The RAW DEAL from October 10, 2025 (edited) "The Jesus Hoax" with Jim Skrbina
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Well, in addition to his work on the historical Jesus and so forth, David has done a lot of work on technology, the metaphysics of technology, confront technology, two of his books.
One of greatest interests for us today, no doubt, is the Jesus hoax, how St. Paul's Cabal fooled the world for 2,000 years.
David, you're really into an approach that receives too little attention today.
I think so much goes on about religious conflicts that are completely untestable.
It's impossible to prove or disprove even the existence of God, as you as a philosopher well understand.
Yet people believe these things with absolute conviction.
So the degree of subjective conviction overwhelmingly exceeds the objective evidential support, which in that case is non-existent.
Thus, am I, for example, an agnostic, recognizing in accordance with the ethics of belief, one should never accept or believe anything without sufficient evidence.
So how could I possibly other than suspend belief in either the existence of God or the non-existence of God?
I like what you're doing by going about and investigating what we can piece together about the real story of this guy who was, in my opinion, a great moral leader.
I mean, he made a lot of very significant contributions.
But when it comes to miracles, once you understand that miracles are violations of the laws of nature and that the laws of nature cannot be violated and cannot be changed, I mean, the very concept of a miracle is an irrational presumption, or at least a rational.
It's one that suspends or goes beyond the boundaries of rationality in relation to what we know about walking on water, turning water to wine, the loaves and fishes, the whole bit, not to mention the resurrection.
I turn over to you.
I do want to add one footnote, however.
My respect for Helsinki is phenomenal.
I had a dear friend there.
You may or may not have encountered Ilkhaninaluto, one of the best philosophers of science in the world.
If you had any encounter with him, he was a great friend of mine.
Don't like a hit, David.
Yeah, very good.
Thanks, Jim.
Yeah, maybe just to begin with, you're showing there, that's the book.
In fact, that's the original edition.
I've got a new second edition that's out.
It's on my, if you go to my personal homepage and just scroll down the first page, you'll see the latest editions of those books.
So they're there.
And yeah, they're available on Amazon.
We haven't been blocked yet, which is good.
But yeah, I mean, to me, it's a hugely important story.
I think this is a massively undertold story for clear reasons.
There's a lot of reasons why people don't want to talk about this.
I don't want to get to the bottom of what's going on, the origins of Christianity.
I mean, a lot of the stuff that we're dealing with, at least that I'm dealing with in the book, isn't really theological issues.
I'm not arguing about the theology or God's power and his existence and so forth.
It's more just of the historical facts, right?
What we know, what documentation we have, what we do not have, and what we can plausibly infer from the data that we have and that we don't have.
And it really shows that something is rotten at the core of the traditional Jesus story.
I mean, it's just basically impossible that you have a miracle-working son of God.
I mean, a literal God who comes to earth for crying out loud, raising people from the dead, walking on water, all the nifty miracles that it's attributed to him.
And there's no record, there's no documentation, there's no contemporary, contemporaneous evidence.
No one writes anything for or against one way or the other for decades after these things supposedly happened.
I mean, it's just in addition to the fact that the miracles, as you say, are basically violations of laws of nature.
Even if something amazing happened, you know, they don't really know what was a law of nature back then.
Something amazing could have happened, but there's no documentation of that either.
So we have almost no reason to even believe that a Jesus character even existed.
I suspect he did because that makes a hoax that much better if there was an actual rabbi that was at the core of the story.
So that was my presumption.
Even that is on pretty thin ice, but I'm willing to go that far.
Let's presume there was a rabbi.
He was a preacher.
He was an agitator, got in trouble with Roman authorities, got himself crucified, and then got, you know, the body is buried somewhere in some tomb and may still be there today.
So that's the little bit of truth, I think, that's at the core of that story.
That everything else comes from decades later, comes from Paul and his followers who have a real incentive to spin a tale to Jewish benefit.
And that's really what my book is about.
Yeah, I want to hear the whole story.
How the gospels came to be written.
Figures like Jeremiah, if you have any insight, I have a friend who says he was a complete genocidal lunatic and wrote several of the books and that they've had this pernicious influence.
I've long held the belief that merging the Old Testament with the new was a calamitous historical blunder of a magnitude that's virtually incalculable, and that it should not have happened and that the world would have been far better off without that kind of merger.
And the even theological incoherence that generates, if you presume this is supposed to be one and the same God, the Old Testament, the God of vengeance, revenge, slaughter, genocide, the God of the new, a God of forgiveness, compassion, love, mercy.
I mean, they're irreconcilable unless God schizophrenic.
So, you know, I think there's something very wrong that happened way back when that has had the most profound consequences for world history as a consequence.
Your thoughts?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, we have to keep things straight, right?
The Old Testament is the Jewish Bible, right?
Pure and simple.
It was written by Jews, for Jews, about Jews.
That's all it was.
It was a Jewish, Judeo-centric book.
It was their theology, their history, their stories of how to dominate the people in the region.
That's all it was.
It's a Jewish Bible.
And that's sort of one standalone document.
It's got ludicrous stories and ridiculous origin stories and all the stuff that you would expect to show up, you know, from 500 BC or even older.
So yeah, you know, just take it as that, as what it is.
It's a document that's by, for, and about Jews, and that's that's it.
When they talk about, you know, the dominion and loving your neighbor and all those nice little, you know, that did the Ten Commandments, that's all just for Jews.
That relates to Jews, has no bearing on a Gentile at all.
Never was intended to, was never written that way, was never interpreted that way ever when it was, you know, for hundreds of years when that thing existed.
So you got to set that aside, right?
And then later you come with the Jesus story, which is a whole new ballgame.
And that has to be set in the context of the Roman conquest of Palestine, right?
The Romans moved in in 63 BC.
They threw the Jews out of power.
The Jewish groups were incensed.
They did everything they could to fight back.
They did renegade guerrilla actions and they launched the little militant forays and they tried to kill individual Roman centurions.
And yeah, they did everything they could to try to fight back at the Romans, to get back into power, to drive them out, basically.
And that's the context in which Paul comes along in the year 33.
This is supposedly, well, I'll follow traditional chronology.
Year 33, this is three years after the crucifixion, and he decides he's going to write a story about Jesus who's the Son of God and is here to save every non-Jew in the world, right?
So he starts writing his minimalist theology, and that's what you see in the letters from Paul, which is the bulk of the New Testament.
It's just basically the traditional 13 letters of Paul, and then the four gospels and a few other miscellaneous pieces.
That's what the New Testament is.
And if you just look at the letters from Paul, it's a super minimalist theology.
He's just saying, hey, there is this guy, Jesus.
He was, you know, he was a divine being.
He died for your sins.
And, you know, he's here to save you.
And just believe him and then all will be well.
I mean, there's no quotes from what Jesus said.
There's no Jesus theology.
There's no words of wisdom.
There's no mention of the gospels because the gospels did not exist in Paul's lifetime.
In his entire lifetime, there were no gospels.
Paul lived, was roughly born about the year zero and died apparently in the year 65 or 70, right before the rebellion in Jerusalem.
So, yeah, all you see is a super stripped down theology in the letters of Paul.
He's trying to build a church.
He's trying to attract, suck in the Gentiles to a new sort of a theology based on a Jewish rabbi named Jesus, based on the Jewish God, Jehovah.
And he's just trying to get the Gentiles kind of onto his side ideologically and against the Roman pantheism, the Roman worldview.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
It's very interesting you suggest that those Ten Commandments and all of that were just for the Jewish community, that the Goya, the non-Jews, weren't intended to be covered in us.
They weren't actually supposed to be universal, but I suppose they're simply to be adhered to within the Jewish community.
I think that's major all by itself.
So exactly.
That's that.
Exactly.
Yeah, that's that's that's that's people got to keep that key.
It's not like the Old Testament, New Testament is just one continuous document that's all right, you know, that all relates to two completely different documents of an entirely Jewish document and then an entirely, you know, pernicious document that was written, you know, constructed after the fact, backfilling data, you know, back predicting prophecies to serve their purposes, to try to manipulate and deceive the Gentiles.
That's really what we see in the New Testament.
Paul, any thoughts you'd like to toss into the hat here?
Well, I was going to say, you're probably a popular speaking guest at Baptist picnics, I would imagine.
So, yeah.
I'm available for booking.
Just contact me and I'll come.
You know, it jives nicely with where I come from, which, you know, in terms of, you know, the broad category of white nationalism.
And we, I've taken a fairly dim view of Christians for a long time.
In fact, I may have told Jim this before, but I've mentioned it on air on different shows that I've been on in another network too as well.
That I kind of missed the days of RBN when I used to, I didn't start out with the intent, but I used to go back and forth and really, in many cases, mock a lot of these Christian callers because there's a heavy, you know, Christian component of RBN listeners.
And some of them are literally retarded.
I mean, and this is sort of reinforces my experience in life, you know, because I've been around, you know, so-called Christians.
I was born and raised Catholic, and I like to joke that we Catholics even make fun of Christians because we're kind of a different breed, right?
But yeah, I've encountered lots and lots of Christians, including in many cases wanting to date some very, you know, Christian women because of many attractive features about them.
But in the end, I found often that they were just vacuous, you know, and I just couldn't jive with my outlook and my intellect.
It's a cult.
I mean, that's what the Romans called it.
They literally called it a cult because it was a mindless, you know, belief system of just allegiance, you know, and it required no thinking of any kind.
It was, it required anti-thinking, really.
That's what it was.
So, and I think, in a sense, that's what it is today.
You got Christians who just believe the stupidest things, and you know, it assumes a cult-like persona there.
I'll tell you the stupidest thing I heard, and we can go on with the show, but this was a caller to RBN.
This is probably a couple years, two, three years ago.
And I was on a show with another co-host or host, Giuseppe, who Jim knows well.
We were doing a show every Sunday night.
And, you know, typically our shows covered, you know, the evildoers of the world, and we know who they are and the kind of things they were doing and the way they were manipulating us.
And a caller called in, a very well-known guy who called many times and expressed overall his Christianity.
And he actually said that all this evil in the world just demonstrates the greater glory of God.
He actually said that on the air.
And I literally, I didn't lose it, but I just go, What the hell are you talking about?
Well, that's right.
I mean, they take the most absurd things and they'll just say, well, that's proof of the will of God.
I know.
It's just boggles the mind.
Yes, stupidity and incoherence is the will of God.
Okay, that's a nice God to have, right?
I mean, if I was in a court of law under oath, I'd swear that that happened.
Go ahead, Jim.
Just right myself from some balls more caustic remarks.
I appreciate all my callers, all my audience, RBN, whether they're Christian, Jewish, and I have Christian, Jewish, and Muslim friends, and I respect them all for their beliefs, which they're utterly entitled to hold, however much I may not share those beliefs.
But I'm going to say the only time I was involved in organized religion was in junior high in high school.
My mother had committed suicide after having divorced from my father, married a man, it was ill-fated.
And my wonderful brother and I went back to live with our father and then stepmother.
Sherry had one son by their second marriage, my father's second marriage, and was pregnant with another.
They thought it was good for Phil and me to get involved in organized religion.
I was just coming into junior high school.
And so when junior high in high school, I was involved in the St. James Episcopal Church, a youth program.
I sang in the choir.
I was an acolyte.
I gave sermons on Youth Sunday.
I was ahead of the Young People's Fellowship.
I wasn't even a delegate to the 14th World Convention on Christian Education in 1958, held in Tokyo, Japan, where I've mentioned on a previous show I went to Chinese Communist Japanese communist headquarters to obtain information from to see if what we're being told about the communists were true or not.
I've still got those documents.
Probably made the CIS list at that point in time.
But the fact is, I was always baffled by whether we were talking about one God or three.
That's Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost.
How does that all add up?
I could never reconcile it.
And I don't know that it is capable of reconciliation.
It is a theological issue.
That was my only involvement in organized religion.
I went off to Princeton, became a philosophy student, you know, and I never had any further engagement with organized religion.
But I mean, that period in junior line high school, however, was very positive.
They had a great program.
It was beneficial to me in many different ways.
And I don't begrudge it at all.
I appreciate it.
David, your thoughts.
Yeah, well, we have to keep in mind again when they constructed the New Testament, this new theology, they drew from many different traditions, including Greek and Roman and pagan traditions.
So there is a lot of sort of philosophical wisdom, if you will, that was pulled into this new theology.
It was just put in the package that would turn out to be a hoax.
So that it's not that the ideas are necessarily bad.
I mean, you know, love your neighbor and forgiveness and so forth.
Okay.
I mean, those things are sort of intrinsically valuable, but those are drawing from older traditions.
And that's what Paul and the gospel writers did.
On the Trinity, it's actually interesting because, first of all, there's no mention of the Trinity anywhere in the New Testament at all.
That was a post-New Testament interpretation that there were three in one.
And the other interesting thing is the Holy Spirit, when you look at that word in the Greek of the New Testament, it was the word pneuma.
And pneuma was an ancient Greek concept for a spirit that dates to 400-500 BC.
So clearly, Paul and the gospel writers were drawing from Greek philosophy.
They drew from this idea of the pneuma, which was a spirit-like entity that pervaded reality.
And they just stole it and they gave it a name, call it the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit, and then they worked it into the Bible.
I mean, all those ideas are already there.
They just didn't tell you where they came from.
Yeah, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.
Paul, you want to add another thought?
Yeah, no, I find this absolutely fascinating.
I've always enjoyed this sort of history or what I call, you know, the deeper dive that, of course, we really never get.
In other words, Christians never really get, Catholics never get.
And having said that, I'll just add a little bit to what you said, Jim, to bring some what I call color into a color commentary.
Is that I personally believe, because I experienced it, I went to Catholic school.
I, you know, I am very thankful for my Catholic education, which I believe was a very solid foundation for going into the much more lax public school system.
But I believe, as a friend of mine once said, that as what you would call a cultural software, that overall, Christianity is a very good thing.
And I have a lot of fondness for Catholicism and for, you know, the Mass, the Latin Mass, and all these things that you went through, you don't understand them when you're a child, obviously.
And it's better off to sort of be maybe hornschwoggled a little bit when you're a kid and then later on outgrow it than to have never experienced what I think is or can be the good derived from that.
You know, there's no equivalency to, for example, Santa Claus and all that sort of thing.
But I honestly feel that European tradition, you know, American tradition, Christianity, Catholicism is a good thing overall.
But of course, I find all this discussion fascinating today.
Good, good.
I would object to that one because I think all the benefit, all the beneficial things, all the good things that you see in Catholicism or Christianity come from older traditions.
They're coming from Greek and Roman pagan traditions.
So just go to the sources.
Don't take the distorted, you know, Pauline versions of those things.
The only good stuff is the stuff that was much older than Christianity.
And yeah, I mean, everything else is just a hoax and a fraud and a cover for this other stuff.
So, you know, I would have to object to that view.
I mean, that's okay.
That's a very fair point.
And glad you said it.
Obviously, you're much more educated in this than I am for sure.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's an opinion thing, but I mean, I understand what you're saying, right?
So, man, expand upon Paul's influence and his followers and what happened in the gospels.
We want more.
Yeah, so, right.
I guess, yeah, just to kind of continue the story, right?
So, yeah, so Paul was the originator.
So, we know that after the crucifixion, nothing happens for about 20 years.
There's a 20-year void of literally nothing.
No one writes anything.
There's no documentation.
Nothing happens from about the year 30 to about the year 50.
From about the years 50 to 70, this is when Paul is writing all of his letters.
We have the seven authentic letters.
Then we have another six that seem to be fraudulently attributed to Paul.
So there's some early fraud right there in Christianity, even by the experts that they accept that fraud.
But yeah, nominally like 13 letters from Paul is written between the years 50 and 70.
Then the Jews revolt in Jerusalem.
The Romans come in, they crush them, they crush the revolt, they destroy the temple.
And that's when Paul is dead.
He dies about that time.
And his followers decide they're going to write a better story of this Jesus character that Paul began in his lifetime.
So they flesh out the story of Jesus as a man.
This never existed until the year 70 when the first gospel was written, the Gospel of Mark.
So it wasn't in Paul.
It wasn't documented anywhere.
These guys just create a story of a baby who was born in a manger to Virgin Mary in the star of Bethlehem.
All this stuff is just invented out of whole cloth around the year 70, beginning with Mark, and then shortly thereafter with Matthew and Luke.
So what they're doing is they're fleshing out, they're trying to humanize this Jesus character that was at the core of Paul's hoax.
And they're just embellishing it.
They're coming up with, they're drawing in, like say, little wisdom traditions.
They're having him give these wise sayings and the Sermon on the Mount and all that stuff.
That simply did not exist until the years 70 and 80 AD.
Those are, you know, decades after they were supposedly happened.
So this is all just being fleshed out sort of real time by these Jewish writers of the four gospels.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Tell me about the fraudulent.
What was the point of the fraudulent?
What did they want to attribute to Paul that Paul hadn't said himself, but they wanted to work into the historical matrix?
Yeah, right.
Well, I guess we don't really know all the rationale.
Somebody's, you know, if Paul is getting some influence, he's building the church.
Jesus didn't build a church.
Paul built a church.
And Paul was gaining some influence.
And apparently, at some time, maybe much later, we actually don't really know how much later, some people decided to, you know, gin up some bogus letters from this guy, Paul, and then they added some details that they thought were important.
You know, I haven't done a detailed comparison between the so-called actual and the so-called fraudulent letters.
That would be an interesting little sort of side project to do.
But yeah, I mean, they're just trying, they're trying to add the details that Paul didn't do because Paul had such a stripped-down theory.
They're trying to flesh that out as best they can.
So, we see it in the fraudulent letters of Paul.
We see it in the anonymous writers of the gospels for crying out loud.
Those guys were anonymous.
There's four names attached there, but those mean nothing.
We don't know who those people are, when they live.
Really, we know very roughly when they were written, but nothing about the authors other than that they were very well versed in the Old Testament because they cite the Old Testament repeatedly.
So, they were clearly Jewish writers, knowledge of Jewish theology, and they were drawing that into this new Jesus story.
So, yeah, we see more sort of fraudulent, deceptive activity to create this new theology.
Do those citations of the Old Testament have been part of the motivation for putting them together when they're bound?
The old and the new?
Yeah, I think maybe in a sense they wanted to hide that, right?
Because they wanted to reach the Gentiles.
They knew they weren't going to reach them with a Jewish Bible because that would be nonsense.
So, they had to create something new that was sympathetic to Jews, sympathetic to the rabbi Jesus, sympathetic to Jehovah, the Jewish God.
They had to create that sort of story without sort of explicitly citing the Old Testament because that would not fly.
So, they had to create a sort of a new kind of a story, weaving in these ideas, these Jewish ideas, and Jewish values.
That's what happens.
These Jewish values are drawn from the Old Testament, woven into a new story, which is this New Testament.
And we see it repeatedly in the four gospels.
Enumerate what you take to be those Jewish values that make such a difference here.
Yeah, so I mean, we see them in the Old Testament: it's this idea of dominion, right?
That God put us in charge, that we are better than the rest of the life on earth, that we can dominate, that we can know the will of God, that we need to enact the will of God forcibly upon people.
This sort of belligerence, this sort of, yeah, I mean, you see those kinds of ideas which are pulled from the Old Testament, and then it's kind of rolled into New Testament ideas.
So, so yeah, and that all the other races really owe everything to the Jews, all their sacred treasure, even their lives, and the Jews can kill non-Jews with impunity, even if it comes to it.
But God forbid that any non-Jew kill a Jew.
That's absolutely verboten.
I would like to ask the guest about this concept of original sin or sin, right?
Is that also a quote Jewish value?
Original sin.
So, you're born into sin, right?
Right.
Yeah, I mean, right, there's a tremendous guilt complex in Judaism, right?
So, there's this constant feeling of guilt and atoning for guilt.
And, you know, you see it in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, about the need to absolve oneself of sin, and there's blood sacrifice.
And, you know, I wrote a whole, yeah, I read, read, read several pieces talking about sort of the importance of blood sacrifice to absolve yourself of the sin, right?
So, this idea, this idea of guilt.
I have a musical interlude as a token of appreciation of a party.
Actually, a listener to RBN who suggested I interviewed David about these subjects.
The very first time I heard this song on the radio, I nearly fell out of my chair.
It's absolutely wonderful, a classic called Drop, Kick Me, Jesus.
Listen to this.
Drop, kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life.
End over end, your left, nor to right.
Straight through the heart of the righteous uprightness.
Drop, kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life.
In your master game plan.
See from the earthly tempestion below.
I've got the will, Lord, if you've got the toll.
Drop, kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life.
End over end, your right.
Straight through the heights of the righteous.
Drop, kick me, Jesus, before.
And all knocked on your door.
All the departed, dear loved ones of mine.
And stick them up in the offensive line.
Kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life.
End over end, your right.
Tight through the heights.
Kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life.
The bench warmer I'm contented to be.
Until the time when you have need of me.
The flash on the big scoreboard that shines from on high.
The big super bowl way up in the sky.
Drop, kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life.
End over end, your right.
End over end, your right.
Drop, kick me, Jesus.
Yeah, drop, kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts.
End over end.
I was actually very pleased to have the opportunity or the occasion to play that.
Because I've always sounded to be quite charming.
I mean, I've always liked this song.
I don't know what to say about it.
David, your thoughts.
And we'll go to Paul.
Go right ahead.
Yeah, that's a cute one.
I hadn't heard that one.
I heard the phrase, but I hadn't heard the song before.
But, yeah, you know, it's more of the silly kind of, it's really kind of juvenile sort of stuff, right?
You know, you're, yeah, you're praying for salvation, right?
And, you know, yeah.
But, you know, keep.
I just like the merger of, you know, popular religion with popular sports, you know, and all that.
Well, exactly right.
And then we're going to, we're going to, right, right.
The theology isn't good enough.
So we're going to draw on the old football analogy.
I've got the will of God, Lord, if you've got the toe.
I think it's absolutely blasphemous.
And the singers and songwriters should be put up before the righteous secret committee of Catholic transgression.
Boiled in oil after they've been put on the rack.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I really like it.
It's charming.
It's like, you know, it's like that.
It's like that.
the very first time i heard it i couldn't believe my ears i could not believe my ears but that one line got me where if you've got the toe you know yeah i got the will lord if you got the toe i love it i love it David, go right ahead with your story of the gospels that grow the church and all that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, like I said, you know, the first phase of the whole process was Paul.
He kicks things off and he moves, he builds a church.
Yeah, he gets an idea a few years after the crucifixion about this Jesus guy.
He makes him into a son of God and writes these letters and builds a church.
And then he dies, and there's a revolution.
Then the gospel writers decide they need to flesh out the Jesus story.
So around the year 70 is when we think the Gospel of Mark was written.
That was the first one, the shortest one.
It gives a lot of details that never existed in history before, suddenly show up in this gospel.
About 15 years later, around the year 85, we think is when the next two Matthew and Luke were written.
They're very similar.
We know from studies of those two gospels that there's a lot of commonality, some similarities, some differences, but they cover similar events.
It's like the authors were sort of working together from a basic core story and they gave different spins on those stories.
And those appear about the year 85.
And then sometime in the early 90s, we have the Gospel of John, which is generally considered the last written gospel.
It's the most intellectual, really draws from philosophical ideas.
And we see that repeatedly in the Gospel of John.
But again, you know, for much of this time, no one's saying anything about the Christians.
That was one of the striking facts that I noted in my book, The Jesus Hoax, was no one writes about Jesus in his lifetime.
No one writes about him for the 20 or 30 years after him until the revolution, rebellion in the year 70.
No one, besides these handful of Jews, writes about Jesus for another, you know, 20 years after the rebellion.
And then suddenly you have Josephus, who was a Jewish writer, turned coat, converted to the Roman Empire hierarchy.
And he writes supposedly one paragraph that mentions Jesus around the year 93 in his book, The Antiquities of the Jews.
And this is the first non-Christian mention that there's anything like a Jesus that even exists.
And that's the year 93.
So this is, you know, decades and decades after he was born, after the miracles, after the crucifixion.
And all you get is one paragraph by some other guy who says, yeah, there's this Christian movement that's kind of starting to brew itself and grow itself.
And, you know, then you go another, if you look for another mention, you don't go all the way to Tacitus, who was a famous Roman historian in the year 115.
And he's documenting some elements of the histories at that time.
And he includes just a couple of sentences on the Christians and sort of what they were causing trouble and they were agitators.
And he sort of knew that they were basically Jews in the early years.
And I mean, again, it's decades, approaching a century after the time of Jesus before anybody even mentions this guy.
I mean, it's impossible that they got anything right, anything that they know was true.
They couldn't verify anything.
It was all had to be constructed from hearsay and just manufactured evidence.
That's the only way they could have happened.
Yeah, so when we search for the historical Jesus, we have very rudimentary, fragmentary, imperfect, incomplete, almost non-existent data.
I mean, it's fascinating.
You got a whole religion built on basically mythology.
Exactly.
It really is.
It's mythology.
It's a mishmash of ideas.
Like I say, there's some interesting and valuable ideas in there, but those came from the Greeks and the Romans.
And so the writers were clever.
They were drawing from existing ideas that they knew that were out there in the world, and they wove them into their little story about this Jesus character to give it some credibility.
But yeah, I'm in terms of actual evidence, actual contemporaneous evidence.
There's nothing for decades and decades.
It's impossible that they got anything right, that they knew anything of what they were talking about.
They couldn't confirm anything.
Everybody who would have known the guy was long dead by the time this stuff starts showing up in writing.
It's just, yeah, it's a ludicrous story from start to finish.
And yet we believe it's the literal word.
Every word is absolutely correct the way it's written.
That's nonsense.
We, you know, there's a lot of, shall we say, parallels to the world that we live in today.
I mean, talk about people believe in mythology, right?
I mean, we could cover everything, right?
In other words, they wanted to get a central bank of issue to stop all the booms and busts in the economy, right?
Or, you know, what these injections we're going to give you will prevent disease.
Or how about the carcinogenic drugs that we're going to administer to you are going to be called chemotherapy and they're going to kill cancer cells.
And on and on.
It's like everything these people do.
It's just, yeah.
Anyway, go on.
Yeah, right.
There's a strong element of faith in a lot of this stuff where they're asking me, just believe it.
Just believe us, right?
Yeah, we have no evil intentions.
Believe us.
Yeah.
Okay.
Right.
That's that's that's caused a disaster time and time again over 2,000 years at least.
Yes.
Very good.
Yeah.
Jim, I didn't know that you were going to have such an anti-Semite on today.
I'm offended.
Wait a minute.
Who's that?
I'm attacking the Jews who they, I mean, they had a story, they had a rationale.
They were looking out for their own best interests.
That's all the Jews ever do.
That's just fact.
There's no it's an it's an ins it's an inside joke.
Jim and I go way, way back.
Okay.
I've dragged the whole truth, nothing but the truth, guy.
I just want to figure out what the hell's going on.
I'm trying truth is far more fascinating than fiction, actually.
And if you, I mean, Charlie Kirk has a perfect illustration.
It's a very complex hoax.
Here we're talking about a Jesus hoax.
We got a Kirk hoax.
We got a moon hoax.
We got all kinds.
I mean, they go on and on and on.
And I'm kind of in the role of being a hoax buster.
You know, Jim, did you see that post that Brute?
I don't know if Bruce shared it with you, but he sent it to me where there's a video of the guy who was asking the question to Charlie Kirk, the last guy, and he was rehearsing his reaction to the crazy.
He heard his reaction when Jolly got shot.
It's like, you know, come on.
I'm sorry to say Candace has now lost her credibility.
She's going on about the medical records, and there actually were now two shots, and there was a bullet lodged in his spine.
I mean, it's all ridiculous.
I'm sorry.
I've been such a fan.
You know, I hate to see an idol crumble.
I've been such a fan of Candace, but she's really blown it big time.
I mean, I'll be covering the story in greater detail this afternoon.
You need to have her on the show, Jim.
I don't know if she'd do it.
I'd love to do it.
You know what?
I thought what could be fun, Jim.
I don't know if you have his contact info, but we could have another show with Mike Huckabee, and we could go back and forth.
I only have contempt for Mike Huckabee.
I know.
We could postulate These ideas to him, see what his reaction is, you know.
Oh, God, you don't want to cut off, David, though, from there's more to the story, but the church grew in.
Yeah, no, no, no, where we left off, just as a reminder, right before the break at the top of the hour, was uh, we were talking about original sin and this whole guilt thing.
And I don't know if you would fully flesh that out or not.
If you want to, I like the fact that this, uh, there's a lot of guilt in Judaism.
I think that's fascinating.
Go for it, David.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, guilt and sin are intrinsically Judaic.
I mean, that's that's built into the Old Testament stories and the need for absolution and the need for blood sacrifice.
That that's that's what you see over and over again in the Old Testament, and it's it's projected into the Talmud and the Shul Chan Aruch.
Um, but but you know that it's Jewish because it doesn't come from other sources.
If you look at Greek philosophy, uh, you know, I've studied for many years, you know, you look at the Roman ideology, Roman philosophy, you don't see those ideas.
It's not this idea that you're you're guilty and you're sinful and you have to atone for this sin and there's divine powers at work.
I mean, that's absolute nonsense.
That does not really exist.
That's that was a Jewish construction, and then that gets projected as a motivating force, as a malevolent force, uh, with within Judaism and then later within Christianity.
So it's a kind of a guilt tool.
I mean, Nietzsche was really good about this, he was writing about how there's this whole guilt tool of sin that's really used to exploit people's feelings and their fears, you know, about death, which is legitimate.
Okay, right.
Nobody knows what's going to happen after death.
So we're going to use that fear and we're going to, and we're going to construct a story of sin and suffering and hell and so forth.
And we're going to manipulate you using these ideas to our benefit.
I mean, it's just horrendous.
They're taking legitimate fears that people have about getting old and sick and dying, and then we're going to, we're going to use that against you to serve our ends.
It's utterly malicious, really.
And, you know, to think about too, like, again, just to inculcate into people from a very early age that you are essentially you're fallen or you're you're flawed and you're you're you're basically lucky to be under the grace of god because of his forgiveness because you have a sinful nature i mean all this is very powerful manipulation yes absolutely and it's 100 judaic it doesn't does not exist it's not there in greek philosophy it's it's
and it's in a construction that they came up with to manipulate us.
And you, Paul, as a young Catholic, must have been subjected and inundated in that.
Oh, I was a mess like a lot of kids, you know.
But, I mean, there's other factors as well.
You know, your parents, we all survive our childhood.
Sometimes, you know, it's a little bit more idyllic than others.
Overall, even as a young adult, I was always fairly, you know, grateful for the way things were, even though, you know, obviously I didn't have the best relationship with my mom or my dad.
And, you know, I experienced bullying as a kid.
But then, you know, you get old and you realize everybody has gone through these things.
And it's sort of the process of life.
But, yeah, you know, making kids, which, and it works.
making kids feel guilty and fearful is not an altogether healthy thing.
I don't think it's altogether 100% bad because let's face it, there's a lot of kids out there that are just a little sociopaths, you know.
It is that control mechanism, isn't it, Paul?
Well, I would imagine that's a heavy part of it.
But again, when you look at from, and I've not dived into it as much as the people that I've, many of the shows I've listened to, but I mean, you know, in the so-called white nationalist sphere, you know, so I'm sure that your guest has heard such terms as the cookianity and the Christ insanity.
You know, for the more the coarse renditions of that, I remember the first time I heard dead Jew on a stick, and I couldn't help but chuckle.
You know, I was not fully on board yet, but the first time I heard, you know, these people speaking so mockingly of Christianity and using that term dead Jew on a stick, I just thought to myself, I just wonder, I wonder.
And of course, later on, I would become, you know, fairly converted.
That's why I'm very open and on board today with everything your guest is saying.
Yeah, you know, that's very, that's a good point because, you know, you get a lot of mocking comments just because people think it's silly or stupid and they'll make they'll make jokes out of it, right?
But there's a real reason to sort of be highly skeptical or worse.
And that's, that's what I think is important that people aren't missing, that they're missing.
They need to know sort of the background, the context, you know, the Jewish misanthropy that they have this long-standing, you know, hatred of Gentiles and they were at the core of this religion.
I mean, that adds all the details that are missing behind these crude jokes, you know, and then it kind of makes sense.
Hey, look, there's a rationale here why we should be super skeptical, you know, and try to be, yeah, highly suspicious of what this story is trying to do for us.
Right.
And I would like to add a little of my, what I call, I guess, testimony here.
And I'm sure I speak for probably millions like me that, you know, it's a process you go through, the deconditioning.
And I remember as a young man in my 20s, I was working with a guy.
You know, he and I were kind of like more like partners.
We spent so much time together.
And he was very anti-religious or anti-Christian.
And of course, I was still, you know, I was never very devout, but I, of course, I absorbed it all.
That's why I use the word inculcate because that's really what it does.
And I remember multiple times, you know, the discussion ever came up or he heard somebody else talk about, you know, Christianity or Jesus.
He would always go like, oh, F, F him, F Jesus.
There is no, there is, it's all made up bullshit.
I remember one time we're driving in the truck together.
We're working together, right?
And he makes the finger, the middle finger gesture, and he flips off upward, like towards the sky, goes, you know, F, you know, Jesus or F, you know, God, whatever.
And I remember just cringing, going, no, no, come on, don't do that, man.
Don't do that.
You don't know what you're doing.
I mean, because literally it just was still part of me.
It's like I was really, I won't say fearful, but I just was really uncomfortable with him doing that because I thought, no, no, no, no, no, you don't want to do that.
That's no good.
And that's how powerful this is.
I mean, absolutely.
You're right.
It's really kind of a brainwashing technique.
And you really react viscerally to those kind of things.
And you have to say more than it's, oh, this Jesus guy, it's all bullshit.
I mean, in a sense, it is, but you got to do better than that because then you just sound like a naysayer or a nutcase or something.
You don't really know.
You don't really know what's behind it, right?
That's why it's really important to sort of, I'm sort of always asking people to do a little digging.
You don't have to do a Ph.D.
level work here.
Just get a couple of good books or get the Jesus hoax book and fill yourself in on some basic facts.
So if somebody says, oh, this Jesus story is bullshit, at least you sort of know what's going on.
You have some rationale why that probably is true and how that came about.
That's a lot better than just dishing off little insults and little quips, right, which sounds kind of ignorant and stupid in its own right.
Right.
And especially in the presence of someone like at the time, I mean, there probably was a subconscious desire for it.
You want it to be true.
In other words, the whole, you know, upward, like up in heaven, there's nothing there.
He would say, oh, there's nothing up there.
There's nothing there.
And, of course, that just goes against, you know, because we sort of had this belief, right?
In other words, oh, it's going to be nice.
It's going to be the gates of heaven.
And there's like the fluffy clouds.
And I mean, look, they do it with pictures.
I mean, when you think about it, they do so much with animation, very similar to the whole COVID thing.
Remember, I used to point out, and Jim probably remembers this, with all these depictions of COVID and whatever, whether it was in print in the newspapers or TV or whatever, it was always animation.
It was always drawings.
And I thought, you know, anyway, I just thought that was pertinent.
We get back to Marx's observation that religion is the opiate of the masses, you know, keep the workers content for an afterlife.
They may suffer in this life, but they're going to be rewarded in the afterlife.
And the thought there is no reward, all you got is in this life, is too much.
He thought, for most of the handling, that it was a psychological, saporific, that it was beneficial in a way to endure the hardships humanity endures every single day.
Right, right.
In other words, I'm sure, Jim, you felt the same thing that many in humanity have felt in their lives.
Sometimes it's like, is this it?
Is this all there is?
That's pretty normal.
Is this all there is?
I mean, I don't find it.
I accept it.
That's why you got to make every day count, you know.
And as much time as you can with your family, your friends, that people you love and care about, because that's all there is.
David, go right ahead.
Yeah, no, I, you know, that's one of the evils of the Christian stories.
It makes you put value in the time when you're not going to exist because you're dead, right?
The real, the true value supposedly is in the afterlife.
And this life is just a temporal realm of, you know, just kind of get through it and do the best you can.
And then everything will be just wonderful right after you're dead.
And conveniently, no one could check that or prove that.
So, yeah, I mean, but yeah, I mean, it really is malicious because it lets you write off this life, which is the real life, the life that you're going to have your one and only life.
And you're going to write that off and say, well, I'm just going to get through it and I'm not going to, you know, going to try to make it as easy as possible.
I'm not going to make any waves and I just want to get through it because then I'm going to be saved and everything's going to be wonderful.
And that's, that's an absolutely malicious story to convey to people.
Would you like to comment on, I don't want to derail the show here, Jim, but I think you might find it interesting.
Would you like to comment on the whole near death experience and the whole.
you know, people leaving their body and having these experiences and being accurate, supposedly, in the detail and then coming back in.
I mean, do you have thoughts and feelings about that?
You must have.
It's entirely possible, but it's not a theological afterlife.
No, I mean, no, yeah.
Yeah, if there's some kind of afterlife, then that's where everybody's going.
And it doesn't matter if you're good, bad, endoriferant, or whatever.
I mean, if that's that's if there's some kind of thing.
I mentioned it because not in any way to validate, you know, Christian beliefs or, you know, that sort of thing, but it's, it's so interesting.
And there's so many, not just one or two.
Are you familiar with the work of Daniel Brinkley and his books and so forth?
No, I only know incidentally some of that.
Oh, my goodness, man.
I'm telling you.
Well, I first heard him on Art Bell, and he was struck by lightning.
He was actually in his home back in the day, landlines and all that.
He was actually talking on the telephone of all things.
And lightning struck the house.
And what happened to him, he said, actually, this is amazing when you think about it of how much damage, the fact that he actually was able to live.
He died supposedly temporarily.
They brought him back and he was messed up for a very long time, right?
But the nails in his shoes melted.
That's how much power, heat, or electricity went through his body, right?
And he was a mess.
But the testimony that he gave was unbelievable of what he saw and what he experienced.
And he was looking down the classic up above, looking down at his body, being worked on by doctors and being mourned over by his family.
It was very powerful.
And there's many others like that.
Mind you, you're duly skeptical about Jesus' story.
Why not the skepticism about this story?
Well, you know, again, when is it that we stop being skeptical of everything and trust the fact that I'm just saying this is kind of extraordinary, isn't it?
I mean, well, no, not actually.
I love it.
Well, again, these things, there's several books you might not have delved into this topic, Jim.
So, yeah, just as a brief response, I'd just like, again, to kind of maybe, you know, get our guest's opinion on the topic because I'm sure he's thought of it.
But you said something about that side of me.
In other words, you were, and I'm kind of surprised at that remark, Jim, because you should know by now that I'm very open in many cases.
And I've always had a sort of a seeking mind.
I mean, I'm not alone.
When I first became aware of you, I believe it was 2012 because you were speaking at the conference in Santa Clara, right?
The conspiracy con.
And that was the 12th one in a row.
I went to another one, then they stopped having them.
So I went to 13 conspiracy conferences in a row as an example.
Also, of many cases, they had a related UFO conference, typically at different time of the year.
I think one was in the spring and one was in the fall, that sort of a thing.
And I probably went to, I don't know, nine or ten different UFO conferences because I thought it was just fascinating.
But I remember what somebody said once about the whole notion, the whole UFO thing.
And he basically said this.
It was one of the more well-known people in the movement.
I forget who it was, right?
But, you know, the guy had some credentials, some gravitas.
And he said, essentially, if it was to be put in a court of law, right, with all the rules of evidence, and it was just based upon sworn testimony, eyewitness testimony, affidavits, physical evidence, the case would be so overwhelming that there was no jury anywhere that wouldn't be convinced of the reality, so-called, of the UFO phenomenon.
And so I look at many things in a similar light, such as the near-death experience, right?
And what people have reported.
And again, there's books on this you can read.
You probably have not delved into it, but I came up on talk radio way before the internet.
So I used to listen to shows and they would have, you know, they would have guests on similar to today.
And a lot of times the guest had written a book and I would go out and I would buy that book.
So, you know, I'm quite open.
I am very convinced this is actually not all there is.
I don't think it has anything to do with the whole Christian notion of things.
But I have to believe based upon what I actually think I've experienced in my own life that there is a spiritual nature to things.
There's what people call a life force, an animating force, and that we are given glimpses of it, for example, when we dream or have visions.
Because there's a notion, all right.
In other words, where do these dreams and or visions come from?
Are they completely manufactured inside of your head?
Or are things like we've all had this experience of ideas pop into our head?
I mean, yeah, for my part, I consider myself a rationalist, right?
So to me, I like to have rational explanations for things.
That's just how I am.
I think a lot of that stuff can be rationally explained.
You know, I haven't gone into the near-death stuff, so I don't have a lot of comment on that one.
But, you know, a lot of the UFO stuff is, yeah, there's all kinds of various phenomena that are that are possible.
And then they don't always necessarily have to be extra terrestrial aircraft, right?
So I.
But I haven't done a deep dive into UFO phenomena.
I'm open-minded about it.
I've seen videos that purport to be authentic of little greens and, you know, and Brosha that looked authentic.
But, you know, I can't claim to any degree of expertise here.
Please go ahead.
But yeah, but like you, Jim, I've also studied philosophy of mind and consciousness for many years.
And I wrote this book on panpsychism.
So, you know, and I think there's a real basis for thinking that everything is sort of has a level of consciousness to it, including the cosmos.
So I think there's a real rational reality to believe that there is a cosmic consciousness.
That's not a spiritual thing.
I have very good rational arguments, and there's been many in the past that said that such a thing is actually true.
I want to bring it back.
I mean, I look at your stuff on the technology, the sub-unconsciousness.
It's great stuff.
It's interesting.
Let them talk.
Yeah, well, you're right.
I think we have to do a separate show on technology and a separate one on panpsychism.
That would be interesting.
But yeah, I mean, there's some, I guess my point was there's some pretty, quote, fringy things that actually have a rational basis to them and therefore are pretty well grounded in my opinion.
So that's sort of one piece of it.
The other piece of it is, you know, when we talk about conspiracy theories, we have to recognize that pretty much everything is a conspiracy because that's people who are working together for some purpose.
That's all a conspiracy is, right?
And it's been turned into a slandered term by the powers that be because they want to cover up various inconvenient facts.
And so they're going to dish that out at their convenience as it serves their purposes.
So but all of it, for me, all it takes is a couple of really compelling instances of where we've been lying to really get a healthy dose of skepticism going, right?
And so to me, that's one of the purposes of the Jesus hoax.
As you can see, there's really no rational basis for it.
We have a good rational explanation for what we have.
And we have a better counter story than we're given in the Bible and in our churches.
And it's being covered up because it's inconvenient for Christians and it's inconvenient for Jews.
And I think we can see that pretty actively.
Another example is the Holocaust.
So there's another story which rationally doesn't make a lot of sense, but you can't talk about it because it's inconvenient for the powers that be.
So all it takes is a couple of good stories like that when you can say, look, there's rationally, those things are clearly cannot be correct.
The conventional story cannot be right.
And there are some malicious powers behind these incidences.
And then it really stokes your sense of suspicion and makes you skeptical of a lot of things.
And probably rightly so, right?
We don't know.
Once you've got one or two major stories in history that are pretty much proven to be fraudulent or hoaxes to a large degree, then you're naturally asking yourself, well, what else is going on in history or in the world today is also being covered up, is also being manipulated, and is also basically a fraudulent story, right?
So that's an entirely rational position to take.
And I think that's one of the huge values of studying the Jesus hoax in particular.
It really shows you sort of sort of the value of being rationally skeptical and really confronting these stories and asking for hard evidence and being open-minded about different possible solutions.
And also the profundity of the effects of beliefs that are not rooted in evidence or facts or history.
I mean, it's astonishing.
I think the beliefs that could be broadly characterized as mythological may have more influence on human behavior generally than all the factual, objective, scientific findings the world has ever compiled cumulatively.
I mean, it's just astonishing.
The irrational overwhelms the rational when it comes to human behavior.
Go ahead, Baul.
I was going to just bring one example.
Maybe it's a movie that you both saw.
I just think there's a lot of things that make you think about things, right?
That's where I'm coming from.
So you remember the movie Contact, right?
Jody Foster, Matthew McConaughey.
You recall that movie?
I remember E.T.
Okay, how about you, David?
You saw the movie Contact?
I know just a little bit about the story.
I don't think I've seen it.
Okay, well, there's a great scene in the movie.
Disgust darn it.
I'm big on movie references and scenes.
Well, anyway, there's a great scene in the movie where, okay, Jody Foster's playing the scientist, right?
Matthew McConaughey's playing the man of the cloth, the man of God, the spiritual guy.
And, you know, Jody Foster, I only can, you know, believe what I can prove.
And, you know, she's, like I said, the scientist in the movie.
Well, anyway, there's a point where they're trying to connect, reach each other, you know, in a way because there's a struggling relationship going on.
And Matthew McConaughey asked her a question.
He says, Did you love your father?
And of course, if you saw the movie at the very beginning, you know, she had tremendous bond with her father, and she lost him at a young age.
And she says, well, yes, of course, I love my father.
And he goes, prove it.
Now, you know, a lot of people might not think a lot of that, but it was a very profound scene in the movie.
And of course, it had its effect on me as well.
And the point to be made that, for example, if somebody was to tell you about a dream they had, right, you have no way of knowing that they had that dream, but they know what it is they experienced.
So in many cases, that's all we have to go on.
If we don't, if we're not there in person, is the supposed testimony of others.
In many cases, it's written down, other times it's not.
And we're living in a world where essentially We are formed in many ways by the testimony of and the relationship with all the others that we encounter in our life, starting with our parents.
So anyway, me too.
I got to run.
Thanks a lot, David.
I really appreciate it.
Great having you here, as always.
Thank you, Jim.
Bye-bye.
Love you guys.
Thank you.
David, you're a super guest, and we have so many overlapping interests.
I love all this.
And you're doing an exploration of a very underexplored aspect, namely the whole idea of the historical Jesus.
What do we actually know about this guy?
What he did.
Obviously, this is a monumental figure.
I mean, even our calendar is rooted on the before and after the birth of Christ for God's sake.
I mean, there are different.
And this in some ways a hope.
So, and this is not to dance people who continue to believe.
I'm not compromising, you know, what they believe.
I'm just simply doing an exploration of what we know objectively.
Go right ahead, David.
I'm really, I mean, yeah, just when you mentioned how we number our years even based on the Jesus hoax, you know, there's a great line at the end of Nietzsche's Antichrist where he's blasting.
He makes exactly that point.
He says, for crying out loud, we number our years based on this bogus character.
He says, we need to start again today.
We need to start now.
This is day one.
This is year one.
We're starting it new, right?
And this is like, yeah, okay, that's what we should be doing, man.
I was an undergraduate.
I went through a Nietzsche thing.
I mean, like for a weekend, I just buried myself.
I read everything I could find that Nietzsche had ever written.
I mean, it was super saturation.
I don't think I even slept.
It was so fascinating.
Oh, yeah.
It's fantastic.
It's fantastic stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
Anyway, one of those great experiences one undergoes if one has the occasion and the joyful experience.
Really pleasure.
I'm so grateful to the party who inspired all this because I don't think I would have gone here other than for his inspiration.
So I'm extremely pleased.
And I do look forward to future conversation.
Give us kind of a summing up, just how you'd like overview, leaving your final thoughts for today.
Yeah, well, I guess kind of what I was saying before, right?
There's these broad events in the world today and in the past that are still influential today that we just don't ask enough questions about.
I mean, we really need to be skeptical.
We need to ask tough questions.
We need to not be bullied.
We need to not be worried about somebody's going to call us bad names because we're poking at those in power and the dominant ideologies because those are doing us some harm.
I mean, they're causing active harm.
And if we don't start, you know, get a backbone and really start pushing back, I think it's just going to continue to cost us and cost society, right?
I mean, in many ways, I think the other side of the coin is a critique of Judaism, that Judaism has become a force for evil in the world in the Talmudic gods.
Now, Jews are evil.
I'm not making that claim.
As I've said, some of my best friends have been Jews, some of my closest friends of my whole life.
And so it's not that.
It's a muddock.
It's a presumption of Jewish superiority, entitlement to the promised land.
You know, talking about Jerry Garcia singing about the promised land where the Jews think they own it.
They think it belongs to them.
I'm not talking now just afterlife as a promised land, which the song is about, but I'm talking about Palestine.
You know, I mean, exactly.
I mean, yeah, we're seeing this played out in the most horrific way, right?
The last two years has just been a slaughter.
And you're like, what's people are like shocked, or they're like, what's behind this?
And they can't believe this is happening.
And how can the U.S. support this stuff?
And it's like, wait a minute, if you knew the history, you knew what these people were like, and you knew the history of how the Jewish lobby works in the U.S., it's completely understandable.
In fact, it's entirely predictable that that was what was going to happen.
I mean, there's lots of long-standing history that we're heading in this direction.
So, again, people are afraid to ask tough questions.