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Category: New Testament

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Christendom Jesus Neanderthalism New Testament Parapsychology Richard Carrier

On Richard Carrier

A depiction of Ecce Homo, as Pontius Pilate
delivers Jesus to the crowd (Antonio Ciseri, 1862).

Before reading Carrier, I imagined that there was a historical Jesus crucified by Pilate if we only eliminated all the legendary tales, miracles and resurrection stories that appear in the Gospels. As I have already said, it was not until the end of last year that I changed my mind.

Discovering the mythicists reminded me strongly of what happened to me in the 1990s with CSI literature, and especially when I read a book by Robert Sheafferthat made me doubt, for the first time, of the existence of ‘psi’. The fact is that the exegetes of the New Testament, starting with Albert Schweitzer, have been in bondage of the introjects of their parents. They could never encapsulate the viruses and malwares as I have done in my mentality.

All the liberal and even secular exegetes of the New Testament that I read since the 1980s were in bondage of parental introjects. The simplest hypothesis should have been, from the beginning, the theory of a mythical Christ because no single contemporary witness outside the Bible ever bothered to write about Jesus.

None. Zilch. Zero. Plenty of people, long after Jesus supposedly died, claimed he was real but outside the Bible, sorry: it is a tall tale. It is the same as happens with parapsychologists: they cannot conceive the inexistence of psi. By force of deep parental introjects the historicist exegetes (those who believe in a historical Jesus) cannot conceive the nonexistence of Jesus (which includes those who believe in the historicity of an ordinary, non-miraculous Jesus).

The implications of my finding of the last days of last year are tremendous. Now I see the tragedy of the West (and the demographic bubble that Christianity caused) in another way as I saw it before my December discovery. The nonexistence of Jesus crushes all Christianity and neo-Christianity in a most forceful way. Or rather, I can use Carrier et al for the thesis I’ve been advancing in this blog.

The Christian bug is incredibly stupider—stupid indeed was believing in the Gospels in the first place—than I previously thought. If what Carrier et al say is true, the result would be that the white race is even more ‘Neanderthal’ than I imagined before my December 28 discovery.

Richard Carrier may be a blue-pilled liberal as foolish as those at Columbia University where he studied. But just as we cannot dispatch the findings in physics or medicine of those who graduated there, neither can we reject what Carrier says in his book that, perhaps, I’ll start to review on Mondays.

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Christendom Jesus New Testament Richard Carrier

Law’s article

Further to my previous post. I’ve now read the article by philosopher Stephen Law (pic) and largely agree with the two principles he discusses. However, Law is wrong that Carl Sagan invented the principle ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. I discovered such principle in the writings of CSICOP writers before Sagan became famous. The second principle however is an original of Law:

Where testimony/documents weave together a narrative that combines mundane claims with a significant proportion of extraordinary claims, and there is good reason to be sceptical about those extraordinary claims, then there is good reason to be sceptical about the mundane claims, at least until we possess good independent evidence of their truth. [emphasis added]

Those who watched Carrier’s lecture embedded in the previous post will remember his presentation of the field of New Testament studies as divided into three competing viewpoints:

(1) Christian historicity: Jesus was an amazing famous superman who could walk on water and shit—the majority of so-called biblical scholars in the US believe this.

(2) Secular historicity: Jesus was an ordinary nobody, whom no one noted but a few fanatical observers. The Gospels are mostly fiction, but there are kernels of historical truth in them. This is what I used to believe up to the last week, when I discovered mythicism or:

(3) Secular non-historicity: Jesus was the name of a celestial being, subordinate to god, with whom Saul/Paul hallucinated conversations. The Gospel began as a mythic allegory about the celestial Jesus, set on earth, as most myths then were (e.g., the god Osiris).

Law elaborates his second principle in the context of the three competing theories to explain the origins of Christianity. His conclusion is that secular non-historicity is the best approach to explain it.

Regular visitors of this site will remember that I have mentioned the work of Albert Schweitzer while discussing the (quixotic) quest of the historical Jesus. Yesterday I was struggling with myself as to who was right, Schweitzer or Carrier. Schweitzer’s view was that the apocalyptic Jesus makes historical sense from the viewpoint of secular historicity because his prophecy was unfulfilled (‘Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God’).

Law’s piece resolved my doubts in a more parsimonious way than Schweitzer because the New Testament ‘is a story developed by myth-makers who had certain radical ethical and other views (e.g. the Kingdom of God being imminent) that they wanted others to accept’. Since those who advanced apocalyptic eschatology were Paul (in his very first epistles), Mark and Matthew, it is unnecessary to postulate a historical Jesus in the secular historicity sense.

I was raised as a Catholic in the 1960s and 70s and then became an eschatologist (William Walter’s ‘Eschatology’ is a schismatic cult originated in Christian Science). After I left the cult, since the middle 1980s through the middle 1990s I became interested in secular historicity and did not change my views on the so-called historical Jesus until last week. However, I doubt that those who have not struggled with religious parental introjects will find this post interesting.

My biography aside, I believe that the ultimate truth about the origins of Christianity is pivotal to save the white race from extinction. Those white nationalists who are traditional Christians have stagnated in Christian historicity, and many secular WNsts assume that the second stage, secular historicity, is the most plausible one. What whites need is a complete rejection of the New Testament, even the notion of a non-miraculous historical Jesus, as the NT was largely written by men of Semitic origin.

If universal, Christian-inspired love, is murdering the Aryan race what we need is full apostasy from Judeo-Christianity. This means that we should consider secular non-historicity seriously.

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Jesus New Testament On the Historicity of Jesus (book) Richard Carrier Videos

Mythicism, a closer look

The last few days I have been immersed in the videos and lectures of Richard Carrier about the Christ myth theory, to the extent that his views are shaking my previous point of view about the so-called historical Jesus (yesterday I ordered his latest book, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt). In this lecture Carrier was younger than he is today but it is a good starting point for his work:

https://youtu.be/yzwS7BfRapw

Today I will be reading the article of another mythicist, Stephen Law, published in Faith and Philosophy 2011, Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011, pages 129-151, which abstract says:

The vast majority of Biblical historians believe there is evidence sufficient to place Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt. Many believe the New Testament documents alone suffice firmly to establish Jesus as an actual, historical figure. I question these views. In particular, I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed—a principle I call the contamination principle—entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of independent evidence for an historical Jesus, remain sceptical about his existence.

Law’s full article, ‘Evidence, Miracles and the Existence of Jesus’ can be read: here.

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Celsus Jesus Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) New Testament St Paul

Christianity’s Criminal History, 103


 Editors’ note: To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.
 

The oldest Christianity is hostile to education

Jesus himself had suppressed the aura of the ideal of the wise. At any event, the New Testament warns against the wisdom of this world: philosophy (1 Cor. 1, 19ff, 3, 19, Col. 2, 8), affirming that in Christ there reside ‘all the treasures of the wisdom and knowledge’ (Col. 2, 3). It is true that the gospel was, to a great extent, interspersed with philosophy on the part, above all, of Justin, Clement of Alexandria and Origen. But until the 2nd century the opponents of philosophy—among them Ignatius, Polycarp, Tatian, Theophilus and Hermas—were in Christianity more numerous, producing endless attacks against the ‘charlatanism of the foolish philosophers’, their ‘mendacious fatuity’ and ‘absurdities and deliriums’.

In this regard, Paul was gladly referred to, who was supposedly confronted by Epicureans and Stoics in Athens and who on numerous occasions had warned against the false preaching of certain lost teachers, eager to unify Greco-Roman philosophy and Christianity, as well as teaching: ‘Where is the sage, Where is the lawyer? Where is the disputant of the things of this world? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?’ or ‘Look let no one deceive you with fallacious and vain philosophies, founded on human traditions’.

This Paleo-Christian hostility against education based on the authority of the Christ, the Synoptics and Paul, went hand in hand with various factors of a religious nature. On the one hand, the primitive Christian belief in the end of time—although its effects were weakening with the passage of time—was incompatible with culture and the world in general. Whoever waits for the irruption of the end, who is not of this world, does not care about philosophy, science or literature.

Christ does not propagate them or mention them with a single word. It is clear that for him only one thing is necessary. Hence, when someone praises the magnificence of the Jerusalem temple before him, he limits himself to the opinion that there will be no stone left over from it: probably his only manifestation about art. Art that hardly played any role in their cultural environment, by virtue of the Mosaic prohibition, ‘You will not make carved images, or any figuration…’

That hostility of early Christianity also derived from the close interweaving of the entire cultural world of antiquity with the Greco-Roman religion against which Christianity maintained, and also against any other religion, an attitude of strangeness and animosity as a result of its hybrid pretension of absolute validity and its Old Testament exclusivity and intolerance.

Clothed with an unprecedented arrogance, Christians called themselves the ‘golden part’, the ‘Israel of God’, the ‘chosen gender’, the ‘holy people’ and ‘tertium genus hominum’ (third type of human), while they denounced the Greco-Romans as impious, as overflowing with envy, lies, hatred, bloodthirsty spirit, and decreeing that all their world was ripe for annihilation ‘by blood and fire’.

That hostility is also related to the social composition of the Christian communities, which were recruited almost exclusively from the lower social strata. It is considered, even by Catholics, that numerous testimonies show that, ‘during the first centuries the vast majority of Christians belonged, both in the East and in the West, to the lower popular strata and only in a few cases enjoyed a higher education’ (Bardenhewer).

It is certainly no accident that a Clement of Alexandria has to be on guard against believers who claim that philosophy is the devil’s thing, nor that ancient Christians are so often exposed to the reproach of ‘being fools’ (stulti). Tertullian himself unambiguously recognises that idiots are always in the majority among Christians. The cultural hostility of the new religion is always among the main objections of the non-Christian polemicists. The apology Ad pagans rejects no less than thirty times the denomination of stulti applied to the Christians.

Celsus, the great adversary of the Christians of the 2nd part of the century, succeeds in the essential when he labels the new doctrine ‘simple’ and when he writes that Christians ‘flee in a hurry from educated people, for they are not accessible to deception, but they try to attract the ignorant’: an attitude that is certainly enforced among the Christian sects of our time! Celsus continues:

Let no cultured man approach us, no wise or sensible. Those are not recommended people in our eyes. But if someone is ignorant, obtuse, uneducated and simple, come intrepid to our ranks! Insofar as they consider people to be worthy of their God, they show that they only want, and can persuade, those subject to guardianship; the vile and obtuse as well as the slaves, the little women and the children.

With vehemence even superior to that of the secular clergy, the monks despised science by seeing in it, with all reason, an antagonist of the faith. With the same consequence they encouraged, therefore, ignorance as the premise of a virtuous life.

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New Testament St Paul

Second Epistle to the Corinthians

Second Corinthians is the sixth book in a chronologically rearranged New Testament. In the previous book, Philippians, we noted that Paul described himself as ‘a Hebrew of the Hebrews’. In Second Corinthians (11:22) Paul wrote: ‘Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they Abraham’s descendants? So am I’.

Any prosecutor could rest his case at this point. But facts don’t matter to those white nationalists who are also Christians. They won’t have second thoughts about the arch-Apostle Paul. No wonder why American white nationalism is a weak movement. Its proponents cannot even settle accounts with the ideology that allowed Jewish takeover in the first place.

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New Testament St Paul

Epistle to the Philippians

In a chronologically-ordered New Testament Philippians is the fifth book in the NT. In this letter, specifically in 3:2, Paul uses the expression ‘Beware of dogs’ referring to some inhabitants of Philippi in Greece. And in 3:5 Paul describes himself as ‘an Hebrew of the Hebrews’.

I do not need to quote other passages from that letter except asking myself: How do the Christian nationalists cannot see their own schizophrenia? Aren’t white nationalists supposed to be aware of the Jewish problem? How can they have this ‘Hebrew of the Hebrews’ as a mentor and spiritual guide? Was I not right in saying that it is time for a tremendous internal work on the island of the Jedi?

And what is most outrageous is that this shitty Jew dares to preach no less than in Greece: the cradle of our civilisation! Some scholars even believe that the epistle was written in Ephesus.

Recently I used this image in a comments thread to make a point. Now I am using it to show that no Jew should have had any right to preach his thing in the Roman empire—that eventually reached the ears of female beauties.

Why can’t American racists see something so obvious? Was I not right to claim that they are also committing ethnic suicide?

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New Testament St Paul

Epistle to Philemon

In a chronologically-ordered New Testament, the Epistle to Philemon is the fourth book of the NT.

This letter consists of only 335 words in the Greek text. When Paul was imprisoned, he wrote this letter to a wealthy Christian of Colosse, an ancient city of Phrygia in Asia Minor, and used the theme of freedom and slavery.

Paul appeals to Philemon’s pity regarding Philemon’s runaway slave, and offers to pay for any debt created by the escape, which suggest that Paul was rich enough to save the slave’s skin. Roman law allowed the owner of a runaway slave to even execute him, but using the Jesus message Paul tried to break through the social barriers dividing Aryan Romans and Semitic peoples.

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Aryan beauty Eschatology New Testament St Paul

First Epistle to the Corinthians

Or

Antimalware software

In a program for Japanese television Jared Taylor said in Japanese, ‘Koreans, Japanese, Chinese for those reasons are superior to White people in terms of IQ, in my view’. A genuine priest of the 14 words would never say such a thing in a public space. Just look at the faces of Taylor and the Asian interviewer and tell me if, from the esthetical viewpoint, he’s not far superior to the Jap (who beside Jared looks like a Neanderthal)?

But Taylor is the typical Neochristian. The son of very pious parents who moved to Japan to preach the Word to the heathens, once he distanced himself from religion he maintained in his mind residual malware that Christianity implanted in our psyches millennia ago. So let’s talk about the original virus.

As we said in the previous entry of this series, it was Saul/Paul the one who first preached about how there should be no distinctions between the peoples of the Roman Empire, Hellenes (whites) and Jews included. We have also linked to the conference by Marcus Borg about the zeitgeist of the first Christians, ‘thoroughgoing eschatology’ as Schweitzer put it or ‘apocalyptic eschatology’ as exegetes call it today. When the eschaton failed to occur—which means that both Jesus and the early Paul (the Paul of 1 Corinthians) failed—, Paul started to rationalise the failure in subsequent epistles (see Paul’s apocalyptic eschatology in chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians). As Karlheinz Deschner noted in Christianity’s Criminal History:

And here there is how the oldest Christian author, the apostle of the peoples, Paul, reacts. If he first explained to the Corinthians that the term ‘had been set short’ and the ‘world is heading to the sunset’, ‘we will not all die, but we will all be transformed’—later he spiritualised the faith about the final times that, from year to year, became increasingly suspicious. Paul thus made the faithful internally assume the great renewal of the world, the longing for a change of eons, was fulfilled through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

(((Paul))) preaching to non-Jews by Renaissance painter Raphael. Instead of the preaching of the kingdom of God, instead of the promise that this kingdom would soon emerge on Earth, Paul thus introduced individualistic ideas of the afterlife, the vita aeterna (eternal life). Christ no longer comes to the world but the believing Christian goes to him in heaven! Similarly, the gospel authors who write later soften Jesus’ prophecies about the end of the world and make the convenient corrections in the sense of a postponement. The one that goes further is Luke, who substitutes the hopeful belief for a history of divine salvation with the notion of previous stages or intermediate steps.

This was Pauline Christianity’s gigantic fraud: selling to us gentiles a salvation Christology when the original Yeshua cult—thoroughgoing eschatology—was something altogether different. (As a defence mechanism before the Roman occupation, the Jesus cult immersed themselves in apocalyptic imaginary: believing that the kingdom would come within their lifespan, something that still lingers in 1 Corinthians.)

But there is something more serious than selling us a religion that had very little to do with the original Yeshua cult. Once again, see the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. In a chronologically ordered New Testament it was Paul the first major writer who sold us the inversion of Greco-Roman values. If accepted by whites, this ideology would be the original virus for Aryan decline: that the strong should be considered evil and the weak good:

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?… God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe… but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God.

So that no white man may boast before the Jewish god, Paul would have written today. No wonder why Nietzsche wanted to transvalue back these values that Paul had inverted! By the end of chapter 3 Paul reiterates ‘For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God’. In verse 13 of chapter 4 he adds ‘we have become as the scum of the world, the dregs of all things, even until now…’

Preaching inversions of values could be interpreted as slogans based on Semite envy before the handsome Roman world. In my Saturday entry I quoted Catherine Nixey’s book about how the scum of the world, once in power, rationalised their drive to destroy the handsome Greco-Roman sculptures: by claiming that they were demons! It was that tiny seed, Paul, the one who first sowed such attitude in his letters. In chapter 10 he says:

I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God; and I do not want you to become sharers in demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.

Incidentally, it was in this long epistle where Paul wrote his famous words, ‘When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things’.

I wonder when will American racists do away with their childish Xtianity? Or do you believe you can save the race with this malware still installed? Why don’t you see this site as a sort of antimalware software for your minds?

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Axiology Deranged altruism Friedrich Nietzsche Jesus New Testament Theology Videos

On progressive Christianity

The hatnote of my articles on the chronologically ordered New Testament links to a book by the late Marcus Borg, a representative of the liberal movement called ‘progressive Christianity’. Like other progressive Christians, Borg was a stepping-stone between old-time Christianity and what we are calling ‘secular Christianity’ or ‘neo-Christianism’. In other words, the theology of Borg and other progressives is at the midst of the traditional Christian and the secular humanist who actively destroys the white race.

Yesterday I watched this Borg conference, originally recorded in the year 2000:

In this talk, Borg presents to liberal Christians a classic book that we have been discussing, The Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer, published in Germany more than a century ago.

Schweitzer was the clinical case of how, once the educated Christian starts doubting the historicity of the Gospels, the doubter contracts an ethnosuicidal mental disease: out-group altruism. In extreme cases, such as Schweitzer’s, the semi-apostate literally ends up giving his life for the well-being of blacks, believing that the noblest cause is thus pursued (see my 2013 article ‘Schweitzer’s niglets’).

Schweitzer was a German. The ethnically Aryan Borg, raised in a Lutheran family, followed that same path although without Schweitzer’ eccentricity of leaving the West in search of the poor peoples of Christ in Africa. I find fascinating how, once the exegete of the New Testament questions the historicity of some Gospel stories, he suffers a call to sublimate his previous theology into secular altruism, which includes feeling compelled to help, with all his might, the Other.

When visitors of this site see me using, in the hatnote of my New Testament articles, a link to Borg’s book it should not be believed that I endorse his theology. I can use his chronology about when the New Testament books were written. But unlike him and the nutty Schweitzer, I believe that we need an axiological apostasy, like the one preached by Nietzsche, whom I quote at the end of ‘Schweitzer’s niglets’.

Ultimately, Schweitzer, Borg and other representatives of progressive Christianity are more dangerous than the fundamentalists. Axiologically, they are closer to the ethnosuicidal ethos of secular humanists than, say, our parents and grandparents (I speak as a boomer). Their writings may be useful to see that, from the historical point of view, the Gospels cannot be trusted. But from the survivalist viewpoint they are, to put it bluntly, race traitors. Even the Wikipedia article has them as champions of ‘social justice’.

Very interesting, in the video embedded above, to see how Borg sublimates Christian ethics even after recognising that the historical Jesus was wrong to believe that the eschaton would happen within his lifespan (‘Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death until they see the son of man coming in his kingdom’). Yes: the eschaton failed to occur in Jesus’ time, but nowadays the progressive Christians try to make it possible through Orwellian social justice!

Christian love is murdering the white race.

As in a novel by Agatha Christie, I am increasingly seeing that Christianity is the real culprit of white decline (something like an HIV virus), and Jewish subversion is simply a secondary infection (like pneumonia).

I will continue to comment on the twenty-five remaining books of the New Testament. It is necessary to provide a Nietzschean view on those texts that leaves behind the Anno Domini of Borg et al and inaugurates the Anno Hitleris, even in biblical studies.

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Christendom New Testament St Paul

Epistle to the Galatians

The Epistle to the Galatians is the second book in a chronologically ordered New Testament. If you are still a Christian that reads the Bible in the traditional way, take a good look at the first chapters of Marcus Borg’s Evolution of the Word, which includes the New Testament in the order the books were written.

Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by a man, but by Yeshua the anointed and god the father, who raised him from the dead—and all the brothers and sisters with me, to the churches in Galatia: Grace and peace to you from god our father and the lord Yeshua the anointed who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age…

My italicized words in Paul’s opening sentence to the Galatians evoke what I said about Paul last Friday in the context of how the Attis cult might have influenced the Semite Saul (a.k.a ‘Paul’) in his native town of Tarsus.

Many of those educated in the Christian faith are still unable to distinguish between the Christ of dogma and the Jesus of history. As we have already noted about the oldest New Testament books, in the genuine Pauline letters the details about the historical Jesus (in contrast to Paul’s mythical ‘Christ’) are surprisingly absent. But what is most conspicuous in an ordered reading of the New Testament is that, for example, Paul’s letter to the Galatians:

(1) does not mention the Empty Tomb,

(2) does not mention the Apparitions of the Risen Jesus,

(3) does not mention the Ascension of Jesus,

(4) does not mention Pentecost,

(5) does not hint any allusion toward the story we all heard as children: that, after the above extraordinary events, the Apostles were catapulted with such a fire of enthusiasm that they preached the gospel to the point of martyrdom.

Regarding (2), New Testament writers were not biographers as the word ‘biography’ is understood in our modern world. Paul would certainly mention Yeshua’s apparitions in later epistles when his Christology was more developed not from a historical, but from a theological point of view.

The following are my impressions of my most recent reading of the letter to the Galatians.

In the first seventeen verses it is surprising to learn that Paul says that his vocation to preach the word of the lord had begun before (!) his meeting with the apostles. Then, in Gal. 1: 18-19 Paul confesses that three years after his great religious conversion he finally decided to visit Peter and James, and that fourteen years later he visited the Jerusalem Church again, to inform them he would preach to the gentiles (Gal. chapter 2).

All of this smells that it was Paul’s zeal, not the true apostles, what ignited the movement that became known as Christianity.

Then I read in that same chapter 2 that Paul had an incident with Peter because Peter and the Jerusalem Church had not broken away from Jewish practices. I immediately realised that this story could be used as a powerful weapon against those who believe in the historicity of the Empty Tomb, the Apparitions of the Risen Jesus, the Ascension and the spiritual fire of the Pentecost that, according to tradition—rather than the impression from a chronological reading of the NT—ignited Christianity.

We can imagine a Judaea in which all these Resurrection stories had really happened. How on earth those who received the tongues of fire on their heads to preach with euphoria the Good News could have regressed to the rancid practices of Judaism, something that can be surmised in this early Pauline epistle? We are talking about elemental Judaic stuff, such as circumcision and the diet prescribed by the Torah against which Paul preaches not only in Galatians but in other letters.

The Galatians letter does not reflect the theology of the Jewish Jerusalem Church. It reflects the incipient theology of the ‘apostle to the Gentiles’.

In the third chapter of Galatians Paul laid out the foundations of his new cult, rehabilitating man by ‘faith’ instead of the observance of Jewish law: observances that those who had really known Jesus were still practising. It is in that chapter that Paul pronounces his famous words, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Yeshua the anointed one’.

It is also interesting that in chapter 4 Paul mentions that god sent this Yeshua ‘born of a woman and subject to the law’—that is, Jesus was a Jew—‘to rescue those who were subject to the law’, that is to rescue the Jews. In that verse it is not implied that we gentiles would also be rescued in the original Yeshua cult. In that chapter Paul also scolds the Christian community that had not given up Jewish practises.

Again, that alone suggests that the legends of the Resurrection listed in the numbered paragraph above, or at least the thoroughgoing embellished stories as understood in later Christendom, had not yet emerged when the second book of the New Testament was written. Even in the postscript and farewell of his letter to the Galatians Paul continues to talk against circumcision repeatedly.

Certainly, reading the New Testament in the order the books were written and from a strictly rational viewpoint—i.e., with an exegetical eye to distinguish who might the ‘historical Jesus’ have been—make a fresh reading of the ‘book of books’.