By Koenraad Elst
In the West we don't hear much about it, and even in India it doesn't make many headlines, but Hindu society is faced with a Christian problem besides the better-known Muslim problem. One focus of this conflict is the history of Christian iconoclasm, which is not entirely finished, and which past history has crystallized into some hundreds of churches standing on the ruins of purposely demolished Hindu temples. This history of iconoclasm is not an accident: it is the logical outcome of Christian theology, particularly of its deep hostility towards non-Christian forms of worship.
Christian sacred places in Palestine
A book well worth reading for those engaged in controversies over sacred sites, in particular concerning Christian churches in South India, is Christians and the Holy Places by Joan Taylor, a historian from New Zealand.2 It shows that the places where Christians commemorate the birth and death of Jesus have nothing to do with Jesus, historically.
The Nativity Church in Bethlehem was built in the fourth century A.D. in forcible replacement of a Pagan place of worship, dedicated to the God Tammuz-Adonis. Until then, it had had no special significance for Christians, who considered pilgrimages to sacred places a Pagan practice anyway: you cannot concentrate in one place (hence, go on pilgrimage to) the Omnipresent. The concept of "sacred place" was introduced into Christianity by converts, especially at the time of Emperor Constantine's switch to a pro-Christian state policy.
The Christian claim to Bethlehem as Jesus's birthplace was a fraud from the beginning, as Cambridge historian Michael Arnheim has shown: through numerous contradictions and factual inaccuracies, the Gospel writers betray their intention to locate Jesus's birth in Bethlehem at any cost, against all information available to them.3 The reason is that they had to make Jesus live up to an Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah was to be born there.
The Holy Cross Church in Jerusalem was built in forcible replacement of a temple of the fertility Goddess Venus, at the personal initiative of Emperor Constantine. His mother had seen in a dream that Jesus had died at that particular place, though close scrutiny of the original Christian texts shows that they point to a place 200 metres to the south. Constantine had the Venus temple demolished and the ground searched, and yes, his experts duly found the cross on which Jesus had died. They somehow assumed that their forebears of 33 A.D. had a habit of leaving or even burying crucifixion crosses at the places where they had been used, quod non. The Christian claim to the site of the Holy Cross is based on the dream of a gullible but fanatical woman, and fortified with a faked excavation.4
Remember the Ayodhya debate, where Hindu scholars were challenged to produce ever more solid proof of the traditions underlying the sacredness of the controversial site? Whatever proof they came up with was automatically, without any inspection, dismissed by the high priests of secularism as "myth" and "faked evidence". It was alleged that there was a "lack of proof" for the assumption that Rama ever lived there. But in the case of the Christian sacred places, we do not just have lack of proof that the religion's claim is true, but we have positive proof that its claim is untrue, and that it was historically part of a campaign of fraud and destruction.
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