Christian HypocrisyThe embellishments of the lives of the saints can be followed by any student willing to bother because often successive manuscripts survive showing the growth of the exaggerations. The case of S Hilarion is one such. Written by S Jerome about ten years after Hilarion’s death, the first translation of Latin to Greek was sufficient occasion to begin the magnification, which then did not cease in subsequrnt editions. One of his wonders was to bless the horses of a Christian racehorse owner. Jerome writes:
The decisive victory in those games and many others later caused many people to turn to the faith.
That would attract thousands of Christian converts today. So Yehouah is the God of horseracing and gambling. Christians conveniently forget that. As Robin Lane Fox observes, in Pagans and Christians, Christians are selective in what they want to remember of their saints. Such partisan recollection can make us all into saints, even gangsters and torturers, and not a few of them have become saints, too.
They did the same with the bible itself, and indeed the very thing that the Pagans did to make sense of their myths of gods and mortals. The attitude of educated Pagans to the Greek myths was that they dismissed as fairy tale what was absurd but retained the rest as allegories of deeper truths. Christians take the same lines to the bible. There is scarcely a Christian in the world who will not consider poverty unnecessary for Christian belief, even though Jesus—by his own example as well as his words in the gospels—took it to be of the highest value.
So far as we can tell, Jesus and his band were travellers who had given up working even though they had had jobs. It is more evidence that they were outlaws, though no Christian will contemplate it. Yet anyone who refuses to work now is a wicked disrupter of society, acting for selfish reasons. Modern liberal Christians will freely reject the miracles of Jesus as fairy-tale embellishments, though they are more likely to be deliberate misinterpretations of Essene code. In each case, they are ready to ignore the “Word of God”.
Homosexuality however is a grievous sin for Christians because it is somewhere in the “Word of God”, even though Jesus had nothing to say about it, and, if Morton Smith is right, evidence exists that Jesus was one. When the Jews fought the Greeks in the war of the Maccabees, they utterly rejected all things Greek, including nudity and homosexuality. Since the Persians who compiled the bible originally were also not homosexually inclined, the Maccabees writ large the relevant parts to emphasise their distaste for Greeks.
Christians have never ceased to continue this arbitrary way of choosing what they like and what they do not, while continually convincing themeselves that they are actually doing what God has had written. So-called Fundamentalists are no different. How many of them have deliberatly chosen poverty as spiritually beneficial, as Jesus obviously considered it? Jesus railed against the hypocrites, and lo! now the hypocrites are all Christians!
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