 I have Mate 40 here listening to Richard Spence's conversation with his philosopher David Scrobina. So he's talking about when the Romans took control of Palestine, they took, they stole, they murdered, they raped. Right, so in the Gospels, the Romans are these kind of shadowy figures, right? Even though they're the ones who are actually running things in the first century Palestine at the time of Jesus. Yeah, obviously a lot of resentment and a lot of anger there by the people who were in charge, which was the various Jewish tribes. You think, you know, normally people are excited to be invaded and conquered and have, you know, foreigners ruling them? Really? Yeah, so the Kingdom of Heaven from a Jewish perspective 2000 years ago meant self-rule, right? Jews in control of their own destiny, right? It wasn't another worldly thing, it wasn't, you know, salvation to another world. It was about salvation in this world, away from the barbaric Romans and their cruel regime. So yeah, there are many different Jewish responses to the Romans, right? Some just tried to make the best of things. Right, just a seed to the power. Another approach was like revolution and assassination, right? So many different Jewish approaches 2000 years ago, there are many different Jewish sects, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Zealots, the assassins. There are a lot of, you know, renegade killers trying to assassinate individual Romans as a way to attack them, you know, to get back at them, okay? Of course you're facing the largest military in the world, so you have limited options at that point. But obviously individual small-scale attacks were working, so there was more movement on the foot there. But I started speculating, you know, the intellectuals like Paul, who was an intellectual, he was, you know, a well-educated elite Jew. And, you know, he would likely have known that, hey, this little stabbing to killings would probably not going to really do it in the long run. So Paul had a tremendous imagination. There's no evidence that he was much of a scholar. No evidence that he could even read the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew. So he was not a scholar of things Jewish. His claims about having studied Rabban Gamliel are lies. Because to study with Rabban Gamliel, you'd have to speak Hebrew. All evidence we have is that Paul could not speak Hebrew. Like he was relying upon Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh. What Christians call the Old Testament. So from everything we know, Paul didn't speak Hebrew. Paul, I think, was from Tiberias. There were no Jewish academies there. Right, so he was Jewishly ignorant, but had a superficial understanding of the Hebrew Bible, gained through the Greek translation Septuagint. And he had ambition and imagination. Okay, I don't think it holds up to see the apostle Paul as being primarily motivated by trying to take down the Romans. There isn't a lot of anti-Roman sentiment in the apostle Paul. There are some, but there's plenty of render under Caesar, that which is Caesars. There's some anti-Jewish sentiment. Right, so it's not unknown that a person with an above average intelligence such as Paul will sell something to the masses that he thinks will get the masses moving in a direction he likes. See the same kind of phenomenon with Donald Trump. He's the great parole whisperer. Now he knows how to speak to the 95 IQ crowd, like almost no other politician in the last 20 years. Yeah, Paul was not a systematic thinker, he was not a systematic theologian. He was someone with a tremendous imagination. Yeah, right. If you understand your religion, you're not really religious. So of course most people don't have a profound understanding of their own religion. It just happens to be the social club that they were raised in. Ideology, you know. Well, these weren't sects of Christianity. They were sects of the Jesus movement. There wasn't really a Christianity in the first century. So he's a kind of movement organizer is the best way of describing it. But the other thing that I was stressed is that Paul found Jesus in the Old Testament. So again, there's the story of the trip to Damascus and Epiphany and so on. But he never met the historical figure Jesus. If he existed, he kind of found him in the text. And so Christianity is profoundly Jewish in that sense. Christianity isn't profoundly Jewish because Paul was able to read Jesus into the text of the Hebrew Bible. Any more than Buddhism would be profoundly 40. Just because I'm able to say read the sacred text of Buddhism and see myself foretold there. Islam is not profoundly 40. If I can read the Quran and see myself prophesied there. Your ability to read your imagination into some ancient text doesn't mean that it's really there in the text. It doesn't make Christianity profoundly Jewish. He just created this whole new thing. It has nothing to do with the Old Testament. No, the myth of Jesus and even the story of Jesus emerged from the Old Testament. Now, that doesn't mean that there are important differences. But of course there are. But it is profoundly Jewish in its inception. No, that doesn't make it profoundly Jewish. There are claims wanting to take on the mantle of things Jewish. But reading Jesus into the Hebrew Bible doesn't make Christianity profoundly Jewish. He's going to think in a Jewish term like Jews do today. It has changed in 2000 years. Paul was not educated Jewishly. He couldn't even read Hebrew. There's absolutely no basis to believe that he was literate in Hebrew. All evidence shows that he couldn't read Hebrew. Ogo, he was a Jewishly ignorant Jew. He didn't know the Hebrew Bible. He relied on a Hebrew translation. It just shows you how ignorant he was. He can clearly draw from those morals and fables as best he can. He wants to construct a Jewish friendly theology as much as possible because that's the objective. But I think there was an actual guy, an actual rabbi. Maybe he was called Jesus. Maybe he was from Nazareth. We don't know. Probably he was agitating on behalf of the poor and the impoverished against the Romans. He might have been sort of a political agitator and trying to drive those invaders out and so far. He probably had a little bit of a moral backbone there. He was imposing the Romans. If you got visible enough and you caused enough stir, then the Romans strung you up on a cross and they crucified you. And that was the punishment for political agitators. So I can imagine all that probably actually happened. Probably wasn't Jesus agitated, back crucified, and then a few years later, Paul comes along and maybe he's drawing from this actual story. Again, this is sort of my speculation. But of course, it's obvious. If you want to construct a hoax to deceive people, it's always best to include as much truth in it as you can. Sure. Because it's going to sound more or very mobile and verifiable. It's going to sound more and it's going to be true. Right? If anybody checks anything. Yeah, there actually was that Jesus guy. Yeah, I remember him. Yeah, he was a great guy. He was a great teacher. Okay, he really didn't exist. Paul would have drawn from an actual person, a life and probably death, and then gone back to the Old Testament and drew bits and pieces that kind of seemed to mesh with that story. You know, from what I've seen, it's very, it's typically biblical. It's very cryptic sort of stuff. When you look at people say, oh, the Old Testament anticipated Jesus coming. We look at this very obscure sort of passages and say, well, that sounds a little... Yeah, you'd have to, you can read anything you want into a text according to the Hebrew Bible. So that's Isa Jesus. When you read a meaning into the text, Exa Jesus is when you deduce a meaning from the text. So Christianity is engaged in Isa Jesus, not Exa Jesus. This could be interpreted as this, and I, you know, okay, that's very useful when you want to make your story. So I can imagine that Paul did that. He took little bits and pieces, maybe not even a bit, maybe more than he did in the Gospel, where he was the Paul himself. But he could have even, Paul could have taken little elements of the Old Testament and attached it to this guy's life and then started to use that to build this, you know, the three days. People talk about the three days in the cave. Well, it sounds like three days. You know, one of those three days in the whale. You know, these kinds of stuff. You can sort of construct parallels that were there in the Old Testament. And sort of weave. Yeah, and you can do all that from a translation. You don't need to know the Hebrew to come up with these imaginative roaming. Interesting and compelling. New story. Right, and in Daniel, there is the image of a suffering Christ, a suffering Messiah, which I think would go against other versions of the Messiah who would be more David-like that they would be a warrior king who would come out with nowhere and start kicking out. Okay, the notion of some suffering Messiah who takes the world's sins upon his shoulders is unknown in Judaism. As, obviously, Jesus doesn't do that at all. But again, there is very strong precedent. I mean, and the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 refers to the Jewish people, right? It refers to Israel. It doesn't refer to an individual. I mean, I've been exposed also to Daniel in the sense of many particularly Protestant Christians will say, you know, this is the text that the Jews don't want to know about Let me just fast-forward through this nonsense. Yeah, it was a hard sell then. It was a hard sell 100 years later. It was a hard sell 200 years later. Like Jews who know anything about Judaism and the Hebrew Bible simply don't buy the claims of Christianity. They don't buy the claims made for Jesus. Only Jewishly ignorant Jews can buy into this because it's completely repellent from a Jewish perspective. The idea of this cannibalistic ritual sacrifice where you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the God being sent to earth to die on a cross, right? This is all repellent from a Jewish perspective. Jews have never looked for a Messiah who's a suffering victim, right? First of all, the doctrine of the Messiah plays very little importance in the way that Jews lead their lives. It's an esoteric piece of storytelling that doesn't have much practical significance. And then to the extent it does have a significance it's ever some individual suffering for the world's sins. Yeah, it was an easier story to sell to Gentiles. Not an easy story to sell to Jews. Jews are a tough audience. They were spoken to a group of Jews that they're kind of feisty and have one very nice Protestant friend who had a lot of Jews at her event. Like, right in the middle of her talk someone stood up and said, some Jews stood up and said, I've never heard such nonsense in my whole life. Jews are a tough audience. They don't just sit back and passively buy into things. Yeah, that wouldn't sell to Jews. That would sell to more credulous non-Jews. Paul had a tremendous imagination. He had a gift with words. He had a high verbal IQ. I don't think you need to go deeper than that.