Marketing the Messiah | Christianity | Documentary | Bible | Jesus | Faith | New Testament | God

[Music] rawr if you're one of the world's 2.2 billion christians wow that's a lot of people you probably think that around 2000 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 five 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 [Music] 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 that was happening at the beginning of the 20th century a german scholar walter bower came to the conclusion that in fact that picture is a very manufactured one and it's 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 can i tell you a few good cracking sunday school stories and then afterwards you can get down with worshipping me um that that may be the the basic view but that's 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 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 the sort of greatest hits or you know the most uplifting most you know 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 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 [Music] that's augustus caesar if you ask most people living in the roman empire right 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 jc 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 dear we filius the son of the deified it was new to to rome because it was augustus himself who saw uh what he thought was the soul of 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 um a divinity another title bestowed upon augustus was savior because he ended a hundred years of civil war he bought 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 2 000 years scholars still can't agree on exactly who jesus was one thing they all do agree on though jesus was a jew [Music] 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's torah observant peter is tor 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's 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 a.d 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 favorite 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 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 but how [Music] 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 raiders of the lost ark for instance where the fire comes down and burns up all the nazis you know that's that's probably the view that a decent number of jews Had now some jews living in the first century believed that god was going to send someone to save them they call that person the messiah [Music]

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 uh 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 uh 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 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 the 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 the 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 being 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 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 you know here's an interesting thing about jesus's name in hebrew his name was yeshua which basically translates as god saves or savior and 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 uh if you just get executed as a 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 [Music] 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 what is that so you want to

be a messiah well the messiah actually okay did you kick the romans out of judea well no not yet but they uh have you converted the world to judaism no i'm planning on it but you know did you bring about world peace in your lifetime well not yet at all but Going by 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

i've got an idea what if we market it to gentiles [Applause] so what you see in early christian Writings uh 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 early 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 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 a 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 haven't eaten the magical piece of fruit now most romans 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 centuries 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 that Makes everything else pale into insignificance okay 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 in 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 super powers but not many jews bought into the whole super-powered 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 [Music] the original sect

just wasn't hitting the right market essentially and paul figured this out Consciously or unconsciously uh 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 way more gentiles than jews way more gentiles who are 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 our penis up anymore 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 rumors that

you've been making up some focaccia 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 oh and gentiles don't need to become jews anymore whoa are you crazy this is a jews only club bubbler anyone who wants to get in needs to lose the end of his fans Not negotiable you schmuck peter bobby the gentiles really like their foreskin let them keep it oh vey the hot spot on the schmendrick listen up

butts you know bubkus we were his best friends james is his brother if he wanted to let the guy him 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 mazeldov i think a lot of jesus's 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 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 bitters right every bit as much of a right to be called an apostle as you all 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 their 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 opposed 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 and taking it all Down that's that's the best way to imagine paul you know creating galatians led to the galatians and at the same time but a lot of affection and love and care as well so i made 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 seem to be a number of different factions emerging and just like today they all claim to be the one true movement so we have example of uh in first corinthians paul is trying to respond to uh a letter that the corinthians wrote him saying hey this other apostle apollos um came by and taught us all this other new Weird stuff what's it seems to contradict yours what's what are we supposed to make of this but you'd 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 cojones on the sky we know that in the first century there were a whole range of divergent Jewish sex 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 uh 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 are 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 5 12. 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 uh are basically descendants of paul's version of christianity and that was just one sec now paul's not going after the well-educated the gentiles or the the rich and the famous paul's going to take

it down market it becomes a religion for the the poor and the downtrodden and the Oppressed and the underprivileged who can all find in this a sense of a better tomorrow the graco 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 jesus did healings it's absurd now one of the explanations for this might be that paul's letter's 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 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 to the married i give this command not i but the lord a wife must not separate from her Husband first corinthians 7 10 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 to sick with this 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 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 first 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 well he says oh geez right about the resurrection uh you see yeah some are gonna die but uh but christ will come back and the the dead in christ will rise first uh we'll have the we'll be second In line will be transformed paul was clearly wrong the 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 there lord could you just repeat that last bit i'm not sure i heard you correctly the words going on 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 of 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 uh or not the vast vast majority of scholars who

say no looks pretty clear from from jesus's teachings as preserved in the gospels that he really does expect the end to come in his lifetime so um 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 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 gonna do with it which is he says taking it back to the saints in jerusalem you know the holy ones in jerusalem uh 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 it's 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 uh 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 really 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 [Music] 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 illicit of the gospels is probably the gospel of mark which seems to be Written about 70 a.d 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 uh who 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 2nd 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 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's written after the fall of the temple in a.d 70. the romans had just come in and destroyed the temple just ended the cult basically raised the city 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 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 bapkus oh yeah sure there are letters in the New testament that claimed 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's 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 uh that 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 poor line 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 mouth 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 it just blows my mind and that's in mark 4 11 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 parable so that they may be ever seen but never Perceiving and ever hearing but never understanding otherwise they might turn and be forgiven mark 4 11 they can't handle the truth what kind of messiah tells his disciples to keep his work a 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 he was 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 well That's because he told us not to tell anyone right exactly maybe this story about parables is also a parable you you go through the gospel story after story after story and they look like parables that has you know additional meanings like they might not be meant to be taken historically true uh 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 uh pontius pilate wants to let jesus go uh but mark says that this was the holiday and on the holiday the romans would Traditionally let go one prisoner uh and the crowd kept calling for barabbas we want to release barabbas whom mark says

was a notorious rebel a rebel and murderer right and pilots like no no let me let jesus go and not this this murders rebel and no there's no let 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 he i would date pilate from the gospels because he seems like a perfectly decent Guy who 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 he is the best bit and according to The gospel of matthew barabbas's first name was jesus jesus barabbas jesus son

of the father pilate says you can have jesus barabbas a murderer and insurrectionist or you can have jesus of nazareth the other jesus son of the father the jews are given a choice between two jesus's 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 were 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 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 this story by the way is where we get the term scapegoat forgive me lord i have committed murder that's a terrible sin have you pushed a goat well yes lord i did [Music] now most people who read the barabba 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 as something representing something else then it makes perfect sense and looks Literally 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 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 auger 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 is 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 of 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 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 right couldn't have written it down because 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 i 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 uh you know this the nativity idea or you get the you know 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 uh 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 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 yeah so 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 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 spiritualize 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 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 you

know 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 anytime 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 [Music] 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 Twelve disciples but it's 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 event why would a disciple an eyewitness to jesus's ministry use somebody else's second-hand reports why wouldn't they just tell their own Story so so it does not

seem that matthew is actually written by an eyewitness and 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 and 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 24-26 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 5-6 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's original Intention he think he would have told his apostles so matthew

was 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 went away is also re-jesusizing mark's gospel is actually bringing it a bit back around to what jesus was probably more like the Historical jesus that is a jew yeah preaching to jews about being a good jew right 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 uh you know

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 uh 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 in emerging christianity that saw the christians duty as being not just

to be loyal to jesus but also to be loyal to the jewish law and they and they were loyal to the law because they believe 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 They have to get well at the very least they have to get a copy of the talmud and start learning hebrew where yamako yep 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 i think is 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's 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 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 riding 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 riding Most of those original disciples are probably dead and yet there's still no sign of jesus [Music] 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 you know really big epic narrative he wants to tell the story of jesus and the story

of the early church luke uh according to tradition uh was a traveling companion of paul he was a gentile a physician you know a doctor in the ancient world so he was definitely a what we would call a second generation christian he says this is the stuff that was handed on to us Uh and written down by earlier generations and i'm you know working with it myself in reality we know he's not using oral lore we know he's using the previous books uh 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 gang luke undeadly is trying to present an idealized account of the early christian community certainly at the end of acts chapter 2 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 he i think he does try to paint generally a rosy picture of it but it's it's certainly Not a complete whitewash he does include some instant instances of division and differences and i mean he does portray paul as quite a hot head by the time luke's writing acts towards the end of the first century the poor line 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 [Music] the last of the four gospels to be written is john probably

written around 100 or 110 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 Uh new york la 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 in it because he wrote Everybody's part and and so uh you've 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 has

come he will declare unto us all things jesus saith unto her i that speak unto thee am he john 4 25 i am my father are one john 10 30. 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 are strange why do you see the stories that didn't

Even make it into the bible [Music] 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 canonical means approved by the vatican in the early centuries there were some fairly significant christian Factions the ebionites the martianites 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 i can't do this to you know

i've i've spent my entire life riding 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 nagamadi 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 super villain 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 [Music] this ron burgundy says that escalated rather quickly uh so it's it's a it's a fascinating story and yet if we think that the story is saying oh jesus had these sort of you know 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 you know he can strike them dead this is how they viewed jesus weird and

upsetting to us as it seems to be and i love 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 ebianites again that means the poor they claim to be the descendants of the jerusalem christians maybe they were to be a true christian you had to Obey the jewish law they seemed 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 may be 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 their worshiping jesus

the ebionites declared paul A heretic on the other hand another one of the major early factions the martianites loved paul but really hated judaism marcion said that 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 was a a wicked god who made the world i mean 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 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 with the real stories and the ones that didn't were just made up well when it comes to the stories of jesus's

birth and childhood it's all made up if you talk to uh 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 innocence 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 [Music] 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 he'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 the a version of christianity secures imperial support early in the fourth century they're able to suppress their opponents ever more effectively once christianity um and you know orthodox christian became the official religion of the empire they had official patronage um

yeah You then could use imperial power to put the thumb screws 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 mega church 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 constantine does not enforce Christianity on everybody constantine allowed pagan temples to stand in 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'm the i am the pontifex maximus so therefore i'm the head of this community um the bishop seemed to agree to that without much hesitation overnight the persecuted become the persecute tours 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 cruise 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 [Music] you know it wasn't that long ago that most historians believe 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 well 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 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 um when you 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 gotta look at it all you Can't leave anything out even stuff that's weird and say is that the evidence that should exist if this hypothesis existed is it what we expect uh and

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 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 right 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 uh and that took you know 20 30 years so you know i 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 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 [Music] so let's take a look at what our new updated sunday school story looks like around 2000 years ago the romans decided the 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 sex said this is our guy jesus christ which means saving 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 sect 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 bubbler According to paul jesus spoke to him in visions and any day now jc 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 in his 30 years of missionary work paul never mentioned anything about jesus's life teachings or miracles but the jews did get their war against The romans and got their butts badly kicked no warrior 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 eyewitnesses or people who knew eyewitnesses or people or new 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 lines 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 refuse said the emperor constantine and within a hundred 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 is 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 [Music] so [Music] so [Music] six feet two eyes of blue Jesus christ he wasn't you has anybody seen my lord big hook knows there he goes preaching so that everyone knows has anybody seen my lord speared in the abdomen by a roman blood gushing out roasting the dead so it is said people believe without a doubt jesus died still a jew still

a jew so why aren't you has anybody seen my has anybody seen my has anybody seen my lord [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music]