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April 12, 2023 - Know More News - Adam Green
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The Jesus Hoax Conquered the World | Know More News w/ Adam Green feat. David Skrbina PhD
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Adam Green here with no more news.
It is Wednesday, April 12th, 2023.
Thank you all for joining me.
We have a great show today.
Return guest, Dr. David Scurbina, PhD in philosophy, philosophy professor.
He has the excellent book that I just reread last night, that Jesus Hoax, how St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for 2,000 years.
He's been on twice before.
It's been about a year, wanting to bring him back on to catch up with them.
So I appreciate you for being here.
Dr. Scurbina, how are you doing?
Hey, you're doing great, Adam.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me back.
So what's been going on in your world, in your mind, around this Jesus hoax issue lately?
Yeah, it's been gaining traction, I would say for sure.
I mean, I can just tell by the discussion, by the, you know, the website hits and book sales, everything's looking pretty positive, which is a good sign.
I think people are kind of really opening up to this idea.
It's another interesting thing is, you know, people are increasingly attacking the ideas.
And that's usually a good sign, too, when they feel threatened by your own views and they start attacking the thesis, even if it's in a silly or trivial way.
At least it tells you that they're aware of what's going on.
And people are worried.
I mean, they're worried that this hoax thesis is going to get out there, gain some traction.
It's going to start pointing fingers at people that they don't want fingers pointed at.
And it, yeah, exposes a lot of dark corners that people don't really want to have light shed on.
So, yeah, I think it's a good time for the thesis.
Things are looking up.
Well, that's good.
I'm glad that you're optimistic about it.
I've noticed, I feel like we're almost like between a rock and a hard place, between the Christians, which obviously are not going to be open to this idea because then their whole worldview would collapse.
And then also, in Judaism, doesn't want to promote this idea.
Neither does Islam, as you write in your book, there's all this incentive for them not to investigate this thread.
And then also on the atheist biblical criticism side, they're also reluctant to address this elephant in the room.
You seeing the same thing?
Yeah, that hasn't changed.
I mean, that was true when I wrote the book a few years ago, and it's still true today, right?
I mean, people have a lot of selfish motives, self-interested factors that are driving what they're saying, what their arguments are, what they're allowed to talk about, what they cannot talk about.
So it's really kind of important to know who you're dealing with, who's making the argument, as much as possible, where they're coming from, what their perspective is.
And that's going to tell you a lot about how open they are to the whole story.
And there's a really kind of a complete story, I think, that we can spell out here.
And we'll get into that today.
But people touch on bits and pieces of the hoax thesis, but they hit a brick wall and they don't want to go any further because it just looks too bad for them or their backers or their sponsors or their funders or whatever.
So it's really an interesting situation.
It tells you a lot about not only theology, but what's going on in the world today.
So it's a really, really an interesting situation.
And your book is so good.
I really suggest everybody get it.
It's only just over 100 pages, but it is jam-packed with no fluff, just the important stuff to really get this point across.
And you talk about how, like, you know, everybody can agree that Christianity is a falsehood, right?
It's not real.
People have been deceived into believing something that's not true.
So I would call Christianity a deception.
And then you got to ask what was the motive and the intent for that deception.
And that seems to be the question that nobody wants to get into because it implicates.
Sir, Doug, we're talking about the book, right?
How it's a kind of a concise story.
I wanted to keep it concise to get to as many readers as possible.
Didn't need to load it up with a lot of baggage.
I just want to get the essentials of the story in a very straightforward book.
And that's what I did with this first version.
And it's like, people can agree that Christianity is not true.
These are myths.
These things, you know, there's no magical man superhero that walked on water and rose from the dead and these things.
So they know these are myths, they're legends.
But people believe that they're real and historical.
So they believe a falsehood.
They're deceived.
I would call Christianity a deception.
But then it seems like all the other Bible scholars don't want to look into if there was any nefarious motive to create this deception.
Well, right.
That's the first key step that nobody wants to take, right?
There's a lot of people who are questioning and they're skeptics and they don't buy the miracle stories and they don't buy the miracle man and so forth.
So, okay, that's fine.
Except the Bible says this guy really existed.
It says he did these miracles.
And, you know, the writers are testifying to the veracity of the story.
And yet today, we sort of really understand that it's just not possible.
Those things didn't happen.
They're just either based in myth or they're just wishful thinking or the various other things that would have caused those stories to be constructed.
So what we have is a clearly false story that is clearly presented as being a true story.
So that doesn't happen by accident.
So somebody is doing this on purpose.
They know what they're doing.
They know what they're saying is false.
They're writing it as if it is true.
The question is, why did they do that?
So that's really what we're trying to get at here.
That was one of the key points that I wanted to raise in the book is what's the motive?
First of all, with Paul, who was the original author of this Christianity story, if you will.
And then later the anonymous gospel writers.
They elaborated on this story.
So that's really the first key question, right?
Why did these guys write down as if it was true a story which we now know today is virtually certainly not true, that it was false?
So that's the first step.
And even that first step, to me, that's just a logical baby step to figure out what's going on.
And almost nobody's willing to even ask that question.
Why did these guys write down as true something that was not true?
And what was going on there?
What was in their minds?
What was in their motives?
Why would they have done that?
That's the first key question.
Why did they lie?
What was their incentive to lie?
That's got to be the question.
The next question is, and then, you know, most Bible scholars will say that it was just, it was completely innocent.
You know, there was no malintents.
It's just some organic, spontaneous thing that happened.
The idea that it could be any type of deliberate conspiracy or plot, they just dismiss knee-jerk reaction offhand.
Like, you can't even do that.
You're not allowed to even suggest that they could have done this on purpose.
But it's very clear, Paul was targeting the Gentile world.
He was the apostle to the Gentiles.
It was written in Greek.
His whole theology was that Christianity wasn't for the Jews, not at least initially.
Only in the end, they would not be blinded anymore and they would see it.
But I see this as a clear deception on the Gentile world to trick them into worshiping the God of Israel and following the Torah Messiah, who was meant to conquer them all along.
Um...
So Bible scholars usually admit that they say that Jesus existed, but then there was just his followers.
He died.
He was killed by the Romans.
He was a rabbi with a small following.
And then after he died, they looked to the scriptures to try to find proofs that he was the Messiah.
And then they had embellishments and exaggerations and legends built around him.
And, you know, there's the phone, what is it?
Not phone tag.
When you pass something along and the story changes and exaggerates.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So that's kind of the way you see it, right?
For your book, you say that you do think that there was a man, a kernel of truth, and then they base lies around that, right?
Can you elaborate on that?
Yeah, yeah, sure.
I mean, right.
So a lot of the mythicists are hung up on proving that Jesus was a myth.
And so they'll draw from ancient, more ancient mythological stories and find some parallels.
And I think certainly those things are there.
But they get really fixated on, like, that's the key point, whether he was a purely mythological figure or was he not.
So to me, that's kind of an interesting point, but that's not the main point because it doesn't really matter in a sense whether he was a pure construction or was he just a mortal guy, just a rabbi who agitated for the poor and, you know, probably caught the attention of the local Roman authorities and they decided they're going to string him up because he was causing trouble.
And that's what the Romans did to political agitators back then.
But either way, on my basic hoax thesis, it doesn't really matter because either you have a non-existent person or more likely an actually existing person, mortal person, whose story was hugely embellished in a very fraudulent and deliberate way, such that he's the Son of God and is here to save humanity, right?
So, yeah, I think, I actually suspect that probably there was an actual mortal human, Jesus of Nazareth, because it always makes a better lie, a better hoax, if it's based on a kernel of truth.
And so I think it's, you know, it was probably convenient that there was a rabbi who was an agitator for the poor.
Maybe he was an eloquent speaker, probably actually got himself crucified, body disappears because he's long gone.
This is at least three years after the crucifixion, if we believe Paul's, quote, conversion.
And I think that makes a very convenient kernel of truth behind a story that Paul can now expand on and create this Son of God story, this miracle-working person, and then use it against the Gentiles for purposes of undermining Roman rule.
I completely agree that it's either way, if there was a real person or not, it's still a deception.
It's still a lie because they made up stories after the fact.
But would you agree that if Jesus was a completely fictional character, that they just created and fabricated whole cloth, that that would make it even more of a deception?
Well, yeah, technically, right?
Because if they're really constructing the existence of the man and then his whole life story that goes along with it, then yes, it's obviously it's kind of a greater, a greater fraudulent act in that sense.
But I suppose that's possible.
I'm not sure we'll ever be able to determine that.
It's probably just the utter lack of corroborating evidence that's contemporaneous to the lifetime of Jesus.
We have literally nothing.
People tend to forget.
We have absolutely nothing, not a shred of documentation of any kind, any relics, any remains from the year zero to 30 or whatever, roughly the lifespan of Jesus, even for two decades after.
We have nothing, absolutely nothing from anybody.
Friends, enemies, followers, family members, nothing.
We have really nothing at all.
So we're really at a loss to say, was there an actual person who existed or was it purely a construction by Paul and then elaborated by the later guys?
It may be kind of lost to history.
We may never know.
Yeah, it would be a greater, a greater fraudulent act if they created this guy to scratch, but I think they had no need to.
They could have easily just taken a regular rabbi who got crucified and pumped this guy up to the Son of God, and that would have worked for them.
You know, I was thinking about the idea of like, a lie is better if it has a kernel of truth.
And I do agree that usually it's easier to spin a lie if there is a little bit of truth in there.
But if you're creating a fictional character, you could also make the argument that it's easier to make up lies about somebody that didn't exist.
Because then if people knew who he existed, like Paul's the earliest documents that we have of Christianity.
And if he was saying these things about Jesus, people would be like, but I knew him and he didn't do that.
Or I never heard that about him or something.
But if it's a completely fictional character, you can make up almost whatever you want and nobody would know because you can't prove a negative in a way.
But the way Paul writes.
That was, you know, that was so, that was, you know, remember the primitive technology.
Nobody's documenting anything.
Nobody's filming anything.
There's no videos.
There's no audio clips.
Right.
The first letter from Paul is, I guess we could acknowledge is probably Galatians, right?
So that comes from about the year 48 or the year 50.
So even that is 20 years or so after the crucifixion, right?
So Paul doesn't maybe, as far as we know, doesn't really get serious in his fraudulent act for two decades afterwards.
I don't think he's got to worry about a handful of minor figures somewhere in Nazareth who say, yeah, I heard Jesus talk and he actually didn't say that.
I think, you know, Paul's got bigger problems to worry about than one or two guys who might pipe up and try to dispute him.
So, yeah.
And Paul makes it very clear that he never knew Jesus and that he sees him in the scriptures, that all these things, he's basically reading the Old Testament and then connecting different prophecies and then saying this is like a myth that happened.
And he says to the other so-called apostles like Peter and James, well, according to Paul, that he says, have I not also seen the Lord?
And when I read that, it makes me think that like all of them, all of these other supposed pillars or apostles were doing the same thing that Paul was doing, just reading the Old Testament scriptures and then creating new myths, fulfilling the prophecies of the Old Testament.
What do you think of that idea?
Yeah, I think that's probably right.
I mean, they really, these are, you know, dyed-in-the-wool Jewish scholars.
These guys know the Old Testament inside and out.
They don't want to refute it per se.
They want to make it relevant, kind of show the truth value, the visionary prophecies.
They want to, of course, wanted to see those realized so they can draw from those.
They know those very well.
They can't use them directly because that means nothing to the Gentile masses.
So they have to somehow weave those little stories in, put it in a new light, cast it in a new way, such that it sort of fulfills these prophecies, but also appeals to the Gentile masses who don't know those Old Testament documents and don't care about them, frankly.
So to me, that's what I see that it was really their task for Paul and his followers and the gospel writers later.
You talk in the book how like military combat against the Romans in ancient Judea was futile, so they had to come up with a new approach with the suffering Messiah.
And I think that's exactly what's going on.
Can you speak on that?
The idea that war on the battlefield wasn't the approach.
Instead, they kind of went for theological warfare and like religious propaganda.
Right.
So, I mean, that's another important point that really seems to be lost in all these mythicist discussions, right?
It's the historical context.
So, so we know that the Roman Empire moved into Judea around 63 BC and took over.
The ruling tribes were the Jews, and they were thrown out of power by the Romans, like always happened when Romans moved into new territory.
They overthrew whoever happened to be in charge, established control, maybe plundered their temple or whatever they would have done, established taxation for the empire.
So obviously, anybody who was in charge, Romans come and throw out, you're immediately in confrontation with them.
You immediately view them as enemies and invaders.
I mean, this was common certainly in the ancient world at that time.
But the Jews who would have been in charge in the region around Judea and Palestine, they would have had tremendous anger, obviously, at the Romans for invading in 63 BC.
But Romans were far superior, both numerically and militarily, and so forth, right?
And so that would have posed an immediate problem to the Jews.
What are they going to do in response?
Probably for a while there was some collaboration.
We read in the early documents, even with like Julius Caesar and so forth, that they were relatively on good terms.
I mean, the Romans didn't want to make enemies.
They just wanted to capture territory and bring new land into the realm of the empire.
So, I mean, they tried to be friendly with the Jews.
They just said, hey, this is just the way it is.
Right now, this is part of the Roman Empire.
Just get used to it.
We're in charge.
You guys are not.
And they tried to be compatible with local traditions, local religions.
The Romans were actually very forgiving, very open-minded when it came to other religions and other cultural traditions.
But the Jews were not.
I mean, they were very belligerent.
That history goes back hundreds of years, well before Rome ever came in.
We have documentation back from 300 BC that anybody who runs into this Jewish tribe, they find there's problems.
The Jews are, you know, they're haters and they're deceivers and they're self-interested.
And yeah, I mean, you get lots of negative comments for hundreds of years prior to Roman invasion, prior to the time of Jesus.
So we have a long established history of Jewish antipathy towards anybody, any of their neighbors of whatever sort.
And then you can imagine, here comes the Romans in from far away Rome and takes over.
And now they really are the enemy.
They really are the evil enemy.
And, you know, then the Jews are at a loss what to do.
They can't fight back.
Here's a superpower militarily.
You know, they have no ability to fight back.
There are small movements that are attempting to do small-scale attacks.
We know about the Sicarii movement that seems to have initiated sometime around the year 0 or 5 AD, where they're doing small-scale assassinations of individual Romans just as a way to try to attack the Romans.
But they had no good options in terms of physical violence.
They really had no good options.
It was almost suicidal to oppose Rome at that point.
So obviously, being clever, learned men, they're going to think about other options.
What other ways do we have to sort of undermine support for Rome?
Because Rome relied on local good relations with the local people, most of whom were non-Jews.
It was the local Gentiles.
And Rome wanted to stay on good terms with those people.
They brought lots of things to the people.
They brought new technologies and civilization in a sense.
They probably threw out the hated prior rulers, which in this case were the Jewish tribe.
You can imagine a lot of the non-Jews were actually quite happy to see this change in government when Rome comes marching in and takes over.
So the Jews are at a loss.
They're going to think about ways.
How can we undermine, if not directly, the Roman Empire, which is this vast, powerful thing, but we can at least undermine the local populace, at least at first, and undermine their support for this new Roman worldview, this Roman ideology that came marching into town and took over.
So I think maybe that was probably the trigger that got Paul thinking about what he can do to create a new kind of ideology that would counter the Roman ideology and would also create a kind of a sympathy towards Judaism in some form, whether it's a Jewish God or the Jewish rabbi or Jewish values or the Jewish plight as they were oppressed by the Romans.
So I think kind of all these things come together in Paul, who's really the kind of the key, first key figure.
And I think his conversion, right, if we accept his conversion on the year 33 AD, I think it really was kind of a bing, kind of a kind of a light bulb moment, right, where he gets this great insight.
Like, look, I can take this figure of Jesus.
I can make him the son of God who died for everyone's sins and he's here to save everyone.
But all you have to do is believe in Jehovah, who's the Jewish God.
You got to believe in Jesus.
The Jewish rabbi is your personal savior.
And you got to believe in basic core Jewish values and dump that old Roman pantheon stuff, you know, the pantheism.
Stop that.
Stop that idol worship and demon worship is how he compared it to.
Yeah, exactly, right?
These are devils and Satan worshipers and so forth.
So dump those guys and come on, sort of come on to the Jewish side of the fence and believe in the Jewish God and Jesus the rabbi.
And, you know, that was a great light bulb moment, great, great piece of inspiration for Paul.
I mean, I give him credit for a really tremendous insight.
Yeah, it's the deception that has conquered the world.
I question the whole road to Damascus story, though, because he doesn't mention anything about it in any of his letters.
We don't get that until Acts, which is written like probably 30 years or more after Paul died.
Exactly, right?
And like, you know, I don't think that it was his initial idea of the Jesus myth, because he claims he was persecuting Christians, so there must have been some type of Christianity before him.
Maybe like Ebionites, Jewish Christianity from maybe Peter.
He says the first to see Jesus, the visions of Jesus was Cephas and the 12 and then others.
So I'm wondering if there was this little sect that just kind of was reading the scriptures and they're like, oh, I see all these things from Daniel and Isaiah and Psalms and Zechariah of a suffering Messiah that dies and atones for our sins.
Do you think that there was a real person?
Do you still think that there was a real person that died and they went to look for scriptures after the fact to prove he was the Messiah?
Or do you think that they were just looking at all these prophecies, trying to find like hidden mysteries revealed in the scriptures and like reading them different verses esoterically?
And that's where they got the whole idea for Jesus and they just completely invented it.
Yeah, well, if we can believe Paul that he persecuted Christians before he converted, I mean, that's further evidence that there was an actual guy, right?
It would seem that, if we can believe that, that there was an actual guy who some people viewed as maybe divine, maybe godlike, maybe a kind of savior, maybe a secular savior, maybe a secular Messiah, because these would have been Jews.
So I mean, actually, that's additional evidence in addition to the kernel of the hoax, that maybe there was an actual person who had a kind of following.
And maybe Paul even did persecute in some way those handful of Jews who saw this Jesus who got himself killed.
They maybe saw him as a kind of savior or potential savior of Judaism from the Romans.
So again, I don't have any real problem with that.
That doesn't really change.
And then maybe it slightly adjusts how the story develops.
But apparently those people were not able to construct a church and a theology that was aimed at the Gentiles, which I think is what Paul did.
I mean, if there was a prior movement, it was an internal Jewish movement.
Paul was the one who says, I'm going to take this idea and I'm going to use this as a weapon against the Gentiles.
And I'm going to draw them onto our side and I'm going to undercut their faith in Rome and I'm going to use that.
And I really think that was really his innovation.
Whether he drew an existing sect that was already there or not, it's hard to say.
But yeah, I agree.
I do think that was Paul's innovation.
And that's where it may have been an honest Jewish cult turning into a deception when they're taking this to the Gentiles.
But I don't know that there being Christians before Paul is proof that or is a good argument that there was a real person because they could have done the same thing that Paul did, just saw him in the scriptures.
And if there was a real guy, I feel like they would have been like, Paul, we walked around with this guy.
We were his disciples.
We heard his teachings.
You never even knew him.
But in none of Paul's letters is he like having to defend against that argument that they knew him, but he didn't.
And also the way Paul says, have I not also seen the Lord makes me think that all these people were just thinking of this like celestial Messiah figure from the scriptures.
And you're familiar with the Melchizedek scroll from Qumran?
No.
So it's dated 100 BC, 100 to 200 BC, 100 years before the supposed birth of Jesus.
And the Melchizedek scroll is like a messianic type of figure, Melchizedek, who the beginning is like they're using the Daniel 9 timetable, or maybe it's Daniel 7, saying that everybody was doing to try to say that they thought the Messiah and their redemption would come in the first century around 30 AD.
And also they're connecting Daniel 9 and Isaiah 52, the suffering servant, and connecting that with the different psalms, psalms or verses from Isaiah that Jesus supposedly read from the scroll.
So I see Melchizedek scroll as like a pre-Christian messianic Christian text that's doing the same thing, like looking at different verses, connecting them and saying like, this is what we think is going to happen, or this is what did happen in one of the heavens of the firmament or something.
And then, you know, in Hebrews, one of the earliest Christian documents, they liken Jesus all over to the order of Melchizedek.
And so that's what makes me think that this is just fabricated from whole cloth.
But I do agree with you that it's a lower bar to or a lower hurdle to get through to say, okay, maybe there was a guy.
We don't even need to argue about that.
Even if there was a guy, it's still a lie and it's still a deception.
So I think it's an easier and stronger argument.
But I want to ask you about the Caesar's Messiah, the Roman providence theory.
This is something that's been pretty popular online.
A lot of these biblical YouTube channels are very interested in this.
What do you think of the idea that the Romans, the conspiracy theory, that the Romans created Christianity to subdue the rebellious Messianic Jews?
What do you think of that?
Yeah, I don't see any really compelling story there, right?
I mean, Atwell is famous for this, and James Vellant has done a little bit of work on that.
But, you know, it's all very kind of a piecemeal ad hoc kind of argument that they're really trying to create something where there's really no compelling evidence.
It's not even a complete theory.
I mean, I've, you know, challenged these guys directly.
Like, how exactly did this work, right?
How did the Romans, who thought of the idea, well, we're going to use the Jews, we're going to create a new religion that's sort of like Judaism, but it's kind of anti-Roman, and we need to create something like this.
We need to find a Jew who can do that.
Let's hunt around and find somebody.
Oh, look, there's a tent maker, Paul.
Maybe he'll do that.
And then what do they just start dishing him out money?
Like, here's a bunch of money here, Paul.
Why don't you go off and create a new church?
And we're going to secretly back you up and use that to control the Jews.
I mean, just, I mean, just the mechanism, the process on its face.
How is that going to work?
When did that happen?
Who thought of the idea?
Was it a Roman?
Was it Paul?
Did he think of it?
And he goes back to the Romans and say, I can control those Jews for you.
Just pay me a bunch of money.
I mean, you know, all those missing pieces, they don't have a thesis of how that actually works.
So you have to suspect that, I mean, not to mention there's really no evidence for it.
If you look in the letters of Paul and even in the Gospels, there's really very little evidence that anything is pro-Roman.
People talk about, you know, render unto Caesar and pay your taxes and, you know, turn the other cheek and whatever sort of, you know, benign phrases that they get, a handful of benign phrases that they can find.
And those are massively outnumbered by militant and aggressive phrases and ideas that are against the ruling powers, which, of course, was Rome at the time.
So, I mean, on the face of it, just the lack of a comprehensive story, the actual evidence that we do have, the lack of a, yeah, I just think, right, the bottom line, it's not a Comprehensive theory, right?
If you ask these guys, how did this happen?
How did Paul become an agent of Rome?
You know what I find is so ridiculous is they act like Paul was involved with the Romans to target the Jews, but he wasn't targeting the Jews.
He wasn't the apostle to the Jews.
He was the apostle to the Gentiles.
The gospel is all written in Greek, which is like the enemy language of the extremist Jews in the first century.
You have the whole idea of Christianity, it's for the Gentiles.
It's not created for the Jews.
They're meant to reject it.
Christianity is predicated on the idea of the Jews rejecting the Messiah, so it goes to the Gentiles.
All right.
I think Mossad's getting this now.
It's never been this bad before.
We're back on, and I'm joking.
Oh, no, it says it's so weird.
It says no interaccess, but you can hear me, right?
Yeah.
I can hear you.
So, yeah, Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles.
The whole idea of Christianity is that the Jews are rejecting it and they're blinded to the truth about Jesus.
The gospels also are Pauline in nature, where the great commission is to go to the nations.
And it wasn't like they just decided to do this because, dude, I'm going to go reset my router, okay?
This just isn't working.
So, my internet didn't want to work this morning.
Apologize to you guys.
Apologize to Dr. Scurbina.
I'm still going to post this, edit it out where we lost internet several times.
And I'm going to schedule Scorbina back.
He'll be back on in a few weeks.
In the meantime, you guys pick up his book, Jesus Hoax, the Jesus Hoax.
You can Google it, find it.
Link will be in the description below.
Can't wait to see what you guys have to say in the comments.
And I appreciate all the support, the super chats, the Odyssey sign-ups, the Subscribestar, the P.O. box.
I couldn't do this without you guys.
And sorry for the internet, the short interview today, but I'll have him back on in a few weeks.
Until then, I'll see you guys very soon.
Owen Benjamin on Monday, and I'll see you guys then.
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