22. Plea for Rejecting Jesus as Junk

Jesus Christ has been the stock-in-trade of Christian missions down the ages. He has been packed in all shapes and sizes depending upon the gullibility of the clients to be duped. And he has been rammed down the throats of those who have refused to be hoodwinked by the hoax. As one surveys the history of Christian missions in lands where this hoax has been hawked or imposed, one comes across no end of force and fraud employed in its service by a variety of soldiers and salesmen most of whom are presented as saints. It can be said without exaggeration that if one is in search of a hardened criminal with a clean conscience, one should reach out for the first available Christian saint and one will not miss the mark. St. Francis Xavier, the Paron Saint of the East according to the Roman Catholic Church, provides an excellent example.

The Jesus shop in India was set up for the first time by the Portuguese pirates who started flocking in from 1498 AD onwards. But no buyers came forward to sample the merchandise except for some vagrants who took the bribes offered in exchange for baptism, and went back to live their lives as before. The garbage was then fed forcibly to helpless men and women and children whom the pirates had reduced to slavery and concubinage. The poor Parvas on the Pearl Fishery Coast had to purchase it because the Portuguese navy threatened them with a blockade of their catamarans in case they refused to come round. Meanwhile, some pirates dressed up as priests had started peddling the stock in the interior of Malabar, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Bengal. But Hindus everywhere had turned away with contempt and ridicule. Finally, Maharshi Dayananda had warned his countrymen against the fraud in words which were loud and clear. The hawkers of Jesus Christ were on the run after Swami Vivekananda exposed their methods in picturesque language, and invited them to have some sense of shame.

Jesus Christ would have continued to stink in Hindu nostrils but for another historical process which was simultaneously at work in this country. The long spell of Islamic terror had spawned a class of Hindus to whom superiority of armed might had come to mean superiority of religion and culture. They had started seeing exceptional merit in the Allah of Islam. They could not but see even greater merit in the Jesus of Christianity when the mailed fist of a Christian power overcame the Islamic marauder. Raja Ram Mohun Roy was a typical member of this double-distilled class. He had already passed under the spell of Allah when he came across Jesus. He took no time in jumping on the new bandwagon, and started presenting Jesus as an embodiment of virtues unknown to his countrymen. The Brahmo Samaj he founded continued to place Jesus on a higher and higher pedestal.

Mahatma Gandhi did not belong to this self-alienated class of Hindus. He came from the mainstream of Hinduism which had refused to be overawed by the bluff and bluster of both Islam and Christianity, and remained faithful to its age-old spiritual vision. Nor could the Mahatma be influenced either by the armed might or by the cultural arrogance of the latest conqueror. But due to a variety of reasons, he had developed a cult of his own and, like the medieval acharyas, identified the whole of Sanatana Dharma with this cult rather than see it as one of the strands in a vast fabric. Next, he had gone out in search of a similar cult in the scriptures of Islam and Christianity. He could not find what he was looking for either in the Quran or the Hadis. But some verses in one of the gospels made him dance with delight. He had hit paydirt!

This was the Sermon on the Mount which no Christian theologian or historian had so far noticed as something significant. In fact, Christian scholars had come to suspect the Sermon as an interpolation which was not at all in accord with the character and teaching of Jesus as found in the rest of the gospels. But what could these Christian worthies do in the face of the Mahatma�s claim that he knew Christianity better than any Christian, dead or alive? In any case, the Mahatma�s identification of Jesus� teaching with the Sermon was convenient for Christian missions in carrying forward their commerce farther a field.

Almost all other Hindu leaders and organisations followed the Mahatma�s lead. They started vying with each other in praising Jesus to the skies. The Ramakrishna Mission all but replaced the Paramhamsa with this newly found fetish. Even those Hindus who looked askance at the activities of Christian missions could not help heaping fulsome praise on the Christian totem. It became a fashion with Hindu gurus, in India and abroad, to pay homage to Jesus before saying any thing else. And it was not long before Jesus was hailed as an avatar by many mainstream Hindus. Christian missions in this country had never had it so good. Now they had only to mention the magic name, and almost every English educated Hindu stood spell-bound. They went further and proclaimed that a Hindu who did not honour Jesus as a spiritual giant was no Hindu at all!

I myself had swallowed the Hindu version of Jesus hook, line and sinker - while I was a college student. And that version stayed with me for forty long years - till I read Ram Swarup�s critique of Monotheism in The Word As Revelation: Names of Gods. As a student of European history, I knew that the history of Christianity had been cruel and blood-soaked till recent times. But I had never thought that this history had been created by doctrines taught by Jesus in the gospels. Ram Swarup�s critique made me sit up, and study Christianity in some depth. And I learnt with painful surprise that Jesus of the gospels was a vicious character. The viciousness of Christian history now stood fully and satisfactorily explained.

Another surprise for me was the findings of Christological research in the modern West. Book after book, written by Christian scholars, informed me that nothing was known- not even knowable - about the real Jesus if he existed at all, and that Jesus of the gospels was a theological statement rather than a historical character. So the historicity of Jesus, which is a fundamental tenet of Christianity, was a Big Lie. 

The next thing that I learnt - now with considerable delight - was the steep decline of Christianity in its Western homelands due to the rise of humanism, rationalism, universalism, and science. It was only in the Afro-Asian countries, particularly Hindu-Buddhist lands, that Christian missions had found a flourishing market for Jesus. In fact, Christianity was trying to find a new home in the Hindu Buddhist countries. The Western countries had no use for Jesus any more. But they were prepared to finance Christian missions to unload this junk elsewhere in exchange for services to be rendered by the missions in some other spheres - political, diplomatic, commercial, and subversive.

What pained me no end, however, was the fact that the Christological research in the modern West had remained unknown to Hindus by and large although it was readily available. Swami Vivekananda was the last Hindu leader who was fully acquainted with this research, and who had used it for blunting the thrust of Christian missions. One also got glimpses in Mahatma Gandhi�s encounter with Christian missions to the effect that he was aware of this research to some extent, though he did not permit it to affect his evaluation of Jesus. But for the rest, Hindus had remained uninformed with the result that Christian missions had continued to sell Jesus of the gospels with great gusto, particularly the �Jesus of history� with miracles and all. So I decided to present the findings of Christological research in a small booklet, Jesus Christ An Artifice for Aggression, to serve as a companion volume to the revised and enlarged second edition of my major work on Christian missions, Catholic Ashrams: Sannyasins or Swindlers?

The first part of the book on Jesus presented the salient features of Christological research which had been summarised as follows by a scholar writing in 1986: �During the last thirty years theologians have come increasingly to admit that it is no longer possible to write a biography of him [Jesus], since documents earlier than the gospels tell us next to nothing of his life, while the gospels present the �kerygma� or proclamation of faith, not the Jesus of history. Many contemporary theologians therefore regard the quest of the historical Jesus as both hopeless and religiously irrelevant - in that the few things which can, allegedly, be known of his life are unedifying and do not make him an appropriate object of worship.�

The second part of the book dealt with how the Jesus of Fiction had come increasingly to the fore in the modern West as the Jesus of History started fading fast. It listed and summarised quite a few books written by two schools. One school believes that notwithstanding his unknowability a man called Jesus did exist at some time. Many early sources as well as stray incidents in the gospels have been used to reconstruct the man and his doings. The outcome has been a spate of novels and speculative books which are entertaining rather than enlightening. Another school believes that no man named Jesus by Christianity ever existed, and that the Jesus of the gospels is a synthetic product for manufacturing which many cults prevalent in the Roman Empire in the first century AD have been used. The books produced by this school are fewer than those produced by the other school, but equally speculative.

The third part of the book came up with the latest Christian trickery, namely, how die-hard Christian theologians have invented the Jesus of Faith when they were deprived of the Jesus of History and faced with the Jesus of Fiction. This is a desperate attempt to resurrect the Jesus of the gospels. But the same research which has exploded the Jesus of History has nailed the Jesus of the gospels as a figure soaked in the blood of millions of innocents in many lands. In fact, the gospels are now regarded as the First Nazi Manifesto by knowledgeable historians, sociologists, and psychologists, and Christianity itself as a Big Lie.

The last part of the book provided statistics from authentic Christian sources for showing how Christianity had crumbled in the modern West, and how Jesus has been reduced to junk which the West is dumping on the East with the help of Christian missions. For the missions themselves, Jesus is only an artifice for mounting aggression against non-Christian societies and cultures, and no more an object of worship because they know the truth about what they are selling. Hindus should know that Jesus means nothing but mischief for their country and culture, and stop showing any weakness for him. Weakness for Jesus in a Hindu is the same as the weakness for dice in Raja Nala of epic fame. As Kaliyuga was able to enter Raja Nala and ruin him because of his weakness, weakness for Jesus helps in increasing the stranglehold of intelligence networks and foreign policy department of the West on the only Hindu homeland.

The book invited comments soon after it was published in April 1994. Most of the comments came from Hindus and objected to the language used in some parts of the book, particularly the description of Jesus as junk. But all writers agreed that the fact �revealed� from Christological research were �startling�, and had put Jesus in his proper place as a monstrous myth. I told them that the criminal gangs of Christian swordsmen and missionaries had been waging a war against Hindu spiritual traditions, Hindu culture and Hindu nation, for the past five hundred years and with every weapon available to them at any time. Now that they had been worsted in their own homelands and forced to wear a soft face, they were trying to dictate the language we use for their totem. So long as Christianity refuses to revise its theology and withdraw its missions, there was no language which was strong enough for it and its hirelings.

Dr. K. Swaminathan of Madras, however, endorsed my language also. In a letter dated 2 June 1994, he wrote as follows to Swami Devananda Saraswati who had presented to him copies of the two books:

�Jesus Christ: An Artifice for Aggression� takes my breath away. It is a devastating expose of the myth of Jesus, besides which even the myth of St(?) Thomas pales into historical inconsequence, relatively speaking. The damage done by the latter is limited to South India only whereas that caused by Jesus has ravaged continents and destroyed civilizations in all parts of the world.

I still cannot understand why Gandhiji had to extol Jesus, the person, to the skies (except perhaps his ignorance at that time) while condemning missionary work unequivocally although in understanding sweet language. Now I have come to the conclusion that Shri Goel�s language, apparently strident and caustic at first look, is the most appropriate way (without mincing words) to deal with the sugar-tongued vipers that the Church and its missions have perfected themselves to be. Shri Goel has done immeasurable service to the Hindu cause and the Hindu awakening. His writings should be taught in the universities. What courage and perseverance he has displayed! I wish he were 20 years younger. What agony his heart must have gone through in fighting almost single-handedly a seemingly hopeless battle inspired by Ram Swarup. Thank the Lord Nataraja that he is now admirably supported by scholars like Shourie, Elst, yourself and a few others. I pray to the Lord that VOICE OF INDIA sweeps through our land in the coming years and causes a new Hindu Renaissance, jolting the so-called enlightened elite Hindus out of their fond illusions about Jesus and Prophet Mohammed into a realistic assessment of their lives. Till two years ago I believed in them myself!�

�Catholic Ashrams� is indeed equally revealing about their modus operandi. I had all along thought-Swami Abhishiktananda was a genuine Hindu Swami and a Yogi who fully followed Swami Gnanananda of Tapovanam and Sri Ramana Maharshi and had rejected Christ totally after coming to India!

The Shantivanam Branch (Sathya Nilayam) in Mylapore still continues such fraudulent exercises. I recently came across one Father Thomas Marriet�s books condemning Swami Vivekananda and Advaita� (Emphasis in original)

Shri B. M. Thapar of New Delhi, a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba, was more than annoyed by my description of Jesus as junk. He advised me against using the language I had used, and thought that my attack on Christianity could have been dexterous instead of being direct. I disagreed with him and told him that most of the time I had only cited what scholars in the West had said. Shri Thapar had, however, sent the two books - Catholic Ashrams and Jesus Christ - to some of his friends in the West. He sent to me copies of two comments he had received. In a letter dated 13 July 1994, Mr. Meads of Emporia, Kansas, USA, wrote:

And thank you for the books Catholic Ashrams and Jesus Christ. Being from a Christian Background, I was very interested in reading other�s perspective of this major religion. Sita Ram Goel writes like a very angry fundamentalist, and I find that very unusual coming from a Hindu. It is quite obvious that he is not a Sai Baba devotee.

I found it a little disheartening to read the Jesus� is junk paragraph in Jesus Christ, page 85. Baba said in his Christmas discourse 1978 (Sathya Sai speaks, vol X, chapter 45) that Jesus was a Karan-Janma, a Master born with a purpose - the mission of restoring love, charity, and compassion in the heart of man� I know nothing about the Catholic ashrams, very enlightening�.

The books have arrived safe and sound. 1) CATHOLIC ASHRAMS 2) JESUS CHRIST. Denise has already read No.2 from cover to cover and agrees with much. I think Sita Ram Goel is a clever man with quite a mind. His English is beautiful but he is so sharp and at times vicious. So Brij you have begun an interesting discourse. Denise and I feel like a couple of students about to read for our Ph.D. in CHRISTOLOGY.

I have completed reading �Jesus Christ - artifice for aggression�; when I previously wrote I had by chance read p. 85 only (viz. Jesus is junk etc.); your language made me uneasy. Now I have to thank you for alerting me to the subject of Christology; the documentation is such and so well done that it speaks for itself; I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of your letter of 9/8/94 but feel I must part company with the language you have used on p. 85 and in a couple of sentences elsewhere� 

I was late in air-mailing a copy to Dr. Winand Callewaert of Louvain, Belgium. He is an old India-hand who knows and speaks Hindi fluently, and has edited some medieval Hindi texts. I had met him some years ago, and a warm friendship had developed between us. But as soon as he saw some VOICE OF INDIA publications, he stopped even telephoning to me during his annual visits to Delhi. Back in Belgium, he started a whispering campaign against Koenraad Elst who, according to him, had been �brain-washed by Sita Ram Goel�. I was, therefore, not altogether surprised when I received a long letter from him in November 1995:

Dr. Winand Callewaert,