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May 3, 2022 - Know More News - Adam Green
01:03:06
Destroying the Jesus Myth | Know More News LIVE w/ Adam Green & Dr. Robert Price
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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to No More News Live.
Thank you for joining me today, Monday, May 2nd, 2022.
Got a powerful show for you guys today.
A highly distinguished guest returning.
He is the legendary biblical scholar, Jesus mythicist, and author.
He is returning.
He was on about seven months ago.
I just re-watched the show.
It was an excellent show.
We'll hope to try to top it today.
I got some good questions for him.
He is Dr. Robert Price.
Thanks for being here, Dr. Bob.
Oh, it's an honor.
I appreciate it being invited.
Yes, yes.
I've always enjoyed watching your videos and your books.
You know, I just ordered actually Judaizing Jesus, the ecumenical golem.
Can you give me a little summary of that before I start reading it tonight?
Well, my basic thesis in that is that the current orthodoxy of mainstream scholarship square one in Jesus studies must be to see Jesus in the context of Second Temple Judaism, kind of proto-rabbinic Judaism.
And that the and so that my theory is that that's more of a theological creation, hence the golem that the people who was magicians conjured up the golem sculpture, just like God did with Adam in the Garden of Eden.
Well, the golem here is a safe rabbinical Jesus.
And why?
Well, to facilitate interfaith dialogue.
Now, personally, I'm all in favor of interfaith dialogue and increased understanding between any and all religions.
So that's not the problem.
It's just that I think they're made to order.
And that is kind of a product of ecumenizing theology rather than a straight study.
And if you said, okay, we want to change Christology, the Christian doctrine of Jesus to make it more possible to integrate with Judaism or coexist or whatever,
that I think is sort of a futile effort, but it's at least it doesn't invite my criticism, which is that they're cheating and just doing what people have done for hundreds of years, just remake Jesus in their own image.
But then I go into a kind of a gallery, alternative, plausible possibilities as to where the Jigger came from.
And my point there is all of them are plausible, but that kind of implies none of you can't know.
Not left.
Okay, it's a Jewish Jesus or nothing.
So that's the way to go.
I say, hey, no, no, there's a homework.
You can't just rush to judgment on this or any of the other ones.
The eco-feminist Jesus, the vegetarian Jesus, Jesus, the community organizer, Jesus, the Galilean magician.
Like there is some evidence that you can say suggest these.
White supremacist Jesus?
Yeah.
That's one I see.
I see these people online.
There's these Christian identity people, and they think that white people are the true Israelites.
And they think Jesus is their white Adamic leader and that they actually have the birthright and have all the same identical views as the rabbis, all the supremacist Judeo views.
It's really something.
Yeah, it's like there again, it's an excuse.
It's like erecting an eye that you say, you see, we find here.
Oh, no, you don't.
These things are all fabricated and often for kind of political reasons.
So, what do you think is the political?
What's the political reason to Judaize Jesus?
Oh, well, in this case, I mean politics, not in the voting sense, but how are our religious communities going to get along?
What adjustments make it easier?
And so, well, if we kind of regard Jesus as really belonging to Jews more than Christians, that's a good negotiating point.
He's a bargaining.
So, even though it's not like foreign policy type things or taxation or these issues that we're going to be voting on, it's a kind of politics of negotiation between faith communities.
Right.
And that's the faith fabricating.
So, Judaizing Jesus, another way to look at that is you're Judaizing Christianity.
So, do you see that happening as well?
You think that was maybe part of the plan for Christianity?
I don't know that we could, I mean, if it's possible to demonstrate it, I'd want to know.
But from what I know, it seems to me to be a kind of repudiation of the treatment Christians have accorded Jews in the past, and they're kind of overreacting that they can't.
But let's have mutual respect.
Let's cooperate in good works.
As Paul Tillick said, if you're going to have an inter-religious dialogue, it implies both sides believe in their religion.
Because if you don't and you start tailoring it, you're no longer representing the religious community you're representing.
You're just representing a little elite group of ecumenists.
Most members of your religion won't know what you're doing, or if they do, they'll repudiate that.
Not out of ill will necessarily, but saying, I don't recognize this as my Christian faith.
Or similarly, Jews have the same problem.
Wait a second.
Are you trying to get us to accord some kind of quasi-met to Jesus?
I'm willing to admit he was some kind of ethical prophet, but don't try to push me beyond that.
Christology.
So I think there's a funny thing going on here that doesn't really work ultimately.
Plus, it's dishonest.
Do you talk about the Hebrew roots movements in the book?
Because that's kind of like taking Christianity back to its Judeo-roots and recognizing the Jewishness of Jesus is definitely a part of that.
Yeah, and it's to some degree, it's viable.
In fact, I mentioned that I think that the view of Jesus as an anti-Roman revolutionary that Robert Eisler long ago and more recently SGF Brandon and others have argued, that it seems to me, if there was a historical Jesus, anything like the Gospels have, that that's probably it.
But I admit there's equivocal evidence that points in various directions.
And how are you going to decide which resultant Jesus, which extrapolated Jesus, is the true historical one, if there was one?
Because, of course, I am big into the Christ myth theory.
I think it most probable that there was no historical Jesus.
But, you know, I'm open to rethinking it.
And if there was a historical Jesus, I kind of think Brandon's got him, that he was a failed revolutionary would-be king.
Well, when I get the book and finish reading it, I'll take down notes and then bring you back on to talk further about the book because I've got a lot more to say on it.
But you touched on something there about what would the kernel of truth of Jesus look like.
And preparing for this, I re-watched your debate you had a few years ago with Dr. Bart Ehrman.
It's got almost a million, I think it hit a million views on his channel.
And he made an argument in there that you didn't have the opportunity to respond to.
And I thought it was just the most outrageous statement he could have made.
Shocked that he was able to even say this and get away with it.
He said that his argument was: why would ancient Jews, if they made up a Messiah, why wouldn't they make up a victorious military Messiah that destroyed the Romans?
Why would they make up a Christ that was crucified?
I come at this from the standpoint that what's really being asked here is: what are the origins of Christianity?
How does it relate to ancient Judaism and how did the two become, or how did the one become two, I guess?
And given the fact that you have all of these clues within acknowledged Jewish documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocrypha, the Wisdom of Solomon, Philo's writings, and Jewish angelology that was all going on at this time.
What is there that is implausible about that as an origin for the Christian religion, for the Christian belief?
What was the origin?
That it was basically a natural metamorphosis from elements of Jewish thought that were already there.
You have the Jews telling the story that there was a Jesus, but he lived 150 years before the turn of the millennium.
You have many stories.
You have all of the references to Philo's Logos, to the wisdom of Solomon, that contain very similar concepts to the Son of Man, the teacher of light, all of these things.
Why do you not consider that to be as plausible an explanation for the origin of Christianity?
Thank you.
Yeah, I don't, because the earliest attestation of what Christianity was was that it was the worship of a crucified Messiah.
And you don't get that in Jewish circles.
So it couldn't be just a kind of a natural evolution of something that existed.
What I'm saying is they wouldn't have said they crucified Christ.
The idea of a Christ was a Jewish, there was a Jewish figure, or there are numerous different Jewish figures they considered to be the Christ.
The Christ was a title for the anointed one from God who is going to overthrow the enemy and set up a kingdom on earth.
If they wanted to talk about getting rid of Jesus, they would have simply said they killed Jesus, they crucified Jesus.
But they said they crucified Christ.
And I'm saying they wouldn't have made that up because the Christ was not supposed to be crucified.
Does that make sense?
Do you understand what I'm trying to say?
I still don't buy it, Cook.
I'm not asking you to buy it, but if you do want to buy it, it's for sale in the lobby.
What do you think of that?
I think that shows a surprising ignorance.
Now, recently, the idea, I forget the guy's name, but there's a book pretty new on Messiah Ben-Joseph, the idea of which was that he is a primary Messiah from the northern tribes who does fight against the wicked,
the heathen, whoever, but he dies in glorious battle, kind of like the Klingons, and that his death atones for the sins of Israel have so far God from liberating them.
So now that that's taken care of, Messiah Ben-David, the Judean Messiah, will come at some point to kick Roman butt.
Well, now it's clearer that this is a very, this was attested in the third century AD or CE, whatever.
But it turns out now that no, this appears to be a much older view.
Well, I didn't know that at the time, but neither did he.
But I was trying to say that the sacred king mythology of ancient Israel and Judah, which was just like that in Babylon and Canaan city-states and so forth, involved the king being the vicar of Yahweh on earth, and that he went through a ritual death and resurrection, just like Marduk and Baal and others.
The myth describes that.
And then every year to renew the mandate of heaven, the king would act this out ritually.
And so that the Messiah, the anointed king of Israel and Judah, did the same thing.
Now, what is the Messiah supposed to be?
He's supposed to be the sacred king again, along with Israelite sovereignty.
And so the notion of a dying and rising Messiah and a divine Messiah, this had existed, but during the so-called Deuteronomic reform, where, for instance, Yahweh and El Elian, God Most High, they have been conflated into a single deity, and the sons of God have been reclassified as angels, and many other things were changed.
Well, one of the things they seem to have changed was the idea of this coming king.
Now it's like since they're committed to monotheism, this stuff about a divine king, maybe not.
And so I sort of demythologized him and said, well, one day a new descendant of David will come and will restore our sovereign, but die to and rise when everybody does at the end of the world.
And I don't think that was, I believe that was an innovation.
And into critical scholarship to see that, yes, they did have messianic ideas of a divine dying and rising God as the sacred king.
But I gather Bart just has ignored that or never heard of it.
Just as to him, the idea that Paul might not have written Galatians literally laughed it off and felt like Sat, I don't know if I said this or not now, so long ago.
Karl Bart's major teacher, Rudolf Steck, he already believed this.
And there were a number of scholars that have, but I don't think Bart is familiar with it.
Or the idea that the crucifixion may be fiction borrowed from contemporary Greco-Roman novels where this happens.
Yeah, you can buy a book of the translations of them and read it for yourself.
But, you know, apparently as a textual critic, he has not ventured that far from that very intricate, exacting methodology and subject matter.
And he at that.
But I think he's sort of talking outside of his expertise here.
And what I'm saying is so bizarre to him because he's never heard of it that he just takes it.
And that's unfortunate.
But he made many claims I tried to refute that he just did not reply to.
Well, his statement that the ancient Jews would never make a mythical crucified Messiah is just absolutely preposterous.
Number one.
Number one, that you can't fake destroying the Romans, but you can fake a spiritual victory that happened in heaven or in the firmament.
And the zealot movements weren't working.
So they went for the nonviolent approach so it wouldn't get snuffed out.
And they went for instead of military combat, it was religious combat.
It was spiritual combat, theological warfare.
And, you know, actually, there's a guy, a famous Jewish historian, Greats.
He says that Christianity was a new form of warfare to undermine Rome.
He even says that.
And where else was I going to go?
Oh, the other point.
Also, it's not only the crucifixion that there is stuff from the Old Testament prophecies about.
It's everything in Jesus', everything in the Gospels is basically taken from either the Old Testament or from, you know, Greco-Roman myths, you know, pagan myths, which I believe they adopted because they were targeting the people that already had those beliefs.
And that's why it was all written in Greek.
You know, the ancient Jews were writing in Aramaic and Hebrew, right?
That's what the Talmud and their books were.
So if you were targeting them, it would have been, I think, in their language.
Well, there's some reason to think, though most reject this, that the Gospels were originally written in Aramaic because that had been the lingua franca, or that's the word I'm probably mispronouncing it, because of the Persian Empire using it.
So it wasn't that long ago that just as Koine Greek after Alexander the Great became the universal second language that any way you cut it, it seems like the Jesus Christ who dies and rises and all this other stuff, miraculous birth and so forth.
This seems to be, as Harnack once put it, a Hellenization of the gospel.
Because the way I look at it, I think you can sum it up by what relevance would an original Jewish Christian messianism about Jesus have had for Gentiles?
Can you imagine Paul or Apollos or any of these guys going into Athens or Corinth and saying, hey, I've got great news.
The king of Liechtenstein has taken the throne.
Who cares?
I mean, why would it matter?
Why would it be relevant to say, oh, the true son of David has come?
Yeah, and where was this again?
It's like they just can't culture the historic probability.
So what are they going to spread something that does make sense to Gentiles much like the Hellenistic mystery religions going on at the time with dying and rising gods?
You might say, well, that's such a divorce from the original.
Why even call it the same thing?
But maybe they didn't.
I mean, in Acts, it says they were first called Christianoi in Damascus, in Syria.
Maybe where the James is type of Jesus group, they're just called the way, like the Essenes were, the poor, another term they used.
So maybe Christianity really is a different thing.
Well, also, I mean, the idea that the ancient Gentiles would be like, oh, Paul, you want us to follow your crucified Messiah that was meant to rule over us by our enemies?
Like, why would that be compelling to worship the Messiah that was meant to conquer you, basically?
And that's what Paul says about the Messiah.
He says, as Isaiah said, the root of Jesse will reign over the Gentiles and he will judge the nations.
And that's what he did.
So really, Jesus did conquer the Gentiles, but just theologically.
And I believe Carrier says in his book that it's the Song of Solomon has verses about he will conquer the world with his words and his teachings and not with an army, something along those lines.
Does that ring a bell?
I doubt if that's the song of Solomon.
Song of Psalms.
Song of Psalms.
Maybe it is.
Yeah, I mean, that was, You do have stuff like that.
He rules the nations with the rod of his mouth, his word, his decree.
And that in the last days, when things are sorted out, the nations will stream up to Mount Zion to be catechized in the Torah because by then it will be clear who was right and who was wrong.
To me, that is not necessarily more than saying we are right.
Our God is one, not these bed hopping degenerates like Zeus and Apollo, these rapists and so forth.
And they will, a lot of Gentiles already felt that way.
A lot of Gentiles were so-called God-fearers and attended synagogue without actually converting.
So they were saying our religion is superior.
Theirs is degenerate.
One day that'll become clear, and everybody will jump on our bandwagon.
I don't know if that is necessarily nefarious since a lot of Gentiles.
And as they had, it's kind of like the adjustment that Jehovah's Witnesses and the Millerites, the Adventists made.
They had predicted Jesus going to come and rule this earth on another date.
And then it didn't happen.
So they couldn't bring themselves to say, I guess we were wrong.
Instead, they said, well, he did do what we said, but in heaven, not on earth.
So he is thrown is in heaven.
Does it look like he is?
Well, but they had to save face and cognitive dissonance reduction.
They had to say, it's all spirit.
Is not of that to me mitigates a bit the possibility that they really spiring enslave all the Gentiles and kill them.
We do know some of the apocalypse writers did believe that literally, but I don't know what percentage of ancient Jews felt that way.
Others said, no, they're just going to convert.
So there seems to be a debate with the historical Jesus advocates.
They believe that there was a real person who may have did some things, maybe was crucified, maybe was a rebel against the Romans, but then he died and he didn't conquer and fulfill the kingly duties of the Moshiach ben David.
And then he says that his followers, like this is what Ehrman says, the followers went and looked back at the Old Testament and tried to find proofs to support the idea of a crucified Messiah.
It's so much more likely and reasonable that it was the other way around, that they collected all of these ideas from the Old Testament and then created a new story to have a fake fulfillment of all these things.
Wouldn't you agree?
Oh, yeah, I think that you surprising, even to me, was the result of a lot of reading I did from different authors who said, you know, I think this or that gospel passage looks a lot like a rewrite of this old Elijah or Elisha or Moses story.
Well, I read a bunch of these books and I found some of the arguments seem kind of harebrained to me, but there were enough of them so that you could find good arguments for saying every single gospel episode looks very much like a rewrite of the Old Testament.
And so what have they got left?
I think that was really the thing that pushed me over the line into thinking mythicism made the most sense of all the theories.
So yeah, I think they did come up with a new story by rewriting stories.
A new myth from the old myth.
And, you know, like to see, to answer Aaron's question, like all you got to do is look at Zachariah, like 3, 6, 9, and 12.
Look at Isaiah 53 and 52.
Look at Daniel 9.
The idea of a suffering Messiah that dies to atone for your sins is all there.
And he's acting like ancient Jews weren't already connecting these verses to figure out what redemption would look Like and what their Messiah would do.
I mean, I can't believe somebody of his stature could make this argument.
It blows my mind.
Well, I think, you know, I'm not a mind reader, but knowing his background, he had first gone to Moody Bible Institute, which is nearly as conservative as you can get.
Bob Jones University might be worse.
His education is in apologetics, basically, is what you're saying.
Yeah, even at Princeton, he studied under Bruce Metzger, who was a great textualist.
That's what Bart studied with him.
But he was also a fundamentalist, Metzger, and wrote apologetics, the standard stuff.
Oh, the mystery religions were, they got the ideas of a dying and rising God from Christianity, which is just patently.
Or Satan planted those myths.
So it would look like...
Otherwise, you'd have to be insane to make an argument like that.
You would be creating the idea that the rival gospels were older.
I just can't, well, I guess I can see there's just an ability to think outside.
And so he maintains these arguments that are essentially those of evangelical apologetics.
And the big thing that people hold against him, conservatives, is what he says about when he perhaps exaggerates the dangers of criticism and says there's a huge amount of errors in the New Testament manuscripts.
Well, yeah, but most of them are piddling little changes in spelling of words and stuff like that.
He does have a point.
I mean, if you're going to admit that the text as we have it has been altered, it's theoretically possible it was drastically altered in the period from which no manuscript evidence survives.
But he's a strange mixture of radical and very conservative views on a lot of things.
And I can't help thinking that he just can't kick the habit, though gradually he may be.
Like he used to say, but the empty tomb stories, basically, yeah, that's true.
The women went to the tomb and found it empty.
Well, that's what the old Protestant rationalists of the 18th century said.
They didn't believe that God altered the laws of nature, which he created.
So there couldn't have been any supernatural miracles.
But as Protestants, they wanted to say, whatever the Bible says happened must have happened.
So can we figure out a scientific explanation for these things the ancients couldn't have understood properly and said it was magic?
And this is where you got the swoon theory, right?
That, well, Jesus was crucified and he was seen alive again a few days later.
But miracles, what happened there?
Oh, I guess he didn't die.
He was just doped up and then snapped out of it later.
It's like Jesus didn't walk on the water.
He knew where the stepping stones were.
Well, Bart was still arguing the way apologists did, as if they were arguing against the rationalists.
That's why they always say, given the rest of the passion narrative, you tell me what would explain everything other than Jesus rising from the dead.
Hey, who said you have to take the passion narrative literally?
It's like in this Jesus and Mo cartoon where Jesus and Muhammad are talking.
Jesus says, well, the empty tomb.
I mean, you can't really explain that away.
Muhammad said, Look, you can't prove one part of a story from another part of the same story.
It's like saying there must be an emerald city of Oz because otherwise, where does the yellow brick road lead?
Well, he didn't see the error in that, but eventually he did.
Bart started to say, you know, I'm thinking even the empty tomb thing is legendary.
I wonder what's going to step.
I go on some more steps.
What do you think is the real reason that Ehrman doesn't want to debate Carrier?
Oh, well, there, I can see that.
I do think Carrier has him on a number of points.
But Richard Carrier is so nasty in nerve, but Bart has told me he just won't share the stage with this guy because of his nasty.
And I can't believe it.
I don't think I want to either.
Issues be damned.
I don't want to be subjected to that kind of abuse or be drawn into a cat fight with him.
But you do agree, though, that Carrier would win the debate on the arguments.
I think so.
I believe that the arguments he has pointed out about Bart's erroneous statements, I don't see how he can refute that.
So I do think Carrier probably win the debate.
You mentioned Moshiach ben Joseph earlier.
He is the suffering Messiah.
Ehrman makes the argument also that Christ means Moshiach, which means anointed, and that's the king that's anointed.
So Jesus wasn't a king, so he couldn't have been.
Why would they make up a myth where he's a crucified Messiah?
He's ignoring.
I mean, I'm not even a biblical expert, and I know this, that the high priest is also anointed as a Moshiach.
And Jesus is described as the almost the Melchizedek high priest, who Melchizedek, who also was argued, was in heaven and has been associated with Megatron also in the rabbinical documents.
Yeah, that's right.
Hebrews is really going out of its way, that epistle to say Jesus' high priest doing his.
Oh, but he wasn't a Levite, you say?
Hey, no problem.
Melchizedek was a bigger and better priest even before there was a Levi or an Aaron.
So, yeah, that is one of the big ways.
I mean, there was even like there's a Nag Hammadi Gnostic tract called Melchizedek.
MQ 13, right?
And it winds up saying that Jesus was the return of Melchizedek.
Right.
And Melchizedek is the high priest, and the high priest is the one that does the Yom Kippur atonement sacrifice.
And that's what Jesus was: the atonement scapegoat sacrifice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's early Christianity appears now to have been so diverse.
It's really a jungle of different views, which implies it started earlier.
Yeah.
And one of those earlier ones was possibly Philo, who Philo was analyzing, I think it's Zachariah 6, and he talks about Joshua, the high priest, who is called the branch.
And apparently, from what I've learned, mistake me if I'm wrong, the word for branch there also means east, like towards the east, which was where the sun rises.
So it also means the one called rising.
So that's Joshua, the high priest, who is rising as in rising from the dead.
And that's Carrier at least argues that's where an idea of resurrection comes from.
Also, because we're talking about resurrection and crucifixion of the Messiah, Zachariah 3:3 through 5, it says Joshua, which is Yeshua, was dressed in filthy clothes.
And then take off your filthy clothes.
I will take away your sin and will put fine garments on you.
Do you agree that that verse is alluding to that that's a metaphor, taking off the clothes and putting on fine garments as a metaphor for resurrection?
Well, white robes are sometimes used in rabbinic writings as a metaphor for the road.
So it could well be.
I tend to think in the context, it just means his record has been expunged.
Yeah, all right, there are things that Satan can accuse him of, but God is purifying it.
Like Isaiah says he's the message of God, and he says, look, don't worry, I'll take care of that.
And one of the seraphim in a vision puts this hot call, purify his mouth.
In other words, now you are fit to speak the divine word.
I think it probably in context means that Richard is certainly right.
That was eventually taken as an image for the resurrection body.
And it could be, it could very well have given rise to a resurrected Jesus.
That seems a little up in the air to me, but it's certainly reasonable.
Also, another crucifixion in Hebrew mythology is Haman in the Esther story.
And Haman, who represents Amalek, is hung on a pole, and they use the same Greek words as for Jesus is crucifixion.
And it's interesting also that the rabbis say a curse for Jesus' name.
It's an acronym for may his name be blotted out.
And that's the same curse that they use for Haman and for Jesus, linking Jesus and Haman in separate ways.
And what else are we going to say?
Oh, also, I wanted to ask you about Joseph.
You said Moshiach ben Joseph.
Following the Joseph of the Genesis story, he is rejected by his brother.
He's the favorite son, rejected by his brothers, thrown into a pit, brought down low, and then sold to the Ishmaelites, sold to the enemy into Egypt.
And then he rises to rule behind the throne.
Is this not the template for what Jesus is doing, ruling all of the Gentile nations?
Well, before our split, Derek and I collaborated on an article about that that was in my Journal of Higher Criticism, where there is this clear line of development between Osiris and Joseph, and then Jesus with some surprising links and background material.
Like, for instance, in the Hellenistic Jewish novel, Joseph and Azanath, Azenath, the future wife of Joseph, the daughter of the high priest of Osiris, she sees him transfigured and said he appeared as the son of God.
And I just can't help thinking this is part of the puzzle from getting from Joseph to Jesus.
And so I think there's no question that both Joseph, Hebrew version of Osiris, and Jesus is a Christian version of both.
Would you agree Jesus is also amalgamations of like a new Moses?
He's also similar to Isaac with the self-willing sacrifice.
Also, he's also like Joseph.
He's like Jonah in the whale for three days.
There's where you get your three days in coming back.
What are some other ones that I'm thinking of here?
Well, the women seeking the body to anoint it.
This is a pattern that shows up in the connection.
Attas, Tammuz, Osiris.
In Osiris' case, it's Isis and Neph that are looking for the body and wind up anointing It and it rises from the dead.
I personally think the Bethany anointing is of place to hide this, and that originally they came to the tomb and found the body of Jesus and anointed it, and that's why he rose.
But there's that Sibile after Attis kills himself in grief after having betrayed her.
She seeks the body and raises him from the dead.
When Tammuz dies and goes to the netherworld, his sister wife, Ishtar, goes down there to bring him back, and so on and so on.
There are other ones as well.
Pretty clear to me.
Joshua.
Joshua is another one that came to mind.
Jesus as the new Joshua.
And I've heard there's actually a theory that there were competing pre-Christian sects that were all Joshua cults.
Yeah, that could well be because Joshua is credited with Moses-like feats.
He dries up the Jordan so they can pass over into the promised land.
He makes a covenant of laws with the people.
His name, the son of Nun, mean the son of the fish, which actually might make him like John the Baptist.
And the Greek version of John, Ioannis, is the same as the Greek name for Dagon, who appeared as a fish man out of sea to teach wisdom to humans.
So there's that too.
But yeah, there are, I think I, yeah, in my book, the Christ myth theory and its problems into the evidence for a pre-Christian Joshua cult, which is an old theory.
It's naturally conservative.
It seems to me, yeah, there is evidence for it.
And that may simply be an updating of that myth to because the chronology changes as people update their myths.
They keep the same interval between the founding events and the present, a few generations.
So they'll, later documents have a later origin date too.
And Joshua.
No, all these things are relevant.
Joshua was, it was whispered in his ear to wage war against Amalek.
was the lesson that he was commanded to do.
And that's...
So they're supposed to say that they secretly wage war on Amalek.
Amalek is the enemy of the Israelites.
So is that what Jesus is doing as the new Joshua, waging war against Amalek and his uncle Esau?
Well, if he was a revolutionary against Rome, that would kind of fit pretty well.
Jesus is also the Passover lamb amalgamation.
He's the Yom Kippur goats as well.
So it's literally just everything.
It's a literary genius to actually put together this story, connecting all of these different prophecies.
And, you know, it evolved over time as well.
But just to bring it back to that Zachariah 3, 3 through 5, how it talks about the clothing being taken off and fine garments putting on.
So I think Fitzgerald and Carrier say that that's a metaphor for resurrection.
And he connects it to the naked boy that's there when the Romans are arresting Jesus that flees, right?
And then that guy shows up again.
What?
Yeah, he shows up at the tomb again.
Shows up at the empty tomb, yeah, representing the resurrection and the death, too.
So I see that as kind Of connecting Zachariah a little bit.
And the reason I'm talking about this is because this is where you get the idea of a crucified and resurrected, as well as in Isaiah and other places.
Yeah, to me, this idea of a literary composite creating Jesus is a more natural way of understanding.
than the Christian view that it was all typology that is fulfilled in Jesus.
Doesn't that only make sense in retrospect that it's not something you could use as evidence for Jesus?
It's just a way of getting of making virtue of necessity.
If you have to admit all these parallels, you kind of say, well, they were types and Jesus was the anti-anti-type.
Well, you mean this was a kind of a historical charade that nobody could have understood.
What would have been the point of that?
Like, did God do that just to give a favor to apologists in the future?
I mean, what would be the function of typology?
It's just a way of rounding all that stuff up and saying, well, yeah, yeah, it's sort of a precedent for Jesus, but it was an act of prophecy, which therefore no one could have understood.
Yeah.
Paul even says that he gets everything from the scriptures, the mysteries revealed from the scriptures in his revelations.
Let me ask you, do you think Paul was a liar and a deceiver?
I think that's actually Haim Maccabee says that, and I highly appreciate his work, but he was also sort of in the old-time rationalist camp.
He gave much to much of credence to the stories in Acts and to the genuine Paul as the author of the epistles.
He says that when Paul claims to be a Pharisee in Acts and I don't think it was true, but he's not lying.
This is part of a later propaganda picture of Paul trying to get different factions together.
And I think originally the Paul character is a kind of embellishment of the guy we know as Simon Magus, Simon the sorcerer, who Josephus mentions by name and says he was a magician who hung around with Felix Festus, Bernice, Drusilla, and those people with whom Paul is also associated by name in the book of Acts.
And I think that he's probably got, without knowing it, he's actually referring to the historical Paul, Simon Magus.
I got a big chapter on that in my book, The Amazing Colossal Apostle.
I saw you discuss that a little bit in your talk with Christopher John Bjorkness the other day on his channel.
But just for the sake of a hypothetical argument here, like saying that Paul actually did write the authentic gospels, he really was the apostle to the Gentiles.
Would you call him a liar?
Because he targeted the Gentiles to say that you believe in these prophecies, otherwise you're going to burn in hell forever, basically.
That's kind of the way I see it happening.
Well, he never really makes that connection.
In fact, Paul, in the Pauline literature, Paul never says anything about hell.
That's in the Gospels, but it never comes up in any epistle with Paul's.
The closest he ever comes is saying to the Thessalonians, you're being persecuted now, but don't worry.
Soon Jesus will re and these people will perish in the Flaming fires of judgment, but perish like they're going to get it when the scorched earth triumph of Jesus occurs.
There's nothing about any post-mortem torment.
You have to go to Matthew and the book of Revelation, really, for that.
So, Paul started with the carrot and not the stick, then.
Yeah, yeah, for him, as far as it says, like in 1 Corinthians 15, he's just thinking of the wicked or the unbelievers or whatever as staying dead.
There is no resurrection for them.
Whereas in the book of Acts, he is represented as saying he believes in a resurrection of the righteous and the wicked, but that's never in any Pauline letter.
Interesting.
Yeah, and your theory about Simon Magus and Paul and maybe somebody else even being Paul, like how do we know?
Ehrman laughed this off, the idea that Paul didn't actually write these things, but how do we really know that he did?
I don't think there is any way to that, they're just taking it at face value and harmonizing the internal evidence, at least all by the guy.
I was stalled for the whole length of a telephone interview some years ago with me on the one side, Gary Habermas, Mike Lycomb on the other end.
And because I said, Look, in 1 Corinthians, Paul, quote unquote, says, I delivered first of all what I received, namely that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scripture, you know, was buried, rose from the dead in accordance with the scripture, so-and-so, so-and-so.
And then he appeared to this guy and that guy and the other guy.
So, and apologists like to say, oh, well, received this from new before.
Well, it must have been one of the encounters that Acts describes when he went to Jerusalem with Barnabas.
It doesn't say that.
And if you flip Galatians, Paul is explicitly repudiating anything like that.
He said, My gospel is not of man.
It did not come from man.
It was revealed to me by Christ directly.
Well, how can both of these statements be from the same guy unless he is lying or unless multiple personality?
Because they are pointed opposites of one another.
Did he get catechized by the 12 or whoever?
Or did he not pointedly not get it from any human source but through a revelation?
I don't think you can have both.
And they kept trying to harmonize this.
I said, look, oh, maybe he means the essentials of the gospel came to him by revelation.
I said, take a look at 1 Corinthians 15 again.
This is the essential content of the gospel.
That's his whole point.
And they just can't see it because it would be very theologically dangerous to see it.
And that's just one example of the problems in the Pauline epistles.
Like one last thing, 1 Corinthians is the page.
Again and again, you have one chapter trying to refute the point made in the previous one.
Can women pray and prophesy in public?
Well, according to chapter 12, yes, according to chapter 14, no.
Is tongues speaking in tongues a big deal?
Well, according to 12, yes, according to chapter 13, no.
Can apostles make a living out of preaching the gospel in one?
Sure, of course.
The worthy labor is worthy of his high in the next chapter.
Oh, no, I never do that.
I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea that I'm just doing this to make money.
Can you eat meat previously offered to idols in pagan temples?
Sure, what the heck?
You know, those gods don't exist.
It's just like going to an all-you-can-eat steak buffet.
Go ahead.
But then you turn the page and no, don't do that.
You saw what happened to the children of Israel when they ate meat from a sacrifice to another God.
Over 2,000 of them were killed.
What?
And honest, what is going on here?
And I have to say, as the old Dutch radical critics did, what you have here is a kind of a digest of opposing opinions between Paulinists, because there were various Paulinists, the Encritites, the Valentinians, the Marcionites.
There must have been plenty of debate, and that's probably why this just is crawling with self-contradictions, because somebody put Paulinist essays on the same topic together, almost as in these books that Inner Varsity and Zondervan publish.
Four views on the resurrection, five views on the atonement.
It's almost like that.
It's an anthology, not a continuous work.
But you just ignore that if you insist, oh, no, no, no, no, all this was written by one guy.
Well, good luck with that.
Okay, last question for you, because I know you've got somewhere you got to go after this.
Your theory about Paul's road to Damascus not ever occurring.
Can you explain that to us a little bit?
Yeah, and I found after I wrote this up, this essay also appears in my book, The Amazing Colossal.
It wasn't, I mean, it was new to me, but it was not new with me, as I later found out.
Some New Testament critics in the 19th century had already suggested this.
Okay, the idea is that even assuming Paul wrote all the letters with his name on them, he never describes such a thing.
He says he's had revelations in which he has seen the Lord and all that stuff.
But one of them, he's explicit, was a heavenly ascent, a visionary ascent.
But there's nothing about this Damascus road or Ananias who baptized him and all that.
So where does Acts get it?
It tells different versions of the stories three times with certain contradictions in detail.
But it seems clear to me that he put together material from 2 Maccabees chapter 3, which talks about Heliodorus, the henchman of Antiochus Epiphany, the Seleucid ruler.
He sends Heliodorus to Jerusalem to appropriate the riches in the temple treasury.
And of course, he does not dare lay hand on the treasure of God.
So he's on his horse riding toward the temple through the streets of Jerusalem.
And suddenly a couple of angels appear and knock him off the horse and beat him.
And he gets up blinded.
Well, the Jews are glad God has intervened, but they know there could be hell to pay from the Seleucid emperor.
So they nurse him back to health and pray for his recovery.
And he does recover.
He gets his sight back.
He doesn't take the money.
He just goes back to the Seleucid capital.
Oh, where's the money?
He says, look, let me tell you this story.
If you have any enemy you want to be attacked, you can send him on the mission.
But as for me, well, it implies he converts to Judaism.
This kind of reminds me of a story where Paul is on an evil mission and gets blinded and infirm and a faithful Jew, Ananias, brings him back out of it and he converts the whole deal.
Flip over to Euripides the Bacchae, where Pentheus, the king of Thebes, is upset by the advent turns out to be Dionysus himself, the son of God.
And he imprisons him, but it doesn't work because the doors swing open on their own.
And Dionysus confronts Pentheus and says, you have no authority over me.
Forces Pentheus dresses up in the garb of the Minads, the female disciples of Dionysus, and goes to spy on them.
But he's now a believer.
You're frozen.
Seems like he's not having a very good connection.
It froze last time.
He was on, also.
Dr. Price.
Let him see what others are going through.
Just as Jesus to Ananias, I'm going to show him how much he must suffer for my name.
It's like Acts conversion.
Both of them are.
And they're both well-known documents in their time before Luke was writing.
It's not in the Pauline material, right?
But it is in these two well-known sources.
So I must think that Luke has pinched them.
Well, I hate to say that.
He has rewritten them.
That was going on all the time.
People were rewriting the Odyssey as the Aeneid and stuff like that.
So I don't mean to say, oh, this is nefarious.
It's just like today.
They're always rewriting stories.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I try to emphasize this to people.
This doesn't mean you hate the Bible and you want to explode the Bible.
Now, I love the Bible.
I love all this stuff.
I do.
I hate it.
As well as I can.
And that involves not taking it literally.
I'm anti-theist, anti-Yahweh, anti-Abrahamic, anti-Torah, anti-Bible.
It's got terrible stuff in it.
The Bible, I see the Torah as a blueprint for God's chosen people to basically rule over the world with their Messiah.
I'd have to go through argument, which I'd like to do.
I'd like to understand more about this viewpoint, but I see things in there more likely as things from an ancient Bronze Age context.
It doesn't seem to me there's an overarching continuity at all, really.
And there are different viewpoints, even among the Old Testament writers, and there's barbarism and chauvinism, but it would be a miracle if there weren't.
This is only a terrible embarrassment if you're committed.
The Bible is divinely inspired and infallible.
Well, that's just ridiculous.
And to try to say, well, yeah, it does have commands to genocide, but that was progressive revelation.
Come on.
That's bunk.
It's just absurd.
But there is reprehensible stuff, but there's also good stuff.
And I feel like I'm fascinated by it.
I don't believe everything in it or much in it.
I don't agree with a lot of the teaching in it.
Some of it I do find illuminating, but to me, it's not one thing or the opposite.
It's because it's one of the reasons I don't like it is because it's so anti-Gentile.
Well, in parts, it is, but in the New Testament, this big struggle saying Gentiles can convert to our faith, but what are the prerequisites?
And Paul or whoever is writing his name says, there are none.
They just have to believe and be baptized.
But the others say, well, no, Jesus is the Jewish Messiah.
They got to become Jews.
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