RadixJournal - The Jesus Hoax

00:00:00.000 I was thinking we could talk a little bit about mythicism and that you could offer this group a

00:00:09.100 kind of introduction on that. And then we can, you know, let the conversation flow in all sorts

00:00:15.620 of directions. And yeah, so we have a good number of people on right now. And then a few hundred

00:00:22.520 will listen to it afterward. I think I might even put up some parts of it for, you know,

00:00:29.060 for the public for free. But so let's just, let's start out, I guess, with the basics. I actually

00:00:37.740 reread your book, The Jesus Hoax, last night and then this morning. And let's just start out

00:00:45.620 real concretely. What is Christ myth theory? Right. So we use the word myth in different ways.

00:00:58.760 So it's a little bit, a little bit funny to talk about it that way. You know, philosophically,

00:01:04.360 because that's sort of my background, a myth is really just kind of a story or a worldview,

00:01:08.980 right? A view of viewing the world and an account of how things came to be and how they, how they

00:01:14.320 are. And, and so lots of people have different myths that they adhere to over, over time. And,

00:01:22.780 you know, even arguably today, you know, I know some philosophers have argued even our secular

00:01:27.420 worldview is a kind of a myth. It's a kind of a story about the world and it has its problems and

00:01:32.480 it's almost certainly not true and so forth. So, you know, we tend to use the word myth

00:01:37.700 disparagingly, like it's something that's false or fake. But in general, it does not mean that. It's

00:01:45.800 just kind of, kind of a story or kind of a worldview about things. But in this case, when we talk about

00:01:52.100 Jesus myth, yeah, I think, you know, the general position, I don't know all the, all the views of

00:01:58.660 the Jesus mythicists, but generally they're saying that basically the story is mythological in the

00:02:05.000 sense that it's just a story, right? That there's no historical or factual basis to Jesus of Nazareth,

00:02:12.160 that he wasn't really, either completely didn't exist or was some kind of made up character or maybe

00:02:19.260 highly altered character that fit into a narrative that was convenient for Jews at the time that the

00:02:25.720 story was written down. And so I think that's, that's kind of the general view. I think a lot

00:02:32.080 of people would, would believe that because, I mean, a lot of people are sort of skeptical of

00:02:36.880 Christianity story and, you know, Jesus in general and the myth, the miracles that he performed and so

00:02:42.340 forth. So I think just the idea that there's something mythological about the nature of Jesus, I think

00:02:47.620 that's a pretty, pretty safe claim, pretty general claim, and probably a lot of people buy into that.

00:02:54.940 What, what matters is where you take it from there, right? How, how you elaborate and what the

00:02:59.320 implications are of your particular, you know, Jesus myth version that you're adhering to.

00:03:06.080 Right. So in terms of the, in criticism of Christianity in the ancient world, you know,

00:03:12.780 contemporaneous criticism, were they stressing mythicism? I mean, and I, I know there's maybe a

00:03:20.100 bit of a poverty of sources, but Celsius, for instance, um, were they, were they taking a mythicist

00:03:28.300 approach? No, no, in general they weren't. And then that's a little bit of a striking thing. When

00:03:33.320 you look at the ancient critics, they, they generally did not say, well, this Jesus character

00:03:38.420 never existed and he's just a fable. I mean, they didn't say that. In fact, I don't know anyone who

00:03:44.040 said that about anyone. I mean, they didn't say that about, you know, the, uh, the Greek gods or

00:03:48.900 the Roman gods or the, you know, they might, they might say, well, they might use the words like

00:03:53.140 superstition, right? Which sort of implies it's not really true. And, and the Romans did in fact,

00:04:00.080 who were the first critics of the early Christians, they did in fact talk about the Christians as a kind

00:04:05.540 of a superstitious, well, the Jews in particular, is that the Jews were a superstitious people,

00:04:10.180 meaning they believe things that weren't really true. So it was a kind of a critique of Jewish

00:04:14.280 Judaism. Uh, when it came to the Christians, uh, the early critiques seemed to focus on the fact

00:04:21.140 that these people were troublemakers, they were rabble rousers and, um, you know, they were just not

00:04:29.540 assimilating into Roman society. So they were just like objectionable people and they, and they were sort

00:04:35.440 of strange people. They had this, in fact, the word that the Romans used was a cult. So they described

00:04:41.280 the early Christian movement literally as a cult. They use the word cultionis in Latin. Um, and so

00:04:46.520 they described it as a cult. So these were, you know, strange people who adhere to some odd view

00:04:50.980 about some savior guy who came down and promised them eternal life. It's like, okay, that's pretty

00:04:56.660 weird, you know, and then, and then to really sort of, you know, buy into that story, of course, it, it,

00:05:00.700 it does sound very cult-like even today, many fundamentalist Christians could certainly qualify

00:05:05.560 as, as being cult members because it's, that's the nature of the belief system. Right. I think

00:05:10.880 that was, that seems to be how the early critiques went. It was, it was just, you know, this was a

00:05:15.020 cultish, weird group that were rabble rousers and troublemakers and we just don't like them.

00:05:20.200 That was kind of, kind of what the Roman, Roman view seems to have been. Do you, do you think

00:05:24.820 it spoke to a bit of a different perspective on divinity in the ancient world? And in the sense

00:05:34.240 that in my reading of ancient texts, you don't get a kind of skeptic in, in the, uh, version of

00:05:42.320 the world, a word that we know today, uh, you know, attack on Zeus, you know, where, where's the

00:05:47.960 evidence, where's, you know, so on. It, I think it, it probably spoke to just a, a different

00:05:53.440 perspective on what the gods were. And in some ways, you know, fundamentalist of today are

00:06:02.440 more rigorous and demanding a kind of historicity. I mean, I, I even remember when I went to an

00:06:10.060 Episcopalian service last Easter, um, the priest to his credit, I would, I would say said, you have

00:06:17.200 to believe this, you, this isn't just some narrative that you can draw moral from you, you actually

00:06:23.980 have to believe the, that he rose from the dead. I think in, in some ways to his credit, he was

00:06:28.660 taking his religion seriously, but I, I think maybe in the ancient world, um, they, they just

00:06:35.180 had a different perspective on the divine and to, to suggest that, you know, did Zeus really

00:06:41.540 come down and, um, you know, father Perseus or it, this was kind of missing the whole point

00:06:48.180 and we're kind of projecting our own, you know, viewpoints backwards.

00:06:54.100 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's, that's a very modern scientific way of thinking, right?

00:06:58.220 To ask for evidence and construct logical arguments and look for proofs and that, you know, that,

00:07:02.940 that kind of stuff. And then, you know, that doesn't come about until the 1600s. So prior to that

00:07:07.600 time, it was just, you know, I don't believe you, you know, or that sounds crazy. And, you know,

00:07:13.480 of course, none of them were really on sound basis, right? I mean, they all had their own

00:07:16.460 competing gods and mythology. So it wouldn't do any good to say, Hey, your God has no evidence

00:07:21.300 because actually my God has no evidence either. So what the heck we're equal ground. So I can hardly

00:07:26.660 blame you for that. Cause I don't have any evidence for mine either. So I can just say, well,

00:07:30.360 I don't like yours or yours sounds silly or it sounds crazy. I mean, it was very, very loose kind of

00:07:35.240 critiques. Well, so I think what, what is unique about Christianity is that pretense of historicity.

00:07:43.620 And in the sense of, if you read Matthew, say the, the sermon on the Mount or something,

00:07:48.440 you can take that as a plausible report, I guess, of what, what was said there seems to be a 2000 years

00:07:56.980 ago, an almost kind of new perspective on religion where this actually happened then and there,

00:08:03.880 and we're going to report on it. And, and so I guess there's, there's this kind of double quality

00:08:11.500 to, to Christianity in that sense. And that it does have a pretense of historicity, which I think

00:08:17.260 is really powerful and important to it. But then it's also, you know, reviving other myth systems and

00:08:26.240 kind of spinning them and, and, and so on it. And I think maybe that maybe, maybe that doesn't allow

00:08:32.140 us to kind of see mythicism correctly, or the, the mythal mythical quality in Christianity correctly.

00:08:40.700 Because there, there is something kind of modern about Christianity in the sense that it was a real

00:08:45.840 guy, a, you know, a, a, a somewhat poor carpenter who came out and spoke and told moral lessons.

00:08:53.460 It's something that can kind of appeal in a way to a more modern sensibility. But that kind of blinds us

00:09:01.120 to the, the mythic quality at the essence of Christianity as well.

00:09:05.940 Right. Well, again, you know, keep, right. I mean, the, the New Testament does read like,

00:09:09.640 kind of like a transcript at points about what Jesus said. It's like, you're actually sort of there.

00:09:13.780 That was kind of the idea. But of course, you know, that, that general idea had been around for a long

00:09:17.840 time. I mean, we can go back to Plato's apology, which is basically a transcript of what Socrates said in his

00:09:23.380 own defense. And that was 500 years for, sorry, 400 years prior to the time of Jesus. So, so there was

00:09:29.680 a long intellectual tradition of that happening. And, and I highly suspect that Paul and the New

00:09:36.520 Testament writers were aware of that tradition. And of course they were aware of the mythological

00:09:41.260 traditions and the pagan traditions. And I think they sort of sought this little blending merging of

00:09:47.160 the intellectual respectability of the Greeks and, you know, Platonic sort of writing and then blended

00:09:53.280 that with pagan and mythological ideas. And it was kind of a nice sort of happy mixture that they

00:09:59.040 used to construct this Christian theology. Interesting. So why don't, why don't you talk a little

00:10:07.260 bit about your version of mythicism? So the, as, as you lay out at the beginning of your book,

00:10:16.220 there are, there, there are a number, number of people who have taken this up, um, really in the,

00:10:22.700 in the 19th century, um, particularly with German criticism, uh, there, they were kind of dissecting

00:10:31.300 the Bible for the first time in a way. And this was the origin of the document, uh, documentary

00:10:36.980 hypothesis of different authors that were blended together into these texts. And, um, there are

00:10:44.600 obvious contradictions in the Bible where, where, where do those derive from? Are they coming from

00:10:49.440 different sources? Uh, and so on. And then there was, uh, you know, figures like Bruno Bauer, uh, who,

00:10:55.200 uh, Marx got into, uh, various disputes with, but, but there was a, there was a kind of atheism

00:11:02.220 brewing out of the Hegelian tradition. Um, you could say as well, but maybe talk a little bit

00:11:11.100 about that tradition because I actually find that interesting. And, you know, we, we sometimes seem

00:11:16.540 to be reinventing the wheel of, you know, new atheism or, you know, Richard Dawkins was the first man

00:11:22.460 to ever question whether God exists. And, and that's actually kind of ridiculous that this is a,

00:11:27.600 a very long tradition. Maybe talk a little bit about that. I find that intellectual history

00:11:33.080 really interesting. And then also how your, um, your, your version of this is, um, is, is quite

00:11:40.900 different in fact. Yeah. Well, right. So skepticism about the gods, I mean, you're right. That goes way,

00:11:46.100 way back. I mean, I would go back again to the ancient Greeks, you know, because, um, you know,

00:11:50.640 Socrates talked very little about the gods or just sort of in a little hand-waving kind of way.

00:11:56.120 And, you know, Plato talked about it, Demiurge, you know, uh, you know, the world soul, but those

00:12:02.160 are sort of very distant and abstract things. And Aristotle kind of had this world mind that was

00:12:07.200 kind of turning the cosmos, but again, a very abstract philosophical kind of being. Um, so,

00:12:13.780 so, you know, they, in, in no sense were those like sort of modern gods, which is like a personal

00:12:18.360 being that you can kind of talk to and you pray to him and he, you know, gives you forgiveness and

00:12:22.580 so forth. So, I mean, that's, those were, those are very old ideas, right. To sort of be skeptical

00:12:27.140 about gods that look like humans, the anthropomorphized kind of gods that we are, have

00:12:33.200 traditionally associated with religions. Um, and that, that kind of comes and goes over, over the

00:12:39.000 years. And of course with science, right. That gave, gave it a whole new boost, right. In the 1700s

00:12:44.240 in particular, scientific reasoning, you know, starts to say, well, look, we don't even need

00:12:48.940 these, these mythological tales anymore. We can just talk about materialistic explanations

00:12:54.140 of things. And then they look at the Christian story and they say, oh, by the way, there's

00:12:57.320 a lot of weird contradictions in that story and things don't seem to make sense. At the

00:13:02.540 same time, the German anthropologists are digging up, you know, ruins and, and hunting for evidence

00:13:07.280 in the middle East. And they're finding that things aren't where they're supposed to be.

00:13:11.240 And they're not finding evidence of cities that are mentioned. They're like, well, maybe

00:13:13.880 that city never actually existed. You know, maybe this thing is a lot newer than it would

00:13:18.420 seem to be, or maybe a lot older than it seemed to be. And they were starting to get actual

00:13:22.440 data that was conflicting with the story. The story had internal contradictions. And then

00:13:27.680 that raises people like, yeah, Bruno Bauer and Reimers and, and, uh, you know, early, you

00:13:32.420 know, uh, uh, David Strauss, who are really kind of really start to press hard on the Christian

00:13:37.260 story. And they're like, Hey, this, this is dumb fly. There's, there's major problems

00:13:41.100 here, internal and external. And that really started the ball rolling. I think.

00:13:46.540 Definitely. Um, so, so what are, what you're offering really is, I guess, is kind of picking

00:13:54.980 up on, um, instances in Nietzsche of focusing on Paul. And I, I think you actually lay it

00:14:02.600 out in your book quite well, where you're saying, okay, you know, there, there is a lot of, you

00:14:08.920 know, mythical criticism of, uh, of the Bible and so on, but we actually need to get to intention

00:14:16.960 and motivation. And this wasn't just some accident or, or honest mistake in the sense that

00:14:25.160 the people doing this really believed it. Um, at, at some point they were consciously creating a

00:14:32.940 myth that they wanted to have, uh, that they wanted to have an effect in the world. And so,

00:14:40.240 yeah, granted, when we're looking back at history, you always have to use some informed

00:14:44.780 speculation. You can't know things for sure, but you actually can intuit, uh, a certain intent

00:14:51.600 and motivation, uh, in people's minds. Yeah, absolutely. And, and I mean, I think there's

00:14:58.200 a very clear motivation. I think Nietzsche was maybe one of the first to pick up on it. Uh,

00:15:02.460 although it wasn't really very clear because just the way Nietzsche writes and it's sort of

00:15:06.240 scattered or bits and pieces in his writings, it, it takes a lot of work to pull those threads

00:15:10.480 together. Um, but you know, I mean, Nietzsche had the right, the right basic picture, right?

00:15:15.740 The picture is you've got, you've got a Jewish power structure, Jewish tribes who were in power

00:15:20.900 in Judea and Samaria until 63 BC, when the Romans come marching in and throw them out of power and

00:15:26.880 the Romans take over and the Jews, like anybody else would have been highly incensed at these foreign

00:15:31.980 intruders who threw them out of power, probably pilfered their temples, you know, and extracted taxes

00:15:38.060 and tributes and so forth. And yeah, obviously a lot of resentment, a lot of anger there by the

00:15:43.560 people who were in charge, which was the, the various Jewish tribes, um, for the people who

00:15:49.140 live there, the masses to them. And I sort of portrayed it in the book this way. So it was kind

00:15:53.880 of a change in government. Okay. We, you know, we used to be ruled by the Jews. Okay. Now we're

00:15:57.960 ruled by the Romans and actually the Romans got some pretty cool stuff that they're bringing in here

00:16:01.680 that we'd never seen before. So you can imagine even for the masses, it was actually a positive move,

00:16:07.100 right? That they, they, they, they saw some gains and okay, you know, we never really liked the Jews

00:16:11.420 anyway. So we're happy to have the Romans come in and sort of run the show. But, but obviously the

00:16:16.540 Jews have been highly incensed at this whole situation. And we know this because there's a story of the

00:16:21.820 early resistance movement that comes right around the year zero, uh, with the Sicarii movement,

00:16:28.640 right? These guys were basically assassins. They were kind of, you know, renegade killers trying to

00:16:34.780 assassinate individual Romans as a way to, uh, attack them, you know, to, to, to get back at them.

00:16:41.180 Okay. Of course you're facing the largest military in the world. So you have, uh, limited options at

00:16:46.360 that point, but obviously individuals, small scale attacks were working. So there was a movement afoot

00:16:52.240 there. Um, but I, I sort of speculated, you know, the intellectuals like, like Paul, who was an

00:16:58.960 intellectual, he was, you know, well-educated elite, uh, Jew and, you know, he would likely

00:17:04.800 have known that, Hey, this little stabbings and killings was probably not going to really do it in

00:17:09.260 the long run. And we, we may have to think sort of harder and deeper about how we can go about

00:17:14.820 really undermining the basis for the Romans. We can't just kill them off one by one. That'll take

00:17:19.740 centuries. So we, we need to try something else. We need to try to attack their basic picture of the

00:17:24.620 world, the structure of their belief system, their, their, you know, the moral basis for the

00:17:29.060 worldview. And in, in, in these, and you can imagine them thinking like, well, maybe that will

00:17:34.180 work on at least on the masses, if not the Romans themselves, if we can at least sort of get the

00:17:39.900 masses away from the Romans and towards on our side, a little bit more towards our side of the,

00:17:46.140 of the, of the, of the worldview of the picture of the world, then we might sort of really undermine

00:17:51.740 a common support for Rome. We might sort of get the, to get kind of sympathy in some sense from

00:17:56.620 the masses, and maybe that will have an effect. And I really kind of think that was sort of the real

00:18:01.700 insight. I mean, it was a kind of a brilliant insight that Paul, who, who was by consensus, the first

00:18:07.240 writer, the first Christian writer, his letters are the first documents in Christian history. So he must

00:18:13.380 have been the first to, to kind of concoct this idea that he envisions this very skeletal structure

00:18:20.860 of a theology. It's very bare bones. You really see nothing of the detail in the, in the letters

00:18:26.620 of Paul. All the details come later in the gospels, and those don't appear until Paul is gone. Right. So he

00:18:32.900 either knows nothing about them, or he had nothing to do with them. We don't really know for sure. But, but,

00:18:38.180 but Paul can, we can imagine, constructed a bare bones theology about a God who came to earth. He's here for you.

00:18:44.880 He sacrificed himself for you. He got crucified. He got raised from the dead. And you too can do that

00:18:50.560 if you believe in us. Don't believe in those Romans. You can believe, you know, believe in

00:18:54.580 our new story about this rabbi, this rabbi Jesus from Nazareth. And then, and there's great benefits.

00:19:02.680 Yeah. So, you know, that was a kind of an interesting little story that you can imagine

00:19:06.800 Paul constructs, and he's ready to promote that among, among the masses.

00:19:11.180 Yeah. I, I wouldn't, I would want to stress this because this is something that I, I think

00:19:16.880 I would suggest that most average Christians actually don't know, which is that Paul never

00:19:24.200 read the gospels. Paul never met Jesus. And it, we, and these are letters to, again, various

00:19:32.660 sects of Christianity where he's kind of, uh, you know, hammering away at ideology and, you know,

00:19:37.820 ah, no, that's, that's wrong. That's heretical. And this is, this is the right way. Um, uh, so he,

00:19:43.060 he's a kind of movement organizer is the best way of describing him. And, but there's the other

00:19:49.740 thing that, uh, that I w that I would stress is that Paul found Jesus in the old Testament.

00:19:57.480 Uh, so again, again, he, there's the story of the, you know, trip to Damascus and an epiphany and so

00:20:03.060 on, but he's, he, he'd never met the historical figure Jesus. If, if he existed, he kind of found

00:20:10.040 him in the text. And so, um, Christianity is profoundly Jewish in that sense. Um, it, it isn't,

00:20:21.840 it, it, there isn't, it isn't like, you know, God, you know, chose the Jews for a time and then he just

00:20:28.120 created this whole new thing. You know, it has nothing to do with the old Testament. No, um,

00:20:33.800 the, the myth of Jesus and even the story of Jesus emerged from the old Testament. Now that doesn't

00:20:40.820 mean that there aren't important differences, but of course there are, but it is profoundly Jewish

00:20:46.500 in its inception. Absolutely. I mean, that, that was the milieu. That was the context in which

00:20:53.360 everything emerged. I mean, you know, Paul as an elite educated Jew, I mean, he's, he's going to

00:20:58.600 think in a Jewish terms like Jews do today. I mean, it hasn't changed in 2000 years and he, he's going

00:21:04.180 to draw from his background. He has expertise in the old Testament. Um, certain, certainly he did.

00:21:10.340 He really knew, knew the, uh, you know, the, the, the, the Jewish Bible. That was an obvious thing.

00:21:15.080 So he's going to clearly draw from those morals and fables as best he can. Um, he wants to construct

00:21:23.140 a Jewish friendly theology as much as possible because that's the objective. Um, but, uh, but I,

00:21:30.920 I suspect, and I, and this is where I differ with some of the mythicists. I think there probably was

00:21:35.660 an actual person. There probably, I think there was an actual guy, an actual rabbi. Maybe he was called

00:21:40.600 Jesus. Maybe he was from Nazareth. I do, we don't know. Probably he was agitating on behalf of the

00:21:46.980 poor and the impoverished against the Romans. He might've been sort of a political agitator,

00:21:52.100 you know, and, and trying to drive those invaders out and so forth. He probably had a, you know,

00:21:56.300 kind of a little bit of a moral backbone there and was opposing the Romans. And if, if you got

00:22:00.740 visible enough and you caused enough stir, then the Romans strung you up on the, on a cross and

00:22:05.440 they crucified you. And that was the punishment, the Roman punishment for political agitators.

00:22:10.040 So I can imagine all that probably, probably actually happened. It probably wasn't Jesus

00:22:15.040 agitated, got crucified. And then a few years later, uh, Paul comes along and maybe he's drawing

00:22:23.100 from this actual story. Again, this is sort of my speculation, but of course it's obvious. If you

00:22:29.160 want to construct a hoax to deceive people, it's always best to include as much truth in it as you can.

00:22:34.580 Sure. Because, because it's going to sound more, more variable, uh, verifiable. It's going to sound

00:22:39.520 more true, right? If anybody checks anything, yeah, there actually was that Jesus guy. Yeah. I

00:22:45.040 remember him. Yeah. He was a great guy. He was a great teacher. Okay. He really did exist. So it

00:22:50.140 makes sense that Paul would have drawn from an actual person life and probably death, and then gone

00:22:55.960 back to the old Testament and, and drew bits and pieces that kind of seemed to mesh with that story.

00:23:01.560 Uh, you know, from what I've seen, it's very, it's typically biblical. It's very cryptic sort

00:23:07.380 of stuff. When you look at people say, oh, the old Testament anticipated Jesus coming. Well, okay,

00:23:11.860 there's very obscure sort of passages that would say, well, that sounds a little bit like this. And

00:23:16.560 that's could be interpreted as this. And I, you know, okay, that's very useful when you want to

00:23:22.760 make a story. So I can imagine that Paul did that. He put, took little bits and pieces,

00:23:26.940 maybe not even him, maybe more than even the gospel writers than Paul himself, but he could

00:23:32.260 have, even Paul could have taken little elements of the old Testament and matched it to this guy's

00:23:36.740 life. And then started to use that to build this, you know, the three days, people talk about the

00:23:41.460 three days in the cave. Well, that sounds like three days, you know, Noah's three days in the whale,

00:23:45.620 you know, these kinds of things. So you can, you can sort of construct parallels that were there in the

00:23:50.600 old Testament and sort of weave those into the life of someone who was, who existed and make

00:23:55.180 kind of an interesting and compelling new story. Right. And then in Daniel, there, there is the

00:24:01.460 image of a, a suffering Christ, a suffering Messiah, which I think would go against other

00:24:09.840 versions of the Messiah who would be more David-like that they would be a warrior King who would come

00:24:15.140 out of nowhere and start kicking ass. Obviously that Jesus doesn't do that at all. But again,

00:24:20.520 there is very strong precedent. I mean, I I've been exposed also to, to, to Daniel, um, in the sense

00:24:27.640 of, um, many, particularly Protestant Christians will say, you know, this is the text that the Jews

00:24:34.180 don't want, don't want to know about because this just profit, this is Jesus to the T. In fact,

00:24:40.560 he's accurately described. And I think they're actually right about that. I mean, they're,

00:24:45.200 they're wrong in some other ways, but they're actually, they're actually right about that.

00:24:48.520 That notion of a suffering Messiah who's kind of rejected by his own people. Um, it's kind of the

00:24:56.320 archetypal image in some ways of the leftist hippie or something, you know, who I, I, I, I'm not trying

00:25:03.880 to demean anyone here, but you know, that who, who says the truth sticks up for the poor, but then

00:25:08.200 they, they, the people he's trying to help reject him kind of thing that, that kind of tragic image

00:25:13.620 of the, of the, of the peaceful Messiah. Um, and all of that actually is in the old Testament.

00:25:19.560 Like that, that's the, there's an archetype that's being constructed on a, in a literary basis right

00:25:25.520 there. Yeah. Well, right. You know, you, you have to recall, right. Most of the Orthodox Jews were

00:25:30.380 expecting the warrior savior, right. The certain great King and hero and general, he's going to sort

00:25:35.300 of militarily lead to, to triumph, you know, in this world. And of course that was a very hard sell

00:25:41.300 at the time because the Jews were just crushed. I mean, the Romans rolled in and boom there, you

00:25:45.340 know, they're just trampled underfoot. So, so you, you have, you were hard pressed to look for a

00:25:50.860 warrior King who was going to save you at that point. It was a lot easier to find the suffering

00:25:55.300 victim, excuse me, the suffering victim who took a moral position, got himself killed. And now he's,

00:26:02.640 you know, beloved of God because he was such a great guy. That's a whole lot easier story to sell

00:26:07.520 at the time that Paul is, you know, constructing his, his, his theology. So yeah, it makes sense.

00:26:12.720 Paul must've known both sides. He would have known about the warrior King side and the sort

00:26:17.680 of the suffering savior. And he's like, all right, I'll take, I'll take that suffering savior

00:26:21.440 because I can match that to the guy who got crucified a couple of years ago. And I can make

00:26:25.620 a good story out of that one. Right. So do you, do you, do you think that Paul's motivation,

00:26:32.920 motivations were ideological in this sense, and in some ways cryptic in the sense that he was

00:26:41.300 trying to create this ideology that would undermine the Roman ideology and, and many ideologies of,

00:26:52.360 of the ancient world that this was something new. And he, he almost kind of invented the left to a

00:26:59.960 degree. Um, in the sense of this, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth and all you see where

00:27:05.780 I'm going with that. Yeah, exactly. Well, right. It's, it's a, it's a really good question. I have

00:27:09.520 to believe his primary objective was to get back at the Romans, right? He just, he just hates the

00:27:13.500 Romans. He wants to get them out. He's got anti-Roman messages sprinkled throughout his letters.

00:27:18.520 And they're also there throughout the gospels. Um, they want people to kind of resist sort of

00:27:23.460 physically and psychologically and mentally and morally, they want them to resist the Romans.

00:27:28.080 And I think that was really objective. Number one, let's get the Romans out of here,

00:27:32.600 you know, undermine their bases for support, and then we can come back into charge.

00:27:37.080 Right. And that was probably number one. Number two is, of course, the Jews had this longstanding

00:27:41.300 antipathy toward anybody else. I mean, anybody who wasn't a Jew. So they really had a really

00:27:46.000 disdainful position towards the pagans at the time, the Arabs. I mean, they weren't Muslims,

00:27:51.920 because there was no Islam back then. But, uh, you know, the Turks and the Greeks and whoever they,

00:27:56.000 I mean, the Jews were just like, they just thought everybody else was, was dirt, you know,

00:27:59.900 or worse. So you can imagine there's a kind of, uh, you know, maybe like, you know, if I can screw

00:28:07.020 with their minds a little bit, those masses, you know, and at the same time, sort of, you know,

00:28:11.700 get them on this anti-Roman side and maybe, you know, get them to buy a little bit of the kind

00:28:16.040 of the basic Jewish goodness. Um, maybe that'll serve two or three purposes. I can guess that kind

00:28:22.140 of thing was maybe going on in Paul's mind. You don't know how much he was really planning,

00:28:27.560 you know, a lot of this kind of, I don't know, you know, maybe it's sort of spun out of control.

00:28:32.220 It was kind of, you know, ran away from him. It's hard to tell with Paul because it's such a sketchy

00:28:37.040 theology and all the, all the details that we know don't come until later. So Paul either didn't know,

00:28:43.300 or maybe had nothing to do with all the later details about what the meek Jesus did and said,

00:28:48.540 I mean, there's none of that in Paul, right? Right. It's just the savior's here. He died and

00:28:53.860 he went to heaven and you, you can go to heaven too. I mean, it's very bare bones, but you know,

00:28:58.800 even that, even, even that was enough to a, get you opposed to the Roman pantheon, the Roman

00:29:05.180 theology. Yeah. And B, according to Nietzsche, I mean, that, that alone was a highly destructive

00:29:11.000 move because now suddenly that your, your real world, your saved world is in the beyond.

00:29:17.040 It's after you die. This world is kind of the pain and suffering and you're carrying your cross with

00:29:23.400 Jesus and you're suffering like him. And maybe you're dying on the cross or whatever. So this

00:29:27.860 world is a nasty, ugly suffering place. And the next world is a good place. Then that's what you're

00:29:33.240 looking forward to. And, and, um, both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche kind of said, well, look, this is a

00:29:39.060 highly destructive view of life. I mean, you're supposed to be a creature of the world. You're in the

00:29:45.020 world. You're part of the world. You know, you're, you, uh, you know, a normal human being wants to

00:29:50.460 live a good life, to be happy, to be satisfied with how things are and not view every day as kind

00:29:56.460 of a tribulation and a trial and suffering and pain and nastiness. And, you know, maybe, maybe I hope

00:30:01.880 someday I'll be better when I'm gone. So, so both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche said, this is a highly

00:30:06.720 life-denying, life-negative view of the world because the true life is the afterlife. It's not,

00:30:13.840 it's not this world. It's not here now. It's the next one. And that has all kinds of repercussions,

00:30:18.180 uh, about how you live your life and attitudes towards things and other people and towards your

00:30:23.400 own health and towards sickness. I mean, really very far-reaching consequences that I don't, I

00:30:30.340 suspect neither Paul nor the gospel writers really, really knew about it. I mean, they just wanted it.

00:30:35.320 They just wanted a really good hook. They wanted to really hook people in. Well, what's a better

00:30:40.020 hook than you get to live forever, man? You don't have to die. You get to live forever in a happy

00:30:44.360 place. And to me, that was just a big hook to get the people in, but it has a lot of really negative

00:30:50.520 consequences for society over the years. And I think that was to their credit. That's what both

00:30:56.040 Schopenhauer and Nietzsche really, really latched onto. And they really stressed that point.

00:31:00.420 Right. Well, what are some of those consequences? Because there, I think there,

00:31:04.100 there are a lot of contradictions and intentions within Christianity. First off,

00:31:12.140 what you were saying and, and, and also what, what Nietzsche said about Christianity, I mean,

00:31:16.340 this is obvious to you.

RadixJournal - November 17, 2022

The Jesus Hoax

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