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In this episode Trent examines the strangest theories about Jesus from modern academics and authors that have been featured in popular media.
- 00:00 - Intro
- 02:47 - Globetrotting Guru
- 06:07 - Married Dynastic Jesus
- 13:48 - Caesar-approved Jesus
- 18:12 - Fakes His Own Death
- 21:19 - Jesus Was a Mushroom
Narrator:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers Apologist and Speaker Trent Horn. And today, I want to talk about five wacky academic views of Jesus. Now, you go on the internet, you can find all kinds of people who have unusual views about who Jesus is. You can find people with unusual views on all sorts of things on the internet, apparently. You go to YouTube, go to Reddit, go to obscure message boards. But, I want to focus today on academics. And by “academic,” some of these people were legitimate academics scholars in fields that were relevant to the study of scripture, or at least ancient history. Others are more well-published authors and they may be experts in one field, and then they try to apply their thinking style to the Bible and come out with unusual results. So, that’s what I want to focus on, that these are not nobodies.
These are people, some of whom were very respected biblical scholars even that came out with really… Wacky is a word that I… I love the word “wacky” by the way. It reminds me of Nickelodeon. Wacky. I feel like slime’s going to come down on me right now. Maybe I guess in academia, it’s not wacky, it’s unusual or it’s counterintuitive. Bizarre. Perhaps eccentric. And so, these views bundled up in their research, it’s really fascinating. And you might be saying, “Well, Trent, why were you to talk about some of these things? Some of these are really low-hanging fruit. Shouldn’t you be engaging the more sophisticated critics of Christianity?” And I certainly intend to, I feel like I do do that in my debates, in my books. I’m happy to engage to that.
I’ve written rebuttals to things that Bart Erhman has done, for example. You can find it at catholic.com. But every now and then, it is fun to talk about these things, and also they have a very wide reach. There might be very sophisticated arguments against Christianity, but I guarantee you more people have probably heard about some of these wackier views on Joe Rogan’s podcast than they had those more sophisticated views. So, there’s a time and place. And that’s why here on the podcast, I always try to balance between reaching the low-hanging fruit that affects a lot of people and so it needs to be addressed, and also addressing the more sophisticated objections to our faith, the strongest and most potent objections that really need to be answered. It’s always about trying to find a balance here.
And if you like to help us to address all those different kinds of objections, definitely go to trenthornpodcast.com. Become a subscriber there. That helps us. You can get access to our Catechism and New Testament study series. You get the print edition of Catholic Answers Magazine sent to your home. That’s pretty cool. Get something actual in print that you can have. You can get a mug, Counsel of Trent mug, all kinds of great stuff. Go and check it out at trenthornpodcast.com.
Now, without further ado, here are the five wacky academic views of Jesus that I want to get into today. Now, here’s number one, or sorry, number five. We’ll count up to one. Number five, Jesus, the globetrotting guru. All right. This is a view of Jesus… The idea that Jesus kind of left the Holy Land is something that’s been around for quite a while. I think William Blake’s poem, And did those Feet in Ancient Time, talked about an old story about Jesus traveling with Joseph when he was a tin merchant to go all the way to England, for example.
So, Deepak Chopra, and there’s a wonderful online generator called the Deepak Chopra Word Generator. I don’t know if it’s still active, but I remember using it and it was hilarious. It would generate fake sentences that sounded like Deepak Chopra, and it’s very hard to tell the difference. He’s a doctor, but he does a lot of new age stuff and claims through the power of consciousness. You can cure cancer. The moon only exists because we think it’s there. If we stop believing in it, it wouldn’t be there. All kinds of weird stuff. Consciousness is all that exists. Things like that. Deepak Chopra has talked about Jesus being that he is really the true enlightened one. Jesus is not God, but he discovered God within him. And if we’re like Jesus, we’ll discover God within us. And in this book, Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment, Chopra says that how Jesus discovered the God within then we can do the same is by traveling to India and to Nepal, that he studied Buddhism, studied with these mystics and gurus.
And then like I said, it goes all the way back. When would Jesus do this? Well, he did it at some point between the age of 12 and 30. He got 18 years here that are somewhat unaccounted for. These are called the hidden years of Jesus’ life or the unknown years of Jesus’ life. People come with all kinds of stories about what Jesus did during this time. I think what he probably did was after he turned 12, I think Joseph died shortly after that, because we never hear about Joseph again. And Jesus, being a good Jewish son, decides to live with his mom and takes care of his mom, and does odds and ends, and he invents the table.
I remember that was one of my favorite scenes in The Passion, where Jesus is happy and not getting bludgeoned into death and whipped. He is all happy with his mom. And he’s like, “Look, I made this table.” That’s pretty neat, right? That’s what I think he did, but Chopra is saying, “No. He went to India and he became a guru.” And this is an older view. This is a picture here on the right of a guy named Nicolas Notovitch. He was a journalist who claimed that he had been to Nepal, to a monastery. He wrote a book called The Life of Saint Issa, claiming that Jesus had gone here, and he had found scrolls in a Buddhist temple that proved Jesus went to Nepal, went to these temples. And then when other journalists went to that monastery, like these Buddhist monasteries, to check the story, they found out Notovitch had never even been there. It was just this giant hoax. He made a bunch of money off of it like most hoaxers throughout history and today.
And in fact, Chopra, when he was asked about the theory, “What’s the evidence that Jesus actually did this and where is your evidence that he did this,” Chopra basically admitted… This is in an interview in Time Magazine in 2008. He says, “I went into incubation, meditation, and I allowed this story to unfold. It fits into the category of religious fiction.” So, there you have it. It’s a fun and fanciful story, but not one we really have good historical sources to rely on for that.
Number four, Married Dynastic Jesus. This of course is The Da Vinci Code, authored by Dan Brown, that was later turned into a movie with Tom Hanks. And what’s hard is normally when Tom Hanks is in a movie, it’s awesome. Tom Hanks is a national treasure. They should just put him in the Smithsonian with Paul Rudd, both of them. Keep them safe there and on display because they’re great, especially Tom Hanks. Every movie I see with him, he kind of plays the same character a lot, but I really like it. And he does his best in Da Vinci Code but it’s just bad, because Da Vinci Code is not really a great novel. The characters are really thin, it’s not really great.
In The Da Vinci Code, Tom Hanks plays Robert Langdon, a symbologist, which I don’t think is a real occupation, solving about a murder in the Louvre. And there’s an albino hunting people. And it all has to go back to these clues that Leonardo Da Vinci left in the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. And the clue in the Last Supper is that Jesus was actually just a regular guy and he was married, and he was married to Mary Magdalene, and their offspring became the Merovingian dynasty in France. So, married Jesus that formed this powerful dynasty. And the idea that he was God was invented later. And I remember actually going through The Da Vinci code, this is in 2005. I hosted an apologetic session for the youth group I was volunteering with at that time. I had just been out of college for about two years, and there were teens who were really, their faith was really shaken by this book.
And I asked them, “Why are you concerned about this? It’s just a story. It’s just a novel.” And so, they have things like, “Oh, in The Da Vinci Code, look, this is actually Mary Magdalene. See? And they form an M like Mary Magdalene.” No, this is John, and he’s drawn without a beard because he’s youth. I think in the book they’re even like, “I peered at the painting and saw her abundant breasts,” or something like that. “And I couldn’t believe it. It’s Mary Magdalene right here.” No, you ask Renaissance scholars, this is just John. Nothing unusual here in the Last Supper. Even if it were, that wouldn’t say anything about what Jesus actually did because the earliest historical evidence that Jesus had a wife is…
Actually, there was I think a document in Egypt. Karen King is a scholar who promotes the view that Jesus was married. And she actually says the Gospel of Philip. It describes something where Jesus has an affection towards Mary Magdalene. But even Karen King, who supports the view Jesus was married, thinks that’s an ambiguous reference. She used an Egyptian document that later turned out to be a hoax, a forgery that didn’t even support her thesis at all.
The Da Vinci Code, what’s funny about it is it says things that are just completely not true and contradicted by the historical record even outside scripture. There’s a part in it where they go see this historian, Teabing, who tells them, “Here’s what really happened with Jesus,” who’s played by I think Sir Ian McKellen in the movie. And it says, “Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which emitted those apocryphal gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him Godlike.” The idea here is the Constantine conspiracy theory of putting forward, “Where do we get this idea that Jesus is God?” Well, what they’ll say is that these other apocryphal gospels like the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, they show us the human Jesus. And Constantine banned them and gathered them up and burned them, and instead forced Christians to use the canonical gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that “embellish those gospels that made Him God-like.”
What’s interesting here is that it’s the reverse actually. When you look at the earliest gospels, the synoptic gospels, they really show Jesus in his humanity. Even the Gospel of John, it talks about how Jesus wept, for example. Jesus gets hungry, he gets agitated. He’s very human in these canonical gospels from the first century. The later apocryphal gospels talk about Jesus, the Gospel of Peter has Him coming out of for His resurrection. It’s really exaggerated. He’s like a giant going up in the sky. The Gospel of Thomas, He says, “Split a piece of wood, I am there.” Almost as if Jesus is just the one with everything. What was that joke? What did the mystic say to the deli owner? “What kind of sandwich do you want?” “I want one with everything.” I don’t know, I probably botched that joke, but there you go.
These later gospels have docetic heresies, of other heresies, that really these gnostic gospels try to emphasize Jesus’ divinity and undercut his humanity. The earliest gospels actually show Jesus’ human traits. Although the earliest testimony we have, like Paul, really speaks about Jesus in a very cosmic way. And Paul knows the original disciples. Galatians chapter one, he says he went and spoke with Peter and the other apostles to make sure what he was preaching was correct. And so, the original disciples are not following a merely human Jesus. And the first Christians did not believe Jesus was merely human. There’s this idea that, oh, Constantine got people to believe in a divine Jesus to have unity in the empire. No, belief in Jesus’ divinity long preceded Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. And yet, I don’t need to use the Bible to show that either. You can use non-biblical sources to show this.
I love this here. They’re talking with Teabing. He’s talking about the Council of Nicea. “Hold on. You’re saying that Jesus’ divinity was the result of a vote?” At the Council of Nicea. “A relatively close one at that,” Teabing replies, except it wasn’t. I think there’s only two bishops out of the hundreds who were at the Council of Nicea who abstained from the vote. It was nearly unanimous. Even Bart Ehrman agrees with this in his critique of The Da Vinci Code. Bart Ehrman wrote a good book critiquing The Da Vinci Code. I don’t agree with everything in it, but Ehrman knows that this is not how serious scholars look at the historical Jesus.
And so, he’s writing in that, even Ehrman showing there saying no, it was pretty unanimous that the Council of Nicea affirming that Jesus is God. They’re just trying to say, “Is He fully God or is He like the Arian say, he’s only kind of divine?” And no, they fully affirm with the only two abstaining that Jesus is homoiousious. He is consubstantial. The same being with the Father. And the idea that the first Christians, early Christians before Constantine, believe Jesus was God and not a mere man, one of my favorite pieces of evidence for that is right here. This is a photograph and this is a line drawing representing it. This is called the Alexamenos graffito. And this inscription here, it says, “Alexamenos worships God,” or “worships his God.” You have this Roman soldier here, and he’s worshiping a guy being crucified with the donkey’s head.
This is not Christian art, this is art making fun of Christianity. But, even the art making fun of Christianity admits that Christians, how it’s making fun of them, is they worship a crucified man with a donkey’s head someone to pity and to ridicule this is his God. And in the beginning of the second century, Pliny the Elder said that Christians would meet early in the morning at a fixed time to sing a hymn to Christ as to God. So, you go to these non-Christian sources before Constantine, it’s very clear Constantine did not invent the divinity of Christ. That’s number four.
All right, so number three, Caesar-approved Jesus. Now, we’re getting in the real wacky ones here. They were wacky before, but we’re going to dial it up to 11. This is from Joseph Atwill, and he is an independent scholar. I think he went to a Catholic high school in Japan long time ago. And he’s independently researched all of this. I think he’s still alive. He’s like in his seventies. Atwill wrote a book that was turned into a documentary called Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus. And the idea here is that Flavius Josephus was hired by the Romans to invent the historical figure of Jesus sometime in the late first century, to have an appropriate figure of worship to be able to pacify the Jewish people. I’m still not entirely sure what his thesis is in this regard, but the idea is that clues were left behind for us to see. The Romans deliberately left clues. So if you read the Gospels in the New Testament, you can see they left clues in there for us that this is all made up.
One that he gives is that when Jesus says, “Come and I will make you fishers of men,” this is a reference to when the Roman soldiers during the Jewish war killed Jews fleeing from them who are fleeing in the Sea of Galilee. They shot arrows at them and caught them like fish. So when Jesus says, “Be fishers of men,” that is a veiled reference to when the Romans caught Jews like fish in the battle of the Sea of Galilee. All right, there’s so many problems with this, so many problems. Atwill says Jesus never existed, but not just that. He says Peter never existed, Paul never existed. All of this in the New Testament was fabricated. And someone can only make these kinds of arguments if, and you hear this with mythicists. Now, he’s like Mythicist Supreme. He’s so much of a mythicist that other mythicists think that he’s nuts. You’ve got to be way beyond the pale if even regular mythicists will say, “You went too far with this one.”
I think a lot of mythicists, especially those who are more amateurs in the field, I mean there’s a few mythicists I can count on one hand who have relevant PhDs in this subject. But, the regular people who are on the internet who say, “Jesus never existed. The Bible is just made up,” they forget that the way that Christianity was spread in the ancient world was not just people had a Bible show up at their house and read it and came to believe this. It was spread through the proclamation of church communities. And these are communities people would’ve been aware of that existed and gone all the way back to the time when Jesus was crucified. It would be really weird if the Roman Empire is trying to invent Jesus and then claims in all these fake writings of the New Testament, all these fake churches, that eventually these churches end up existing. Some of these churches, these churches still have patriarchs that exist to this day, in Thessalonica and other places.
When people by the time of the second century come to join them, wouldn’t they be suspicious these churches basically popped up overnight that claim to have a historical existence going back several generations? Instead, the Roman Empire just kind of pops them up like, “Here you go, come and join.” It does not make sense. And like I said, other mythicists have utterly rejected Atwill. Richard Carrier says, “I gave it my best shot. It doesn’t work.” Robert Price, who’s a really fun guy actually, I enjoy reading and listening to him on a lot of different things. Here’s Price’s review. Robert Price denies Jesus existed as well. And here’s his review of Atwill’s Caesar’s Messiah. He says, “One hates to be so severe in the analysis of the work of an innovative thinker who gives us the gift of a fresh reading of familiar text.” He’s charitable or trying to be. “But in the present case, it is hard to euphemize. The reading given here is just ludicrous.” And that’s a lot coming from Price who’s willing to open himself up to all kinds of unusual readings of the New Testament to support mythicism.
I even love, and there’s a book, Five Views of the Historical Jesus, and Robert Price is in there representing the Mythicist view. And John Dominic Crossan, someone who denies the resurrection of Jesus… He’s someone who normally would be, “I would engage in arguments in a critical way.” John Dominic Crossan just savages Robert Price in that anthology. It’s called Five Views of the Historical Jesus. Definitely go check it out.
Number two, now we got to go back to the wild sixties and seventies. So, get out your disco, get out your woodstock paraphernalia. Here’s number two. Jesus tried to fake his own death. The Passover Plot by Hugh J. Schonfield. Our last two are the most legitimate scholars. Price has a PhD. He teaches at a seminary, I think it’s called Johnnie Colemon Seminary. I’m not sure if he’s still there anymore. Schonfield was a legitimate Jewish scholar that was well respected. And then, he published this view called The Passover Plot, which was later turned into a film in the 1970s. He writes in his book that a “conspiracy had to be organized of which the victim was himself the deliberate secret instigator. It was a nightmarish conception and undertaking, the outcome of the frightening logic of a sick mind, or of a genius. And it worked out.” He’s talking here, what Scholfield claims in The Passover Plot is that Jesus wanted to be a messiah to people. And he knew the Messiah had to die and rise again so Jesus’s plan was to fake his own death and then fake his own resurrection.
And he got it all set up. He had a few disciples in on it, but he didn’t plan that a Roman soldier would stab him with a spear and he ended up actually dying. And then, people still believe in his resurrection anyways. That’s The Passover Plot. Another theory that even secular and critical scholars don’t pay heed to because it doesn’t really explain a lot of things… It doesn’t explain why people come to believe in the resurrection when you can go and find Jesus’ empty tomb, you can actually go and find the body. It’s there because Jesus did die. Now, you say, “Well, some of the inner… Maybe some James and Peter were in on it.” So, that’s the fraud theory. That’s the fraud theory. But, liars make poor martyrs, especially somebody like Peter who would demonstrate himself to be quite the coward.
And also Schonfield is very, he cherry picks what he needs for his thesis in the New Testament. He’ll say a lot of it is historically unreliable, but the detail in John about the spear going into Jesus’ side, which critical scholars, often many of them don’t accept, he definitely accepts it because he needs that for his theory to work. He’s not very consistent, even in his own methodology. It also doesn’t explain, well, why did St. Paul convert if there was no actual resurrection appearance on the road to Damascus? That’s The Passover Plot, and it’s good for you to know.
Also, the detail here is Schonfield did not say Jesus faked his death and faked his resurrection. That’s the classic Swoon theory. And that’s was dispensed long ago, I think by Strauss, who was a German critic who is very skeptical of Jesus, but said, “Look, no one’s going to believe the Lord of life has risen from the dead if you have this bloody beaten body that people see after the crucifixion.” So, that’s not Schonfield’s view because he thinks he really did die but accidentally, but he organized it. It’s an intricate web of nonsense.
And of course, number one. Number one wacky academic view of Jesus, it was all mushrooms, man. This is one that has shown up on the Joe Rogan podcast, where Rogan’s talked about this, because Rogan likes talk about psychedelic things and other things like that. And he references a book written in 1970 by John Allegro called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Like Schonfield, John Allegro was a distinguished and respected scholar. He was involved in translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was a respected scholar, and then he published The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross in 1970, and he lost all respect in the academy. The book is actually kind of a hard read, but basically the point of the book is that Allegro claims by looking at the etymology of words in the New Testament, there’s hidden symbolism in the words that you can trace back from these Greek and Semitic words to ancient Sumerian words and saying that the Christianity began as a fertility cult that engaged in orgies and had mystical visions after eating mushrooms or drinking juice distilled from mushrooms.
I forget the name of the mushroom itself, Amanita or Amanica. I can’t remember the name, but it was a picture of it here on the cover. And the idea is that, yeah, it was mushrooms, man. Jesus is a mushroom, and that is what it is. And Allegro himself tries to find all kinds of parallels. He says that to take up one’s cross is actually the cross is a reference to the chariot, and the chariot has a cross section, and the chariot is the active driving force. It’s a reference to the active partner in the sexual act. Jesus’ command to take up your cross is an instruction to engage in sexual fornication. Go ahead and be confused. I’m totally confused as well. Allegro’s book is super confusing, and scholars at the time rejected it.
This is from an article in the London Times in 1970 when the book came out. And here’s what the expert said of the book at the time. “This is a work upon which scholars would not normally wish to comment. But the undersigned, specialists in a number of relevant disciplines and men of several faiths and none, feel it their duty to let it be known that the book is not based on any philological or other evidence which they can regard as scholarly. In their view this work is an essay in fantasy rather than philology.” The study of words in their origins or, I say language, and the spread and development of language.
And online, on the internet, you’ll see people who will take up Allegro’s thesis and try to run with it. Sometimes, they’ll go and they’ll point to medieval pictures that look like there’s mushrooms with Jesus, and they’ll say, “Look, there’s proof. See, Jesus is a mushroom. It’s a mushroom cult. It’s this sex cult,” which by the way, if Christianity began as a mushroom sex cult, why does Christianity have such rigid sexual restrictions to it? Not like what the Gnostics had. Christianity’s founding documents don’t teach these things, which we would expect if that was the origin of the cult, even in any other tradition going back to that.
Oh, by the way, also this whole mushroom hallucinogenic thing, I think the cults that did it and do this, they would drink the urine of those who had eaten the mushroom. That’s how they got their hallucinations. And the Bible itself condensed things like Pharmakeia, using medicines, using potions, rather than talking about this as being the source of one’s revelation. Like I said, they’ll go, they’ll find these pictures, there’re weird mushrooms so to speak. And it’s like, “Oh look, see, it’s been a hidden tradition. Jesus was a mushroom. It’s hidden in all this medieval art.” There’s probably a simpler explanation for that.
When you look at this picture, I would say, “All right, let’s put it on our critical thinking hats. You look at it, yes, this plant here looks like mushrooms.” And I would say it looks like giant mushrooms that are taller than the people that are around. What’s going on here that this person… Is this a mushroom cult? Well, what’s happening in this image? Jesus is riding on a colt, and there’s people who are laying down their coats in front of the colt, and this person’s waving something in his hand. It’s Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Hossana in the highest, or people are waving palm fronds. And it’s very clear in scriptures talking about palms.
It’s maybe the case of a 12th century medieval artist who’s depicting this scene and he never saw a palm tree. Maybe he lived, he’s across the Alps, he’s never seen a palm tree. He is doing the best he can with the material and he draws them like this, and it’s just poorly drawn palm trees. We should probably go with a simpler explanation than there’s this hidden magic mushroom cult of Christianity that’s been preserved for thousands of years that nobody knows about.
All right, so those were the five wacky academic views of Jesus. Jesus, the globetrotting guru, Married Dynastic Jesus, Caesar-approved Jesus, Jesus tries to fake his own death, and it was all mushrooms, man. If you would like more on these false views of Jesus, I would recommend my book, Counterfeit Christs, if you’d like to go deeper into this subject. Thank you guys so much for taking part in this. And yeah, I just hope that you have a very blessed night.
Narrator:
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