Historicity Of Jesus

[Guest]

ok found the link. Transcript: http://www.rodephemet.org/hudson.html

in fact, it is better to archive it here.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Transcript of public access show Rodeph Emet - The Roots of Antisemitism - Bracha Bat Yosef Interview with literary analyst John Hudson

BBY... I am here with John Hudson.  Mr. Hudson began working on the literary and structuralist analysis of Biblical texts in 1975  as one of a group of English cultural anthropologists including Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1978 and  is one of the pioneers of applied literary analysis as a field  of  social science.  Over the last 30 years he has used  literary analysis, semiotics, media studies and cognitive science in projects for some of the world’s  largest companies. He was formerly a visiting researcher at MIT and is now doing research at the University of Birmingham. For the last two years he has also been a colleague of Joseph Atwill’s and is working with him on several new books following on from Caesar’s Messiah. Welcome.



JH.... glad to be here.



BBY... Tell us where does literary analysis  come from and  how does applied literary science enable you to reach the sorts of conclusions  about Christianity that you have done?



JH... The first real literary analyst of the Christian New Testament was Porphyry Malchus who lived about 300CE. He wrote a 15 volume critical commentary on the Gospels suggesting that they were literary creations. For instance he rightly  suggested that Gospel of Mark was modeled upon Homer. One of his pieces of  evidence was that  instead of calling the Gennesaret the Lake of Gaillee Mark calls it the Sea of Galilee and has inserted extra voyages on the water and makes the storm more sea like. Of course the church was very threatened by Porphry’s work and it was all burned —we only have a few fragments left. But enough to see what he was doing. He was showing that the gospels are literary creations, not works of history.



BBY... So is  your work  in the same tradition?



JH... Very much so. What  social scientists do in looking at literature is  study  the structures, look objectively at how the texts were created and edited, the social communities  and political environments that produced them, and how they relate inter-textually to other documents.  Then you consider how they were re-written and how they continue to be used by various power brokers to create and generate meaning. Texts are not neutral things; they are instruments of social power.



Literary analysis never just looks at the surface. Texts are always produced by people with an agenda. In the case of the gospels, well,  the winners  always write history and the Romans were the winners of  the Jewish war, and they wrote both the Gospels and the other New Testament texts to reflect their own agenda, their  strategic needs and ideologies. The reason so many plentiful manuscripts  of the Gospels survive-unlike with other early texts—is that the  Romans wanted them to be widely available. In comparison out of all  the  authentic Jewish documents of the period-- only one example survives--those hidden away and buried in the caves at Qumran where the Romans couldn’t get at them.  Today the  Gospel texts are still being used to manipulate and control people, to stop them from thinking for themselves, to be malleable and obey their leaders. All the things that the Romans designed them for.







BBY... When you refer to the Romans, which Romans do you mean?



JH...  OK. The  Roman-Jewish war of 66-70CE was fought by two generals, Vespasian and his son Titus.  They  used their military success in the Middle East to rally popular support in Rome and stage a military coup and  take over the throne.  Vespasian became the first of the new dynasty of Flavian emperors, and was succeeded  by his eldest son Titus, and then by his youngest son Domitian. The problem  the Flavian emperors had was to legitimate their rule by creating useful myths and propaganda. In particular they had to  offer an alternative to the  stories  of the Jews in order to  try and  trick them into worshipping  a false literary messiah, who would really be Caesar in disguise.



BBY...  Your  literary analysis  shows that the figure of Jesus is entirely a literary creation.  But isn’t Jesus mentioned in the Talmud? And  in the 19th century didn’t  the Jewish scholar Geiger claim  that  Jesus could have  been  an early Rabbi?



JH... The Romans wanted people to believe there was a historical Jesus. That was their whole way of tricking and deceiving the Jews into accepting their  imitation  pro-Roman version of the Torah. Unfortunately  Geiger  fell for it. Like many others he was  just  ignorant and very naive—he took the Gospels  on face value instead of subjecting them to literary analysis. So he basically was fooled by the Roman war propaganda, just the way the Romans intended. And he isn’t alone by a long way.



As for the Talmud, that was written 200 years later, so that alone makes it  irrelevant as evidence. But traditionally Jews have rightly argued, for instance at the  13th and 14th century  Disputations, that  these were references to someone else who lived at another period of  time, so no they are not  evidence of a historical Jesus in the first century.



BBY... So is there any historical evidence for the existence of  Jesus?



JH...There is no independent  historical or archaeological evidence whatsoever for  the existence of the Jesus figure  described in the gospels.  Quite to the contrary.  There is a vast amount of  evidence showing  that Jesus was created  entirely as a literary character and he was deliberately created for malicious anti-Semitic reasons. 70% of this character was created by midrash on traditional stories, 10%  by  re-using material on Cynic philosophers, and  20% by drawing on events in the Roman military campaign of Titus Caesar from the years  66-70CE , as Joseph Atwill shows in his book Caesar’s Messiah. In fact Atwill shows that  what the church has always  proclaimed as the biggest piece of historical evidence for the existence of Jesus—something called the Testimonium Flavinianum—is essentially a confession by the Flavian emperors that they created the whole thing as a fraud to deceive the Jews.



BBY... What were the Flavian Emperors trying to accomplish by inventing Jesus as a literary character ?



JH... The Romans’ priority was to calm down  the Middle East and to make the Jews pay taxes and to make the Jews worship Caesar as Lord. They did this by taking over the name of one of the local Hebrew religious figures namely the ‘messiah’—and using it as a disguise for  a literary account of Caesar that lay underneath. It was exactly the same strategy that the Romans  used throughout the Empire, to disguise Caesar as a local god. That was the way the Caesar cult worked, and it was the Caesar cult that united the Empire.





BBY... So after the Jewish war in 70CE the Romans had burned all the Torahs they could find, and they wanted to destroy Judaism.  They decided to create a  replacement for the Torah, which  would teach  Jews  to live by Roman values. Is that what happened?



JH... Yes pretty much. They were trying to create a comic cartoon version of the Torah.

You mentioned Roman values. The Gospels teach Jews to pay taxes, to honor Caesar, to give up on laws like circumcision, give up on the Mosaic Law, to be obedient and not to fight enemies, to work on the Sabbath and help the Roman occupying army by carrying their backpacks twice as far as the law required. Whereas a traditional Jewish text would talk about freeing slaves and prisoners, the gospel texts  never talk about freeing slaves---because Rome was a slave-based society. And they talk about visiting prisoners and feeding them in order to save the State money—nothing about freeing them.  It is a Gospel of oppression, slavery and death, and its focus constantly reminds us of Rome’s expertise—as cross builders and  as torturers.  Creating a fake Jewish messiah to instruct the Jews to submit to Rome in all these ways was highly comic from a Roman point of view.



BBY... Why were the Romans replacing the Torah with a Gospel? Why did they call it by that name?



JH... The word Gospel in Greek is Evangelion. It literally means ‘good news of military victory’.  Nobody until recently has been able to explain this. But now the reason is obvious. My colleague Joe Atwill in his book Caesar’s Messiah shows that all the key events in the life of Jesus are literary satires of  Roman battles in their campaign in Judea. Battles which the Jews lost.  So the ‘good news of military victory’ refers to the fact that the Romans won these battles and have  created literary satires of them, and are going to humiliate the Jews by educating them to believe that their defeats are ‘good news’. That was the Roman idea of Revenge—Seneca writes about it.  The Romans were  determined that the Gospels would humiliate the Jews and  force them to accept a false version of their own history. It was part of the Roman take-over of Jewish culture.







BBY... And the reason why it was all done covertly?



JH... It was all a trick. A deception. The Romans had tried for  a hundred years or more to try to get the Jews explicitly to worship Caesar. The emperor Caligula for instance had even tried putting his statue in the Temple.  The Jews would rather die first. That was why the Romans knew they couldn’t do it overtly, and instead had to do it covertly by creating something that appeared on the surface to look like a Jewish document.  It was  a way of tricking the Jews into accepting these teachings by making the Gospel  appear to be a  genuine record of a  historic religious leader 40 years before. So what they couldn’t do directly the Romans would do by deception. The Romans were good at writing false histories. There are many other examples of it. They found it amusing. All  effective propaganda works by deception and concealing its true authorship. Just look around today, the world is full of it. The Gospels  are fake news, and fake history, only 2000 years old.



BBY... So how did the Romans create this replacement Torah?



JH... The first  version that the Romans created  is  what we know today as the Gospel of Matthew . This  is the largest book of the Christian New Testament . According to something that Bible scholars call the ‘two document hypothesis’—on which there is amazing work done by Professor Peabody and  the International Institute for Gospel studies-- this was the first of the New Testament  Gospels to be written.  I agree with that view, although there was an even earlier  draft version.



BBY... What is the draft version?



JH... It is known as the Gospel of Peter and it is clearly set in the year  70CE because Jerusalem is burning in the background.  It is also much more clearly a fantastic  satire because there is a mile high talking cross that follows people around. But then the Romans decided to make it more realistic instead.



BBY... So what is  the Gospel of Matthew exactly ? How was it composed?



JH... The Gospel of Matthew is the most anti-Semitic document ever created because it was deliberately written as a comic parody of the Torah. We know it was written as a replacement Torah for two reasons; firstly  because of its content and secondly because of its structure. Both of these things show that  Matthew was written not as  real history but as a literary parody of the Torah.  Which do you want to deal with first?



BBY... Lets start with  Matthew’s structure. You gave a technical  talk at the Society of Biblical Literature a couple of years ago announcing  your new discovery of the structure of  Matthew.  Can you just give us an overview of what you have found?



JH... It  has long been known that the Gospel of Matthew is divided into 5 books just like the books of the Torah.  It starts with an account like that of  Genesis, moves on to an account like that of Exodus and another like Numbers , then the bulk of the Gospel is like the Book of Deuteronomy, and it concludes with  a piece that is like Leviticus. So it is like the Torah except the order of the books is different. My work was to point out some unrecognized features that finally proved how the Romans had written it as a deliberate parody. We can run through  a couple of books  as examples if you like.





BBY... OK. Lets take Devarim or Deuteronomy . In what way was Matthew was based on that?



JH... The entire central part of Gospel of Matthew is taken up by a parody of Deuteronomy, which is known  as Sefer Devarim from its initial  phrase ‘these are the Words’. This  is similar to Matthew’s initial  phrase  in chapter 4 v.17 ‘from that time forth Jesus began to say these Words’. Like the five speeches by Moses in Deuteronomy, it is organized around a series of five great teachings given on a mountain, each of which concludes with a very formal rhetorical ending.



BBY... Then the  last  part of Matthew was based, you say  on Va-yikra the Book of  Leviticus ?



JH... Yes it was also  a literary parody. My great teacher the English anthropologist Mary Douglas showed in her book on Leviticus that  the different chapters move in succession around the walls of the  courtyard of the Tabernacle before approaching the Ark, and there are two episodes of blasphemy—one the sons of Aaron in front of the door, and the other the account of the blasphemer in front of the curtain  in chapter 24.  Well the  last part of Matthew moves around the  Temple in exactly the same way and Jesus  is twice accused of blasphemy  at the equivalent places in front of the entrance ways. This is absolute definite proof that the entire account in the gospel is a literary anti semitic joke. 





BBY... Well all these similarities in structure certainly seem show that the Gospel of Matthew was written as a comic imitation of the Torah. But you are saying there are  similarities in content as well. Can you give an example?



JH... The best example is  Moses, which is very well known.  Dale Allison has a good book on this.  The writers of the gospel took  all the key events in the life of Moses, as described in the Torah, and then created  satirical equivalents of them to invent the  fictional life of Jesus. The sequence of events even appears in exactly the same order. Then they added in  another dozen events from the campaign in Judea by the Emperor Titus as well, to show who the true savior of Israel was.





BBY...So that is the Gospel of Matthew.  You have shown that it is all a fake version of the  Torah.  But what about the other Gospels, Mark and Luke?



JH... They are also entirely literary creations and they aren’t independent documents. On the contrary they are basically rewritings of Matthew according to different literary styles.  Mark is a rewriting of Matthew’s gospel to make it look like a Greek epic of Homer’s.  Luke is a rewriting of Matthew to make it like a Roman epic, like Virgil’s Aeneid. They were targeted on the Jews in the Diaspora, so they used a different literary style to be more acceptable.



BBY...  OK . We have talked so far about the gospels at a top level.  Now  I want to  get into much more detail  on two  particular bits of the  Gospel  story that  most  Jews  wonder about. The first question is  whether the Gospel presents Jesus as  an equivalent to the Akedah, the binding of Isaac.



JH... As you know  the Akedah appears in the Torah in Genesis 22. Originally, in  the equivalent passage in  Matthew 1.1-2.12  which is the passage about the baptism of Jesus  in the river Jordan in the wilderness there is  nothing like the Akedah. The Romans forgot to include it first time round.



But when Mark re-writes the second edition—yes you are  correct--- Mark remodels Matthew’s story of the wilderness to provide  a version of the Akedah. In Matthew’s original account of the baptism  there was just a voice  and the heavens are described as opening. But Mark  doesn’t use the word opening, instead  he uses the word  splitting schizo (Mk 1;10). Then he adds in the words “and it happened” (Mk 1;9) to begin the story and tells the reader specifically that Jesus “saw” this splitting of the heavens.



Mark  has taken his wording straight  from the  story of  the Akedah  given in  Greek in  the Septuagint. This  also begins with those words “and it happened”, Abraham ‘split’ schizo wood for the sacrificial fire, a voice called out “from heaven” (Gen 22;11,15), and Abraham named the place “the Lord will see” (Gen 22;14). So Mark creates several different comic parallels in order to present Jesus as a replacement for  Isaac. What was the  second question?



BBY...  You have just described how the baptism story in Mark’s  Gospel was re-written as a sort of  parody of the Akedah.  Many Jews  will want to know whether the account of the crucifixion of Jesus was  also  created as a  literary parallel  to the Akedah?



JH... Again there is nothing about the Akedah in the first edition of the story in Matthew. But  when Mark did his rewriting of Matthew’s  crucifixion story  yes he added in elements of the Akedah into the crucifixion story as well. But he did so  in a very subtle way that also adds in Roman anti-semitic humour.



In Torah Isaac of course had two sons, Esau the red haired, and Jacob who was Israel the soldier of God.  You remember how Isaac carries the wood to the altar.  In  Matthew’s  crucifixion account there was  a man who carried the wood of the cross—who is called Simon of Cyrene.  So this act of carrying wood makes  Simon a bit like Isaac.



The author of Mark then makes him even  more like Isaac, by giving him a son Rufus the red haired and Alexander which means ‘protector of mankind’. Its in Mark 15;21. This is just Roman humor since these are the names of two Roman generals.  During the Jewish War Rufus was the Roman general who helped crucify the true Jewish messiah and Tiberius Alexander was the other general who crucified the sons of the freedom fighter Judas.



So  the  Roman generals who crucified the Jews  are being given cameo appearances in this epic as Esau and Jacob-Israel. Instead of featuring Israel the soldier of God the gospel features Tiberius Alexander the Roman  general who was known for slaughtering Jews in Alexandria. The Romans thought this hillariously funny. That is why the Gospels are the most anti-Semitic documents ever written.



Then  a generation after the gospels were written a whole secondary literature of commentaries  sprung up  like the Epistle of Barnabas written which  tried to spell out the message and claimed that  in the crucifixion, Jesus offered “the vessel of his spirit as a sacrifice for our sins, in order that the type established in Isaac, who was offered upon the altar, might be fulfilled”.



BBY... So now that it has been discovered what the Gospels really are, what should Jews be doing about it?



JH...It's not for me to say, but now that we know that the Gospels  are a comic parody of Judaism created by the man who destroyed Yerushalyim to make people worship him in a concealed Caesar cult, we cannot just  stand by  and  do nothing.  The religion that the Emperor Titus  created  continues to poison and  devastate our world 2000 years later. We have the  ethical and moral responsibility to learn how to read these ancient texts, to understand what they are, and to use our modern media to make sure that the truth is known, to prevent further damage to our world. So what do we have to do? go, study, ask questions and teach the truth.



BBY.. That is a very powerful statement. Do you think that the recent alliances that the Jews have made with many Christians movements will deteriorate as a result of  this knowledge?



JH...It's not really for me to say, but I hope that Jews and Christians together will study these ancient texts intelligently  and  come to a decision on what to do about them that is not based on ignorantly mis-interpreting ancient  Roman war propaganda.







                                      References



C. Allison The New Moses:A Matthean Typology (1993).



Joseph Atwill Caesar’s Messiah (2005).



Benjamin W. Bacon, Studies in Matthew (1930).



David R Bauer The Structure of Matthew’s Gospel  (1988).



Mary Douglas  Leviticus as Literature (1999).



W.Farmer, D.Dungan, A. McNicol, D Peabody and  P. Shuler ‘ Narrative Outline of the Markan Composition According to the Two Gospel Hypothesis’ in SBL Seminar Papers (1990) pp 212-39



John Hudson ‘The Structure of  Matthew’ conference paper, abstract at

http://www.jcu.edu/bible/eglbs/Archives/20...NTabstracts.htm



Allan J.  McNicol with David L, Dungan and David B. Peabody Beyond the Q Impasse Luke’s Use of Matthew:  A Demonstration by the Research team of the International Institute for Gospel Studies (1996).



David Peabody  One Gospel From Two; Mark’s Use of Matthew and Luke (2002).
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