Empire, or the way Persia became Shia, or Islam in southeast Asia. Does, say, the spread of Islam in Indonesia constitute the Arabs absorbing the Indonesians? Did the Jews absorb the Romans? The Safavids brought a new religion to Iran, Shia Islam, and they themselves were probably ancestrally Kurds or Turks - at any rate something other than Persian - and yet it seems absurd to say that the Turks absorbed the Persians.
Cultural assimilation can mean multiple different things. When the Roman Empire came to worship the God of Abraham, yes, there's a certain sense in which something of Israel came to dominate the Roman Empire. But to say that the Jews 'absorbed' the Romans seems nonsensical.
This is a gross distortion of anything Paul actually said. He certainly told people - without distinction as to race - to love their enemy and to fear the Lord, but that italicised part is important. There is no basis for seeing Paul as some agent of Jewish infiltration attempting to weaken or destroy a 'white race' that neither he nor any of his contemporaries would have believed to exist. Paul's message is undoubtedly preached to both Jews and Gentiles, and he sees all people who have received it as fundamentally in the same boat and called to the same standard of behaviour. He could hardly have been more clear about this.
The link I provided there was to a modern Jewish website. Contemporary Jews understand what genetics are, and yet they clearly indicate that descent from Abraham, in the sense that it is matters for being a Jew, is a spiritual rather than a genetic notion. You are making bold assertions about the nefariousness of the Jews without any reference to what Jews themselves actually say or do.
Are you asserting that from at least the 18th century, the Jews somehow prevented the Americans from asserting an ethnic or racialised sense of American identity? Even if that were true, which it clearly is not, that would not even be particularly germane to the point. The Americans are, for whatever reason, an example of a nation who assert a particular 'chosen' status for themselves in the eyes of God and accompanying mission to the world. They were talking about themselves as an 'Empire of Liberty' as early as the Revolution itself! The 'City on a Hill' motif has been deeply significant over the last century, and regardless of any quibbling about the origin of the phrase, I think the notion of America as a destined nation specially chosen by Providence goes back well before it.
As such I repeat that Jews are far from unique in having a sense of a covenant nation with a mission to the world.
I don't think there's anything particularly suspicious to explain, really. Jews are a very well-educated creative minority with very large historical populations in centres of American media, most notably New York. Of course there are lots of them in the culture industry. This seems entirely explainable to me without needing to posit some malicious Jewish talent for infiltrating and destroying non-Jewish cultures.
I'll be blunt here - when you're telling me that you understand Jewishness and Judaism better than Jews, better than Jewish sacred texts, better than Jewish rabbis... I'm going to be very, very skeptical. When it comes down to it, I trust a rabbi to know what tikkum olam means better than I do a random I met on the internet.
It is not completely harmless, because Jews use their station in these cultural institutions to formulate radical critique of Gentile history, culture, and racial identity and use the same influence to protect themselves from any in-kind criticisms. Like I said, imagine an alternative world where every media executive here is Chinese instead of Jewish, but if you Notice that or have anything negative to say about it then you are regarded as mentally deranged at best. Imagine all our social institutions were in complete alignment to punish anybody who has anything remotely critical to say about Chinese influence in media.
This is not an innocuous dynamic of cultural exchange, it is hostile.
Of course Greek Myth is formulated with a race consciousness, gods in the pantheon, as in the bible, are frequently representative of groups of people. The Ionians were said to have been descended from Ion the son of Apollo, who scholars directly relate to Javan son of Japheth in the Hebrew Bible. Both Apollo and Japheth point to ethnic identity. Paul is described as "of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews"...
This is nonsense, the relationship between the Jews and Rome was an ethnic conflict, everybody perceived it, both then and now. As Marcus Eli Ravage put it (1928):
Paul's motives are impossible to disentangle, but in the same way that a Jew today may genuinely believe he is healing the world by promoting diversity, dismantling white supremacy, and punishing anybody who has anything negative to say about Jews, there's no reason to assume Paul had malintent. He influenced the gentiles to reject the gods of their ancestors and worship Yahweh, so he ought to be revered by Jews as the embodiment of Tikkun Olam and there's no reason to suppose his motives were "worse" than Hollywood when they give each-other accolades for the Nth Holocaust movie- they really do think they are guiding humanity on the spiritually correct path, and after all, the gentiles must be taught "Never Again" as the most important moral lesson.
I'm not sure how much you know about American history, but racialized American identity was entirely central to the concept of being an American until after the end of WWII. The first Congress restricted citizenship to "Free White men". The Immigration Acts in the 1924 were specifically intended to anchor the racial composition of the country to the 1800s. This all radically changed. Given the enormous amount of Jewish influence in American cultural institutions, it would prima facie be highly dubious to suggest that the elites in our cultural institutions played no part in these cultural upheavals. Of course they did and they continue to do so today.
The entire "It's OK to be White" trolling campaign, why was that effective? Because according to the media and American culture you are not allowed to assert any positive race-feelings as a white person. How did this radical shift happen from 1923 - 2023 if not the culture and those in influential positions to direct it?
When Jews tell me that "healing the world" means the ethnic displacement of my people and the quasi-worship of their own ethnicity with special social and legal protections, and they view that arrangement to simply be the will of Yahweh to heal the world, yes, I am going to claim I understand the latent motivation for this behavior than they do.
Do they? Take the example were just discussing - Superman. Is Superman a 'radical critique of Gentile history, culture, and racial identity'? Surely Superman is best-known as an avatar of 'Truth, Justice, and the American Way' - he is a patriotic avatar of American values in a way that is explicitly presented as inclusive of all races and cultures. This does not seem like a radical critique of Gentile identity - on the contrary, it is clearly an affirmation of a particular understanding of American identity that is extraordinarily inclusive of people of different racial or religious origins.
You mentioned Stan Lee as well. Are the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, or Spiderman radical critiques of Gentile history and identity? You're going to have to explain that to me, because it's not obvious.
There are obviously many thousands of Jews engaged in all sorts of creative or ideological activities all over the world, from many different political perspectives, and it's not at all obvious on what basis you can assert that Jews as a group are engaged in a destructive critique of Gentile culture or identity. Is, say, Ben Shapiro involved in such a project? He seems pretty keen on a concept of Western identity that includes Jewish and non-Jewish Westerners on equal terms.
If Chinese people in America had the same history as Jewish people? Then it seems likely they would be treated the same way, no?
Mentioning ancestry in any way is not the same thing as 'formulating a race consciousness'. It's true that ancient Greek writers have some sense of ancestry - all human beings do. But that's a motte-and-bailey.
What does that quote have to do with anything? A writer in the 1920s snarking about the accusation of Jewish involvement in the Russian Revolution reveals anything about the history of Christianity in Rome... how, again?
My point is that there does not seem to be any reason to suspect Paul of pushing some sort of racialist or Jewish supremacist agenda - on the contrary, Paul's evangelistic program is famously something that surmounts and crosses ethnic divides. Paul's program is not to convert all Gentiles to following 'the God of the Jews' in an imperial sense - he clearly understands God to be the God of all human beings from the creation. In Acts 17 he is accused of proclaiming a foreign divinity (17:18), and his response is to argue that God is implicitly known among the Gentiles in an anonymous way, that they too are God's offspring, and he even quotes Gentile poets to the effect that God is not far from them and they live in his own being. Likewise the diatribe of Romans 1 only makes sense on the understanding that God should be properly understood as the God of the Gentiles as well of the Jews.
In what way, then, does it make sense to accuse Paul of an agent of this Jewish racial consciousness to subvert and manipulate the Gentiles for Jewish benefit? He himself clearly disclaims that - indeed, in the passage you quoted where he recites his ancestry (Philippians 3:5), his whole point in context is that this ancestry is of no significance, and that there is no cause for being 'confident in the flesh'.
It's the same thing I've been complaining about all along - the mere presence of a Jewish person in any context, no matter that person's actions or plainly-stated agenda, is evidence of this Jewish racial consciousness to you. What could possibly falsify your claims?
If we strip away the spooky language, what this essentially boils down to is that many Jews - like the woke TikTok girl - want to make the world better and believe that they are helping to do this. I am baffled that continue to find this horrifying. Why do many Jews want to make sure the Holocaust is remembered? Is it not entirely plausible that they sincerely (and correctly) believe the Holocaust was something unimaginably horrible and don't want anything like it to happen again, and to the extent that self-interest is involved, it's because they fear being victims again? Sure, I'll buy that Jewish people want to influence the societies they're in in ways that prevent the Holocaust from ever being repeated. What I don't buy is that there's any malevolence in that, or anything that seems particularly hostile to non-Jewish cultures qua non-Jewish cultures. "Please don't try to murder entire cultures, especially if it's us" seems like a pretty reasonable message to push, and there are perfectly obvious, non-malevolent reasons for doing so.
I'm aware that American citizenship and identity has not been available to all people since the beginning of the United States. Over time the circle of acceptable American citizenship in terms of race has expanded.
But what does that have to do with the point? I presented the United States as an example of a nation that regards itself as chosen by God for a special mission to enlighten the other nations of the world. That was true even when American citizenship was heavily racialised.
I don't believe they do tell you that, not least because thus far you have not given a single example of a Jew saying that, to you or to anyone else.
E-X-A-C-T-L-Y. This is exactly what I am talking about. It is a radical critique of Gentile identity because it subverts the identity of America as a white country. I presume you have some sympathies with Israel, what if a bunch of Palestinians somehow had the wherewithal to take control over Israeli cultural institutions, and they made massively-popular superheroes giving moral lessons to Children about how Israel is not a country for Jews?
How did we get to this point where white people are just totally submitted to their own demographic replacement? Slowly, and with propaganda like this. This propaganda was intelligently crafted with a political motivation, it planted the seeds of our current culture.
You can look at many examples- take Captain America. Who could have a problem with him right? He's a macho Aryan who is a role model for children. He was also created by a Jewish storyteller, Joe Simon, and Wikipedia relates:
It is extremely mythologically significant that "Captain America* was engineered by Jewish storytellers in 1940 to fight the Germans. That is not innocuous, it is not a cultural exchange, it is mythmaking and culture-creation for the ethnically-motivated intention of influencing a mass audience. Here's the cover of the first issue from December 1940 when there was essentially a consensus of public opinion against intervention in WWII. Today, Captain America's identity as a "Nazi puncher" is fully internalized by the mass audience.
Last week I posted that secret report from the Polish ambassador in 1939:
It is interesting to compare this political agenda to craft this myth of an Americanism that exists to "punish trouble-mongers" with the character of Captain America who was created only a few months later.
This is an example of how an apparently innocuous cultural symbol was consciously designed in the service of an ethnically-motivated agenda. Now I'm not that interested in arguing with you about the validity of that agenda, it suffices to show mythmaking as ethnically-motivated propaganda consciously designed to influence public opinion. Joe Simon conceived, in 1940, of Hitler as the "greatest villain in the world", and his comic-book villain soon became engrained in our quasi-religious consciousness with that role.
My argument is no stronger than assigning credit to our popular culture for our popular social movements, and you cannot acknowledge that basic fact without considering the underlying motivations of Jews who have heavily influenced this culture with race-conscious aims.
They fear being victims again, so they cannot allow white racial consciousness or advocacy for the ethnic interests of white people. Their sincerity does not at all alleviate the conflict that is staring us in the face, the conflict that they are conscious of and my co-ethnics are not because they "learned their lessons" from Superman and Captain America, if not from St. Paul and Christ.
I have no particularly strong feelings about Israel one way or the other.
That said, I don't think it's any sort of 'radical critique of Gentile identity' to take the position that people of many different races and religons should be welcome and equal in America. Many Jews believe that, yes. But also most non-Jews in American believe that now, and the social forces that led to that change, that led to the broadening of American identity, don't seem to have had anything particularly special to do with Jews.
See, once again what you're doing is just vaguely gesturing towards the idea that anything that happened in a place that any Jews lived that you don't like is the result of a Jewish conspiracy.
I would say again that you are clearly moving goalposts. You asserted that narratives created by Jews, of which you regard Superman as an example, are used to critique Gentile identity. I reply that Superman firstly is clearly a confident defender of American identity and patriotism, and secondly frames this in a way that regards all races as equally welcome. This sure seems like as a literary creation Superman is firstly pro-American-identity and secondly anti-ethno-supremacy. This is directly contrary to the picture you just painted of Jews as ethnosupremacist and alien from their countries! If you read Superman as metaphor for the Jewish experience (which is only one of many valid ways to read Superman), the thrust of that metaphor is that Jews can be fully assimilated Americans.
Are you asserting that Siegel and Shuster in the 30s and 40s were part of a deliberate, conscious attempt to destroy 'white' American culture?
How is it remotely suspicious that a superhero created and drawn and published by Americans in the 1940s was opposed to one of 1940s-America's greatest overseas enemies?
Okay, sure, Jews in 1940s America didn't like Nazi Germany much. I concede this. What is that supposed to show?
This is the frustrating thing about this entire argument from you - your entire strategy is to pick some totally innocuous incident in history and just because it involves a Jewish person, you present it as if it's clear evidence for some pan-historical Jewish agenda to destroy the white race.
What's missing from all of this is, well, any evidence for anything whatsoever. Okay, Joe Simon didn't like the Nazis and made a hero to fight them. He felt that Hitler was an enemy of everyone in the free world, and Captain America represents that commitment. But there are many conceivable reasons why a Jewish-American in 1940 might hate Hitler that do not amount to a deliberate Jewish racial plot to destroy white people.
What conflict is this?
We've gone from "Jewish people don't want the Holocaust to happen again" (entirely obvious and reasonable) to "therefore Jewish people want to destroy white racial majorities" (do they?) to "SecureSignals' co-ethnics are in a conflict with Jews" (who? how?).
I really wish you'd just be straightforward with all of this - if you could just say it as plainly as "multiculturalism is a deliberate, conscious plot by the Jewish people to destroy whites".
If Superman were about the actual assimilation of our Kryptonian hero, Kal-El (the Kryptonian name of Superman), that would make for a very boring story. Of course Superman is not about that- he cannot assimilate.
The most he can do is adopt an alter-ego in his daily interactions with humans by changing his name from Kal-El, meaning "Voice of God" in Hebrew, to the Gentile name Clark Kent. He changes his appearance, puts on a suit, goes to work as a media reporter (!) with everyone else none the wiser to his true identity.
But when Clark Kent tears open the shirt, he affirms that underneath the disguise he was always Superman. He holds sentimental feelings towards humanity as his adopted family, but in his heart of hearts he is a diasporan son of Krypton and he will never be them- he is a superior being and he must protect them and guide them.
This is extremely sophisticated storytelling. It provides perceptive Jewish audiences with a sense of identity, and yes superiority, it is a myth that tells them they cannot assimilate even if they change their name and appearance such that nobody around them knows who they truly are, they will always be Kryptonian underneath the surface. At the same time, there is compelling content for Gentile audiences that internalize the Ethos espoused by the ass-kicking superhero.
My point is that ethos is downstream from mythos. So those who have special talents in creating mythos likewise are in a strong position to influence the ethos of the collective consciousness. Siegel and Shuster's Superman telling children that being American means being anti-racist in 1950, not 30 years after the United States passed legislation intending to wind back the clock on demographics to the 1800s, is an example of this, as-is Captain America.
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This is exactly what I am talking about. It is a radical critique of Gentile identity because it subverts the identity of America as a white country.
This is perhaps a well-worn point by now, but it bears repeating if you're going to insist on this 'white country' framing; without wishing to be too Whiggish about this, does not, surely, the extension of American identity to all racial groups simply represent the final stage of the steady expansion of the range of that identity to non-Anglos and freed slaves in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? That the 'white country' idea ever emerged among anyone at all is itself testament to the fact that the nativists had had their day long before the middle decades of the twentieth century and before even you could impugn Jewish influence.
Last week I posted that secret report from the Polish ambassador in 1939:
And as last week, uncritically handing us what a contemporary thought is not evidence of anything, even if it is his real thoughts.
The report from the Polish ambassador is relevant here because the agenda he perceives takes on a mythological form of a comic book hero and a comic book villain. It shows how an ethno-political agenda consciously takes the form of myth and storytelling. Captain America is absolutely evidence of the narrative-framing identified by the Polish ambassador, and you saying "it's not evidence of anything" is just wrong, because it certainly is evidence that the ambassador's perception is correct.
According to Superman it does, being racist is un-American!
We live in a country where you will be de-personed if you ethnically advocate for white people or are critical of Jews in any capacity. It is easier to ponder questions like 'white country' than explain the reality of the present culture without tying it to the actual culture, which was created in the 20th century and beyond.
Can you explain why all of our prevailing cultural institutions will consider you evil if you advocate for white people specifically in the way you would for Jews? The Whig view of history is the myth, that we just got some enlightenment that this was the path of moral behavior, and Superman just got it right a couple decades faster than the rest of us. Nope, we internalized myth and propaganda developed with conscious political motives, the Whig view of history is just believing the myth rather than the truth of what forms our perception of reality.
If I understand you correctly, then I don't think anyone would disagree with the fact that myth-making of that kind occurred, the point is whether the Polish ambassador is correct in his assertion of the 'unbreakable ties' of such things to 'international Jewry', which I would dispute and here is the relevance of my next comment re;
Ignoring the rather tiresome strawman of Whig history that appears to have become common currency these days, the point is not necessarily that the expansion of American citizenship represented some natural endpoint of the 'path of moral behaviour', but that once the extension of the American nation beyond the Anglo, or at most Nordic/Germanic/Saxon etc. character, which was well before any one could assert any notion of Jewish influence, the only possible next resting place was a universal definition. Those trying to stop the growth of American citizenship no longer had plausible ground to stand on; if a freed black slave, Irishman, Pole or Italian could become a citizen in every sense, on what basis was a Chinaman to be denied that same citizenship? And so forth. Whether or not this was a good or bad development is besides the point, which is that the trajectory was set before any possible Jewish influence.
Because in an American context 'whites' is a meaningless and unhistorical category; what are white interests?
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St. Paul was preaching tolerance of Gentile Christians to Jewish Christians almost exclusively. The discrimination at the time was overwhelmingly coming from Jewish Christians who believed either that Gentiles couldn't be saved, or that they had to convert to Judaism in order to do so. Hence the arguments over circumcision, foods, the law, etc, etc.
And that's the genius of Paul, he accomplished the integration of the Gentiles into the Judaic pantheon without required subservience to Jewish law, which would have been a complete roadblock to the cult proliferating the way it did among the Greco-Romans. And Paul, despite never having met Jesus, attained the status of apostle in Christian thought.
It is the entire reason Paul deserves his status among the greatest mythmakers of human history, and shows the political power of intelligently crafting myth. He figured out a religious pathway for converting the Gentiles to the Jewish god.
Think of how much foresight Paul had compared to "the Goy can't become Christian unless he gets circumcised," Christianity would have gone nowhere in the latter case...
The notion that Jesus would have been ok with Christians completely abandoning Jewish law as Paul suggests is absurd, as we read in the Book of Matthew. It's Paul's innovation which was a lynchpin to the entire religion.
Is the argument that Christianity is clearly just repackaged Judaism? That certainly would be news to the Jews, then and now. And if it's not repackaged Judaism, then why does it matter if the Gentiles are converting to a "Jewish God"? What does it even mean to convert to a "Jewish God" in a form that Jews vehemently refuse to recognize, requiring none of the rules that Judaism consists of?
If Judiasm and Christianity are essentially the same, why the conflict? If they're essentially seperate, how is Paul converting Gentiles to Judaism? Why is converting Gentiles to Christianity a bad thing, and what would be preferable?
I don't accept that you have any insight into what Jesus would or would not have been okay with. You're simply applying a label to your own beliefs, which is fine as far as it goes, but provides zero evidentiary value. Christians have a well-developed theory about the issue you're gesturing at; you can believe that theory is rationalization if you like, but you have no way of actually proving it, and Christians like myself will observe that our version appears to pay rent in the form of an intellectually coherent faith, and yours does not.
Matthew 5:17:
But the Greco-Romans would not have converted if it entailed following Jewish law: circumcision, strict dietary restrictions, etc. Of course Christians have a theory for why they don't have to follow Jewish law, that theory was created by Paul who was motivated to convert them. Without Paul, there's no Christianization of the Greco-Romans or Europe.
To say the least, the Jewish attitudes towards Christianity are complex and vary. Many see Christianity as a root cause of antisemitism and view it as a hostile faith. Others, like Ben Shapiro, emphasize "Judeo-Christian values" as being some foundation for Civilization.
But other Jews do have a more sophisticated interpretation of Christianity. Marcus Eli Ravage was a Jewish immigrant who wrote a 1928 essay against antisemitism:
Some heavy words, it's a scathing critique of the cognitive dissonance of Christian antisemitism. But the analysis here would not be news to Eli Ravage (who was beat to the punch by Nietzsche), nor many of his more sophisticated co-ethnics who believe this but don't say the quiet part out loud. This critique also doesn't work as well when an increasingly larger number Europeans are indeed outright rejecting Christianity.
For what it's worth, I don't think Paul conceived of destroying Roman civilization or anything, it suffices to assume he genuinely believed he was bringing gentiles into the fold of a more spiritually truthful doctrine, although that motive also underlies most important social revolutionaries, including the social justice advocates of our own age.
The Jewish attitudes towards Christianity are not complex - Jews, even the most secularized and assimilated ones with no interest in Jewish religion, see Christianity as enemy and conversion to Christianity as the ultimate treason.
People peddling "Judo-Christian values" Prager University style are speaking for gentile audience, Jews see them universally as, at best, hacks and fraudsters.
This is not surprising, no one should expect old religion having good feeling towards newer successor religion that claims the old religion is false and obsolete, Christians were historically never too fond of Islam either (nor were Muslims friendly towards Baháʼí faith)
Surprising are the completely unrequited warm feelings American Christians feel towards Jews.
There was an e-debate on Rumble yesterday with Nick Fuentes on one side and a Jew teamed up with Christian Zionist Gavin McInnes on the other side. Gavin's reaction to the news that it is common for Jews to hate Christianity more than Islam was hilarious. Pretty funny Gavin's own debate partner admitted to preferring Islam to the Christian Zionist's religion.
But there's a deeper level, some Jews properly understand Christianity as Judaism for Gentiles (and Islam too, for that matter). Christianity is the only reason Judaism exists today, owing to the station and mythological power that the Christian religion concedes to the Jewish people by accepting the Torah and Covenant as divine truth. Christianity was also the force which clashed with the idols and myths- indeed, the fabric of civilization, of pagan Europe. There are Jews who like Christianity for the role it has played in this dynamic and understand how crucial the adoption of Christianity has been for the station of Judaism.
This is fully mainstream Jewish position and always had been.
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Does not conclude. Jews survived for centuries in pagan Roman Empire (once they stopped revolting) and for millenia in India. One can easily imagine that in alternate timeline where monetheism never caught on in Roman empire, Jews will be still there.
One cannot easily imagine that at all. From the Roman destruction of Judea to the Zionist project, international Jewry has only survived and been molded by its symbiosis with Aryan civilization (with Israel revealing the contradictions of Jewish Nationalism, owing to that fact). Assuming that Judaism, an extremely peculiar type of religion which is a rote race worship that is nearly extinct in the modern era, would still exist without European adoption of Christianity is an extremely tall order. It very much helps that the entire Western world came to accept the Jewish framing of their own identity and even allowed them to live among them as foreigners. Without Christianity I do not think Judaism has a chance of existing because the myths that congeal Jewry together have a lot less potency if 99% of the world doesn't believe them, or treats them as superstitious, supremacist, and hostile, and a lot more potency when everybody is convinced of the truth of those myths.
It's easy to feel like you are Chosen when the entire world civilized world accepts that as true.
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The Christian understanding is that Jesus's self-sacrifice indeed fulfilled the law, with his final words being "it is finished". This is consonant with Jesus's teachings recorded in the Gospels, where he constantly clashes with the Pharisees and teachers of the law, arguing that the purpose of the law was never to inculcate legalism, but to help people understand the nature of evil and sin. Jesus violates his contemporaries' traditions about and understandings of the law repeatedly, and affirms his disciples doing so as well. Christians do not recognize a discontinuity between Jesus's teachings and Paul's. Maybe we are wrong in that assessment, but you have not demonstrated any reason why your own opinion is obviously more correct.
Indeed not: what they converted to was not Judaism as it was practiced and understood by Jews, then or now. Jews don't actually think that Christianity is Judaism, and Christians don't think Christianity is Judaism. They both think they are talking about the same God, but their respective understandings of that God are quite different, and largely unreconcilable. From the outside objective view, there is nothing useful conveyed in the claim that Christianity worships the Jewish God; this claim is only relevant once one accepts the axioms of the faith, which are flatly incompatible with your claims for other reasons.
I don't see what makes this view "sophisticated" or even colorable. It does not seem to be engaging in good-faith communication, which is about what I'd expect from a communist radical.
The Christians did not seize control of the government and then exterminate a significant portion of the Roman population. They converted the romans peacefully, quite often through their own mass-martyrdom, until a tipping point hit and mundane ingroup-outgroup mechanics enacted by a "cultural Christianity" cemented the new normal. Rome continue on under Christianity for more than a millennium, and smoothly transitioned to the post-Rome west that has built every comfort you've ever enjoyed.
Who's "we", kemosabe?
Again, Christianity split with the Judaism he's appealing to from the start. Jewish contemporaries to the first generation of Christians were actively working to stamp them out with extreme prejudice, a process that continued until the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, at which point the Jewish community was busy merely trying to survive, forming insular communities with minimal contact with or influence over a Christianity which was busy conquering the world. None of that history is compatible with his pretense that Christianity, which my guess is he has nothing but contempt for, owes anything at all to the "Judaism" he claims to speak for.
This isn't evidence for your position, it's a radical jackoff arguing in bad faith in an effort to shock and offend. You're repeating his lies because they're convinient to you, but that doesn't make them less obviously stupid.
Or could it be that people like him have never understood my church's Jewish teachings? That claim would have equal basis, it seems to me.
Yeah, this guy has no idea what Christianity even is, and I'll reiterate that you don't either if you thought an argument this bad was compelling. And that's fine! Just don't expect actual Christians to be persuaded by insights that don't actually engage with anything we believe.
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