The Great Leap-Fraud: Social Economics of Religious Terrorism, Volume Ii: Islam and Secularization

By A.J. Deus

Based on a reassessment of primary documents from the beginning of Judaism through to the Reformation, author A. J. Deus evaluates the Judaic scriptures of the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims for their potential to stir hatred, violence, and terrorism. He searches for messages in the scriptures that may alter the economic behavior of societies.

In this, the second volume of The Great Leap-Fraud, Deus exposes the frauds that overrun the Islamic faith. He focuses on the scriptural foundation of the Muslims and explains the status of terrorism, Jihad, and human rights in the historical context. Tying history to contemporary issues, Deus puts the evidence together that shows how the Jews used the doctrinal difference of the time to heave themselves into power and redeem Israel. He demonstrates how societies and economies have changed because of religion and shows the consequences of those who preach hatred against humanity.

The findings in The Great Leap-Fraud are highly relevant to the crisis in the Middle East and the poor world:

Intellectual framework and social norms in four Judaic religions
Social organization in the industry of religion
Interaction mechanism of violence and terrorism between believers and nonbelievers
Economic development and religiosity
The working of the secularization process

In The Great Leap-Fraud, Deus argues that religious freedom poses the biggest threat to humanity, and he calls for the regulation of religion as an industry. He encourages citizens to look at religious history through unbiased eyes.

See http://www.ajdeus.org for more information, previews and articles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462029754

A.J. Deus

A. J. Deus is a researcher in economics and writes political economics articles. His research focuses on social economics and history of economics. Deus earned an economics degree from the University of Applied Sciences in Economics and Business Administration, Zürich, Switzerland, and a master’s degree from the University of Ottawa, Canada. More background information and mission statement at www.ajdeus.org.

Book preview

Contents

Flashback to Volume I

The Birth of Judaism

Confusions about Khristos

Roots of Islam

The Abyss

Cracks in Heaven

A New Approach

The Linage of Elijah

The Kaaba

Mecca

Ghassanid Saracen Royalty

Justin and Justinian

Divine Trinity in Law

The Jews Thrown out of Yemen and Palestine

God Objects

Death Impersonated

Rome Emancipated

A Perishable Eternal Peace

The Year of the Elephant

A Mad Mind Rises from the Rubble

Papal Leadership Emerges

The Arian revenge

The Levites Return

The Beginning of the End

Short Biography of Muhammad

A Team with an Angel

Early Allies

The Robbery of the Cross

Jihad

The Creation of a Redeemer

The Assault

The Short-Lived Agreement

Rome Refutes

The Religious Foundation of the Ghassanid Saracens

An Expanding Caliphate

Conquest by Surprise

Islam in the Cradle

Caliph Uthman

Greek Puppet Popes

Ishmaelite Leadership

Ghassanid Saracens Focus on Economy

Constantinople out on Holidays

A Last Truth

A Shi’ite Martyr

An Intermediate Levite Theocracy

Another Redeemer

The Dome of the Rock

1300 Years of Controversy about the Koran

Religious Freedom and Human Rights?

No Partners to God

A Maze of Wisdom

Koranomics

Muslim Restrictions

The War of Good and Evil

Economic Changes

Feeding the Millions

Christian-Muslims

Spain Joins

A Quraysh Usurper

A Farewell

The Freedom Trap: Muslim Law

The Byzantines Adapt

The Melchite Saracens Are Back

Free Will

Unrest Returns

A Jewish Caliphate

Charlemagne

Business First

An Empress

A Revolution in Curiosity

Inquisition

Souvenir for Sale

Persia Assaults Italy

The Father of Sunni Terrorism

Doomsday

Mechanism of Oppression

A Fractured Islam

The Fatimids

After Dark

The Muslim World Ends

Seed of Revival

Conspiracy Against Constantinople

Crusade

Gold Rush

Exodus from Spain

The Hangover

A Bird’s-Eye View

The Rise of Usury

Education Revolutionized

Italians Expelled From Egypt

A Silent Invasion of Italian Thinking

A Candle Is Lit

Mounting Dissent

Reason Returns

Philosopher Power

The Great Awakening

A Flood of New Ideas

Spanish Inquisition

The Pot Breaks

Now What?

The Economic Spark

Clash of Civilizations

Anti-Americanism

Ethnic Divisions

The Taliban and Pakistan

An Ethical Framework

The Economic Lessons

Acknowledgments

Bibliography, Volume II

Primary Sources

Significant Church Councils

Secondary Sources

For Princess Soriah,

to the children of the World.

The author has made all reasonable efforts to locate and contact all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful, the publisher welcomes communication from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgments can be made in future editions and to settle other permission matters. Some quotes have been slightly edited for style.

Flashback to Volume I

The Birth of Judaism

Faith is a difficult topic in social economics. Many authors evade it altogether or work with cynical sidekicks—and by doing so they ignore one of the building blocks of economic and cultural life. New archaeological evidence from Mexico hints at religion’s instinctual property, having accompanied humanity since the time of hunters and gatherers. As a community-building force, religion might have bettered the chances of survival for any given group. Because of its abstract nature, religion can be abused for power, and people can easily be misled. With that purpose in mind, the men in charge would claim the ability to hold frightening evil forces at bay using their gods. Fearmongering is a strong tool in creating a faithful following and keeping it in line. On the upside, faith builds strong, cohesive communities that are often willing to die for their beliefs. The reasons people are easily susceptible to religion, from a receiver’s point of view, are unexplored in social economics and need fundamental research. Such research may unlock broad secrets about seemingly irrational decisions. Belonging to religious groups may turn out to be more rational than what atheists and agnostics might like to think. It builds a strong sense of belonging, which translates into a deceptive perception of security in communities once they have crossed a threshold of size.

The research in The Great Leap-Fraud focuses on the sender’s side of religion. It shows that the establishment of each of the Judaic religions was a rational, secular act with a purpose that is removed from divine inspiration. This finding was not premeditated—quite the contrary. This book was originally meant to be a chapter of a new approach to social economics that would recognize religion as one of the forces in the fight against poverty and terrorism. The trouble with this plan was that research for the book soon revealed that the history of the Judaic religions was riddled with fraud.

Countless historians have been ridiculed for the doubts they dared to raise about the order and historicity of religiously relevant events. However, while the notion of serial fraud seems to be almost universally accepted, starting over to find out what the likely avenue of history without such meddling might have been would probably amount to too great a task and too overwhelming a risk to reputation—and maybe life. This book represents the overwhelming amount of material that needs to be absorbed in order to come up with a path of history through unbiased eyes.

Stumbling over economic background information in the scripture that did not make sense in the context of the narratives, combined with sheer determination, led to the surprising and frightening conclusion that both Judaism and Christianity rest on premeditated frauds. They both originate from the same motif: establishment and redemption of Israel. For the land claim of Israel, the Palestinians were defrauded through the means of religion.

Just as Judaism was invented in the early third century BC to establish Israel, Christianity was brought forth at the turn of the second century with a strategy to reject the lifestyle of the Roman Empire and to refuse to partake in its economy. It worked.

The manipulative nature of the Judaic religions is so strong that the establishment of modern Israel must be questioned as an error. Unfortunately, the conclusion leads to the thought that the version of religious history taught at school may be misleading—so much so that little of value is learned, if anything, from its study at the expense of the taxpayers. As religious writers are the main sources of historic information over centuries of our heritage, the implications are even deeper. One of the reasons that this may be so is the tendency of experts and scholars to focus on relatively narrow areas of study that necessarily rely on the understanding of what happened before and after their time of interest. If that understanding is biased or follows a groupthink, the study of religious history is in vain.

For example, despite overwhelming evidence that the words Christ and Christians have been used in a different context, for church historians, these terms suffice as proof for the existence of their own faith since the fictional birth of Jesus Christ. There were so many christs, messiahs, prophets, and other charlatans that it is difficult to identify which were real.

When it comes to history of religion, the issues of groupthink and bias are particularly strong—so much so that religious writers of any given faith have had a vested interest in rewriting history according to their belief. Modern experts of religion do not seem to have an interest in correcting such revisions, as that process must inevitably lead to the collapse of their worldview and belief system. Hence, no means is too large to protect their truth. The chain of fraud is particularly strong where theocracies have had their hands on state archives—that is, throughout the former territories of the Roman and Persian Empire.

Heresies are building blocks that pave the path to violence and terrorism. The identification of heresies and their destruction is critical in a religion’s long-term prospects. Evidence of other beliefs, cultural treasures, books, and people must be destroyed thoroughly and without mercy; this destruction continues still today.

Because of the scope of The Great Leap-Fraud, it is a matter of certainty that it is riddled with errors—some small, others catastrophic. However, striving for perfection would have inevitably led to these findings never being published. Having said that, the errors can be no worse than the ones of the universally accepted version of religious history, which is known to have been penetrated with fraudulent edits, rewrites, inventions, fabrications, and plagiarism. My hope is that Renaissance historians who question the current version of church history will pick up the line of thought of this book and see their findings in a new light. It will possibly help them shape a more accurate concept of history than the consensus today. This will lead to a better understanding of economic and social history that is desperately needed in the global fight against poverty and terrorism.

Professor Andrew Rippin of the University of Victoria explained to me that Scholarship tends to work in slow, minute steps—and paradigm shifts are often only recognized after the fact. The Great Leap-Fraud proposes such a shift for the Judaic religions, and it is not certain that it will hold the test of unbiased, professional scrutiny. However, today’s knowledge about religious history is advanced enough that it is commonly accepted that much of it came from authors who must be mistrusted—Eusebius being a prime example. What is not known is what an alternative path would look like.

Put differently, what many professors in biblical studies and history are teaching is patently false.

Understandably, that notion is hard to swallow. The here-proposed version of religious history shows a single secular motif for the invention of all three Judaic faiths that makes more sense than the spiritual idea of divine intervention by a singular God who comes out of nowhere in the historical context. Here, religious history is connected to real people and Jewish national interests. In the version supported by the consensus, neither the order of events nor the events themselves add up, and the best argument is that the less sense it makes, the more divinely inspired it must have been. The consensus of the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam appeared out of order and full of unrelated and isolated events, so much so that only with a leap of faith can the religious history of the consensus be swallowed by students interested in the past. The troubling thought is that nothing of value may have been learned.

There might be a temptation to believe that a rational review of sacred texts is off-limits and can only lead to religion-bashing. Not so. Conducted with reason, it leads to a respectful assessment of the mistakes that civilizations have made with religious freedom and religious oppression or with religious indifference, and it provides an intellectual framework on how religious freedoms can be upheld without risking to eventually compromising all other freedoms. Religious freedom must include the freedom of others to respectfully assess religion and write about their findings. It doesn’t make sense that religion is free to preach the truth of Jesus Christ, for example, but others are not at liberty to publish their finding that the worshippers follow a fictional character and that they may have fallen prey to a Ponzi scheme to redeem Israel. Freedom is a two-part system: exercise of freedom and scrutiny of freedom. Only in the balance of those two elements can freedom ultimately prevail.

I would have thought that protecting freedoms should have been the ultimate goal of people’s governments. The key to this should have been to protect the proper functioning of an unhindered balance between the exercise of and scrutiny of freedom. The religious glorification of poverty not only creates people who are not free but fosters humanitarian disasters. Poor people are not free, and glorifying poverty amounts to an effective weapon of mass destruction and to terrorism. Hence, the call for poverty by religious organizations needs limiting and condemning.

The clues for what may have really happened in the past are in the background noise of the historic documents. Social and commercial contracts identified the profiteers, and the motives were often in the outcomes of events. The money trail tells a story of framing others and defrauding entire nations of their history. New so-called realities were relentlessly preached through the spiritual networks of the synagogues, the churches, and the mosques until truth and myth became indistinguishable.

The realization that ideas neither come out of the blue nor penetrate a society quickly helped guide through the maze. Fourth-century arguments did not make sense in first-century documents, and the history of thought is evolutionary and not as chaotic as commonly believed.

Agreeing to notoriously false concepts is much more comforting to people’s herd instincts than forming new concepts and being in danger of isolation, oppression, or termination. Humans seek social communities that think alike, naturally engaging in groupthink. While The Great Leap-Fraud seems to offer a view from outside the box, it is merely embedded in an increasingly secular culture and built on what others have found over the past centuries. It is the inevitable result of the spark that inspired a religious revolution 2,300 years ago.

Volume I of The Great Leap-Fraud looks into the evolution of faith and examines how the ideas of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah fit into the religious ideas in the surrounding cultures and which religion may have influenced the other. Historical and archaeological evidence provides the pointers that the prophet Jeremiah must be out of order and that his placement needs exploring. His writings reflect Hellenistic moral virtues of Aristotle that were carried to the Jews with the conquest of Canaan by Alexander the Great. Other ideas were adopted by the Jews from their former Persian host. The latter may have displaced them from their former home in Chaldea.

The economic messages in the background of the Torah push the timeframe for the creation of the original scripture into the late fourth or early third century BC, shortly after Alexander’s death. Seemingly later biblical writings come across as being unaware of the details of the Torah, pointing at a concentrated effort of multiple teams who were working under time constraints for a common purpose. The Torah and the Hebrew Bible were likely written for the Library of Alexandria in order to establish the land claim to Israel and to defraud the Palestinians of their home. It is in the context of the efforts by the Alexandrian library to collect all books that Judaism first appears in the historic evidence.

It seems to be generally overlooked in the Torah that the text systematically works its way through eradicating one tribe after another, until the musical chair ends with only one tribe left: the Jews, intent to grab the land of Canaan. As the tribes were terminated, no evidence of their existence was needed. The motifs and methods of the Torah point to the establishment of everlasting leadership through a theocratic form of governmental organization by the Jewish Levite tribe, the descendants of Moses, his brother, Aaron, the Korahites, and a few other tribes. The absence of archaeological findings needs to be viewed in the context of the path of destruction evidenced in the narrative of the Torah. Rather than coming up with forged evidence, the Torah repeatedly states how the evidence got lost, burned, or eaten—it simply vanished as an integral element of a plot. Evidence that should have immediately led to the creation of shrines and temples was forgotten. Mount Sinai, which was never identified, and the missing tombs of Moses and Aaron are two of the most immediate examples.

The initial five books of the scripture were largely transformed from earlier historic documents and other religions, into which the Jewish story was inserted and fabricated. The Torah is probably the oldest evidence of plagiarism with the intent to provide a doctrinal framework that justifies all means for the end of Israel. This includes genocide and ethnic cleansing; mass murdering of women and children; destruction of entire cities; and, first and foremost, the rooting out of the Palestinians.

In the historic context, the Ten Commandments come across as a criminal code with odd priorities. The second commandment, which prohibits idolatry, has a specific purpose that is more important than any other (excepting the first, which restricts believers to one God). Listening to what modern Jews and Christians have to say about the meaning of the commandments and comparing their opinions with what the scripture says reveals that modern believers have lost the historic connection to these laws. As the literal evidence of evidence, the second commandment delivers an explanation as to why there is no evidence. However, according to their own scripture, the Jews had fallen off their faith repeatedly. Hence, if their stories held a grain of truth, there would still be ample evidence of Jewish idols across the land of Canaan. That is not so.

The scripture provides clues that the Jews were originally star worshippers. It is likely that the Jews had incorporated star- and stone-worshipping rituals—most visibly the ceremonial walk around an object (the circumambulation) and the foundation stone of their temple. This stone, a rock, plays also an important role in Christianity when Jesus proclaims to build his church on this rock, a saying that would only make sense if the Jewish temple had been razed.

Critical pieces of evidence are found in the scripture that are important building blocks for the emergence of Islam. As the Jewish religion fragmented, the Muslims ended up preserving the pre-existing Jewish rituals in their traditions, while the Rabbinic Jews lost them due to the demolition of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem in the first century. Because of the spread of Rabbinic Judaism through the Roman Empire, the star worshippers were not recognized as Jewish by writers accustomed to the Rabbinic culture.

The path of destruction of evidence makes it impossible to verify the Jewish biblical claims. All that remains of their ancient history is the scripture itself, a text that merits distrust in regard to the nonspiritual messages. Unfortunately, plagiarism and serial fraud do not make the spiritual messages trustworthy, either. While the spiritual component of the Judaic religions is not the subject of this work, the inventions include the Genesis; the Exodus; David or Solomon; the first temple; the prophets; and the divine inspiration of the Levites. These tales were constructed around pre-existing histories, leading to the greatest fraud ever committed upon humankind: Israel.

The confusions of the Jewish Messiah with the Christian Messiah rest on the Greek word Khristos and provide for a clue to the evolution of early Christianity. The two Messiahs boil down to one identity, the Khristos, who was used differently for Jews and Christians for the same purpose: the redemption of Israel. With that goal in mind, some of the most beautiful stories in the Torah turn out to be cruel acts of genocide with an intolerable hatred toward mankind, most notably represented by the doomed Palestinians. It is the Jews’ mission to grab the land of the Palestinians—a mission that has been going on for 2,300 years and continues today. For eternity, the Palestinians find themselves on a Jewish death list: the Jewish scripture, which is deployed to Jewish children from kindergarten. This hatred unfortunately survived even when the Jews finally accepted natural-born Israelites into their nation; the Palestinians were excluded. This biblical hatred has been the foundation of a culture of terrorism that continues today. The promise of the land of Canaan by the God of the Israelites has lain at the heart of the Israeli conflicts since World War II. The so-called Promised Land includes today’s Sinai in the south, most of Jordan in the east, Lebanon, most of Syria in the north, and the portion of Iraq that lies west of the Euphrates River. The motif for the creation of the Torah was a land grab from the Palestinians and their neighbors.

Central questions include who directed the effort to create the scripture and how they may have organized the fraud. Two Jewish career politicians with a hidden agenda had made it to top government ranks in the Persian Empire of the late fourth century BC, Mordecai and Nehemiah. Together with the prophet Ezra, they directed the effort to father the Torah and most of the Hebrew Bible. Three Jewish sects with opposing worldviews had worked on the scripture within a timeframe of only months, not enough time to weed out inconsistencies and contradictions. Its composition, looking like a draft, boiled down to inventing a Jewish religion out of fragments of others that ensured these sects the claim to their own land for eternity. The Israelites combined and retold—in a manner of speaking—various stories from a thousand-year-old memory that was not theirs. From the beginning, a fourth group, the Samaritans, rejected the story of the others and thought that the Torah and the Temple Mount were a fraud.

The social and economic messages in the Hebrew Bible provide a strong intellectual framework for industriousness, but they take a turn toward modesty and progressively shift away from wealth creation as the work progresses. This shift of heart is due to differing credos of the three sects who shared in the composition; these respective credos are reflected in each group’s sections of the resulting Hebrew Bible. The Torah was written in the name of success and sheer determination, while the last books of the Hebrew Bible were written in the name of spiritual beings. The Apocrypha, which means something like the secret books that are only available to insiders, contains those books that were written before the advent of Jesus Christ and were used by the Catholic Church, but not by most Jewish sects and also not by the Protestants or the Orthodox Christians. The books of the Apocrypha glorify poverty with increasing intensity. This idea of Christianity was not born out of spiritualism, but from the intention to erode the foundation of the Roman Empire by rejecting their way of life. To reach their end, the Jews—more precisely, the Levite Korahites—hijacked the doctrines of the Essens sect, a marginal spiritual group that was among the founders of the biblical writings. Then they deployed a professional propaganda machinery with missionaries and prophets to spread the message among those most susceptible, the poor and disadvantaged of the Roman Empire. Likewise, the Apocrypha increasingly rejected everything dear to Romans. Even the oldest books of Christianity turned their backs on wealth to the point where money and God were irreconcilable.

Ultimately, the Jewish strategy worked by rejecting the Roman social values. However, the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the succeeding Dark Ages were a product of a sudden invasion of the Arian Christian faith into the West by the Goths. The fall was preceded by centuries of sectarian unrest in the East, costing humanity 1,200 years of progress and millions of lives. The Arian teachings in the West rested on the Paulinic letters and in particular on the book of Romans, the book that stands out in the scripture as entertaining the deepest hatred against mankind. These teachings triggered a social devolution and a succession of humanitarian disasters, highlighting a direct connection to modern terrorism.

Confusions about Khristos

During the Herodian period in the first century AD, the Jews refused to submit to Roman rule but engaged in terrorism instead. The historian Flavius Josephus seems to have been one of the Jewish leaders of the revolt that led to the First Jewish-Roman War between 66 and 70 AD. The assessment of his version of history reveals passages about Jesus Christ that had been fraudulently added to the original text a few hundred years later. The origin of those texts was communicated unintentionally through ideas that can be pinned down to originate in the fourth or even the sixth century AD. Josephus also confirmed the Roman custom of crucifying rebels and criminals at the time of the Jewish-Roman wars—by the thousands.

The search for Jesus’s historicity uncovered a number of surprises. First, messianic confusions during the first and into the second century may mislead later interpreters. Second, the Gospel may have had a much different purpose than what the consensus proclaims: rejecting the Roman Empire through a refusal to participate in its economy and society. Third, the New Testament may have been fraudulently built unto the historic text of Josephus around the turn of the second century—in particular when it comes to the rescue of a crucified friend of his. The Gospel was written in an era when the Temple of Jerusalem had already been destroyed. Likewise, the role of the apostle Peter, who was handed the keys to the kingdom of heaven, was not only different from the Christian consensus, but also astonishingly obvious once the dots are connected: Peter and Jesus, both Jewish high priests, were standing beside the Foundation Stone of the destroyed Holy Temple of Jerusalem, the only church that was supposed to exist. Jesus passed the temple keys to Peter. The latter never visited Rome, but was instead supposed to be the apostle who represented Jerusalem, the city the Jews had been banned from by the Romans.

Saint Paul (Saulus), in turn, may have been a member of the royal Agrippa family with a similar agenda in mind: the redemption of Israel by rejecting Roman society, however more extreme. He went further than the Gospel, rejecting friends, wives, and children. The Gospel may have been commissioned in a Jewish kickoff meeting in Jamnia in 93 AD to Saint Paul, who seems to have maintained connections to the exiled Jews in the Arab Peninsula. The authors of the Gospel had the same goal in mind as the writers of the Old Testament: the redemption of Israel.

Despite the alleged persecution of Christians in Rome under Nero, neither Jesus nor Christianity (at least as the religion is understood today) existed during the first century. To the contrary, the evidence points at a fire that broke out in the Jewish business quarter in Rome, possibly as a carefully orchestrated terrorist attack by the Jews. Even if the Christians had existed, they had no business to attend to in the shop district of Rome, where the fire started. Instead, no means was too great to achieve the Jewish goal. In this environment, the Jewish terrorist cells, the Zealots and Sicarii, were role models on how to fight a war without an army. While these terrorists were carried by the Jewish population, nobody admitted membership in them publicly. Like the Taliban today, they were protected, hidden, and provisioned by the public. They struck out of nowhere and vanished into the crowd unseen as heroes, the al-Qaeda of the time.

The Third Jewish-Roman War may have played a pivotal role in the rise of Christianity. As the Jews lost their last stance, they were in search of a new identity, and the former teachers of Judaism turned into the teachers of the new Christianity. Jewish leaders who had been relocated from Jerusalem into the Roman Empire in the wake of the various conflicts may have established centers of dissent in the West. A relocation of the Agrippas to Cologne could have facilitated the invasion of the Goths and Franks into the Roman Empire by invitation of the Jews later down the road.

The Jews’ hatred for the Roman Empire; their persistent, rebellious nature; and their culture of terrorism provided the impetus for their being singled out and persecuted through the ages. Logically, the Roman Empire looked at a Jewish-induced Christianity and its scripture as a danger to humanity. This reasoning is missing in most history books. The Roman conviction that Christianity represented hatred toward mankind may have led to spot persecutions, but it is important to distinguish between persecutions of Jews who believed in a khristos to come and Christians who believed in Jesus Christ. Some of the reports about persecutions coincide with places where Jewish leaders had been relocated—in particular, Vienne in present-day France.

Christianity, as a rebel faith that rejected Roman society, held a strong appeal for the disadvantaged in the empire throughout the East. The Jewish (and later, the Christian) sectarian conflicts had put an end to the expansion of the Roman Empire. The persecutions of the first and early second century were against the Jews as enemies of the empire, not against Christians.

Christianity penetrated the Western Roman Empire much less extensively than is generally believed, even up to the fourth century. However, the city of Rome stood as the Christian symbol for everything evil in society. The new faith had been imported into the West from North Africa during the persecutions at the turn of the fourth century. Before, the language differences and Western Paganism had combined to provide an impenetrable barrier.

The East had a different religious evolution than the West. It was marked by Jewish sectarian conflicts, terrorism, and rebellions even before the advent of the Messiah, and the Jews only intensified the resistance over time. The birthplace of Christianity was neither Jerusalem nor Rome. Instead, it was probably in Nicomedia (near Constantinople) for Jewish Christianity and in the cities of Alexandria and Carthage in North Africa for the Christianity of the Divine Trinity.¹ Even deep into the second century, it is unclear whether Christianity, as it came to be understood, had split off from the Jews because the early reports suggest a messiah to come and not one who had already arrived. Due to their persecution, there is a high probability that many Jews morphed into the group who founded the early Christian church. After all, the Christian bishoprics in the East traced their linages to one of the twelve apostles—the nonexisting Jewish apostles, that is. They represent the twelve tribes of Israel.

While the empire’s society was not unlike the modern West, drowned in rampant debt and submitting to a lifestyle of excess and indecency, it underwent two shifts of paradigm all at once: the swing from expansion to preservation and the shift from glorification of wealth to glorification of poverty. After first problems with Christians² surfaced in the army, a smallpox outbreak that raked away millions of lives initiated the slow decline of the city of Rome. The Jews were believed to be responsible for the calamity. On the other hand, the rampant corruption in the empire, which was finally auctioned off by the Praetorian Guard, may have been a result of the anarchy following the disaster. Soon thereafter, the new Christianity was looked at as a danger for society by the emperors.

By the time of the Plague of Cyprian in 251, the world of thought had changed for a sizable portion of the disadvantaged masses in the East. The Jewish subversion; structural weaknesses; the drying up of the flow of loot from the expansionist era; outside aggressions; civil war; a smallpox pandemic; and the successive economic contraction opened a new chapter for the Romans: the Crisis of the Third Century. It almost brought the empire to its knees, and the Jews were close to achieving their goal. For the Christians, a simple message proved attractive: the world was about to come to an end, and the only way for salvation was to be redeemed by Jesus Christ and to live in absolute poverty. The emperors recognized a Christian threat, but they did not seem to have identified the drivers behind it. Emperor Diocletian decided to persecute Christians and Manicheans and allowed the Jews to regain status.

In the absence of Christian disturbances, little was going on in the West, but spot-persecutions were executed in the East. The incarceration, torture, and execution of Christian and Manichean leaders who refused to recant would later be magnified by Christian writers into the Great Persecution between 303 and 312, as if there were mass executions in the style of the Jewish Holocaust. In reality, persecutions were part of the scriptural belief system, which would naturally lead the Christian writers to exaggerations. The evidence of those leaders who recanted and survived is much stronger than of those who may have stubbornly perished. Instead, Emperor Galerius worked on a large-scale effort to revive the traditional Roman religions and to revive the temples across his domain in the East.

The West was busy restoring the borders along the Rhine and Danube rivers against the Goths’ immigrations. Pretend Christians constituted a strong portion of the population in the Eastern Roman Empire. Those continued to reject the Apocrypha, only accepted the Gospel of Matthew according to the Hebrews, and relied on the Hebrew Bible with the Torah. This led to an entirely different message that was closer to Hellenistic ideals than the Paulinic Christian outlook. Still, they fiercely rejected the Roman way of life.

A group of Christians and Manicheans fled from North Africa by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar into Spanish Andalusia. The persecutions on the Black Continent were the reason Christianity came upon the West. These African Christians had absorbed the Manichean idea of Jesus being a divinity. It is in the context of the persecutions that historic evidence about Jesus’s divinity first emerges.

Emperor Galerius finally changed his strategy and proclaimed a general toleration of Christians during the spring of 311. Everything conceivable had been tried, from oppression to freedom to leading the faith. Oppression and persecution triggered compassion and an apologetic imperial behavior for a century to come.

There were many more Pagan emperors in the succession than what the consensus suggests—first and foremost, Constantine the Great. Without a solid understanding of the emperors’ religious positions, the decisions by Roman leaders for or against the further advance of Christianity are impossible to be understood, particularly in light of the fact that most emperors of the fourth century still held the title of the Pagan pontiff, the Roman equivalent to the Catholic pope. The understanding of what superstition or magic is, for example, depends on the view of the issuer of a law and on the dominant culture of a country. It is thus imperative to understand whether a law was issued from the point of view of a Christian or from a Pagan leader.

There is evidence from rulers outside of the empire that it was common for the appointments of leaders of any religion to be approved by the head of the state. Likewise, the empire may have changed its strategy from persecution to trying to control the Christians where elected leaders and internal regulations had to be approved by the emperor. Hence, it cannot be entirely refuted that Constantine may have had a hand in some of the less understandable decisions, if only by appointment of a bishop of the Divine Trinity to preside over the First Council of Nicea in 325 AD; however, Constantine would have exerted such influence not as a Christian, but as a Pagan ruler.

Constantine had provided for religious freedom for all faiths. However, only those few sects that survived were telling the stories for posterity. Instead of a senseless demolition and looting of Pagan temples, the events point to a relocation of Pagan temples as part of the construction of the new capital in Constantinople. Pagan temples were still being built elsewhere. To commemorate the foundation of the city of Constantinople, the Column of Constantine was erected and crowned by a statue of Constantine depicting the Pagan god Apollo. Among a long list, a Pagan statue—an idol—is one of the pieces of evidence that demonstrate a mismatch of historical consensus with imperial actions. Under the same imperial pretense of religious freedom, the Jews’ situation had also changed for the better. The main difference between East and West was the absence of Christian sectarian groups in the West.

There was a first failed attempt to establish a papacy in the city of Rome during Constantine’s reign. However, the episode is connected to the usurper Maxentius in Rome as part of a strategy against Constantine. It was a period of high creativity in producing evidence for the early existence of Christianity under the guiding hand of Eusebius, a notorious inventor of church history and serial forger. The falsifications may include pretty much everything known today about Jesus in Jerusalem; about Peter and Paul in Rome; and about church history during the first three centuries. To put the extent of these Christian forgeries into perspective, they went as far as signing over the entire Western Empire as a gift to the Christians even before Constantine had built his New Rome, the city of Constantinople. The Universal Church was now strengthening through alliances of various sects and agreements under one doctrine and one official Gospel that resembled the Protestant version of today’s Bible.

The newfound religious freedom triggered a missionary race into the West. However, the period also brought to life the all-dividing question of whether Jesus was God or mere man, here defined as Christians of the Divine Trinity or Arians. Western Europe remained silent, and Christianity may have advanced quietly and slowly under one doctrine of Jesus being God, while the East plunged deeper into sectarian conflicts. The doctrinal decision at the First Council of Nicea had come about through a backroom deal with Bishop Hosius, who had been leading the North African refugees across the Strait of Gibraltar. Christianity’s dark past must have somehow been exposed: the Levite Korahite Jews, who had been in control of Christianity, now lost the leadership. The decision, where the official version of Christianity submitted to a creed that Jesus was God, amounted to a coup d’état, which was later responded to with an attempted countercoup under Eusebius. How the former could have happened remains a mystery, but it almost seems as if it represents a fraudulent merge of events into a fiction. It is otherwise inexplicable that a minority that was outnumbered fiftyfold could have imposed its doctrines on the majority, assuming that the Arians were present in the respective councils to begin with and that the original creed is extant. This last thought opens the prospect, left unexplored as inconsequential for the goals of this book, that three entirely different Christianities were at work: first, the original Jewish Arian Christianity; second, the relatively new Christianity of the Divine Trinity, having originated in North Africa; and third, the Paulinic Christianity, launched by Eusebius, a so-called Doctor of the Church, and brought about in Western Europe by the invading Goths.

In the last quarter of the fourth century, Christianity of the Divine Trinity, determined to shake off its connection to the Jews, deliberately changed rituals and customs to be different from the latter. The Roman approach of self-determination was ever more replaced with the Christian concept of fate, the will of God. As the vaults of the empire emptied, the churches were filling with treasures up to their roofs.

The Germanic Goths who had converted to Eusebius’s Paulinic Christianity pressed harder across the Danube River starting around the second half of the fourth century. They caused chaos in the area and a series of Roman humiliations. The Goths brought along the strongest glorification of poverty of all the Christian sects, fitting to their traditional lifestyle. They were able to build a bridgehead that formed what is here called the Bulgarian Wedge. It soon split the Roman Empire into East and West.

Extraordinary embarrassments of the Roman army happened under the military leadership of Emperor Theodosius the Great, while the consensus is that Theodosius was in retirement. He is mistakenly attributed to having lifted Christianity to the exclusive state religion. His respective laws were part of an imperial strategy against the Arian Goths in the Balkan region—the same Goths who had brought repeated defeats to Theodosius as a military commander. Meanwhile, he had cosigned a law that declared Christianity in the city of Rome a heresy. Theodosius may have opened one of the darkest eras of the Roman Empire, which also marked its end as a union: ethnic cleansing of the Arian Christian Goths with the help of the Divine Trinity.

The rising paradox of the Roman Empire under Theodosius was that it could no longer restore peace from within and could also not keep aggressions at bay from the northeast or the east. The northern and western flanks of the empire at the Danube and Rhine Rivers were unprotected against invaders of the same ethnic background as the Roman mercenaries. Soon after Theodosius’s death, the consequences of the culmination of the French Wedge; the Bulgarian Wedge; a boy emperor in the West; a Pagan city of Rome, among others; continued sectarian conflicts in the East; financial ruin; and enriched friends of Theodosius in Spain brought the empire to its knees.

After the emperor’s strategy against the Goths had failed, both West and East were up for grabs—literally. The West was conquered by a walk in the park, and the East was saved by the walls of Constantinople. Two generals of the Roman Empire, one a Goth and the other a Vandal, pulled the strings from within East and West. Even Alaric, the new king of the Goths and invader, was an insider. He had been trained at the imperial court in Constantinople under Theodosius. Consequently, the Goths could simply walk about the empire as far down as to Spain and up to England after having bounced off the walls that protected Constantinople. When the Romans realized they had fallen prey to a conspiracy, they went after family members of the Gothic mercenaries. This led to the desertion of the Roman mercenary troops and also of hordes of slaves, culminating in the sack of Rome in 410. Rome was taken literally overnight with an onlooking Roman army.

Now the West was suddenly Christianized, but in much different ways than the consensus suggests. It was according to the wrong belief that Jesus was a mere man—Paulinic Arianism. In the wake of the fall of the city of Rome, as many as 800,000 Pagans and Jews were allowed to flee but went missing. In all likelihood, they moved farther west into Spain, bringing unprecedented prosperity to the Iberian Peninsula.

As the societal structures of East and West had been turned upside down, a new kind of society was about to emerge in the West—one that glorified death over life on earth. The ideas of Augustine’s The City of God made all the difference in the West and helped plunge society into what is commonly known as the Dark Ages, which was rather an age of a papal kingdom in control of life, food, and information. It was The City of God that was experimentally diffused by the clergy in the West, dedicated to the Paulinic letters of the Gospel and wiping out all competing thought. The East was untouched by Augustine’s ideas and remained comparatively wealthy, although at a much lower level than under the Roman high culture. The former trap of the Jews to erode the empire had turned against them, as they were now branded murderers of Jesus. Luckily, Augustine did not call for their persecution. Life on earth was punishment enough for them.

The Jews had to adapt to the new realities quickly and were now fully exposed to the wrath of the Christians throughout the territory of the former empire. Hence, many left for places where business was better.

Roots of Islam

To trace the roots of Islam, we need to rewind to the beginnings of Judaism. The prophet Elijah is of particular importance in the emergence of Islam, as he appears in the linages of both tribal groups, the Saracen and the Quraysh. The latter will eventually claim spiritual leadership for the Muslims. It is the miracle man Elijah who provides for the strongest connection back to the Levite Korahite Jews. They were still pursuing the same goal as with Judaism and Christianity: the redemption of Israel. The Jews had looked at Elijah as a messiah, another son of God, a khristos, and a redeemer of Israel. Now that the West had fallen but the East kept its grip on Palestine, the Levite Quraysh (alias Korahites) needed a new messiah.

The Arab Peninsula was an attractive and vast hiding place for Jewish terrorist groups, minimizing their chance of detection. When these groups could not achieve their goal of establishing Israel from within the Roman Empire, the Jewish terrorist cells chose to launch stings and attacks from the deserts around the Roman borders. These were executed in particular by the Jewish fundamentalists and their terrorist cells, the Zealots and the Sicariis. While Arabia was never really integrated into the Roman Empire, it had apparently been given to King Herod the Great, the former Messiah of the Jews. It seems that much of the Red Sea area has been in Jewish hands ever since. The Nabataean city of Petra served as the hidden gate into the desert hideouts. Other Jews worked themselves up the ranks of the Roman administration and infiltrated the leadership, only to strike and backstab their hosts when the opportunity to come out ahead presented itself. After the ordeals of the three Jewish-Roman wars, those who survived possibly also ended up in the Red Sea area in larger groups.

Jewish nations sprang up at various places along the borders of the Roman Empire. Many Pharisees transformed to the Rabbinic Judaism that is common today. They had all the reasons to change their approach while retaining their unshakable faith in the redemption of Israel. Many Jews fled to Oman, Yemen, and Ethiopia, establishing large colonies along the overland trade routes on both coasts of the Red Sea. Rabbinic Judaism was predominant in the Roman Empire, which is why they inherited the designation of being Jews. Because of that identification, the ones outside of the empire were no longer recognized as Jews but rather as Saracens, Ishmaelites, and Qurayza (the Korahites, alias Quraysh).

The earlier Ishmaelites were the survivors of the Maccabeean Revolt, and the Saracens were those that left Jerusalem under John the Baptist and in the wake of the three Jewish-Roman wars. Among the Ishmaelite Saracens, the idea that Jesus survived the crucifixion was carried on. It would serve the Muslims to reject the crucifixion. Islam would also come to reject the idea that Jesus could be a God. They relied on the early Christian concept of Jesus being the Messiah to redeem Israel. It was the original Arian Christian stance that would find its continuance and revival in Islam.

From the northern parts of Africa, the Sinai, and the Arab Peninsula, so-called philosophers and prophets emerged with a strong focus on anti-Roman doctrines. Another Judaic religion, the Manichaeans, was founded by the Saracen Mani. Mani’s Sacred Books of Manichaeism were based on the same rejectionist texts that had been used by the Essens Jews. He was born in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, then the Persian capital and home to thousands of Jewish refugees from Israel, but also capital of the Persian Empire. The twin city would also come to fame as the capital of an Arian Christian papacy and as the likely birthplace of the Muslim faith, sparked by a schism that can be traced back to the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD. The Levite Korahites (alias Quraysh) had dispatched one prophet after another to subvert the Roman Empire’s culture to redeem the nation of Israel. Sectarian conflicts were an intended symptom of their strategy to divide and rule.

The fourth century saw intensifying swoops and successful plundering by the Saracens, naturalized Arabs who became known as Saracens, Ishmaelites, or Arabs. The name Saracens denotes that they did not descend from Sarah, wife of the biblical Abraham. Two distinct Saracen groups were to emerge: those of Abraham’s maidservant and second wife, Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, who are recognized either as Ishmaelites, as Persian Saracens, as Lakhmids, or later as Shi’ites;³ and those of the third wife of Abraham, Keturah, who would be branded Syrian Saracens, Ghassanids, or later Sunnis.⁴ As Christianity had arrived at the northwestern tip of the Arab Peninsula and in the trading center of the city of Petra, the Ghassanid Saracens in the western region of the Arab Peninsula converted to Melchite Christianity.⁵ They turned out to be useful partners of the Byzantine Empire and enemies of the Persians as well as the Ishmaelite Saracens in the eastern Arab Peninsula.

Alexandria had been a center of Jews for centuries. At the beginning of the fifth century, the Jews were thrown out of the city, and their synagogues and assets were seized. Two of the few possibilities of shelter for the Jews were Persia and the Red Sea area, where they would be received by fellow Jews with a helping hand.

The seminal moment in the emergence of Islam was the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon. A compromise formula was conceived to appease East and West. The council found a new formula with two natures: Jesus was fully man and fully God. The Orthodox Church in the East was to adopt the political compromise of Jesus with two natures, while the Arians in East and West rejected the idea altogether. It would turn into the last stance of the Arian belief—a stance that would lead to extraordinary successes by their version of faith, culminating in Islam.

Emperor Marcian’s watch over the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon had strong implications. The emperor’s exit strategy from the dangers of a theocracy in the East was to send the churches into poverty and persecute those who paid for ecclesiastic offices (a corrupt practice known as simony). Bishops were no longer allowed to engage in business but were exempted from military service. The poorhouses were placed under the authority of bishops, which established a social role for the churches and provided them with recruits. First and foremost, Marcian recognized that the self-appointed poverty of the Christians had to be remedied by the Christians themselves. Monks and nuns would from now on be excommunicated if they were to marry.

The renewed influx of the Arian Vandals into Africa presented an opportunity for the Jews to move back into Jerusalem. It seems that the Levite Korahites had occupied Jerusalem between about 460 and 480 AD. Through the late fifth century, many churches in the Middle East fell off the Orthodox doctrines of Constantinople and maintained their Arian or Semi-Arian beliefs. The Melchite Syrian Christian Church saturated the area most intensely between the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers. In its north, the cities of Edessa (a Christian and Jewish stronghold) and Harran were part of it, along with portions of the provinces of Babylonia and Chaldea in the south. The more compromise a formula embodied, the more the Arians and Melchites rejected it on fundamentalist grounds. Forced conversions of Jews and Arian or Melchite Christians would lead them to rethink their position altogether, bringing about the foundation of a new, unified Arian faith: Islam.

The Abyss

Cracks in Heaven

Structurally, the Byzantine Empire had been reduced to a manageable, defendable, and relatively compact territory with an unscathed hierarchy. The universal Christian belief was different from the Western Arian (and later also Catholic and Protestant) doctrine of predetermination, where all humans deserved to be destined to hell, except for a few select. In the East, the original sin was cleansed through baptism. Dealing with sinful habits was an individual’s affair, and with improvement one could become more Christ-like, a better Christian.

The main differences between the competing faiths in East and West were the number of sects that advertised their cause to potential believers, the composition of the sects’ scriptures, and the way they approached those scriptures. The Greek version of the Old Testament⁶ was taken straight from the Jews, and the text of the Gospel was written for a Judaic church. Many Eastern sects based their religion on the Torah and on the collection of those books that were identified in Volume I as the Pharisee part of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. In addition, they prioritized the Gospel of Matthew according to the Hebrews. For these sects, the motif of social rejection was weaker than the one found in the Paulinic books. While the Roman customs were rejected through the Gospel of Matthew, the message was more focused on the Pharisee ideals of wealth creation and the protection, by God, of those who made a living. The Byzantine Empire contained a high percentage of forced Jewish converts, who founded a number of Christian sects with the same scriptural foundation as Judaism but with slightly different interpretations. Some sects in the East provided for a sort of stealth faith that allowed the Jews to evade persecution after the Jewish-Roman wars.

The Bible of the Universal Church, including all of the books of the modern form of the scripture, was supposedly ratified in 368 after careful review of and adoption to the desired Eastern doctrines, including the rejectionist books. Despite the inclusion of those books, the Universal Church was more lenient than the Arian church in the city of Rome, which was based on the Gothic Bible with the letters of Saint Paul and Augustine’s City of God. As had been custom under the Romans before, Eastern bishops incorporated local traditions into their policies. Customs superseded the written word and were upheld with diligence. This kept the discourse alive and ensured colorful sectarian conflicts. New Eastern doctrines had to be universally accepted by all fathers of the church.

Contrary to the approach in Rome, questions that were unclear were left open because the truth would manifest itself over time. Things that were clear were vigorously upheld. A margin of error was met with greater tolerance and with debate and discourse, often resulting in open conflicts. As long as the religious teachings were not contradicted, the individual was free to a private theological conscience.⁷ The Universal Church did not require anyone to be of the official faith to earn God’s gift of salvation. The mercy of God was for all, and the free will of the individual, over which God had no power, could accept the gift of God or reject it. In the East, an intentional refusal of the church’s dogma was required for a heresy. Unintentional errors would not be enough to brand someone a heretic. Demonstrating the wide chasm between East and West, the Universal Church was so critical of what they saw to be Augustine’s errors that they declared him a heretic.

Compared to the West, extreme religious decisions were not the norm. Many cities still showed signs of urban life toward the end of the sixth century, as shall be shown, although they were in obvious decline. Concentrated local conflicts might have been the cause of some imperial restrictions. The historian Hugh Kennedy noted in The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East,

In 502 the emperor Anastasius abolished the spring celebrations in the theatre at Edessa,⁸ probably in response to the opinion of local ecclesiastics like Jacob of Sarug,⁹ who denounced the performances as dancing, sport and music, the miming of lying tales, teaching which destroys the mind, poems which are not true, troublesome and confused sounds, melodies to attract children, ordered and captivating songs, skillful chants, lying canticles composed according to the folly invented by the Greeks.¹⁰

Given the importance of Harran, with its Chaldean Temple of Sin, the area of Edessa and Harran might have been engulfed in Jewish and Christian fundamentalism. Edessa used to be home to the Arian¹¹ school of thought, but also served as the cradle of various Jewish and Arian or Semi-Arian (Melchite) sects.¹² The area was a hotbed of dissent against the creed of the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon.

The senate of the Western Roman Empire had been toothless for some time, and a theocracy had consumed and reduced it to giving church decisions the so-called official stamp of approval. Ironically, the last decree issued by the senate was against simony¹³ in papal elections. The church in Rome under the Arian Goths had turned into a vehicle of politics and exploitation of the believers. While the overwhelming majority of the population was dirt poor, a few were unbelievably rich and enjoyed an opulent lifestyle by manipulating an illiterate and impoverished population through controlling their food supply.

With the appearance of the Goths and Augustine on the stage of history, a permanent rift had divided the Universal Church from the church in the city of Rome. Ulfilas’s Bible for the Goths was similarly structured as the modern version and was based on Eusebius’s Paulinic Arian teachings. Jesus was man, society was rejected, and poverty was glorified. Augustine’s doctrines burdened humanity with eternal guilt and intellectual, as well as material, poverty. As a consequence, the West fell into economic and social collapse.

The scripture was taken literally, like undisputed science, while methodical knowledge was rejected with the added curiosity that the Bible had not existed in Latin until recently. Scholarship turned out to be a threat for the narrow-minded church in the West. According to Augustine,

the good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the Devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.¹⁴

That is not to say that the East did welcome progress. Due to the importance of Jewish traditions, innovation found it difficult to penetrate their minds as well. However, the West, influenced by the Augustinian ideas of The City of God and by the writings of Saint Paul, went down the path of total rejection of anything that moderners would term as civilization.

Soon, Italy was to re-emerge with city-states as Cities of God, a chain of small, vegetative theocracies, turning the development clock back by over a thousand years. The church in Rome was much concerned with thought control, dictatorial leadership, and clamping down on heresy, which could be whatever the church said it was. Thus, in doubt, the church leaders clarified its Western doctrine for the clergy, and the masses had to strictly follow suit. Its doctrines left no room for dissent, and they were efficiently dispersed through sermons for the growing church clergy.

The historian Edward Gibbon described the situation in Italy:

The acquisition of knowledge, the exercise of our reason or fancy, and the cheerful flow of unguarded conversation may employ the leisure of a liberal mind. Such amusements, however, were rejected with abhorrence, or admitted with the utmost caution, by the severity of the fathers, who despised all knowledge that was not useful to salvation, and who considered all levity of discourse as a criminal abuse of the gift of speech […] The unfeeling candidate for Heaven was instructed not only to resist the grosser allurements of the taste or smell, but even to shut his ears against the profane harmony of sounds, and to view with indifference the most finished productions of human art. Gay apparel, magnificent houses, and elegant furniture were supposed to unite the double guilt of pride and of sensuality; a simple and mortified appearance was more suitable to the Christian who was certain of his sins and doubtful of his salvation. In their censures of luxury, the fathers are extremely minute and circumstantial; and among the various articles which excite their pious indignation, we may enumerate false hair, garments of any color except white, instruments of music, vases of gold or silver, downy pillows (as Jacob reposed his head on a stone), white bread, foreign wines, public salutations, the use of warm baths, and the practice of shaving the beard, which, according to the expression of Tertullian, is a lie against our own faces, and an impious attempt to improve the works of the Creator.¹⁵

For a population drowning in filth and rot, this translated into a social experiment that led to the collapse of trade and industry. The Christians did not partake in any business and refused to take an active part in the administration or in the military. The doctrines of the church in the West were raping