Ep. 75: Christ Before Jesus

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