a mesh of photos from Pexels by artists Jeswin Thomas and Sadman Chowdhury
an essay by Joshua Brown
This is not true. At least not in any objective sense. This is a thought experiment. Jesus was a Roman intelligence operative. He was a spy.
Once again, I want to reiterate. This is not true. I don’t believe this actually happened. I have zero evidence. I’m exploring this strange hypothesis because of the Q-Anon storyline. The Q-Anon story is irrelevant. Instead, the more interesting posts from Telegram channels, Trump affiliated groups and even in person run-ins I had with self-proclaimed spiritual militia leaders got me thinking about similar things in the Bible.
a photo from Pexels by artist Haley Black
Jews.
Growing up, I went to churches that didn’t really talk about Jews. But as I got more and more involved, the cognitive dissonance grew as I tried to put two things together: the Christian teaching that Jesus is the ONLY way to Heaven and another Christian teaching that Jews were the Chosen Nation and that they too were going to Heaven. No one really taught it clearly and nearly all pastors imposed strict emasculating codes of conduct that basically kept the other men in the church from bringing up questions.
The traditional Holocaust was alluded to regularly and both Corrie Ten Boom and Dietrich Boenhoeffer were generally unread but known of.
Then I made a simple “mistake.” A coincidence that would change my life forever.
I posted a picture of an old woman holding a rifle.
At the time I really probably just Googled “old woman gun” or something similar. I’ve grown up around guns and I thought it would be a funny internet meme in some strange context.
Now just for more context, I actually designed a “family flag” during this time that included multiple stars of David. I preached on more than one occasion that the Jews were God’s chosen people and that the nation of Israel was to be protected at all cost to keep God’s blessing on the United States.
So when I posted a picture that triggered one person in particular, I had no idea what I was about to get into and how my life was going to drastically change.
I was married. My wife and I had a neighbor and “friend” who we often watched her young daughter. At some point our neighbor and “friend” got divorced and eventually found some Israeli who wanted a green card. So she married him to help him infiltrate.
I’m saying these things matter of factly, but in reality it was not obvious or really stated in plain terms, maybe euphemisms. Anyways, somewhere along the timeline of this neighbor and friend being in this relationship of convenience, I posted this image of… and old Palestinian woman holding a rifle.
Once again, I had no idea the political affiliations of the old woman, just that I thought it was edgy.
One day I was talking to this neighbor / “friend” about her “husband” and she confided in me that he and his Israeli friends (none of which I had ever met) were very angry at me for voicing support for Palestine and spreading Palestinian propaganda.
It was during this time that I began to notice the cognitive dissonance in myself and I began trying to disassemble what I was taught from what I accepted as valid arguments. Which led me to
Steven Anderson
God, was Steven Anderson an interesting person to run into just at the time I ran into so many other online figures, from Ben Shapiro to Gonz Shimura to Stefan Molyneux.
Steven Anderson was a voice of consistency. He was a breakthrough from the weird theological gaslighting of the figures I grew up with. From Allen Domelle and Jack Hyles to James Dobson and John R Rice, the feminine approach to scripture was nearly ubiquitous. Even the shouting preachers were cucked in many ways and used the before mentioned power framing of the pulpit to prevent questions being asked that would reveal the lack of logical constancy.
Films like Marching to Zion and Beyond Jordan were a breath of fresh air. Not that I believed the Bible more now that Anderson was preaching but that all the tip toeing around the passages that clearly distinguished Christian theology from Jewish anti-theology were not some special wisdom I could not achieve but in fact just lazy duct tape jobs on a car dangerously careening through a busy parade.
Donald Trump
During the reign of the God Emperor, I spent a lot of time thinking about why I was so emotionally invested in religion. It held a huge part of my life, thoughts and feelings. Also I began to notice that I experienced the world in a dramatically different way than many of the people I knew. And almost impossibly recognizable to people I DIDN’T know.
Then I began to question dogma.
Then I met “Carla.” That wasn’t her name, I don’t remember her name. She came into my work. She asked about the football game playing on the TV and I volunteered that I didn’t watch TV and preferred politics. She immediately responded positively and asked if I supported Trump which I affirmed. She sighed in relief and began to go ON about how she was enlisted in the Q army and was a captain reporting to some general. She was dead serious and was referring to specifics.
It spooked me.
So I ultimately did NOT vote. The Q situation was something I was not privy to and I found it all a bit gross.
Q-Anon included much spiritual language like “faith” and “trust,” and often referenced God and angels. None of this interested me but I was following accounts that took this stuff VERY SERIOUSLY at least that’s how it appeared. Maybe it was all a
SCAM
Back in the grand Bitconnect times, I became very aware of the memetic nature of money. Watching the Christchurch shooter “use my money” to pull off an accelerationist event of epic proportions impacted me deeply.
It was almost like there were three persons struggling over control of my worldview.
1. Denial – stupid people had stampeded out of Bitconnect and the fundamentals were good
2. Conspiracy – the CIA or FBI had kidnapped the people behind BCC as part of a CIA money laundering scheme
3. Acceptance – Bitconnect was a scam and I had got got
My current view: all three were true.
Okay I’ll admit this was a long way around to talking about Jesus being a spy.
The Jews were incredibly tribal.
Public-private partnership was a time bomb. (Jews operated outside of Roman law and every once in a while dipped into it where Roman law disallowed their practices)
An angel appeared to Mary.
Multiple “kings” visited Jesus early on.
Jesus lived in Egypt for a period.
We know almost nothing of Jesus life until around the time he turned 30.
Zacharias (Jesus “uncle”) experienced a strange loss of voice until he affirmed his own son’s – name.
Jesus rose from the dead.
In a worldview of supernatural, these events seem spooky.
But in a worldview of spies, these events sound suspiciously like the CIA.
Even post-Jesus ascension activities sound like a spy novel. The catacombs, the fish symbol, Marcus Auerelius and smallpox, Saul’s conversion in the desert, they all sound a bit like secret tunnels, secret symbols, fake disease outbreaks and “turning” assets.
Once more I really want to reiterate that I come from a fundamentalist Christian home in which I pledged my “faith in Christ” honestly, or at least as honestly as one could under the deep pressures of an evangelical church. I’ve knelt by my bedside begging God for forgiveness of sin and “confessing” faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as my only saviour from a real lake of fire and Hell.
Two points, I grew up in a Jack Chick home which viewed Islam, Catholicism and Freemasons as demonic. It just so happened that I showed up to a local militia meetup one day, years ago, and during our conversations, someone brought up pro-Freemason sentiment which I challenged. I was responded to with a simple, does it matter WHO? Basically, if the results and principles were similar to my own, why would it matter if some group who I demonized did it?
Also, I remember clearly a similar circumstance when Stefan Molyneux responded to someone hypothesizing that Bitcoin was a CIA tool. He also responded with a “so what” as if to say “it doesn’t matter where Bitcoin came from, just that it’s here.”
Same thing with Jesus being a spy. So what? What if Jesus was a spy? What if he went into witness protection after effectively paving the way for Jews to lose their identity? So what?
Does it make the Bible any less important to the ENTIRE WORLD? Do the arguments that Jesus presented hold any less truth? Does the resurrection mean any less?
What concerns me most about this hypothesis is related to Chesterton’s Fence. Just bringing up this concept can be a monumental shift in worldview. Is the existence of “superstition” or the “belief” in supernatural something that is actually very important for some reason?
I don’t think we should abandon teaching children religion but I also don’t think that it’s guaranteed that children will be crazy violent lunatics if we teach them the critical thinking.
Knowing why the Fence is there can help us determine if maybe there is a better way to fulfill that why. I personally am not qualified to say what that why is or how to adjust for if there is a better way to address that why than with church, religion, conversion, “belief” etc.
All of which I still conform to in some degree.
But as I was taught as a child, it is not enough to conform, but the goal is to be transformed, and in my opinion, part of that transformation is honesty. And my honesty is that I suspect that Jesus was a Roman spy trained in Egypt.
I personally find skeptics boring. The idea that Jesus travelled the world I find boring. That he was some kind of weird esoteric philosopher is boring. The idea that he had a fling with Mary Magdalene: boring. The idea that he was born to a Roman soldier: boring.
All of the pot shot dismissals of who he was and what he stood for, like the Jewish caricature of him as some magician or Balaam, they just are gross and not intelligent. They’re lazy and they have no respect for the immense impact that his life had on the world.
Even our calendar is based off of his life.
There is no reason to disbelieve. I fully respect Christianity. I was born to a Christian mother. I have a line of Christian ancestors many generations back. I am baptized as a Baptist. I have attended three years of seminary. I have memorized large portions of scripture. I have listened to thousands of hours of sermons OUTSIDE of church doors.
But part of my commitment to Christ includes speaking the truth and I truly find all of the circumstances surrounding Christ’s life and the assembly of the Bible to be suspiciously similar to a well executed, truthfully executed intelligence operation.
Qui bono?
Who benefits?
Important figures with their own set of incentives include the families involved (Mary, Zecharaiah, etc) the politicians involved (Rome, Egypt, Galilee, etc), the “spooks” (Roman secret service, Jewish revolutionaries, etc) and the religious (High priest, pharisees, scribes).
Obviously I have ZERO idea what their incentives might have been. I do have my suspicions about the High priest. The Bible leaves it ambiguous whether he knew what Jesus was up to. The exact phrase the High priest used can be viewed through all three perspectives: angry zealot, smart politics, or inside job conspiracy.
The story of Herod killing all the children to try to kill Jesus is suspicious as well. It does seem like John the Baptist may have been blackmailing him.
Once again, not that this is “true”. Instead this is all just a large, loose theory.
I’d be interested in hearing weird stories you may have about run-ins with spooks that made you second guess some of your basic assumptions. I definitely think the most important thing is the reduction of child abuse. I know a lot of so-called “Christians” that justify child abuse. Maybe this will help demystify the Bible and help proliferate peaceful parenting. Thanks for reading!
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