19. Notes on Christianity

January 16, 2021

Dr. Bart Ehrman.  Why do we suffer?  The canonical gospels.  Who wrote them?  When?  Quelle (source).  Problems of translation such as "logos".  Meaning of Messiah.  Gospels as credos, not historical records.  No record of Jesus in documents written in the 1st century.  James, brother of Jesus, was the first "pope";  he was Jewish, not Christian.

Dr. Robert Wright:  A History of God.  Starting with spiritual origins with hunter-gatherers. Reassurance of survival especially on a planet where volcanoes, earthquakes, and famines threaten survival.  The idea of fairness--does it pre-date religion?  God--a concept to discourage theft.  Polytheism--monolatry--monotheism, a transition during Israelite history.  Polytheism and monolatry encourage peaceful trade and discourage wars.  Monotheism encourages warlike behaviors.

Emperor Constantine.  Not really a Christian himself but encouraged it to tighten control over the Roman Empire.

Dr. Reza Aslan.  "Zealot, the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth".  See highly cringeworthy Lauren Greene-Aslan interview on Youtube.  He has chosen history over theology.  10 facts that I learned from the book, Zealot.

Again, ignore the statements about the bars.  I am making the bars here in France from chocolate made in the village of Lakota.  If you want some bars, please contact me.

Thanks.  Tom 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Sorry for the abrupt halt. That was the first part of WC's Menuet. A menuet, also spelled minuet, is according to the Google dictionary, a slow, stately ballroom dance for two in triple time, popular especially in the 18th century. Well, both my hands played it, so it's for two indeed. And it's also in triple time, although syncopated as well, which is not surprising since WC lived at a time, the late 19th century, when jazz was just becoming popular in the Western world, as white people had just begun to admire the African musical and visual arts. I've been working on a book tentatively entitled Five Visions of Fairness. Part one of the book will feature five chapters about biological, medical, political, economic, and religious interpretations of fairness. Part two will concern chocolate, history of the business, child labor, how chocolate is made, and a history of Project Open Fairness. I am thinking this book will take me five years to write, so I am in no hurry. I am currently 70, so I hope to have it finished by the time I turn 75. I'm writing this book because I've been working on building chocolate factories in West Africa, and let me tell you, it's the hardest and most frustrating thing I've ever done. The hard part is not the Africa piece. That's really easy. The hard part is to break through centuries of bad habits associated with taking advantage of people thousands of miles away. I'm trying to solve problems that sometimes appear utterly intractable. The biggest problem is inspiring people to help me accomplish this Herculean feat, which is to help cocoa farmers become chocolate makers. And because and and to also provide a market for their products, and that's the hardest part. My dream is so hard and it's so immensely frustrating. Every morning I wake up wondering if I'll ever succeed, if I'll ever develop a market for chocolate bars and candies. And given that my personal clock is running out, I'm writing this book hoping to leave a trace, hoping that even if I do fail at this whole thing, that maybe someone will recognize the value of it and pick up the slack when I'm gone. About a year ago, I started listening to Dr. Robert Sapolsky's lectures at Stanford University on YouTube, and I bought his book, Behave, which is an ethological and neurological view of animal behavior. My plan was to use his book to develop a chapter on how fairness plays out in the animal world. Parts of his lectures and the book mention fairness as a behavior that promotes genetic adaptiveness, mostly between individual animals, not so between so much between groups. And I have read most of Joseph Stiglitz's book, The Price of Inequality. So I've made some headway through the both the biological and the economic perspective on fairness. And then because of a wealth of lectures available for free on YouTube, I meandered into religion. So it's typical of me. I've gotten parts of two things done and now started on part of a third thing. Now the subject of religion has completely derailed me, and I have become temporarily enslaved by it. My father is partly to blame. Always blame your parents. All through my youth and into much of my adulthood, he was always talking to me about science and religion. His science lectures usually focused on biochemistry. He spent his career on kidney toxicology and had devoted his professional life to ferreting out the life and times of a specific kidney protein, alpha 2U globulin, which has a Wikipedia page devoted to it. I'm not sure when or how his perambulations led him to issues of nephrotoxicity, but at some point, as all the other unknowns, such as molecular weight, methods of separation and purification, etc., had been determined, he somehow wandered into kidney cancers caused by unleaded gasoline and limanine, which is one of the pigments in orange peel. Yes, oranges cause kidney cancer, but only in male rats. When I was a young shaver, about the same time I began shaving, I worked in dad's lab. My job, rat urine collector. It was my first job. I was transfixed by the steps required to separate the urine, which involved collecting it, dialyzing it to remove salts and other small molecules, lyophilizing or freeze drying it to obtain a mixture of proteins. Eventually, this mixture got purified to the point that Dad would suspend the pure protein alpha 2U in a sugar syrup and run it on a centrifuge that occupied a very large room. So it's hard to forget the sheer wonder of doing basic research, knowing that the information will someday save many lives. Dad liked to point out that although I didn't follow directly in his footsteps, at least I was teaching the chemistry of cooking, which he thought was a pretty cool melding of art and science. Besides biochemistry, Dad was also fascinated with early Christian history, especially the reign of Emperor Constantine, who was second only to Saint Paul in ensuring the 2,000-year-old success of Christianity as the dominant religion of the Western world. Over the years, the shelves in his office at home were occupied by the works of Eusebius, an important early Christian bishop and historian. And late in my father's life as a Christmas present, I gave him a copy of Constantine's Sword, written by a former Roman Catholic priest, James Carroll. A year later I asked him how he liked the book. He responded, I hated it. The rest of his response I didn't even hear because I was too upset. In his book, James Carroll lays out a case for how the Christian religion has promoted anti-Semitism from the first rapidly anti-Jewish sermons of St. Ambrose through Martin Luther's book on the Jews and Their Lies, and finally to the embracement of the Nazis by Pope Pius XII. Last April 29th, the Washington Post wrote in an article about documents unearthed at the Vatican Library. Pope Pius XII knew from his own sources about Berlin's death campaign early on, but he kept this from the US government after an aide argued that Jews and Ukrainians, his main sources, could not be trusted because they lied and exaggerated. So uh my fascination with religion started uh recently when I was listening to Dr. Bart Ehrman on YouTube. I walked the dog every evening at around 8:30, and I listened to all manner of lectures on the cell phone. And uh at one point, about a year ago, I started listening to religion lectures, and he was the one. He's a noted scholar of the New Testament who teaches at the University of North Carolina, and he's written over 30 books. I have repeatedly listened to two of those books, How Jesus Became God, and Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. And I have listened to a great number of Dr. Ehrman's lectures and debates. I find him quite erudite. That is, he has read all of the New Testament in its original Greek, as well as numerous non-canonical works, such as the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of St. Thomas, neither of which got uh because they're called non-canonical, because they were not included in the canon, which is the Bible, uh the New Testament, which has 27 books. I also find uh Dr. Ehrman respectful of religion. Uh he's uh he was a Christian at one time, but he uh is not anymore. Um and I I like the fact that he's respectful of the religion, which is quite a contrast to Richard Dawkins, who's um a noted expert on evolution, but who tends to speak disrespectfully of religions. Um Dr. Ehrman's respect comes from his educational background. He started his college education at Moody Bible Institute, where people literally memorize the entire New Testament and where they consider the Bible the inerrant literal word of God. Uh, Dr. Ehrman then moved to Wheaton College, the alma mater of Billy Graham, and finally he earned his PhD at the Princeton Theological Seminary. Having ignored my own religious roots since the ripe old age of 20, I am really enjoying rediscovering the meaning behind so many parts of the Christian service, as I was a pipe organist for a few years. And so I know the service, you know, the different versions fairly well. Uh Southern Baptist and Lutheran Catholic, I know those fairly well. I am in no danger of rejoining the Luther League or any other religious organization, however, because like Dr. Ehrman, I'm a confirmed agnostic. Um, I don't think I know, like him, enough about uh anything to call myself an atheist because that's just a little too egotistical. Uh Bart Ehrman gave up his Christianity because of issues relating to the God that he perceives as indifferent to human suffering. Uh, so that's his reason for leaving. Uh he didn't think it was proper of a god to uh who supposedly takes an active role in human history to ignore, you know, earthquakes, etc. Uh he wrote about his struggle with this uh issue in his book God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our most important question, why we suffer. But as is the case for so many former Christians, uh, the church and the Bible had a profound effect on me. Every time I play Johann Sebastian Bach on the organ, I think about what that music means because Bach was no agnostic, he was a a true Christian, um, and his music speaks volumes, although I don't seem to be able to decipher uh or convert the the notes into concepts. But I can I can feel it, I can feel it. Anyway, listening to Dr. Ehrman for the last year on YouTube uh and listening to the two books over and over again, I learned the following ten facts, which I didn't know. Uh the funny thing is I was I listened in church and uh Turk took it very seriously, but I never really was serious enough to do any reading. Um so here I am, 70 years old, and I'm starting to listen to this because it's fascinating. Uh first thing that I learned from Dr. Ehrman is that uh Mark, which is the first synoptic gospel, there are three synoptic gospels, Mark, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and but not John. That's not a synoptic one. So the they're synoptic in that they repeat each other's stuff, whereas John sort of goes all way out in left field. The first one, Mark, was written 40 years after Jesus' crucifixion. So somewhere around 70, which is right when the Romans utterly destroyed Israel, totally destroyed the temple, destroyed everything, flattened the place. And Jews uh went on the across the world to find other places to live uh as a result of that. Um Matthew and Luke uh were written about a decade later. Um Mark, they're they're all somewhat different from each other, but they do share a lot of stuff, but a lot a lot of date data is is different. The Gospels uh were written by people who by Greek, so it's quite different from Jesus who spoke Aramaic like his follower. The second thing that I learned was that Matthew and Luke contained elements of an earlier gospel that is called Q, which is sort of cute, and I can't remember why it's called Q, but there's a Oh, because Q is for the German word Kvela. Kvela means source. Uh-huh. So anyway, that's why it's called Q. The third thing I learned was that John, which is the fourth gospel, is the least historically accurate. Um, it has a lot of very uh repeated phrases in it. Um, it begins with the words in the beginning was the word, which actually the word was not word, but it was logos, uh, which is uh a foundational principle in the act of creation and is part of Greek philosophy. Um and John create the Gospel of John creates contains phrases that are not found in the uh synoptic gospels, and it was written about 70 years after the crucifixion or even later. The notion of Jesus as God, this is fact number four, uh, was already accepted by the time Mark was written. And it's debatable whether Jesus thought of himself as a God. He thought of himself as a Messiah, that means anointed one or king. And there were uh we'll we'll talk we'll get back into that a little bit later. The books of the New Testament were chosen by Athanasius in the late fourth century and are not ordered temporally. Uh so that means that the first gospels are not the first things that were written. Um the first things that were written were two letters by Saint Paul, by Paul. Um he um became a Christian. Well, he joined the Jesus movement. They I don't think they were called Christians, uh, about two years after the crucifixion. Uh there are 27 books in the New Testament, uh, and 27 is three multiplied three times three times three. Uh so the Trinity. So that's sort of a curious coincidence, but it may not be coincidental at all, because uh they probably I think math was pretty well developed by then. I mean, certainly, you know that um the the Greeks uh in 700 BC and developed uh geometry. So fact number seven, the historical veracity of the four gospels is minimal. They were written as kratos, that is I believe. Crato in Latin means I believe and or creeds, uh, which is uh an English version of Krato. Um, they're written as Kratos or Creeds, uh, that is what I believe. They're not uh summations of historical events, and there are big parts of them that are inaccurate. Uh, for example, the whole idea of Jesus' parents going uh to uh going to Egypt that was uh physically impossible, and also going to uh that was in one gospel, and also the whole idea of uh going to um Nazareth to um to be counted, the census. There was no census, and the Romans uh were excellent uh documentarians. Um it's so that's that's just not true. They did do censuses, but there was no census at that time, and also Herod uh, I believe died in 4 BC, and Jesus was born somewhere between 4 BC and 2 BC 2 AD. So uh Herod uh wasn't even alive. So there's a lot of they're not really they're not uh history books. Fact number eight uh there is no mention of uh Jesus in any contemporary document. That is, at the time that he was alive, there's no rec record of him existing. Uh a hundred years later, Josephus, a wealthy Jewish historian living in Alexandria, Egypt, mentions him. But uh the way it's mentioned, it's uh very suspicious, and it sounds like that phrase was inserted by Christians long after Josephus was dead. Fact number nine uh James, who was one of Jesus' forebrothers, became the head of the Jerusalem Jesus movement, which of course was not called Christians, they were Jews. Um, and Saint Paul, who never met Jesus, uh who really was the founder of the Christian religion, uh was made this originally Jewish cult into a Gentile religion. Um so Saint Paul went around the Roman Empire by establishing this new religion. He and James they disagreed because uh James wanted it just to be to be something uh in Israel. He didn't want it to, it was just a Jewish thing, and everybody who was a Jesus follower was circumcised and followed the giantary laws to the letter. They uh they were very devout, as was Jesus. He was a devout Jew. Uh he was he was not a Christian at all because it didn't even exist, the name didn't exist. So James saw his role as continuing his brother's legacy, whereas Paul pushed the notion of Jesus as God and suppressed the idea of Christianity as a Jewish cult. So it's really because of Paul uh that this religion survived the downfall of Israel in the year 70 when the Emperor Titus completely devastated the country. And there's even an arch in in uh Rome uh commemorating the Titus arch that shows them carrying off uh the menorah from the temple as well as the Holy of Holies and all the gold. And I remember reading from Constantine's sword that the price of gold uh plummeted uh after the Romans destroyed the temple, but there was so much gold in the temple, which then got released on the market. Um and fact number 10 uh from uh Dr. Ehrman's lectures uh and books, uh the books of the New Testament were copied and recopied many times, and Dr. Ehrman talks about this a lot. Um, and the original versions dating from the first century, uh as I mentioned, are nowhere to be found. And the first the earliest manuscript is business card sized papyrus hunk of papyrus of j of the gospel. Of John dating from the first half of the second century. Well, while working on the religion chapter of my book, I came across another expert in religion who I'm now reading and listening to. And his name is Dr. Robert Wright. He wrote a book, The Evolution of God, which I am currently reading in order to find out how the idea of fairness has worked its way into religions other than Christianity. An important thread that runs through the book, God is a concept that was anthropocentric at the start and remains anthropocentric. That is, God is a concept that we make in our own image that God has for the hunter-gathers, for example, the gods were extremely human. But that as Dr. Wright says, God has grown morally from a selfish God such as the Yahweh, the God of the Deuteronomy, who prescribed the massacre of entire societies, including the farm animals, anything that breathed had to be exterminated. Wright begins his book considering the origins of religion among the hunter-gatherers. As one might expect of preliterate societies, they kept their religions fairly simple. Instead of gods, hunter-gatherers had spirits. They did not differentiate so much between humans, other animals, and plants, and spirits were in charge of everything. There were sky spirits, underground spirits, forest spirits, etc. Religion for the hunter-gatherers served to reassure them of survival while also maintaining order. If there was an earthquake, for example, it was because some underground spirit was fighting with somebody, maybe his wife. With increasing population and development of technology such as agriculture, bands of hunter-gatherers clumped together into chiefdoms, and the chief maintained strict order. At this point, gods appeared and they replaced the spirits, and the gods were partly responsible for maintaining a chief authority. In hunter-gatherer societies, land ownership was rare as clans often would move when the soil had lost its richness or the animals had been hunted out. In chiefdoms, however, landownership was common and property markers were used. However, unlike modern societies, property markers of chiefdoms had religious connotations. That way people couldn't steal land from each other because they would be published by, they would be punished, I mean, by a god. One could, with a priest's help, place a taboo on a property marker, a taboo is a South Pacific word, to keep thieves out of one's fruit orchard. It was then up to the gods to ensure fair treatment by meeting out punishment to the thief. Polynesian societies governed by chiefdoms were often quite unfair in terms of distribution of wealth or in the division of classes into commoners and elites. To support the system of chiefdoms, gods were guardians of the political order, and they preserved a system that was innately unfair, sustaining a ruling class that was accustomed to getting its way at the expense of the majority. But sometimes a chief recognized the people's anger and meted out material good to de-escalate any resentment. After hunter-gatherers and chiefdoms, the next evolutionary step was polytheism, which became important in societies that included cities. Ancient Egypt and Sumer were examples. According to Wright, Israel was never solely monotheistic from its founding under Omosis to its destruction under Titus, by Titus. Israel wavered between polytheism, monolatry, and monotheism. Monolatry means it recognized there are other gods, but that this one God is the most important, the most powerful. So during Israel's time, uh ancient Israel, uh the uh for approximately 13 to 1400 years, uh it was alternately polytheistic, monolatry, melan uh uh engaged in monolatry and monotheism. And really, uh monotheism was probably the shortest amount of time. Uh Wright applies uh an idea of zero sum versus non-zero sum games to explain the wavering between these three different uh belief uh types of gods. And he uses uh he talks about the zero-sum game, which is where there's a clear winner and a clear loser. For example, if you play tennis, one person is going to win and the other is going to lose. But if you have partners, then you have a non-zero sum game relationship because on uh between the partners, because they both will lose or they both will win. Uh so that's a non-zero sum game. And you this concept right applies to uh to nations and to religions. Uh and he found he he says in his book that when nations fall into a period of extreme division between haves and have nots, nationalism and xenophobia often result. And we can see that clearly under Donald Trump, where uh and actually it started with probably with Ronald Reagan, you know, this whole whole thing of dividing into haves and have-nots, and uh now we have uh a uh a society that is both nationalistic, that has a very strong nationalistic and xenophobic uh strain running through it. Uh and Wright attributes this uh propensity to resort to nationalism and xenophobia uh to zero-sum periods where there are clear winners and losers. During the nationalist zero-sum periods, monotheism would dominate in Israel. The uh feeling was if they didn't shape up Yahweh, it would cause a lot of suffering. So uh Wright mentions a number of times during Israel's history when monotheism dominated, partly be and it was because of the zero, according to him, it's because of the zero-sum period, this idea of clear winners and losers, and uh it's associated with the uh rise of nationalism and xenophobia. In contrast, during periods of open borders where Israel traded with its neighbors and warfare was not so common, the Israelites were polytheistic or monolatrous. Uh that is, they uh monolatrous, again, they acknowledge other gods but preferred Yahweh. King Solomon was polytheistic. He was an international trader, he married many women in order to seal various international commercial deals, and as a result, Solomon's temple included multiple gods. This was a non-zero sum period that was dominated by uh peaceful trade. Well, jumping ahead uh to 330 AD, uh, when Constantine the Great was the emperor of Rome, uh Rome was always uh pantheistic, and uh Rome even had uh the Pantheon, which is where they would hold hold house their most important gods. Um but Constantine felt that the that the things were not going so well with the Roman Empire, you know, it was only a hundred years before it fell. Um, and of course he didn't know that. But uh he um wanted to uh he wanted to make one religion more important than others, and so he called the Council of Nicaea to tighten up the concept of Christianity to strengthen it. He really didn't care about Christianity, he wasn't a Christian, but supposedly they say he became a Christian on his deathbed, but his mother was a Christian. She brought back pieces of the cross, supposedly, and the seamless robe and uh on other artifacts from Jerusalem. Uh but uh he he uh pushed Christianity and he and yeah, he saw it as a way of strengthening his empire by being more monotheistic or at least monolatrous. Uh while I was engaged in reading Wright's book, I somehow came across speeches by Dr. Reza Aslan, a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside, University of California, Riverside. Once again, I somehow found him on YouTube, and I was immediately attracted to his um lectures. What a phenomenally good writer and speaker. Aslan has written four books, two of them bestsellers. His first was about Islam, entitled No God But God, and it was translated into 17 languages. His second bestseller is Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. This was a New York Times number one bestseller and has been translated into 25 languages. Dr. Aslan was interviewed in 2013 on Fox News by Lauren Green, who is their chief religion correspondent. She began the interview asking why a Muslim would write a book about Jesus. Taken aback, Aslan responded that he's an academic, that his PhD is in religion, actually in sociology, but his dissertation was about Muslim political activism. And he earned a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard's Divinity School. And he said, and he continued, it's normal for academics to pursue research in their fields, whatever their religion. If you want to hear one of the one of the most cringeworthy interviews ever made, check it out. Search for Lauren Green Asron A S R A N interview on Google. Regarding academia and research, there are certainly those who think canonically in the academic world. That is, they think of academia as composed of subject fiefdoms. For example, I used to think, I used to uh teach an anthropology of food course called Food and Culture. I taught it in a nutrition department. When the course was entered into the university roster, people in the anthropology department protested to our department chair. After all, they reason shouldn't uh anthropology be the one who teaches this course? Those of us with more of a liberal bent say, no, not always. Uh it is, in fact, quite likely that people who teach within their discipline are actually constrained by the blinders imposed by their own teachers and by those who came before them. So sometimes it's good to be a little free of the blinders of history. Um I also taught a course in the chemistry of cooking, and uh I uh that was what I had a background in. Um, and yet I would say Harold McGee, who was an English professor at Yale, who wrote a book on food and cooking, would have done a better job at it than I did. Uh, and he didn't even have a background in the chemistry of food. He was just a good researcher. The point is that people in academia are supposedly educated to think critically and analytically. Of course, on our most imperfect planet, that may be merely an ideal. But the fact is, when I listen to Reza Aslan, I find his arguments to be most persuasive, although he has many detractors. His arguments are clearly and concisely made. Um, and other experts on the New Testament may not be such good communicators. And because we know absolutely nothing about Jesus, the subject of who Jesus was is a very malleable topic. Uh, in approaching it, one can take one has two choices. One can either uh memorize all the scriptures and then use deductive and inductive logic to make arguments, or one could consider the evidence provided by people who lived in Palestinian Palestine at the time, the Hellenized Jews and the Romans. Aslan has chosen the latter approach, which means he's chosen history over theology. Anyway, I was most impressed by his uh what I heard, and so here are 10 points that he makes. Uh, Jesus was a technon. This is a Greek word that means day laborer, it does not mean carpenter. So uh so many, so much has been made of the fact that Jesus was a carpenter, but he wasn't really one, he was a day laborer, which was a very uh un not a very prestigious job. Uh Jesus called himself the Messiah. There were over a hundred messiahs living in Israel at the time. Uh to the Israelites at that time, a Messiah was a human, not a god, whose goal was to re-establish King David's Israel, which people called the Golden Age. Uh but Jesus failed at that task because he was crucified, and that is not how the proper ending for a Messiah. Fact number three, uh, after his death, Jesus became an extra special Messiah, the Son of God, who would return to oversee the end of days, judgment, and establishment of God's kingdom. But the only evidence that Jesus considered himself to be a divine was in the Gospels, written 40 to 100 years after his death. Jesus was, fact number four, Jesus was dirt poor and illiterate. He came from Nazareth, a town with no paved roads, no schools, no nothing. Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Greek, and he could neither read nor write. The same was true of his followers. Apostle Paul, uh, who never met Jesus, uh, was um uh literate and he he wrote and spoke Greek. Uh fact number five, Jesus was unknown during most of his life. According to Aslan, he preached for only three years. He never visited a city during that time, but hung out in the backwaters of Galilee. Then the last five days of his life, he enters Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, and in order to fulfill the prophecy of the book of Zechariah. Uh, any devout Jew would have known the prophecy by heart. Uh, so he did it not to show his humility, but to add credibility. Uh, fact number six Jesus was considered to be abandoned by Rome. Uh he proclaimed himself to be the Messiah, uh, which to first century Jews meant that he was there to re-establish David's kingdom, as I mentioned before. Um, and by definition, this meant that he was contesting the authority of Rome. And like the other Messiahs, he ended up on a cross because the punishment for sedition was to be crucified. Uh, so essentially on the day uh of the crucifixion, Jesus was located between two thieves. That's what it says, but actually it was mistranslated, two two bandits. So essentially, three bandits. That's all only bandits, or that is people who were trying to undo the power of Rome, were uh crucified. Uh Jesus was most probably married because to be called rabbi, which is he was called rabbi, you had to be married. Uh and and virtually all male Jews were married, uh except for maybe the Essenes who lived an ascetic life. There's no mention of Jesus as a married man, however, in the four gospels. Jesus was a social revolutionary, uh, which set him apart from other messiahs. So that made him very special, according to Aslan. Uh, at the time that Jesus uttered the eight beatitudes, which some people argue are the high point of Christianity, uh, which were recounted in the Gospel of Matthew. Israel was very similar to the U.S. of today, country split between the filthy rich and the extremely poor. Jesus was representing the extremely poor because that's the background he came from, and he despised the Hellenized Jews, such as the Sadducees who wrote Greek and uh cohorted with the Romans. So Jesus sought to upend the rook social order, and that's what the Beatitudes are about. Flipping the those who have a lot with those who have nothing, whether it's material goods or spiritually, etc. Point number nine, fact number nine, Jesus was a Jew. Now, for 2,000 years, Christians have not really emphasized that, but that's what Jesus was. He died a Jew. He did not die a Christian. Christianity was basically uh developed after Jesus died. He was circumcised and he knew the Hebrew Bible backwards and forwards, at least judging from the gospels. As a Messiah, I I mentioned he he wanted to bring back the golden age. He despised the Hellenistic Jews who um were very uh fond of Herod. Um Jesus was convicted, this point number 10. Jesus was convicted by Pontius Pilate and killed by the Romans. Although for most of 2,000 years, Christianity has maintained that uh, especially by by the Paul, by the by John, by John, the fourth gospel, uh, it was the Jews who killed Jesus, but it wasn't. It was Pontius Pilate, who was known as a uh a mass murderer. He was an awful man. And he was and he would never have consented to allow Jesus to be buried. Uh when you get crucified, you were put on the cross to hang there until the birds had pecked your bones clean. That was the what crucifixion was all about. Crucifixion was not about killing. It was not many times they would kill people and hang them on the cross after they're dead. In conclusion, I found all this very interesting. I I find religion to be a very fascinating topic because at one time I was a Christian, and and I'm I can see there are a lot of people who were Christians and are drawn to to to learn more about what they used to believe. I I found this very fascinating. Now I want to uh finish my podcast with getting back to uh the situation with the chocolate. Um, we're working very hard right now. David is building a building in in the village. Uh he made 1900 bars. They were we've sold most of them. Uh we still have some for sale, uh milk, chocolate, and and uh dark chocolate. And uh please contact me at TW Newhouse, T W N E U H A U S at Gmail.com if you'd like to order some. Uh the minimum order is 40 bars at$100,$2.50 each. That's with free shipping. And also I'm working on a new bar called the African Choco Fudge Bar that I want the village of Peswan to start making. So we're making some progress, and also I'm going to be making African truffles for sale here in the village of Cortes, Your Siel, and in France, where I live. Um, and uh so that's the latest news with the chocolate. We need uh, as usual, uh to get this whole thing going. It's um very uh takes a lot of money to keep to to get to the point where uh we'll actually get this uh engine, this diesel engine known as chocolate manufactured in the African village started and self-sustaining. So anything that you can help help me with uh financially, I would greatly appreciate it. And now we finish with the last part of the WC menuet and talk to you next time.