Know More News - Adam Green - Mythical Jesus & the Origins of Christianity | Know More News LIVE feat. Dr. Richard Carrier

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Jan. 31, 2022 - Know More News - Adam Green

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Mythical Jesus & the Origins of Christianity | Know More News LIVE feat. Dr. Richard Carrier

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	Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, once again to No More News Live.
	I am your host, Adam Green.
	Thank you all so much for joining me today, Sunday, January 30th, 2022.
	I have an incredibly powerful show I've been anticipating for years to interview my epic guest today.
	He is Dr. Richard Harrier.
	He is a PhD in ancient history from Columbia University.
	He is a historian, philosopher, best-selling author.
	He specializes in modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, the origins of Christianity that we will be discussing today, ancient philosophy, science, technology, and he is a top expert on Jesus mythicism, author of several books that I've listened to on Audible over and over again,
	just countless hours studying his research on the historicity of Jesus, not the impossible faith, why I am not a Christian, his latest Jesus from outer space, as well as some of his other titles that I need to pick up soon, and I will on Audible, Sense and Goodness Without God, and the scientists in the early Roman Empire, as well as proving history and others.
	Dr. Carrier, it is a pleasure to finally be speaking with you.
	How are you doing?
	Doing well.
	It's cool to be here.
	Glad to join.
	Oh, I have been taking notes, studying your books over and over again.
	I've got so much to talk to you about.
	I have you for an hour and a half.
	I really admire your debates.
	You are excellent, very sharp in your debates.
	You do a lot of them.
	I've used a lot of your research and a lot of your information to kind of change my path of research, and it's helped me in a lot of my debates as well.
	I just want to start off before we get in the nuts and bolts of things.
	I just want to ask, what is it like to you knowing that the most influential character in our history never existed?
	Well, of course, from my perspective, I don't know that we can know that for sure.
	So, you know, if it's, I guess, widely known that my conclusion has a large margin of error.
	So I think there's a respectable chance that Jesus existed historically.
	I just think the evidence leans in the other direction.
	So to rephrase your question, how does it feel to like the significance of realizing that?
	What if, like if there was no historical Jesus?
	It ironically doesn't change a whole lot because modern Christianity doesn't really adhere to hardly any of the dictates of the original faith anyway.
	So it doesn't really matter whether Jesus existed or not.
	Nobody's doing what Jesus would do anyway.
	So I find more valuable the liberal Christian attempts to interpret the gospels as fiction, right?
	Stories from which you can extract moral lessons, rather than relying on any of that being historically true.
	And the liberal Christian wing of Christianity actually takes that position that the gospels are not literally true stories, that these things, most of these things didn't happen.
	So there's, you know, a lot of the world is already comfortable with the idea that the Jesus of the Gospels is mythical.
	So for there to not even have been an actual Jesus behind even the myths that grew up around him doesn't really change much personally.
	But I think I find it interesting as a methodological position.
	And it reveals a lot about how historians in this field will quickly abandon valid methodologies and sometimes even honesty when this third rail is touched.
	So that has been fascinating to me and to see what happens.
	Like how do people defend this difficult to defend thesis that there was actually a historical Jesus, even though there's evidence suggesting that there wasn't.
	Oh, yeah, a lot.
	I think you do your, you say there's a certain percentage.
	I think it's 33% chance that Jesus did exist, right?
	That's about what you're saying.
	Yeah, I say that's the furthest end of my margin of error.
	One in three odds, roughly, that there could have been a historical Jesus, but he would have been very different from what's depicted in the Gospels.
	It's obvious that, you know, I've learned from your books that Christianity is just a Hellenistic Jewish mystery religion.
	And you also call it a Pesher.
	But this is another question.
	You know, you.
	The gospel.
	I would say the gospel derives from a Pesher.
	Yeah.
	For people who don't know what that is, we have examples of Peshars from Pesharim in the Hebrew plural from Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls.
	And it's, you know, you have a scribe or some sort of sage or wise man is inspired by the Holy Spirit to find secret hidden messages in scripture, and they find disparate verses in different books, put them together to find this secret message, the sort of secret scriptures that God hid in the Bible.
	And from that, you can extract these elaborate theologies and messianic prophecies and stuff like that.
	Christianity is totally one of those.
	Like when you look at the way they say, well, you pull these scriptures together to create this story, that's exactly Pesher logic.
	That's exactly what the rabbis and thinkers at Qumran were doing, for example.
	So yeah, it definitely fits in that vein.
	And you mentioned the mystery cult idea.
	And I was just recently talking to someone about this, pointing out that if you could go back in time, 100 years before Christianity started, and find a scholar who was well informed of both Judaism and mystery religion, someone like Philo of Alexandria, probably, someone who was well informed on both.
	And you asked them, what would it look like if the Jews came up with their version of one of these mystery cults?
	And they would rattle off a list of things that the syncretism would produce.
	It would basically describe Christianity to a T. It's exactly what it is.
	And I think the aversion to accepting the non-historicity of Jesus, to accepting the idea that this started as a revelatory cult and that Jesus was put into history mythically later, the aversion to that is turning historians away from actually paying attention to the actual historical origins of Christianity,
	that it really was this cultural syncretism between the popular Zeitgeist of the time, which was Hellenistic mystery religions, and Hellenized Judaism of the time, even Palestinian Judaism of the time.
	And just as Judaism, as we know it, is a syncretization of Persian Zoroastrianism and pre-exile Judaism, right?
	So like pre-exile, Judaism did not have resurrection, did not have the apocalypse, did not have the devil as the enemy of God.
	It didn't have any of this stuff.
	All of that stuff came from Zoroastrianism.
	And it got Judaized, right?
	It's changed.
	It's made to be more suitable for other Jewish beliefs.
	So it was altered, but it became the Orthodox Judaism of the time of Jesus, or what would have been the time of Jesus.
	And that's already a syncretism.
	And it was a syncretism when the Jews were conquered or under the empire of Persia.
	So now they're under the empire of the Hellenized Romans.
	Of course they're going to come up with someone, one of the, you know, some side sect, some French sect is going to come up with a similar amalgamation.
	But this one didn't take off.
	It did not succeed among Jews.
	The majority of Jews went a different direction in Palestine.
	They went towards military messianism and led to multiple wars and very grievous actions against the Jews by the Romans.
	And then the diaspora Jews took a different path altogether because that wasn't working out for them.
	Christianity only really was successful among Gentile audiences ultimately.
	It grew the most in that domain and pretty much drove extinct the original Jewish sect.
	You started a lot of this research.
	You credit it to Earl Dougherty's The Jesus puzzle, and he calls the New Testament a midrash.
	So whenever I'm explaining this, I always use both.
	I cite you and say Pesher and him and say Midrash.
	What's the difference?
	So Midrash is a misnomer.
	So Midrash is a commentary on the Bible.
	So it would read like someone saying a commentary.
	Like the early Talmud is a Midrash.
	Yeah, the Talmud is a Midrash on the Mishnah, for example.
	But you also have more of an exegetical commentary would also be a Midrash, someone who just gives a homily or a speech on the meaning of a particular Bible verse.
	A Haggadah, however, is a sort of elaboration of a story.
	So you take a minor Character in the Old Testament, and then you elaborate a whole myth around them that teaches some more lesson, and that would be a Haggadah.
	And so you could have Midrashic Haggadah, which would be doing this fictional thing, but in the purpose of commentary, so that you're writing a commentary, but you're doing it through fiction.
	And that's more like what you would call the gospels.
	It would be a Midrash Haggadah or a Haggadik Midrash would be the way to describe it.
	And that's too complicated to explain to people.
	So I just avoid that terminology.
	Pesher is also not what is happening in the Gospels either.
	I mean, pesher underlies what's happening in the Gospels.
	So the Gospel itself, before it got turned into stories, the gospel that Paul is preaching and all of that, there had to have been some sort of pesher, whether it was written down or oral, where someone is doing what's done at the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where they've got Bible verses and then commentary explaining how there's a hidden message within that.
	And the hidden message would be the Christian gospel, that Jesus died for our sins.
	He was buried and then rose on the third day, etc.
	So all of that would be quote-unquote predicted in this pesher, which would be a sort of hidden scripture extracted out of real scripture.
	Esoteric fanfiction.
	Yeah, well, that's what happens when you make it into a Haggadah, when you turn it into a story.
	You take this idea and you turn it into a story.
	Now you're making a fictional narrative that's more like Haggadah than Midrash.
	But it is commenting on the Old Testament.
	It is commenting on Judaism in general, but also on the scriptures.
	So it is a Midrashic Haggadah.
	So that would be an accurate description.
	It's just, it's a very esoteric terminology.
	I don't usually go into that.
	You have a more positive outlook, I guess, on secularism versus Christianity.
	I see all the Trump supporters and the evangelicals and the end times rapture, Armageddon fanatics.
	And I see even people in politics that believe the Bible is the word of God.
	And that's if they're, if Israel is the chosen people and all these things.
	It feels to me like we're living in the Twilight Zone, or for a more modern reference, Black Mirror, when half of the planet believes in these just absurd, delusional Abrahamic myths.
	Yeah, I mean, we are still stuck in that.
	That is absolutely true.
	The growth of the nuns is only just recently started to be visible in America.
	We're catching up to Europe and other first world countries, but even you can find Canada, England, etc.
	You can find the same kind of sort of weird cultish, supernaturalist evangelical Christianity.
	It's still a thing, but it is much more overvoted.
	It's much more outvoted in most first world countries.
	America is kind of weird in that regard.
	And was especially weird as of like 20 years ago.
	But now the last 20 years, people leaving Christianity and also leaving conservative Christianity is increasing quite a lot.
	In fact, if you look at the generation, if you look at the young generation now, like the population of these evangelical Christians is hemorrhaging.
	It's shrinking precipitously.
	And they've been wringing their hands about this for quite some time now.
	How do we get the kids back in to church?
	How do we get the young adults back in?
	Keep them off the internet.
	Don't let them watch Richard Carrier videos.
	That is what they would have to do, but they know they can't do that.
	So I read a book once where they were giving advice to what to do.
	And they said, we need to get more biblical.
	We need to get more into the biblical text.
	And it's like, no, no, well, that's what's happening.
	They're becoming more extreme and radical, it seems like.
	Right, right.
	And so, yeah, it's in desperation.
	This is the same point that Farid Zakaria made this point about Islamic radicalism.
	That actually, Islamic fundamentalism is declining, and that's why it's becoming more violent.
	It's losing power.
	So that's why most targets of Islamic terrorists are Muslims.
	Most of their deaths, the people they kill, are fellow Muslims because they're losing the argument.
	And so the only thing they have left is to use violence to try and basically compel and terrorize people.
	That's why the Taliban uses violence and terror to get the population of Afghanistan behind them.
	Most of the Muslims in Afghanistan don't give a crap about Taliban theology.
	They don't want to have anything to do with it.
	So it's the same thing's happening here, where the more Christianity shrinks, especially this conservative Christianity, the more power they lose and the more desperate they get, the more violent they'll get, and the more they'll resort to corruption and other unconstitutional means to try and remain in power.
	And so we need to be ready for that.
	And we got to survive it right through it until they're so small that they can't even do that anymore.
	But this is the growing pains of growing up, I think, as a civilization.
	Yeah, well, when there's world leaders that believe in these ideologies and they're all predicated upon end times and Armageddon, Gog and Magog wars, it's just quite disturbing.
	Yeah.
	Half the planet.
	They don't know about that.
	They should just Google the family or dominionism or those together.
	What about Council for National Policy?
	Have you heard of them?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	So there's some, you know, people always worried about Islamic terrorists.
	And it's like, actually, these crazy Christian psychos actually are close to controlling our nukes.
	They're much more dangerous.
	You need to be worried about them or get us embroiled in a war in the Middle East that they're always trying to do.
	So yeah, that's we need to be, we need to keep our eye on these people and do what we can to reduce their power and influence.
	What I find interesting is like, I'll read your book and I'll see all of these obviously like direct quotes from the Old Testament in the New Testament.
	Basically, the New Testament is just an artificial fulfillment of the Old Testament.
	It's like they came out with an old movie, the original, and then they made a remake, you know, a few hundred years later.
	And it's like, oh my God, it's a miracle.
	Everything's been fulfilled.
	And I find it so, you know, everybody, you and Christian Christians agree.
	Oh, yeah, Jesus fulfilled all the prophecies.
	That's the whole point.
	He's the fulfillment of the law.
	But it's so much more, so much obvious to me that they wrote everything to fulfill it, not that it all actually happened and they wrote it down 50 years later.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And their interpretation of scripture is really off-book, right?
	It's really bizarre.
	It's not in line with Orthodox Judaism, but that's also true for all fringe Jewish sects at that time, right?
	So like the Qumran sect had this elaborate narrative of the future because they wrote it in a prophetic speech as a pescher where they'll have a verse from, they'll say the verse from the Bible and identify it and then say, well, this means this.
	And then this verse here ties into this.
	And they'll build this whole narrative about this cosmic savior is going to come down and there's going to be this massive war in the sky between the angels of light and the angels of darkness.
	And there's this timeline and a sequence and all this.
	Now, if you had that and then someone just wrote the story, right?
	That's that's kind of what the gospels are.
	It's like someone took, they had a pescher saying what would happen.
	And then someone just sat down and wrote, well, let's just fictionalize that and turn that into a story.
	And then we'll use that to teach all the lessons that we have.
	So they throw the lessons of the gospel into the story and things like that, which is just how Deuteronomy was composed, right?
	It's the same thing.
	None of that happened.
	Moses didn't exist.
	But they needed a way to teach why the laws are the way they are, the morality that's supposed to underlie the laws, the way society is supposed to be organized, what a good person is versus a bad person.
	They do all of this through narrative.
	They tell a fictional story that is supposed to teach all of these things.
	And then, of course, you get to the point where people know that it's fictional and they say, well, why should I listen to that?
	That's just fiction.
	And that leads to the need to start insisting that it's true, because then you can start saying, no, you should follow it because it's true.
	So you start with the fictionalization, the kind of allegorization, but there becomes a rising need to start insisting that it actually happened.
	And that's how you end up with the church that we have today, where they got in this same corner where they had to start insisting that it was true for people to start following their interpretation of it.
	And then we end up with the historicity of Jesus.
	That's kind of the process, just the same way we ended up with the historicity of Moses.
	Yeah, well, not anymore in academia, right?
	And hopefully you're on the cutting edge that in a few decades people will concede.
	Once the gatekeepers like Bart Ehrman, I've been in so many debates, Dr. Carrier, where they go, even Bart Ehrman says that Jesus was real.
	You know, I would say it would be unfair to call him a gatekeeper.
	I think people misapprehend his popularity among the public with his influence within academia.
	I don't think he really has that.
	He can pull any strings in academia.
	I don't think his voice is particularly influential among academics.
	There are others who are more like trying to push this gatekeeping perspective, lesser known figures.
	But Ehrman is the most vocal, right?
	The most angry of the anti-mythicists.
	But it's mostly he's talking to a lay audience.
	He's not usually talking to scholarly audiences.
	Even though he refuses to debate you and even declined $5,000 to a charity, which is just shameful, you've already been winning the debate in the public sphere from what I've been watching go down.
	And it's interesting to me that he gets promoted on mainstream media all the time.
	It seems like there's not interest in your work.
	Like, you know, I've seen some maybe low-budget documentaries, but not, you're not getting invited on CNN to promote Jesus Wasn't Real, right?
	Yeah, well, that's not a popular subject to discuss.
	So that's not going to end up on any major, any major network.
	I'm not surprised by that at all.
	They're more interested in debates that Christians can get behind.
	So Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted, which is a good book, in my opinion.
	It's a good summary of the state of New Testament scholarship.
	So even when I disagree with its conclusions, he is correctly describing what many scholars believe.
	So it's useful in that regard if you want to see where New Testament studies is, which is not where preachers are claiming it is to their audiences and church and stuff.
	So you have him talking about which things, well, certain things Jesus certainly didn't say, certain things he did say, certain things people changed over time.
	There are Christians who are open to that debate.
	They're interested in hearing that.
	And so, and I think when you have liberal networks especially, cater to those Christians more than they cater to the Fox News Christians.
	So having someone like Bart Ehrman on is safe and interesting.
	So you can have this controversy that is a safe controversy to have and try to spread this sort of liberal way of looking at the text, which is improvement, I would say, over the evangelical way.
	So one thing that I really found interest in in your book is the idea of the twin Messiahs, the two Messiahs in Judaism.
	And you make a strong case that this is a pre-Christian belief.
	And there's a common misconception that the Davidic king was supposed to be a military, victorious ruler that would subjugate and conquer the whole world.
	And that that's why the ancient Jews rejected Jesus because he wasn't that.
	But you completely disprove that beyond any reasonable doubt.
	Can you share your thoughts on that?
	I think there can be a reasonable doubt.
	Well, maybe.
	It's on the cusp.
	I'm fairly convinced that this is the case.
	I don't rely on it, however, in my argument that Jesus didn't exist.
	All I do is argue that this possibility cannot be dismissed.
	So you can't say they couldn't or wouldn't have done this because they did.
	We have it in the Talmud.
	The standard Talmudic messianic narrative is that the Messiah ben Joseph, Messiah son of Joseph, conveniently, the same name that was assigned to Jesus, Jesus' father, the Messiah ben Joseph would come and he would die.
	He would be killed.
	And then the Messiah ben David, the Messiah son of David, would come and resurrect him and bring about the end times.
	So there was actually this two Messiah model where one of them dies.
	We see this in the Talmud.
	And there's other Jewish texts that have this, and there's hints of it in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
	Unfortunately, the scrolls are fragmentary, right where we need them to not be.
	But there are hints in the Dead Sea Scrolls that they had adopted this two Messiah model.
	And all Christianity did, all the Christians did, is take these two Messiahs and turn them into one.
	So you have the Messiah ben David and the Messiah ben Joseph are the same Messiah.
	And so then, and then he resurrects and resurrects himself and brings about the end of the world, right?
	So it's just it takes this two Messiah model the Jews already had and then just merges them into one Messiah.
	And I think that's a perfectly logical progression of this ideology to go.
	So I'm not at all surprised that the Christians did this.
	But it's important to be aware of the fact that there were Jewish sects, even standard traditional rabbis, who did believe in a dying Messiah.
	This was a thing.
	And what you'll have is scholars will try to deny that this idea existed in the time of Jesus, but there's no evidence that it didn't.
	And right?
	So that's sort of an apologetic, just knee-jerk reaction.
	It's not a scholarly position to take.
	There's no hint in the Talmud of this not being an early belief.
	There's no hint of it being, for example, a reaction to Christianity or anything like that.
	In fact, it's actually counterpredicted by their hostility to Christianity.
	They should have not had this doctrine.
	The fact that it coincidentally has them dying Messiah also being the son of Joseph suggests that they did not borrow this from Christianity.
	They would not have.
	It suggests that Christianity borrowed it from this ideology, which means that ideology had to be around at the time.
	Exactly.
	And I think it's a very convincing argument that they would have never put it in the Talmud that one, that Isaiah 53 is the Messiah, as it does in Sanhedrin.
	Yeah, also, your audience might not know this.
	There's a lot of, usually Christian apologists, but some mainstream scholars will try to insist that Isaiah 53, which has this dying Messiah figure in it, they'll insist that that was never interpreted as Messianic.
	But there's no evidence that it was never interpreted as Messianic.
	In fact, it's all over that.
	It's in the Talmud.
	It's without question.
	There's no doubts about it.
	They just assume that this is about the dying Messiah, and they just cite this passage as foundational for it.
	So I've done a lot of research into esoteric Judaism about the twin Messiahs.
	And there's definitely a theme where it's like the first coming.
	It's almost like Cain before Abel or Esau, Ishmael before Isaac, Esau before Jacob, where the firstborn is kind of like the, you know, they have a dualistic light and dark view of the world.
	So the Moshiach ben Joseph is almost like the evil serpent, the evil Messiah.
	And in essence, if Jesus is Moshiach ben Joseph, the character, that's who they based him on, these motifs that were memes at the time, then he really is the adversary, the evil kind of Esau to the Jews in Judaism.
	You see what I'm saying?
	I mean, you're right.
	That's not in the Talmud, right?
	I mean, their idea of the Messiah ben Joseph is not of an evil Messiah.
	They don't say that, no.
	No, no, yeah.
	They seem to assume that it is actually a legitimate part of Messianic history.
	None of that, the negative attributes are in the Talmudic version of this.
	But they did have what you described, their attitude towards Christianity was very much like that.
	They thought in their myths in the Talmud, which in the Talmud it puts Jesus 100 years earlier.
	It has him get executed not under the Romans, but under Alexander Janias by the Jewish authorities at the time.
	So in 70s BC, like 100 years earlier.
	But in their version of it, Jesus was basically a sorcerer and was executed for sorcery, essentially.
	And his disciples are such that's similar.
	And they have all these weird stories about him going to Egypt and carving spells into his flesh and stuff like that.
	It's really strange things.
	But this is medieval Judaism.
	So unfortunately, we can't tie this back confidently centuries earlier.
	But it is hard to explain how the Babylonian Jews, rabbis who composed these stories, how they'd never heard of the Pilate story, how they'd never heard of Jesus living and dying under the Romans.
	They only know this Jesus that's being preached as dying 100 years earlier.
	And so it's clues like that that I think suggest and help support the idea that Jesus didn't exist originally.
	And when people started putting him in history, they chose historical periods that made sense for them politically.
	So if you want to sell the Jesus' message of the gospel under the Roman Empire, you pick a key moment in Roman history, and that's when you have him killed.
	And if you want, if you're outside the Roman Empire, this would be the Christianity that would have been in Babylon when the Talmud is being composed shortly before, that wouldn't have any resonance.
	That wouldn't mean anything because it's not the Roman Empire.
	So they would pick another ideal, some sort of resonant, politically meaningful time, and they picked the transition between Janias and subsequent kings of Judea.
	And this is even explicit in Epiphanius, who points out that they had this ideology that the moment Janias died, that's when the new Messiah rose and got killed, etc.
	So that the throne of Israel would never have been unoccupied officially or something like that.
	So it's a convoluted argument, but it shows that they're thinking politically as to when they're choosing to put this drama.
	Well, the Messiah had to die in 30 AD according to the Daniel timetable, right?
	That was causing all the messianic fever at the time?
	I mean, not originally.
	But yes, it's easy to interpret the Danielic timetable in that way, which I think contributes to the religion beginning then.
	I think the religion began in the 30s AD, and I think it began from Pesher-like readings of Daniel.
	They were looking for the clues in the tea leaves, and their calculations said 30s AD, and so that's when they had the revelation of the Christ and so on.
	I think that's what happened, really.
	I do think Daniel influenced it.
	But there were many different sects interpreting the chronology in Daniel in different ways.
	So you have the Dead Sea sect was trying to find a date in the 100s BC or after 100 BC.
	They're trying to find a date in there.
	Didn't pan out.
	But the original text is a more convoluted numerology.
	It's supposed to be referring to events in the 160s BC because it was forged for that purpose.
	But since its predictions didn't come true, people started reinterpreting it as must refer to some other period of time.
	And so they go scrambling to find different ways to interpret the chronology in the timetable in the prophecy.
	And you get different dates depending on which calendars you use, depending on which starting points you use, and so on.
	And one of them is definitely the 30s.
	So I think, and we have Christians actually pointing this out.
	Julius Africanus lays it out in the third century.
	I think that goes back probably to the beginning of the religion.
	The first time that I reached out to you in email, I had this question and you were so kind to respond.
	This also points to 30 AD, and it's found in the Talmud.
	And the same logic that you use to prove that the two Messiahs are pre-Christian, I think you can apply that same argument here.
	Why would they put in the Talmud something that looks like, oh, there was a big sacrifice in 30 AD, and now the Yom Kippur is not working anymore?
	Don't you think the Christians would have picked up on this?
	Well, of course, that wouldn't have happened when Christianity originated, right?
	So this is a post-hoc theory.
	40 years is a theologically significant period of time.
	It's the time spent in the wilderness.
	So I think it's just, I think the authors of the Talmud are composing this long after Christianity began, after the Jewish war, where they're trying to explain why the Jewish war happened when it did.
	I think they're doing the same logic in reverse, where they're saying, well, 40 years in the wilderness puts us in the 30s.
	The Danielic timetable puts us in the 30s.
	And so they're trying to make retrofit events to the Danielic timetable.
	So I think they're doing the same thing, but they're using a different calendar, a different timetable to do it than the Christians did.
	Here's another question.
	On Daniel, Daniel calls for the Messiah to be cut off and then for the sanctuary to be destroyed.
	You talk in your book about how there were Jewish sects that had anti-temple sentiments.
	Do you think that there was Jewish sects that actually wanted to see the temple destroyed?
	Because that's what Daniel called for?
	Yeah, right.
	And I think the idea would be that God or either God would do it or the enemies of the Jews would do it basically by God allowing them to do it, right?
	So as part of God's plan, like, and I think you see that in the Gospels too, this idea that this is all God's plan.
	God was tired of the temple cult.
	It was too corrupt, so he got rid of it.
	And yeah, I think there were Jewish sects, even in the time of Christianity, that were already thinking this way.
	The Dead Sea sect is definitely an anti-temple cult.
	I don't know if they have specific declarations that the temple will be destroyed, but they're definitely against the temple itself and the temple hierarchy.
	They believe that it's become too corrupt and needs to be replaced with a new Israel that's kind of created outside the framework of political Israel at the time.
	It's interesting also that the temple was supposedly destroyed on the same day as the first temple, and it's a Jewish holiday, Tisha Ba'av.
	It's quite that.
	I haven't looked into that, so I don't know if that's true.
	I doubt it is, but they claim it is.
	They celebrate it.
	Yeah, so I can't comment on that.
	So I don't know enough about that.
	But That is the kind of thing that people would claim.
	Do you believe Solomon's temple existed, or is that fictitious as well?
	I haven't really looked into that in detail.
	Following Finkelstein and others, if it did exist, it wasn't an elaborate stone structure because there just isn't one.
	But it could have been.
	So you notice in Deuteronomy and Exodus, the tabernacle is a tent, essentially.
	And yet it was still constructed based on their idea of this fabulous temple in heaven.
	So they had temporary structures.
	So you could use wood, you could use a clock, you could build a temple that wouldn't be a surviving stone structure and still call it a temple.
	So as far as historical reality, I would suspect that there may have been a Solomonic temple, but it wouldn't have been this fabulous stone structure like the Herod, like Herod built, for example, or that was built after they exiled.
	Have you seen the contemporary fanatics that want to destroy the dome of the rock and rebuild the temple so Jesus will return?
	Yeah, I know that's a thing.
	Right.
	It's one of those things.
	Let's make the prophecy happen, right?
	Let's destroy the temple.
	And then by things to come, right?
	But yeah, by Gentiles believing in Hebrew prophecies, they're in essence fulfilling the prophecies because the prophecies were that all the flesh would come and worship the God of Zion and that obedience, the Gentiles will be obedient.
	That's literally what Paul says.
	That's what the scriptures said to do.
	And I find it interesting, the Josephic Messiah, so Messiah Ben Joseph, the Joseph character in Genesis, was rejected by his brothers and basically accepted by Egypt.
	And he's like almost the hidden Messiah.
	His brothers didn't recognize him, right?
	That's what it says.
	It's almost like the Jews not recognizing Jesus is their Messiah.
	But that's the prophecies that they have to be hardened.
	And it says everywhere, wisdom of Solomon and all over that they wouldn't believe in the Messiah.
	Almost like it's all just fake prophecy fulfillment.
	Yeah, no, that's correct.
	And those ideas go back.
	I mean, the idea of the oppressed prophet that no one listens to is fundamental to the entirety of the Old Testament, right?
	So the idea that the Jewish elite killed the prophets rather than listen to them.
	That is still a Jewish teaching.
	It is very much an attempt to kind of put a check on elite power by shaming and criticizing them and trying to put respect and status back onto religious leaders.
	And so it represents this constant struggle between political leaders and religious leaders that goes back centuries.
	And we see it in Christianity as well.
	I mean, the history of the Middle Ages and so on.
	So I know you're not a fan of Caesar's Messiah.
	And I had Atwill on a couple weeks ago and basically had a friendly debate with him.
	I kind of see it as the exact opposite.
	I see Christianity as more of a spin-off Jewish sect that meant to basically theologically conquer the Gentile world.
	Are you familiar with Scurbina, the Jesus hoax?
	I haven't read it.
	The name sounds familiar, though.
	He's debated.
	He debated on myth vision with James Valiant, who did Creating Christ.
	What was Scurbina's thesis?
	Remind me.
	Basically, how St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for 2,000 years is the subheading.
	Well, from your book, I feel like your book mixed with this one, it kind of makes a lot of sense because as you write, the Jewish messianic groups knew that a military victory wasn't coming.
	They were occupied.
	They were being crushed.
	So they almost had to come up with a not a they couldn't fake a military victorious Messiah, but they could fake a first suffering Messiah.
	And it's like exactly a spiritually victorious Messiah is the only Messiah that you can invent.
	So it was spiritual combat.
	That's why it is, right?
	I see Paul doing theological warfare and basically making selling the Gentiles a deception.
	You have a good presentation that Christianity is a delusion.
	I think It's also a deception because he deceived people.
	Jesus wasn't real.
	You're not going to burn in hell if you don't believe in these prophecies of the Jewish Messiah.
	So, what do you think of that?
	The Christianity basically Judaizing the world in fulfillment of prophecy of the Old Testament.
	Yeah, I think Judaizing might be the wrong word.
	I think moralizing.
	So, I think it is valid to think that Paul, either deliberately or subconsciously, realized the power of a pacifist way of unifying the Jews and the Gentiles and getting the Gentiles to adopt the fundamentals of Jewish morality that he thought would end corruption.
	Of course, then what we got was the Vatican, which is one of the most corrupt organizations.
	He didn't really unify them, though.
	He kept the separation.
	He wanted to.
	No, actually, he wanted to.
	Yeah, he wanted Jews and the Gentiles to get along.
	And you can kind of tell his ideas the new phase of things would be to go in the direction of what he was selling to the Gentiles, where we can get away from the old Torah that's causing all these political problems and social distancing and things like that, and then unify under a common banner without war, without having to take over the temple, without having to use arms.
	We can just persuade people to join these sort of socialist communes, and then everything will be fine, right?
	His idea is like, I think he thought everything would be fine if we just did that.
	Or the end of the world would come.
	Right.
	He also, he might have genuinely believed the world was going to end.
	That could also have been a ploy.
	I suspect he was a genuine believer.
	I think he thought the world was generally going to end for whatever reason.
	And so he thought the time was short to try and save as many people as possible.
	So he's going around the world, lifeboating as many people as he can.
	I think that's, and doing it without weapons, right?
	Doing it without violence.
	That was his big thing.
	It's like, we can do this without violence.
	And I think that was one of the decisions that led to Christianity evolving in that direction.
	Doesn't he say that they're the enemies for the sake of the gospels?
	Who?
	Paul, Romans 11, 28.
	As far as the gospel is concerned, they are the enemies for your sake.
	Talking to the Gentiles about the Jews.
	Yeah, it's not that he's saying that about the Jews in general.
	He's saying that about the Jews that won't see reason, right?
	The ones that don't believe in Jesus.
	Right.
	If you look at the entirety of Romans, Paul thinks most of these guys are going to turn around and join us, right?
	That his idea is like, you know, that these guys are going to be saved, but there's also, you know, some of them are going to be resistant and cause problems for us.
	And that's, he's trying to rationalize that as this is all part of God's plan, which he has to do, right?
	Because if all, you know, they're getting a lot of pushback from Jews, and this is supposedly a Jewish sect, that can cause, that could raise some eyebrows and raise some hostility or opposition to what he's doing.
	So he has to come up with this rationalization of why the Jewish elite against us.
	It's like, well, God has hardened their hearts because it's all part of the thing to test us and so on.
	But if there was no Jesus for them to reject, that this is all just a fictional story of a rejection.
	I mean, which thing is the fictional story of the rejection?
	Well, if Jesus never existed, they never actually rejected him and killed him.
	Oh, right.
	Yeah, I know that.
	This is all fake fulfillment.
	He's saying that about Jews and Christians, not Jesus specifically, right?
	So Jews rejecting the Christian message or the Christian gospel, basically not converting to their sect, right?
	The Pharisees are staying Pharisees.
	The Sadducees are saying Pharisees.
	No one's becoming a Christian.
	How do I explain this?
	So that's what Paul's doing there is he's trying to find a way to explain how there can be hostility and at the same time, how the Jews and Christians can work together peacefully and unite.
	So the Romans is all about that.
	That's his whole mission there.
	Paul, let's see.
	I hope I have this.
	Okay, here it is.
	Let me share this with you now.
	Shoot.
	Stumbling block.
	Oh, man.
	I'm missing the thing I wanted to show you.
	I'm talking about Paul and one of his quotes here.
	I wanted to share this with you.
	That's not it.
	To get the context of what Paul believed was the fulfillment of prophecy.
	Here it is, right here.
	I just did a whole long video the other Day based on your research.
	Here we go.
	All right.
	So Paul says, make the Gentiles obedient.
	He's the apostle to the Gentiles.
	Paul is the oldest known documents of Christianity, and he was the apostle to the Gentiles.
	Mark was very Pauline, targeting the Gentiles.
	So Genesis getting the obedience of the nations.
	Yeah, and you see that even in Jeremiah, which is crucial because the Danielic timetable is a reinterpretation of the failed prophecy in Jeremiah.
	And Jeremiah has this sort of master race teaching as well, this idea that the Jews will be the masters of the world.
	The whole world will bow to them.
	Everybody will come to their temple and worship their God.
	But that kept not happening, right?
	Well, it happened with Christianity, though, really.
	I mean, yeah, thousands of years later.
	Well, 300 years later, until it started to take over the Roman Empire.
	Yeah, right, right.
	But that obviously was not on the mind of Paul, right?
	When Paul's going around, he has no conception that there's going to be some sort of Vatican power play, that it's going to get the ear of an emperor, have one of their people be the tutor of his sons, get his ear, have him choose the church to be the central lynchpin of his fascist empire.
	There's no way Paul would have seen that coming.
	And I don't think he would have approved of it had someone told him that's what happened.
	Wasn't one of the first proto-Orthodox churches in Rome, though?
	Isn't that where they kind of went and set up?
	I mean, in the time of Paul, you mean?
	I mean, Paul was very clearly like his mission was to target the Gentiles and have as many of the Gentiles come in.
	There was already a church in Rome, and it may have been, and it already had Gentiles and Jews in it.
	But he did not found that church.
	So there were other evangelists going about founding these churches.
	But it's hard to say, because that was hard to say much about that church because we don't know much of it from his letters, right?
	He doesn't say when it originated.
	He doesn't give us a census of who was in it or anything like that.
	We just get his letter and we can kind of infer what sort of arguments he had to deal with.
	But clearly, they had heard of him.
	So his influence had already reached there.
	And that's why he has to write them a letter because his ideas were already sort of causing conflict in the Roman church without him even having to be present.
	I just want to share this.
	This is what I learned from your book.
	And I think this is such a strong case for mythicism here and for your whole theory.
	Paul says, last of all, Jesus was seen of me also.
	So that's implying that all the other pillars of the church and Cephas and the 12 and who is it, John, James, and Peter?
	John's not in there, but I mean, the name John's is not in there.
	But in 1 Corinthians 15, there's a line for Peter and the 12.
	There's a line for all the brethren.
	There's a line for James and the other apostles.
	And then there's a line for Paul.
	But yeah, absolutely.
	The way Paul writes this is that he understands everyone to have had revelations of the risen Jesus.
	Now, this is compatible.
	That by itself is compatible with historicity because we're only talking about the resurrected Jesus.
	Most mainstream scholars already agree that's not a real person, right?
	They already agree that there wasn't an actual resurrected Jesus who appeared to them.
	So they only had visions or dreams of Jesus appearing to them and just believed that that was authentic, which we have precedence for people of that time generally took dreams and visions as real contacts with the divine.
	But it's clear that this is not Jesus walking around having dinner parties with them, is the way I put it.
	In fact, earlier on, and you look at 1 Corinthians 15, 5 or 6, you have, he says, he appears to all the brethren at once, or above 500 brethren at once.
	And that's the only line where it's an at once, which means that's the only appearance that was a group appearance.
	All the others are individual people.
	So you're having a dream.
	So the 12 go away and individually have their dreams, come back and meet and say, hey, I had a dream of Jesus.
	He came to me.
	He told me the same thing and you've verified your gospel, etc.
	But this one group experience was clearly something set aside.
	It was unique unto itself.
	And the only thing we have sign of that in the Bible is Acts 2, where Acts has the Pentecost vision, Where people see tongues of fire above them and feel the Holy Spirit move them.
	I think that's probably a more accurate description of what it was like.
	So, Acts, you have that vision, and you have Paul's vision.
	It's just a light and a voice in the sky.
	It's not a body.
	It's not a person.
	No dinner parties.
	I think that's what the original visions of Jesus were.
	I think the significant part for historicity is when you look at 1 Corinthians 15 and you read, and he says, this is what I preach to you.
	And he goes through the sequence of events, and he says, Jesus was crucified and died for your sins and was buried.
	And he says, all of that is according to scripture.
	In other words, scripture is their source for it.
	And then he was seen by people.
	There's no mention of anyone seeing Jesus before he died.
	There's no mention of him having a ministry.
	There's no mention of him preaching, no mention of him collecting disciples while he was alive.
	As far as Paul knows, the first time anyone saw Jesus was the risen Jesus, the visions after his death, which means that, and the only way you know about his death is from scripture, which means it must have happened somewhere in the mythical realm where people weren't there to be witnesses.
	The only way you could learn about it was from scripture.
	So you can look for what that would mean in that context.
	That's where we get the idea of the celestial crucifixion concept, which correlates with other religions at the time.
	It was actually, and within Judaism, their idea of there were many things in the sky and in the heavens where you could have gardens and castles and burials and stuff in these different levels of heaven.
	So anyway, that's the key part there is the fact there's no appearance of Jesus before he dies, only after.
	And so I think that's one of the examples of things that are very suspicious that suggests that this is a revelatory encounter with Jesus.
	There's no historical guy starting all this.
	In all of Paul's letters, he never has to defend against the accusation that, hey, you never even knew Jesus.
	You know, you only had visions.
	We all knew him and saw his teachings and his miracles.
	And then he says, have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?
	implying that they all saw him the exact same way.
	Yeah, and in fact, it's even the opposite, right?
	In Galatians 1, Paul has to spend an entire chapter, chapter and a half even, defending himself against the accusation that he only learned the gospel by word of mouth, that he didn't have a revelation.
	And so he insists, no, I did not speak to anyone.
	I learned the gospel by revelation.
	Not with flesh and blood.
	I did not meet with flesh and blood.
	Almost like it was secrets.
	Like you couldn't, you know, you must have heard these secrets of Jesus from Daniel and Zechariah and Isaiah and Psalms and wisdom of Solomon.
	You had to have this communication from Jesus from heaven.
	He had to choose you to come to you.
	Otherwise, you couldn't just go to his lectures on Sunday, right, or anything like that.
	But the key part here is that this meant that this was the only way the Galatians would accept preaching from apostles, which means that this is what other apostles were claiming.
	Other apostles were claiming they did not meet with flesh and blood.
	They'd met with the revelation of the Christ.
	And so they must have been preaching the same thing.
	That's why Paul has to defend himself and insist that he learned it the same way they did.
	And so that's another piece of the puzzle that actually suggests that Jesus was not a historical person.
	He was only a revelatory being at this point.
	And he only got put into history in stories after Paul was dead, basically.
	I may forget, and it's on the top of my head.
	Are you working on a new book right now that I can look forward to reading?
	No, no, I'm trying to solve a bunch of other things.
	Gotcha.
	So right now I'm blogging.
	I need to get my Jesus from outer space recorded for audio.
	My only book that I don't have an audible yet, and I just can't find time.
	My mother died recently, and I'm a trustee of her estate, so I've been dealing with fixing up the house to get it ready for sale and things like that.
	So I've been too busy to take on any other project.
	Well, your contribution has already been enormous, so please take all the time you need to take care of your things.
	I do want to get back to it.
	I want to get, we've got to knock out the audiobook.
	That'll be the next big project.
	And then I haven't decided yet what book I'm going to write next.
	I've got a lot of ideas, but nothing's really settled.
	I have your books in Audible, and just I can't even explain to you countless nights whispering in my ear as I go to sleep listening to the same bookmarks about Jesus being a fictional character.
	I'm glad.
	A lot of hours of work went into those audio recordings.
	Oh, I know.
	I can only imagine.
	Romans 15, 12.
	So this is Paul's context of what he thinks the Messiah is.
	He says, Isaiah said, there shall be a root of Jesse, and he shall rise to reign over the Gentiles.
	In him shall the Gentiles trust.
	Also, the root of Jesse, the banner for the people, all the Gentiles shall seek the root and stem of Jesse, the branch.
	And then you look at Psalms 1.10, the rod, which they just likened to Jesus.
	The rod of strength will come out of Zion and rule in the midst of thine enemies.
	Is that what Paul thinks Jesus is doing?
	Is reigning over the Gentiles and ruling in the midst of thy enemies?
	And even Mark or Matthew says, sit on my right hand till I make thine enemies thy footstool.
	That's what the Messiah is meant to do.
	Paul actually translates this into the gospel itself.
	So he rereads it as the gospel will come out of Zion and the gospel will conquer the Gentiles.
	And so he rereads it as this pacifist narrative where the ideas will triumph, essentially.
	Well, the gospel of Christ, though, who Song of Solomon rules by the word of his mouth without arms.
	And Paul sees this as through the missionaries, through the apostles, the earthly realization of the spiritual battle that's happening where Jesus is defeating the demons and stuff that were influencing the Gentiles, right?
	So really, Paul, through the gospel, is freeing Gentiles from demonic influence and then doing them a solid, basically, right?
	It's this idea.
	And so their idea is that Paul's idea is that they would conquer through the ideas.
	And that's what Paul's contributing to this, rather than a military conquest.
	Certainly the Old Testament is full of dreams and fantasies of Israel militarily conquering the world.
	There's a lot of that.
	And they meant that literally.
	They actually thought they were going to be the master race, but it didn't work out that way.
	So Paul is the earliest documents of Christianity, but very clearly there was a theme going around at the time, a meme of the kind of Philo Logos, suffering Messiah character.
	What do you think, where did Paul pick this up from?
	You say in your book, I want you to put your speculation hat on a little bit.
	You think he got it from Cephas, the 12, which has been linked to possibly being the Essenes.
	There's Targums of Hillel that are linking Daniel and Isaiah.
	There's the Qumran scrolls.
	What do you think Christianity looked like before Paul got his hands on it?
	Yeah, all of those are plausible.
	Christianity, especially pre-Pauline Christianity, looks a lot like the Qumran sect.
	It's not identical, but it does look like someone from that sect broke off and started their own subsect of it, basically.
	And even if it's not a direct relationship, it's a cousin and niece relationship isn't like an uncle and cousin relationship, something like that.
	I do think there's a contact there.
	I think there's a lot of influence for different sects.
	I don't think you say it's just Essenes or just Samaritans.
	I think there's a little bit of Samaritan ideas in early Christianity, a little bit of Essene, and so on.
	And Philo.
	Yeah, so Philo, I think it's entirely plausible that Paul had read Philo's works because Philo wrote, started writing his works in the 20s, possibly earlier, but definitely by the 20s, a lot of Philo's writings were available.
	And he was a renowned sage.
	And there's a lot of overlap between Paul and Philo.
	They reference a lot of similar ideas.
	Now, it's possible they got those ideas from common sources, not from each other, right?
	So it's possible that rather than Paul reading Philo, Paul read and or sat at the feet of sages and lecturers who were spreading these ideas.
	And then so did Philo.
	And then Philo took him in his own direction.
	Paul took him in his own direction.
	They were Hellenized Jews, so they were studying Greek Orphic myths, right?
	Most likely.
	I mean, they were studying everything.
	So when you look at Philo, he's looking at Greek myths and he's looking at a mystery cult terminology and things like that and reinterpreting it as messages or corrupted messages that go back to the Bible, right?
	So he's still doing this master race idea where everything comes from the Bible.
	Plato copied the Bible, right?
	That's what he said.
	Plato copied Moses.
	Yeah, yeah, something like that, right?
	That kind of ideology is what's going on.
	But there's no reason to assume that Paul Knew the works of Philo, but he could have the chronologies, right?
	Cut from the same cloth, I think.
	Yeah, they might have been using material that predates this.
	So you asked, like, what about before Paul?
	And I think some of these ideas are already in the religion before Paul comes along.
	So Paul might be picking up ideas from Philo or similar sources, but some of these ideas have already gotten in.
	I think, and I agree with Ehrman on this, his new book, or not his latest book, but one of his new books is How Jesus Became God.
	I agree with Ehrman that the Christians right out of the gate after Jesus died came up with the idea that he was the incarnate pre-existent archangel of archangel of many names.
	They decided that he was this celestial being who had come down to earth, even if Jesus existed, right?
	Because Ehrman believes that he existed.
	Even if Jesus existed, after his death, the Christians formulated this idea that he was an incarnate angel.
	And the whole theology spins out off of that.
	The angel they chose for him to be the incarnation of is the angel of many names that Philo talks about, who's the Logos, the high priest of God's temple, Melchizedek, Metatron.
	Those connections with Melchizedek, Metatron, we can find possible hints of connection to.
	Philo doesn't talk about that, nor Paul, but you can find this complex of things.
	I have an article on my site about the angel Michael, who might have also been associated with the same as the angel of many names.
	Michael might have been one of the names, right?
	But it's clear that this idea was already infiltrating Christianity at its beginning.
	So even if Jesus existed, right, that that's the case.
	It would have infiltrated possibly after his death rather than something that he came up with if he existed.
	So I wanted to ask you.
	He didn't exist.
	It was whoever the leader, like Kephas, is the leader of this.
	He was getting these ideas from somewhere.
	It could have been Philo.
	Philo wrote that, which was in the 20s.
	Kephas is formulating his new religion in the 30s.
	So it's entirely possible that Kephos is the first to get these ideas and import them in to the sect.
	Some information I learned from Christopher John Bjorknis, Beware the World to Come.
	He sees the Orphic myth of Phanes protogenous, which means the firstborn in Greek mythology, the Orphic myth.
	Is this a predecessor to the Logos of Philo, do you believe?
	He's the lightbringer, the firstborn, related to Dionysus, which has lots of Jesus parallels as well.
	I don't know if it's this one, but let's talk about logos theory more broadly.
	In my book on the historicity of Jesus, where I do talk about the logos, I cite somewhere in there an article.
	I can't remember the author, but it's in one of the prestigious series of religious history in Roman history.
	But it's a whole article on the logos within Stoicism.
	So Stoic theology had this whole idea of the logos that is very, very similar to the way we see the Jewish logos.
	So Philo is talking about the Jewish logos.
	The logos idea comes from the Greeks.
	I think that was an import, right?
	That's a Hellenistic influence on Jewish thinking.
	So this whole logos theory, but trying to trace exactly where it came from.
	So the question is, for instance, you could have this logos theory and it's independently affecting all these religions.
	So it's independently affecting Orphics while it's independently affecting the Jews.
	So it's not like the Orphics affected the Jews, right?
	It could be this ideology is affecting both at the same time.
	So we can't really trace chronological or sequential order.
	All we can see is that the same idea is propagating throughout all of these religions.
	And so it's in many religions, not just like you mentioned, the Thanes sect, but in many of these religions.
	So Stoic theology had incorporated this whole idea of it as well.
	So a lot of similarities there.
	So it's definitely this idea was a going theological concept in Hellenistic religion, but trying to trace its exact origins, its exact history is difficult.
	What about pre-Christian Gnostic sects?
	Do you believe that there was Gnostic sects before the Orthodox are always like Kryptonite, talking about Marcion or these Gnostic groups, like the Ophites, who were Christian Gnostic sect?
	They had speculations about the serpent in Genesis.
	Basically, their logos, the light bringer, was like a serpent character, and they believed Jesus did not exist in the flesh, and that they talk about John lifting up the serpent on the pole like Jesus, and the Ophites did not actually prefer the snake to Christ, but thought them identical.
	They also have the almost Kabbalistic diagrams as well.
	And they, just like Kabbalah has the Adam Kadmon character and the Ein Soft instead of the demiurge.
	Unfortunately, we're looking at sources that are a couple hundred years late.
	So we're looking at Hippolytus' origin, etc., so early third century.
	And we can't trace these ideas earlier.
	It's entirely possible some of the ideas go back earlier and have been evolved and changed over time, but we just can't tease that out.
	There's nothing we can do with that.
	But it's important to use the word Gnostic in the correct way.
	So I actually side with the Westar seminar, the Westar Institute lately, that they came out with a report where Gnosticism didn't really exist at all.
	There wasn't even such a thing as Christian Gnosticism.
	That's a modern scholarly construct.
	There are specific Christian sects that had specific ideas that we now call Gnostic.
	But there's no sect that lacks all of these features, and that every sect has some of these features.
	And there's no sect that has all of them at the same time.
	So the word Gnostic is kind of meaningless.
	It doesn't help describe anything in antiquity.
	If by Gnostic, all you mean is just one thing, which is that secret spiritual knowledge was essential to salvation, and don't specify what that secret knowledge was.
	That as absolutely a pre-Christian idea and is present even in Judaism.
	We have examples of the Essenes teaching that there were secret teachings of salvation.
	The Dead Sea Scrolls referenced secret teachings of salvation.
	So, or secret teachings that are relevant.
	So, Paul and Jesus as well, speaking in parables, and Paul with his.
	He's not right saying that there are secret things that he can't explain.
	You have to have a certain rank in the church, certain level of initiation to know the truth of it.
	He's referring to mysteries.
	That's what they're called.
	Could the secret be is that Jesus represents the serpent secretly?
	Like the Naocenes?
	Well, the problem with secrets is that they can change on a dime because there's no way to control it.
	That's the thing with once you get it on paper and you've published it everywhere, it's harder to change doctrine.
	Whereas if they're oral doctrines, it can radically change.
	And we can see this in Hippolytus.
	You mentioned the Ophites, and Hippolytus is one of our main sources for that.
	Hippolytus wrote this whole treatise on all these Christian sects, and they're all different from each other.
	They all have weird, bizarre beliefs.
	And he's listening, you know, every single one of these sects has just a strange, completely unique, different secret lore.
	Like all of them, it's completely different.
	That's why it's hard for us to figure out, like, well, which one of the, which pieces of all of these lore go back to Paul's day?
	We can't tell because it's become so corrupted.
	All these different sects have like evolved their secret teachings in such weird directions.
	We can't reconstruct what the original teaching was unless we get clues specifically in Paul.
	And I'll give you an example of that.
	Paul references, he says, marriage.
	Marriage is a mystery that it has something to do with Jesus and he can't explain further.
	We have evidence in early texts of Gospels and various and other writings that mentions other things mentioned by Paul, where there's something about how Jesus is the groom and the church, the Christian believers, are the bride.
	And they're all one body.
	They're basically one bride that Jesus is married.
	Ironically, that makes it incest because we're also the brothers and sisters of Jesus by adoption.
	But there was best one of the reasons why probably this was a mystery, that it was a problematic teaching, but was somehow spiritually important.
	This idea that you were, in a sense, both the brother of and the spouse of Jesus when you became a Christian.
	And so there's clearly some more lore going on there.
	Another example is Ignatius mentions that there's this complex angelology and demonology that's somehow important to know for your salvation.
	But he says, I can't talk about it.
	I can't tell you more.
	But you know what I'm talking about.
	So we know there's something about this.
	And we get like Hebrews touches on Melchizedek.
	And you can tell there's more to the story that's not telling you about what does Melchizedek have to do with any of this.
	There's some sort of secret teaching that's important about Melchizedek.
	And Melchizedek is important.
	He's the cosmic savior in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which ties in really closely with the teachings About Jesus, about the Messiah, coming out of clouds of glory in the end.
	Well, that's Melchizedek in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
	So there's a lot of secret lore going on here, but we don't know the details of it because it was secret and no one recorded it, and it just changed over time.
	By the time you get to Hippolytus, it's all been corrupted, and there's just no way to discern.
	I've heard you say in other interviews that there was all of the angels' names were mixed up, and also that there were rules that you weren't allowed to write down any of their esoteric secrets.
	You know, I've done a lot of study of the Dead Sea sect has something about secret names are important, and only select people are allowed to know the names, and somehow knowing the names is important to salvation or something.
	We don't get details, but they do reference this.
	It's in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
	So, yeah, that is a thing and may have been a thing.
	You know, Paul doesn't reference this, but that doesn't mean it wasn't going around.
	Like, Paul doesn't have occasion to discuss every single thing that was crucial to their teachings.
	I've read a lot of books by modern-day Messianic Jews and Kabbalah, like books like Return of the Kosher Pig.
	They say Jesus is Melchizedek.
	He's the Moshiach ben Joseph.
	He represents Esau and the evil other side, like the darkness in dualism, and that Jesus represents the snake.
	And then they point to a bunch of reasons.
	One of the ones is Gematria, which we know goes back to ancient times as well.
	They say that Messiah equals snake.
	And then there's like the twin Messiahs, the twin Leviathans.
	So basically, what I'm getting at is pick in your brain if there's any idea.
	Yeah, I don't think we can trace that back prior to the Middle Ages.
	A lot of that is like Jewish Kabbalah.
	Kabbalah is not an ancient thing.
	That was definitely a much later development.
	But it borrowed a lot of lore that was passed around for ages and a lot of obscure Judaica used.
	So it's another example where pieces of this might go back pretty far, but trying to reconstruct it is what went back is a challenge unless we could find reference from like evidence from the ancient period.
	We can't tell which of those ideas actually go back to the ancient period.
	Well, I find this interesting about Kabbalah, too, something I wanted to share with you because, you know, just like the reasoning about the stuff in the Talmud, like they are, they are big into keeping secrets, and that's what these mystery religions have always been about, keeping the esoteric secrets hidden to the initiates.
	But there's this theme of them, Israel having a hardening, and their wickedness had blinded them.
	Corinthians 2, 7, and 8, the wisdom of God.
	For had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
	Isaiah 63 also has some comments like that.
	Where am I getting at?
	Ascension of Isaiah has the same theme where they're tricking Satan.
	He didn't know.
	Otherwise, he wouldn't have crucified Jesus.
	And we find the same theme in the Zohar where the Yom Kippur scapegoat offering represents Esau and it's like a bribe to him so that he doesn't mess with their other blood atonement sacrifice.
	So it's almost like the same thing, tricking the devil with an offering.
	And one wonders to what extent this is influenced.
	So there's another one of those examples.
	We have a similar story in Greek mythology, Prometheus, right?
	Prometheus helps humans trick the gods into accepting the shitty parts of the sacrifices, the bones and fat.
	So the humans could then eat the, and the viscera, so the humans could then eat the meat of the meat.
	And this all idea of like tricking, you can trick the gods, right?
	And so it's similar to the idea.
	And demons, it's important to note that in antiquity, when you see the word demon in the New Testament or in any Jewish text, the Greek word is actually God.
	It's daimonos, which is a divinity.
	So this means a minor divinity, minor deity.
	So, you know, Theos, of course, is God God.
	Like, it's the big honor title for gods.
	But daimons, divinities, that's another word for God.
	So that's why they thought all the pagan gods were really demons, which to them, what they meant was bad gods, basically either fallen angels or the progeny of fallen angels.
	So not basically enemies of God, but divine beings nonetheless.
	And in the 70 nations, each had their own God, right?
	Yeah, originally, yeah, when you go back to the Old Testament, the belief was that there was a right, there's a, and that got turned into the 70 angels, right?
	So, angels are basically just being replaced, they're just basically gods under a different name.
	Uh, and then you have the gods who are on the side of the god, and then you have the gods who are the enemies of the god.
	Uh, and so it's really polytheism.
	The only thing is it's henotheistic in the sense that the one God created all of these, and then some of them rebelled, etc.
	So, there's one supreme God, but there's all these other gods, these divinities, some of which we'll just call demons, others we'll call angels.
	And so, that was fundamental.
	That we can show was fundamental back then.
	But, yes, you could trick these beings.
	It's various things that you could do in different ways.
	There's some good stories in the Talmud about how to trick even God if you can trick God.
	So, what I'm getting at here, and just to give credit where it's due, this is I got this from Beware of the World to Come, Christopher John Bjorkness.
	And surprisingly enough, he actually references that Prometheus and tricking the gods with the bones in the book as well.
	But so, if is this the secret oral law, which they've always claimed was handed down from Mount Sinai with Moses, but we know that's fictional.
	But have they always kept this esoteric secrets of the real meaning of Yom Kippur?
	Yeah, there's no way to know.
	Um, unless you can find an ancient attestation to a certain secret teaching, there's no way to know what goes back to them.
	Um, so if you look at like Origin, for example, he has a whole section on the scapegoat and the symbolism, and uh, so and he doesn't mention this, what you're talking about.
	So, he believes in ransom atonement, where Jesus was a sacrifice to Satan again.
	Two ways to explain that: one is there was a secret oral lore and he didn't know it, the other is he knew it but couldn't write it down, and so told this different story instead.
	But we can't prove it's one or the other, so we're stymied.
	This is one of the biggest problems with ancient history is that most of the time we just don't know the things we want to know.
	Well, I also learned from your books, and yeah, I first learned it from you, that the whole Pilate and Jesus and Barabbas story is all a retelling of Yom Kippur and represents the goats.
	Yeah, it's an excellent example of Midrashic Haggadah, where you take the whole Levitical sacrifice, narrativize it, and then put characters in there representing different pieces of it.
	So, Barabbas, of course, means son of the Father.
	So, and in some manuscripts, he's actually called Jesus Barabbas.
	So, we have two men named Jesus, both as sons of the Father.
	And one is sacrificed to atone for the sins of Israel, and the other bears the sins of Israel and is released into the wilderness.
	And the sins of Israel listed are rebellion and murder, which are the most fundamental sins, right?
	Explain all other sins are rebellion and murder in some form in this thinking.
	So, and also if people are thinking of the Jewish war, murder and rebellion are the primary sins that you want to attribute to the Jews because that's the story you're telling.
	So, yeah, and then you have, yeah, this is totally the Yom Kippur ceremony.
	You have the two identical goats, one bears the sins of Israel and is released into the wilderness to die, and then the other is the pure one that's sacrificed, and its death and its blood atones for the sins there too.
	So, the whole story is just allegorizing the Yom Kippur and making Jesus, just the message being that Jesus is the Yom Kippur.
	That's what inspired the intro video.
	Did you like that, by the way?
	The Jewish blood magic?
	It's extra interesting because the other half of that allegory is that that means that Barabbas represents what's wrong, he represents the wrong choice, he represents what's evil, rebellion, and murder.
	In other words, war.
	So, that is an anti-war passage.
	It's about like that, it's basically entirely against the military messiah, the militaristic messiah concept.
	They're basically saying you're following, you're following false messiahs.
	That's what that whole thing is about.
	And the true messiah is this guy who meekly was innocent and meekly went to his death to atone for the sins.
	So, that's the message of this text.
	And you notice that's the message that isn't being promulgated when you see this, oh, the lamb is magically powerful.
	It's like that, you know, you're missing the whole point of the story, but okay.
	Yeah, that's not the takeaway.
	Um, and in uh, the author of this, again, beware of the world to come, he believes that Jesus Barabbas represents the Moshiach ben David.
	He's the rebellion, uh, military victorious leader, and they choose him over Jesus.
	And he gets this because he found an ancient Hittite ritual where the king, say the king was sick, they would find some peasant, dress him up like the king, and then sacrifice him to like say, you know, appease the gods and save the king.
	So he thinks that's that's where it came from, and that actually esoterically represents Moshiach ben David and Moshiach ben Joseph.
	Just some.
	Yeah, that sounds like a modern, more modern interpretation.
	Well, I've read some academic papers on all of the different theories on what the two goats represents, which one is Jesus.
	Is he the scapegoat or the sacrifice?
	But yeah, I mean, we have this in Origin, right?
	So Origin lays it out.
	And I actually sorted this out myself, then found some scholars who wrote about it and came to the same conclusion I did.
	And then I found Origin's treatment, and it matched ours.
	So that was the thing.
	It's like, oh, okay.
	So that's how we know we're on the right track.
	We all came to it independently, including Origin.
	Jesus is definitely the sacrifice.
	And Barabbas is definitely the scapegoat.
	And it's important to understand the scapegoat at that time was really associated with the devil, like with evil.
	That's why the scapegoat.
	That's what they believe is that the scapegoat represents Esau.
	Well, it's Azazel, which is a demon, particular demon.
	And so they would actually, it's not mentioned in the Bible, but the ritual was that they would chase it and push it off a cliff to die.
	And some implications are that the cliff is Gehenna, you know, where the trash is burnt and stuff like that.
	So anyway, so that's definitely the bad guy in the story by far.
	And the one, the scapegoat, or the not the scapegoat, but the sacrifice goat is definitely Jesus.
	They definitely understood him as the pure lamb whose blood hits the altar and thus purifies Israel.
	And that's in Hebrews too, Hebrews 9.
	Very explicitly, Jesus' blood is the altar blood.
	So he's definitely being associated with the sacrificial lamb, not the scapegoat.
	One of the theories I saw was that Jesus represented both, and that's why they had his name for both.
	And you know how they also, like, he did the walk of shame where he carried the cross.
	That's kind of like them chasing the goat out into the wilderness.
	It was just a theory.
	Here's another theory I heard.
	This was from David Fitzgerald.
	He said the Nazareans, that means people of the branch.
	Have you heard of that before?
	Yeah, I've written about that.
	So that would mean basically the Christians, the followers of the branch or the rod or the root of Jesse.
	That's implied in Epiphanes.
	So the Nazorians were probably the original name for the sect.
	That and brothers of the Lord.
	I think they called themselves brothers of the Lord.
	But Nazorians was what they were called before they were called Christians.
	And of course, Christian is a Greek, you know, a Hellenism, right?
	So it comes from the Greek Christos, which is nose of the anointed.
	So Christian is a Greek name for them.
	Nazorian, however, is a transliteration of the Hebrew or Aramaic.
	Like you said, it's people of the branch.
	It could mean other things.
	There are other words that fit that same etymology.
	Secret keepers, gatekeepers, things like that, too.
	But there's lots of evidence that the Nazorians were the original sect.
	And in Epanius, the Nazorians were still the Torah observant Jews, even in the fifth century when Epiphanius is writing.
	So that also supports this.
	The Nazorians were the original Torah observant sect.
	And it was the Pauline sect that later got dubbed Christians, called themselves that.
	Branch, you know, it makes me think of like the grafted in Christians that are following the branch of Jesse.
	And isn't Christians also called Ephraimites, Ephraimites, as well?
	Which that's the son of Joseph.
	There's a sect, supposedly, a sect of Ephraimites.
	I don't know.
	I haven't studied that particular heresy.
	There's nothing early on it.
	So all the texts regarding that are too late to be useful for my work Because I'm looking for evidence that I can pin back to the first or second century.
	You're a PhD scholar, so you have to be.
	I can do a little more speculation and theorizing on some of these things without being under the scrutiny that you would get.
	Are you familiar with this book, The Christ Myth by Arthur Drews?
	Yeah, Drews' work is, I think, seminal in Jesus' myth history.
	It's obsolete.
	It's really old.
	I mean, I wouldn't completely rely on it, but it is.
	Got to get the latest peer review.
	Historicity of Jesus.
	It is one of the best.
	And that and Angus.
	So there's two texts.
	Drews and Angus in the early 20th century wrote some of the best Jesus mythist stuff.
	Some of it's a little too speculative, not always entirely accurate, but it is the best stuff to find in the early 20th century.
	There's some crap stuff back then, too, but Drews is doing some decent work.
	So just a couple highlights from where I read this online.
	The presence, the angel of God, whom Jacob wrestled in the desert, they believe that is Samael, because Samael is Esau's archangel, his guardian angel.
	Firstborn Sud, God, Protogenus, also appeared among the Orphics among the name Thanes.
	The hip personprevan.
	Okay, this is what I'm looking for, though.
	Haman is the prototype of Jesus at the Pirim Festival, was also hanged upon the gallows.
	I learned from your book they use the same word for cursed and hung on the pole for Jesus in Greek.
	I hear this from modern scholars a lot.
	It's like, oh, it's Roman crucifixion.
	It's a very specific form of execution.
	It's like, that's not in the Bible anywhere.
	The New Testament never says Romans crucifixion.
	And it doesn't actually say crucifixion either.
	It says polling.
	So it's staros or equivalent words.
	Or xulon, which just means plank.
	Staros or star isdos.
	These are all references to just being polled.
	What does being polled mean?
	When we look at the actual use of the word, it refers to all manner of executions, including the Mishnah standard execution of stoning.
	You would stone someone and then you would hang them up on a plank, Xulon, or Staros.
	So it's the same.
	So it's too ambiguous.
	It refers to Jewish forms of execution, as well as any other empire.
	So when you're talking about Haman, for example, the Pirim story, yeah, it would be the same.
	It might not be literally.
	Gallows is not an accurate translation, by the way.
	I don't think there's any reference to a rope hanging.
	I think the term is literally just being impaled or being hung on a stake or nailed to a stick.
	Inanna, right, Inanna is another example where she's killed and then her naked corpse is nailed up.
	And then she's resurrected on the third day after.
	So yeah, the terminology is vague as to who you're talking about.
	So yeah, when you're talking about the Purim feast, it's the same terminology that was used to refer to Jesus.
	And it's the same terminology where the Jews call Jesus Yeshu, which is like an acronym for may his name be blotted out.
	And in Pirim Festival, that's the same thing that they say for Haman.
	And Haman is known to represent, he was an Amalekite, so he represents basically just the evil enemy of the Jews.
	And then Jesus is the new version of that.
	So it's almost like Jesus is the new Amalekite leader in a way from the Jewish perspective.
	I mean, he's the.
	Right.
	I can see how a Jewish interpreter would spin it that way, for sure.
	Well, wasn't it created by in the account of last events?
	Go ahead.
	He wouldn't have been created in that idiom, right?
	That's more of a polemic than a.
	That's more like the teaching that you find in the second century.
	It starts in the second century.
	I mean, you find it elsewhere, but it's earliest origin is in the second century, where Mary is not the virgin.
	She's the basically the lover of Pantheros instead of Parthenos.
	So Parthenos means virgin, Mary the Virgin.
	Pantheros, just a slight change in spelling, is Panther, which is basically a common nickname for Roman soldiers.
	We're like, yeah, I'm Panther.
	I'm Rocky, you know, whatever.
	But it was a common nickname for a Roman soldier.
	And so this whole legend arose from a Jewish polemic that Mary was actually having an affair with a Roman soldier.
	That's what Armalus is as well, is almost like a copying of that, but for Rome.
	Correct.
	Yeah.
	No, it's the same polemic, right?
	This is another piece of evidence that I believe points to Moshiach ben Joseph, the first evil serpent Messiah being evil according to the Jews, is he was cursed.
	Like Paul says, he's hung on a pole, and that means he's cursed in the Old Testament.
	One who is hung on a pole is cursed.
	Right.
	Paul meant something different by that than that.
	Than the polemics you're talking about.
	Yeah.
	And because also it's important to note that you don't stay a curse, right?
	So the whole idea of Jewish soteriology is that you are a curse before God until you're buried and atone for your sins in the grave.
	And in the Talmud, and I think it's in the Mishnah, or it's in the Mishnah or the Talmud.
	It doesn't matter, but it's in Jewish texts that if your flesh atones, the idea was that your body would be buried and you would rot in the grave, but you'd still be conscious.
	If you were a sinner, you would still be conscious.
	You would be paralyzed, but aware of your body rotting, and it's like being burned and eaten by worms, hence worm and flame, right?
	So that whole idea that Jesus says that worm and flame will never end, right?
	But this is the idea.
	But in the Jewish teaching, it would only last a year and that would atone for all your sins.
	and then you would be you would go to sleep and then you would be resurrected with all the saved at the end times and so this is the whole They're saying that's part of your atonement is that being a curse and then suffering in the grave.
	But then that atones and you'll be with the righteous who will be saved.
	That was the teaching of the time.
	So that doesn't mean like you're just evil and therefore permanently cursed.
	Right.
	And so Paul's teaching is that Jesus voluntarily became a curse, voluntarily took this hit because his mojo is so powerful that his sacrifice by doing that would end all sin, right?
	Not just his, but it would end all.
	And so, and it wouldn't even be his, really.
	It would just be the sin that attaches to the body suit he's wearing, which wasn't even his, right?
	It's just something he's given temporarily to die in because he's a pre-existent perfect being, right?
	Like that predates all of this.
	So this is all just take the flesh and all the curse of the flesh, kill it, and then this creates this magical spell that if you attach yourself to it, everybody can kill the sins of the flesh through the sacrifice of Jesus.
	It's so nice that Jesus killed himself, so there's no more sinning in the last 2,000 years.
	It's been really nice without any sinning.
	Yeah, well, I mean, this is the sort of illogical way that this kind of thinking works.
	They didn't think of, well, if God can do everything, why not make a spell that stops all the sinning?
	No, they can't think of that.
	No.
	What they need is God can't stop the sinning, but what he can do is he can cast a spell that will allow him to save all the sinners in the end.
	The other thing I find interesting is the atonement blood offering sacrifice retelling of Yon Kippur doesn't actually do anything.
	It's the belief that it's real is what actually saves you.
	It's the belief, not the actual sacrifice.
	That's more a focus of modern Christianity.
	Paul's view wasn't that you had to believe it.
	Paul's view was that you had to let the Spirit in you through the ritual.
	So you had to go through the ritual.
	And it was actually very much a physical transaction.
	If you went through the baptism, you were part of the Holy Spirit.
	And that's that.
	Belief doesn't matter.
	And so there's an example of this in 1 Corinthians 10.
	I can't remember exactly.
	It's somewhere in 1 Corinthians.
	Where he's talking about there's someone who's become an unrepentant sinner, baptized Christian, who's become an unrepentant sinner, and he's becoming a problem at dinner at the Eucharist rituals.
	And so the community asks him, what do we do about this guy?
	And he says, well, expel him.
	Leave his flesh to the, basically leave his flesh to the devil, like expel him.
	But it's very clear that what Paul means is that their flesh will be in the throes and the control of the devil while they're alive, but they still get saved in the end times.
	They will get resurrected because they are still part of the Holy Spirit.
	They still accepted it into them.
	They basically became a part of the spell that was cast.
	And it doesn't matter whether you're good or evil or sin or not.
	Once the spell is cast, you get the effect.
	That's it.
	Saved by grace, not by works, is kind of what you're saying.
	Yeah, that's kind of what Paul's saying.
	Now, he then has to struggle to try and desperately explain to people why they then shouldn't just become party animals.
	Right?
	And so the fact that he has to desperately give reasons as to why they shouldn't just become immoral libertines shows that this is the he believes in the physical salvation aspect, that it is a physical transaction that you can't undo.
	So once you're saved, you're saved.
	This creates a problem if what your goal is to get people to be moral, because then you have to try and convince them, let's give them reasons.
	And he never says you better be moral or you're going to be unsaved.
	God's going to leave you dead or whatever.
	You can't lose your salvation.
	So you have to come up with other reasons for people to be good.
	I need to read Sense and Good, your book, Sense and Goodness Without God, because in a lot of my debates with Christians, they say, oh, well, what are you going to replace it with?
	Or where do you get your morals?
	They're some of their favorite arguments.
	Sure, sure.
	That'll have to be for a different show.
	I know we got to wrap up here in a minute.
	Are you familiar with that?
	It's a rabbinical view that Saint Peter is actually, it's an old Jewish tradition that Peter joined the early Christians at the decision of the rabbis.
	And I've got several clips of rabbis saying that Peter is their double agent.
	I have not heard of this.
	I had not heard this.
	You want to hear one of the clips?
	Sure, sure.
	Let's do.
	Also, that they sent Paul out to the people who are lying away from.
	But why, wait, wait, wait.
	Simon Peter.
	Every Jew in the world fast for Simon Peter.
	I never heard of that.
	Yes.
	They don't know who it is, though.
	No, they know who it is.
	But why, wait, wait, wait.
	Why do they fast?
	Ah, ah.
	Because during the time of tribulation of the Jews, during the first century, Peter, Peter, he's actually protected the Jews because, quote-unquote, he was the apostle to the Jews.
	So they say he actually saved the Jewish people.
	Wait, wait, wait, wait.
	How do they know?
	Please forgive me.
	I'm trying to catch on with you, and it's so much more suspicious.
	How do they know that they're not going to them?
	Peter, according to Judaism, is what?
	He's a secret agent of Judaism that was put by the Jews themselves to protect the Jewish people from those big, mean Christians.
	It's very, very interesting.
	And then this Kabbalah rabbi says, Peter was a rabbi and he said, We're going to Rome.
	We're setting up church in Rome.
	This is some interesting.
	I'm sure you're familiar with Maimonides, his view on Christianity.
	No, actually, I mean, I'm familiar with Maimonides, but I don't know his works thoroughly because it's medieval.
	Well, he agrees that Christianity is basically a step in the right direction for the pagan world.
	It got the pagans to abandon their gods.
	I can understand his perspective on that.
	Yeah.
	And then he said, it got the world believing in that the Torah is the word of God, believing the commandments, looking towards the Jews for salvation, believing in a Jewish Messiah.
	He says all of these things are steps to prepare the world for the messianic age.
	So it seems to me like it fulfilled a lot of their prophecies for certainly spin it that way.
	Also, are you familiar with Eli Ravage?
	He was a Jewish writer.
	1928, he did a real case against the Jews.
	Have you ever read that one?
	No.
	Oh, man.
	From your standpoint of being an admirer of Roman science, you should check this out.
	I could play.
	You know what?
	I'll just send you a clip of this and you can watch it if you want.
	Before we wrap up here, I just want, could you give me like one or two minutes?
	What are the main chapters and reasons in why you're not a Christian?
	Oh, just bullet point, if you can remember what they are because they're so good.
	Yeah, I've listened to that over and over and over again.
	Very.
	I'm not a Christian.
	And it's a short book.
	It's pretty small, right?
	This is one thing I want to do: I want to come up with a Slightly larger version of that with some added material.
	But, well, I mean, really, so it's four chapters, right?
	So, and they're just, and I'll just read the titles, but I'll explain.
	But God is silent, God is inert, wrong evidence, wrong universe.
	And then the chapters just explain.
	And so I go through the argument from divine hiddenness, but I do it from a perspective of I heard all the rebuttals, all the responses that Christians give.
	So I construct the argument in a way that's immune to all those rebuttals.
	So you can't answer it.
	There's no logical answer for why God doesn't just talk to me right now.
	There's so much good that we could do if God could just have a conversation with me and we could sort this out, right?
	Like I could be an evangelist for his mission or whatever.
	And there's no reason for him to not do that to everybody.
	There's no reason for him to not be a helpline in general.
	Like people talk about, like, I pray to God, but then all you do is rely on your intuition.
	God doesn't actually phone you back and give you divine advice, right?
	But why not?
	Like, wouldn't you?
	Like, if you were God, you have unlimited resources, unlimited time.
	You can't be annoyed because you have infinite patience.
	You can't run out of time because you have infinite time.
	Like, you have no excuse to not be there for everybody and help them out in every way that they need to help them live the lives that they need to leave.
	But no, God is completely silent.
	And there's many specific examples you can give of where this absolutely is indefensible.
	It makes no sense.
	And so that's the one.
	And then inert, where God doesn't do anything.
	There's lots of things God could do.
	He could have written laws of the universe in so that people who sin or engage in bad things get sicker or weaker, and people who are more righteous and more moral and more compassionate get stronger and healthier.
	Like you could have written that into the laws of the universe, for example.
	That's just one example.
	But we have nothing like that.
	The good and the bad get punished and rewarded by nature randomly.
	Like there's no, right?
	There's no divine guidance behind the organization of the universe.
	God doesn't do anything.
	He doesn't stop bullets.
	He doesn't intervene at all.
	And you can make up excuses for this, but that's the problem.
	The excuses don't work.
	They make God look worse than before you started making the excuses for him.
	And then going to the wrong evidence, that's what we're getting at here, where if you want to prove these things, you're presenting the wrong evidence.
	The kind of evidence you would need to believe Christianity, it doesn't exist, but it could.
	So why doesn't it?
	And then the wrong universe, which is basically going through the cosmological and fine-tuning arguments as to why the universe we see is exactly the one we would expect if there's no God.
	It is not the one we would expect to see if there was.
	And it goes into why that is.
	So that's the stuff that I cover in that book.
	It's only like 90 pages.
	So it's a pretty short, I think pretty effective refutation of Christianity.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, if this is what I often bring up in debates.
	Why wouldn't Jesus dies and resurrects and then he's only seen by a couple people?
	Why wouldn't he do a victory lap all over the ancient world?
	Why wouldn't there be huge sculptures?
	Why wouldn't God carve the real commandments very clearly and concisely for everybody to read?
	Anything like this?
	But no, we've got gospels written by biased people 40 years later.
	Right.
	And you can even point out that humans have been engaged in religion for 40,000 years before even Judaism.
	Right.
	So what's God doing all that time?
	I mean, honestly.
	Just waiting for his chosen people to come along.
	Yeah, it doesn't make any sense.
	And why have I chosen people?
	Aren't we all his chosen people?
	That makes no sense either.
	So, yeah, when you look at the history of religion, it looks like all man-made.
	And the ignorance of religions, including Judaism, and even early Christianity, ignorance both scientifically as well as morally.
	They still were not condemning slavery.
	They still were not promoting gender equality.
	They still were not promoting even democracy.
	All the good stuff was invented by pagans, you know.
	So this tells you that these are just man-made religions, just repeating human fallibility and ignorance and just putting a stamp of God on it.
	And Christianity is no different than any other religion in history in this regard.
	I just got a comment.
	Adam, why not have Ray Comfort on to balance this out?
	Oh, I would love that.
	I actually debated Ray Comfort on the moral argument, if you're interested in that.
	You can find my summary and response in my blog.
	For those who want to find all things, Richard Carrier, by the way, it's richardcarrier.info.info.
	Yeah, I got your links below.
	I highly suggest everybody get your audibles, get your books, study this information.
	Or if you don't want to do that, just watch all the YouTube videos.
	You're a star on YouTube.
	You've got many videos with millions.
	I've got a new channel, but there are tons of scattered videos that you can find all over the place.
	I've done lots of interviews, lots of lectures.
	So there's lots of good stuff on the internet, on YouTube.
	We want to go hunting for that.
	And I also teach courses every month.
	So people who are interested in different aspects of philosophy, ancient history, and so on, you can see on my website there's a take classes.
	You can go in there and see which courses I offer and how they work.
	Awesome.
	I enjoyed speaking with you, Dr. Richard Carrier.
	Thank you so much for coming on.
	Thanks for having me.
	All right.
	I'll let you go, I guess, and then I'll close out the show.
	I got a couple super chats to read, and I'll send you the link when it's up and done.
	I appreciate it, and I'll be in touch.
	Thank you.
	Awesome.
	I appreciate it.
	Okay.
	Take care.
	Good.
	All right.
	There he goes, guys.
	That was fun.
	I only had him for an hour and a half.
	Let's see.
	Where are we?
	What are we going to?
	Oh, I'm looking for my super chats.
	Youper Groiper says, fascinating show, as always.
	Yes, it was.
	I wish I could have dug a little bit deeper into some things, but it's the first talk.
	I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to talk to you.
	I've been anticipating this interview for probably like two years.
	Kingschlog says, thanks, thank you.
	We also have a heart and a fire.
	By the word religion, our world has seen the lunacy of fanatics from every denomination be called the will of God.
	Yeah, everybody thinks God is on their side and they're the ones that got it right.
	And anybody that disagrees, they're the devil.
	Oh, yeah.
	Jay Dyer would get destroyed by Richard Carrier.
	He's basically undefeated and he's debated a lot of people.
	He's very sharp and good at debating.
	All right.
	Let's wrap it up before we get too long.
	His links are below to find all of his books.
	Again, I highly suggest Historicity of Jesus.
	Let me know what you guys think in the comments.
	This is be posted in HD.
	You can comment on Odyssey.
	It'll also be up on BitChute.
	And I will see you guys.
	I got Dr. Brown coming on in about two weeks.
	We'll be discussing some of the same things from a different perspective.
	He's coming from the Messianic Jewish believing perspective.
	And I will be back very soon with some news show.
	I've been waiting to cover some of this latest news, so we'll have a good, powerful news show and probably have some guests.
	And I appreciate all the support.
	Look forward to reading your comments.
	And I will see you guys all again very soon.

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