Me in Words

Jesus of Nazareth started a new sect in Judaism. He was then crucified by the Romans in approximately the year 30. The Romans crucified him because he claimed to be the King of the Jews. The Romans crucified everyone who made that claim (there were others who made this same claim). All of these men were crucified because the Romans had appointed solely the Herodian family to that kingly position. For anyone else to claim this title was automatically viewed as being – and it actually was – sedition against Rome. This is why Jesus was crucified by the Romans, for sedition. (Though the Gospels say that Jesus was crucified for violating Jewish blasphemy laws, that was a lie, as will be documented and explained in this work.)

Jews were at that time a conquered people, who had lost their independent nation of Israel, and who were being ruled by these kings appointed by Rome. Moreover, Jesus taught that the Law came from God, not from Rome’s Emperor or Caesar, and this made his sedition especially threatening to Rome’s continued rule over Jews.

Consequently, if for no other reason, Rome actually had little other choice but to crucify Jesus, as a public example and warning to any Jew who might similarly challenge Rome’s authority to make the laws, and to appoint the kings.

Furthermore, according to Josephus’s Antiquities 18:2:2, Rome appointed not merely the Jews’ kings but also the chief Jewish priest, in Jerusalem, Caiaphas. If Caiaphas advised his people to tell (his actual employer) Pilate to kill Jesus, as is alleged in John 18:14, then this wouldn’t have been done “so that one man should die for all the people,” as that Gospel alleged, but instead done to halt and block any spread of such sedition. And it also wouldn’t have been done to suppress “blasphemy” against Jewish laws, as is alleged in Matthew 26:65 and Mark 14:64. Pilate’s job wasn’t to assure “that one man should die for all the people,” nor to suppress blasphemy against Judaism; it was simply to crush sedition. Moreover, Jesus did not blaspheme against Judaism; he taught Judaism; he was, in fact, a recognized rabbi. He never abandoned Judaism. The idea that he did was created, starting twenty years after his death, by enemies of the sect that he had established.

Jesus’s disciples were followers of this convict who had been executed by Rome for sedition. Rome was wary of them.

Furthermore, Jesus’s disciples were poor people, not serving or affiliated with the owners of most wealth, the ruling Roman authorities.

This historical background is essential in order to understand why Jesus’s remaining followers, in Jerusalem, were vulnerable both politically and economically.

Shortly before Jesus’s crucifixion, he appointed his brother James to head the young sect. (Though the Gospels say that Jesus appointed Peter as the group’s new leader; this, too, was an intentional falsehood, documented and explained herein.) James took over leadership of this Jewish sect. Within approximately three years after Jesus’s crucifixion, Paul joined the sect. Then, three years after joining, Paul traveled to Jerusalem, in order to receive missionary training specifically from Peter, who was the sect’s chief missionary selling this sect to Gentiles, or to non-Jews.

Peter had had only modest success converting Gentiles to join this Jewish sect, but Paul became the star missionary or salesman to the Gentiles. In fact, Paul brought in such a great number of new members, so that soon most of the sect’s members were actually Gentiles who had been converted to Judaism by Paul.

As the years went by and Paul brought more and more Gentiles into this sect throughout the Roman Empire, he was bringing into the sect a wealthier and less threatening-to-Rome class of members, people who hadn’t been raised to believe that God and not Rome was the ultimate arbiter of the laws. Paul collected funds from these higher-social-status people to maintain and support the very weak-status disciples in Jerusalem. Consequently these disciples grew increasingly dependent upon Paul.

However, this soaring number of new members who hadn’t been born as Jews created a problem for the members who had been so born: These new Jews weren’t circumcised. According to the Jewish legend, which as Jews they all believed to be history and not myth, Judaism had started at Genesis 17:12-14, with God telling Abraham: “Circumcision will be your signature on our agreement [God’s agreement with the Jews], a physical sign that our covenant is eternal.” In Genesis 17:14, God said: “No man who is uncircumcised will be one of my people.” God’s agreement was thus only with circumcised men; no uncircumcised man would be one of God’s people. Then, in Genesis 17:19, God made clear that this would never change; he said: “This agreement will extend through all future generations – everlasting.” Abraham complied, and thus the Jewish covenant began, according to the Jewish legend. In ancient cultures, and in cultures that are pre-literate or maybe just becoming literate, “signing” a contract (like the contract with God, which is the Jewish covenant) was sometimes done “in blood”; and the signature in this case was done on a private part of a man’s body, a part which moreover represented the future; it represented coming generations: the penis.

So, the question is: were these new men, whom Paul had brought in, actually Jews? Not according to the commandment that started Judaism: they certainly weren’t. Circumcision was Judaism’s signature commandment; a man didn’t even qualify to be a Jew unless he had first signed the covenant with God by becoming circumcised, and Paul’s men had not signed. This was in black and white, in Genesis. It was undeniable.

By the time of the 17th year of Paul’s employment with the sect, 14 years after his first visit to Jerusalem, Paul’s congregations included so many members, that James called Paul back again to Jerusalem. In Galatians 2:2, Paul said that what was at stake in this Jerusalem conference was the success or failure of all of his missionary work up to that time. The crucial moment for him had finally come.

If circumcision were to be imposed upon his men, Paul would have lost almost all of them, and the reason for this was quite simple:

Anesthesia didn’t yet exist, and therefore any medical operation was a living terror. This is why few medical operations occurred that weren’t absolutely necessary. The circumcisions of male Jewish infants on their eighth day, in accord with Genesis 17:11, were exceptions. Those infants didn’t even choose it; this was something that their parents did to them. Paul’s converts, by contrast, were grown men. They would have been terrified to be subjected to that requirement. Most would have refused.

In addition, antibiotics and antiseptics didn’t exist; germs weren’t even known to exist; the microscope hadn’t yet been invented. Consequently, the death-rate in any type of operation was very high, due to infections. When death occurred to an infant, it was no major concern, because infants possessed no property, and thus no power. But adult males possessed all the property, and so all the power in society, and therefore Paul knew that he would lose his life’s success if he demanded that his men become circumcised.

All scholars have ignored these determinative realities about circumcision during the First Century, and many scholars have even said that circumcision was only a small concern to those of Jesus’s followers who were trying to convert uncircumcised adult males. For example, Harvard’s Krister Stendahl said (in his 1963 Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, Part 6) that “circumcision … was not a barrier to Christianity but quite attractive to Gentiles, who were enamored of what was Oriental. … Even ritual laws like those from the Old Testament were not a liability but an asset – as any reader of Galatians can see.” He provided no documentation for that opinion regarding circumcision, because none exists: You’ll be investigating Galatians yourself in the pages here to follow, and you won’t find anything in Galatians to support this commonly held scholarly opinion of the innocuousness (if not attractiveness) of circumcision during the First Century – nothing whatsoever there. Scholars don’t have to document their opinions, because (unfortunately), even without evidence, scholars are deemed to possess authority of their own. Only scientists are obliged to cite evidence for their views. (We’re not doing it here in this Summary, but we do it throughout the rest. Even a scientist may summarize.)

James understood that if he demanded that Paul’s men become circumcised, then he’d lose most of his members; and so James, too, didn’t want to do that. Furthermore (as has been noted), Jesus’s disciples were poor people; they were Jerusalem Jews, who had been defeated by Rome, and almost all of the rich people were associated with the Roman regime, and they were Gentiles – uncircumcised. Paul’s congregations were thus contributing money to the upkeep of these poor Jews in Jerusalem. James strongly wanted this financial assistance to continue.

Paul wrote in Galatians 2:10 that at the conclusion of the conference James required only that this money keep coming. Paul seemed, at first, to have had his way.

But then, only shortly after Paul returned to Antioch, Peter came, and, later that same day, other agents from James also came, and they told Paul that James had changed his mind, and that Paul’s men would have to be circumcised, after all. According to Paul’s account in Galatians 2:14-21, Paul responded by saying that the covenant was at an end as a result of Jesus’s crucifixion, and that “a person is viewed favorably by God only by means of possessing Christ-faith, never by following God’s laws [which are set forth in the covenant in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible].” In other words, Paul said that the agreement that God had with the Jews was now replaced by Paul’s “gospel of Christ,” in which a faith that Jesus was the Messiah is all that God requires, in order for a man to become one of God’s people and so go to heaven instead of to hell after death. Paul said, in Galatians 2:21, “If a person is put right with God by adhering to the covenant, then the Messiah died for nothing!”

That was the first time this doctrine, Christianity’s basic doctrine, personal salvation by means of faith instead of by the Jewish means (which is via obeying God’s commandments), had been stated anywhere. It occurred in the year 49 or 50. That’s the occasion when Christianity actually started: the doctrinal break away from Judaism, the creation of Paul’s gospel of Christ. Paul was virtually forced into it, by circumstances, or else he would fail in life; his entire prior 17 years as the sect’s best salesman would have gone down the drain, if he had required his men to go under the knife. In Philippians 3:1-2, he warned his men, “As I’ve said before, I am concerned about your safety,” because “those evil people, those dogs, who insist upon cutting the body,” are wrong, and (Philippians 3:8) the entire covenant is “garbage” (or “dung”), which the Messiah’s death has made superfluous. Judaism was here trashed.

Paul knew that discarding circumcision meant discarding the covenant to which it signed. (A contract doesn’t exist unless it’s accepted; and, according to Genesis 17:10-14, God’s contract wasn’t accepted unless it was signed via circumcision.) But Paul couldn’t afford to tell his men that he was rejecting the covenant on account of rejecting the circumcision requirement – and that he wasn’t really, as Paul claimed, rejecting the circumcision law on account of rejecting the covenant. Paul understood that, if he were to say to his men, “I reject the covenant because I reject the circumcision law,” then his phenomenally successful sales career would end. He would be confessing his own fraud. His followers would reject his fraud, and he’d soon have no followers. An honest statement of his concerns here would have transformed him from a success to a failure in his own eyes, because of this loss of his followers. He would have told them, in effect: For you to be a member of the Jesus (or, indeed, of any) sect of Judaism, you must first become circumcised, because no uncircumcised man is one of God’s people; no uncircumcised man is a Jew at all. They would have left not only Judaism but also his congregations, in order to avoid the terror and danger of an operation. So, Paul never told them this.

Galatians 2:11-21 presents an embarrassed and nervous Paul recounting to the Galatians the event that had actually started Christianity (as noted, he couldn’t afford to admit to them that this occasion was its start); and, in this account, Peter simply lacked the stomach to inform Paul of the bad news from James. Peter instead sat down to dinner at Paul’s headquarters, with Paul’s uncircumcised followers. Then, James’s backup team suddenly arrived, and saw that Peter was dining with Paul’s uncircumcised men, not telling Paul that they needed to become circumcised before they could be authentic followers of Jesus. Peter backed away from the table and seconded James’s demand. This precipitated the blow-up, which caused Paul to assert 2:16-21 – Christianity.

Paul, in Galatians, didn’t mention that James had changed his mind and had decided that Genesis 17:14 needed to be imposed after all in order for Paul’s men to continue being members of the Jesus sect of Jews. Paul simply couldn’t bring himself to admit this, because if his Galatian readers were to be informed that the sect’s leader, James, now demanded circumcision, then those Galatians would be made conscious that by their staying in Paul’s congregations they’d no longer be members of the Jesus sect, and they’d then abandon both James and Paul. They’d abandon the Jesus sect on account of refusing to go under the knife in an era without anesthesia, antibiotics, and antiseptics; and they’d abandon Paul’s congregations because they’d know that Paul’s congregations were in violation of Jesus, and weren’t even Jewish at all; they’d learn that this was really just a hoax. (The case presented in this work will be that Paul perpetrated not just an “error” but a hoax when he created Christianity – that he was intending to deceive; that his deceptions here were the result of careful planning and scheming, not of mere sloppiness on his part. That will be our case.)

Paul and James were now locked in the equivalent of a bad marriage that couldn’t be ended. Divorce was too painful for either to carry out. If James were to announce publicly that Paul’s men were no longer his followers, then James’s poverty-stricken group in Jerusalem would no longer continue to receive the financial contributions coming in from Paul’s far better-off Gentile congregations throughout the rest of the Roman Empire. James’s desperate followers had simply become financially too dependent upon the far larger number of Paul’s followers. Thus, James remained quiet about his change-of-mind. And Paul, for his part, continued telling his followers to continue contributing to the group in Jerusalem, because Paul needed the at-least-tacit acceptance by James’s group to continue for a long enough time for Paul’s new faith to be able to go out ultimately publicly on its own, as an entirely new religion, abandoning its Jewish status. If Paul were to become publicly known as being no longer Jewish, then his claim to be a follower of the Messiah would be blatantly fraudulent, since no non-Jewish context yet existed for even the very concept of the Messiah (“Christ”). Paul walked a fine line: he had to preach a new religion, by using terms that seemed to his contemporaries to be consistent with an established religion, when he was actually negating the latter.

James’s group faded away. But Paul’s blossomed and thrived. One reason why Paul’s group grew was that Paul was telling people that they don’t need to go under the knife in order to win an eternity in heaven; just Christ-faith (as described in Galatians 2:16-21) will do the job. In other words, Paul said that God changed everything after Jesus’s crucifixion, so that heaven was now on sale at a far lower price than in Judaism. No longer did one have to follow Jewish Law in order to go to heaven, but now mere faith in Jesus’s being the Christ was sufficient.

Another reason Paul’s group grew was that in Romans 13:1-7 and elsewhere, Paul and his followers told their followers that the laws they should adhere to weren’t the ones from Judaism’s God, but were instead the ones from the Roman Emperor of the time. Romans 13:1-7 and other passages presented Rome’s Emperors as, in effect, God’s agents upon Earth, imposing God’s will, and legislating on God’s behalf, so that, as Romans 13:5 put it, “You must obey the political authority [the Emperor] not just because, as God’s agent, he’ll punish you for violating the law, but also as a matter of conscience.” This teaching by Paul and his followers was enormously helpful to the Emperors; it served as a huge inducement for Emperors ultimately to impose Christianity throughout their realm.

When it’s understood that the four canonical Gospel accounts of Christ were written not by Jesus’s followers but by Paul’s, both the truths and the lies in the New Testament become fully explained, and make 100% sense. Even the NT’s internal contradictions now make sense, without any exception whatsoever.7 Reality makes sense; only myths do not.

Paul, in his account in Galatians 2, had been faced with an extraordinarily painful choice: either he would carry out his instructions from James and demand that his perhaps thousands of men become circumcised, or else he and his congregations would leave the sect and go off into the future as an entirely new religion, which renounces the Jewish covenant (wherein, following God’s laws is a person’s pathway to an afterlife in heaven), and which replaces that by Paul’s Christian “gospel of Christ” (in which Christ-faith is Paul’s new pathway to heaven). Replacing Judaism – Jesus’s own religion – would be traitorous to Jesus. But remaining Jewish would have led here to Paul’s oblivion, because few of Paul’s men were willing to risk their lives (via circumcision) in order to stay with him. Paul took the path to his personal success, rather than to his personal oblivion. This is what caused Paul to start an entirely new religion, which was custom-tailored by him to become the world’s largest, because it placed heaven on sale, and also because it created for the Roman Emperors a new universal or “Catholic” religion to replace the old parochial and merely local Roman gods.

Already before Paul’s time, the Emperors had been struggling with the inadequacies of their old religion: the Roman gods provided no moral authority for the laws the Emperors dictated; and these gods were also purely local tribal Roman deities, who possessed no authority outside of Rome anyway. Paul’s solution to both of these pressing problems provided the only way to make the Emperors’ subjects – not just in Rome but elsewhere, throughout the Empire – follow the Emperors’ commands as if those commands came from God. (E.g.: Romans 13:1-5.) This solution emerged to become a powerful inducement for the Emperors ultimately to adopt Christianity.

However, in order for Paul and his followers who wrote the Gospels to win support from the Emperors, a way also had to be found to explain Jesus’s crucifixion by the Roman authorities. After all, no Roman Emperor would ever endorse a religion that worshipped a man who was acknowledged to have been executed by one of the Emperor’s own predecessors. Paul and his followers came up with a solution to this problem, too: They alleged that the Jews (despite having been conquered by the Romans) somehow (and they didn’t say how) managed to force the supposedly reluctant Roman authorities to crucify Jesus for “blasphemy” against Jewish Law. This lie didn’t only present in a frighteningly bad light the very thing (Jewish Law) that Paul in Galatians 2:16, Romans 3:28, and elsewhere, had said that God was now abandoning in favor of Paul’s gospel, Christ-faith. More to the point here, this lie freed the Roman Emperors from any Deicide charge, that they had killed God. Without this lie, Paul and his people would have stood no chance at all of ultimately winning over the Emperors.

Thus, securing his support from both the mass base and the Imperial elite, Paul emerged to become the most powerful person in history, the creator of the world’s largest religion, just as he hoped. Paul said, in 1 Corinthians 9:24-25, “Run life’s race so as to win the prize.” For him, winning was everything. “Every athlete in training submits to strict discipline in order to win a prize that will not last; we, however, do it to win a prize that will last forever.” And so he did: his prize has already lasted 2,000 years.

The people who penned the four canonical Gospel accounts of “Christ” wrote into his mouth words expressing the agenda of Paul, not necessarily of Jesus.

And that’s how the moral base of Western Civilization was created: as a hoax.8 This is how Paul dealt with a threat that would otherwise have destroyed what had been, up till the moment, his phenomenally successful 17-year-long career: he overcame it in the only way that was even possible. Moreover, subsequent millennia have demonstrated that his career not merely succeeded, but that it turned out to have been the most successful career ever, because the organization he thereby started became the largest in history, just as he was hoping it would.

Even the Trinity, and the Resurrection, are fully understandable, and will be explained in the following pages, as outcomes from this decision by Paul. (That is to say: those beliefs were essential to the success of Paul’s hoax; and this is why he introduced them, and it’s why his followers fleshed them out in their narratives about “Jesus.”)

Even the word-choices by Paul, and by his followers who wrote the four canonical Gospel accounts of “Jesus,” were carefully calculated by them to fool future generations, and not only their own. For example (as was previously noted), they presented their “Jesus” as having established an “ekklesia” (which is today translated as “church,” though it actually meant in their own time any kind of an assembly, which could also have included its being a synagogue or “sunagoge”) rather than as his having established (as they might otherwise have called it) either a “threskeia” (meaning a religion – which would have made their hoax obvious to their own generation, since everyone in their time knew that Jesus hadn’t started any religion), or else a “sunagoge” (which would have made their hoax obvious to future generations, such as to ours, since future generations weren’t intended to know that Jesus had lived and died as a devout Jew). Paul was the source of all of these brilliant tricks. (E.g., the decision to refer to Jesus’s organization as an ekklesia, and not as a sunagoge or threskeia, predates the canonical Gospels: “ekklesia” is the term Paul used in all seven of his authentic letters.)

Some supporters of religion might consider this to be too harsh an account of the creation of the Christian faith. However, the actual distinction between this account and all others isn’t its harshness, but rather its methodological foundation: namely, that this account is based upon a legal/forensic analysis of the evidence.

This history of the origins of the hoax we recognize as Christianity is documented with full details in the following, in which the people who created that hoax wrote and displayed not only their hoax, but also – under the first-ever legal/forensic analysis of their writings – how and why they did it. Without necessarily assuming their testimony to be honest, but rather “cross-examining” this testimony by placing it under a legal/forensic logical microscope, which exposes both the overtly explicit and the logically implied assertions in these documents, and which distinguishes between these two levels of assertion, this history becomes revealed with stunning clarity, as we shall now see, starting with the first-ever legal/forensic analysis of the most reliable of the Christian scriptures, Galatians, in which Paul exhibits far more than he asserts, and in which his testimony even demonstrates/proves some things that outright contradict, and that thus disprove, some of his claims