Final Version THE END OF CHRISTIANITY: THE BIG PICTURE By John Hudson Hi, my name is John Hudson and I am here to talk about the Big Picture of what this research means for the end of Christianity. But before I get started I would like us all to do an exercise. Just for a moment will you please close your eyes and try to imagine you are going across time to the far and distant future. As the centuries slip past, faster and faster, imagine for a moment you have reached the year 4013. Over the last two millennia there have been several world wars, civilization has slipped back into a less high tech existence. Imagine also that Hollywood and the movie industry have been destroyed. All that survives are a few projectors and some pieces of a Batman movie. Our descendants don't know what a movie is, they think it shows what really happened in Gotham in the late 20th century. So a group gets together to project the bat logo onto the clouds hoping that Batman will come and save them, as if he were a real superhero, as if he really existed and was not just a literary fiction. Does that sound absurd? But really it's not so different to how Americans today treat another 2000 year old literary superhero. .... OK. You can open your eyes again. This conference is titled Visions from the Edge; the End of Religion. The research that is outlined in the Caesar’s Messiah documentary addresses only one part of that question, the end of Christianity. But that is quite big enough. I am very happy to be part of a panel that is beginning to think about the Big Picture implications of New Testament scholarship. This is no obscure academic matter. It is highly relevant to the world around us in every way. Christianity is one of the biggest and most toxic problems that we all face and the least understood. It is almost like a piece of malware that you think is promising something good, but that actually is contaminating how a third of the global population see the world, by popping up all these distorting lenses to prevent us seeing clearly and hijacking our ability to think for ourselves.
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Globally, Christianity continues to grow rapidly in the developing world and it still remains powerfully entrenched here in America in many thousands of different variants. Although the younger generation of Millenials is much less interested in Christianity, in the population at large, which is much older and more conservative, the fantastic Christian story is still very entrenched. Amazingly a third of the US population still takes the Bible literally. Specific beliefs are even more worrying. The Rasmussen telephone survey in April 2012 found that overall 86% of Americans believe Jesus was a real historical figure and 77% believe that he physically rose from the dead. It would be one thing if these were just crazy private beliefs. But they aren’t. As a voting bloc the fundamentalist Religious Right has real social and political impact. It has pushed Christianity driven social policies regarding abortion, gay rights, lack of care for the poor, the destruction of our ecology, support for the military, and support of massive wars all in the insane hope they will bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus and a new world. At the heart of the problem is our inability to distinguish fact from fiction, or to distinguish history from literature. Just like that Batman movie discovered by our distant descendants, the gospels seem realistic, or at least at first glance. This is because Roman visual and literary arts at the time favored realism. Think of those banquet scenes in the ruins of Pompeii. The gospels are very clever works of literary art. And realistic movies like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which made $600m in box office, go even further to make people think the NT texts are accounts of events that actually happened, and-‐-‐-‐by switching the genre from text to video-‐-‐ they remove the literary markers showing that these are simply fantasy literature. The other side rarely receives a hearing. People have been drawing attention to the evidence that the gospels are not history but simply literature since at least the 3rd century. Research over the last two hundred years has shown that these texts were created by people skilled in creating fictional histories and fantastic stories, and who used religions as part of the apparatus of State power. As Professor Robert Eisenman can testify, they do not much resemble authentic Jewish texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls. What they resemble is
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Roman fantasy literature and fantasy biographies. Their name also gives them away. The word in Greek ‘evangelion’ means Good News of Military Victory. That is what the word ‘gospel’ really means. I would like to ban the over-‐used word ‘gospel’ and instead have everyone say Good News of Military Victory, because it begs the questions of whose military victories, over whom, and for who were these victories good news. We now know the answers to those questions. They are Good News of Roman Military Victories over the Jews. That has been confirmed by Joseph Atwill’s discovery that the key events in the Gospels are actually literary satires of individual battles in which the Jews were defeated by the Romans-‐-‐-‐and they appear in exactly the same order as they do in the authorized account of the Roman-‐Jewish war. This discovery is really the missing piece of the jigsaw, after which everything else falls into place, and it shows that the character of Jesus is a sort of literary allegory for Caesar. This really should not be a surprise. It was simply the normal Roman strategy for Empire building which was renaming and co-‐opting the local gods. Thus Camulus, the war god of the Gauls, was renamed Mars-‐Camulus , the shining Celtic god Lugh was renamed Mercury, and the goddess Sullis who presided over the spring of hot water at Bath, England, was renamed Sullis-‐Minerva. This is what the Romans then did in Judea with the Jewish Messiah or Christ, to rewrite Jewish literature in order to try and trick the Jews into worshipping Caesar as their Lord and Savior. So now we know that this supposed Good News of Military Victory is simply ancient Roman war propaganda and fantasy literature, doesn't it seem absurd that millions of people should run their lives, let alone 21st century political policies based on this ancient religion of covert Caesar worship? Christianity destroys rational thought, and makes people approach the world as a sort of narcissistic fantasy which operates for their personal benefit, through miracles and angels, through demons, supernatural forces, prayers and magical thinking. Is it any wonder that this world is in such a mess? This lack of critical thinking has long been diagnosed among the Religious Right. As Mark
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Noll notes in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, there are substantial barriers to “careful and constructive thinking” in the Evangelical churches and in their Neo-‐ Conservative allies. Their thinking is full of appeals to authority, assertions, generalities, over-‐simplifications and authoritarian threats of social disapproval. The religion is sloganized and feeds into endless apocalyptic speculation which demonizes opponents and does not engage in critical thought. Yet as a voting bloc the Religious Right has also been extremely significant in supporting the Neo-‐Conservatives in actively promoting militarization and especially war in the Middle East, in the hope that this will bring about Armageddon. It promotes a kind of intellectual passivity, and prevents a genuine inquiry into issues. And we can see the result in politics today. The Republicans and the Religious Right are not concerned with being ‘fact based’ or ‘data driven’. For instance many commentators have criticized Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican convention for being factually not correct in at least half a dozen major ways. Ryan even claimed in a radio interview that he had run a marathon in under three hours-‐-‐-‐-‐-‐whereas the fact is that it happened in 1990 and he took over four hours. But we are living in a world of fantasies where facts don't seem to matter, and this is a deliberate political choice. As a member of the Bush Administration (probably Karl Rove), told the New York Times Magazine in October 2004, “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” This is a worldview that doesn't believe in facts, it believes in creating their own stories, their own fantasies. Tell a story enough times and it becomes reality. This is exactly the same epistemology that underlay the ‘pax Romana’, the so-‐called peace that held together the Roman empire. As one British chieftan complained, the Romans plunder and butcher, and call it ‘Empire’. They create a desolation and call it ‘peace’. The Romans used much the same approach in creating the picture of a false, imaginary, peace-‐loving messiah in this Good News of Military Victory. Tell the story enough times and people will think it is history, will think it is true. They will not care about the facts. In order to curb the threat from the Jews who potentially were a sort of counter-‐Empire that
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did not accept slavery, nor Caesar-‐worship, nor a perpetual war machine, the Romans created the story we know as the Gospels. It was created as war propaganda to support the Roman Imperial system to prevent another rebellion. And it is still working today, all around us. Today the same approach to reality as fantasy undergirds the American Empire. Gore Vidal was on target when he wrote “Most of the world today is governed by Caesars. Men are more and more treated as things. Torture is ubiquitous”. He wrote that essay (On Robert Graves and the Twelve Caesars) in 1959. Since then the situation has got much much worse. The Roman Empire is being replicated in America and around the globe. Do you remember all those cartoons of president Bush as Caesar? I counted at least 100 of them. Well there was a reason for them. The dominant forms of Christianity continue to support a power structure characterized by a militarized State, incessant global warfare, the stereo-‐typing of members of other religions as demons, and a massive inequality in the distribution of wealth. All the hallmarks of the Caesars and Roman imperialism. But this is an unspeakable issue. Do you remember the German politician who claimed that “Bush is acting as if he's Caesar Augustus and Germany is the province of Germania”. He was quickly removed from his job for making the comparison. If we think that American imperialism is insane, that we can’t afford trillions of dollars to spend on the military, or that we want a society that values critical inquiry, high levels of literacy and scientific reasoning, then we have to tackle it at the source it all comes from-‐-‐-‐-‐ those fantasies in the Gospels, and the Book of Revelation. To make this happen there has to be a massive social change. How might this occur? Lets look at two approaches. One is Rationalist, the other is Artistic. The first Rationalist approach might consider that the change has to begin through education, in schools, at the grassroots. It is true that higher levels of education teach people critical thinking and make them less likely to accept Christian stories as fact. Maybe parents should press for the Gospels to be studied in schools as literature, as Roman fantasy literature. They have to be studied as works of ideology, created to support
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the power of an Empire. What has to happen is a sort of revival of critical thinking that takes away the guns and religion from mainstream America. It has to undermine those fantasies of supernatural salvation so that people face facts. But pragmatically this is most unlikely to happen. The facts alone wont do it, that is for sure-‐-‐-‐otherwise the last 200 years of NT criticism would have had more impact already, rather than being confined to scholarly academic circles. The Caesar’s Messiah documentary gets some of those facts to a wider audience by presenting them visually. But facts alone aren’t enough. Facts aren’t emotional. People can easily ignore inconvenient facts. We live in a culture in which fantasies and stories matter much more than inconvenient facts. People mostly believe in Christianity because it is their tradition, or that of their neighbors. They believe because of Word of Mouth, not because they have done a detailed examination of the original texts, and they are unlikely to be swayed by facts. Similarly, for instance, anti-‐smoking campaigns made limited progress by just presenting the facts….it was only when they started using emotional visuals that people began getting the message. So the second approach is an emotional Artistic one. Those gospels are works of literature. Works of art. They have enormous emotional power. They are deeply manipulative. They aren’t just presentations of facts. They are telling a powerful emotional story. So to counter them successfully requires other works of art, other emotional stories which can be used to package the facts in a way that is easy to digest and which makes an impression. So yes, since this conference is taking place in Hollywood, on the one hand this is a call for Hollywood storytelling, and for the movie industry to wake up and see the incredible potential of this story. So if any of you in the audience know a movie producer-‐-‐-‐and that is probably all of you-‐-‐-‐ then as soon as I finish speaking take out your phone and text them about this research. But on the other hand, if Hollywood screenwriters balk at this, then maybe there is another solution. Nowadays I work in the theater and direct a small experimental Shakespeare company called the Dark Lady Players. What would you say if I told you that this understanding of how the Gospels were created by Titus and Vespasian Caesar is not new, and it was known both to that famous atheist Christopher Marlowe and also to the
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writer of the Shakespearean plays? What would you say if I told you that the works of Shakespeare are indeed exactly what Harold Bloom called them, a ‘secular Bible’. They contain over 3,000 Biblical allusions using 14 different translations of the Bible, and feature over a dozen mock resurrections. They are a kind of alternative New Testament that at their deepest layers parody the NT texts, tell the story of how the Romans created Christianity, and mock them. In other words, if we wanted one of the world’s greatest artists to produce an artistic counter to the fantastic stories of the New Testament, then it is out there waiting already…..we just have to look carefully to understand what it is. We have to pick it up. And make it come alive in the right way. That is difficult because of the entrenched interests that want to see the plays just on their surface layer, as realism, not as religious allegories. But the core work has been done-‐-‐-‐we just have to wake up and see it, and make it happen. And to me this seems to be our best shot of countering the Gospel stories so that the widest possible audience can see them -‐-‐-‐at long last-‐-‐-‐for what they really are. Thank you very much.
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