Why Invent the Jesus? • Richard Carrier Ph.D.

I guess tonight it's dr. Richard Carrier has a PhD in the history of philosophy from Columbia University and is a published philosopher and historian specializing in the contemporary philosophy of naturalism and in Greco-Roman philosophy, science, religion and the origins of Christianity. He regularly lectures to community groups around the world. and teaches online courses is the author of many books, including Sense and Goodness Without God on the Historicity of Jesus, Why I'm NOT a Christian. An amazing book like that, not the impossible faith because it's short and I have a short attention span and it demonstrates the story as well as others. chapters, anthologies and articles, his most recent books include Scientific Education in the Early Roman Empire and Scientific Education in the Early Roman Empire.

I feel like a topic is good, so let's welcome dr. Richard Carrier, yes, I was asked to talk about the historicity of Jesus and the question that I'm going to talk about today, there are a lot of different angles that you could approach this and the one that I'm going to approach today is like why do we

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Jesus, let's assume there wasn't one, why they created one and then I'll talk a little bit about the evidence that they weren't versus what they were and of course here when I wrote my book on historicity. of Jesus, I'm just comparing two hypotheses, the hypothesis that there never was a Jesus and the hypothesis that there was just an ordinary Jesus, a guy who wasn't miraculous, wasn't super famous, but legends grew around him, In other words, the next most plausible theory, if there is no God, is that Jesus was just an ordinary guy and then the gospel built legends and myths around him and people deified him.

That's completely plausible and that's the only hypothesis I take seriously in the book. In no way am I in that book dealing with the hypothesis of the miraculous fundamentalist Christian Jesus. I simply assume that that is already false, so the questions that we are going to talk about today are going to relate those two different Jesuses, the hypothesis of the ordinary Jesus and the no. The Jesus Hypothesis Now let's first guide us with some evidence or guide us with some chronology, one thing you should keep in mind in the ancient world, the average life expectancy for someone who survived infancy was only 48 years, so back then a life was about half of what it is today and that is significant because it means that the witnesses died much earlier and things can change and be lost to history much faster now that religion definitely began around the year 38 D, no matter what the case, but the first documents we get of any mention of Christianity or Jesus or anything are the epistles of Paul that end up in the New Testament.

Now, several of the ones that we know in general consensus are that they are fakes. Paul did not write them, but seven of them are generally believed to have been written by him. yes he originally wrote them in different forms and stuff, but those documents are the first documents that we have for the Christian Church and they only refer to visions, I will talk about that a little later, they would never talk about Jesus having a ministry or Anyone who knew him in life, the first time anyone meets him or encounters him is after his death and there are a variety of different ways of interpreting the epistles, but there is no direct claim that he was actually a guy who I walked through the world. earth in the epistle and the epistles, the authentic ones, the gospels come a lifetime later by ancient standards, about 40 years after the beginning of the religion, you start seeing gospels and then they are written in a time span between 75 and 115 A.D., perhaps. and that's the first time we've heard of a biography, so we go from non-ordinary memoir and non-ordinary history and immediately we're out of the gate with wild religious mythologies about this guy, so there's no middle ground present in the historical record and then comes all the other evidence.

Later you often hear people talk about Josephus dating back to the late first century, but the evidence is pretty clear that either he didn't mention Jesus or we can't establish that he originally mentioned Jesus, other people inserted mentions of Jesus. in your text. First, as very clear examples of someone who is not a Christian, something outside of the New Testament that mentions Jesus was already around 115 AD. and then, we are already a long time after the beginning of religion and all those references seem to simply refer to the gospels or Christians quoting the gospels, so we have no independent corroboration of the gospels and this produces an unusual sequence of evidence The epistles only speak of a pre-existing heavenly being and a revealed gospel.

There are several places where Paul says The gospel is known through revelation and hidden messages in the Scriptures, such as the idea that it is known because Jesus preached it and Galilee is not there. in Paul at all and the Gospels come a life later and are tremendously fictitious, even what it contains that is not miraculous is not realistic. and implausible and I will give you some examples later and yet all subsequent testimonies about the historicity of Jesus are based on the gospel so these fictional stories come to light even if Jesus existed these are fictional stories about him and all later references are to refer to these, so there is no independent evidence and all other evidence of the first 80 years of the development of Christianity was not conveniently preserved, not even among citations or refutation;

In other words, a lot of other literary activities that would have been going on, including tons of other letters, don't survive, not only do they not survive, we don't even have mentions of them, so the evidence has been pretty well eliminated and then all the other evidence we have is falsified instead, we have dozens of gospels, at least 6 versions of Acts, hundreds. of false epistles, manipulated passages, etc., and when you look at Christian literature, you take, for example, the facts and the epistles of the Gospels and count the number of people who everyone agrees are forgeries compared to those who people believe they might be authentic, the ratio becomes between 5 to 1 to 10 to 1 forgery to authentic, meaning that forgery was the normal mode of literary production for Christians in the first twenty centuries, which It tells you something about how the evidence is mixed up with highly unreliable things that have been removed.

They've been falsified and doctored and altered so you really have to lift yourself up to get to the truth, you have to go through this lens that has been massively screwed up to prevent you from seeing the truth of how it really started and you have to look for clues that might escape from that network now what is the alternative explanation suppose that Jesus did not exist how then do we explain Christianity? There are some unusual but indisputable facts that we can first queue up about is that some pre-Christian Jews had already identified a character in the Old Testament called Jesus as a supreme archangel and the firstborn son of the gods, so the belief already pre-existed Christianity.

What Christianity did was teach that their Jesus was that archangel, so they are taking an angel that already existed. in Jewish angelology and attribute it to their guy now, that could be done with a historical guy, they could be saying there was a historical Jesus, he's this angel that came down and taught us things, but either way, whether that's it or not, definitely They have already borrowed this figure of Jesus from Jewish angelology before their time and what they taught that was different from what other Jews taught about this angel was that this Archangel angel came down incarnate, was killed and resurrected, that's the unique part of Christianity as a Jewish sect that they have. this particular doctrine and they teach this doctrine in parallel to the cosmic story of Satan and if you know Satan, the story of Satan rebelling in heaven and being cast out, he is not cast down to the earth, he is cast into the upper heavens or the heavens. lower beneath the moon.

He sits in the sky and builds castles in the sky a hundred thousand miles away sending his demons to meddle with us and all that, that's standard Jewish demonology from ancient times, but that whole story was read from the Scriptures. , was found there or people wrote books. about it, it is obviously not historical, there was no Satan, there was no war in heaven, it is a myth, so Satan is a non-historical person that the Jews put in history and made a historical character and he is also an archangel, so Jesus is his role. Later we will show you that he reverses the role of Satan.

Satan rebelled. Jesus submitted and therefore when Satan rebelled, he brought death and all the horrible things of the world. By submitting Jesus, he canceled all the evils that Satan caused, so Jesus and Satan are designed mythically for the opposition Jesus was designed to cancel Satan in Jewish mythology, so here is the alternative theory that these events did not were revealed as it actually happened, the death, incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus were not witnessed by anyone, they were actually revealed only through private visions. choose people if they are the apostles and that Jesus was actually killed by Satan and his demons from heaven in his kingdom above the clouds.

Now you might think that sounds strange, why would it actually be that we have a Christian text called the ascension of Isaiah written approximately? around the same time as the canonical gospels that originally said this that Jesus was killed by Satan and his demons in outer space and there are some clues as well as that other sects were teaching this, but all of those sects disappeared by the mid 2nd century. and We hear nothing more about them, we have no documents from them, the Ascension of Isaiah only survives in manipulated copies in different versions where people tried to erase this part, but because we have different traditions in different languages, we are able to reconstruct some of the original and this again reversed the fall of Satan.

Satan failed the test and was given the opportunity to be equal to God and tried to take all the power and rebelled. Jesus was given the opportunity to be equal with God and he was subjected to death and therefore cancelled, there is another parallel and I will get to some examples later in the adjacent province, so in Judea the adjacent province was Egypt, which It had a huge and flourishing Jewish community, there are many pilgrim journeys between Judea. and Egypt at that time, so there is a lot of cultural communication about the main savior God and Egypt was Osiris and Osiris has the same model in which he was placed in history as a pharaoh who lived in a particular historical time, lived in the land and was killed. and he was resurrected and ascended to heaven that is the version that was sold to the public but the priests talked among themselves and said that it was not really true, that that was just an allegory of the real thing that happens, which is that Osiris descends right below Moon. where he is killed by the equivalent of Satan in Egyptian mythology and resurrected, so they had the cosmic version that I'm talking about here, which was the real version and then they had these public stories that they created and of course in the case of Osiris, Egyptian. the story is magnificently well documented thousands of years ago, so we can confirm that Oh Cyrus existed, so we know he was a non-existent person, so we have exactly the same model to follow and it's happening in exactly the same province, so What would not be so out of the ordinary for this to happen in Judea now in a way analogous to what I say and now I suppose that the Jewish sects realize, I say Jewish sects, some of all these religions that I have mentioned here are actually just sects of Judaism that people try to think of.

They as different there is no Christianity it is just a Jewish sect they changed some things Mormonism is just a version of Christianity therefore it is just a version of Judaism Islam is just a version of Christianity which is just a version of Judaism in fact Islam It's very similar to the original Christian sect that was Torah observant, the original Christian sect said there was no bacon, etc., circumcised and all that Islam says there was no bacon and circumcised and all that, so actually They still retain many of the original Torah-observant Christian elements, making Islam a sect. of Christianity just grew in a particular region and gained much more success than other heretical sects, but as a sect of Christianity it is actually just a sect of Judaism, so technically Islam is just Judaism 3.0 or something, but what everyone has in common Mormonism, you know the story of Joseph Smith having conversations with the angel Moroni and seeing words on magical plates and the Book of Mormon records what they said those things.

Islam Muhammad has conversations with the angel Gabriel and the Quran records the spoken teachings of Gabriel as speaking. like the voice of God,Christianity, this theory would say that the apostle Peter has conversations with the angel Jesus and the New Testament records the hidden deeds and teachings of that angel, that would be the analogy for this alternative explanation of the origins of Christianity. What happened differently is that like all the other savior gods in that particular period, they had historical eyes even though they didn't originally exist. The same thing happened to this angel. He got the story from him that Moroni and Gabriel didn't, now we can argue against that theory.

There are a variety of different attempts to try to say that that can't be. I wish I had the slide of showing Luke Skywalker saying, you know he can't be my father, it's impossible, but I'll point out some of the best ones. This is the best attempt to argue it and you can't really get it from the Gospels because the Gospels are very dubious and have no sources, so the Gospels are not useful. You can't get it from additional biblical evidence because they're all based on the Gospels, so they can't independently corroborate them, so you're left with the epistles, those seven authentic epistles of Paul and that's really all they have. that we have, so we have to go deeper there if you want to prove that there was a historical Jesus.

I find it there and one of the places where people who defend historicity find it is that twice Paul refers to this group of people called the Brothers of the Lord and the assumption is, oh, those are the biological brothers of Jesus, so So, he really must have done it. The problem existed is that the only brothers of the Lord Paul ever talk about knowing something about our brothers of worship of the Lord all baptized Christians our adopted children of God and therefore brothers of each other and therefore brothers of the Lord Paul says that Jesus is the firstborn of many brothers means that we are all brothers of the Lord, so those passages become ambiguous: is he referring to baptized Christians or is he referring to biological brothers of Jesus?

He never says and you would think that if he, the only version he talks about explicitly is the cultured version if he was going to refer to a biological version he would have to specify it, you have to say as brothers of the Lord and the flesh or something like that really emphasize, I'm not talking about baptized Christians, I'm talking about the actual biological brothers of Jesus, but he never really seems aware of the need to make that distinction, so he suggests that actually when he uses that phrase he's only referring to the cult version, but it's ambiguous at best, we can't build anything from it, there are a couple of passages. where there are two passages, one passage where it says, you'll often see it translated descends, descends from David, descends from David, it's not in Greek, it actually says literally in Greek it says manufactured from the sperm of David and there's another one.

The reference to being born of a woman is exactly the same word manufactured from a woman now, in the case in which you speak of David, what is suggested is ambiguous, what do you mean by manufactured from David's sperm? Do you mean literally or do you mean? is a reference to offspring, what does that really mean? The word that Paul uses there is ambiguous and he also uses it in the case of the woman passage. The word that Paul uses there is the word that Paul uses for divine fabrication. It is for when he mentions the creation of Adam.

He uses that word when he mentions the creation. of our future resurrected bodies which, by the way, are waiting for us in heaven like empty zombie shells for us to inhabit and I'm not kidding, that's 2 Corinthians 5, Paul is very explicit. Those bodies are already there waiting for us. Paul uses the same word, so he is not talking about natural birth like we do when Paul refers to natural birth, he uses a different word in Greek and this was very disturbing. We Christians have examples and Bart Ehrman shows it in his book Orthodox Corruption of the Scriptures.

We have examples of Christians trying to change one word for another because they know that Paul uses one word for manufacturing and he uses a different word for birth, so I tried to change it in both passages, we have manuscripts where we have the scribes' attempts to screw it up, but they were late, so we have earlier manuscripts and that can establish and establish that no, that's not actually the reading and Now everyone agrees that Paul used the word disturbing instead of the word obvious. Another example is when he talks about the birth of a woman.

Actually, Paul's argument is allegorical and he explicitly says, "I'm talking about allegorical women, I'm not talking about a real woman." Biological woman, I mean the world order that you are born into, so if you are born in a particular world you have a particular mother, but then you know that can get into the debate about the semantics of Paul's rhetoric and so on, I think . ultimately becomes ambiguous so once again these are very ambiguous passages that do not predict that they are not particularly good evidence of historicity but, going back to the James example, I will give an example of why dominant views are often based on long -Assumptions held about the Christian faith and they don't really hold up when you look at the evidence and this is an example, everyone assumes that Jesus had a brother named James, but when you look at the evidence it doesn't really support that or that Jesus had a brother named James James who was ahead in the church a church leader the evidence does not support that any of Jesus' brothers, neither James Jude nor anyone else in the New Testament, are said to be apostles anywhere in the entire New Testament. so we don't actually have an explicit statement saying that any of the Brothers of Jesus were an apostle, even the book of Acts is not aware of this being a case, so it is the only place where we have the origins of the history of Christianity from its first public. announcement in its first 30 years at no time is there a brother of Jesus leading the church neither James nor anyone else the letters we have in the New Testament of James and Judas none of those letters say that they are the brother of Jesus marks if Jesus has repudiated his brothers, just like they're not my brothers anymore, these are my brothers, so it doesn't show any knowledge of any of them having joined a church.

Luke only puts them all in the church in acts 1, but then they disappeared from the story like I said and so do their mom and dad, by the way, somehow, as soon as you know the real history of the church, the whole Jesus' family disappears the first time his brothers appear as apostles in wildly ridiculous stories written more than a century later. You see, the legend seems to be growing in that direction, the family is

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ed over time in the same way that Moses' family was invented over time and everyone who is not fundamentalist now agrees that Moses is a fictional person and that it was mythical. he did not exist and yet he has named brothers and sisters, etc., so simply having named brothers and sisters does not make you a historical person.

Fictional people also have brothers and sisters and there are other passages in Paul. People refer to what Paul says Jesus describes. The Latsis will say the Last Supper to the right of him before he is executed and he says, well, actually, Paul never calls at the Last Supper, that would have been kind of useful because it would suggest that there were many other suppers before, no, him. He only calls it the Lord's Supper and says that he received it directly from the Lord, in other words, what he communicates there is from a vision that he is hallucinating or dreaming or claiming to hallucinate or dream and he affirms that he received it that way, not of no witnesses and when he describes the event of the eucharist there is no one else present he does not mention anyone who was there, it is just Jesus communicating it spiritually to his community there is a reference to the rulers of this time crucifying him but who they were Paul never uses it the phrases are cons of this Aion which means princes of this universe or princes of this cosmic era, he never uses that phrase of human leaders or rulers, he uses similar terminology to refer to the demonic forces that rule the world, so is he talking about Satan and his demons or is he talking about Romans, is he talking about Jews, we're not sure that there is a people that says, well, frankly he says that the Jews killed him, that's in 1 Thessalonians, except almost 80 percent of leading experts agree that it is an interpolation of the passage where Paul blames the Jews for killing Jesus not only does it not only have historical errors, making it objectively impossible that Paul wrote it, but it also contains an ISM emmett Unpolished, anti-Semitism reflects later Christian thought, not Paul's thought itself, but contradicts things. said about the Jews elsewhere, so the people in the passage generally agree with something someone added to the text that wasn't originally in Paul and then you'll hear someone say right there.

Paul says that he confessed to Pontius Pilate in 1 Timothy, but all leading scholars agree that 1 Timothy is a forgery. Paul didn't write that. Well, then the evidence looks dubious when you start looking at it, and so when you start picking each piece of evidence, it dissolves and you start comparing the two different hypotheses. As for how well they explain the evidence that remains, that's what I do in the book. I look at all the evidence - they all present pros and cons, that's why it's so big, plus you could provide a lot of important background knowledge that you can use to understand and interpret that evidence and I find that even being as generous as I can with the historicity hypothesis , I still find a probability of 2 and 3 that the alternative hypothesis is a better explanation, it is the one that is true for the origins of Christianity now, that still means no.

There's not a 1 in 3 chance that there was a Jesus, that it really was an ordinary Jesus and that's how the religion started, so that's on the more generous side and then when I look at it the way I think in terms of the most skeptical. On the other hand, I come up with a twelve thousand to one probability against the historicity of Jesus, so those are my margins of error, they are very wide because the data is really bad, so why would they do that? Here is a clue about Peter and there in the gospel there is 1st.

Peter in 2 Peter are written by different people, the authorial style of both is so radically different that we know they were not written by the same person and 2 Peter refers to 1 Peter, which means it is a clear indication that 2 Peter is a forgery, so everyone agrees: Peter is a forgery. Many scholars think that 1 Peter is also a forgery. I think they are wrong, but that is not relevant because a Peter never places Jesus in history is something witnessed, so that is one problem, but two. Peters is definitely a fake, everyone agrees now, the interesting thing is why would they fake it, what are they doing in it and if you read Peter his main messages to say that we do not follow cleverly contrived myths, we were eyewitnesses of his majesty and He then immediately falsifies an eyewitness account of the encounter with Jesus on earth and does so not to respond to critics of Christianity, but to attack fellow Christians, unknown Christians who claimed that such a Jesus was a cleverly contrived myth, not something that someone met in person, so That's why this letter is forged to attack that sect of Christians, which gives us a clue that there was such a sect of Christians to attack.

Now the thing is that we are not told anything else about that sect, we do not have any of their documents. We don't know the name of the WA cult that we made, we don't know anything about them, everything was purged and destroyed, so here we know that there was a second that said this, but we are not allowed to see anything about when that cult originated what they were . say what their documents were or something like that this is an example of a clue that slipped through the lens of the distorted lens that was created now why the allegory of the Gospels is originally allegorical why that mystery of the Eclipse several scholars have proposed different theories note the null The thesis is that we see this all the time, in fact, we look at the cargo cults, we look at the ancient mystery cults, we look at the hadiths, it is the natural progression to start historicizing and inventing history and inventing people who did and they said things that religions tend to do.

Another example we have is Origen himself, this is a Christian scholar from the 3rd century, he actually lets out a speech once he says that you have to control the masses and control the masses. The lower-ranking illiterate people who fill the pews of Christians need to be fed literal stories and allowed to believe that they are literally true because they are not educated enough or high enough to understand the allegorical meaning and must be saved or else they will be killed. they will. they die and then they will end up in hell, so to save them it is better to just let them believe the literal story and then if they rise high enough and get enough education andthey can come down, so you can let them in and say, "Okay, these things are." just allegories, you have to understand that the real story is not the literal part, that is a clue to the type of mentality of the Christian elite of this particular sect, the sect that he was and then this outlet finally gained power and decided that all the documents would survive. kind of mentality, so they're actually tending to try to outsell the allegory as literal because it's a better way to grow a big Church because it's very difficult to fill the pews with people when you're trying to explain this complicated thing: an allegorical. version of Jesus had better be much more impressed by the literal Jesus, so the tendency was to stick to a more literal Jesus.

Another factor is the bottleneck of the first century. We have a letter from Pliny the Younger for the first time in history. non-Christians, we mention the existence of Christians in the year 110 AD. C., writes a letter about this and what that letter reveals is that there were actually very few Christians, since there were so few that many of the youngest were one of the most legally. person with experience in the Empire like him, you know, it is difficult to explain, there is a complete list of all the positions he has held for decades and yet he has never been present at a trial of Christians who did not know what they were guilty of and they didn't.

He knows what punishments to exhibit and then he has to ask the Emperor and another thing he points out is that most of the people he interviewed there was an anonymous list of people accusing of being Christians that he interviewed that the majority had stopped being Christians. like 20 years before or 10 years before so it was really very few people. They were actually still Christians and there are so few of them that even Pliny the Younger didn't even know what they were guilty of or why they were illegal. He finally punished them for being an illegal assembly in the ancient Roman Empire. you have amendment rights that would allow the rights of a peaceful assembly sent, you have to assemble, you actually had to get a license from the state and if you didn't it was automatically assumed that you were organizing and agitating against the state, so the opposition to Christians It wasn't religious it was political, the fact that they gathered at night or gathered without permission from the state just seemed suspicious to the state and was literally illegal so it had nothing to do with them being a religion originally that changed. in later centuries, but the point is that this shows that there were so few Christians in 110 AD. that you can understand why it would be easy for church history to be radically altered; it would only take a few people to start selling a different version. and there aren't enough people left to contradict that version of things because the religion that was disappearing and then someone reacted clouded it by publishing these books to try to sell the ISM of Jesus and promote a literal version, so it was actually easy to get a. to eclipse the other, another factor is the historical accident, the sect that most promoted the historical verses of Jesus, for example in 2 Peter, the sect that that letter was forged to attack that letter was forged by the sect that finally gained the heard from Constantine, Emperor Constantine the first Christian emperor who began transferring money from pagan temples to Christian churches and in fact actually introduced Christianity into the empire as a state religion and who turned out to be the most fundamentalist and illiterate literalist sect of all , Constantine, for example, the tutor he chose for his sons lacked ancius and langt ancius was like the Ken Ham of the ancient world this is a time when I give a full lecture on this on this Connait tour of Canada on the ancient science that all educated people at that time knew that the earth was a sphere had really good multiple core operational empirical evidence that the earth was a sphere.

Ancius didn't have it, he said they are entities. I just throw out all that evidence that it's impossible for the Earth to be a sphere because that means there are upside-down people on the surface. The other side of this and that is just ridiculous, so this is the sect that actually gained political power and then ultimately decided which books and things just to survive, so that's a big factor in determining which version of Christianity ended up prevailing in the history and that, like I said. that the sects had absolute power decided the survival of all documents for a thousand years with very few exceptions such as the discovery of NAG Hammadi, but that occurs at the beginning of the Middle Ages.

These few surviving sects hid some of their documents in vessels in the early Middle Ages and they survived for Find them today but we have nothing, we are very small, that is before that and certainly nothing before 50 AD, so the first hundred years of Christianity are a blank space to us, all that evidence, all the original sects, all the evidence of them is. everything went well so that's some of it well let's give it more context or this will make even more sense now this is what you can hear on the internet some of it is really terrible so be careful on the internet with statements like this.

I am about to go through a lot of those things, it is terrible, please never repeat that Jesus is like Horace, that is not true, so there are many false facts about Horace, forget Horace, just erase Horace from your memory , there are better analogies. um these are some of the best ones and I know you probably don't even know that maybe three or four of these are all of them possibly, but these are the gods that we have good pre-Christian evidence that were dying and rising gods that had associated salvation cults Osiris Adonis Romulus Zell Maxis and in Nana, in fact the first in the story is in Nana, so it actually began with a woman and, in typical patriarchal style, the woman's story is replaced with the story of a man, so instead of a woman being crucified and resurrected on the third day it is now suddenly a man being crucified and resurrected on the third day because who needs goddesses right?

I don't know anyway that story is very interesting by the way, it would have been a more interesting religion if we had kept that. I don't know if any of you studied under Donna, she is an interesting person in mythical history, but Mithras, who is also a savior god of this time, is not a dying and resurrected god. You will often hear the claim that he is one of those dying and resurrected gods. This is not the case. It is that we do not know exactly his gospel. We do not have his written gospels. They existed but we do not have them.

What we do have is our comics, basically graphic novels. This right here. there is a graphic novel of the gospel of Mithras carved in stone that tells the entire gospel in the picture, so it's like having an illustrated Bible without the text and you're trying to figure out what's happening on earth but what's not. What happens here is his death, he does not die upon resurrection, he undergoes other great sufferings and struggles that give him power over death, so that is still the analogy and it is relevant because there are numerous personal savior deities, personal saviors, Mithras was a personal savior.

Anana was Also Osiris was too and there are many different ones, not all of them are dying in rising gods, some suffered some other type of suffering, but they are fashionable at the time, I know what they all have in common, they are these. all savior gods, so you gain personal salvation by joining them, they are all the Son of God or occasionally the daughter of God, they all go through a passion apotheon in Greek, exactly the same word Christians use for Jesus , there is a passion of Osiris. there is a passion of Inanna and so on.

The Passion of the Christ is actually the latest version of that idea and through that passion, things with passion mean suffering or struggle, some kind of great suffering or struggle that they experience. who have to end up going through it gain victory over death and share that victory over death with their followers often through baptism and communion the idea of ​​baptism and communion as the means of sharing death and resurrection or The conquest of The Death of His Savior God predates Christianity in multiple cults, so it's not actually unique to Christianity, it's a push from another cultural trope and all of these savior gods have stories about them set in human history in the earth, just like Jesus, but none of them. they really existed, so in fact if you look at the galaxy of people that Jesus fits into to make him historical, it would make him extraordinary, he would be the oddball out of them all, oh you can barely see the bottom of that.

Oh well, sorry, there's a sentence there, but anyway, you need evidence, let's say that Jesus is the exception for all these guys and then for some girls, we need evidence of that, so in the Jewish context, Now what happened is all these other savior gods. every national culture had one, so the Greeks had one, the Egyptians had one, when the Syrians had one, what was now a turkey that culture had won, the Thracians did, who would take their local religion and fuse it with this basic model and create a new version. of the religion that would be different from all the others but that would have those same characteristics that I just mentioned and some others, then what the Jews seemed to have done there, a small marginal countercultural sect of the Jews, took this model and did what they All the other surrounding cultures did was basically make a Jewish version, so they created a Jewish personal savior, and to do that, they built off of the most fundamental structure of ancient Judaism at the time as a religion that is basically based on the atoning sacrifice.

Blood Magic Blood magic that would unleash the wrath of God and ensure blessings in this life and the next and begins with the story of Isaac. Abraham is ordered to sacrifice Isaac, his firstborn son, to appease God's wrath and God stops him. at the last minute he's going to do it, he's totally obedient and God stops and says no, okay, I'll let you replace him with an animal and that's actually, in Jewish tradition and legend, the beginning of the beginning of Yom Kippur. , the Yom Kippur ceremony where you would take a goat as a substitute for people and kill it and that its atonement would affect us unleashing the wrath of God and atoning for the sins of Israel, sins being the things that offend God, that was the basic model , but the problem is, of course, that animal blood is less powerful, less magical than human blood and therefore you have to repeat this every year, so every year in the Jewish temple or equivalent there was a ceremony in which the goats were kept and I am going to talk a little about the ceremony.

Plus, there are a few more details that are relevant to Christianity, but the basic idea is that you sacrifice this animal and all of Israel's sins are canceled, but that wears thin. The magic only lasts a year. The duration of the spell is only one year, so you have to keep doing it and this especially became a problem when the temple cult was destroyed by the Romans. Oh no, now how do we get the atonement? There is no temple to perform the ritual and that was a crisis for rabbinic Judaism. They have to solve it in others.

Ways Christianity was already on board to solve the problem because they wanted to eliminate the temple even before it was destroyed because they were an anti-temple sect like the Qumran sect was that they thought the temple cult had become so corrupt that he was actually preventing the end of the world they wanted the end of the world they wanted to bring about the day of judgment and the reason why God would not do it is because he, the Jews, continue to sin. I was like, well, keep sitting, I'm not coming to save you and So, this countercultural sex saw that the temple is getting in the way.

Well, if the temple worship is corrupt, it will never end sin. So what if we just got rid of the temple cults theologically so that it's not even a component anymore? If you went straight to God. Skip the middleman, then we can appease God and then maybe we bring about the end of the world like we want it to happen, so Jesus, when you look at Paul's epistles, it's very clear that he really is the only and most important one. The function of Jesus in his theology is that he replaces the temple. He replaces both the Passover sacrifice and the Yom Kippur sacrifice.

If you become attached to Jesus, you no longer need the temple ritually. You no longer need Yom Kippur because Jesus is and you are. meet the archangel, the firstborn son of god, that is the most powerful magical blood you can get, so if you sacrifice it, if you sacrifice this guy, the duration of the spell is infinite, so you no longer need to repeat the ritual year after year, therefore, I no longer need the temple and you can see this, you can read this in the shovel letters, that is really the role that Jesus plays, everything else about moral terms and teachings and teachings and those things were just complements to the court to create the local community they were trying tobuild, but the real function of Jesus theologically is to replace the temple as the final sacrifice and that was the version that they imported into this model of a savior deity, so they created a kind of Jewish version of this DD Savior that has an Aeon path He has a passion and a death and resurrection and through which he gains victory over death and shares with his followers through baptism and communion and all that, so that's it, but let's go to Jesus in the Gospels.

I told you before that religious literature was typically false; by the way, there are about 40 gospels, half a dozen Acts, dozens of counterfeit guns or more, actually, depending on when you count them, but even the Exodus, Deuteronomy, the Kings, Daniel, his Maccabees, Tobit, Joseph, Aseneth and other Wills and lives. of the patriarchs, Jewish literature was generally falsified, actually a lot of Jewish literature was really Bible fanfiction, there was like a line from the Bible that said something really strange and then someone wrote a huge book explaining that line, so it's al just like you know, Harry Potter fanfiction or something, except they took it seriously and Christians did that.

The Christians, for example, eventually got upset that there were no stories of the baby Jesus, so they invented a baby Jesus who wanders around the city and kills all the locals. villagers villagers children for bothering him just to prove that he is God and that you should not offend God. It is actually one of the scariest Bibles or gospels you will ever read. It's like a script for the omen that was too scary even for the film industry. So yes, they are writing a lot of false things, so we have to be aware of their falsification.

One of the most interesting things I told you about nog kamati, so in nach mati we have an example of them in the process of forgery. a document, they have the original source document which is this letter written by someone else and someone was creating a narrative of a resurrected Jesus, a resurrected Jesus interacting with his disciples literally borrowing the text of that other letter and there they were halfway there and Then apparently they'll come and kill them or something because they just swept their entire desk into the pot and now, 2000 years later, we can see their work in half so we can see even in the process how things were invented. about Jesus there are many books about this John Dominic Crossan this book the power of the parable is really an excellent demonstration that the Gospels are just that in extended parables that they really shouldn't be they shouldn't be taken as history they should be taken as parables themselves Randal Helms' Gospel Fictions is another example.

I give examples to prove the story and then of course I give tons in chapter 10 of the historicity of Jesus, most of which is taken from peer-reviewed literature, so you don't even need to take my word for it. , a lot of the things are already in the literature and people just haven't put them in. together in one place so you can see how widespread this understanding is, so here is the key to this mark as soon as in the Gospel of Mark, as soon as Jesus begins to talk about the gospel, almost immediately when he begins to do that , Said this.

It's Martin Chapter Four Then Jesus says he who has ears to hear should hear but when he was alone the twelve and those who were around asked him about the parables he told them the secret of the kingdom of God it has been given to you but to those in the exterior everything is told in parables so that they always see but never perceive and hear but never understand, otherwise they could turn and be forgiven then Jesus said to them: do you not understand this parable, how then will you understand any parable? and then goes on to explain that the story he just told is not literally true, it represents something symbolically, so Mark is really giving the reader a key, he is telling my whole gospel, this is how you should read my whole gospel, and if dont do it. read my entire gospel this way, you are one of those outsiders who won't know how to turn and be forgiven and here is an example of that: how many people know that Jesus hates figs?

Yes, that's right, he does it well, so in Mark 11, Jesus is. Walking and he is hungry and he sees a fig tree in the distance and Mark goes out of his way to say that it was not fig season and that Jesus knew it was not fig season, but the tree approaches anyway I don't know why to go to look for gissy figs and get some fake figs to eat he goes up there and there are no figs to eat but obviously there wouldn't be any, it wasn't the season for the tree to be in fruit but he gets angry at the tree and curses it and says maybe never bear fruit again and then the next day they come and have withered to their roots now, this is obviously a fictional story, it never happened, I mean people. you don't have X-Man's secret power to wither fig trees, so we know it's a fake story, so why is it said what's the point of this story?

But even if you had the that Jesus was a miraculous magician, it's driving him crazy, why would he do that? It makes sense if you read it literally, but it makes sense if you don't read it literally. The entire story is actually an allegory of God and the temple bandits. If this is a story of why God allowed the Romans to come and raise the temple and destroy the so-called temple and put an end to it one for all the fig tree actually represents the temple and basically Jesus acting in God's world curses it and says that you will never bear fruit again and it dried up to its roots and that's why it's explaining that that's why you know God said it's not the time for that anymore, we're going to get rid of it and he immediately says what would you do now is pray to me and this and yada yada then he's talking about what God has replaced him with. so it's an allegory of that and I didn't make it up, that actually comes from peer reviewed literature, our ji Hammerton Kelly writes a paper called sacred violence and the Messiah, so this is in the scholarship, so this is things that are not communicated to the public very often and one of the clues why you can interpret it that way is not only because you can think it, but Marc writes by wrapping stories around stories, there are many Pat places in the mark where a story and it's interrupted and then another story happens and then you go back to the end of the original story and this is one of them so you have the curse of the fig tree and then the next day they come and find it withered.

Do you know what happens between those two events? Does anyone know the cleanliness of the temple? Jesus enters the temple condemns the temple as being corrupt and throws out all the money changers and so anyway, when Mark does it while wrapping one story around another, they are meant to be comments about you to each other, so that's what you He says this is all about the temple, that's how Mark writes, he's not writing literal. No story, he is, this is not a memory, this is not something that happened to him orally, Laura, this is something he is crafting very carefully, he is wrapping one story around another, he is using an allegory. , is actually building all of this to sell you a message.

I'm actually saying this is why God condemned the temple cult, this is what we're replacing it with and therefore it's about the message, not the historical truth of the thing and when you go from one story to story throughout the Gospels. Especially notice, everything is like that, everyone is like that, or looks like, when you look at it originally, it seems stupid and strange, like that couldn't have happened and then you look at it allegorically and suddenly, it's a big deal. sense, then all the gospels are written this way, there are other examples of why John baptizes Jesus.

I mean, Christ in that story is a model for Christians. What would Jesus do? He would undergo baptism. He tells you what baptism looks like. as if telling you what baptism means, it is adoption by God, etc., it emulates the crucifixion, baptism is a death and a rebirth to eternal life and that is how it was in the cult of Osiris before Christians took borrowed the idea and it was also in Jewish cults before Christianity. or the Jewish sects before Christianity adopted the idea and its other aspects of this, you can talk about the submission of Christ reversing the rebellion of Satan and things like that and that is why, for example, if you notice that as soon as As Jesus undergoes baptism, Satan's rebellious nature is reversed, he is immediately tempted by Satan and survives all temptations.

He resists temptations. There's a reason those two are joined together and then of course look if you have Jesus being baptized by John and John is actually declaring Jesus his successor. This is the best. story to invent because in reality they want to co-opt the fame of the Baptist cult and get rid of certain competition, another example and the one I referred to before, you know the story that Pilate, according to custom, offered them a freed prisoner every time there was one. On a holiday or this particular holiday, he would release a prisoner to the Jews and the Jews elected the murderer and rebel leader Barabbas, now Roberts.

I don't know if you know that he means son of the Father in Aramaic, which is why in some manuscripts he is called Jesus. Barabbas, then we have two Jesus sons of the Father in this story that is a bit suspicious and there was no such custom either. We know for a fact that Pilate would never have done that and never would have done it, but also what we notice here is there now. Looking at this, it coincides with the Yom Kippur ritual I was talking about because the Yom Kippur ritual did not simply involve sacrificing a goat, you would get two identical goats, into one of them you would cast all of Israel's sins to cast it out. the wild and then I would chase him and push him off a cliff and the other is the pure one would be the one you would sacrifice and his blood falling on the altar would atone for the sins of Israel.

This is an allegory. exactly for the Yom Kippur ritual that says Jesus is the real Yom Kippur Barabbas and his ways of murder and rebellion, those are the sins of Israel and if you choose him, you are actually choosing the sins, you have to choose Jesus, he is the real sacrificial goat, so the whole story doesn't make sense as a story, but it makes sense as an allegory that Jesus is the Yom Kippur. Barabbas is the scapegoat. Jesus is the blood. So what was the gospel myth that served the function of being new scriptures that Christians did not?

I don't like the ancient Scriptures because there were certain things that were old-fashioned. Jesus is the new Moses in the new Elijah and in fact they take stories from Moses and Elijah and update them, so a lot of the stories about Jesus are actually revised. versions of stories about Moses and Elijah are evangelical guides to missionary life every little poppy in the gospels has a little thing you can use to respond to people who are arguing with you dealing with miracles family skeptics enemies etcetera so it's useful for Actually, If missionaries are challenged by something, is that okay?

Let me tell them a story and then they would tell it and then they could riff on the story and look very impressive. The ritual explained from the Gospels. These explain the origins. Myths explaining the origins of rituals baptism eucharist martyrdom explained the gospel itself through parables, for example, as Mark 4 says, but were later used to establish a stable Authority. The biggest problem with early Christianity is that if it originated from visions, anyone can come. and he says that Jesus spoke to me in a vision and he changed his mind and now we are going to do this other thing and we have Paul do that right, so he is an intruder, he comes in and says that Jesus spoke to me and he says that we are going to do something different and he had to fight very hard and you can see clues in Gotha and his epistles.

He also had to collect a lot of cash and take it to Jerusalem to convince the original apostles to accompany him. your scheme of things and accepting your church into theirs, but eventually that starts to get annoying, you can't have people constantly having visions of Jesus, so what's the convenient thing to say, you could say oh , you know, the allegorical versions of Jesus are actually literal? It is true that there were actually disciples, he handpicked them and those disciples choose their successors and you don't have a pedigree going back to the historical Jesus and you can't because there was no historical Jesus, you can create a sect that You can try and argue that You can't go into this cult and change things by saying you had a vision, now you have to have a pedigree, of course, to do that, they invented pedigrees and then you have this propaganda arms race with different cults. everyone makes up genealogies and claims you know I came back five.

He could be descended from Peter or whatever, so it didn't really work, but we have plenty of examples of religions tryingdo this right, so I'll end this, by the way, that's justice. just a tip of the iceberg there are some aspects of how this makes sense some aspects of the evidence some aspects of the debate there are many more things that you will notice the book is quite long but I will end with an analogy so you can see how this all fits with the flying saucer Roswell what really happened in 1947 in New Mexico a guy found some sticks and aluminum foil in the desert I mean that's really what happened what was said to have happened was remains of an alien spaceship what was said what It happened in just 30 years that a flying saucer complete with extraterrestrial bodies was recovered and autopsied by the government.

Now look at how fast that legendary development is, and yet there are millions of people who believe it despite a lot of really solid evidence against it. even in this era of universal literacy universal education photographs newspapers government records all that stuff myth still trumps history now the difference is the rest of us know it's false because we have access to all that other documentation why he did that and why what the myth became so popular why so many people believe it how it was invented is an example of conspiracy theories many conspiracy theories become very popular this is an example of conspiracy theories and coded worldviews shaping fears and assumptions and explain events and why things are the way they are and it's comforting to think that you know the truth and everyone else is an ignorant stranger and how they do it, you use culturally familiar symbols in this case, space age technology, futurism, government experimentation and corruption and coverage. -oops and all that, but what if civilization collapsed, say today, and for hundreds of years the Roswell believers controlled and edited every document that survived? above you would be in the same position you are now regarding the historical Jesus and that is actually what happened in the Middle Ages so thanks that's my talk, with how confident can we say that there was a Jewish sect in the early the first? millennium worshiping a jold hurricane angel named Jesus why I say high certainty very sure based on the epistles of Paul now there is I mean there is more than 90% probability that those epistles of Paul were written in the 50's as we have done discovered from internal evidence and there they refer to events that occurred between 15 and 20 years earlier, which gives us the date range of the cult's origins and everything.

There are some attempts to argue that those letters actually date from a century later and there are arguments. that those letters date back a century and are not impossible I think they are improbable but they are not absurd so the level of confidence is as if they were instructions for a rocketIf the idea that they really started with an advertisement from the 30s as the interpretation general view of the epistles is if they were instructions for a rocket, I wouldn't get on that rocket, but I'd like to buy some cargo, you know? Do you have any idea what the origin of the image of Jesus we see now is?

The reason I ask is because if you look at all the other images of the course of death and resurrection, they probably look less human than the image of Jesus. I don't know anything about the origin or how it came about, yeah, I mean, there are no images of Jesus that go back to the beginning of the religion of him. The first images that we see, I think, or the third century, were already 200 years, 300 years too late and they just represent scenes in the Gospels like that image of Mithras, right, and Mithras looks quite human there, he just looks like a soldier doing military stuff back then and Christians saw him as a magical worker, basically like a Moses figure or an Elijah figure.

So in older art he is depicted with a wand, he actually performs all his acts with wands and he just looks like a regular rabbi or something casting spells with wands and that is the original version of Jesus which looks nothing like the later medieval. version of Jesus that we all know and then you know the images of Jesus, it just morphs to be what the church wants you to sell and the market they want to appeal to, so they keep reinventing the image of Jesus, but when you get Back to the material original, looks nothing like them.

I have a question, so you talked about the historicity of Jesus and mentioned the existence or non-existence of his brothers, what about all the other characters that go along with Mary? and Joseph and Pontius Pilate and all of these historical figures fall under the same type of hypothesis that didn't exist, so the way I look at it is that because the evidence is so suspect because of all these things that if you want to argue So that For someone in the Gospels to be real it takes some evidence besides the Gospels and we have that for some like Pontius Pilate Caiaphas and certain other figures we have evidence outside the Bible that establishes that they existed and that is why the Gospels are actually creating a narrative as Fiction historical essentially where they borrow real people and put them in there and then have that care of the main character, Jesus, interact with them or other characters interact with them.

Some other figures that we know are real or within the Christian tradition are James John and Caphis. o Peter James and John were brothers of each other, not brothers of Jesus. James John and Peter were the pillars that Paul refers to as the type of the creators of the Christian sect in Galatians 1 and 2, so yes, James John and Peter are all in the gospels, so those are real people that have been put there and interact with Jesus to represent things about the missionary journey, the path from doubt to belief and things like that, so yes, some of them are historical. some of them are probably not historical, some of them we don't know about and I talked about a lot of them.

I like, you know, this Simon of Cyrene II, there's Joseph of Arimathea, this Judas, so the question is do these people come from any success? Origin of Oracle. Or are they completely made up for the purpose of the text and I look at many examples of that in the historicity of Jesus? I was wondering if you think maybe it's possible that the days of the big debates with William Lane Craig and the leasing issues over the world, do you think that's over or do you think it's possible with the internet now and people reading everything? about counter apologetics that can be apologetics will become more interesting?

Have you noticed that they are starting to change? Oh, it always happens and you can see the difference if you ever realize that Muslim apologetics is actually not even terribly and embarrassingly bad, but it looks exactly like Scopes's monkey trial era Christian apologetics, so it seems like a hundred year old apologetics and I think one of the main reasons for this is that I've basically been imprisoning or killing the opposition, so they've never done it, they're essentially like someone who has no immune system, They have never had to react to open the discourse, the challenges that religion and, but in the West, of course, we have So Christians cannot kill us or imprison us even if they want to or try and that is why they have to respond to our arguments and They become more and more sophisticated over time to try to make their arguments seem more impressive and to make you imagine that you go and see that some of the most ridiculous arguments will be couched in the most elegant peer-reviewed formal philosophical prose, with footnotes and this all looks exactly like conventional scholarship, but it's complete nonsense that they figured it out because they know it. it seems prestigious and they know they can peer review it or whatever for the particular religious journal or whatever, so yeah, they keep evolving trying to make more sophisticated versions of their religion or their apologetics as they keep knocking them out. and where that end point where the end point is, I don't know.

I will continue to see how they evolve and change and their arguments, of course, yes, yes, people have tried to organize a second debate. I did a debate with William Lane Craig's people. I tried to organize the second debate, he says now I've beaten Richard Carrier. I don't need it again, so yeah, that's the big problem, but yeah, I would. I would debate with him on any topic in which he has experience. He would have ordered it. Throughout the presentation you referenced a sort of mainstream, you know the academic consensus on a variety of topics, but in the presentation that Jesus probably didn't exist, your position is decidedly outside the mainstream, the great most of the New Testament.

The scholars and historical experts of that time would disagree with you and believe that Jesus somehow existed, so when you take that as your representative in the mainstream, why on this key issue are you outside the mainstream? most scholars don't agree with you on this, yes, because they don't know half the things in my book. He gives an example, so I contacted Mark Good Acres, a very capable renowned scholar and biblical studies scholar on London radio, and we were discussing this. this Kunduz these two competing theories and one of his arguments was that Paul says in his letters that he learned about Jesus from those who are in Christ before him, that he learned it from the witnesses and I told him no, that is not in Paul, in fact, Paul says the exact opposite, not only to say the exact opposite, but he swears up and down against it, he says no, no, I'm sure the lines there say no, I don't. is, so the commercial was a commercial break and we were looking for. and he had to admit like, wow, you're right, that verse isn't there and yet for some reason throughout his life, even as a PhD student, he thought there was a line in Paul's letters that said that and the problem.

It's that even conventional, even secular, experts in this field have been trained and raised with a set of Christian faith assumptions that are this lens through which you have to look at the evidence and select what evidence to look at so that they really are kind. . of being trained to see it only one way and one of the things I do in my book on the historicity of Jesus is to fill in all the things that when I interact with experts there would be, it's not that all of us experts are missing the same piece. of information each expert is missing some information and I would have to say they would say something like that and I said that's not true, but you'll be a little bit different for every seat you shake, each academic involved would be like three or four things they would say that actually they're fake and then I could show them that they're fake and it's like, how did you not know?

And when I added it all up, you know about a hundred and two hundred things and So I cover that in the book that I think the consensus is based on now, in this infrastructure of the Christian faith, assumptions that you don't realize, no. examine them if they don't actually examine them, so they need to. I actually stand back and look skeptically at your own evidence and I do it in a way that makes sense and one of the points of my book is to get it through peer review, so it's a peer reviewed book published by Sheffield Phoenix which was published on the University of Sheffield campus by Sheffield Faculty and with the intention of saying okay, here's a peer-reviewed case because there are a lot of really bad versions of it, you hear that a lot of the consensus It's based on them reading the arguments on the internet and saying that's true, it is, but oh no, don't read that, read them, read your own peer-reviewed literature, read the latest book on this topic and then interact with it, so the consensus right now is based on ignorance of this new discovery is a set of things that really need to be re-looked at and re-thought and they just won't until we get academics to really commit to this theory, we're not really sure whether their consensus position is based on logical principles or objectively correct reasoning and that's the problem we're in now, there's really nothing we can do about it unless we can encourage academics to read the book and engage with it honestly as academics and rethink things and then see where they come from.

Outside of this, I would love to see someone propose a defense of historicity that addresses all of and incorporates all of the evidence I have gathered for the historicity of Jesus. That is the best defense of historicity you can give so that it can have people like you. read, you say, read that book and then read this other book and then you can compare because these are the two best cases that exist and you can come to your own conclusion, you don't have to rely on the opinions of any consensus, a consensus that is driven largely by actual Christians, so you know secular scholars aren't the majority in the field, so that's where it has to go, but if scholars continue to ignore the book and you can squeeze in your own peer-reviewed literature, I don't know what to argue in terms of how to get them to reconsider their position,they will believe, and the amount of references that will support these crazy, crazy, yes, yes, amazing, yes, ideas on the Internet is problematic. because sometimes you can't tell if it's a poem or something authentic, so a Poe is when someone writes an attack pretending to be the real thing that if you're trying to mock something like the best mockery of a thing seems indistinguishable from the real thing. thing in itself, yes, but on the internet I don't know, sometimes I can't tell when I read something like if they really believe what they say or it's just a joke and then of course I know people like you. who have met people and say: you know, they really believe it, yeah, that's great, thank you all for coming tonight.

I think it was really interesting before we finished. I just wanted to thank our AV staff who We won't be paying because this is a voluntary thing so thanks to Robert and Paul please.