Know More News - Adam Green - Jesus Mythicists Winning the Debate | Know More News w/ Adam Green

All Episodes

Previous Next

Feb. 20, 2025 - Know More News - Adam Green

01:55:21

Jesus Mythicists Winning the Debate | Know More News w/ Adam Green

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	What's up, guys?
	Adam Green here with no more news.
	Thank you all for joining me today.
	Wednesday, February 19th, 2025.
	Got a important show for you guys today.
	Going to be going over some of the highlights of the recent Jesus mythicism debates that's been happening on YouTube.
	I have been obsessively following the did Jesus exist, did he not exist debate that's happening mostly online and in the scholarship and published works and in these debates that we've been seeing recently.
	And they need more attention because the Jesus mythicists keep winning.
	And I feel like we're at a tipping point.
	Hopefully we're at a tipping point where people are going to realize that this supposed consensus of biblical scholars that know without a question that Jesus existed is not true at all.
	The debate's actually been happening for a little over a decade now, pretty fiercely between Dr. Richard Carrier and his book on the historicity of Jesus.
	And he's got several other Jesus mythicism books as well.
	And verse, arguably the most popular biblical scholar in the world, Bart Ehrman, who had his book, Did Jesus Exist.
	I've read both many times.
	I've also got the book here, Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth.
	This is a book written in response to his book, Did Jesus Exist?
	And it gets ripped apart by many different scholars, like Richard Carrier has some chapters.
	Earl Doherty, who wrote the Jesus puzzle, the theory of the celestial Jesus, a mythical celestial Jesus before he was historicized.
	Carrier expanded on that.
	One of the co-authors also is Frank Zindler.
	The Jesus, the Jews never knew one of his books, another Jesus mythicist.
	Randall Helms doesn't have a chapter in the book, but they all cite him as well.
	Gospel Fictions by Randall Helms.
	Completely fiction, all these gospels.
	And David Fitzgerald, who wrote Nailed in the Jesus Mything in Action series as well.
	And then Robert Price also can't forget to mention Robert Price, who's written many books on Jesus mythicism for decades now.
	Judaizing Jesus is one of the paperbacks that I have of his.
	But we're not going to be watching any of those people debating.
	We're going to be watching some of their acolytes debating.
	The debate has fiercely been happening online.
	People act like it's not debated.
	It's really like the only thing that's seriously, there's no more contentious issue.
	And as soon as we clear up these musics and stuff, we're going to play some of the highlights.
	These debates have been happening.
	More attention.
	We're going to watch the highlights.
	They need some more attention.
	So the guy hosting a lot of these is a YouTube channel called History Valley, Jacob Berman.
	I've been watching him since he started.
	He might be on the spectrum or autistic, but he knows a lot about biblical studies and puts a lot of work in on his YouTube channel, doing videos and interviews with all types of authors and scholars and covering a wide range of biblical studies issues.
	So he's hosted some of these debates.
	He's been in some of these debates.
	Here's one of them.
	They all got like about 7,000 views max.
	This one was two months ago.
	There's been a series of these two.
	Did Jesus exist, Jacob Berman and Jack Bull versus Dr. Aaron Adair, who is awesome.
	He's one of the best Jesus mythicism debaters there is.
	And so that was the first one.
	That was two months ago.
	And then they did Did Jesus Exist, Dr. Dennis MacDonald, who writes books on the theory that the New Testament is based on Homer's epics and the Odyssey.
	And which I think he's right about a lot of that, by the way.
	And then so it's Dennis MacDonald and Jacob Berman arguing for Jesus did exist versus Dr. Aaron Adair and Godless Engineer.
	Godless Engineer does tons of videos with Dr. Richard Carrier and is always covering Jesus mythicism.
	And then after the debate that they had, Berman brings on these friends of his to do debate reviews with several different people.
	We're going to be playing highlights from some of these.
	Again, he brings on these guys.
	And then we're going to show the latest four days ago.
	See, it's only got 1.4,000 views.
	It's three and a half hours.
	We're going to show some of the highlights I have time Stamped because when you see how bad the arguments are and how little proof, any good proof there is for a historical Jesus, and you can see them losing the debate and being destroyed on all of their points and objections they bring up.
	It becomes, I'm just trying to get you guys to see the debate that's been transpiring and unfolding between all these characters because the Jesus mythicists are winning.
	And I think anybody that's honestly, non-biasedly been following this would have to say the same outcome.
	So I appreciate you all for being here.
	Little late night show.
	No suit today.
	We're all under the weather.
	I've got a bit of a cold or a flu.
	Caught it from my daughter.
	Both of my daughters are sick.
	But let's get into it.
	First, with we have the intro from the first debate from Aaron Adair, the proposed mythicist model.
	We're going to start there with his opening statement, basically.
	I'll be going through a proposed way of understanding Christian origins without the historical Jesus needing to be there.
	How does this actually work?
	This is primarily built on the ideas of Richard Carey and Earl Doherty that have probably done the most to put this work together.
	Neil and I are at least familiar with this model and we'll have our things to say about it, but this is a deck that I prepared to try to make.
	It's unfortunate that Carrier's not doing more of these debates.
	He has done a lot, but he should be doing them and slaughtering all of these apologists and scholars on the regular.
	Unfortunately, these other guys are here because although although they do a good job as well and they know Carrier's material, but Carrier apparently charges $150 to everybody, $150 an hour, so he doesn't get invited to as many interviews and debates as I wish he would.
	A case for it and why this model, I think, has legs versus a historicity model.
	So the first one is that when we are trying to understand the earliest form of Christianity versus how it developed later, is that it grew out of what was already a concept that we can see in earlier Judaism, namely that there is the idea of a heavenly man, sometimes called the Son of Man, someone who basically lives in heaven and will be coming to our world in apocalyptic times.
	This is the figure that we see in Daniel 7 in 1 Enoch in 4th Ezra and the 5th of the Sibylline oracles, this heavenly man who basically comes about during the last days.
	And this is a Messiah that is supposed to then bring in the new golden age.
	And that Messiah doesn't necessarily just win a big victory and it's over.
	There is also the concept of a dying Messiah as well.
	So we see explicitly the idea of a dying Messiah in Daniel 9, where it says explicitly the Messiah will be cut off.
	But we also see this dying heavenly Messiah as well showing up in 4th Ezra, where it explicitly says that he will be killed before the final tribulations for the world.
	In 4th Ezra, 2nd address, which I believe was in the Septuagint or maybe the first Bibles, Codex Vaticanus.
	The Messiah in 4th Ezra is likened to the Son of Man, and he dies and then returns and conquers Rome.
	Remind you of anybody?
	Does that seem like a framework that they developed and adopted when they created Christianity?
	The Messiah dies and then conquers Rome.
	They made up the story of the suffering Messiah and Son of Man, Jesus, and then they targeted Rome and Rome eventually ultimately adopted the religion.
	And the God of Israel and the Messiah conquered Edom in Rome as intended, as outlined in 4th Ezra, which they believe is written right after the temple was destroyed.
	1 Enoch, the son of man in 1st Enoch, I went over in my last stream, decoding Jesus from Enoch 48, 46 and 62.
	You could even see this concept as a possible outgrowth in Zechariah 12, 10.
	So I have the text quoted here.
	And the thing to note is that the way that we actually have it in Hebrew, as well as some early Greek translations, is that it talks about this heavenly figure that is pierced.
	And the person who's speaking in this case is actually God Almighty.
	So at the very least, some sort of heavenly entity is saying that I'm the one who will be pierced.
	And everyone will be scared once I come back and have a thing or two to say about that.
	So in Zechariah 12, 10, Hebrew and Greek translations indicate that it is God's voice.
	So God is pierced.
	Pierced, and then they mourn for him like a firstborn.
	So in that verse, they have a pierced one and a firstborn, which they viewed as messianic.
	And then in the Talmud, is it the Talmud or the Zohar?
	I can't remember.
	But one of the two says that the figure that is pierced in Zechariah 12.10 is the Moshiach, son of Joseph.
	And there's a pierced Messiah scroll found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I believe that's the one that connects the branch and the rod of Jesse, the Davidic Messiah, the Davidic root and rod and shoot with the branch of David and Jeremiah in Zechariah.
	A little deep.
	We have actually some testimony from the Talmud that this verse was even explicit used in reference to the dying Messiah, the dying Messiah ben Joseph.
	So it was Talmud that says that it's Moshiach ben Joseph.
	Yo, scene Kyle for 25 says, Adam, I can't imagine the kosher grind you feel as I've been following you since 2019.
	Thank you for following so long, Scene Kyle.
	And you lifted my brain fog from Jewish fairy tales.
	Love to hear it, man.
	The Jewish fairy tales outweighs a free person's free will.
	Thank you for all you do.
	Very nice to hear your testimonial about freeing your mind from the Jewish prophecy lies.
	Thank you, Scene Kyle.
	That the name of son of Joseph for a Messiah sounds familiar.
	That's because you've been reading your Bible.
	There's also the idea that I have seen Jesus is the son of Joseph in the New Testament.
	That this Messiah can also have a much more mysterious birthing process.
	So the text I'm going to be showing here, I'm actually relying on the Syriac version of these texts.
	One, because Jack will teach me a thing or two, because I know his Syriac is far better than mine.
	And two, so that way that actually we have all these texts in the same language.
	For example, the Odes of Solomon, we only have it incomplete in Syriac.
	Fourth Ezra, we don't have in Greek, but we have complete versions in Syriac and so on.
	So there's an interesting verb that is being used here to talk about the origins or the birth of this Messiah.
	The verb there is Dinah.
	It's the same that you find in Aramaic, Dina.
	And it seems to also then get translated into Greek as anatelo, anaptele.
	Basically, this is a term that you would often use in a more astronomical context.
	For example, this is used in the star prophecy of Numbers 24, 17, the star that will rise out of Jacob and so on.
	The word for arise there in the Syriac translation of this In the Peshitta is Dinah.
	And in 4th Ezra, where it also talks about this Messiah figure, this heavenly Messiah, who is also supposed to be of Davidic stock.
	The term there we see in the Syriac is also the same word.
	If you go to Hebrews 7, it's interesting because it says the Messiah will be like Melchizedek will be of the Melchizedekian priesthood and like Melchizedek, who has no father and mother.
	This seems to be also what this Messiah is supposed to be like.
	And where does this Messiah come from?
	He says also that this Messiah will arise from the tribe of Judah, basically a way it's saying also supposed to be Davidic.
	And again, the same verb is being used there.
	When you see the same word, the arise is also the Anatole is the word they have for branch also in Zechariah that ties in all these ideas.
	And then they use the same word for the star of Bethlehem that arises, same one from Numbers 24, 17.
	And they reference Numbers 24, 17 in the Dead Sea Scrolls, too.
	So this isn't like original to Jesus.
	It developed and progressed messianic expectations.
	Were you guys familiar with that?
	That in Hebrews 7 it talks about compares Jesus to Melchizedek.
	Like there's a Melchizedek scroll in the Dead Sea Scrolls also that connects all these different verses in Daniel and Isaiah and the Psalms.
	But it says that Melchizedek was without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life, resembling the Son of God.
	He remains a priest forever.
	So they're basically saying, telling us that Jesus lived since the beginning of time, which Paul says, and never died, and is the Son of God and doesn't have a father or mother.
	Pretty weird that they're going to say Jesus is like Melchizedek, the high priest, and he didn't have a mother and father.
	Kind of implies that Jesus never had a mother and father.
	Meanwhile, Amalek has been watching Berman as well, too.
	Yeah, I disagree with him on some stuff, but his channel has a lot of interesting guests and material and topics.
	Okay, where were we?
	Come over then to the Odes of Solomon 41.
	A couple interesting things.
	One, it says in Ode 41 that the Messiah is of another race than those that saw him, which is a bit weird because if he was seen by a bunch of humans, is he saying he's not human?
	That's already a bit odd.
	And also somewhat similar to what we are seeing in Hebrews 7, saying that he's kind of of a different lineage than normal.
	And also it says that the light of the word will arise.
	Again, using the same Syriac word.
	There seems to be this idea of the origins of this entity, including this heavenly entity, and using terminology for his birth that is not normal for human gestation.
	Where do we get the idea, though, that this kind of applies to our friend JC?
	So in our earliest literature about Jesus as a suffering Messiah, we see things that actually say that he was heaven-sent.
	This is explicit in the Philippians hymn, which is usually considered some of the earliest Christian literature that we have access to, pulled from Paul's letter to the Philippians, or allegedly.
	I know Jack is going to have a few things to say about that.
	The ascension of Isaiah also talks about the Messiah coming from the highest heaven, descending, getting killed, and then reascending.
	Who kills this Messiah?
	It actually seems like the idea that this Messiah wasn't actually ever here on earth, but was actually killed in a more supernatural context.
	This seems to be explicitly said in a few different cases in the ascension of Isaiah.
	I have some of the texts stated there that says the Messiah will descend to the firmament, basically the upper atmosphere, to be killed, that they will not explicitly go down all the way beyond that point, and that he will become like those in the firmament to be killed by those there.
	I also see hints of this in Revelation 1:7 and also suggestive in 1 Corinthians.
	I'll be talking about those verses a little bit later.
	Then this Messiah, after being killed, is transformed.
	It becomes an even more spectacular-looking supernatural being.
	Again, this is explicit in the Philippians hymn.
	It's seen in the ascension of Isaiah.
	I also see.
	Look at this in the ascension of Isaiah 9:14.
	He's killed by demonic forces in the heavens, and it says, and the God of that world, or Satan, will stretch forth his hand against the sun, and they will crucify him on a tree and will slay him, not knowing who he is.
	Paul says essentially the exact same thing.
	It's probably this, 1 Corinthians 2, 8.
	1 Corinthians 2, 8, which says, None of the rulers, none of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
	The rulers of this age, the rulers of the air, as it says, the arrow in Greek.
	The God of that world, not the God of heaven, the God of that world is Satan.
	Satan stretched forth his hand against the son that crucifies him on a tree, not knowing who he is.
	The myth started with a tradition like we see in Paul, 1 Corinthians 2:8, and the ascension of Isaiah, where he's killed in heaven, hung on a tree, buried, became flesh in the heavens so he could suffer and trick Satan and his demons with this Yom Kippur scapegoat sacrifice.
	This is in the star hymn of Ignatius from the letter to the Ephesians 19.
	And this is also in the shorter version, not just the more accepted version by scholars.
	So this means that in the earliest versions of Christianity, the idea of who Jesus was and what he did was all basically in a heavenly supernatural context.
	There wasn't a guy running around northern Galilee in the first century in this earliest version of the story.
	How, though, do we get the actual...
	Let me show you this.
	It's in my book.
	Isaiah 9, 14.
	He didn't read 9, 16, 15, and 16 either.
	It says, and thus his descent, as you will see, will be hidden even from the heavens so that it will not be known who he is.
	There's this huge theme of Jesus is the secret Messiah or the hidden son of man.
	It talks all about the hidden son of man and Enoch as well.
	They didn't know who he was.
	And when he hath plundered the angel of death, he will ascend on the third day and he will remain in that world 545 days.
	So indicating that this didn't happen on earth.
	And it also talks about in Ascension of Isaiah, how go forth and descent through all the heavens and thou wilt descend to the firmament in that world to the angel in Sheol.
	Thou wilt descend, so Satan, and thou wilt be careful, become like the form of angels of the firmament.
	The New Testament also says that he was seen by the angels and preached to the nations.
	So not seen by the nations, not seen by the Jews.
	Paul implies that nobody would even know who Jesus was if it weren't for preachers like him.
	Paul literally talks about his understanding of Jesus and then cites a verse: It's what no eye could see and what no ear could hear and no mind couldn't conceive of the story.
	How, though, do we get the actual stories of Jesus?
	Part of that is that people were creating stories based on revelations they had or what they could extract from scripture.
	This is something that we actually see explicitly cited as how they get knowledge of revelations they have in the letters of Paul.
	That Paul says over and over again that everything he knows comes via revelation or scriptural scriptural exegesis.
	In fact, in 2 Corinthians 12, also it seems like Paul or someone hinted at as being Paul also takes a trip up to the heavens to basically see the Garden of Eden and things like that.
	This is apparently how the ancient Christians learned about how the world works and how God interacts with it.
	Not that a carpenter came by and was giving them some good news.
	Now, then the idea that we have the gospel stories are ultimately taking these revelations or these scriptural exegesis.
	I'm actually not sure what the best plural of exegesis is off the top of my head.
	I need more coffee.
	Exegesis.
	These kinds of stories and creating a more novelistic approach to present that story to the masses at large in a process that's often called euhemerization, taking something divine and putting it in a more earthly context.
	But there's actually some sort of deeper hidden meaning that you basically have to work your way up to learn about.
	That's probably how it started, but it's also inevitable that these competing Christian sects would claim disciples of an earthly person because it gives them more authority.
	You know, I forgot to mention also, in response to a debunker of Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist, which every Christian loves to cite Bart Ehrman.
	They've never read his book.
	They've never read any of the books refuting him.
	Another book that refutes him a lot is the Jewish Gospels by Daniel Boyerin proves that they would have invented a crucified Messiah.
	Bart Ehrman claims they wouldn't have.
	Clearly, from the Talmudic scholar, they did.
	They would have and they did.
	And also, there's a PhD dissertation by Raphael Letaster that is like hundreds of pages refuting Bart Ehrman's book.
	So the top book proving Jesus existed has been ripped to pieces and destroyed by a bunch of other scholars.
	But they're all still trying to gaslight and pretend like you're not even allowed to question it.
	This is something that we understand happened in other cults at the time.
	Plutarch talks about this with the cult of Isis and Osiris, saying that all the stories of the gods running around in Egypt, getting killed and such, is actually a story of what's happening in the heavens.
	I'm saying that something similar could be happening in the Christian cult.
	And then again, revelation becomes history.
	We can see this, for example, in the Lord's Supper as described in 1 Corinthians 11.
	This is something that Paul says was a revelation to him.
	And then this eventually becomes the Last Supper, as we see in the gospel accounts.
	In fact, it might be the case that Mark in particular knows Paul's letters and is using that to tell the story that way.
	So we can go from mythical Jesus to historical or historicized stories to then people actually believing those stories in mass and that becoming the Jesus model that we know and then try to deal with and finding out what the historical Jesus is behind that.
	I'm saying what's behind that could actually just be all myth.
	All myth.
	The scholars start, the apologists and the biblical scholars like to start with the presupposition that there for sure is a historical Jesus at the core of the story.
	So if they just remove all of the criteria of different things where it's obviously a myth or, you know, other things like that, and they think they can just strip away all the miracles and the clear myths or the clear fulfillment and rewriting of prophecy.
	And then at the core, you'll still see some historical Jesus.
	That's like taking a plot of Superman, removing all of him as Superman, and there being a real historical Clark Kent.
	Doesn't work like that.
	The earlier, earlier, farther back you go in Christianity, the earliest layers, the more mythical, celestial, and you see no biographical details, not placing him on earth in any type of non-ambiguous way.
	Here's shout out Liam, but here's PhD Raphael Lataster's introduction on Ehrman.
	He debunks the top latest two books supposedly proving Jesus.
	Ehrman and Casey have mistranslated the ancient Greek or oh, he's not claiming that they have mistranslated the sources, but they do make logical errors of biblical proportions, which should have us questioning the soundness of their conclusions.
	Reasons we might think that is one of our earliest commenters, Justin Martyr, writing in the mid-150s, he tells us that the Old Testament is just full of symbolism and parables, things that are actually there to hide the true meaning, which the demons misunderstood and created all their gods and demigods by accident because they didn't really understand things.
	But Christians like Justin, who can really understand everything, he will come through and explain to you what those texts actually mean and how he knows what Jesus did and didn't do.
	And the interesting thing is when he actually does that, he shows how the stories about Jesus are being created by scripturalizing prophecies, and he knows things that even the gospel authors don't know or even straight up contradict them.
	He will cite these quote-unquote memoirs of the apostles, but note that when he says apostles, that's distinguishing it from disciples.
	He'll distinguish the two terms and he'll even call John of Patmos an apostle and actually cite John of Patmos as a source about what Jesus is going to do.
	This is not what you would do if you treat these as just straightforward historical sources.
	And it looks like he'll invent his own examples of how he knows what Jesus did.
	So for example, Jesus born in a cave.
	Does he cite a gospel for that?
	No.
	What he does is he cites Isaiah 33 and he says to fulfill scripture that Jesus had to be born in a cave.
	This does not fit any of the gospels that we have canonically, but this is what he declares must be the case.
	See, this was the tradition, writing stories about this mythical comic book character, this fan fiction of God's secret hidden Messiah in the scriptures.
	And if you want to tell stories about what he did, the only source for knowledge about Jesus for the first Christians and even for Justin Martyr was the scriptures.
	That's the only source they had to know about Jesus.
	I should look this up.
	Justin Martyr, dial 70.
	Also, he'll straight Up contradict the gospels.
	So, for example, when he talks about the origins of the Magi, the wise men, our Gospel Matthew says they come from the east.
	This is usually understood as Babylonia or Persia.
	What does Justin say?
	He says they come from Arabia.
	That's not the same thing.
	He even specifies they come from Damascus.
	That's not the same thing.
	That is definitely not to the east of the Holy Land.
	If anything, Damascus is north.
	Most of Arabia is south.
	And also, the two regions aren't even the same.
	Justin has to like really stretch things to say Damascus was at one time controlled by someone from Arabia, therefore it's Arabian.
	Really strange.
	But he says this was to fulfill scripture.
	So he's literally changing the stories to fulfill scripture as he needs it to and also say all sorts of things about the Magi being actually demon controlled.
	Again, you read the Gospel of Matthew.
	Where does it say that?
	It doesn't.
	This is how Justin understands the truth of what happened based on his reading of the Old Testament.
	This is not historical reasoning.
	This is the sort of thing that people do out of exegesis, not out of doing good histiographic work.
	Also, there's something a bit weird as well.
	When Justin keeps talking about the birth story of Jesus, he talks about the star of Bethlehem and he says, yeah, there was a star at Jesus' birth, but he also explicitly says multiple times that Jesus is a star.
	How do you square that circle?
	How can there both be a star at Jesus' birth?
	But Jesus is also a star.
	In fact, Justin Martyr says again that Satan and the world didn't know the Messiah.
	They didn't know that he was there.
	It's the hidden Messiah idea.
	And Jesus is the star.
	Not that he's born in Bethlehem under a star, but he is the star.
	He's the light.
	He's the star of Jacob that arises.
	In fact, he'll say it in the same chapter, in the same line of his dialogue with Trifo, saying that Jesus is a star and there was a star at his birth.
	How is this even possible unless he's actually reading something else into the text and actually sees the text not as something historical, but as basically something to be interpreted, something that is symbolic.
	In other words, he's also not treating the gospels as gospel truth.
	And when we try to figure out what's actually going on behind there, it is a bit interesting.
	There are other stories where Jesus is actually explicitly a star.
	This is something that the book of Revelation says in multiple cases that Jesus is the morning star.
	2 Peter says the same thing.
	The star hymn from Ignatius, again, Jesus is this new shining bright star.
	The revelation of the Magi is also this later gospel.
	There's also a star idea that was developing in the Testament of Levi that they found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, another pre-Christian text.
	It has Jesus as both the baby in the crib and the star that the Magi see and guides them.
	So Jesus could bilocate and change his morphology.
	Later commenters on Revelation, our earliest one telling us that Jesus is the morning star, the morning star is the star of Bethlehem, which, by transitive property, Jesus is the star of Bethlehem.
	That's a little bit weird, isn't it?
	Unless you are treating the Gospels as parabolic or symbolic, this will not make sense.
	And if they're treating the Gospels this way, that this is not literally true, but there's some other hidden meaning behind that, that might be telling us what might be the real mythical Jesus behind the quote-unquote historical Jesus of the Gospels.
	How am I on time?
	You have 90 seconds.
	90 seconds.
	Okay.
	So I'm just going to very quickly go through some of the stuff that I have been putting together.
	That some of it is going to be published soon.
	Some of it is the stuff I recently presented at SBL.
	But very quickly, one thing I'm going to note is there seems to be a deeper semantic connection between the morning star and the star of Bethlehem.
	The text there says that the star was Ente Anatole.
	This phrase is actually a little bit weird.
	This combination of preposition and anatole is extremely rare.
	And when you go digging for it, as I've tried to do, what it really seems to suggest is a star at its first rising saying that this is a morning star, the title that Jesus gets.
	There's literally a morning star at his birth, and Jesus is the morning star.
	Kind of interesting.
	Also, note that a morning star would be useful because a leading star that is Lucifer, the morning star, is also the same star that led Aeneas to Rome to found this new country at the end of the Trojan War.
	So I think Matthew knows what this is coming from, and he's using that to play on by having his own leading morning star to bring the wise men from the east to the newborn king.
	Also, this phrase, his star, when you try looking for things with this genitive construction, that it's also quite rare.
	And when you find it, you find over and over again.
	Actually, it's the case that when you say someone is his star or that's that person's star, you are identifying that person or that person's soul with the star.
	So this is the case with Julius Caesar.
	This is the case with one of Hadrian's famous lovers who died in the Nile.
	This is even true of the high priest from the Testament of Levi, a Jewish or Jewish Christian text.
	It's also the usual understanding of Numbers 24, 17.
	The star is the same as the Messiah.
	So when we are seeing this phrase, his star in the gospel account, it's actually still holding on.
	And the Dead Sea Scrolls was connecting Numbers 24, 17 to the Davidic branch as well.
	So all these connections were already happening before Christianity did not begin with Christianity, are not unique to Christianity.
	They're messianic memes and fanfictions that developed into what we know as Christianity.
	So that legacy that Jesus is the star.
	And that's clearly not the case of how it is exoterically in the text, but I'm saying that's what it is esoterically.
	We are going from mythical stories into historical.
	And that's the process of euhemerization that I'm seeing.
	I believe I'm out of time, so I'll leave it there.
	Yep, that's your time.
	All right, that was good.
	Good intro.
	And we're going to go to the other side, the affirmative.
	This will be Jacob and Dr. Jack Bull.
	Are you presenting Jacob?
	Yes, and before I do.
	Okay, we're going to skip that and now go to 41.16.
	Here we go.
	Over my time.
	Oregon mentions that Josephus talks about John the Baptist, and nobody complains about that, to my knowledge.
	I mean, not really.
	Everybody thinks Oregon's got that right.
	Okay, so why does Oregon get that right?
	But he must be confused about James.
	Oregon, is it Origin is the one that says that James is the spiritual brother of Jesus, not the physical brother, but the spiritual brother.
	I'm pretty sure that's what it is.
	Tales of the Levant for five.
	Thanks, buddy.
	Says, I think the Christ before Jesus book will be the turning point in scholarship in favor of mythicism.
	The book dated Paul and the Gospels to the second century.
	Imagine having the Gospels written close to the period of the ascension of Isaiah and the apocalypse of Abraham.
	The book dated Paul and the Gospels to the second century.
	Hmm.
	So I guess it's possible.
	We don't really know.
	They date him right after the temple was destroyed.
	But they now, Paul, they date Paul's letters to Before the temple being destroyed, before the war even broke out, seems like Paul's not aware of a war.
	Hebrews definitely is going to be before the temple was destroyed because it's making arguments against animal sacrifice.
	And it wouldn't be doing that if the animal sacrifices already stopped because the temple was destroyed.
	But Christ before Jesus, I'll have to check out that book.
	Thank you.
	Origin is the one that says James is the spiritual brother of Jesus.
	I thought so.
	So I think that's problematic.
	If I were a mythicist, I would try to say, I would try to make it work somehow that the interpolation happened before Oregon.
	I wouldn't even try to say Oregon.
	Got it confused.
	I was like, okay, the interpolation must have happened before Oregon.
	That's the way I would argue that if I were a mythicist.
	The thing, though, that makes that, I think, a bit hard to maintain, mythicist or not, is that when Origen is trying to cite this James passage, he can't cite where in Josephus it is.
	When he talks about John the Baptist, he says in the 18th book of the Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus, he talks about John the Dipper, but when he talks about James the Jeff being killed, he just says it said in this book.
	He can't actually say where it is.
	And that's the thing that's confusing if the text is easy to find and all of a sudden he can't find it there.
	That, to me, indicates a later edition, because otherwise, if it were already in his text, he could have said, oh, it's in book 20, rather than it's somewhere.
	So yeah, it is.
	Origin of Alexandria says James was not the blood brother of Jesus.
	His commentary on Matthew is, quote, James is called the brother of the Lord, not so much because he was the biological brother of Jesus, but because of his close association with him and his significant role within the early Christian community.
	So they're claiming that he was, he doesn't say he was a spiritual brother, but that is what it says in the Apocryphon of James, the secret book of James, says, quote, oh, wait, that's not it.
	Hold on, I'll play this and look for that.
	Jack, do you have any comments you want to?
	Well, I mean, in some sense, because of, I feel like we're going to go for another sort of 40 minutes.
	As it was my intention, as I say at the beginning.
	Okay, skip that.
	Now we're going to go to the McDonald debate and go to 41.16.
	That's where I was supposed to go to 41.16.
	Kind of, should we do the opening statement again?
	It's probably going to be his same opening statement.
	Let's do it.
	Talking about the background information surrounding Christianity, the Pauline evidence, and then finally, so a bit of background information.
	First off, that we see just from Judaism even before Christianity, there's this notion of a heavenly man, sometimes also called the Son of Man, in our various sources.
	It goes back at least to the book of Daniel, but this heavenly man figure we see also showing up in 1 Enoch in the apocalyptic literature like 4th Ezra, the Sibylian oracles, and even the Apostle Paul seems to suggest that Jesus was some sort of angelic being, as suggested in one point in Galatians.
	Now, usually the sticking point will be this heavenly being couldn't possibly have been killed, but there are signs that this is something that was actively believed in Judaism.
	Okay, I found the right quote.
	Sorry now.
	This is just so interesting, though.
	It's the first apocalypse of James found in Nagamati.
	And it says, quote, you are not my brother materially, even if we come from the same mother, yet I am not like you, as for me, I am from above, highlights a spiritual kinship rather than a physical one.
	So it explicitly says he's the spiritual brother, not a physical biological brother.
	And it's just like he says, I am from above, you are from below.
	My kingdom is not of this world.
	We see the same thing in the New Testament as well, but we'll go.
	Again, in Daniel 9, it explicitly says that this messianic figure there will be killed, that he'll be cut off.
	And in the apocalypse literature, such as in 4th Ezra, it says that this Devitic heavenly Messiah will also be killed.
	One could also see how it could be extracted from scripture.
	So, for example, in Zechariah 12, 10, there is this unusual thing in the Hebrew there that gets also seen in translations into Greek, that the speaker, who is God in this case, says that that is the figure that is pierced, and that there will be mourning for the one who is pierced.
	So, God saying, I'm going to be pierced.
	There seems to probably be some typo that happened early on the Hebrew, but that's what's being read there, and also being read in the book of Revelation and in the Gospel of John as proclaiming the proof text for why Jesus was killed.
	It's also worth noting this same text is used later in the Babel, both versions of the Talmud saying that this killed figure here is actually referring to the Messiah Ben-Joseph.
	So, a dying Messiah, son of Joseph.
	If you think you've heard of that before, that's because you've been paying attention to your Bible.
	The figure, this heavenly figure, as well, we also see showing up in the works of Philo.
	Philo is a Jewish writer, basically contemporaneous with like the earliest days of Christianity and before.
	And he talks about a figure that is the word of God or the logos.
	Sounds very similar to John, but also is the firstborn of God, the ruler of the angels, the image of God, the creator of the world through which the whole world was created, master of the universe, and not in the he-man sense, like in the actual like rules the world as it is, and also is the heavenly high priest.
	These are all things that we can find in the earliest Christian literature, including the authentic Pauline literature.
	So, the correspondence between Philo's idea of this super angel, this heavenly being, and what early Christians believe in is extremely similar and interesting that needs explanation.
	It's also worth noting when I say that this person is from a heavenly place, like a heavenly temple that they work in, heaven is a little bit different than what we understand.
	In their system, that there are basically multiple levels of heaven.
	We see this, for example, the Apocalypse of Moses that puts the Garden of Eden, that puts paradise in third heaven where Adam is buried.
	The Apostle Paul seems to think the same thing because he also says paradise is in the third heaven, according to his own road trip up to the heavens.
	The idea that the heavens is basically the place of the dead and the souls is something that we find both in the Greco-Roman world and in Jewish and Christian literature.
	I just have a whole bunch of different examples here of saying that on the far side of the moon is where Elysium is, that basically you do get your wings and fly about the cosmos when you are a good soul and you can go up that high.
	We also see some interesting things, such as in the Sibeline oracles and a Revelation, that basically at that lowest levels of the heavens, that it's also filled with demons that are fighting each other.
	You get the original Star Wars there.
	You literally have the stars fighting each other.
	And this idea also shows up the ascension of Isaiah that talks about demons fighting each other in the firmament, and the firmament is filled with the same kind of stuff we have here on earth.
	So in other words, stuff can happen In the firmament, with the same kinds of things that we see here on earth.
	And I have some recent discussion down here, including from Robin Faith Walsh, that actually was published like the last day of 2024.
	So we're talking cutting-edge scholarship here.
	Now, what can we extract from the early...
	9.
	Oh, shoot, 9.42.
	So, uh-oh, no, I don't want to reinstall.
	So, Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians that he's caught up into third heaven, the paradise, and that's where he receives his revelations and the mysteries that are revealed to him.
	And in the Apocalypse of Moses, it talks about how paradise in the third heaven, that's where Adam is buried.
	So, if Adam can be buried in the third heaven, Jesus can also be buried in the third heaven.
	And that's where Paul learned about this.
	And Paul uses the same Greek verb to describe both Jesus's birth and God manufacturing Adam.
	The Greek word is ganonome, genomai, which means to become or to come into being, to be made or to be born.
	So, we got the similarity of the third heaven and Adam in Jesus is like the new Adam.
	Paul argues that because Adam brought sin into the world, Jesus, one man, Jesus, could remove it from the world.
	Jesus is development of the idea of the primal man or the primal Adam as well.
	And it's just in Paul's letters, Galatians and Corinthians, he uses the same Greek term, which means to manufacture for both Adam being created by God and Jesus being created by God.
	So, there's that.
	There's the Melchizedek doesn't have a mother and father, implying Jesus doesn't have a mother and father.
	It's like every which way you look, there's like little, you know, codes or remnants.
	And the firmament is filled with the same kind of stuff we have here on earth.
	So, in other words, stuff can happen in the firmament with the same kinds of things that we see here on earth.
	And I have some recent discussion down here, including from Robin Faith Walsh, that actually was published like the last day of 2024.
	So, we're talking cutting-edge scholarship here.
	Cutting edge.
	What can we extract from the earliest Christians?
	We can usually pull this from the letters of Paul.
	He's our earliest witness to so much of this, especially the things that are considered to be these pre-Pauline hymns, such as from Philippians.
	Thank you, general commentary.
	The earliest belief that we can find in there is that Jesus was some sort of Messiah, somehow Davidic and resurrected from the dead.
	Those are some big things.
	But also, that not just some person who was killed, but somehow is some sort of angelic being that is pre-existent.
	We see that in the earliest literature, especially like in Philippians.
	We don't find things that we would say, here is the life and ministry of this figure.
	We just basically find the super, you know, extragalactic Jesus doing things.
	Oh, it's later that we start seeing that in other documents afterwards.
	Yeah, it started with a very high Christology.
	Where's that super chat?
	Tales of the Levant for five says, Christ before Jesus uses stylometry, stylometry, to show that Paul's letters aren't actually letters, but rather literary fiction with multiple authors written like a think tank.
	Well, my understanding is that Paul's letters were interpolated by historicists because we don't have any of the originals, so they're later on.
	They've been meddled with and tampered.
	And they believe there's only seven of the 13 letters attributed to Paul that are authentically written by one person.
	And even they believe those have interpolations and have been meddled with by later Christians.
	To remove some mythicism aspects to counter the Docetus and to add in ambiguous language like born of a woman and born of a woman and flesh, always adamantly mentioning flesh over and over again.
	But you can have earthly bodies and fleshly bodies is what they believe to in a platonic, heavenly way.
	You want to take Jessica Beale to the seventh heaven?
	I used to watch that show, seventh heaven.
	Sadly, at least when it first came out.
	And a literary fiction written by multiple authors.
	Thank you, Tales of Levant.
	It's also worth noting that we can find some signs that the way that the heavenly Messiah is going to come into the world is not the normal, natural way.
	I have these various sources here in Syriac because that's usually the earliest form that we can find some of them in.
	And it uses this word for the astronomical rising of a star to reference the birth of this messianic figure.
	It seems to derive ultimately from Numbers 24, 17, but it's also used in 4th Ezra to talk about how somehow this heavenly being will arise from David using the same term.
	Hebrews, the letter to the Hebrews also does this, where Jesus is supposed to be like Melchizedek, who has no father or mother.
	That's a little bit interesting.
	And this Messiah will also rise from the tribe of Judah.
	Say, again, Davidic lineage using the same terminology.
	Similarly, in the Odes of Solomon, the Messiah is supposed to be from another race than who saw them.
	In other words, if this is supposed to be a human, then he's not like any other human.
	That's already kind of weird.
	And also, again, using the same term in Syriac to talk about the light of the world will arise, using this astronomical language for the birth of someone or the resurrection of someone.
	This is not the normal language you use for people.
	You see, when you guys, Christians will say, oh, the star of David, that's not in the Bible.
	The star of David's not in the Bible.
	But you can see, like, in books like Second Edress, they say this is the Messiah whom the Most High has kept until the end of days, who will arise.
	Same word arise that you see in Numbers 24, 17 from the offspring of David.
	So there you get the David star prophecy, the star of David.
	Like the star is a messianic idea.
	Like Jesus is the morning star, and he's born under the star of Bethlehem, and he's the light to the world.
	And Bar Kokhba, the first century messianic war leader, was called Bar Kokhba, which is son of the star.
	It's a messianic thing.
	It's a messianic thing.
	People and the reproduction of people.
	Now, the big thing is Jesus is supposed to be heavenly and then comes down to suffer.
	We see this most explicitly in the Philippians hymn that he descends from heaven.
	This also shows up in the ascension of Isaiah in the visionary portion of it.
	And it's also from there in particular, we see the idea that Jesus is killed by demonic forces in heaven.
	This has been contentious in some previous discussions.
	So I'm laying out like some of the texts here directly from the ascension that says that the angel of death lives and does all of his activities, all his fighting in the firmament, that Jesus is explicitly supposed to descend into the firmament to be killed by the angel there.
	And explicitly in verse 10, 14, that afterwards, from the angel of death, he will arise.
	So literally from where the angel of death is, that's where the resurrection takes place.
	So this is happening in a heavenly locale.
	And then the description of that descent to the firmament is given.
	The hints also exist in Revelation and in 1 Corinthians that the source of the killing of Jesus is also demonic rather than human.
	I will be talking about that later.
	Most importantly, though, oh, thank you.
	Most importantly, then the figure resurrects and returns to heaven in a transformed version.
	We see this again in the Philippians hymn, some of our oldest literature in Christianity, as well as the ascension of Isaiah and the star hymn that appears in the letter of Ignatius.
	Mind you, we don't have earthly stories in our earliest sources.
	No earthly stories, all mythical of what Christians believed.
	So, where did the stories of Jesus actually come from?
	So, from Paul, we learned that apparently the source for knowing about Jesus is revelation and scriptural exegesis.
	These are things he's explicit about multiple times in his letters.
	And also, the idea what those revelations could look like is based on perhaps his own heavenly trips, his own trip to the third heaven that is described in 2 Corinthians 12.
	Yeah.
	So, if this is where these trips to the heavens is Ezekiel's chariot ascension Jewish mysticism tradition, Kabbalah gone wrong, as the rabbi said where the early beliefs about Jesus come from.
	How do they transport it?
	Is the idea of euhemerization?
	This was an active sort of thing done in antiquity where you take a god and you basically create a story of them as a more normal dude on earth doing things.
	Plutarch says this is particularly the case for the Isis and Osiris myth that are actually about demonic forces in the heavens, but the stories of Isis and Osiris being kings and queens of Egypt, that was actually the encoded version of that myth.
	The idea then is Christians take their revelatory things and that becomes history.
	Perhaps, for example, the Lord's Supper, as described in 1 Corinthians 11, as a vision, he says it's actually something revealed to Paul.
	This then becomes the Last Supper, as we see in the Jesus story.
	And so from there, the stories are formulated by using common literary tropes, techniques.
	I'm going to say Dentus' favorite word, mimesis.
	A whole lot of that happening in the creation of the Gospels.
	We see some of this also being kind of told to us in the second century by Justin Martyr, who says that the Old Testament is filled with all sorts of symbols and parables that hide their true meaning about what's really going to be happening in the future.
	And ultimately, Jesus is supposed to be fulfilling all these prophecies.
	Now, how does he know about Jesus fulfilling these prophecies?
	Now, he does cite something called the memoirs of the apostles.
	The weird thing, though, is that in Justin's writing, he also says John of Patmos is an apostle and cites the book of Revelation as a source for stuff that Jesus is supposed to do.
	So, for even Justin Martyr, in the second century, the way that you know about what Jesus did is revelatory and scriptural primarily.
	And it also looks like he will make up examples of what Jesus said and did based on his own exegesis.
	So, for example, Jesus was born in a cave.
	Does he have a gospel that says that?
	It's not in any of our canonical gospels, and he explicitly tells us how he knows Jesus was born in a cave.
	It says so, quote unquote, in Isaiah 33.
	Also, sometimes Justin will just straight up contradict the gospels.
	So, for example, in the birth story of Jesus, it's supposed to be the Magi or the wise men who come from the East.
	This is explicit in Matthew.
	But Justin Martyr, what does he say?
	He says they come from the ages.
	Historical not say that divine figures became human.
	Go ahead and check the encyclopedia.
	417.
	The Syriac is this strange word for the rising of astronomical bodies that we see used elsewhere, ultimately derived from the star prophecy of Numbers 24:17.
	So, not only do I don't think this is a problem for mythicism, the strange language being used here for this heavenly man also being used for Jesus in the same sort of way in the epistle to the Hebrews.
	This should actually make us say there's something weirder going on here rather than it being somehow evidence for mythicism.
	We're, of course, limited on time, so I must be quick on a few other things, but we'll get into another round.
	Mentioned the Gospel of Thomas and having James as a leader there.
	When was the Gospel of Thomas written?
	There was some evidence given that it's at least before the Gospel of John.
	I can accept that, but does that mean it's before all the Gospels, let alone is very ancient?
	No evidence for that is given.
	None of that seems to be clear.
	I will hop on the Q document from Dennis because I've got your work, Dennis.
	I do try to appreciate the argument there, and I am willing to say, for the sake of argument, that we'll accept that your Q hypothesis is correct, that there is some underlying source to Matthew and the other synoptics and so on.
	But I look at that reconstruction, and I don't see a reason to place it before 70.
	So it seems to be not any more ancient than the other gospels, and it has things that also look mythical.
	It has Jesus chatting with Satan.
	It has Jesus predicting his resurrection.
	It has him predicting the destruction of the temple.
	It has explanations for the delay of the Paracea.
	These are the sorts of things that look like that later Christian communities would try to be using to explain things.
	So it doesn't look like I have a reason to think it's more historically reliable than the other gospels, which again are full of what's it in terms of historical reliability.
	And I'm using the word what's it to try to be slightly censored.
	And lastly, that I got Euhemerism backwards.
	Euhemerus was trying to explain where the myths of the gods come from.
	And in his original story, he has it so that Zeus was actually just a dude.
	And because he was so awesome that people thought he had to have been a god and set up worship to him, even though he died and was buried, and that you could actually go and visit his tomb.
	In fact, even well into later antiquity, people were visiting Crete and the tomb of Zeus as if it was a religious site.
	But it's worth noting that that's what Euhemerus was trying to do.
	Other people were basically taking gods and making them into human adventures.
	This was done in the, for example, what's called the Phrygian literature, where it basically has Dionysus not as the god of wine, but some dude going around having adventures and having a few good drinks along the way.
	So the idea of taking already established gods and putting them in history, that is something the Euhemeristic people did at that time.
	Did you say I'm out of time?
	That was one minute.
	One minute.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	So there's kind of two different ways that I see euhemerization being used.
	One to basically say, oh, you just believe in deified humans, that you just basically believed people that were Zeus were real.
	And some Christians did that.
	And others used it to basically encode myths about their beliefs.
	I see this being used in the Isis Osiris cult.
	I see this also used in some of the Hermetic literature to basically turn Hermes into just a guy, but internally say Hermes was actually a God revealing things to them.
	So I think Euhemerism is more diverse and more complex than that.
	But that we can have for another round of discussion, along with the many other points that we'll have to have our back and forths on.
	We're almost perfect.
	You're at nine minutes and 53 seconds.
	All right.
	48, 49.
	Earth.
	But the problem is if it happened, if we're saying we're having duplication theology, if it happened in heaven, but it still happened on earth, You still have a Jesus on earth.
	So, Dennis, I'd like you to finish the rest of what I'm saying.
	I just want to bring some clarity to the discussion instead of setting it up as a debate.
	The first thing that I'd like to say is that Mark Goodacre is a friend of mine.
	And we talked about the...
	The Justin Martyr star story would be a good would be a good gotcha for sure.
	All right.
	Q document, and his position is not that there was no Q document.
	It's that it's impossible to reconstruct it.
	And because of that, one needs to probably put it in the freezer until somebody can thaw it out.
	He argues that there are other sources, though, that Mark may have used, but he does not deny the historical Jesus.
	In fact, I don't know of a single scholar who does synoptic work who denies the historical Jesus.
	You see, this is the only argument they ever say.
	Oh, nobody, none of these scholars at these theological schools, as if they don't know that people that usually go into the field of biblical studies are Christians.
	Bart Ehrman went in to be a Christian.
	He was a Christian into his adult life.
	He went to school, university, all theology Princeton Theological Seminary and Moody's Bible Institute.
	I think that's the other one.
	To be an apologist, to be a preacher.
	What my position is, is the Q document shows no signs of the heavy mythologizing that you find in Mark and so on.
	Now, what Aaron said is right.
	You have mythological stuff going on already in Q. So it's not to say that the Q document is a historical or a record.
	Q is hypothetical, and there's no proof that Q is not myth as well.
	You don't even need a Q. Q is just what Matthew made up after reading Mark and then Luke made up after reading Matthew and Mark.
	You don't even need a Q. In fact, in the book that I'm coming out with soon, I don't claim that there.
	All right.
	157.
	157.
	Here we go.
	Out of my experience with apologists out there.
	See, mythicists are grifters.
	No, they're just grifters.
	This is the type of fallacious stuff and ad hominems they do every time.
	And I don't mean to.
	They're so threatened by this, too.
	It's literally like historical Jesus gatekeepers and a mob of angry crypto Christians that don't want that don't.
	I guess they're all scared of the implication that if Jesus turns out to be completely mythical, then we got to ask who invented him and why.
	And you watch my last two videos and that becomes very clear and uncomfortable if you ask that question.
	It'd be denigrating when I say that.
	I'm just saying that I hear a lot of thought-stopping sort of rhetoric.
	Appeal to authority.
	Thought-stopping argumentation from apologists.
	Yeah, mythicists are grifters.
	That's why Bart Ehrman charges $1,000 to do interviews and is loved by the Christians.
	Bart Ehrman, most cited non-Christian scholar by the Christians.
	I'm honestly surprised to hear you present some thought-stopping reason into this discussion.
	I mean, what field of study out there benefits from not questioning the consensus?
	What field of study out there doesn't benefit when this would be a good time to read a little bit from Letaster's introduction.
	He says, many religious studies scholars are aware that even so-called secular studies concerning religion are often entangled with theological concerns, particularly within the areas of Christian origins and Islamic origins.
	This is no longer a crackpot theory that has long been refuted.
	Denying Jesus' historicity is credible, and the scholarly world cannot help but notice.
	Oops.
	Why is this not moving?
	There we go.
	people of that community don't push the boundaries of what's known.
	John, I've never been accused of not pushing against the young people Boleslaw.
	Thank you, Boleslaw, for 50 says, do you completely reject the idea that there was any sort of historical prototype for Jesus?
	No.
	Actually, I don't.
	Jesus Ben Ananias is a figure that Josephus wrote about.
	And I think Mark based some of his Jesus on that.
	But it didn't begin with him.
	There was already legends of a figure, and that guy just happened to match them.
	And then they incorporated some of what that Jesus Ben Ananias said, who was some crazy guy in Jerusalem that said the temple would be destroyed or something like that.
	Yeah.
	They don't want...
	It would be like a revolution.
	Christianity could collapse.
	Israel could lose its millions of supporters of Christian Zionists.
	You could just go to Wikipedia and do Jesus, Ben, Ananias.
	I'll look it up for you to show you what I'm talking about, Bolslaw.
	Guilt.
	No, no, no, no.
	I'm not saying that.
	No, I'm saying that what your statement was doing was trying to stop people from thinking about it.
	No, no, I'm not, that's not true at all, John.
	That really is not.
	I'm sorry.
	That's what your statements had on me.
	Like, to me, that screen.
	All right, here it is.
	Jesus, Ben Ananias.
	This is probably the real historical Jesus.
	Was a plebeian farmer who, according to Josephus and the Wars of the Jews, four years before the first Jewish-Roman war began, went around Jerusalem prophesying the city's destruction.
	The Jewish leaders of Jerusalem took him over to the Romans who tortured him.
	They took him to be a madman and released him.
	He continued his prophecy for more than seven years until he was killed by a stone from a catapult during the Roman siege.
	So that's who I think.
	If there's any historical figure at a core, that would be it.
	And again, the Christian memes and the Jesus memes were already starting long before this guy, also.
	So that's why it's like not.
	Here he is, the historical Jesus.
	Stop thinking about this.
	Please, please stop thinking about this.
	That's what it said to me, Dennis.
	So if that's not what you're doing, I certainly didn't intend it.
	I mean, it is worth it.
	There is, unfortunately, in this particular area, there's rhetoric that exists that makes the subject almost toxic to touch.
	I mean, Ehrman earlier on was effectively calling flat or calling mythicists like flat earthers or Holocaust deniers.
	Yeah, that's what Ehrman says.
	He laughs and says, oh, no scholars believe this.
	You're a Holocaust denier if you say Jesus didn't exist.
	You're a conspiracy theorist.
	You're a creationist.
	They compare it to all these things.
	No, they're actually the ones that are like that.
	Dude, Ehrman's book and arguments are so bad.
	It's just been ripped to pieces by all the sources I mentioned before.
	His time.
	And then imagine if it turns out Bart Ehrman, the most popular biblical scholar, has been wrong.
	He gets proven wrong.
	All of his legacy, all of his best-selling books are all in vain.
	His whole career is in vain because he was wrong.
	He made a whole millions of dollars, I'm sure, with all his best-selling books and speaking appearances telling you about who the real historical Jesus was.
	And if he was wrong, it would not be good for him.
	So he's got a sunk cost.
	He's emotionally invested.
	And no one should ever have a position or anything published if they are proposing that sort of thing.
	That sort of rhetoric exists.
	It puts everyone on edge.
	And of course, there's plenty of, especially on Twitter, dumb mythicists.
	And I have so much of social media.
	I just wish we'd go away and burn and that we could try a fresh start.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Good point, Needmore Amalek.
	That's a good point.
	He says, and only people who are counter-Semitic can see this for what it actually is.
	These scholars don't even understand what they are looking at or the implications.
	Yeah, they refuse to see any type of maleficent intent behind any of this.
	Okay, this is the end of this.
	Now we're going to do the review, the review review of the debate.
	And let me grab my other phone here and get these screenshots.
	first one we're going to 32 26.
	This guy that Berman has on makes the dumbest arguments.
	Oh my gosh.
	I watched their actual talk.
	Look, where is it?
	We can go to it.
	This first one was Brother Garfield podcast.
	This guy he had on, Brother Garfield recording.
	The supposed, what was it called?
	The Black Hebrew Israelite Slayer.
	That's what it says on this thing.
	3226.
	They're at the end.
	So this next part.
	Yeah, this next part is about asking who Paul is persecuting before he becomes a Christian.
	Yeah.
	And so Garfield is very confused about who Paul could be persecuting before the Christians.
	He makes a weird.
	It's just shameful that Jacob brings on this guy to say the dumbest stuff.
	I see the arguments that the historicists make and just they've just been losing, constantly losing.
	That's why I titled this video The Jesus Mythicist Winning the Debate.
	Because it's been playing out.
	Maybe Richard Carey and Bart Ehrman won't debate each other, although I did do a Chat GPT simulated debate, which was pretty amazing.
	I might have to do a video about that one time.
	But I've been watching this debate unfold.
	It's been happening like big time for the last decade.
	And it's not looking good for the historical Jesus, especially with arguments like Garfield here.
	Oddskillep here.
	I don't think a lot of people do this.
	And sometimes when you look at the work that people do, you respect them trying to make a case and all that stuff.
	Shout out to Aaron Adir.
	I actually admire him a lot.
	Now, let me say this.
	You got a shout out there, Aaron.
	See, these people hate me, but they love you.
	So, I mean, you get, I can take the hate.
	I'm just glad that they're not giving you shit.
	I paid them well.
	And the mob of historicists, they all hate Carrier.
	They hate Godless Engineer.
	It really is like a peer pressure mob attacking mythicists.
	It's really weird.
	It's a little sus, actually.
	Apologetic sus.
	Like, they got some skin in the game.
	Like, Jacob's really, really hardcore, just adamantly arguing that there's a Jesus.
	Tidings and everything, right?
	We do know that Paul is a contemporary of Jesus.
	Am I correct?
	And it lived during the time.
	Yes.
	What was he doing?
	He was persecuting believers, right?
	So if he's persecuting believers, Jacob, those believers believe Jesus was the Christ.
	So that means before Paul even wrote or even quote unquote converted, there was a Jesus belief going on.
	So all of the stuff that Paul puts out is irrelevant if we're actually doing a chronology test.
	Let's do a basic chronology.
	And I don't think enough believers point this out to all these guys before Paul had a connection.
	Believers, you're telling me this guy's a Christian believer?
	Why are we bringing Christians on like they're going to be honest?
	Like they don't have Christian colored glasses on like they can be honest about if Jesus really existed or not.
	And then to make the dumbest argument here.
	Our vision or whatever on the road of Damascus.
	He was already persecuting people for holding this belief because he was an Orthodox Jew.
	He was an Orthodox Jew persecuting them for celebrating that Jesus was the Messiah or the Christ.
	So if he persecutes, who is he persecuting?
	The people who are worshiping a guy who they believe.
	So there's already proof logically that there's a historical person being celebrated at the right.
	No, no, there were Christians before Paul, but they believed in a celestial figure, not a historical figure.
	The fact that he gets brought on this show to debunk and review the Jesus mythicism debate, and he's saying something so way off base like that, he doesn't even get it.
	He doesn't even belong in this conversation.
	He's a Christian also, so he doesn't belong in the conversation.
	Need more Amalek said, I put all these debates In that AI and asked it who is winning the debate, and it clearly states mythicists have the better arguments.
	It's like every single time on every point, the mythicists get it.
	They have better arguments, but that the consensus is on the other side.
	And that's what's changing.
	That you can't just, I think about how many hundreds of years they've been shielding this lie by just appealing to the consensus.
	Appealing to the consensus that was created by Christians when they dominated biblical studies.
	Richard C. Miller, who was interviewed on Gnostic Informant and Myth Vision, he said that we're still in the last remnants of the dark ages in biblical studies.
	It's like a cabal of a lot of believers.
	Like the SBL has like a whole bunch of believers.
	You can't just keep saying consensus over and over again.
	I know.
	It's not an argument.
	It's like, yeah, we know.
	Now address the actual points.
	They just want to keep falling back to consensus.
	Okay, right there is the logical leap that I'm talking about.
	He jumps from, oh, these people believed this thing.
	Therefore, there was a historical person there for this belief to be there.
	Well, I think the big leap is this.
	I think the mistake is simply this.
	We know, yes, before Paul, there were Christians.
	There were believers.
	Our argument is about what they believe in, a human or an angelic figure from the heavens.
	Our argument is the original belief was about an angelic being, and only later were stories created to put him on earth.
	The earliest Christians were arguing believed in a heavenly Messiah, not a guy running around in Galilee.
	So we're not saying Paul just made things up.
	We're saying he came into a group that already believed in some other heavenly messianic figure, a figure that I tried early on in the debate, also showing existed in other Jewish texts, a heavenly man figure.
	This Garfield guy has no business being in this conversation with that question and point he just tried to make right there.
	I did a search for consensus in Raphaela Taster's PhD dissertation, Debunking Ehrman.
	He says, over five chapters, Ehrman acknowledges that the available sources for Jesus are problematic, somehow finds them useful regarding the historical Jesus, and curiously appeals to hypothetical sources, which supposedly predate the gospels and the Pauline epistles, while also providing certainty over Jesus's historical existence.
	As is customary among historicists, Ehrman introduces the issue by poisoning the well by noting that those who doubt the existence of the historical Jesus tend to be outsiders in the field of New Testament or early Christian studies and also tend to not hold teaching positions.
	Well, this is not completely irrelevant.
	We must consider that this sort of inquiry questions paradigms essential to such fields, so that this should not be a vital factor.
	It is the best arguments that Jesus skeptics can produce that are truly important, no matter the qualifications or specializations.
	It also seems hypocritical when historicists...
	Okay, what else do we have about consensus?
	Okay.
	Okay.
	We'll just go back to here.
	We're saying Jesus was at, and later a story was created that put him on earth.
	So it's just completely missing that.
	The whole argument is: what did people like Peter believe?
	Our argument is probably something heavenly, not earthly.
	That's the argument.
	Right, exactly.
	And we don't know.
	Like, I mean, I feel like at least you and I, Aaron, are.
	Yo, Stacey in the house.
	My girl Stacey for 25 says, thank you for your work, Adam.
	Coming from a former PK, what is a PK?
	Stacy.
	Thank you so much, Stacey, for the support.
	What's a PK?
	Am I supposed to know that?
	Scene Kyle for 10 says a wise man once told me, your granddad, if you have the means to pay a man for his services and you don't, it's uglier than Putin in Sunday.
	Poutin, Putin in Sunday school.
	Oh, farting in Sunday school.
	This is this man's work.
	Thank you again, Adam.
	I'm just happy I'm not the only one that's so autistically obsessed with the biggest lie of the last 2,000 years.
	The most influential person that led to the two major most dominant religions of the last thousand years, and he never existed, and he was made up, invented by Jews.
	Why?
	To theologically conquer and have dominion over the nations.
	What is a PK?
	Preacher kid, pastor kid.
	Oh, I love to hear that I got pastor kids in here.
	That's good to know.
	Stacy, no wonder.
	We're all a bunch of former indoctrinated Christians in here just learning the truth about the lies that we were indoctrinated with the Jewish cult that we were raised in.
	More willing to accept that we just simply don't know what they worshipped.
	We can figure out what Jews and Jewish Christians in the first century most likely believed.
	And so that can lead us in a direction of what they believed.
	But I feel like ultimately we can't know.
	And I mean, we're perfectly fine admitting that.
	I mean, there's a lot of things about first century, like BCE and CE, Judaism.
	All right, enough of that.
	Enough of that.
	What's his name?
	Godless Engineer.
	I'm forgetting his name right now.
	Austin official for five says, hey, I got blocked by Fuentes today.
	Don't criticize him about his Christianity.
	His fans are too gullible.
	Brainwashed Catholic cultist retards.
	Yeah.
	Not surprised.
	I can guarantee you not one of them has read any of these books that I've read multiple times or have followed any of these debates and these different scholars and their arguments.
	There are no clue, not even anywhere near my level.
	All right.
	What is God?
	John Gleason, that's his name.
	I don't like him.
	Although I like that he's covering mythicism.
	Not a fan.
	And Jewish Christianity that we don't know, but they're, I feel like, you know, they're basically neckbeard from extreme leftists.
	We don't have any of their documentation, but that automatically means that a person existed for them to believe in.
	I mean, it just, it seems so crazy to me.
	Like, maybe it's just my analytical side, hyper-fixating on the evidence that we have and what we can know and what we can't know.
	But like to do this logical leap from, you know, these people believed the thing to this thing actually existed in reality.
	When you hear how bad their arguments are and how bad their copes are, what other conclusion can I be left with that they're wrong?
	Bard Ehrman's wrong and Richard Carrier and Price and Earl Doherty and the mythicists are right.
	Okay.
	15523.
	We only got a little bit left here, probably another 10 minutes.
	15523.
	I just love this stuff, these debates too.
	By the way, like a new Berman, did Jesus exist debate comes out or debate review or these guys doing a review of the review of the debate.
	This is my favorite content.
	15523.
	So this is another like TikToker, another, I think he was Christian and went to seminary, I think, as well, but is like agnostic or something now.
	But he's cringe and makes terrible arguments as well.
	Let's see here.
	The same guy who called it a fabrication is leaning on a supposed pre-existent version of the ascension of Isaiah to make his arguments.
	You think that's probably legit.
	That's what we should say.
	The Q document, that's a total fabrication.
	There is a lot.
	We don't have a Q document.
	It's completely hypothetical.
	Whereas we do have copies of the ascension of Isaiah, and we can see how they don't match with the pocket gospel.
	There's different versions, and it seems like it was tampered with.
	But even regardless of all that, what is left?
	It still places Jesus in heaven with Satan and the demons on the tree, and they did not know who he was.
	And this is all cope and nonsense.
	If this is the best they have to try to disprove the mythes, they lost and it's over and Jesus never existed.
	End of story.
	More evidence for the existence of Q than there is for a pre-existent version of Isaiah.
	I don't think that's true.
	Well, I mean, not only this, we are not reconstructing the section of the Ascension of Isaiah that we think has been altered.
	We're saying there's evidence of alteration.
	We don't know what was original.
	We'll go to the parts that still look to be stable.
	And what do they say?
	Exactly what the mythicists are saying.
	And Ricky and Jacob are just straight up ignoring it.
	And that's the thing that's a bit frustrating and saying, we have no evidence.
	And we do.
	It's just you're unfortunately ignoring what we're pointing to.
	And instead pointing to the part that we can see is the not stable portion of the text.
	But on the other hand, I will note when Jacob is speaking here, he's closer to our position about textual textual criticism than otherwise, because he says, yeah, I believe that there are multiple sources for the Pentateuch and things like that.
	And we just can't be sure of the reconstructions.
	I agree.
	I'm also going to say, I don't know how to reconstruct the earliest version of the Ascension of Isaiah.
	I'm just going to say that chapter 11 is so adulterated, we can't figure out what was there originally.
	It's just that what we have there is probably not the original form.
	And that's as far as we're taking the argument.
	What we have now isn't original, and what was original is lost.
	And we're leaving it at that and not actually trying to reconstruct it.
	Yeah.
	And I feel like what Ricky is trying to do here is that he is trying to say that our Ascension of Isaiah hypothesis is yo, chem suicidal for 50.
	Excuse me, my throat's killing.
	Excuse me.
	Hold on.
	I got the flu or something, guys.
	I've got the flu.
	I caught it from my baby.
	She's been coughing all week.
	And of course I caught it.
	Body aches and sore throat.
	Chem Suicide for 50.
	Thank you so much, Chem Suicide.
	Making my night, making my night beautiful.
	Such an honor and a pleasure to be spending my night with you guys, seeing how bad the historical Jesus arguments are.
	Chem Suicide says, every time I see a thousand, see thousands of crosses in graveyards across the Western world, it reminds me that our heritage has been conquered on ridiculous levels.
	Pisses me off bad.
	Marcus E. Ravage, your playlist, Mizrachi laughing about Goy bowing down on Exmus on Christmas, did the job waking me up from the cult.
	I knew it would.
	Mizrachi laughing.
	How can I not be happy with millions of Goyim bowing down to one Jew tonight?
	I knew that would do it.
	Just imagine how many people have had their eyes open because of this one clip from Mizrachi.
	How can I not be happy when I see millions of Goim bow down to one Jew tonight?
	And that's only one of many.
	See Through It All and John, they've been doing compilations and so many, we have hours of rabbis talking about how they see the benefit brought to the world from Christianity.
	They see Jesus as a positive thing, Judaizing the nations and conquering pagan idol worship and making the Goyim believe in the God of Israel and the prophecies and believe in a Messiah and monotheist.
	Berman looks related to Tovia Singer.
	I wonder why.
	Yaakov?
	Our buddy Yaakov?
	I'll debate Yaakov.
	I don't even know if he knows who I am, probably.
	Their ideas that they're spouting here.
	And I feel like there's a lot more evidence for our position on the ascension of Isaiah than there is for like the Q document.
	I mean, here's my problem with the Q document is that everybody that studies a Q document or that proposes a Q document seems to have a different Q document.
	They all generate their own version of the Q document, and it just so happens to be 206.
	206.
	Two hours, six minutes.
	Okay.
	The son sperm of David has kept until the end of days will arise from the posterity of David.
	So somehow this heavenly hidden Messiah who has been around since the beginning of time will arise from David.
	How is that possible if he is not human?
	It must be some other supernatural means.
	And I also highlight this particular word here, arise.
	Now, we don't have the original language version of the fourth Ezra.
	Most likely, what we have in our other versions is translated from Greek, and the Greek may go back to either a Hebrew or Aramaic version.
	But this keyword here for arise is actually the word you would use for astronomical bodies.
	In the Syriac that I pulled this from, it's dinach, and this is what you use for like a rising star.
	And this is ultimately derived from the star prophecy of Numbers 24, 17, where a star will arise out of Jacob.
	It's the same language.
	And this is the language basically to say that somehow the Messiah will come from David, but by supernatural means.
	It also happens to be the same language used in Hebrews 7 for how the Messiah is born Of David or Davidic lineage.
	In other words, by non-natural, special means, not the human coming out of female vagina means.
	And I bring this up.
	I explicitly show this on screen multiple times, and Ricky just shows complete ignorance to it and still disparages the whole cosmic sperm bank when I effectively found it.
	So this is what they do.
	We'll debunk their arguments and then they'll just keep repeating the same arguments and not addressing like the refutation of their point.
	This is Carrier talks about this.
	This is what they do all the time.
	They ignore it.
	They just act like they don't have to read or they don't have to understand.
	They just keep regurgitating their same copes and nonsense.
	Stacy for another 10 says, let's go.
	Thank you, Stacey.
	It was you that was the preacher kid, right, Stacya?
	Preacher kid, huh?
	I get it.
	I totally get it.
	Were you a wild preacher's kid?
	A lot of the time the preacher's daughter is, if you know what I mean, but the preacher's daughter.
	Yeah.
	And to add on to what you're talking about here, as far as the cosmic sperm bank goes, I think that maybe Ricky is taking the sperm bank part like way too literally.
	But we can find this in 2 Samuel 7, 12 through 14.
	It says, when your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom.
	He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.
	I will be him to a father, and he shall be to me a son.
	When he commits iniquity, I will discipline him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men.
	And so, like, I mean, I feel like even if you only use what's in like the scripture as far as like Jews would have known it, like in the Hebrew Bible.
	Yeah, they ask, like, this is something that Carrier said, a cosmic sperm bank.
	And he uses this scriptural proof to justify.
	And it's like, Christians believe in wacky shit.
	How are you going to have the son of David if there is no lineage of David?
	Well, somehow God can, God can do it.
	God can do anything.
	And then this is what the anti-Jesus mythicists will do.
	They'll be like, cosmic sperm bank, like laugh.
	And it's like, it's, it's plausible.
	Sorry, but it's plausible that they believe some wacky shit like that.
	Taking it way too seriously.
	You can find the sperm bank idea.
	Literally.
	The whole idea that God magically took David's sperm and held it for some time and then created offspring using it.
	Like a very literal interpretation of what I just read would entail that.
	And so like, I think I've said this before in a video.
	I don't care if God palmed it for centuries or if he kept it in an actual sperm bank or whatever.
	Or what's that one?
	There's this one ancient fairy tale or ancient religious belief of the sperm being held in like a celestial lake or something like that.
	Oh, so there's a lake in Iran, Persia, where the sperm of a Zarathustra is preserved.
	And one day a virgin will go swimming in that water, will be inseminated by that sperm and will then give birth to the Sashkoya, the Persian equivalent of the Messiah.
	Right.
	I mean, you're talking about a group of people that believe magical things.
	And this is just one other magical thing that they believed.
	Why is this so hard to grasp that ancient people believed magical shit?
	Like, it just doesn't make sense to me.
	Like, why they would be like, oh, I don't think they would believe this.
	Why fucking not?
	Right.
	Now, to be fair, if you don't have direct evidence for that belief, they can disparage what you're saying.
	Here, though, I'm saying, hey, I found it.
	Right.
	No, yeah, that's the big difference is that like you can claim anything about the past, but the fact that, you know, our hypothesis here is supported by pre-existing beliefs that they had.
	Like, I feel like that should lend some kind of credence to it.
	Yeah.
	Well, we can establish how the idea came about, but to show that the idea existed, I have, in this case, it looks like direct evidence.
	Pre-existent Messiah, heavenly being, not seen on earth until the last days, and then will somehow descend from heaven as a descendant also of David.
	That it cannot be possible in the normal biological process.
	It has to be through the supernatural process.
	And the language used here in 4th Ezra is also the same as found in Hebrews to describe Jesus's lineage.
	So to me, as far as I'm concerned, I found the sperm bank.
	Stop saying there's no evidence.
	Come on, Aaron.
	That's just crazy.
	Nobody would believe that.
	Except the people who wrote 4th Ezra.
	Exactly.
	Now, I should put one caveat there.
	I have talked to Carrier about this, and he is less willing to hop on the bandwagon with me because he's not sure if this is a Christian interpolation into this document.
	And that's a fair thing to worry about.
	I don't think Force Ezra has interpolations.
	Okay, 232.
	Where are we?
	232.
	Booyah.
	Yeah.
	Boo yeah.
	We just missed it.
	Hold on.
	First, early, second century.
	But disgusted to disguise himself in order to fight against him.
	Berman brings on these guys to try to refute the Jesus mythicist, and they do the worst job ever and say the most laughable face palm type of things like imaginable.
	I'm just like shocked by how bad the other side is, what they bring to the table.
	The words of Nego from the mother's mouth.
	He goes like one of his arguments is, well, that's out of context.
	Zachariah is actually like about something else.
	It really means that.
	And like, it's like, yeah, we know.
	The mythicist argument is that they ignore the original context and reinterpret it and read it esoterically.
	They'll connect a word that's in common.
	They'll connect a theme or something that sounds similar with one another in Midrash and Pesher.
	And then he thinks he's got some own saying, but that's out of context.
	That's not what the original context was.
	We never claimed, like, it's already been so explained.
	And that's the best you can say.
	It just makes me think, like, how uninformed are you about all of this?
	Of God.
	But he came to wage war in the plains of McGill.
	And the archers shot King Josiah.
	That's what's being referred to, as it appears.
	Now, that passage isn't talking about this person specifically, but he's talking about something like this.
	And there was mourning for this person similar to this guy who suffered the same fate here in the highlight of blue.
	All Judah in Jerusalem mourned for Josiah.
	And Jerusalem chanted the song of mourning for Josiah.
	Elder male and female singers speak about Josiah.
	And their song is the mourning of the day, and they were made.
	They made them an ordinance to Israel.
	So, this period.
	Has anybody in the chat ever heard of this guy, Captain Dadpool?
	He's so cringe, and he just hates mythicists.
	He hates Richard Carey.
	There's like a whole little crew of the Richard Carrier haters with like this carrier derangement syndrome.
	What was that super chat?
	Austin official for 10 says, God has send you money for that great debate with Andrew Wilson.
	He filibustered and threw hypothetical nonsense.
	Dyer would be good.
	No, he would not be good, but he does belittle a bit too much.
	That's all he does.
	Transcendental and tries to talk shit.
	My debate with Andrew wasn't even like about if Jesus is real or if Christianity is a psyop.
	He only wanted to debate, like, what's a better worldview to live by, Christianity or secularism?
	The period of mourning for this individual who shot by an arrow was so epic.
	It was recorded in the Book of Lamentations.
	And whoever came after this that was likable.
	Likewise pierced, was mourned similarly.
	That's what the passage is referring to.
	Don't separate the pastor.
	So I know that he continues here with continue reading the text and everything like that, but I feel like our argument lies on the pesrim that's created off of these verses.
	And so this would be the later interpretations of Jews and Jewish Christians, where they changed the meaning of the original context to be something that more aligned with what they were expecting.
	Yeah, well, there's two things to note here.
	So, first off, the background that Ricky provides, I think, is reasonable.
	I haven't checked it thoroughly to see if it's the best way to interpret what Zechariah originally meant.
	But guess what?
	We don't necessarily care what Zechariah originally meant because later interpretations can be quite independent of in original interpretations.
	That's like the history of religion.
	And in particular, if you can bring back up my slide, bring up my scare shared screen.
	Eventually, I'll be able to use words correctly.
	So there's two things to note.
	One is that there's something actually weird in the Hebrew that's probably due to a textual issue where it talks about the person being pierced talking in the first person all of a sudden, but saying, I am the one who is pierced.
	And the person who is talking in this text is God.
	So this was this guy, Captain Dadpool's like, Zechariah 12, 10 is not about the Messiah.
	Like, you're so dumb.
	You don't even know the real context.
	And it's like, dude, we know that they're ignoring our argument is that they were ignoring the context.
	And the Talmud says, Zechariah 12, 10, that the Talmud Jews, Talmudic Jews, interpreted Zechariah 12, 10 to be about the Messiah, son of Joseph.
	It's just, it's, it's, I couldn't even believe my ears that he says, oh, you're ignoring the original context.
	Every time I explain it, I always go, they ignored the original context of scripture.
	They thought all the prophets, they could just pick and choose.
	There's verses basically about them saying they ignored the original context of what the prophets were saying.
	What do you think an ancient interpreter is going to do seeing that God is talking about being pierced or the Lord is talking about being pierced?
	Oh my goodness, what amazing insight must be here.
	And we see this both in the Hebrew.
	I highlighted that, that the word being used there is to refer to me.
	It's first person there rather than third person.
	And it's probably a defect in the original Hebrew that there was a valve that got dropped along the way that would have changed the difference between me instead of him.
	So I think it's that simple, but it was stable because we see later in the Theodotian, which is a late first, early second century Greek translation, it also says, towards me, towards me, the one who is pierced.
	So again, it's the Lord, Kurios, who is saying, I am the one who is pierced.
	What is an interpreter to do when they read that, especially if they're trying to look for special messages?
	And we know, we know that not all Jews are reading the text and limiting it to the original context.
	We see that throughout Philo.
	What's the original context?
	I don't care.
	I've got something new to say.
	If we go to the Talmud, they explicitly say this passage is about a dying Messiah, the Messiah Ben-Yoseph.
	My goodness, it may not originally be about the Messiah, but we see Jews in the Talmud saying it is.
	So again, original context is important to know to understand what Zechariah might have been getting at.
	But when it comes to the history of religion, that isn't actually relevant.
	We care about how it was interpreted.
	And guess what?
	It was interpreted in just the sorts of ways I am saying.
	In fact, this exact verse is quoted by Revelation and the Gospel of John to talk about the piercing of Jesus.
	So we know it is not just being read in its original context.
	So stop saying here's what it originally meant as if that's the only thing that mattered to interpreters.
	That has almost Bart Ehrman does the same thing.
	He goes, oh, Isaiah 53, they didn't think that was about the Messiah.
	Basically, regurgitates what rabbis like Tovia Singer say.
	Clearly, and he's wrong too.
	The Talmud does, the Talmud also says Isaiah 53 is about the Messiah, the Messiah.
	And Jonathan to the Targum Jonathan also says Isaiah 53 is about the Messiah.
	And in Enoch, it connects the son of pre-Christian Enoch.
	It connects the son of man to the sufferings or to the servant of Isaiah.
	Excuse me, hiccups.
	I told you I'm sick.
	The book of Enoch connects the son of man from Daniel to the servant via the light to the nations that we see in Isaiah 42 and the servant songs, 42, 49, 52, 53.
	So they make the same argument, and it's a non-starter argument that does nothing but show their lack of understanding of what the Jesus mythicism argument is.
	It's preposterous how bad it is.
	It's like we're dealing with crazy people.
	It's never limited interpreters.
	Boo yeah.
	Booyah.
	That was definitely a mind dropped moment right there.
	It definitely confuses me how they're hyper-fixating on the original meaning versus what we're actually arguing for.
	And all the more so when I go to the original text and say, here's what it literally says, that's going to affect how an esoteric interpreter is going to go at this.
	And Ricky just ignored it completely.
	You ready to continue?
	You lose.
	You lose Dadpool and Berman.
	You've lost the mythic.
	The very next chapter.
	This last passage was in Zachariah chapter 12.
	This is chapter 13.
	Keep in mind, when you study the Bible, passages and verses were added later.
	All of these texts are scrunched together.
	They're not separated by anything.
	They're all together to save space.
	So when you read these chapters, don't think about it suddenly changing subject when it goes to a different chapter.
	It's still talking about the same thing.
	When I come about the day, the day declares the Lord of armies, I will eliminate the names of the idols from the land and they will no longer be remembered.
	And I will also remove the prophets and even the spirits of Israel.
	And if anyone still prophesies, and his father and mother who gave birth to him will say, you shall not live because you have spoken falsely in the name of the Lord.
	And his father and mother who have given birth to him shall pierce him through.
	So the context of this passage of whomever this is as being pierced, and there's several different theories about who this is talking about.
	The context is immediately after, God ends prophecy.
	He ends evil spirits.
	And prophecy is so forbidden that you'll be murdered if you do it.
	So when mythicists try to appeal a passage like this and say, oh, this is talking about Jesus.
	No, talk about the next passage because Paul continues.
	Dude, it's not mythicist appealing to this.
	It's the Christians appealed to this.
	Because this is what inspired their Jesus fictional Jesus story.
	He tries to act like it's us taking these verses out of context.
	Our argument is that the first Jews mystically read these, esoterically read these, ignoring the original context.
	And this guy's up here yelling like he thinks he's got some slam dunk argument.
	He's literally just making a fool of himself.
	And this is like the case time and time again with these guys.
	Peter continues to promise the disciples.
	The whole point is we see other people interpret it differently than what the original context would have suggested.
	We're not saying that this was in the text and Christians were naturally reading out of it.
	It's saying here is the landscape of interpretations that existed and the Christians are among those interpreting it in that range of possibilities that were developed, which were irrespective of the original context.
	Let's go back to, say, Philo.
	I remember there was so much discussion about the Anatole figure from Zachariah 6 and how Philo interprets it.
	In the original context, Zechariah, is he talking about a supernatural being, a supernatural high priest?
	Almost certainly not.
	For Philo, he is talking about some amazing being because the name of Anatole can't be given to a regular human.
	And that's his whole argument.
	This can't be a regular person because this title is too awesome.
	So he says, fuck the context.
	I like this word and it's so special to me.
	I'm going to interpret it in this totally different way.
	I'm basically just doing and saying, here is how people interpreted texts.
	Here are the range of interpretations of this very text that existed and saying the Christians were just following in suit.
	All the context that Ricky is providing is definitely interesting, definitely necessary to understand originally what Zechariah was at, but is pretty much irrelevant to how it was interpreted centuries later.
	Yeah, especially when you consider Philo and that he hyper-fixates on like singular verses for the types of things.
	I don't think that this particular verse is what Philo was citing, but I guess I'm just talking about how Philo seemed to be engaged in good points.
	Dude, Need Moore Amalek is on it.
	He says, this is so over.
	I would like to see some interesting argument against it, but they are not bringing that at all.
	No, it's pathetic.
	They always say this shit.
	They believed in a military conquering Messiah and they were wrong.
	It's like, no, you could easily read the scriptures.
	They cite the scriptures about a suffering Messiah and a rejected Messiah.
	It shows they don't understand anything about Jewish mysticism at all as well.
	Exactly.
	This Peshrim creation.
	I know that he actually talked about it positively a lot.
	So like the Peshrim don't consider like spanning verses across whole sections.
	I mean, it can, but like oftentimes it is just like hyper-fixating on one verse or one, you know, small section of scripture.
	Oh, sometimes the only connection a Pesher person, a Pesher interpreter will use a single word.
	These two words are in common, and we'll find that.
	So, for example, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the Damascus document, and others, they will combine this statement about a star god from Amos and the star of prophecy from Numbers 24:17.
	And the only word they have in common is ho-hab, the word for star in Hebrew.
	And that's basically the only connection between the two.
	And they interpret them together to talk about messianic figures.
	It's like you cannot obviously get that from the original context.
	So, saying here's the original context, the other interpretation is impossible.
	It's that, no, the way interpretation happens is regardless of the original context.
	Right.
	You ready to continue?
	Okay.
	Continue to prophesy after Jesus appears.
	So anyhow, he presents this next slide that's talking about.
	All right.
	So let's see.
	This next part is about this one is so confusing.
	Honestly, this next part.
	Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what he's trying to talk about here.
	Let's play it for the audience and let's see if the audience can interpret it because I'm bamboozled.
	No, he has some convoluted nothing argument.
	That is all we have for today, guys.
	I'm tired.
	I'm sick.
	Thank you all for staying up late with me and covering this topic that I'm so interested in.
	I want to end with one little paragraph here from Raphael Letaster's PhD dissertation debunking Bart Ehrman and the historical Jesus.
	Appreciate everybody for the support tonight.
	As you can see, this is just one.
	You know, some of the debates that have been going back and forth on this channel, you know, we're two hours in.
	I try to cover the most that I could, but I mean, if you, this is just scratching the surface.
	If you see the rest of it, it's all pretty much this bad every time.
	All right.
	Where was that thing I was going to read?
	Oh, I got to put this away.
	There it is.
	I simply cannot find enough negative superlatives in all the thesaurus in all the libraries in all the world to describe the complete and utter ridiculousness and bankruptcy of Ehrman's approach to the historical Jesus.
	The generally unreliable, untrustworthy, and fiction-filled gospels can occasionally be considered excellent sources of objective and accurate historical information because of their foundational written sources, which do not exist, which contain many fictions if they did, and which cannot now be scrutinized for authorship, age, genre, intent, and so forth.
	Ehrman makes up all these hypothetical sources, and that's his proof.
	It's terrible.
	These hypothetical written sources are themselves based on oral traditions that also cannot be scrutinized, that changed over time, and that may well have been made up whole cloth.
	Therefore, we have conclusive proof that Jesus definitely existed.
	This is enough to make supremely logical analytic philosophers wonder how such fields can exist.
	In what universe can this be considered good history and good scholarship?
	That's the question I ask myself.
	No, this is not my book.
	This is Raphael Letaster's questioning the historicity of Jesus.
	PhD, peer-reviewed by Brill, debunking Bart Ehrman.
	But all this information is going to be included in my book, which I'm working hard on.
	Appreciate all the support tonight, guys.
	Huge shout out to Bolslaw and Chem Suicide, Scene Kyle, Stacey, everybody that donated.
	Thank you for making this show possible.
	You know, do you ever see like Christian channels ever getting this deep into the Bible?
	I don't.
	All these guys that want to shill Jesus and Christian nationalism and Christ as king all the time, they never get down in the nitty-gritty of the information and the history and the scripture like I do.
	Or their understanding also of what rabbis and Jews actually see about all this stuff.
	So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it.
	Let me know what you think in the comments.
	Appreciate everybody for the support.
	Everybody have a nice night.
	I love you all.
	Everybody have sweet dreams.
	I'm going to get to sleep and hopefully I feel better and get over this cold.
	But I probably, I might be out tomorrow.
	We'll see how I feel.
	Anyway, Unit 8200 is late to the party.
	Where's Unit 8200?
	I don't see them there.
	Yeah, a lot of these guys that shill Jesus and Christ is king all day and call me a lie and call me a Jew because I expose all of this Jewish bullshit and tricks and fake prophecies and this Jesus deception, none of them even come close to the type of reading or research or understanding of these issues.
	Not even close.
	Anyway, everybody have a nice night and take care.
	music
	Yeah, they just LARP as Christians.
	That's right.
	They don't even go to church.
	They never even open up the Bible.
	They just go, they just lie to themselves and go, nothing the Jews hate more than Jesus.
	Jesus.
	They killed him.
	It's literally subtard level understanding and reasoning.
	They're useful idiot cultists.
	What else can we say?
	Pathological, lying, useful idiot cultist.

▲