Eric Zuesse
5 Star Christianity is Fraud Subordinated to Empire, New Testament Written by Enemies of Jesus & Judaism
Unlike other books that gently question the Bible's authenticity without challenging the Vatican or Protestant denominations outright, this book pounds a stake into the heart of Christianity with fatal effect. I've read and reviewed several of the books I refer to here at Amazon and I recommend them as context for this book; the below list is both books I have read and others in the same vein I have not.
101 Myths of the Bible: How Ancient Scribes Invented Biblical History
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
Forged: Writing in the Name of God–Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are
Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
Note: there are other books with the words “Bible” and “fraud” in their titles, I do not list them here because I consider this book to be “the” book, see the note on methodology below, and the others to be relatively shallow and their integrity suspect.
This book is unique from other works in its methodology — it could be said — I am not versed enough to attest to this but I see it as a real possibility — that this is the ONLY book of this genre that introduces a methodology up front, exercises that methodology all along the way with extensive notes, and then concludes with an integrated summary of the methodology, the conclusions, and why the two are so radically opposed to conventional wisdom.
Many of the other reader-comment here have complained of repetition, but I think that they are missing the essential aspect of repetition as part of the author's methodology: The documents that are being analyzed keep repeating their points, and the analysis of them needs to explain each repetition of them, and to note why a given point is being repeated in a given context. Zuesse does this in order to explain the motive behind each line of the biblical text. I venture to say that repetition is an acceptable if not an essential price to pay for a study that is as scientific as one can get in this domain, and also as radical as one can get.
+ Paul was a traitor to Jesus. Jesus was a Jew and a rabbi, but Paul invented a new religion, Christianity, as a means to shape human history, Paul’s historic achievement, which he succeeded in doing: the religion he created has indeed become the world’s largest. But it was created by Paul, not by Jesus, who lived and died as not merely a Jew but a rabbi.
+ Paul further betrayed the central tenets of Judaism in subordinating religion to the Emperor and making religion part of the support structure for Empire — he offered up a universal Church teaching obedience, most useful to Empire, and consequently embraced by Empire. Paul (in Romans 13:1-7) subordinates the laws of God to the laws of the Emperor, and promulgated the myth that the Emperor was God’s representative on Earth. On two grounds, then, he designed a religion to win: to win the masses by eliminating the danger and pain of circumcision; and to win the Emperors because they now became the source of the laws that the masses were required by God Himself to obey. The Emperor thus became God’s agent — via Paul’s new gospel.
+ Paul developed the lie assigning the crucification of Jesus to Jews, when the author’s sources suggest that Jesus was put to death — as were many others — for refusing to accept the authority of the Emperor, for sedition, for Jesus’s asserting that only God made the laws, that the Emperor didn't.
+ Paul invented anti-Semitism; the author is at pains to make this point and it got my attention. So not only is Christianity a fraud perpetrated by enemies of Jesus, it is inherently anti-Semitic and unjustly so because of its fraudulent foundation, using Jesus’s corpse as a weapon against the living Jesus’s own religion.
That should be enough to get any Christian’s blood boiling and restart calls for a new Inquisition! I found this book provocative and compelling. I am not well-read enough in this domain to be able to render a judgment, other than to say it passes a smell test with me. For myself, I consider all religions that rely on dogma and faith and obedience to be suspect, while those that focus on practice, e.g. Buddhism, seem more in turn with God as Cosmos and love as the core value. I particularly condemn religions that subordinate themselves to fascist tendencies, be they Zionists from Israel or neo-conservative evangelicals and pentecostals from the USA.
My bottom line is that this is a five-star book, the author has done some deep ably documented research, and all those scholars that fail to cite this book and integrate its findings into their work will be living up to the author’s (and my) disdain for pretenders who pontificate and go through the motions without doing the homework. The homework isn’t to cite the thousands of books that have been written about the start of the Christian faith; it is instead to cite the evidence itself — but also to read behind the lines, and not merely on the lines, of the biblical (and other) texts that are being explained within the context of the other contemporaneous evidence.
Best wishes to all,
Robert David STEELE Vivas
INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, Sustainability
