Marketing the Messiah

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How much do you really know about the origins of Christianity?

Whether you are a Christian, an atheist, or a member of another faith, it is impossible to ignore the impact Christianity has had on Western civilization.

But most people, including many Christians, do not have a solid grasp of the history of early Christianity, even if it is hinted at in the New Testament.

Many people still think that the Gospels were written by the people whose names adorn the books.

Many people still think that these people were eyewitnesses of Jesus.

Many people do not realize how much Paul of Tarsus reinvented early Christianity to fit his own vision, and the tension he created with the original disciples.

In the last century, New Testament scholars have examined the text word for word to separate the true story from the accepted tradition. In this lighthearted but fact-based film, the "true" story of early Christianity is told with the help of twelve biblical scholars, Renaissance masterpieces and humorous animation.

It is neither a film about faith nor a film attacking or mocking Christianity. It is an honest attempt to reconstruct a very complex and fascinating story that everyone will enjoy.

One of the Worlds 2 2 billion Christian Wow that\'s a lot of You probably think them around 2000 years ago here in the Nazareth mountains in Galilee region of modern Israel A man known as Jesus Christ was born You probably think of famous The Messiah the son Of yahweh the god of the Jews If you\'re one of the other 5 billion people on the planet you probably just think of Jesus\'s some kind Why is man who had a religious cult built up around him after his death Maybe you\'re one of those people Believe he never even really exist He\'s just I\'m kind of literary mate like Hercules King Arthur But whichever Campion I think we can all agree The Jesus is one of the most influential and intriguing figures in all of the world About 4 years ago when I was a good little Catholic boy going to Sunday school I was told the story Of Giza It went something like About 2000 years ago a young married woman Still a virgin With me pregnant by the god of the Jews She gave birth to a baby in a barn and three wise men found him by following a star And give some gold and scented oils When he grew up Jesus walked around you they\'re telling thousands of people he was God and performing miracles That is magically making fish in bread appear turning water into wine in raising people from the dead When I keep hold of friends to eat some bread which was his flesh and drink some wine which was his blood The Jewish authorities who were angry with him turn him over to the Romans who actually wanted to let him go But did you convinced them to crucify him Button A few days later he Rose from the dead and told his friends that I\'m was secretly the plan all along The sins of the world his friends wrote down what happened in a book And started a new religion But then the wrong instead of persecuting them Until the Romans change their mind I decided to become Christians instead at the end of the world Jesus will return to judge the living and the Dead To be honest when I was a Play The Story didn\'t make a lot of sense to me I remember thinking So this dude has magical powers and he\'s invisible and watching me when Sleep at night A little bit creepy What is an Edo I started learning more about the history Christianity Is the Bible more carefully in red the MoDA Testament scholars in Ancient historian Starting to realise The Sunday school version of the Jesus store Was vastly Do the story Appears in the bye The actual stories Far more complicated and far more interest So I thought I\'d died and interview a reindeer World-renowned biblical scholars and Historians and academics And ask them to help me tell the story Of how Christianity went from being some sort of Fringe Jewish personality call From the backwaters of the Roman Empire Two point where it was the state religion of that empire wielding a normal Power Over the influence them so So let\'s get back to the Sunday school version of the story What does scholars think about How accurate that version Research that was happening at the beginning of the 20th century A German scholar with the bar Came to the conclusion and effect that picture is a very And it\'s not like Jesus was walking around Palestine saying hi I\'m gone I\'m going to die for your sins soon but until then how do I tell you a few good cracking Sunday school stories Turn off the kitchen getting down with worship And that may be the basic view but that\'s not quite what he So how did it How did the version Become the story most of my Christian friends single A lot of Christians don\'t actually read the Bible if they do with the Bible they don\'t read it historic Don\'t read it thinking about What the story is Telling you about the origin Cristiano They look at this uplifting passenger that uplifting pass They don\'t compare The Gospels to one another They don\'t look at the really weird stuff So they feel like they know the bike But it\'s a very selective knowledge up to certain Greatest Hits or you know the most uplifting Seemingly relevant stuff to the 21st century there looking for a single verse that will inspire them Play journey that day That\'s perfectly fine there\'s no criticism of that but the problem with that approach is that you\'re not actually reading the Bible As it\'s intended to be read Christians read But do they read it systemically Systematically but not necessarily for historical reasons systemically To clarify the belief And they just said Don\'t get to see all the really Strange star All the contradictions of the discrepancies I mean how do you go From being a religion that celebrate summer Who has died Orla Roman Cross To a religion Celebrate Cross and take that cross forward into battle I mean that\'s the story of Christianity within 300 years Going from a superstition to be mistake religion that\'s absolutely extraordinary and that is what The early Roman historians called in they called a superstar Before we get into the story of Jesus I think we do wind the clock back a little And talked about the world into which Christianity A long time ago It was a man known as law Liberal Redeemer saviour simultaneously for human and fully divine The son of God and God The bringer of peace and salvation Sent into the world in the form of a man to forgive the sins of the p That\'s August If you ask People living in the Roman Empire Where abouts the time It was born Who the son of God was Most of the would have told you it was this guy Augustus was the adopted son of the original J C Julius Caesar The great Roman general who was stabbed to death in 44 BCE After he was assassinated the Roman Senate Play the the ascended into the To become a go And Augustus as his adopted son was there for called The son of the deified it was new to to Rome because It was Augustus himself who saw what he thought was the Solar Apostasy verse Going up to The heaven that\'s what I he can then claim The hits the sun the adopted son Amazon A divinity Another title bestowed upon Augustus was Save Because the end 100 years of civil war He brought peace he brought peace to Rome he brought peace to the Empire and room According to tradition some around the middle of the reign of Augustus Jesus was born So several decades before Jesus Eva Please on the scene Romans are pretty familiar with the idea that somebody can die and become and God or be the son of a gun And the saviour of mankind So who exactly was Jesus Well it kind of depends on Who you are Top scholars believe he was an apocalyptic preacher or a political trouble How does think he was more of a wise Sage or a hippie pacifist Loving brother Strange that after 2000 years scholars still can\'t agree Exactly huger Does was Wanting they all do agree on that 0gz Residue If you look at pictures of Jesus in most churches White guy with long brown hair dye Trimmed beard blue eyes The Christianity start as a Jewish personality Jesus was a Jew So we probably will look more like I don\'t know DJ Khaled Then Jared Leto You would have been a dark skinned brown eyed Palace What\'s this If Jesus Returned and tried to board Finally United States today You\'ll probably get taken into a little room and randomly screen When I say Jesus was in July Ethnically Do I mean a religious Jew he was a very real Most of the early members Cit Jesus is tore observe Peter is tour observant James\'s Torah observant and Paul is 4 of 0 The Torah is the first five books of the Hebrew bible but Christians called the Old Custom Jesus and the guys who ran his group after he died Peter the guy who lived in charge and James who according to tradition was one of Jesus Brother Would you Not Chris Trying to start a new religion They were trying to ring you Judaism they were just trying to fix Jesus was not only Torah He actually made the law Strict Rather than The last don\'t commit adultery jesus\' don\'t think about it that\'s why The ones that don\'t murder jesus\' don\'t be angry Jesus Was a first century a

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Galilean Jew Prophet he was a prophet who believed that God was about to intervene decisively in human history A religious Jew in the first century Must have been pretty depressed Hundreds of years Jewish prophets and promise that their god Yahweh Really thought they were pretty pretty Favourite crime He had a back And he was going to make sure they rule the world But for some reason Yahweh hand deliver Century after century The Jews have been invaded and conquered Effect just a few years after Jesus was born His home raided finally become an official Ryman Jewish people can see Things will not go Particularly well Things were not flourishing Subject Two external powers will they be there The Great King The seleucid kings or wa By the Romans later on Instead of coming to the conclusion that the approach All the yahweh headlines The Jews just decided they must do Disappointed And he was Ignoring them or not answering Play Praise So anyway the Jews decided they had to be Better And make yahweh happy with Bed head The most important thing to know Is that there was no a green standard of what being a good you was in the first century Just like the hundreds of different versions of Christianity Today And they all I think that they\'re the right one we know that in the first century there were lots of different versions As well And they were all trying to figure out The mad Trick to get them back into your way Is good This is a situation that is eventually going to be rectified by God destroy the Roman oppressors End of Radio At the last start for instance where the fire comes down and Burns up all the Nazis No that\'s that\'s probably the view that Decent number of June Had Some Jews living in the 1st century in belief that God was going to send someone to say They call that person the Maasai So how do you know Who is the Messiah Different people will give you different answer Different messy and it candidates too I\'m just looking for the Official guide to 9 Is somewhere There\'s no messianic checklist in Judaism is it to make sure your mother is a virgin when you\'re conceived walk on water Raise the dead dia sacrificial Death come back after 3 days Some juice Expecting a shepherd Expecting the Angel Michael Still others were expecting a priest and still others are warrior Some people fart during the bath Where\'s the Messiah and he doesn\'t fit any of those categories we use the term Messiah Is fine it means anointed mean that God has anointed this person with oil but when you\'re talking about my size You talking about Somebody who is a king In the line of the greatest of all the Jewish Kings Qingdao And lots of Jews believe King David like figure would establish himself in Jerusalem And he would trans Israel restore the kingdom politically Was powder that bring the people back from exile Set up the Homeland again Restore independence Drive at the foreign invader Sunday I thought the Messiah was going to be a great warrior To lead them to a military Victor Thought he might be a carrot Preacher Who would convince the entire world to believe in you I didn\'t think about the Messiah mate Not orgy I want a massage Because normally someone going around killing themselves on the sides Gonna Leave Warnings Def Famine Bloodshed that type of thing so I mean not everyone wanted as I not even believe in Socialism variety of expecting Certainly a dominant what is this political Military figure So why is this important Will win Jesus\'s drag Play before the Roman governor of Judea pontius Pilate The Chargers lighting Are the his claiming to be the Crystal What\'s the crack Which is the Greek word for Messiah In other words he\'s claiming to be King of the Mark 15 to pilot Jesus Are you the king of the Jews The time was ruled by Rome I didn\'t have King of the Road I had a gun Who reported to the Roman emperor Tiberius Claiming to be the Messiah was on The political rebellion against A modern equivalent Would be Declaring your the rightful King Of the United States Another important thing to understand about the Jewish concept of Amos I was there he wasn\'t supposed to be Divine and it wasn\'t going to have magical powers He was just going to be a regular Ladies sometimes talk about the Messiah as the son of God but not in the later Christians Son of God in the Saints Good Israelite because all Israelites are sons of God in the adopted Anointed by Special to god would like the Kings David Solomon Andy dick Other good Kings Somebody that God Placed on the throne to rule in his Stead But it doesn\'t really mean Somebody who From all time being sitting at the right hand of God the Father is a different concept from that is much more Jewish and it\'s much more Grounded The Son of god Would only have been Used I think In a metaphorical Since Not Not in the way that we Expect with Christian The only Christian NRAM with food It really does remind me of how Augustus Caesar was Anointed to be the adopted son of his Father Julius Caesar and therefore became the son of God An interesting thing about jesus\' name In Hebrew his name was yeshua which basically translate said God saves a saviour We\'ve already seen Christ Means messiah in the Messiah was supposed to be the same So Jesus the Christ Translators Saviour the say According to the Jewish historian josephus Directly quite a few guys Who people thought might be the Messiah Walking around you dear roughly around about the same time Is Jesus None of them Succeeded They are all fine Dial broke kills And can you really be there Messiah If you don\'t achieve Which is why the vast majority of Jews in the middle of the first century don\'t follow Jesus Because I Messiah Was not supposed Die on a cross Executed by the Roman Because this is somebody who supposed to Leader successful military Victory If you just get executed as a as a revolutionary In the most used that rules you Can possibly Riverside camping the Maasai in there Precisely So what day they reinterpret diary invite The meaning of the word A crucified Messiah Which kind of white fried ice That\'s an oxymoron is a paradox in the side doesn\'t get crucify he Rises The beach the rhyme How much is a new kingdom What is So you want to be Actually Did you keep the Romans added you dear Have you convert the world to Judy planning on United did you bring about world peace and love you You really don\'t have the qualifications the meeting Maasai and I\'ll do you Maybe you should try it I see you have some experience in it So somebody came up with the idea to Pitch The concept of the messiah to the gentiles What do Primark do to gentiles So what you see In early Christian Ridings a sort of redefinition of a messiah Pictures of Free wacky idea when you think about it because the whole point of the messiah was he was supposed to Save the Day From the gentle Save the gentiles A gentile is someone who isn\'t Jewish The gentle Didn\'t know that They didn\'t know that the Messiah Was supposed to come in And I had already been indoctrinated over the last 100 years with the idea that a man Die Become a god so Turn off this g Just Guy The Greeks and Romans already accepted a whole painting So there was no big deal about adding one more Especially if this one is promising that the end of the world is coming soon And that people who proud of him as a god Will get the reward Eternal Paradise Something the only God Didn\'t Who was The number 1 salesman 4th New kind of Messiah The earliest references to Jesus come from the letters of the Apostle Paul The New Testament contain 14 letters supposedly written by Paul Many scholars only believe 7 of those are all fine Despite his latest being stuff down the back of the New Testament Who was actually the first person who ever Road ne About g At least as far as Balls a bit like that friend you have you just started watching Breaking Bad It was a bit late to the party Paul never met Jesus But he knew people who knew One of the things that really surprised me when I Started studying Christianity was that The earliest the most prolific writer about Jesus I never even knew him Never even Sore ear For that No pulses that he knew people Said they knew Jesus We didn\'t really know them We\'ve only got his word for And before he joined the Jesus Paul Was a high Call actually had letters From the high price That enabled him to go into Execute earlier The high priest was a member of the Thatch easy facts of Judaism They control the sacrifices in the temple and didn\'t believe in the afterlife or the Resurrection of the Dead But Saul began to destroy the church Going from house to house he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison His own words Paul says he Beating up an arresting Christian Because Pulses That To him As a Jew the idea of a crucified messiah the Maasai go and get inclusive Wish A few years after Jesus dies Paul goes from Been them up to becoming their number one sales Why the change of Well according to His own letters written in the 40 CE 15 20 years after Jesus died The ghost of June Sepideh Paul And told him to go preach To the gents How do you convince a bunch of Greeks and right To worship a dingy The Paul came up For fantastic marketing Continue to resonate with billions of people Around the world For what I received I passed on to you as a first important The Christ died for our sins According to the scriptures Paul the Messiah is not really a warrior king or a charismatic priest Is more of a human sacrifice Let\'s try Reporting to think that So yeah I would forgive the human race for atom haven\'t eaten the magical No most Romans in affect most people on the planet had never even heard of yahweh little-known Adams Active grants Pluto Will be harsh to send them to an eternity of Damnation 9 most Don\'t like Jesus Is a human sacrifice to an angry god Let\'s be honest Least on paper that exactly what it looks According to the encyclopaedia Human sacrifice is the offering of the life of a human being To a diary Centuries before Paul What\'s the Jews and the Romans Replace Human sacrifice Places with animals Buddies bread With the greatest Sacrifice Of them Not just a human but a son of a god the best sacrifice you can possibly have Is the super human sacrifice and because it was given That blood Conceive over A pole doesn\'t stop there He\'s resurrecting Morals It comes then down to the fundamental thing for Christianity Is Jesus is raised from the dead That becomes the one thing that makes Everything Pylint in C Ok He hasn\'t driven the Romans out of Jerusalem but God raised him from the dead No matter what else happens whatever failure he was in his life He is a prove By God Like human sacrifice Is the idea of a resurrected god wasn\'t To pole or Christianity I like every great marketer pull How to take a naked with the fact that Jesus did really kick the Romans out of here before he died And spinach Understand he\'s going to come back and then he\'s going to destroy Every authority in power The Terminator I\'ll be back You know what\'s cooler than a warrior King messiah a warrior King Messiah Which superpowers But not many Jews born in the whole superpowered messiah are they turning BS on all of that So Paul decide he needs to find a new ward Holes the guy The takes it to the gents The original S just wasn\'t hitting a right And we told it to me Next one I think they do love it Because Adam large bigger So when were gentle When were gentiles were excited And so you had The churches Wilder size Switch on towel Of course in order to market Judea Paul Needham Change As far as all of the Albert early Jesus worship Concerned in order to join the little club you had to either be or become a Jew Probably the biggest hurdle for most gentiles in Having a Jew was that you had to get circumcised Whether you\'re a child Or an adult The walnuts Forget about it Just a marketing genius it took to get rid of that one We don\'t have to do that shirt That\'s fine I\'ll take on this new religion Are penis Can I interest you in a new form of Judaism No thanks Heard it all before You don\'t Chop off the end of your knob Go on Type of preaching was ideal for that we can be in there Jewish Trajectory but without over stuff without like sign me up But what did the original do Tinkerbell Well as they were Torah observant Jews We can only So Paul We\'ve been hearing rumours that you put making up some fakakta stories about Exactly you telling me Just the usual stuff Jesus was a real man Who died for our sins Coming back any day now What superpower Gentiles don\'t need to become Jews Are you crazy This is a juice only Club Anyone who wants to get in needs to lose the end of his fans Sociable Mark I really like Hotspot on this meant Listen You know Bucky We was best friends James is Brother If you want to delete the game in it would have told her Listen I\'ll tell you You do your thing We\'ll just see who is Muzzled I think a lot of Jesus\'s original disciples We\'re very suspicious of It wasn\'t part of the original band he didn\'t know And even worse than that The young Paul Persecuted the church he was he was trying to bring down the church so why should they trust this Call Mother really seem to care Peter and James think anyway Did meet them They didn\'t tell him anything that he didn\'t already know It is very clear Repeatedly in his letters That he learnt this is gotta from no man no human source whatsoever to know brother Sisters that the gospel I preached is not of human origin I did not receive it from any man Norwich Rather I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ when he does mention he saw It\'s the Divine It\'s the Lord It\'s gone Ennis descriptions Because he feel Well I\'ve got every bit as right every bit as much of a ride To be called an apostle as you will They said yeah but you didn\'t meet Jesus His big Is to say I didn\'t I met him On the To Damascus I met the resurrected Horses that the ghost of Jesus told him he could throw out 1000 Years of June Lawrence Road Believe in Anyone can claim to have a revelation Great reputation either I mean it was only just a few years ago that he was having their friends on And beaten So the singer booking Is one story where Call aunt Stand up Standard round anti up in front of everybody because they disagree on the implications of The movement of their part According to Paul zone account He started calling Peter Ford To his face In front of every When period came to Antioch I post into a space because Clearly in the wrong Who was the first Disciple that Jesus said Can you imagine what must have been going through his mind When is Paul died I never even knew Jesus Getting up in his face in front of people unfortunately we only have Pulsar When pools in Bad mood and it\'s in a really bad mood in a pencil to the Galatians he wants to say Nectar There\'s nothing that they told That added anything To the Gospel which I got from God We know This isn\'t true imagine pacing up and down a room You know yet You know well someone\'s like taking and taking it all down it\'s the best way to imagine Holyoake reading Galatians letter Entertainer I want to affection and love and care as well So I made maybe he was bipolar I don\'t know And it\'s not Peter and James that pulls having a problem with the disc Early phase of the Jesus movement The singer by a number of different fractions and merging And she was like today They all claim to be 1 Cromer We have example of 1st Corinthians Paul Trying to respond A letter of the Corinthians welcome saying hey This other apostle Apollo The new weird stuff Seem to contradict Laura\'s what\'s what am I supposed to Can you let me know Apollo Sky Paul calls these are the missionary Full support Even though he\'s the guy Better never even you Jesus Which iPhone is on the sky We know that in the first century there were a whole range of the Virgin Jewish 60 It\'s entirely possible that there were a range of Baby Colts running around at the same time Was Paul using similar terminology Let\'s just keep in mind that Jesus in the side Both meme Saviour What\'s the name of your saviour We just call in the saviour Sergey What\'s the name of your say Ouija Call in the saviour So Jesus Yeah yeah Each cold probably would have had their Favourite messiah stories the favourite miracles in their favourite teacher Each other Would have had There are Missionaries as well Manifest signs of the New Testament When you look at other stuff Didn\'t get it Debenhams At one point Paul gets so angry about these competing missionary The writing is late He wishes they Tottenham own genitals off Asbos agitators I wish they would go the whole way and emasculated themselves Galatians 5:12 Emasculate Means removal of Penis Testicle Matches castration But the whole package So much for turning the other cheek Remember this is the same guy that Beating up in a resting Christians Is 20 years earlier Forget about the site S would Jesus have thought about As a tour observant Jew I suspect that he may have found some of Paul\'s rhetoric a little bit hurt I think the different Jesus Headset Nobody has to follow the Jewish law anymore Then Why would polyp had such a hard time convincing g Apostles The Gospels record certain mission areas That Jesus gave his followers But they\'re not Detailed Going to the gym Which If you ask me is a little bit of an oversight On Jesus All versions of Christianity Today are basically descendants of Paul\'s version of Christianity and just Once The Poles not going after the will educated the gentiles all the the rich and the famous Who\'s going to take it Del Marquis It becomes a religion for the Poor And the downtrodden in the Stand The underprivileged to can all fine in this sense of A better tomorrow The graeco-roman religions didn\'t really offer much in the way of an afterlife unless you was some sort of Hero King And heaven doesn\'t actually turn up in Judaism Billy gets a mention in the Old Testament The polls saying You can Turn on heater Paradise and is offering a day every He doesn\'t want to spend eternity in Paradise Hill won\'t be happy with a weekend in Paris So Paul talks a lot about w g Is going to do when he comes back How much does he have to say about the life Teachings of Jesus During his actual time on it Poole road a lot You had a massive chunk Of the new test We don\'t even go Incidental mention About Jesus healing It\'s absurd No one of the explanations for this might be there Pause the weather\'s really dealing with disputing is Communities about How to be good Chris When is it that the perfect time to be quoting the founder of the firm When it comes Disputes about Easily said Jesus Said When Jesus was in Jerusalem he said that No what we get is Paul speaking from his own authority He gets his From the Lord About From his celestial And also From the earlier Briefly mentions there Jesus Born Died and resurrected answer Pretty much it when it comes To talking about the life Teachings of There are a few passengers where he said he got something From the Lord As he climbs no human Told her He might just be referring to The ghost To the married I give this command not I but the Lord A wife must not separate from her husband First Corinthians 7 The pool has 0 to say about the Miracles of There\'s no turning water into wine no multiplying loaves and fishes there\'s no walking on water Is not healing the sick with his There\'s no exorcisms there\'s no bringing people back from the dead Strange if you think about If you knew somebody who could do all of those things You never stop talking With all that\'s really strange Or Wigan Because for example He takes for granted that they know that already Is hard to be sure Maybe Paul Simms They already knew that But we have to remember that Paul\'s riding his later When did the 30 years before the Gospels Maybe you\'ve never heard this Maybe he had heard them in believe Maybe they were invented later Or maybe Paul Had heard the stories but just didn\'t think they were very Maybe he thought they were Completely your ring Look at what Christian Preachers do today When they want to say what you should be doing what you should be thinking what you would you be What do they say they say Jesus says this Jesus says She just in this Stop that So why doesn\'t Why I\'ll never say what would you do What did men at Paul was converting as many people as possible Is quickly Because he\'s absolutely convince What\'s the time Paul believes that the end of the world is dawn in any I mean everybody gets in the morning and things it Then we Are Alive who are left Chubby car up together with them in the Cloud To meet the Lord in the air First scillonian Then time goes on And the end still hasn\'t arrived So Paul Every doomsday prophet Starts to Hedges better Sunny now we got Christians dying in Not supposed to happen Jesus meant to return The kingdom of God is meant to be asarina It\'s not happening so He needs to be a reason Well About a Resurrection At you say yes I\'m going to die but but Christ will come back and the dead in Christ will Spurs I will have that will be s and wine will be true Form V engine Pull Eventually realise That he\'s more likely than not going to die Before Jesus Poor claims the ghost of Jesus told him the end of the world would come with in his lifetime Give God told you the end of the world was happening soon you\'d be pretty careful of bad Blessed are the meek Turn the other cheek The world will end in your lifetime Let him who hath not saying How much oil What\'s going on in my lifetime Yeah yeah and your lifetime Are you sure I find your love Faithless Derby Hi hey What to say to get something like that Would one of my conscience So far as I can tell one Five things must have happened Either one Jesus made a mistake 2 Jesus 3 Jesus changed his mind and just forgot Tell Paul Paul misunderstood Jesus All 5 Call Jess Made it all This is a debate Among historical Jesus scholars about whether Jesus Believe that the end of the world would happen in his lifetime Or not The majority of scholars who say I know looks pretty clear from from Jesus\'s teachings preserved in the gospel But he really does Expect the end To come in his life So He seems to have been like Many people before And pretty much everybody after him Everybody who predicted that the world is going to end in their lifetime that far has been wrong And Jesus would seem to have been one of the If you don\'t Think of Jesus is getting something that important wrong Let\'s go with Paul Madeley If you did Maybe is lying about all this other stuff for using Did he really meet Peter and Jane We only have his word Did the ghost of Jesus really appear And tell him to preach to the gym So if Paul is throwing out all this Jewish law Telling people that the end is nigh And having public arguments with the original posh Why did they tolerate From Howard appears in the Bible It seems that James Paul Agreed or some kind of Payment There\'s a lot of reference letters to him collecting money from his purchase It\'s clear that some of these factors are challenging him I like what you doing with this money and he is like justify No don\'t worry I\'m not running off at it Give me what I said I was going to do it Taking it Injuries And we\'re not entirely sure what that means but you can be sure it\'s really meant that the Jerusalem Getting a whether we want to call them Drive 8 in terms of let\'s collect this money so that the Jerusalem Christians don\'t send missionary To make our lives more difficult It\'s hard to say In Rome Even sure that they\'re going to accept This He expresses anxiety About take Prospect surgery Because He thanks well maybe though Reject So That sounds a bit like a boy In fact that you probably get arrested Yeah Yeah I mean you know if we follow the Book of Acts Adapt PT What seems to be going on when he is in Jerusalem in Israel Is that That\'s when he was going to take the collection And put it at the feet of the apostles Introduce That doesn\'t seem don\'t work Appal Went to Rome And was under house arrest So presumably Paul Executed by the Acts of the apostles Written many decades Vaguely blinds Paul\'s rest in Jerusalem on Some Jews Complained the poll was leading people Stray Hello Israelites help This is the man who teaches everyone everywhere against our people and our law and display Of course the people is taking the money to in Jerusalem also fit the description They are Jews Who think the Polish Leading people astray with his idolatrous teachings about abandoning the law William mini wise I think we can save it Who\'s the guy that invented Christianity As we know it today If it wasn\'t for Paul I think most Christians today Would probably be due Somewhere between the years of 1670 CE it\'s a shame that Peter Paul and James all died We don\'t really know much about where or when One thing we do know Open during this period hours Jewish Zealots to say To rise Roma Be patient and it lead to a In war We don\'t know who started it could have been the judean People\'s front Could have been People\'s Front of Judea We Know It lasted 4 years And the Jews god Lately destroy Is it turns out Yahweh I didn\'t say Messiah To save Has punishment for the Rebellion The rhyme Completely destroy The temple in to Something else happened just after The destruction Temple The first Christian Gospel The list of the Gospels is probably the Gospel of Mark It seems to be written about 7080 maybe a few years before maybe a few years after ironically the first thing ever Again again as I travel Who had where Christians are Any off and tell me like the first is idealist To find out that Mark was written before They were shocked to find out that the letters of Paul were written before The Who\'s something that might shock some Most scholars don\'t think Mark was written by an AI Or even somebody who knew and I The Tradition In The 2nd century Is that Mark was written Buy a disciple of the Call Peter And that he was sort of Peter Cetera Followed him Peter Sermon notes and arranged About Is that Call Mark really was It\'s hard to say if Mark and then he describe Mark would say a describe that\'s how ancient history And respond being called the Gospel According to mark the document doesn\'t actually stay Who the author was The difficulty with Mark\'s gospel is it Like the other Gospels it\'s anonymous we don\'t really know where it comes from most people now think that it\'s Play play the mark is kind of taking down Peter\'s dictation or anything like that Refer to him as Mark otherwise we\'re going to win Prince Author Formerly known Smart Gospel connect To the Jewish Roman War Marcus Connor Best with the Temple Something recent and traumatic has happened so makes a lot of sense to say the months within The Fall 80 The Romans had just come in and destroyed End in the The biggest dental issue of your ass Stems from the Jews and the Jewish god just let here Coming into his own house This is a problem as a marketing problem as a PR problem so how do you explain Distracted Out of here The inventor According to the Jewish historian josephus who actually fought in the war Over a million Jews Die This is a Performer traumatic time for Judaism they lost the land Gloucester temple They\'ve lost the sense of God Blessing on there every day This is really very difficult time And of course the original Jesus die The decide Were Jews living in Germany So they probably got swept up in all of the Death industry 2 What happened to the We don\'t really know There\'s no historical Record In fact we have Nothing at all Written down by Pedo or James or any other eyewitness of June Nothing 0 nozzle Are you sure there are letters in the New Testament The claim to be written by But the scholars believe those leaders are actually I don\'t think we actually have any Extant writings from Peter Moore from James we have Documents that claim to be by then The probably other people writing in their honor in their name pretending to be these figures so We are actually a little bit Week on knowing what Peter and James Actually thought we have to read Struts what they thought was a tribute to Paul that found their way into the new Many scholars believe the Lizard Peter and James A fake That means we really don\'t Have any clear idea Of what Jesus\'s immediate disciples actually thought about him Is teaching Is Miracle What he told Or what they thought about Paul They must have been riding Apparel Nobody bothered the Copies Holly That that that I had existed hundred and down somewhere in some form It\'s just all go How convenient 14 poor After the Jewish Roman war are the only Major Christian That\'s left Please of the gentiles the Greeks and Romans Who on Jews Don\'t understand you diesel And quite frankly I don\'t like the Jews so kind of May Fan of day version of the messiah So the original disciples The people who actually new g The name movie Is pretty much completely wiped out Within 40 years Of the deaf Of Jesus And if we accept most of the New Testament writings Post 7 When the Jews have been removed as as an influence Fine kind of Pauline crusade from 20 years earlier He\'s going to win Thomas gospel is written for a gentle commute Not Jews and probably in Rome sometime just after the reign of the Emperor Nero Staffing match One of them is the Jesus is walking around trying to tell us the site Keeping male shot About the Miracles that he\'s doing like it\'s supposed to be some kind of Big C Mark starts his gospel with saying something that it just goes my And that\'s in mark for 11 where he has Jesus gather all his disciples inside Ok I\'m teaching you all these things In parable That way you\'ll know I\'m talking about Windows outside They won\'t be able to tell when I\'m talking Otherwise and this is the kicker They would turn from their sins in repair NBC And he told them The mystery of the kingdom of God has been given to you But those on the outside everything is Comparable They may be ever seen but never received Another hearing but never Otherwise they might turn them be forgiven Mark for 11 They can\'t handle the truth What kind of Messiah Chelsea Decipher To keep his work Secret What kind of Messiah Doesn\'t want his disciples To be forgiven According to Mark Jesus is telling Secret teachings Only 2 is in a Cell Liverpool score today or what are those secret teachings The secret teachings a lost forever I like the truth about who killed JFK What happened to Michael Jackson\'s nose Maybe the whole secrecy business is Marx wife Explaining why most people in history I have never heard of Jesus This is all made up By the gospel at the author of the Gospel of Mark That sort of damage Control an explanation for why People didn\'t widely accepted as the Messiah because he didn\'t want them to So when Max time people saying he did all these miracles I never heard of any guy doing miracles he goes on Right exact Maybe this Story about Parables is Also Parable Go to the gospel Story episode Story and they look like parables that Additional It might not be met My apology is written Tell a story about something it\'s the meaning of the story rather than the little That\'s actually Turn on the story Let\'s take a look at the story of the trial Emma tells the story where Pilot wants to Let\'s go This was the Holiday Inn on holiday the Romans would traditionally let go one prisoner And the crowd check calling from Robert we want to release the Robber so Mark says was a notorious Rebel Rebel And pilots like Jesus Travel and that letting go And then Jesus crucified and that\'s the story When we look at the door Pirate in 9 Sources pilot Venal Pilot does not clear it all about Jewish sensibility Pilot goes out of his way to offend you Pilot Is off But when we look at the guy Going from the earlier gospel item Up to draw Pirate looks better and better and better pilot from the Gospels because he seems like a poo Crystal queen back into the corner by a bunch of evil due which Vita White him to do it Snow in assist So what does barabbas Translate Son of rambow The word bar in Aramaic means son of An object comes from ABBA which year Father And he\'s the best B According to the Gospel of Matthew The first name Wish Jesus barabbas Jesus son of the Father Pilot says you can have Jesus brother A murderer an instant Or you can have Jesus of Nazareth The other Jesus song of the far Given a choice Between To say 1 Is the violent kind of saviour like the one who tried to overthrow the Romans in the Rebellion 66 cm Is a Pacifist kind of Who\'s never heard anything Which one Will the Jews choose And what happened The innocent Jesus pays the penalty pays the rent For the very guilty Son of the Father In terms of Christian theology It\'s In terms of History It\'s Two identical save What is going to be set free One is going to pay the penalty Now if you\'re due living in the 1st century The story myself a little familiar When we noticed This is This is the whole ritual of Kapoor which is the home of tournament ceremony Yom Kippur as usual Preston English as Day of Atonement Ceremonies in the Jewish calendar when was Passover And this one every year that would be this you have the two goats the two identical go to have to be in all but the same One you work at the sins of Israel and casted into the crowd Releasing in the wilderness any other you would Sacrifice on the altar in the temple and its blood with a stone floor The brothers story Seems to be saying that the goat sacrifice Richard reply Human sacrifice In judo And they\'ll be replaced once more With the ultimate human Mark is running for one of those communities Possibly in Original it was written Eliza gasp It wasn\'t written to be taken as literally true at least not by informed inside The story by the way is where we get the two Skype Forgive me lord Committed murder Oh yes I did People who read the forever store Today probably and you probably don\'t know the video is very well So the whole story about two identical guards Right over there And I think you can go from story to story do Mark and see like if you look at its history doesn\'t make a lot of sense But if you look at it is allegory Something representing something else It makes perfect sense literally brilliant towards the end of Gospel we find Jesus in Garden of gethsemane Where is literally begging yahweh To let him big hill They went to a place called gethsemane He began to Deeply distressed and trouble He fell to the ground and pray that a possible that our might pass from him Father Take Cup for me Mark 14 30 42 It\'s a very moving story Until You realised Jesus is yahweh So this was his Play an all along He\'s literally begging himself Not to kill him Which is Pretty confused Jesus Please to be very human He does Pork Like a God in disguise This might be an idea to Christian Came up with whale Speaking you Humans and Parrot What are the stories that we don\'t finding Mark Is the Virgin Mark starters gospel And says the beginning of The gasper Jesus God And then he doesn\'t tell us The story about Birth but instead near it Jesus has died Some by John And if you like Carefully at Story With the Holy Spirit Sending a poem Jesus Like a dog And God saying this is my What\'s on mixed sounds like Marcus Ang This is when Jesus becomes the son of That is bad Birds laying on things was The positive sign from the god The process of deciphering the movement of the birds was called Hiking the office Which literally translates is looking at bird It\'s the basis by the way of the English word auspicious The person who took the auspices Was known as an all girl which is the basis of the name Augustus The original son of god So again many people living in the Roman empire 1900 years ago Would probably have understood the sea So what you see in Early Christian history is there The status of Jesus as son of God keeps getting kicked back further and farther for the Resurrection Dennis baptism Zenith his Then Always be From the beginning Devolve the idea Is evolved over A century or so And that\'s just for paws The other factions including the one of the Disciples had different ideas all together Contractors will see a little bit later on at least one major early Christian facts Didn\'t even believe Jesus was divine at all One of the other surprising things that missing from Mark\'s gospel is one of the most important ideas in all of christy Jesus\'s Resurrection appearance It\'s so hard the oldest gospel is Mark\'s gospel the most scholars believe that I believe that And there are no Appearances of the risen Jesus The disciples in the gospel ends in a very dark and quiet Steris enigmatic weiwei This young man who just happens to be at the too Set to the women Go and tell the disciples and Peter what\'s happened And the women just run away and and don\'t tell anyone for they\'re afraid of it Tell me No I never found out About the resurrection At some point The Christian Scribe decided to write a new end Marks He decided the sex it up Erect Like George Lucas making greedo shoot first I wonder why I bother Why not just leave the original ending as it was What\'s happening I think is that The Enter pub First rule about Jesus Club Don\'t talk about g These particular doctors we can less important to keep secret And so you see them leaking out overtime Nativity ideas More of the secret to being ripped out in more attempt to try and prove points by creating stories that support your Getting more about miracle story to get more doctrinally relevance It really makes me wonder about the intention Of easily Chris If the truth was so important Why bother rewriting the ending First daughter I just like Paul Mark Is counting down Mark\'s gospel believe Just like poo The end is absolutely So there is a line in Mark\'s gospel some of those Standing Here Jesus Will not taste Before they see the kingdom of God come with power Is one of these interesting Irene is a history but Every time there\'s a delay in the Ascot on The faithful don\'t kind of give up on the idea Baby come all the more In thinking that it\'s about to happen the Ascot on means the entire The End of the World as We Know It Like a modern UFO car Yeah so one minute just as well I mean I do this all the When does appointment comes they don\'t say we must have been wrong Portlaoise We must have been wrong INOA fundamental identity they just a bit wrong so You revise it you change Are there any Christians When I different from that it\'s Christian to believe that the Bible is literally true What\'s a hard time explaining why the world hasn\'t ended Is one of the things that I think many Christians across the sense Really struggled with the fact that Jesus appears to say That he is coming back within the lifetime Office follow that clearly didn\'t happen it clearly didn\'t happen you can spiritualize it you can kind of try and Find some sort of fine fancy way of saying in a very real sense spiritual he did come The factors that he didn\'t return In the lifetime of His followers As he had said that he would And this is something that has always been at the heart of Some real anxiety in Christianity is almost like a kind of a trauma trying to come to terms with how can it be that you Send this when it didn\'t actually Yeah definitely you can see a trajectory in the New Testament writings as you move from Letters like Paul\'s So the earliest writings we have to write Composed In the first half Of the 2nd century Where are the apocalyptic expectations Just continue to get sore Tone down and then become sore Increase Recognition The Jesus is Coming back Anytime Each Christians the probably legible What happened in there time just Still have And they may not even have noticed that there had been at the way it\'s not like most people had copies of Bible So they only me with a haha Don\'t worry though The end of the world Coming Any Day Now The next gospel to be written was Probably 10 or 20 years after Mark around 80 or 96 So who was he Gospel Matthew Is attributed to Matthew one The Twelve disciples It\'s Improbable that this was actually written Bye And I will Because Gas boilers using as one of its major sources Work And if Mark is not written by a disciple Why would a disciple I win Jesus is mine Use somebody else\'s second-hand Reports why won\'t they just tell their own store So So it does not seem that matter if you was actually written by an AI Greek Written by Fink by a Jewish Christian Who It kinda likes Mark\'s gospel copyhold past You know so you can be quite like US Masters golf But I think he thinks Mark got something is wrong Foremarke who\'s Burnley and Paul\'s World of Christian gentle Jesus doesn\'t appear to be varied Matthew on the other hand called bs and all of that In Matthew Jesus White clear that he\'s only interested in the I was sent only to the Lost sheep of the House of It is not right to take the children\'s bread and throw it to the dogs Matthew 15:24 220 Is 12 Jesus sent out with the following Do not go among the gentiles or enter any time of the Samaritans Go rather to the Lost sheep of Israel Matthew 10 52 Which makes false claims that the ghost of Jesus Told him to go To the gentiles pretty I mean if that was Jesus\'s original intention I think you would have told Engaged in this fascinating project every Judy eyes in Jesus and quite interesting Because Jesus was a Jew and because he was probably quite faithful to the law Matthew and always also read Jesus Is actually bringing Bit back around what Jesus was probably more History And to Preaching the Jews It is an irony of History The Most popular cast Increase And yeah Most Duo Yeah of the forecast And probably would have been quite hostile to the kind of laughing The Paul Proposing these two sources Paul and the Gospel of Matthew I would definitely Come into conflict Over weather Shefali little the law Paul Definitely says no they don\'t Matthew says yes absolutely They do and it\'s one of the amazing things about Christianity that most people just ignore That most people just ignore it but it was a very important Strand in early Christianity and emerging Christian That\'s saw The Christians Duty As being not just to be loyal to Jesus Also to be loyal to the Jewish law and And I will loyal to the Because they believe that\'s what Jesus are taught The Matthews position is If you\'re not going to Temple you\'re not circumcised and you\'re not eating kosher food You doing Jesus wrong Have to get one Copy of the town moor And Start learning Where am I The Matthew gospel as we\'re some of those now Famous And dubious Jesus story First Remember Helen Paul\'s Day the sinderby lot Factions telling different stories about Jesus Matthew seems to have included story He had her That Mark either Or just didn\'t like Stories like the Sermon on the Mount The Resurrection appears And the Massacre of The Innocents We have the Great King of Judea What is the Execution of all male babies around Historians by the way of found no other evidence of that ever Matthew probably just made up The sound like the similar story about Moses in Matthew is also the first person to mention The Verge Fully half a century appears Before we ever get any one writing about a virgin The story of the virgin birth I think it is is bad You have In Matthew\'s gospel this genealogy But connect Jesus Right back to Abraham going through David King David the possibly mythical second king of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah who supposedly killed a giant Slingshot All going through Joseph jesus\' father Then the very next story is about how is his and jesus\' father I mean Religious people are very good at getting their head around contradictions but there\'s a big one right there on the very first page of the Customers What did Matthew think he was doing why is he telling a story About a virginal conception when he also wants to tell us that Jesus was descent From David Via his father I don\'t know I think it\'s I think it\'s a mess Did you just type no one would know And so Jesus The descendant of King David because Joseph Father But I thought Mary was a virgin It\'s the Messiah Play Just Larry forgot the same beer No no no I lost my place Don\'t worry about Let\'s go get it Kebab Halifax is lots of people don\'t know How many Christians will happily a firm Jesus is the son of David They will also a firm that Jesus was conceived Buy a virgin Scholars believe that Matthews ID The virgin birth Possibly based on a bed Translate The old See you in the Hebrew version The prophet Zahid A baby boy will be born The sign that God is going And Hebrew word that Isaiah uses Describe the mother of the boy is Alma No how much is translates as a child Young woman But Matthew wasn\'t using the Hebrew version of Isaiah he was using a Greek Translate Which Mistranslated Alma into Verge Another unfortunate thing about Matthew\'s gospel is the spider being filled Pro tour It\'s also inspired 1900 years Of Cemetery In Matthew\'s gospel You have this ideal of a kind of loyalty tourer loyalty to the sinner Log to all of these Jewish traditions and also Is better Better virtual again Fellow Jews I keep in mind that although Matthew is And he\'s running for a community of Is Christian Stream Lee fringe 6 I don\'t like the way that Catholics view Mormon And he\'s riding 10 or 20 years after Big Jewish Roman War Seduce a probably pretty unpopular across the empire And the Jesus die Want to distance themselves from the traditional Jews as much as possible Political And Matthew just like Mark and Paul before Believe that the end of the world is going to happen very To keep in mind The time he\'s riding Most of those original disciples are probably dead And yet this Steel No sign Jesus According to most scholars the next gospel to be written Islam Britain Somewhere between 10 and 30 Years After Luke by the way I also wrote the Acts of the Apostles which is kind of a sequel to The Brooks running I think this year really big epic Niall if you want to tell the story of Jesus and the story of Dior t-shirt look according to tradition Would a travelling companion He was a gentile A position you\'re a doctor in the ancient world But he was definitely a what we would call a second generation This is the stuff that was handed down to us In written down by earlier generation And I\'m still working with myself out even though he\'s not We know he\'s using the previous Box American so so that the traditional attributions are clearly related In mainstream scholarship is long since realised Acts of the Apostles Luke\'s account of what happened after Jesus died Tries to whitewash All the Keynsham Conflict Obviously existed Between Paul in the original Jesus gay Work and deadly is trying to present an idealised the car Of the early Christian Community certainly at the end of Acts chapter 2 you could everyone get it around the apostles Teaching breaking bread Worshipping god finding favour of garden all Definitely idealise All of the anger pensioner Bribery that we see in Paul\'s letters He disappears and Luke or gay Kinder Call wifey saying I was nowhere near as bad You\'ve probably heard I think he does try to paint General Lee Rosie picture But Certainly not Whitewash it does include some instances of division and differences Anime does Patrol paws quite a hot head Are the time Loops riding Towards the end of the first century Pull on community and try to strengthen their credentials Solidify the connection To the original founders Peter and James who are probably get at this stage The community is pretty much why So they can\'t fight back Winners Get to Rye The All in all Luke not a very credit Historical And look just like Matthew Mark and Paul before him Believes the end of the world is going to happen Anytime soon Truly I tell you this generation will not pass away until all these things are fulfilled Luke 132 The last of the four Gospels to be written is John Probably written around 100 or 110 c Compared to the other three John Is different for this why there\'s not that gospel The Gospels of Mark Matthew and Luke are called synoptic which means they share a common vision of G New York la Chicago John is basically Newall Ok he\'s He\'s doing something very Down there With Jean This whole thing is so obviously a literary creation Jesus in the Gospel of John does not sound like he does in the other gospels And all the characters in John sound the same way like you\'re watching a Woody Allen movie everybody\'s Am I going out and then and Get Me Rollin everybody\'s fired And so are you It\'s obviously Is now Add anybody\'s recollect Instead of telling everyone The stories about his mirror The Big C He might as well have on a T-shirt I am gonna bring in big letters And you wonder why didn\'t they have last meal as then why it wasn\'t the Stone Age 5-minute timer The woman\'s say that to him I know that messiah come He that is called Christ When he is come he will declare unto us all things Jesus saith unto her I that speak unto the I\'m here John 4:25 I and my father are one John tenta Gospel contains no parables No last No Sermon on the Will it\'s the only way With Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead And it\'s the most 80s and Of the As for the second coming As far as John is concerned It\'s happening Right Why is John so From the other three gospels No one really know But if we look at Paul and The Four Gospels in chronological order we can kind of see how the Jesus story of valdovas In Hall he doesn\'t do any miracles and become special after he died In market become special when a bird lands on Walks around being a secret Miracle worker Whose body The PS from a cave Matthew and Luke making the product of divine pregnancy Who comes back The Dead And enjoy Is proudly Of the guard clothes Do you think the variation and the stories are strange where do you see the stories that didn\'t even make it into the bow So one of the things that Many Christians don\'t now is that in addition to the four canonical There is a number of other Early Christian Gospel Out there canonical means April To buy the Vatican Early centuries there was Fairly significant Christian factions the heavy Unites the master United and the gnostic Male head Pretty different ideas about who Jesus was The Gospels were all destroyed By imperial decree around 400 CE However One Suspects Some Monkey Napoli just decided I I can Do this to you know I\'ve spent my entire life riding I\'m out for example I can\'t do this to that So I\'m in a Gather them up and put them away safely and say that they destroyed The wonderful thing that happened in 1945 is there was the Discovery 12 Codesys 12 ancient leather books Found in a jar In nagarmadi Inigo Summer And the ones that I love the most Clinton cigar So stories about Jesus\'s birth Inshallah In one of the most interest Is a text that is generally no The infancy Gospel of Thomas What does tax Text to do Say What would Jesus have been like As he If he\'s a divine being How much does tax relief seem to be if he\'s a divine being from the beach Is that all this miraculous power What does he actually what does Kid like that According to the infancy Gospel of Thomas is not a pretty Is Jesus the Bart Simpson of the kind of the early Christian world is really a brat 1 Storey infancy gospel of Thomas is that when Jesus was 5 years old he was sitting by a pool of water make Play sparrows which were coming the life and when another kid came in messed with his poop love Jesus cursed him and he withered up and down Is basically a little supervet Yeah I did say so because Essentially Get angry at a number of his playmates for different things And kills them Ian Tully kills one climate He kills another player mate Then the Villagers Start to complain to Mary and Joseph what\'s Jesus\'s response to all Faces accuses Go blind Burgundy says Escalated So it\'s a fascinating story and If we think The story of saying oh Jesus had these sort of you know immature things that you had to work out of his system I don\'t think that\'s what the infancy Gospel of Thomas is saying It\'s essentially saying that you Jesus He\'s got all the power of god And if people are jerks him He can you know he can strike them down This is How they view Jesus Weird and upsetting to us as it seems to be and I love I love Joseph\'s instructions to Mary after This has happened and he takes Jesus Put him in their house in Chelsea Don\'t let him outside because those who enjoy him end up there So you might think one that\'s an Unbelievable story no wonder it didn\'t But is it any crazy and then stories about walking on water Turning water into wine or raising people from the dead Zapping demons into a herd of pigs Why do we say These magic story The Krays Stories about magic Back then argue over What Jesus was who he was What was his relationship to God all the controversies about christology and this included Of course with the Jesus was Eve Human being Just a really interesting human being who somehow Became possessed by God Other study wasn\'t angel still other spot he was Part of God The weather study was just a good Don\'t know What is the really big early Christian factions Evian More closely resemble The original Christian Tp\'d The eBay night again that means the poor they claim to be the Descendants of the Jerusalem Christian Maybe they were To be a true Christian you had to obey the Jewish law They seem to have denied the idea of the virgin birth And they had A kind of Gospel that sounds very much like AG Christian gospel maybe one of the earliest forms of the We have people who are following you wish for honouring the sad On Saturday and keeping it Circumcising your kids and their worship in cheese The annoyed Declare Paul Hera The other hand another one of the major really factions the mass unit Love Paul The really Hydra Judaism Mrc Mum said that Jesus Head come from a different god not the Hebrew god not the creator god not Torah given The Guard of the old test The god of the Old Testament was Was a a week ago Who made 10-minutes why the world was so messed up The Lost Claim to have a special teaching from Jesus Is the only vein us Well the word gnostic really mean somebody who is claiming to have knowledge but it\'s basically the idea That This world is bad and we\'re And we have to get away from And getting a certain secret knowledge of the universe\'s origins and your own cosmic origin How you get away from it all So why didn\'t all of those Gospels make it into the Bible will a common Christian view is that the ones that made it Real story And the ones that didn\'t win Maeda Well when it comes to The stories of Jesus\'s birth And childhood it\'s all If you talk to Most New Testament Scholar About the infancy narratives the Christmas story in Matthew\'s gospel and Luke\'s gospel There is not much Storical basis behind any of the There is no census There\'s no slaughter of The Innocents by Herod Star of Bethlehem no wise men Jesus probably was not born Probably born In Nazareth those stories are all propaganda Letter design on one hand to present Jesus as a divine being from the moment of his And also to say He can fit the qualifications for Messiah Because he\'s born in the city of Of course all of these factions believe that version of Christianity was the correct Just like they all do too There are many different Christianity is today there were many different Christianity Back then Eventually team Paul sold his soul First Christian m Const For his way to power in the year 305 CE According to His contemporary Eusebius the so-called Father of Churchill Constantine In a vision And said helping defeat Is rival for Thrown in a bloody War Hallelujah Finally The Warrior King Messiah That the Jews had been waiting for According to Christian source From the Jesus used as supernatural powers The help Constantine Kill Thousands of Roman city And consolidate his control Over the Winners of green And so Because The A version of Christianity Secures imperial support Early in the full send Be able to suppress their opponent ever more effective Wants Christianity and you know Orthodox Christian became the official Religion of the Empire they had a fictional patronage Jenny could use imperial power 2 Put the thumb screws down on in dissident Christian Final selection Books that made it into the Bible wasn\'t actually decided 400 CE It seems like a number of competing Christian factions mod Merged in the same sort of mega church Each of these gases Has a fashion designer there is a lot of people like they have their own favourite gas What\'s your favourite Harry Potter Whatever And so if you want to win Spell for the 31 as many people on your side out number of the other side Best way to do that is a pink glass bowl The head of water supporters behind them They were not too deep The other Gospels were declared Bacon Constantine does Enforce question Everybody Constantine pagan temples to stand in pagans to worshipping in Dewsbury Dewsbury does favoured 1 Christian faction and tries to shut down all the rest And this one faction has no edit A putting the head of the Roman Empire The same Roman Empire The Cube Jesus Paul Peter and Jane At the Hill Spencer Constantine I think he treats Christianity has any impression Treated any other religious Kind of group By saying well I\'m the head of religion I am the Defects Maxim So therefore I\'m the head of this Community The bishop Centre Agree to that without Hesitate Overnight The persecuted become the person Tours And the first Group that they persecute I rather Chris Who they now declare Parrot You\'re only a heretic if you lose the historical data It takes the church about 3 to 400 years To figure out who is in About 50 years after Constantine Another room Theodosia Drove the final nail into the And my Catholic Christianity The state religion of the Turn on Pre-existing Varieties of versions of Christianity wiped out or Put on a band New dissident groups emerge and adult with With this new Kind of imperial 4 Temples Shut down Taking priests if they wanted keep their job Weekend Cheers Heather movements restrict We\'re not allowed to join certain Guild Heather synagogue Ferndown And the Empire beak Christian and it remains Christian because of the force Estate And the force of the Resistant Nothing It was a It\'s something we Put a modern perspective Imagine that the song Apologist Arrival to get Tom Cruise elected president And he passed the law making Scientology 14 pauldia roundabout 400ce The Roman Empire Became of the Northern lights Halliford that Isis has been trying to set up in the middle east in the 3 years Hard to be a success for religion when you\'re the only game in town and everything Is pretty much out That\'s the story of how Christianity went from being yellow 2 In the sky But in the words of different god Wait There\'s one You know it wasn\'t that long ago that most historians believe that the characters in the Old Testament Like Abraham Moses Figures from literary history like King Arthur Were also based on real People But today most historians think they are L Mythical So what about g What is a historian I was actually Quite certain that Ethical person and I thought anyone who suggested otherwise as a crap What happened what is the more I look at the evidence the worse it look the more you put that ransomware it falls apart and I Actually amounts of evidence it looks like it goes the other way it just seems to me The the weight of probability One thing that struck me is Is the case For this figure Is extreme The main sources we have On the go Over time we found even more reason to doubt the Really really What sauce is there not what we Jesus is better History then Alexander Wing wing The evidence for both of those fingers and it\'s not even close to correct and actually the other controls another Way better than Obviously a lot of evidence Lost or destroyed Over the Is like the letters Peter So historians are trying to piece together What have Using Sketchy evidence or evidence that\'s been corrupted like marks And the trip to that is Look at that body look at that all you can\'t leave anything out Weird And say is that the evidence NN What you look at when you can Your feelings How expected is the 70 how weird is the Severn And then you look at all of the fear Play some trying to side which one does the m Supporting And if you\'re sucking Situation where the evidence is equally expected on all your height It can be any one of those type of Can I have a set alarm What\'s one of those So how does the evidence stack up with The theory that Jesus Actually I think I\'m better than Siri Di papa sister he started out revelatory Became his poor size later I think Next Expected Another words Jesus Play the some kind of Angel in Vision Do people like poo And then later on people decided that Willie must have been real But of course this kind of you is still at mine or Mum Scholar Always be there The same thing The changing of the It is right in the 70 Springs at crazy Nelson I\'m not talking 30 years so I know Come back to me in 23 years and I will see if it\'s still with it This kind of toy Get some people pretty Well with my brand response to that the whole Jesus mysticism thing To be frank I considered mental masturbation for 80 That\'s the best way I can describe it is the ultimate get off Telling your archenemy that superhero didn\'t exist It\'s with the joy of going up to some brand new kid you don\'t like and say hey kid guess what There\'s no Santa Claus Telling a little kid That doesn\'t exist YP mean But it\'s also true But the fact is that the historical The Jesus exist Is Pro Swim Say that But the evidence that the stories about in were all over the place Evolved over time Is incredibly strong Mike from there What So let\'s take a look at what I am new updated Sunday school story Looks 2000 years ago the Romans decided the Dead Men could be God\'s and living meant to be sons of God Meanwhile in the back walls of the Roman empire the Jewish people were waiting for dear God yahweh to send a warrior King they called them The kick out the Roma What the Messiah was a note Eventually several Generations later a small fringe Jewish sex said Jesus Christ which been saving the saviour was a very Jewish due to problems in his He had not defeated the Romans he was already dead A few years later Paul would be busy beating up early Jesus worship Mind his own version of the Jesus The massager be a super powered celestial warrior King for non-jews And still get into heaven The og Christians were impressed this is fake news Paul didn\'t even know Jesus this is a juice only club bubble According to Paul and any day now Tracy would come down the word with supernatural powers to the Anyone else who didn\'t worship Unfortunately Jesus didn\'t return within Paul\'s life And despite riding lots of limits in his 30 years ago Never mention anything about Jesus\'s life teachings Didn\'t get the war against the Rome Hang up there Barely kiss No worries a king-size showed up the temple was torn down Deadly single written record of what they thought about Jesus or a After the community did documents and stories about Jesus as a human Super powers in a big secret Try not to let it be killed that yahweh ignore his prayers Any other versions of the Jesus story recorded over the next 100 years by actual Witnesses My Witnesses As Time passed the stories grew more far-fetched Sunley including miracles white walking or more of the virgin birth The Resurrection of Ireland teenage Jesus and 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2 billion Christians, wow, that's a lot of people

You probably think that around 2,000 years ago, here in the Nazareth Mountains in the Galilee region of modern Israel, a man known as Jesus Christ was born

You probably think of him as the Messiah, the son of Yahweh, the God of the Jews

But if you're one of the other 5 billion people on the planet, you probably just think of Jesus as some kind of wise man who had a religious cult built up around him after his death

Or maybe you're one of those people who believe he never even really existed, he's just some kind of literary myth like a Hercules or King Arthur

But whichever camp you're in, I think we can all agree that Jesus is one of the most influential and intriguing figures in all of world history

About 40 years ago, when I was a good little Catholic boy going to Sunday school, I was taught the story of Jesus

It went something like this

About 2,000 years ago, a young married woman, still a virgin, was made pregnant by the God of the Jews

She gave birth to a baby in a barn, and three wise men found him by following a star so they could worship him and give some gold and scented oils

When he grew up, Jesus walked around Judea telling thousands of people he was God and performing miracles such as magically making fish and bread appear, turning water into wine and raising people from the dead

One night, he told his friends to eat some bread, which was his flesh, and drink some wine, which was his blood

Then the Jewish authorities, who were angry with him, turned him over to the Romans, who actually wanted to let him go

But the Jews convinced them to crucify him

But then, a few days later, he rose from the dead and told his friends that dying was secretly the plan all along because his death wiped out the sins of the world

His friends wrote down what happened in a book and started a new religion

But then the Romans started persecuting them

Until one day, the Romans changed their minds and decided to become Christians instead

At the end of the world, Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead

To be honest, when I was a little kid, the story didn't make a lot of sense to me

I remember thinking, so this dude has magical powers and he's invisible and watching me when I sleep at night? It all seemed a little bit creepy

But as an adult, I started learning more about the history of early Christianity

As I read the Bible more carefully and read the works of modern New Testament scholars and ancient historians, I started to realize that the Sunday School version of the Jesus story was vastly different to the story as it appears in the Bible

The actual story is far more complicated and far more interesting

So I thought I'd go out and interview a range of world-renowned biblical scholars and historians and academics and ask them to help me tell the story of how Christianity went from being some sort of fringe Jewish personality cult from the backwaters of the Roman Empire to a point where it was the state religion of that empire wielding enormous power over the emperors themselves

So let's get back to the Sunday School version of the story

What do scholars think about how accurate that version is? Research that was happening at the beginning of the 20th century, a German scholar, Walter Bauer, came to the conclusion that in fact that picture is a very manufactured one

And it's not like Jesus was walking around Palestine saying, hi, I'm God, I'm going to die for your sins soon

But until then, how about I tell you a few good cracking Sunday School stories and then afterwards you can get down with worshipping me

That may be the basic view, but that's not quite what happened

So how did it happen? How did that version become the story most of my Christian friends seem to believe? A lot of Christians don't actually read the Bible

And if they do read the Bible, they don't read it historically

They don't read it thinking about what the story is telling you about the origins of Christianity

They don't look at this uplifting passage or that uplifting passage

They don't compare the Gospels to one another

They don't look at the really weird stuff

So they feel like they know the Bible, but it's a very selective knowledge

It's a sort of greatest hits or the most uplifting, most seemingly relevant stuff to the 21st century

They're looking for a single verse that will inspire them for their journey that day

And that's perfectly fine

There's no criticism of that

But the problem with that approach is that you're not actually reading the Bible as it's intended to be read

Christians read bits, but do they read it systematically? Well, systematically, but not necessarily for historical reasons, systematically to clarify their beliefs

And they just sort of don't get to see all the really strange stuff, all the contradictions, all the discrepancies

I mean, how do you go from being a religion that celebrates somebody who has died on a Roman cross to a religion that celebrates that cross and takes that cross forward into battle? I mean, that's the story of Christianity within 300 years, going from a superstition to being the state religion

That's absolutely extraordinary

And that is what the early Roman historians called it

They called it a superstition

But before we get into the story of Jesus, I think we need to wind the clock back a little bit and talk about the world into which Christianity was born

A long time ago, there was a man known as Lord, liberator, redeemer, savior, simultaneously fully human and fully divine, the son of God and God, the bringer of peace and salvation sent into the world in the form of a man to forgive the sins of the people

That's Augustus Caesar

If you asked most people living in the Roman Empire, round about the time Jesus was born, who the son of God was, most of them would have told you it was this guy

Augustus was the adopted son of the original J

C

, Julius Caesar, the great Roman general who was stabbed to death in 44 BCE

After he was assassinated, the Roman Senate declared that he ascended into the heavens to become a god

And Augustus, as his adopted son, was therefore called Deuphilius, the son of the Deified

It was new to Rome because it was Augustus himself who saw what he thought was the soul of a part of Caesar going up to the heavens and that's why he can then claim that he is the son, the adopted son, not the natural son clearly, the son of a divinity

Another title bestowed upon Augustus was savior because he ended a hundred years of civil war

He brought peace

He brought peace to Rome

He brought peace to the empire

And then, according to tradition, somewhere around the middle of the reign of Augustus, Jesus was born

So several decades before Jesus even appears on the scene, Romans are pretty familiar with the idea that somebody can die and become a god or be the son of a god and the savior of mankind

So who exactly was Jesus? Well it kind of depends on who you ask

Some scholars believe he was an apocalyptic preacher or a political troublemaker

Others think he was more of a wise sage or a hippie pacifist who preached love and brotherhood

It's a little bit strange that after 2000 years, scholars still can't agree on exactly who Jesus was

One thing they all do agree on though, Jesus was a Jew

If you look at pictures of Jesus in most churches today, you'll see a white guy with long brown hair, neatly trimmed beard, blue eyes

But Christianity started out as a Jewish personality cult

Jesus was a Jew

So he probably would have looked more like, I don't know, DJ Khaled than Jared Leto

He would have been a dark skinned brown eyed Palestinian

Let's put it this way, if Jesus returned and tried to board a plane in the United States today, he'd probably get taken into a little room and randomly screamed

And when I say Jesus was a Jew, I don't just mean ethnically a Jew, I mean a religious Jew

In fact he was a very religious Jew and so were most of the early members of his set

Jesus is Torah observant, Peter is Torah observant, James is Torah observant, and Paul is Torah observant

The Torah is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament

Jesus and the guys who ran his group after he died, Peter, the guy he left in charge, and James, who according to tradition was one of Jesus' brothers, were Jews, not Christians

And they weren't trying to start a new religion

They weren't trying to reject Judaism, they were just trying to fix it

Jesus was not only Torah observant, he actually made the law stricter rather than looser

The law says don't commit adultery, Jesus says don't think about it, that's harder

The law says don't murder, Jesus says don't be angry

Jesus was a first century AD Galilean Jewish prophet

He was a prophet who believed that God was about to intervene decisively in human history

And being a religious Jew in the first century must have been pretty depressing

For hundreds of years, Jewish prophets had promised that their God, Yahweh, really thought they were pretty, pretty special

They were his favourite tribe, he had their back, and he was going to make sure they ruled the world

But for some reason, Yahweh hadn't delivered, century after century, the Jews had been invaded and conquered

In fact, just a few years after Jesus was born, his homeland had finally become an official Roman province

Jewish people could see that things were not going particularly well, things were not flourishing

They were subject to external powers, whether they be the Greek kings, the Seleucid kings or whether it be the Romans later on

Instead of coming to the conclusion that their prophets were wrong, or that Yahweh had lied to them, the Jews just decided they must have disappointed him and he was ignoring them or not answering their prayers

So anyway, the Jews decided they had to be better and make Yahweh happy with them again

And how? The most important thing to know is that there was no agreed standard of what being a good Jew was in the first century

Just like there are hundreds of different versions of Christianity today, and they all think that they're the right one

We know that in the first century there were lots of different versions of Judaism as well, and they were all trying to figure out the magic trick to get them back into Yahweh's good book

This is a situation that is eventually going to be rectified by God

Destroy the Roman oppressors, you know, think end of Raids of the Lost Ark, for instance, where the fire comes down and burns up all the Nazis, you know, that's probably the view that a decent number of Jews had

Now, some Jews living in the first century believe that God was going to send someone to save them

They call that person the Messiah

So how do you know who's a Messiah? Different people will give you different answers, and there are different Messianic candidates to follow

Oh, I'm just looking for the official guide to knowing who the chosen one is

I'm sure it's got to be in here somewhere

There's no Messianic checklist in Judaism as if, make sure your mother is a virgin when you're conceived, walk on water, raise the dead, die a sacrificial death, come back after three days and ascend

Some Jews were expecting a shepherd, others were expecting the angel Michael, still others were expecting a priest and still others a warrior

Some people thought John the Baptist was the Messiah, and he doesn't fit any of those categories

We use the term Messiah

The term Messiah is fine, it means anointed, it means that God has anointed this person with oil

But when you're talking about Messiah, you're really talking about somebody who is a king in the line of the greatest of all the Jewish kings, King David

And lots of Jews believed that a King David-like figure would establish himself in Jerusalem and he would transform Israel, restore the kingdom politically, was part of that, bring the people back from exile, set up the homeland again, restore their independence, drive out the foreign invader

Some Jews thought the Messiah was going to be a great warrior to lead them to a military victory

Others thought he might be a charismatic preacher who would convince the entire world to believe in Yahweh

Others, they didn't think about the Messiah much at all

Not all Jews wanted a Messiah, because normally if someone's going around calling themselves a Messiah, it's going to lead to war, war means death, famine, bloodshed, that type of thing

So I mean, not everyone wanted a Messiah, not everyone even believed in one

So there's a variety of expectations

Certainly the dominant one is this political military figure

So why is this important? Well, when Jesus is dragged before the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, the charges laid against him are that he's claiming to be the Christos, the Christ, which is just the Greek word for Messiah

In other words, he's claiming to be the King of the Jews

Mark 15-2, Pilate asked Jesus, are you the King of the Jews? Judea at the time was ruled by Rome

They didn't have a king of their own

They had a governor who reported to the Roman emperor Tiberius Caesar

Claiming to be the Messiah was an act of political rebellion against Rome

A modern equivalent would be declaring you're the rightful King of the United States

Now an important thing to understand about the Jewish concept of a Messiah was that he wasn't supposed to be divine and he wasn't going to have magical powers

He was just going to be a regular man

They did sometimes talk about the Messiah as the son of God, but not in the later Christian sense

They meant son of God in the sense of good Israelite because all Israelites are sons of God in the adopted sense

Anointed by God special to God, but like their kings, David, Solomon, and their other good kings, yeah, fully human

Somebody that God has placed on the throne to rule in his stead, but it doesn't really mean somebody who has from all time been sitting at the right hand of God, the father

It's a different concept from that

It's much more Jewish and it's much more grounded than that

The son of God would only have been used, I think, in a metaphorical sense, not in the way that we come to expect with Christian doctrine

The early Christians took that and ran with it further

It really does remind me of how Augustus Caesar was anointed to be the adopted son of his father, Julius Caesar, and therefore became the son of God

Here's an interesting thing about Jesus' name

In Hebrew, his name was Yeshua, which basically translates as God saves or savior

As we've already seen, Christ means Messiah and the Messiah was supposed to be the savior

So Jesus the Christ translates as savior, the savior

According to the Jewish historian Josephus, there were actually quite a few guys who people thought might be the Messiah walking around Judea roughly around about the same time as Jesus

None of them succeeded

They all failed

They were all killed

And can you really be the Messiah if you don't achieve anything? Which is why the vast majority of Jews in the middle of the first century don't follow Jesus

Because a Messiah was not supposed to die on a cross executed by the Romans

Because this is somebody who's supposed to lead a successful military victory if you just get executed as a revolutionary, in the eyes of most Jews, that rules you out

Can't possibly be the Messiah

Can't be the Messiah in that precise understanding

So what they, they reinterpret, they reinvent the meaning of the word

A crucified Messiah was kind of like fried ice cream

It's an oxymoron, it's a paradox, and the Messiah doesn't get crucified

He rises up, defeats the Romans, and establishes a new Davidic kingdom

So you want to be a Messiah? Well, the Messiah, actually

Okay

Have you kicked the Romans out of Judea? Well no, not yet, but I tried

Have you converted the world to Judaism? Well no, I'm planning on it, but you know, it's

Did you bring about world peace in your lifetime? Not yet, no, but

Boy, bye

You really don't have the qualifications to be the Messiah, now do you? Maybe you should try carpentry

I see you have some experience in that area

Next

So someone came up with the idea to pitch the concept of the Messiah to the Gentiles

Wait, I've got an idea

What if we market it to Gentiles? So what you see in early Christian writings is a sort of redefinition of a Messiah

Which is a pretty wacky idea when you think about it, because the whole point of the Messiah was he was supposed to save the Jews from the Gentiles, not save the Gentiles

A Gentile is someone who isn't Jewish

But of course, the Gentiles didn't know that

They didn't know that the Messiah was supposed to come and defeat them

And they had already been indoctrinated over the last hundred years with the idea that a man could die and become a god, so why not this Jesus guy? The Greeks and Romans already accepted a whole pantheon of gods, so there was no big deal about adding one more

Especially if this one is promising that the end of the world is coming soon and that people who pray to him as a god will get the reward of eternal paradise

Something the older gods didn't promise

And who was the number one salesman for this new kind of Messiah? The earliest references to Jesus come from the letters of the Apostle Paul

The New Testament contains 14 letters supposedly written by Paul, but many scholars only believe seven of those are authentic

Despite his letters being stuffed down the back of the New Testament, Paul is actually the first person who ever wrote anything about Jesus, at least as far as we know

But Paul was a bit like that friend you have who just started watching Breaking Bad

He was a bit late to the party

Paul never met Jesus, but he knew people who knew him

One of the things that really surprised me when I started studying Christianity was that the earliest and most prolific writer about Jesus never even knew him

Never even saw him for that matter

Now Paul says that he knew people who said they knew Jesus, but did he really know them? We've only got his word for it

And before he joined the Jesus bus, Paul was a hater

Paul actually had letters from the High Priest that enabled him to go and persecute earlier Christians

The High Priest was a member of the Sadducee sect of Judaism

They controlled the sacrifices in the temple and didn't believe in the afterlife or the resurrection of the dead

But Saul began to destroy the church

Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison

In his own words, Paul says he was beating up and arresting Christians because

Paul says that to him, as a Jew, the idea of a crucified Messiah, the Messiah going and getting crucified was nonsense

A few years after Jesus dies, Paul goes from beating them up to becoming their number one salesperson

Why the change of heart? Well according to his own letters, written in the late 40s CE, about 15 to 20 years after Jesus died, the ghost of Jesus appeared to Paul and told him to go preach to the Gentiles

But how do you convince a bunch of Greeks and Romans to worship a dead Jew? Well Paul came up with four fantastic marketing ideas that continue to resonate with billions of people around the world to this very day

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures

For Paul, the Messiah is not really a warrior king or a charismatic preacher, he's more of a human sacrifice to Yahweh

See, Paul seems to think that Jesus had to die so Yahweh would forgive the human race for Adam having eaten a magical piece of fruit

Oh, messy madam

Now most Romans, and in fact most people on the planet, had never even heard of Yahweh, let alone Adam's act of grand theft fruto

So it seems a little bit harsh to sentence them to an eternity of damnation

Now listen, I know most Christians don't like thinking of Jesus as a human sacrifice to an angry God, but let's be honest, at least on paper that's exactly what it looks like

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, human sacrifice is the offering of the life of a human being to a deity

Years before Paul, both the Jews and the Romans had replaced human sacrifices with animal sacrifices

But he's bringing it back, baby, with the greatest sacrifice of them all

Not just a human, but a son of a God, the best sacrifice you can possibly have, is the superhuman sacrifice, and because it was given, that blood can save everybody

And Paul doesn't stop there, he's resurrecting more old ideas

It comes then down to the fundamental thing for Christianity, is Jesus is raised from the dead

That becomes the one thing that makes everything else pile into insignificance

He hasn't driven the Romans out of Jerusalem, but God raised him from the dead

No matter what else happens, whatever failure he was in his life, he is approved by God

Like human sacrifice, the idea of a resurrected God wasn't original to Paul or Christianity

Now like every great marketer, Paul knows how to take a negative, the fact that Jesus didn't really kick the Romans out of Judea before he died, and spin it into a positive

He says, wait, wait, wait, wait, you don't understand, he's going to come back and then he's going to destroy every authority and power

He's like the Terminator, I'll be back

You know what's cooler than a warrior king messiah? A warrior king messiah with superpowers

But not many Jews bought into the whole superpowered messiah idea, they tended to call BS on all of that, so Paul decides he needs to find a new audience

Paul's the guy that takes it to the Gentiles

The original sect just wasn't hitting the right market essentially, and Paul figured this out, consciously or unconsciously, and retooled it to be successful in that market, and that's why it exploded

Which I think led to the doom of the original sect, because Paul had a much bigger market to tap, there were way more Gentiles than Jews, way more Gentiles who were excited by this idea than Jews would be, and so you had the churches explode in size with Gentiles

Now of course, in order to market Judaism to the Gentiles, Paul needed to make some pretty fundamental changes

As far as all of the other early Jesus worshippers were concerned, in order to join the little club you had to either be or become a Jew, but of course, probably the biggest hurdle for most Gentiles in becoming a Jew was that you had to get circumcised, whether you were a child or an adult

But Paulie Walnut says, oh, forget about it

Just the marketing genius it took to get rid of that one restriction, oh, we don't have to do that? Sure, sure, I'll become a Jew, yeah, that's fine

I'll take on this new religion, we don't have to chop our penis up anymore

Psst, can I interest you in a new form of Judaism? No thanks, heard it all before

Um, what if I told you that you don't have to chop off the end of your knob, go on? Paul's type of preaching was ideal for them, oh, we can be in that Jewish trajectory but without all the stuff we don't like, sign me up

But what did the original disciples think about all of this? Well, as they were Torah-observant Jews, we can only imagine

So Paul, we've been hearing rumours that you've been making up some for-cutter stories about Jesus, what exactly are you telling people? Just the usual stuff James, Jesus was a real mensch who died for our sins, he's coming back any day now with superpowers, yadda yadda yadda, oh and Gentiles don't need to become Jews anymore

Whoa, are you crazy, this is a Jews only club, Abelah, anyone who wants to get in needs to lose the end of his funds, non-negotiable, you schmuck

Peter, Bobby, the Gentiles really like their foreskin, let them keep it

Oy vey, the chutzpah on this schmendrik, listen up, bots, you know Babkes, we were his best friends, James is his brother

If he wanted to let the goyim in, he would have told us, listen, I'll tell you what, you do your thing and I'll do my thing and we'll just see who wins, mazel tov

I think a lot of Jesus' original disciples were very suspicious of Paul, he wasn't part of the original band, he didn't know Jesus and even worse than that, the young Paul had persecuted the church, he was trying to bring down the church, so why should they trust this guy? Paul doesn't really seem to care what Peter and James think anyway, he says that when he did meet them, they didn't tell him anything that he didn't already know

He is very clear repeatedly in his letters that he learned this, his gospel from no man, no human source whatsoever

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin

I did not receive it from any man nor was I taught it, rather I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ

When he does mention his sources, it's the divine, it's the Lord, it's God and it's the scriptures also

Because he feels, well I've got every bit as much of a right to be called an apostle as you will have, but they said yeah but you didn't meet Jesus, so his big answer to that is to say, I did meet Jesus, I met him on the road to Damascus, I met the resurrected Jesus

Paul says that the ghost of Jesus told him he could throw out a thousand years of Jewish law and tradition, but they don't seem to believe him, I mean anyone can claim to have a revelation and he doesn't really have a great reputation either, I mean it was only just a few years ago that he was having their friends arrested and beaten up, so they all seem to butt heads

There's one story where Paul and Peter have a stand-up row, a stand-up row in Antioch in front of everybody because they disagree on the implications of the movement that they're part of

According to Paul's own account, he started calling Peter a fraud to his face in front of everybody

When Peter came to Antioch, I posed him to his face because it was clearly in the wrong

Now Peter was the first disciple that Jesus ever had, can you imagine what must have been going through his mind when this Paul guy who never even knew Jesus started getting up in his face in front of people? Unfortunately we only have Paul's side of the story

When Paul's in a bad mood and he's in a really bad mood in the epistle to the Galatians, he wants to say they didn't add anything to me, there's nothing that they told me that added anything to the gospel which I got from God, but we know that this isn't true

Imagine pacing up and down a room, you know, yelling, you know, while someone's like taking it all down

That's the best way to imagine Paul, you know, creating Galatians, he led to the Galatians

At the same time, a lot of affection and love and care as well

So maybe he was bipolar, I don't know

And it's not just Peter and James that Paul's having a problem with at this stage

You see, even at this early phase of the Jesus movement, there seemed to be a number of different factions emerging

And just like today, they all claim to be the one true movement

So we have an example of in 1 Corinthians, Paul is trying to respond to a letter that the Corinthians wrote him saying, hey, this other apostle, Apollos, came by and taught us all this other new weird stuff

It seems to contradict yours, what are we supposed to make of this? But you immediately ask, like, who's this Apollos guy? He's not on any lists of disciples

Paul calls these other missionaries false apostles, even though he's the guy that never even knew Jesus

Oh, the Cahones on this guy

We know that in the first century, there were a whole range of divergent Jewish sects

So it seems entirely possible that there were a range of savior cults running around at the same time as Paul, using similar terminology

Let's just keep in mind that both Jesus and Messiah both mean savior

What's the name of your savior? We just call him the savior

So Jesus

Yeah, yeah, Jesus

What's the name of your savior? We just call him the savior

So Jesus? Yeah, yeah, Jesus

Each cult probably would have had their favorite Messiah stories, their favorite miracles and their favorite teachings

Each of course would have had their own missionaries as well

There are manifest signs in the New Testament of big differences

And when you look at other stuff that didn't get into the New Testament, it becomes real obvious

At one point, Paul gets so angry about these competing missionaries that he writes in his letters, he wishes they would cut their own genitals off

As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves

Galatians 512

Emasculate means removal of the penis and the testicles

Not just castration, but the whole package

So much for turning the other cheek

And remember, this is the same guy that was beating up and arresting Christians just 20 years earlier

Forget about what the disciples would have thought about him for a second

What would Jesus have thought about Paul? As a Torah observant Jew, I suspect that he may have found some of Paul's rhetoric a little bit heretical

I think that if Jesus had said, nobody has to follow the Jewish law anymore, then why would Paul have had such a hard time convincing Jesus as apostles of this? The Gospels record certain missionary instructions that Jesus gave his followers, but they're not detailed toward going to the Gentiles

Which, if you ask me, is a little bit of an oversight on Jesus's behalf

All versions of Christianity today are basically descendants of Paul's version of Christianity, and that was just one sect

Now, Paul's not going after the well-educated, the Gentiles, or the rich and the famous

Paul's going to take it down market

It becomes a religion for the poor, and the downtrodden, and the oppressed, and the underprivileged, who can all find in this a sense of a better tomorrow

The Greco-Roman religions didn't really offer much in the way of an afterlife, unless you were some sort of great hero or king

And heaven doesn't actually turn up in Judaism much either, barely gets a mention in the Old Testament

But Paul is saying you can get eternity in paradise, and he's offering it to everyone

And who doesn't want to spend eternity in paradise? Hell, I'd be happy with a weekend in paradise

So Paul talks a lot about what Jesus is going to do when he comes back, but how much does he have to say about the life and teachings of Jesus during his actual time on earth? Paul wrote a lot

He wrote a massive chunk of the New Testament, and we don't even get incidental mentions, not even once, about miracles that Jesus did, healings

It's absurd

Now one of the explanations for this might be that Paul's letters are really dealing with disputes in his communities about how to be good Christians

But isn't that the perfect time to be quoting the founder of the firm? When it comes to disputes about that, he could have easily, he could have easily said, Jesus said this

When Jesus was in Jerusalem, he said that

No, what we get is Paul speaking from his own authority

He gets his information directly from the Lord above, from his celestial Christ, and also from the earlier scriptures

Paul briefly mentions that Jesus was born, died, and resurrected in some form

But that's pretty much it when it comes to talking about the life and teachings of Jesus

There are a few passages where he says he got something from the Lord

But as he claims no human told him anything, he might just be referring to the ghost of Jesus

But Paul has zero to say about the miracles that Jesus did in his lifetime

There's no turning water into wine, no multiplying loaves and fishes

There's no walking on water

There's no healing the sick with his spit

There's no exorcisms

There's no bringing people back from the dead, which is kind of strange if you think about it

If you knew somebody who could do all of those things, you'd never stop talking about it

Whether that's really strange or whether that's because, for example, he takes for granted that they know that already is hard to be sure

Maybe Paul assumed that they already knew the stories, but we have to remember that Paul's writing his letters 20 to 30 years before the Gospels were written

Maybe he'd never heard the stories

Maybe he had heard them but didn't believe them

Maybe they were invented later

Or maybe Paul had heard the stories but just didn't think they were very important

Maybe he thought they were completely irrelevant

Look at what Christian preachers do today

When they want to say what you should be doing, what you should be thinking, what you should be behaving, what do they say? They say, Jesus says this, Jesus says this, Jesus did this, Jesus taught that

So why doesn't Paul? Why does Paul never say what would Jesus do? What did matter to Paul was converting as many people as possible as quickly as possible because he's absolutely convinced that time is running out

Paul believes that the end of the world is dawning any minute

I mean, every day he gets up in the morning, he thinks it could be today

Then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, 1 Thessalonians 4

17

But then time goes on and the end still hasn't arrived yet

So Paul, like every doomsday prophet, starts to hedge his bets a little

Suddenly now we've got Christians dying and that's not supposed to happen

Jesus is meant to return

This kingdom of God is meant to be ushered in and it's not happening

So there needs to be a rethink

Oh, he says, oh, geez, right, about the resurrection, you see, yeah, some are going to die, but Christ will come back and the dead in Christ will rise first, will be second in line, will be transformed

Paul was clearly wrong

The end didn't come

Paul eventually realizes that he's more likely than not going to die before Jesus returns

Paul claims the ghost of Jesus told him the end of the world would come within his lifetime

You'd think if God told you the end of the world was happening soon, you'd be pretty careful about getting confirmation

Blessed are the meek, turn the other cheek

The world will end in your lifetime

Let him who hath not sin, excuse me there, dear Lord, could you just repeat that last bit? I'm not sure I heard you correctly

The world's going to end in my lifetime? Yeah, yeah, in your lifetime

Are you sure? I find your lack of faith disturbing

Hey, hey, okay, chill, big guy

I just hate to get something like that wrong

Wouldn't want that on my conscience

So as far as I can tell, one of five things must have happened either one, Jesus made a mistake, two, Jesus lied, three, Jesus changed his mind and just forgot to tell Paul, four, Paul misunderstood Jesus, or five, Paul just made it all up

This is a debate among historical Jesus scholars about whether Jesus believed that the end of the world would happen in his lifetime or not

The vast, vast majority of scholars who say, no, it looks pretty clear from Jesus's teachings as preserved in the gospels that he really does expect the end to come in his lifetime

So he seems to have been like many people before him and pretty much everybody after him

Everybody who's predicted that the world was going to end in their lifetime thus far has been wrong and Jesus would seem to have been one of those

Now if you don't like to think of Jesus as getting something that important wrong, let's go with Paul made it all up

And if he did, maybe he's lying about all this other stuff we're using him for

Did he really meet Peter and James? We only have his word for it

Did the ghost of Jesus really appear to him and tell him to preach to the Gentiles? So if Paul is throwing out all of this Jewish law and tradition, telling people that the end is nigh and having public arguments with the original apostles, why did they tolerate him? Well, from how it appears in the Bible, it seems that James and Paul agreed to some kind of payment

There's a lot of references and letters to him collecting money from his churches

It's clear that some of these churches are challenging him and like, what are you doing with this money? And he has to like justify that, you know, no, no, don't worry, I'm not running off with it

I'm doing what I said I was going to do with it

Which is, he says, taking it back to the saints in Jerusalem, you know, the holy ones in Jerusalem

And we're not entirely sure what that means

But you can be sure it certainly meant that the Jerusalem church, these heads are getting a cut

Whether we want to call that a bribe in terms of let's collect this money so that the Jerusalem Christians don't send missionaries to make our lives more difficult, it's hard to say

And Paul's not even sure that in Romans, he's not even sure that they're going to accept this collection

He says he expresses anxiety about taking this back to Jerusalem because he thinks, well, maybe they'll reject it

So that sounds a bit like a bribe

And in fact, he probably gets arrested

Yeah, yeah

Yeah

I mean, you know, if we follow the book of Acts, at that point, what seems to be going on when he is in Jerusalem and is arrested is that that's when he was going to take the collection back and put it at the feet of the apostles in Jerusalem

That doesn't seem to have worked out

Paul went to Rome and was under house arrest there

So presumably, Paul got executed by the Romans

Acts of the Apostles, written many decades later, vaguely blames Paul's arrest in Jerusalem on some Jews who complained that Paul was leading people astray

Fellow Israelites, help us

This is the man who teaches everyone everywhere against our people and our law and this place

Of course, the people he's taking the money to in Jerusalem also fit that description

They are Jews who think that Paul is leading people astray with his idolatrous teachings about abandoning the law

Only in many ways, I think we can say that Paul's the guy that invented Christianity as we know it today

If it wasn't for Paul, I think most Christians today would probably be Jews

Somewhere between the years of 60 and 70 CE, it's assumed that Peter, Paul and James all died

We don't really know much about where or when or how it happened

One thing we do know happened during this period though is some Jewish zealots decided to rise up against Roman occupation and it led to a devastating war

We don't know who started it

Could have been the Judean people's front

Could have been the people's front of Judea

We know it lasted for four years and the Jews got completely destroyed

As it turns out, Yahweh didn't send a Messiah to save them

As punishment for the rebellion, the Romans completely destroyed the temple in Jerusalem

Something else happened just after the destruction of the temple

The first Christian gospel was written

The earliest of the gospels is probably the Gospel of Mark, which seems to be written about 70 AD, maybe a few years before, maybe a few years after

Ironically, the first thing I run into again and again as I travel North America and talk to people who either were Christians or are Christians, and they often tell me like the first is like they were shocked to find out that Mark was written before Matthew

They were shocked to find out that the letters of Paul were written before the gospels

Here's something that might shock some Christians

Most scholars don't think Mark was written by an eyewitness or even somebody who knew an eyewitness

The tradition in the second century is that Mark was written by a disciple of the apostle Peter and that he was sort of Peter's secretary who followed him around and took Peter's sermon notes and arranged them into sort of a narrative about Jesus

Is that who Mark really was? It's hard to say

If Mark had been Peter's scribe, Mark would say, I'm Peter's scribe

That's how ancient historiography was written

And despite it being called the gospel according to Mark, the document doesn't actually state who the author was

The difficulty with Mark's gospel is it's like the other gospels, it's anonymous

We don't really know where it comes from

Most people now think that it's unlikely that Mark is kind of taking down Peter's dictation or anything like that

But for the sake of simplicity, let's refer to him as Mark, otherwise we're going to end up in prince territory, you know, the author formerly known as Mark

And how's Mark's gospel connected to the Jewish-Roman war? Mark is kind of obsessed with the temple as if something recent and traumatic has happened

So it makes a lot of sense to say that Mark was written after the fall of the temple in AD 70

The Romans had just come in and destroyed the temple and just ended the cult, basically raised the city, the city of God, destroyed God's temple

So this is a big existential issue

If you're a sect that stems from the Jews and the Jewish God just let heathens come in and destroy his own house, this is a problem

This is a marketing problem, right? It's a PR problem

So how do you explain that? Well, Mark, a lot of Mark is structured to answer that and say like, well, here's the answer

They've got to reinvent themselves

According to the Jewish historian Josephus, who actually fought in the war over a million Jews died

This is a profoundly traumatic time for Judaism

They've lost the land

They've lost the temple

They've lost the sense of God's blessing on their everyday lives

So this is really a very difficult time indeed for Jews

And of course, the original Jesus gang, the disciples were Jews living in Jerusalem

So they probably got swept up in all of the death and destruction too

What happened to them? We don't really know

There's no historical record

In fact, we have nothing at all written down by Peter or James or any other eyewitness of Jesus

Nothing

Zero

Nada

Zip

Bupkis

Oh yeah, sure

There are letters in the New Testament that claim to be written by them

But do scholars believe those letters are actually legit? I don't think we actually have any extant writings from Peter or from James

We have documents that claim to be by them

They're probably other people writing in their honor, in their name, pretending to be these figures

So we are actually a little bit weak on knowing what Peter and James actually thought

We have to reconstruct what they thought

Like half of the letters attributed to Paul that found their way into the New Testament, many scholars believe the letters from Peter and James are fake

That means we really don't have any clear idea of what Jesus' immediate disciples actually thought about him, his teachings, his miracles, what he told them in private, or what they thought about Paul

They must have been writing letters too, but apparently nobody bothered to keep copies of them

It's all erased

That data had to have existed

It had to have been written down somewhere in some form

It's just all gone

Well, how convenient for Team Paul

After the Jewish-Roman war, they're the only major Christian sect that's left

These are the Gentiles, the Greeks and Romans who aren't Jews, don't understand Judaism, and quite frankly don't like the Jews who kind of made fun of their version of the Messiah

So the original disciples, the people who actually knew Jesus and their movement is pretty much completely wiped out within 40 years of the death of Jesus Christ

And if we accept that most of the New Testament writing occurs post-70, when the Jews have been removed as an influence, then the kind of Pauline crusade from 20 years earlier is going to win

So Mark's Gospel is written for a Gentile community, not Jews, and probably in Rome sometime just after the reign of the Emperor Nero

And there's a lot of strange stuff in Mark's Gospel

One of them is that Jesus is walking around trying to tell his disciples to keep their mouths shut about the miracles that he's doing, like it's supposed to be some kind of big secret

Mark starts out his Gospel with saying something that just blows my mind, and that's in Mark 411, where he has Jesus gather all his disciples and say, okay, I'm teaching you all these things in secret, in parables, that way you'll know what I'm talking about, but those outsiders, they won't be able to tell what I'm talking about, otherwise, and this is the kicker, they would turn from their sins and repent and be saved

And he told them, the mystery of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to those on the outside, everything is expressed in parables, so that they may be ever seen but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding, otherwise they might turn and be forgiven

Mark 411

They can't handle the truth

What kind of Messiah tells his disciples to keep his work big secret? What kind of Messiah doesn't want his disciples to be forgiven? According to Mark, Jesus is telling secret teachings only to his inner circle

And when you ask a biblical scholar today, well, what are those secret teachings that he's giving? They don't know any more than we do

Those secret teachings are lost forever, like the truth about who killed JFK and what happened to Michael Jackson's nose

Maybe the whole secrecy business is Mark's way of explaining why most people in his time had never heard of Jesus? This is all made up by the Gospel, the author of the Gospel of Mark, as sort of damage control and explanation for why people didn't widely accept him as the Messiah, because he didn't want them to

So around Mark's time, people are saying, he did all these miracles, I never heard of any guy doing miracles

He goes, oh, that's because he told us not to tell anyone

Right, exactly

Maybe this story about parables is also a parable? You go through the Gospel story after story after story, and they look like parables that has additional meanings, like they might not be meant to be taken historically true

And this is how mythology is written, right? You tell a story about something and it's the meaning of the story rather than the literal truth of the story that's actually the important part of the story

For instance, let's take a look at the story of the trial of Jesus

And Mark tells this story where Pontius Pilate wants to let Jesus go, but Mark says that this was the holiday and on the holiday the Romans would traditionally let go one prisoner and the crowd kept calling for Barabbas

We want to release Barabbas, who Mark says was a notorious rebel, a rebel and murderer, right? And Pilate's like, no, no, let me let Jesus go, not this, this murderous rebel

And they're like, no, release Barabbas, release Barabbas

And so Pilate lets him go and then Jesus is crucified

And that's the story

When we look at the depiction of Pilate in non-biblical sources, Pilate is venal

Pilate does not care at all about Jewish sensibilities

Pilate goes out of his way to offend Jews, Pilate is awful

But when we look at the gospels, going from the earlier gospel like Mark up to John, Pilate looks better and better and better

I would date Pilate from the gospels because he seems like a perfectly decent guy who's simply backed into the corner by a bunch of evil Jewish leaders who want him to do away with Jesus

Now, there's no way this is historically true

So what does Barabbas translate as? Son of Rabbas

The word bar in Aramaic means son of, and abbas comes from abba, which means father

And here's the best bit

And according to the gospel of Matthew, Barabbas' first name was Jesus

Jesus Barabbas

Jesus, son of the father

Pilate says you can have Jesus Barabbas, a murderer, an insurrectionist, or you can have Jesus of Nazareth, the other Jesus, son of the father

The Jews are given a choice between two Jesuses, two saviors

One is the violent kind of savior, like the one who tried to overthrow the Romans in the rebellion of 66 CE

The other is a pacifist kind of savior who's never hurt anything

Which one will the Jews choose to punish? And what happens? The innocent Jesus pays the penalty, pays the ransom for the very guilty Barabbas, son of the father

In terms of Christian theology, it's perfect

In terms of history, it's ridiculous

Two identical saviors

One is going to be set free

One is going to pay the penalty

Now if you're a Jew living in the first century, this story might sound a little familiar

Well we know this story

This is in Leviticus

This is the whole ritual of Yom Kippur, which is the whole atonement ceremony

Yom Kippur is usually expressed in English as Day of Atonement

There are two great ceremonies in the Jewish calendar

One was Passover and the other was Yom Kippur

And this one, every year there would be this, you would have the two goats, the two identical goats

They have to be, you know, look the same

One you would cast the sins of Israel on and cast it into the crowd, release it into the wilderness

And the other you would sacrifice on the altar in the temple and its blood would atone for all the sins of Israel

The Barabbas story seems to be saying that the goat sacrifices, which had replaced human sacrifices in Judaism, are now being replaced once more with the ultimate human sacrifice

Mark is writing for one of Paul's communities, possibly in Rome

Originally it was written to symbolize the gospel

It wasn't written to be taken as literally true, at least not by informed insiders in the sect

The story, by the way, is where we get the term scapegoat

Forgive me, Lord, I have committed murder

That's a terrible sin

How do you push the goat off a cliff? Well, yes, Lord, I did

Well, we're all good then

See you next year

Now, most people who read the Barabbas story today probably aren't Jews, probably don't know their Leviticus very well

So the whole story about two identical goats goes right over their heads

And I think you can go from story to story through Mark and see, like, if you look at it as history, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense

But if you look at it as allegory, as something representing something else, then it makes perfect sense and looks literarily brilliant

Then towards the end of Mark's gospel, we find Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, where he's literally begging Yahweh not to let him be killed

They went to a place called Gethsemane

He began to be deeply distressed and troubled

He fell to the ground and prayed that if possible, the hour might pass from him

Father, take this cup from me, Mark 14, 32 to 42

It's a very moving story until you realize that Jesus is Yahweh

So this was his own plan all along

And he's literally begging himself not to kill himself, which is pretty confusing

In Mark, Jesus appears to be very human

He doesn't talk or act like a god in disguise

This might be an idea that Christians came up with later

Speaking of humans and parables, one of the stories that we don't find in Mark is the virgin birth

Mark starts his gospel and says the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God

And then he doesn't tell us a story about Jesus's birth, but instead narrates Jesus's baptism by John

And if you look carefully at this story with the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus like a dove and God saying, this is my beloved son, it sort of sounds like Mark is saying that this is when Jesus becomes the Son of God at his baptism

In ancient Rome, birds landing on things was read as a positive sign from the gods

The process of deciphering the movement of the birds was called taking the auspices, which literally translates as looking at birds

It's the basis, by the way, of the English word auspicious

Now the person who took the auspices was known as an augur, which is the basis of the name Augustus, the original Son of God

So again, many people living in the Roman Empire 1900 years ago, reading Mark would probably have understood the symbolism

So what you see in early Christian history is that the status of Jesus as Son of God keeps getting kicked back farther and farther

First it's the resurrection, then it's at his baptism, then it's at his birth, then he's always been there from the beginning of time

So it evolved, the idea that Jesus evolved over a century or so

Yes, definitely

And that's just for Paul's communities

The other factions, including the one of the original disciples, had different ideas altogether

In fact, as we'll see a little bit later on, at least one major early Christian faction didn't even believe Jesus was divine at all

One of the other surprising things that's missing from Mark's gospel is one of the most important ideas in all of Christianity, Jesus's resurrection appearances to his followers

It's so odd

The oldest gospel is Mark's gospel

Most scholars believe that, I believe that

And there are no appearances of the risen Jesus to his disciples

In fact, the gospel ends in a very dark and quite mysterious, enigmatic way, where this young man who just happens to be at the tomb says to the women, you know, go and tell the disciples and Peter what's happened to these women, and the women just run away and don't tell anyone for they're afraid, that's it

So I mean, if you believe Mark's gospel, no one ever found out about the resurrection because they didn't tell anybody

Including Mark, who couldn't have written it down because they didn't tell anyone

Yeah, it's extraordinary

At some point, a Christian scribe decided to write a new ending to Mark's gospel

He decided to sex it up a little bit

He retconned it, like George Lucas making Greedo shoot first

Have to wonder, why bother? Why not just leave the original ending as it was? What's happening, I think, is that the secret doctrines, some of the secret teachings are leaking out into the public teachings

The first rule about Jesus Club is you don't talk about Jesus Club

These particular doctrines became less important to keep secret, and so you see them leaking out over time

So you get, you know, the Nativity idea, or you get the magical incarnation idea

More of the secrets are being leaked out, and more attempt to try and prove points by creating stories that support your points

And so you get more miracle stories, you get more doctrinally relevant stuff

It really makes me wonder about the intentions of these early Christians

If the truth was so important to them, why bother rewriting the ending of the first gospel? And just like Paul, Mark is counting down

Mark's gospel believes, just like Paul does, that the end is absolutely imminent

So there is a line in Mark's gospel, some of those standing here, Jesus says, will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power

It's one of these interesting ironies of history that every time there's a delay in the eschaton coming, the faithful don't kind of give up on the idea

They become all the more eager in thinking that it's about to happen

The eschaton means the end times, the end of the world as we know it

Like a modern UFO cult

Yep

There are modern religious cults as well, I mean they do this all the time

When disappointment comes, they don't say, oh we must have been wrong

Or at least they don't say we must have been wrong in our fundamental identity

They just, we may have got the timetable a bit wrong

So you revise it, you change it

And the early Christians were no different from that

Those Christians who believe that the Bible is literally true must have a hard time explaining why the world hasn't ended yet

It's one of the things that I think many Christians across the centuries have really struggled with

The fact that Jesus appears to say that he is coming back within the lifetime of his followers

And that clearly didn't happen

It clearly didn't happen

You can spiritualise it, you can kind of try and find some sort of fine fancy way of saying in a very real sense spiritually he did come

But the fact is that he didn't return in the lifetime of his followers as he had said that he would

And this is something that has always been at the heart of some real anxiety in Christianity

It's almost like a kind of a trauma trying to come to terms with how can it be that Jesus said this when it didn't actually happen

Yeah definitely you can see a trajectory in the New Testament writings as you move from letters like Paul's, so the earliest writings we have, to writings composed in the first half of the second century where the apocalyptic expectations just continue to get sort of toned down and there becomes sort of an increasing recognition that Jesus is not coming back any time soon

Each generation of Christians was probably led to believe that it would happen in their time, just like still happens

And they may not even have noticed that there had been a delay

It's not like most people had copies of the Bible to read, so they only knew what they heard in church

Don't worry though, the end of the world is coming any day now

The next gospel to be written was Matthew, probably 10 or 20 years after Mark around 80 or 90 CE

So who was he? Gospel of Matthew is attributed to Matthew, one of the 12 disciples, but it's improbable that this was actually written by an eyewitness because Matthew's gospel is using as one of its major sources, Mark, and if Mark is not written by a disciple even, why would a disciple, an eyewitness to Jesus' ministry, use somebody else's second-hand reports? Why wouldn't they just tell their own story? So it does not seem that Matthew is actually written by an eyewitness

Also Matthew, again, is writing in Greek

Matthew is written, I think, by a Jewish Christian who, he kind of likes Mark's gospel, he copies whole passages verbatim, you know, so he clearly quite likes Mark's gospel, but I think he thinks Mark got some things wrong

For Mark, who's firmly in Paul's world of Christian Gentiles, Jesus doesn't appear to be very Jewish

Matthew, on the other hand, calls BS in all of that

In Matthew, Jesus is quite clear that he's only interested in the Jews

I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel

It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs

Matthew 15, 24 to 26

These 12 Jesus sent out with the following instructions, do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans, go rather to the lost sheep of Israel

Matthew 10, 5 to 6

Which makes Paul's claims that the ghost of Jesus told him to go and preach to the Gentiles pretty suspect

I mean, if that was Jesus' original intention, you think he would have told his apostles

So Matthew is engaged in this fascinating project of re-Judaizing Jesus, and quite interestingly, because Jesus was a Jew and because he was probably quite faithful to the law, Matthew in a way is also re-Jesusizing Mark's Gospel, he's actually bringing it a bit back around to what Jesus was probably more like, the historical Jesus that is

A Jew, preaching to Jews about being a good Jew

It is an irony of history that the most popular Gospel in Christian history far and away has been the Gospel of Matthew, and yet it presents the most Jewish of the four Gospels and probably would have been quite hostile to the kind of law-free Christianity that Paul is proposing

These two sources, Paul and the Gospel of Matthew, would definitely come into conflict over whether Gentile Christians should follow the law

Paul definitely says no they don't, Matthew says yes, absolutely they do

And it's one of the amazing things about Christianity is that most people just ignore that

Most people just ignore it

But it was a very important strand in early Christianity, an emerging Christianity that saw the Christian's duty as being not just to be loyal to Jesus, but also to be loyal to the Jewish law, and they were loyal to the law because they believed that's what Jesus had taught them to do

So Matthew's position is, if you're not going to temple, you're not circumcised and you're not eating kosher food, you're doing Jesus wrong? That's right, well at the very least they have to get a copy of the Talmud and start learning Hebrew

Wear a yarmulke

The Matthew Gospel is where some of those most famous and dubious Jesus stories first turn up

Remember how in Paul's day there seemed to be lots of factions telling different stories about Jesus? Matthew seems to have included stories he had heard that Mark either hadn't heard or just didn't like

Stories like the Sermon on the Mount, the resurrection appearances, and the massacre of the innocents, where Herod the Great, King of Judea, orders the execution of all male babies around Bethlehem

Historians by the way have found no other evidence of that ever happening

Matthew probably just made it up to sound like the similar story about Moses in the Old Testament

Matthew is also the first person to mention the virgin birth

So fully half a century appears before we ever get anyone writing about a virgin birth

The story of the virgin birth I think is baffling

You have in Matthew's Gospel this genealogy that connects Jesus right back to Abraham going through David

King David, the possibly mythical second king of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah, who supposedly killed a giant with a slingshot

All going through Joseph, Jesus' father

Then the very next story is about how Joseph isn't Jesus' father

I mean religious people are very good at getting their head around contradictions, but there's a big one right there on the very first page of the New Testament

It's fascinating

What did Matthew think he was doing? Why is he telling a story about a virginal conception when he also wants to tell us that Jesus was descended from David via his father? I don't know

I think it's a mystery

Did he just hope no one would notice? And so Jesus is the descendant of King David because Joseph is his father? But I thought Mary was a virgin

Yeah, look over there

It's the Messiah

Where? Oh no, it's just Larry

They got the same beard

Oh no, no, I lost my place

Hey, don't worry about it

Let's go get a kosher kebab

And the fact is, lots of people don't notice

Many Christians will happily affirm Jesus is the son of David

They will also affirm that Jesus was conceived by a virgin

Scholars believe that Matthew's idea of a virgin birth is possibly based on a bad translation of the Old Testament

See, in the Hebrew version of the prophet Isaiah, he predicts that a baby boy will be born as a sign that God is going to destroy his enemies

And the Hebrew word that Isaiah uses to describe the mother of the boy is Alma

Now Alma just translates as a childless young woman, but Matthew wasn't using the Hebrew version of Isaiah

He was using a Greek translation, which mistranslated Alma into virgin

Another unfortunate thing about Matthew's gospel is, despite it being fairly pro-Torah, it's also inspired 1900 years of anti-Semitism

In Matthew's gospel, you have this ideal of a kind of loyalty to Torah, loyalty to the synagogue, to all of these Jewish traditions, and yet also this bitter, bitter vitriol against fellow Jews

Now keep in mind that although Matthew is a Jew and he's writing for a community of Jewish Christians, they're an extremely fringe sect, kind of like the way that Catholics view Mormons today

And he's writing 10 or 20 years after this big Jewish-Roman war, so Jews are probably pretty unpopular across the empire

And the Jesus Jews want to distance themselves from the traditional Jews as much as possible for political reasons

And Matthew, just like Mark and Paul before him, believes that the end of the world is going to happen very soon

But keep in mind, by the time he's writing, most of those original disciples are probably dead

And yet there's still no sign of Jesus

According to most scholars, the next gospel to be written is Luke, written somewhere between 10 and 30 years after Matthew

Luke, by the way, also wrote the Acts of the Apostles, which is kind of a sequel to the gospels

Luke's writing, I think, this really big epic narrative

He wants to tell the story of Jesus and the story of the early church

Luke, according to tradition, was a traveling companion of Paul

He was a Gentile, a physician, a doctor in the ancient world

So he was definitely what we would call a second generation Christian

He says, this is the stuff that was handed on to us and written down by earlier generations

And I'm working with it myself

In reality, we know he's not using oral lore

We know he's using the previous books, Mark and Matthew

So yeah, so the traditional attributions are clearly late legend

And mainstream scholarship has long since realized that and gotten off that wagon

Acts of the Apostles, Luke's account of what happened after Jesus died, tries to whitewash all of this tension and conflict that obviously existed between Paul and the original Jesus game

Luke undoubtedly is trying to present an idealized account of the early Christian community

Certainly at the end of Acts chapter two, you've got everyone gathered around, the Apostles teaching, breaking bread, worshiping God, finding favor of God and all the people

So it's definitely an idealized account

All of the anger, tension and bribery that we see in Paul's letters either disappears in Luke or gets toned down

It's kind of like he's saying, oh, it was nowhere near as bad as you've probably heard

So I think he does try to paint generally a rosy picture of it, but it's certainly not a complete whitewash

He does include some instances of division and differences

And I mean, he does portray Paul as quite a hothead

By the time Luke's writing Acts towards the end of the first century, the Pauline community are trying to strengthen their credentials, trying to solidify their connection to the original founders, Peter and James, who are probably dead at this stage

Their community is pretty much wiped out and so they can't fight back

Winners get to write the history

All in all, Luke's not a very credible historical source

And Luke, just like Matthew, Mark and Paul before him, believes the end of the world is going to happen anytime soon

Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things are fulfilled

Luke 21, 32

The last of the four gospels to be written is John, probably written around a hundred or a hundred and ten CE compared to the other three

John is different

Think of it this way, the synoptic gospels

The gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke are called synoptic, which means they share a common vision of Jesus

New York, L

A

, Chicago

John is basically New Orleans, okay? He's just, he's doing something very different down there

With John, this whole thing is so obviously a literary creation

Jesus in the gospel of John does not sound like he does in the other gospels

And all the characters in John sound the same way

Like you're watching a Woody Allen movie, everybody's talking like Woody Allen

Because he wrote everybody's part

And so it's obvious this is not anybody's recollection

Instead of telling everyone to keep the stories about his miracles a big secret

He might as well have on a t-shirt, I am God written in big letters

And you have to wonder, well, didn't they have blasphemy laws then? Why wasn't he stoned to death five minutes out of the gate? The woman saith unto him, I know that Messiah cometh, he that is called Christ

When he is come, he will declare unto us all things

Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he

John 425

I am my father are one

John 1030

John's gospel contains no parables, no last supper, no sermon on the mount

But it's the only one with Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead

And it's the most anti-semitic of the gospels

As for the second coming, as far as John's concerned, it's happening right now

Why is John so different from the other three gospels? No one really knows

But if we look at Paul and the four gospels in chronological order, we can kind of see how the Jesus story evolved over time

In Paul, he doesn't do any miracles and becomes special after he died

In Mark, he becomes special when a bird lands on him, walks around being a secret miracle worker whose body disappears from a cave

Matthew and Luke make him the product of a divine pregnancy who comes back from the dead and in John, he's proudly out of the God closet

But if you think the variation in these stories is strange, why do you see the stories that didn't even make it into the Bible? So one of the things that many Christians don't know is that in addition to the four canonical gospels, there's a number of other early Christian gospels out there

Nael means approved by the Vatican

In the early centuries, there were some fairly significant Christian factions, the Ebionites, the Marcionites and the Gnostics, and they all had pretty different ideas about who Jesus was

Their gospels were all destroyed by imperial decree around 400 CE

However, one suspects that some monk in Upper Egypt decided, I can't do this to, you know, I've spent my entire life writing them out, for example, I can't do this to that

So I'm going to gather them up and put them away safely and say that they're destroyed, whatever

But the wonderful thing that happened in 1945 is there was the discovery of 12 codices, 12 ancient leather books found in a jar in Nag Hammadi in Egypt

Some of them, and the ones that I love the most, are infancy gospels

So stories about Jesus's birth and childhood

And one of the most interesting of these is a text that is generally known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas

And what this text seeks to do is say, what would Jesus have been like as a child if he's a divine being, which this text believes him to be, if he's a divine being from the beginning? He's got all this miraculous power

What does he actually, what does a kid like that look like? According to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, it's not a pretty picture

It's Jesus the Bart Simpson of the kind of the early Christian world

He's really a brat

One story in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas says that when Jesus was five years old, he was sitting by a pool of water making clay sparrows, which were coming to life

And when another kid came and messed with his pool of water, Jesus cursed him and he withered up and died

He's basically a little supervillain

Yeah, I'd say so because he essentially gets angry at a number of his playmates for different things and kills them

And so he kills one playmate, he kills another playmate, then the villagers start to complain to Mary and Joseph

What's Kid Jesus's response to all this? He makes his accusers go blind

Oh, what the? I can't see

Ron Burgundy says that escalated rather quickly

So it's a fascinating story

And yet, if we think that the story is saying, oh, Jesus had these sort of immature things that he had to work out of his system, I don't think that's what the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is saying

It's essentially saying that's who Jesus is

He's got all the power of God

And if people are jerks to him, he can strike them dead

This is how they viewed Jesus, weird and upsetting to us as it seems to be

And I love Joseph's instructions to Mary after all of this has happened

He takes Jesus, puts him in their house and tells Mary, don't let him outside because those who annoy him end up dead

Oh, you might think, well, that's an unbelievable story

No wonder it didn't end up in the Bible

But is it any crazier than stories about walking on water or turning water into wine or raising people from the dead or zapping demons into a herd of pigs? Why do we say these magic stories are crazy? But these other stories about magic, well, they're just fine and dandy

Back then, they were arguing over what Jesus was, who he was, what was his relationship to God, all the controversies about Christology

And this included, of course, whether Jesus was even a human being

Just a really interesting human being who somehow became possessed by God

Others thought he was an angel

Still others thought he was part of God

Still others thought he was just a good teacher

They didn't know

One of the really big early Christian factions, the Ebionites, might have closely resembled the original Christians, Team Peter

The Ebionites, again, that means the poor, they claimed to be the descendants of the Jerusalem Christians

Maybe they were

To be a true Christian, you had to obey the Jewish law

They seem to have denied the idea of the virgin birth

And they had a kind of gospel that sounds very much like a Jewish Christian gospel, maybe one of the earliest forms of the gospel

We have people who are following Jewish law, honoring the Sabbath on Saturday and keeping it holy, circumcising their kids and they're worshiping Jesus

The Ebionites declared Paul a heretic

On the other hand, another one of the major early factions, the Marcionites loved Paul but really hated Judaism

Marcion said that Jesus had come from a different God, not the Hebrew God, not the creator God, not the Torah giving God

The God of the Old Testament

So the God of the Old Testament was a wicked God who made the world

That's why the world was so messed up

The Gnostics claimed to have a special teaching from Jesus that only they knew about

Well the word Gnostic really means somebody who's claiming to have knowledge

But it's basically the idea that this world is bad and wicked and we have to get away from it

And getting a certain secret knowledge of the universe's origins and your own cosmic origins is how you get away from it all

So why didn't all of those gospels make it into the Bible? Well a common Christian view is that the ones that made it in were the real stories and the ones that didn't were just made up

Well when it comes to the stories of Jesus' birth and childhood, it's all made up

If you talk to most New Testament scholars about the infancy narratives, the Christmas story in Matthew's gospel and Luke's gospel, they'll say there's not much historical basis behind any of that

There's no census, there's no slaughter of the innocents by Herod, there's no Star of Bethlehem, no wise men

Jesus probably was not born in Bethlehem, he was probably born in Nazareth

Those stories are all propaganda that are designed on the one hand to present Jesus as a divine being from the moment of his birth and also to say he can fit the qualifications for Messiah because he's born in the city of David

Of course all of these factions believe that their version of Christianity was the correct one, just like they all do today

There are many different Christianities today, there were many different Christianities back then

Eventually Team Paul sold their soul to the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, who fought his way to power in the year 305 CE

According to his contemporary, Bishop Eusebius, the so-called Father of Church History, Jesus appeared to Constantine in a vision and said it'd help him defeat his rival for the throne in a bloody war

Hallelujah, Jesus is finally the warrior king Messiah that the Jews had been waiting for

According to Christian sources from the time, Jesus used his supernatural powers to help Constantine kill thousands of Roman citizens and consolidate his control over the empire

Winners are grinners and so because the A version of Christianity secures imperial support early in the 4th century, they're able to suppress their opponents ever more effectively

Orthodox Christianity and Orthodox Christianity became the official religion of the empire, they had official patronage, you then could use imperial power to put the thumbscrews down on any dissident Christian groups

The final selection of books that made it into the Bible wasn't actually decided upon until 400 CE

It seems like a number of competing Christian factions might have merged into some sort of megachurch

Each of these gospels has a faction behind it, there's a lot of people like they have their own favorite gospel, it's like everybody has their own favorite Harry Potter novel or whatever

And so if you want to win this battle for control of the church, you want as many people on your side to outnumber the other side, and the best way to do that is to pick gospels that had a lot of supporters behind them that were not too deviant

The other gospels were declared fake news

Christian does not enforce Christianity on everybody, Constantine allowed pagan temples to stand and pagans to worship and he let Jews be Jews

But he does favor just one Christian faction and tries to shut down all the rest

And this one faction has no hesitation at putting the head of the Roman Empire, the same Roman Empire that killed Jesus, Paul, Peter and James at the head of their church

And so Constantine, I think he treats Christianity as any emperor has treated any other religious kind of group by saying, well, I'm the head of religion, I am the Pontifex Maximus, so therefore I'm the head of this community

The bishop seemed to agree to that without much hesitation

Overnight, the persecuted become the persecutors and the first group that they persecute are other Christians who they now declare heretics

You're only a heretic if you lose the historical battle and it takes the church about three to four hundred years to figure out who's in and who's out

About 50 years after Constantine, another Roman emperor, Theodosius, drove the final nail into the cross and made Catholic Christianity the state religion of the empire

So not only are pre-existing varieties or versions of Christianity wiped out or put on a banned list, new dissident groups emerge and are dealt with, with this new kind of imperial authority

Temples were shut down

Pagan priests, if they wanted to keep their job, became Christian priests

Jews had their movements restricted, were not allowed to join certain guilds, had their synagogues burned down

And the empire becomes Christian and it remains Christian because of the force of the state and the force of the army

Was this a good thing or a bad thing? It was a thing and it's something we have to deal with

To put a modern perspective on it, imagine that the Scientologists were able to get Tom Cruz elected president of the world and he passed a law making Scientology mandatory

And that's what team Paul did around about 400 CE

The Roman Empire became a theocracy, not unlike the caliphate that ISIS has been trying to set up in the Middle East in the last few years

It's not that hard to be a successful religion when you're the only game in town and everything else is pretty much outlawed

So that's the story of how Christianity went from being irrelevant to inescapable

But in the words of a different god, wait, there's one more thing

You know it wasn't that long ago that most historians believed that the characters in the Old Testament like Abraham or Moses or figures from literary history like King Arthur were also based on real people

But today most historians think they are completely mythical

So what about Jesus? When I started as a historian and I was actually quite certain that Jesus existed as a historical person and I thought anyone who suggested otherwise was a crackpot

And what happened was the more I looked at the evidence, the worse it looked

The more you pull up the threads, the more it falls apart

And I started to realize by the end of it, it was like actually on balance of evidence it looks like it goes the other way

It just seems to me the weight of probability is that there was no Jesus

One thing that struck me is just the case for this figure is extremely poor

The main sources we have are the gospels

Over time we found even more reason to doubt the gospels

They're just really, really poor sources

They're not what we want

E

P

Sanders says that Jesus is better attested in history than Alexander the Great

When you actually compare the evidence for both of those figures, that's not even close to correct

And actually the evidence for Alexander the Great is way better than for Jesus

Obviously a lot of evidence gets lost or destroyed over the years, like the letters of Team Peter

So historians are trying to piece together what happened using sketchy evidence or evidence that's been corrupted, like Mark's gospel

And the trick to that is that you look at that body of evidence, you've got to look at it all

You can't leave anything out

You can't be weird and say, is that the evidence that should exist if this hypothesis existed? Is it what we expect? And that's what you look at

And you can measure that in the sense of your feeling of like, how expected is this evidence or how weird is this evidence given that hypothesis? And then you look at all of the theories and try and decide which one does the evidence support best? And if you're stuck in this situation where the evidence is equally expected on all your hypotheses, then you don't know

It could be any one of those hypotheses and we just kind of have to settle on, well, it's one of those

We don't know

So how does the evidence stack up with the theory that Jesus actually existed? I think on balance, he probably didn't exist

I think the hypothesis that he started out a revelatory being and became historicized later I think fits the evidence better

It makes the evidence more expected, especially a lot of the weird stuff

So in other words, Jesus appeared as some kind of an angel in visions to people like Paul, and then later on people decided that, well, he must have been real

But of course, this kind of a view is still a minority amongst scholars, but will it always be that way? We saw the same thing with the challenging of the historicity of Moses in the 70s

Everybody said that's fringe, that's crazy

Now it's the mainstream consensus, at least agnosticism about the historicity of Moses

And that took 20, 30 years

So I always tell people like, come back to me in 20 and 30 years, and then we'll see if that's still the situation or if it's changed since then

This kind of talk gets some people pretty, pretty cranky

Well, look, my blunt response to that, the whole Jesus mythicism thing, to be frank, I consider it mental masturbation for atheists

That's the best way I can describe it

It's the ultimate get off telling your arch enemy that their superhero didn't exist

It's with the joy of going up to some bratty kid you don't like and saying, hey, kid, guess what? There's no Santa Claus

Telling a little kid that Santa doesn't exist might be mean, but it's also true

Look, the fact is that the historical evidence that Jesus existed is pretty slim, to say the least

But the evidence that the stories about him were all over the place and kind of evolved over time is incredibly strong

Make from that what you will

So let's take a look at what our new updated Sunday school story looks like

Around 2000 years ago, the Romans decided that dead men could be gods and living men could be sons of gods

Meanwhile, in the backwaters of the Roman Empire, the Jewish people were waiting for their god Yahweh to send a warrior king they called the Messiah to kick out the Romans

But the Messiah was a no show

Eventually, several generations later, a small fringe Jewish sect said, this is our guy

Jesus Christ, which means savior, the savior, was a very Jewish Jew, but had two problems in his messianic resume

He had not defeated the Romans and he was already dead

A few years later, Paul, who had been busy beating up early Jesus worshipers, suddenly changed his mind and invented his own version of the Jesus set

He reinvented the Messiah to be a super powered celestial warrior king for non-Jews who could keep their foreskin and still get into heaven

The OG Christians weren't impressed

This is fake news

Paul didn't even know Jesus

This is a Jews only club, bubblah

According to Paul, Jesus spoke to him in visions and any day now, J

C

would come down to earth with supernatural powers to defeat the Romans and anyone else who didn't worship him

Unfortunately, Jesus didn't return within Paul's lifetime and despite writing lots of letters and his 30 years of missionary work, Paul never mentioned anything about Jesus' life, teachings or miracles

But the Jews did get their war against the Romans and got their butts badly kicked

No warrior or king messiah showed up and their temple was torn down

The original disciples of Jesus were all dead, leaving not a single written record of what they thought about Jesus or his teachings

After the war, one of Paul's community did document some stories about Jesus in which he appears as a human but with superpowers and a big secret, who begs Yahweh not to let him be killed but Yahweh ignored his prayers

Many other versions of the Jesus story were recorded over the next 100 years, none by actual eye witnesses or people who knew eye witnesses or people who knew people who, you get the idea

As time passed, these stories grew more far-fetched, suddenly including miracles like walking on water, the virgin birth, the resurrection of violent teenage Jesus and Jesus raising people from the dead

All these authors were still certain that the messiah would come to defeat their enemies within their lifetimes but he still didn't come

For 300 years various Jesus factions fought against the Romans, lions and amongst themselves about who Jesus was and how to worship him properly until one of these groups met with the Roman emperor and said, give us protection and tax breaks and we'll make you the head of our religion

That's enough, I can't refuse, said the emperor Constantine and within 100 years this group managed to take control of the entire empire

They burnt competing gospels, tore down temples, killed pagan philosophers and banned other religions including competing versions of the Jesus Club

And that, my friends, is the slightly more accurate story of the triumph of Christianity

Amen

Well isn't that a far more interesting story and it's also one that's supported by historical evidence and biblical scholars

So what does the next century hold for Christianity? Peace and love or another theocracy? I guess only time's going to tell

Unless of course Jesus does come back soon, which I've been told with very good authority should be happening any minute now

Amen

Six feet two, eyes of blue, Jesus Christ he was a Jew, has anybody seen my Lord? Big hook nose, there he goes, preaching so that everyone knows, has anybody seen my Lord? Spirit in the abdomen, by a Roman, blood gushing out, a rose in the dead, so it is said, people believe without a doubt, Jesus died, still a Jew, still a Jew, so why had you? Has anybody seen my, has anybody seen my Lord? Spirit in the abdomen, by a Roman, blood gushing out, a rose in the dead, so it is said, people believe without a doubt, Jesus died, still a Jew, still a Jew, so why had you? Has anybody seen my, has anybody seen my Lord?

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