And I just turned around and I call ass out of there. I was
done. I wasn't deal with them. The hypocrisy of the cult is one
of the things that turned me away the quickest. When I turned my head
lights on, it turned and looked at us. And one of the things
I remember the most, where the eyes were glowing red. I see an
orb of light. It is just circling these steps like it is waiting for
me. And he begins to tell them that he saw Ufo. They're basically
like, what are you talking about. That's seven foot up on a tree,
peeking around it, and that's where I saw the top of the muzzle,
nose and the eyes. As soon as I made eye contact with this
thing, it don't like death. Welcome back to Tenfoil Tells. I'm your
host Brandon right nine's episode, We're going to be joined by Jaren and Matthew.
They are the authors of Christ Before Jesus. Now, what this book
entails is they've done a lot of research into the topic of Jesus and the
New Testament. What they've been able to discover could be eye opening for some,
could be offensive, But as I've always said, try and keep an
open mind, but before we bring them on. If you've ever had an
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even hop on there and share with the audience. But I think now we're
going to go ahead and bring Jaren and Matthew on. Been looking forward to
talking with them. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode. And again,
this could be a controversial topic for some, so if this is something that
you might be offended by, I recommend that maybe you just skip this episode.
But at least if you do listen, keep an open mind. But
on that note, sit back, relax and enjoy the show. Like take
time to welcome my guests, I, Jared and Matthew, thanks for coming
on here and talking to me. Thank you very much for having us.
Yeah, happy to be here. You guys reached out to me a while
back about a book you were writing and kind of peaks my interest. So
if you want to give a little background about yourselves and then we can talk
about the book that you have been writing. Absolutely so. My name is
Jaron and I am the co author of this book along with Matthew, and
the book is Christ Before Jesus and we are we're I want to say that
we're finished with it, but we're trying to put in as much recent data
as possible up to date and keep it up to date and everything. So
it's officially coming out on March the sixteenth onto Amazon and you know, print
ebook, even audiobook version. But we are still trying to iron out any
kind of you know, typos or anything like that and making sure all the
information is up to date, and even still working on some citations. So
definitely coming along. My background is in economics and statistics, that's what my
degree is in. And then Matthew, he's got a couple degrees Matthew.
Yeah, So I'm Matthew. I have a bachelor's in philosophy and religious studies
minor and master's in public administration, which I used basically, you know,
end up getting a job with that type of degree, and my job ended
up doing a lot with database work, and that led into some of the
tools we end up using in the book, so which we can talk about
later. Yeah, it's been an interesting process writing the book. Do you
want to talk about the gist of the book, Jared or you know?
Yeah? Yeah. So in short, we present our theory, which is
that not only do we find very compelling evidence that Jesus as presented by the
Bible, even in a historical sense, did not exist, but on top
of that, we have a lot of evidence that suggests that there is not
a single New Testament book that was written prior to the start of the second
century. And we have, you know, theological and logical and textual evidences
for this. And then finally in our book we present our case backed up
by stylometry. And this stylometric analysis is ran for the first time ever on
not only the New Testament, but on Greek text for the first few centuries
CE and even going back to at least one century into BCE. It is
the first of its kind, or I guess I should say the first of
its magnitude to actually include all these different texts and take a look at the
New Testament. Now, I had a question, and you'd mentioned that you'd
like done all this research and everything into this. What made you, of
all things to research? What made you want to start the book? Like
what made you the research on Jesus? Like what led to that? Well,
I think it was just kind of curiosity. Matthew and I were both
raised in Southern Baptist homes, and you know, I consider myself a Christian
for the first twenty years of my life twenty twenty one. And you know,
I had, even though I was an atheist at a certain point.
I had always assumed that there was a historical Jesus that the stories just kind
of got attached to and just kind of the supernatural elements got added to.
But it at a certain point a couple of years back, Matthew and I
were talking and we were talking about the idea of, you know, what
happened at the very beginning of Christianity, because you know, even if Jesus
did exist or didn't exist, doesn't you know, either way, Christianity exists.
And so what did they see, you know, what led them to
believe what they believed and write down what they wrote. So it was just
kind of jumping in and diving in because we were just curious. And I
don't know if Matthew would have a different take on that, but that's that's
at least where I started. Yeah, I mean, if you wanted to
trace it back all the way to like our youth or childhood, I grew
up in a multi faith house and led to a lot of debates and then
at one point, I think early college, Jaron presented this case that Jesus
didn't exist to me and a friend and we kind of rejected it at the
time because the mainstream theory is that there was a historical Jesus, even if
you know, the miraculous parts of his life didn't happen. And then,
like you're saying, a few years ago, it just kind of popped back
up in our lives and we were looking into it and noticed a few odd
things, and those odd things led us to ask ourselves, is there a
way to approach this that's more objective because a lot of these things rely on,
you know, theological arguments that it's kind of it's a matter of opinion
sometimes or he said, she said, and that led us to get into
stylometry, and you know, kind of ball got rolling from there. Now
there's been a lot of theories out there. I've heard something before about the
Bible, like the New Testament wasn't written until like two hundred years after the
supposed crucifixion of Christ. So it kind of made me wonder, like who
were writing these stories two hundred years later? If the people that would have
witnessed it wouldn't have been alive. But then even there's parts of the Bible
I think was Abraham was like seven hundred or something years old. I never
understood like the ages when it come to the Bible. None of that stuff
ever made sense to me. But no, I will say, before we
get into it or whatever, I know a lot of the listeners and a
lot of things they relate to Bible stuff. And I've said it before that
I'm not really a religious person. I don't really mean one way or the
other. I think there's I would hope there's something, but I don't know.
I'm not going to say I'm a Christian. I'm not going to say
I'm an atheist or whatever. I'm just I'm a person. I try and
do good right, no right, I don't know I'm out out there doing
crimes or committing murders or whatever else. So hopefully if there is something that
I'm rewarded sometime, I don't know. Before we just dyeing, we never
know. We've definitely heard the idea that you know, without without God or
without Jesus, you know, where's your moral compass? You know you could
go out and you know, commit a whole bunch of murder and stuff like
that without God's laws and stuff, which, first of all, you know,
there's obvious problems with that kind of thinking. But on top of that,
I commit as much murder as I want, which is zero. But
that I do, I commit as much murder as I like, and that's
zero. I know there will be people if they ever find this episode,
not so much the normal listening base, but like I know, there's very
religious types out there. They would try and use this as you guys were
working for the devil. I have a feeling. I just I know how
certain groups are and then said that your work, your book or whatever,
this is the work of the devil trying to disprove Jesus, and that you're
just going to dig their feet down in deeper just because that seems to be
how they operate, right right, Well, I will say that not only
do we not believe in Jesus, we also don't believe in Satan. So
yeah, I think we're good there. Yeah, but yeah, I mean,
you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of different responses,
you know to what we what we postulate. You know, when we say
something like, hey, we don't think that Jesus existed, we get a
ton of response. If we get a ton of questions about it, and
the way that our book is actually laid out, it is fifty different questions
that get asked to us the fifty most common they get asked to us whenever
we talk about what we believe and talk about our particular theory, and we
take each one of those questions and we give a response to it. And
that's that's how the book is laid out. And the questions are categorized,
you know, like based on historians, or based on the Gospels, or
the epistles, or the stylometry, all these different things. We let them
out, we categorize them, and so it's a little it's pretty easy to
read, and you know, it makes it to where you know, if
you if you already know the answer to something, if you already know what
some people say to say Josephus the story, and then you can skip ahead
of the next question, you know. So we make it, try to
make it easier, try to make it digestible. And I would say that
it's not an atheist book per se. It's focused on whether or not Jesus
was a historical figure. The reason we named the book Christ before Jesus is
something that we found is that there were people who believed in a mythical Christ
figure before the name Jesus and these historical stories got attached to it, right,
Yeah, And that's probably the most eye opening thing is that, you
know, at a lot of people kind of fall prey to what we come
up with in our book what we named the synonym problem, the idea that
when Christ or Christians are talked about, then that somehow means Jesus, that
somehow means Jesus was real, when Christians just means, you know, someone
who follows a Christ or believes in a Christ, and a Christ. Christ
is just a title, that's not a name. You know, there were
plenty of people who were considered a Christ. John the Baptist from the Bible,
he doesn't have too tarily many scenes before he's killed by an overdose of
guillotine. But the point is his followers, called the Mandeans, they considered
him to be a Christ. So yeah, I mean, you have a
lot of people, You have a lot of people who are apparently following a
Christ and calling themselves Christians, but they don't have a story of Jesus until
much later. All, if you guys want to dive on in from the
beginning, oh yeah, started with it, absolutely absolutely so. The mainstream
opinion of Jesus, and the mainstream opinion of the Gospels or the New Testament
is that, you know, most historians, they assume that Jesus probably existed.
You know. You might run into a historian that says, oh,
there is absolutely proof of Jesus, you know, that kind of thing.
But a lot of that is based on either old or faulty reasoning, possibly
even circular reasoning, lots of times using the Christians themselves as sources for it,
which doesn't really make much sense. But overall, historians and Bible scholars
generally say that the first Gospel to be written was the Gospel of Mark,
and they claimed that it was written roughly about seventy CE, which would have
been right around the time of the Siege of Jerusalem, because it talks about
the destruction of the Jewish temple there in Jerusalem, and so historians they say,
hey, you know, if it talks about the if it talks about
the destruction of the timp more or less, it can't be before seventy you
know, because that's when it happened. Because the historians don't want to they
don't want to admit that there's a like a prophecy or someone's telling the future
or something, which makes perfect sense. But of course the Bible scholars they
want to move, they want to move the authorship of Mark is as early
as possible, so they just kind of compromised and went with seventy. But
yeah, they've got Mark in seventy, and then Matthew in about about about
eighty or so, Luke in eighty five, and then John anywhere from ninety
to one to ten I think is the range that they typically give it.
And then they say that the Epistles of Paul or the Letters of Paul were
written prior to the Gospels by a few decades. And one of the things
that kind of gets floated around is the idea that Jesus is just a just
another demi god that takes from prior gods. So you've got like Egyptian gods
like Horus and stuff like that, and the people try to find parallels like,
oh, he was born on December twenty fifth, born of a virgin,
had followers resurrected all all kinds of stuff, And ultimately we looked at
a lot of that and we were like, wow, there's a lot of
this that just doesn't have any evidence for it. You know, like December
twenty fifth wasn't even a birthday given for Jesus in the Bible. So,
you know, while we didn't think that Jesus existed, we were finding that
a lot of the arguments for why he didn't exist were kind of bad.
So we needed to kind of look into it, you know, a lot
further, and ultimately that's when we ran into a guy named Marcion. And
I'll let Matthew kind of talk to you a little bit more about Marcion there.
Yeah, so Marcion is the name you won't really hear a lot,
but he was a second century Christian theologian and author writing in around the one
thirties or one forties, and he comes from modern day Turkey in the north
part which was at the time called Bethenia and Pontus. And according to all
of the church historians at the time and after in one four he was kicked
out of the church in Rome after he went there for basically being a heretic.
They labeled him a heretic. But when he left he published ten letters
from Paul and his own gospel. And that doesn't sound too significant, probably
because you know, like Jaron just said, this is decades after the other
gospels supposedly came out. But there was a thing that stuck out that some
of the later historians claimed that Marcion said his was actually first, and that
you know, he could prove it, but then the church leaders would say,
oh, no, we can prove that ours actually came first. And
it was kind of a he said, she said thing. So we're like,
well, it's interesting, but I don't know if there's really anything to
that. And we started looking into it a little bit more and we came
across some interesting little incidents in Luke, which is the gospel he supposedly stole,
that would seem to indicate, based on the order of the events,
that Marcion might have actually been the first. And if that's the case,
you know, Jesus dying around the year thirty, the first Gospel not coming
out until around one forty four, that range, you know, you've got
over one hundred years before anyone writes a story of Jesus, and then the
Letter of Paul's coming around that time. That's that's really significant too, because
that's supposed to be, you know, written within ten or so years after
Jesus has died, it's really significant that this would all be there. And
you know, we thought, well, if the Gospels had been around since
you know, the year seventy to eighty or that range, we should see
quotations from people in between the years, like you know, eighty and one
forty four. But it turns out there aren't any, and the ones that
people claim there are those those texts actually date to one fifties or later.
So we just asked ourselves, like, you know, is there any more
objective way we can look at this other than going off of these two groups
accusing each other of stealing each other's books. And yeah, that's when we
ended up with stylometry and specifically a program called Stylo. Yeah, more or
less, a lot of a lot of our findings started to push a lot
of these texts into the second century. And that caused a problem because if
Jesus dies in thirty roughly thirty, and then all of a sudden, you
don't have anything else into the second century, there's just a gap. And
so a lot of the early church leaders and the church fathers, they just
made people up. It just made people up. There's numerous people that are
just that are talked about that straight up didn't exist. And not only are
they making them up, they're writing letters as these people. They're claiming that
these people, you know, taught this person or learned from this person,
or went to this place or started a church here, all kinds of stuff.
It's also it's wild, not dinner rebel. There's also like a big
time gap in the supposed life of Jesus anyways, wasn't there, Like it
started off when he was young and then all of a sudden that's when he's
out doing his miracles and everything else, Like what happened in between that was
never There are some gospels that are I mean, they're a trip because there's
a lot of gospels that didn't make it into the New Testament. So when
they decided what's called the canon for the New Testament, they decided on four.
The reason for it can be kind of ambiguous, but the best that
we've got is that at a certain point they said, we need one for
the north, the south, the east, and the west. I have
no idea what they I have no idea what the hell that means. But
that being said, they chose four gospels, but there are over forty that
were written. I mean, most of them are wild and crazy. They
have all kinds of stuff. But to answer your question, though, one
of them, there's a couple that are that are considered the Infancy Gospels,
and they talk about how Jesus was when he was a kid and when he
was like a teenager and stuff like that, and they are they're a trip.
I mean, you've you've got Jesus. He's and one of them he's
just making birds out of clay and just like throwing them up in the air,
and he just turned he's just doing it because he's bored. And then
another one he's he's like playing in the mud, and another kid comes around
and is just like starts like stomping all around, you know, in the
puddles and stuff like that. So Jesus as a kid, he gets pissed
and he makes the kids straight up fucking explode, like he just murders this
kid. It just it's ridiculous. It doesn't fit the narrative of the yeah
righteousness exactly exactly. You mean, this guy is gonna say blessed O the
peacemakers and he just like off the kid like that doesn't make any sense.
And so there's no it's a no brainer to keep those out of a to
keep those out of the cannon, to not present those as the best of
the best. But ultimately you are right. You know, there's this huge
app there in the canonical gospels as we have him. The last time that
we hear from him as a kid is when he's twelve and he's taken to
the temple and then he runs off, he gets lost, and his parents
look for him. Well, you know, he's he's talking to the high
priest and just amazing them, you know, according to the story. But
then his parents show up and they're like, you know, what the hell
have you been doing? Like you got us worried sick. And he's like,
well, don't worry about him, you know, doing what God wants
me to. And they're like, okay, whatever, and just take him
home, and like that's it. Yeah, there's an important reason that there
is no childhood for Jesus, and that's because that first gospel we talked about
from Marcion, he descends from the sky as an adult. Yeah, so
if that's the first one, all this other stuff gets added later to make
him more historical. But like we were saying, there was a whole Christian
movement and they believed in this celestial being and that's where he came from.
He came from the sky in this first gospel, and there was no childhood.
He never was a human. So yeah, the earliest versions of the
Jesus story just had the guy coming down as an adult man out of heaven,
probably naked, but that's beside the point. So the whole story of
his birth and everything that was all wrote way later. Yes, yes,
And that's actually one of the little pieces of evidence were able to use to
prove that Marcion's Gospel was first. In our style of metric analysis, one
thing that we noticed was that the authorship for those birth narratives match acts the
Acts of the Apostles, which is the technically the second part of the Gospel
of Luke in the canonical Bible, right, but it didn't match the rest
of the style of the main body of the text where Marcion's Gospel started off,
which means somebody took Marcion's Gospel and tried to make it theirs, but
couldn't cover up their tracks in terms of style and other things. They actually
get a story completely out of order. Which is if Jared you want to
talk about that one. That one, Oh yeah, that was what really
tipped us off that Marcillon's gospel had to have come before at least Luke.
Oh yeah. So in in Marcion's Gospel, which is called Evangeline and like
like we said, it was published in one four CE, Jesus comes down
as an adult into a town called Copernium, which is in the region of
Galilee there in Judea. So he comes down to Capernium and he, you
know, does some miracles and whatnot, you know, wows a whole bunch
of people, you know, just absolutely blowing their minds. And eventually some
people are around him, they're they're all amazed, and and he goes,
well, this is Jesus. He says, uh, I suppose that next
you're going to ask me to do signs like I did back in Copernium.
And you know, he goes on to kind of dismiss these people, and
that's fine. You know, he came down to Copernium, did some signs
and then started talking about started talking about how he had done signs before.
But in the Gospel of Luke they take that same verse. They take the
verse that says, oh, do signs like you've done for us back in
Copernium. But the problem is, in the Gospel of Luke, he hasn't
been to Copernium yet. They took that part out. They took the part
out where he came down as as an adult into Copernium, and they slapped
on a birth story, and in doing so, they removed the part about
him doing signs of Capernaum. So all of a sudden, that line is
completely out of order. It doesn't make any sense. And Evangeline from Marcion
is the only other gospel that has it other than Luke. So it's I
mean, it's the smoking gun, like he's just he just took it,
like it's there in our English version of the Bible. He took it from
Marcion. Where did you guys go from that point? Like, once you
come across that and you just kept diving into it further. Yeah, So
stelemetry, I know that we've mentioned it a couple of times. Basically,
I mean I have Matthew correct me because he does a lot more of the
work on it, But at least my words, what it is is it's
a peer reviewed mathematical mathematical analysis, it's literary analysis. What it does is
it tries to using math and peer reviewed formulas, it tries to assign authorship,
or it tries to attribute authorship. So, in other words, if
I was to write something and you were to write something, and we run
both of the texts, provided that they're the same language, we run both
of these through styleometric analysis, it would be able to determine whether or not
it was all from the same author, or if it was two separate authors.
And then if another text gets introduced that could be yours, could be
mine, it would be able to determine if it was yours or mine.
It would go to either your text or it would be right next to my
text. It just kind of spits out these results and it puts them all
on the same branch if they're on the or if they're from the same author.
So what we were able to do is dive into Luke and sure enough,
the birth story at the very beginning, and you know, the story
about him being really little and stuff like that in the temple and whatnot,
that was all one author, along with the along with the ascension story at
the end, that was all one author. But then every everything in the
Middle came up as a different author, and that's because Marcion's Gospel has that
same content. So you have the Christians saying, oh, Marchion stole from
Luke, and the followers of Marcion said, no, no, no,
Luke took from Marcion. So they're arguing back and forth. But if Marcion
had taken from Luke, then we when we ran Luke, it should have
all came up as the same author. But it didn't. They took from
they took from Marcion. And in our book we have the graphs and this
is all free, open source software that anybody can run. We did all
of this in the original Greek. You know, all the New Testament was
written in Greek. There are definitely manuscript problems in terms of we don't have
any originals. The earliest copy of anything we have dates to around the year
two hundred. But you know, to the best of what we have,
we ran. Not only did we find this, we found that, you
know, we said Mark was supposedly written in seventy and there's this prediction that
you know, this temple's going to get destroyed, and how that's how they
date it, well, we ran it, and that chapter was not in
the original version of Mark, right Mark thirteen. Mark thirteen comes up completely
separate from the rest of Mark, which means that it was it was not
there originally, so which didn't make any sense because you know, if that
was all one story written around the year seventy, why would some other author
have written that part. And so what we were able to piece together is
that the original version of the Gospel of Mark was written around the year one
twenty or so, maybe one thirty. And then there was another destruction of
Jerusalem in the year one thirty five, called the Barcopola Revolt, and that's
what all this is about. That is what spurred Christianity onto what it became
today. That's why every version of what's called the Synoptic Gospels, Mark,
Matthew, and Luke, you find a copy of this, they all copied
each other more or less. And Marcion moved to Rome in one thirty six
that time, range bringing with him that story, that prediction, and they're
just using that as an analogy for the destruction of Judea. The temple represents
Judea in that story, and Mark thirteen, the prediction of that was added
after the year one thirty five, meaning all of our canonical gospels and all
the gospels that anyone has found, you know, Thomas, Peter, all
these other gospels were after the year one thirty five, which kind of just
blowed the you know, traditional dating out of the water. And then we
started looking into Paul and all these other things, and it just kept everything's
kept showing up in the second century. Yeah. One of the big points
there that how we know that Mark thirteen or where it starts talking about the
destruction of the Temple and stuff like that in the gospels. The way that
we know that that's related to one thirty six the bar Kopa revolt as opposed
to the destruction of Jerusalem there in seventy is that it has this line and
it's kind of it's kind of weird, but it says, it says,
when you see the abomination of desolation standing where it shouldn't, let the reader
understand. And it's a that's a really weird line. It specifically says,
let the reader understand. So it's it's basically telling the reader, think about
what I'm saying here and the abomination, the abomination of desolation was a statue
specifically in the Book of Daniel, and so in that particular story, it's
this more or less like an idol, so to speak. But in one
thirty six and the bar Kopa revolt, when Hadrian took over the area,
when he he when he finished off bar Copa and all the rebels, he
went to the temple mount and he installed a statue of himself where the Jewish
temple used to be. And so that's them right there saying, hey,
look, that's the abomination of desolation. That's the new one. That's the
new abomination of desolation. And they're talking about it there in that in that
little that little line, it's it's it's all like like Matthew said, it's
spurred on by bar Kopa. It has nothing the Gospels, have nothing to
do with seventy. It's everything to do with one thirty six. When you
guys were able to figure all this out, I know there's gonna be people
listening, even ones that will read your book or whatever. In like Layman's
terms, you mentioned, like what you used to everything. How does it
determine how it was written like wrote to different writers? How is it like
an algorithm or like how is it function? Because I know people are going
to like, well, how can they can't prove that? You know what
I mean? Yeah yeah so oh yeah yeah yeah, we'll have Matthew talked
to that. Yeah yeah. So, like Jerry was saying, we used
form of stylometry and the program is called stylo, which is written in the
programming language are. It's all available here, reviewed, free, open source.
Anyone can download it. And what it does is there are a number
of formulas you can use. We use a formula called Eaters delta, which
is a distance formula, and you put all of your texts you want to
look at into a collection and then the computer will analyze the frequency of the
words in that collection. So you know, you think about the frequency of
the words we use each day. It's not words that you would see in
like, you know, theological things. It's not talking about you know,
crucifixion or temple or things like that. We use words like it, I,
the A, and and same goes for Greek. You know, they've
got their own version of these function words. And it turns out that these
function words are basically a linguistic fingerprint where everybody who talks and everybody who writes
and this, this software, this type of analysis has actually been able to
prove modern day authorship of something as small as a tweet. So the example
we use in the book, we use two examples. One is two different
researchers actually were able to determine when former President Trump wrote a tweet or if
he had one of his interns do it, based on styleometric analysis. So
they would just look at the tweets and be able to tell based off of
you know, running it through these kinds of formulas and tell you know who
wrote it. Same goes with JK. Rowling. So she has a pen
name Robert Gailbraith, and for a long time people didn't know who that was.
And somebody ran a program very similar to the one we ran and was
able to correctly identify that she was the author behind Robert Gailbraith, and eventually
it forced the publisher to admit, yes, she was, you know who
wrote that book. And so we when we did this, we created a
test corpus, which is like a test body of texts, and we got
it up to ninety six percent accuracy in Greek for that time. Range Jaron
was talking about you know, it's about four hundred year range. And the
way we tested it, you know, we have letters and all kinds of
documents from people all over the Roman Empire that spoke Greek. You to collect
things that you know were written by the same person, and when it correctly
attributes them, it'll put them all in this group and say this is all
one author. Then you know it's working because a lot of these people,
like say Clement of Alexandria or Origin, these Christians writing in like an around
the year two hundred or so, we were able to use them for an
example out of many as part of our tests, and we saw that,
okay, it's the way we're doing this is getting it ninety six plus percent
of the time right. And then we went back in and we tested it
on the New Testament. And with what we're using, we're actually able to
look at it at a chapter by chapter level. And that's how we were
able to look at that text with Luke and Marcion and see that chapters one
through three of Luke were not in the original version, and part of chapter
four and part of chapter twenty four, the final chapter, we're not in
the original version of the Jesus story. So it's it's something that you know,
we didn't come up with ourselves, and that was a concern of ours,
is we didn't want to have some black box formula if we did record
or did you know, do this all ourselves and program it ourselves. So
we really, honestly, we're just at a lucky time in this period of
history where this software came out in if you're twenty fifteen or twenty seventeen.
A bunch of Greek texts just became available online in the past five or ten
years too, and we're just now getting to where we can reconstruct Marcian's Gospel,
because go figure what became the Catholic Church destroyed all the copies of Marcian's
Gospel, along with all kinds of other you know what would be invaluable texts
if we can look at them. There's a bunch that the Catholic Church tends
to keep from people. I felt like, oh yeah, oh yeah,
and hey, we came out with this book thinking, you know, it's
possible that you all of a sudden, the Catholic Church might hit us with
some giant hurdle. You know, they may come up, come up and
say hey, look, you know, we got this thing down in the
Vatic somewhere in some some some library that just completely destroys all your work.
And yeah, hey, look hey, if we're wrong, we're wrong.
You know. That's why in our book we we tell people exactly what software
we're using, how to get it, how to run it, you know,
and we say, hey, look, go prove us wrong. You
know, if we're wrong, we're wrong, and we'll admit it. But
you know you can probably run it and exactly see or see exactly how how
how you guys came up. Yeah, man, it's the idea. That's
the idea. I've got some questions, but I don't want to keep like
derailing. No worries, no worries. Yeah. Well, as Matthew stated,
there is what's called a reconstruction of Marcion that we were able to run.
Uh, and it's really really cool. So, as as he stated,
what eventually became the Catholic Church. The Christians deemed Marcion as a heretic,
and all of his followers to Marcia Knights, they were considered heretics too,
so they wanted nothing to do with them. They destroyed a lot of
those gospels and everything like that. But we're able to reconstruct it because they
talked so much shit. If it wasn't for them talking shit, we wouldn't
have the ability to reconstruct it. So early church fathers actually at certain points
literally went line by line and talked crap about all these different all these different
quotes, all these different verses from Marcion and said, oh, well,
he says this, and we think it's wrong because of this, and he
says this, and he says this, and we have so many quotes that
were able to actually take that and reconstruct his gospel. We didn't do it.
Scholars did it. Our favorite and specific is a text from Jason Badun,
who's a scholar who was able to put together Marcion's gospel. He was
able to piece it back together. And I mean, this is all like
Matthew said, it's stuff that is, it's within the last ten eleven years.
I think Jason be Dunes correct me if I'm wrong, Mathew, but
I think his his his reconstruction came out in twenty thirteen, I believe.
Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. So that's the one thing that
is really something to remember here, you know, and for you, for
anyone listening to this, it's the idea that you know, if you're thinking,
wait a minute, you know, all these scholars and stuff like that,
I've been saying for years that Jesus did this and Paul did this,
and we have historical blah blah blah blah blah. No we don't. That
was the old idea. Those are the old ideas based on old information.
What we're talking about here, these reconstructions of Marcion, and in fact,
the reconstruction of Marcion that we just talked about in twenty thirteen, that was
the English one. We didn't actually have the Greek and specific until like a
few years ago at most. So ultimately, the information that we are able
to that we're able to use here and run through this analysis and present in
our book, like Matthew said, it is really recent. And so this
is this we're on the forefront of what will more or less be a wave
of methicism that comes in here. And not to to our own horn here,
but ultimately that's what we're seeing. You know, you look at scholars
today and they are absolutely starting to say there's some there's some reasons to doubt
this Jesus character there really is right, and mythicism being the belief that Jesus
was a mythical figure, and that's something you know, it's it's not acceptable
in a lot of circles to even question. You take a figure like Zeus
or Hercules, and it's a legitimate question to ask, did this start out
as a mythical like story like full or is there some historical truth behind it?
Was Hercules or Zeus or Jesus? Were they myths first that then became
historicized or were they actual historical people who became mythicized or you know, turned
into gods. And so mythicist is the term for people who think that Jesus
started out as a myth or folklore or a deity as opposed to starting out
as a historical figure who then got called Christ or God. Yeah, and
consider what Matthew was talking about with the Gospel of Luke and what we already
said there where they took from Marcion which said he came down from heaven as
an adult and they put a birth story. That's because they're trying to they're
more or less trying to historicize them. Matthew comes first as a response to
Evangeline, and it has kind of a burst. It has a burst story,
but it's not as ornate, it's not as detailed as Luke's, which
comes later. But that's the idea. But surely you can see how they're
coming up with the more historical Jesus Mark Evangeline, no burst story. All
of a sudden, Matthew, they got a burst story, and they've got
a bit of a fairly primitive like genealogy. Luke goes a little bit more
into the genealogy and everything like that. It tries to not only have a
burst story, but it tries to place it in a certain time. It's
like, oh, hey, while Corinius was here and Herod was here,
and you look at the dates that it gives in the names that it gives,
and they don't even line up. You know, it's clearly just somebody
guessing it's not actually historically reliable. But at the same time they're attempting to
make him fit into history somewhere. That's the idea. You think that the
reasoning behind all of this is, like, what's the purpose? I guess
I don't want to I was gonna ask this later, but right, well,
what is the purpose of Jesus, Like, what was the whole game
if they wrote stories about a character that didn't exist, Like, what was
their end game if they already had the Old Testament? What was the point
of why they wanted to write this? Doing about a want of reference like
comic books, but like the superhero Yeah. Well, I will say that
there are some mythicists out there who do have some wilder takes, some that
don't really have really any evidence who's supported or anything like that. The the
more recent one that we've kind of seen floating around is the idea that the
Romans started it, and that the Roman government was trying to come up with
a more pacifist religion and was trying to put down the the Jews and specific
who were being rebellious in these wars, these these these revolts, and they
were saying, hey, you know, look at Jesus. You know,
he said pay your taxes, you know. Uh, And you know,
ultimately the Romans we put them on the cross and everything because we're in charge,
ha ha ha, you know, and so they there is some there
are some ideas, there are some ideas that are floating around regarding more or
less like a like a conspiracy from the Roman government. There's just no evidence
for that. And ultimately a lot of these books come after the Barcopa Revolt,
and the Barcopa Revolt would have been the last time that that there was
really anything there between the Jews and the Romans. I mean, after the
bar Cocoa Revolt they renamed Judea Roman Palestina because they just pretty much just wiped
them all out and everything, and the Jews were spread out there in the
outlying areas and provinces. So there's so there's not really the not really like
a there's not really a lot of evidence to suggest that it was like a
conspiracy per se, not really at all by the time it was written.
But at the same time, there are plenty of evidences for mystery cults,
these little these little beliefs or these little religions that just kind of behaved in
really strange ways. One of the well the the earliest attestation two Christians is
Pliny the Younger, and he is a at the time in one eleven CE,
he was the governor of As Matthew pointed out earlier, that that area
that Marcion comes from, which was Bathennian Pontus, and he comes in contact
with these Christians and he's writing a letter to the Emperor, Emperor Trajan,
and he's like, I don't know who the all these people are. I
don't know what they believe. I have no idea, So I started torturing
them to try to figure out what they believed. So he starts torturing them,
and he's saying all this stuff about what they do. He says they
share everything they including money and food, and they help each other out.
They get together, and they meet together and sing songs or hymns or whatever,
and they believe in Christ. But he never says Jesus. Never once
does he say Jesus. He doesn't mention any texts that they have. When
you know, according to Christian tradition, all of the books should have been
available by this point. But one to eleven nothing nothing, no text,
no name Jesus, No he was crucified by Pilot, nothing nothing. They're
Christians, they believe in a Christ, but they don't have a Jesus story
yet. But ultimately, the way he describes them is incredibly similar to mystery
cults that we have from the first century or even dating before there's a group
down near Alexandria called the Therapeutie, and the Therapeutie are written about in Philo.
Now Philo was a he was a historian who was in the first half
of the first century. And he doesn't say, you know jack shit about
Jesus, but yet he talks about this group called the Therapeutai, which is
like this offshoot of Judaism, that they all lived in this commune by a
lake down in Alexandria, and they got together once a week, shared food,
sang hymns, read from the scriptures like the Old Testament, and they
after that they dispersed and went back to their communes and lived peacefully. And
it was extremely similar. It's so so so close to Christianity that later church
church leaders, church fathers in the second century tried to claim the Therapeutae as
the earliest Christian monks, and they weren't, but they tried to claim them
that as that because they they saw the similarities. You know, it's it's
pointed out a lot. Yeah, And we think, or at least we
speculate in the book towards the end when we ask ourselves that question, like
how did it go from this, you know, just a belief in this
spiritual savior based on you know, whatever it might have been, based on
their personal experiences or what traditions they had at the time, into a oh,
there was a historical guy, you know X number of years ago,
you know, one hundred years ago. And what we think happened is when
the first version of the Gospel of Mark came out, which was around one
twenty it we were trying to reconstruct it right now, that's our next project,
and it's so trimmed down from what you see in the modern version of
Mark that we have available to us. It's we think what happened is somebody
is just writing some kind of story or play. The language they use is
very, I guess, unsophisticated. Every sentence starts with and pretty much every
sentence I mean, yeah, just just every single yeah. And it looks
like what happened is once Marcion brought his Gospel, which was he had this
copy, this proto Mark. And it's important to note that we're saying Marcion
because that's how you say it in English, but in the languages they would
speak at the time, it would have been marking on and which means little
mark, little Mark and Mark is you know, the shortest gospel, and
he brings it to Rome, and then we think he probably collaborated with another
group there to create his gospel Evangeline, and that what happened is after some
people saw evangelin you know, there's this figure walking around in this story,
and yeah, he descended from the sky, but it just it made sense
to people that he was historical, and this idea of a historical figure doing
this stuff caught on, and when you get to the Gospel of Matthew,
it just is historical for them. They interpret everything as literal and historical.
And my favorite example in the Gospel of Matthew of that author taking things literally
is he's reading, or he's citing, basically a poem from the Old Testament
in Hebrew and it says they will ride a donkey and a foal or something
to that effect, the child of a donkey. And it's a way of
writing in Hebrew that you duplicate things, but it doesn't mean it's actually two.
They're talking about one, and it's just you know, the style that
Matthew doesn't get that though, and so he has Jesus ride into Jerusalem on
two donkeys at the same time. And so that's just what happens is they
took this story literally, and then people really latched onto this literal story and
lost that concept of the you know, this was all a spiritual movement,
and it became this historical effective movement that had to be absolutely true because it
was history. And then you know that was it was tied in with all
those theological beliefs, and you end up with you know, it becomes the
religion of the Roman Empire, and Emperor Constantine writes this edict that all Marcianite
churches have to be destroyed in the three hundreds, and from then on you
don't hear anymore about the Marcianites, and you don't hear a lot about Christians,
who up until that point might have still believed that this wasn't a historical
story, it was just you know, a spiritual one. Yeah, the
Marcianites continued on with that belief that Jesus wasn't really historical, or at the
very least, you know, if he had a body, he wasn't fully
God, you know, it was it was a very different version of Christianity
that wasn't holding to as much as the literal interpretation of the others were.
But I mean they lasted until all of a sudden Constantine said do away with
them, kill them, you get rid of them. As luck would have
it. The oldest inscription that we have, like the oldest physical inscription that
we have of Jesus, is a stone that appears to be from an archway,
you know, above a doorway there, and it's it's from a church
of Marcion, like a Marcianite church, and it mentions Jesus. And we
know that it's a Marcianite church because of the language that they use there,
and so you know, it's kind of funny that, in a sense kind
of Marcion kind of got the last laugh there, that like the oldest inscription
that we have is from his church, not anybody else's. There's been several
different religions or deities or whatever you want to call them, to have the
same story as Jesus too, which I've always thought was interesting because I'm pretty
sure like you had. Wasn't the Egyptian Osiris. Wasn't he supposed to be
like the son their son of a god or whatever? And he kind of
died on like similar things. I've been attributed to the same stories, and
I could be one hundred percent wrong on this, But in the Old Testament,
they was never mentioned if Satan was there in the Old Testament. Satan
shows up. Satan's definitely in the Old Testament. It's just that so the
concept of Satan wasn't always there for the ancient Jews. The ancient Jews,
go ahead, Satan shows up, but not the devil, I think,
is the best way to put it. Yeah, yeah, because that's what
I was kind of thinking. Is like with the New Testament. I've said
this years ago, before anything like this, I always thought it was strange,
like you don't really hear much about the devil or whatever in the Old
Testament. But they made the New Testament. Whoever wrote it, you had
your protagonist, which would be Jesus. Yeah, so you had to have
an antagonist. So who they make. They made the devil, Lucifer,
Saytan, whatever you want to call him, Like you had your good guy
and your bad guy. That's the new And then the New Testament's God is
completely almost different seeming from the Old Testament God. The Old Testament God is
this almost like a jealous god if you say that, and the new one
like, oh, he said the son here he wants to bless us and
forget the old ones like no, I'm gonna wipe you all out. Well,
there's a massive, massive reason for that. Marcion's theology was that Jesus
was sent by a god called God the Father, who was different from Yahweh,
and that Jesus was sent to more or less ransom or purchase the souls
of humanity from this other god to basically save us from Yahweh. Was that
was Marcian's idea. And so that, I mean makes sense that you would
notice that because it's you know, it's definitely there. It's definitely there.
And that's why Marcian was deemed a heretic because he believed in more or less
another God. Yeah, that was one of the things. One of the
take commands, wasn't the worship no other gods? And despite the fact that,
you know, if there's only one God, then why would you even
need to say that? Yeah, I've always thought that too. Is like
when it comes to religious why I'm not religious? So I feel like of
all the tragedies that happened all the things that we have to go through,
everything that people go through, seeing children have cancers or whatever. Right,
why do we have to have all the suffering? If they sent as supposed
Jesus back to save us all this, and that it came back at a
time frame where no one really knew much of anything to an extent, like
not to how we are now like there was Know, it's weird to me
that the way life has evolved, the way we've evolved and become, the
technology and everything else. You keep hearing the story of Jesus is coming back,
like that's the big Christian thing. At what point is he coming back?
Like how far off does life have to go before this Jesus is coming
back to save us all? When's the rapture coming? You know what I
mean? Like right right? None of it ever made sense to me,
Yeah, I mean, and you got to wonder, you know, of
course, you know this is kind of putting more supernatural concepts back into it.
But ultimately, if you know, if God is sending his son,
why did he send it or why why did he send him to to to
the Middle East back in you know, back two thousand years ago, Like
if you're going to send him back. Then send them to China. They
keep a lot of written records over there. The literacy rate is pretty good
compared to three to five percent literacy rate over there and Judea. And if
you're going to send them to that area, just send modern day when they
have cameras, when they have video, you know, something like that.
And on top of that, even if even if you were to say,
okay, there's some kind of weird reason why they went to Judea, and
there's some kind of weird reason why he's picked that particular time. Okay,
great, Why did you not offer us anything that was going to be valuable?
Why did you not tell us about how you know, the Romans at
the time, they thought that diseases were spread by bad smells, you know,
not germs, bad smells. Teach us about germs, Jesus, you
know, to just the ingredients for penicillin, like you know what I mean,
Like, teach us something that's going to be useful. Well, that's
the one thing that's not useful for me because I'm allergic to it. Oh
okay, well you know there's that. But but you know, he's just
regurgitating a lot of these old, older, older concepts. You if you
ask, if you ask, you know, just anyone off the street,
Hey, who came first? Jesus or Socrates? They'll probably say Jesus because
just kind of the way that, especially in America, I guess, you
know, the way that we kind of are raised to kind of assume this
like religious just confirmation, like in the sense that you kind of you place
the Bible, you place Bible times, you place it into history in your
mind, and it's almost more of an anchor than anything else. And again,
I when I've asked people adults, teenagers, you know, people in
my age, you know, whatever, Hey, who came first? Plato
or Jesus? They say, I think Jesus came first, right, And
I'm like, no, Plato he was, He predated him, like by
a couple hundred years, you know what I mean. Like, it's just
people assume that Jesus is somehow delivering these messages first, when in reality,
very little of it is new at all. There's a lot of things that
were taken from the concept of the Teacher of Righteousness, which was a Jewish
leader in specific that had a lot of you know, teachings and everything like
that from BCE, you know, and you know it just kind of got
lifted. You know, there are some things that just get lifted from from
previous writers. But you would talk a little bit about the concept of,
you know, when Jesus is coming back and all that kind of stuff,
and that kind of ties in a little bit with Revelation. And we found
some pretty pretty I guess neat to us, pretty cool to us kind of
stuff about Revelation. I'll let Matthew kind of share with you what we found.
Yeah, yeah, So you know, the standard view on Revelation is
that it was written by John in his I guess nineties or so, or
it was written in the nineties, and he was an old man at the
time after I think what he had been and oil is the story something like
that, and then exile the patents have a terrible right, just terrible time.
And what we found when we ran it is that the first three chapters,
which are just kind of the intro and then some letters to churches,
all in you know, modern day Turkey, which is where we've discovered the
religion actually started. It didn't start in Judea. The rest of the text
after that was actually originally a Jewish text written in Hebrew. And the way
we can tell is because when you translate a text, a lot of the
wordings and word choices carry over, so that most frequent words in that document
they show up like the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, and it's just
it was. What's interesting about that is it opens up the possibility for the
dates having actually been further back, you know, because people like to date
it and say it was in the nineties because it's talking about this emperor.
It was in the sixties, was talking about this emperor. I mean,
we don't really know now, But the point being it was a stolen document.
It was just lifted from you know, whatever Jewish author wrote it,
and Christians kind of made it their own. And we see a lot of
that, you know, like you had said, a lot of you know,
stuff is not original, whether it's like the concept of a dying,
rising God or the moral teachings that Jesus has that are found in all different
kinds of philosophies and religion at the time. If a scle heals as Sclepias
heals people, Orion walks on water, right, yeah, Actually, one
of the healing stories Jesus does you know he spits in somebody's eyes And that
sounds really weird, but that was actually a thing from another cult at the
time, in Yeah Therapist, where like the for some reason spit had healing
power and so that's that's what they did. And when we were working out,
you know, like you were saying, like a devil concept is not
really in the Old Testament the way it is in the New Testament. So
we're trying to figure out, like, how did this old worldview come around
that the Christians had at that time, And we're working on that in our
current one with the Proto mark work. And if you look into different languages
and cultures all across Europe and even into you know, Iran and India,
there was an underlying it's called the Proto Indo European language, and they had
a god broadly across those various cultures called Deus or deuz Potter, which is
like sky god or godfather and Zeus. The name Zeus comes from that the
name Jupiter, it's literally a variation of Deus Potter Jupiter. But he didn't
create the world. He was a father, but he didn't create the world.
And then Judaism is from a Semitic language, Hebrew, and they have
a creator God who doesn't necessarily really have a son, depending on how you
read it and stuff. So what we think happened is these merged and they
took some from Judaism, they took that creator God and they decide, well,
the creator God's really mean in the Old Testament, so we need another
God. And they've got this one from you know, the Indo European cultures,
like you know, Greek, and that's where God the Father came from.
And then he sends down the sun to more or less ransom the souls
of humanity from the mean God yahweh. Another kind of I guess name or
kind of variant so to speak of Jupiter is jovis j O v ees.
And what's interesting is that. And I'm going to use the English letters here.
I know that technically, you know, there's Greek and you know,
some Latin to a certain point and everything in order to get there. But
the Gospels, the New Testament, they use something called the nominous sacra,
and no one really knows why. No one really has a good answer why.
And what that is is they would abbreviate words. They would abbreviate these
names, like, for instance, Jesus would and again I'm using the English
variant of these letters, but Jesus would be JS. That's it. And
they didn't actually spell out Jesus for a really long time, but in the
text Jesus was JS. That's more or less what he would be called.
And it's interesting because that could be really anything that in English has j jay
at the beginning and S at the end, so it could be Jovis or
it could be Jesus. You know, it's very possible that the earliest writers
were more or less combining, like Matthew said, these concepts from the son
of the Skyfather, the Godfather Jupiter and combining it with Judaism. The thesis
for like Jesus would be the Romans needed something, which I think is strange
too, but like the Catholic Church is based in Rome. Rome were the
ones that supposedly crucified Christ you mentioned earlier, they kind of needed something too,
not so much persuade the Jews, but like a different type of religion.
It's almost like everything was made just to change, like the narrative to
like I said before, and I've always the psycho means to control, I
mean to some extent. You know, you look at the early church leaders
and you see that, you know, they're writing some of this stuff that
you know, they're they're making up a lot of the religion as you go,
you know, as far as control, I mean maybe sure, you
know, to keep power positions of power. Again, I there's no evidence
to suggest that the Roman government is behind it, but I mean, obviously
somebody, somebody is coming up with these stories and everything, and we just
think that they're you know, just people, you know, human beings who
are just saying, hey, you know, let me let me keep this
thing going, you know, let me let me keep my position of power.
Uh. There's this guy who wrote and some Christians will actually try to
claim him as proof of Jesus, but he's not so late. It doesn't
matter. But his name is Lucian, Lucian of Samasada. He was a
satirist. He wrote a lot of it's pretty funny if you you know,
if you take time to read them. But he wrote a lot of little
stories, little little books. And in one of his books he writes about
this guy named Peregrinus, Proteus, and Proteus comes from well, he comes
from Asia Minor. He comes from modern day Turkey, where all of this
is uh. And somehow he gets involved in a pretty pretty early in life
as a young man, he gets involved with the Christians and he convinces them.
According to Lucian, he had convinced him that he convinced them that he
was really, really smart, and they harold him, heralded him as the
the second coming is of Socrates. You know. They they loved him.
They gave him food, they gave him sheltered, they gave him tons of
money. Uh. And he he was just a con man. Proteus,
he just he just ate it all up. He loved it. They they
promoted him to bishop and stuff like that. Lucian said that he not only
wrote books, but he edited other books and sent letters to a whole bunch
of different cities, which, by the way, sounds a lot like Paul.
Sounds a lot like you know, all these different all these different people
that are writing these letters. Sounds a lot like another guy named Ignatious.
He was writing letters to different cities and stuff like that. It sounds a
lot like them. But anyways, Proteus. Eventually he ends up eating something
that the Christians thought was unclean or something, and so they kick him out
of the church. I mean, really finicky cut people. But ultimately,
the entire point that Lucian was trying to make was that the Christians were so
gullible that they just threw all their money at this guy. And so the
takeaway here is that you have these people who are bishops in this religion,
more or less creating this religion, making it up as they go along,
but there is an incentive to keep doing it. There's an incentive to keep
going. And you know, lots of times people say, oh, well,
you know, you know, why would the Christians lie if they were
getting they were getting killed, And it's like, well, there's actually very
very little evidence that they ever really did. Like I said earlier, when
Pliny wrote that letter to Trajan and he was explaining that he was torturing the
Christians to try to figure out what they what they believed, Trajan said,
hey, hey, cut that out, cut it out, don't don't don't
worry about it, you know, unless they're like Christians and they refuse to
take part in anything. You know, as far as the Roman Empire goes
don't don't mess with them, no, that kind of thing. So ultimately,
ultimately there's not a lot of evidence that these guys were killed. In
fact, there's more evidence that they were thrown bookoos of money and had great
positions of power and influence over all these people. So it doesn't have to
come from the government, just has to come from these preachers, right.
And you know, we see in one of the letters that's used very frequently
in terms of, you know, controlling a lot of what goes on in
the church, multiple letters first Timothy, second Timothy entire and these are some
of the latest letters. And in there we're actually able to tell that,
not even we prove it with our style of metric analysis, but even without
that in the text, we're able to identify that it is really late because
the author is just so I guess self absorbed that he gives away who he
is who is writing this letter, and it's not it's not Paul who the
letter says this is for Paul. It's actually from someone named Polycarp and his
scribe Crescence. And you see this name Carpus, which is the short version
of what Polycarp's name would have been Polycarpus, Polycarpus, and then his scribe
Crescence, which is in the actual letter from polycarp that we still have.
And you know, these letters are used to fight back against other religious groups.
It's the one i think that tells women to keep their head covered.
It it more or less maintains the slave system in there. There's a lot
of a lot of infighting going on. And then by the time you know,
you get to Constantine, he has the church wipe out or not,
it just church, the Roman Empire, wipe out, the Marcian knights,
the opposing groups. And even up until like the twelve hundred's, the Catholic
Church is putting out official decrees saying no one is allowed to read the Bible
unless you are a priest. No one's allowed to translate it. Even if
they can read, you know, they are not allowed to translate it,
not allowed to read it. No one is able to access it except the
clergy. Because when you actually read it, and if you read it close
enough and with this you know, skeptical mindset about it, you start seeing
names like you know, polycarp and things like that, and it's it's a
trend throughout the history of the religion and a lot of religions. Yeah,
I mean they're just they're they're clinging on to power and they can get away
with it. I mean as soon as the I mean it's pretty well documented,
believe it or not. You know, as soon as as soon as
the Christians came to power in the three hundreds, they wasted no time destroying
temples, destroying statues, destroying artwork, you know, claiming that you know,
other people were uh Satanic and stuff like that. There's some there's a
church father in the second century that said that uh Satan had gone around the
world before Jesus even showed up and taught people how to take the Lord's supper,
like drink wine as blood and eat bread as flesh, because that was
a thing that was already around. There were already cults that were doing that
before Jesus showed up. They just stole the idea and then just claimed it
was satanic before Jesus shows up, which doesn't even make any sense. But
you know that being said, you know, they just they did all kinds
of stuff. I mean, look up, I mean, the listeners,
anybody can can they can look up Hypatia. Hypatia she was. She was
a Greek astronomer who was drug through the city into a temple called the Kasarian
and murdered by the Christians in the three hundreds because they claimed that she was
just a witch like she had. I mean, as soon as they came
to power, they were just there was mad with it, mad with it.
It was their turn to be the boot, and they went to town
stopping Here we are almost two thousand years later, and it still seems to
be that way. Oh yeah, oh yeah, I do have something again,
Like I mentioned, I wanted to talk about. Yeah, and this
is going to go on the wu wu side, that supernatural element. But
many people that I've talked to at this show, they tend to think and
say that when they have weird experiences obviously like something paranormal, and I've had
my own weird stuff happen too. If they claim they use the name of
Jesus Christ, it makes these into teas, the spirits, these whatever that
could possibly be. Even people have claimed they've been abducted by aliens, claim
they've rebuked the aliens with Jesus Christ and that leaves them alone. Why would
a name have so much power if the thing didn't exist. Like that's where
I've always come back to, Like when people say, oh, you just
need to pray to Jesus this and that, I'm like, why would that
even work if? Because I'm not a religious person. So it's like,
if I'm praying, I'm going through here and saying this in the name of
Jesus Christ whatever, it's going to listen to me even if I don't believe.
Like, how does that work? Matthew, if you wanted to take
that, I know that you had talked a little bit about that particular book
of I think it was a book of spells or something that that was written
or something. Yeah, actually was what I was thinking of. I don't
remember exactly when it was written. It was somewhere between like the years two
hundred and three hundred, I think. But there is a collection of spells
from I think it's in Egypt, and it's just collection of spells from around
the Roman Empire. You know, somebody went around the empire and collected what
they believed were powerful sayings. And I say it spells, but it was
just kind of variations. It might be spelled, it might be mantras,
it's just variations of you know, spoken words that they thought had power,
and one of them is actually Jesus and it's not Christ. It's a chrest,
which is really interesting because it means like the Good, which is what
a lot of Marcianites called him. It wasn't Jesus the messiah anointed one.
It was Jesus the good or the righteous one. And this wasn't even necessarily
a Christian book. They just but it was collected in with all these others
we were saying earlier. I mean, this book that we wrote, Christ
before Jesus is about the historical aspects of it. We really don't delve into
the religious aspects. Obviously there was some belief that started a christ movement.
We just think that the historical figure that it became like you know, like
the guy with the beard and long hair and the white robes, if you
whether it's that or like a more like historical so to speak, idea of
him that just came later and is what was made up. We don't really
speak to anybody's you know, experiences or their beliefs before we try to guess,
you know, and try to do work out what we can based off
of what texts we do have, but you know, it's beyond the purview
of this specific book we are working on. Like we said that proto Mark
one to try to get a better idea of where this all came from,
Jared, if you wanted to do right, but I would, however,
you know, just to try to attempt to, you know, answer the
book at all that you know, it seems to have been something that people
thought worked or felt worked or whatever, you know, going back you know,
you know, eighteen hundred years, you know, you know, I
got the more or less the Marshie Knights were someone vaguely familiar with them.
There seemed to be using some kind of mantra with that name, thinking that
it would be beneficial you know, against you know, bad spirits or anything
like that. So I mean it seems to date back really, really far.
But again, you know, obviously he doesn't exist. He doesn't exist,
and so you know, people can deal with that however they want to
deal with it. But I mean, ultimately we do kind of see something
kind of trace back. I think the concept of Jesus was something that works
for people and if they want to believe in it, and if that helps
them be a good person and sleep better at night. I'm all for that,
but that's what that's. That's faith basically, like if you have faith
in something and you live a good life. That's what I said earlier.
I'm not a religious person, but I think if you're a good person,
That's what I think most of this stuff was always about. Is they're trying
to set like almost like guidelines, and for whatever reason, they made a
mythological main character to set out these guidelines. Yeah, I mean there was
obviously some kind of intent initially, whether that be you know, to try
to you know, poke fun or to you know, dismiss a lot of
the Jewish beliefs because I mean, you know, if you're writing Post one
thirty six and the Jews have just come out and droves from Judea because of
the Barkope revolt and everything like that, and they're now in your country,
I mean, maybe maybe there could be some animosity there which led to the
creation of the First Gospel proto Mark. There there's you know, we don't
know the intent. We don't know if it's that, we don't know if
it's someone who just really really really likes the Jews and wants to kind of
write something with that backdrop. We don't know if it's somebody who just picked
up the book of Josephus, you know, some of his books and thought,
okay, let me let me write a story that's kind of based on
We don't know. It seems to be a play. It seems to be
you know, some kind of, like you said, a mythological kind of
story at first that just kind of took off, but we don't know the
intent. And I mean, ultimately, you know, if somebody did truly
sort of kind of hope that there was some savior and that was their fictional
story of this savior that they were wanting, sure great. You know,
I don't know what the intent was. I don't know if it was to
establish rules or not. But eventually, you know, there was a you
know, it spread with a whole bunch of downtrodden people, people who are
uneducated and people who were you know, disenfranchised. So I mean, you
do kind of find that kind of like that that that faith element of it
that seems to keep people happy, which again, you know, I don't
necessarily don't want to necessarily step on anybody's happiness or anything I just care about
personally just the truth, you know, and putting that out there. And
so yeah, I mean, if somebody wants to believe in Jesus that yeah,
I mean that's fine. But I guess my only recommendation there would be
to, hey, you know, recognize that this is this is mythical that
you know, you can believe in Hercules, you can pray to Hercules.
I don't know, I don't give a shit, you know, just ultimately,
just come on, like, don't don't hold on to this dogmatic belief
system. This this book that was written years and years ago and is demonstrably
false, and and somehow use what's in it to dictate how you treat other
people and how you how you think about other people, and ultimately how you
vote. You know. I mean, if you have a belief in something,
you have a belief in something, you know, and if it's based
in truth, it's based in truth, and that's awesome. But you gotta
be careful when you back up your beliefs with something that isn't real. As
Voltaire said, you know, when we believe, when we believe absurdities,
we commit atrocities. We don't exist in a vacuum and eventually your beliefs will
come out, So be very careful as to what we put into our brains.
No, I agree with that. There's a lot of faith being put
into a lot of things, and I think what nowadays people's religion and faith
is what is being manipulated into other avenues of life. I'm not going to
go down that rabbit hole in this episode, but there's a lot of things
when it comes to religion that I feel like is being used as means now
more nefariously than what it was originally intended for. And I think Matthew would
probably agree on that too. Yeah, yeah, And that was kind of
almost the message of the whole thing is that, like it's just not what
it originally started out as, not as what it was intended for, for
better or worse, Religion now, especially Christianity, is a very big profitable
thing to be involved in. And I'll just at that. Yeah, yeah,
yeah, And I mean I think, you know, as time goes
on, I think that we're going to see like I mentioned earlier, I
think we're going to I think I mentioned earlier, I don't know that,
uh, you know, I think we're going to see yeah, that that
scholarship is going to start kind of more or less trending towards the mythicism,
uh standpoint, and the idea that Jesus didn't exist that uh. You know
a lot of these characters from the New Testament were probably you know, made
up for a particular purpose, you know, to advance the particular religion,
and made up over time, historicized over time, you know that kind of
thing. And so you know, I do see that things will probably move
that direction, and eager to see what that looks like and how that unfolds
into you know, daily life and society as we know it. You know,
obviously it's got to trickle down. It's starts with the scholars and then
and then finally you know, it gets maybe talked about in a college course,
and then eventually it goes to maybe K through twelve eventually, you know,
you know what I mean, Like, you know, over time,
that kind of concept just kind of trickles through, trickles through you know,
education, trickles through our understanding of the world and everything. I mean,
already we're starting to see a lower amount here in America of people who go
to church or people who consider themselves religious. You know, it's it's there's
a movement and specific that is seeming to really take place. And then when
you listen to the diehards that are still religious, Yeah, they people that
don't go to church and removing God from this, like you can't say in
God we trust or prayers in school and everything else depending on what part of
the country or in I'm in a very deep red state, so everything here
is super religious. And if you go down that route to where you're trying
to remove things, people are getting upset around here just because you're trying to
uproot everything they've been taught. And it's very hard for anyone to accept anything
new, right, right, And I mean, I mean that's that's what
life is all about, in my opinion, is growing as a human being.
And a lot of that is, you know, taking taking new information
and processing it and thinking, hey, you know, do I need to
do I need to change who I am? Do I need to change what
I believe? Do I need to tweak it? You know? Or is
you know possible that what you hear might be complete and total bs And if
that's the case, well you know that's the case. But I think the
best way to determine if it is is to make sure that you live your
life believing is many true things as possible and not believing as many false things
as possible, and possibly you know, being able to use that as a
as a barrier or that as a barometer for how you want to determine if
something is you know, a good new idea or not. You know,
anyone that's listened to the show should know by now that I remained skeptical on
a lot of things, and I've always encouraged everyone to keep a healthy dope
with dose of skepticism when it comes to any topics that people bring on here.
Not to discredit any guests or anything like that, but yeah, it's
I believe in what I believe. I know what I can see and what
science proves. But at the same time, science doesn't prove everything, and
I've seen some stuff that science shouldn't even say, like there's no proof of
it. So it's like, I know what I saw, So I'm not
going to discredit anyone else for like the weird things that they see too.
But when it comes to like religious aspects, wasn't there two thousand years ago?
So if someone wants to have faith. Like I've said, I if
religion works for people, what's great. But I've just always it's not been
my thing. Right, And like we said, you know, this isn't
an atheist book or anything. Christ Before Jesus is a you know, it's
a book that just presents what, you know, what we found, you
know. I mean one could literally read the entire book, believe everything that
we say and still have believe in God. I mean yeah, in fact,
you could even be a Christian. You know, you could just accept
that, you know, Christian just kind of means something a little bit less
historical now, maybe as a mystery cult or something. But yeah, you
could make one hundred percent. You know, we we debated whether or not
I think Matthew was thinking about whether or not. You know, we put
that into the to the end of the book. You know, something about
you know how Christianity. You know, if maybe it had accepted or maybe
if it today accepted you know, it's more of its roots, maybe you
would look different. I don't know, yeah, because we were saying,
you know, those a lot of the fake letters are where you find these
things, like you know, the women need to be silent and stuff,
like that those were like all of it. Yeah, I was written way
after the fact that those are ten to be the latest ones and the ones
that are being written by these bishops and such that have some interest in protecting
their power. So the original religion, you know, had that kind of
like the mysterious aspect of spiritual savior, things like that, and there still
are some moral teachings behind it, but it didn't have all of that the
baggage that it developed over the next hundred and plus years. Yeah, that's
kind of where I've said, not like it was used once you got out
there for the people in power to want to stay in power, like to
control their narrative. They wanted to feed it on the people, so everyone
had to believe what they wanted them to believe in so they could keep on
being in charge for the church and whatever else they wanted to do. I
think they influenced a lot of how life has become the way it is now.
But that's my my ten foil hat thought for the night. Nice,
No, if you guys would like to let everyone know where they can find
your book. We're getting about to get close to over an hour and a
half, so we kind of wrap this one up. Oh yeah, yeah.
So again, our book comes out specifically on March sixteenth, that is
three sixteen. We did that on purpose, and it comes out on Amazon
on print. We're going to we're finishing up an audiobook hopefully it'll be around
the same time, and also ebook copy, and as far as ebook goes,
you know, look, we're not trying to get rich off of this
kind of stuff. We're putting the ebook at two dollars and ninety nine cents,
so you know, right when it comes out, we're going to have
it at two ninety nine and and yeah, I mean it again, we're
not going to get rich off of it. We're just trying to get the
idea out there because the way that scholarship kind of looks at this, you
know, is they they want to see certain credentials before they really start taking
a look from a peer review kind of standpoint. You know, if we
submitted this to scholars, they'd say, oh, you know, did you
go to a seminary or did you do you have a PhD in Greek or
you know, all these different things that we just simply don't have. So
ultimately, we did notice that a lot of Mythhaesist authors would get mentioned by
scholars and they would feel obligated to respond to these authors. If the authors
were you know, if they sold enough books, if they sold enough books,
you know, if they got popular enough, then yeah, a lot
of these scholars would have to respond. So more or less, that is
our only way, that's our only way of actually getting in front of these
guys. So ultimately, yeah, we're not trying to get rich. We're
just trying to get the idea out there and you know, maybe have a
lot of scholarship taking take another look at the Bible, take another look at
the New Testament. Yeah, and we also do lives on TikTok just so
people like if you hear this and anybody wants to ask us questions directly.
We try to be accessible, just like that software we use, open source
free, everybody can do it. We welcome all different people come in,
ask questions if they get it or not, the book or not. You
know, we're on every week, so I will include a link in the
show notes to the book because by the time this airs, which will probably
be I think the first or second week of April, your book should already
be out for about a week or two. So I'll have the link in
the show notes for anyone that's interested, and if you want to send me
the link to your TikTok, I can put that on there as well,
defintely. Well, thank you, sir, Yeah, not a problem.
I appreciate you guys coming on here and talking with me and night. It's
been a pleasure, absolutely, been very informative and little eye opening here and
there. Well, thanks, thanks, and hopefully we didn't put too many
people to sleep, but you know, I throw it on if you need
a good night sleep or too many pitchforks. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're either going to get people who are like, wow, that was the
most boring thing ever, and then the other half are going to be like
we're gonna kill everybody. I think with the way my show is, they
kind of should know at this point, this after eighty something episodes, they
should know that there's always going to be those topics that don't always fall into
the weird paranormal stuff. But gotcha, I have noticed that when I do
I wouldn't say this is not so much conspiratorial, but like when I do
the stuff the ventures off, it seems to ruffle a lot of feathers,
so I enjoy having topics that might get people talking. So got you,
got you? Well, thank you very much for having us on. It's
been a pleasure. No, definitely, And again, anyone listening, if
you would like to find the book, you can just check out the show
notes and we'll take you right there. But again we're gonna head on out,
So thanks to Jared and thanks to Matthew, and good night everyone.
Remember the truth lies, and the stories we share, the connections we make,
stay curious, stay open minded. Thank you all for joining us on
this journey, and until next time, keep questioning, keep seeking, and
keep exploring the end nowe good night everyone,