ok found the link. Transcript:
http://www.rodephemet.org/hudson.html
in fact, it is better to archive it here.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Transcript of public access show Rodeph Emet - The Roots of Antisemitism - Bracha Bat Yosef Interview with literary analyst John Hudson
BBY... I am here with John Hudson. Mr. Hudson began working on the literary and structuralist analysis of Biblical texts in 1975 as one of a group of English cultural anthropologists including Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1978 and is one of the pioneers of applied literary analysis as a field of social science. Over the last 30 years he has used literary analysis, semiotics, media studies and cognitive science in projects for some of the worldâs largest companies. He was formerly a visiting researcher at MIT and is now doing research at the University of Birmingham. For the last two years he has also been a colleague of Joseph Atwillâs and is working with him on several new books following on from Caesarâs Messiah. Welcome.
JH.... glad to be here.
BBY... Tell us where does literary analysis come from and how does applied literary science enable you to reach the sorts of conclusions about Christianity that you have done?
JH... The first real literary analyst of the Christian New Testament was Porphyry Malchus who lived about 300CE. He wrote a 15 volume critical commentary on the Gospels suggesting that they were literary creations. For instance he rightly suggested that Gospel of Mark was modeled upon Homer. One of his pieces of evidence was that instead of calling the Gennesaret the Lake of Gaillee Mark calls it the Sea of Galilee and has inserted extra voyages on the water and makes the storm more sea like. Of course the church was very threatened by Porphryâs work and it was all burned âwe only have a few fragments left. But enough to see what he was doing. He was showing that the gospels are literary creations, not works of history.
BBY... So is your work in the same tradition?
JH... Very much so. What social scientists do in looking at literature is study the structures, look objectively at how the texts were created and edited, the social communities and political environments that produced them, and how they relate inter-textually to other documents. Then you consider how they were re-written and how they continue to be used by various power brokers to create and generate meaning. Texts are not neutral things; they are instruments of social power.
Literary analysis never just looks at the surface. Texts are always produced by people with an agenda. In the case of the gospels, well, the winners always write history and the Romans were the winners of the Jewish war, and they wrote both the Gospels and the other New Testament texts to reflect their own agenda, their strategic needs and ideologies. The reason so many plentiful manuscripts of the Gospels survive-unlike with other early textsâis that the Romans wanted them to be widely available. In comparison out of all the authentic Jewish documents of the period-- only one example survives--those hidden away and buried in the caves at Qumran where the Romans couldnât get at them. Today the Gospel texts are still being used to manipulate and control people, to stop them from thinking for themselves, to be malleable and obey their leaders. All the things that the Romans designed them for.
BBY... When you refer to the Romans, which Romans do you mean?
JH... OK. The Roman-Jewish war of 66-70CE was fought by two generals, Vespasian and his son Titus. They used their military success in the Middle East to rally popular support in Rome and stage a military coup and take over the throne. Vespasian became the first of the new dynasty of Flavian emperors, and was succeeded by his eldest son Titus, and then by his youngest son Domitian. The problem the Flavian emperors had was to legitimate their rule by creating useful myths and propaganda. In particular they had to offer an alternative to the stories of the Jews in order to try and trick them into worshipping a false literary messiah, who would really be Caesar in disguise.
BBY... Your literary analysis shows that the figure of Jesus is entirely a literary creation. But isnât Jesus mentioned in the Talmud? And in the 19th century didnât the Jewish scholar Geiger claim that Jesus could have been an early Rabbi?
JH... The Romans wanted people to believe there was a historical Jesus. That was their whole way of tricking and deceiving the Jews into accepting their imitation pro-Roman version of the Torah. Unfortunately Geiger fell for it. Like many others he was just ignorant and very naiveâhe took the Gospels on face value instead of subjecting them to literary analysis. So he basically was fooled by the Roman war propaganda, just the way the Romans intended. And he isnât alone by a long way.
As for the Talmud, that was written 200 years later, so that alone makes it irrelevant as evidence. But traditionally Jews have rightly argued, for instance at the 13th and 14th century Disputations, that these were references to someone else who lived at another period of time, so no they are not evidence of a historical Jesus in the first century.
BBY... So is there any historical evidence for the existence of Jesus?
JH...There is no independent historical or archaeological evidence whatsoever for the existence of the Jesus figure described in the gospels. Quite to the contrary. There is a vast amount of evidence showing that Jesus was created entirely as a literary character and he was deliberately created for malicious anti-Semitic reasons. 70% of this character was created by midrash on traditional stories, 10% by re-using material on Cynic philosophers, and 20% by drawing on events in the Roman military campaign of Titus Caesar from the years 66-70CE , as Joseph Atwill shows in his book Caesarâs Messiah. In fact Atwill shows that what the church has always proclaimed as the biggest piece of historical evidence for the existence of Jesusâsomething called the Testimonium Flavinianumâis essentially a confession by the Flavian emperors that they created the whole thing as a fraud to deceive the Jews.
BBY... What were the Flavian Emperors trying to accomplish by inventing Jesus as a literary character ?
JH... The Romansâ priority was to calm down the Middle East and to make the Jews pay taxes and to make the Jews worship Caesar as Lord. They did this by taking over the name of one of the local Hebrew religious figures namely the âmessiahââand using it as a disguise for a literary account of Caesar that lay underneath. It was exactly the same strategy that the Romans used throughout the Empire, to disguise Caesar as a local god. That was the way the Caesar cult worked, and it was the Caesar cult that united the Empire.
BBY... So after the Jewish war in 70CE the Romans had burned all the Torahs they could find, and they wanted to destroy Judaism. They decided to create a replacement for the Torah, which would teach Jews to live by Roman values. Is that what happened?
JH... Yes pretty much. They were trying to create a comic cartoon version of the Torah.
You mentioned Roman values. The Gospels teach Jews to pay taxes, to honor Caesar, to give up on laws like circumcision, give up on the Mosaic Law, to be obedient and not to fight enemies, to work on the Sabbath and help the Roman occupying army by carrying their backpacks twice as far as the law required. Whereas a traditional Jewish text would talk about freeing slaves and prisoners, the gospel texts never talk about freeing slaves---because Rome was a slave-based society. And they talk about visiting prisoners and feeding them in order to save the State moneyânothing about freeing them. It is a Gospel of oppression, slavery and death, and its focus constantly reminds us of Romeâs expertiseâas cross builders and as torturers. Creating a fake Jewish messiah to instruct the Jews to submit to Rome in all these ways was highly comic from a Roman point of view.
BBY... Why were the Romans replacing the Torah with a Gospel? Why did they call it by that name?
JH... The word Gospel in Greek is Evangelion. It literally means âgood news of military victoryâ. Nobody until recently has been able to explain this. But now the reason is obvious. My colleague Joe Atwill in his book Caesarâs Messiah shows that all the key events in the life of Jesus are literary satires of Roman battles in their campaign in Judea. Battles which the Jews lost. So the âgood news of military victoryâ refers to the fact that the Romans won these battles and have created literary satires of them, and are going to humiliate the Jews by educating them to believe that their defeats are âgood newsâ. That was the Roman idea of RevengeâSeneca writes about it. The Romans were determined that the Gospels would humiliate the Jews and force them to accept a false version of their own history. It was part of the Roman take-over of Jewish culture.
BBY... And the reason why it was all done covertly?
JH... It was all a trick. A deception. The Romans had tried for a hundred years or more to try to get the Jews explicitly to worship Caesar. The emperor Caligula for instance had even tried putting his statue in the Temple. The Jews would rather die first. That was why the Romans knew they couldnât do it overtly, and instead had to do it covertly by creating something that appeared on the surface to look like a Jewish document. It was a way of tricking the Jews into accepting these teachings by making the Gospel appear to be a genuine record of a historic religious leader 40 years before. So what they couldnât do directly the Romans would do by deception. The Romans were good at writing false histories. There are many other examples of it. They found it amusing. All effective propaganda works by deception and concealing its true authorship. Just look around today, the world is full of it. The Gospels are fake news, and fake history, only 2000 years old.
BBY... So how did the Romans create this replacement Torah?
JH... The first version that the Romans created is what we know today as the Gospel of Matthew . This is the largest book of the Christian New Testament . According to something that Bible scholars call the âtwo document hypothesisââon which there is amazing work done by Professor Peabody and the International Institute for Gospel studies-- this was the first of the New Testament Gospels to be written. I agree with that view, although there was an even earlier draft version.
BBY... What is the draft version?
JH... It is known as the Gospel of Peter and it is clearly set in the year 70CE because Jerusalem is burning in the background. It is also much more clearly a fantastic satire because there is a mile high talking cross that follows people around. But then the Romans decided to make it more realistic instead.
BBY... So what is the Gospel of Matthew exactly ? How was it composed?
JH... The Gospel of Matthew is the most anti-Semitic document ever created because it was deliberately written as a comic parody of the Torah. We know it was written as a replacement Torah for two reasons; firstly because of its content and secondly because of its structure. Both of these things show that Matthew was written not as real history but as a literary parody of the Torah. Which do you want to deal with first?
BBY... Lets start with Matthewâs structure. You gave a technical talk at the Society of Biblical Literature a couple of years ago announcing your new discovery of the structure of Matthew. Can you just give us an overview of what you have found?
JH... It has long been known that the Gospel of Matthew is divided into 5 books just like the books of the Torah. It starts with an account like that of Genesis, moves on to an account like that of Exodus and another like Numbers , then the bulk of the Gospel is like the Book of Deuteronomy, and it concludes with a piece that is like Leviticus. So it is like the Torah except the order of the books is different. My work was to point out some unrecognized features that finally proved how the Romans had written it as a deliberate parody. We can run through a couple of books as examples if you like.
BBY... OK. Lets take Devarim or Deuteronomy . In what way was Matthew was based on that?
JH... The entire central part of Gospel of Matthew is taken up by a parody of Deuteronomy, which is known as Sefer Devarim from its initial phrase âthese are the Wordsâ. This is similar to Matthewâs initial phrase in chapter 4 v.17 âfrom that time forth Jesus began to say these Wordsâ. Like the five speeches by Moses in Deuteronomy, it is organized around a series of five great teachings given on a mountain, each of which concludes with a very formal rhetorical ending.
BBY... Then the last part of Matthew was based, you say on Va-yikra the Book of Leviticus ?
JH... Yes it was also a literary parody. My great teacher the English anthropologist Mary Douglas showed in her book on Leviticus that the different chapters move in succession around the walls of the courtyard of the Tabernacle before approaching the Ark, and there are two episodes of blasphemyâone the sons of Aaron in front of the door, and the other the account of the blasphemer in front of the curtain in chapter 24. Well the last part of Matthew moves around the Temple in exactly the same way and Jesus is twice accused of blasphemy at the equivalent places in front of the entrance ways. This is absolute definite proof that the entire account in the gospel is a literary anti semitic joke.Â
BBY... Well all these similarities in structure certainly seem show that the Gospel of Matthew was written as a comic imitation of the Torah. But you are saying there are similarities in content as well. Can you give an example?
JH... The best example is Moses, which is very well known. Dale Allison has a good book on this. The writers of the gospel took all the key events in the life of Moses, as described in the Torah, and then created satirical equivalents of them to invent the fictional life of Jesus. The sequence of events even appears in exactly the same order. Then they added in another dozen events from the campaign in Judea by the Emperor Titus as well, to show who the true savior of Israel was.
BBY...So that is the Gospel of Matthew. You have shown that it is all a fake version of the Torah. But what about the other Gospels, Mark and Luke?
JH... They are also entirely literary creations and they arenât independent documents. On the contrary they are basically rewritings of Matthew according to different literary styles. Mark is a rewriting of Matthewâs gospel to make it look like a Greek epic of Homerâs. Luke is a rewriting of Matthew to make it like a Roman epic, like Virgilâs Aeneid. They were targeted on the Jews in the Diaspora, so they used a different literary style to be more acceptable.
BBY... OK . We have talked so far about the gospels at a top level. Now I want to get into much more detail on two particular bits of the Gospel story that most Jews wonder about. The first question is whether the Gospel presents Jesus as an equivalent to the Akedah, the binding of Isaac.
JH... As you know the Akedah appears in the Torah in Genesis 22. Originally, in the equivalent passage in Matthew 1.1-2.12 which is the passage about the baptism of Jesus in the river Jordan in the wilderness there is nothing like the Akedah. The Romans forgot to include it first time round.
But when Mark re-writes the second editionâyes you are correct--- Mark remodels Matthewâs story of the wilderness to provide a version of the Akedah. In Matthewâs original account of the baptism there was just a voice and the heavens are described as opening. But Mark doesnât use the word opening, instead he uses the word splitting schizo (Mk 1;10). Then he adds in the words âand it happenedâ (Mk 1;9) to begin the story and tells the reader specifically that Jesus âsawâ this splitting of the heavens.
Mark has taken his wording straight from the story of the Akedah given in Greek in the Septuagint. This also begins with those words âand it happenedâ, Abraham âsplitâ schizo wood for the sacrificial fire, a voice called out âfrom heavenâ (Gen 22;11,15), and Abraham named the place âthe Lord will seeâ (Gen 22;14). So Mark creates several different comic parallels in order to present Jesus as a replacement for Isaac. What was the second question?
BBY... You have just described how the baptism story in Markâs Gospel was re-written as a sort of parody of the Akedah. Many Jews will want to know whether the account of the crucifixion of Jesus was also created as a literary parallel to the Akedah?
JH... Again there is nothing about the Akedah in the first edition of the story in Matthew. But when Mark did his rewriting of Matthewâs crucifixion story yes he added in elements of the Akedah into the crucifixion story as well. But he did so in a very subtle way that also adds in Roman anti-semitic humour.
In Torah Isaac of course had two sons, Esau the red haired, and Jacob who was Israel the soldier of God. You remember how Isaac carries the wood to the altar. In Matthewâs crucifixion account there was a man who carried the wood of the crossâwho is called Simon of Cyrene. So this act of carrying wood makes Simon a bit like Isaac.
The author of Mark then makes him even more like Isaac, by giving him a son Rufus the red haired and Alexander which means âprotector of mankindâ. Its in Mark 15;21. This is just Roman humor since these are the names of two Roman generals. During the Jewish War Rufus was the Roman general who helped crucify the true Jewish messiah and Tiberius Alexander was the other general who crucified the sons of the freedom fighter Judas.
So the Roman generals who crucified the Jews are being given cameo appearances in this epic as Esau and Jacob-Israel. Instead of featuring Israel the soldier of God the gospel features Tiberius Alexander the Roman general who was known for slaughtering Jews in Alexandria. The Romans thought this hillariously funny. That is why the Gospels are the most anti-Semitic documents ever written.
Then a generation after the gospels were written a whole secondary literature of commentaries sprung up like the Epistle of Barnabas written which tried to spell out the message and claimed that in the crucifixion, Jesus offered âthe vessel of his spirit as a sacrifice for our sins, in order that the type established in Isaac, who was offered upon the altar, might be fulfilledâ.
BBY... So now that it has been discovered what the Gospels really are, what should Jews be doing about it?
JH...It's not for me to say, but now that we know that the Gospels are a comic parody of Judaism created by the man who destroyed Yerushalyim to make people worship him in a concealed Caesar cult, we cannot just stand by and do nothing. The religion that the Emperor Titus created continues to poison and devastate our world 2000 years later. We have the ethical and moral responsibility to learn how to read these ancient texts, to understand what they are, and to use our modern media to make sure that the truth is known, to prevent further damage to our world. So what do we have to do? go, study, ask questions and teach the truth.
BBY.. That is a very powerful statement. Do you think that the recent alliances that the Jews have made with many Christians movements will deteriorate as a result of this knowledge?
JH...It's not really for me to say, but I hope that Jews and Christians together will study these ancient texts intelligently and come to a decision on what to do about them that is not based on ignorantly mis-interpreting ancient Roman war propaganda.
                   References
C. Allison The New Moses:A Matthean Typology (1993).
Joseph Atwill Caesarâs Messiah (2005).
Benjamin W. Bacon, Studies in Matthew (1930).
David R Bauer The Structure of Matthewâs Gospel (1988).
Mary Douglas Leviticus as Literature (1999).
W.Farmer, D.Dungan, A. McNicol, D Peabody and P. Shuler â Narrative Outline of the Markan Composition According to the Two Gospel Hypothesisâ in SBL Seminar Papers (1990) pp 212-39
John Hudson âThe Structure of Matthewâ conference paper, abstract at
http://www.jcu.edu/bible/eglbs/Archives/20...NTabstracts.htm
Allan J. McNicol with David L, Dungan and David B. Peabody Beyond the Q Impasse Lukeâs Use of Matthew: A Demonstration by the Research team of the International Institute for Gospel Studies (1996).
David Peabody One Gospel From Two; Markâs Use of Matthew and Luke (2002).
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif' /><!--endemo-->
