Last month Trump vowed to defend Christianity and urged Christians to vote for him
“This is really a battle between good and evil,” evangelical TV preacher Hank Kunneman says of the slew of criminal charges facing Donald Trump. “There’s something on President Trump that the enemy fears: It’s called the anointing.”
The Nebraska pastor, who was speaking on cable news show “FlashPoint” last summer, is among several voices in Christian media pressing a message of Biblical proportions: The 2024 presidential race is a fight for America’s soul, and a persecuted Trump has God’s protection.
“They’re just trying to bankrupt him. They’re trying to take everything he’s got. They’re trying to put him in prison,” author, media personality and self-proclaimed prophet Lance Wallnau said in October on “The Jim Bakker Show”, an hour-long daily broadcast that focuses on news and revelations about the end times that it says we are living in.
Nobody’s “sure”, but there are enough records and accounts to be reasonably confident that among the many traveling rabbis collecting followers in Roman Judaea was one from Nazareth named Joshua/Jesus, and that he was executed for political activities.
That’s it though.
Beyond that, his story is largely a creation of his followers, some of whom were apocalyptically charismatic enough in their own right to keep an ember alive, and eventually it sort of spread among the Jewish diaspora and the military, and happened to be in (relative) ascendance with the latter when an Eastern emperor needed to rethink some political strategies.
After that, it’s largely survivorship bias, with every hint of writing about him being preserved, transcribed, recreated, or invented from whole cloth, and anything from his contemporary itinerant preachers being ignored or suppressed.
Not quite. In fact, there’s a rather significant survivorship bias around the versions of Jesus. Literally the very earliest primary documents involve someone known for persecuting Christians telling Christians in an area he has no authority to persecute that they should abandon other versions of Jesus they accepted or other gospels in favor of the version he claimed based on spiritual visions of someone he never met in life.
We have nothing but fragments recorded by its critics of the Gospel of the Egyptians, for example, and the Gospel of Thomas we only have because of a single person burying it in a jar around the time it became punishable by death to possess.
The version of Jesus with female disciples that was talking about Greek atomism and Epicurean proto-evolutionary thought is actually super interesting historically given the overall philosophy, but it’s barely extant and only is because of archeological discoveries after the church lost effectively mega-monarchal status to just become a mega corporation instead.
And even in the modern era discoveries the church has any purview over like the Mar Saba letter abruptly go missing before it can be further validated by scholars.
The survivorship around “other versions” of Jesus look like they were conducted by Stalin with a two millennia reach. It involved literally burning down the successor to the library of Alexandria (and with it sources potentially related to a “Gospel of the Egyptians”).
May I see those records? Contemporary first hand please.
Also I was wondering if you could explain why Paul never mentions Nazareth or anyone else until Mark needs a name of smallest toen he can find in the area. Man, Mark could really set a scene well.