Quite right.  Sorry, Mr Pinkterton, but a society of Calvinist economics and Epicurean morals is not exactly a continuation of the glorious Catholic Middle Ages.  Men used to fight for the Cross; now these effeminate Y-chromosomed creatures fight for expensive gadgets, the mortgage, and the freedom to fornicate with their masculinised X-chromosomed counterparts.  If this profane and lifeless anti-civilisation is ‘the West,’ we have already lost.

Much too much is being made of Christendom.  Spengler considered it a pseudomorphosis
imposed on Europeans and Asians.  Asians threw it off with Islam.  Europeans had a
harder time finding a substitute.

Christianity has one fatal flaw:  its Jesus in not the real Jesus.  The real Jesus
was followed by the earliest Jewish Christians led by his brother James.  After the
Roman destruction of Jerusalem these believers were dispersed.  Some of their beliefs
eventually found their was into Islam.  What the gentile churches believed was
invented by Paul and others and had nothing to do with the real historical Jesus.
This makes Christianity either a terrible misunderstanding or a fraud, pure and simple.
Christendom is founded therefore on a lie.

A Short History Of Christianity by Norman Ravitch sounds like Marxist drivel to me. Quit Christian-baiting, Norman.

Mr Ravitch,

Christianity has one fatal flaw:  its Jesus in not the real Jesus.

If the Jesus proclaimed by the Apostles (including both Paul and James) is “not the real Jesus,” then there is no real Jesus (or, at least, we can have no knowledge of him).  To identify “the real Jesus” with a tradition which comes only through Jesus’ brother James is, in reality, to project a “Jesus” of your own imagining onto a “James” who never existed.

Thankfully, the real Jesus is precisely the crucified and risen Messiah whom Paul preached and all of the Apostles proclaimed.  Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing Life!

Mr. Jones:  there is a group of literary remains, the Clementine ones, which shows how
the followers of James and Jesus, the Ebionites, continued for several centuries
insisting that Paul has completely distorted Jesus’ teachings.  They were eventually to
disappear as the gentile church took over.  Read the works of Robert Eisenman on James,
the work of SGF Brandon on Jesus and the Zealots.  The Gospels were written to ignore
Jesus’ family; they portray them negatively, even Paul did not do that.  All you
fascist Christians can do when you get someone who disagrees is to call them marxist!

Christo-Fascism is every bit as dangerous as Islamo-Fascism—and more real.

There is a new book I wish I had written.  Barrie Wilson’s How Jesus Became Christian.
Read it and weep, you New Testament-thumping know-nothings!

@Ravitch,

You’re obvious personal hatred of Christianity has more obviously compelled you to seek solace in crack-pot gnostic literature.  Not that I am an authority in that genre per-se (I generally stay away from that section of Barnes and Noble) - but seriously, I believe this website is trying to be a serious forum of Thought.  Methinks you should either grow up or take your name-calling and persecution complex elsewhere.

Theresa: the literature I am referring to is not gnostic but Jewish-Christian.
Stop calling me names just because you don’t like the truth.

‘All you fascist Christians can do when you get someone who disagrees is to call them marxist!’

Obviously you, Ravitch despise Western (Christian) civilization. You consider it “fascist.” Yet no doubt, you are fat on its fruits. It’s called biting the hand, Ravitch, something at which your Christian-hating kind is expert. It seems to go right along with emotionally stunted left-liberal, Marxist, Zionist and Neocon thought patterns. Since you are so hateful of Western civilization, why don’t you disclose which of the above is your political orientation, so we can ascertain your real motives? Or, like an adolescent, do you merely enjoy pointing fingers and snickering?

Speaking of Fascism, Mr. Ravitch’s thesis reminds me of the old Nazi claim that Christ was an Aryan whose ideas had been perverted by the Jew Paul. Mr. Ravitch’s twist seems to be that the Jew Paul perverted Jesus’ message by de-Judaizing it. Interesting. He remains what he has always been: a stumbling block to the Jews and nonsense to (some) gentiles!

It is true that the Nazis considered Paul too Jewish and the Jews thought him too
Hellenistic. But in any case Paul had never met Jesus.  His Jesus was a figment of his
imagination of epileptic seizure.

“Mr. Ravitch’s twist seems to be that the Jew Paul perverted Jesus’ message by de-Judaizing it.”

And now their is a concerted political effort by Bush Christian Zionists, Clinton Neolibs, Jewish ideologues and Neocons to re-Judaize it so we can all join together in a war against Islam for the socialized military industrial complex and Israel. Didn’t you get the memo, Ravitch, or does your abject hatred of Christianity override your other fetishes?

Mr Ravitch,

The fact that the Ebionites survived for a few centuries, and that a few of their literary remains are extant, does not by itself establish that their claim of having preserved the authentic teachings of Jesus via James is valid.  Still less does it establish that the Ebionite tradition is independent of the tradition that comes from the Apostles (including Paul).  On the contrary, it is much more likely that the Ebionite tradition is entirely derivative of (and a corruption of) the orthodox Apostolic Tradition.

It is of no small moment that it was orthodox Christianity, not the Ebionites, that transformed the world.  You may not like the results of that transformation, but if the Ebionite Jesus is the “real Jesus” then the real Jesus is a frankly unimportant, and almost unknown, historical figure.  The Jesus whom Paul preached, on the other hand, is at the center of human history.  If that Jesus was simply Paul’s invention, then it has to be said that Paul was quite the prodigious inventor.

I have not, BTW, called you a Marxist or engaged in any other sort of ad hominem.  Rather, I have engaged your views with respect even though I have challenged them forcefully.  If you held your views with confidence and intellectual honesty (rather than simply as an expression of an animus against Christianity), you would have no need to stoop to calling people whom you do not know “fascist.” If the shoe fits ...

Yes, Jesus was a rather unimportant figure.  He counted on God to save Israel; as usual,
God disappointed him.  Albert Schweitzer figured all this out over 100 years ago in his
Quest for the Historical Jesus.  He told us truly that the Jesus who really was would
not interest us very much.  He was an apocalyptic messianic preacher who sought the end
of Roman rule through divine intervention.  He died disappointed.  He was posthumously
made into some quite different. Yes, the invented Jesus has been immensely
important and influential, but he didn’t exist!

It’s been said that the chief achievement of William Buckley, Jr. was to purge the
conservative movement of anti-semitism, racism, and tendencies towards fascism. 
I guess Buckley never got around to you guys, eh?

You can hardly read a couple of lines here before you hear about Jewish Bolsheviks killing
exemplary Christians like Nicholas Romanov, about evil black politicians running for
president, and about the fact that anyone to the left, however slightly, of the
Taki conscensus must be a Marxist.  Calling people you don’t like Jews, Reds, and
Niggers is the mark of Fascism.  It comes right from Goebbels.  In this country you get
it mediated by Limbaugh, Hannity, and their ilk.

“Yes, the invented Jesus has been immensely important and influential, but he didn’t exist!”

Are you saying all of the quotes attributed to Jesus in the New Testament (which make up the Christian essence) were invented by Paul, and that all the historical Jesus really ever did was rant about the apocalypse? In that case, we owe less gratitude to “the Jews” for producing Jesus and more to Westerners for following Paul’s example and transforming a simple myth into the most socially, technologically, politically and intellectually sophisticated civiliztion in the history of the World. No wonder you primitive Marxists hate Western civilization so much: you’re envious and jealous. Your backward ideology produces nothing but poverty and misery.

...and calling anyone to your right, however slightly, a Fascist is the mark of a Marxist.

PS: most paleocons despise “Limbaugh, Hannity, and their ilk” because they are lying, oportunistic, grasping, big government authoritarians--not unlike your ilk.

Don’t let the door hit yer arse on the way out.  BTW - you might want to consider editing the Wiki article you so kindly created for yourself.  You simply confirm your crank-edness in yet another public forum.

For anyone who’s still interested, quite the exotic bird, N Ravitch seems to be:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Ravitch

PS Don’t bother responding - I am already the most hated woman on this website and you’ll just contribute to my masochistic pleasure in that status. XXXOOO

Hey, Marie Claire,

What did you ever do to deserve such a distinction? The only ones who seem
to get the non-scholastic contributors all riled up are those of us who
find more than a few faults with Vatican2 and its modernist manipulators.
Appreciate your link to Wiki; who woulda thunk it?

Welcome aboard, Christopher Jones.

All well-put.

Quoting the Byzantine prayers. I like very much.

Dan Larison on History:
“between 1517 and 1529 (date of the Protestation of Speyer), there were people who could rightly be called Protestants who were not identified with the Protestation, because it hadn’t happened yet.  To push the category back earlier than the time of the Reformers doesn’t really make a lot of sense.  This isn’t to deny that the Reformers were part of an earlier medieval tradition of Church reform, nor would I want to deny that they borrowed from medieval sources and were deeply influenced by traditional patristic and scholastic modes of inquiry.  But Luther’s (or Calvin’s or Zwingli’s) education does not make earlier members of the tradition to which he belonged part of the confession or religious movement that he and others like him inaugurated.”

OK: let’s follow this “logic.” Movements don’t exist unless proper terms exist for them.  Since “Protestant” had not been coined before the Reformation, there were no Protestants.  Why stop there?  Since Nietzsche did not describe himself as an existentialist, he cannot be described this way.  Since Hobbes and Locke did not employ the 18th c term “bourgeois,” they were not bourgeois either (even though they defended the rising bourgeoisie).  And all those 17th c thinkers who are now considered part of the “Enlightenment,” sorry, that term did not exist until the late 18th c either.
Pedantry is a kind word for DL’s thinking here.  For his next trick, he will count the no of angels boogying on the heads of pins.