Cultish: Nicaea & the Lost Gospels, Pt. 2

Constantine’s Conversion and the Edict of Milan

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All right. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Koltish, entering the kingdom of the Kolts. My name is Jeremiah Roberts, one of the co-hosts here. I am joined once again by Andrew, the Super Sleuth of the show.

Good to have you back as we are following a very interesting linear Indiana Jones timeline with a little red line going across from Egypt to the Roman Empire and all that. We got papyrus, we got Roman empires, we've got a little bit of everything going on this episode.

What have you, how have you enjoyed this episode so far, Andrew?

Oh man, I'm loving it. Just right after we finished the first episode, I told Wes before a little break, I was like, dude, I got to, I'm going to go back and listen to that episode like four or five times for myself and just try to memorize a bunch of stuff.

It was, there are so many gold nuggets in there and I'm just very thankful for Wes and his time to help us out, to help us think through some of these issues that are very important for us to be.

Well-versed on. Awesome. Well, Wes, appreciate you joining us again, man. It's good to have you back.

On. Yeah, I appreciate that. I wish that academia and archeology was actually like Indiana Jones. It's a lot more boring and staring at dead languages than it is running through ancient caves with giant boulders chasing you.

At least hopefully like the first three movies,.

Not the last two because there's only, there's only three in Canon. If we're going to be speaking of Canon, there's only three Indiana Jones movies. Let's, let's be particular about that. That being said, and just probably laughing here because it's always my movie stuff that comes up, but, um, yeah, let's, uh, let's jump in.

So we're kind of talking about Constantine and talking about the political thing. We're kind of really talking about Diocletius Constantine, his conversion, like becoming a Christian, take us into that.

Like, what's the story behind that? Cause according to the, you know, narrative that gets pushed, you know, he was a Christian by the time he like made this political decision. What, what's the real, what do we know from sources and everything?

What's the real story of Constantine's.

Conversion to Christianity? Yeah. You know, what's interesting here in my office I have, and if you're just listening to this on audio, you might not be able to see it, but I have an actual coin from three Oh seven to three 37 AD.

Um, that has Constantine on it. And, uh, it's a Constantinian Roman coin, uh, which was gifted to me by a mentor of mine. Um, Jim Parker, who, who taught at a Southern evangelical seminary for a long time.

Um, but it, and it has the sun God's soul on the back. So this is clearly before his conversion because the coinage changes. Uh, it has Constantine's face on one side, and then it has, uh, soul Invictus, the, the conquering son on the other side.

So there obviously was a time when Constantine was not a Christian when he was a sun worshiper. And, uh, there's evidence that up until about three 23, Constantine did appear to have a level of allegiance to the sun God.

And you CBS is writing, uh, the life of Constantine appears to make it clear that there does come a dramatic shift in Constantine's thinking away from paganism and exclusively to Christianity in around three 23 AD.

So you have, um, it's here at the famous battle of Melvin bridge that their narrative Constantine's conversion takes place. So the story goes that Constantine prayed for divine intervention and had seen some sort of vision in the sky, which, um, he, uh, or, um, he, or his advisors had interpreted as, as coming from the Christian God.

So Constantine's victory appears to have been positively favored towards him in the direction of Christianity. So, uh, some stories say that he saw the vision of the Cairo, uh, that those first two letters of the word Christos, uh, Christ in Greek, what looks like a P X.

And, um, and then he heard the words in, in this conquer, um, others have him just, uh, having, you know, a vision of Christ and, and being moved by that. But either way, it's, it's at this point that you have some sort of shift in Constantine's perspective, whether that story is actually historical or not is a separate situation, but either way, Constantine has this kind of shift in his orientation away from kind of sun worship, which is sun as an S O N in the sky.

Um, and, and towards Christianity now prior to Constantine's conversion, Christianity had been an illegal religion, which we talked about last time. And Christians weren't allowed legal rights or rights to assembly and were pretty heavily persecuted, particularly as we mentioned under Diocletian.

And it's in this time period, the Constantine, as I mentioned last time meets with Licinius, who's running things in the East and they meet at Milan, which is in Italy. And they issue, uh, the edict of Milan, which decriminalizes Christianity in three 13.

And it did significantly affect Christians as a decriminalized Christianity and allowed them to worship in public. And also declared that any property or possessions that had been confiscated from Christians leading up to that time would be returned.

So there's a huge shift within his perspective towards, uh, being, uh, very, uh, very, um, you know, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Um, he's not anti-Christian, but very, uh, pro-Christian, but not in a way that sets Christianity up.

Constantine sometimes is referred to as the emperor who made Christianity, the official religion of Rome. He didn't actually do that. That's under an emperor later, but he did decriminalize Christianity and appears to, at some degree, whether you want to argue that he had a conversion, um, he, he at least verbalizes some sort of conversion.

Yeah. So why, why form a council then in, uh, uh, three 25 AD? So what was the impetus behind that? Did he, was he the one that formalized the council? Um, how exactly did that work?

Cause it just, sorry to add in, but, um, cause Nicaea and Constantine, those two things kind of go hand in hand in the argumentation of this is how the, by how, what they decided, what would be in the can and what would not be according to how people would articulate that.

Narrative. Yeah. Yeah. So the council of Nicaea is kind of this easy, uh, let's put a pin in a geographical area and on the, the timeframe of history as to when the books of the Bible were established.

The problem with that narrative is that there's no historical evidence for it. I mean, we, we actually have the documents that come from the council of Nicaea. We have the, the Nicene Creed, which has been, you know, sat at the center of historical Christianity for the last, you know, however many, uh, thousand plus years.

And then we have some writings that come out from that, but this council had nothing to do with any books of the Bible, not to mention, you know, the Gnostic books that are sometimes ascribed to it, the Bible, because at this point in history, Gnosticism that we, we sort of alluded to last time, we talked a little bit more about Gnosticism, but, but Gnosticism in general, this idea of secret knowledge, you know, the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, Gnostic gospel of Philip, um, those types of things, it had almost completely died out by this, this time in the fourth century.

Gnosticism had its heyday between the middle of the second and middle of the third centuries. And by the fourth century, it had almost completely lost traction. So it wasn't like Constantine was, uh, kind of vying for the Matthew, Mark and Luke and John over and above Peter, Thomas, Philip, and Mary.

The Gnostic gospels were really, if not out of favor, they were, uh, completely ignored because they weren't even on the table. In fact, if you read anything that comes out of the gospel or the council of Nicaea, what you find is that they're quoting the new Testament documents as if they have authority already.

So it's not like they're, they're voting on anything or they're making some kind of list. The, the argument of Nicaea was concerning the, the, the place of the deity of Christ, not even that Jesus was God or not.

And everybody at the council of Nicaea believed Jesus was God. The argument was whether this Bishop from North Africa named Arius, who argued that there was a time when the son was not, who believed that Jesus was God, just believed that he was a lesser positioned God in the Godhead because he was created by the father.

Uh, everyone at the council of Nicaea believed Jesus was God. So in that sense, um, it wasn't the argument was about, well, how do we understand the position of Christ within the Godhead? So does that make.

Sense so far? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe, maybe, maybe in contrast to that, I'm going to read another, just a segment from, from medium, just so you can kind of get an idea of where the narrative would differ in contrast to what you're saying.

So this is from the article from medium .com. Uh, he's talking about, you know, the first ecumenical council of Nicaea and he, he talks about, you know, all the different people that converge together, uh, what you talked about, but he says, quote, Constantine was given absolute power to wield a state faith, carefully selecting Christian thinkers who represented a particular point of view.

Constantine, along with Hoschus of Corduba, a confident who had planned to support the emperor in defining a state religion, along with the Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, who was driving force in incorporating many texts from ancient Egyptian scripts, which have been translated into Greek for the Roman empire, stealing the basic tenets of Christian ideology.

Constantine became solely responsible for the content of the newly formed Nicene Canon of Christianity with this new Christian Bible, contents were to be used for further political agendas that had little to do with religion.

So his argument is that this is a huge political thing and that Constantine would have had a lot of power or political motivation, uh, with making this move at Nicaea. So that that's what he articulates.

You kind of see this brings back so many memories of Dan Brown and Da Vinci code a little bit, but that that's what he's saying. So in contrast to that, how does, how would you.

Bounce back off of that or push back on that? Yeah, it's interesting. I remember when Dan Brown's Da Vinci code came out and how much it affected the church. And I think later on, when I started studying church history, I realized that if even Christians knew a little bit about church history, the Da Vinci code would never have made the splash that it made because the, the testimony of church history is so different than what's communicated in the Da Vinci code that the red flags would have gone up immediately.

And, um, this is one of those, right? We, we have no surviving minutes or recordings from the council of Nicaea while it was happening. There are however, some primary sources. So we have the creed and the list of church leaders who signed it.

We have 20 Canon rules. So not, not nothing to do with the Canon of the new Testament, but an official list of rules that were passed. None of which by the way, have anything remotely to do with the contents of the books of the Bible or which books of scripture are in or not.

We also have a synodal letter that was released by, uh, telling churches that the council was going to be held. And we have a letter, uh, led later letter written by Eusebius who was the Bishop of Caesarea and Athanasius who was at the time just a secretary who was present.

He later becomes a Bishop in North Africa. Um, but we have those documents. So we actually have primary source documents written in the original languages of which I've looked at that we can look at, that we can translate, that we can say, okay, what was going on here?

And none of that has any hint or indication that it had anything to do with the, the Canon of scripture, what books are in scripture, what books are considered inspired. So who was there? Well, this is where actually the, uh, the, the article that you just read, read Jeremiah actually gets some facts, right.

Or at least in terms of the quote unquote official facts. Um, we're not actually sure who is there, but numbers range from 200 to 318. Now what we can say is it's somewhere in the range of that. Um, now we get the official number, uh, that, that what was the number that he used in the, in that article?

I think it was 318,.

Wasn't it? I believe he said, I think so. And I had to pull it back up. I want to,.

Cause I think that that's what's Athanasius. Uh, yes. That's the number of the individuals who, who he says were there. Now it's probably somewhere in the range of 250 to 300. Now, Constantine's involvement, as far as we can tell, was in an opening statement he gave, where he pleaded with the church leaders to establish peace and truth among themselves.

But the extent of Constantine's participation within the council is completely unknown. Anyone ascribing sort of a central or pivotal role is basically making an argument from silence. We have no evidence that Constantine played any pivotal role.

We just know that he pleaded with them to establish peace because he was sick of them arguing, right? You don't want the Christians arguing because if there's Christians on one end of the empire and the other end of the empire, you want them to be peaceable.

Um, and Eusebius in a later writing seems to put some emphasis on Constantine's oversight, but Constantine himself doesn't seem to do that at all, which is if you're an emperor and you actually did have a lot of power at this thing, you'd think you would emphasize that in some sort of later writing, but he doesn't do any of that.

No,.

No, I just heard that. No, that's, that's good. I mean, just to think about that and that's where political, uh, with, with, uh, where Constantine's at him just wanting to seek the peace and even like his direct involvement, you think about, um, you know, right now we in the United States here, obviously we have the Biden administration and you know, you go to every other week, you know, there's probably some highlight footage of somebody on some sort of committee, you know, Ted Cruz is interrogating some lady about something and she's given some sort of wishy washy, like how much could a woodchuck chuck of wood cut Chuck could Chuck would answer, but it's like, yeah, Biden's the president, but he's probably not in that room when whatever that hearing is going on.

Like when you look at C-SPAN, there's always some sort of meeting going on with something of all these different government agencies. And just because you have one person who's the president doesn't mean he's intimately involved in all of them.

But that's really interesting because usually what's articulated is that, you know, Constantine is just like sitting there, like in the middle of this kind of like George Montgomery Burns, like, yes, it's all coming to plan.

But according to primary sources, he's, there's no really record of him just being there. I'm like, he, he, he wanted to happen to have this piece happen, but he wasn't, there's no evidence that he was actually.

Even directly there, like at Nicaea. Well, we know he was there at least at the beginning. Okay. And I mean, if we can say one thing about politicians is they want to take credit for things, right. You know, whether we're talking about Biden, where you guys are or Trudeau, where I am, politicians love to take credit.

Yes. And yet we have no evidence of any sort of direct influence or coercive involvement of Constantine at Nicaea whatsoever. And so I think that does speak volumes because if, if this was a power grab, if this was a power move, why not situate yourself advantageously?

I mean, when I was in Egypt, one of the things that stood out to me is that there are lots of inscriptions that we know of Pharaohs who say that they won certain battles where we know they did not win battles, but they were draws, but they portray themselves as if they did win the battles because nobody likes to make a giant megalithic structure that says it was a draw.

You know, that's not, that's not great. And so what you do is you say, well, I actually won and I established peace and that's far better than saying, you know, I, there were an equal amount of people destroyed and killed on my side as there was on the other side and we just, we just stopped the battle there.

And so we have a situation where Constantine has an opportunity to have, to communicate a direct involvement at this thing and he doesn't. And so was Constantine involved in Nicaea? Now, although we're not actually sure what the level he was involved, he was involved, but everything we know about Nicaea or Constantine's involvement, it has nothing to do with the books of the Bible.

And the council was called to establish what was the majority view of Jesus and the way that scripture was used points unanimously to the recognition of books that had already been recognized and established as scripture.

So when Nicaea quotes the scripture, it doesn't argue what is and isn't scripture.

The Council of Nicaea, the Canon, and the Deity of Christ

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That's good. Let's, let's flush that out just a little bit too. So thinking as someone goes, okay, I concede West that they did not formalize the canon at Nicaea, but what they did do is they actually as people were the ones who chose what Christian doctrine was.

It's them. They created the Christian doctrine. There was no agreement of Christian doctrine before then. They even had varying forms of scripture, let's say, in their interpretations, but it was here men determined what the doctrine was and it has pagan influences.

How would we.

Respond or think theologically about that? Well, I think that what that does is it ignores the previous, you know, 300 years of church history where Christians who are showing up at Nicaea, some of them very well may have had a few less limbs due to persecution because of the faith that they held onto.

You know, one of the, the issues immediately before the council of Nicaea was an issue related to the persecution that we've been talking about over these last two episodes, where Christians were asked to call Caesar Lord and those who wouldn't do that were either thrown in prison or were faced, you know, physical harm to do so.

And so you had some, what was called the Donatist controversy, where there was when Christianity was decriminalized and Christians were, you know, let out of prison and were coming into the, the woodwork of the church, there was a big discussion as to, do we allow within the context of church discipline, these Christians to be part of our church community?

Those who literally, you know, said that Caesar was Lord over and above Jesus being Lord, are they allowed to be within the church? And there was a legitimate question as to if you were baptized by someone who gave the pinch of incense on the altar of Caesar, is your baptism legitimate?

You know, these were questions that the early church had because this was a big issue. And so the Donatist controversy was a big issue within the early church. And this is leading up into the context of the Council of Nicaea.

So there's been persecution for their profession of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit being co-equally and co-eternally God. Now that language comes out of Nicaea, so they wouldn't have necessarily used the Trinitarian formulaic language that we use today, but they would have believed it in some form or another because it's scriptural, it's biblical, it comes from the pages of scripture.

And so they're leading up to Nicaea, they already understand who they believe Jesus is, they already understand how they understand that fitting within the context of the Godhead and within the understanding of the revelation of God.

And so to then say that, okay, well, Constantine calls this committee, he calls this council, and he's going to tell them what to believe. Well, there are people showing up at the Council of Nicaea who had family members who had died in prison, who maybe had lost limbs because of persecution.

Are you really telling me that Constantine is just going to say, actually, you believe this now? And they're going to be like, well, I guess if Constantine said it, we're going to believe it. Is that really truly realistic to what we see happening in history?

I don't think it is. I think the Christians were willing to go to their deaths for their profession of faith. And so if we hypothesize the Da Vinci Godesque argument that then Constantine, the Roman emperor, who Christians have already been willing to die under, is going to say, these are the books and this is the doctrine that they're just going to roll over, I don't, I don't, I think that's a pretty silly narrative given the previous 200 years of church.

History. So the question I have then, and just going, continuing off of what you're just saying here is that, so in this article, he talks about, he makes some emphasis on some things post Nicaea. And this is what some things that he says is, he says, so some roughly 760 books, many of which were firsthand gospels of the life of Jesus, did not make it into the first Nicene Creed, which is the foundation of every Christian church to this day.

All decided by one man, Emperor Constantine, absolute ruler of the world's greatest empire and the world's largest faith. He goes on to say, although the Nicene Creed did not officially decide upon the content of the Christian Bible, Constantine made it very clear which gospels he considered acceptable.

He commissioned a creation of 50 copies of the first Christian Bible, which contained only the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So what happened to the other gospels? Of the other seven councils recognized in whole or in part by both the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches at ecumenical, all were called by the Roman emperor who gave them legal status across the entire Roman empire.

And then he continues and says that there were additional councils and one in 382 AD, a church council banned all other gospels from being read anywhere. All other books, many which were cherished by true Christians for generations, these scriptures have been relinquished for fear of persecution and imminent death.

And then he basically goes on to say, back when we talked at the very beginning of the episode, this was the case up until these gospels were rediscovered in the 1800s. So maybe my question would be, how would you respond to that?

But also one thing I maybe we only kind of touched on a little bit, the relationship of actual like Gnostics and the Gnostic gospel, because there is a narrative, sometimes it is perpetuated, that it's actually the Gnostics who were under immense persecution because of their belief in these Gnostic gospels.

That seems to be what he's implying. So.

What's your take on all that? I would love to see his primary sources. Because they're non-existent. I think, you know, I don't fault people who espouse these types of narratives because I think they're just going on what they are told.

I think this is a lot of parroting of, I've heard these things said over and over and over. They're in the Da Vinci Code. They're in TikTok and YouTube videos. Joe Rogan is espousing them. This person is communicating them and that person is repeating them.

And so I think it's unfortunately a product of our time, of the internet age, where we don't have people who are questioning things enough to go to the primary first-hand sources. So now this person, I believe, has a PhD, right?

So they have doctor on the front of their name, at least. So they should know better, I guess. I don't know what their PhD is in. If it's in, I don't know, mathematics, then that's irrelevant to the topic.

But I mean, this is a combination of me feeling a little bit of empathy and having a little bit of a headache because you hear these things so often. But like I said at the beginning, the fact is there are just no primary sources for it.

And it's often portrayed as if the early Christians are just given a pile of books and they have to choose. Like I said before, it's not a matter of choosing. The early church recognized the books that had been given to them by the apostles, right?

The church was a product of scripture. Scripture was not a product of the church. And I get a lot of pushback on that from both my conspiratorial friends and my Roman Catholic friends, because they want to also see the scripture as being established by the Roman Catholic church.

But I don't think that history bears that out. I think that what the unanimous communication of the early church is that they knew the books that had been handed down to them. And the conversation of canon was one of clarifying what are the books that come from either an apostle or someone who knew an apostle of someone who knew Jesus or who knew someone who knew Jesus.

So are there questions about some of the books that end up in our Bibles? Yes. But it's books like 2 and 3 John and 2 Peter, because there are a lot of letters that are being purported to be written by Peter and a lot of letters that are being purported to be written by John.

We got to make sure we're doing our homework on this. And so any of the question of the books is one of the church doing due diligence to let the dust settle on the canon. But by the time you get to Nicaea in the fourth century, that conversation, as far as I'm concerned, is over.

And so even the canons after that are saying, here's what scripture is, they're not putting a pronouncement on that. They're just establishing what was already held at that point. Nicaea understands what is scripture.

And we know that because we have conversations leading up to that. We have canon lists that are leading up to that. Do canon lists differ? Yes, they do. But by the time you get to Nicaea, you have the established 66 books of the Protestant canon.

And there's a conversation about what we refer to as the Apocrypha or the Deuterocanonical books that are in the Catholic Bible. I think that's almost a separate conversation. But I think if we're retrieving the earliest books that get us to the time frame of Jesus, we're talking about the 27 books of the New Testament.

And if we're talking about the Jewish canon, we're talking about the 39 books of the Old Testament Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevim, and the Ketuvim. And so the Gnostic Gospels, these other writings, did they exist?

Yes. But like I said, they've almost completely fell out of fashion and belief by the time the fourth century happens. The Gnostics were a dying group. They were a dying group by the time that the Council of Nicaea is called.

They're fragmented. Even calling the Gnostics the Gnostics I think does a disservice because the Gnostics aren't one group. It's kind of like, I don't know, have either of you guys been to India?

No, I've considered at one time potentially going on a mission trip, but that was eons ago.

Yeah. Because Hinduism is a very confusing religion because I've been to India. In fact, this is an entirely different conversation. I actually had a short-lived Bollywood career, but I went to India in 2012 for to be a special skilled extra in a Bollywood movie.

And you talk to Hindus and one Hindu is telling you that Hinduism is polytheistic. And you walk down the street and you talk to another Hindu and they're saying, no, no, no, Hinduism is monotheistic. They're just all different representations of the same God.

And then you walk further and you talk to another Hindu and they're telling you that actually, no, Hinduism is non-theistic. There is no God. The universe just has different, they have different avatars and representations of the universe who is an impersonal force itself.

And so that's kind of what you're dealing with within Gnosticism. And we have this overarching concept of Gnosticism, but realistically Gnosticism is not one thing as much as it's a umbrella term. And so the Gnostics were not unified themselves.

And so you have differentiations with throughout the Gnostic Gospels of what they're even communicating. The single thread being that Gnosticism is communicating what is the antithesis of biblical Christianity.

Because the Gnostics, the Greek word gnosis means knowledge. And the Gnostics believe that you were, you gained salvation through understanding secret knowledge. So how about I put it this way, in historical grounded biblical Christianity, salvation is something that's outside of yourself done on behalf by the finished work of Christ's work on the cross.

So along the lines of 2 Corinthians 5, 21 and Hebrews 10, 10, that for our sake, the father made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Christ, we might become the righteousness of God. And by that will of the father, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

However, in the range of Gnostic belief, salvation was something inside of you that you realize that you unlock via secret knowledge. So it's not just that Jesus is divine, Jeremiah and Andrew are divine.

And you actually have aspects of that divinity that upon realization through understanding of secret knowledge, you're able to attain salvation and overcome the material world. So that goes back to the docetic thing that I was talking about.

The material world is evil, spiritual world is good, you unlock that by secret knowledge. That's completely passe by the Council of Nicaea. So any type of discussion about the gospel of Thomas, gospel of Peter, gospel of Mary, gospel of Judas being in contention, that wouldn't have even been on the table because the Gnostics were a dying group by that time.

The Gnostic Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Mary, and Judas

Yeah. Andrew, do you have any questions.

Real quick? Because I want to get a kind of a breakdown of some of those gospels. But go ahead. What's on your mind, Andrew? Yeah. What are some of those early primary.

Sources we have of people speaking of certain books in the New Testament, like affirming sections, not really affirming, but recognizing books that we have today in the New Testament? What are some of the earliest primary sources for that?

And I just want to comment real quick. It makes sense to that people like Joe Rogan or some of those other popular figures like to try to make arguments in favor of Gnosticism because they themselves look for knowledge and secret knowledge through drug use and means of other things.

So of course, you have to deny and try to reinvent what happens historically, especially with biblical Christianity, because if biblical Christianity is true, then what you're doing is false and it's also sinful.

So there's got to be some way to try to justify the actions that you're making. And one way to do it is you have to deny who God is and you got to deny his word in order to feel justified or even righteous in sinful decisions, which makes sense to me why they would look to attack it.

But historically, as Wes has been shown, those arguments just do not stand up. They don't stand up. Yeah, you can understand why.

It's palatable to the modern audience who, you know, is kind of sympathetic to these new age ideas that the divinity is unlocked in you. And then you find, you know, the these ancient Gnostic gospels and that's what they're communicating.

I mean, there's other things that you probably don't realize that are problematic within them. I mean, the last line of the Gospel of Thomas communicates that women are not worthy of salvation and that every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.

That's the last line of the Gospel of Thomas. So, you know, transgenderism aside, that's kind of the message. And that leads into, you know, a whole other conversation. But you're exactly right. These ideas are far more palatable.

And I think we want conspiracy. We like conspiracy. The history of the canon of scripture in some ways is more complicated than we can imagine, but in other ways is far more simple. And we don't like simple.

We want there to be suppression. We want there to be conspiracy. And so to simply say, well, okay, but what are the earliest books that get us the time frame of Jesus? Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Oh, that's boring.

What about these other ones that are more exciting that portray Jesus as a pagan mystic? Well, those are more interesting. Well, okay, they might be more interesting. But Jesus was a first century Jew.

So what's more likely that Jesus was a pagan mystic who is more palatable to the pagan audience or that Jesus was a Jewish Messiah who made audacious claims, claims to be God himself, predicted his own death and resurrection, and then did it.

And I don't know about you guys, but people who rise from the dead have more credibility and authority than people who don't rise from the dead. And so that's not palatable for an ancient pagan audience.

And so I think it's far more realistic to say that the pagan mystic Jesus comes later and is appropriated and written back onto the lips of Jesus than the actual first century Jewish Jesus, who was a Jew, who did live in the first century and is communicated as such within Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.