73- WHO WAS CONSTANTINE?

The emperor constantine killed jesus christ

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RACHEL Emisoras Latinas continues its broadcast from the ancient Caesarea Philippi. Our press department has put together an identikit, that is, a narrated portrait, of the Roman emperor Constantine, whom we now realize was the real founder of the Christian church. Beside us now, as in our previous programs, is Jesus Christ.

JESUS I’m very curious to know more about this fellow Constantine. I think I’m beginning to see a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

RACHEL According to the information we have, Jesus, he looks more like a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Let’s see, … Constantine, … a cruel and bloodthirsty character. He massacred entire populations throughout Europe. In the Roman circuses he had his enemies thrown to hungry beasts. He cut the throat of his son Crispus. He murdered his father-in-law. He also killed his brother-in-law. He had his wife Fausta boiled alive. Should I go on?

JESUS And you say that fox, who was worse than Herod, founded the church?

RACHEL Once again we have established contact with our advisor Pepe Rodríquez. Pepe, in an earlier program you spoke to us about a pact between Constantine and some bishops.

PEPE Yes, that’s right. By means of that pact Christianity, which had been the religion of the downtrodden, became the state religion, the only official religion of the Roman empire. Constantine donated huge estates to the church and had magnificent temples built, using public funds. And some three centuries after Jesus Christ, in the year 325 to be precise, he convoked the sadly famous Council of Nicea.

RACHEL But aren’t the councils supposed to be convoked by the Popes?

PEPE This one was convoked by the emperor. And to add insult to injury, the bishop of Rome, who was in a dispute with him, wasn’t even invited to attend.

RACHEL And what was Constantine after with this council?

PEPE He wanted to control the church and have it at his beck and call. There would be only one empire, the Roman; only one church, the Roman; and only one God, the one imposed by Constantine.

RACHEL Why do you say that, Pepe?

PEPE Because in that council Constantine defined who you were, Mr Jesus Christ.

JESUS Who I was?

PEPE Yes. In Nicea they approved the famous dogma of the Blessed Trinity, which affirmed your consubstantiality with the Father. The creed that is recited even today in the churches was not inspired by the Holy Spirit; it was formulated by Constantine.

JESUS Remember, Rachel, all we talked about the last few days? I told you so. I didn’t have anything to do with all that.

RACHEL And that creed was approved by the bishops?

PEPE Actually, nobody approved anything because Constantine had the first word and the last word in everything. He declared that all churches refusing to submit to the church of Rome were heretical. He decreed that those who did not accept the decisions of the Council of Nicea should be persecuted and even put to death. The Church went from being persecuted itself to being a persecutor.

RACHEL And the bishops didn’t react?

PEPE Some did, yes. But they were exiled. Others were poisoned. The Council ended with a great banquet offered by Constantine in honor of the bishops who were in attendance. The emperor gave them expensive gifts and named them to public posts with good salaries, all financed by the imperial treasury.

JESUS Everything you’re telling us … is a complete abomination.

PEPE That’s why I said that it was Constantine who murdered you, Jesus Christ. In Nicea they buried your message and brought to birth the Holy Mother Church, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman. Above all, Roman.

RACHEL Any more information for us, Pepe?

PEPE You can make your identikit complete by saying that while he was alive Constantine had himself called “Supreme Pontiff”, “beloved commander of God”, “Vicar of Christ”. He ordered that when he died he should be buried as “apostle number 13”.

RACHEL Thank you, Pepe. That’s enough for today.

JESUS Yes, quite enough. Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.

RACHEL This is Rachel Perez, reporting for Emisoras Latinas from Caesarea Philippi.

MUSIC

ANNOUNCER Another God is Possible. Exclusive interviews with Jesus Christ in his second coming to Earth. A production of María and José Ignacio López Vigil, with the support of the Syd Forum and Christian Aid.

*More information about this polemical topic…*

A criminal
The Roman emperor’s “conversion” to Christianity can be understood many ways, but most likely it was a skilful way for him to conceal his crimes. That’s the interpretation of the German theologian and philosopher Karlheinz Deschner in the first volume of his Criminal History of Christianity (Editorial Martinez Roca), an essential reference work for knowing the face of the church that has been hidden by the official history: This monster Constantine was a cold-blooded, hypocritical killer who cut his son’s throat, strangled his wife, murdered his father and his brother-in-law, and kept in his court a gang of bloodthirsty, servile priests, just one of whom would have sufficed to put half of humankind in conflict with the other half, forcing them to slaughter one another.

A “saint”
Despite his criminal background, the emperor Constantine was venerated as a saint by the Christian church out of gratitude for his having made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire. The cult of this new “saint” spread rapidly, above all in the eastern churches and in the parts of Italy where the Byzantine influence was greatest. In the present day the Eastern Orthodox churches venerate Saint Constantine, and there are even icons which portray him as a saint with halo and all; he is pictured alongside his mother, who is venerated as Saint Helen. The Orthodox churches celebrate the feast of the mother and her son on May 21st. The Catholic Church venerates only Saint Helen, on August 18th.
Tradition attributes to Saint Helen, the mother of Constantine, the discovery of the locations of Calvary and of the “holy sepulcher”, the place where Jesus was buried. She is also credited with the discovery in the year 326 of the “true cross”, the wood on which Jesus was crucified. These traditions are really just pious legends. The year before, 325, Constantine had asked Bishop Makarios to search for those “holy places”, but the locations determined by Makarios and Helen are very questionable, even though they are the ones that modern-day devotion still venerates. Within a century after the death of Jesus the Jerusalem that he had known was totally altered: the Temple was destroyed in the year 70, and the kingdom of Judea ceased to be a political entity after the final uprising of the Zealots in the years 132-135.

Builder of temples
A little after the battle of the Milvian Bridge, the emperor Constantine gave Pope Sylvester I the Roman palace that had belonged to the emperor Diocletian, so that he could build a Christian temple there, which indeed he did. That temple is today called the Basilica of San John Lateran. In the year 324, when Constantine finally reunified the western and the eastern empires and became the sole emperor, he had another Christian temple built on Rome’s Vatican hill, the place where Peter was martyred, according to tradition. Many centuries later that temple was vastly expanded. Today it is called the Basilica of Saint Peter.
As sole emperor, Constantine rebuilt the city of Byzantium and called it “New Rome”. He built Christian temples there and placed the city under the protection of Christian relics, specifically, fragments of the supposed “true cross” of Jesus and the even more hypothetical rod of Moses. After the death of Constantine New Rome was called Constantinople, “the city of Constantine.”

From persecuted to persecutors
When Christianity was declared to be the only religion of the Roman empire, Christians went from being persecuted to being persecutors. They waged a criminal persecution against the “pagan” priests and worshipers who belonged to religions which till that time had cohabited peacefully in the empire. In the same year 324, after Constantine allowed the Christian cult to be freely practiced in all the empire, the Christians in Dydima, Asia Minor, ransacked the oracle of the god Apollo, tortured the priests of that cult, and destroyed the temples on Mount Athos.
In the year 354 an imperial edict authorized the destruction of all pagan temples and the execution of all “idolaters”. Five years later, in Skythopolis, Syria, the Christians set up a “concentration camp” where they detained, tortured and executed “pagans”, whom they arrested in all parts of the empire.
The emperor Theodosius, who succeeded Constantine, made Christianity the exclusive religion of the Roman empire and decreed that all nations subject to our clemency and moderation must continue to practice the religion that was given to the Romans by the divine apostle Peter. From that time on non-Christians were officially characterized as “repugnant, heretical, stupid and blind.” In one of his imperial decrees Theodosius forbade anyone to disagree with any of the church’s dogmas, which were already beginning to take form and to be disseminated throughout the empire.

The destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the murder of Hypatia
In the year 391 zealous Christians, led by the patriarch Theophilus, burned all the texts in the Library of Alexandria, the most famous of the ancient world; it had over a half million handwritten manuscripts, original texts that contained all the science that had been accumulated over centuries.
Some years later, in 415, the patriarch Cyril, who succeeded Theophilus, destroyed the library building itself and encouraged the Christian hordes to kill in a most cruel way the wise woman Hypatia, who was the library director and a professor of mathematics, algebra, geometry, astronomy, logic, philosophy and mechanics. She also invented the astrolabe and the hydrometer, and according to some scholars she was a precursor of the astronomical theories of Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo. She was without a doubt the last great scientific mind of antiquity.
The Christians of Alexandria, however, were fanatical and they had power; they considered all Greek knowledge to be irredeemably heathen, since it did not come from the Bible. The obliteration of the Library of Alexandria meant the loss of approximately 80% of Greek science and civilization, as well as the loss of extremely important legacies of the Asian and African cultures. Alexandria was the intellectual center of antiquity, and the destruction of this treasury of human knowledge caused a stagnation of scientific progress that lasted more than four centuries.

The crimes of the “Galileans”
In the year 528 the emperor Justinian ordered the execution of all those who practiced “sorcery, divination, magic or idolatry” and proscribed all the teachings of pagan authors and “those suffering from the blasphemous madness of the Hellenes”. The following year Justinian closed down the Philosophical Academy of Athens, where Plato had once taught.
In his magnificent work Julian: a Novel (1964), the American writer Gore Vidal recreates the intolerance that followed on Christianity’s becoming the official religion of the empire after Constantine’s “conversion”. Vidal reconstructs in literary fashion the sentiment of that epoch, recounting the persecutions and crimes committed by the Christians (whom Julian always called “Galileans”) against the pagans and describing the ambience that prevailed before the end of the Roman empire. The novelist narrates the story from the perspective Julian (331-363), who was Constantine’s son-in-law, the last of that dynasty and the last Roman emperor who sought to restrain Christianity and restore Hellenistic culture.