What if strength training wasn’t simply about building muscle?
What if stepping beneath a barbell could become an act of devotion?
In this episode, I sit down with Awen of Primal Druidry, whose approach to physical training challenges many of our modern assumptions about both fitness and spirituality.
For her, the gym isn’t merely a place to improve health or appearance. It becomes sacred space—a place where discipline becomes ritual, physical hardship becomes offering, and strength training becomes a way of cultivating relationship with the divine.
Throughout our conversation, we explore questions like:
What is Primal Druidry, and what makes it a living tradition rather than an attempt to recreate the ancient past?
Why has strength training become such a central part of her spiritual practice?
What changes when exercise becomes ritual instead of self-improvement?
How does physical discipline shape character, devotion, and spiritual life?
What does she mean when she describes receiving guidance through training?
How do we think carefully about deeply personal spiritual experiences without dismissing them…or accepting them uncritically?
One aspect of our discussion that I found especially compelling is the challenge it poses to a very modern assumption: that the body is simply a vehicle for the mind. Throughout history, many religious and philosophical traditions have understood bodily practices (whether fasting, pilgrimage, martial arts, dance, or manual labor) as capable of shaping the soul.
This conversation asks whether lifting weights might belong in that lineage.
Even if you don’t share her theology or spiritual framework, I think the deeper questions are worth exploring.
Can repeated physical practice become a form of prayer?
Can discipline become devotion?
Can the body become a place where meaning is discovered rather than simply performed?
Those are the questions at the heart of this conversation.
As always, the goal isn’t to tell you what to believe. It’s to explore ideas with curiosity, ask better questions, and think more deeply about the relationship between body, mind, and the search for the sacred.
Thank you for taking the time to listen/watch, comment and share. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Hey Hey, Welcome back to Taste0ftruth Tuesdays. In today’s episode we are sitting down with Tina K. of The Rune Shack to explore runes, esotericism, and Norse-Germanic spirituality, alongside my own path through New Age spirituality, Christianity, and deconstruction.
For years, I was searching.
I wandered through wellness culture, festival communities, New Age spirituality, psychedelic conversations, evangelical Christianity, and eventually the long road of deconstruction. Every step taught me something. Every community offered language for experiences that often felt deeply meaningful.
But over time, I began to wonder:
How do we know when spirituality is making us more grounded—and when it is simply helping us escape reality?
Modern spirituality often promises awakening, healing, manifestation, higher consciousness, hidden knowledge, or secret wisdom. Sometimes those ideas genuinely encourage reflection and personal growth. Other times, they can become substitutes for the harder work of living honestly, accepting limits, grieving loss, cultivating discipline, and remaining accountable to reality and to other people.
This conversation isn’t a rejection of mystery. Far from it.
I believe human beings need myth, ritual, symbol, beauty, and experiences that remind us life is deeper than material reductionism alone can explain.
The challenge for me has been learning to distinguish between mystery and manipulation.
That distinction is one reason I wanted to invite Tina K. from The Rune Shack onto the podcast. Rather than centering on a single article, this conversation explores a broader landscape of ideas:
What is heathen spirituality?
What are runes beyond their popular image?
What does esotericism actually mean?
Why can spiritual authority become dangerous?
What makes New Age spirituality appealing and where can it become escapist?
Why do so many modern spiritual movements continue to reinterpret Jesus through ideas like the cosmic Christ or Christ consciousness?
And perhaps the deepest question of all:
What does real spirituality actually require?
I don’t approach these questions as someone who has everything figured out.
I ask them as someone who has lived inside several different spiritual worlds and has become increasingly interested in discernment rather than certainty.
My hope is to encourage more thoughtful questions about the stories we inherit, the authorities we trust, and the practices that shape our lives.
I hope you’ll join us for the conversation. Please let me know your thoughts.
Jesus, Scripture, and the Mythmaking Machinery of the Abrahamic World
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One of the most successful ideas in modern spirituality is the belief that Jesus represented a radical break from the religious world that produced him.
The problem is not merely that modern people have misunderstood Jesus. It is that the Gospel texts themselves are capable of generating multiple, even contradictory versions of him: compassionate teacher, apocalyptic judge, mystic, revolutionary, cosmic redeemer. That textual instability is one reason Christianity has proven so endlessly adaptable. Readers can extract the Jesus they want and then present that selection as the essence.
Whether presented as an enlightened teacher, a cosmic Christ, a universal sage, or simply a wise moral reformer, Jesus is often portrayed as transcending the tribalism, judgment, and exclusivity associated with the covenantal and apocalyptic world of the Hebrew scriptures. In popular imagination, he stands opposed to the harshness of the Old Testament: a teacher of love replacing a god of wrath, compassion overcoming law, and universal brotherhood replacing ancient tribal loyalties.
Later philosophical and spiritual movements took that elasticity and pushed it even further. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century currents such as Theosophy, New Thought, Western esotericism, and Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual reinterpretations recast Christ as a universal principle rather than a figure embedded in a specifically Jewish apocalyptic and covenantal world. “Christ” becomes less a messianic title rooted in Jewish expectation and more a symbol of inner divinity, cosmic consciousness, or spiritual evolution.
I reject that rescue attempt entirely. The modern “cosmic Christ” is not a recovery of some hidden essence. It is one more extraction from a set of texts already structurally open to reinterpretation. The same flexibility that allows one reader to find a gentle moral teacher allows another to find a figure of judgment, exclusion, and cosmic authority.
And that harsher figure is not hidden in some obscure corner of the tradition. Jesus speaks of judgment. He divides humanity into the saved and the condemned. He warns of outer darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth, eternal punishment, and destruction for those who reject his message. Paul speaks of everlasting destruction. Revelation culminates in divine wrath, cosmic warfare, and the final defeat of God’s enemies.
This is not a departure from the older scriptural framework. It is its expansion.
What if the New Testament did not abandon the worldview of the Hebrew scriptures, but carried its deepest assumptions forward in universalized form?
That is the argument I want to follow here. The New Testament did not discard the basic structure of the Hebrew scriptures. It expanded it. Covenant became salvation history. Chosenness became a global saved-versus-condemned framework. Messianic expectation became cosmic kingship. Scripture became biography. On this reading, Christianity was not a liberation from the older framework, but its Gentile-facing sequel.
Representative examples of New Testament passages in which Jesus is portrayed not only as a moral teacher, but as a figure of exclusive authority, judgment, division, and ultimate rule.
Research from the Copenhagen School, along with scholars such as Russell Gmirkin, Jan Assmann, Yonatan Adler, and Thomas Thompson, has challenged assumptions many of us once took for granted. Their work points toward a far more dynamic process of literary construction, cultural memory, reinterpretation, and retrospective claims to antiquity behind the Hebrew scriptures. Some of that scholarship presses the issue further still, raising the unsettling possibility that Jesus himself may belong in the same larger scriptural problem-set as other biblical figures whose historicity has been asserted far more confidently than it has been demonstrated.
In previous episodes of my Jesus Myth series, I argued that the Gospels should not be treated as straightforward eyewitness biographies. Archaeology can illuminate the world of first-century Judea, but it does not confirm the Jesus of the Gospels. Paul’s letters give us a cosmic, scriptural Christ rather than a detailed memory of a recent Galilean teacher. The early Christian movement appears fragmented from the beginning, with competing visions of Christ long before later orthodoxy cleaned up the story.
This essay begins where that argument left off.
If the Gospels are not simple biography, then what are they? And if the Jesus figure is shaped so deeply by earlier scripture, then an even more unsettling question follows:
What kind of scripture was doing the shaping?
Because once we begin examining the New Testament closely, an extraordinary pattern emerges. The Jesus of the Gospels does not merely quote scripture. He is a product of it. The story begins to look less like the fulfillment of ancient history than the continuation of an ongoing literary tradition.
And if that scriptural world could generate covenant, chosenness, law, and sacred history, the possibility that it could also generate a messiah is no longer so easy to dismiss.
God giving the Tablets of the Law to Moses, from a manuscript attributed to Chrétien Legouais, 1325 CE. Image source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque municipal de Rouen.
Not Influence but Scaffolding
The claim that the Gospel writers drew from Jewish scripture is not controversial. Virtually every New Testament scholar acknowledges that the evangelists quoted, interpreted, and reworked earlier biblical texts. The real question is what kind of borrowing we are dealing with.
Some modern writers argue that the Gospels are fundamentally Greek in character, shaped by Hellenistic literary conventions such as heroic archetypes, divine signs, dramatic climaxes, and narrative form recognizable to a Greek-speaking audience. There is truth in that observation. The Gospels were written in Greek, circulated in a Hellenistic world, and emerged from a culture saturated with literary adaptation and symbolic storytelling. But that framing can miss something more concrete. The density of engagement with Jewish scripture in the Gospels is not merely thematic or stylistic. It is textual, structural, and relentless.
Dozens of explicit citations appear across the texts. Beneath them lies a much larger web of allusions, echoes, narrative patterns, and character templates drawn from the Hebrew Bible. Counted conservatively, these parallels number in the dozens. Traced more fully, they run into the hundreds. Entire scenes are shaped by earlier passages. Entire narrative arcs follow scriptural precedent. By comparison, proposed parallels to Greek myth or pagan figures are usually broader, more conceptual, and far less anchored in specific texts. My aim is not to deny Greco-Roman influence, but to put it in proportion. The Gospels may speak Greek, but they think in Hebrew scripture.
This framing is not idiosyncratic; volumes such as Is This Not the Carpenter? place the question of Jesus’ historicity alongside Paul, intertextuality, and the “rewritten Bible,” showing how difficult it is to separate later “biography” from scriptural rewriting and theological construction.
One example of that scriptural-political matrix appears in the star and scepter imagery attached to messianic expectation.
Star, Scepter, and Political Theology
Long before Christianity, certain biblical oracles had already been charged with political and eschatological force. Numbers 24:17, “a star shall come out of Jacob, a scepter shall rise out of Israel,” was read in the Dead Sea Scrolls as prophecy of a coming Davidic ruler. Matthew places a star over Bethlehem. Revelation has Jesus call himself the bright Morning Star. This imagery stood at the crossroads of Jewish expectation and the wider symbolic world of antiquity, where heavenly signs marked kingship, divine favor, and world-changing rule. Early Christians did not invent that language. They seized it and redirected it toward Jesus.
Matthew tells us that the holy family’s return from Egypt fulfills Hosea’s words, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” In its original context, Hosea was speaking about Israel, not a future messiah. The passage is not simply cited. It is repurposed. And that pattern repeats across the Gospels.
The crucifixion sharpens the problem because it is often treated as the most historically secure element of the Gospel tradition. Yet when we look closely, the scene does not read like a bare report of an execution. It reads like a carefully arranged scriptural drama. Psalm 22 is especially central. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” appears in the Gospels as Jesus’ cry from the cross. The mocked sufferer, the taunts of the crowd, and the casting of lots for garments all appear in the passion narrative. Isaiah 53 adds the rejected and afflicted servant who is silent before his accusers and numbered among transgressors. Psalm 69 contributes the sour wine. Zechariah supplies the struck shepherd and pierced figure. Even the Wisdom of Solomon describes a righteous man mocked for calling God his father and condemned to a shameful death. Taken one by one, these parallels can be treated as interpretation. Taken together, they stop looking incidental and start looking compositional.
At minimum, the evangelists are constructing the meaning of Jesus’ death through inherited texts. At maximum, some of the scene’s most memorable details may have been generated by those texts.
The same dynamic extends beyond individual scenes into the wider narrative structure. Joseph is betrayed by his brothers, sold for silver, stripped, cast into a pit, and later exalted. Jesus is betrayed by Judas, sold for silver, stripped, entombed, and exalted. Jonah spends three days in the belly of the fish; Jesus predicts three days in the heart of the earth. Moses escapes a ruler bent on killing Hebrew infants, emerges from exile, ascends a mountain, and mediates a covenant. Jesus follows the same symbolic arc: threatened by a murderous ruler, called out of Egypt, tested in the wilderness, teaching from a mountain, and inaugurating a renewed covenant. This is not random resemblance. It reflects a world in which earlier stories functioned as templates.
Ancient Jewish authors did not treat scripture as a static archive of facts. They treated it as a living body of tradition that could be revisited, reinterpreted, and applied to new circumstances.
One key technique is typology recognized recurring patterns across time: Moses could become a template for a future deliverer, and Israel’s exile could foreshadow restoration. Midrash explored hidden meanings, tensions, and new applications within older texts. Pesher, attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, treated scripture as containing encoded meanings that spoke directly to the interpreter’s own time.
By the time we arrive at early Christianity, scripture is no longer functioning merely as a record of the past. It is functioning as a codebook. The first Christians did not read the Hebrew scriptures as neutral background material for a life that had already happened. They searched them for hidden patterns, veiled prophecies, typological correspondences, and Spirit-guided meanings. A passage did not have to be about Jesus in its original context in order to become about Jesus through inspired interpretation. Israel could become Jesus. The suffering righteous man could become Jesus. The rejected servant could become Jesus. A sign given to an ancient king could become Jesus. The text became a map, and Christ was the figure readers were trained to find within it.
That is crucial because it shows how scripture was actually being used. Early Jewish readers were not passively receiving texts as fixed records of the past. They were searching them, recombining them, and uncovering patterns that could be applied to their own historical moment. As Richard Carrier and others have noted, this kind of scriptural decoding was not marginal. It was widespread. The New Testament writers emerged directly out of this world. They were Jews steeped in a tradition where scripture was not treated as a flat archive of past events, but as a living body of meaning to be searched, reread, and reapplied. When early Christians portrayed Jesus, they were not simply recording a life in the modern biographical sense. They were rereading the Hebrew scriptures to interpret his life, death, mission, and cosmic significance. That is why so much of the Gospel narrative appears to fulfill older texts. The authors were not recording events and then attaching verses afterward. They were crafting a theological portrait through inherited techniques of scriptural interpretation.
This is visible even in the words attributed to Jesus. What later readers encounter as the “red-letter” sayings are not free-floating teachings dropped into history untouched by tradition. They are deeply embedded in a scriptural world. When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus answers by quoting Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19. His warning that “the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” comes from Psalm 118. Even his cry from the cross is lifted from Psalm 22. He does not stand outside the tradition commenting on it from a distance. He speaks from within it.
Once the literary architecture of the Gospels becomes visible, a more difficult question comes into focus. Are the evangelists taking a real remembered life and interpreting it through scripture, or are they using scripture itself to shape the narrative they present? Those are not small variations of the same idea. They are rival explanations. One begins with a historical figure and treats scriptural patterning as interpretation. The other begins with a scriptural tradition and understands the figure as emerging from it. The more densely these patterns appear, the harder it becomes to maintain a clear boundary between the person being described and the literary tradition doing the describing.
The Foundation Is Younger Than It Appears
Most readers imagine the Hebrew scriptures as ancient deposits of sacred memory stretching deep into the past. Moses belongs to remote antiquity. The prophets stand centuries before Jesus. The New Testament then appears as the culmination of an immense and venerable arc.
But that inherited picture is much shakier than people like to admit.
Biblical minimalists associated with the Copenhagen School, including Thomas L. Thompson, Niels Peter Lemche, and Philip Davies, challenged the assumption that the Hebrew Bible gives us transparent access to early Israelite history. Their argument was not that nothing existed before the texts, but that the biblical story of Israel may be less a record of national origins than a later literary construction of those origins.
Elephantine Temple reconstruction petition, 5th century BCE. The Elephantine papyri preserve evidence of a Jewish/Judean military community in southern Egypt that worshiped Yahweh and maintained a temple outside Jerusalem — a striking challenge to the assumption that Torah-centered Judaism was already universally organized around Jerusalem by this period.
The Elephantine Problem
The Elephantine papyri make that problem hard to ignore. In the fifth century BCE, a Jewish/Judean military community in southern Egypt worshiped Yahweh, maintained its own temple, practiced sacrifice, and remained in contact with Jerusalem. Yet this community does not clearly reflect the fully formed Torah-centered Judaism later projected backward into Israel’s past. There is no obvious evidence of an exclusive Jerusalem cult, a centralized Pentateuchal legal order, or the religious system later treated as ancient and universal. That does not prove no Pentateuchal traditions existed in any form, but it does make the traditional timeline look far less secure.
Archaeology adds more pressure. The patriarchal age, the Exodus, the conquest, and the grandeur of the united monarchy have all been heavily challenged. Egyptian records do not confirm the biblical Exodus. Archaeology has not vindicated the conquest of Jericho in the form the Bible presents it. Even early Israelite religion appears messier than later monotheistic memory allows, with inscriptions invoking Yahweh alongside Asherah. The issue is not merely that the Bible contains embellishment. The issue is that some of its foundational stories may be retrospective national myths written as ancient history.
Plato, Moses, and the Making of Sacred Antiquity
This is where Russell Gmirkin pushes the argument further. He argues that the Pentateuch reached final form around 273–272 BCE, in the Alexandrian and Ptolemaic world of the third century BCE, close to the Septuagint project and the intellectual culture of the Great Library. On this model, the Torah was not merely translated into Greek at Alexandria. It may have been composed or finalized there.
Gmirkin’s argument is controversial, but it is not random. He points to literary dependence: Genesis 1–11 drawing on Berossus’ Babylonian history, Exodus engaging Manetho’s Egyptian history, and the Torah’s legal materials reflecting Greek, especially Platonic, models of law, constitution, and national foundation. Philippe Wajdenbaum develops a similar comparison, arguing that the Hebrew Bible resembles Greek literature, especially Plato’s Laws, in its construction of a people around a lawgiver, sacred land, twelve tribes, and a divinely authorized legal order.
This changes the way Moses looks. In Gmirkin’s reading, Moses is not simply a prophet. He resembles an oikist, a founder figure: the one who organizes a people, distributes land, establishes institutions, and anchors political order in a sacred origin story. The Torah, in turn, begins to look less like a loose bundle of ancient laws and more like a charter myth. It tells a people who they are, where they came from, why their laws are sacred, and why obedience to that order is obedience to God.
That is where the real trick lies. Once law is placed in the mouth of Moses and projected backward into sacred antiquity, it stops looking like legislation and begins to look like revelation.
This also helps explain later apologetic reversals. By the time we reach writers such as Philo and Josephus, the direction of influence has been flipped. Greek thinkers are now said to have borrowed from Moses, not the other way around. The issue was never merely content. It was priority. The Bible’s authority depended not only on what it said, but on when people believed it had been said. The Letter of Aristeas belongs to the same machinery of sacred self-presentation: Jewish antiquity staged for the Greek world as though ancient wisdom were simply being translated, rather than emerging from a competitive Hellenistic culture of literary production and historical self-invention.
Yonatan Adler adds one final complication. The question is not only when these texts were written, but when they became socially real. Adler argues that widespread Torah observance becomes clearly visible much later than tradition claims, especially in the Hasmonean period. A text can exist before it rules. A law can be written before it governs a people.
The implications of that compressed timeline are enormous.
The implications are enormous. If the Pentateuch reached final form around 273–272 BCE, and the Gospels were written between roughly 70 and 100 CE, then the scriptures supposedly being “fulfilled” by the Gospel writers may be only three or four centuries older than the Gospels themselves.
That does not make the connection less Jewish. It makes it look less like the unfolding of immemorial revelation and more like literary tradition building on literary tradition.
And once that compressed timeline is taken seriously, the next question is no longer simply how old the tradition was supposed to be. It is how sacred antiquity itself was made.
The Library of Alexandria in Egypt: the intellectual crossroads of the Hellenistic world, where texts were collected, translated, and rewritten. Building on comparative studies and source criticism, Russell Gmirkin argues that the Pentateuch may have taken shape in this environment in the third century BCE, drawing on Greek histories, legal traditions, and philosophical works.
From Failed Kingdom to Spiritual Messiah
This is the missing hinge. Jewish messianic hope did not arise in a vacuum. It was forged in the long shadow of conquest, exile, humiliation, and imperial domination. From Assyria and Babylon to the Greeks and Romans, Jewish life was repeatedly shaped by foreign rule. It is not difficult to see why restoration, divine justice, and the dream of an anointed deliverer became so central. A people under pressure will search its own sacred memory for the pattern of rescue.
By the first century, that hope had become unstable. Second Temple Judaism was not a unified religion serenely awaiting fulfillment. It was a fractured landscape of rival sects, competing scriptural interpretations, anti-Temple resentment, apocalyptic expectation, and bitter disagreement about where Israel had gone wrong. Some blamed foreign occupation on sin. Some blamed corrupt elites. Some rejected the legitimacy of the Temple leadership altogether. In that environment, scripture was not merely read. It was mined for survival strategies.
This is where Carrier’s point becomes useful. As he writes, “The traditional messianic hope (of a conclusive military victory over all of Israel’s neighbors) was a doomed hope, and that would have been obvious to at least some Jews.” A warrior-king who would visibly crush Rome was precisely the kind of messiah history kept refusing to produce. A spiritual messiah, by contrast, could not be falsified so easily. He could conquer Satan rather than Caesar, the heavens rather than the earth, sin rather than empire. Defeat could be reinterpreted as hidden victory. Political disappointment could be absorbed into myth.
That shift matters. A suffering, dying, or heavenly messiah fits prolonged subjugation far better than a triumphant Davidic conqueror who never arrives. Christianity did not solve the Roman problem by overthrowing Rome. It solved it by changing the terms of victory. The kingdom became “not of this world.” The struggle moved from flesh and blood to cosmic powers. The messiah no longer needed to raise an army from Jerusalem if he could instead be enthroned in heaven.
And that made Christianity exportable. The movement that emerged did not require Gentiles to become Jews in the full covenantal sense. It offered a way for Gentiles to worship the God of Israel without circumcision, kosher law, or full Torah observance. Acts 15 is the obvious flashpoint. The Jerusalem leadership approves Gentile inclusion through a reduced set of obligations, allowing the biblical framework to expand beyond ethnic Judaism without dissolving its theological core. The God remains the God of Israel. The scriptures remain Jewish scriptures. The messiah remains the Jewish messiah. What changes is access.
That is one of the most important transformations in religious history. Christianity became, in effect, Judaism for Gentiles: a way of universalizing Israel’s God, Israel’s scriptures, Israel’s messianic story, and Israel’s eschatological framework without requiring the nations to become Jews. The old covenantal architecture was not abandoned. It was scaled.
And once that is clear, the next question presses harder than ever. If this new messiah emerged from scriptural reinterpretation, apocalyptic disappointment, sectarian fragmentation, and theological adaptation to empire, then the issue is no longer merely what early Christians believed about him.
It is whether there was ever a stable historical figure there in the first place.
The Last Firewall: “But Surely Jesus Was Historical”
By this point in the argument, a familiar fallback usually appears. The miracles may be myth. The resurrection may be theology. The birth stories may be literary invention. The passion narrative may be scriptural construction. The speeches may be later compositions. The chronology may be artificial. Fine. Grant all that, people say. But surely there was still a man underneath it all.
I no longer accept that assumption, and I do not think it deserves to be treated as intellectually safe merely because it is familiar.
Once literary and theological construction has been conceded at nearly every level of the tradition, the so-called “historical Jesus” begins to look less like a demonstrated figure than like a residue, a placeholder left standing after everything obviously mythic has been stripped away. The problem is not that a historical core has been disproved in some crude, absolute sense. The problem is that it is constantly assumed, while the evidence for it remains astonishingly thin.
Where, exactly, is this man supposed to be found?
There is no contemporary, independent, non-Christian evidence for Jesus as a historical person. There is no inscription, no administrative record, no eyewitness account, no Roman report from his lifetime, no Jewish source from his lifetime, no archaeological evidence identifying him, no surviving text from anyone who actually met him. What we possess are Christian theological writings.
And our earliest source, Paul, does not give us a remembered Galilean teacher wandering around first-century Judea. He gives us a revealed, cosmic, scriptural Christ known through visions, revelation, scripture, death, resurrection, and heavenly significance. Paul does not preserve a stable earthly biography. He does not narrate Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, Judas, Mary Magdalene at the tomb, Pilate’s trial scene, or the sermon material that later becomes central to the Gospel portrait. That absence is not a trivial inconvenience. It is a structural problem.
Even 2 Peter is revealing on this point. “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” The denial is telling. It does not prove invention by itself, but it does show that early Christian claims could be heard as mythic, visionary, or constructed. And the response is instructive. The author does not answer by providing a grounded earthly biography. He answers with prophecy, revelation, glory, and Spirit-soaked authority.
The Gospels themselves do not rescue the situation. They are anonymous literary-theological compositions written decades after the alleged events, in Greek, through dense scriptural patterning. They do not read like independent eyewitness memory. They read like sacred narrative built from older texts, typology, apocalyptic expectation, and theological necessity.
The supposed external witnesses do not solve the problem. Josephus is late, textually disputed, and preserved through Christian transmission. Tacitus is later still and tells us, at most, what Christians in his own time believed about their origins. These are not contemporary confirmations of Jesus’ life. They are later references to a movement that already existed. They tell us Christianity happened. They do not securely tell us that the Gospel figure at its center was historical in the way readers are encouraged to imagine.
The same goes for the phrases in Paul that are endlessly hauled out as if they settle the matter. “Born of a woman,” “seed of David,” “brother of the Lord” — these are not granite biographical anchors. They can function as incarnation language, messianic credentialing, or intra-community title. They do not give us a recoverable historical Jesus standing solidly behind the later narratives. They give us phrases. The heavy lifting is done by prior belief.
This is why I reject the polite compromise that says, “Of course the Gospel Jesus is mythologized, but there must have been a real preacher behind him.” Must there? Why? Because modern scholars feel more respectable keeping one sandal planted on the ground? Because the imagination panics at the thought that the whole figure may be literary from the start? Because once the miracles, fulfillment scenes, speeches, chronology, passion details, and resurrection appearances are recognized as constructed, people still want one final reassuring object left?
To me, this often functions less like an argument than a psychological reflex.
And this is precisely where Gmirkin’s work ceases to be merely interesting and becomes a consistency test.
If we are willing to follow biblical minimalism when it exposes the Pentateuch as a late literary-theological construction, why should the inquiry suddenly stop at Christianity? If the Hebrew scriptures can be composed, adapted, borrowed, and projected backward into sacred antiquity, why is Jesus protected from the same analysis? Why is the critique allowed to dismantle Moses, law, covenant, and national memory, only to halt politely at the Messiah as if some invisible velvet rope had been lowered around him?
That exemption makes no sense.
Christianity does not escape the biblical matrix. It depends on it. It preserves the God of Israel, the prophets, the covenants, the messianic framework, the chosen-people logic, and the eschatological expectation that history moves toward divine judgment and final rule. Its dispute with Judaism is not over the structure. It is over who gets to occupy the central role within it. Christianity is not the grand liberation from the older framework that its admirers like to imagine. It is the sequel.
And once that is admitted, the next step is not radical at all. It is obvious.
If scripture can generate Moses, covenant, law, land, chosenness, and sacred national memory, then scripture can also generate Jesus, fulfillment, cross, resurrection, judgment, and cosmic kingship. If a literary-theological tradition can manufacture sacred antiquity, why should it suddenly lose that power when it reaches the first century? If the old stories can produce a founder, a people, a law, and a history, why should they not also produce a messiah?
Christianity does not begin, in our earliest sources, with a stable man later decorated with myth. It begins with a revealed Christ known through scripture and visions. The earthly biography comes later, and when it appears, it arrives already saturated with literary design.
If that is true, then the task is no longer to keep exhausting ink and paper trying to peel a “real Jesus” out of layers of literary construction. The more urgent question becomes: what were the earliest apostles, visionaries, and authors actually doing? What experiences did they think they were having? What apocalyptic expectations drove them? What rhetorical and mythical work were the later stories performing? Once the data about Jesus comes to us primarily through scripture, revelation, and literary invention rather than recent biography, the center of gravity shifts. The real subject is no longer a recoverable Galilean teacher hiding behind the text, but the motives, methods, and imaginative world of the people who produced the text.
The Gospel Jesus is not history remembered and then embellished. He is scripture personified, given narrative form, furnished with a recent setting, and made to walk through a world already prepared for him by text. At that point, Christianity begins to look less like a movement built around a misremembered man and more like a movement built around visionary claims, apocalyptic expectation, scriptural decoding, and later literary elaboration. What demands explanation is not how a historical teacher was gradually mythologized, but how a mythic and scriptural Christ was gradually narrativized.
That is the last firewall. Once readers are willing to concede literary construction everywhere else, Jesus becomes the one figure they are still expected to protect. Not because the evidence suddenly improves, but because the emotional and institutional cost of following the argument any further becomes too high. And if that protection finally collapses, then a great deal of Jesus studies will have to admit that it has been spending enormous effort on the wrong pursuit. The real work would no longer be reconstructing a man behind the myths, but reconstructing the interpretive practices, sectarian motives, visionary experiences, and literary intentions that produced the myth in the first place.
And that is exactly where Jan Assmann becomes useful.
The resistance here is not just intellectual. It is civilizational. By the time people reach Jesus, they are no longer defending one ancient figure among others. They are defending a memory-world: a moral vocabulary, a theory of suffering, a structure of hope, a story about history, and often the emotional architecture through which they understand themselves. That is why the argument suddenly feels so charged. It is no longer just about evidence. It is about what happens when literature hardens into memory and memory hardens into reality.
Mnemohistory: When Literature Becomes Memory
“Mnemohistory,” a term coined by Jan Assmann, refers not simply to the past, but to the way societies remember the past. That sounds academic. In practice, it is far more destabilizing than it first appears.
I was first introduced to Assmann’s work through my friend Brado, and once the idea clicked, a great deal of human behavior stopped looking mysterious. One of the hardest things to swallow is realizing how much of what people confidently call “history” is not history in the plain sense at all, but mnemohistory: emotionally charged civilizational storytelling repeated so often that it hardens into something psychologically untouchable.
A society does not merely pass down facts. It passes down stories about origins, suffering, enemies, rescue, chosenness, betrayal, exile, return, and destiny. Those stories do not simply describe the past. They train perception. They teach people what to love, what to fear, whom to trust, whom to blame, and what future to desire. After a while, people are no longer defending a memory. They are defending the world that memory built for them.
That is why historical arguments go feral so quickly. You are never just disputing an event. You are touching the memory structure through which a group recognizes itself. The Exodus is one of the clearest examples. It is not merely a story to be remembered, but a story about remembering: bondage, liberation, divine rescue, covenant, promised land. It turns memory into identity and identity into destiny. The past is ritualized so that it can keep governing the present.
This is also where Neil Van Leeuwen’s distinction between factual belief and religious credence becomes clarifying. A factual belief is supposed to track reality across contexts. Religious credence works differently. It behaves less like stable fact-tracking and more like an imaginative, identity-bound commitment activated in specific social and ritual settings. A church can gather in a gymnasium and everyone still knows they are sitting on bleachers under fluorescent lights. Yet within that setting, the space becomes sacred. The credence does not erase ordinary reality. It overlays it and reorganizes meaning.
That helps explain why apologetics so often feels impervious to evidence. It is not primarily a truth-seeking enterprise, but a credence-maintenance system. Doubt is framed as danger, questions are met with prefabricated responses, and rituals, narratives, and authorities work together to protect identity rather than expose it to risk. As Van Leeuwen argues, when an attitude is rooted in group identity, truth can easily take a back seat.
Once you see that, a great deal of Christian apologetics becomes easier to understand. Its stubbornness is not a bug. It is the design. It is not really trying to investigate whether the historical Jesus can bear the weight placed on him. It is trying to prevent the collapse of the cognitive and social world built around him.
That is why arguments about Jesus’ historicity so often feel like Groundhog Day. One side keeps asking what the evidence can actually support. The other keeps reasserting the figure as though familiarity itself were proof. By the time people reach Jesus, they are no longer just defending one ancient claim among others. They are defending a moral universe, a structure of consolation, a theory of suffering, a promise of justice, a spiritual identity, and often an entire social world.
This is how Christianity became one of history’s most successful Trojan horses. It entered the Roman world clothed in humility, forgiveness, self-denial, and the sanctification of suffering. But that moral vocabulary was tailor-made for rule. A religion that teaches obedience, glorifies submission, and casts suffering as meaningful does not merely coexist with empire. It serves it. Constantine did not have to distort Christianity into something authoritarian. Its authoritarian potential was already there, waiting to be scaled.
The reason this matters is not that ancient people wrote sacred stories. Humans have always done that. The reason it matters is that some sacred stories do not stay on the page. They become political grammar. They teach civilizations how to imagine enemies, destiny, land, obedience, suffering, and war.
Modern Consequences: When Sacred Story Becomes Political Machinery
And this is where the conversation is no longer academic or safely trapped in antiquity.
In the modern West, and especially in the United States, support for Israel is often presented not merely as a strategic choice but as a moral and even spiritual duty. For millions of Christians, conflict in the Middle East is not simply geopolitics. It is part of a sacred script. Apocalyptic language has not remained tucked away in pulpits and prophecy conferences. It has drifted upward into policy, media, lobbying, diplomacy, and war.
And the problem is larger than American evangelicalism.
What is now sold as “Judeo-Christian friendship” increasingly functions as a transnational political package. Israel is marketed not simply as a nation-state but as a symbol of “the West,” biblical truth, anti-communism, anti-Islamism, anti-woke moral order, technological modernity, and civilizational resolve. That is why gatherings such as the JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem and the Judeo-Christian Zionist Congress matter. They are not quaint interfaith exercises. They are strategy rooms in which theology, media, diplomacy, philanthropy, and security discourse are braided together and sent back out as political messaging.
Latin America makes the pattern especially visible. As evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity grows as a political force, Israel is increasingly recoded as a sacred-political emblem of order, family values, anti-left resistance, and biblical destiny. The Isaac Accords are a perfect example. They are presented in the language of democratic values, innovation, security, and cooperation, but the emotional engine underneath them is older and hotter than that. Israel becomes a proof-text. Foreign policy becomes catechism by other means. The old Abrahamic machinery has simply evolved to speak the language of diplomacy, branding, and strategic partnership.
This is why the usual dismissals fail. We are not dealing with private religious sentiment lingering harmlessly at the margins. We are dealing with inherited apocalyptic structures that shape how nations imagine enemies, allies, legitimacy, time, and destiny. When political leaders, religious institutions, military personnel, media ecosystems, and ordinary citizens inherit stories about Israel, Iran, final battles, messiahs, Armageddon, and divine destiny, the line between prophecy and policy begins to blur. Conflict stops looking contingent. It starts looking prewritten.
The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit coined the term hyperstition for ideas that bring themselves into existence because people believe them strongly enough to act on them. That concept belongs here. A prophecy does not have to be true to become dangerous. It only has to recruit enough believers willing to organize behavior around it. Once that happens, old stories stop functioning as symbolic expectation and begin operating as strategic motivation.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all carry end-times narratives organized around the same theological lore: messianic figures, final conflict, cosmic judgment, and the Middle East.
A revealing example appears in the Qur’an’s treatment of Jesus. In Surah 3:45, Jesus is called al-Masīḥ — the Messiah. Islam does not use that title in the Christian sense: Jesus is not divine, not the Son of God, and not a crucified savior. But the messianic category remains.
The traditions are not identical, and their details often conflict sharply. But they share enough inherited narrative architecture to be significant here.
Maimonides makes the continuity unusually explicit, and his wording matters because he was no fringe oddball. He was one of the most important Jewish legal and philosophical authorities in history. In Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings 11:4, frames Jesus and Muhammad as figures who, within divine providence, helped spread knowledge of messianic expectation and the God of Israel among the nations.
That is the blueprint: a shared body of theological lore, a transmitted narrative architecture that persists even as details are revised. Its logic is self-reinforcing. Prophecy validates scripture, scripture is reread as fulfilled prophecy, and each new crisis is folded back into the old frame as confirmation. The game works not because the texts reliably predict history, but because they are endlessly reinterpreted, retrofitted, and made to certify one another.
And that is why literary origins matter. If sacred histories are constructed, revised, projected backward, and then defended as untouchable truth, they do not remain harmless. They shape borders, justify wars, license alliances, sanctify violence, and train populations to see obedience as virtue and confrontation as destiny. The danger is not simply that people believe old stories. The danger is that these stories still command institutions, budgets, media systems, electorates, intelligence networks, and weapons.
Entire populations become characters in someone else’s sacred drama. Human beings become pieces on an apocalyptic chessboard. War ceases to be merely war. It becomes fulfillment.
Voltaire’s warning still bites: those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
This is why I do what I do with such fierce passion. I believe the Abrahamic traditions are built on layers of fabrication, borrowed myths, retroactive claims to antiquity, and sacred stories whose origins are rarely examined with the seriousness they deserve. To me, it is an insult to wisdom, curiosity, and the pursuit of knowledge that so much of our culture remains shaped by narratives that are historically unstable, morally suspect, and fiercely defended as untouchable truth.
Questioning these stories is not hatred. It is not divisive. It is intellectual self-defense. It is spiritual self-defense. It is the work of reclaiming the human mind from inherited scripts that have too often taught people to sanctify obedience, suffering, conquest, and fear.
If sacred stories can shape civilizations, then examining them is not a niche academic exercise. It is necessary work.
Resources and Further Reading
Laurent Guyénot — “Russell Gmirkin and the Biblical Con” (Substack series) Jan Assmann: Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism Jan Assmann: Cultural Memory and Early Civilization Richard B. Hays: Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels Dale C. Allison Jr.: The New Moses: A Matthean Typology E.P. Sanders: The Historical Figure of Jesus Geza Vermes: Jesus the Jew Bart D. Ehrman: Did Jesus Exist? Yonatan Adler: The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal Russell Gmirkin: Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus Russell Gmirkin: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible Philippe Wajdenbaum: Argonauts of the Desert Thomas L. Thompson: The Mythic Past Philip R. Davies: In Search of “Ancient Israel” Ze’ev Herzog: “Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho” (Haaretz, 1999) David Skrbina: The Jesus Hoax Richard Carrier: On the Historicity of Jesus, The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus Thomas L. Thompson and Thomas S. Verenna, eds., Is This Not the Carpenter? The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus
What Christianity Absorbed, Built, and Left Behind
Listen as you read here!
People say this all the time.
That the West got its ideas about pluralism, tolerance, and liberty from Christianity. That without it, there would be no concept of human dignity, no rights, no freedom in the modern sense. And that if those things feel unstable now, the solution is simple: return to the source.
The claim that pluralism, tolerance, and liberty are direct inheritances of Christianity is not just oversimplified. It reverses the historical pattern.
In Part 1, I pushed back on the idea that Christianity “founded the West” in any clean or singular sense, or that returning to it offers an obvious path forward. In Part 2, I stepped back and looked at something more fundamental: the fragility of freedom itself. Not as an abstract ideal, but as a social order that depends on limits, restraint, and a population capable of sustaining it. More importantly, I looked at how quickly that order begins to break down when those conditions are no longer present.
Across the responses to both pieces, there was a shared sense that something is not working. Not just politically, not just culturally, but at a deeper level that is harder to name.
One way to make sense of that is to stop looking for a single cause and start looking at how the whole inheritance fits together.
Western civilization did not develop along one track. It emerged through multiple layers operating at the same time. At a minimum, those layers include institutions, culture, and psychology.
Institutions include law, political authority, and the distribution of power. Culture includes religion, tradition, identity, and shared meaning. Psychology includes the moral instincts people use to interpret the world: instincts tied to fairness, loyalty, authority, purity, harm, belonging, and threat.
For long stretches of time, those layers reinforced one another. Institutions reflected shared values. Cultural traditions gave meaning to authority. Moral instincts were channeled through forms of life that provided both order and legitimacy.
But that fit was never permanent.
When those layers begin to pull apart, the result is not merely disagreement. It is instability.
That is the backdrop for this final piece.
The goal here is not to argue that Christianity caused the West, or that it deserves credit for everything people now associate with Western civilization. It is also not to reduce Christianity to a purely destructive force. Both approaches distort the picture in different ways.
The same problem appears in the phrase “Judeo-Christian values.” This often creates the impression of a smooth and unified inheritance, when the actual history is far more fractured. Judaism and Christianity are related, but they are not interchangeable. Christianity did not simply preserve Jewish covenantal thought. It reinterpreted it, universalized it, and claimed fulfillment over it. A tradition rooted in a particular people, law, land, and covenant was recast as a universal message for all mankind.
This repositioning changed the role of religion entirely. It no longer sits alongside other domains. It began to judge them.
It loosened religion from peoplehood and place. It made belief itself the primary marker of belonging. And once belief becomes the primary boundary, disagreement takes on a different moral weight.
Today’s article will address the harder question:
What did Christianity reorganize, what did it scale, and what did it leave unstable?
Because Christianity’s real inheritance was not simply compassion, liberty, or dignity. It reshaped how belief, authority, identity, and moral obligation functioned at a civilizational level. It expanded moral language in ways that could operate across large populations, but it also introduced sharper boundaries between true and false belief, salvation and error, belonging and exclusion.
That combination, expansion on one side and constraint on the other, is where the inheritance becomes complicated.
McClees, Helen and Christine Alexander. 1933. The Daily Life of the Greeks and Romans: As Illustrated in the Classical Collections, 5th ed. pp. 131, 133, fig. 159, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
SECTION I: THE GOOD What Christianity Absorbed and Reorganized
Before getting into what Christianity actually contributed, it’s worth being clear about what is usually attributed to it.
A moral framework. Stable family structures. The unification of fragmented tribal societies into something resembling a shared civilization. A sense of cohesion strong enough to hold large populations together.
Those developments did happen. The question is where they came from…
Because none of those things begin with Christianity. They depend on something older: stability across generations, shared practices, inherited obligations, and a way of life that binds people before it explains itself.
That is what tradition is.
The word itself comes from the Latin traditio: a handing over, a passing down, something delivered across generations. But that definition only gets you so far. Tradition is not just a set of ideas preserved in texts or doctrines. It is lived. It shows up in habits, rituals, inherited gestures, seasonal rhythms, family patterns, and the quiet repetition of things people do not always stop to explain but continue to do anyway.
It exists in the structure of daily life.
You see it most clearly in how societies deal with death.
Long before Christianity became dominant in Europe, burial practices already reflected a deep sense of connection between the living and the dead. In the Stone Age, communities used mass graves in caves or pits. Later, megalithic cultures constructed communal tombs that anchored memory to specific places. Indo-European groups developed barrows and cremation practices that changed over time while preserving the same underlying logic.
The dead were not discarded. They were placed, remembered, and integrated into the ongoing life of the community.
Tradition, in that sense, is not something invented at a particular moment. It is something carried forward, shaped and reshaped over time without losing its original intention.
Christianity enters into that world rather than creating it from scratch.
What changes is not the existence of tradition, but its scale and its organizing thought.
Earlier religious life was largely tied to local identity: tribe, land, household, ancestry, city, and people. Christianity expands beyond that. It speaks in universal terms and builds a shared symbolic order that can operate across regions and populations that do not share the same lineage, gods, rituals, or customs.
That increases the reach of the moral imagination.
Concern no longer stops at the boundary of immediate belonging. It extends outward, attaching value to individuals beyond their role within a specific family, tribe, or city. Over time, that broader vision feeds into developments people now associate with the Western inheritance: ideas about dignity, education, care for the poor, moral responsibility, and obligation toward those outside one’s immediate circle.
But this is typically where the story gets oversimplified.
Those impulses did not originate with Christianity. Traditions within the Greco-Roman world had already developed forms of civic responsibility, philanthropy, patronage, public works, and mutual obligation. Grain distributions, civic benefaction, philosophical ethics, and local forms of duty were not Christian inventions.
But even the Greco-Roman world was not self-contained. It had already absorbed influences from older and neighboring civilizations (Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Anatolian, and Phoenician) through trade, conquest, and cultural exchange. As scholars like Martin L. West and Walter Burkert have shown, Greek thought itself was shaped in part by these eastern traditions.
The ancient world was not morally empty before the church arrived. It was already layered, interconnected, and carrying forward inherited forms of order, obligation, and meaning.
You can see this clearly in Stoic thought. Christianity is often treated as if it introduced universal human concern into a cruel and indifferent ancient world. Stoicism already spoke in universal terms. It could describe human beings as participants in a shared moral order and extend concern beyond tribe, city, or immediate kinship.
But the structure was different.
The bronze Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, Capitoline Hill, Rome.
Runar Thorsteinsson’s comparison of Roman Christianity and Roman Stoicism helps clarify the distinction. Stoicism could speak of universal humanity without making moral belonging depend on conversion to a saving truth. Early Christianity, by contrast, carried a universal message while also drawing a sharper boundary around religious adherence. Its moral vision expanded outward, but it did so through a division between those inside and outside the saving order.
Christianity did not invent universal concern but it did reorganize it.
It took older moral instincts, philosophical ideas, Jewish inheritance, Roman scale, and local traditions, then bound them into a universal religious narrative. It gave those instincts a broader scope, a more unified story, and a more durable institutional form.
But expansion alone does not explain why a civilization holds together.
A social order lasts when it fits the way people already experience the world.
People do not move through life as detached rational observers. They respond through instinct: loyalty and betrayal, fairness and injustice, authority and rebellion, purity and contamination, belonging and threat. These instincts do not operate on their own. They cluster.
In more traditional societies, moral intuitions tend to reinforce one another. Care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and a sense of the sacred operate together rather than pulling apart. Even when people disagree, they often draw from the same underlying moral vocabulary when interpreting what is happening around them.
That shared moral vocabulary gives a society stability.
Christianity operated at that level.
It did not simply present moral rules. It gave instinct narrative form and placed it inside a larger story about meaning, suffering, hierarchy, obligation, sin, redemption, and ultimate reality. It offered a way of interpreting the world itself.
For people living in unstable conditions, where political authority could be inconsistent and survival uncertain, that kind of story organized experience. It offered coherence in a world that might otherwise feel random. It placed individuals inside a larger order and gave meaning to suffering, duty, death, and loss.
Once that fit took hold between cultural meaning, institutional power, and moral instinct, it became difficult to dislodge.
At the same time, Christianity did not remain completely closed off to innovative thought. Even within a religious order that emphasized authority and inherited truth, there were moments where that inheritance was tested from within.
Peter Abelard represents one of those moments.
His importance lies less in the drama of his life and more in the method he applied to truth itself. The intellectual world he entered was structured around inherited authority. Figures like Augustine were treated as settled voices, and the role of the student was often to understand, organize, and transmit what had already been established.
Peter Abelard with Book Giclee
Reasoning had a place, but it operated within limits. It was expected to clarify, not destabilize.
Abelard did not reject the tradition from the outside. He worked within it and exposed its internal tensions. In Sic et Non, he placed authoritative statements side by side in a way that made contradiction difficult to ignore.
If these sources were meant to provide certainty, why did they diverge so sharply?
If truth had already been handed down in a unified form, why did it fracture under comparison?
He treated those questions as a starting point rather than a threat to avoid.
“For it is from doubt that we arrive at questioning, and in questioning we arrive at truth.”
That quote represents the change in intellectual posture.
Instead of beginning with certainty and using reason to defend it, Abelard begins with tension and uses reason to work through it. Authority alone no longer settles the issue. Claims must be examined, language clarified, and assumptions tested.
Once questioning becomes legitimate, authority can no longer rely on transmission alone. It now has to also persuade.
Abelard pushed beyond accepted limits. He applied reason to doctrines often treated as beyond rational explanation and placed greater emphasis on intention in moral evaluation. In doing so, he opened space for a more nuanced understanding of ethics, one not entirely bound to inherited categories.
The response to him was what you would expect from institutional power.
He was condemned. His works were burned. He was brought before councils that were less interested in exploring his arguments and more so in containing their implications. The reaction showed what was at stake. A religious order grounded in authority does not easily absorb a method that legitimizes doubt.
And yet the method persisted.
Even when his specific conclusions were rejected, the habit of inquiry he modeled proved difficult to suppress. The practice of setting opposing views side by side and working through contradiction became central to scholasticism. The intellectual tradition that later shaped medieval universities carried forward elements of an approach once treated as dangerous.
Abelard does not stand alone as the cause of a broader intellectual reopening. The recovery of classical texts, the reintroduction of Aristotle, contact with Islamic and Jewish scholarship, and the growth of educational institutions all played a role.
What his story represents is the shift in attitude.
Inherited knowledge no longer functions as a sealed inheritance. It became something that can be examined, refined, and, within limits, challenged.
Of course, those constraints never fully disappeared.
Abelard was allowed to question, but not indefinitely. He was permitted to reason, but not without consequence. The same religious culture that made his work possible also defined where it had to stop.
That tension between authority and inquiry did not remain confined to intellectual life. It also carried forward into the institutions that developed over time.
A university lecture (an illustration from the second half of the 14th century).
The medieval university is one of the clearest places to see this pattern at work. Often treated as a distinctly Christian achievement, it grew out of a much broader mix of influences.
In Spain, Baghdad, and Cairo, Islamic schools, libraries, and observatories held resources far beyond anything available in much of Europe at the time. Arab, Jewish, and Christian scholars shared intellectual interests through expanding trade networks and translation movements. After the Christian capture of Toledo in 1085, that city became one of the key places where these worlds met, allowing texts to move across languages, traditions, and religious boundaries.
The Western reopening of inquiry did not happen because Europe simply looked inward and rediscovered itself.
It happened because knowledge traveled.
Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle, translated into Latin, became essential sources for thirteenth-century Christian intellectuals, including Thomas Aquinas. That alone should complicate any idea that Christian scholarship developed in isolation. The university absorbed, translated, debated, and reorganized knowledge that had already passed through Greek, Arabic, Jewish, and Latin traditions.
Islamic Astronomers #1 is a photograph by Science Source
Even the structure of medieval universities reflects that broader inheritance. They developed their own corporate identities, governed collectively by masters, with distinct curricula and examination systems. By the late thirteenth century, Master of Arts could vastly outnumber Master of Theology. Historian Charles Freeman notes one example where 120 teachers of the arts were listed against only 15 Masters of Theology. That imbalance tells you what mattered most. The curriculum leaned heavily on classical texts, not purely Christian foundations.
Christian Europe helped institutionalize learning, but the material being organized was older, broader, and more cosmopolitan than the church-centered story suggests. The university becomes another example of Christianity’s larger pattern: it absorbed existing goods, gave them institutional form, and placed them inside its own theological horizon.
But the results did not move in one direction.
The same religious vision that could support care and dignity could also justify hierarchy and control. Because the tradition depended on scriptural interpretation, and interpretation depended on authority, very different conclusions could emerge from the same source material.
That instability is not only a matter of later interpretation. It is already present in the texts themselves.
The Gospels do not present a single, unified account. They offer overlapping portraits that do not fully align.
In Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Mark, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” while in Gospel of John, he concludes, “It is finished.” The tone shifts from abandonment to completion.
The timeline shifts as well, with the Synoptic Gospels placing the final meal at Passover, while John places the crucifixion before it begins.
Even the ethical posture is not entirely consistent: in Matthew, Jesus teaches “turn the other cheek,” while in Luke, he tells his followers, “Let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one.”
Taken together, these are not minor discrepancies. They open space for fundamentally different readings of what the tradition demands.
Christianity persists not as a fixed form, but as a tradition capable of producing multiple, competing forms while still claiming continuity.
This becomes especially clear in debates over slavery.
Christians were involved in abolition movements, and that history is part of the record. The language of universal moral equality played a real role in mobilizing opposition to slavery and reshaping moral expectations.
But that is not the whole story.
The same texts were also used to defend slavery, reinforce it, and argue that existing social orders were divinely sanctioned.
That contradiction is not incidental. It reveals something important about the Christian inheritance itself.
A religious order that combines universal moral language with authoritative texts creates the conditions for both expansion and constraint. It can push moral concern outward, but it can also bind that concern within approved categories. The outcome depends on who interprets the texts, which authorities prevail, and what social pressures shape the reading.
Critics of abolitionist movements, including Thomas Carlyle, argued that what they saw as abstract humanitarian concern could override more immediate obligations or practical realities. A contemporary political cartoon captured this dynamic under the phrase “telescopic philanthropy”—a tendency to focus moral concern at a distance while neglecting what is closer at hand.
The point I’m trying to make here is not that concern beyond one’s own group is inherently false or wrong.
The point is that moral expansion creates distance.
The farther a concern stretches, the easier it becomes to neglect concrete obligations close at hand: family, neighbors, local order, inherited duties, and the people one is actually responsible for. Abstract compassion can become morally flattering precisely because it asks less of the person expressing it.
Whether one agrees with those criticisms or not, they point to something very real.
A moral order that expands obligation beyond local belonging gains reach, but it also risks losing proportion. It can elevate the stranger while forgetting the neighbor. It can speak beautifully about mankind while failing the people right in front of it.
Christianity extended moral concern beyond tribe and built institutions that carried that vision forward. But it also introduced pressures around authority, interpretation, exclusion, and the limits of acceptable thought.
The good is real, but…so is the tension inside it.
Christianity’s inheritance was not simply compassion, dignity, or education. It was a moral architecture: universal in scope, institutional in form, inward in psychology, and unstable once detached from the cultural world that had once held it together.
That brings us to our next inquiry.
Not just what Christianity gave the West, but what kind of order made those outcomes possible.
SECTION II — THE BAD
Truth, Authority, and the Limits of Inquiry
At this point, the issue is not simply what happened when Christianity moved from the margins to power. I’ve explored that elsewhere: the suppression of rival systems, the narrowing of acceptable thought, and the long habit of treating competing worldviews not as alternatives to debate, but as errors to contain.
The deeper question here is more structural.
What kind of religious order produces those outcomes in the first place?
Because the shift was a reorganization of how truth operated, how disagreement was handled, and how legitimacy was defined.
Earlier Greco-Roman religious and philosophical life was not tolerant in the modern sense, but it was more comfortable with multiplicity. Rival schools, local cults, household gods, civic rituals, and philosophical traditions could coexist without requiring one totalizing creed to absorb or eliminate the rest. That did not make the ancient world peaceful or morally pure. It did mean that truth was not always treated as one fragile object that had to be protected from every rival.
The Abrahamic worldview introduced something different, often called the “Mosaic distinction.”
God giving the Tablets of the Law to Moses, from a manuscript attributed to Chrétien Legouais, 1325 CE. Image source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque municipal de Rouen
It drew a sharper line between true and false in a way that changed the stakes of disagreement. Belief was no longer simply one option among many. It became a dividing line. Once that line was drawn, alternative ways of seeing the world did not remain neutral. They became errors, and error began to carry drastic consequences beyond private belief.
If truth is singular and binding, then the religious order has to decide what to do with everything outside of it. Some ideas are absorbed. Some are tolerated for a time. Others are pushed out entirely. But none of them sit comfortably alongside it anymore. They exist in tension with the claim that one truth must govern above all others.
As we previously discussed, Christianity is often credited with preserving learning and building universities, and that claim is not false. Medieval universities became important institutions for intellectual training, debate, law, theology, medicine, and philosophy. They helped organize knowledge and gave scholastic inquiry a durable form.
But that achievement has to be kept in proportion.
The medieval university was an achievement, but it was not a recovery of classical freedom. It was classical inheritance under theological supervision.
Ancient philosophy could be studied, but it had to be reconciled with Christian doctrine. Aristotle could return, but not as Aristotle alone. He had to be interpreted through Christian categories, corrected where necessary, and placed beneath revealed truth. Reason was permitted, even sharpened, but it was not sovereign.
The medieval university did not represent inquiry on open ground. It represented inquiry inside boundaries. Reason could clarify doctrine, defend doctrine, organize doctrine, and reconcile contradictions within inherited authorities. But when reason pressed too far against the architecture of belief, the limits became quite visible.
That does not make medieval learning worthless. It makes it conditional.
And that conditionality is the point.
Christian Europe did not simply preserve the classical world. It received it, edited it, baptized it, and constrained it. What could be made useful to the Christian order survived more easily. What threatened that order did not.
This is the kind of intellectual narrowing later critics would recognize in Christianity’s relationship to philosophy. Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology is not aimed at Christianity alone, but it helps name the pattern: open-ended questioning becomes absorbed into a prior explanatory order. Instead of wonder remaining primary, inquiry is routed through established claims about creation, causality, divine order, sin, and salvation.
The question is no longer allowed to remain fully open.
It has to be answered inside the architecture of doctrine.
Once orthodoxy is established it operates within boundaries that have already been set, and stepping outside those boundaries starts to carry not just intellectual consequences, but social ones. Access to authority, education, and influence becomes tied, at least in part, to alignment.
At that point, belief is no longer just something people hold. It becomes something that moves outward, seeking to correct and expand.
SECTION III: THE UGLY
Universalism, Power, and the Moral Afterlife
By the time you reach the modern West, the question is no longer whether Christianity shaped it. That much is obvious. The deeper issue is what, exactly, it left behind, and what happens when the conditions that once sustained that inheritance begin to unravel.
Christianity did not simply introduce a set of beliefs and then fade as those beliefs weakened. It reorganized moral life at a level that persists long after doctrine loses its authority. It changed how individuals understood themselves, how they related to others, where moral responsibility resided, and how truth was expected to move through the world.
The ugly side of the Christian inheritance is not merely universalism. It is universalism with a missionary engine.
Christianity does not simply say, “This is true.” It says truth must be spread. Error must be corrected. The world must be brought into submission to the saving order. That structure changes the meaning of difference. A rival worldview is not merely foreign, local, or ancestral. It becomes spiritually demonic.
And once a difference becomes an error, correction can be justified as mercy.
The religious world Christianity emerges from was already in tension with the surrounding Greek and Roman order. Second Temple Judaism didn’t simply blend into Hellenistic life. Again and again, it resisted it—politically, culturally, religiously.
D. H. Lawrence saw this tendency clearly. In Apocalypse, he describes a fear-driven impulse within Christianity—a refusal to leave other ways of understanding the world intact. Not just disagreement, but the drive to overcome, absorb, or eliminate what stands outside the truth.
That instinct is already embedded in the apocalyptic world Christianity emerges from. Second Temple Judaism carries expectations of final judgment, cosmic conflict, and the ultimate victory of a single, rightful order-the coming of the Moshiach/Messiah.) Christianity inherits that framework and gives it a wider reach.
That is where Christianity’s relationship to Rome becomes essential. Christian universalism did not spread on its own. It moved through the late imperial Roman systems: roads, cities, law, administration, literacy, political centralization, and habits of governance already trained toward scale. The faith did not merely conquer Rome. It also inherited Rome’s machinery.
Rome gave Christianity infrastructure. Christianity gave Rome a sacred moral horizon. Together, they helped produce a form of power that could move across peoples, lands, languages, and customs while claiming to operate in the name of truth rather than mere domination.
This is also why Christianity receives too much credit for goods it did not invent.
One reason it’s treated as the source of Western morality is that it became dominant enough to absorb older goods and narrate them backward as Christian achievements. Care for the poor, philosophical inquiry, civic duty, moral discipline, education, and concern for the common good did not appear out of nowhere when Christianity entered history. Many of these were already present in Greek, Roman, Jewish, and local European worlds. Christianity reorganized them inside its own story.
That reorganization gave them reach.
But it also gave them a new master narrative.
Older traditions were often embedded in particular peoples, places, households, ancestors, cities, gods, calendars, and sacred landscapes. Religion was not just a private belief system. It was woven into the life of a people. Christianity altered that relationship by making belief portable. It could cross borders, override local cults, and create a community defined less by blood, land, or inherited custom than by shared confession.
That is one of the most consequential shifts in Western history.
Christianity weakened the older link between people, place, ancestors, and gods. It did not erase those attachments overnight, and in practice it often absorbed local festivals, sacred sites, and folk customs. But the deeper logic changed. The highest belonging was no longer rooted primarily in the local or ancestral. It was relocated into a universal religious identity.
Conversion, then, was not merely persuasion. It was the remaking of belonging.
A people could be separated from their gods, their rituals, their inherited calendar, their sacred places, and their ancestral memory, then folded into a new universal story that claimed to redeem them while also replacing the world that formed them.
Not every conversion was violent. That would be too simple. Some conversions were gradual, political, strategic, sincere, blended, or partial. But once that universal truth claim became tied to salvation, rival traditions do not remain equal neighbors. They become obstacles to be overcome, errors to be corrected, or remnants to be absorbed.
The First Crusade: Pope Urban II and Jerusalem vs. Diplomatic Unification
The crusades make this structure visible in its most explicit and militarized form.
They were not only political wars. They were religious wars shaped by sacred geography, penitential promise, and the belief that violence could be folded into a redemptive order.
The Crusades did not simply mobilize Europe—they redirected it toward Jerusalem, a sacred center that was not its own.
That does not mean every participant had the same motive, and it does not mean politics, land, wealth, status, and military ambition were irrelevant. Of course they mattered. But the crusading imagination reveals something specific: once warfare is placed inside a sacred story, conquest can be interpreted as obedience, purification, defense, or salvation.
That is the danger of missionary structure joined to power.
It sanctifies expansion.
And this is not confined to medieval history. The same basic pattern can reappear whenever politics inherits religious moral intensity. The opponent is no longer merely wrong about policy. He becomes a threat to truth, justice, salvation, progress, safety, democracy, equality, or whatever sacred term now carries the old theological weight.
At that point, disagreement becomes harder to contain.
The modern West inherited this moral intensity even as explicit Christian authority declined. Most people inherited a world in which Christianity had already begun to lose its grip, but nothing fully replaced it. The rituals became optional. The authority fractured. Yet many of the underlying assumptions remained intact.
What had once been explicitly theological was gradually translated into secular terms.
At the center of that structure is a form of universalism Christianity helped entrench: the idea that all people stand beneath one moral order, that identity is secondary to a broader human category, and that truth applies universally rather than locally. That assumption did not disappear with religious decline. It migrated.
Liberalism, in many of its modern forms, carries that template forward: the individual abstracted from place, lineage, inherited duty, and thick communal belonging, then positioned inside a universal framework of rights, equality, and moral expectation.
The language changes. The structure does not.
The West moved from Christian universalism to liberal universalism without seriously interrogating the universalism itself. It replaced theological justification with philosophical or political justification, but it retained the assumption that the highest moral order transcends particular identities rather than emerging from them.
And what carries forward is not only universal morality, but missionary mentality.
Salvation becomes progress. Sin becomes injustice. Heresy becomes hate. Evangelism becomes activism. The world must still be corrected. The morally backward must still be brought into line.
And the irony is hard to miss. The same people who pride themselves on rejecting religious dogma often reproduce its structure almost perfectly—moral certainty, heresy-hunting, and the impulse to correct and convert, just without calling it religion.
You can see this most clearly in the modern left, especially in its activist and radical edges. What presents itself as political theory often behaves like secularized salvation mythology. The infrastructure is unchanged: the world is broken and the masses need liberation. God is removed, but everything else remains. The heretics still need correction. Sin becomes hierarchy. Salvation becomes self-rule. The missionary doesn’t disappear—he just changes form.
It still sorts people into the righteous and the condemned. It still creates moral taboos. It still treats disagreement as contamination. It still imagines that the world can be redeemed if only the right moral order is imposed—with enough force, shame, education, policy, or institutional pressure.
That is not the absence of Christianity.
It is part of its afterlife.
Later European expansion, and even modern geopolitical projects, often operate within the same structure—intervention framed as liberation, reform, or progress.
Whenever universal moral claims are aligned with power and tied to the belief that truth must spread, action begins to feel necessary rather than optional.
To understand why it persists, and why it adapts so easily across different historical contexts, you have to look at what is happening at a deeper level. Not just in institutions or empires, but within the individual.
Because the most enduring change Christianity introduces is not only institutional.
It is psychological. It altered where morality is located.
In earlier classical traditions, especially in Aristotle, the moral life is oriented outward. The Greek conception of eudaimonia assumes that human beings can develop toward excellence. Flourishing is cultivated through practice, discipline, rational activity, and participation in the world. Character is formed through what one does, and the moral life is outward, embodied, and lived over time within a shared civic and social context.
Christianity, especially through Augustine of Hippo, redirects that focus inward.
The problem is no longer simply what a person does, but what a person is. Human nature itself becomes suspect, marked from the beginning. The doctrine of original sin reframes the individual not as someone developing toward excellence, but as someone starting already compromised. This is not just about isolated wrongdoing. It is about a baseline disorder built into human existence, transmitted across generations, shaping inclination before any conscious choice is made.
From that premise, morality reorganizes itself accordingly. If the problem lies within, then moral evaluation cannot remain limited to outward behavior. It extends inward, into thought, desire, intention, and impulse—the parts of life no one else sees but are still treated as morally significant.
Fra Angelico, The Conversion of St. Augustine (c. 1430−1435)
This becomes structured into daily practice. Monastic traditions classify internal states (temptation, pride, doubt, desire) as if they were items that could be named, tracked, and corrected. Authority expands beyond regulating behavior into defining what counts as acceptable thought, shaping not just action but the boundaries of the inner life itself.
Once it relocates inward, the primary site of regulation is no longer only the community. It is the individual mind, where conscience, guilt, confession, fear, and self-regulation operate continuously, often without any visible external enforcement.
You can see the implications of this in the conflict between Augustine and Pelagius. Pelagius emphasizes human capacity: the ability to choose, improve, and take responsibility for moral development. Augustine rejects that position, insisting on dependence—on God’s grace, on divine intervention, on something beyond human effort.
This is not only a theological disagreement.
It is also a question about agency.
If the individual cannot fully rely on their own capacity to move toward the good, then moral development becomes entangled with God’s authority. Responsibility does not disappear, but it no longer stands on its own. It becomes mediated, conditioned, and in some cases limited, as the individual is situated within a framework that places ultimate transformation outside of purely human reach.
Over time, that tension begins to shape intellectual life as well. Historians like Charles Freeman do not argue that inquiry simply disappeared, but that the conditions surrounding it changed. When belief becomes tied to salvation, and when error carries not only intellectual but spiritual consequences, curiosity itself begins to look different. Questions are no longer neutral exercises. They take on moral weight, and in certain contexts, they begin to carry risk.
Writers like Thomas Paine noticed this and pushed directly against the idea that truth can rest on inherited authority. In The Age of Reason, Paine argues that revelation, once it passes through human hands, can no longer function as unquestionable truth. What begins as divine claim becomes human interpretation, and therefore something that must be examined rather than simply accepted. That move cuts directly against the structure that treats questioning as risk. It reopens the possibility that belief itself should be subject to the same scrutiny as anything else.
Mark A. Noll describes a similar pattern in later Christian intellectual culture: a tendency to preserve belief rather than extend it. Questioning is not always welcomed as curiosity. It can be interpreted as disloyalty, a sign that alignment is weakening rather than deepening. The safest position, in that environment, becomes one of conformity rather than exploration.
The obedient mind is the secure mind.
This is not new. It is already visible earlier in the tradition. The same system that could produce figures like Abelard (where questioning began to reopen) also produces the conditions Noll is describing, where belief becomes something to preserve rather than extend.
The instinct to monitor thought, to moralize disagreement, to treat deviation as more than error—those habits do not emerge in a vacuum. They develop within specific historical conditions, and they persist even as the surrounding language changes.
This is why the internal reorganization matters.
It is not only about doctrine.
It is about how individuals learn to relate to themselves.
If Augustine relocates morality inward, Protestantism amplifies and personalizes that shift. The individual is placed in more direct relation to truth, expected to read, interpret, examine, and align himself without the same mediating structures that once guided that process. Authority does not vanish. It becomes more diffuse and more demanding.
The church hierarchy may weaken in some places, but new pressures emerge through scripture, sermon, household discipline, community surveillance, literacy, and conscience. The individual is made more responsible before God, but also more exposed.
The burden of interpretation moves further into the self.
Over time, that inward structure detaches from the communal and cultural worlds that once gave it shape. What remains is a society of individuals expected to interpret, justify, and regulate themselves inside a universal moral order, but without a shared culture capable of holding that process together.
That misalignment becomes visible in how people interpret conflict, identity, history, and political life.
In modern America, this can still be seen in forms of biblical literalism, dispensationalism, and end-times prophecy that shape how many Christians understand Israel, war, nationhood, and world events. These beliefs do not remain private. They influence political imagination. They affect how people interpret history, alliances, enemies, and what they believe is inevitable or divinely sanctioned.
In this context, belief stops being just belief. It starts shaping how everything else is seen.
That is the same mechanism operating in another key. The pattern that once defined orthodoxy and constrained variation does not disappear. It adapts as the cultural environment shifts. The language evolves, but the underlying habit remains… truth is singular, error is dangerous, and those outside the moral order must be corrected, converted, contained, or cast out.
What this reveals is not a simple story of progress or decline.
Christianity did not leave behind a stable moral foundation that the West either followed or abandoned. It left behind a set of interacting pressures: universalism and particular identity, internalized morality and external authority, individual responsibility and collective order, compassion and conquest, salvation and exclusion.
For a time, those pressures could be held in relative balance, but this fit no longer holds.
The institutions remain, but they no longer command the same trust. The moral instincts remain, but they are no longer guided by a shared tradition. The universal language remains, but it floats above increasingly fractured peoples, places, and loyalties.
Conflict becomes more moralized. Disagreement becomes harder to contain.
This is why the modern West feels both thin and volatile.
Thin, because inherited forms of continuity have weakened.
Volatile, because the moral pressure embedded in the inheritance remains, now operating without the older structures that once gave it proportion.
That is the condition the modern West has inherited.
CONCLUSION: Why the West Still Cannot Escape the Problem
The Christian inheritance of the West cannot be reduced to either gratitude or resentment.
It gave moral concern, meaning to suffering, durable institutions, and the preservation and transmission of knowledge, even as that knowledge was filtered through doctrine. It created a shared moral vocabulary capable of binding large populations together.
But it also changed the terms of belonging.
It loosened religion from peoplehood, place, ancestry, and local custom. It made belief portable. It turned truth into something singular and binding, making disagreement morally charged. Once rival traditions became errors rather than neighbors, the pressure to absorb, correct, or suppress them followed naturally.
The West did not abandon Christianity so much as carry its habits forward. The missionary impulse remained. The abstract individual remained. The suspicion of rooted identity remained. Social Justice became their new end times.
That is why a return to Christianity does not solve the problem. It would not restore a stable foundation but reassert one layer of the inheritance while leaving its tensions unresolved.
Secular liberalism does not solve it either. It often preserves the universalism while stripping away the cultural limits that once gave it proportion, asking people to live as abstract individuals inside a moral framework detached from place, memory, and inherited obligation.
What remains is not a coherent worldview, but a contradictory one.
From the beginning, the inheritance carried competing impulses. Early Christianity emerged from an apocalyptic environment while also developing moral and institutional frameworks for life within the world. Over time, those tensions were not resolved but reworked and emphasized in different ways.
Within Protestantism alone, some strands treated the world as something to be ordered and reformed, energizing movements like abolition, while others emphasized its corruption and eventual end, orienting life toward endurance and escape. The divergence is not a break from the tradition, but a difference in emphasis within it.
The result is a system that can point in opposite directions while still claiming the same foundation.
This is not a foundation a civilization can stand on.
A civilization needs moral scale, but also proportion. Compassion, but not so abstract that it forgets its own people. Rights, but not detached from duty. Inquiry, but not subordinated to sacred certainty. Space for disagreement, but enough shared identity to keep it from becoming civilizational warfare.
Above all, it needs rooted obligations.
A civilization cannot survive on abstract principles alone. It needs loyalty, shared memory, boundaries, place, and a people capable of recognizing what is theirs to preserve.
Because removing structure does not remove power. It removes the forms that make power visible and accountable. And when that happens, power does not disappear. It shifts—into forms that are harder to see and harder to resist.
We are not standing outside this inheritance.
We are still working within it.
And the task is not to romanticize Christianity, completely demonize it, or pretend we have escaped it, but to understand what it absorbed, what it built, what it destabilized, and what it left behind clearly enough to stop repeating its most destructive patterns.
Atkinson, Kenneth. “Judean Piracy, Judea and Parthia, and the Roman Annexation of Judea: The Evidence of Pompeius Trogus.” Electrum 29 (2022): 127–145. https://doi.org/10.4467/20800909EL.22.009.15779
Augustine. Confessions.
Augustine. The City of God.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000
Burkert, Walter. The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Doner, Colonel V. “Cognitive Dissonance of Political Activists, Or Whatever Happened to the Religious Right?” Chalcedon, July 1, 1999.
Freeman, Charles. The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. London: Heinemann, 2002.
Freeman, Charles. The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment. London: Head of Zeus, 2023.
Lawrence, D. H. Apocalypse. 1931.
Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration. 1689.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700. London: Allen Lane, 2003.
Panpsychism, the Emergence Problem, and the Fractures Inside Mythicism with Dr. Skrbina
Today’s conversation isn’t just about whether Jesus existed.
It’s about something sitting underneath that entire debate.
Most mythicist conversations, meaning scholars and skeptics who argue that Jesus may be a literary or constructed figure, operate inside a philosophical framework called materialism.
Materialism in this sense doesn’t simply mean “trust science.” It’s a deeper metaphysical claim: that everything that exists is ultimately physical. Matter is fundamental, and consciousness is something the brain produces when matter is arranged in the right way.
Revisit a past episode where we discussed the dogma of materialism further
In that picture, mind comes after matter. Meaning comes after biology. Religion becomes a byproduct of social evolution.
But there’s a philosophical tension hiding inside that assumption.
Evolution can explain how biological bodies change. It can describe how organisms adapt and diversify. What it does not explain is something much more basic:
Why is there subjective experience at all? Why does pain actually hurt? Why does the color red look like something?
If matter is completely mindless at the ground level, how does experience suddenly appear?
Philosophers call this the emergence problem.
One alternative view (panpsychism) proposes that consciousness isn’t produced by matter at all. Instead, consciousness may be fundamental to reality itself.
That’s where philosopher Dr. David Skrbina enters the conversation.
His book Panpsychism in the West traces this idea across centuries of philosophical thought, showing that the notion of a mind-infused cosmos has appeared again and again throughout Western intellectual history.
But Skrbina has also stepped directly into the mythicist debate with his book The Jesus Hoax. More recently, he published a sharp response to criticism from fellow skeptics David Fitzgerald and Richard Carrier.
Add to that Adam Green’s recent book The Jesus Deception, which approaches early Christianity from yet another angle, and something interesting starts to appear:
Mythicism isn’t a unified theory. It’s fracturing into camps.
So, this conversation moves across several layers at once:
• consciousness and materialism • the emergence problem • whether panpsychism overlaps with Neoplatonism • Paul: historical strategist or literary construct? • and how The Jesus Hoax differs from The Jesus Deception
Let’s start with the philosophical ground beneath it all.
Consciousness and the Return of Panpsychism
Panpsychism is one of those philosophical ideas that sounds strange the first time you hear it but becomes harder to dismiss the more you think about the alternatives.
In plain terms, the idea is simple: mind or experience may exist at some level throughout reality.
That doesn’t mean rocks are thinking thoughts. Rather, it suggests that the basic constituents of the universe may possess extremely simple forms of experience.
The reason this idea keeps resurfacing across centuries of philosophy is precisely because of the emergence problem.
If consciousness appears only when matter becomes sufficiently complex, we still have to explain how completely mindless matter suddenly gives rise to subjective experience.
Panpsychism flips that question around. Instead of asking how consciousness emerges from matter, it proposes that matter itself may already possess proto-mental properties.
Skrbina’s historical work traces this idea from ancient Greek philosophy through early modern thinkers and into contemporary debates in philosophy of mind.
The interesting thing is that the idea never quite disappears. Even in periods dominated by strict materialism, it keeps resurfacing whenever philosophers run into the same problem: explaining how subjective experience arises from purely physical processes.
Materialism and the Emergence Problem
Materialism has been extraordinarily successful as a scientific framework.
It assumes that the universe is composed of physical entities governed by consistent laws. That assumption has allowed science to model everything from particle physics to molecular biology.
But when we apply that framework to consciousness, something unusual happens.
If matter is entirely mindless at the fundamental level, then at some point in the evolutionary process subjective experience must suddenly appear.
But where?
There’s no obvious “magic neuron” where awareness switches on. There’s no clear moment in development when matter transforms from non-experiencing to experiencing.
This is the emergence problem in its most basic form: explaining how subjective experience arises from purely physical systems.
Some scientists have attempted to address this by looking deeper into physics itself. Theories like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s Orch-OR model propose that consciousness may be connected to quantum processes occurring inside neurons.
Whether or not those models succeed, they reveal something important: even within science, researchers are exploring ways to rethink the relationship between mind and matter.
Panpsychism is one such attempt.
Is Panpsychism Just Neoplatonism?
Because panpsychism proposes a cosmos infused with mind, people often assume it’s simply a modern version of Neoplatonism.
But the two traditions aren’t identical.
Neoplatonism describes reality as a hierarchical structure flowing from the One— a metaphysical unity that gives rise to intellect and soul. It carries strong teleological and ethical implications about how humans align themselves with the structure of reality.
Panpsychism, by contrast, is often framed as a metaphysical hypothesis about the nature of matter and consciousness, without necessarily including the moral or spiritual framework found in Neoplatonic thought.
Still, the overlap is hard to ignore. Both challenge the idea that the universe is purely mechanical.
Both suggest that mind and reality may be deeply intertwined.
The Mythicism Debate Fractures
Another interesting tension here is that some of the things Skrbina is criticized for aren’t that far from ideas that already exist in mythicist literature.
One of the central claims in The Jesus Hoax is that St Paul and a small cabal of early Christians may have functioned as a kind of non-military strategy within the Roman world. Instead of armed revolt, the movement theologically conquered by the spread through ideas, theology, and cultural influence.
Skrbina frames this as a kind of ideological or narrative strategy that could reshape behavior across the empire.
What makes the criticism somewhat puzzling is that a similar concept appears in Richard Carrier’s own work.
In Not the Impossible Faith, Carrier describes early Christianity as a movement that spread not through military rebellion but through cultural transformation. Rome could defeat armed revolts, but it could not easily suppress ideas that moved through communities, texts, and belief.
Carrier even characterizes this as a kind of revolutionary strategy. If Rome would always win a military conflict, the only rebellion that could succeed would be a cultural one— a war ofideas rather than armies. (Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith, Ch. 9).
In that sense, the notion that early Christianity functioned as a non-military cultural movement is not controversial. It is widely recognized that the early Jesus movement spread through persuasion, networks, and theology rather than organized violence.
Where the real disagreement emerges is over intent and origin.
Skrbina interprets this cultural transformation as something that may have been deliberately constructed or strategically shaped. His critics tend to view it as an organic religious development rather than a coordinated narrative project.
Another point raised in the exchange concerns the authorship of the gospels, particularly the question of whether Luke was a Gentile writer. Skrbina notes that even if certain details of authorship were revised, for example: if Luke were ultimately shown to be Gentile, the core structure of his argument would not collapse. It would simply require refinement.
That willingness to concede smaller points while maintaining the broader model is something he addresses repeatedly in his response.
The broader takeaway from this debate is that mythicism itself is not a single theory. It is a field where scholars often agree that the traditional gospel narrative is historically unreliable but disagree sharply about what actually replaced it.
One of the most important figures in this entire discussion is Paul of Tarsus.
Skrbina’s model treats Paul as a strategic actor who played a central role in shaping early Christian theology.
But other scholars have raised a more radical possibility: that the Pauline corpus itself may not represent a stable first-century historical figure at all.
Research such as Nina Livesey’s work on the Roman literary context of the Pauline letters suggests that some of these texts may reflect later second-century developments.
If Paul himself were partly a literary construct, it would reshape the debate considerably.
Yet even in that scenario, Skrbina argues, the broader thesis of deliberate narrative construction would not necessarily collapse. It would simply require revision.
Adam Green and the Midrashic Jesus
Adam Green’s recent book The Jesus Deception adds another dimension to the conversation.
Green emphasizes the possibility that the gospel narratives were crafted through midrashic techniques, weaving together Hebrew scriptures to construct the story of Jesus.
This raises a broader question about how religious narratives function historically.
Are they simply stories? Or do they operate as cultural scripts that shape behavior across entire societies?
Green invokes a concept from cultural theory called hyperstition: the idea that beliefs can begin to influence reality because people act as if those beliefs are true.
In other words, a prophecy doesn’t need to be literally true to become historically powerful.
It only needs to be believed strongly enough that people start behaving in ways that bring it about.
That possibility becomes particularly interesting when we look at modern geopolitics.
Some recent reports have suggested that military personnel have framed conflicts in the Middle East through apocalyptic biblical language, describing events as part of a divine plan leading toward Armageddon.
Whether or not such interpretations reflect official policy, they illustrate how powerful religious narratives can be in shaping political imagination.
For readers who want to explore the topics discussed in this episode more deeply, the following books and research have shaped the ideas discussed in this conversation. These works cover philosophy of consciousness, panpsychism, early Christianity, and the intellectual history of the ancient world.
Philosophy of Consciousness & Panpsychism
Panpsychism in the West – David Skrbina A comprehensive historical survey tracing the idea that mind or experience may be fundamental to reality across centuries of Western philosophy.
Science Set Free – Rupert Sheldrake A critique of the assumptions underlying modern scientific materialism and an exploration of alternative ways of thinking about nature, consciousness, and scientific inquiry.
The Emperor’s New Mind – Roger Penrose A physicist’s investigation into the nature of consciousness, the limits of artificial intelligence, and the possibility that consciousness is tied to deeper physical processes in the universe.
The Jesus Hoax – David Skrbina Explores the possibility that early Christian narratives functioned as a strategic cultural movement within the Roman world.
The Jesus Deception – Adam Green Argues that the story of Jesus may have been constructed through Jewish midrashic storytelling traditions.
Not the Impossible Faith – Richard Carrier Carrier’s argument that Christianity’s success in the Roman Empire was historically improbable given the cultural environment of the time.
The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context – Nina Livesey A scholarly examination of whether the Pauline letters reflect later Roman literary production and rhetorical conventions.
The Opening of the Western Mind – Charles Freeman A history of classical Greek and Roman intellectual traditions and the philosophical foundations of the ancient world.
The Closing of the Western Mind – Charles Freeman Examines how classical philosophical traditions were gradually replaced by Christian orthodoxy in late antiquity.
A historical documentary blended with a personal reckoning and a cultural warning
This one has been sitting with me for a long time.
Six months, maybe more. Notes in the book margins. Tons of screenshots. Quotes stacked in my notes folder. Books half-highlighted and folded pages revisited. Every time I thought I was ready to write it, I wasn’t…
Because this isn’t just about history. It’s about a story we keep repeating with confidence: that Christianity saved the West and what happens when you actually slow down to examine that claim.
The claim that Christianity civilized Europe. Christianity gave us human rights, pluralism, rational inquiry, restraint. And if Western civilization feels unstable today, the prescription is simple— return to Christian moral supremacy.
I find myself increasingly tired of hearing it.
Tired of watching “Judeo-Christian values” invoked as shorthand for liberty. Tired of hearing that our freedoms, our intellectual life, our legal architecture all flow directly from the Bible. Tired of the way paganism is casually used as a synonym for barbarism, ego, domination — while Christianity is cast as the moral counterweight, the conscience that civilizes power.
A recent example sharpened that fatigue. Leighton Woodhouse published an opinion piece in The New York Times titled Donald Trump, Pagan King. The framing was familiar and rhetorically smooth. Paganism was associated with appetite, force, and unchecked authority. Christianity appeared as restraint, humility, moral seriousness. The implication was subtle but unmistakable: whatever is broken in our politics represents a departure from Christian virtue.
The structure of this narrative is ancient. Pagan equals raw power. Christian equals moral discipline.
But that framing rests on an assumption that deserves far more scrutiny than it receives. It assumes that Christianity is the moral software of the West. Before it, there was chaos; after it, civilization.
The deeper I have gone into late antiquity, through Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age, Charles Freeman’s analysis of intellectual narrowing, Ramsay MacMullen’s documentation of coercive conversion, and through primary sources from both Christian and pagan voices— the more that tidy civilizational story begins to unravel.
Because when Christianity gained institutional dominance, what followed was not the natural flowering of pluralism and inquiry. It was very opposite.
And for us to truly understand, we have to begin this story before Christianity held power.
A World Before Monopoly
The Greco-Roman world was not a utopia. It had power structures, that were often violent, and deeply unequal. But it operated within a religious and intellectual framework that functioned very differently from exclusive monotheism.
Roman religion was additive rather than subtractive. One could honor household gods, civic gods, the imperial cult, foreign deities, and philosophical conceptions of the divine without renouncing the others. Orthopraxy mattered more than orthodoxy. What counted was correct ritual performance, not exclusive belief. The pax deorum (the peace with the gods) was maintained through observance, not doctrinal conformity.
Philosophically, multiplicity was the norm. Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics, and Platonists argued openly about cosmology, ethics, and the nature of reality. Protagoras could admit uncertainty about the gods without being erased from the record. Cicero articulated natural law grounded in reason and universality long before Christianity gained political authority. Debate was public. Rhetorical training was a civic skill. Argument was like oxygen at the time.
Cicero
The Roman legal system developed sophisticated structures of administration and legislation that would profoundly shape Western law. None of this depended on exclusive revelation. It depended on human reasoning operating within a plural environment.
Rome suppressed what it perceived as politically dangerous. It was capable of cruelty. But structurally, it tolerated metaphysical competition. Truth was not framed as singular and jealous in the way later Christian orthodoxy would insist.
Christianity did not enter this world as one more school of thought among many. It entered with a different moral architecture. Not “add Christ to the pantheon.”
But “burn down the rest.”
That distinction is not merely cosmetic. It is foundational to understanding the real history.
The Architecture of Exclusivity
The Hebrew scriptures that Christianity inherited contain a recurring moral posture toward rival worship. Altars are to be broken down. Sacred groves burned. Idols smashed. “You shall have no other gods before me” is not a suggestion of preference; it is a declaration of exclusivity. Rival worship is not seen as a mere mistake; it is corrupting.
When confined to private devotion, this posture functions as identity formation. When fused with state power, it moves from conviction to coercion.
For the first three centuries of its existence, Christianity lacked imperial authority. It survived in the margins of society. The decisive shift came when Christianity aligned with imperial power under Constantine and his successors.
Estimates vary, but many scholars place Christians at roughly ten percent of the empire around the year 300. The exact percentage is debated (ancient demographic modeling is necessarily approximate) but the trajectory is clear. Within a few generations, that minority became the ruling faith. By the end of the fourth century, imperial law assumed Christianity as normative and increasingly treated rival ritual as illegal.
This demographic reversal was not merely theological. It was political.
Once exclusivist theology acquired enforcement capacity, differences in beliefs was no longer merely error. It was threat.
In the 380s and 390s, imperial edicts against non-Christian ritual multiplied. In 399, a Christian emperor issued a decree stating:
“If there should be any temples in the country districts, they shall be torn down without disturbance or tumult. For when they are torn down and removed, the material basis for all superstition will be destroyed.”
The language is bureaucratic. The effect was not.
These edicts provided legal cover for demolition. Bishops lobbied rulers for stricter laws. Congregations became demolition crews. Rival worship was framed as superstition whose material foundation had to be eradicated.
As Ramsay MacMullendemonstrates, once rival belief is conceptualized as spiritually dangerous, compromise becomes morally suspect. In a plural system, rivals are mistaken. In an exclusivist system, rivals are demonic. And demons are not debated. They are expelled.
This is the mechanism. And it becomes visible in stone.
Once theology fused with imperial authority, enforcement did not remain theoretical. It moved outward into public space. It moved into cities. It moved into stone.
Catherine Nixey opens The Darkening Age not with doctrine but with an image. The choice is deliberate. Arguments can be abstract. Statues cannot.
The Temple of Athena in Palmyra had stood for centuries. It was not a relic in a museum. It was part of a living civic landscape. Its columns had watched merchants pass through the city, soldiers march under banners, pilgrims move between worlds. Within it stood Athena— goddess of wisdom, of strategic intelligence, of disciplined thought. She represented more than devotion. She embodied the classical inheritance itself: philosophy, rhetoric, ordered reasoning, the cultivation of mind.
When the destroyers arrived, what they attacked was not simply stone.
Nixey describes a man entering the temple with a weapon and striking the back of Athena’s head with such force that the goddess was decapitated. The violence did not stop there. Her nose was sliced off. Her cheeks crushed. Her once composed face mutilated with intention.
And yet her eyes were left intact.
Those eyes still exist.
They look out from a ruined face that once symbolized wisdom.
This was not accidental vandalism. It was theology enacted physically. The old gods were not to be debated, not to be reinterpreted, not to be absorbed into new meaning. They were to be neutralized. Their presence was dangerous. Their very material existence was a threat to salvation.
The word often used for this period is triumph. Christianity triumphed over paganism. But triumph over what? Over multiplicity? Over a world in which philosophical disagreement could exist without annihilation? Over the idea that wisdom might not belong exclusively to one revelation?
The violence at Palmyra was not isolated. Temples across the empire were damaged, repurposed, stripped of ornament, or demolished. Some were converted into churches. Others were dismantled entirely. Sacred spaces that had structured civic and religious life for centuries were rendered spiritually illegitimate almost overnight.
What makes the image of Athena more destabilizing is its repetition.
In 2015, Islamic State militants bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud because it was deemed idolatrous. The reconstructed remnants of Athena were attacked again. Beheaded again. An arm sheared off again.
Different century. Different scripture. Different empire.
Same logic. When rival sacred presence is conceptualized as contamination, destruction becomes purification.
This is not about equivalence between traditions. It is about structure. When any Abrahamic framework defines truth as singular, exclusive, and threatened by proximity to rivals, pluralism becomes fragile. Once that framework acquires political power, fragility becomes enforcement.
And enforcement does not stop at statues.
Hypatia and the Enforcement of Certainty
If Athena represents symbolic erasure, Hypatia represents human cost.
Hypatia of Alexandria was not an obscure mystic. She was a philosopher, mathematician, and teacher in a city long known for intellectual life. Alexandria had been home to the great library and to competing schools of thought for centuries. Hypatia occupied a visible position within that tradition.
By the early fifth century, Alexandria was also home to a group known as the parabalani — often translated as “the reckless ones.” Officially devoted to acts of charity, they functioned in practice as muscle for ecclesiastical authority. By some estimates there were hundreds of them in the city. Roman legal documents describe them using the word terror.
Hypatia lived in the same civic space as these enforcers.
Her murder was not random street violence. It occurred within an atmosphere already shaped by escalating Christian authority and shrinking tolerance for rival influence. When exclusivist theology defines truth as singular and civic order as dependent upon that truth, intellectual figures outside that structure become destabilizing.
Hypatia was stripped, beaten, and killed by a mob associated with Christian zeal.
Her death did not mark the beginning of violence. It marked the normalization of it.
Once difference is framed as corruption and corruption as emergency, elimination becomes defensible.
This pattern appears again and again in late antiquity. Pagan philosophers were exiled. Schools were closed. Public debate narrowed. The emperor Justinian would eventually close the philosophical schools of Athens entirely. Inquiry did not vanish overnight, but the atmosphere changed. What had once been competition became suspicion.
And suspicion reshapes a civilization quietly before it reshapes it violently.
Fear as Teacher
One of the most revealing threads in the historical record is not the destruction itself but the emotional atmosphere that made it possible.
Demonology was not marginal superstition. It structured perception. Pagan temples were described as inhabited by malevolent spirits. Sacrifices were not merely mistaken rituals but demonic feasts. The world itself became morally charged terrain.
The Devil Belial before the Gates of Hell, from Das Buch Belial, published in Augsburg, 1473
Christians wrote anxious letters asking whether they could sit in places pagans had sat, use baths used on feast days, drink from wells near deserted temples, eat food that might have been associated with sacrifice. The fear was not symbolic. It was visceral.
Augustine’s response: that it was better to refuse contaminated food with Christian fortitude even if one starved, reveals a hierarchy of values. Survival could be negotiable. Purity could not.
John Chrysostom’s sermons described eternal punishment in sensory detail: rivers of fire, venomous worms, inescapable bonds, exterior darkness. Fear was not incidental rhetoric. It trained the imagination to view error as catastrophe and proximity to rival belief as existential threat.
When fear becomes formative, pluralism becomes psychologically intolerable.
And when that psychology is paired with law, narrowing becomes institutional.
The Disappearance of Thought
The destruction of statues is visible. The destruction of thought is quieter.
One of the most devastating aspects of late antique Christianization was not merely the smashing of temples but the narrowing of what was considered worth preserving.
The ancient Mediterranean world once contained the greatest concentration of written knowledge humanity had yet assembled. The Library of Alexandria, even allowing for scholarly debate about its exact size, symbolized an ambition toward accumulation. Knowledge was not singular. It was expansive. It was contradictory. It was messy.
Scholars selecting and reading scrolls in the Great Library of Alexandria hall
What remains of that intellectual inheritance is fragmentary.
By some estimates, only about one percent of Latin literature survives from antiquity. Entire authors are known only by name. Entire schools of philosophy survive only in hostile summaries written by opponents. Whole lines of speculation disappeared not because they were refuted but because they were not copied.
Copying is survival.
In the late antique world, the people doing the copying increasingly operated within Christian institutions.
And institutions preserve selectively.
“Stay clear of all pagan books!” reads the Apostolic Constitution. The warning is not casual. It reflects a moral anxiety about contamination. Texts are not neutral. They are spiritually charged. Exposure to the wrong argument is dangerous.
Celsus, one of the few pagan critics whose voice survives, accused Christians of discouraging inquiry. He mocked the posture: “Do not ask questions; just believe.” His tone is sharp, even sarcastic, but the anxiety is real. In Greek philosophy, reason was virtue. Inquiry was sacred. Faith, as unexamined assent, was the lowest epistemic posture.
Even Origen, writing within the Christian tradition, conceded the problem with striking bluntness, remarking that “the stupidity of some Christians is heavier than the sand of the sea.” The anti-intellectual reputation of early Christianity was not a later invention. It was noted by contemporaries.
The tragedy of Democritus crystallizes this narrowing.
Democritus — the philosopher often described as the father of atomic theory — wrote extensively across cosmology, mathematics, and ethics. He proposed a universe composed of atoms and void centuries before modern physics. And yet none of his works survive intact.
Not one.
What we know of his thought survives because it was partially preserved inside a single poem, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, which itself survived precariously through a single manuscript discovered in a German monastery centuries later.
The physicist Carlo Rovelli has called the total loss of Democritus’s writings “the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of the old classical civilisation.”
An entire philosophical lineage survived by accident.
That should unsettle anyone who claims Christianity simply “preserved learning.”
Yes, monasteries copied texts. But copying is filtration. Texts deemed dangerous, frivolous, obscene, or spiritually corrupt were less likely to be preserved. When a civilization narrows its moral boundaries, its archive narrows with it.
Charles Freeman, in The Closing of the Western Mind, argues that the most significant shift was not physical destruction but the narrowing of acceptable modes of thought. Public philosophical debate gradually gave way to appeals to authority and revealed certainty. Disputes were settled by councils backed by imperial power. Orthodoxy was defined not by open inquiry but by boundary enforcement.
The world did not stop thinking overnight. But the conditions for free competition of ideas shifted.
And once intellectual diversity contracts, recovery takes centuries.
The Martyr Myth and Moral Insulation
The martyr narrative sits at the emotional center of Christian self-understanding. It does more than preserve memory. It defines identity.
The story is familiar: early Christians were persecuted by a pagan empire. They were imprisoned, tortured, executed for their faith. They endured without retaliation. They did not conquer. They survived.
There is truth in this. The Great Persecution under Diocletian was real and brutal. Scriptures were burned. Churches destroyed. Christians were imprisoned and executed. No serious historian denies that.
What modern scholarship questions is scale and continuity. The most severe empire-wide persecution lasted roughly a decade. Other persecutions were local, sporadic, and uneven across regions. They were not a continuous three-century campaign of systematic eradication.
Martyr literature itself expanded over time. Detailed analysis of saints’ calendars reveals duplication, embellishment, and narrative layering. Some figures appear under multiple names. Some accounts contain anachronisms or miraculous flourishes that complicate their historical reliability.
The historian G. E. M. de Ste. Croix observed that later martyr literature increasingly displayed what he called “a contempt for historicity.”
That line matters. Because it signals a shift: suffering was not only remembered. It was shaped.
And shaped suffering serves a purpose.
Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian is an Italian Renaissance Tempera Painting created by Andrea Mantegna in c.1480.
Once Christianity aligned with imperial authority, the martyr narrative did not recede. It hardened into interpretive insulation. The same tradition that now authorized temple closures and school shuttings still understood itself as historically persecuted.
The story generates moral asymmetry: whatever Christians do can be framed as response, not domination.
And the function of the martyr narrative did not end in late antiquity. In modern apologetics, it often operates as proof. The logic runs like this: the apostles would not have died for something they knew was false; early Christians endured torture rather than recant; therefore, their testimony must be true.
But willingness to suffer proves sincerity, not metaphysical accuracy. People across religions have died for beliefs that contradict one another. Martyrdom establishes conviction. It does not establish truth.
This is why the martyr story is so stabilizing. It allows a movement to wield authority while retaining the self-image ofinnocence. It transforms power into protection and critique into persecution.
When temples were outlawed and philosophical schools shuttered, the tradition exercising authority did not see itself as conqueror. It saw itself as guardian of truth under threat.
If you are always defending truth, enforcement feels righteous.
The Last Pleas for Coexistence
One of the tragedies of this period is that the archive becomes overwhelmingly Christian. The winners preserved their own voices. The losing side survives in fragments.
But some fragments remain.
Libanius, a pagan orator in the fourth century, watched as temples across the empire were damaged, repurposed, or destroyed. His speeches are not the rantings of a fanatic. They are the anxious observations of a man watching his world contract. He describes sacred spaces falling into ruin, rituals forbidden, property seized. He notes opportunists dividing temple lands for personal gain under the cover of piety. What Christian historians later frame as triumph, Libanius experiences as loss.
Then there is Symmachus.
In 382 CE, the Christian emperor Gratian ordered the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Roman Senate House. For centuries, senators had offered ritual observances there before conducting civic business. It was not merely religious decoration; it was part of Rome’s public identity.
Symmachus wrote an appeal for its restoration.
His language is remarkable for its restraint. He does not demand dominance. He does not threaten revolt. He argues for coexistence.
“We look on the same stars,” he writes. “The sky is common. The same world surrounds us. What difference does it make by what pains each seeks the truth? We cannot attain to so great a secret by one road alone.”
It is difficult to imagine a clearer articulation of pluralism in the ancient world.
He closes not with hostility but with humility: “We offer now prayers, not conflict.”
He lost. The altar was not restored. The plea for multiplicity was overridden by certainty.
This moment matters because it reveals a collision between two moral architectures. One sees truth as approached through many paths. The other sees truth as singular and threatened by rival proximity.
Symmachus represents not pagan decadence but civic pluralism. He is not asking to suppress Christianity. He is asking for coexistence.
The answer he receives is enforcement. The narrowing was not accidental. It was structural.
The Long Return of Pluralism
The narrowing of late antiquity did not permanently extinguish intellectual life. But it did change its conditions. For centuries, inquiry moved within theological boundaries defined by ecclesiastical authority. Councils determined orthodoxy. Deviation could be punished. Philosophical speculation survived, but often cautiously, often cloaked.
What we now call the Enlightenment did not arise as a natural extension of Christian supremacy. It arose within tension — sometimes quiet, sometimes explosive — with religious monopoly.
Beginning in the Renaissance, Europe experienced a gradual rediscovery of classical texts. Manuscripts long buried in monastic libraries re-entered circulation. Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, preserving echoes of Democritus’s atomism, resurfaced. Greek philosophy was studied not merely as commentary on theology but as intellectual inheritance in its own right.
The recovery of classical thought did not instantly dissolve Christian authority. But it reintroduced plurality into the bloodstream of European intellectual life.
The Enlightenment sharpened that reintroduction.
Thinkers like John Locke articulated natural rights grounded not in revelation but in reason and shared human nature. Locke’s arguments for religious toleration did not emerge from biblical exclusivity; they emerged from a recognition that coercion in matters of belief corrupts both faith and civic peace.
Montesquieu analyzed the separation of powers not as a theological doctrine but as a structural safeguard against concentration of authority. His framework was explicitly concerned with preventing tyranny — whether monarchic or clerical.
These ideas did not descend seamlessly from medieval orthodoxy. They developed alongside, and often in resistance to, religious entanglement with state power.
When we reach the American founding, the tension becomes explicit.
The framers of the Constitution were deeply literate in classical thought. They read Cicero. They read Tacitus. They studied Roman republicanism. They were steeped in Enlightenment political theory. They feared concentrated power, including ecclesiastical power.
The Constitution contains no reference to Jesus Christ. It prohibits religious tests for office. The First Amendment forbids establishment of religion and protects free exercise. This was not a casual omission. It was intentional architecture.
The American experiment was not a biblical republic.
It was a republic designed to prevent religious monopoly.
Thomas Jefferson provides a particularly revealing case. Jefferson famously produced his own edited version of the Gospels, physically cutting out miracles and supernatural elements. The result, often referred to as the Jefferson Bible, retained ethical teachings while discarding divine intervention.
This was not the act of a man seeking to found a theocracy.
It was the act of a man separating moral philosophy from revealed absolutism.
Jefferson’s project reflects a broader Enlightenment impulse: to preserve ethical insight while disentangling it from exclusivist authority.
Roger Olson’s theological scholarship further complicates the claim that Christianity simply “gave us” pluralism. Olson emphasizes that Christianity was never doctrinally uniform in its early centuries. Orthodoxy was consolidated through contest, suppression, and boundary enforcement. The unity later invoked as civilizational foundation was itself the product of narrowing.
The Enlightenment did not grow naturally from that narrowing. It reopened debate.
It reintroduced skepticism as virtue.
It separated church and state not to destroy religion but to protect civic plurality.
If Christianity had already secured pluralism, the Enlightenment would have been unnecessary.
The fact that it was necessary tells us something profound.
Pluralism survived not because exclusivity reigned, but because exclusivity was restrained.
Did Christianity Give Us Human Rights?
At this point, the most common objection surfaces.
Even if there were excesses. Even if there was narrowing. Even if temples fell and texts disappeared. Christianity still gave us the concept of human dignity. Christianity laid the groundwork for human rights.
The claim sounds intuitive because Christian theology does contain a powerful moral idea: humans are made in the image of God. That idea has inspired reformers and abolitionists and activists. It matters.
But the existence of moral language is not the same thing as institutional pluralism.
The Stoics articulated a form of universal human rationality centuries before Christianity held power. Roman law developed ideas of legal personhood and universality that would influence later legal systems. Cicero’s natural law did not depend on revelation.
Christianity contributed to moral discourse. That is true.
But the institutional protection of dissent: the right to disagree publicly, to publish heterodox ideas, to worship differently without legal annihilation… did not emerge during periods of Christian monopoly. Those protections developed when religious authority was structurally limited.
Rights require restraint of power.
And historically, the moments when Christianity was most fused with state authority were not the moments when pluralism expanded.
What This Feels Like From the Inside
What unsettles me most about this history is not simply that it happened. It is that I recognize the mechanism.
I have lived the internal version of it.
Burn the books. Throw away the tarot cards. Remove your new age spirituality material. Avoid contamination of demonic entities. Guard the mind. Monitor the thoughts. Stay pure.
When you inhabit Christianity long enough, the anxiety internalizes. You become your own enforcer. You police your curiosity. You treat rival ideas not as intellectual challenges but as spiritual threats.
When I read about Christians in late antiquity asking whether they could sit where pagans had sat or drink from wells near deserted temples, it was too relatable.
The narrowing does not begin with demolition crews. It begins with fear.
Fear reshapes perception. Fear shrinks curiosity. Fear frames difference as danger.
Scale that fear across institutions and you have late antiquity.
Scale it across a nation and you have something far more consequential.
The Warning
This is why the rhetoric of Christian supremacy unsettles me.
Not because Christianity has contributed nothing to Western civilization. It has shaped art, music, law, charity, moral imagination. That is undeniable.
Much of this period is still narrated as civilizational triumph rather than suppression. As the academic John Pollini notes, “modern scholarship, influenced by a Judeo-Christian cultural bias, has frequently overlooked or downplayed such attacks and even at times sought to present Christian desecration in a positive light.”
But the claim that Christianity saved the West collapses complexity into myth. It erases the plural foundations of Greco-Roman thought. It erases the Enlightenment’s deliberate separation of church and state. It erases the long struggle to restrain religious monopoly.
Reformers like John Calvin did not argue for a secular state. In his Institutes, Calvin insisted that magistrates had a duty to suppress blasphemy and false worship.
Pluralism did not emerge from supremacy.
It survived by limiting it.
When modern commentators frame Christianity as the sole guardian of civilization and paganism as barbaric force, they repeat a frame older than they realize. They invoke a story in which exclusivity is equated with order and multiplicity with chaos.
History suggests something different.
Civilizations are stabilized not by monopoly but by constraint. Not by erasing rivals but by tolerating them. Not by conflating revelation with law but by separating the two.
If we forget that, if we mythologize exclusivity as the foundation of freedom, we risk mistaking that narrowing for renewal.
And that is not a mistake history makes gently.
aaaand that’s all I have for you today folks. If you’ve been here for a while, you know this is what Taste of Truth Tuesdays is about. Not tearing down for sport. Not defending tradition out of reflex. But slowing down long enough to ask: Is the story we’re repeating actually true?
and As always…
Maintain your curiosity. Embrace skepticism. And keep tuning in.
Endnotes
Leighton Woodhouse, “Donald Trump, Pagan King,” The New York Times, February 11, 2026. (Referenced as an example of contemporary framing of paganism versus Christianity.)
Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Knopf, 2002). Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). See also Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
On Roman religion as orthopraxic and plural in structure, see: Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Jörg Rüpke, Religion of the Romans (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
Cicero’s articulation of natural law appears in De Re Publica and De Legibus. See: Cicero, On the Republic and On the Laws, trans. James E. G. Zetzel (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
On late fourth-century anti-pagan legislation, see: Theodosian Code 16.10 (various edicts restricting sacrifice and authorizing temple closures). For analysis: Michele Renee Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy (Harvard University Press, 2002). Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire.
On the debated scope and frequency of early Christian persecutions: Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution (HarperOne, 2013). G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy (Oxford University Press, 2006). These works challenge the traditional narrative of continuous empire-wide persecution and note embellishment in later martyr literature.
On the parabalani and Hypatia: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, Book VII. Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford University Press, 2017). Roman legislation regulating the parabalani appears in Theodosian Code 16.2.42 and related laws.
On the Altar of Victory controversy and Symmachus: Symmachus, Relatio 3 (Petition for the Restoration of the Altar of Victory). Ambrose of Milan’s response in Epistle 17–18. See also: Michele Renee Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy.
On demonology and late antique Christian perceptions of paganism: Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Blackwell, 1996). Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age. Brown discusses the moralization of the inner life and late antique anxiety regarding contamination and spiritual danger.
On the survival rate of classical literature: It is widely acknowledged among classicists that only a small fraction of ancient literature survives. See: Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997). James J. O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word (Harvard University Press, 1998). The exact percentage is debated, but the scale of loss is undisputed.
On Democritus and the loss of his works: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Book IX). Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems (Riverhead Books, 2016), where Rovelli refers to the loss of Democritus as a major intellectual tragedy. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, as the principal ancient source preserving atomist philosophy.
On the closure of pagan philosophical schools under Justinian: Procopius, Secret History. Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation (University of California Press, 2015).
On Enlightenment political theory and religious toleration: John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748).
On Thomas Jefferson’s edited Bible: Thomas Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (commonly known as the Jefferson Bible), completed in 1820. See also: Edwin Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Eerdmans, 1996).
On early Christian theological diversity and consolidation of orthodoxy: Roger E. Olson, The Story of Christian Theology (InterVarsity Press, 1999). Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press, 2003) (for broader context on early doctrinal diversity).
Archaeology, “External Evidence,” and Groundhog Day in the Comment Section
Welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays, where we stay curious, stay skeptical, and keep a healthy distance from any dogma, whether it’s wrapped in a Bible verse or a political ideology.
This is Part Two of my Jesus Myth series, and I’m going to be straight with you:
This one is a doozy. Buckle up, buttercup. Feel free to pause and come back.
Originally, the plan was to bring David Fitzgerald back for another conversation. If you listened to Part One, you know he’s done a ton to popularize the idea that Jesus never existed and to dismantle Christian dogma. I still agree with the core mythicist claim: I don’t think the Jesus of the Gospels was a real historical person. If you missed it, here is the link.
But agreeing with someone’s conclusion doesn’t mean I hand them a free pass on how they argue.
After our first interview, I went deeper into Fitzgerald’s work and into critiques of it (especially Tim O’Neill’s long atheist review that absolutely shreds his method.) While his critique of Fitzgerald’s arguments is genuinely useful; his habit of branding people with political labels (“Trump supporter,” “denier”) to discredit them is… very regressive.
It’s the same purity-testing impulse you see in progressive (should be regressive) spaces, just performed in a different costume.
And that’s what finally pushed me over the edge: The more I watch the atheist/deconstruction world online, the more it reminded me of the exact rigid, dogmatic cultures people say they escaped.
Not all atheists, obviously. But a very loud chunk of that ecosystem runs on:
dunking, dog-piling, and humiliation
tribal loyalty, not actual inquiry
“You’re dead to me” energy toward anyone who may lean conservative or shows nuance
It’s purity culture in different branding.
Then I read how Fitzgerald responded to critics in those archived blog exchanges (not with clear counterarguments) but with emotional name-calling and an almost devotional defense of his “hero and mentor,” Richard Carrier. For me, that was a hard stop.
Add to that: his public Facebook feed is full of contempt for moderates, conservatives, “anti-vaxxers,” and basically anyone outside progressive orthodoxy. My audience includes exactly those people. This space is built for nuance for people who’ve already escaped one rigid belief system and are not shopping for a new one.
He’s free to have his politics. I’m free not to platform that energy.
So instead of Part Two with a guest, you’re getting something I honestly think is better:
me (😜)
a stack of sources
a comment section that turned into a live demo of modern apologetics
and a segment at the end where I turn the same critical lens on the mythicist side — including Fitzgerald himself
Yes, we’re going there. Just not yet.
Previously on Taste of Truth…
In Part One, I unpacked why “Jesus might never have existed” is treated like a taboo thought — even though the historical evidence is thin and the standards used to “prove” Jesus would never pass in any other field of ancient history.
Then, in a Taste Test Thursday episode, I zoomed out and asked: Why do apologists argue like this at all? We walked through:
early church power moves
modern thought-stopping tricks
and Neil Van Leeuwen’s idea of religious “credences,” which don’t function like normal factual beliefs at all
Today is about the evidence. Especially the apologetic tropes that showed up in my comments like a glitching NPC on repeat.
⭐ MYTHS #6 & #7 — “History and Archaeology Confirm the Gospels”
Papyrus P52 (𝔓52), often called the oldest New Testament manuscript. (It’s the size of a credit card) Apologists treat it like a smoking gun. It contains… one complete word: ‘the.’
These two myths always show up together in the comments, and honestly, they feed off each other. People claim, “history confirms the Gospels,” and when that collapses, they jump to “archaeology proves Jesus existed.” So, I’m combining them here, because the evidence (and the problems) overlap more than apologists want to admit.
In short: Archaeology confirms the setting. History confirms the existence of Christians. Neither confirms the Jesus of the Gospels. And once you actually look at the evidence, the apologetic scaffolding falls apart fast.
1. What Archaeology Really Shows (and What It Doesn’t)
If Jesus were a public figure performing miracles, drawing crowds, causing disturbances, and being executed by Rome, archaeology should show something tied to him or to his original movement.
Here’s what archaeology does show:
Nazareth existed.
Capernaum existed.
The general layout of Judea under Rome.
Ritual baths, synagogues, pottery, coins.
A real Pilate (from a fragmentary inscription).
That’s the setting.
Here’s what archaeology has never produced:
no house of Jesus
no workshop or tools
no tomb we can authenticate
no inscription naming him
no artifacts linked to the Twelve
no evidence of a public ministry
no trace of Gospel-level notoriety
Not even a rumor in archaeology that points to a miracle-working rabbi. Ancient Troy existing doesn’t prove Achilles existed. Nazareth existing doesn’t prove Jesus existed.
Apologists push the setting as if it confirms the character. It doesn’t.
If the Gospels were eyewitness-based biographies, their geography would line up with first-century Palestine.
Instead, we get:
• Towns that don’t match reality
The Gerasene/Gadarene/Gergesa demon-pig fiasco moves between three different locations because the original story (Mark) puts Jesus 30 miles inland… nowhere near a lake or cliffs.
• Galilee described like a later era
Archaeology shows Galilee in the 20s CE was:
taxed to the bone
rebellious
dotted with large Romanized cities like Sepphoris and Tiberias
But the Gospels portray quaint fishing villages, peaceful Pharisees, and quiet countryside. This reflects post-70 CE Galilee: the era when the Gospels were actually written.
• Homeric storms on a tiny lake
Mark treats the Sea of Galilee like the Aegean (raging storms, near capsizings, disciples fearing death) even though ancient critics mocked this because the “sea” is a small lake.
Dennis MacDonald shows Mark lifting whole scenes from Homer, which explains the mismatch: his geography serves his literary needs, not the historical landscape.
• Joseph of “Arimathea” (a town no one can find)
Carrier and others point out the name works more like a literary pun (“best disciple town”) than a real toponym.
• Emmaus placed at different distances
Luke places it seven miles away. Other manuscripts vary. There was no fixed memory.
These aren’t the mistakes of people writing about their homeland. They’re the mistakes of later authors constructing a symbolic landscape.
3. The Gospel Trial Scenes: Legally Impossible
This is the part Christians never touch.
One of the most respected legal scholars of ancient Jewish law did a line-by-line analysis of the Gospel trial scenes. He wasn’t writing from a religious angle, he approached it strictly as a historian of legal procedure.
His conclusion? The trial described in the Gospels violates almost every rule of how Jewish courts actually worked.
According to his research:
capital trials were never held at night
they were not allowed during festivals like Passover
capital verdicts required multiple days, not hours
the High Priest did not interrogate defendants
witness testimony had to match
beating a prisoner during questioning was illegal
and Jewish courts didn’t simply hand people over to Rome
When you stack these facts together, it becomes clear:
The Gospel trial scenes aren’t legal history…. they’re theological storytelling.
That’s before we even get to Pilate.
Pilate was not a timid bureaucrat.
He was violent, ruthless, removed from office for brutality.
4. Acts Doesn’t Remember Any Gospel Miracles
If Jesus actually:
drew crowds,
fed thousands,
raised the dead,
blacked out the sun,
split the Temple curtain,
and resurrected publicly…
Acts (written after the Gospels) should remember all of this.
Instead:
No one in Acts has heard of Jesus.
No one mentions an empty tomb.
No one cites miracles as recent events.
Roman officials are clueless.
Paul knows Jesus only through visions and the scriptures.
Acts behaves exactly like a community whose “history” was not yet written.
5. Manuscripts: Many Copies, No Control
Apologists love saying:
“We have 24,000 manuscripts!”
Quantity isn’t quality.
almost all are medieval
the earliest are tiny scraps
none are originals
no first-century copies
scribes altered texts freely
entire passages were added or deleted
six of Paul’s letters are pseudonymous
many early Christian writings were forged
Even Origen admitted that scribes “add and remove what they please” (privately, of course.)
The manuscript tradition looks nothing like reliable preservation.
6. The Church Fathers Don’t Help (and They Were Tampered With Too)
This is where Fitzgerald’s chapter hits hardest.
Before 150 CE, we have:
no Church Father quoting any Gospel
no awareness of four distinct Gospels
no clear references to Gospel events
Justin Martyr (writing in the 150s) is the first to quote anything Gospel-like, and:
he never names Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John
many of his quotes don’t match our Gospels
he calls them simply “the memoirs”
Even worse:
The writings of Ignatius, Polycarp, Dionysius of Corinth, and many others were tampered with. Some were forged entirely.
So the apologetic claim “The Fathers confirm the Gospels” collapses:
They don’t quote them. They don’t know them. And their own texts are unstable.
Metzger claimed we could reconstruct the New Testament from the Fathers’ quotations but his own scholarship shows the Fathers don’t quote anything reliably until after the Gospels were circulating.
7. External Pagan Sources: Late, Thin, and Dependent on Christian Claims
This is the other half of the myth… that “history” outside the Bible confirms Jesus.
Let’s look quickly:
• Tacitus (116 CE)
Reports what Christians of his day believed. He cites no source, no archive, no investigation.
• Pliny (c. 111 CE)
Says Christians worship Christ “as a god.” Confirms Christians existed — not that Jesus did.
• Josephus (93 CE)
The Testimonium is tampered with. Even conservative scholars admit Christian hands were all over it. The “James, brother of Jesus” line is ambiguous at best.
These are not independent confirmations. They’re late echoes of Christian claims.
In closing:
You can confirm:
towns
coins
synagogues
political offices
geography
But that only shows the world existed, not the characters.
The Gospels are theological narratives composed decades later, stitched out of scripture, symbolism, literary models, and the needs of competing communities.
Archaeology confirms the backdrop. History confirms the movement. Neither confirms the biography.
Once you strip away apologetic spin, the evidence points to late, literary, constructed narratives, not eyewitness records of a historical man.
Myth #8: “Paul and the Epistles Confirm the Gospels”
Albert Schweitzer pointed out that if we only had Paul’s letters, we would never know that:
Jesus taught in parables
gave the Sermon on the Mount
told the “Our Father” prayer
healed people in Galilee
debated Pharisees
From Paul and the other epistles, you wouldn’t even know Jesus was from Nazareth or born in Bethlehem.
That alone should make us pause before saying, “Paul confirms the Gospels.”
Paul’s “Gospel” Is Not a Life Story
When Paul says “my gospel,” he doesn’t mean a narrative like Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. His gospel is:
Christ died for our sins
was buried
was raised
now offers salvation to those who trust him
No:
Bethlehem, Nazareth, Mary, Joseph
John the Baptist
miracles, exorcisms, parables
empty tomb story with women at dawn
And this isn’t because Paul is forgetful. His letters are full of perfect moments to say, “As Jesus taught us…” or “As we all know from our Lord’s ministry…”
He never does.
Instead, he appeals to:
his own visions
the Hebrew scriptures (in Greek translation, the Septuagint)
what “the Lord” reveals directly to him
For Paul, Christ is:
“the image of the invisible God”
“firstborn of all creation”
the cosmic figure through whom all things were made
the one who descends to the lower realms, defeats spiritual powers, and ascends again
That is cosmic myth language… not “my friend’s rabbi who did a lot of teaching in Galilee a few decades ago.”
The “Lord’s Supper,” Not a Last Supper
The one place people think Paul lines up with the Gospels is 1 Corinthians 11, where he describes “the Lord’s Supper.”
Look closely:
He never calls it “the Last Supper.”
He never says it was a Passover meal.
He never places it in Jerusalem.
He says he received this ritual from the Lord, not from human eyewitnesses.
The phrase he uses, kuriakon deipnon (“Lord’s dinner”), is the same kind of language used for sacred meals in pagan mystery cults.
The verb he uses for “handed over” is used elsewhere of God handing Christ over, or Christ handing himself over not of a buddy’s betrayal. The specific “Judas betrayed him at dinner” motif shows up later, in the Gospels.
Then, when later authors retell the scene, they can’t even agree on the script. We get:
Paul’s version
Mark’s version
Matthew’s tweak on Mark
Luke’s two different textual forms
and John, who skips a Last Supper entirely and relocates the “eat my flesh, drink my blood” thing to a synagogue sermon in Capernaum
That looks less like multiple eyewitness reports and more like a liturgical formula evolving as it gets theologized.
Hebrews and the Missing Connection
The author of Hebrews:
goes deep on covenant and sacrificial blood
quotes Moses: “This is the blood of the covenant…”
spends time on Melchizedek, who brings bread and wine and blesses Abraham
In other words: The author sets up what would be a perfect sermon illustration for the Last Supper… but he never takes it. No “as our Lord did on the night he was betrayed.” No Eucharist scene. No Passover meal.
The simplest explanation: He doesn’t know that story. He knows the ritual meaning; the later narrative scene in Jerusalem hasn’t been invented yet in his circle.
How Paul Says He Knows Christ
Paul is very clear about his source:
He did not receive his gospel from any human (Galatians 1).
He barely met the Jerusalem “pillars,” waited years to even visit them, and insists they added nothing to his message.
He says God “revealed his Son in me.”
His scriptures are the Septuagint, which he reads as a giant coded story about Christ.
In other words, for Paul:
Christ is a hidden heavenly figure revealed in scripture and visions.
The “mystery” has just now been unveiled.
That only makes sense if there wasn’t already a widely known human teacher whose sayings and deeds were circulating everywhere.
The Silence of the Other Epistles
If it were just Paul, we could say, “That’s just Paul being weird.”
But the pattern runs across the other epistles:
From the New Testament letters outside the Gospels and Acts, you would never know:
Jesus was from Nazareth or born in Bethlehem
he grew up in Galilee
he taught crowds, told parables, healed people, or exorcised demons
he had twelve disciples, one of whom betrayed him
there were sacred sites tied to his life in Jerusalem
“Bethlehem,” “Nazareth,” “Galilee” do not appear in those letters with reference to Jesus. Jerusalem is never presented as, “You know, the place where all this just happened.”
The supposed “brothers of the Lord” never act like family with stories to tell. The letters attributed to James and Jude don’t even mention they’re related to Jesus.
When these early authors argue about circumcision, food laws, purity, and ethics, they consistently go back to the Old Testament…not to anything like a Sermon on the Mount.
That is very hard to reconcile with a memory of a recent, popular Galilean preacher inspiring the entire movement.
Myth #9: “Christianity Began With Jesus and His Twelve Besties”
If you grew up on Acts, you probably have this movie in your head:
Tiny, persecuted but unified Jesus movement
Centered in Jerusalem
Led by Jesus’ family and the Twelve
Paul shows up later in season two as the complex antihero
That’s the canonical story.
When you step back and read our earliest sources on their own terms, that picture melts.
Fragmented from the Start
In 1 Corinthians, Paul complains:
“Each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Is Christ divided?” (1 Cor. 1:12–13)
That’s not “one unified church.”
He also:
rants about people “preaching another Jesus”
calls rival apostles “deceitful workers,” “false brothers,” “servants of Satan”
invokes curses on those preaching a different gospel (Gal. 1:6–9; 2 Cor. 11)
Meanwhile, the early Christian manual Didakhē warns communities about wandering preachers who are just “traffickers in Christs” (what Bart Ehrman nicknames “Christ-mongers.”)
Right away, we see:
multiple groups using the Christ label
competing versions of what “the gospel” even is
no sign of one tight central group everyone agrees on
Different Jesuses for Different Communities
By the time the Gospels and later texts are in circulation, we can already see:
Paul’s Christ: a cosmic, heavenly savior, revealed in scripture and visions, ruling spiritual realms
Thomasine Christ: in the Gospel of Thomas, salvation comes through hidden wisdom; there’s no crucifixion or resurrection narrative
Mark’s Jesus: a suffering, misunderstood Son of God who’s “adopted” at baptism and abandoned at the cross
John’s Jesus: the eternal Logos, present at creation, walking around announcing his unity with the Father
Hebrews’ Christ: the heavenly High Priest performing a sacrifice in a heavenly sanctuary
These are not just “different camera angles on the same historical guy.” They reflect:
different liturgies
different cosmologies
different starting assumptions about who or what Christ even is
And notice: there is no clean pipeline from “this man’s twelve students carefully preserved his teachings” into this wild diversity.
Paul vs. Peter: Not a Cute Disagreement
Acts spins the Jerusalem meeting as:
everyone sits down
hashes things out
walks away in perfect unity
Paul’s own account (Galatians 2) is… not that:
he calls some of the Jerusalem people “false brothers”
he says they were trying to enslave believers
he says he “did not yield to them for a moment”
he treats the supposed “pillars” (Peter, James, John) as nobodies who “added nothing” to his gospel
That’s not a friendly staff meeting. That’s two rival Christianities:
a more Torah-observant, Jerusalem-centered Jesus-sect
Paul’s law-free, Gentile-mystic Christ-sect
Acts, written later, airbrushes this into harmony. The letters show how close the whole thing came to a full split.
Where Are the Twelve?
If Jesus’ twelve disciples were:
real,
the main founders of Christianity,
traveling around planting churches,
we’d expect:
lots of references to them
preserved teachings and letters
at least some reliable biographical detail
Instead:
the lists of the Twelve don’t agree between Gospels
some manuscripts can’t even settle on their names
outside the Gospels and Acts, the Twelve basically vanish from the first-century record
Paul:
never quotes “the Twelve”
never appeals to them as the final authority
treats Peter, James, John simply as rival apostles, not as Jesus’ old friends
We have no authentic writings from any of the Twelve. The later “Acts of Peter,” “Acts of Andrew,” “Acts of Thomas,” etc., are generally acknowledged to be later inventions.
The simplest explanation is not that the Twelve were historically massive and weirdly left no trace. It’s that:
“The Twelve” are symbolic: twelve tribes, twelve cosmic seats, twelve zodiac signs, take your pick.
Their names and “biographies” were built after the theology, not before.
The Kenosis Hymn: Jesus as a Title, Not a Birth Name
In Philippians 2, Paul quotes an early hymn:
“Being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — death on a cross. Therefore God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow…”
Notice:
The hymn does not say God gave him the title “Lord.”
It says God gave him the name Jesus after the exaltation.
That is not what you expect if “Jesus” was already the known name of a village carpenter from Nazareth. It makes a lot more sense if:
“Jesus” functions originally as a divine name for a savior figure (“Yahweh saves”),
assigned in the mythic story after his cosmic act,
and only later gets retrofitted as the everyday name of a human hero.
Mark: From Mystery Faith to “Biography”
All of this funnels into the earliest Gospel: Mark.
Mark announces up front that he’s writing a gospel, not a biography. Modern scholars have shown that Mark:
builds scenes out of Old Testament passages
mirrors patterns from Greek epics
structures the story like a giant parable, where insiders are given “the mystery of the kingdom,” and outsiders only get stories
In Mark’s own framework, Jesus speaks in parables so that many will see but not understand. The whole Gospel plays that way: symbolic narrative first, later read as straight history once the church gains power.
So did Christianity “begin with Jesus and his apostles”?
If by that you mean:
One coherent movement, founded by a famous rabbi with twelve close disciples, faithfully transmitted from Jerusalem outward…
Then no. That’s the myth.
What we actually see is:
multiple competing Jesuses
rival gospels and factions
no clear paper trail from “Jesus’ inner circle”
later authors stitching together a cleaned-up origin story and branding rivals as “heresy”
Biographies came after belief, not before.
Myth #10: “Christianity Was a Miraculous Overnight Success That Changed the World”
The standard Christian flex goes like this:
“No mere myth could have spread so fast and changed the world so profoundly. That proves Jesus was real.”
Let’s slow that down.
But before we even touch the growth rates, we need to name something obvious that apologists conveniently forget:
Christianity wasn’t the first tradition built around a dying-and-rising savior. Not even close.
Long before the Gospels were written, the ancient Near East had already produced fully developed resurrection myths. One of the oldest (and one of the most important) belonged to Inanna, the Sumerian Queen of Heaven.
Ancient Akkadian cylinder seal (2350–2150 BCE) depicting Inanna
Inanna’s Descent (c. 2000–3000 BCE) is the earliest recorded resurrection narrative in human history.
She descends into the Underworld, is stripped, judged, executed, hung on a hook, and then through divine intervention, is brought back to life and restored to her throne.
This story predates Christianity by two thousand years and was well known across Mesopotamia.
In other words:
✨ The idea that a divine figure dies, descends into darkness, and returns transformed was already ancient before Christianity was even born.
So, the claim that “no myth could spread unless it were historically real” falls apart immediately. Myths did spread. Myths do spread. Myths shaped entire civilizations long before Jesus entered the story.
Now (with that context in place) let’s actually talk about Christianity’s growth..
Christianities Stayed Small…. Until Politics Changed
Carrier’s modeling makes it clear:
even if you start with generous numbers (say 5,000 believers in 40 CE),
you still don’t get anywhere near a significant percentage of the Empire until well into the third century
And that includes all groups who believed in some form of Christ — including the later-branded “heretics.”
So, for the first ~250 years, Christianity:
is tiny
is fragmented
is one cult among many in a very crowded religious landscape
The “miracle” is not early explosive growth. It’s what happens when their tiny, disciplined network suddenly gets access to empire-level power.
Rome Falls; Christianity Rises
Fitzgerald is right that Christianity benefitted from Rome’s third-century crisis:
chronic civil wars
inflation and currency debasement
border instability and barbarian incursions
trade networks breaking down
urban life contracting
As conditions worsened:
Christianity’s disdain for “worldly” culture
its emphasis on endurance, suffering, and heavenly reward
its growing bishop-led structure and charity networks
…all became more attractive to the poor and dispossessed.
“It was a mark of Constantine’s political genius … that he realized it was better to utilize a religion … that already had a well‑established structure of authority … rather than exclude it as a hindrance.” Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & the Fall of Reason
But there’s a step many historians including Fitzgerald often underplay:
How Christianity destroyed the classical world.
From Tolerated to Favored to Tyrannical
A quick timeline:
313-Constantine legalizes Christianity (Edict of Milan). Christianity is now allowed, not official. Constantine still honors Sol Invictus and dies as a pagan emperor who also patronized bishops.
4th century– Christian bishops gain wealth and political leverage. Imperial funds start flowing to churches. Pagan temples begin to be looted or repurposed.
380– Emperor Theodosius I issues the Edict of Thessalonica: Nicene Christianity becomes the official state religion.
395 and after– Laws begin banning pagan sacrifices and temple worship. Pagan rites become crimes.
Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age and Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind document how this looked on the ground:
temples closed, looted, or destroyed
statues smashed
libraries and shrines burned
philosophers harassed, exiled, or killed
non-Christian rites criminalized
Christianity didn’t “persuade” its way to exclusive dominance. It:
received funding and legal favor
then helped outlaw and dismantle its competition
That is not a moral judgment; it’s just how imperial religions behave.
The “Overnight Success” That Took Centuries and a State
So was Christianity a new, radically different, overnight success?
Not new: it recycled the son-of-god savior pattern, sacred meals, initiation, and rebirth themes common in the religious world around it. Even early church fathers admitted the similarities and blamed them on Satan “counterfeiting” Christianity in advance.
Not overnight: it stayed statistically tiny for generations.
Not purely spiritual success: it became powerful when emperors needed an obedient, centralized religious hierarchy to stabilize a collapsing state.
Christianity didn’t “win” because its evidence was overwhelming.
It won because:
it fit the needs of late-imperial politics
it built a strong internal hierarchy
it could supply social services
its leaders were willing to suppress, outlaw, and overwrite rival traditions
This is not unique. It’s a textbook case of how state-backed religions spread.
Why the Pushback Always Sounds the Same
After Part One, my comment sections turned into Groundhog Day:
“You’re ignoring Tacitus and Josephus!”
“Every serious scholar agrees Jesus existed.”
“Archaeology proves the Bible.”
“There are 25,000 manuscripts.”
“Paul met Jesus’ brother!”
“If Jesus wasn’t real, who started Christianity?”
“Ancient critics never denied his existence — checkmate.”
“You just hate religion.”
“This is misinformation.”
Different usernames. Same script.
This is where Neil Van Leeuwen’s work on religious credences helps:
Factual beliefs are supposed to track evidence. If you show me credible new data, I update.
Religious credences function differently: they’re tied to identity, community, and morality. Their job isn’t to track facts; it’s to hold the group together.
So when you challenge Jesus’ historicity, you’re not just questioning an ancient figure. You’re touching:
“Who am I?”
“Who are my people?”
“What makes my life meaningful?”
No wonder people come in hot.
That doesn’t make them stupid or evil. It just means the conversation isn’t really about Tacitus. It’s about identity maintenance.
Now Let’s Turn the Lens on Mythicism (Yes, Including Fitzgerald)
Here’s where I want to be very clear:
I am a mythicist.
I do not think the Jesus of the Gospels ever existed as a historical person.
But mythicism itself doesn’t get a free pass.
Carrier’s Probability Model: When Someone Actually Does the Math
Most debates about Jesus collapse into appeals to authority. Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus at least does something different: it quantifies the evidence.
Using Bayesian reasoning, he argues roughly:
about a 1 in 3 prior probability that there was a “minimal historical Jesus”– a real Jewish teacher who got executed and inspired a movement
about 2 in 3 for a “minimal mythicist” origin– a celestial figure whose story later got historicized
Then, after weighing the actual evidence (Paul’s silence, the late Gospels, contradictions, etc.), he argues the probability of a historical Jesus drops further, to something like 1 in 12.
You don’t have to agree with his exact numbers to see the point:
Once you treat the sources like data, not dogma, the overconfident “of course Jesus existed, you idiot” stance looks a lot less justified.
O’Neill’s Critique of Fitzgerald: Atheist vs Atheist
Tim O’Neill, an atheist historian, wrote a long piece on Fitzgerald’s Nailed and does not hold back. His basic charges:
Fitzgerald oversells weak arguments
cherry-picks and misuses sources
ignores mainstream scholarship where it contradicts him
frames mythicism as bold truth vs. “apologist cowards,” which is just another tribal narrative
When Fitzgerald responded, he didn’t do so like someone doing serious historical work. He responded like an internet keyboard warrior.
And that same ideological vibe shows up in how he talks about people in general, which I said in the beginning.
Atheism as New Orthodoxy
The more time I spend watching atheist and deconstruction spaces online, the more obvious it becomes that a lot of these folks didn’t escape religion, they just changed uniforms. They swapped their church pews for Reddit threads, pastors for science influencers, and now “logic” is their new scripture. Ya feel me? It’s the same emotional energy: tribal validation, purity tests–like what do you believe or think about this? And the constant hunt for heretics who dare to ask inconvenient questions.
Say something even slightly outside the approved dogma…like pointing out that evolution (calm down, Darwin disciples) still has gaps and theoretical edges we haven’t fully nailed down and suddenly the comment section becomes the Inquisition. They defend the theory with the exact same fervor evangelicals defend the Book of Revelation. It’s wild.
And look, I’m all for science. I’m literally the girl who reads academic papers for funsies. But when atheists start treating evolution like a sacred cow that can’t be questioned, or acting like “reason” is this perfect, unbiased tool that magically supports all their existing beliefs… that’s not skepticism. That’s a new orthodoxy, dressed up as a freethinker. Different vocabulary, same psychology. Good gravy, baby— calm down.
and….here’s the uncomfortable truth a lot of atheists don’t want to hear:
Reason isn’t the savior they think it is.
French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have spent years studying how humans actually use reason and prepare yourself because: we don’t use it the way we think. Their research shows that reason didn’t evolve to help us discover truth. It evolved to help us win arguments, protect our identities, and persuade members of our group.
In other words:
confirmation bias isn’t a flaw
motivated reasoning isn’t a glitch
tribal loyalty isn’t an accident
They are features of the reasoning system.
Which is why people who worship “logic” often behave exactly like the religious communities they left… just with new vocabulary and a different set of heretics.
This is also why intellectual diversity matters so much. You cannot reason your way to truth inside an ideological monoculture. Your brain simply won’t let you. Without competing perspectives, reasoning becomes nothing more than rhetorical self-defense, a way to signal loyalty to the tribe while pretending to be above it.
John Stuart Mill understood this long before modern cognitive science confirmed it. In On Liberty, Mill argues that truth isn’t something we protect by silencing dissent. Truth emerges through friction, through the clash of differing perspectives. A community that prides itself on “rational superiority” but cannot tolerate disagreement becomes just another church with a different hymnal.
And that’s where many atheist and deconstruction spaces are now.
They haven’t transcended dogma. They’ve recreated it. Trading one orthodoxy for another.
This isn’t just about online atheists. This is about what happens when any movement stops questioning itself.
Challenging the Mythicist Side (Without Turning It Into Another Tribe)
Let’s get honest about the mythicist world too — because every camp has its blind spots.
Tim O’Neill’s critique of David Fitzgerald wasn’t just angry rhetoric. Strip away the insults, and he raises a few legitimate issues worth taking seriously:
1. Accusation of Agenda-Driven History
O’Neill argues that Fitzgerald starts with the conclusion “Jesus didn’t exist” and works backward, much like creationists do with Genesis.
Now Fitzgerald absolutely denies this. In his own words, he didn’t go looking for mythicism; mythicism found him when he started examining the evidence. And that’s fair.
But the deeper point still stands:
The mythicist movement can get so emotionally invested in debunking Christianity that it mirrors the very dogmatism it critiques.
You see this all over atheist spaces today — endless dunking, no nuance, purity tests, and very little actual curiosity.
That’s a valid critique.
2. Amateurism and Overreach
O’Neill also accuses Fitzgerald of relying too heavily on older scholarship, making confident claims where the evidence is thin, and occasionally overstating consensus.
Again — not entirely wrong. Fitzgerald’s book is sharp and compelling, but it’s not the cutting-edge end of mythicism anymore.
There are places where he simplifies. There are places where he speculates.
This matters because mythicism deserves better than overconfident shortcuts.
3. Fitzgerald doesn’t push far enough
And ironically, this is where I diverge from O’Neill entirely. He thinks Fitzgerald goes too far; I think Fitzgerald stops too soon.
There are areas where the mythicist case has advanced beyond Fitzgerald’s framework, and he doesn’t touch them:
• The possibility that “Paul” himself is a literary construct
Nina Livesey and other scholars argue that:
The Pauline voice may be a 2nd-century invention.
The letters reflect Roman rhetorical conventions, not authentic 1st-century correspondence.
The “apostle Paul” may be a theological persona used to unify competing sects.
Fitzgerald doesn’t address this— but it’s now one of the most provocative frontiers in the field.
• The geopolitical legacy of Abrahamic supremacy
Fitzgerald critiques Christian nationalism. Great. But he doesn’t go upstream to examine the deeper architecture:
It focuses almost exclusively on Christian excess while leaving the deeper architecture untouched: how Abrahamic identity claims themselves shape law, land, empire, and modern geopolitics.
When you zoom out, the story is not “Christian nationalism versus secular reason.”
It is competing and cooperating Abrahamic power structures, each with theological claims about chosen-ness, inheritance, land, and destiny.
Abrahamic Power Is Not Just Christian
Very few people are willing to look at the broader landscape of Abrahamic influence in American politics and global power structures. When they do not, they miss how deeply intertwined these traditions have been for over a century.
One under-discussed example is the longstanding institutional relationship between Mormonism and Judaism, particularly around shared claims to Israel and the “house of Israel.”
This is not hidden history.
In 1995, Utah Valley State College established a Center for Jewish Studies explicitly aimed at “bridging the gap between Jews and Mormons” and guiding relationships connected to Israel. One of the board members was Jack Solomon, a Jewish community leader who publicly praised the LDS Church as uniquely supportive of Judaism.
Solomon stated at the time that “there is no place in the world where the Christian community has been so supportive of the Jewish people and Judaism,” noting LDS financial and symbolic support for Jewish institutions in Utah going back to the early twentieth century.
This matters because Mormon theology explicitly claims descent from the house of Israel. Mormons do not merely admire Judaism. They see themselves as part of Israel’s continuation and restoration.
That theological framework shapes real-world alliances.
1. The Mormon Church Is a Financial Superpower
Most Americans have no idea how wealthy the LDS Church actually is.
The Mormon Church’s real estate & investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, was exposed in 2019 and again in 2023 for managing a secret portfolio now estimated at:
👉 $150–$200 billion
(Source: SEC filings, whistleblower leaks, Wall Street Journal)
To compare:
PepsiCo market cap: ~$175B
ExxonMobil (oil giant): ~$420B
Disney: ~$160B
Meaning:
📌 The LDS Church is financially on par with Pepsi and Disney, and not far behind Big Oil.
This is not a “church.” This is an empire.
And it invests strategically:
massive real estate acquisitions
agricultural control
media companies
political lobbying
funding influence networks
And let’s be clear: Mormons see themselves as a literal remnant of Israel (the last tribe) destined to help rule the Earth “in the last days.”
Which brings us to…
2. Mormonism’s Quiet Partnership with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR)
NAR is the movement behind the so-called “Seven Mountain Mandate”— the belief that Christians must seize control of:
Government
Education
Media
Arts & Entertainment
Business
Religion
Family
This is the backbone of Christian nationalism and it’s far more organized than people realize. But here’s the part that never gets discussed:
Mormon elites collaborate with NAR leadership behind the scenes.
Shared goals:
influence over U.S. political leadership
shaping national morality laws
preparing for a prophetic “kingdom age”
embedding power in those seven spheres
This isn’t fringe. This is the largest religious–political coalition in the country, and yet most journalists never touch it.
3. The Ziklag Group: A $25M-Minimum Christian Power Circle
You want to talk about “elite networks”?
Meet Ziklag: an ultra-exclusive Christian organization named after King David’s biblical stronghold. Requirements for membership: a minimum net worth of $25 million Their mission? Not charity. Not discipleship.
Influence the Seven Mountains of society at the highest levels.
Members include:
CEOs
hedge-fund managers
defense contractors
political donors
tech founders
Including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups.
AND YET…
Most people yelling about “Christian nationalism” have never even heard of Ziklag.
4. Meanwhile, Chabad-Lubavitch Has Met with Every U.S. President Since 1978
Evangelical influence isn’t the only Abrahamic power Americans ignore.
Chabad (a Hasidic cult with global reach) has:
direct access to every U.S. president
annual White House proclamations (“Education & Sharing Day”) explicitly honor a religious leader as a moral authority over the nation.
a network of emissaries (shluchim) embedded in power centers around the world
This is influence, not conspiracy.
This is religious lobbying at the highest level of government, treated as unremarkable simply because the public doesn’t understand it.
The Rebbe’s ambassador to Washington D.C., Rabbi Abraham Shemtov, addresses the crowd at an event in front of the White House organized by American Friends of Lubavitch, as President Carter and The Honorable Stuart E. Eizenstat, Chief Domestic Policy Adviser and the Executive Director of the White House Domestic Policy Staff, look on.
President Gerald Ford is greeted by Rabbi Abraham Shemtov (left), national director of American Friends of Lubavitch; Rabbi Moshe Feller (right), Chabad-Lubavitch emissary to Minnesota; and Senator Rudy Boschwitz; at the American Friends of Lubavitch Philadelphia dinner, May 1975.
President Ronald Reagan signs the Education Day U.S.A. proclamation
President Bill Clinton places a dollar bill in a charity box after receiving members of the American Friends of Lubavitch in the White House.
President George W. Bush speaks to Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis after signing the Education Day U.S.A. proclamation.
President Obama Welcomes Chabad-Lubavitch to the White House
Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis meet with President Donald J. Trump on Education and Sharing Day, U.S.A. in 2018. “The First Lady and I encourage all Americans to reflect upon the Rebbe’s teachings,” President Trump wrote in this year’s proclamation. “His inestimable dedication and unwavering example have become woven into the very fabric of our nation and its character. His memory remains a blessing to the world.”
Biden meets with over 100 Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis
See the Pattern Yet?
When people say “Christian nationalism,” they’re talking about one branch of a much older tree.
Christianity isn’t the problem. Atheism isn’t the solution.
The issue is Abrahamic supremacy: the belief that one sacred lineage has the right to rule, legislate, moralize, and define history for everyone else.
Across denominations, across continents, across political parties, the pattern is the same:
chosen-people narratives
divine-right entitlement
mythic land claims
sacred-tier influence operations
the blending of theology with statecraft
“Groupish belief systems that justify valuing one’s group above others must be inventable.” — Religion as Make-Believe.
Exactly.
These power structures aren’t ancient relics. They’re alive, wealthy, organized, and deeply embedded in American political life. And yet we’re told to panic exclusively about MAGA Christians… while studiously ignoring:
Mormon financial empires
NAR infiltration of U.S. political offices
Zionist influence networks
Chabad’s presidential pipeline
elite Christian dominionist groups like Ziklag
This isn’t about blaming individuals.
It’s about naming systems. Because if we’re going to talk honestly about orthodoxy, myth, and power…
we need to talk about all of it— not just the parts that are fashionable to critique.
4. Mythicism still hasn’t grappled with empire
Most mythicist writing stops at: “Jesus didn’t exist.”
Cool. Now what? The real question is:
HOW? How did a mythical figure become the operating system for Western civilization?
So, here’s where I actually land:
Christianity didn’t emerge from a single man. It emerged from competing myths, political incentives, scriptural remixing, imperial needs, and evolving group identities.
And if that makes me someone who doesn’t quite fit in the Christian world, the atheist world, or the deconstruction world? Perfect. My loyalty is to the question, not the tribe. That’s exactly where I plan to stay.
That’s exactly where I plan to stay.
aaaand as always, maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in. 🎙️🔒
Footnotes
1. Jodi Magness, Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit (Eerdmans, 2011).
Archaeologist specializing in 1st-century Judea; emphasizes that archaeology illuminates daily life, but cannot confirm Jesus’ existence or Gospel events.
2. Eric M. Meyers & Mark A. Chancey, Archaeology, the Rabbis, and Early Christianity (Baker Academic, 2012).
Shows how archaeology supports context, not Gospel narrative details.
3. Steve Mason, Josephus and the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Hendrickson, 2003).
Explains why the Testimonium Flavianum is partially or heavily interpolated and cannot serve as independent confirmation of Jesus.
4. Alice Whealey, “The Testimonium Flavianum in Syriac and Arabic,” New Testament Studies 54.4 (2008): 573–590.
Analyzes manuscript traditions showing Christian editing of Josephus.
5. Louis Feldman, “Josephus,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3 (Yale University Press, 1992).
Standard reference summarizing scholarly consensus about the unreliable portions of Josephus’ Jesus passages.
6. Brent Shaw, “The Myth of the Neronian Persecution,” Journal of Roman Studies 105 (2015): 73–100.
Shows Tacitus likely repeats Christian stories, not archival Roman data, making him a witness to Christian belief — not Jesus’ historicity.
7. Pliny the Younger, Epistles 10.96–97.
Earliest Roman description of Christian worship; confirms Christians existed, not that Jesus did.
8. Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus (HarperOne, 2005).
Explains why New Testament manuscripts contain thousands of variations, with no originals surviving.
9. Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (Yale University Press, 2000).
Argues Mark intentionally modeled episodes on Homeric motifs — supporting literary construction rather than eyewitness reporting.
10. Attridge, Harold W., The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia Commentary Series).
Shows how Hebrews relies on celestial priesthood imagery and makes no connection to a recent earthly Jesus, even when opportunities are obvious.
11. Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle (1999).
Early mythicist argument emphasizing the epistles’ lack of biographical Jesus data.
12. Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix, 2014).
Presents a Bayesian model estimating mythicist origins as more probable than historicity.
13. Richard Carrier, Proving History (Prometheus, 2012).
Explains the historical method he uses for evaluating Jesus traditions.
14. Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (Yale University Press, 2000).
Demonstrates the pluralism and fragmentation within earliest Christianity.
15. Burton Mack, The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy (Continuum, 2006).
Describes the emergence of various Jesus traditions as literary and theological constructions.
16. Clayton N. Jefford, The Didache (Fortress Press).
Analyzes early church manual revealing “wandering prophets,” factionalism, and market-style competition among early Jesus groups.
17. Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age (Macmillan, 2017).
Documents the destruction of pagan culture under Christian imperial dominance.
18. Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind (Vintage, 2005).
Explores how Christian orthodoxy displaced classical philosophy.
19. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (Yale University Press, 1984).
Shows Christianity expanded primarily through imperial power, incentives, and legislation, not mass persuasion.
20. H.A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
Outlines Constantine’s political use of Christianity and the shift toward enforced orthodoxy.
21. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
Provides context for how Christianity overtook the Roman religious landscape.
22. Neil Van Leeuwen, “Religious Credence Is Not Factual Belief,” Cognition 133 (2014): 698–715.
Explains why religious commitments behave like identity markers, not evidence-responsive beliefs.
23. Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (MIT Press, 2015).
Useful for understanding modern online purity culture dynamics, relevant to atheist-internet behavior discussed in your commentary section.
24. Joseph Reagle, Reading the Comments (MIT Press, 2015).
Analyzes comment-section behavior and ideological enforcement online.
25. Tim O’Neill, “Easter, the Existence of Jesus, and Dave Fitzgerald,” History for Atheists (2017).
Atheist historian critiquing Fitzgerald’s methodological errors, exaggerated claims, and misuse of sources.
26. Raphael Lataster, Questioning the Historicity of Jesus (Brill, 2019).
Secular academic arguing mythicism is plausible but insisting on higher methodological rigor than many popularizers use.
27. Richard Carrier, various blog critiques of Fitzgerald (2012–2019).
Carrier agrees with mythicism but critiques Fitzgerald for overstatement and inadequate source control.
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