Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums

Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (In English Criminal History of Christianity) is the main work of the author and church critic Karlheinz Deschner. It describes the misconduct attributed to various Christian churches, denominations, sects, and leagues, as well as its representatives and Christian sovereigns during Christian history. The work covers the entire history of Christianity from its biblical beginnings until the present. It was published in ten volumes beginning in 1986, with the final volume appearing in March 2013.

Partial or complete translations of this work have been published in Italian, Spanish, Greek, Polish, and Russian.

In the introduction to the complete works, which is the beginning of the first volume, Deschner explains his intention by starting with what is not to be found in his work: an answer to the question "What is Christianity good for?". According to the sentence Audiatur et altera pars ("one should listen to the other side, too") he wants to counterbalance the gigantic ascendence of the existing glorification of Christianity. Also, he does not want to write about the alleged or - exceptionally - really positive effects of Christianity. Instead, he wants to demonstrate that the advocates of a primary moral instance not only partially but permanently failed their own ideals.

Deschner anticipates the main criticism at his work, namely the one-sidedness of selection of facts, and responds with a clear counter. His aim was not a history of churches, but an illustration of all (including non-churchy) phenomena of Christianity. These would be measured up to not only generic terms, like crime or humanity, but also to the central ethical ideas of the synoptics, as well as to the Christian self-conception as the religion of glad tidings, love, peace, etc., and also the ignored demands of the later church, like prohibition of military service (first for all Christians, then for the clergy, only), ban on simony, interest-taking, usury and many more.

In the following, all volumes are listed with an abstract for each of them. The English titles were taken from the author's English web-site where available. Where not available, they are marked as (translation).

This first volume was published after 16 years of preparatory work. It illustrates the genesis of Christianity and its ascension to the Roman state religion.

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