Himself, however, he regards as one of those “dedicated and persistent truth-seekers in the world, who might take the trouble to expose their hoax” (p.83). Their, they, them, that’s the Jews, stupid!
The message of his thin book is a new conspiration myth figuring the old culprits: “Paul’s gang”, that is the thirteenth apostle with his “band of little ultra-Jews” (as he translates those “kleine Superlativ-Juden” Nietzsche smiles about in his “Der Antichrist”), constructed a “simple and elemental lie based on common ideas in mythology and a kernel of actual truth, in order to manipulate the Gentile masses for the benefit of the Jews. It was, quite frankly, a brilliant plan.” Brilliant really, as its result, planned three centuries in advance (“The Jews were, after all, famous for always taking the long-term view of things”) was nothing less than the downfall of Roman Empire.
I never read so much pseudo-scientific nonsense within just seven hours, the time I needed to work through Skrbina’s eye-opening work. “The media have no interest in examining this alternate story” he laments in the first chapter, but “the guilty parties need to be exposed”.
“Just the facts” is the title of the second chapter, where Nietzsche warns us that “The first thing to be remembered, if we do not wish to lose the scent here, is that we are among Jews.”
In the next chapter the Michigan philosopher, like a schoolboy who just discovered that Santa Claus doesn’t come with reindeer, explains that Jesus’s miracles are not reliable facts. In chapter 4, then, we are told that “The Jews, perhaps, had something to fear in this Jesus, but they were not so scared that they couldn’t push for his execution.”
The depravity of Jews yet in antiquity appears “as if the Jews took out their anger on the rest of humanity”. Wherever they settled amongst other peoples, “they seem to have made enemies.”
PhD Skrbina tells us, trusting Greek philosopher Poseidonios, that those Jewish cannibals held a Greek citizen captive in their temple, to be “fattened up for sacrifice, and eaten”. Maybe with Judas in mind, he wonders “at the evident readiness of the Jews to side with their enemies, for pay”.
While Skrbina has heard that “religious intolerance derives from the monotheistic fundamentalists (Jews, Christians, Muslims), not the polytheists or religious pluralists”, he relates various Roman acts of intolerance against Jews; understandable measures since “in the case of the Jews, though, monotheistic arrogance was combined with racial distinctness and other cultural characteristics, resulting in a deeply-embedded misanthropic streak”.
Contrary to his healthy scepticism regarding gospels and Jews, sceptic Skrbina takes all anti-Jewish commentaries of antiquity at face value, for instance when a certain Molon calls them “the very vilest of mankind”. Willingly he trusts Roman author Cassius Dio who wrote that “Jews would eat the flesh of their victims and make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing”. Israel’s defeat in 850 BC, recorded on the Tel Dan Stele, makes clear that Israel was “a belligerent people, and once against [sic!] paid a price.” And Skrbina comments: “For those today who argue that Jews were perennially the cause of wars, this would provide some early evidence.”
“To say that the Jews were disliked is an understatement”, Skrbina quips. The critiques of Judaism in antiquity are “uniformly negative”. Really? Investigating the issue, Menachem Stern (Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1984) found that among 161 Greek and Roman authors who dealt with the Jews, 133 wrote respectfully about the high age of Judaism, its well documented history and literary grandeur, its emphasis on family and community; they praised the monotheism of the Jews, their rejection of all God-images and their high codex of morale. 28 expressed negatively on them. Main point of the critics was that Jews were different and bothersome, because obstreperous, rebellious, insubordinate.
Again Skrbina: “As the saying goes, “When one person hates you, it’s probably them; when everyone hates you, it’s probably you.” Logically Skrbina is among “everyone”.
But the Jews deserve it. “The media and Hollywood are working hard to continually remind the public of Jewish suffering during the war and of the evils of Nazism. I see no good reason why Jews should continue to merit special sensitivity.”
Skrbina’s shamelessness peaks when he, in order to prove the Jews as eternal liars, unabashed and applaudingly quotes my Catholic compatriots Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels, well-known for many things but hardly their love of truth.
In chapter 5, “Reconstructing the Truth”, the Romans came to Palestine “as bringers of civilization”. Including, by the way, the cruellest execution method ever practised on this planet.
The most crucified people of antiquity (500 daily in 70 CE), the people who from Crusades to Auschwitz suffered from the defamation of having crucified Jesus, in Skrbina’s view have created this accusation themselves.
If he’d read, for instance, James Carroll’s “Constantine’s Sword”, Skrbina would have known that the Christ-converted Roman imperator during the Council of Nicaea chose Pauline doctrine as state religion not because of Paul’s rebellious “message of resistance” but because the doctrine of this Roman citizen didn’t question slavery, preached passivity and obedience, condemned rebellion and therefore suited every authoritarian state until today. “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands as to the Lord”, writes the author of Ephesians, “for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church ... Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right ... Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, in singleness of heart, just as you would obey Christ.” (Eph 5:22; 6:1-5); Paul’s all-embracing hierarchy of obedience centers in the one who “taking the form of a slave ... humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death on a cross” (Philippians 2:7-8).
“For centuries afterward”, Skrbina knows, “Christians would blame the Jews for killing Christ, not realizing that the whole tale was a Jewish construction in the first place. Perhaps there’s a kind of justice in that irony after all.” Skrbina would like us to understand his hearable schadenfreude as justified due to his insight that Paul and his "Jewish cabal" created, “simply for the benefit of Israel and the Jews”, the myth of the crucified godson, his resurrection and afterlife in general.
I think I'll pass on the book.