Sunday, 9 February 2025

The Cursed Nation and the Temple of Satan Laurent Guyénot • January 17, 2025.

 POSTED BY DR. KEVIN BARRETT

The Cursed Nation and the Temple of Satan
• January 17, 2025

Not all Christians stand with modern Israel. But all Christians stand with ancient Israel. Not all Christians believe that Israel has “the right to defend itself” by committing a genocide in Palestine and invading other countries. But all Christians have been taught that ancient Israel had the right and even the sacred duty to exterminate the Amalekites, “man and woman, babe and suckling” because they stood in the way of Israel’s conquest of Canaan (1Samuel 15:3).

All Christians are expected to stand with Moses when, in Numbers 31, he ordered his men to slaughter all the Midianites, as a punishment for having encouraged the Israelites to intermarry with the Moabites. Moses was enraged with the army commanders for sparing the women and the children, but finally allowed them to keep for themselves “the young girls who have never slept with a man.” The booty amounted to thirty-two thousand girls, of which Yahweh required 0.1 percent as his own “portion”, offered to him presumably as holocausts, together with Yahweh’s portion of oxen, cattle, donkeys and sheep.

Where does this kind of story fit on the scale of civilization? It belongs, at best, to “prehistoric warfare” as described by Lawrence Keeley in War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, when the extermination of enemy tribes was not uncommon, and “[t]he capture of women was one of the spoils of victory — and occasionally one of the primary aims of warfare — for many tribal warriors. … The social position of captive women varied widely among cultures, from abject slaves to concubines to secondary wives to full spouses.”[1] In ancient Israel, “abject slaves” seems to have been the case. “Full spouses” was out of the question, since the whole justification for the massacre was to prevent intermarriage. Sex with non-Israelites is fine, as long as “no bastard shall enter the assembly of Yahweh, nor any descendant of his even to the tenth generation” (Deuteronomy 23:3). This, rather than any special respect for women, explains the rule that a Jewish mother is required for being a Jew.

There are other biblical stories reflecting such pre-civilizational war code. In Judges 19-21, the rape of the concubine of a Levite by the Benjaminites of the city of Gibeah leads to a blood feud, in the course of which the eleven other Israelite tribes slaughter everyone in Gibeah and set the city on fire, while six hundred Benjaminite warriors have escaped into the desert. Then, as a token of reconciliation, the Israelites decide to provide these Benjaminites with new wives. For that purpose, they attack the Israelite town of Jabesh-Gilead, which had refused to join the punitive expedition, and kill “all males and all those women who have ever slept with a man,” and gather four hundred virgins to offer the Benjaminites .

When these stories were written, there were civilizations in the Fertile Crescent — meaning civilized peoples, with moral values. Despite their legendary brutality, the Assyrians did not slaughter the defeated Israelites, but deported and resettled them. Later the Babylonians allowed their Judean captives to stick together and prosper on the riverbanks of the Euphrates. Yet the Israelites and the Judeans chose to record and cherish their gruesome stories of indiscriminate massacre and child-trafficking as part of their sacred traditions. Worse, they decided that, by committing these acts, their ancestors had done nothing but obey the Almighty God. And since the day we became Christians, Jews got us used to their inverted narrative, and to looking at the Assyrians and the Babylonians as the baddies.

By sanctifying old tales of tribal genocides, and claiming that the corresponding war code is the eternal Word of God, Israel has turned itself into a living stone-age fossil, a monster from a bygone age of savagery[2]. Not the elephant, but the tyrannosaurus in the room. The Hebrew Tanakh functions as a bronze-age software programming Israel with an inflexible prehistoric mentality or semi-nomadic pastoral raiders.

With a genocidal maniac as national-religious hero, with a kill count of 24,681,116 people for its national god[3] — a delusional demon who declared itself the only real god, therefore God — but with a modern army and a nuclear arsenal, and with an unmatched international power of corruption, Israel has grown to be the warmonger, the bloodsucker of the world, a force for the destruction of every civilizational achievement, such as human rights and international law. If civilization means less war, then Israel is the anti-civilization. And it’s not because they reject Jesus and read the Talmud; it’s because they worship Yahweh and read the Torah.

When the Zionists claimed that they were restoring ancient Israel, they really meant it. We should have listened carefully when the Chief Secretary of the Lehi, or Stern Gang, claimed that his terrorist organization was “the inheritors of the purest traditions of ancient Israel.”[4] He was right. Israel was always about the Bible. As it grew stronger, it became more and more openly biblical. And here we are today, with a government-funded rabbi like Yitzak Shapira (“a great halakhic arbiter” according to Netanyahu) writing in his book Hamelech (“The King’s Torah”): “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us.”[5] Shapira claims that his edict “is fully justified by the Torah.” He is right, no question about it. The Bible is Israel’s blueprint for genocide.

Put down for a moment your “allegorical” or “eschatological” Christian glasses, if you have any, and read the prophecy of Zechariah 14:

And this is the plague with which Yahweh will strike all the nations who have fought against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet; their eyes will rot in their sockets; their tongues will rot in their mouths. … [Then] the wealth of all the surrounding nations will be heaped together: gold, silver, clothing, in vast quantity. … After this, all the survivors of all the nations which have attacked Jerusalem will come up year after year to worship the King, Yahweh Sabaoth.

Now think what a nation with such a program and nuclear power will do when it thinks God gives the go-ahead.

Israel is not just anachronistic. It is sick. Israel is the psychopath. Something must have happened in the infancy of this Yahweh-worshipping federation of tribes, something of a traumatic nature. I will suggest a “Cain complex” — similar to the Oedipus complex that Freud projected on all mankind (Totem and Taboo, 1913). Not that I believe in the Freudian theory of a universal psychopathological pattern resulting from an original prehistoric murder. Rather, I believe that such a theory came into the mind of an introspective Jew because it does have some truth for Jews. Jewish identity is, among other things, the impression of being under the influence of an ambivalent collective fatum or karma going back thousands of years: what Jews rationalize as being a people “chosen” by God, they also perceive as a burden or a curse. Leon Pinsker has given a smart expression of this ambivalence when he wrote that the Jews are “the people chosen for universal hatred” (Auto-Emancipation, 1882). And Theodor Lessing approaches the same idea when he claimed that all Jews without exception suffer from some degree of self-hatred (Jewish Self-Hatred, 1930). If the theory I am about to present is correct, then the Jewish delusion of chosenness — clearly a psychopathological symptom —, is the manifestation of a sense of cursedness, by a process Freud called “compensation”.

The Cain Complex

According to the so-called “Kenite Hypothesis”, the Mosaic cult of Yahweh originated from a semi-nomadic tribe of coppersmiths, the Kenites (Qayn).[6] Moses’s father-in-law was a Kenite, according to Judges 1:16. He is named Hobab there, but Jethro in Numbers 18:1 and in most of Exodus, except in Exodus 2:18 where he is called Reuel. We’ll call him Jethro. The Book of Exodus records the following about him:

– Jethro was a priest, or kohen (2:16 and 18:1).

– It was while herding Jethro’s goats that Moses found himself on Yahweh’s “holy ground” (3:5).

– It was Jethro who “offered a burnt offering” to Yahweh when Moses and Aaron came back from Egypt, which makes him, by definition, a sacrificial priest of Yahweh (18:12).

– It was Jethro who instructed Moses how to organize the tribes politically (18:19-25): “Now, listen to me,” Jethro told Moses, “and I will give you some advice, that God may be with you.” The passage concludes with: “Moses followed the advice of his father-in-law and did all that he had suggested.”

– It was Jethro’s daughter Zipporah, Moses’s wife, who performed circumcision on their newborn son (4:24-26).

The Kenites are not presented as being part of the Israelites, but are uniquely associated to them, fighting and settling alongside the tribe of Judah in Canaan (Judges 1:16), and sharing with the Israelites the booty of the Amalekites (1Samuel 15:6, 30:26-29).

Additionally, according to 1Chronicles 2:55, the Kenites are “descended from Hammath, father of the House of Rechab.” This makes them identical or kindred to the Rechabites, who are praised by the prophet Jeremiah for their fidelity to Yahweh and to their ancestor’s pledge not to “drink wine, build houses, sow seed, plant vineyards or own them, but [to] live in tents all your lives” (Jeremiah 35:6-7). This sounds like a recognition of the Rechabites as the remnant of an archaic stage of Yahwism. We also hear of a Jonadab son of Rechab who helps the Judean general Jehu to exterminate the priests of Baal in the northern kingdom of Israel (2Rois 10).

As I said, Moses’ father-in-law is a Kenite according to Judges 1:16, but he is called a Midianite in Numbers 10:29, and a “priest of Midian” in Exodus 3:1 and 18:1. It seems that Midian was a region rather than a specific people, and that the Kenites were a tribe living in Midian. The Israelites apparently had a special alliance with the Kenites, but not with the rest of the Midianites, who were supposedly exterminated on Moses’ order in Numbers 31.

Midian is located in the northwest Arabian Peninsula, on the east shore of the Gulf of Aqaba. It is a region rich in copper, and copper was mined there by the Egyptians from the end of the 14th century BCE. The name of the Kenites (Qayn) actually means “blacksmith” or “metal-worker”. Their skill in copper or bronze metallurgy is consistent with the hypothesis that they worshipped a god coming from a volcano, as Exodus 19:16-19 makes quite clear. Northwest Arabia happens to be a volcanic area, unlike the Egyptian peninsula which later mistakenly came to be named Sinai (explorer Charles Beke was the first to point this out in Mount Sinai a Volcano, 1873). Israeli Biblical scholar Nissim Amzallag is of the opinion that Yahweh was originally a god of metallurgy worshipped by semi-nomadic copper smelters between the Bronze and the Iron Ages.[7] In that case, Moses’s major innovation to the Kenites’ religion was to build a wooden chest (the Ark) and a tent (the Tabernacle) to carry their god to Canaan.

But here is where the Kenite hypothesis becomes interesting and possibly enlightening about the inborn character of Israel.

As a rule in the Torah, peoples bear the name of their supposed ancestor: just like the Edomites are named Edom, the Kenites are simply named Cain (Qayn), which means that Cain is their legendary ancestor. Genesis 4:19-24 describes the descendants of Cain as tent-dwellers, inventors of copper and iron metallurgy, and makers of musical instruments. It is therefore surmised that the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 was adapted from an etiological myth by which the Kenites explained their wandering lifestyle as a consequence of a divine curse for the fratricide committed by their eponymous ancestor on his younger brother. Yahweh said to Cain:

“What have you done! Listen: your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil! Therefore you shall be banned from the soil that opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. If you till the soil, it shall no longer give you its produce. You shall become a restless wanderer on the earth.” (Genesis 4:10-12)

Yahweh’s curse is counterbalanced by a special protection: “‘Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.’ Yahweh puts a mark on Cain, so that no one coming across him would kill him” (4:15). One of Cain’s descendants, Lamech, changed the rule to seventy-sevenfold vengeance (4:24).

The third brother Seth, conceived by Adam and Eve as a substitute for the dead Abel (Genesis 4:26) was not part of the Kenite myth. He was added to the story by a biblical redactor who, on second thoughts, decided to give the tribes named as descendants of Cain an alternative, blameless ancestor. This is the likely explanation for why the names of Seth’s children in Genesis 5:6-32 are a rough copy-and-paste of the names of Cain’s children’s in Genesis 4:17-18.

The general picture we can form based on this scriptural material is that the Kenites were a semi-nomadic tribe known for their skill in copper and brass work, but also feared, not only because metallurgy was a secret art associated to magic, but also because they had a reputation for being dangerous and extremely vengeful. It is also plausible that, as keepers of a secret art associated to the cult of a jealous god, they cultivated a rigid tradition of separateness.

Since individuals stand for peoples in the Torah, the story of Cain and Abel can be interpreted as a tribe exterminating a kindred tribe (as the Israelites did to the Midianites, actually). The genocidal tribe may have been haunted by the guilt, the sense of being cursed, the paranoid fear of being themselves exterminated in retribution, and the need to both deceive and build a reputation of extreme vengefulness in order to preclude that possibility.

The parallel between the story of Cain killing Abel and the story of Jacob cheating Esau of his birthright, suggests the possibility that the Kenites’ ethnogenetic myth was duplicated by the Israelites, who reinterpreted the divine curse as a divine election. We can even speculate that in a primitive version of the Jacob and Esau story, Jacob killed Esau and later wrestled against Esau’s ghost in the form of an angel at the ford of the Yabboq (Genesis 32).

Finally, we must recall that, when he was adopted by a Kenite priest, Moses was himself a murderer on the run: “Looking this way and that and seeing no one in sight, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand” (Exodus 2:12).

It may seem improbable that a people would attribute their nomadic and separate lifestyle to a divine curse, but Yuri Slezkine mentions other ethnic groups of wanderers who conceived their mode of existence “as divine punishment for an original transgression.” For example, “of the many legends accounting for the Gypsy predicament, … the most common one blames the Gypsies for forging the nails used to crucify Jesus.[8]” This is an interesting parallel to the Christians’ blame on the Jews for having crucified Jesus, and to the medieval legend of the Wandering Jew.

Should we then seek the secret source of Jewish psychology in a “Cain complex” dating back to a primordial tribal genocide, like Freud seeking the key to the human psyche in a universal Oedipus complex dating back to a primordial parricide, or like Augustine theorizing an original sin going back to Adam and Eve and affecting all their descendants (a very Jewish theory, come to think of it).

Whatever the case may be, it is interesting to think of the Jews’ assertion of their being chosen by God as a compensation for a deep-seated sense of being cursed by God. The implications of that hypothesis are immense, both for understanding the Jews and for dealing with them.

It’s not genetic, but it’s genital

As an interesting appendix to the above theory, there is some evidence that, before they adopted the rite of circumcising every newborn male, the early Israelites were once required to sacrifice every first-born male: could it have been an atonement rite for the murder committed by the first-born Cain?

The evidence starts with Exodus 4:24-26, in which Yahweh wants to kill Moses but spares him when his wife Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter, circumcises their newborn son with a flint. Since Yahweh’s wish to kill Moses comes totally unexplained, and since the previous verse is about Yahweh’s threat to Pharaoh to “kill your son, your first-born,” I speculate that this incoherent narrative is the distorted version of a more straightforward one, in which Yahweh would have killed Moses’s son if he hadn’t been circumcised.

Why would a scribe make this clumsy edit? Answer: to obscure the obvious implication that the Jewish rite of brit milah (the “covenant of cutting”) was established as a substitute for the sacrifice of the first-born male. This would be speculation if there were no other scriptural clues that this is precisely what happened during the Babylonian exile, when human sacrifices were banned and eighth-day circumcision established.

Exodus 13:12-13 commands: “you shall dedicate to Yahweh every son that opens the womb; and all the male firstlings of your animals shall belong to Yahweh.” It adds that the first-born of a donkey can be “redeemed by a sheep,” and that the same must be done for the first-born of a human: “Every first-born son you must redeem.” This is repeated in Exodus 34:19-20.[9] “Redeem” means “buy back”; in the context of a religious sacrifice, it means that the first-born son is sacrificed symbolically while replaced on the altar by an animal (as was Abraham’s son Isaac).

If these verses are open to interpretation, Exodus 22:28-29 removes the ambiguity: “You shall give me the first-born of your sons. You must do the same with your oxen and your sheep; for seven days the firstling may stay with its mother, but on the eighth day you must give it to me.” This clarifies that the commandment is the same for farm animals and for humans. It also specifies that the first-born is to be sacrificed on the eighth day after his birth.

How can a sheep — or a human — be “given to Yahweh” except by sacrificing it, presumably as a holocaust (burnt offering), since this is the only sacrifice pleasing to Yahweh? It is true that the notion is not fully explicit in the verses I’ve just quoted. We should not expect it to be, because at the time of the final redaction of the Bible, that commandment was obsolete; human sacrifices were no longer required, nor even allowed. But Ezekiel 20:25-26 confirms unambiguously that, in a not so distant past, Yahweh demanded that the Israelites “sacrifice every first-born son.”

Human sacrifices are forbidden in Leviticus 18:21 and 22:2-5, as well as in Jeremiah 7:30-31, but to the historian, the prohibition proves the practice, because there is no need to forbid something that is never done (the same holds true for the commandment not to copulate with animals in Exodus 22:18-19, by the way). Therefore children were still sacrificed at the time when Leviticus and the Book of Jeremiah were written, although it was officially outlawed.

What is puzzling is that, in Leviticus and Jeremiah, child sacrifices are said to be offered to Molek (or Molech) but in the name of Yahweh and in his temple. For example: “Anyone … who gives any of his children to Molek, will be put to death, [for] he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name” (Leviticus 20:2-3). This apparent paradox has been solved by Swiss biblical scholar Thomas Römer: the word MLK, vocalized as molek in the Hebrew Masoretic version and melek in the Greek Septuagint, means “king” (malik in Arabic), and it is applied more than fifty times to Yahweh himself. This means that Molek was originally none other than Yahweh himself. During the exilic period, YHWH–MLK was dissociated between the evil god MLK who asked the sacrifice of every first-born son eight days after birth, and the good god YHWH who forbade this practice.[10] The result is a biblical text containing two layers, as in a palimpsest: in the ancient version, the first-born son was to be sacrificed to Yahweh on the eighth day, while in the new version written over it, human sacrifices are forbidden but still offered to Melek (but in Yahweh’s name and in Yahweh’s sanctuary). Kings of Israel and Judea who offered their sons as burnt offerings are condemned (1Kings 16:34, 2Kings 16:3, and 2Kings 21:6).

The systematic sacrifice of the first-born son on the eighth day of his life was not just abandoned during the exile. It was replaced by the systematic circumcision of every son on the eighth day of his life:

“As soon as he is eight days old, every one of your males, generation after generation, must be circumcised … My covenant must be marked in your flesh as a covenant in perpetuity. The uncircumcised male, whose foreskin has not been circumcised — that person must be cut off from his people: he has broken my covenant.” (Genesis 17:9-14)

This Abrahamic covenant comes before the Mosaic covenant in the biblical narrative, but it was written later. Abraham is never mentioned by pre-exilic prophets.[11] His journey from Mesopotamia to Palestine, promised to him in Genesis 15:7, was invented as a blueprint for the (re)conquest of Palestine by the exiles in Babylon.

The story of Abraham showing perfect obedience to Yahweh when being asked to sacrifice Isaac, but then being prevented from it, is traditionally held as marking a major civilizational breakthrough credited to Israel. René Girard adapted this interpretation in numerous books, starting with The Scapegoat (1986): the story of God sparing Isaac is about ending the polytheistic practice of sacrificing one’s own children to the likes of Moloch. Girard suggests that the stance of biblical monotheism against idolatry stems largely from an understanding that polytheistic “religions” are, in the final analysis, cults of human sacrifice.

But the historical record does not support that interpretation, and if you ask me, Girard’s theory is a Jewish fantasy, just like Augustine’s original sin — I known, Girard was a Catholic, like Augustine. Human sacrifices were indeed practiced in many other societies. The Phoenicians certainly did it. Even the Achaeans (Greeks) did it exceptionally (Iphigenia, Oedipus). But the Israelites were certainly not the first to give up human sacrifices. Theophrastus, a disciple of Aristotle, wrote around 250 BC that, “the Syrians, or whom the Jews [Ioudaioi, or Judaeans] constitute a part, still now sacrifice live victims.” He adds that, “they were the first to institute sacrifices both of other living beings and of themselves.”[12] This may not be true, but it shows that the Jews were not regarded as pioneers in the abolition of human sacrifices.

According to 2Kings 23:10, it was King Josiah (640-609 BC) who abolished the sacrifices of children, “so that no one could pass his son or daughter through the fire of sacrifice to Molek.” But Thomas Römer believes that human sacrifices were only banned after the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, for the reason that it was outlawed in Babylon. Eighth-day sacrifice of the first-born male was then replaced by eighth-day circumcision of every newborn male instead.

Circumcision on the eighth day is, objectively, a ritual trauma whose psychological impact is intense and irreparable. A week after he enters life — a trauma in itself, but one that is soon healed by the mother’s love — the male infant is painfully initiated into the cruelty of his family and their god. We know, thanks to Stephan Blackford (but do we really need to be told) that basic trust is the fundamental sense of security and confidence that an individual develops during the first year of his life. It is the bedrock of his future psychological development, as psychologist Erik Erikson theorized it, and it depends primarily on the sense of being protected and nurtured by the parents. Failure to develop this basic trust can lead to chronic anxiety, depression, and personality disorders. Children enduring the excruciating pain of circumcision (without anesthesia) may not all react the same, but can there be any doubt that many will have their basic trust permanently damaged?

The trauma is also on the mother, whose guilt is a determining factor in the well-known ambivalence of the “Jewish mother”. During the ceremony of brit milah, the mother is normally kept away from the scene. But testimonies by “Mothers Who Observed Circumcision,” published on the Circumcision Resource Center web page, are eloquent. “The screams of my baby remain embedded in my bones and haunt my mind,” says Miriam Pollack. “His cry sounded like he was being butchered. I lost my milk.” Nancy Wainer Cohen: “I will go to my grave hearing that horrible wail, and feeling somewhat responsible.” Elizabeth Pickard-Ginsburg:

Jesse was shrieking and I had tears streaming down my face. … Jesse screamed so loud that all of a sudden there was no sound! I’ve never heard anything like it!! He was screaming and it went up and then there was no sound and his mouth was just open and his face was full of pain!! I remember something happened inside me … the intensity of it was like blowing a fuse! It was too much. We knew something was over. I don’t feel that it ever really healed. … I don’t think I can recover from it. It’s a scar. I’ve put a lot of energy into trying to recover. I did some crying and we did some therapy. There’s still a lot of feeling that’s blocked off. It was too intense. … We had this beautiful baby boy and seven beautiful days and this beautiful rhythm starting, and it was like something had been shattered!! … When he was first born there was a tie with my young one, my newborn. And when the circumcision happened, in order to allow it I had cut off the bond. I had to cut off my natural instincts, and in doing so I cut off a lot of feelings towards Jesse. I cut it off to repress the pain and to repress the natural instinct to stop the circumcision.

Because infants cannot speak, rabbis who defend the tradition of brit milah speak in their place to minimize their physical pain. But according to Professor Ronald Goldman, author of Circumcision, the Hidden Trauma (1997), studies prove the neurological impact of infant circumcision. Behavioral changes observed after the operation, including sleep disorders and inhibition in mother-child bonding, are signs of a post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Parental abuse cannot be processed by the infant, whose very survival depends on his parents. The idea of the wickedness of parental figures is so devastating that the repressed anger will be deviated away from them. Is it farfetched to suppose a causal link between the trauma of eighth-day circumcision and the tendency of Jews to be incapable of seeing the abuse perpetrated on them by their own community leaders, and instead see the rest of the world as a constant threat? Could it be that the trauma of eighth-day circumcision has caused a special predisposition to paranoia that impairs the Jews’ capacity to relate and react rationally to certain situations? Was brit milah invented some twenty-three centuries ago as a kind of ritual trauma intended to enslave mentally millions of people, a “covenant” carved into their heart in the form of an incurable subconscious terror that can at any time be triggered by code-words such as “Holocaust” or “anti-Semitism”?

In 2015, a research team led by Dr. Rachel Yehuda at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, concluded that the trauma of the Holocaust is passed from generation to generation via “epigenetic inheritance.”[13] While they’re at it, they should study the epigenetic impact (or “genomic imprinting”) of eighth-day circumcision? Today, more than 9 out of 10 Israelis have endured the trauma: this cannot be without consequence on the national psyche.

This is just a theory. But we know we are dealing with a madman, so we need to find a cause, before we can find a cure. It would be easy to test that theory: outlaw circumcision in one nation, and see if the Jews’ mental health improve. The Icelanders tried in 2018, but their bill was successfully fought by European Jewish organizations as “anti-Semitic”.[14]

Sooner or later, it will have to be banned globally anyway, because it goes against the most basic, natural and universal child protection legislation. There is a good chance that banning brit milah will go half-way toward solving the Jewish Problem.

The Temple of Satan

Let’s face the truth: we, the collective Christian world, have not been helping Jews get better: we have been telling them that we believe them when they say that God chose them, and we have allowed them to keep on mutilating their newborns. We have always granted them a privileged position within Christendom, as the only non-Christian religion allowed. This goes back to Augustine’s “witness theory” in The City of God:

By the evidence of their own scriptures they bear witness for us that we have not fabricated the prophecies about Christ. … It follows that when the Jews do not believe in our scriptures, their scriptures are fulfilled in them, while they read them with blind eyes. … It is in order to give this testimony which, in spite of themselves, they supply for our benefit by their possession and preservation of those books [of the Old Testament] that they are themselves dispersed among all nations, wherever the Christian church spreads. … Hence the prophecy in the Book of Psalms [Psalm 59]: “Slay them not, lest they forget your law; scatter them by your might.”[15]

Let’s go back to the pre-Christian way. Almost unanimously, the Greeks and the Romans used to think that hatred of humankind was a common trait of the Jews (read Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World, Harvard UP, 1998). Tacitus noted in the first century A.D. that they are ever-ready to help each other, but “regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies” (Histories V.5). In the same period, the Alexandrian Greek Isidoros went to Rome at the head of a delegation to complain to the emperor that the Jews “are trying to throw the whole world into a state of turmoil.”[16] Apion, another Greek from Alexandria, wrote a best-seller against the Jews, which is lost but known in part through its refutation by Flavius Josephus (Against Apion); he claimed that the Jews worshipped a golden ass’s head in their temple. The rumor came from the Egyptian belief, documented by Plutarch in his treatise on Isis and Osiris, that the Jews’ god was Seth, the Egyptian donkey-headed god. Seth is the murderer of his brother Osiris (a Cain-like fratricide), exiled by the community of the gods and settled in the Judean desert. For the Egyptians, Seth is the god of lies, civil war and famine, a polytheistic equivalent of Satan.

When they became Christians, the Romans were taught that the Jews were the first to worship the true God. And so the wickedness of the Jews could no longer be attributed to the wickedness of their god. Instead it was explained as a consequence of the Jews’ turning away from the true God. Whereas ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans had thought the Jews were a cursed people because they hated all gods but Yahweh, Christians believe that the Jews were a holy people as long as they hated all gods but Yahweh.

Using Revelation 2:9 and 3:9, Christians blame the “synagogue of Satan” and the Talmud rather than the Temple and the Torah. Which is odd, because Jesus fought the Temple, not the synagogue. He called the Temple “a den of thieves” (Mark 11:17), and it was the uproar he caused there that determined the priests to get rid of him. They accused him of wanting to destroy the Temple. And according to the gospels, he did predict its total destruction (Mark 13:2).

The Christian “synagogue of Satan” theory means that Jews commit evil under the influence of Satan, not Yahweh. But that theory is demonstrably false: whenever Israelis do satanic things, they do it in the name of Yahweh, not in the name of Satan. Netanyahu declared that he will do to the Palestinians what Yahweh, not Satan, ordered Moses to do to Amalek. So it is about time we return to the Greco-Roman theory: Israel is evil because the god of Israel is evil. The problem is with the Temple itself (which, in ancient times, was also the Bank, by the way).

The Babylonians must have known this, when they destroyed Solomon’s Temple in 586 BC. The Romans knew it, when they leveled Herod’s Temple to the ground in 70 AD. Then in the 130s, emperor Hadrian built a new city on the ruins of the old one, and named it Aelia Capitolina (the Arabs continued long after to call it Iliya), and used the Temple site as the city dump. He renamed the province Syria Palæstina, in remembrance of the Philistines.

But Christian nations gave Palestine back to the Jews, who renamed it Israel and are now planning to rebuild their Temple and (re)create Solomon’s regional empire.

My Christian friends resent me for hammering these facts. And I hate to disturb their religious hypnosis. But history demands that they wake up from their delusion about holy Israel. There is no longer any excuse for the worshipping of the Hebrew Bible and its genocidal god. There is no longer any excuse for failing to denounce Jewish chosenness as the biggest and most catastrophic lie in human history. Enough theological cop-out, such as “reading the Bible allegorically”! Take the green pill!

But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Keep Baby Jesus: he is the mythical and ritual personification of the “new sun” (noio hel), a European tradition predating Christianity, and therefore a keystone for our reappropriation of our pre-Christian roots. Keep the adult Jesus as well. His story is the story of every man destroyed by the Empire for having defied the Temple. Jesus is the Palestinians.

Jesus to Israel: “Go to hell, Satan!”

But beware: there are two Jesuses, and that’s one Jesus too many: there is Jesus the Messiah, and there is Jesus the son of God. The first is Jewish, the second is Greek. We don’t need Jesus the Messiah, because if Jesus was the Messiah, that means the whole messianic scenario — Israel being chosen by God and the rest — is true.

By chance, it turns out that Jesus didn’t believe he was the Messiah. He said so in Mark 8:27-33 (here from the Catholic Jerusalem Bible):

27 Now Jesus and his disciples set out for the villages of Caesarea Philippi. Along the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 They said in reply, “John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others one of the prophets.” 29 And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter said to him in reply, “You are the Messiah.” … 33 At this he turned around and, looking at his disciples, rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

Yes, I skipped verses 30 to 32, because they are a later interpolation:

30 Then he warned them not to tell anyone about him. 31 He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days. 32 He spoke this openly. Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

With these verses, the passage takes the opposite meaning: Jesus accepts the messianic title, but wants to keep it secret, and Peter is now rebuked for not wanting Jesus to die. But Jesus’s predestined death and resurrection is a post-Easter Christological development, so the whole passage can plausibly be attributed to the historical Jesus, but only without verses 30-32.

Verse 30 introduces the motif known to Jesus scholars as the “messianic secret” (first conceptualized in 1901 by William Wrede). The purpose was to respond to an objection: in the early 70s, some people who had known Jesus or his early disciples had never heard that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah. The gospel writer’s response was that Jesus had told his disciples to keep it secret. And so the motif of Jesus’s messianic secret was written over the motif of Jesus’s messianic denial.

That’s just a theory. But there is another strong argument that Jesus did say something like “Get behind me, Satan” (Vade retro, Satana, in the Latin Vulgate) in response to the Jewish messianic hope of his time, and that his words became memorable: the very same phrase is replicated in the story of Jesus’ temptation in the desert:

the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor, and said to him, “I will give you all these, if you kneel down to me and worship me.” Then Jesus replied, “Get behind, Satan!” (Matthew 4:8-10).

Here we have Jesus rejecting the very principle of Yahweh’s covenant with his people, recorded in Deuteronomy and repeated as a leitmotiv throughout the Hebrew scripture: if the Jews worship Yahweh and no other gods, then Yahweh “will raise you higher than every other nation he has made”, and “you will make many nations your subjects, and will be subject to none” (Deuteronomy 26:17-19 and 28:12). The parallel between Satan’s temptation and Yahweh’s covenant is unmistakable. Jesus refuses to be the messianic king that will usher Israel’s glorious supremacy. The temptation story may be legendary, but it was probably built upon a memorable expression used by Jesus to qualify Israel’s messianic dream, and Mark 8:27-33 provides a plausible context for those words.

That is still just a theory. Let’s face it: we don’t know exactly what Jesus really said, and no one will ever know for sure how to separate the words he said from the words that gospels writers and editors made him say. The point is that we have the choice of interpretations. There is only one Jesus, but there are many ways to understand Jesus. Even with the relatively recent “historical Jesus”, there are variations: Jesus the rabbi, Jesus the revolutionary, Jesus the healer, Jesus the apocalyptic preacher, or Jesus the Palestinian. We can choose to believe that Jesus endorsed Israel’s narcissistic and xenophobic delusion of metaphysical superiority, or that he tried to cure Israel from it. We can choose to believe that Jesus accepted the god of Israel as his Father in Heaven, or that he implicitly identified the god of Israel with Satan. We can choose to believe that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, or that he vehemently rejected that title as a satanic idea. It is a rational choice, and there are strong scholarly arguments in favor of the second choice. I have presented one of them.

I’m trying to help Christians who are starting to understand that Israel is evil from the start. There is a rational basis for Marcionism, if we understand by that term a vision of Jesus as radically opposed to the ideology of the Old Testament, and a concept of Jesus’s Father as radically opposed to Yahweh. Marcionism is a heresy? Tertullian condemned it? Who cares? Jesus taught to seek treasures in heaven, while Yahweh is obsessed with filling his Temple with gold and silver: “I shall shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations will flow in, and I shall fill this Temple with glory, says Yahweh Sabaoth. Mine is the silver, mine the gold! Yahweh Sabaoth declares” (Haggai 2:7–8). It’s not just the synagogue of Satan, it’s the Temple of Satan.

Notes

[1] City of God, 18.46, quoted in Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 86.

[2] Arnold Toynbee applied the metaphor of the fossil to the Jews in the first volume of his monumental Study of History (1934).

[3] Steve Wells, Drunk With Blood: God’s Killings in the Bible, SAB Books, 2013.

[4] Thomas Suárez, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, Skyscraper, 2016, p. 55.

[5] Wyatt Peterson, Perfidy of Zion, 2022, p. 58.

[6] The “Kenite hypothesis,” or “Midianite hypothesis”, is presented in Thomas Römer, The Invention of God, Harvard UP, 2015. Also worth reading is Hyam Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner, Thames & Hudson, 1982.

[7] Ariel David, “Jewish God Yahweh Originated in Canaanite Vulcan, Says New Theory,” Haaretz, April 11, 2018, on haaretz.com.

[8] Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton UP, 2004, pp. 22-23.

[9] Numbers 18:15-17 declares redeemable the “first-born of an unclean animal” (unfit for consumption), but forbids to redeem “the first-born of cow, sheep and goat,” which are destined for the consumption of the Levites.

[10] Thomas Römer, The Invention of God, Harvard UP, 2015, pp. 137-138.

[11] Mario Liverani, La Bible et l’invention de l’histoire, Gallimard, 2012, pp. 354–355. English edition: Israel’s History and the History of Israel, Equinox Publishing, 2007.

[12] Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (vol. 1), Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974, p. 10.

[13] “Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children’s genes,” The Guardian, August 21, 2015, on www.theguardian.com.

[14] David Rosenberg, “Iceland drops proposed circumcision ban,” April 30, 2018, on www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/245193

[15] Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism, Yale UP, 2010.

[16] Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton UP, 1995, p. 178.

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This review was published by RBL 2007 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.
RBL 06/2007
Dungan, David
Constantine’s Bible: Politics and the Making of the New
Testament
Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007. Pp. xii +224. Paper. $17.00.
ISBN 0800637909.
Garwood P. Anderson
Nashotah House Theological Seminary
Nashotah, Wisconsin
David L. Dungan’s provocatively titled book, Constantine’s Bible: Politics and the Making
of the New Testament, promises a fresh approach to the vexing historical questions
surrounding the canonization of the texts that would become Christianity’s New
Testament. In particular, as the subtitle indicates, Dungan argues that the process by
which a larger set of revered texts became a fixed smaller set of canonical texts is
inextricably bound up in a variety of political realities, in both a broad and narrow sense.
As the title suggests, the decisive moment is the reign of Constantine, the protector and
patron of the Catholic Church, whose activist engagement with the Church’s theology
and polity extended to the determination of the New Testament canon, forever altering
the status of those texts and with them the future of the Christian religion. It is a thesis as
bold as the title, and the book is sure to arouse the interest of many readers.
In the introductory first chapter, “What a ‘Canon’ of Scripture Is—and Is Not,” Dungan
insists that canon not be confused with scripture as if the terms were simply synonymous.
From the perspective of comparative religion, it is evident that religions might have
scripture but without a notion of canon of the sort one finds within Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam. Dungan explains: “As we shall see, a canon results when someone seeks to
impose a strict boundary around a smaller subset of writings or teachings within the
This review was published by RBL 2007 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.
larger, slowly evolving, ‘cloud of sacred texts’.” Thus, “[i]n terms of the history of
Christianity, a canon of scripture, properly so called, did not appear until church officials,
acting under the guidance of the highest levels of the Roman government, met together
on several specific occasions to create a rigid boundary around the approved texts, forever
separating them from the larger ‘cloud of sacred texts’ ” (3). This distinction thus also
clarifies what Dungan will mean by “canonization,” not a gradual process of collection,
debate, and consensus-building but the decisive final moments of a process when the
canonical boundaries are fixed.
With the second chapter, “The Greek Polis and the Demand for Accuracy,” Dungan
initiates an argument that locates the impetus of the New Testament canon in the larger
cultural ethos of the Greek polis rather than merely as an intrareligious response to
second-century sectarianism and heresy (e.g., Marcionism, Montanism, Gnosticism).
Canvassing vast terrain in short compass, Dungan traces the revolutionary ideology of
polis in Greek civilization. More pointedly, he shows that the metaphor of kanōn as
measuring stick or ruler is applied in the context of an interest in accuracy and precision
that characterizes the ethos of the polis.
In the third chapter, “Greek Polis Ideology within Second Temple Judaism and Early
Christianity,” Dungan seeks to demonstrate that the Jewish and Christian communities
also very much participated in and aspired toward the ideals of the polis outlined in the
previous chapter. The claim with respect to Second Temple Judaism is substantiated with
less than a page of argument (although with some substantial appeal to secondary
literature), but more attention is given to the ideology of polis in the Christian ekklesia,
which now provides the backdrop for understanding the early Christian uses of kanōn.
Dungan notes that, although the term is used widely in the sense of a rule or standard, it
also refers in diverse contexts to normative lists of various kinds. Nonetheless, kanōn is
not used to refer to an authoritative list of early Christian books until the later fourth
century. “The reason” for this linguistic phenomenon, according to Dungan, “appears to
be that so far no official ecclesiastical body had met to determine which writings to accept
and which to reject in Holy Scripture.” Only after the “Roman emperor [Constantine]
stepped in and … took de facto charge of aspects of the Catholic church’s doctrine, polity,
and scripture selection” does the term canon of scripture appear (30).
With the fourth chapter Dungan extends further his reflection on the controverted matter
(more controverted than this chapter would lead us to believe) of “The Influence of Greek
Philosophy upon Early Christianity.” The discussion begins, as might be expected, with a
quick survey of the philosophical orientation of second-century apologists, including
their rhetorical use of the term philosophy as though synonymous with religion. The
remainder of the argument consists in an illuminating demonstration of parallels between
This review was published by RBL 2007 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.
Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers and the deliberations
concerning scripture of second- and third-century figures such as Marcion, Irenaeus,
Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Origen. Like Laertius’s engagement with his philosophical
sources, these early Christians likewise show an interest in demonstrations of the
authenticity and accuracy of the texts, in assessing the genuineness of succession, and in
reporting the “state of the question” objectively and dispassionately, without prematurely
foreclosing the discussion.
All of this so far serves as background to the fifth chapter, the longest and most detailed
of the book (40 pages along with another 11 in the notes): “Against Pagans and Heretics:
Eusebius’s Strategy in Defense of the Catholic Scriptures.” Here the author explores those
passages in Ecclesiastical History where Eusebius engages the question of the church’s
scripture, showing how he employs the methods and even specific terminology of his late
second- and third-century Christian predecessors, themselves heirs of a philosophical
tradition valuing precision, evidence, and rational demonstration. After setting the
historical context (e.g., the pagan critiques of Celsus and Porphyry) and describing the
rhetorical objectives of Ecclesiastical History, Dungan concentrates his discussion on
books 1–7, with a particular emphasis on the pivotal passage in 3.25.1–7.
Highlights of Dungan’s exegesis of Eusebius include the following. (1) The twenty (or
nineteen, if the Revelation of John is excluded) “genuine” or “acknowledged”
(homologoumenoi) writings (he seems to think Eusebius excludes Hebrews from the
“Epistles of Paul,” so apparently—and curiously—it is never even mentioned in this
passage) represent a 100 percent consensus from the “network of orthodox Catholic
bishops and scholars” such that a “single ‘no’ vote was sufficient to doom a writing
forever” (92, summarizing an earlier discussion). (2) As to the “disputed” writings
(antilegomenoi), Dungan regards the twofold designation (“those known and approved by
many” [James, Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John] and the “spurious” [nothoi; Acts of Paul,
the Shepherd, the Revelation of Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Institutions of the
Apostles]) to be Eusebius’s attempt at a candid account of the state of the question, not an
argument for the acceptance or rejection of either set. (3) Ultimately, Dungan maintains,
Eusebius operates with three “tests” for canonicity, a “three-layer sieve”: that which is (a)
“true,” a theological test; (b) “genuine,” the question of apostolic authorship; and (c) “well
authenticated,” the test of ecclesiastical acceptance and use (78–83). To these can be
added two subsidiary “corroborative criteria”: “style” and “theological consistency” (85–
87). These, Dungan argues, function “as a kind of ‘double-check’ which in principle could
validate a genuine, but not well known, writing, however problematic it might be to apply
these criteria in practice. (4) Dungan adds to this discussion an “excursus” in which he
notes some of the tests and methods not used by the orthodox authorities: divination
(such as lot-casting), dreams and visions, an appeal to the texts’ inspiration or to the fact
This review was published by RBL 2007 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.
that advocates of a text were martyred. In sum, it can be said of Eusebius’s deliberations
regarding the New Testament that, consonant with the best scholarship of the day, they
were public, dispassionate, and open-ended; no final demarcation of the canon is to be
found.
Only with the intervention of Constantine is the story of the New Testament canon
brought to closure, with the far-reaching implications detailed in chapter 6, “An Emperor
Intervenes: Constantine Reshapes Catholic Christianity and Its Scriptures.” Here Dungan
reviews material that will be familiar to many readers, namely, the story of Constantine’s
“conversion” (if it should be called that) and his subsequent benefaction and active
support of Catholic Christianity. Dungan’s telling of the story is a maximal account of
Constantine’s influence on the structures and theology of early Christianity, including
what would become the Christian Bible. The chief evidence is to be found in
Constantine’s commissioning of the production of “fifty copies of the sacred scriptures,” a
task he entrusted to Eusebius (Vit. Const. 4.36). Dungan implies that the ultimate
outcome of this event (which he dates prior to the Council of Nicaea) was to fix the
boundaries of the New Testament canon, to put to rest any ongoing dispute over the
matter, and to shift the language of canon into legal categories (122). Thus, Constantine’s
intervention in the canonization of the New Testament had no less “chilling and
inflammatory effect” than did his “heavy-handed intervention” with respect to the
Council of Nicaea and its aftermath. Dungan concludes the chapter by ruing the glad
acquiescence of the church to the “imperial sword” and its devastating results for
Christianity and its Bible:
When it began to use the sword against its enemies, the “heresies” (haireseis), the
church thus became deeply twisted and lost its way. Power-hungry, greedy
politicians began to take over positions of leadership. In this alien atmosphere,
how could Jesus of Nazareth or the Apostle Paul or Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and
the prophets speak? Were not their voices almost snuffed out, encased in heavy
leather bindings of the lavishly illustrated codexes, lying on cold stone altars in
giant stone buildings? How could those voices speak and be heard? (125)
In the final chapter, an “Epilogue,” Dungan reflects on the history of canon subsequent to
the fourth century, not only in Christian history but also with respect to parallel
developments within Islam and Judaism. He contends that the conditions under which
Islam ratified its canon in the seventh century are parallel to those of fourth century
Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism as well. But these three religions are unique
among the world’s religions in holding to a defined canon with fixed boundaries rather
than a more fluid and boundless collection of sacred texts, a fact having more to do with
shared cultural and political realities than with impulses intrinsic to the religions
This review was published by RBL 2007 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.
themselves. Dungan’s treatment of “Developments in Christianity during the Middle
Ages Down to the Reformation” concerns only Augustine, who “closed the door, as far as
western Christianity was concerned, on any further discussion regarding which books
should be in the Bible” (134). Augustine’s commitment to the canon also motivated a
novel way of reading the Gospels—harmonization—that eliminated the inconsistencies
between the texts that had so often called forth skepticism from Christianity’s critics.
Turning then to Luther, Dungan asserts that with his unwillingness to accept the
inviolability of the magisterium and his critical regard for certain New Testament
writings (e.g., James and Revelation), “the straitjacket of the canon was torn off Christian
scripture, and a prodigious religious vitality began to flow through Europe once again”
(136). But in the face of subsequent religious violence and, especially, the Enlightenment,
the subsequent centuries would see a substantial reevaluation of religion in general and of
the concept of canon in particular. As for the contemporary situation, Dungan quotes
Robert Funk approvingly when he says that many agree that “the Christian [and Jewish]
canon is obsolete.” Nonetheless, untainted by the coercive use of force, Eusebius’s
scripture selection process is still to be admired for its “objectivity, honesty, and
dedication” (139).
The main text of the book is supplemented by another eighty-five pages of back matter,
beginning with three appendices: (A) a helpful index to all of the references to early
Christian writings in Ecclesiastical History; (B) a list of “Writings Considered ‘Scripture’
by One or Another Christian Group”; (C) a list of the Nag Hammadi texts. These are
followed by a “Timeline of Figures and Events Discussed in the Text”; over fifty pages of
endnotes; a select bibliography; and a general index.
As Constantine’s Bible well illustrates, the questions surrounding of the canon of
Scripture are not easily engaged dispassionately, straddling as they do controverted
matters of history and theology. Moreover, the paucity of direct evidence compounded
with the abundance of indirect data is such that there are any number of ways in which
the story might be told, some complementary, some competing. By concentrating on
certain political dynamics, Dungan has offered a novel account that sheds valuable new
light on the question. One might read the book as an attempt to fill out the standard
account (if there is one) by giving equal time to the political dynamics, in which case it is
a useful corrective to the underrepresentation of these factors in the literature. I suspect,
however, that this intends to be a more ambitious narrative, beginning with the very
definition of “canon” and concluding with an affirmation of the obsolescence of the idea.
In any case, this is a book that needs to be accounted for in future attempts to describe
and evaluate the formation of the New Testament canon. I am, however, less persuaded
than one of the publisher’s endorsements that this “will be the touchstone in future
This review was published by RBL 2007 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.
discussions of the New Testament canon” (James A. Sanders) nor even that Dungan has
satisfactorily demonstrated his thesis. In fairness, given the narrow focus, limited scope,
and implied inclusion of a popular readership, it would be churlish to criticize the book
for failing to be exhaustive, yet, even so, there is simply too much data that this
hypothesis fails to account for and a critical absence of evidence at certain points. Leaving
aside numerous points worthy of debate, I will highlight here only two of my most
substantive misgivings.
Any evaluation must begin with the definition proffered for canon, as it is central to the
overall argument of the book. For Dungan, canon is not to be confused with scripture but
only applies to the rigid and enforced setting of boundaries around scripture. It is, or at
least becomes with respect to Christian scripture after Constantine, a word with strong
legal connotations. Thus, there can arise no canon in this sense where the conditions for
such are not to be found, namely, an impulse within a religion to demarcate its sacred
texts such that some are excluded and the political will and ability to do so. Here, to this
reader, it seems that Dungan’s appeal to alleged parallels between Christianity, Islam, and
Judaism is counterproductive to his argument, for what stands out are the radical
differences in process, timing, and political setting, to say nothing of the phenomenology
of the texts themselves. While it is quite right to note that within the broad and evolving
semantic range of kanōn the meaning rule or even law is well attested, it is but one of
many possibilities, and Dungan fails to demonstrate that, in post-Constantinian uses with
reference to scripture, this is the actual or primary semantic contribution rather than
catalog or even norm (if not some happy combination of the two). Dungan may be right,
but the linguistic evidence is not marshaled here to make the case. Lacking such
substantiation, this move smacks of J. Barr’s notorious “illegitimate totality transfer.”
Yet the implications of this definition are far-reaching, for if “canon” means what
Dungan suggests, then “canonization” can only refer to the (bitter?) end of the process
and can only happen under the aegis of political patronage. Even supposing one were
persuaded that this is the best way to use the words, it is a truncated account of the
origins of the New Testament to leave aside discussion of the well-attested processes of
sharing, collecting, using, and debating over those texts. In other words, this way of
defining the terms leaves little room for reflection on the function of these texts in an
organic social history of early Christian communities.
There is, second, an apparent non sequitur in the argument between chapters 5 and 6. In
chapter 5 Eusebius’s scholarship, temperate deliberations, and candid open-endedness is
lauded as exemplary, as indeed it is again at the very end of the book. With the entrance
of Constantine there is a decisive shift, fixed boundaries enforceable by no less than the
emperor himself. But we are given no indication how it is that Eusebius’s open-ended
This review was published by RBL 2007 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.
state of the question, with only twenty (or nineteen) confirmed books became a twenty-
seven-book canon. According to Dungan, by the time Constantine commissioned the
fifty Bibles, “Eusebius had just published his Ecclesiastical History, a most impressive
demonstration of which books belonged in the Catholic New Testament and which did
not” and that “Eusibius’ masterful analysis of the intricacies of the scripture selection
process was widely regarded as the ‘last word’ on the subject” (122). But, in fact, Dungan
had just concluded in the preceding chapter, rightly, that Eusebius had done no such
thing but instead left the matter open. Did Constantine interpose and insist on twenty-
seven books? Did Eusebius himself determine that the Christian Bible should include
both the homologoumenoi and the subset of antilegomenoi that “were known and
approved by many,” excluding the nothoi? Did the Constantinian edition of the Bible
even have twenty-seven New Testament books, fewer, or more? In fact, we do not know,
and to his credit, Dungan resists even making a guess.
At the same time, that we lack the data to confirm that Constantine commissioned a
twenty-seven-book New Testament renders dubious, or at least inconclusive, a central
tenet of the book’s argument. It is notable that in the climactic moment of the argument,
“Constantine’s Influence on the Selection of Scripture” (118–25), only some three pages
are actually given to a discussion of the matter, and there is no discussion at all of which
books were likely to have been included—rather disappointing for a book so titled. The
reader is left to assume that they were the twenty-seven of our New Testament. As for the
argument on behalf of Constantine's activism in the determination of the New Testament
canon, it is largely one of insinuation: if the emperor was willing to use his powers of
enforcement in other ecclesiastical matters, surely he would do the same with regard to
the canon. The fact that Constantine’s edict against heretics directs that “search be made
for their books” might well support such a claim, but as Eusebius’s own discussion
demonstrates so clearly, heretical texts could have been identified as such without a
definitive closure to the canon or any canon at all.
Moreover, there is simply too much data that suggest that the New Testament question
was not settled with Constantine. For starters, there are the numerous canon lists that
postdate Constantine (nearly a dozen extant), even as late as the sixth century, but that
are more or less inclusive than the twenty-seven-book canon of Athanasius’s Festal Letter
of 367. Likewise, none of the several complete extant fourth- and fifth-century manuscripts
(e.g., Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, Claromantanus; cf. the Peshitta), matches the
twenty-seven-book canon. This sort of evidence gives lie to the claim that “it is possible to
say exactly when a canon of scripture was created in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but
not in any of the other religion of the world” (3). In fact, for Christianity it is not possible,
not exactly at any rate. The fact that the question of the canon carried on with some
fluidity and with regional variations for centuries beyond Constantine does not well

 

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