11. Apostle of the Uncircumcised

“Nicene creed, A stolen god uprooted and reborn in Rome
Nicene creed, The past of the man god erased by Paul
Nicene creed, To flavian greed the world must befall
Nicene creed, What was sacred is now ash and bone
James the just, The truth died with him
James the just, The lies never ending
James the just, A riddle in time
James the just, Erased from history

Nicene creed, The Vatican arises from Jerusalem’s fall
Nicene creed, A Christian cancer infecting one and call

James the just, The truth died with him
James the just, The lies never ending
James the just, A riddle in time
James the just, Erased from history

Pauline truth, Twisted into form
Pauline truth, Buried in time
Pauline truth, Judaic scorn
Pauline truth, Faith is blind
Pauline truth, Twisted into form
Pauline truth, Buried in time
Pauline truth, Judaic scorn
Pauline truth

Repent, Armageddon is near, Death has awakened

the end of all is brewing in the clouds above.
Those of the uncircumcised shall be cast into the absolute darkness of hell where
Skinless storks will peck at your soul and thereafter you shall be boiled in the bowels of the earth with the unborn.

And the smoke of your flesh shall ascendeth up for ever and ever.
Death is but a gateway to the open graves of they who lived.

Headless funerals will proceed the coming of the abomination of desolation and cadaveric spasms will shatter the teeth of the wicked until the black bile of redemption oozes from their open wounds.

Nicene creed, A stolen god uprooted and reborn in Rome
Nicene creed, The past of the man god erased by Paul
Nicene creed, To flavian greed the world must befall
Nicene creed, What was sacred is now ash and bone

James the just, The truth died with him
James the just, The lies never ending
James the just, A riddle in time
James the just, Erased from history”

This song is about Saint Paul and the strain of Jesus’s teachings that were corrupted and elaborated upon in the forming of the Christian Church.
James the Just [the brother of Jesus was head of the Jerusalem church at the beginning and Paul formed the Gentile part of the Faith, hence the song title, Apostle of the Uncircumcised.
James, the brother of Jesus was the one true bearer the teachings of Jesus.
To understand the rise of Christianity we need to familiarize ourselves with the core elements of its doctrine.

The New Testament

The books within this testament record the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. Like the Old Testament the books are not written in the same order in which they appear in our Bibles today. The earliest New Testament books are some of the Epistles [ or letters] written by Saint Paul between AD 50 and 61.
The Book of Revelation is dealt with in a separate chapter.

The Gospels
The life of Jesus is contained in the four Gospels which the 2nd century church placed at the beginning of the New Testament. The earliest Gospel [ good news] was written by Mark about AD 65. It is the shortest of the four. Next came Mathew’s followed by Luke. These three Gospels are called Synoptic [ with one eye] because they are so alike they can, in many parts be placed side by side.
The Gospel of John is different as it is mainly concerned with the deeper spiritual meanings behind the works and words of Jesus. The rest of the testament deals with letters written by Paul, John, Peter, James and Jude. These are the early awakening of the Catholic [universal] church. The Acts of the Apostles are also included as is the out of place Revelation.

The Gospels are cherished by the church as authoritative accounts of the life of Jesus. The four Evangelists who wrote them are viewed to be faultless in their written observations and detailed references to the life of Jesus. For the Church of Rome they are the definitive texts that the Christian faith is built upon.

In reality nothing could be further from the truth. The Gospels constantly conflict with each other.
The personality of Jesus according to Luke was of a humble savoir. Mathew decries him as a powerful and majestic sovereign. Only two of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke mention Jesus’s birth. In Matthew, he was visited by three Kings. In Luke, he was visited by three shepherds. In Matthew Mary and Joseph had lived in Bethlehem. In Luke, they lived in Nazareth and this was where the ‘poor carpenters son’ derives from. The fact that Nazareth does not appear on any map at the time gives the impression that Nazareth had not even existed until after the revolt of A.D.68-74. There were however many sects at the time including the Essenes, the Zealots and the Nazorites. It was probably a connection with the sect of Nazorites which Jesus became associated with.

The four Gospels that eventually made it into the New Testament, for example, are all anonymous, written in the third person about Jesus and his companions. None of them contains a first-person narrative (“One day, when Jesus and I went into Capernaum…”), or claims to be written by an eyewitness or companion of an eyewitness. Why then do we call them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Because sometime in the second century, when proto-orthodox Christians recognized the need for apostolic authorities, they attributed these books to apostles (Matthew and John) and close companions of apostles (Mark, the secretary of Peter; and Luke, the travelling companion of Paul)

The Crucifixion also has its contradictions.
According to John, the crucifixion occurred on the day before the Passover. Mark, Matthew and Luke state that it was on the day after. There is even a disagreement about the last words he spoke on the cross. In Mathew and mark they are, ‘My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ In Luke they are, ‘My Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’. In John they are, ‘It is finished’. How can we say the Gospels are authoritative accounts when they disagree on so many points?

A Religion built on a fragile truth.
Jesus is one of the most famous men in history. But unlike other noted men, who have changed the course of history, men like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, who have left a legacy of coins, buildings and archeological evidence, Jesus is somewhat of a mystery. There is no historical evidence other than the writings of men who preceded him to confirm his existence. These written records are themselves open to scrutiny being that the earliest writings are placed more than 50 years after his death. Similarities arise with King Arthur and Camelot. The only reality is that there was an Arthur, but he was a Celtic chieftain managing a futile guerilla war with the migrating Saxons around 500 AD. There are still many people who believe Arthur was an actual king around the fourteenth century.
Legends are born from a whisper in time. Like the epics of Homer and the great siege of Troy or Robin Hood and Gilgamesh, all are rooted to some distant fabric of truth. We know there was a Troy, and yet the affixation with the Gods takes the reality into legend where truth is hacked away and replaced by fantastic fiction.

Jesus must be looked upon in this way. There is no reason to suppose a God who manufactured a universe of such magnitude and complexity would place his son amongst a decimated culture to preach a futile message and endure the most terrible of deaths. The same cane be applied to the same God who supposedly sent a flood to destroy mankind at a time when the human capability to commit atrocities and inflict suffering were nothing compared with today.

But contrived exaggerations of Jesus by the early church fathers made him into what he is now.
Would not a God of such infinite power be beyond the trappings of mortal frailty?
Why would a God produce only a single son whose message has since become lost in church corruption and human error? Surly a God would foresee the futility of what has become the Christian Church in all its crumbling out of date teachings. Why send a Son to save the sins of man and leave his doctrine to a few disciples who themselves could not ensure his words would be preserved until at least 30-50 years after his death? For what reason would the world have to suffer even more unspeakable cruelty two thousand years on to this day? Why would all this mystery be locked in a maze of religious jargon that is so at odds with itself the very church has splintered into various denominations each proclaiming to be the purest doctrine of Christ?

To most Jews his teachings were as maverick as many of the other idiosyncratic movements with Judaism. The Jewish strain of Jesus teachings presented though his disciples, most notable, Peter and James were to be erased by the new message of Paul. A system of belief in Rome was already in place, Christianity had only to build upon it, adopt it and become as one with it. As his story grew, so did his deification reach out of the Jewishness that bore him, and a new faith was coming to life. The minimalist procedure of Christian theological evolution provides only a skeleton of the historical truth, but the near certainty that Jesus lived and died in Judea 2000 years ago is the only basis for its birth.

The link with James and the family of Jesus was also removed from Christian dogma thus making it free to construct its own agenda on their new Man-Gods past. By the late third century the central role of Jerusalem in the Christian hierarchy had all but vanished along with the link to contemporary Jews.

James The Just.
If James the Just is to be identified with James, the brother of the Lord, then the letters by Apostle Paul are the only surviving first-hand primary source on James the Just. Paul’s Epistles Paul met James a few times over the years. The first meeting was about 3 years after his conversion in the mid-30s AD. Roughly two decades after the event, Paul briefly mentions meeting “James, the Lord’s brother” in the Epistle to the Galatians. The second time Paul writes meeting with James was again many years later, during a dispute over acceptance of Gentiles in the church, possibly the same incident as the Council of Jerusalem described in the Acts of the Apostles. Notable is how Paul mentions James before Peter (Cephas)
“James, Cephas and John, those esteemed as pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the Jews. All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along.
The third mention of James in Galatians is within the so-called “incident at Antioch.” According to Paul, Peter was not only afraid of James, but also bent to his will.
“When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group.
Here we have the tell tale signs of a conflict between the Gentile strain of Paul and the original Jewish strain of James. Paul would win this battle and James would eventually be executed.
What ever the unfathomable reason for the seemingly absurd motive for a God creating life on Earth, the fact is the modern mind should not be condemned to eternal suffering for its inability to comprehend a message that has proven to be as fragile as the church that covets it. If anything Christianity has given nations the tool to amass vast armies and reek destruction on lesser cultures throughout its bloodthirsty history. To create Man with freedom of choice and then curse him for choosing the wrong path does seem a pretty harsh way to establish a perfect world don’t you think?

The Birth of the Christian Church
To survive in a Romanised world the Gospels and other works in the New Testament are to some degree setup for a Roman audience.
Thus, when most Jews rejected Christ as their Messiah, and who better to know than they, it was for the long and laborious task of the adherents to the message to spread the word outside of Palestine, to the very centre of the known world, Rome.

At this time Rome was at its height of extravagance and promiscuity. The great age of the Emperors had begun in 23 BC with the ascension of Augustus Caesar. Tiberius assumed the throne in A.D.14, [Jesus would have been in his mid teens at this time according to tradition]
Tiberius was murdered in A.D.37, after a reign of great cruelty and degradation.
His successor, Caligula, is by name a reviled megalomaniac who’s debauchery and wanton viciousness painted the well known picture we all have etched in our minds of these most outrageous of rulers.
He was deposed in A.D.41, and replaced with Claudius I, who ruled until A.D.54, when he was poisoned to allow the most infamous of all Roman Emperors to take his place on the throne, Nero.
Nero ruled from A.D 54-68, and it was during his reign that the great Jewish revolt in, 66, Heralded the beginning of the end for the Jewish nation as a cohesive entity.
After Nero’s suicide in A.D.68, the following chaotic short lived reigns of, Galba 68-69, Otho 69, and Vitellius 69, Vespasian brought some stability to the political unease until A.D.79, where after Titus ruled with some calm until A.D.81. Then it was a swift return to the blood excess of merciless inhumanity, with the appearance of Domitian A.D.81-96.
It was the aforementioned successive Emperors that make up the coded complexities of the Book of Revelation, a Christian document that is the last book of the New Testament and the only apocalyptic work to find its way in to the Christian cannon.

Taking that Jesus was not the supernatural son of God, it at this stage that the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and many of the attributes necessary for a man to become God appeared around his story.
The original Jewish oral traditions had no Virgin birth, [only the gospels of Matthew and Luke have birth narratives] To acclimatise the new faith with a Roman, and indeed a Hellenistic audience, the new faith had to adhere to certain criteria that the masses were familiar with.
The surrounding deities of the day, Mithras, Attis, Osiris, Adonis, and numerous other Gods, had their own virgin births, miraculous powers, and resurrection myths. The very Spring time festivals that these religions upheld were also affiliated into the Christian faith as the Easter, Death and resurrection rites.

These unfettered ideas and beliefs were as yet unbounded by any fixed doctrine. At around 100 AD, [70 years after the death of Jesus], there was still no definitive Christian reading, rather there were many.
If they were not so they would have been extinguished before they even gained the notoriety that was to follow. The Jews became the scapegoats in the whole drama of Jesus’ life. As the faith grew in Rome the Empire itself was beginning to wane. The first fixed dogma of Christian orthodoxy came in AD 180. A Bishop called Irenaeus, insisted on a single ‘Catholic’ [ Universal] church with a definitive cannon. Catholicism rests on an ‘ethical dualism’ evil manifesting primarily through man and the Devil.
This would contain a fixed list of writings which would dispel any deviations as was the case before hand. There were many books relating to Jesus and many individuals had their own deviations from Roman orthodoxy. This is how the first edition of the New Testament came into being. Anything else was regarded as heretical and dealt with harshly. In AD 303, the pagan Emperor Diocletian destroyed any Christian writings he could find. This resulted in all but a few books vanishing from history.
The Emperor Constantine in A.D 325 sanctioned the confiscation and destruction of all works that challenged orthodox teachings. These included all works by heretical Christian authors as well as Pagan authors who referred to Jesus. The time had come to eliminate any text which contradicted or undermined the Church. He also commissioned new versions of the documents that had been burned.

The Nicene Creed
[Creed meaning ‘any system, doctrine, or formula of religious belief, as of a denomination.]
The Nicene Creed of 325 explicitly affirms the divinity of Jesus, applying to him the term “God”. The 381 version speaks of the Holy Spirit as worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son.
Traditional Wording
I believe in one God,
the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
and of all things visible and invisible;
And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only begotten Son of God,
begotten of his Father before all worlds,
God of God, Light of Light,
very God of very God,
begotten, not made,
being of one substance with the Father;
by whom all things were made;
who for us men and for our salvation
came down from heaven,
and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost
of the Virgin Mary,
and was made man;
and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered and was buried;
and the third day he rose again
according to the Scriptures,
and ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of the Father;
and he shall come again, with glory,
to judge both the quick and the dead;
whose kingdom shall have no end.
And I believe in the Holy Ghost the Lord, and Giver of Life,
who proceedeth from the Father [and the Son];
who with the Father and the Son together
is worshipped and glorified;
who spake by the Prophets.
And I believe one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church;
I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins;
and I look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. AMEN.
A seemingly minor difference in the wording of this simple text had a profound impact on European history. The Nicene Creed, or Symbol of Faith, was written by the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 C.E., with additions (the 3rd paragraph and following) by the first Council of Constantinople (381). There is an unresolved controversy over the words ‘and the Son’ (in Latin filioque). This language was added in 587 by the local council of Toledo, Spain, in an attempt to combat the Arian heresy. Pope Leo III (795-816) forbade the use of the filioque version and had it engraved without ‘and the Son’ on the walls of St. Peter’s Basillica. After a failed attempt to unite by marriage Charlemagne’s Frankish holdings with that of the Byzantine Empress, Charlemagne challenged Byzantinium’s claim of universal jurisdiction as the successor to Rome by claiming in 792 that among other things, that the Byzantines had omitted the filioque from the original text. The filioque was finally accepted by the Romans in the year 1014, and the revision has been part of Catholic doctrine ever since. The “filioque,” the significance of Roman primacy, and geo-political conflict led to the the Great Schism of 1053. To this day, the Eastern Orthodox Churches do not accept the filioque and raise this as one of many reasons that prevent re-unification with the Roman Catholic Church.

This creed just goes to show how human the forming of a religion is and how un supernatural the internal bickering and gross neglect of humanity prevails. This western strain of the now obliterated Jewish original is in my opinion an abomination of the very ethical code that was once relevant in the teachings of its God King, Jesus, all those years ago in the unimportant district of Galilee.

The actual erosion of the original Jewish strain of James can be seen in more detail at the foot of the last song on the album, A Canticle..

The Trinity
Here’s a mind boggling conundrum that evolved during the Roman Churches early growth. It had absolutely nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus the Galilean, but everything to do with this creaking Roman Church that had carved its doctrine into the minds of the west. (Even though there is good reason to suspect that it was invented by Paul and has no basis in Old Testament stories)
God is a trinity of persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father is not the same person as the Son; the Son is not the same person as the Holy Spirit; and the Holy Spirit is not the same person as Father. They are not three gods and not three beings. They are three distinct persons; yet, they are all the one God. Each has a will, can speak, can love, etc., and these are demonstrations of personhood. They are in absolute perfect harmony consisting of one substance. They are coeternal, coequal, and co-powerful. If any one of the three were removed, there would be no God
And if you can get your head round that then belief in God isn’t that hard to understand. And no, I have no clue what this puzzle of words is supposed to mean and I find this absolutely laughable that such a complex issue would ever be thrown into the simple mans mind view. Remember Jesus taught to the simple folk, the lowlifes and illiterate. This message of Christ was carefully utilized to good effect by the Roman Church to indoctrinate and lure the masses into its fold. The complexities of the actual faith would be left to the learned church fathers. In any event all the Bibles were in Latin and the clergy had a monopoly on actually reading the contents. None of the wider audience of lay people would ever know if they were being read from the bible or the readers preferential thoughts of the moment.
Other ways of referring to the Trinity are the Triune God and the Three-in-One. The Trinity is a controversial doctrine; many Christians admit they don’t understand it, while many more Christians don’t understand it but think they do. In fact, although they’d be horrified to hear it, many Christians sometimes behave as if they believe in three Gods and at other times as if they believe in one. What Jesus would have made of this is any ones guess, but I suspect eh would have been as bemused as the rest of us.
The idea that there is One God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit means:
• There is exactly one God
• The Father is God
• The Son is God
• The Holy Spirit is God
• The Father is not the Son
• The Son is not the Holy Spirit
• The Father is not the Holy Spirit
An alternate way of explaining it is:
• There is exactly one God
• There are three really distinct Persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
• Each of the Persons is God
Are we getting their yet?
The Trinity is not
• Three individuals who together make one God
• Three Gods joined together
• Three properties of God
The Athanasian creed gives a summary of the early Church’s teaching on the Trinity :
We worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost; but the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal. The Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten; the Son is of the Father alone, not made, nor created, but begotten; the Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son, neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.
The doctrine of the Trinity is encapsulated in Matthew 28:19, where Jesus instructs the apostles: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Now if that’s not a later insertion I’m a poppy seed in a pipe of ivory. What I mean is, this statement is more than likely a alter addition to the Jesus story.

The parallelism of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit is not unique to Matthew’s Gospel, but appears elsewhere in the New Testament (e.g., 2 Cor. 13:14, Heb. 9:14), as well as in the writings of the earliest Christians, who clearly understood them in the sense that we do today—that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three divine persons who are one divine being (God) Here are a few examples of the early thought process of the trinity. This is a wholly Christian concept and has little to do with our wandering Jewish Galilean. The complexities of the Roman Church are both absurd as they are perplexing. Here are a few of the early Church fathers issuing statements of one sort or another.
Irenaeus
“For the Church, although dispersed throughout the whole world even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and from their disciples the faith in one God, the Father Almighty . . . and in one Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who became flesh for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit” (Against Heresies 1:10:1 [A.D. 189]).
Ignatius of Antioch
“[T]o the Church at Ephesus in Asia . . . chosen through true suffering by the will of the Father in Jesus Christ our God” (Letter to the Ephesians 1 [A.D. 110]).
“For our God, Jesus Christ, was conceived by Mary in accord with God’s plan: of the seed of David, it is true, but also of the Holy Spirit” (ibid., 18:2)
Origen
“For we do not hold that which the heretics imagine: that some part of the being of God was converted into the Son, or that the Son was procreated by the Father from non-existent substances, that is, from a being outside himself, so that there was a time when he [the Son] did not exist” (The Fundamental Doctrines 4:4:1 [A.D. 225])

The Church evolves
By Diocletian. This enabled the Church to revise, edit and re-write much of the New Testament and therefore secure there position with the deified Jesus. By A.D 350 Christianity had become the official state religion of Rome. In A.D.391 the Emperor Theodosius ordered the great library of Alexandria to be destroyed. This contained many of the great Greek works as well as Christian documents which were contradictory to the authorized canon.. Who knows the reasons for this strange behaviour of these early church fathers. I wonder what Jesus would think of all the fuss?

With the Barbarian invasions of AD 400, the old Roman Empire was all but finished. The Church had secured its position from the legacy of the very beast it sought to subdue. After centuries of disputes over Doctrine the faith split in two. In AD 1054 the orthodox of western Christianity rested in Rome and the Eastern orthodox Christians remained in Constantinople.

The pulpit was the vehicle for the preaching of the Bible. We tend to forget that only a select few could read and Bibles were written by monks in Latin. English versions appeared around A.D..800 but they were few and far between. It wasn’t until the 17th Century that everyone could have access to the sacred books providing they had the education to read them. The responsibility of the priest to convey the message was often at the mercy of the human inability to observe the ethics of honesty, trust and to quote a very priestly word ‘Righteousness’. In other words no one was free from sin least of all the priests who frequently bent their sermons to suit the dogma they sought to uphold. Add to that the numerous translations of the original Greek and Hebrew documents which again often conflicted with each other. Why does Religion have to be so complicated?

But faith like most things in life is never secure in its original form. Christianity has since splintered into many forms. There was the reformation of the 16th and 17 centuries which spawned the Protestant movement. This was a further split from the Orthodoxy of Rome. Then appeared the Baptists, Methodists, Evangelists, Adventists, Modernists, Congregationalists, Jehovah’s Witness movement and many other smaller denominations.

A History of Oppression
Along with the new faith came a new oppression. The Christian God as we know tolerated no rivalry, no contradiction to its written word. Once Christians were butchered in the Gladiatorial arena. They were hounded into the sewers to preach there chosen faith. After all, it was their right to worship the God of their choice. Now things had come full circle. Now the Christians were hounding anyone who interpreted the Bible differently to themselves. The age of the Heretic was born and along with it vast acts of wholesale slaughter and misery. The Devil appeared as a direct opposition to God. A whole Satanic doctrine was born to put the fear of God into the growing Christian faith. The documents that were not included in the Catholic Bible were deemed as Heretical and any one found preaching their contents were dealt with in any number of violent ways.
In Europe the Dark age had set in and this was the climate for the ignorant and naive to be sucked in to the increasingly fanatical Catholic religion. The dark shadow of Christianity blackened the western world. The pagan cults of the tribal communities of Europe were decimated. Believe or die was the message. Follow Christ or follow nothing. The spread of the new faith was unstoppable as it was ruthless. Even the winter and summer pagan festivals were adopted and changed to Easter and Christmas.

The Cathars were a sect who believed the flesh was intrinsically evil, that the world must be under the guidance of a usurper god and that the Good God had no part in the worlds creation. They were Gnostics and in the eyes of Rome Heretics. They grew to prominence in the South of France in the 12th Century AD
Known as Albigensians and having grown to the point of causing a direct threat to Rome it was not surprising that their days became numbered. The Church in no way could allow the Albigensians to grow any further so in 1208 AD Pope Innocent III ordered a Crusade. 30,000 Knights and foot-soldiers from Northern Europe swarmed down on the peaceful lands of the Languedoc and vented a furious bloodlust on its inhabitants. In one town alone 15,000 men, women and children were butchered in the name of God.
The brutal extermination of the Albigensians continued for 16 years until the Church was satisfied they had been removed from the religious map. The Inquisition was born from these dark times and not long after in 1481 the abhorrent Spanish Inquisition. The Roman Church it seemed would go to any lengths to secure its future. Through the Inquisition anyone suspected of Heresy were arrested on the most fragile evidence. The trials were held in secret and the accused knew nothing of his or her accuser. Torture was frequently used to extract a confession which resulted in conviction. The Inquisition was responsible for thousands of deaths and a vast amount of unnecessary suffering. It lasted until the 19th Century, where it was suppressed in different countries at different dates
.God certainly works in mysterious ways.

Here are some of the ways Christianity evolved, not by peaceful conversion, but ruthless indoctrination. This is not meant to be a blight on faith that has wholly good intentions, but a stain on human greed and cruelty. It is by human hands the world befalls its woes, and not by some mysterious heavenly guidance.

Greece During the Christianization of Greece, there was much persecution of Ancient Greek religion. Followers were the subject of a great deal of religious intolerance from Christians. The priests were killed, the followers persecuted and killed, and the temples torn down to be made into limestone quarries, Christian Churches, or civic buildings. Many followers of the Hellenistic gods were punished and slain by Christians, and those caught worshipping or making sacrifices to their gods were often imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Many myths and accusations were issued against the Pagans of Greece. Christians used false accusations that the pagan Greeks killed Christians at their temples during ritualistic sacrifices to justify much religious persecution and blood shed.

Early Middle Ages The Christianization of the Germanic peoples was at times voluntary, though exceptions exist such as events during the Saxon wars. In 782, Charlemagne allegedly had 4,500 Saxons who continued to practice their indigenous Germanic paganism after converting, under duress, to Christianity beheaded at the Massacre of Verden. These events are sometimes described as religious warfare rather than religious persecution. Still, some neopagan authors present them in support of a case for involuntary conversion. Alcuin and other theologians at the court of Charlemagne opposed his treatment of the Saxons and insisted in peaceful and voluntary conversion.

Late middle Ages
“Not until 1022, when fourteen people were burned at Orleans, do we come across another case of executions in western Europe ‘, though this may simply be due to the lack of sources for the earlier period.

Christianization of Scandinavia Olaf I of Norway, during his attempt to Christianize Norway during the Viking Age, had those that practiced their indigenous Norse paganism and refused to Christianize under his rule tortured, maimed or executed, including seidmen, who were tied up and thrown to a skerry at ebb to slowly drown. After Olaf I’s death, Norway returned to their native paganism. Olaf II of Norway had pagans who refused to convert tortured, blinded or executed and despoiled pagan temples, eventually resulting in at least nominal Christianization of Norway.

The Inquisition and the Crusades
In fully Christian Europe there were a number of persecutions directed against Jews and Christian heretics. There were massacres of Muslims and Jews when Jerusalem was taken by Crusaders in 1099.

Jews were also persecuted in Visigothic Spain and later elsewhere in Europe, especially after the emergence of the blood libel. Jews were eventually expelled from England by King Edward I. In Spain after the Reconquista, Jews were forced to either convert or be exiled. Many were killed. Although the Spanish had agreed to allow Muslims the freedom of religion in 1492, this was often ignored. In 1501, Muslims were offered the choice of conversion or exile. In 1556, Arab or Muslim dress was forbidden, and in 1566 Arabic language as a whole was prohibited in Spain.

The age of the Witch gives us another insight into the World gone mad syndrome. How can you justify the ridiculously barbaric treatment of innocents in the name of a God? In the middle ages Fear griped the common people and their obedience to their priests was guaranteed.
Old hags on broomsticks, virgins sacrificed at black mass and wild orgies.

Christianity had gone completely insane by the 15th century. Power corrupts so to speak and with most of Europe in the grasp of the Roman Church, power was absolute. This was an age when politics was dominated by religion. Ambition was furthered by alliances which with Papal backing could ensure positions of power in return for loyalty. The warmth of Christ’s words became tools to control the masses. The leaders of both nation and church had to much to lose to bother with such sayings like ‘Good will to all men’ and ‘ Love thy neighbour’.

Reformation, Counter-Reformation and Colonialism
Conflict between Christian factions reached its height following the Reformation, as Protestants and Catholics struggled for control of territories in Western Europe. Catholic authorities persecuted Protestants in a number of jurisdictions, the most notorious being the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when the French king ordered the murder of all Protestants in France. Outbreaks against Catholics also occurred in Protestant countries, leading to endemic conflicts in some areas, such as Ireland, where the British government imported Protestants and expelled Catholic landowners following a long period of conflict over control of the island.
The bizarre [albeit not surprising] thing about religion is its instability. From the orthodoxy of Rome comes the fracturing doctrines, revised theological formulars that suite each particular mind set.

The rise of denominations within the Christian faith can be traced back to the Protestant Reformation, the movement to “reform” the Roman Catholic Church during the 16th century, out of which four major divisions or traditions of Protestantism would emerge: Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, and Anglican. From these four, other denominations grew over the centuries
The splintering of Orthodoxy The Lutheran denomination was named after Martin Luther and was based on his teachings. The Methodists got their name because their founder, John Wesley, was famous for coming up with “methods” for spiritual growth. Presbyterians are named for their view on church leadership—the Greek word for elder is presbyteros. Baptists got their name because they have always emphasized the importance of baptism. Each denomination has a slightly different doctrine or emphasis from the others, such as the method of baptism; the availability of the Lord’s Supper to all or just to those whose testimonies can be verified by church leaders; the sovereignty of God vs. free will in the matter of salvation; the future of Israel and the church; pre-tribulation vs. post-tribulation rapture; the existence of the “sign” gifts in the modern era, and so on. The point of these divisions is never Christ as Lord and Savior, but rather honest differences of opinion by godly, albeit flawed, people seeking to honor God and retain doctrinal purity according to their consciences and their understanding of His Word.
There seems to be at least two major problems with denominationalism. First, nowhere in Scripture is there a mandate for denominationalism; to the contrary the mandate is for union and connectivity. Thus, the second problem is that history tells us that denominationalism is the result of, or caused by, conflict and confrontation which leads to division and separation.