Christianity as a Jewish evolutionary strategy

Introduction

In recent posts, I have made a series of arguments that the Christianization of the Roman Empire was good for the Jews (here and here) and bad for the Gentiles (here and here), and that it has paved the way for the subversion and subjugation of Western civilization by Jewish Power. Since Christianity is a Jewish invention, it is hard to resist the theory that it was part of a grand Jewish conspiracy (that “aggressive and vindictive conspiracy … against the rest of the world” that is written “plain and clear” in the Hebrew Bible, as H. G. Wells tried to warn us about in The Fate of Homo Sapiens, 1939). However, no matter how hard I look for some clue that Christianity was from the start a Jewish psy-op to alienate the Romans rather than to save them, I do not find it. The vast number of Jews (mostly Hellenized Jews from the Diaspora) who converted to Christianity in the first century runs contrary to that theory. I find no reason for suspecting Paul, the real founder of Gentile Christianity, of being some sort of Israeli asset trying to deceive the gullible Goyim into believing things that he didn’t believe himself. The fact that he wrote “This is the truth” (Romans 9:1) doesn’t mean he’s lying. Yet, we do find in his letters the conviction that with the massive conversion of Gentiles to Christ, “all will be restored to [the Jews]” in the end (Romans 11:12).

So we are left with the firm conclusion that Christianity provided a decisive selective advantage to Israel in its millennia-long war against Rome, but no proof that it was secretly manufactured for that purpose. It is time, therefore, to call on professor Kevin MacDonald to help us solve this riddle. I will here discuss whether Christianity can fit within the general theory that he has developed in A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, With Diaspora Peoples (1994) and his subsequent volumes.

The great advantage of MacDonald’s evolutionary psychology approach is that it bypasses the question of intentionality and therefore allows us to study “group evolutionary strategies” without having to look for evidence of a conspiracy. Evolutionary psychology postulates that the various strategies that kinship-based groups (clans, tribes, nations) develop for survival, reproduction, expansion and dominance in a competitive environment can be, at least in part, subconscious rather than clearly articulated. There is, in any ethnic group, a collective, transgenerational will to power operating below the threshold of individual consciousness. The group’s collective mentality is not purely the product of biology, but involves ideology: through generations, culture becomes a second nature.

These assumptions coincide with the conclusions of sociology (Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, Le Bon), that the average cognitions, emotions and behaviors of individuals are subconsciously determined by some form of group mind. To some extent which depends on the cohesion of the group, when individuals think, feel and want, it is the group that thinks, feels and wants through them. Western individualists are least likely to have a strong connection to the group, highly ethnocentric groups like Jews are the most likely. In the case of a highly sophisticated group such as the Jewish community, this principle works in highly sophisticated ways, but it still applies at some level. The paradigm of evolutionary psychology therefore makes it possible to understand Jewish strategies as involving a fair amount of self-deception, rather than mere deception.

As a national group, the Jews have two distinctive features. One is that they are a worldwide community. In their vast majority, they have lived and strived in the midst of foreign nations for more than two thousand years (since the Hellenistic period). For this, they have elaborated unique strategies that have become part of their ancestral cognitive habits. It is almost like they have developed a dual personality: a core personality for their Jewish environment, and a more flexible one for their Gentile environment. They do not necessarily experience this complexity as inconsistency or hypocrisy.

The other special feature of the Jews is that they are both an ethnic and a religious community, with the unique advantage that their most essential strategy for survival in foreign environments is also the central commandment of their religious scripture: strict endogamy.[1] In From Yahweh to Zion, I have argued that the Jews’ peculiar collective behavior is not genetically determined, but culturally programmed. Their Bible tells the Jews that what is good for the Jews is good in absolute terms, and therefore must be good for the Gentiles too, even when they don’t like it. The mission of the Jews is to obey the Jews’ god by destroying the Gentiles’ gods, meaning whatever is sacred to them, including their ethnic or national identities, because these gods are either evil or fake, contrary to the Jews’ god who is the one and only true God.

Beside the elementary strategy of endogamy, MacDonald distinguishes two major sets of group strategies among Diaspora Jews: strategies by which they adapt to their environment, and strategies by which they modify their environment. The first kind of strategy is akin to the crypsis or mimesis that can be observed in the animal world. The second kind has no equivalent in the animal world and can even be considered a special faculty of the Jews.

I will show that, if we analyze the early diffusion of Christianity as a Jewish “group evolutionary strategy”, it fits both categories: Jews who converted to Christianity were adapting to their dangerously “anti-Semitic” environment, by making themselves less Jewish and more Graeco-Roman (Christianity being, to some degree, an imitation of Graeco-Roman mystery cults), while preserving their core belief in Jewish chosenness and their primal hatred of the pagan gods. And Jews who converted Gentiles to Christianity during the same period altered their environment by making Roman society more Jewish and less pagan, and, above all, more credulous of the Jews’ central role in God’s providence. In a very deep sense, Christianity convinced Romans that “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22), an idea that Hellenistic Jews like Philo of Alexandria were already promoting a century earlier, saying that “the Jewish nation is to the whole world what the priest is to the state.”[2]

How Jewish is Christianity ?

Obviously, the theory that Christianity was a Jewish evolutionary strategy can only apply to the Christianity of the first centuries, when Jews were creating and leading Christianity. Jews cannot reasonably be held responsible for the conversion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, let alone the conversion of the barbarians. By the time Christianity became Rome’s official religion, Jews were not in charge of it. We are entitled to suspect a number of influential crypto-Jews in the courts of the Constantinian and Theodosian dynasties, but no case can be brought to light. Without doubt, the Church was then predominantly of Gentile extraction, and Gentile Christianity had taken a life of its own. The Jews only provided the initial impetus.

But it is important to realize that the leadership of Jews on Gentile Christianity was much more intense and enduring than Church historians have led us to believe. Let’s break down the state of our knowledge on that matter.

The first thing to recognize is the importance of the Jewish population in the megacities of the Roman Empire, where Christianity first thrived. In the first century, it is assumed that there were a million Jews in Palestine and about five million in the Diaspora, particularly in big cities such as Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome. A part of Rome’s Jewish population descended from the thousands of Jewish captives that Pompey brought after capturing Jerusalem in 63 BC, and their number increased in AD 70, when Vespasian and Titus brought to Rome an additional 97,000 Jewish captives, according to Flavius Josephus (Jewish War VI,9). Many of them would be freed, as was Josephus, who worked tirelessly to promote his nation to Gentiles. There is debate about the reality and extent of Jewish proselytism in the first and second century, but we know from Cassius Dio that a member of the imperial family, Flavius Clemens, was executed by the emperor Domitian for “atheism” and “deviation toward Judaic customs” (Jews were regarded as atheists for their contempt of the gods), while his wife Flavia Domitilla was banished.

The next fact to consider is that we have very little information about the way Christianity spread in Roman cities from the time of Paul to the middle of second century. In fact, as Bart Ehrman noted in The Triumph of Christianity: “outside of Paul’s work itself, we do not know of any organized Christian missionary work—not just for the first century, but for any century prior to the conversion of most of the empire. … That may be hard to believe, but in fact, if you were to count every Christian missionary about whom even a single story is told, from the period after the New Testament up through the first four centuries, you would not need all the digits on one hand.”[3] This is remarkable in itself.

As Rodney Stark argues in The Rise of Christianity, there are many reasons to believe that Jews, who were highly mobile and interconnected, were the main propagators of the gospels throughout the Empire, even after the second century.[4] Archaeology confirms that Christian churches and artefacts are always found in Jewish quarters. Eric Meyers reports that data from Rome and Venosa show that “Jewish and Christian burials reflect an interdependent and closely related community of Jews and Christians in which clear marks of demarcation were blurred until the third and fourth centuries C.E.”[5]

In the second half of the second century, both Jews and Christians were only beginning to see each other as belonging to different religions, and the first known apologists, though Gentiles, were still engaged in dialog with Jews, as illustrated by Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, Aristo of Pella’s Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus (now lost), or Origen’s later mention of having taken part in a theological debate with Jews before “umpires”.[6]

In support of his view that Christianity was predominantly controlled by Jews until the mid-second century and beyond, Rodney Stark mentions the defeat of the Marcionites, who wanted to discard the Old Testament:

Indeed, the speed with which Marcion built a substantial movement suggests that his solution pleased many. But the crucial point is this: the traditional Christian faction seems to have easily ousted Marcion and successfully condemned Antitheses as heresy. I do not believe that the traditionalists won out because of superior theology. Rather, the whole affair suggests to me that in the middle of the second century the church still was dominated by people with Jewish roots and strong current ties to the Jewish world. Notice that this was after the Bar-Kokhba revolt.[7]

Stark suggests that the final break between Jews and Christians happened under Constantine, and didn’t go without resistance. When in the 390s St. John Chrysostom complains that many Christians “join the Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts” (First Homily i,5), or even get circumcised (Second Homily ii,4), we should see him as “an early leader in the movement to separate a church and synagogue that were still greatly intertwined.”[8]

Having established that Christianity was a Jewish movement targeting both Jews and Gentiles during the first and second centuries, and was still under strong Jewish influence during the third and fourth centuries, we can examine if it fits MacDonald’s criteria for a Jewish “group evolutionary strategy”.

Christianity good for the Jews

Jews who converted to Christianity in the early centuries were very much comparable to those who converted in later centuries, while remaining attached to the purity of their Jewish blood. MacDonald makes the following remarks, highlighting the premise of evolutionary psychology:

Indeed, one might note that New Christians who maintained group separatism while sincerely accepting Christianity were really engaging in a very interesting evolutionary strategy—a true case of crypsis entirely analogous to crypsis in the natural world. Such people would be even more invisible to the surrounding society than crypto-Jews, because they would attend church regularly, not circumcise themselves, eat pork, etc., and have no psychological qualms about doing so. … Psychological acceptance of Christianity may have been the best possible means of continuing Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy during the period of the Inquisition.[9]

Whether sincere, duplicitous, or something in-between, Jews who converted to Christianity in the Middle Ages reaped immediate social advantages. In the eyes of the Gentiles, they could hope to be seen as equals while under no obligation to marry their offsprings to non-Jews. The same applies to the early days of Pauline Christianity (as opposed to the Jewish Jesus movement that evolved from the Jerusalem church), which portrayed itself as breaking the barriers between Jews and Gentiles. Claiming that “there is neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28) was especially useful for Jewish converts.

Pauline Christianity is best understood as an extension of Hellenistic Judaism, which was already engaged in weakening the barriers between Jews and Greeks. Before, during and after the devastating Jewish Wars (66–135 CE), most Hellenistic Jews, especially in Alexandria, took their distance from the messianic fever of Jewish nationalism and tried to make their tradition look as Greek as possible. Flavius Josephus’s obsequious theory that the nationalist Jews failed to understand that their own prophecies were actually pointing to Vespasian as the true Messiah (Jewish War IV), is a good example. Christianity is another. According to Rodney Stark, “many Hellenized Jews of the diaspora found Christianity so appealing precisely because it freed them from an ethnic identity with which they had become uncomfortable.”[10] This is why “a steady and significant flow of Hellenized Jewish converts to Christianity probably continued into the late fourth or early fifth century.”[11] Jews who converted to Christianity were not converting out of Judaism entirely, as long as Christianity was still connected to its Jewish matrix, and they were emphatically not converting to another God, but simply to a new, flexible Jewish identity with a universalist claim.

By spreading Christianity among Gentiles, Jewish Christians were also contributing to the general effort of Hellenistic Judaism to make Gentile society more accepting of the Jews’ uniquely positive contribution to the world. Ultimately, the conversion of the Roman Empire would imply the sacralization of the Jewish nation as the once-chosen people of God. Judaism became the only legal non-Christian religion. By the “witness theory”, the Church declared that the Jewish nation had a divine right to exist until the end of days, and that Church and Empire shared a divine responsibility to protect them. This was a radical improvement compared to the repeated attempts by Roman emperors, from Vespasian to Hadrian, to eradicate Jewish nationality altogether. This witness theory was enshrined in Catholic soteriology by Augustine, and repeatedly reaffirmed to combat anti-Jewish popular sentiments. When informed of persecutions of Jews in Cologne and Mainz during his campaign for the second crusade, saint Bernard of Clairvaux protested: “The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered. They are dispersed all over the world so that by expiating their crime they may be everywhere the living witnesses of our redemption. … If the Jews are utterly wiped out, what will become of our hope for their promised salvation, their eventual conversion?”[12]

Certainly, the Church also gave Gentiles a new reason to hate the Jews as Christ-killers. And Christianity didn’t make Romans less “anti-Semitic” than they had been as pagans. But from an evolutionary strategic viewpoint, this was not a negative, for Gentile hostility has always been the best incentive for Jewish cohesion. Diaspora Jews need to feel “chosen for universal hatred” (Leo Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation, 1882) as much as they need to feel chosen by God. The ideal situation, from an adaptationist point of view, is a Gentile society that makes Jews feel excluded while minimizing the violence against them. Church policy was actually very supportive of Jewish ethnic interests by forbidding Gentiles to intermarry with non-baptized Jews, while at the same time forbidding Gentiles to force Jews into baptism.

All in all, the Christianization of the Roman Empire has been very favorable to the development of the Jewish community, from a demographic as well as an economic point of view. The great historian of Late Antiquity Peter Brown writes:

In the legislation of the period, rhetorical humiliation of Judaism as a religion coexisted with extensive corporate privileges for Jewish leaders and for Jewish synagogues. Although Judaism was repeatedly branded as a “mad impiety” (Codex Theodosianus xv.5.5), the leaders of the Jewish community — a succession of patriarchs in Palestine, and other groups of representatives in other provinces — received from all Christian emperors repeated reassurance that Judaism, unlike polytheism and many forms of heretical Christianity, was “not a sect prohibited by the laws” (C. Th. xvi.8.9). Jewish synagogues enjoyed the exemptions associated with “holy places” (C. Th. vii.8.2). The personnel of the synagogues enjoyed the same privileges as did the Christian clergy: for they also were persons “truly devoted to the service of God” (C. Th. xii.1.99).[13]

A case can even be made that the prohibition of usury for Gentiles provided a tremendous selective advantage to Jews, and this is exactly what the Fourth Lateran Council admitted in 1215, in its Constitution 67, “On Jewish usuries”: “The more Christians are restrained from the practice of usury, the more are they oppressed in this matter by the treachery of the Jews, so that in a short time they exhaust the resources of the Christians.”[14]

Christianity bad for the Gentiles

The Roman Empire was an extensive network of cities connected by nearly 200,000 miles of roads, in addition to navigation across the sea medius terra. In The First Urban Christians, Wayne Meeks writes that “the people of the Roman Empire traveled more extensively and more easily than anyone before them did or would again until the nineteenth century,” and reports a merchant’s grave inscription in Phrygia attributing to him seventy-two trips to Rome, a distance of well over a thousand miles. This high mobility created a cosmopolitan urban population of uprooted individuals suffering from “status inconsistency”. It was among them, Meeks believes, that most converts to Pauline Christianity originated. In the Church they found a family of substitution, brothers and sisters to care for each other. “The natural kinship structure into which the person has been born and which previously defined his place and connections with the society is here supplanted by a new set of relationships.”[15]

The back side of this is that Christianity contributed in no small manner to desacralize and destabilize the traditional Roman family. This is a well-discussed issue, on which I have written before. One need only recall Matthew 10:35–37: “For I have come to set son against father, daughter against mother, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law; a person’s enemies will be the members of his own household. No one who prefers father or mother to me is worthy of me. No one who prefers son or daughter to me is worthy of me.” Here you have the essence of what E. Michael Jones calls “the Jewish revolutionary spirit.” Pitting sons against fathers, and wives against husbands, is exactly what the Jewish “culture of critique” has been doing in recent decades, as MacDonald has abundantly documented in The Culture of Critique.

As much as it attracted desocialized individuals to resocialize them by conversion, Christianity aggravated the desocialization that it fed upon. As a salvation religion, Christianity taught that man was not primarily a social being who found fulfillment in the city, as Aristotle had taught, but a spiritual being who longed for the “city of God”, where kinship counts for nothing. Roman religion was family-centered as much as city-centered. There were domestic cults of Vesta (who symbolized the continuity of the family life), of di penates (who expressed the continuity of the household’s means of subsistence), of di Manes (the ancestral dead), and of the genius of the paterfamilias.[16] But Christianity called these cults demonic, and in 391, Emperor Theodosius enacted a law forbidding them even in the privacy of the home.[17]

It may be counter-intuitive to blame Christianity for the increased deemphasis on kinship bonds, since today’s practicing Christians are the defenders of family values in the West. That is because of the paradox that Christianity is both revolutionary and conservative. It was revolutionary at the beginning, and conservative at the end. All established religions are conservative. But Western Christianity’s conservatism is about preserving the nuclear family, the final stage before complete social disintegration.[18] In a very fundamental way, Christian individualism competes with blood kinship. The Christian morality of universal altruism is also inherently hostile to the values of race, kinship, genealogy and procreation. This hostility influenced the Church’s social policy. As Jack Goody has documented[19] and as Kevin MacDonald has himself recognized in Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, the influence of the Catholic Church “was directed at altering Western culture away from extended kinship networks and other collectivist institutions,”[20] although MacDonald also emphasizes a primordial tendency toward individualism and its implications for family structure. Thus Christianization has influenced the psychological and sociological vulnerability that later Jewish intellectuals and activists would exploit to weaken the syngeneic cohesion of White nations. If “making the United States into a multicultural society has been a major Jewish goal beginning in the nineteenth century,”[21] then it is logical to recognize the same Jewish goal in the foundation of Gentile Christianity by Paul of Tarsus. Again, this is not to say that Paul and his associates were conspiring against the Romans. Because Diaspora Jews feel safer in a multicultural society with individualistic and universalist values, they sincerely think that such a society is healthier—as long as Jews can keep the upper hand. From that point of view, Christianity was definitely helpful.

Conclusion

MacDonald wrote: “Any discussion of Jews and Judaism has to start and probably end with this incredibly strong bond that Jews have among each other—a bond that is created by their close genetic relationship and by the intensification of the psychological mechanisms underlying group cohesion. This powerful rapport among Jews translates into a heightened ability to cooperate in highly focused groups.”[22] If we ask ourselves what Christianity has done to weaken this incredibly strong bond of Jewry, the obvious answer is: absolutely nothing. On the contrary, it has provided the ideal environment for the sustainment and reinforcement of this bond. And while no educated pagan Roman had ever taken seriously the Jews’ ridiculous claim of being specially loved by the Creator of the Universe, Christians have been compelled to believe the truth of that claim. The Jews had written a book saying that God chose the Jews, and Christians have accepted it as God’s word. By so doing, Christians have not only paid tribute to the Jews; they have comforted them in their delusion. A strong argument can be made that without Christianity, the Jewish nationality would have effectively dissolved in the fourth or fifth century.

In short, Christianity introduced into the operating system (the dominant cognitive paradigm) of Roman society two trojan horses that both gave the Jewish nation a decisive selective advantage: it taught Gentiles that, by virtue of their divine chosenness, the Jewish nation was uniquely qualified to remain distinct, separate, and in many ways privileged; and it has taught Gentiles that, contrary to the Jews, they have no ethnic identity of any spiritual value. On the one hand, it has been assumed that the Jews are one nation and will be saved collectively at some point, and on the other hand, it has been affirmed that nationality is irrelevant for the Gentiles, since their salvation is strictly individual. The Jews can continue to sacralize the purity of their blood, while Gentiles are told every Sunday that only the (Jewish) blood of Christ will save them. Christians has given a handle to the Jews for driving them to their doom.

Seen in this light, Christianity surely looks like a Jewish conspiracy. But it is not a conspiracy in the traditional sense: rather, it is a Jewish group evolutionary strategy.

[1] The commandment of eighth-day circumcision is also a powerful, because traumatic, factor of cohesion and separation.

[2] Scot McKnight, A Light Among the Gentiles: Jewish missionary activity in the Second Temple period, Fortress Press, 1991, pp. 39, 46, quoted in Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples, Praeger, 1994, p. 63.

[3] Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity, Simon & Schuster, 2018, p. 99.

[4] Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History, Princeton UP, 1996.

[5] Graydon F. Snyder, Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine, Mercer UP, 1985, p. 2, and Eric M. Meyers, “Early Judaism and Christianity in the Light of Archaeology,” Biblical Archaeologist 51, pp. 69-79, quoted in Stark, The Rise of Christianity, op. cit., p. 9.

[6] Stark, The Rise of Christianity, op. cit., p. 70.

[7] Stark, The Rise of Christianity, op. cit., p. 64.

[8] Stark, The Rise of Christianity, op. cit., p. 66.

[9] Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, p. 277.

[10] Stark, The Rise of Christianity, op. cit., p. 214.

[11] Stark, The Rise of Christianity, op. cit., p. 138.

[12] Leonard B. Glick, Abraham’s Heirs: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe, Syracuse UP, 1999, p. 122.

[13] Peter Brown, “Christianization and religious conflict”, in Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey, eds., The Late Empire (The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII), Cambridge UP, 2008, p. 632.

[14] John Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages, MacMillan, 1969, p. 182, quoted in MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone, op. cit, p. 243.

[15] Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, Yale UP, 1983, pp. 17, 88.

[16] William Warde Fowler, Roman Ideas of Deity in the Last Century before the Christian Era, MacMillan, 1914.

[17] Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World, Oneworld Publications, 2018, p. 252.

[18] David Brooks, “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake,” March 2020, www.theatlantic.com

[19] Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, Cambridge UP, 1983. Joseph Henrich builds up on Goody’s work in The WEIRDest People on the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2020.

[20] Kevin MacDonald, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future, rev. ed., KDP, 2023, p. 159.

[21] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, Praeger, 1998, p. 259.

[22] Kevin MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilizations, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism, The Occidental Press, 2007, p. 34.