Jesus is the OG Psy Ops

Nothing says Christmas like conspiracy research!

In this episode, I examine Joe Atwill's book, Caesar's Messiah: the Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus. I talk about my initial rejection of the concept, only to find that every Bible scholar I read confirmed it, without any idea that they were. Naomi Wolf's post, A Walt Whitman Poem for Christmas Day is subtitled Must We Really Stand Up for the Truth? From it, I distill the inherent dogmas of superiority that she isn't willing to question: Christianity, Judaism, America, academia and artists. With admiration for Naomi, I talk about why our unexamined dogmas make us vulnerable to manipulation. My book, How to Dismantle an Empire, begins by looking at democracy and money as the foundational psy-ops of Western civilization and this episode adds the third pillar of Judeo-Christianity.

In Naomi’s beautifully written article, I find many things to agree with. She quotes her father in saying that once you write something, it no longer belongs to you—it belongs to the universe—and that one true reader is enough. Your job as a writer, he states, is to do your utmost to tell the truth as you know it and not to worry about what people think of it. She states that:

You know that I believe we are in the midst of an all-out war on humanity. The war is aimed at religion of course, and at love and family; it is also aimed squarely at art, poetry, theatre, dance, music, and all the things we humans do that reflect that we are made in the image of God; that raise us up from the serf-like status of “hackable animals,” the gutter-level, where the global evildoers, the Hamans of our time, wish to reposition us.

I mention my father’s training in not caring what the world says, because we are at the end of a year in which the people whom I most respect, and my husband and I too, have been called lunatics, murderers, spreaders of lethal “misinformation,” ignorant, “unhinged,” “anti-science”, terrorists, unworthy of medical care, hysterics, and threats to society.

The people whom I most respect have seen their livelihoods vanish, their institutional affiliations disappear, their former colleagues turn their backs….

Most of these heroes, I would venture to say, stood firm because they believed in something greater than the always-mistaken clamor of the world.

When I was interviewing Dr Jay Bhattacharya, early in 2021, I asked him, late in the discussion, why he had the courage to put his reputation on the line, given the unpopularity at the time of his anti-lockdown views. He had just shared his conviction that millions of poor people would face starvation if “lockdowns” were not lifted; many of them would be children. I pressed, probably annoyingly; finally he responded, modestly and quietly, that he was a Christian.

I am not a Christian, though I really love Jesus and try to follow him as my Rabbi … But to me, speaking very humbly and with no great knowledge at all of what “being a Christian” means, there can be no better definition of “being a Christian” than what Dr Bhattacharya was describing, in that context. …

I am not Christian — I guess — but I tear up every single time I hear the child in The Little Drummer Boy say,

“I am a poor boy too.”

Why?

Because this is true for all of us.

I also believe we’re at the culmination of a 3500+ year war of empire vs. sovereignty. In a spiritual sense, maybe even since time began although not in eternity. This is a battle of ideas—without a shared belief, it would only be one person fighting. And the ones promoting the ideas are never the ones doing the fighting. So it’s important, if we are to end this war against ourselves, for the sake of all of the little drummer boys and girls, that we name our own dogma and raise everything else to question. Because whatever we accept without question can be used to manipulate us.

My sole (soul) dogma is that I’m no better than anyone else. That’s the touchstone that I measure every other belief against. In Naomi’s piece, there are subliminal assumptions of superiority: the moral superiority of the religious, the intellectual superiority of academics and the arts, and the superiority in the later-quoted Whitman poem, of America as heir-ship and heiress-ship of the world. I don’t disagree with Naomi about the critical point in history we’re in or the courage and integrity of those standing up for the truth. But we need to face our own pockets of gullibility to not trade one psy-ops for another.

And so I want to look at the voice of Jesus saying “I am a poor boy too” and ask, really? Or is it the voice of a fictional character created by the ruling dynasties of the Roman Empire, laughing at a joke that’s lasted two millennia and tricked billions into worshiping Caesar as God? That’s the conclusion of researcher Joe Atwill in his book Caesar’s Messiah: the Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus.

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Religion and Christianity are things that I have studied deeply. I attended Catholic grade school, HS and college, entering as a religion major. Twenty-odd years ago I became an oblate at a monastery and regularly attended something called The Jesus Seminars—a worldwide conference of Bible scholars who present research and vote on whether particular passages are true, not true or partly true, based on the historical, archeological and linguistic evidence. I have a bookshelf devoted to Bible history, theology and Gnostic scriptures.

So when I walked into a bookstore and saw Caesar’s Messiah, I thought it was an interesting premise. I started reading and then—literally—threw it across the room as utter nonsense. The next book I read was by John Dominic Crossan, a former monk and possibly the world’s most eminent Bible scholar, who co-founded The Jesus Seminars. It presented archeology from Rome during the time of the gospels and showed that the sayings I memorized in Catholic school—God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, one in being with the Father—were as ubiquitous as advertising. But they referred to Caesar, not Jesus. Huh.

The second book I picked up was Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan. It said that demons were invented to describe the ‘intimate enemy', the enemy within. In the gospels, the devils were the Jews who were revolting against Roman rule, the zealots. I knew that the gospels had been written down post-70 CE after the siege of Jerusalem brutally crushed the zealot revolt, which had succeeded for three years in taking back Judea and ousting the Roman soldiers and complicit priestly elite. Why would the story turn the anti-imperial rebels into demons? Unless what Joe said was right and this had been written to serve the empire.

I went back and read Caesar’s Messiah more carefully.

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To understand the gospels, they need to be put in historical context. During that time, there was an ongoing revolt led by the militant zealots, who were also known as Sicarii for the short dagger called a sica. During religious festivals, they would stab the collaborators among the temple elite, then melt back into the crowd. The movement was started by two teachers: Judas the Nazarene, also known as the Sicariot or assassin, and Zadok or Saduc, whose followers may have been the Sadducees. Of course, if you take Judas Sicariot and transpose two letters, you get Judas Iscariot. Curiously also, modern definitions make the Sadducees wealthy, haughty and cozy with Rome while the Pharisees are pious and learned. The Sadducees “viewed the ministry of Jesus with considerable alarm and apparently played some role in his trial and death” but mysteriously disappear after Jerusalem “falls”.

During the revolt, Josephus led the Galilean militants, by which I mean that he surrendered within a few days. Hiding out, the tradition was to draw straws in pairs to determine who would kill the other, so they couldn’t be captured alive. It came down to Josephus and one other, who he killed. When discovered and taken to the Roman general Vespasian, by his account he declared: You think that you’ve captured me but really I’ve been sent to you. The prophecy says that the Messiah will come from Judean soil, and these silly Judeans think it will be one of them. But look, here you are on Judean soil. You’re the Messiah of prophecy, sent to be their ruler!

This flattery kept him alive, along with a potential role he played in the betrayal of his compatriots. The Romans broke the siege and killed until the streets ran red and they were exhausted, then sold the rest as slaves or sent the leaders back to be tortured. When Vespasian later indeed become emperor, he rewarded Josephus by adopting him as the son of Caesar or son of God, which was one and the same.

During the siege, a rabbi named Yochanan ben Zakkai faked his death and was lowered over the wall in a coffin. He groveled to Vespasian that he had urged surrender and begged to be allowed to preserve the Jewish scriptures with his scholars. He also had a convenient ‘vision’ that Vespasian would be emperor and when this did occur, his school was granted. So this is who has ‘preserved’ and edited the version of Hebrew scriptures we have today—a man who deserted his people and sided with their oppressor. The Fourth Philosophy zealot or Sadducee Judaism that inspired courage and solidarity, fearing neither death nor torture, has been lost to imperial history.

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What Joe Atwill does in Caesar’s Messiah is read the gospels and Josephus’ War of the Jews side-by-side. He also engages in a decade-long study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In comparing the gospels and War of the Jews, he writes:

Certain events from the ministry of Jesus seemed to closely parallel episodes from the military campaign of the Roman emperor Titus Flavius as he attempted to gain control of the rebellious Jews in Judea. My efforts to understand this relationship led me to uncover the amazing secret that is the subject of this book: This imperial family, the Flavians, created Christianity, and, even more incredibly, they incorporated a skillful satire of the Jews in the Gospels and War of the Jews to inform posterity of this fact.

Joe utilizes typology, shows the patterning of story elements, and analyzes word order with the statistical probability that it could happen by chance. He shows it to be beyond likely that these works are authored by the same person or proxies working with the same formula. Stylistic elements, like the ‘Markan sandwich’ are employed in both, along with tropes and characteristic figures of speech. The devil, or the truth, is in the details and it requires some Biblical knowledge to follow all the logic. However, since Josephus is the only historian to ever mention Jesus, it calls into question any independent verification of his existence.

The central question remains: are the gospels on the side of the common people, the “poor boy too” drummer, or on the side of the rulers and empire? Given the historical context of the gospels, this isn’t a question on which they could be neutral. On my Third Paradigm website, I posted a paper I wrote in 2007 called Jesus: Rebel or Imperialist? It traces the Greek word for robber throughout the War of the Jews and the gospels and shows how it always means rebel. It looks at Josephus and his disdain for the zealots or robbers. And then it examines each use of robbers in Jesus' life: a den of thieves, arrested like a robber with clubs and swords, and the good thief/bad thief. From the parables I look at thieves and robbers used by the Pharisee in the temple, the good Samaritan, and the good shepherd. Finally, I look at a passage in the gnostic gospel of Thomas that speaks about rebels and imperial resources.

I encourage you to read my article. It answers the question definitively of whose side Jesus and the gospels are on. Although I chose to focus the next decade on economics, there’s power in knowing the truth. This is a 1000-piece puzzle that I worked on for many years, and I could go on and on explaining how the various parts fit together. What the picture shows, though, is that the Bible is upside-down and inside-out where the heroes, like Judas the Sicariot, have been made into the villains, and the villains like Josephus have been made into the heroes. This is how good people have been misled into worshipping Caesar and believing the empire will always win because God is on its side.

As Joe concludes his introduction:

So, after 2,000 years of misunderstanding, a new meaning of the Gospels is revealed within this work. By turning this page, readers will enter a new world. I do not know if it is a better world. I only know that I believe it is a truer one.

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To follow with a different version of a truer world, this is The Crisis of Meaninglessness on Bret Weinstein & Heather Heysing:

In Russell Brand's interview, I agree with Bret and Heather that we're in a crisis of meaninglessness but challenge that it's an unintentional byproduct of capitalism. I look at religions, money and evolution as all myths of superiority. I quote David Graeber's work on the simultaneous emergence of coinage and religions of altruism, and cite Gandhi and A Course in Miracles on truth and reality. But in the end, I completely agree with Bret and Heather's destination, to a future that works for all of us, no matter how different our journeys to get there.

and this is Kali and Ultimate Reality on Bradley Garrett:

Using Kali as a prop, I question objective vs. subjective reality and whether the world represents our collective death wish. Regarding Russell's interview of Bradley Garrett, Prepare for the Apocalypse (UtS 193), I ask why surviving annihilation seems easier than the idea of inconveniencing some bankers and saving us all. The Greek meaning of apocalypse and crisis are explained from the perspective of the recent Greek revolt of Yanis Varoufakis against the economic troika. A spiritual view of social change is considered within an alternate possibility for ultimate reality.