“[A]rchaeological evidence cannot ever prove an account true; it can only correlate with an account. Even when it correlates, it may be possible to create multiple historical scenarios to account for correlations, so that the biblical account is just one potential scenario. However, positive archaeological evidence that does not correlate with a biblical account is much more damaging. This is the principle of falsification rather than verification, because two contradictory statements cannot both be true at the same time.”
– Joan Taylor, “Material and Visual Culture,” in The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus, edited by James Crossley and Chris Keith (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2024), 139-140.
- Robyn Faith Walsh talks about Markan Priority.
- What does the phrase “the husband of one wife” mean in 1 Tim 3:2? Growing up in a KJV-Only church that was beholden to Peter Ruckman, we all thought it meant something like “one wife at a time” or serial monogamy. (Ruckman was married three times over the course of his life.) In a recent post, Marg Mowczko offers a pretty in-depth look at the passage, particularly in the context of claims that women cannot be pastors. In the end, she argues that the phrase means something more like “married only once” (cf. NRSVue).
- Dan McClellan has a brand new Pharisee flowchart to show you! (It’s from the recently published volume Judeophobia and the New Testament.)
- Kipp Davis’ new book has arrived at my doorstep!
- Mark Goodacre (yeah, I know) talks oral tradition and the problems associated with it.
- Heather Thiessen discusses 1 Peter 2:1-12, sensitive to the replacement theology that seems embedded in it.
- Jim Davila has some links to resources on the Shroud of Turin, including an open access journal article on that situates the artifact’s origins squarely in the Middle Ages.
- Interested in Jewish ritual baths from the Second Temple period? Here’s a free book by Alexander Melamed on the topic!
- Does the Tel Dan Stele prove the existence of King David? Jordan Jones responds to the claims of Scott Acklin.
- Here on my site, Lex Lata has a guest piece arguing for the reliability of the Epic of Gilgamesh in the style of many a pop-apologist who argues for the reliability of the Bible.
- Phil Long has the latest Biblical Studies Carnival, covering July and August. You’ll find stuff I’ve linked to and stuff I haven’t. It’s a great collection.
- Tim O’Neill has another post in his series on “the Great Myths,” this time covering the purported conflict between science and religion (i.e., the Conflict Thesis).
The Amateur Exegete 
Hi Ben, I would like to know your opinion about the meaning of harpagmos in Philippians 2:6?
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I’m inclined to think that Paul believes Jesus held some kind of divine status before his death (before his birth?) but refused to make use of it when obeying God’s will. In other words, though being in some sense “divine,” Jesus refused the prerogatives of that divinity when faced with the prospect of death by crucifixion because he valued obeying God more.
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Does the expression ‘form of God’ in Philippians 2 indicate that Jesus was equal with God?
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I think the phrase often rendered “form of God” could easily be understood as “divine form” or “divine status.” I don’t think Paul thought of Jesus as God’s equal as other texts seem to indicate.
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In the opinion of me, and many many others, O’Neill’s real Great Myth is that papal anti-semitism after the Middle Ages didn’t exist. He “manages” to make this claim, in part, by simply never reading David Kertzer. (I know, as a search of his entire site has just one or two hits for Kertzer’s name.)
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Except that he has read Kertzer?
https://x.com/search?q=from%3Atimoneill007%20kertzer&src=typed_query
Unless he’s lying because he’s a cultural Catholic (or maybe actual Catholic) or whatever, which is the only reason why anyone would disagree with you in this regard.
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A. I didn’t search Twitter, I searched his website, as noted.
B. If he thinks Kertzer has wildly overstated his case, he’s also never said so in a Goodreads review, because he and I are both on there.
C. If anybody has an agenda, per his tweets, IMO, it’s O’Neill. Beyond cultural Catholicism, per one tweet of his, maybe it goes elsewhere.
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Not at all inclined to agree with your last point, but whatever you say, man
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Oops, meant for this to be a reply to Gadfly, my bad
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While I haven’t read any of David Kertzer’s books, I have encountered other works demonstrating the presence of anti-Semitism among post-Medieval popes. One example is discussed in Adam Zamoyski’s book Phantom Terror (which is primarily about the counter-revolutionary actions taken by European countries in the 18th and 19th centuries):“Pope Leo XII tried to turn the clock back. When the French occupied the Papal States in 1809, they reorganised the administration, lifted the disabilities on various groups, abolished the privileges of others, and modernised the infrastructure. The pope sacked all those who had worked in the administration under the French, brought back the Inquisition and the Jesuits, and sent the Jews back to the ghetto.” (pg. 102)
Whatever his faults, Napoleon Bonaparte did remove certain restrictions against the Jews in the French Empire and halted the Inquisition.
As to whether History for Atheists’ Tim O’Neill is a “cultural Catholic,” I can’t really say after having visited his website multiple times. What I have noticed, however, is a tendency on the site to feature myths about Catholicism and history prominently (whether about the Inquisition, the Galileo Affair, or Giordano Bruno.) However, when it comes to myths against Protestants (such as exaggerations about the Puritans) I haven’t seen these included in his “Great Myths” or highlighted on the site. What I mean is that on myths for which there is often agreement between Protestants and skeptics, Tim is outspoken on his site but for myths about “those silly Protestants” (as they might say on the show Father Ted) that would be told by both Catholics and the skeptical crowd, he is not so outspoken. Furthermore, one of his Great Myths is that the Church Fathers (and by extension, the early Catholic Church) did not often take the Bible “literally.” While this is partially true, there are certainly bizarre cases of Catholicism employing biblical literalism if it suits the purposes of the Church. Examples include using the New Testament verses about Simon Peter being “the Rock” to bolster Papal Authority, seeing the Virgin Mary as the woman “taken up away” from the dragon in the Revelation of John to justify the otherwise non-biblical Assumption, and insisting against the general consensus that the Gospel of Matthew can be “understood” to say that Jesus did not really have biological half-siblings so that Mary could remain a “virgin.” Even St. Augustine was willing to accept Genesis literally as giving the universe a young age. (On a side note, I sometimes wonder if given that biblical scholars have called the scriptural basis of Marian veneration into question, the real motivation was for the church to find a maternal figure who could compete with pagan matriarchal deities or if this was somehow due to the Catholic Church trying to “find” an equivalent to the Vestal Virgins. I mean given that the office of pope is somewhat based on the Ancient Roman Pontifex Maximus and there isn’t a clear biblical basis for Simon Peter transmitting his “title” to a successor.)
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(Continued from Previous Post)
(Continued) According to the following link1, another oddity is that the Holy Office (under the Roman Curia) ultimately used Romans 13 as a biblical justification for keeping Hitler’s Mein Kampf off of the Index of Prohibited Books and delaying denunciation. On a related note, as far as I am aware, David Kerzter’s books have won (among other awards) a Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography (for The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe.
One of my disappointments with some of the discussions on History for Atheists is that certain authors who have received mostly positive critical reviews of their work (such as Tom Holland for his book Dominion) are defended vigorously by Tim and fans on his site while David Kertzer has apparently written several acclaimed books exposing misdeeds of the Catholic Church is and his case is “overstated.” (It’s also worth noting that the majority of critics for said books seem to be associated with the church or conservative publications… Conflict of interest?)
I meant for the above to respectfully raise some questions about the content on Tim’s site from a concerned skeptic. If he wishes to respond to the above, it would be best to post it here directly since I don’t condone his “cussing out” those who disagree with him on his site even if their posts never use profanity. That’s not proper netiquette IMO.
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I did want to make a correction to a statement I made above about Augustine and biblical literalism after doing some web research:
Apparently, Augustine of Hippo did not take Genesis to mean that the world was made in six days. The text through which he interpreted the Genesis creation story was apparently the now-apocryphal Book of Sirach (more precisely Chapter 18, verse 1). This particular verse was what he took literally to mean that God actually created everything mentioned in the Creation Story in a single instant as opposed to spreading it out over “six days.”
This idea would still appear to conflict with biological evolution and a 13.8 billion year-old universe though.
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Biblical Liberalism?
Some Platonizing (Roman Orthodox) Church Fathers, that is, those who considered Plato’s dialectic as a fundamental science, such as Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus, Ambrose of Milan, or Augustine of Hippo, deeply disregarded Aristotle and especially his dialectic. They accused him of believing that “the universe was uncreated and imperishable and doubted the immortality of the soul.”
This is, of course, absolute nonsense. As a Stoic, Aristotle belonged to Stoic philosophy, which is a cosmological perspective focused on the holistic understanding of the world, from which a universal principle emerges that governs all natural phenomena and natural connections. For the Stoic as an individual, the goal is to recognize and fulfill his place in this order by learning to accept his fate through the practice of emotional self-control and striving for wisdom with the help of serenity and peace of mind (ataraxia). The constant characteristics that give Stoicism a distinctive character are found in all three areas of the Stoic system of thought: physics, which deals with the cosmos and the things in the cosmos; logic, which is directed towards knowledge, explanation, and proof; and ethics, which deals with human life (see Aristotle’s critical work “Politics” and his virtue ethics) and forms the center of Stoic philosophy. In Stoic terminology, dialectic (along with rhetoric) is a part of Stoic “logic” (understood in a broader sense than today). It is defined (presumably by Chrysippus) as “the science of what is true, what is false, and what is neither.” Dialectics is thus the Stoic’s instrument for distinguishing true from false ideas and encompasses, in particular, Stoic epistemology. At the conclusion of his studies, referred to as Aristotelianism, with Aristotle, and before he continued teaching based on Plato’s writings, he advised (or rather, demanded of) his students to participate in the following:
“Since God (not “the gods”!) is the final cause of all action, the world must continually develop – a positivist religion. The soul is the form of the body, its principle of life. This perishes with it. In spirit (nous, thyrathen: the human capacity to intellectually grasp something >from the outside<, a thinking power separable from the body), the soul is immortal. Only as a principle of life is the soul mortal (separation from the body). The latter is obvious anyway.” – Aristotle’s Metaphysics
What the Platonizing Church Fathers were really concerned with… Aristotle, with his “philosophy of objective enlightenment,” established “liberalism; the freedom of the individual” as “the premise or basic position for political theory and philosophy” and had described long before the Romans which “constitution of the state” does not even strive for this goal of autocracy (a policy for the common good that allows every citizen to freely develop their life). In “Politics,” he formulates: Democracy, according to Aristotle, is considered the “rule of the many free and poor (free = living outside the state of the polis, “either an animal or a god,” and poor = arrogance, no blissful life of virtue, gentleness, and reason) in the state, which occurs at the expense of the capable (those who constantly strive for knowledge for the polis) and to the detriment of the wealthy (in virtue and happiness). It is also unacceptable for Aristotle that the poor are more powerful than the rich. However, since they are more numerous and in a democracy the majority is decisive, democracy brings about a “dominance of the poor.” He specifically criticized this extreme form of democracy, which does not serve the common good at all and, with its “politics for the sake of politics,” focuses on the interests of the demos, “the lawless multitude of the poor” (despite the constitution, “arbitrary politics”):
“Where the laws do not decide, there are the popular leaders (Greek: demagogues). For there the people are the sole ruler, even if composed of many individuals. […] Such a sovereign people seeks to rule because it is not governed by the laws, and becomes despotic, where flatterers are held in high esteem, and thus this democracy among the forms of single-person rule corresponds to tyranny.”
For while Aristotle was scandalized with “fake news,” the principles of Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s ten categories were more or less openly used by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and these subsequently became part of Christian Orthodox theology throughout the Mediterranean region. Aristotelian dialectics and concepts (such as substance, essence, accident, form, and matter) also proved helpful in formulating Christian dogmas, such as the description of God and the distinction of the three elements of the Trinity. From the three hypostases (the One, the Spirit, and the Soul) that appeared in Plotinus and Porphyry, the path to the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity was not far. From what, then, was the doctrine of the Trinity formed? From the “forged” Epistle to the Hebrews, a book of the New Testament, which the “Early Church” counted among the (thus 14) Pauline epistles, although it does not claim Paul as its author. Because of the style, which is unusual for Paul (for example, a vocabulary of 1000 different words in a text of 3000 words, compared to Paul’s rather limited/simple writing style), or because no other document comparable to the Epistle to the Hebrews is known, and it thus stands “in a completely unique form and content,” and the letter itself says nothing about the author, it is considered very likely that it does not originate from Paul. The Church Father Jerome wrote in a letter to Claudius Postumus Dardanus that it “does not matter from whom it originates; it is enough to know that it comes from a man of the Church, that it is read daily in the churches!” Jerome’s works propagated the Western interpretation of Nicene orthodoxy and the ascetic ideal, which increasingly gained followers. This led to the Nicene Creed of the First Council of Nicaea in 325, the first ecumenical council. The council ended with the (provisional) victory of the opponents of Arianism and various forms of Origenist hypostasis theology, and with the Nicene Creed, which affirmed the divinity of Jesus and the essential unity of God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Trinity). Subsequently, the Nicene Creed was often referred to as “the faith of the 318 holy fathers.” This refers to the 318 bishops who supposedly participated in the First Council of Nicaea; their number was intended to correspond to the number of servants with whom Abraham went forth in Genesis 14:14! This is quite amusing, because in orthodox religions (“the only true faith”), faith or confession (confessional religion) is central, and “only the right faith promises divine salvation” in the afterlife, such as “faith in Jesus Christ” (not faith in the one God), which supposedly leads to the salvation of the human soul. Such cults and ritual acts, however, were largely devalued by the Christian apostle Paul.
Christianity was increasingly to assume the functions of the “old god-emperor cults” and bring about divine support for the Roman Empire. Only when the church was organizationally and theologically united could it support the unity of the state. To this end, the emperor – as Pontifex Maximus – now also actively intervened in its internal affairs. In 325, he convened the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea. The bishops traveled at state expense; the emperor himself presided over the sessions and enforced purely theological compromise formulas such as homoousios to resolve the internal church dispute concerning the divine sonship of Jesus. The biblical references to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit only provide starting points for later interpretations in the development of a doctrine of the Trinity. The ritual and prayer practices of early Christians were particularly influential. At the same time, over centuries, what was considered Christian and what was considered heretical was gradually defined. Part of this development, in which established traditions and decisions made at councils were occasionally questioned, is also the emergence of different denominations. Anti-Trinitarian views were already included as a capital offense in the new Roman state law of 380 and only later rejected as heretical at the First Council of Constantinople in 381. The edict with which Emperor Theodosius confirmed the decisions of the council on July 30, 381, states, among other things: “Thus we believe, according to the teaching of the apostles and the Gospel, in the sole divinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, accepting equal majesty and loving Trinity. All who adhere to this faith shall, according to our command, bear the name of universal (Greek: catholic) Christians.” All outsiders who did not agree with the Trinitarian confession were designated as heretics by the emperor. In the same decree He announced draconian measures to them: “The rest, insane and mentally deranged as they are, shall bear the shame of their heretical faith. Their places of assembly shall not be called churches. They shall suffer above all divine punishment, but also the punishment of our disfavor, which we intend to inflict upon them according to God’s will.”Right from the beginning of its state establishment under Emperor Constantine and after the introduction of the dogma of the Trinity in 325, the Roman Orthodox Church had its critics dispossessed (starting in 326). Thus, according to the so-called “Heresy Law” of Emperor Constantine, the authorities confiscated, for example, houses where people had gathered who wanted to live in small groups as in the time of early Christianity, and the authorities “donated” the confiscated houses and apartments to the church, which was already then called the “Catholic Church.” However, anyone who, after the Christianization in 381, preferred to actually follow Jesus the Christ instead of the Pontifex Maximus and the doctrine of the Trinity, no longer had a place there. The Catholic Church ultimately rose to become the sole state religion of the Roman Empire and, after the Migration Period, practically became the successor to the ancient Roman Empire. The old “Pontifex Maximus” of ancient Rome was now once again the new “Pontifex Maximus,” now in a Catholic guise, beginning with the then new Emperor Pope Leo I the Great. He and the subsequent leaders of Catholicism thus adopted, with the title “Pontifex Maximus,” the symbolism of power of the old god-emperor cult of the murderers of Jesus of Nazareth, and thereby effectively placed themselves in the succession of this murderous system of rule. The “death penalty for non-Catholics,” introduced under Emperor Theodosius I in 380, cost millions of lives over the centuries, especially from the Middle Ages onward, including during wars… such as the genocide of the “unbelieving heretics” among the Germanic Vandals, the church-critical Donatists, and the rebellious Agonistics in Northwest Africa.
The Agonistics, also known as “Circumcellion Christians,” combined social and religious protest. To realize the biblical principle of equality, they joined forces with the anti-Roman Donatists and formed paramilitary groups that roamed the North African countryside. Their movement was triggered by a revolt of impoverished tenant farmers in 320. In 332, Emperor Constantine the Great issued a law that indicates that certain tenant farmers were now forbidden from leaving the land they leased:
“Emperor Constantine to the provincials: Whoever is found harboring a tenant farmer of foreign origin must not only return him to his place of origin but also assume his poll tax for that period. Tenant farmers who assist in the escape must also be bound in chains…” – Codex Theodosianus 5,17,1 [332]
Originally, the group consisted of ordinary inhabitants (social differentiation), particularly in the Roman province of Numidia, who, around the years 340 to 350, were pejoratively characterized by representatives of the established church as “circum cellas” (those who wander around the huts) because of their nomadic lifestyle. Although the movement initially had a social-revolutionary aspect, opposing wealthy landowners, they soon allied themselves with the schismatic Donatists. They called themselves “Saints” and their leaders “Heads of the Saints” and were sworn to pursue every perceived injustice with a kind of counter-terrorism. They viewed the government, the landowners, the moneylenders, and the propertied class as instruments of the devil used to persecute God’s saints (Jews, anti-Trinitarian early Christians) as well as the poor in general, and also large landowners who oppressed poor farm laborers. The Circumcellions roamed the region with their slogan “Deo laudes” (Praise be to God), committing many brutal acts of violence, beating their victims and leaving them to die. It is reported that the Circumcellions also stopped wagons on the country roads, dragged the owners out, and forced them to walk, while the slaves in the wagon then took the masters’ place.They considered the established Church their particular enemy. In their raids, initially armed only with clubs (also called cudgels, bludgeons, or sticks), which they called “the staves of Israel,” they focused especially on Catholic-Orthodox clergy, whose houses they plundered, whom they blinded by throwing unslaked lime in their eyes, and whom they forced to be rebaptized. Catholic-Orthodox laypeople, men, women, and children, were also persecuted, churches desecrated, and altars destroyed. The other side of the Circumcellions was their veneration of martyrs and their striving for martyrdom. They danced at night at the graves of their martyrs. Every Circumcellion hoped and prayed to be allowed to suffer a martyr’s death themselves. They sought death, believing they were carrying out God’s work and thus could claim the martyr’s crown. Some went so far as to attack fully equipped Roman legionaries or, as a last resort, to throw themselves from city walls or cliffs. At a group of rocks in central Numidia, there is a series of rocks marked with names and dates of death, from which Circumcellions threw themselves in search of martyrdom. Depending on the perspective, the Circumcellions are considered either the first “Christian revolutionary group” that publicly sought to eliminate and overcome the existing unjust social order, or as fanatical religious terrorists. (see: Wikipedia Agonistics)
The cause of the peasant revolt was the agrarian system practiced by the Roman Empire, which, in favor of large landowners like Augustine and the state’s wealth, brutally exploited the so-called working class economically. This practiced state economic policy was also nothing new: The “El Argar culture” from 2200-1550 BC in southeastern Spain is considered the first known “state entity of the West” due to its area of expansion (approx. 31,000 km²), the size of Belgium, its strictly ordered social hierarchy with a division of labor, and a governing political forum. Around half of the population was engaged in agriculture and copper and silver mining (men), as well as in the industrial mass production of exceptionally high-quality fired ceramics (vessels) (women). The objects found, such as vessels, were almost entirely unadorned, with clear lines, simple shapes, and schematic execution, i.e., standardized according to a canon of forms – which strongly distinguished this “culture” from many others of that time. The land-based identified border areas are characterized by significant differences in the clay and pottery techniques of the various regions of the Segura basin. In all settlements of the southern half, the typical Argar pottery dominates, which was made from clay found more than 100 kilometers further south in the coastal mountains of Murcia and Almería. Another 40% of the population can be described as a hard-working and specialized class of craftsmen or as state employees, e.g., in the military, who also produced specialized weapons and objects made of bronze, silver, and gold. The remaining 10% of the population belonged to a ruling elite who built large buildings and residences for themselves, e.g., A “throne room” measuring over 100 square meters was discovered in La Almoloya, near which large storage facilities were also located. Enormous silver finds were made, including silver diadems as grave goods for the upper class. Both pithoi (large storage jars) and silver were more common in the eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia at this time, so a connection to the Aegean region is considered likely in this context. Imported goods from the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt (e.g., faience) attest to far-reaching trade relations.
This system was maintained by a state-controlled regime of force, probably through a centrally organized military, which is why it can also be described as the first known military dictatorship in Western Europe. The ruling class brought the food supply under its control in its residence and distributed it from there to the rest of the population. The common people were fed a rather monotonous diet of grain porridge, supplemented by self-gathered beans, lentils, and acorns, while a good food supply with meat and honey has been documented for the ruling class. The genetic composition shows that an integral part of the working class originated from the central and eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia. As an ultramonopolistic, expansive culture (initially a core area of 5000 km²), the burial rites also changed. While communal burials virtually disappeared (not that there were no more deaths among the lower class…), the burials of the middle class shifted to individual and double burials in the walls and under the floors of the settlement and building complexes, while for the ruling class, magnificent elite burials were held in special ceramic vessels with expensive grave goods such as jewelry and food. So what was actually going on? Because the ruling elite became increasingly greedy regarding “their luxury imports,” the export volumes of grain, including ceramic production (used as transport vessels), were greatly increased through the expansion of agricultural production. The widespread deforestation of wooded areas was followed by a monoculture of barley, which eventually led to soil salinization and crop failures, to which the elite responded by artificially restricting supplies to the workers. Towards the end of this culture, therefore, famines, nutritional deficiencies, and child mortality among the lower classes increased steadily. Finally, all settlements ended in a layer of ash, dated to approximately 1550 BC. Evidence of a military conflict has not been found, but numerous “pots and storage facilities” filled to the brim attest to the sudden end of the core area of La Bastida. Presumably, the “mass of insurgents” had reached such a critical point that it could no longer be suppressed militarily; a civil uprising followed in which the ruling elite was first eliminated, and then the workers’ ghettos were burned to the ground.
It is clear that the material culture changed completely after the destruction of the cities, without any signs of immigration from other population groups. The forms, for example of the ceramic vessels, become more individual and also show decorations again. The destroyed cities were never resettled; instead, the population dispersed into smaller settlements typical of this period. The beginning of the El Argar culture is dated to 2200 BC, which roughly coincides with the destruction of Troy II. There are various indications of contact or even a possible origin from this area. Similarly, the end of the culture, slightly delayed, coincides with the exodus of the Egyptian ‘Apiru (aka Hebrews; the ‘Apiru were the slave under- to middle-class throughout the southern-northwestern Mediterranean region from Greece to Egypt), it is quite possible that the collapse of El Argar as a granary and major supplier of raw materials to the “globalized Mediterranean region” led to a cascading collapse of economic systems and thus triggered the Dark Ages of the Bronze Age (approx. 1200–750 BC) in the Mediterranean, a time of abrupt change and decline caused by the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations, leading to social upheaval, trade disruptions, and the loss of writing systems. Or perhaps it was “The Golden Centuries” for the free civilizations, with the Egyptian Apiru deciding to leave for Canaan due to the severely deteriorating socio-economic and nutritional situation caused by the lack of grain imports from El Argar, and there, among their “brothers in crime,” they essentially found the same situation through state-controlled economic exploitation. With now numerically sufficient reinforcements, a rebellion or revolution occurred, during which the local regime was overthrown.
As a consequence, proto-communism also emerged as the liberal-democratic social order of the “flatly organized” early Jerusalem community (e.g., Zealots) and their socio-economically practiced exchange community… which was then, as is often taught in religious education, ended by the Romans “due to the unyielding and rebellious Jews.” Perhaps the people simply had no interest in having to live once again under the rule of the same old “state-economic mainstream thinking.”
However, this historical narrative is far from over. Thanks to the “School of Salamanca,” the same economic ideas became the basis of both mercantilism/cameralism, or the mercantile system as described by Adam Smith in “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” and neoclassical economic theory, which still orthodoxly dominates all areas of economics today. The alleged “scholasticism,” which presents itself as a methodical philosophy of improvement based on Aristotle, much like the Platonizing Church Fathers misused his dialectic to create a hierarchical instrument of power, was never anything other than the same Ramism, after which the critical teachings of Petrus Ramus on Aristotelian-scholastic logic, dialectic, and philosophy were later named. Starting from Plato, Cicero, and Quintilian, Ramism criticizes Aristotelian logic and replaces it with a natural logic of common sense based on rhetoric (cf. Petrus Ramus’ Aristotelicae animadversiones, 1543). Ramus was a clergyman and professor of philosophy who initially gained widespread recognition through his critique of Aristotle and later through his conversion to Protestantism and his death during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Ramism subsequently developed into one of the most influential philosophical movements in the late 16th and 17th centuries: Theodor Zwinger’s Theatrum Vitae Humanae, one of the most comprehensive pre-encyclopedic works, is based on Ramist principles. Johann Thomas Freigius also coined the term psychology, using Ramist dialectics to systematize knowledge. From a historical perspective, Ramism is an important precursor to René Descartes’ concept of method.
Considerations regarding time preference and money creation by banks can be found in the work of Martín de Azpilcueta in 1556. He, observing the effects of the arrival of American silver and gold in Spain, namely the decrease in their value and the increase in prices, developed the idea of scarcity of value, as the first form of the quantity theory of money. Jean Bodin was a follower of Ramist philosophy and a French jurist, and is considered the first French political theorist of note. Throughout his political life, Bodin wrote numerous works on political theory and the theory of the state. As early as 1566, Jean de Malestroit, in his work “Les paradoxes du seigneur de Mallestroit sur le faict des monnoyes publiés,” addressed the question of the price revolution (the Great Elizabethan Inflation, referring to a Europe-wide increase in the general price level during the 16th century), asking “whether a general increase in prices (price inflation) had occurred and how it should be characterized.” What seemed “paradoxical” to him was that the relative value of goods to one another had not changed, but rather their value in terms of money or precious metals such as gold and silver. Jean Bodin responded to this in 1568 with “La réponse de Jean Bodin à propos de la monnaie et de l’enrichissement de toute chose et le moyen d’y remédier,” which received little attention, and also reacted in 1568 with his influential first work “Réponse aux paradoxes du seigneur de Malestroit” (Reactions to the Paradoxes of the Lord of Malestroit), in which he apparently was one of the first to analyze the previously unknown phenomenon of inflation, i.e., the “creeping devaluation of money that arises from an excessive increase in the means of payment, specifically due to the coinage minted and put into circulation with the gold and silver from the Spanish colonies in America.” By presenting his naive monetary theories, stating that “the money supply and the value of money are inversely related – the higher the money supply, the lower the value of money,” Bodin anticipated the quantity theory of money, as it was later expounded in particular by David Hume. In his most important work on political theory, “Les six livres de la République” (Six Books on the Republic), Bodin established the modern concept of sovereignty, advocated for absolutism, and, as a solution to the problem of inflation caused by the increase in the money supply, developed a form of conceptual protectionism: “By imposing export duties on goods whose import is essential for foreign countries, by levying low import duties on necessary raw materials, and by imposing high import duties on foreign finished products, an active balance of trade (trade surplus) should be achieved.”
These theses formed the core idea of mercantilism and led to the emergence of bullionism, which “saw money as the exclusive form of socially recognized wealth, specifically as ‘world money,’ particularly in its metallic form as gold and silver,” as advocated by early monetarists such as Thomas Gresham and John Hales, as well as the bullionists around Thomas Milles, who considered state reserves of precious metals as a measure of a state’s economic and military strength, since there were no measures for national income at that time. In the United Kingdom, this principle was implemented most consistently, and a bullionist monetary policy was practiced that included exchange rate management and aimed in particular at retaining gold and silver reserves within the country. Since money and gold were equated with wealth, an export ban on money and precious metals was enacted. This type of mercantilist monetary policy was primarily interested in practical goals and measures to maintain and promote state power and national prosperity, as the prevailing conditions of political fragmentation at the time were more or less equivalent to those of a war economy. Long-distance trade was hampered everywhere by customs fragmentation and the staple policy, i.e., the targeted control of transit trade via specific staple towns or ports. Based on the idea that an “active balance of trade” represents an increase in a nation’s power potential, this was elevated to an economic policy objective.
This view was declared too narrow by Thomas Mun, a successful Mediterranean merchant, in his main work “England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade” (published in 1664). He argued that it was not necessary to achieve a surplus in foreign trade with every single country, but that it could be quite sensible to import many raw materials and commodities in order to sell them abroad at higher prices after processing them in England. The only thing that matters is that there is a surplus in the overall balance of foreign trade:
“Therefore, the usual means of increasing our wealth and filling the treasury consists of foreign trade, in which we must follow this rule: We must sell more to foreigners annually than we buy from them in terms of value.” – Thomas Mun
This principle was first implemented in state economic policy by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the French statesman and founder of mercantilism (Colbertism), who saw the “most important source of national wealth in an active balance of foreign trade.” Jean-Baptiste Colbert took over the government (only the king above him and the army were outside his responsibility): As “Minister” for everything, he successfully reformed the state budget to finance the very high expenditures, especially for the king himself, the court, the military, and its campaigns. Colbert thus created the basis of French “economic and colonial policy” and, fundamentally, of European colonialism and economic imperialism. Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, a French statesman and mercantilist “economist of enlightened absolutism,” described the “basic principles of the law of diminishing returns” with his law of land yield and is therefore considered, along with James Steuart-Denham, Thomas Robert Malthus, and Johann Heinrich von Thünen, as a “discoverer of the law of diminishing returns,” from which, via utilitarianism and the marginal utility school from 1870 onwards, neoclassical economic theory emerged. In 1769, he wrote his “Mémoire sur les prêts a intérêt” on the occasion of a scandalous financial crisis in Angoulême; in it, the lending of money at interest was treated scientifically for the first time, and not only from an ecclesiastical point of view. In other works, Turgot protested against state regulation/intervention in the economy and advocated for free competition. During the famine of 1770-1771, he obligated landowners to help the poor, and especially their tenant farmers, and established workshops and offices (workhouses) to provide work for the able-bodied and assistance for the infirm, while simultaneously condemning “the indiscriminate distribution of alms.” In 1774, he became Controller-General of Finances, and his first act was to present his principles of action to the king: “no bankruptcy, no tax increases, no debt.” He expected the king to implement all reforms and rejected any interference by the parliaments in legislation, arguing that they had no competence outside of the judiciary. As the first minister of austerity, his political actions (restrictive fiscal policy, austerity measures; budget cuts and tax increases) established austerity policy, and he succeeded in considerably reducing the state deficit, thus restoring the state budget. The state’s creditworthiness increased, allowing him to negotiate loans with Dutch bankers at 4% interest in 1776. He was then overthrown by the elites because he also wanted to “tax the rich more.”
Furthermore, Turgot’s austerity policy also generated pauperism, the impoverishment of large segments of the working class, which ultimately led to the French Revolution. Since then, this economic connection between increasing state revenues and the precarization of society, followed by a rebellion (even if this is only expressed in voting behavior for the “wrong positions”), has been observed repeatedly. Today’s social systems, which view the unemployed as an economic problem, also stem from this, particularly the new poor law of 1834, which was influenced by the Preacher Robert Thomas Malthus’s postulates on the “population catastrophe.”
Liberalism… where has there been true liberalism since Aristotle and the early Christian community in Jerusalem? Most people still believe that an increase in the money supply automatically leads to inflationary devaluation of money and, at the same time, due to their money fetishism, senselessly want to possess a lot of money… and because the healthy money supply is thus limited, in the sense of utilitarian ethics, it’s best to take money away from someone, because ultimately everyone will be better off. Nobody understands that in an economy whose driving force is always the consumer and production society, no one can benefit if the poorer people are denied the financial means to “consume more,” just as nobody understands that a decreasing “money supply equals reduced consumption” leads to higher consumer prices, because companies, despite “lower sales volumes,” still depend on the “same level of revenue” to finance their operating costs, and employee wages are the biggest cost factor in this respect; therefore, they are forced to increase their selling prices with decreasing consumer demand. See the economic crisis that began in 2017 due to a demand weakness, also known as a recession in Germany, with the largest low-wage sector in the EU, which was made possible by the dismantling of the welfare state through the Hartz IV system from 2005 onwards, as a constructive reintroduction of the poor laws of 1834 with democratically adapted repressive measures, resulting in a real and perceived precarity of society and increased electoral support for radical parties of the left and right, with the highest government tax revenues ever and a political system that only takes notice when tax revenues stop increasing. The blame, of course, lies with the evil unemployed total refusers who receive social benefits (3 million unemployed with 665,000 open jobs) who don’t want to apply for any job offers determined by the job center and therefore should have their social benefits completely cut.
William Godwin (nonconformist preacher, writer, and social philosopher) is considered the founder of philosophical anarchism due to his main work, “Enquiry Concerning Political Justice” (1792), written in response to religious absolutism. In his works, Godwin celebrated the French Revolution, which came about due to the austerity policies, including those concerning social spending and the resulting pauperism, initiated by Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, but rejected violent revolution, arguing that violence only fosters the emergence of a new authority, as revolution is driven not by reason but by passion. Revolutions should not be carried out with violence, but with justice – he considered forcing the rich to relinquish their privileges through violence to be the wrong approach. Godwin, a passionate critic of this capitalist/mercantilist social system, also refuted the Malthusian fallacy of the “Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798, population catastrophe/trap) with his work “Of Population: An Enquiry Concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind” (1821) and stated, “It was only with Malthus (who, driven by his aversion to Godwin’s theories, resorted to reactionary criticism) and especially with Ricardo that political economy became the ‘dismal science’.” For Godwin, virtue had an objective value, derived from a theologically inspired concept of right reason. The virtuous person had a duty to constantly explore moral, intellectual, and political questions. Godwin expanded on this view in the second edition of “Enquiry concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Manners” (1796), in which he drew upon the “philosophical tradition of English moralists,” particularly Adam Smith. He read Adam Smith’s “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759) and found in it confirmation that a flourishing civil society must be based on interpersonal virtue. In his “positivist view” on the perfectibility of human society and its inherent problem-solving capacities, he stated: “People are always receptive to reason and logical arguments – the only path to individual happiness lies in practicing virtue. The only authority that man should accept is reason. A system can only maintain itself through the trust of those governed in that system. This trust in the system stems from the ignorance of the people. Therefore, the general education of all people must be promoted.”
“Virtue, then, is a behavior (an attitude) of choice, grounded in the mean relative to us, a mean determined by reason and according to how a reasonable person would determine it.” – Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics
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