Debunking Jesus?

Dan McClellan The law of parsimony and Occam's razor just tear to shreds all of the very complex, convoluted structures that you have to build upon other structures in order to make it all work. And it seems an awful lot more convenient to just say, "There was a dude, he died. Tradition started circulating about him coming back to life, and then it took off from there." That is a far simpler solution to the problem. Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the "Data Over Dogma" podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan Beecher Oh, I'm doing better than you are, man.

Dan McClellan I got- That's not hard to do ...

Dan Beecher zero cold right now, and you have a cold.

Dan McClellan Yes, I have one.

Dan Beecher That is one to nothing. I win. It's like golf. You want a lower score on that one.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Lower score is better. So, I was like, "Can I just have one this time?" And, at least I've got that going for me.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, yeah.

Dan Beecher So, sorry about that. Sorry that I'm making you record while you have a cold. I'm a very cruel and heartless taskmaster.

Dan McClellan Taskmaster, yeah. That's the one. What do we got on the docket for today?

Dan Beecher We got a couple of fun things. We got a Who's That coming up at the end of the show. We're going to be talking about one Flavius Josephus.

Dan McClellan All righty.

Dan Beecher What's that? We're going to hit Flavius town.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher We're going to go to Flava Flavius.

Dan McClellan You said, "Who's that?" And immediately the "New Girl" theme song jumped into my head.

Dan Beecher I don't know "New Girl," I'm afraid.

Dan McClellan I'm- Oh, gosh. Yeah, this cold has me a little disoriented, but- Well, that'll happen.

Dan Beecher Yeah. But before that, we're going to talk, I'm going to call it a History's Mysteries.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher And we're going to dive into a commonly held out thing from the people on my side of the table.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Meaning a lot of atheists share this kind of thing. Around this time of year, it starts to crop up, and we're going to discuss the various saviors in the world and how completely and totally similar they all are. And/or maybe not.

Dan McClellan The many that predate Jesus and were very obviously the inspiration for- Yeah ... the fabrication of the story of Jesus.

Dan Beecher Jesus was a big old rip-off, and we're going to prove it. Or not. So let's just dive into that- Let's do it ... with History's Mysteries.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher So, many people's first exposure to this, my first exposure to this, I will say, to this concept, came from the documentary made by, documentary, the self-aggrandizement made by Bill Maher called "Religulous."

Dan McClellan "Religulous," right?

Dan Beecher Pronounce it as you will.

Dan McClellan Okay. Yeah, whatever.

Dan Beecher I don't know the original Greek or Hebrew- ... so I'm afraid I can't do anything with that.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But yes, "Religulous," that was the one where I first encountered these claims.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher And I will admit, believed them rather uncritically.

Dan McClellan Not- So that's just like the- But like first ... the scene where there's the Jesus actor or something- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher and he's confronting him about the- Yeah, he's at some sort of Christian-themed amusement park, and he- Okay ...

Dan McClellan corners- I feel less bad about him confronting an actor if he's at a Christian-themed amusement park.

Dan Beecher Yes. It was that dumb.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher But yes, then he presents him with this long list of gods who predated Jesus and who had eerily similar biographies or stories about them.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher But he didn't get that from nowhere. He didn't make that up.

Dan McClellan No. It was made up by somebody else.

Dan Beecher Somebody else did that.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It was also perpetuated by a movie that I watched in preparation, or at least I watched the relevant part of, in preparation for this episode.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And now I'm mad because of that.

Dan McClellan That I said, "Hey, check this out."

Dan Beecher You said, "Hey, check out 'Zeitgeist.'" And I was like, "Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan I'll do that."

Dan Beecher And now I have done that. That's minutes of my life I can't get back. But even the guy that made "Zeitgeist" did not make this up.

Dan McClellan That is correct.

Dan Beecher But why don't we start with the claim? Do you want me to outline what I witnessed in "Zeitgeist?"

Dan McClellan What claims were made, or- Well, let me share where I first encountered this, because this is some- Oh, sure. And then, yeah, I'll have you outline the... Because I have not watched the movie in, it's been a year and a half since I watched- Right ... that segment of the movie, and I was glad to pawn that off on you for this go around.

Dan Beecher But- ...

Dan McClellan I am exposed to this most frequently. It still happens all the time. From little clips from a gentleman named Jordan Maxwell.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan I honestly don't know his background, but he made a name for himself spreading a lot of conspiracy theories in the '80s and- Mm ... into the '90s, particularly related to religion. And he was fond of confronting people and insisting that there were 16 major pre-Christian religions that all had a messiah with the exact same story as Jesus. And he would say it the exact same way, that they were a messiah that came to Earth, born in a manger- With 12 disciples, died on a cross with a crown of thorns.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan And the first time I saw that, he was on some television show being interviewed by a woman who was clearly a Bible believer. She's got a Bible there that she's flipping through, and he's like, "Did you not know this? This is history, ma'am. This is history." And making her feel rather awkward and uncomfortable and she doesn't know where to flip to in her Bible.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And literally none of that is true.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I have had to point out that you cannot find any pre-Christian savior with any two of those features, and people have tried to prove... The first time I made a response to this, I posted it on YouTube. It wasn't even a minute long. It was a YouTube Short. It was like 40 seconds long, and I was just like, "There is absolutely no primary text from the ancient world that demonstrates anybody had any two of these features."

Dan Beecher I feel like you just did a spoiler, but okay, fine. Go on. We'll get there.

Dan McClellan But I had more views on that little Short than on any five videos combined on my YouTube channel.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan It had almost a million views on that thing, and then half as many comments from people telling me I was wrong- ... and to go check out this book or that movie, and it's like- Right ... I'm not asking for a book or a movie. I'm asking for a primary text.

Dan Beecher Yeah. A source, some source material.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So why don't you go ahead and, I don't recall exactly what the claim in Zeitgeist is, but- Well, okay.

Dan Beecher So it's not quite as obviously stupid- ... as your friend Jordan with all of them having the same thing, but- Yeah ... it's the same kind of idea, right? This idea that all of these gods prefigured the Jesus narrative, but in slightly different ways.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher So, specifically mentioned were Horus. Now, they launch into this in Zeitgeist, talking about how the sun was God.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Right. The pernicious thing about all of these things, about this kind of conspiracy theorizing, is that they will often have kernels of truth or have whole truths that they inject into things- Yeah ... that are real, that then bolster up and support really bad claims that have no support.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So they start with the idea that people worshiped the sun, and there are little moments that you can kind of catch them out as, like, oh, they've just pulled a rhetorical maneuver without explaining themselves or whatever.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher So they keep talking about the sun, and then they're talking about the sun is God, and then they just throw out the phrase, "God's son." And I was like, "You made a leap, and you did not explain where that leap came from."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Anyway, they go to Horus, this is the Egyptian god, Horus. The claims are Sun God of Egypt. Maybe that's true. I haven't looked into Horus at all.

Dan McClellan Close. Horus was the sky god, but there was a conflated version of Horus and Ra, and that was Ra-Horakhty, and that was a conflated- That's right, because Ra- ...

Dan Beecher sun god ... Ra was a sun god, right?

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So Horus- So Ra-Horakhty is Horus's kind of team-up to be- Aha ... the sun god with Ra.

Dan Beecher I feel like you're supporting the theory now. You agree with Zeitgeist. I'm putting it in the books.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher They claim, "Horus, sun god of Egypt." They use the word savior. They don't explain why Horus is the savior of anything, but they make sure to throw that in there.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher They claim that Horus was the nemesis of Set. Horus was the light and the day. Set was the dark and the night.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher Horus wins the fight every morning. Set wins the fight every evening. That's a very stupid concept, but okay, fine. So, here are the claims about Horus.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Born on December 25th of a virgin. Star in the East, don't know what that means. Adored by three kings. Teacher at age 12. Baptized and started a ministry at 30, baptized by Anup.

Dan McClellan 12...

Dan Beecher Oh, I've been auto-corrected. I've apparently written 12 decibels. But I think it means disciples.

Dan McClellan Probably, yeah.

Dan Beecher And then known as the Lamb of God, the Truth, the Light. Crucified, resurrected three days after. I'm going to guess that some of those/all of those don't apply to Horus. Or there's a way that you can sort of, if you squint and look sideways and you happen to be upside down and looking through a mirror- Uh-huh ... maybe some of those things kind of apply.

Dan McClellan I don't know.

Dan Beecher Do you know enough about Horus to be able to debunk that stuff?

Dan McClellan Yeah. So for the most part, none of it's accurate.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But there are a couple of places, and some of it's just totally made up. There's absolutely nothing that supports it in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. But some of it has things, like you said, you could squint at it and maybe get that. For instance, there is an inscription in a tomb from 1500 BCE that shows Horus seated on a throne, and there are 12 anthropomorphic figures before Horus lined up, and each of them has a star- Oh.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan 12 disciples, right? Each of them has a star over their head. And these represent, and each star represents an hour of the night. So it's the 12 hours of the nighttime.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And so they're basically just anthropomorphized celestial bodies that represent the 12 watches of the night or whatever. Not disciples. Certainly not apostles.

Dan Beecher I don't know if you've seen Zeitgeist recently, but I believe you mean instead of watchers of the night, you mean the 12 zodiacal signs. I'm pretty sure that's what you mean.

Dan McClellan Well, in this inscription, there's no relationship to the zodiac.

Dan Beecher That comes- How dare you, sir?

Dan McClellan ... that comes from much later.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Well, and this is one of the things that you have to do with these kinds of conspiracy theories, is you have to chronologically collapse everything.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And things that are separated by 1,000 years, you got to just be like, "Nah, same time."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan You know, "Nah, same time."

Dan Beecher And you know- Or you just insist that everyone has to think, "No, that part's a metaphor, but this part's literal."

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher "Oh, no, it's not literal? That means it's a metaphor. Oh, it's not working in your mind? You're not getting the figurativeness of it all."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then in the Temple of Amun at Luxor, there is a little triptych, a little series of scenes and a bunch of text associated with the birth of Amenophis III, so this king.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And in this conspiracy theory, the three scenes are the annunciation, the conception, the birth, and adoration of Horus. Of course, it's not Horus. It's this human king.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And when you actually look at the text, the text is not describing an annunciation. It's not a virgin birth. In fact, it is a graphically sexual conception. Like, literally, it's talking about the human woman just marveling at the sexual prowess of the deity with whom- Okay ... she's doing the gods know what. And, well, actually, they describe it in graphic detail in the text. And then the queen is pregnant and showing, and these deities are using ankh symbols to-- It's kind of the ensoulment. They're putting the divine soul of the king into the fetus, and then- Okay ... the baby is born. So if you just entirely ignore the text that is explaining what these little vignettes are, and if you don't know Egyptian and don't care to look it up, of course you're going to ignore it. And then you can just make up whatever you want about these things, and that's what is done in a lot of the texts that try to promote this idea that all of these things predate Jesus.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan So yeah. It's, again, entirely made up. And if you ignore the data, if you ignore what the scholarship all has for many years indicates, then you can just say, "Hey, if you squint at this enough, the lines blur, and you can squish it into a shape that looks kind of like Jesus." And so- Yeah ... it's like for every one thing that's kind of based loosely on a factoid- Mm-hmm ... there are three or four things that are just thrown in there and entirely made up. But like you said, as long as you include enough things that sound factual or maybe even are to some degree factual, you can also squeeze in some utter falsehoods, and people aren't going to notice.

Dan Beecher Right. Well, you say that, but- ... let me just tell you about Attis of Phrygia, because if you don't know anything, because Attis of Phrygia, born of a virgin on December 25th, crucified, resurrected after three days. There you go. Krishna, apparently.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Krishna was born of a virgin, Devaki. Star in the East. What does that mean? There's always stars in the East. Performed miracles.

Dan McClellan Resurrected.

Dan Beecher Boom. Dionysus, born of a virgin.

Dan McClellan December 25th.

Dan Beecher Performed miracles. Turned water into wine. King of kings. Alpha and Omega.

Dan McClellan Resurrected.

Dan Beecher Mithra of Persia, born of a virgin December 25th.

Dan McClellan 12 disciples.

Dan Beecher Miracles. Dead for three days.

Dan McClellan Resurrected.

Dan Beecher I think it's funny. And what's really funny is that he goes through all of those.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher And then is like, "And there were more," and just presents a list.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher And that, of course, does not want you to pause on that list- Yeah ... or look into it at all.

Dan McClellan Bart Simpson is going to be one of them on there too.

Dan Beecher Right. Well, I did look at-- So I wrote down a bunch of them.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher I did pause.

Dan McClellan Horus of Egypt.

Dan Beecher I don't know who Horus is. But Odin, I was like- That's a-- Yeah ... "Okay, now we're getting into Odin." Zoroaster, Salivahana of Bermuda, Baal, Indra of Tibet, Bali of Afghanistan, and then I was interested in this one, so I just googled it and checked it out a little bit. Witoba of the Billinganese.

Dan McClellan Hmm.

Dan Beecher So I was like, "I would like to know more about Witoba of the Billinganese." And it turns out that literally everything about that is so wrong, it's absurd.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Like, nobody now calls it Witoba. It's actually generally-- What were the names? It was Vitoba or Vital or Vithala, and was not- Bilinguis or Telinguis, which is the other one that... Anyway, nothing about it, including just the identification of this God- Yeah ... was correct.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So interestingly, we know where all of these claims come from.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Because like we said, this movie did not make them up.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And there are a couple of texts that were published at the end of the 20th century that popularized these things, were responsible for probably the Zeitgeist movie picking them up. One of them was a book called "The Jesus Mysteries: Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God?" by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. And I didn't say a word. It's such a- I didn't say a word. It's just so a little on the nose, Freke family.

Dan Beecher If your name is Freke, don't go into the conspiracy business. Go into good science business, good data business. Just go against the grain a little bit.

Dan McClellan Freakonomics, yeah. And then you had another book called "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" that was published under the name Acharya S.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan Which is the nom de plume of Dorothy Murdock, who along with Jordan Maxwell, and I think, I don't know about Freke and Gandy, but I know that Dorothy Murdock and Jordan Maxwell have since passed away. But none of these people have any training or any academic background whatsoever in anything related to what they're talking about. But they kind of popularized this. But it all comes from a 19th-century book by a gentleman named Kersey Graves.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And we really don't know if Mr. Graves had any academic background either. But in 1875, he published a book, and get ready because pre-20th century book titles could carry on for a while.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors, or Christianity Before Christ: Containing New, Startling, and Extraordinary Revelations in Religious History, Which Disclose the Oriental Origin of All the Doctrines, Principles, Precepts, and Miracles of the Christian New Testament, and Furnishing a Key for Unlocking Many of Its Sacred Mysteries, Besides Comprising the History of Sixteen Heathen Crucified Gods."

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And this is where the main 16 gods are Thulis of Egypt, Krishna of India, Krist of Chaldea, Attis of Phrygia, Tammuz of Syria, Hessus or Eros, Bali of Orissa, Indra of Tibet, Yao of Nepal, Buddha of India, Mithra of Persia, Alcestos of Euripides, Quetzalcoatl of Mexico, or Vithobah of the Bilinguis, Prometheus or Aeschylus of the Caucuses, and Quirinus of Rome, and then he actually lists dozens of others, which is where some of these other folks- I'm particularly interested in Quetzalcoatl because- Yeah.

Dan Beecher How did news- I'm not sure how- ...

Dan McClellan of Quetzalcoatl get to the authors- Yeah ... of the New Testament in the 1st century CE?

Dan Beecher And how did it get from... Clearly it all started in the regions around Egypt, India, whatever, the Middle, Southwest Asia, and Northern Africa and stuff. How the hell did it get to Mexico? That seems pretty strong.

Dan McClellan It seems like we might be squinting at all of this stuff.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And you see this in the anthropology of the 19th century with folks like Frazer and Tyler and others, where what they're doing is they're trying to distill everything down to a single kind of ur-society. And they want to try to account for all the different societies of the world by suggesting they all share certain features.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And so, for instance, Frazer has the dying and rising gods motif, this idea that the societies of the world have these traditions about gods that die and rise in a cycle. And so everything gets classified into that. And this is also the time period that things like monotheism are also being used as these buckets, and it's like, "All right, you either go into the monotheism or the polytheism bucket. Line up, everybody. I'm going to decide which one you're in."

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan And it's a way to just divide up the societies trans-historically, trans-nationally, to just try to show that we can reduce everything down to single theories.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so you've got this idea that, "Oh, all of these gods, they're all the same template."

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan It's just somehow this template was just making its way around the world, and everybody was just like, "Oh, we'll make our god just like this other god."

Dan Beecher And the Egyptians dress him up as Horus and- Yeah ... so and so dress him up in different... It's basically the same guy, but with different clothes on.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and what's bizarre is with the idea of Jesus being based on one of these templates, there's a lot in the tradition of Jesus that is pretty idiosyncratic, and so you have to kind of generalize. You call them all messiahs. It's like messiah is a Hebrew word- ... that describes a specific anointed one.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And it's not like, "Oh, well, that person over there was a deity, and they helped their people." That's a messiah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan You're overgeneralizing quite a bit there by trying to use that title. But here's something that Graves claims in one part of his book where he's talking about how Jesus is all related to these deities. "These have all received divine honors; have nearly all been worshipped as gods, or sons of gods; were mostly incarnated as Christs, Saviors, Messiahs, or Mediators; not a few of them were reputedly born of virgins, some of them filling a character almost identical with that ascribed by the Christian's Bible to Jesus Christ; many of them, like him, are reported to have been crucified; and all of them taken together furnish a prototype and parallel for nearly every important incident and wonder-inciting miracle, doctrine, and precept recorded in the New Testament of the Christian's Savior." And there's absolutely zero documentation to support any of these claims anywhere in the book.

Dan Beecher And therein lies a bit of a problem.

Dan McClellan Therein lies the rub, yes. They cannot find a text or iconography or anything that demonstrates any of these claims. I pointed out with Horus, they're like, "Well, maybe it's this little series of drawings over there."

Dan Beecher Nope.

Dan McClellan The text says it has nothing to do with that. "Oh, well, maybe it's this drawing of Horus with 12 stars and standing in front of them."

Dan Beecher Nope.

Dan McClellan Has nothing to do with disciples. I have tried for years to get people to identify primary texts that support any of these claims, and the reason I do this is because I know there are none.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because I have looked. I looked for a long time before I ever responded to any of these claims. No such texts exist.

Dan Beecher And by texts, we're talking about something inscribed on a wall or something chiseled into a stele or something like that.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Anything contemporary to the time that would shed any light on any of this.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And this is where, when we get into Dionysus and stuff like that, people are like, "Oh, Dionysus' tradition has this, that, and the other, and that's very Christian." It's like, well, if you look at this, the things that are most similar to Jesus are things that pop up in the Dionysus tradition from after the time of Jesus.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And that's not to say that it influenced the Dionysus tradition. It's just to say that's not an inspiration for the Jesus tradition.

Dan Beecher Right. And there's an argument- And Jesus could have been an inspiration for some of the Dionysian tradition. That's possible.

Dan McClellan It's certainly possible.

Dan Beecher But it's also like, if, for example, we take the example that was used in "Zeitgeist" that Dionysus also turned water into wine, don't know if that was ever part of the actual Dionysus myth. But even if it was, wine was a big part of everybody's life in both places.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's totally possible for storytellers to have come up with the same idea in different parts of the world.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's not that impossible. Coincidence does not prove anything.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it wouldn't shock me at all, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the Gospel of John is kind of riffing a little bit on Dionysus in relation to Jesus as the vine and- Mm ... the relation of Jesus to wine. That wouldn't surprise me at all. But guess what? John is being written at the end of the first century CE. John is not inventing the Jesus tradition. The tradition- Right ... is already in circulation. John is just adding some rhetorical flourish. The turning water into wine, that's one story from one chapter of one gospel, and that is not the Jesus tradition. And I've looked, and the two things I have found regarding Dionysus that come closest to turning water into wine, there's a tradition about him. He likes the look of some nymph that comes and drinks at this stream every day, and he decides that he's going to replace the water with wine. And so it doesn't say turned water into wine. It says he- Mm ... replaced the water with wine of the stream, so the nymph became drunk, so he was able to have his way with her. The other tradition is the notion that there was a tradition associated with a temple dedicated to Dionysus where they would put empty vases in the temple, and then when they came back the next morning, on the day of a certain festival, the vases would be filled with wine.

Dan Beecher So that's- Boom ...

Dan McClellan that's the closest- Boom.

Dan Beecher That proves it. I don't know what you're talking about. Suddenly, we've proven that Dionysus and Jesus are absolutely ripping each other off.

Dan McClellan Both born on December 25th. And that's the one that comes up the most, particularly in, what is it, the 14th of November right now? This comes out probably last week in November. Once we get into December, you're going to have all this December 25th crap.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And none of it is accurate. None of these deities is ever associated with December 25th in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. That's another thing that- I mean, Jesus did.

Dan Beecher Well- They have associated Jesus with that.

Dan McClellan Touché. But that's toward the beginning of the third century CE.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, the Jesus tradition is not only well underway, it is already deeply embedded in a lot of these societies by that time period.

Dan Beecher So- We should talk about why December 25th is so integral or so important to this line of thinking.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Because what "Zeitgeist" at least is aiming at, what they are going toward, they end up arriving at, which is that the reason each of these things are significant is that- All of this is just astrology myth.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And so they're saying that December 25th is when the ancients thought the equinox, not the equinox, what's the winter summer one?

Dan McClellan The winter solstice.

Dan Beecher Solstice.

Dan McClellan The winter solstice.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So they thought that it was the 25th. It was the 21st, but they thought it was the 25th or whatever. And that's when the sun dies, and then three days later, the sun is reborn because the days start to get longer again.

Dan McClellan Oh, gosh.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And then they make the claim that the star in the east was Sirius, which is one of the brightest stars in the sky, and then that on December 25th, Sirius aligns with Orion's Belt, which were known as the three kings. I've never heard them referred to as the three kings.

Dan McClellan How does one star align with another star?

Dan Beecher Well, they form a line. That's all.

Dan McClellan But they all turn, and they don't move in relation to each other.

Dan Beecher No. Planets do, but not the stars. But yes, they kind of form a vague line that's kind of true.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher And around December 25th, that line could be said, if you look at it in the east, to point to the vague area where the sun rises- Mm ... in the morning, and therefore, the three kings follow the star to the birth of the son. You spell it either way.

Dan McClellan Son. The S-U-N of God, yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Or S-O-N.

Dan Beecher Blah, blah, blah. It's funny because I did reach out to a friend of mine who's an astronomer and just said, "Hey, will you just check this for me?" And he was like, "Yeah, it's basically kind of mostly true. But also, it's true all of the time."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And why does it matter? It wouldn't have been particularly useful at the year one or whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And you'll frequently see included in those claims that the Southern Cross, the constellation known as the Southern Cross, is a part of it.

Dan Beecher Right, because that explains his crucifixion.

Dan McClellan Crucifixion, he died on a cross.

Dan Beecher Dying on a cross, right.

Dan McClellan Except the Southern Cross was not visible- Right ... in that part of the world 2,000 years ago.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It was something that was because of the precession of the equinoxes, it was below the horizon for that part of the world for centuries. And so- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher ugh.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's some silliness, and the traditions, like the three wise men, Matthew says nothing about three wise men. Matthew just says the Magi.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And we did a show on this.

Dan Beecher There came wise men. Yeah, we did a whole thing about it. Go check last year.

Dan McClellan Yeah. These are later traditions that develop. So they're not picking up on these to develop the account. The account later on becomes these traditions.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And yeah, the winter solstice thing is silly because the solstice is the 22nd sometimes, with a little bit of wiggle room.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan The 25th was actually the observed celebration of the solstice in the Roman Empire for a time.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan It was not in ancient Egypt. And the notion that the sun stopped and held still for three days and then started going, that's nonsense. It has its lowest point, and then the next day, it's moving the other direction. It is not- Yeah ... just holding still. It's not like, "All right, I've got to rest for a minute, and then I'm going to go."

Dan Beecher And the ancients who studied this had ways of figuring that out.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher They knew.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so the 25th is actually, as best we can tell, and there's still debate about when this originates, but the identification of December 25th as the day of Jesus' birth seems to come down to a calculation that was made based on the tradition regarding the date of his conception.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And we see this first in Hippolytus around 210 CE. This is the first time we have a good case to make that somebody's actually arguing this. But the idea is March 25th was thought to be the date of Jesus' death. That may have been the celebration of the Passover that aligns in the gospel stories with Jesus' crucifixion. In the ancient world, they had a tradition of aligning a big, important figure or a divine figure's death with the day of their birth.

Dan Beecher And so- Mm ...

Dan McClellan this was just a tradition. It was like, "We don't know when he was born. We're just going to line it up with when he died." And for whatever reason, when it came to the Jesus tradition, they lined it up with when he was thought to be conceived. This was the Annunciation.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan And still, there are Christian traditions that celebrate the Annunciation on March 25th. So if Jesus was conceived on March 25th and you just estimate that gestation takes nine months, you count nine months from March 25th, you get December 25th. And so the idea was, "Oh, that's when Jesus died. That's when Jesus was conceived. December 25th must've been when Jesus was born." And its proximity to the winter solstice, when the sun starts going the other direction, was not lost on them. The significance of that, of celestial phenomena, was not lost on them. They obviously- Right ... thought that was significant, but it wasn't the inspiration for it. It was just a cherry on top. And so, that's probably where the date December 25th comes from. It certainly does not have anything to do with Sol Invictus- ... because the temple to Sol Invictus that was dedicated in Rome on December 25th was not dedicated until 274, 273 or 274 CE. So a good 60 to 70 years after these calculations were first made. So, Mithra has nothing to do with December 25th. None of the other deities have anything to do with the 25th. Sol Invictus does, but we have no evidence of it until decades after- Sure ... the initial calculation, which is based on this assumption that he must have died on the same day that he was conceived.

Dan Beecher Well, all right. So there you have it, friends. If you are trying to dismantle Christianity, this is not the way to go.

Dan McClellan I think- There are easier ways to do that.

Dan Beecher All right. There's that. Let's move on to our next thing, which is a "Who's that?" Now, the reason that I wanted to do this as our "Who's that?"

Dan McClellan is that- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher this guy is conspicuously not mentioned in Zeitgeist. Now, Zeitgeist the movie does have a moment where it's like, "And why do no historians contemporary to the Jesus time mention Jesus? Here's a list of all of these historians from that era, and none of them mention Jesus." And I looked at that list, and I paused again, and I read through them all, and I went, "Wait a minute. We're missing somebody."

Dan McClellan Why? Who were some of the historians that were on that list? I don't remember the list.

Dan Beecher I don't know.

Dan McClellan You don't remember?

Dan Beecher Okay. I didn't write them down or anything. What I did notice was just that the one guy that I know should've been on the list wasn't, and that is one Flavia Josephus. Talk to me about Josephus. Who was he? We've mentioned him before, but let's just- Yeah ... sort of give the broad strokes on Josephus.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So Josephus was likely born around 37 CE, so a handful of years after Jesus was probably crucified. Born to a priestly father and an aristocratic mother. He was pretty well-off in this priestly family.

Dan Beecher Flamily?

Dan McClellan Flavial family? But he was- And Jewish, right?

Dan Beecher A Jewish family, correct?

Dan McClellan Yes. So priestly as well. So- Yeah ... he was actually a leader of the resistance against the Roman siege. So when the Romans came into Judea and Galilee and everything, he was a general who helped the Jewish people defend against the Romans. He was in the Galilee. In fact, when you go up to... There's a cliff overlooking the western half of the Sea of Galilee. If you go up there, a lot of tours will take you up there. There are some caves near that cliff side that Josephus helped people hide out in when the Romans were coming. And where they debated- Consider that- "What have the Romans ever done for us?"

Dan Beecher Consider that foreshadowing, everybody. People hiding from the Romans rather than triumphantly fighting them.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And then he ends up getting captured and decides that he's basically going to use a... He reads a prophecy in Jewish literature to say that Vespasian was going to become emperor. So he's caught, and he's kind of like, "Hey, guess what? I know you.

Dan Beecher You're Vespasian, right?

Dan McClellan Hey, this literature prophesies that you're going to become the emperor." And Vespasian likes the cut of that jib- Uh-huh ... so takes him on as an enslaved person, a servant, and then Vespasian does become emperor. You've got to love it.

Dan Beecher If you're Josephus, that's a good moment for you.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So in 69 CE, Vespasian becomes emperor, and he grants Josephus his freedom, and this is when Josephus takes on the emperor's family name of Flavius.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And so Flavius Josephus identifies him as a kind of an honorary member of that family. And then he fully defects, and he becomes a Roman citizen and decides he's going to write histories. So he writes a history called The Jewish War somewhere around 75 CE, and then writes Antiquities of the Jews, or Judean Antiquities, and that's later. That's around mid-'90s CE. And these are written for a Greco-Roman audience, and the point is kind of to defend Judaism against charges of all kinds of different things, blasphemy and all this kind of stuff, and try to make the case that the Jewish folks are following their traditions, they're following their laws, they're faithful people, and they have good reason to be doing all this stuff. But obviously, he was seen as a traitor to an awful lot of Jewish folks, which is why his works weren't really preserved within any Jewish streams of tradition. It was mainly Christians who preserved his works. But, yeah, he also wrote a handful of other stuff. He wrote A Life, which is kind of a biography about himself. But yeah, he is our main historical source for virtually anything that happened in or around Judea or Galilee in the early to mid, or even late first-century CE, because we have no other historians that are covering that region in that time period. The closest we get is Philo, who is a philosopher and to some degree, a diplomat who has literature that he's writing from just before the time that Josephus starts writing, where he talks about an embassy to Rome and talks about what's going on in different parts of the Jewish world, but primarily focused on Alexandria in Egypt. But Josephus was there. He was watching all of this go down, and so he is an eyewitness account to a lot of what went on in the late 60 CE in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Galilee, and so is a wonderful source. And yeah, our reconstruction of the siege of Jerusalem and the Romans destroying the temple and the things that happened after that, as well as most of the things that led up to that, including the different procurators like Pilate and others, and the history of Herod the Great and his family, pretty much everything we know either comes from Josephus or is extrapolated, inferred based on Josephus.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah, if you want a historian who's covering that time period, Josephus is all you have.

Dan Beecher He's the only game in town.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Now, you won't expect a formerly Jewish, now Roman citizen defending the Jewish sort of tribe to care all that much about Christian traditions. So mention of Jesus would be significant, it seems to me.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher It seems like that would be a thing. And his book does it theoretically, and we'll get to why I say theoretically, twice.

Dan McClellan Twice, yep.

Dan Beecher There's one mention of him and his brother.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher So this is in- But that's not- Sorry, go.

Dan McClellan That's not the big one.

Dan Beecher Go ahead.

Dan McClellan But it's in "Judea Antiquities," Book 20, chapter 9, where he refers to the execution, the unjust execution of James, and he identifies this James as the brother of Jesus who was called Christ. And the idea there being that, yeah, there was this dude, Jesus, people called him the Anointed One.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So he's not endorsing that label, but just saying, "By the way..." Because he mentions like 20 different people named Jesus or Iesous in Greek.

Dan Beecher So he's got to differentiate which one this is.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so he's like, "Yeah, that one, the one they called the Anointed One, those doofuses."

Dan Beecher Now, you say doofuses, but let's go to Book 18, chapter 3, in which what is apparently known as the Testimonium Flavianum- Yeah.

Dan McClellan ...

Dan Beecher is located.

Dan McClellan So this is the other mention, and this one is a significantly expanded mention of Jesus. I'll go ahead and read the Testimonium Flavianum as it has traditionally been preserved.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And this is probably, whose translation is this going to be? It's probably Whiston's translation, which is awful, but I'll go ahead and read it. "About this time, there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds, and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease; he appeared to them, spending a third day restored to life. For the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared." So that's my dramatic reading of the Testimonium Flavianum.

Dan Beecher That is a far cry from Jesus who was called Christ.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher That is a very different feel and quite surprising coming from someone who did not follow Christianity himself.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That would be a shocking thing to read from a non-Christian.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It doesn't make a ton of sense that this came from Josephus, who elsewhere is just like, "That guy."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So pretty much everybody agrees this is definitely not authentic. Definitely not entirely authentic. It may be in part authentic. There may be a core, maybe something similar to what was mentioned in reference to James, but then it got elaborated on. It accreted a bunch of additional stuff, or it could just be entirely a Christian forgery. And the scholarly consensus these days, if you ask most scholars, and I've talked to Martin Goodman, was my Jewish history professor at the University of Oxford. He's- When it comes to the history of Judaism in the first century CE, he's the game in town. And he agrees that there was probably a core to that tradition that just got added onto by Christians who were transmitting the text. So the consensus view is that it originates in some authentic reference to Jesus on Josephus's part that was then elaborated on and added to by later Christian transcribers of the text. Although there are those who want to make the case that it is entirely a forgery, and I know of some folks who have publications forthcoming that are trying to make an even stronger case for that now. So, that could be changing.

Dan Beecher We'll see.

Dan McClellan But right now, most folks think that Josephus referenced Jesus, maybe referenced that Pilate crucified him, maybe didn't. But, whatever the case, the Testimonium Flavianum as it exists right now is definitely not original.

Dan Beecher This may actually seem obvious to a lot of people, but what would you guess is the reason why someone would insert this into a history text?

Dan McClellan That's a question that a lot of people have asked just because the notion that Jesus wasn't around or didn't exist wasn't really something that was taken seriously over 1,000 years ago. So it seems like a silly reason to add this into there. However, at the same time, like I mentioned, Jewish folks are not transmitting Josephus's text. It's primarily Christians, and primarily because Josephus not only provides a good history and background for the things that are in the New Testament, but provides a non-biblical, non-Christian witness to Jesus's existence. Also references John the Baptist.