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Christ's Ventriloquists: The Event that Created Christianity, by Eric Zuesse
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CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS is a work of investigative history. It documents and describes Christianity’s creation-event, in the year 49 or 50, in Antioch (present-day Antakya, Turkey), 20 years after Jesus had been crucified in Jerusalem for sedition against Roman rule. On this occasion, Paul broke away from the Jewish sect that Jesus had begun, and he took with him the majority of this sect’s members; he convinced these people that Jesus had been a god, and that the way to win eternal salvation in heaven is to worship him as such. Paul here explicitly introduced, for the first time anywhere, the duality of the previously unitary Jewish God, a duality consisting of the Father and the Son; and he implicitly introduced also the third element of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost. This work also explains and documents the tortuous 14-year-long conflict Paul had had with this sect’s leader, Jesus’s brother James, a conflict which caused Paul, in about the year 50, to perpetrate his coup d’état against James, and to start his own new religion: Christianity. Then, this historical probe documents that the four canonical Gospel accounts of the words and actions of “Jesus” were written decades after Jesus, by followers of Paul, not by followers of Jesus; and that these writings placed into the mouth of “Jesus” the agenda of Paul. Paul thus effectively became, via his followers, Christ’s ventriloquist. A work such as this can be documented and produced only now, after the development (during the past 70 years) of modern legal/forensic methodology. Previously, the only available methods, which scholars have used, simply assumed the honesty-of-intent of all classical documents, especially of canonical religious ones, such as Paul’s epistles, and the Four Gospels. Only now is it finally possible to penetrate deeper than that, to reach the writer’s intent, and not merely his assertions, and to identify when this intent is to deceive instead of to inform. Whereas scholars have been able to discuss only the truth or falsity of particular canonical statements, it is now possible to discuss also the honesty or deceptiveness of individual statements. This opens up an unprecedented new research tool for historians, and CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS is the first work to use these new methods to reconstruct, on this legal/forensic basis, not just how crimes took place, but how and why major historical events (criminal or not), such as the start of Christianity, actually occurred. The author explains: “What I am doing in this work is to reconstruct from the New Testament the crucial events that produced it, without assuming whether what the NT says in any given passage is necessarily true or even honest. Instead of treating the NT as a work that ‘reports history,’ the NT is treated as a work whose history is itself being investigated and reported. Its origin goes back to this coup d’état that Paul perpetrated in Antioch in the year 49 or 50 against Jesus’s brother James in Jerusalem, whom Jesus in Jerusalem had appointed in the year 30 as his successor to lead the Jewish sect that Jesus had started. The Gospel accounts of ‘Jesus’ reflected Paul’s coup d’état – not actually Jesus, who would be appalled at the Christian concept of ‘Christ.’ That concept was radically different from the Jewish concept of the messiah, and Paul knew this when he created it.”
- Sales Rank: #916743 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Hyacinth Editions
- Published on: 2012-04-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .95" w x 6.00" l, 1.22 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 378 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
About the Author
Eric Zuesse is a winner of the Mencken Award for investigative reporting. His previous books include IRAQ WAR: The Truth, and WHY THE HOLOCAUST HAPPENED. PRE-PUBLICATION ENDORSEMENTS of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: “A winner.” — Bruce Chilton, author of Rabbi Jesus, and Director of the Institute for Advanced Theology at Bard College “My skeptical ear detects a very distinct ring of plausibility in this gripping tale. ... provocatively interesting, ... and forcefully written.” — Richard Dawkins, Oxford University and author of bestsellers The Selfish Gene, and The God Delusion “Great writing; great forensic investigation.” — David Davis, participant in the Jesus Seminar’s discussion group “This book is an absolute must-read for anyone investigating the origins of Christianity ... insightful, well-written, and powerfully informative.” — Joe E. Holman, author of Project Bible Truth “Presents a side of Paul that the general reader of the Bible, or even the scholars, miss.” — Oswald Schrag, Emeritus Professor of Religion at Fisk University, Fellow of the Jesus Seminar, and member of the Westar Institute “It works for explaining Christian origins. ... Paul has to do away with [Judaism’s demand for] circumcision. That is so unambiguous.” — James Crossley, Sheffield University Professor of Biblical Studies, and author of Why Christianity Happened “An open-minded reader/juror will come to the conclusion that [Paul] is guilty of inventing a new religion, illegitimately appropriating Jesus.” — Abe Van Luik, Ph.D., former Christian fundamentalist “It is surprising to me that this view of Paul has not been previously written. ... I love your boldness.” — Reverend Steven Michael Smith, Colona United Methodist Church, and a participant in the Jesus Seminar’s discussion group
Most helpful customer reviews
212 of 266 people found the following review helpful.
The Most Ambitious Christ's Ventriloquist Wannabe
By Mat633
I want to love this book because I love forensic study of the Bible and I want to accumulate some tools to argue against the fundamentalists. But it was a torture to get through this book because of the following reasons:
1) The arrogant tone of Zuesse is very disturbing to read. He seems to have little spiritual foundation to approach the thesis with humility. He set out to write a book to shock the world, claiming that all theologians and scholars have missed what he writes in this book. I want to read about Christ's Ventriloquists, but when I saw Zuesse wants to be one of them, I wanted to throw up.
2) Zuesse promised to be unbiased in his analysis but his writing turned out to be extremely bias against the New Testament. For example, he would quote the OT text about circumcision without questioning it's validity or the author's motive, but he questioned the motive of Paul who interpreted circumcision in a different way; in fact, he didn't just question Paul, he wrote as if he is in Paul's mind. He implied that today's psychology allowed him to do it, but today's psychology also shows that you tend to project your own mind to others. Thus the only way to know Paul's evil motives require a person just like that. Is Zuesse writing about himself? There is a Burmese saying, "It takes a snake to see the legs of other snakes."
3) This book can misinform any reader that doesn't know the Bible well. By questioning the validity of certain books in the Bible and the authenticity of certain versions, Zuesse has created for himself the freedom to pick and choose whatever passage he wants and ignore the rest as invalid. What's the difference between Zuesse and the fundamentalists? The same cherry picking reductionism, only from the opposite dimensions.
4) I believe reductionism is the greatest sin of all. Religious fundamentalism and scientific reductionism are the same species in different realms. They are the cause of war and devolution of civilization. This book is a good example of reductionism.
It's not Paul that wanted to rewrite history because he died for his conviction and, even though he is not perfect, he has a great deal of spiritual strength to teach faith, hope, love, and grace. It's Zuesse, with a tremendous ambition, to rewrite history. With this book, Zuesse wants to create an event that would change the civilization for the next 2,000 years. But if Zuesse is successful in changing the course of history, it would be a civilization where there is no love, no grace, no hope, and no spiritual enlightenment.
If Zuesse can analyze Paul based on the 2,000-year-old documents. Why can't we analyze Zuesse, since his book is fresh, his person is alive, and the evidence is right in front of us. If his conviction is real, he would risk everything, like Paul, to get his message across. His other books on politics didn't fly, yet he thinks he can pull the strings of Jesus with his reductionist mind.
I recommend the book as a representation of 21st Century reductionism.
30 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
Best evidence: logic, forensics and the Pauline texts in the making of Christianity
By Brendan Howley
First, a declaration of biases: I'm a former CBCTV investigative journalist turned media strategist—I freelanced for 'the fifth estate,' the CBC's flagship investigative show, from 1992 to 2001, specializing in intelligence/counterintelligence and war crimes matters. I'm a former 'cops 'n' courts' reporter, who's covered investigations and cases at trial from war crimes in Bosnia and Nazi-occupied Belgrade to homicides in rural Ontario, moneylaundering and white collar crime, including work amongst the Cree First Nations' sentencing circles, from 1990 to present.
A thrice-published Random House crime novelist, I'm at work on two TV crime miniseries, the first about the massacre of the Romanovs and a Canadian/UK effort to rescue them in June/Jluy 1918 (amongst other adventures of Canada's real-life Indiana Jones). The second's about a remarkable young American woman who was at once a CIA asset and deeply involved in Cuban and Latin American left-wing politics: depending on who you believe, she may have danced the twist with Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City ten weeks before JFK was assassinated in Dallas.
Religiously, I'm a lapsed Irish-Canadian Catholic with a deep background in apologetics and epistemology; I was raised by a Jesuit-schooled former Franciscan/IBM logician-engineer. I'm at present a practitioner of mindfulness meditation.
review
Christ's Ventriloquists is hardly light reading; like a skilled prosecutor, Eric Zuesse has marshalled an investigation that's at once historical and logical, as well as, in my opinion, utterly original.
I've never read anything like Ventriloquists in four decades of wide reading in Church history, theology and philosophy ranging from Thomist to Heidigger, Maritain and Zizek. There may be precursors of this book and, indeed, of Zuesse's point of attack—but nothing in my reading comes close to his mode of attack: pure historical investigation, a true 'theory of the crime, scene of the crime' parsing out of the extant relevant texts and known history
This is not a perfect book; in fact, you could make the case that the case is not the most interesting thing about Zuesse's work—his methodological rigour is. Like major crimes never properly investigated, this is a documentary analysis of how Paul transmuted the disparate political 'messaging' of a bifurcated sect (the followers of James, impoverished and largely Palestinian Jews and his own followers, non-Jews politically open to an alignment with Rome) from that of a non-God Jewish Messiah to an essentially corporate entity which melded with the needs and wants of the Roman Empire.
That radical 'repositioning' gave the winning sect critical political cover—and itself a corporatizing common value-set that culminated in Constantine's conversion in 323AD. (Zuesse, in my view, has a colleague in spirit and substance regarding the struggle for Church history in Garry Wills' work on the Papacy, notably Wills' groundbreaking Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (2000) and, in closer focus, a worthy opponent inWills' diametrically opposedWhat Paul Meant (2006), wherein Wills argues Paul was Jesus's brother-in-love, Jesus's liberal 'rescuer.' One would like to see the two debate.)
I don't propose here to weigh Zuesse's competence with respect to Pauline apologetics: that's to miss the point. The essence of his book is that Paul was, hook, line and sinker, a political manipulator bent on growing an international religion by recruiting gentiles, because there was little future in the Jewish variant.
And the best evidence for this, Zuesse submits, is to take Paul at his highest: his own words, his letter to the Galatians, the exemplar of his authorship and belief, *the* Pauline document.
But there's light years between what Paul writes in Galatians, Zuesse construes, and what Jesus's living heirs—those who actually heard Jesus preach—saw and heard and spoke of in their decentralized communities of belief. (There's far more detail in Zuesse's logic than related here. Read the book: it's exhaustive in its logic.)
This distance—an abyss, Zuesse would argue, littered with fragile if not fraudulent textual 'evidence'—between Paul's words and Jesus's is the key to his case. Paul's strategy in writing the letter, evident in Zuesse's elucidation of the intent and, in Zuesse's opinion, the function of Paul's letter to the Galatians: to move the goalposts from Jerusalem to Rome by creating a Christ-myth via the embryonic Greek community of belief.
But these believers won't be circumcised, as per James's dictum, in following Jewish law.
On its face, Paul can't have the argument both ways: he cannot claim to at once be ideologically pure in advancing Jesus-as-God under Jewish law, because that's blasphemous and deny the validity of James's governance that all 'Christians' (James would never have used the term) be circumcised.
Instead, Zuesse ably argues, Paul does an extraordinary thing: he reinvents Jesus and Jesus's message to suit his own ends. Just how Paul did this is the beating heart of Zuesse's articulate legal/forensic argument: perjury, pure and simple.
Zuesse has forced a reconsideration not just of the nature of 'church' but also of 'apostlehood'—and of the very nature of the New Testament itself as an historical document, allegedly representative of the historical Jesus's teachings and life.
This is a tantalizing prospect, especially in light of what Paul and his followers believed was the approaching 'end of history': growing 'gatherings'—not 'churches'—was the opposite of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. This is precisely what the Church of Rome became, a patriarchy, in very short order, with its attendant political and moral crises and, in more than a few cases, outright criminality. (Leaving aside the breathtaking concupiscence of, say, the Renaissance Roman popes, a hard look at the Church's role in the Spanish Inquisition or the Balkans 1941/44 is an instructive foray into such criminality.)
My point is this: as an investigative journalist specializing in war crimes, crimes essentially political in their genesis, I submit that Zuesse's book is that most dangerous of investigations. It goes right to the heart of the politics of belief, which, as any good Catholic knows from the catechism, is an act of the intellect, not the will.
Faith has profound political consequences and Paul, in Zuesse's view, cannot not have known what he was on about in Hellenizing the nascent church. He was, to amplify Wills' notion, far more than Jesus's "press agent": Paul made the patriarchy possible, if not highly likely, in complete contradiction to Jesus's avowed intent. He also set the table, intentionally or not, for the Romanization of the ensuing 'Christianity.'
If one applies the scalpel of legal forensics to Paul's own words, Zuesse's logic runs, the actions which he sought stand revealed for what they are: not acts of faith but rather a theological coup d'etat which set Jesus' most demonstrably 'true believers'—the followers of his brother, James—on the path to historical oblivion. The remaking of the Jewish Messianic tradition into a religion centred on the belief in a resurrected Jesus—a God-man whose nature ran utterly contrary to Mosaic law, which forbade any God save Yahweh—now stands in Zuesse's prosecutorial cross-hairs.
And there's a kicker—a huge one: the second half of Zuesse's argument (the second half of the book) argues that the writers of the canonical gospels did NOT know Jesus personally and knew what they knew of the Jesus myth via Paul's own self-interested repositioning. In other words: what we know of the New Testament is hardly the revealed word of God—it's a reworking of a profound reshaping and utterly second-hand...and self-interested. It's no wonder a patriarchy emerged from these texts: what Paul floated as a deft solution to a dire marketing problem took on—as he hoped it would—an institutional life of its own, based on those texts.
Zuesse's book is at once of piece logically and forensically, meaning: the linear thinking is closely reasoned and the evidence well-integrated. I personally think that he's delimited Paul's motivations regarding Paul's own historical role in compelling fashion.
He's also put the cat amongst the pigeons. Jesus, in his own words, would have had nothing to do with a church blind to the least of the least, Paul's institutional competitors, the persecuted Palestinian Jews amongst whom Jesus actually walked and evangelized. Paul's Romanization of the Christ-myth was more than a marketing tactic; it was his business model.
So here's the $64,000 question: why haven't major reviewers taken on Zuesse? If he's right, it's a revolution in New Testament exegesis; if he's wrong, his work deserves a blistering rebuke and an outright dismissal.
Neither has happened; in my limited experience as both an author and a courts journalist, that's best evidence this book, four years after its publication, paradoxically, is as methodologically discontinuous with the 'scholarly' work that's preceded it as was Paul's own letter to the Galatians, is too hot for orthodox academics or book reviewers to tackle.
It's not that jury's out on 'Christ's Ventriloquists': the trial hasn't even begun.
19 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
I love comparative religious history
By James Kenney
I love comparative religious history, and this book speaks what many do not dare: modern Christianity is more of Paul's making than Jesus'. Still, it gets a bit tiresome when the author is defending himself as he says what he fears others will criticize. Just say it, man! Jesus is a far more appealing advocate for God than Christianity's most prominent early persecutor! Is that so hard to say, or so hard to understand?
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