A Provocative Discussion On Christian Origins with Dr Robert Price Exploring Christianities Inception: Episode 10

Episode Summary

In this podcast episode, a diverse array of subjects concerning the origins of Christianity and the historical credibility of the Bible were discussed. Robert M Price put forth his theories about the genesis of Christianity, proposing that it was influenced by mystery religions and the mythical hero archetype. He delved into the historical Paul and his impact on the development of Christianity, alongside conversations about the New Testament canon and the role played by Constantine in shaping the religion. Jeramiah Giehl brought up inquiries regarding the genuineness of the Bible's portrayal of Jesus and his disciples, and the potential associations between the Ebionites, Essenes, and Zealots.

Throughout the podcast, Price and Giehl delved into the intricate nature of comprehending Christianity's historical backdrop and the diverse interpretations of its teachings over time. They engaged in discussions about the veracity of specific texts and the influence exerted by political factions on the faith. Price defended his theories as an alternative lens through which to scrutinize fragments of Christian origins that might otherwise be challenging to reconcile with the conventional orthodox perspective. The dialogue shed light on Price's scholarly work and his methodological approach, while also posing thought-provoking questions for further contemplation.

In essence, the podcast episode encompassed a broad spectrum of subjects tied to the beginnings of Christianity and the historical precision of the Bible. Price and Giehl delved into the intricacies of comprehending Christianity's historical setting and the manifold interpretations of its doctrines throughout history. Their exchanges encompassed debates about the credibility of specific texts and the impact of political entities on the religion. The exchange provided insights into Price's scholarly endeavors and his scholarly approach, while also prompting inquiries that warrant further exploration.

Chapters & Topics

• 2:24 Origins of Christianity and Paul's Role
• 2:42 Origins of Christianity
• 2:53 Paul's identity and his relation to Enochian Judaism
• 15:11 Robert M Price on Christian Origins
• 19:23 The Historical Paul and his Influence
• 38:25 The Historical Paul: Fact or Fiction?
• 43:39 Early Christian Origins and the Influence of Marcion
• 1:00:51 Discussion on the New Testament Canon
• 1:02:28 Inclusion of non-canonical texts in the New Testament
• 1:08:10 Constantine's Conversion and Influence
• 1:09:41 Constantine's influence on Christianity
• 1:15:00 The Historical Jesus and His Disciples
• 1:15:34 The depiction of Jesus in the Cleansing of the Temple and his association with armed men.
• 1:18:30 The Connection Between the Ebionites, Essenes, and Zealots
• 1:27:25 Robert M Price discusses his work and upcoming projects.

Action Items

• Further research and analyze the pseudo Clementine literature, specifically the Epistle of Peter to James and the Dd K, to gain a better understanding of the historical context and authenticity of these texts.

Key Questions

• 2:53 Who is Paul and where does he fit within Enochian Judaism?
• 6:52 What is the connection between Paul and the sect of John the Baptist?
• 16:27 What are the three forms of Christianity that emerged?
• 20:59 Was Simon Magus a double agent with a view to influence people to be more pro-Roman, and what does Robert M Price think of this?
• 35:20 What are Robert M Price's views on the authenticity of the Pseudo Clementine literature and the historical situation of Peter and James?

Keywords:

Paul, Jesus,

Episode Transcript

(00:09):
All right. Good morning.
Welcome, Doctor Price. Thank you for joining me on
Pulling The Threads podcast again.
This time, how you doing? Great.
Fun. Thanks.
So, So yeah, today I wanted to like last time we kind of talked
about price mythology and historical versus myth, the

(00:31):
mythicist view. Today I kind of wanted to ask
you questions about the origins of Christianity.
Who is Paul? You wrote a book on the colossal
pasal. Gabriel Boccaccini has wrote
works that he refers to Paul as kind of in the vein of Innochian

(00:52):
Judaism, a branch of HellenisticJudaism, kind of based within
the Inocchian literature. Can you give me some background
on, I guess, like who you see Paul as and kind of where he
falls within? I guess you know Gabriel
Boccaccini's view of like Inocchian Judaism and where his

(01:14):
writings come out of. Well, the the.
Innokian thing is really interesting, like the Dead Sea
Scrolls seem to participate in that thought world and as does
the Gospel of John, but it's it's a little tougher to see the

(01:35):
pall of the epistles as fitting as easily into that.
He doesn't speak of the Son of Man.
He doesn't use the same sort of metaphors as symbols of the the
the animals standing for the different leaders of Israel and
other nations. He doesn't he?

(01:55):
He's somewhat interested in angels and usually they're
malevolent ones and and then thewe know that.
The Dead Sea Scrolls people and the people that treasured the
various books of Enoch, of whichthere were many.
I mean that our first Enoch is aPentateugue, actually of five

(02:19):
originally different writings. And then there is the the
Slavonic Enoch, which may have been written slightly later,
which I think is more of a unitary work.
And then there is the couple of centuries later, third Enoch or
Hebrew Enoch. And then we're told there were

(02:39):
several other ones that some more mentioned in the Testaments
of the 12 Patriarchs and so on. And from what I remember, angels
there are in in in that whole tradition are good and the the
armies of God, which of course you would expect from the Yahweh

(03:00):
Sabbath, the Lord of Hosts. But in the Pauline epistles it
sounds more Gnostic to me. In that there the angels
mentioned are in in a group of the principalities, powers,
dominions, Thrones and all this.Which Paul speaks of, like in

(03:23):
Romans, is those entities which would separate us from God but
for Christ managing to to break through and be our advocate.
He speaks of lustful angels in First Corinthians that that's
his final big reason Corinthian women should go veiled because

(03:47):
otherwise they may be attracting.
The frisky attentions of angels,just like Eve did when she was
unveiled completely in the Garden.
And so. And yet of course Enoch knows of
the Watchers is fallen angels, so it's not like that's totally

(04:10):
alien. But they seem to be more active
in Paul. Like still up to their old
mischief. But these are.
These might be judged in a larger framework, as variations
of a theme, just different emphases according to what each
seer or thinker visualizes as important.

(04:32):
Now I I kind of go through a back door into seeing a real
connection between Paul and thiskind of sectarian Judaism.
When I say, as I argue in The Amazing Colossal Apostle, that
Paul was another name for the guy we know as Simon Magus.

(04:57):
Things said about Simon and his relation to the sect of John the
Baptist that he was the the the would be I should say he was
slated to be the successor of John, but was away in Egypt when
John died and for the lack of him they demoted #2 in line

(05:18):
Dossytheus the Samaritan to be the head of the sect.
When John the bap, sorry. When when Simon returned, he
said that oh what? Where's John up?
Sorry he passed away. But Dosytheus is in charge and
he says oh he is. And he he managed to be a good
sport about it for a while, but came to be disillusioned with

(05:40):
Dosytheus and challenged him to into a kind of a miracle
contest. And who could be?
Like docetic and and polymorphous and kind of
transcend the flesh. And in a kind of a duel with
Dosytheus, Dosytheus yielded andsaid, all right, I got to admit

(06:01):
it, you're the standing one, which is sort of a Gnostic
synonym for for the great power of God and however.
He he must have split with them eventually.
And this it really looks that way if you go with Robert
Eisenman, as I do. And I think that this sect of

(06:25):
John described in the Pseudo Clementines was the same as the
Komran community and by extension the same as the
Jerusalem congregation. Now we hear that in the Dead Sea
Scrolls, though of course they're written in cipher
language, so you never really can be sure who they're talking
about. But it I find Eisenman very

(06:47):
plausible that that the individual called the spouter of
lies or the mocker was kicked out of the community because he
was trying to make things easy for the simple ones of.
Who seemed to be Gentiles by saying oh, you can join the

(07:10):
covenant too and you don't have to worry about all those strict
things that the the the Kamran monks do and.
To the Koran elders, of which there were 12, interestingly,
they said no, no, no, you're you're just deluding these
people. You're selling smooth things.

(07:34):
It it's, it's cheap. Grace, as Bond Opera would have
called it, and you're building acity on blood, a phrase.
It occurs in the scrolls. So he he left or was kicked out
and said he he was, I think. Expelled from the covenant for
having denied the covenant itself.

(07:56):
And so to me this sounds a lot like the Pseudo Clementine story
Simon Magus and the The Sect of John.
And yet there is also this interesting thing in Galatians.
Which seems to remember that Paul managed to to reconcile

(08:18):
with the the the Jerusalem Pillars of the Big Three whom I
identify with the three men of the inner circle at in the Dead
Sea Scrolls. And they said, look, that they
needed the money. They were a small group.
They had a kind of socialist communitarianism that'll

(08:41):
bankrupt any group that tries it.
And so they were the poor, the EBM Knights also, and Paul,
apparently, or Simon was having great.
Success among the Gentiles partly by altering the nature of
the preaching to something that that they could make more sense
of, like Jesus as a mystery, religion, savior.

(09:06):
I think this gets really messy, but I Rene is tells us that
Simon claims to have appeared asJesus earlier and to have.
Apparently suffered on the cross, though in fact he hadn't,
and that he had been active in the Old Testament period as as

(09:27):
the Father. When he was Jesus he was the Son
and now he's the Spirit. Well, my guess is that the
command slash Jerusalem Church had no Jesus figure originally.
Though they did have a leader, so they sort of had a, a a hole

(09:49):
to fill there and that to have this rapprochement with, with
Simon. He said, all right, let's get
back together, but I'm not goingto change my gospel, but how
about you give me your blessing to go preach it to the Gentiles,
so you're not preaching to anyway.

(10:10):
I mean, think of Matthew 10. Their Great Commission was don't
go to the Gentiles or the Samaritans, only the law sheep
of Israel. Well, OK, well, as in Galatians
said they decided Peter would goto the circumcised, Me to the
uncircumcised. But this didn't.
Oh yeah, And part of his price was you have to accept.

(10:33):
Me as the Messiah, at least in the first go round.
And that's kind of why the 12, whose names at least the three
their titles in the Gospels implied they had cosmic
significance. Peter the Rock, presumably the
the the cosmic navel stone of the temple that that kept the

(10:57):
flood waters in check. James and John the Bo Ann are
gay, so I think have has it withBoaz and Jake and the two great
pillars which stand for the pillars that hold up the the
vault of of the heavens and so they were cosmic entities and.

(11:19):
But they get shoved aside in theGospels.
And why is that? Well, because when the gospels
were written, they gave pride ofplace to Simon's Jesus and made
his lieutenants the the the 12 disciples who had been really

(11:40):
the the 12 councilmen of Kumran.And the inner circle became the
pillars. Okay.
And they were still sort of important, but they suffer in
comparison with Jesus. And so it seems to me that and
then the whole thing fell apart because of what we also read in

(12:02):
Galatians, that the the Jerusalem Church must have begun
to think. Wait a minute, maybe we can.
Eliminate the middleman. How about if we go around to
these churches Paul founded? Or Simon?
Take your pick and tell him you're off to a good start,

(12:22):
brethren. But I'm afraid Paul only taught
you the beginning of it. If you want to really go the
whole way, of course you've got to be circumcised and keep the
Torah. And some of them said, well,
that's reasonable. I mean, Jesus was Jewish.
It would make sense we follow the Jewish.
Law. And so Paul, they do this after

(12:44):
Paul is left and he finds out about it and said what is going
on here you guys a knife and be in the back and that's certainly
the way he seems to put it in collisions.
I thought we had a deal. What?
What is this? In fact, if you follow this
route, you're cutting yourself off from Christ.
You you're saying he died for nothing if if nothing has

(13:08):
changed. And so the temporary
reconciliation came apart and and and.
This is very complicated and I realize the more links you have
in a chain of hypotheses. The less probable it becomes.

(13:29):
And so it's it's a reconstruction.
It's a possible way of looking at it.
You can never be sure that this is true.
So I'm not getting on my high horse about it.
My hobby horses. Oh yeah, we know this is true.
And if you don't think so, you're no scholar.
Baloney. I I I admit.
But it this does seem to me to be a compelling way of putting

(13:51):
together a lot of. Bits and pieces that otherwise
just all seem very strange and hard to put into the
conventional orthodox view of Christian origins.
And so, and and ultimately, to skip ahead, it seems to me that
Christianity, as it emerged as Catholicism, was ultimately the

(14:14):
the result of three. Sort of later developments, 3
forms of Christianity. Well pre Christianity.
The sacramental system seems to me to have come directly from
the mystery religions, because from what we hear about early
Christian worship, they were a mystery religion.

(14:37):
You had to have catechism beforeyou could be baptized and only
then could you have communion and this enabled you to
participate in the saving, deathand resurrection of Jesus.
You know, you might as well be talking about mythris or
something there, same kind of thing.
So that was important. Second, the the cults of the
Dying and Rise in Gods, which were which fit very well into

(15:00):
the mystery religion, but was technically sort of a different
myth theme. That originally had to do with
agriculture and the real renewalof nature.
And before that, the Israelite sacred king who ritually went
through a death and resurrectionto restore the fertility of the
land and his mandate of heaven to rule, etcetera, etcetera.

(15:22):
And then the Gnosticism was kindof a variation on that, where
you had to have a saving knowledge.
Which is certainly why even today could go Christians say
that, oh, they hate Gnosticism. That was a heresy.
It's obvious to any outsider that you their belief that you

(15:44):
have to believe a certain dogma.What is that?
You have to have the saving knowledge.
And I I guess I would say also you can have a fourth thing the
Hero cult. Because the way Jesus is
depicted in the Gospels, he's like Hercules or Apollonius of
Tiana. He does wonders, and it's even
the same mythic hero archetype, one type scene after another

(16:09):
that you also find with the Buddha and Oedipus and Hercules
and so on even. And this, I think, was the
original point of the death and resurrection.
It's amazing how little the Gospels have to say about the
death of Jesus as an atonement. You have that in the epistles.
But I in the Gospels, it's mainly you can't keep a good man

(16:32):
down. The crucifixion, the Judas's
betrayal, it's all the darkness before the dawn.
Wow, He he's back. You enemies thought you could
stop him, but as Peter says in the book of Acts, but God
overruled you, and that really has nothing to do with this
atonement that's plugged in fromthe the mystery religions, it

(16:55):
seems to me. So again, that's a like a geyser
full of gibberish probably, but that's how I view Christian
origins. My working hypothesis.
Well, no, that was that was really good.
So you you said mentioned 3 layers.
I kind of see I guess 4 layers of redaction I would say or 4

(17:17):
errors of redaction that that inthe formation.
For me the post destruction of the Temple of the Barkopa is an
error where I think you see the Pro Roman influence, the give on
to Caesar. And then I think a big one and I
kind of want to ask you questions a little bit later on
this, but would be like Marcian and his influence.

(17:39):
And then the in the in the next layer would be the proto
orthodox response which then leads up to the final layer
which I see is Roman Catholicism.
Before I ask you questions on that, because that's kind of
like my view of how some of the formations there, which might be
kind of wild, but I don't know, I kind of want to go back to the
Simon Magus thing before kind ofgetting into some of that.

(18:04):
The polemic work Tell du Yeshu speaks of Simon Magus as a
double agent and I've seen some work that questions whether Paul
actually had a conversion or found a different way to
influence the community to be his.
His views seem more akin to Philo.

(18:24):
And the question like that I have that I I don't believe the
statement that's attributed thathe was a student of Gamma Leo
because his his view seemed to more aligned with Philo than
they would Gamma Leo from my understanding.
So, and I guess that's a lot, I kind of went on a rabbit trail
to there but Simon Magus Paul asyou know the name changer who

(18:51):
maybe was a double agent still with a view to influence the
people to be more pro Roman. What do you take of that?
And was do you see him as a disciple of Gamma Leo like that?
I I think you're right about that.
But that's part of the Judaizing, catholicizing
emphasis of Luke, who I think was actually polycarb of Smyrna.

(19:14):
I think it's the 2nd century work.
And the Theophilis to whom his works are addressed is the
Bishop of the Bishop of Antioch Theophilis, who was Polycarp's
colleague. But.
I agree, like Hi Mcabee points out in a couple of his books.
Like one of them is Paul and Hellenism.

(19:36):
He says if Paul, well, he thought he did take Paul to be
the actual author of the Epistles.
I don't. I think it gets more complicated
than that. But nonetheless, whoever wrote
them seems to just have the vaguest.
Acquaintance with Judaism. The way scripture is treated, as

(19:58):
Mcabee points out, sounds more like the Nagamadi texts than
rabbinic stuff. I remember years ago I finally
got around to reading WD Davies book Paul and Rabbinic Judaism.

(20:19):
Oh man, maybe just Paul. I can't remember now, but the in
it this this is supposed to be the big classic that shows just
how Jewish Paul's thought was. Again based on the canonical
epistles. I read it and I thought, what am
I reading? The same book.
This. This does not seem to make its

(20:40):
case at all. In fact, it's almost a
refutation of what people say about it, because the closest he
comes to anything in the Paulineepistles is the idea of the good
and evil inclinations and that that's kind of like where Paul
says, I know that sin dwells within me and all this.
There's another law in my members, but I don't think it's

(21:02):
the same thing. It's it's it's not really the
the meat of the Pauli doctrine that I know that in my flesh
dwell with no good thing. Who will release me from this
bondage death. That seems to me that and when

(21:24):
he in Roman 7 he's talking aboutthe lot of the of the
unregenerate. I mean he seems to be more of a
perfectionist. And this, this just doesn't
sound rabbinic to me at all. And certainly not the.
I mean he quotes the Septuaget or translates it into Greek

(21:47):
himself. The the guys in Palestine had a
funeral for the Torah when the Septuaget was published.
It's like Mark 7 quoting Jesus debating with the scribes over
Panzeya. And Jesus Point depends on
quoting the Greek Septuagent because the Hebrew text doesn't

(22:10):
say the same thing. And so you're supposed to accept
Jesus having a debate with the rabbis from the Septuaget.
No, no, I think it's all Hellenized.
But Luke acts Ephesians first and second Peter, and well,

(22:32):
maybe a couple of other ones areare Catholicizing documents, as
FC Bauer pointed out. Because there it's it's ill
concealed that they're trying tomake Paul sound like Peter and
the Jesus sound like Steven and Paul sound like Steven and the

(22:53):
Jesus and Peter have the same career issuing in the an arrest
at the temple and trials before Herodian Monarchs and and so on
and so on and the they're even Paul's mentioned by name of
course in second Peter that yeahI know Paul a lot of people are
getting weird stuff out of reading Paul but granted it's

(23:16):
it's difficult material and the unstable nuts out there twist
the text but our brother Paul ohhe he was if you read him right
you know he's a good guy and after all it's nothing new for
people to misinterpret scripture.
Wait a minute wait a minute. You're thinking of Paul's
epistles as scripture and you'rethe apostle Peter.

(23:39):
No. No.
This is a later attempt to mergethe two together and he can read
Ephesians and first Peter the same way and but especially who
can act where Paul does the charade to make it look like he
you know, when he's paying for the haircuts, for the guys who

(24:00):
are finishing up their vow and all this stuff.
And it's even put as if this of course is is a scam, right
Paula? But but maybe it'll it.
It just seems to me that that stuff is no evidence for what
Paul was like. And one last thing and I'll shut
up about this. No conversion.

(24:24):
I I think it is very important that if Paul's conversion is
told three times with somewhat different details.
In Acts of course and there there's almost two more
versions, because the whole thing seems to me to be derived

(24:45):
from 2:00 well known already oldsources.
Euripides play the Buckeye in which Pentheus the the king of
Thebes, I guess it is is trying to persecute the the new
religion of Dionysus which is just infiltrated the city and he

(25:08):
has Dionysus jailed. He doesn't realize that that
that Dionysus apostle is really Dionysus in disguise.
And he has a miraculous prison escape.
And he tells Pentheus, you thinkyou have power over me.
You don't. It's He tells him pretty much

(25:29):
what Jesus tells Pilate, you'd have no power over me unless it
was you're just playing a role here.
And then he, he miraculously sort of hypnotizes.
Pentheus said, wouldn't you liketo join the group?
Yeah, yeah, I would. And he says, OK, you're going to
have to dress up as a woman because my followers are all

(25:50):
women. And if you want to go check them
out, you want to be in disguise.OK, he does.
And he climbs a tree to observe them having their crazy rituals
and they recognize him and tear him to pieces limb from limb and
and and Dionysus has already said to the audience, now we'll

(26:12):
say if he is, see if he can takeit as well as dish it out.
Well, this is just what happens to Paul.
He's persecuting the Christians and and suddenly he has this and
well actually the the rest of the story, the miraculous escape
and all that. That's in chapter 16.
But he he does become a Christian.

(26:33):
He does get persecuted before itfor it and finally dies.
But there's even a scene where the risen Jesus appears to
Ananias and makes the same kind of nasty remark.
Now he'll see how much he has tosuffer from my name.
Yikes. Well, the other source is Second

(26:54):
Maccabees chapter 3, where HeliaDoris, an official of the
Salucid Emperor is is put in charge of a raid on the
Jerusalem Temple. We could use that money though.
Those Jews don't need it. Why don't you go down there and
sack the place? Well, he does it, but he doesn't

(27:14):
actually get there because in front of the temple an Angel
appears on horseback and tramples him and he's knocked
out and blinded. And the Jewish elders say, oh
boy, we're going to answer for this.
Let's nurse this guy back to health.
And so they do. And he, he regains his sight and

(27:37):
he pretty much converts to Judaism and goes back to the
emperor and says here's what happened.
That's why I'm empty handed. And So what would you suggest
that I get another guy to do is well, if you want him to get
pulled and to convert to Judaism, you could have him try
it. Wait a second.
And these were well known works.It just seems to me.

(28:00):
And you look at the epistles, it's not a word about this.
It it says at one point when it pleased God to reveal his son to
me or in me, which kind of fits the context better.
Then okay, I began preaching, etcetera, etcetera.
But there's nothing about Damascus Rd.

(28:21):
There are various remarks about him executed the church, but
every one of these seems textually dubious.
JC O'Neill did a great little book on this, showing that it
is. Some of the bits are using alien
vocabulary to their their context.
They seem to be interpolations and and and so forth.

(28:44):
So I I wrote a one of my chapters is the legend of Paul's
conversion and in fact in Roman 16 he or somebody pretending to
be Paul speaks of. I think it's Andronicus and
Junius, notable among the apostles who were in my kinsman,
who were in Christ before me. What?

(29:07):
This guy's comes from a family of Christians.
Hold on. What?
What are we talking about here? And then you think of what the
Ebianites said, that that Paul was a gentile who converted to
Judaism because he had the hots for the high priest's daughter,
but he just couldn't hack it. And so they kicked him out and

(29:29):
he said they're going to be sorry they did this.
I'm going to destroy Judaism andsiphon of the converse.
Was that true? Well, I don't know.
But how come? I mean, it's hard otherwise to
explain how he speaks of the lawas a terrible burden.
Jews don't think that. Jews never thought that.

(29:53):
That's what Gentile would be. Converts thought, right?
That's why in the Epistles it says, hey, don't put a false
stumbling block in the path of these dumb pagans.
This stuff is all natural for you, circumcision, kosher and
all that. But but it's you're asking them
to change their whole lifestyle.What's important, that stuff or

(30:17):
Christ? I mean, it's that sounds like
either he knows very well where they're at, or he's there, he
says. When among Jews, I behaved as a
Jew. You mean it was just a strategy.
What? What does he mean?
It says when with Gentiles, I behaved as one of them.

(30:38):
Well, that kind of throws them both on a par, which was he?
So I I don't think it's at all clear who Paul was, but my guess
is he was Simon Megas. And one last thing.
The Church fathers all said Simon Magus was the father of
all heresies, especially Gnosticism.

(30:59):
Well, what do you know, the Gnostics said that Paul.
Yeah, they said Simon was the father of all the heresies.
But the Gnostics said Paul was the father of all the heresies.
Well, maybe that's because they're talking about the same
guy. And as Bauer pointed out it,
even in Acts, it's pretty obvious that Simon is supposed

(31:21):
to be Paul Crassley trying to buy Apostle Ship recognition
from Peter, and with money and so on.
So much of it is still vague, but a lot of it comes together
and I think it's like where you see the vultures circling,
that's where you'll find the body.

(31:42):
Yeah, well, I think the passage you mentioned where I think it's
a confession, it's the smoking gun where he says, you know, I
become a Jew amongst Jews and a Gentile among Gentiles.
I think that's the smoking gun of like, yeah, he he becomes
what he needs to to people. So you mentioned first Peter and

(32:06):
it seems to have a pro polling perspective.
Yeah, if you look at the secret Epistle of James, or what's
called the Epistle of Peter to James, he's referred to as the
enemy. So I I have a hard time squaring
first Peter with what I would say, the historical Peter who
I'd see in the tradition of the EB Knights, James the Just, who

(32:30):
would see him as a heretic because the EB Knights rejected
Paul and saw him as a heretic. I have a hard time squaring
first Peter. Definitely with what I would see
now, the pseudo Clementine literature I think may reflect
like an earlier more authentic tradition.
As a lot of texts we don't have the original text, so you know,

(32:55):
it seems like it has layers of Catholic redaction in there
maybe? What are your views, I guess of
the pseudo Clementine literature?
The authentic the authentic nature maybe of like the epistle
of Peter to James. The D decay I think reflect,
it's may reflect an earlier tradition of the community say

(33:19):
of James, Peter, John, those whokind of remained within Judaism
versus Paul who went his own way.
Yeah, I think you're right aboutthat.
One giveaway for that is the waythe euchre is dishandled.
There is nothing about the deathof Jesus or atonement, rather
the the bread drawn together from wheat from all over the the

(33:44):
hills and all that. It's like the the unity of the
community. But there's nothing about the
saving death of Jesus. Yet Jesus is mentioned.
He's important. We thank you for your servant
Jesus and your servant David andall that.
So they do sound like sort of lightly Christianized Jews.

(34:04):
The kind you would sort of expect from the book of Acts.
I think the like most scholars that I know of think that the
that there is a second century section of the pseudo
clementines which they call the the EB and I Acts.
And that's where you have the debate between Peter and Simon

(34:26):
Megas where Simon sounds like Paul and like Marcion
especially. And I think that is more of the
the historical situation. And the third Peter as I like to
call it the epistle of Peter to James that is is more of an EB

(34:47):
and I thing and and it could well be authentic.
It shares the the notion of of James as the the head of the as
the master of the missionaries with the Gospel of Thomas.
We know that you will depart from us.
To whom should we go? And he says, wherever you come
from, apparently missionary journeys, you will report to

(35:11):
James the righteous, for whom for whose sake heaven and earth
were created. I think that's a character much
like the elder in the the socalled Johanna and Epistles.
Well, first Peter, I think does not in any way represent the the
historical, Peter. It's an attempt to counter that

(35:34):
stuff. So no wonder it doesn't fit.
And the same darn thing with with Second Peter, which was is
is a pseudonymous sequel to the pseudonymous First Peter.
And I mean, it slaps you in the face with propolinism, because
that's the one where, Oh yeah, our brother Paul, writer of

(35:54):
Scripture and I get out of here and Bowers paradigm just seems
to me to be vindicated anew all the time.
Okay. Yeah, so.
My next question is maybe in therealm of conspiracies.
I don't know, was Paul a real person?

(36:19):
So there's some things. It seems like there's some
similarities in the embellished story about Paul, Where he was
in the wilderness for three years, Josephus was in the
wilderness for three years, was Paul and in literary invention
of Marcian or somebody in the 2nd century?

(36:39):
Because I see potential, at least story layers brought from
different things that made-up who Paul was.
And the first copies of Paul's letter we have are found
conveniently by Marcian. Did he find them or did he
invent them? And where do you see the those

(37:01):
embellished stories? He was a student of Gamma Leo,
the three years in the wilderness.
I mean, where did all this come from?
Well, some of it will like the the conversion comes, I think
for 2nd Maccabees and the the Buckeye.
It's been suggested that at least part of the travel

(37:21):
narrative of Paul comes from traditions of Apollonius of
Tiana, who goes to the same string of cities in the same
order. That doesn't prove anything, but
it's kind of striking. It's possible Paul is another
version of a sort of a nickname for Apollonius, but I've never

(37:42):
been able to nail that down. I've I've read it suggested a
couple times and I I asked the gang at the Jesus seminar.
Does anybody know if if this is if Paul is a short version?
Nobody really. They all confessed ignorance, so
I don't know if it's even possible to find out.
But so that could be. I think there's there's stuff

(38:05):
that comes from the Gospels, possibly.
I mean, the passion narrative ofPaul so closely parallels that
of Jesus, especially in Luke's gospel, that you wonder.
I mean, on that basis, some people have argued that that
Paul and Jesus were two names for the same guy.
I believe Lena Einhorn, right? I think it's Lena Einhorn argues

(38:32):
that in a couple of books. Well, I I wouldn't go that far.
But it is striking that there's so many similarities there with
Josephus. Another gutsy writer, Ralph
Ellis, is a lot of people dismiss this guy as a nut.

(38:52):
I don't share that view. Even when I don't agree with
him, I'm grateful for his pushing the envelope and it's
like Poe says in The Raven he dreamt dreams no mortal ever
dreamt before. And and he he's he's
fascinating. And his his historical

(39:15):
reconstructions. Again, I don't buy them all.
But for instance, he says that Paul and Josephus were the same
guy, and he points to a number of parallels.
And I said, well, I find that a little hard to accept, but
you're on to something. It seems to me that that acts,

(39:36):
which it seems pretty obvious, used Josephus and Luke used
Josephus. Well, maybe he filled in part of
the the life of Paul from Josephus.
And that's why they're so similar.
But my guess is the historical Paul was Simon Magus, because

(40:00):
Josephus tells us that in the circle of Agrippa.
I mean, I mean, yeah, yeah, I guess it was Herod Agrip at the
2nd. Felix Festus, Drusilla Bernice
and all these people, they had akind of a Rasputin figure as

(40:22):
sort of sage, wizard, astrologerguy that hung around with him
and he was named Simon and and Paul is associated with these
people too. And and he was supposed to be a
miracle worker and so forth. And once you accept that, you

(40:43):
begin to wonder. Well, Simon supposedly went to
Egypt to to learn magic or whatever.
Paul supposedly did miracles andBen Stada, mentioned by the
rabbis, went to Egypt and and and so forth.

(41:06):
So oh man. Or the Egyptian, he may have
been him and he also went to. So it seems to me that there is
a pretty good case. I mean, it's circumstantial
evidence, but that's all you got.
So it has to condition your dogmatism on it.
But it seems to me I could like in the book I go into other

(41:29):
weird stuff that kind of fits like even from the toilet of the
issue. But it makes the most sense to
me of of other stuff that reallydoesn't make any particular
sense if you isolate it and makeit just an an anomaly or an
aberration. So that I find that pretty

(41:50):
compelling. But who knows?
Okay. So talking about Christian
origins, I mean so. The chicken or the egg, which
came first, the gospel or the epistles?
And kind of back to the statement I said earlier, I

(42:10):
think that the early stage of like the layers of redaction
would have been the pro Roman error post destruction of the
temple before Barkopa, kind of the Flavian error.
And that's kind of where we havethe Pro Roman redaction and
that's that's where I see, I seefolks coming in there and that's
where. The question I guess I'm getting

(42:32):
to is that he his, I don't believe his conversion.
I feel like his message was Hellenistic, you know, to pull
away the Jewish zealots into a pacifistic religion and.
Couch it with this the the people with the money and the

(42:53):
wealth to produce and distributewould have the power to edit and
I would say that would be the elite class in Rome.
What do you see in like the distribution of Paul's letters?
And a final thing, because I know it's a lot the the
Clementine homilies to me kind of give proof that there was a
conflict between 2 communities. So I want it completely say Paul

(43:14):
was totally fabricated, somebodySimon Magus or Paul existed and
there was a conflict. So I wanted to say he was
completely made-up, but Marcian,I'm think, may have influenced
his letters a lot. What do you make of I guess the
that first phase of Christian formations and and Paul's
influence on that? Well, I do think the earliest

(43:36):
Christianity was some kind of Komran type Jewish
apocalypticism, perhaps a very likely stemming from the
Essenes. I read an interesting thing
about the the origins of Lord Supper, how it seems to fit
better with the every fifty day celebration of Pentecost as the

(44:01):
giving of the law at Kamran. It fits that better than the
Passover. It's been changed.
And then it looks like, yeah, Renan was right.
It started as an Essenism, but by the time you get to Paul it
it does seem to be Roman accommodationist and and the the

(44:28):
thing with the Gospels and the epistles, I don't know if we can
ever say which was first. They could be contemporary
because I think Schmidt halls may have suggested this that the
non historical Jesus tendency ofthe epistles may have come at
any point from a community that never believed in a historical

(44:53):
Jesus. So they had.
They quoted no sayings, they didn't know him, and they they
weren't coined yet, maybe. And there weren't any stories
until Marcion and others began rewriting the Old Testament to
make it into Gospel stories. And they rejected the Old
Testament ostensibly, but they kind of liked a lot of it and

(45:14):
rewrote it. As Jesus material and Paul
represent the Pauline tradition seems to represent a tradition
where they didn't understand there had been a historical
Jesus and the. But the.

(45:37):
The Marcianites or others, yeah,it must have been some kind of
Marcianites in order to salvage what they could of the Old
Testament was to Christianize it.
The Catholic Christians Christianized it simply by
reinterpreting it. Oh, this is a hidden prediction
of Jesus and all that. But I think Marcianites, I tend

(46:00):
to think I go along with the he wrote Marcion, the dating of the
synoptic Gospels Marcus, Vincent, Vincent and that he
says that Marcion wrote the first gospel and that he wrote
it and he has interesting arguments for this.
He said that he wrote it as a byrewriting the the Old Testament

(46:25):
stories and he made copies of itfor his students that it was
very much like a modern graduateseminar.
I mean we know these guys had groups, circles of students like
Aristotle and Plato did and thathe said don't you know, not for
circulation, let's study this. But the the students love this

(46:49):
and said, well, I'm afraid I can't help sharing the good news
and say you got to see this. And so it began to spread
without Marcian's knowledge. And other people said, I like
this, but I think it could be even better, which is how you
get Matthew, Mark and Luke and and eventually John, and that

(47:14):
this finally comes to Marcion's attention.
And and if this seems historically implausible in
conspiratorial, it's not much different than the scenario
implied in 3rd John, right wherewhere suddenly it comes to the
elder's attention that people representing him have been

(47:36):
teaching docitism in his name, he said.
Wait a minute, we never sent these people out.
If somebody tries to slam the door, well, it's that kind of
thing that you could easily imagine it being done behind the
the big guy's back. And once he finds out about it,
what does he do? He settle the cats out of the

(47:57):
bag. Now I'm going to have to publish
this, but let me revise it. And apparently he said some of
the stuff in these pirate editions was pretty good.
Let's add it in. And that and his.
I can't explain them at the moment, but I found the
arguments. It has to do with comparing the

(48:18):
readings of different ancient copies and so on.
But it's well worth reading, andit seems to me he's probably
right. So that Marcian was the one that
wrote the the first Gospel and the Epistles that he had a
rendition of them. And at Tertellian actually says

(48:41):
when Marcion discovered the epistle to the Galatians, he did
this and that and the other thing.
Well, now that could just mean when he got his first reading of
it. I admit that.
But I can't help like you thinking that it's like Joseph
Smith discovering the the Book of Mormon or the priests in

(49:02):
Josiah's time discovering the Book of Deuteronomy, right?
Yeah, yeah, I found it under theold Sunday school Ledger.
So yeah, I'll bet you did. And because it's part of the
genre to say it's an old book and not just not just something
I whipped up and the same as. It's all pseudo piggery.

(49:24):
That's why anybody does it. So.
But I don't think Marcion wrote all of them necessarily.
Like Colossian strikes me as as simplified Valentinianism.
And there's nothing in there that doesn't sound Gnostic.
The that Christ has the fullness, the the Plyroma of God

(49:48):
in him. It's on, wait a minute, and so
forth. 1st and 2nd Thessaloniansappear to be much later works
that are not particularly Gnostic, but have to do with
there. There are damage control jobs
because of the delay of the park.
See, anybody could have written that.

(50:09):
Obviously the pastorals are partof the the catholicizing layer,
so I don't know that he wrote all of them, but but he could
easily have written at least part of Galatians and Romans,
because then you have to get into are these even unitary

(50:29):
texts? And I tend to go along with von
Monet and say, well, no they're not.
In fact, if you look at First Corinthians without the
harmonizing instinct, you begin to realize that each chapter
refutes the one before it. Can you eat meat, offered idols
or not? Can women speak in the assembly

(50:51):
or not? OK, should just speak in tons or
not? Should apostles get reimbursed
by their congregations? Yeah, but no.
What is? What's what is this?
And we we don't preach sophisticated wisdom among the
mature we do like it just soundslike somebody has heavily

(51:13):
interpolated this to sanitize iteither in a Gnostic or an anti
gnostic direction. So I'm with Van Mon and I think
the epistles are are patchwork quilts and so we're you got the
same problem with the historicalJesus?

(51:34):
What was the historical Paul? Yeah, yeah, definitely.
So that work you referenced, what do you think Luke came
before Mark or Well, no, I take that back.
Marcian's work came before Mark,Luke and Matthew or so Marcian,

(51:58):
because Marcian's the first gospel we have a copy of and
then we have the other traditions which.
I don't know. There may have been various oral
traditions that fed the various different communities.
Each one definitely seems to be to a specific community.
And the interesting thing that that I became aware of is that

(52:19):
the first community to widely distribute the Gospel, John, was
Marcian's community, which the views tend, you know, they're.
More Gnostic, and they dify Jesus a lot more than you're
going to find in Mark, in the earlier mark where it doesn't
have the virgin burst or the resurrection.
So there's there's definitely, you know, that's where I can't.

(52:43):
Subscribe to like at Will's theory that they were all four
made-up at one time. There's just too much
divergence. Yeah.
I I can't accept that. And by one that Josephus wrote
them all. I think that's what he says in
Caesar's Messiah. That just makes no sense to me.
But I see influence of maybe Marcian writing rewriting Paul's

(53:05):
life in the vein of Josephus. But maybe there's a connection
there that could be. So what the problem there is
that Acts generally is anti Marxianite.
It it seems to me by it is heavily catholicizing.
Let's paper over the differences.

(53:25):
Let's make Peter sound just likePaul and vice versa and so on.
So that's a problem and and whenyou know when Paul wants to go
to Pontus to preach the gospel and the Holy Spirit says hold on
a minute there Paul. I don't think we want to go
there. Why?
Because that's where Marcion wasfrom and and when Paul in

(53:48):
chapter 19/18/19 is given his farewell address to the Ephesian
elders in Miletus, he says, Now I know that among you and in
this area, all kinds of heretical wolves are going to
come around siphoning off sheep from the flock, teaching weird

(54:09):
things. Who's he talking about?
Oh, probably the end. Partites, the Marcianites, the
Gnostics and all those guys who were at home there they they all
appealed to Paul. We know from the other writings
and Luke, whoever Polycarp knowsthat and he's got Paul saying
look don't blame me when this happens.

(54:30):
Remember I told you and it seemsto me that it's it's anti Marcy
and I Joe. Something about Luke, Ax's anti
Marcy and I oh I just don't wantto remember his name.
Well that's real. That's a lot of help.
So. Luke Axe, I mean Axe definitely

(54:53):
seems to be proto orthodox or Catholic rewriting trying to
make Paul. Well let's preface this.
I think Paul was going into disfavor when Marcian found it
and brought him into favor. And then Luke Axe.
My idea is that Luke Axe was written by a proto Orthodox who

(55:16):
had seen Marcian as a heretic. Well, because they rejected him
as a heretic. And so then they try to take
look there and I guess as you said Catholicized or you know
redacted and add on acts as a way of rehabilitating Paul, you

(55:38):
know, and getting him where theycould distribute him to the rest
of the various communities. That because the by the time we
get to the 4th century and they try to make it a universal.
Church they've they've got to harmonize the message that they
can get everybody to buy in whenthey were in total divergence.

(55:59):
So I think that Marcian inventedsomething and then the proto
orthodox redid it and then acts as their justification for
taking Paul when the earliest the EBNX rejected Paul.
So they're like, how do we have a religion that's based on Paul?
When the earliest fathers rejected Paul, and I think that

(56:23):
Marcian was the catalyst and theproto Orthodox and then Catholic
just took it further. What do you think of that
theory, I guess. Oh yeah, And and the that's the
origin of the New Testament Canon period.
Marcian was the first to come upwith the the idea.
I mean, once he rejected the OldTestament as a not as a bad

(56:44):
book, but as not a Christian book.
And I mean he believed that the creator God was the Old
Testament deity. He gave the law to Moses.
He wasn't a bad guy, but he was a pretty rough customer.
And he, the Jews are chosen people and he would send a
Messiah to liberate them. Great more power to you.

(57:04):
But that's not Jesus, that's notChristianity.
That's not the gospel. And it's all been screwed up
because the 12 were such dim wits as we see screamingly in in
Mark's gospel. Just a bunch of idiots that are
only there to be corrected and and so the under that influence

(57:29):
the those who looked to the 12 as their figureheads said Oh
well Jesus was the Jewish Messiah.
Yeah yeah so we have to keep theJewish scriptures and and but
this this Marcion guy it's not abad idea to have a uniquely

(57:52):
Christian scripture too but his is a little dicey.
How about if we come up with some other gospels to add and
and some other apostles? It was slim pickings, but these
three letters, they're anonymous.
Let's say they were John's. Here's one by somebody named

(58:14):
James. Here's a couple that are
supposed to be by Peter. Here's one that's by somebody
named Jude. What the heck, Let's connect
them up with these Bible characters and they're not much,
but they're not Paul. So we can have the whole group,
and it's for. And As for Paul, let's Let's

(58:36):
dull the edge there. Let's have 3 Pauline epistles
that will create a conventional Paul an ecclesiastical Paul and
but how are we going to square them?
In fact, I suspect they were originally intended to replace
the the larger Canada Pauline epistles, but couldn't do that.

(58:57):
So they interpolated those Winsome Monroe's great book on
that authority and Paul and Peter goes into that in great
detail and she says there's a pastoral stratum through the
rest of the the epistles and it and it's pretty easy to spot
them once you know what you're looking for.

(59:18):
And so with this they Polycarp according to David Trobisch's
theory created the 27 book New Testament including Revelation.
But it took quite a while for everybody to jump on the
bandwagon like with Athanasius is Easter encyclical.

(59:44):
It said OK everybody from now onit's these 27 books get it.
And of course the point was thatthe people that deliver these
would be back eventually to makesure you had destroyed copies of
anything that wasn't on the list.
Which is why we have the not commodity texts right.
These guys said we're not burning maze let's hide them.

(01:00:07):
And but then even there it was like until the 6th century
before the. Eastern churches would accept
the Book of Revelation and the Western churches would accept
Hebrews. And finally they compromised.
Well, all right, if you'll accept ours, we'll accept yours.
And even then, even today, like in the Armenian Orthodox Church,

(01:00:33):
in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, they got several more
New Testament books than anybodyelse.
So it's never even been closed. People think, Oh yeah, it's all
sewed up. Yeah, Okay.
So like the candidates like one of the earliest full New

(01:00:54):
Testaments we had was Codex Cyanidacus and that has a lot of
the the New Testament. I believe it also has one
Clement. Something there, The shepherd of
Hermes and I think another one. That was Barnabas, yeah.

(01:01:14):
And then there was one I saw on the Canon list, and it was Paul
and some philosopher, but it's not in the Paul and.
Seneca that's what it was. Paul and Seneca.
There was those four text in it.I have your the pre Christian or
pre nice thing New Testament. You didn't have one Clement or

(01:01:38):
Shepherd of Hermes or Barnabas in here, do you?
Or Oh yeah, I have Barnabas in The Shepherd.
Of Hermes, yeah, yeah, but not one.
Clement No. No.
Why did you leave that one out? Well, partly because it's deadly

(01:02:00):
boring, but it somehow seems to me to belong almost genre wise
to a later stage of things. It seems to me you're already in
the the early Catholicism, whereas you've got New Testament

(01:02:25):
type stuff going on in the others like Barnabas.
I have in there partly is Paul of part of the Pauline circle,
even if it's a suit epigraph, because of course I think most
of the Pauline letters are and it's, I mean if you really want
to get down to it, it's conceivable that it was by

(01:02:46):
Barnabas. So I don't think so.
And it it also, the teaching of it is a little, I think it's
sometimes misrepresented as being a bit more radical or
nearly antisemitic than it is. And that's kind of interesting.
A lot of the stuff criticizing the Old Testament is very much

(01:03:08):
like what you have in Jeremiah, that their faults, perikapies
and belief and commandments thatGod never gave and so on.
But plus, it's like a Allah crossing in his terrific book,
The Cross that Spoke It, it looks like the kind of stuff

(01:03:29):
Barnabas has. These testimonia are raw
materials for the Gospels in an early formative state, so it
seems to me to actually fit intothe body of it.
And Shepherd of Hermes well origin thought that ought to be
in the New Testament and and it is sort of raw early apocalyptic

(01:03:53):
stuff. And so if you got the Book of
Revelation in there, I figure, well here's another one And it
also serves to indicate that it was a whole genre and like I'm
thinking partly of something that Benjamin W Bacon said once
he did this fascinating article arguing that the Book of

(01:04:16):
Revelation was written by one ofthe these prophesying daughters
of Philip And and it's kind of far out but but interesting but
the but the thing was the reasonI mention it is he said that he
thinks that the Revelation of John is pseudo pig rifle.

(01:04:39):
And if it's not it's the only example of an apocalypse that
has the author's real name on it.
That's part of the genre to be pseudonymous.
And I I thought, boy, that is interesting.
I mean how early was this And the Christology seems to be very
early. It's sort of adoptionistic

(01:05:02):
fascinating. I mean to me this is like
Christianity still in the in thefurnace being smelted and
molded. So I stuck it in.
There. Yeah.
OK. So you mentioned something.
All right. So as it's being formed, you
know, I felt like Paul was falling into disfavor Marcy and

(01:05:25):
you know, brought him back the proto orthodox are like this is
great. We actually can sell our snake
oil with this, and that's a that's a rough analogy, but.
And then once it starts to become recognized by
Constantine, and you know he Constantine, I've seen estimates

(01:05:46):
that he's he appointed 1000 to 1800 bishops and gave him the
power to declare heretics and excommunicate and the policy of
Rome to censor things they didn't agree with.
So like now. Paul was in disfavor, but then
he becomes the message and then the state power is able to

(01:06:08):
declare heretics and censor and burn and destroy anything that
is not because the winners writehistory.
My question is, I have a lot of questions about whether
Constantine converted and if that's later apologist trying to
say he did. When really his vision of the

(01:06:32):
Cairo more had to do with soul Invictus and he conquered in the
name of Henotheism, maybe a belief in one God or something.
But I don't know if Constantine was truly converted, but
Christianity became something. He could unify the empire and

(01:06:53):
kind of cajole the masses. I mean, what do you take of
Constantine's conversion and influence?
That's my suspicion also becausethere are four different ancient
accounts, I think more or less contemporary of the Milvian
Bridge vision and all that stuff.
In two of them, it's it's the Cairo emblem he sees and in or

(01:07:23):
some emblem, and in two of them he's converted to Christian
faith because of it. And it's a little odd to leave.
This is one of those things where the less spectacular
version almost has to be the theoriginal.
And because afterward he didn't shrink from functioning as the

(01:07:43):
Pont effects Maximus of soul Invictus.
I mean Can you imagine Paul going along with that?
It's and and he he continued that along with being the head
of the church. And he must have been some kind

(01:08:05):
of had some sort of Christian allegiance, because we're told
that he had people hunt for the relics of the 12 and put them
all on platforms. And with the one at 12:00 being
reserved for him and implying that maybe he was the vicar of

(01:08:27):
Christ, I don't know, but he must have identified with
Christianity. I mean, I gather he let it be
known that he agreed with Athanasius, not Arius.
So they if they knew where the bread was buttered, they better
vote that way. So he must have had a foot in
it. But I I suspect, and I've read

(01:08:48):
this as a theory, that he was raised as a Christian of some
kind, but who knows what that meant.
I mean, we're told that, oh, what's her name?
The wife of one of the Roman emperors had a Chapel where she
had statues of Orpheus, Apollonius of Tiana, Jesus and

(01:09:09):
Moses. Well, there's a kind of
syncretism, and Constantine may have been born in that kind of
environment. So I I suspect he was not
converted. Just like I'm not so sure Paul
was converted that he came from.I mean, Roman, 16, says He had

(01:09:31):
family members who were Christians already.
I heard Bart Airman say on a podcast recently that his father
was a henotheist, he believed inone God, and that he may have
converted to being a henotheist,Paul or Constantine.
Constantine. Constantine, are you fully OK?

(01:09:57):
So there's the, the Roman Imperial Codex, the codes, the.
Let me see if I say this right. Theo Dosiennis, which was like a
compilation of the Roman imperial policies in support of
Roman Catholicism. Are you familiar with that?
Not. Very.
Not at all. I've heard of it, really.

(01:10:19):
And that's about. It, yeah.
Yeah. I was just curious if you had
heard of that. But their policies in support
of, you know, Christianity and stamping out anything that
wasn't? So I kind of want to circle back
on kind of a final question trail.
And you know, you mentioned the Ebianites, James Tabor made a
comment or James Tabor that the Ebianites are like the most

(01:10:45):
authentic witness to who the historical Jesus may have been.
I mean, how do you feel about that?
That's entirely plausible, but it's one of a number of equally
plausible ones. Like, I think slightly boom.
I'm not sure what do you thinks of this, but I am very impressed

(01:11:07):
by the idea that Jesus was some kind of zealot revolutionary
that I think the oh of the firstmodern era person that argued
this was Samuel Herman Ry Morris, an 18th century Deist,
and he made a pretty good case for it.

(01:11:28):
And then Robert Eisler did this huge book on it, employing the
Slavonic Josephus and what it says about Jesus.
And then SGF Brandon wrote a book called The Fall of
Jerusalem and the Christian Church, or something like that.
And then another one called The Jesus and the Zealots.

(01:11:49):
And I I find the arguments therevery striking.
I kind of say these days that I'm torn between Christ,
mythicism and and the zealot hypothesis.
I leave out the This guy Haslin wrote something about the.

(01:12:14):
Yeah, Jesus, just a rip off of abrand and without
acknowledgement, it's and where it's original, it's stupid.
But these guys who knew what they were talking about, they
made an interesting case that a lot of odd things again, that

(01:12:37):
it's like there's smoke but people are busy denying that
there's fire. The the cleansing of the temple,
the way it's depicted in Mark, it couldn't have happened.
The the court of the gentiles, where it's placed is the size of
several football fields, if thatif that's where this really

(01:13:00):
happened, then you must assume that Jesus had a large group of
armed men and that he was probably trying to loot the
treasury for weapons because it says he wouldn't let anybody
bring the the vessels back through the temple.
What was he doing? He was saying, hey, you keep

(01:13:22):
that stuff out of here. He must have had an armed force
later on when Barabbas is introduced and said that he he
committed murder during the insurrection.
What insurrection? The one at the temple, maybe,
and the fact that Jesus at the Last Supper tells them, look, if

(01:13:45):
you don't have a sword, sell your shirt and buy one because
you're going to need it. And then just after that they go
to the Garden of Gethsemane where a sword fight breaks out
abortively. The the disciples are ready to
defend them with swords, and Jesus manages to stop it.

(01:14:09):
He says not put your sword away,I'll come peacefully.
And then the fact that his disciples, Judas the Iscariot,
that could mean about three different things, but it could
easily mean the sacarious, the the dagger Man, Simon the
zealot. Well, that's attested as the

(01:14:31):
name of a political Group A little bit later, but you can't
assume that's the 1st, that it was invented on the on the spot
it may already have been used asA and even Peter Simon Barjona.
Well, Jonah is unusual as a patronymic in those days.

(01:14:52):
But there was another assassin group called the Barjo Neme,
which means the Extremists or the Outsiders, and I think Oscar
Coleman translates it to terrorists.
And Peter, of course, is the guywith the OR that that tries to
cleave the skull of of those, I admit.

(01:15:17):
And how does Jesus die? It's not a cup of hemlock.
He's crucified as the man who would be king.
Are we sure it was a frame up? So I I I have to again think
there's smoke, but there's no fire.
It does seem to me that's a pretty good case.

(01:15:39):
But then so is mythicism. So I don't know.
I don't know that if this will ever be resolved.
For me, you don't know, you don't know Which one's more
compelling? Well, the so the Ebianites were
a branch of the Essens, which were.
Doesn't Josephus connect? Because he he has his list of

(01:16:00):
the three and then he adds 1/4 philosophy.
Yeah, of Judaism. You know, the Pharisees said You
sees and the Essens, and I believe the 4th one is the
zealots. But was the zealots a branch of
the Essens and is there Well we're he mentions.

(01:16:23):
I believe it's he that during the the Roman War, one of the
leaders of the Zealots, or whatever they were called, was
John the Essene. And in fact, from what we know
of both groups, it's possible they were simply the same.

(01:16:49):
There's a book by Cecil Roth. The Dead Sea Scrolls are in the
title. I forget exactly what it was.
Maybe it was who wrote. No, that was somebody else.
But he's as from everything we're told about the the essings
and the zealots, they they soundso similar.
They may have been the same. In fact.

(01:17:12):
You know, there's the war scrollthat come on, and it looks to me
like if there is a shade of difference between the two, it's
just that the Essenes were quietest, waiting for God to
light the fuse, and when the angels defended, then they were
ready to go with the weapons andeven ornamentation for the

(01:17:36):
horses in battle. I mean the thing gets down to so
many details as to their military thing.
Whereas the zealots may have figured no, as long as we're
sitting on our butts, God not going to do a thing.
We have to to spark the fuse andI wouldn't be surprised if that
was the only difference. And so in effect they would have

(01:18:00):
been the same. And that what you're saying, of
course. I think I get your point that if
the Ebnites were connected with them, then maybe that's
compatible with the the King Jesus approach.
Does this Tabor. I've read that book, but it was
a long time ago. Does he make Jesus a
revolutionist? He He focuses, I guess, more on

(01:18:25):
the caliphate of the dynasty of Jesus.
I guess the family, the royal lineage.
I don't. I I.
I have the book. I'd have to look.
I don't remember. I remember references to
Zealous, but I I don't think, I don't recall it going that
deeply into that. So I I'd have to look at it

(01:18:47):
again. Well, you mentioned the 4th
philosophy. I don't think Josephus calls it
the Zealots, but it was started by Judas of Galilee, who was
basically a zealot. And Richard Horsley has tried to
deny that, saying that when theywere putting their lives on the

(01:19:08):
line, it just meant they were like Gandhi.
They would, they would die for their causes, martyrs.
But I don't think so, because it's pretty clear from Josephus
that that Judas of Galilee was the patriarch of a line of of
revolutionary messiahs, Menachemand and these other guys.

(01:19:29):
So I I think he's engaged in special pleading because of his
own political inclinations, but it seems to me that they
probably were called zealots, and if not, there was no real
difference except nomenclature. Well, and I think that, but the
zealots were connected to the battle in the Jewish Roman War
at Masada. They were the ones that, you

(01:19:50):
know, like that final salvo thatthey were fighting in in the war
there. So I mean it, you know, if it if
anyway, the historical Jesus, the Ebonites, the Essens were
connected to the zealous, that may be where the traditions come
from. And then they kind of fall out

(01:20:11):
after the, you know, destructionof the temple.
And there's a lot of different things that happen on the
journey away from what may have happened.
But you know, with the censorship, we'll never know
fully what actually happened. And that's where historical
archaeologists, you know, try toput it all back together, so.
Go ahead, go ahead with. Joe Atwell and others.

(01:20:36):
Anyway, the the idea that the Romans cooked up pacifistic
Christianity? That seems a little wacky to me,
but it's only a notch over from something that is entirely
plausible. Because what I mean, if they
were a subversive group, could they have gotten away with

(01:20:59):
saying, oh, we're we're just theMoose Lodge here, we're we we
post no threat to Rome. Could they have done that?
Well, yeah, because that's essentially what the rabbis did.
Right after the 78 D thing, the Romans let him establish a new
sanhedron that would be restricted to religious matters.

(01:21:21):
They could have killed all theseguys, but they decided now, as
long as you swear off troublemaking, go ahead.
Well, that's really all Brandon's theory about Jesus as
a revolutionary implies. That the Christians voluntarily
said, well, Jesus, like even Judas of Galilee, was a rabbi.

(01:21:43):
He wasn't Che Guevara. And so it Jesus could have been
a revolutionary, would be Messiah, and had a lot to teach.
So even just like Judaism, well,let's forget that Messiah, that
violent revolutionary stuff, andjust stick with the Sermon on
the Mount. And that makes perfect plausible

(01:22:05):
sense. So I I think Joe is has made it
a little too hard to accept but it's only a nuance of difference
so that I even there I think therevolutionary thing sounds
pretty good. Well that was short lived too
because then you have the Bart Koko revolt.

(01:22:27):
So even though they sought to pacify them and that's why
that's where I have my layers ofredaction when I look at it what
the between 70 and 1:30 that wasthe Pro Roman influence I would
say And then after the destruction of the temple.
Well not not the after the Barcopa revolt you have Marcian

(01:22:47):
and then you have the proto orthodox response and then you
have the capitalization that happens.
And I that's kind of how I I seethe the origins I guess there,
but yeah, any go ahead. You know, we're told that
Barkokba persecuted Jewish Christians.
That wouldn't go along with them.

(01:23:09):
So that tells us that it was a arecrudescence of violent
messianism, but not from the Christians, and there been
plenty of messianic uprisings. The other thing Are you familiar
with Herman Detering's article about how the?
The Olivet Discourse in Matthew's version fits the time

(01:23:32):
of Barkokba rather than the 70ADruckus I am not, but that is
interesting. Oh boy.
He says that the Mark May have been readjusted to fit 70 in
retrospect, but that this this document.
He, or whoever pasted into the gospel it was, must still have

(01:23:57):
been circulating in its originalform.
And Matthew had one too. And he decided to just stick
with it, basically, and not makethe changes marked in.
And he says all the stuff about the earthquakes, the famines,
the pestilences and all that. He says we have a pretty good
idea what was going on in the 1st century and in the 2nd and

(01:24:18):
the stuff in Josephus. It's the 2nd century more than
the first. I published this in the Journal
of Higher Criticism. I think I can dig it up online

(01:24:39):
somewhere and send it to you if you like.
Yeah, yeah, Send me that. For sure, it's really
fascinating, this guy. Unfortunately gone now a
deterring with he, he was also apartisan of the Dutch radical
critics like von Mann and he he's taught me a lot.

(01:25:00):
I think he was the most brilliant New Testament scholar
of his time. He was incredible and he was a
pastor. He wasn't even a professor.
All right, well, this has been very informative, like always.
Any final thoughts on the topicswe covered today and anything

(01:25:22):
you kind of want to end it with today?
Well, it just as always, whoeversees this, please remind
yourself that I am not trying towin converts to my theory.
My goal is always Socratic to raise questions.
For people to Mull over and comeup with their own answers and to

(01:25:46):
provide information they might not have run across so they can
add that to their synthesis. Make of it what they will as
that's what I've prospered from doing and and I I want others to
to be stimulated the same way. Okay, that's great.
Is there any projects you're working on?

(01:26:07):
And you know, where can people find you online if they're
looking for you these days? I have a website
robertmprice.mindvendor.com and it's got like an archive of
articles, sermons, short stories, movie and book reviews
and all kinds of stuff. I have a.

(01:26:31):
A couple of newish books Judaizing Jesus, where I take on
the almost universal assumption that you have to assume Jesus
was a kind of an orthodox secondTemple Jew as a Wait just a
minute that you're you're doing.That's an ecumenical bargaining
chip, not a historical estimate in my view.

(01:26:54):
Then another one called When Gospels Collide.
Where I show that, yeah, there are plenty of disagreements
between the gospels, maybe more than you ever noticed, but why
are they there? Where the where the gospel
writers just a bunch of stupid idiots that couldn't get the
story straight. It's just a bunch of dumb

(01:27:15):
mistakes. No, you can show why they change
things to make a new distinctivepoint, so you're cheating
yourself if you had to harmonizethem into one thing.
So it's a weird kind of apologetic, oddly.
You know, anyway, I have a book coming out from Pitch Stone

(01:27:36):
Publications. I think it is probably.
Well, I'm pretty sure in 2024 called Houses of the Holy A
Higher Critical survey of the World religions.
Where I do a kind of historical,critical and theological survey
of 12 religions, the usual Big 5, and a bunch of other ones

(01:27:59):
like Mandians, Yazidis and Zoroastrians on that's going to
be over 600 pages, so it's reasonably comprehensive.
Then there's one. That Prometheus is considering,
now called the heresy of paraphrase, subtitled an

(01:28:21):
interpretive rendition of the Gospels, where I try to do a
kind of modern Targum of the Gospels, building a possible
interpretation into a loose translation.
And there's some funny stuff andsome thought provoking stuff in
it. And what the heck was the other
thing that's been accepted? I can't quite think of that

(01:28:46):
offhand, but anyway, I got all kinds of irons in the fire all
right. Well, definitely some
interesting stuff to look out for, and I definitely want to
thank you for taking time. Very thought provoking and yeah,
same thing. You know, I want to provide
information for people to question and seek truth and find

(01:29:07):
information, you know, So I pulling the threads, the idea
we're pulling the threads to to,you know, provoke thought and
more of an open minded journey for people.
So I thank you for this and lookforward to, you know,
conversations in the future. You bet.
Great. Thanks for having me on.

(01:29:28):
Yeah, have a great day.