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Nov. 10, 2023 - Know More News - Adam Green

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Expanding on the Jesus Hoax with Dr. David Skrbina | Know More News w/ Adam Green

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	What's up, guys?
	Adam Green here with no more news.
	It is Thursday, November 9th, 2023, and I have a great show for you guys today.
	Return guest, philosophy, PhD and professor, author of many books, one of the top experts in the world on Ted Kaczynski, the unibomber.
	He's been on the show many times before to discuss his book, The Jesus Hoax.
	And he is back today to discuss his new expanded edition of the Jesus hoax, as well as some other general Jesus hoax things.
	And we're also going to discuss a little bit of what's going on in the world in the Holy Land.
	What's up?
	David Skribina, good to talk to you again, man.
	It's been a while.
	I got a lot to talk to you about.
	Yeah, Adam, thanks.
	Nice to be back.
	And yeah, something's always going on in the Jewish world to talk about, isn't it?
	Yeah, also in like the Jesus studies world as well, you know, with the clicks on YouTube and the feuds happening there and the topics of debate.
	There's a lot of stuff going on that I'd love to chat with you about.
	Sure.
	So I'm glad you're back on.
	So tell us, what do we need to know about the new expanded edition of the Jesus hoax?
	Yeah, sure.
	Well, the first edition came out in 2018.
	It was a really very concise book.
	You've seen it.
	You've got copies of it, right?
	There's the original edition.
	It was really just a very basic argument.
	I wanted to get the points out there so that people could talk about it and sort of start to debate it.
	You know, kind of started out slow, but continued to catch on.
	We got attention.
	We started doing podcasts.
	You know, the book sales were clicking right along.
	And I was always making notes.
	You know, I'm always kind of making comments and doing further research and following up and new works that I hadn't been familiar with before and so forth.
	So even as soon as almost as soon as that one came out, I started taking notes about things I wanted to do for a second edition.
	I've been building up notes for four or five years now.
	And I figured it was good time to cut this new edition there.
	So I made some significant additions, nearly twice as long.
	It's almost double the page count of the first edition.
	I added a lot of new sources.
	I think I doubled the number of quotations in the text of other references, other source material.
	I think I tripled the number of references in the bibliography.
	So I did a lot more sort of background research for people and if they want to follow up on things.
	And I wanted to really emphasize this sort of aspect that was sort of there in the first edition, didn't really come out real clearly, the root cause of this Jesus hoax situation that goes back to sort of two key characteristics of the Jews of the pre-Christian era.
	And that was this idea of dominion or world domination, basically, and misanthropy.
	So a kind of hatred of humanity, a hatred of Gentile or non-Jewish humanity.
	And I wanted to really kind of emphasize that in the second edition.
	So I really kind of fleshed that one out.
	I think it was fortuitous, just happened to come out at the time of the assault on Gaza.
	And I think you can see that they're clear as possible that you can see both of these aspects kind of playing out both in Jewish actions in Gaza and in their supporters around the world.
	So yeah, it kind of works well with current events and worked good with a nice second edition of my book.
	Interesting how this Jesus story has made it so many Christians in America and throughout the world and a lot of our Christian politicians to give so much support to Israel along their whole history and how that benefits the implications.
	Imagine all the support that America gives to Israel because of our religious leaders if this hoax, if this deception were to be exposed on a large scale.
	Would they have any incentive to keep people believing in Jesus?
	What do you think?
	If the hoax was revealed, well, yeah, I mean, you know, there's certain moral stories.
	People, I think, you know, they're not, most people aren't really hugely into the theology.
	They aren't, you know, scholars of any kind.
	They just sort of like the moral stories and the parables and these kind of things.
	So there's kind of, you know, nice little moral lessons.
	It's drawn.
	It's nothing unique to Jesus.
	We know pretty much all the morality of the New Testament either comes from the Old Testament or has been borrowed from the Greeks and the Romans.
	So there's lots of, you know, little moral tales that are in there.
	It's kind of nice, maybe in that sense.
	But again, it's just as a parable, as a story.
	But certainly you can't build a religion around it.
	If people understood the hoax, you know, they would, as a religion, it really collapses on itself.
	It's worse than nothing because it's a malicious action, basically by Paul and by a few of his followers who are the gospel writers.
	And then you realize it really was kind of an out-and-out fraud.
	I mean, really a deceitful text that was really intended to fool people.
	And that's really, you know, that should make people as mad as hell.
	I don't know what to say.
	I mean, I would be really ticked off if I was a believer.
	And then I realized I had been hoaxed there, you know, for a good chunk of my life.
	So, yeah.
	I mean, when the goal of Judaism was to have all of the nations worship their God and have, like, submit to their Moshiach.
	And like you said, have dominion over the earth.
	That's Daniel 7, 14.
	Dominion, everlasting dominion.
	All peoples and nations, every language must serve him.
	That was the whole goal of the Messiah.
	And then this Messiah is now the most influential character.
	This Torah Messiah is the most influential character that has conquered all of the Christian and Islamic world, basically.
	4.4 billion people.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Right.
	I mean, that's a great quote from Daniel.
	But I mean, you know, people don't realize it's like right there in the Torah.
	It's right in the very founding documents, right, of the Old Testament.
	It's in Genesis where he talks about, you know, God gives them dominion over the earth and everything.
	They want to subdue the earth, right?
	That's right in Genesis, right?
	The fear of you and the dread of you shall be on all living things.
	And, you know, it's kind of interesting because as sort of a philosopher and a scholar, you know, the traditional view is that was talking about humans, about all of humanity.
	Like God gave people the right to rule over the earth.
	And, you know, I actually sort of believed that for a long time, but that's not the case, right?
	Because this is a Jewish document.
	It's written by Jews and about Jews and for Jews.
	And what they're saying is God gave the Jews the right to dominate the earth, not humans.
	They said nothing about the non-Jewish vast majority of humanity.
	It's really saying, you know, God gave you, the Jews, the right to fill the earth, subdue it, dominate it.
	The fear and the dread of you shall be on all living things, right?
	Plants, animals, other people who are functionally animals in Jewish theology.
	So, I mean, that's right there.
	It's in Genesis.
	It's in Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
	I mean, it's right there at the very beginning.
	It's laid out as clear as could be.
	So, you know, you just sort of have to, you know, spell out the quotations and realize what that means.
	And yeah, it's a horrific vision of domination of the world, literally.
	One of the new things that you added, you sent me the PDF, so I read the book over again.
	And some of the new stuff that you added was Paul's.
	Was Paul crazy?
	Was he schizophrenic?
	Did he have these visions and delusions?
	And talking about like his Damascus road to Damascus story when he sees the light, you know, the radiance, the splendor of the Holy Spirit.
	I've been seeing a lot about that, about how Paul is essentially describing Merkaba mysticism, proto-Kabbalah, where you have these mystical vision-like dreams or whatever.
	And Paul clearly says throughout his epistles that he's learning about the gospel of Jesus through the scriptures and that and from Revelation.
	So this sounds like Kabbalistic experiences he's learning about these aspects of the Messiah from the scriptures.
	What do you think of that?
	Well, right.
	I mean, that's part of trying to explain this, you know, astonishing vision that he has, presumably around the year 33, right?
	So it's about three years after the crucifixion.
	And, right, Paul sees a blinding light.
	He's struck dumb.
	He falls down.
	He can't speak.
	And people are trying to understand what is this, right?
	Is it some kind of rhapsodic, you know, really, you know, people, I'll just assume it's some kind of supernatural event, right?
	Some kind of blazing, you know, insight from the heavens or something.
	But, you know, it could be actually much more mundane than that.
	And that's kind of one of the things that I mentioned that was new in the book, right?
	I mean, there have been scholars in psychology who have read over that passage and they said, well, look, this sounds a lot like a schizophrenic episode, right?
	It's like it's like a seizure.
	I mean, literally, it could have just been a brain seizure or like a stroke, right?
	Almost, where Paul is sort of like literally struck down.
	He doesn't know what's happening.
	You know, you can get flashes of light.
	You can't speak.
	You can't move.
	And it's very consistent with sort of literal sort of a brain seizure, right?
	And it's consistent with those other passages in the New Testament where people talk about, you know, Paul, you're mad, you're crazy, you know, and they've always sort of wondered, well, he was just being, you know, flamboyant.
	They said you're studying when he was being interrogated.
	They said the studying has made you mad.
	I interpret that as like he's reading all these scriptures and coming up with these fan fiction stories about this character.
	Yeah, well, right.
	So that certainly could be one aspect of it, right?
	We don't really know.
	But all these funny little clues that, you know, this guy's, you know, a little bit nuts.
	He's a little bit insane.
	And, you know, again, I'm trying to, I was, when I was discussing that, I was trying to look for the most, one of the most sympathetic explanations, right?
	The basic thesis of my book is Paul is a liar.
	He knows what he's doing.
	He's sane.
	He's rational.
	He's an outright liar, a malicious liar.
	That's the basic thesis of the book.
	But to look at all the possibilities, I'm trying to be, you know, looking for the kindest explanations.
	And one of those is the poor guy just had a seizure and he saw some vision.
	He didn't know what it was, flash of light, thought it was God, you know, couldn't speak, pulled himself together.
	Maybe he's, you know, I mean, there's a lot of insanity.
	Did he really truly believe all of it or was he lying?
	That's that kind of the issue you were tackling.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Right.
	I mean, it's super hard to know, obviously, because we have such limited information, right?
	That we have to go by his letters and what a few other people have allegedly said about him.
	So really hard to know.
	You know, I guess trying to be charitable if he's, you know, and this has happened in other cases.
	People have sort of been literally insane, but they sound rational.
	They can speak.
	I'm thinking of people like Charles Manson or these kind of guys.
	They could commit murder.
	They can build a cult.
	They can attract followers.
	They can seem very charismatic, but they're sort of like technically pathological people.
	So this is certainly possible with Paul.
	If that's the case, that's the charitable interpretation.
	I don't want my religion founded by a guy like that.
	I mean, that's like following, like I say, it's following Manson or somebody like that, some kind of lunatic.
	Okay, maybe he believes it, but okay, that doesn't do me any good.
	So that's one possibility.
	I just kind of threw it out there as sort of a technical possibility.
	I don't think that's the case.
	I think Paul's a little bit too rational, too lucid, too sane according to everything that we can see.
	So the only other explanation is that he's just an outright liar and you have to take it at that level.
	So what exactly is his lie, though?
	Because he didn't start the Christian movement.
	There was already Christian sects, probably like Peter and James and like a Jerusalem church, possibly led by James.
	So they had a belief in this Jesus figure, but he just came on and came along and innovated and said, you don't need to circumcise.
	You don't need to keep the commandments.
	You're going to now consume the blood of Jesus in the Eucharist.
	And I'm going to go to the Gentiles.
	Those were the twists.
	So is that the lie?
	Right.
	I think there was, because I've argued that there was an actual guy, historical Jesus.
	He was a rabbi.
	He was probably a charismatic rabbi.
	He probably attracted a following, probably was agitating on behalf of the poor and the oppressed, opposing Roman rule.
	The Romans didn't like it.
	They crucified him and he got buried.
	Okay, we can talk about the Jesus tomb later.
	That's another new thing I added to the second edition.
	So I suspect that's the core, the true core of the hoax.
	There was an actual guy, charismatic rabbi, who had a following, got noticed, was labeled as a troublemaker, got crucified, and then got buried.
	And then Paul comes along and he wants to overlay on that a couple of things, as you said.
	He wants to turn this charismatic rabbi into a divine figure, a cosmic figure who's here not just for the local Jews, not just for the Jews of Jerusalem or Judea, but for all people.
	So Paul wants to make this guy someone who died as a holy mission for the sake of the souls of all humanity.
	And he's going to save everyone's souls and take you to heaven, right?
	This very stripped down, it's a very basic theology that we see in Paul.
	It's not elaborate.
	We don't see a lot of the complicated, we don't see the Jesus stories.
	There's no quotes from Jesus.
	We know about that in Paul.
	Paul doesn't know anything about the gospels because they weren't written yet when Paul was writing during his lifetime.
	So it was a very basic theology that Paul invents, takes this crucified rabbi, says he's the son of God.
	He rose from the dead.
	He died for your sins.
	Believe me, and then he'll save you too if you are sort of, you know, follow in his footsteps.
	And to me, that's really the important innovation that Paul lays on top of this little kernel of truth, and he turns it into a blazing hoax to appeal to the Gentile masses to pull them in, get them away from the Romans, and to construct a destructive worldview is really what it was.
	So, you know, most anybody that's not a Christian could acknowledge that Christianity is like a falsehood, right?
	It's not real.
	Nobody walked on water, raised from the dead.
	You know, these are, these are myths, even if there was a historical Jesus.
	So if they believe a falsehood, they're deceived.
	So if this is deception, we're asking, was Paul deceived?
	Did he really believe these things or was he lying?
	And then once we can substantiate if he was lying or not, the next question is, why the hoax?
	Why did Paul do what he did and become the apostle to the Gentiles?
	So Paul doesn't really talk about the miracles, right?
	So we have the 36 or whatever rough counts, 36 Jesus miracles.
	And those show up in the Gospels.
	They're not really there in Paul.
	I mean, it's kind of a miracle resurrection, but the healing miracles, the withering, the fig tree, the fish and the loaves, that's all after Paul is gone.
	So he doesn't really talk about the miracles, except the miracle of the resurrection, and that you can be like that too, right?
	So he wants to make this impressive story, this guy who died and rose from the dead and now he's this model for all of humanity because Paul is looking for a – They got thrown out of power by the Romans in 63 BC.
	They got, you know, they desecrated the temple.
	They probably plundered the treasury.
	Paul is an educated elite, you know, hated the Romans like crazy.
	Basically, hated the Gentiles, too.
	There's that long history of misanthropy, right, in the Jewish religion.
	So they have always looked down on all the Gentiles, sort of low, low life.
	He thinks they're demon worshipers and heathens, basically.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Exactly.
	So Paul's got a bunch of people he doesn't like.
	He doesn't like the Romans because they're ruling over Palestine, Judea.
	He doesn't like the masses because he thinks they're just a bunch of cattle.
	So he knows in their superstitious masses and he can sort of create a kind of a theology, a very basic picture that he can use to entice them onto his side.
	So I think that's really what's going on there.
	He's just a really simple story about people who are fearing death and want to live forever and whatever the nice little bromides that they get from this basic theology.
	And Paul's going to use that to kind of suck in the Gentiles and sort of get them on, get them worshiping the Jewish God because you have to believe in Yahweh, the Jewish God.
	You have to worship Jesus, the Jewish rabbi.
	And that's going to get you away from the Roman outlook, away from the Roman worldview.
	You're not going to worship the Roman gods.
	You're going to get them all on sort of on the Jewish page, not going to turn them into Jews, but get them on the same page and sort of mess with their heads.
	I mean, it's going to kind of corrupt them, this kind of crazy story about you get to live forever in heaven and it's all wonderful.
	So, yeah, I mean, that's.
	Suffering and loving your enemies is good in this life, and you'll be rewarded in the afterlife.
	Yeah, exactly, right?
	I mean, there's looking for things to entice people into this, you know, non-existent afterlife.
	And you could promise anything under the sun for an afterlife because nobody can contest you.
	There's no coming back and saying, hey, you screwed me over there on that one.
	So, yeah, I mean, it was an easy thing for him to do.
	You also added some good material on how Paul was really into suffering, super into suffering, and also like all the anti-family, anti-having kids type of rhetoric you find in the New Testament also.
	Seems loving your enemies, being okay with suffering and being a slave because, you know, just having faith in the Jewish rabbi and the blood atonement sacrifice, and you'll go to heaven.
	It just seems also subversive.
	And accomplishing the goal of eradicating the pagan idol worship and co-opting it into worshiping the Messiah and imposing the Torah Messiah on the rest of the pagan world seems a little too convenient to me.
	It's amazing.
	You talk about how it's so amazing.
	You don't hate Jews today because of this, how stupid it would be to do that.
	But you got to tape your hat of how amazing this deception has been, right?
	Oh, yeah, I give him huge credit.
	I mean, you know, it's a tremendously successful story, and it, you know, is still convincing people today, and it's carried a lot away for a couple thousand years.
	You know, one thing I sort of emphasize in this new edition, that there's been actually a lot of things in history that have seemed persuasive, convinced a lot of people, including very smart people, for centuries, and turned out to be completely wrong, right?
	I give a couple examples in the book there, right?
	You talk about the celestial sphere, right?
	The idea that the stars are on some giant sphere and it's spinning around the earth at night, the way it looks like you see those stars moving over the earth.
	It looks like they're on a big sphere, right?
	And yeah, very smart people believe that.
	Aristotle and Plato, you know, basically bought into that story and it got propagated for hundreds of years, trying to be completely wrong.
	You know, people believed in witches and that, you know, they slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people because they thought they were witches.
	And it's complete nonsense.
	You know, they had belief in the four elements, which are fire, earth, air, and water.
	You know, that held for about 2,000 years.
	So, I mean, there's a lot of sort of, you know, they weren't hoaxes.
	They were honest attempts to try to understand the world, but they were wrong.
	They were flat out wrong, and people believed them for a long time.
	So, you know, it's not surprising that here we have another one, a kind of a mythology that people take as literal truth.
	It was passed off as literal truth.
	It wasn't true.
	I guess the miracle stories are probably the best evidence that we have because we have no reason to believe that any of the miracles actually happened.
	But in the gospels, they talk like literally as if they were true.
	And they do so decades after they happen.
	So there's multiple reasons to believe that those gospel writers were outright liars as well.
	I like how you commented in the book on how Bart Ehrman will write a book called Forged, the New Testament Are Forgeries, or other guys like Richard Care or whoever else will say, you know, they lied here or they made this up or like, you know, this is proven to be not true.
	So we know they're lying, but they'll never attribute any motive or blame at all for these lies or talk about the motive behind it and who benefits and how it's played out and stuff.
	They won't go there.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	The best you can hope for is they'll pick a few little things and they'll maybe hint at them that, yeah, this seemed to be not quite right, even though this guy said it was, you know, and, you know, Carrie's a little bit, Carrier, Richard Carrier is a little bit better at that than others.
	He'll pick out things.
	They'll say, yeah, that was an outright lie.
	But he doesn't weave it into a narrative.
	He doesn't explain, like you say, the motive, you know, who is lying, why, and to whose benefit.
	You know, that's, that's what you really have to flesh out to make the complete picture here.
	And, yeah, Erman doesn't want to touch that stuff.
	The conventional Jesus scholars don't want to touch that kind of stuff.
	And that's what you really need to really flesh out the story.
	They'll all call their gatekeepers.
	They'll call honest, legitimate criticism of Judaism anti-Semitism.
	They all work to protect, you know, this.
	They all work to protect Judaism and play with it with kid gloves.
	But they're more than happy to go after Christianity and Islam.
	And they love to entertain the idea also you write about in the book.
	You have a great debunking of Caesar's Messiah, the Roman providence theory that's so popular among the biblical YouTube channels.
	And so yeah, they're happy to entertain the idea that the Romans did it as a nefarious plot and conspiracy and subversion on the Messianic Jews, which is a complete inversion of reality of what actually happened.
	You want to touch on that a little bit?
	Yeah, sure.
	I mean, right.
	At Will's book gets a lot of coverage.
	There's a couple of the people who have been trying to make this case.
	It was really the Romans who, you know, kind of invented this.
	A lot of Jews have done it too as well.
	Robert Eisenman is one that's done that.
	Hi Maccabee is another one.
	They even go as far as to make up conspiracies about Paul that he wasn't actually a Jew.
	He was really like a Roman agent or a crypto-Gentile, things like this.
	Yeah, exactly, right?
	I mean, you know, it makes them the victims.
	They become the victims of Christianity instead of the perpetrators and the beneficiaries.
	Exactly right.
	It's the same old story, right?
	We're going to take the bad guys.
	We're going to make them look like the villains.
	You know, we don't like the Romans because the Romans crushed the Jews in Israel, you know, and they defeated them, crushed, destroyed the temple.
	So the ancient Romans are sort of the eternal enemies of the Jews.
	So they're going to do anything they can to make them look bad.
	You know, if we have to pinpoint a source of the hoax, they want to throw that on top of the Romans on top of every other sort of debauchery they can attribute to them.
	Right.
	They'll say Paul was a Roman agent.
	He was bribed by the Romans to do this kind of thing.
	But, I mean, it's just sort of ridiculous because there's really no evidence for it.
	It doesn't really add up.
	It doesn't align with the text that we have.
	We have no other corroborating evidence that that was true.
	You know, the Romans themselves, we know eventually the Roman elite bought into the Christian story.
	So, you know, in a sense, they would have to buy their own sort of hoax.
	You know, if it was.
	Well, they were all, if you look at the scriptures of the Old Testament, they were always the targets, was to target the kings and the leadership of the nations and the kingdoms with the Moshiach.
	So it's going exactly according to the plans.
	The suffering Messiah story conquered Rome as the Messiah was intended to do.
	Right?
	Wasn't that the whole goal for the Messiah?
	Yeah, right.
	Well, he was supposed to conquer the evil one, the evil powers that rule in the world, right?
	I mean, so this, the story came out around 400 or 500, 600 BC.
	So there was no Roman Empire yet at that point.
	But, you know, there were others.
	There were Babylonians and the Persians and so forth, right?
	They were the evil empires of the time.
	So it was easy to take that story of, you know, defeating the evil empire.
	And, you know, the Messiah is going to save the Jews.
	And now here we have potentially a new Messiah and a new evil empire in the Roman Empire.
	So all the stories just carried over.
	The fourth kingdom, the fourth beast in Daniel was around that time was definitely interpreted to be Rome and still is interpreted to be Rome, actually.
	Yeah, I don't know when Daniel was written offhand.
	That must have been...
	It's like 167, I want to say something like that, BC, is where they date it at.
	Okay, so that would have been early years of the Roman Republic.
	So yeah, that could have been targeted at Rome explicitly.
	Even if it wasn't when it was written shortly thereafter, it was definitely interpreted to be Rome.
	Yeah.
	So you have a whole bunch of stuff debunking Caesar's Messiah.
	And you debated one of the top purveyors of it, James Valiant, and you mopped the floor with him, in my opinion.
	Funny, they don't want to have you do any more debates.
	You'd be more than happy to, but they don't want that.
	Yeah, I'd love to do more debates on those guys.
	They just don't seem to be interested.
	So, yeah.
	So I wanted to share something else, too, about the Paul Kabbalah talk.
	Let's see.
	Here it is.
	So 2 Corinthians 12.
	This is the famous verse where Paul explains that he's many people think that he's talking about himself.
	Some people say he's talking about James.
	James probably was doing these same things too.
	I think this is how he was having revelations and learning about Jesus.
	But he says, I will come to visions and revelations from the Lord.
	14 years ago, he knew a man, but he can't tell you who it was, was taken up into the third heaven.
	And I know the same man, whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell, God knows, how he was taken up to paradise.
	That's an important word, paradise, for the Kabbalistic term for where they would go to in the third heavens, the third firmaments.
	It's kind of like ascension of Isaiah with the seven heavens of the firmament as well.
	This is what they were doing in Merkaba mysticism, going up Jacob's ladder and Ezekiel's chariot and these like proto-Kabbalist type of stuff where they're majorically reading all these verses, looking for revelations and mysteries.
	Paul calls his gospel the mystery, right?
	So not just me.
	It's not my theory at all.
	I've seen Christians, rabbis, everybody say this is basically explaining that he's had a Kabbalistic experience.
	And he could be schizotypal too, because the type Carrier in his book has a whole long chapter about the schizotypal visions, prophets type of thing, and how back then they thought it was supernatural.
	They didn't know what it was.
	So they would value people like that.
	Those would be the seers, right?
	Yeah, that was common in all sort of, you know, early historical prehistorical societies.
	People who had, you know, whatever seizures, you know, psychotic episodes or visions.
	They didn't know what it was.
	I mean, the obvious answer is some kind of spirit or demon or something that came to them and imparted some kind of special information to them alone.
	So that was, you know, that would have been a standard interpretation at that time.
	And they knew nothing about how the brain works and human physiology.
	So that was the best explanation they had.
	Absolutely.
	And one other now, 1 Corinthians 2.
	Listen to Paul.
	So this is, Paul is, all the earliest documents of Christianity come from Paul.
	Paul precedes all of the gospels.
	And look at what he said.
	He never knew Jesus.
	He said, when I came to you, to Christians, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony of God.
	For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
	And then he says his words were not as wise, but he had the Spirit's power and did not rest on human wisdom.
	But listen to this.
	This is the mystery hidden, God's wisdom, mystery hidden since before time began of how Jesus would be crucified.
	And then he starts citing different scriptures for this midrash he's creating.
	But do you see the significance here?
	He's saying all he knew about Jesus from reading the scriptures was that he was crucified.
	I resolved to know nothing while I was with you.
	So he was teaching Christianity and the gospel, but all he knew from reading the scriptures and visions was that Jesus was crucified.
	That's all he knew.
	Well, yeah, I mean, that's right.
	I mean, when you look at what he says, again, he doesn't, you know, he knows, he knows nothing of the gospels, the four gospels, because those did not exist yet.
	He doesn't quote Jesus.
	He gives no facts about his life, his biography.
	He really knows almost nothing about him.
	All I know is, hey, this guy was crucified.
	He was raised up to heaven.
	And believe in him and believe in the Jewish God.
	And you can do that too.
	I mean, that's really what it's like.
	It's such a stripped down kind of theology.
	And in the sense, he's admitting it right there, right?
	I don't know anything except Jesus was crucified.
	Yeah, that's really about it.
	And then so you know, God's wisdom revealed by the Spirit.
	He's learning about Jesus through the Spirit.
	And he says, however, the verse he cites for this revelation, he cites, what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived.
	Is he saying Jesus was not seen, heard, or conceived by anybody else until him and his buddies, Paul and Peter, started reading the scriptures?
	That's what it sounds like to me, right?
	These are things God has revealed to us by his spirit.
	Not by the disciples who witnessed Jesus, by the Spirit.
	Right, no, of course not.
	No, I think he's really sort of admitting.
	He's like saying, hey, I had this brilliant idea, man.
	I'm going to take this crucified rabbi and I'm going to turn him into the God, the Son of God.
	And, you know, and he died for human sins and all the Gentiles are here.
	You have to believe in him.
	I mean, I think he, I think that was his flash at Damascus.
	It was this great insight that he had.
	He's like, hey, no one ever thought of this before.
	I'm going to turn this Jewish rabbi into the savior of the Gentiles.
	I mean, that's like a radical sort of crazy idea, right?
	That probably never existed in Jewish history before.
	But Paul's got this flash of insight.
	I can use this to suck in the Gentiles and, you know, get them on our side, get him thinking like Jews, get him sympathetic to Jews.
	And I can work that to my advantage.
	I think he saw that as a great, a great, you know, vision from God, probably, you know?
	So, yeah.
	I don't see how Jews could be studying the Torah and the Tanakh and not see that the Gentiles were supposed to go to the Messiah.
	It says the Messiah will be the light unto the Gentiles.
	And in Isaiah, it says the Gentiles will put their hope in him in all of the isles, all the islands around the world will wait for his law and stuff like this.
	So I well, that's part of the dominion thing, right?
	So they're going to rule.
	So the Jews are going to rule over the Gentiles, right?
	But that's, you know, that's almost sort of like, you know, it says it will put he will raise a banner for the Gentiles and they will put their hope in him.
	Yeah, okay.
	So but here's the question.
	Here's what I want to go back to.
	Back it up a little bit.
	So you agree Paul didn't come up with the Jesus lie that he was the Messiah.
	There was already Christians that believed he resurrected and was the Messiah, right?
	Like Peter, Paul.
	I'm sorry, Peter, James, right?
	Well, that's the question.
	Whether anybody believed that he was a risen God who was here to save all of humanity, if anybody believed that before Paul conceived that idea, that's really an open question.
	Paul says that like he got the gospel from revelation and scriptures, but when he did finally meet with the apostles, James, the brother of the Lord and Cephas, that they like corroborated his story of the gospel.
	And it was him even lecturing them about how Christianity should be, right?
	You should have eat with the Gentiles.
	You shouldn't be circumcising these type of things, right?
	So.
	Well, it's important for his story that he not portray it as he was the lone inventor, right?
	I mean, it's got to be this guy who died actually was what I'm telling you he was, right?
	So he has to portray it as a pre-existing story.
	He can't say, hey, I invented this story out of the blue of this guy who was resurrected.
	So you don't think it was a pre-existing story?
	You don't think there were Christian sects before him with James and Peter?
	I think they were just followers of a charismatic rabbi.
	I really think that's what I suspect was going on before Paul's time.
	I think it was just, I don't see any evidence that it was really more than that.
	Now, I'm not ruling it out, but I don't really see the compelling evidence for that, right?
	Okay, so walk me through this then.
	So there was a charismatic rabbi.
	He had a small group of followers.
	He did something to piss off the Romans and then they crucified him.
	That's what like Bart Ehrman and that's the consensus view of scholarship on what we know for sure about the historical Jesus.
	Everything else besides that, basically we don't know or it's up for debate, but they want to say that is like the status quo, right?
	So what I don't understand is if a rabbi had a small following and then they thought he was the Messiah, number one, why would they think he's the Messiah if the Messiah is meant to be the king of Judea that conquers the Gentiles?
	He was nowhere conquers Rome and conquers the world.
	He was nowhere near doing that at all.
	So that would be a problem.
	He wasn't doing miracles, right?
	He wasn't really a magician.
	So they wouldn't think he was the Messiah because of that, right?
	So he gets killed.
	The Messiah is not supposed to get killed, right?
	The Messiah is supposed to conquer the world and redeem the Jews and bring peace on earth and all these things.
	So why would they think he's the Messiah?
	The official story that Bart Ehrman says is that the followers of Jesus after he was crucified were coping.
	They thought he was the Messiah so much.
	I don't know why He didn't fit the role of the Messiah.
	He wasn't doing miracles, but so much that they had to come up and look at the scriptures to try to find justification to explain why their Messiah died.
	And this is how the idea of the suffering Messiah is born, right?
	That's the official story, right?
	I don't see the motive to go back and search the scriptures and try to come up with the suffering Messiah.
	Like, they didn't see a vision of Jesus that made them think this.
	They didn't all really see a vision.
	That's that's supernatural and serious.
	Bible scholars shouldn't be considering that they really all saw a vision and that that actually happened.
	So, no miracles, no vision, not really fitting the requirements.
	So, why, why the cope?
	Why the need to go back and cope?
	But what I think happened is that before Christianity, they were already seeing that there could be a suffering Messiah, and that's how they formulated the mythical suffering Messiah story.
	But I don't know, I threw a lot at you.
	What do you think about that?
	Well, again, I don't rule it out.
	I think it's possible, right?
	That there was talk at the time, as soon as, right, as soon as Jesus gets crucified, he loses the role of the traditional Messiah because you're not supposed to be dead.
	You're supposed to be a triumphant general who's going to, you know, reconquer the world for the Jews.
	So, as soon as he's dead, his followers would have sort of either been in shock or just distraught or whatever, because, like, hey, our nominal Messiah just got himself killed.
	So, so, either they, amongst themselves, had to construct some new story, as you say, maybe he's really not dead, maybe he's really alive, and he's maybe he's going to come back from the dead, right?
	Um, so there could have been some talk like that, but but do you see the problem though?
	Like, why would they need to come up with that cope if he didn't even come close to being the actual Messiah?
	Because, according to the story, he didn't do anything that the Messiah was supposed to do.
	That this actual guy, yeah, you know what I'm saying?
	Yeah, this is a Daniel Boyer.
	The reason I say this is because Daniel Boyerin talks a lot about this.
	This has been a big feud when the idea of the suffering Messiah first came about.
	I'm with Daniel Boyer in and Carrier that thinks that the idea of suffering Messiah came probably from Madrashic reading of Daniel.
	And so, that was around long before you see bits of it at the Dead Sea Scrolls too in Qumran.
	So, but they all want to say Jesus had to exist.
	So, they have to say that it came after, after he died.
	Then, they came up with the cope and the, you know, they became apologists for why he looked for proof texts to prove he was the Messiah.
	I think the proof texts led them to the story.
	It was the other way around.
	But, like you said, either way, whether there was a historical guy or not, it's still been spun into a fictional narrative and a deception.
	That's the important part.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, there's some there's interesting debates about you know the precedents and the antecedents of these elements, these key elements that we see in Paul.
	So, and yeah, there's you know, you're right, there's little bits and little clues in Daniel and other Old Testament texts that, you know, maybe there's something like a Messiah who gets crucified, and there's you know, little intriguing passages that you know sometimes get pulled out, like, well, this was prophesied in the year 500 BC.
	Okay, I mean, maybe there were aspects of that there, but but but you know, we we uh we don't have really anything more than that.
	We did, we have no documentation from anybody who says that they actually believe that.
	We don't uh we don't have a documentation of a movement that believed in a risen Christ until we know Paul, because I mean, he's the first documented person who makes these claims that we know of.
	There's no corroborating evidence by Philo or anybody else, and either the Jewish scholars who looked at that time that said, Oh, there was an existing movement in Jerusalem who believed in a risen Messiah.
	We don't have that, there's nothing like that.
	So, so I mean, there may have been, and we just didn't hear about it.
	Maybe it was a very small movement, maybe it was a very marginal movement.
	But the only thing that we know for sure is that it's in the letters of Paul, and those start about the year 50, right?
	The earliest letter that we have from Paul is about the year 50 AD.
	So, so that's the first thing we know for sure.
	We can sort of speculate, yeah, maybe it was there before Paul, maybe Paul invented it.
	Those are interesting, sort of, you know, tangential discussions that helps flesh out the whole story.
	But in the end, it doesn't really affect the hoax.
	It's still a hoax, there's still a fraud going on, there's still deception because they portrayed falsehood as truth, they still intended to suck in the Gentiles.
	So, yeah, we just need to, I think, keep that big picture in mind there.
	Absolutely.
	I think that Christianity evolved out of like an Essene, some type of set, because there was lots of in the Qumrans at Essene, there was lots of different sects there.
	It wasn't just one monolith.
	So, like, the Ebionites, the poor, the Nazarites, maybe the Naocenes, these different types of groups.
	John the Baptists, many believe he was an Essene and could be related to these movements as well.
	There's an early church father, I can't remember who, but he said there was a group called the Ebionites with James the Just.
	There's a lot of talk about James the Just as the leader of this Jerusalem church.
	And there was a book called The Ascent of James as well.
	So, I think there could have been a leader of a sect like James.
	He was the one that was the brother of the Lord.
	So, he was seeing Jesus just like Paul did in these visions and in the scriptures.
	And there was a book called The Ascent or The Ascension of James that describes the same thing.
	And even if you read James and Peter in the New Testament, the books, like they read like they're not the brother of the Lord at all.
	The book of James does not act like he's the brother of the Lord.
	And that's like what that's the official story that so many of the top scholars say is like, well, we know Jesus was real because Paul says he met his brother.
	That's Bart Ehrman's like biggest proof that he's real, right?
	But if there's a book, The Ascent of James, how did he not just see Jesus like an ascension of Isaiah in heaven or like Paul did in his third heaven, right?
	Right, right.
	Well, you had James who was one of the apostles, right?
	And, you know, we don't really know where that guy fits in.
	I mean, there's like two Jameses.
	There's two James.
	Exactly.
	You got multiple people with multiple names, you know, and you can start attributing anything to anybody practically.
	You know, I mean, scholars have wondered why wasn't Jesus' brother one of his apostles?
	You think the brother would know him very well.
	The brother would be impressed.
	Jesus could trust him.
	You would think the brother would immediately be one of the 12 apostles, but no, not that James.
	A different James is one of the apostles.
	So, I mean, it's just, you know, it's just all this.
	And they're called the pillars.
	And the reason I say it came out of Dead Sean's Qumran because you can see so many similarities and parallels and using the same proof texts.
	And they're doing peshers and midrash and stuff.
	There's similar stuff with the Melchizedek scroll citing these messianic verses and stuff.
	One more point because this is just, I don't have anybody else to talk about this, basically.
	So Jesus didn't, the official story according to the Bible is that Jesus predicted his death and resurrection, Right, so of course, when he resurrects, they all believe it.
	He never, there was no Jesus that predicted he was going to die and raise from the dead.
	This all comes after the fact, right?
	So, why would they believe so strongly that he was the Messiah if this didn't happen?
	He didn't do miracles, he didn't predict he would come back, he didn't actually come back in a vision and do all these things.
	So, it's like without all of that, I don't see the necessity for them to come up with this huge cope that created Christianity.
	It didn't start with a cope, it started well, it could have started with this cope, actually, where they can't defeat them on the battlefield, but they're really the Romans, the Gentiles are really ruled by demons, right?
	So, it's a spiritual battle, so they need to beat them on a spiritual level, they need to beat them with a spiritual sacrifice in the heavenly realm.
	I think that's kind of what their mindset was.
	Exactly, right?
	You know, I would say philosophical realm or the realm of worldviews, right?
	Those kind of things-that's where the battle had to move to because it couldn't be on the physical plane.
	The Jews were getting slaughtered by the Romans, they were in no position to oppose them on the you know, physically, so it had to move to the spiritual/slash intellectual/slash philosophical realm, and that's that's where they moved the battle, and that's where they that's where they won the battle.
	They moved it onto the field where they could dominate, and that's where they eventually succeeded.
	Theological warfare, and it's so interesting, they wouldn't have been able to fake a myth that conquered Rome if it was the myth of the conquering political Messiah.
	Instead, they went the other approach, the pacifist, you know, the non-threatening, the slow infiltration, theological warfare to Judaize Rome and get them to abandon their idol worship and worship the Son of God as a Jewish man and the God of Israel.
	Yeah, you know, Nietzsche has a great line.
	Nietzsche talks about how the Christians were like they were like vampires who just bled Rome to death, right?
	They just sort of latched on and just kind of sucked, drained the blood right out of the Roman Empire and the Roman worldview and just destroyed them that way.
	So, yeah, it was not some kind of head-on confrontation that was never going to work.
	It had to be a slow, dripping draining of the strength and the power of the Roman ideology and the Roman worldview.
	And that's that's what they did.
	Where are we at on time?
	50 minutes.
	Wow, that's gone by fast.
	I'm gonna read a few super chats.
	So, thanks, guys, for all the support.
	You guys are awesome.
	John Garadis for 50 says, Skirbina is one of my favorite guests.
	I could listen to him for hours.
	He's like, Carl Sagan in philosophy.
	David, could you tell us more about your political career in 2006 with the Green Party and how it went?
	Is politics rigged?
	Is change possible anyway?
	Have a great show, all of you.
	Thanks, John.
	What do you think?
	Tell us about all of your political career and if we can fix politics.
	My short-lived political career, right?
	It's got really nothing to do with the Jesus hoax.
	But yeah, no, way back in 2006, because I'm part of my area's environmental philosophy.
	I've been doing that for many years.
	And I ran with the Green Party in Michigan.
	I was on the ticket for lieutenant governor.
	So, right, that's like the vice governor.
	And I ran with a guy we ran on the Green Party.
	And yeah, we got the usual 0.2% of the vote or something, I think.
	But it was, but it was instructive for me.
	All these things are really helpful for me because I really kind of see how the system works, right?
	Whether it's the power system, the political system, how the advertising system works, how the academy responds to people like that.
	So, to me, it wasn't so much a political ambition.
	It was a learning exercise to really kind of see from the inside how these processes work and how they respond to threats to their power.
	And that, you know, carries over to the religious realm, political realm, and so forth.
	So, yeah, it was really a very instructive little episode in my career.
	Okay, thank you, John.
	Tristoff says, for 25, says, Dr. Scurbina, are you not aware of the major flaws in the establishment consensus chronology on what, the New Testament?
	Their scholarly tradition, though, it has not gained traction due to the dominance of the mythmakers, exposing fraudulent history chronology.
	Edwin Johnson and Famenko are good starting places.
	Yeah, well, it's not clear what he's referring to.
	How is the chronology wrong?
	I don't know.
	To me, well, right.
	So, to me, the chronology is hugely revealing, right?
	So, the traditional chronology says Paul's letters were written between 50 and 70.
	The Gospels were written between 70 and 95 or so.
	So, this is, you know, Paul's letters were at least 20 to 40 years after the crucifixion.
	The Gospels were 40 to 70 years after the crucifixion.
	So, there's a huge time gap in there, right?
	I mean, these are really unexpected.
	That's one of the things I documented in my book.
	The chronology says so much time passed.
	And, you know, there's so much time for people to talk.
	And, you know, we lost all of our first-hand witnesses, and stories get changed over time, and they get passed along orally, and then they get ramped up, they get accelerated, and so forth.
	And so, to me, that's the problem of the chronology.
	That's what I call it.
	It's one of the two major problems in the conventional story.
	The chronology is hugely incompatible with an actual Son of God who actually worked miracles because you would expect the chronology to be very compressed, very close, if not concurrent with his lifetime.
	And instead, these things show up decades and decades later, conveniently after the Romans have destroyed the temple, which again casts a whole new light on things and gives a whole new motivation for the Jews to get back at the Romans.
	So, it's important, you know.
	Now, if he's questioning that chronology, I've just sort of accepted that as probably the accurate chronology because that's exactly consistent with the hoax story.
	But it could be something else altogether.
	Yeah, sometimes you'll see Bible apologists say that the gospels are independent attestations, right?
	And they go, oh, Jesus is the most documented person in all of ancient history.
	They'll make these bold claims, but there's the synoptic problem: Mark, Matthew, and Luke.
	They're not independent, and they're contradictory.
	Matthew is copying Mark and expanding on Mark and changing Mark and taking liberty to change Mark or add things or remove things.
	Luke comes and reads Matthew and Luke and does the same.
	Luke comes and does Matthew and Mark and does the same thing.
	So these are not independent, and this isn't even a historical thing.
	They're literary constructs, almost competing or trying to improve on one another.
	This is not history.
	This is literary fiction, just like all of the rest of the non-canonical, the Apocrypha, the Nagamati.
	Yeah.
	This is what they were doing.
	They were myth-makers.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I mean, they read like novels.
	If you just read it from an objective standpoint, it reads like a novel.
	There's this omniscient third-person perspective.
	And, you know, the writer knows everything that's going on, knows what Jesus is thinking.
	He tells you what Jesus said when Jesus was all alone.
	I mean, who's going to record that?
	Nobody knows that, right?
	Unless there's some magic, you know, hotwire to God who's telling the writer what's going on, which is ridiculous.
	The writers are writing, they're writing fiction.
	They're writing a novel.
	And they weave in elements of truth that are convenient to them.
	And yeah, the novel, you get little novelette.
	They're short from Mark is different from the one that you get from Matthew and from Luke.
	And then, you know, John goes in another direction altogether because he wants to be more philosophical.
	So, yeah, I mean, you're getting competing sort of novelistic stories, narratives that suits their purpose.
	And they're going to play up certain things and try to be consistent where they can, but deviate where they had to.
	So it's entirely understandable how that happened.
	John Garadis for 20 says, Paul saw the vision of Jesus and Muhammad saw the angel Gabriel.
	It's the same fraudulent, made-up story for Christianity and Islam.
	Nothing original.
	By the way, why would surrounding nations create and adopt religions that are based on Judaism, which hates them to the core?
	Yeah, why would the Romans ever do that?
	Yeah, we just conquered you and destroyed your temple.
	Now let's worship your God.
	Exactly.
	I mean, the whole thing is just so absurd.
	It's unbelievable, right?
	Yeah, you're going to worship the God of the people who hate you.
	And it's documented that they hate you.
	We've got testimony from people literally for over 2,000 years.
	I put some of that in my chapter four in my book here, where I'm documenting that the Jews hated everybody.
	They were misanthropes.
	They had this great hatred of humanity.
	It's documented going at least back to 300 BC.
	And you say, well, I'm going to worship these people and their God, and they hate me.
	And I'm still going to treat them as blessed and divine and holy and whatever.
	I mean, it's like pathological in the extreme.
	It's just unbelievably stupid.
	But people bind at this door and it gets baked in.
	And you've got sort of human weaknesses that want to believe in the afterlife and the fear of death and they're afraid of going to hell.
	And the Jews worked in these kind of nifty little carrot and stick.
	I wrote about this quite a bit in the book, right?
	It's a little carrot.
	We're going to give you a permanent life in heaven and we're going to threaten you with going to hell, which is horrible.
	And, you know, people are generally sort of unknowing, superstitious in a sense, don't know what's going on after death, a little bit afraid, a little apprehensive.
	I mean, that's natural.
	And they just eat right up this crazy story and they end up worshiping the God of the people who hate you.
	It's just really ridiculous.
	Also, saying that the light story of Paul in Damascus, the road to Damascus, that comes from Acts, which is written after Paul was dead.
	Paul never mentions this conversion story in any of his letters anywhere.
	And there's been scholars who connect this story where he says, kick against the goads.
	And the whole story, they believe, is lifted from a play, Euripides, I think it is.
	A Euripides play.
	Or Bacchus.
	No, it's a Bacchus play.
	Bacchus play, yeah.
	Okay.
	That was common at that time.
	So it's not even an original story.
	And Paul even cites stuff in the Old Testament, like he was chosen in the womb before to be the apostle of the Gentiles.
	That's completely lifted from scripture as well, too.
	What are you saying?
	You say something?
	Yeah, right.
	I mean, so, right.
	So, so the guys, you know, we think of Acts as being written by the same guy who wrote Luke.
	So it's common to speak of Luke/slash Acts, right?
	It's like sort of one document.
	And that was written, we think, about the year 85 AD.
	I've heard after like 95, because one, it had to happen after Matthew and Mark.
	And also, people think that Luke was picking up historical things to add to his story to make it seem more realistic from Josephus, which was like 93.
	That's what I understand.
	Yeah, you're right.
	Exactly right.
	So there's an argument that says it was actually later than that.
	I think the earliest was probably 85, but you're right.
	It could have been more like 95 or even, you know, so, but yeah, but this writer, whoever wrote Luke and Acts, I mean, he's a smart guy.
	He's educated.
	He knows Greek and Roman history.
	He knows Jewish history because he's a Jewish scholar.
	He's writing in Greek because the New Testament was written in Greek.
	And yeah, he's going to work in as much truth aspect as he can that's moderately consistent with his mythological story of Jesus.
	So yeah, that's completely to be expected.
	John Garadis for 10 says the Quran was written in Arabic and the New Testament and Paul's letters were written in Greek.
	It was obviously meant for the Gentiles and the authors had deep knowledge of the Old Testament.
	We know who wrote them and they're rubbing their hands now, seeing how it serves them and protecting it.
	The way, you know, I've been obsessively following the whole Jesus mythicism, historicism debate happening with all these scholars that are on Myth Vision and on YouTube and Bart Ehrman and Carrier and all this stuff.
	And it is truly amazing what I've been witnessing.
	The Society for Biblical Literature, this guild, this big institute, this organization of scholars is like one of the gatekeeping groups that was founded by a bunch of Christians.
	In fact, they had a huge scandal once the war, or I shouldn't even call it a war, once Israel started killing 10,000 Palestinians, they took a stand that wasn't pro-Israel enough, some of the leadership of this biblical society, and like a huge list of Jews all quit and left the thing.
	So that's who's influencing.
	That's why there's no criticism, honest criticism of Judaism.
	That's why this status quo of the Jesus myth is being secured there so much.
	And they'll make you sign.
	They'll dismiss you in your book and just say, oh, this is, he's not a real scholar.
	This isn't what the consensus says.
	This is anti-Semitic.
	That's all they'll say.
	They won't actually disprove anything.
	I've been watching it.
	No, that's right.
	In fact, I've had a lot of criticism over the last four or five years since the first edition came out.
	And I was, you know, keeping tabs.
	What are people saying?
	What's the actual argument?
	Is there something I've overlooked?
	You know, you always want to sharpen your arguments like any scholar would.
	And, you know, I documented a bunch of them.
	In fact, that made the bulk of chapters eight and nine in this new edition.
	So I tackled, you know, in total, 23 relatively common attacks against either me or my argument, right?
	And so many of them were not even about the material.
	They were all other things.
	That's all people can cope with.
	That's what I know.
	Exactly.
	I mean, so there's a whole chunk where they're just attacks against me, ad hominem arguments, right?
	Like I have bad motives, or I'm a get bad guy, or either they're calling me a Jew or they're calling me a Jew hater or whatever, you know, whatever they can think of to try to slander Me personally.
	Okay, well, okay, I don't care about that.
	And that does nothing about the argument.
	So those things don't work at all.
	You know, there's a bunch of consequentialist critiques where they're saying, well, look, if Scarbina was right, there would be really horrible consequences because, well, you know, then traditional morality would fall to pieces and people might start hating Jews and all that.
	Okay, well, you know, consequences are what they are, but that's not an argument against the theory.
	I'm putting out a theory about the origins of Christianity as a kind of a hoax.
	And that says nothing against them.
	So there's really, there's really almost nothing of substance.
	I mean, I'm looking for these.
	I'm digging to try to find substantial, tangible criticisms, and I just don't see them, right?
	One more.
	John Garadis, keep up the great work, David.
	You're the man.
	It's funny.
	Thousands of people claim to have had visions, but only the stories of a few are suspiciously chosen and promoted by the Abrahamic scriptures.
	It seems like they have a goal that's hiding in their writings.
	Come on, guys, get it to at least 200.
	Yeah, come on, guys.
	John can't be the only one.
	Who else has some questions?
	So, David, I really liked your section about Caesar's Messiah.
	You have a bunch of bullet points.
	It's on like 126 and 127.
	Can you just hammer through those real quick?
	Because way too many people believe in this Roman providence theory.
	What do you say here, too?
	I love the way you word it.
	You say something like it's a distraction away from your theory.
	Contrive to take all attention away from the Jews as guilty parties and place it on the Romans.
	But there's no evidence for it.
	And it comes across as a deflection tactic to take our eyes away from the Jews as fraudsters and conspirators and place it upon the Roman elite, whom popular media love to hate.
	And who, by the way, Rome and Edom is the ultimate enemy of, they still want vengeance on Rome and all of Western civilization because of the occupation and destruction of the temple.
	So those, of course, they would love to scapegoat Rome and Esau.
	Yeah, of course, right.
	This is all part of what I call the Roman conspiracy thesis, right?
	That was one of the alternatives.
	I'm looking at what are the other possible explanations out there that would explain the situation that we have with the Bible and with Jesus in the New Testament, right?
	So, and that's a little bit what we were talking about earlier with Atwell kind of saying, you know, that the documentation comes from, you know, a Roman source or it's pro-Roman, right?
	And so forth.
	So I'm trying to document some of the points against that and sort of show that the argument just doesn't really hold up.
	There's so many open questions, you know, about the actual mythology.
	There's just actually a complete lack of evidence in favor of this story, right?
	Even today, I mean, there's people who talk about, you know, there's a couple passages about you need to pay your taxes and render unto Caesar and so forth.
	And there's like literally, you know, just two or three of those.
	And there's like, I documented like two to three dozen passages that are much more antagonistic and much more, you know, anti-opposed to Rome, arguing for revolution, sort of rebellious kind of standpoint.
	So, I mean, when you ask people to document this story, they just throw these things out like, well, the Bible was pro-Roman, right?
	Or Paul was working for the Romans.
	I mean, it's just, it's just ridiculous.
	There's nothing to be said.
	If you ask them to document their argument, they come up with two or three passages and they say, well, look, there's proof.
	And they don't give you, it's not really a shred of an argument.
	They don't look at the whole story.
	They don't look at all the anti-Roman passages.
	They don't look at how the ideologies are composed opposed to each other.
	They're incompatible.
	So, yeah, that's what I was trying to document there.
	Their go-to is they always say, well, he says in Romans 13, pay unto Caesar.
	It's pro-Roman.
	Pay unto Caesar, right?
	Number one, it's getting you to worship Jesus as Caesar.
	And it's not like some sneaky trick or anything, but pay unto Caesar.
	From Paul's perspective, all of Rome is going to be worshiping Jesus if this religion takes off.
	So paying unto Caesar is paying unto the Christian church, basically.
	That's worshiping the king of the Jews.
	Yeah, right.
	Eventually, that's where he's heading, right?
	So yeah, he's kind of like, you know, here's our new Caesar, our new, you know, our new reborn resurrection.
	Pay unto Caesar became pay unto the state of Israel, where we're at today, right?
	In a way, through our Christian government.
	Yeah, exactly.
	We're just bending over backwards there to suck up to the Israelis.
	So, yep, it hasn't changed 2,000 years later, right?
	Yeah, they say that it's totally pro-Roman, and you do a good job sourcing a ton of examples that that's not the case.
	It's superficially pro-Roman.
	They didn't want this to be, because it was a doomed effort if this was political and anti-Roman or violent or militaristic or anything, right?
	They would get crushed.
	They would be seen as a threat.
	But this was, you know, kind of went under the radar.
	They tried to go along to get along because they didn't want to be crushed.
	This was the passive infiltration approach.
	Exactly, right?
	I mean, think about it.
	How useful would a document that said, get out there and kill those Romans?
	You know, slit their throats and stab them and kill them.
	How useful would that have been?
	Zero.
	It wouldn't have worked at all.
	Plus, they're targeting the Romans.
	They're targeting the Romans for this religion.
	So why would they make it anti-Roman?
	The Romans wouldn't adopt it if it was anti-Roman.
	But also look at the other side of the coin.
	If this was a subversion to subdue the rebellious Messianic Jews, why'd they write it in Greek for one?
	And why do they make the Jews look the enemies of it?
	They would never adopt it when they're the enemies.
	It was for the centurion.
	They go, oh, this is James Valiant's favorite from Creating Christ, the Roman Providence.
	He goes, oh, the Centurion had the most faith.
	So it's pro-Roman.
	No, that's telling the Romans you should have faith in Jesus, right?
	Yeah, here's a story, right?
	Even Jesus saves you.
	He's here for all you guys.
	I want all you guys to be sucked into my story.
	And the story of the centurion, Peter goes and visits the centurion at his home, and he goes, oh, well, I had a vision, and now I'm allowed to, you know, eat with you.
	And now you're allowed to be a Christian and worship Jesus.
	Like, before the vision, though, you were an impure, evil Gentile.
	Like, oh, thanks.
	I can't wait to sign up.
	You know, the centurion had the most faith, so it's pro-Roman.
	No, that's mind control to get the Romans to have faith.
	It was a religion for the Romans, not for the Jews.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	That's it.
	Paul says it.
	I'm here for the Gentiles.
	That's why I'm here.
	I'm here for the Romans and the Greeks, and I'm trying to convince them and get them to suck up to this story.
	And then that's what they did, and it worked, right?
	Yeah.
	So let's talk a little bit.
	Shift gears the last 20 minutes.
	And I know you've been vocal before about supporting Palestine and criticizing the Zionist state.
	So, what are your overall thoughts about what's been going on in the Middle East the last month?
	Yeah, so I have a long history of promoting BDS, right?
	Boycott, divestment, and sanction of Israel.
	This is back when I was teaching at the University of Michigan, going way back 2003.
	So, I mean, it's been 20 years that I've been sort of active and trying to, in a sense, lead the charge in many ways because we had so many cowardly academics in my university that I sort of had to take that on myself.
	But yeah, I mean, you know, as a professor of philosophy, I'm teaching ethics, and you say, well, look, here's the height of ethical atrocities, what was going on in Palestine, even before the current slaughter.
	I mean, it was apartheid.
	It was a double apartheid system.
	It was a classic story of the same two root causes.
	It was Jewish dominion and Jewish misanthropy.
	In prophecy.
	Jews are out to rule the world, and we don't give a damn about anybody else.
	You guys are animals or worse than animals.
	And that just pervades the whole story of the Jews and the Israelis.
	And, you know, you could see it 20 years ago in Palestine.
	You can see it 50 years ago, 100 years ago in Palestine.
	And it was repeatedly the case.
	I pushed BDS.
	I said, well, at a bare minimum, you shouldn't be investing in these guys.
	You don't want to give your institutional money to the weapons manufacturers who are selling the bombs that are killing these people for crying out loud.
	That's the bare minimum.
	I mean, that's the bare minimum, right, that you could do as an ethical person in this world is not support and promote the killing and the apartheid that was going on.
	And, you know, it was like pulling teeth trying to get people to sign on to that movement.
	The best I could do was to say, look, we need to start a debate about this topic.
	And I would draft up letters like saying, do you agree that we should at least debate the topic and have the discussion?
	And I could maybe get a few people to sign out of that.
	It was too much to say, oh, no, we need to condemn them.
	No, nobody wanted to do that.
	Maybe they could say, yeah, okay, it's a little bit problematic.
	We probably should have a discussion about it.
	That was the best I could ever do within the university.
	So it was really a sad situation.
	I got a lot of support from the Arabic students that I had, from the Arabic faculty.
	They were supportive.
	But really, very little more.
	Not much more beyond that.
	And I got condemned and put on nasty lists and all this kind of stuff.
	I got targeted in a sense because the Jewish groups didn't like that I was being vocal against these guys.
	And then it only gets worse.
	I mean, we see what's happening here recently.
	It's just a catastrophe, but it's a logical consequence of where we've been going for the last 20, 30 years at least.
	Yeah, it's really sad what's transpiring that all of my years, almost 10 years now online, my main focus being Zionism, which I don't interpret just as like the modern-day state of Israel, but just Judaism, Christianity, Christian Zionists as well.
	But have you noticed how so much of the rhetoric coming out of Israel and Netanyahu is all religiously inspired?
	Like they're calling the Palestinians Amalek and the sons of darkness, and they're the sons of light, which is the Dead Sea Scroll war scroll, apocalyptic scroll.
	All the rabbis, all the Christian Zionists, they're all saying this is the Ezekiel end times, Gagan-Magog war.
	Netanyahu said in the news the other day that they're fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah.
	And it's like they're about to drag.
	What do you think about them dragging America into a war with Iran and then that escalating to Russia in China?
	Yeah, well, I think, I don't know, I guess I try to be optimistic as much as possible.
	And I think it's really sort of laying bare what's going on.
	So if I can sort of take the optimistic spin, people are seeing what's going on.
	The U.S. government is bending over backwards to suck up to the Israelis, promise them any money, any amount of weapons that they want.
	We're isolating ourselves from the whole world.
	The whole world can see what's going on.
	Any government with a shred of decency is going to oppose what's going on, but only we are completely in support of what's going on.
	And we pay lip service to say, well, we need a little pause.
	Even ceasefire is too much to ask for.
	We just need a pause, right?
	So somebody can get a cigarette break in there before we slaughter them some more.
	I mean, it's ridiculous.
	It's just ludicrous.
	And I think we're just kind of spiraling down.
	We're driving ourselves further, further down into the hole here because the world sees what's going on.
	We're building up alliances against the West.
	Russia and China, they know what's going on.
	They're smarter than we are.
	So they're building movements.
	The people in their countries see what's going on.
	So I think it's just going to drive us down into a hole.
	And I mean, in a sense, we're so corrupt, I feel like we have to sort of collapse.
	We sort of have to implode because there's no other way out of it.
	It's like traditional politics isn't going to save us anymore.
	And we just sort of have to go through some kind of horrible collapse scenario because we don't really deserve any better than this.
	That collapse would – I think that's way – that's harsh.
	I think a collapse would be devastating.
	You got a home country to go back to, but not all of us have that luxury.
	You know that they view Rome as Edom, right?
	That's their biblical archenemy and the descendants of Esau.
	They believe Christianity.
	Rome morphed into Christianity.
	So Christianity and Western civilization, the West is Edom now.
	And that is like one of the central aspects of their end times prophecy is Edom has to be completely annihilated and destroyed in a big end times war and with plagues and by God and by them too, by their instrument of God.
	So I think that's where all of this is heading.
	You think Trump's going to be back in?
	Who's Edom?
	It's not just the Gazans.
	It's not just the Palestinians, right?
	No, it's the West, Europe and America, yeah.
	Exactly.
	So, but we're funding and paying the Jews to kill the Edomites who are ourselves, right?
	Ultimately, they are ourselves.
	I mean, this is what people are saying.
	Hey, you know, the Jews are now the enemies, the obvious enemies of the Gazans and the Palestinians.
	And then, you know, if they get away with that, they're going to expand their attacks against who are going to be the next Edomites on the list, right?
	Who are they going to go after next?
	Well, once they take down the West in Edom, that's when they can set up their new world order from Jerusalem with their Noahide law and their Abraham Accords and their Russia, China, BRICS, new economy, and the Belt and Road Initiative, the new Eurasian.
	Yeah, but that's going to be outside the Israel-U.S.
	alliance, right?
	That's going to be a competing force that will be against us.
	No, I think Israel is going to betray us because they're going to frame it that America is going to betray them.
	And then they're already blaming us for the $6 billion to Iran.
	They're already blaming us saying that we're allowing, we're trying to hold them back and that way too much anti-Semitism is all over America.
	So I see them prepping us for the fall, just like Edom was Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution.
	They also identified Germany as Edom even before World War II.
	So I feel like we're next.
	Yeah.
	Well, right.
	But, you know, for now, they get too much benefit from their alliance with the U.S. So for now.
	For now.
	But once they use us up and once they use up Christianity, it's meant to be destroyed at the end times.
	Right.
	But then what?
	So then do they go it on their own?
	What are they going to do?
	They're going to really go it on their own because everybody's going to see those guys for what they are, you know, as world haters and attempted world conquerors and hatred of humanity is going to be laid bare.
	So who's going to be their savior then?
	They're not going to have enough money or military power to do anything.
	If that becomes obvious, then the Muslim world maybe goes berserk and just obliterates them.
	I don't know how they can respond to that situation.
	Well, what they believe happens in Gaga Magog is it's the East and the West.
	It's Ishmael versus Esau.
	So Islam versus Christianity.
	They interpret it as Gog is Russia and Persia and some other countries versus the West, essentially, versus Esau.
	they're supposed to mutually destroy each other and then I guess rise from the ashes after Jacob's trouble and the tribulation Israel will...
	They've been able to fake prophecies to theologically conquer half the world.
	They were able to return and create their state that's a rising power.
	Now they got us on the brink of World War III with their prophecies almost perfectly aligned.
	So it's just, I take a more after we and Russia destroy ourselves, then they rise from the ashes and take over what's left.
	That's kind of the idea.
	Basically, yeah.
	With their new canal, too.
	Have you heard about the new canal they're trying to build through Gaza?
	The Ben-Gurion Canal?
	I don't think so.
	No.
	It's to compete.
	I mean, they're cutting it in half, right?
	I mean, they're literally going to.
	Well, yeah, well, that's one of the theories why there's this canal that has to go right through the middle of Gaza to the ocean to compete with the Suez Canal.
	So that's, I mean, that's, I'm sure there's bigger reasons why, you know, they want all the holy land.
	And it's crazy, you know, they're calling this the war of the sons of light and sons of darkness, right?
	Yeah.
	Gallant, the head of the IDF, said it as well.
	Netanyahu tweeted it and then deleted the tweet.
	He also said it in like two speeches.
	There's been headlines everywhere.
	The Sanhedrin in Israel minted a coin with Netanyahu and Trump on the coin, and it's called the War of the Sons of Light and Sons of Darkness coin.
	And Netanyahu got back in with the most hardcore Zionist religious cabinet Israel's ever have, they say.
	Trump, it looks like Trump's going to get back in right with his QAnon messianic movement, all the Christian Zionists that back him and that are his followers as well.
	So we're headed for the perfect storm of an end times prophecy movie to play out.
	And I think that's what's happening is these three Abrahamic faiths, through their belief, are manifesting these prophecies.
	What do you think?
	Yeah, right.
	In a sense, they become self-fulfilling, right?
	Because you want them to be fulfilled.
	You actively work to make them fulfilled.
	And then that's always a danger with any sort of prophecy like that that you want to see happen.
	I don't know.
	I mean, it's going to be interesting.
	There's a fair chance Trump wins next year.
	And he does so many stupid things.
	It's a little hard to say.
	But some of his positions in principle are right.
	And he's made a point of saying, hey, I kept us sort of out of these wars.
	He's going to save us from World War III.
	I'm the only one that can save the world from World War III.
	Well, right.
	Okay.
	But I mean, even the little skirmishes, he managed basically to stay out of those sort of wars, at least, you know, to some extent for his four years.
	So I don't see any appetite for a war with Russia.
	He wants to sort of cozy up with Russia.
	He wants to settle the Ukraine thing, and he'll give Russia half of Ukraine if he has to.
	So he's going to cozy up to Russia.
	He doesn't want to war with Russia.
	I don't think he's going to really go to war for the Jews.
	And, you know, it'd be, I don't know what, you know, I don't, I don't see that.
	But they want us to go.
	Netanyahu wants us to go to war with Russia.
	Yeah, of course.
	So it wouldn't take much for them to do what has to be done for that to happen.
	There's plenty of ways that they can make that war happen if they need to do something themselves.
	Or they could just sit back and just, you know, wait for something to happen that they can take advantage of.
	Yeah, well, I mean, right.
	I don't know.
	I guess obviously we don't know what's going to happen.
	But I don't see, I don't see, you know, Trump seems to be unwilling to go along with that route where he would jump in to save Israel if they really got attacked by Iran.
	That's kind of an interesting question.
	I think him and Kushner are going to get back in and they're going to go, we've got to finish the job with the Abraham Accords and bringing peace to the Middle East.
	I think that's what we're going to see.
	Yeah, but what's that going to be?
	They're going to let them obliterate the Palestinians and wipe out the Gazans and the West Bank and just clear it out.
	I mean, they didn't.
	I mean, they sucked up to the Zionists in some ways, but they didn't really do anything substantial.
	They didn't allow those significant ground-based changes to occur like what's happening now.
	So what's the more optimistic, how do you think this is going to play out with the war?
	How do you think this doesn't result in World War III and Armageddon?
	Yeah, well, I don't know.
	I mean, Israel has to sort of be defeated.
	I mean, one way or another, because they're just too much of a danger to the world.
	So, you know, one way or another, they have to be, yeah, just militarily defeated.
	Maybe it's going to take a two-front, three-front war.
	Maybe they're just going to be sort of slowly bled to death by gradually ramping up attacks on them from Hezbollah and maybe through the West Bank.
	If they just get entangled in a long, it doesn't have to be an overnight, you know, blitzkrieg kind of thing.
	It could just be a prolonged, just a bleeding down, you know, gradually killing the troops, never letting the pressure off, you know, running occasional missiles and bombs in there.
	You know, a small little state can't sustain itself, I don't think, very long under those conditions.
	So if, you know, Iran or whoever can supply those guys with weapons to keep the military pressure on and just kind of wear them down and bleed them down.
	And, you know, the secular Jews are going to get worried about constant attacks and, you know, air raid sirens and they're not going to want to go there and they're going to have a population loss problem.
	And, you know, that could really spell major troubles for that state.
	They may be going under here.
	So you think that's what's going to...
	It seems like you know the bombing of the hospitals and all of these dead kids we're seeing all over the internet and just how they're dehumanizing them and just acting lying about all this war wartime atrocity propaganda.
	It's like they're almost baiting the Arab world to attack them to get us sucked in.
	They know what they're doing.
	They know if they keep it up, eventually the Arabs are going to respond, retaliate, and then America is going to have to get sucked in, which is what I think their ultimate goal is here.
	But that's such a dangerous game to play, right?
	You're the target.
	You're the target of the bullseye, and you're saying, yeah, bring that on, launch those missiles against us, and then our buddy's going to launch missiles against you.
	And, you know, you're right in the middle of all that crossfire.
	That's a mind-bogglingly.
	But it's what they want.
	This is what the religion teaches.
	This is what the Christian Zionists want.
	John Hagee and how connected he is with Trump and all the top Republican politicians.
	These Chabad Lubavitchers and the Laikud party and the rabbis around Netanyahu, this is what they want, man.
	They're obsessed about this happening.
	They're rubbing their hands, fantasizing about the prophetic destruction of the West in this big war.
	Yeah, I mean, it takes a kind of religious insanity to actually want this kind of thing to happen.
	And, you know, from an objective secular standpoint, obviously there's no religious basis to this all.
	It's just, you know, stupid mythology that you're trying to realize.
	And that could be the end of you.
	I mean, when you act that extremely on, you know, extreme mythology that has no basis in reality because it is just mythology.
	I mean, yeah, that's when you die.
	I mean, you get obliterated when you do that.
	So I can imagine if they're acting on the basis of their some kind of fundamentalist Judaic philosophy or theology, you know, yeah, that could be the end of them.
	So, you know, even if they're welcoming it, they're doing it for stupid reasons and they may pay the huge price for that.
	Think of the role Christians are playing, helping them fulfill their end times prophecies.
	Like Paul converting the Roman Empire to Christianity and giving them these Jewish eschological end times prophecies.
	Now, it's like the Christian prophecies have to fulfill the Jewish prophecies with the promise that Jesus will return.
	Is that not so suspicious?
	So the Christians are like helping them build their temple, return to the state, and want the Antichrist to reign with the promise that Jesus will come back.
	Like we have a Jewish apocalyptic death cult that's dominating half the planet.
	And I think that's the elephant in the room that no biblical scholar wants to acknowledge.
	Yeah, I think basically that's right.
	And, you know, eventually, if it's just, if it's just a cult, you know, you can persist for a long time.
	But if you start acting on the basis of that and you incite these wars that are, you know, genocidal and ultimately suicidal, well, you know, then you pay the price.
	And I think there's a fair chance that that's what's going to happen.
	They're going to pay the price and they're going to really get hammered in this impending conflict.
	And, you know, all you can do is hope that we don't get too sucked in.
	We don't want to get nuclear weapons rained down in our heads over here.
	So hammered by who?
	By Hezbollah and the West Bank and I guess Gaza is going to bounce back or something.
	Like, I don't see them getting hammered.
	America will step in immediately if that happens.
	They're already shooting down missiles and drones and attacks from Yemen, Lebanon, everywhere.
	I mean, we can't even keep that up.
	That's, again, that's a slow drain.
	I think that's what, you know, Putin was doing that in Ukraine.
	It's actually very clever on his part.
	It's really a slow drain of the capacity of both the U.S. and Europe to drain down their weapons and their armories and drain Ukraine of men at the same time.
	But isn't he draining his own supplies too, though, to do that?
	Yeah, but he's got 10 times, you know, 50 times the resources that we do.
	He's killing 10 to 1.
	He's using small weapons to wipe out hugely expensive weapons.
	So I think he's happy to play this game.
	If you look at what it's costing him and what he's taking out of commission, he's coming out way ahead.
	I think he continued that game for a long time.
	He's like saying, hey, I'm losing one guy and I'm killing 10.
	I can play that game for a mighty long time because I got way more than even at one to one.
	I can play that game because I got more than the Ukrainians got.
	And I can use small arms missiles to take out Abram's tanks because I got way more missiles than they got tanks.
	So you can play that sort of bleeding game for a mighty long time.
	I think Putin's probably smart about that.
	He's doing that there.
	And probably Hezbollah and Nasrallah and Khomeini and Iran could do the same thing in Israel.
	They can sort of bleed them.
	They don't have to launch a full-out war.
	They can just fire missiles and shoot little bombs and conduct raids and they can just bleed them, bleed them down because they got way more Muslims than you got Jews in Israel.
	They can suffer 10 to 1 defeat, no problem.
	And then in five years, Israel's done because they got nobody left.
	I mean, the Hamas is taking out Israeli troops as we speak, right?
	They're blowing up tanks and they're shooting down troops as we speak.
	And yeah, okay, they're probably losing 10 to 1, but they got 10 to 1 to give.
	So you think Israel is going to ultimately end up being Palestine in a few years, you think?
	That's a possibility?
	It's going to be what?
	Palestine.
	I think the state's going to fall.
	That's interesting.
	It's going to fall.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I think it's going to fall.
	Do you think that they'll fall without America going down with it and getting in nuclear war?
	We want to allow them to fall.
	We'll sacrifice ourselves before they fall.
	Well, okay, I don't know.
	That's a question.
	If it's a continual slow bleeding to death, we didn't get involved full-blown into Ukraine.
	We're just sort of behind everyone's back.
	We're pumping weapons and arms and got special troops or whatever.
	We're not jumping in full-blown because Putin didn't jump in full-blown.
	But we're still getting bled down by that process.
	And the same kind of thing could happen in Israel, except the Israelis are in far worse shape than the Ukrainians.
	Ukrainians, they're done.
	They're out of troops.
	They're out of guys.
	They're out of soldiers.
	We've wiped out 300,000 of their fighting-age men.
	Israel can't, they can't, they're smaller country than that.
	They can't even afford a fraction of that.
	So all we got to do is play this bleeding game with the Israelis and keep their troops fighting and keep picking them off and knock off a tank here and a tank there and do that for a few.
	It's not going to be dramatic enough.
	If it's not a dramatic atom bomb over Tel Aviv that might draw us in, if it's just bleeding them down, we'll condemn it and we'll say, hey, we can't do this and we'll send our weapons there and we'll get bled down too.
	But that works for the Muslim world.
	They can actually win with that strategy, I think, in the long run.
	Well, that sounds a lot better than what I fear could happen if these religious fanatics have their way.
	So I hope you're right.
	I hope I'm wrong.
	I hope they fail.
	I hope you're right.
	It would be a much, much better world.
	right, fingers crossed.
	You bleed them down and they just disappear.
	That's what we're hoping.
	So at least that's what I'm hoping.
	Not them, the people disappear, but the state of Israel as we know it.
	Yeah, exactly, exactly.
	The state, the state has to go.
	It gets justice.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Let's wrap it up.
	Tell people where they can find your books, your websites, and why they should buy the Jesus hoax book.
	Why it's so important.
	Yeah, like I say, it's really the new edition is really kind of well-documented, well-substantiated, responds to all the critics.
	You know, I've heard all the complaints by now.
	It's been four or five years since the first edition.
	I tried to respond to all the critics.
	So, you know, save the trouble of putting nasty little comments out there.
	Just get the book, look at that.
	I've responded to them and see what I've had to say.
	You know, like I said, there's really nothing out there that competes with it.
	No one wants to talk about this.
	No one wants to, there's no counter-argument.
	You know, I've just sort of kept, like, I think at some point I said, I captured the whole field.
	I captured the whole territory because no one wants to argue with me.
	They don't want to take the same view and they don't want to try to defend their own view.
	So if you really want to see a kind of an insightful case, and it's not technical reading, it's relatively straightforward, relatively easy reading.
	I think it's pretty digestible for pretty much anyone in your audience for sure.
	You know, yeah, I think it's really, at a bare minimum, that viewpoint has to be heard.
	That has to be part of the discussion and the dialogue surrounding Christianity.
	And they have to answer to it because there's really a lot of very strong points to be made in favor of this hoax thesis.
	Chad asked about an audiobook version.
	I think that would be a great idea because I listen to way more audiobooks than read these days.
	I know a lot of people do.
	I get comments for those.
	I probably need to look in that.
	I wanted to get this print edition out first.
	That was my first thing.
	But yeah, I agree.
	I probably need to do an audiobook too.
	Yeah, that would be good.
	Because, you know, reading sucks.
	Way cooler to listen, I think.
	Who's got time to read anymore anyway, right?
	All I can do is I can listen to something while I'm getting dressed in the morning or whatever.
	Yeah.
	Exactly, exactly.
	All right.
	Well, I appreciate everybody for donating tonight.
	Big shout out to John Garatis.
	It's Roth.
	Who else?
	all John Garadas today.
	You guys are really Okay, we got one more comment.
	Boleslaw says, USA did the same thing in Ukraine, provided supplies little by little, bleeding Russia and not getting involved itself.
	I believe the U.S. strategy in the Middle East is the same.
	USA already called for a ceasefire and called Israel out for carnage.
	Did it America?
	That's what I saw yesterday, the trending video.
	Yeah, Blinken said something about, yeah, he's against the ceasefire because that's going to allow Hamas to recover and regroup or something.
	So, yeah, I think that's.
	Yeah, but appreciate you, Boleslaw.
	Appreciate everybody.
	Antiquity Resurgent says the vision of Cornelis is about Joel 2.28 verse that Paul quotes at Pentecost.
	Story Luke is conveying is that these earliest Christians are Israelites.
	In the last days, Israel's sons will have visions.
	That is the grift that Paul preached.
	These non-Jews thought they were Israelites.
	Thank you, Antiquity Resurgent.
	All right.
	Look forward to the comments below.
	We'll have to get Dr. Scurbina on again in a few months.
	And I appreciate you all.
	See you all again very soon.
	Have a nice night.
	Thank you, David.
	Thanks.
	Thanks, Adam.
	Glad to be here again.
	All right.
	And we'll see you guys soon.

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