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Nov. 17, 2022 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
31:11
The Jesus Hoax

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comProfessor David Skrbina, author of The Jesus Hoax, The Metaphysics of Technology, and other books, joins the group to discuss Paul’s invention of Christianity, the anti- and pro-natalism message of the Bible, and the current environmental and population crisis.

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I was thinking we could talk a little bit about mythicism and that you could offer this group a kind of introduction on that and then we can let the conversation flow in all sorts of directions.
And yeah, so we have a good number of people on right now and then a few hundred will listen to it afterward.
I think I might even put up some parts of it.
For, you know, for the public, for free.
But, so, let's just, let's start out, I guess, with the basics.
I actually reread your book, The Jesus Hoax, last night and then this morning.
And let's just start out real concretely.
What is Christ myth theory?
Right.
So, great.
We use the word myth in different ways, so it's a little bit funny to talk about it that way.
You know, philosophically, because that's sort of my background, a myth is really just kind of a story or a worldview, a way of viewing the world and an account of how things came to be and how they are.
And so lots of people have different myths that they adhere to over time.
Arguably today, you know, I know some philosophers have argued even our secular worldview is a kind of a myth.
It's a kind of a story about the world and it has its problems and it's almost certainly not true and so forth.
So, you know, we tend to use the word myth disparagingly like it's something that's false or fake.
But in general, it does not mean that.
It's just kind of a story or kind of a worldview about things.
But in this case, when we talk about Jesus' myth, Yeah, I think, you know, the general position, I don't know all the views of the Jesus mythicists, but generally they're saying that basically the story is mythological in the sense that it's just a story, right?
That there's no historical or factual basis to Jesus of Nazareth.
That he wasn't really, either completely didn't exist or was some kind of...
Made-up character or maybe highly altered character that fit into a narrative that was convenient for Jews at the time that the story was written down.
And so I think that's kind of the general view.
I think a lot of people would believe that because, I mean, a lot of people are sort of skeptical of Christianity's story and, you know, Jesus in general and the myth, the miracles that he performed and so forth.
So I think just the idea that there's something mythological about the nature of Jesus, I think that's a pretty safe claim, a pretty general claim, and probably a lot of people buy into that.
What matters is where you take it from there, right?
How you elaborate and what the implications are of your particular Jesus myth version that you're adhering to.
The criticism of Christianity in the ancient world, you know, contemporaneous criticism, were they stressing mythicism?
I mean, and I know there's maybe a bit of a poverty of sources, but Celsius, for instance, were they taking a mythicist approach?
No, no, in general, they weren't.
And then that's a little bit of a striking thing.
When you look at the ancient critics, they...
They generally did not say, well, this Jesus character never existed and he's just a fable.
I mean, they didn't say that.
In fact, I don't know anyone who said that about anyone.
I mean, they didn't say that about, you know, the Greek gods or the Roman gods.
They might say, well, they might use words like superstition, right, which sort of implies it's not really true.
And the Romans did, in fact, who were the first critics of the early Christians, they did, in fact, talk about The Christians as a kind of a superstitious, well, the Jews in particular, is that the Jews were a superstitious people, meaning they believed things that weren't really true.
So it was a kind of a critique of Jewish Judaism.
When it came to the Christians, the early critiques seemed to focus on the fact that these people were troublemakers, they were rabble-rousers, and they were just not assimilating into Roman society.
They were just like objectionable people, and they were sort of strange people.
In fact, the word that the Romans used was a cult.
So they described the early Christian movement literally as a cult.
They used the word cultionis in Latin.
And so they described it as a cult.
So these were strange people who adhered to some odd view about some savior guy who came down and promised them eternal life.
It's like...
Okay, that's pretty weird, you know, and to really sort of, you know, buy into that story, of course, it does sound very cult-like.
Even today, many fundamentalist Christians could certainly qualify as being cult members because that's the nature of the belief system.
Right.
I think that seems to be how the early critiques went.
It was just, you know, this was a cultish, weird group that were rabble-rousers and troublemakers, and we just don't like them.
That was kind of what the Roman view seems to have been.
Do you think it spoke to a bit of a different perspective on divinity in the ancient world and in the sense that in my reading of ancient texts, you don't get a kind of skeptic in the version of the word that we know today?
I think it probably spoke to just a different perspective on what the gods were.
And in some ways, fundamentalists of today are...
More rigorous and demanding a kind of historicity.
I mean, I even remember when I went to an Episcopalian service last Easter.
The priest, to his credit, I would...
I would say.
He said, you have to believe this.
This isn't just some narrative that you can draw moral from.
You actually have to believe that he rose from the dead.
I think in some ways, to his credit, he was taking his religion seriously.
But I think maybe in the ancient world, they just had a different perspective on the divine.
To suggest that, you know, did Zeus really come down and, you know, father Perseus?
This was kind of missing the whole point.
And we're kind of projecting our own...
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, that's a very modern scientific way of thinking, right?
To ask for evidence and construct logical arguments and look for proofs and that kind of stuff.
And that doesn't come about until the 1600s.
So prior to that time, it was just, you know, I don't believe you, you know, or that sounds crazy.
You know, of course, none of them were really on sound basis, right?
I mean, they all had their own competing gods and mythologies.
So it wouldn't do any good to say, hey, your god has no evidence because actually my god has no evidence either.
So what the heck?
We're on equal ground.
So I can hardly blame you for that because I don't have any evidence for mine either.
So I can just say, well, I don't like yours or yours sounds silly or it sounds crazy.
I mean, it was very, very loose kind of critiques.
Also, I think what is unique about Christianity is that pretense of historicity.
And in the sense of if you read Matthew, say the Sermon on the Mount or something, you can take that as a plausible report, I guess, of what was said.
There seems to be a 2000 years ago, an almost kind of new perspective on religion where this actually happened then and there.
And we're going to report.
And so I guess there's this kind of...
Double quality to Christianity in that sense and that it does have a pretense of historicity, which I think is really powerful and important to it.
But then it's also reviving other myth systems and kind of spinning them and so on.
And I think maybe that doesn't allow us to kind of...
See mythicism correctly or the mythical quality in Christianity correctly because there is something kind of modern about Christianity in the sense that it was a real guy, a somewhat poor carpenter who came out and spoke and told moral lessons.
It's something that can kind of appeal in a way to a more modern sensibility.
But that kind of blinds us to the mythic quality at the essence of Christianity as well.
Right.
Well, again, you know, keep, right.
I mean, the New Testament does read kind of like a transcript at points about what Jesus said.
It's like you're actually sort of there.
That was kind of the idea.
But of course, you know, that general idea had been around for a long time.
I mean, we can go back to Plato's Apology, which is basically a transcript of what Socrates said in his own defense, and that was 500 years, sorry, 400 years prior to the time of Jesus.
So there was a long intellectual tradition of that happening.
And I highly suspect that Paul and the New Testament writers were aware of that tradition.
And of course, they were aware of the mythological traditions and the pagan traditions.
And I think they sort of sought this little blending merging of the intellectual respectability of the Greeks and, you know, Platonic sort of writing, and then blended that with pagan and mythological ideas and it's kind of a nice sort of happy mixture that they used to construct.
Interesting.
So why don't you talk a little bit about your version of mythicism?
So as you lay out at the beginning of your book, there are...
There are a number of people who have taken this up.
Really, in the 19th century, particularly with German criticism, they were kind of dissecting the Bible for the first time in a way.
And this was the origin of the documentary hypothesis of different authors that were...
Blended together into these texts, and there are obvious contradictions in the Bible.
Where do those derive from?
Are they coming from different sources?
And so on.
And then there was figures like Bruno Bauer, who Marx got into various disputes with, but there was a kind of atheism brewing out of the Hegelian tradition, you could say, as well.
Talk a little bit about that tradition, because I actually find that interesting.
We sometimes seem to be reinventing the wheel of new atheism.
Richard Dawkins was the first man to ever question whether God exists.
And that's actually kind of ridiculous.
This is a very long tradition.
Maybe talk a little bit about that.
I find that intellectual history really interesting.
And then also how...
Your version of this is quite different, in fact.
Yeah.
Well, right.
So skepticism about the gods, I mean, you're right.
That goes way, way back.
I mean, I would go back again to the ancient Greeks, you know, because, you know, Socrates talked very little about the gods or just sort of in a little hand-waving kind of way.
Yeah.
You know, Plato talked about Demiurge, you know, the world's soul, but those are sort of very distant and abstract things, and Aristotle kind of had this world mind that was kind of turning the cosmos, but again, a very abstract philosophical kind of being.
So, you know, in no sense were those like sort of modern gods, which is like a personal being that you can kind of talk to and you pray to him and he, you know, gives you forgiveness and so forth.
So, I mean, those are very old ideas, right, to sort of be skeptical about gods that look like humans, the anthropomorphized kind of gods that we have traditionally associated with religions.
And that kind of comes and goes over the years.
And, of course, with science, right, that gave...
Gave it a whole new boost, right, in the 1700s.
In particular, scientific reasoning, you know, starts to say, well, look, we don't even need these mythological tales anymore.
We can just talk about materialistic explanations of things.
And then they look at the Christian story and they say, oh, by the way, there's a lot of weird contradictions in that story.
And things don't seem to make sense.
At the same time, the German anthropologists are digging up.
You know, ruins and hunting for evidence in the Middle East, and they're finding that things aren't where they're supposed to be, and they're not finding evidence of cities that are mentioned.
They're like, well, maybe that city never actually existed.
You know, maybe this thing is a lot newer than it would seem to be, or maybe a lot older than it seemed to be.
And they were starting to get actual data that was conflicting with the story.
The story had internal contradictions, and then that raises people like, yeah, Bruno Bauer and Reimers and, you know, early, you know.
David Strauss, who really started to press hard on the Christian story, and they're like, hey, just don't fly.
There's major problems here, internal and external.
And that really started the ball rolling, I think.
Definitely.
So what you're offering really is, I guess, is kind of picking up on instances in Nietzsche of focusing on Paul.
And I think you actually lay it out.
You know, there is a lot of, you know, mythical criticism of...
But we actually need to get to intention and motivation.
And this wasn't just some accident or honest mistake in the sense that the people doing this really believed it.
At some point, they were consciously creating a myth that they wanted to have an effect in the world.
And so, granted...
When we're looking back at history, you always have to use some informed speculation.
You can't know things for sure, but you actually can intuit a certain intent and motivation in people's minds.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I mean, I think there's a very clear motivation.
I think Nietzsche was maybe one of the first to pick up on it, although it wasn't really very clear because just the way Nietzsche writes and it's sort of scattered bits and pieces in his writings.
It takes a lot of work to pull those threads together.
But, you know, I mean, Nietzsche had the right basic picture, right?
The picture is you've got Jewish power structure, Jewish tribes who were in power in Judea and Samaria.
Until 63 BC, when the Romans come marching in and throw them out of power, and the Romans take over, and the Jews, like anybody else, would have been highly incensed at these foreign intruders who threw them out of power, probably pilfered their temples, you know, and extracted taxes and tributes and so forth.
And yeah, obviously a lot of resentment, a lot of anger there by the people who were in charge, which was the various Jewish tribes.
The people who lived there, the masses, to them, and I...
Sort of portrayed it in the book this way.
It was kind of a change in government.
We used to be ruled by the Jews.
Now we're ruled by the Romans.
And actually, the Romans got some pretty cool stuff that they're bringing in here that we've never seen before.
So you can imagine, even for the masses, it was actually a positive move.
They saw some gains, and okay, you know, we never really liked the Jews anyway, so we're happy to have the Romans come in and sort of run the show.
But obviously the Jews have been highly incensed at this whole situation.
And we know this because there's a story of the early resistance movement that comes right around the year zero with the Sicarii movement, right?
These guys were basically assassins.
Kind of, you know, renegade killers trying to assassinate individual Romans as a way to attack them, you know, to get back at them, okay?
Of course, you're facing the largest military in the world, so you have limited options at that point.
But obviously, individuals, small-scale attacks were working, so there was a movement afoot there.
But I sort of speculated, you know, the intellectuals like Paul...
Who was an intellectual.
He was a well-educated, elite Jew.
And he would likely have known that, hey, this little stabbings and killings was probably not going to really do it in the long run.
And we have to think sort of harder and deeper about how we can go about really undermining the basis for the Romans.
We can't just kill them off one by one.
That'll take centuries.
So we need to try something else.
We need to try to attack their basic picture of the world, the structure of their belief system, You know, the moral basis for the worldview, and you can imagine him thinking, like, well, maybe that will work on, at least on the masses, if not the Romans themselves,
if we can at least sort of get the masses away from the Romans and towards, on our side, a little bit more towards our side of the worldview, of the picture of the world, then we might sort of really undermine a common support for Rome.
We might sort of get the...
They get kind of sympathy in some sense from the masses, and maybe that will have an effect.
And I really kind of think that was sort of the real insight.
I mean, it was kind of a brilliant insight that Paul, who was by consensus the first writer, the first Christian writer, his letters are the first documents in Christian history.
So he must have been the first to kind of concoct this idea that he envisions this very skeletal structure of a theology.
It's very bare bones.
You really see nothing of the detail in the letters of Paul.
All the details come later in the Gospels, and those don't appear in the Bible.
Right.
So he either knows nothing about them or he had nothing to do with them.
We don't really know for sure.
But Paul, we can imagine, constructed a bare-bones theology about a God who came to earth.
He's here for you.
He sacrificed himself for you.
He got crucified.
He got raised from the dead.
And you, too, can do that if you believe in us.
Don't believe in those Romans.
You can believe in our new story about this rabbi, this rabbi Jesus from Nazareth.
And there's great benefits.
So that was kind of an interesting little story that you can imagine.
Paul constructs and he's ready to promote that among the masses.
Yeah, I would want to stress this because this is something that I think I would suggest that most average Christians actually don't know, which is that Paul never read the Gospels.
Paul never met Jesus.
And these are letters to, again, various sects of Christianity where he's kind of hammering away at ideology and, you know, that's wrong, that's heretical, and this is the right way.
So he's a kind of movement organizer is the best way of describing him.
But the other thing that I would stress is that...
Paul found Jesus in the Old Testament.
So again, there's the story of the trip to Damascus and Epiphany and so on, but he never met the historical figure Jesus if he existed.
He kind of found him in the text.
And so Christianity is profoundly Jewish in that sense.
It isn't like, you know, God, you know, chose the Jews for a time and then he just created this whole new thing.
You know, it has nothing to do with the Old Testament.
No, the myth of Jesus and even the story of Jesus emerged from the Old Testament.
Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't important differences, but of course there are, but it is profoundly Jewish in its inception.
Absolutely.
I mean, that was the milieu.
That was the context in which everything emerged.
I mean, you know, Paul is an elite, educated Jew.
I mean, he's going to think in Jewish terms like Jews do today.
I mean, it hasn't changed in 2,000 years.
And he's going to draw from his background.
He has expertise in the Old Testament.
Certainly he did.
He really knew the Jewish Bible.
That was an obvious thing.
So he's going to clearly draw from those.
He wants to construct a Jewish-friendly theology as much as possible, because that's the objective.
But I suspect, and this is where I differ with some of the mythicists, I think there probably was an actual person.
I think there was an actual guy, an actual rabbi.
Maybe he was called Jesus.
Maybe he was from Nazareth.
We don't know.
Probably he was agitating.
On behalf of the poor and the impoverished against the Romans, he might have been sort of a political agitator, you know, and trying to drive those invaders out and so forth.
He probably had, you know, kind of a little bit of a moral backbone there and was opposing the Romans.
And if you got visible enough and you caused enough stir, then the Romans strung you up on a cross and they crucified you.
And that was the punishment, the Roman punishment for political agitators.
So I can imagine all that probably, probably actually happened.
It probably wasn't Jesus.
Agitated, got crucified, and then a few years later, Paul comes along, and maybe he's drawing from this actual story.
Again, this is sort of my speculation, but of course, it's obvious.
If you want to construct a hoax to deceive people, it's always best to include as much truth in it as you can.
Sure.
Because it's going to sound more verifiable.
It's going to sound more...
True, right?
If anybody checks anything, yeah, there actually was that Jesus guy.
Yeah, I remember him.
Yeah, he was a great guy.
He was a great teacher.
Okay, he really did exist.
So it makes sense that Paul would have drawn from an actual person, life and probably death, and then gone back to the Old Testament and drew bits and pieces that kind of seemed to mesh with that story.
You know, from what I've seen, it's very, it's typically biblical.
It's very cryptic sort of stuff.
When you look at people say, oh, the Old Testament anticipated Jesus coming.
Well, okay, there's very obscure sort of passages that say, well, that sounds a little bit like this, and that could be interpreted as this.
And I, you know, okay, that's very useful when you want to make a story.
So I can imagine that Paul did that.
He took little bits and pieces.
Maybe not even him, maybe more even the gospel writers than Paul himself.
But he could have, even Paul, could have taken little elements of the Old Testament and matched it to this guy's life and then started to use that to build this, you know, the three days.
People talk about the three days in the cave.
Well, that sounds like three days, you know, Noah's three days in the whale.
You know, these kinds of things.
So you can sort of construct parallels that were there in the Old Testament and sort of weave those into the life of someone who existed and make...
Kind of an interesting and compelling new story.
Right.
And then in Daniel, there is the image of a suffering Christ, a suffering Messiah, which I think would go against other versions of the Messiah who would be more David-like, that they would be a warrior king who would...
come out of nowhere and start kicking ass.
Obviously that Jesus doesn't do that at all.
I've been exposed also to Daniel in the sense of many, particularly Protestant Christians, will say, you know, this is the text that the Jews don't want to know about because this just...
This is Jesus to the T, in fact.
He's accurately described.
And I think they're actually right about that.
I mean, they're wrong in some other ways, but they're actually right about that fundamentally.
That notion of a suffering Messiah who's kind of rejected by his own people, it's kind of the archetypal image in some ways of the leftist hippie or something.
I'm not trying to demean anyone here, but who says the truth sticks up for the poor, but then the people he's trying to help reject him kind of thing that that kind of tragic image of the of the peaceful messiah um and all of that actually is in the old testament like that that's the there's an archetype that's being constructed on a in a literary basis right there yeah yeah Well, right.
You know, you have to recall, right, most of the Orthodox Jews were expecting the warrior savior, right, the certain king and hero in general.
He's going to sort of militarily lead to triumph, you know, in this world.
And, of course, that was a very hard sell at the time because the Jews were just crushed.
I mean, the Romans rolled in and boom, they're, you know, they're just trampled underfoot.
So you were hard-pressed to look for a warrior king who was going to save you at that point.
It was a lot easier to find the suffering victim.
Excuse me.
The suffering victim who took a moral position, got himself killed, and now he's beloved of God because he was such a great guy.
That's a whole lot easier story to sell at the time that Paul is constructing his theology.
So yeah, it makes sense.
Paul must have known both sides.
He would have known about the warrior king side and sort of the suffering savior.
And he's like, all right, I'll take that suffering savior because I can match that to the guy who got crucified a couple years ago, and I can make a good story out of that one.
Right.
So do you think that Paul's motivations were ideological in this sense, and in some ways cryptic in the sense that he was trying to create this ideology that would undermine the Roman ideology, and many ideologies of the ancient world, that this was something new?
and he almost kind of He invented the left to a degree in the sense of this, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth and all.
You see where I'm going with that?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, right.
It's a really good question.
I have to believe his primary objective was to get back at the Romans, right?
He just hates the Romans.
He wants to get them out.
He's got anti-Roman messages sprinkled throughout his letters, and they're also there throughout the Gospels.
They want people to kind of resist sort of physically and psychologically and mentally and morally.
They want them to resist the Romans.
And I think that was really objective number one.
Let's get the Romans out of here, you know, undermine their bases for support, and then we can come back into charge.
Right.
And that was probably number one.
Number two is, of course, the Jews had this long-standing antipathy toward anybody else.
I mean, anybody who wasn't a Jew.
So they really had a really disdainful position towards...
The pagans at the time, the Arabs, I mean, they weren't Muslims because there was no Islam back then.
But, you know, the Turks and the Greeks and whoever they, I mean, the Jews were just like, they just thought everybody else was dirt, you know, or worse.
So you can imagine there's a kind of, you know, maybe like, you know, if I can screw with their minds a little bit, those masses, you know, and at the same time sort of, you know, get them on this anti-Roman side and maybe, you know, get them to buy a little bit of the kind of the basic Jewish.
Maybe that'll serve two or three purposes.
I can guess that kind of thing was maybe going on in Paul's mind.
You don't know how much he was really planning.
You know, a lot of this kind of, I don't know, you know, maybe it's sort of spun out of control.
It was kind of, you know, ran away from him.
It's hard to tell with Paul because it's such a sketchy theology and all the details that we know don't come until later.
Paul either didn't know or maybe had nothing to do with all the later details about what the meek Jesus did and said.
I mean, there's none of that in Paul, right?
It's just the Savior's here.
He died, and he went to heaven, and you can go to heaven, too.
It's very bare bones.
But even that was enough to, A, get you opposed to the Roman pantheon, the Roman theology, and B, according to Nietzsche.
I mean, that alone was a highly destructive move because now suddenly your real world, your saved world is in the beyond.
It's after you die.
This world is kind of the pain and suffering and you're carrying your cross with Jesus and you're suffering like him and maybe you're dying on the cross or whatever.
So this world is a nasty, ugly, suffering place and the next world is a good place.
And that's what you're looking forward to.
Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche kind of said, well, look, this is a highly destructive view of life.
I mean, you're supposed to be a creature of the world.
You're in the world.
You're part of the world.
You know, a normal human being wants to live a good life, to be happy, to be satisfied with how things are, and not view every day as kind of a tribulation and a trial and suffering and pain and nastiness and, you know, maybe, maybe I hope someday I'll be better when I'm gone.
So both Chopin and Nietzsche said this is a highly life-denying, life-negative view of the world because the true life is the afterlife.
It's not this world.
It's not here now.
It's the next one.
And that has all kinds of repercussions about how you live your life and attitudes towards things and other people and towards your own health and towards sickness.
I mean, really very far-reaching consequences that I suspect neither Paul nor the Gospel writers really Really knew about it.
I mean, they just wanted a really good hook.
They wanted to really hook people in.
Well, what's a better hook?
Then you get to live forever, man.
You don't have to die.
You get to live forever in a happy place.
And to me, that was just a big hook to get the people in.
But it has a lot of really negative consequences for society over the years.
And I think that was, to their credit, that's what both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche really, really latched onto.
And they really stressed that point.
Right.
Well, what are some of those consequences?
Because I think there are a lot of contradictions and tensions within Christianity.
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