All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 21, 2021 - Know More News - Adam Green
01:08:42
Deconstructing the Jesus Myth | Know More News LIVE feat. Dr. Robert M Price
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to No More News Live.
Thank you all so much for joining me once again today, Wednesday, October 20th, 2021.
It is my pleasure to be hosting a highly distinguished scholar and prestigious guest that I'm a huge fan of.
I've already learned a ton from, and I'm extremely excited to be speaking with for the first time.
He is a world-renowned Jesus mythicist expert, Dr. Robert M. Price.
Dr. Price is a former Baptist pastor with a PhD in theological studies of the New Testament.
He's the author of dozens of books, some of the top sellers, Deconstructing Jesus and the Incredible Shrinking Son of Man.
He is also the host of the Bible Geek in the Human Bible podcast.
He is the founder and editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism, and he is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar.
Thank you for taking the time.
Speak with us today, Dr. Price.
It's always a pleasure and an honor to be invited.
Yes, I have watched so many of your videos on myth vision.
I have even taken clips and incorporated them in some of my videos using you as the source.
You are possibly the undisputed for decades you've been exposing the Jesus myth, which really is one of the biggest delusions in the last 2,000 years.
I just wanted to start off by asking you, if you were to meet somebody that's never heard of Jesus mythicism and you had an elevator pitch, maybe two minutes, because that's the cutoff for Twitter, where in your view, in your research, did the Jesus myth come from?
Well, I think that partly it comes from the ancient sacred king mythology of the ancient Middle East that was held in common by Babylon, various Canaanite kingdoms and others.
And the idea was that the reigning king was the victor of God on earth, his representative, and in a sense, his incarnation.
And that every year he was symbolically, ritually slain and resurrected, really in a kind of a ritual dance thing, reenacting it.
And that it covered his humiliation at the hands of the high priest, symbolizing his death, which goes back to the myth of the young warrior god becoming king of the gods by fighting the chaos dragons, getting killed and rising from the dead, and then being seated at the right hand of the king of the gods as the new king.
And so right there, you have the basics of Christology.
When people say, well, nope, Jesus didn't fit the messianic job description.
Well, yeah, not as it had been redefined in official Judaism, but the Christ myth, I think, grows out of that much older, common to the Middle East sacred king mythology.
That doesn't mean there was a Jesus who thought that he was that.
I mean, it's possible.
I mean, I don't make it a dogma to say, oh, we know there was no Jesus.
We don't know that short of getting into a time machine, which nobody has.
But it seems to me the most plausible theory that makes the most sense of the evidence is that Jesus was a sacred king, mythic character, and therefore very much like the other dying and rising gods of initiation religions or mystery religions of the Hellenistic world.
And eventually, he was historicized.
That is, some people tried to say, well, he must have actually existed, maybe not with All the technicolor, like Herodotus did this with Hercules.
He figured Hercules must have been a real person, but maybe he was just a great warrior, or as I like to say, Apollo.
Well, there was really an Apollo, but maybe he ran a famous tanning salon or something.
And so it was a desperate attempt to hang on to something when you knew that on the surface it couldn't be literally true.
But it was simply a hypothesis to say, yeah, there must have been such a character.
And there might have, there might not have been.
But if there was a historical Jesus, there isn't anymore.
That is, there's none available to the methods of historical inquiry.
And it's easy to see why Christians would have eventually said, yeah, yeah, there was a historical founder named Jesus because early Christianity included several warring sects.
And this seems to have been an attempt to say, hey, we got the goods.
You guys are having revelations from who knows where.
Maybe it was like Scrooge.
He thinks he's seeing Marley, but really it's indigestion, a hallucination.
No, we had the historical Jesus who taught the apostles, who taught our leaders, etc., etc.
So you can say whatever you want, but we got the copyright.
I think that's likely what happened at a certain point, which kind of explains how there was no agreement among early Christians as to when Jesus lived or died.
That's kind of odd if he was so earth-shaking a figure and really lived within recent memory.
Right.
I've seen you mention the early Gnostic Christian/slash Jewish sects, like the Naocenes, I think is the pronunciation.
Right.
Naocenes, Naocenes, Naocenes, I think.
Naocenes, yeah.
And the Ophites.
What do you think about are these pre-Christian belief systems that kind of mystical Judaism, Hellenized Judaism?
Yes, it appears that way.
Like the evidence for these groups is kind of scanty, that we just have brief descriptions in church fathers who condemn things as heresies and so on, but there's no real reason to doubt it.
And I mean, people believe all kinds of stuff.
And they mention a pre-Christian, I guess, Alexandrian sect of the Naocenes, and they believed, and a Christian one.
And that probably means that it goes back into Judaism some ways.
And it was a kind of philosophized Judaism where the Gnostics among them, and I guess you could say a capital G wide screen category of Gnostics that they counted as that.
They believed, for instance, that the serpent in Eden was the good guy.
He was the bringer of light and knowledge, just like Prometheus.
And if you read the Garden of Eden story, literally, they're right.
What Jehovah says to the first couple, you eat that fruit, you're going to drop dead, doesn't happen.
The serpent tells them it's not going to happen.
I'll tell you what will, though, your eyes will be open and you'll be like gods, knowing good and evil.
Now, what does the narrator say happened when they ate it?
Their eyes were opened.
And then God Himself, once he figures out what's happened, says they say to the other gods, apparently, they become like one of us, knowing good from evil.
And he has to get them out of Eden because if they now have the knowledge of procreation, they can beget a race of gods with the divine knowledge.
He doesn't want that.
So no more access to the tree of life.
Too late for the tree of knowledge.
You beat me to That one life out, and they understood this.
In fact, they weren't even allegorizing the scripture, that's the literal reading.
And they did, however, go on to use certain traditional terms like the son of man.
And they figured that's humanity, the archetype of humanity that we all have within us.
But it is dead in that it's buried in the tomb of the body, like Socrates said, Soma, Sama, the body, the prison house of the soul.
And resurrection was being, I guess, baptized or something, and an awakening to one's divine nature.
And this is a form of Gnosticism, and they figured Jesus was the representative of the serpent.
And then you think of the Gospel of John, as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so will the Son of Man be lifted up, and whoever looks at him will be saved, etc.
So, yeah, it looks like that their attempt to take Genesis literally, but some of the rest of it figuratively could easily have been a major source of the basic Christology.
And various Gnostics have their own systems, but they all boil down to the idea that Jesus was somehow like Morpheus in the Matrix movies.
He had come from another realm to alert those who possessed the divine spark to the fact that they did, and to show them how to stop being reincarnated in this veil of tears, but rather upon one's death to ascend into the pleroma, the divine fullness where the real God dwelt.
So, yeah, the Nocenes were, I think, pretty important.
And one last thing before I shut up on this: there's this odd thing in First Corinthians 12 where he says, Now, you ought to know that nobody under the influence of the Spirit can say Jesus be damned, just like no one can say Jesus is Lord except by inspiration of the Spirit.
Whoa, hold on.
What kind of loony bin are you talking about?
A church where people would say Jesus be damned.
Well, Origen tells us that was the Ophites or the Naocenes, because they were trying to say the human Jesus we're not so interested in.
It was the Christ spirit.
And so, to make that point, they would actually ritually curse Jesus.
Man, that is really weird, but that shows you how diverse early Christianities could be from one another.
Yeah, I just saw that was one of my questions.
Is uh, they were saying it was like uh, in the second century, they were saying that Gnostic groups were cursing Jesus.
And I find it interesting that the what it seems like the original Christian sects were serpent worshipers, they believed in the demiurge was the evil creator god, and that Satan was the light and actually bringing the knowledge and the gnosis.
So, Christianity actually started from serpent worship.
Well, at least that kind did, and the serpent worship goes way back into Old Testament times because it mentions in 2 Kings, I think, how the Jerusalem temple had chapels for all sorts of subordinate deities, and one of them was Nehushtan, which means the serpent.
It's the same thing as Leviathan, which also means serpent.
And this divine serpent had his own cult, and incense was offered to it.
And so, it's, I think that, yeah, that grew into the Christian Gnostenes over many centuries.
And I've there's also, I've seen you speak about how there's correlations between early Gnostic beliefs and like modern-day Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, right?
Like the divine sparks, and uh, what else is the uh the similarities that I'm um forgetting, but the point was I wanted to mention what are the other similarities between the Gnostics and the uh and Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism?
Well, uh, especially with the system of Isaac Luria, a Galilean uh Hasid in the 16th century, he came up with something remarkably similar to the Gnostic system of Basilides back in the second century.
Now, did he somehow know about it?
I mean, you know, these ancient sources have trickled down to us.
Maybe they were available to them, or maybe he just reinvented the wheel, thinking about the same questions and coming up with the same answers.
But he had the notion that God was all there was.
And in order to make room ontologically for a creation, he had to withdraw into himself.
Obviously, it's kind of a picture language.
And when he did, the void that was left in which the world was made was also God, because God really can't withdraw and leave space.
I mean, he sort of did, but not really.
What was left was God.
And the fact that it was the void made it the source of evil.
And that was a way of getting God off the hook in a sense.
He didn't create evil exactly, but it's part of him.
It's the dark side of God.
And one of the first things that God created was the heavenly Adam, the Adam Kadmon, who was a vast universe-filling humanoid form made of light.
And he then used that form as a kind of a template for the universe he was about to create, which would have been itself a world of light.
And so from the eyes, ears, nose, mouth of the Adam Kadmon, the divine light streamed forth.
And it was to fill the kelepath, the shells of light that would be form and content of the world, which wouldn't have been a material world.
Well, the divine light that streamed forth to fill the shells was too you're frozen.
I don't know if you can hear me, but you froze.
But where were you?
Do you remember where you left off?
You're talking about Luriana Kabbalah, the vessels.
Yeah, and the task of the pious Kabbalistic Jew was to meditate.
There were these Tikkun or purification exercises that would cause the sparks of light that were really the Shekinah glory cloud of God now lost in the wreckage of the universe.
It would cause them to recollect and reform.
And when this happened, the Messiah would come and so forth.
Well, this is very at least analogous to Gnosticism with its teaching of one of the divine emanations, the man of light, who was mugged by the Archons,
the evil angels of the demiurge, the idiot creator, and that he had used those sparks to vivify the human creations of his own, which is how we have people stuck in this world with a divine element that they don't know about.
But then the Father sends the Morpheus-like Gnostic revealer to contact those people and say, there is a path of redemption for you.
You just have to wake up to who you really are.
And once you die, no more reincarnation up to the divine fullness should go.
And this is this apparently was not influenced by Christianity.
It just seems to have been, I mean, if it was influenced by anything, Luria could have found out about Basilite and Gnosticism, but I doubt it.
He just came up with the same sort of thing.
And so it, and Gershem Sholem, one of the great scholars of Jewish mysticism, says, well, yeah, you can count this as Jewish Gnosticism, which I think you can.
And very, very fascinating stuff.
And this led to a couple of split-off movements, that of Sabbath Savi.
Oh, yeah, okay, there you go.
I thought I was going to have trouble with the connection again.
But yeah, and there are still types of Hasidic Judaism that have a number of Christian parallels.
It just shows you how something stemming from a Jewish matrix that certain things could evolve along the same sort of trajectory with no real connection between them.
It's like the DNA of a theological system will continue to mutate, but to spin off new species.
Interesting.
And so the similarities between Gnosticism and Kabbalah and Isaac Luria, are you aware that Isaac Luria also claimed that Jesus or Yeshu was a reincarnation, a gilgal of Esau?
No, I didn't know that.
He did.
And you know, you know what Kabbalah teaches that Esau's guardian angel, who Esau's guardian angel is?
Samael?
Exactly.
So in other words, Isaac Luria believed Jesus was the serpent.
Samael is the serpent in the garden with Lilith, right?
Yeah, and even Philo says that Eve was the name of the serpent.
So she gets tarred with that as well.
Interesting.
So, you know, I've read this book.
It's Beware the World to Come.
It's about Kabbalah and origins of Christianity.
And you've talked, you've done shows with MythVision about the Caesar's Messiah theory, the idea that Rome created Christianity as like a propaganda weapon to stop those rebellions of the Messianic Jews.
What do you think about the other way around that it was the Jews creating Christianity to conquer the Gentile world?
To me, there's a problem with that.
This is sort of vague, but it's almost like looking in the telescope from the wrong end.
It seems to me that we know as an accomplished fact that Christianity did take over the Roman Empire, but it's hard for me to imagine that the first Christians could even have had such a thing on their agenda.
Now, I don't know, obviously, but to me, the Roman origin thing makes a bit more sense because somehow you wound up with a Rome-friendly, alleged Jewish Messianic sect, which is kind of, well, it's not all that odd.
I mean, the Pharisees and the Sadducees were sort of collaborators with Rome.
And you can well imagine that some Christians, Jewish Christians, even felt the same way.
Look, look at what's happened with these wars against Rome.
We don't win them.
Maybe we should just learn to be quiet and go along for the ride.
So it's possible, but it seems doubtful to me.
Is there any other reasons off the top of your head that it seems doubtful that it would have been the other way around, that it was a weapon against the Gentile world?
Because doesn't the Old Testament say that Yahweh and the Messiah will get the obedience of the Gentiles?
Yeah, but that even there, they're talking from a perspective where there at least used to be a powerful kingdom of Israel and or Judah.
And they figured, well, one day the sun is going to rise on our empire again.
And when it does, oh boy, are we going to have our licks in?
Whereas apparently the earliest Christians were powerless, which is why you have the turn the other cheek stuff.
It's kind of like Mahatma Gandhi.
What chance do you have against the Roman eagle?
But even that's kind of slippery and vague.
It just seems to me implausible.
And I think the Christianity prevailed for various reasons, like Rodney Stark outlines good sociological reasons that didn't really have to do with that.
Christianity was popular among the so-called God-fearing Gentiles who liked Judaism.
It was better than their religion of rapist gods and all this.
And they said, well, look, it sounds good to me.
I'll go to a synagogue and read the Septuagint.
And then Jews who wanted to assimilate with their neighbors in the diaspora, but they didn't want to make a whole complete break with the Old Testament tradition.
And Christianity started looking pretty good as an alternative.
And it seems to have grown naturally.
In fact, Stark compares it to what we know about the growth rates and circumstances of Mormonism and the unification church, that there's nothing really radically revolutionary, much less miraculous about the growth rate of early Christianity.
And there were just reasons that made it more popular to people and more upstanding.
They were against infanticide and so on.
And so it seems to me it's an unnecessary hypothesis, but I don't know.
I wasn't there.
Right.
You know, I'm curious just to change gears.
How did you go from being a Baptist pastor to the world's leading mythicists?
What was that process like?
Well, actually, by the time I was ordained to the ministry and became the pastor of a church, I was already on the fringe.
I had for years up to that point already been pretty much immersed in Boltman and Paul Tillich and people like that, so that I didn't really believe in the supernatural.
I thought perhaps there was some sort of ground of being, etc., but I wasn't a personalistic theist.
You call yourself a Christian atheist now.
Do you still use that term?
Yeah, because the God that traditional Christianity, Judaism, etc., proclaims is dead in the Nietzschean sense.
It just is incredible.
It's irrelevant.
It doesn't answer questions, but only makes them worse.
And it strangles the creative freedom of humanity.
And yet, the Jesus story can be read as Dostoevsky did as a gospel, like Thomas Althuser said, a gospel of Christian atheism.
And that appeals to me poetically, but also in terms of philosophically.
I don't know that there is a real supernatural realm of idealistic metaphysics, you know, invisible realities.
But there are certain things about certain kinds of Christianity that I admire and would sign my name to.
But like, I don't really fit in with the usual secular atheists, even though I agree with them on an awful lot of things.
But I can't really bring myself to go to church anymore because that's, I kind of look at that as the way the Gnostics did.
It's kind of a delusion for the people that can't advance to the real truth of the matter.
And I was already in this way and had gotten into deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, and so forth.
By the time I, oh, about six years into my pastorate, I tried to get recredentialed as a Unitarian Universalist, but the more I learned about them, the more disgusted I was.
So, uh, I just had a little house church gathering that we didn't exactly call a church.
So, I was I had been a fundamentalist as a teenager, but that was long in the past.
And my congregation was very unusual, very eclectic.
And I didn't even know what most of them believed, if anything, but we had they had religious backgrounds at least and were on a search as well.
And so, we did interesting things like studies of the study groups on the gospel of Thomas and religious experience through film series and such.
And so, I was never a standard Baptist.
I had been as a kid when I was a member of the Baptist church, but as a pastor, I was fortunate to have for a while an amenable, very unusual congregation.
Okay, that makes a little bit more sense than not such a drastic story.
And you mentioned Dead Jesus, Jesus is Dead.
That's the title of one of your books, right?
Jesus is Dead?
What book are you working on right now, or what's your most recent release?
The one that's come out most recently, just a month or so ago, was Judaizing Jesus, which shows how the Jesus character is now said by even critical scholars to have been pretty much an ordinary second temple Jewish rabbi.
And I'm trying to expose that as a bunch of ecumenically motivated text twisting and to show that there are very different alternative views of who Jesus was.
And so, I set those forth and so on.
In a couple of weeks, I have two more books coming out: one called Merely Christianity, which is kind of a response to C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, obviously, I guess, where I do a respectful but pretty searching critique of Christian theology.
Then another one called When Gospels Collide, where I try to show that the fundamentalist fear of finding contradictions or mistakes in the Bible is really a straitjacket for understanding the Bible.
And it's ironic that those who consider themselves the champions of the Bible are actually hindering the understanding of it.
And that if you look at why there are differences, it's because there are editorial changes aimed at making a new point.
So there's more to learn than fundamentalists allow themselves to.
And finally, the one I'm deep into now is called the Gospels Before the Gospels, where I'm trying to show that there must have been several different types of stories of Jesus before what we know of as emerging Christianity, and that you find fossils and relics of these older notions embedded, really scattered in the canonical gospels.
And I'm trying to pick them apart and reconstruct them.
So that's really speculative stuff.
That all sounds very interesting.
I've seen you mentioned the character of Jesus as a Pharisee, and there's like Rabbi Hillel and Shammai or Hammai.
Yeah, that's right, Shammai.
So Judaizing Jesus, that seems interesting.
In my research, I see the Jesus mythical character coming from like an amalgamation of like the suffering Messiah motif of Daniel, Zachariah, Isaiah, and the Psalms, mixed with the Logos, mixed with Sophia wisdom, and mixed with the Gnostic serpent, really.
Does that sound about an accurate Syncretism to you?
Well, yeah, the only hesitation I'd have is that the way most critical scholars look at it is that something like Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 and so forth are not really prophecies of Jesus,
but meant something else in the original context and were used as out of context as proof texts for Christian doctrine.
However, I'm very friendly toward the Scandinavian school that says, well, what was the original context?
They had to do with the ritual death and resurrection of the sacred king of Judah and Israel.
And so in that sense, yeah, those are major ingredients.
They may have rediscovered or simply stood in a Jewish tradition that remembered that stuff.
Because I do think the sacred king thing is extremely vital to Christian origins.
You know, the sacred king, and from author Christopher John Bjorknes, who wrote Beware of the World to Come, he believes that the Yom Kippur ritual and then the New Testament retelling of Jesus and Barabbas is actually, it's like an esoteric story about the Hittite ritual, where there would be the king, they would go find like some normal citizen, they would anoint him, dress him up like the king, and then he would be sacrificed in a way.
And that's where the that's the secret meanings of Yom Kippur with the two goats and Jesus.
You have any thoughts about that?
And it's kind of like the saving of the sacred king.
Yeah, I do think the sacrifice and resurrection of the king, probably with the aid of a fool king or a king for the day, to actually get killed.
And then the old king comes back and he's ritually risen.
But you don't necessarily have to tie that in with the scapegoat ritual, though you can.
There is a great fascinating book by John Dominic Crossan called The Cross that Spoke, where I found it really eye-opening.
He goes through, apparently, mostly the same case that you just mentioned, saying that, boy, it sure looks like the passion narrative of Jesus grew out of this exegetical tradition of, what is it, chapter 16, I forget which of Leviticus with the scapegoat ritual.
And in surprising detail.
And what surprised me most was that after going through various ancient documentary sources, Crosson doesn't seem to realize the punchline that the whole thing is an exegetical creation, that it does not reflect the historical martyrdom of any one guy.
So I do place a lot of stock in the general idea.
I haven't read this immense version of it, though.
I'll have to.
Sounds good.
I could send you the ebook.
And when you look into the Kabbalah, the Zohar interpretation of Yom Kippur, they believe that the scapegoat was like a bribe to Azazel, which is also Samael and Satan, in order to so he doesn't interfere with their blood sacrifice to Yahweh.
So it's this brings me to another question.
The twin Messiahs, the two Messiahs.
I've learned from Carrier and yourself that it was a pre-Christian belief that there would be two Messiahs in Judaism.
And I see the first suffering Messiah, Moshiach ben Joseph, or Jesus, as like the Messiah for the Gentiles, almost like the dualistic, evil other side Messiah.
Well, we don't know how far the Messiah ben Joseph thing goes back.
There's a good argument for saying that Messiah ben Joseph was created by the partisans of the failed Messiah, Simon Bar Kochba, from about 136 CE, AD, whatever.
And that he was a hero.
He wasn't some sort of flash in the pan or quack or charlatan.
He was a hero who died for his faith and for Israel.
But he didn't usher in the kingdom of God.
So that might be the origin of saying, okay, there's a preliminary Messiah who is going to die in battle to get rid of the sins of the Jewish people, to prepare the way for Messiah ben David to kick Roman butt.
Could be.
But we don't really know.
But at least the idea of two Messiahs is certainly older than that.
But instead of a Davidic one from the south and a Josephan one from the north, they tended to think in terms of, like in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Messiah son of David and the Messiah son of Aaron, a royal Messiah and a priestly Messiah.
And you can already find that in Zechariah where both of these guys, Joshua the high priest and Zerubbabel, the Jewish prince who was a servant of the Persian state and began the rebuilding of the temple.
They're proclaimed to be two messiahs.
And in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, they lay it on thick that there's going to be a Judean Messiah and a Levitical Messiah.
And my guess is somehow that comes out of the politics of intertestamental Judaism when they no longer had one of their own kings, but the high priest filled the vacuum.
But there were all these prophecies about having a new king again.
And the current guys that were kings for about a century, the Hasmoneans, they were Levites, not the Davidic rulers.
So it might have been this two-headed Messiah thing might have been a theological arrangement of the political reality.
Wait a minute, who's going to rule when we win?
Is it going to be the high priest or the king?
Yeah, both of them.
It just makes too much sense to me that way, but nobody really knows.
What about the Abraxas Gnostic character that had the twin serpents for the legs?
Yeah, I get mixed up with what Jung said about it.
He sort of understood that to be like a borrowing from Neoplatonism.
That Abraxas was the sort of the two-headed or two-faced being that was the first emanation from the one.
And that all...
Like the Adam Kadmon, the Logos creator, Fainis, Fainis Protagonis character.
Oh, well, there's the universal, the cosmic Adam again.
You get more overlap between the Kabbalah and Gnosticism.
I have a little statue of Eon, the lion-headed god with a snake wrapped around him.
That was part of...
The demiurge?
The craftsman character?
Yes, I think so.
Yeah.
That's cool.
Yeah, I like all your decorations there.
You've probably know more about myths than I've...
You've forgotten more about myths than I've ever learned.
And you know more about Christianity than...
You've forgotten more about Christianity than the average Christian knows.
Another point...
I saw you say in another show that the Dead Sea Scrolls talk about...
You think that they're alluding to Paul going to the Gentiles, and it calls them the Ephraimites.
And Ephraim is the son of Joseph.
So that would...
They're calling Christian Messiah son of Joseph followers in a way, is kind of how I read into that.
Well, that could be because I tend to identify Paul as represented as the spouter of lies in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
With Simon Magus, who would have been a Samaritan, and that kind of fits with Ephraim also.
And in the scrolls, they speak of the simple ones of Ephraim who were led astray by the spouter of lies, who rebelled against the Torah in the midst of the covenant communion.
community.
That sounds a lot like the dispute between Cephas and Paul in Galatians, and like the dispute between Docitheus and Simon Magus after the death of John the Baptist, as we read about in the pseudo-Clementine works.
And so that all fits together.
You've got a northern, possibly dubiously Jewish sect leader or a convert to Judaism who just couldn't hack it, as the Ebionites thought of Paul.
I deal with this.
I kind of outline a theory about this at the end of Judaizing Jesus.
And so, yeah, I'm a big fan of Eisenman and his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Paul.
If it isn't about Paul, there must have been another guy who was his twin, it seems to me.
So I want to ask you about Philo of Alexandria, the Hellenizing Jew.
He was a contemporary of Paul.
Do you think Paul copied Philo?
Do you think Philo copied from these Gnostic sects?
And another question, do you think the Gnocenes have anything to do with the Essenes?
Because they have such a similar name.
If the Dead Sea Scrolls come from the Essenes, I would doubt it.
They do have some interesting links with Gnosticism, for sure.
Boltman said that the Dead Sea Scrolls sect must have been Jewish Gnosticism.
This was even before the.
Yeah, he must have known about the Nagamati texts.
But I do think that Philo was breathing the same philosophical theological air as the Alexandrian Essenes.
And we know that he argued against a group of philosophical Hellenistic Jews in Alexandria who went farther than he did and said, well, yeah, it's true.
The laws are all allegorical.
God doesn't really care whether you eat mice or bats or this one's clean, that one's unclean.
This is symbolic.
And once you know that, you don't have to keep the laws anymore.
And that was sort of like Ismailis in Islam.
But Philo said, now, hold on.
Now that we know what the laws are really about, that's all the more reason to obey them.
But what he's arguing against sounds kind of like Paulinism.
And now, this gets into a huge mess, too, because I tend to go along with the Dutch radical critics who said that Paul didn't write any of the letters.
He was a famous person in the history of Christianity, but just as Peter was too, and people wrote all kinds of nonsense and stuck his name on it.
All these epistles accredited to Paul, which swarm with contradictions, are really by Paulinists of the late first, early second century.
So, you know, what did Paul think?
I don't know if we can even tell anymore, but you sure can find striking parallels between whoever wrote that stuff, let's say between the Pauline epistles and Philo, and also the Gospel of John and Philo.
I mean, the parallels are ample and startling.
And yeah, I guess you could say maybe they came up with it independently, but I don't know.
I mean, especially if you want to take a standard Christian view and say, oh, what Paul and John said was revealed by God.
They didn't have to borrow it from anybody.
Yeah, yeah, right.
And they must, I mean, it's common to others who didn't claim they were getting it from Revelation.
So it seems to me they might well have known about Philo and said, hey, sounds good to me.
Because it wasn't that alien from Hellenistic Jewish thought anyway.
You know, Philo like refers to the Lagos as the heavenly Adam, the son of God, the heavenly high priest, and so on and so on.
Sounds like somebody we know.
Yeah, also Yeshua, Joshua, the high priest.
It does sound like it.
And I find it interesting that Philo of Alexandria, he's in this really powerful Jewish family, right?
Where isn't it?
I saw in the Caesar's Messiah documentary that Atwill claims that Vespasian and Titus were funded by the Alexandrian Jews.
I forget.
I've read it too.
That sounds right, though.
And it's interesting also that, you know, with Titus, Tiberius, the Alexandrian Jew related to Philo, helped destroy the temple.
And we have like anti-temple Christians that want to, like, did they look at Daniel 9 and say we have to create a fake suffering Messiah and then destroy the temple and go into exile to fulfill prophecies?
Like, that's kind of the way I see it going down.
Well, I doubt if anybody, if any ancient Jews viewed the thing about the Messiah, the anointed one being cut off, that seems to refer, like there's this whole network of references in Daniel to the events of the period of the Hasmoneans and Antiochus Epiphanies and all that.
And in that context, it fits perfectly if they're talking about the martyred high priest, therefore an anointed one, Onias III.
And so I tend to think that's probably what they thought and correctly understood.
There are a couple of passages that Richard thinks might have been fuel for the fire of Christian doctrine that just because it could be read that way.
And I like if early Christians could see the Messiah being compatible with the sufferings of Isaiah 53, well, maybe some pre-Christian Jews did too.
Well, that's possible, but you'd really need more evidence that somebody did.
There's wisdom of Solomon, too, that says that they would be blinded.
It's very similar, almost like this was the plan to have a suffering Messiah character that they supposedly rejected and were blinded to.
And, you know, Maimonides, 12th century top rabbi, he believes that Christianity is preparing the world for the Messianic age, too.
And I just see with the spread of Christianity, it essentially Judaized the world.
It spread the Torah all over the world, the concept of the Jews looking to the Jews for salvation and that they're God's chosen people.
You know, the Christians helped through persecution and through believing that they're chosen, helped the restoration of the state of Israel.
So I see it as a right.
Yeah, I think that's certainly the case.
The Balfour Declaration and all that, the Victorian evangelicals had kind of set stuff like that in motion.
It didn't happen out of nowhere.
What miracle?
It fell out of the sky.
So that's true.
Just like today, you have people donating to rebuild the Jerusalem temple.
They figured, well, God's going to do what he's going to do when he's going to do it, but maybe he's waiting for us to show some initiative.
And so, you know, let's speed the thing along.
So I'm sure that's what some of the Victorian British Christians were thinking too.
Do you think you've been doing this for decades now?
Do you think that there's like, I'm not going to say a conspiracy against to keep the Jesus character alive, but do you think there's some kind of systemic kind of what's the word?
A systemic force that is keeping this buried?
Like, you know, I've seen you're in the documentary.
Is it called The God that wasn't there.
You're in a documentary about Jesus that was out a while ago.
But besides that, like, you know, where are, I don't see you getting invited in on CNN and mainstream media.
Is there a conspiracy to keep the truth about Jesus hidden?
In one sense, yeah, like Bart Ehrman, for instance, who's a fine guy and a friend of mine, he always preface any kind of criticism with that just so it doesn't get blown up.
You have a debate with him where it's almost a million views.
Yeah, and I'm not too thrilled with that and with the reactions to it.
People say, well, you should have said this.
And I say, well, I did, don't you remember?
And so on.
But yeah, he actually says in his book, Did Jesus Exist, that in the academic guild, people like him would see to it that no mythicist could ever get a faculty position because it's crazy.
And I think it is anything but crazy.
And it was only a couple of decades ago that people said that about Old Testament minimalism.
Thomas L. Thompson started the ball rolling on that and said, really, you know, archaeologically and other through other means, it becomes clear that there is no evidence for any of the stuff in the Bible happening until a very late stage when you're not really dealing with the interesting stuff anymore, these long post-Reoboam kings of Israel, the house of Omri, well, yeah, so what.
But that it's almost certainly fiction and Moses is a fiction.
Abraham's a fiction.
Well, that was just blasphemy, even to critical, supposedly critical Old Testament scholars.
And poor Thomson was cast out and for years made his living as a house painter.
And then eventually what he wrote and a couple of others that joined the club persuaded the guild.
And now that's the standard position in Old Testament studies.
I would not be surprised if that happens with Jesus mythicism, though I'm sure I won't live to see it.
And really, I don't have a dog in the race.
I don't care what most people believe, nor do I want to get a teaching position.
But I suspect that will happen eventually.
And so there is a kind of a conspiracy, but I think it's because the people that control the academic mainstream just cannot think outside the traditional box.
Now, even if they're atheists, like Bart, for instance, and a number of other ones, they still seem to me to be captive to the basic framework of Orthodox Christianity.
They may rationalize everything, but the idea that Jesus was a myth, they just can't handle that.
And these, of course, are the people that networks go to, like Peter Jennings and other people that did various Jesus documentaries.
They would go to people like this, best-selling authors, people who had high positions in seminary faculties and all that.
And you can understand why.
I mean, they didn't know any better.
And so I think that it's kind of a professional conspiracy, but the church authorities don't need to do it because they're just catechizing the flock.
And they don't know any better.
I would think.
I don't believe they're shrewd enough or interested enough to look into this stuff that would get them fired if they taught it.
It just doesn't occur to them.
I mean, it's not, I don't put them down like, oh, they liars and frauds.
No, I don't think it occurs to them.
It seems loony to them.
And with their mass education efforts in the churches, you don't really need a conspiracy.
Now, you might eventually, when as America follows Europe into secularism, then it might be, you might have to go to extreme lengths to get the Jesus thing, but it could die out.
I mean, religions have.
You can't find too many Mithraists anymore.
Yeah, well, The Abrahamic faiths have been going strong for 2,500 years.
And I think that's so much of the planet believes in the three Abrahamic faiths, and they're invested in the idea that Jesus is real.
The Muslims, the Christians, and even the Jews, where Jesus is almost their most hateful, it's like their anti-Messiah.
He's like the armalis to the Jews.
He almost is the embodiment of Satan.
To the Jews.
Yeah, that's right.
Some Jewish text says that Jesus is in hell in a bubbling pit of excrement.
And they really don't like this guy.
Though now you have more liberal Jews coming up with a more favorable view of Jesus just for the sake of ecumenical or interfaith dialogue.
And that's kind of what my book, Judaizing Jesus, is about.
I mean, I think it's great if there is interfaith dialogue.
I like to see people stop hating each other and working together for good things, but I don't think you can arm twist history to make it useful.
I draw the line at that point.
I want to ask you, I'm going to be doing a debate with a Christian in a few weeks, and I have a feeling he's going to bring up the proof that Christianity is real in the martyred apostles, Paul, Peter, several others.
What do you think about that?
The idea, the argument from apologists that Christianity is real because these apostles' disciples died for their beliefs like Paul.
What do you think about that?
That is really utter nonsense.
For one thing, we don't know what happened.
We don't even know who the apostles were, really.
A bunch of them are just names on a list, and the names don't always even agree from gospel to gospel.
But beyond that, all we, quote, know about any of these guys comes from second and third century apocryphal acts of the apostles' books.
The Acts of John, the Acts of Thomas, of Peter, of Philip, of Tom, Thomas, and at least six major ones, Acts of Paul and so on, that are filled with legends that no one would defend historically.
But we don't really know anything about what may have happened to these people.
In the book of Acts in the canon, it says that John, sorry, James, son of Zebedee was beheaded by Herod Agrippa I. But I don't think it really tells us about any of the others.
And so we don't have any real records of what happened to them.
They may have passed away in their sleep.
They could have died from anything.
Who knows?
We don't even know that they were martyred.
And so the, I mean, even a lot of the saints' martyrdoms are fictional.
They're like pagan stories, right?
Yeah, and just fanciful and silly.
Like in the Acts of Paul, they do the Androcles and the lion story where the Androcles takes a thorn out of the lion's paw.
And then later he happens to run into the lion again and he remembers Androcles and doesn't eat him.
Well, that appears again in the Acts of Paul, where Paul finds a lion limping along and takes the thorn out of the paw and baptizes the lion.
Well, he goes his merry way.
And when Paul is later thrown into the Colosseum and they release a lion to eat him, guess which lion it is?
Paul, how you been?
And so he doesn't get eaten.
Is this evidence about Paul?
And when it gets to his supposed martyrdom, Nero has his head chopped off and they drag the corpse out.
But then back into the throne room comes Paul with his head back on and said, okay, Nero, you're next.
And then he leaves and disappears.
And his disciples go to mourn at his tomb and find incandescent light around the opening of the tomb and see Paul ascend into heaven.
Did that happen?
Do Christians even know that some believe that?
There's just no evidence for that.
And besides, even if we knew they all were horribly martyred and were courageous, that doesn't mean they were right.
It would just mean they were sincere, that they believed it.
Well, nobody would doubt that.
I mean, you know, if it was some sort of a con game and they said, we're sick of you preaching about Jesus and ripping people off to the lines with, oh, well, I guess maybe things have gone a little too far.
I mean, you know, of course, it's not that.
But even if they were martyred for a sincere belief in the resurrection of Jesus, that doesn't mean they were right.
Plus, that might not have been the thing that they were killed for if they were killed.
We get the impression from the letter of Pliny around 117, I think it is AD.
He says that they were executing Christians simply because they were Christians.
They didn't give them a theology test.
And if they got an F, they were killed.
It's all whole, this argument.
It's amazing to me that they don't understand the implications of it and still use this.
They're the worst refutation of their own belief.
All right.
Last question, and I'll let you go.
And I appreciate your time.
We hear about Jesus of Nazareth.
What is going on with Nazareth?
Did it exist?
What are the Nazarenes?
And what do people need to know about that?
There is a big debate.
The mainstream, even of critical scholars, say, oh, yeah, yeah, Jesus was from the village of Nazareth.
And others are not so sure, like Frank Zindler and Renee Salm, who's done a couple of books examining every stitch of supposed evidence for the existence of Nazareth during the ostensible lifetime of Jesus.
Any pottery, any coins, anything.
And he says none of these things associated with Nazareth can be shown to be in that period from the first third of the first century when Jesus would have lived.
Some of them might have come, but you can't just assume that.
Whereas many can be dated, like the dates on coins and so on, but they're later or earlier.
And it so happens that Nazareth was very ancient and had been inhabited on a sort of a plane for hundreds of years, but not consistently.
And that there's no real evidence that it was inhabited during the so-called time of Jesus.
Though, around 50 AD, 20 years after the supposed death of Jesus, they began to settle it again.
And we do have datable artifacts from there.
Well, Salm argues, I think, very persuasively, that the burden of proof is on anybody that would say there was a Nazareth in Jesus' time.
Josephus never mentions it.
It's not mentioned in the Talmud, I believe.
That could just be such a little fly speck.
There was nothing to report about it.
You need some kind of proof.
Yeah, and some evidence anyway.
And so what could, I mean, doesn't it count that it says Jesus of Nazareth?
Well, it doesn't say Jesus of Nazareth.
In the Greek, it's an epithet.
It says, depending on which verse you read, Jesus the Nazarene, which could easily mean Jesus, the guy from Nazareth, or Jesus the Nazarean, which meant something like the keeper, like the keeper of the Torah, the keeper of the laws.
And we're told by, I think it's Epiphanius of Salamis in the fourth century that there was a pre-Christian sect of the Nazareans and that they were wandering carpenters and so forth.
Like Jesus was a carpenter.
Are they related to the Mandorians or the Mandori?
What's the name of the Mandians?
Yeah, could well be, in fact.
And because their name, their own name for themselves, is the Nazareans, though in transliteration, they tend to, scholars tend to substitute an S for the Z, but it's the same name.
And the point would have been that Jesus was a Nazarean, a member of that sect, as if to say Jesus the Essene or something.
Like there was a guy in the Dead Sea Scrolls, John the Essene.
It would be like that.
And or Simon the Zealot, if Simon was part of the Zealot party.
Well, a common theory among scholars is that originally he was just called Jesus the Nazarean.
And there are other possible meanings for that, but the most common was the Nazarean.
But people found it unbecoming to make Jesus the member of a sect because of that thing I mentioned before.
You know, oh, Jesus didn't have to learn anything from anybody.
He already knew it because he's the son of God.
So is there, they didn't want to just cut off what the tradition said, Jesus the Nazarean.
And by the time the gospels were written, I mean, easily by that time, Nazareth was an inhabited town.
And the gospel writers thought, Jesus the Nazarene, I guess that means he was from Nazareth.
And just an honest mistake, because there was a Nazareth when they were writing, and they wouldn't have known the difference.
So it's very likely that there was no Nazareth at the time and that Jesus the Nazarene or Nazarean meant Jesus the member of this sect.
It's funny, like the fulfillment of prophecy where the Messiah has to come from.
Some believe it's Bethlehem, some say he's from Galilee, that he had to come from out of Egypt, and then we have Nazareth as well.
It's just so much uncertainty there.
You know, I just thought of one other thing I wanted to mention earlier when I was talking about Jesus and the Naocenes and the serpent.
Are you aware that I've been reading in Jewish books that the Gematria, the numerology of Messiah equals serpent or equals snake as well?
I never know what to make of that stuff.
It's striking, but it's kind of like the Bible code from a couple of decades back.
The results are startling, but it's hard to know whether it really means anything or not.
But that's fascinating.
Right.
Well, when you add it with the brazen serpent, comparing Jesus to the brazen serpent or the fiery serpent and then the Naocenes and then the modern-day Kabbalists believing that Jesus is this kind of other side, Samael, Gentile, you know, darkness character.
I think it's deception against the non-Jewish world.
But I appreciate you so much for coming on.
You are a legend, Dr. Price.
I want to call you Dr. Bob.
That's what Derek at MythVision always calls you.
I could talk to you.
I don't stand by pomposity.
I didn't think you did.
Dr. Bob, I could talk to you all day.
You are a wealth of knowledge, a human encyclopedia.
I will continue reading your books and watching your videos and hopefully have you back on another time when I have some more questions for you.
Oh, you bet.
Thanks for inviting me on.
All right.
I appreciate you coming.
I hope everybody, I hope he gets some by his books.
What's some of the top books that some titles that you suggest for people in the audience that see this that might want to pick up?
Well, one is the Christ myth theory and its problems.
Another is the case against the case for Christ, which is a reputation of Lee Strobel's.
I've read that.
It's horrible.
Not your book, but Strobel's book.
Oh, what a stinker.
Yeah.
The amazing colossal apostle, subtitled The Quest for the Historical Paul.
The ones you mentioned that deconstructing Jesus and the incredible shrinking son of man.
Let's see.
The new ones sound good as well.
I'll put all your links, your website again.
What is your website called?
Not MindGeek.
What is it?
Robert M. Price.
No spaces or periods.
At MindVender with an OR.
MindVender.com.
And your Apple podcast, The Bible Geek Show.
I'll put all these links in the description below for people that want to find those.
Dr. Price, I'm going to let you go, end the show.
I appreciate you for coming on, and I hope to do it again sometime.
And again, I appreciate all your hard work.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you, everybody.
Let us know what you think in the comments below on Odyssey, where you can watch it in HD.
This will also be up on BitChute.
Let us know what you think.
Give us a thumbs up.
Check out some of Dr. Price's books.
And knowmorenews.org for all of my links and to support the channel.
And I will see you guys all again very soon.
▲
Export Selection