To reconstruct 2nd century cultural literature context of Roman satire in Early Christian texts, it is useful to form a hypothesis that the Jesus character was invented by a pedophile priest in a mystery cult, struggling with moral complexity.
The main purpose of this project is to reconstruct historical context of the literature produced during the 2nd century of Early Christians. This means, to the best of our scientific knowledge, explaining how it makes sense for people to write such texts.
A difficult part of explaining Early Christian texts, is that they contain themes around sexual abusive behavior such as rape and nakedness in public (Thecla), a boy sneaking into women's bath (Gospel of Andrew) and an incesteous mother (both Paul's letters and Gospel of Andrew).
The recent works by Carl A. P. Ruck and Ammon Hillman combines the scientific evidence of mystery cults in the ancient world with Early Christianity. This involves the use of entheogens mixed with wine in eucharist rituals and extracting semen from young boys for use as a drug that functions as an anesthesia. Obviously, this brings a lot of controversy to the scholarly debate about Early Christianity.
However, there is a disconnect between what these hypotheses bring to the table and the motivation for actually writing these texts. How can we explain that people would even write something like this, given that these hypotheses are true?
The idea is that our concept of a savior figure in modern times is in contradiction with the actual concept of a savior figure in the ancient world. Before Christianity became associated with authority in the Roman empire, the savior figure acted as a literary tool for psychological self-discovery, where the goal is to initiate the person, the one to be saved, into adulthood and the moral complexity of the adult mental world. With other words, "to be saved" in this context takes on the meaning of being saved from mental castration and brain washing by cult personalities. This means, the savior figure might not necessarily be a model role character, but a tragic anti-hero to bring about moral reflection. Jesus evolves as a character in the cultural background that uses initiation in mystery cults with help from a tragic anti-hero.
- The tragic anti-hero as savior figure - from the danger of mental castration
- Jesus as a magic healer - yet being an child abuser - reflecting the complex role of priests in mystery cults
- Writing about love as something both beautiful and dangerous
- Jesus' jealousy of the poor - the abuser's mental world
- Crucifixion as symbolizing self-hate and redemption
- Resurrection as symbolizing the magnificent nature of human beings despite all flaws
- Using literary works as a form of confession of sins and psychological journey - a profile of the pedophile priest
Mental castration is a terminology in psychology when a person is prevented from reaching adulthood by some obstacle. It refers to undeveloped genitals, as a metaphor for some mental obstacle that prevents the person from functioning and fitting in society as an adult. Often, this is connected to child abuse that the patient experienced in relation to some figure with authority, leading to self-hate and psychological projection of flaws toward other people around them, that might result is complexes around authority roles and social control.
To heal the patient, ancient healers might have used a character that is contrasted with the stereotypical divine deity, that functions as an tragic anti-hero going through phases of psychological reflection, confession, death and rebirth. Since the ancient world is an extremely violent place, the need for psychological treatment was immense. A lot of priests and priestesses, or traveling healers or magicians, might have been attracted to their occupation by previously personally experiencing abuse and receiving help from others. This could have awakened the desire to bring this form of mental medicine to other people.
One example of a savior figure from the ancient world that functioned as a tragic anti-hero, is Medea. She is the granddaughter of Helios (the sun) and a priestess of Hecate (the moon). Medea is represented astronomically as the planet Venus, due to its complex ascending and descending orbit in the sky. Yet she is fully a mortal human being, that after helping her husband to power, was betrayed and became known for killing her own children in revenge.
Medea helped people understand how they are born into this world, vulnerable and naked, receiving everything they have from the society around them, symbolized by her divine ancestry from Helios and occupation as a priestess for Hecate.
Despite receiving valuable gifts and riches due to our inheritance, humans often choose to spend their resources in a selfish and corruptive way. This is an essential part of the adult mental world, where the social complexities can simply not be communicated in the language of the eternal divine, but as an inheritance or upbringing as a child without understanding the source of this wealth and knowledge.
The wealth and knowledge that humans accumulate, often comes from exploiting and abusing other people. A child that grows up without being confronted with this issue, becomes "mentally castrated", in the way that they do not have the tools to navigate the complex social landscape of adulthood. The child becomes an easy prey for pedophile authority figures, scammers and cult personalities.
At the surface of ancient religions, there are heroic figures and virtuous deities, that inspire children toward greatness and deeds. However, below the surface, there are tragic figures to help and heal people when they are at their lowest. Without the tragic figures, children can not reach adulthood and achieve greatness.
So, the tragic anti-hero as savior figure serves an important part in the initiation of mystery cults. This is a process that is meant to last for some years, after which the person is accepted in various social circles.
Mental castration (or: more commonly known today as trolling), destroys the social life of adulthood. This was considered a childhood desease in the ancient world, that when a person did not leave it behind when becoming an adult, became viewed as, metaphorically speaking: Losing the functioning of their genitals.
2. Jesus as a magic healer - yet being an child abuser - reflecting the complex role of priests in mystery cults
Child abuse in religion was not new at the time when Early Christianity evolved. It is naive to believe that even in the origin of Christianity, these issues were not addressed.
In Late Christianity, people censor, burn and edit texts from Early Christianity to remove the trace of any inauthentic historical origin. While the topics that was written about played an important role for initiation rituals, the interest of keeping control of power of the Roman empire out-weighted the need to heal people from mental castration. This development is reflected in the art of Early Christian paintings in the catacombs, where the earliest versions demonstrate high technical skills and play with light and shadows, which is was how these painting was meant to be experienced, toward more cartoonish and stylistic paintings with more symbolic emphasis instead of an emerging experience. People were gradually becoming more and more mentally castrated and could not reproduce the earlier art forms.
This is why it becomes difficult to reconstruct Jesus as he was as savior figure over time. Jesus was not originally meant to be presented in art as this cartoonish, childish and ethical one-dimensional character. He was a magician and healer, yet also full of conflicting emotions. Jesus both descends for the divine, yet also can not help himself from abusing people using his powers.
Jesus is not merely perceived as a criminal by the law. He knows that what he is doing is wrong, yet he can not help himself. Despite having the power to heal others, when it comes to curing his complex mental world, Jesus is as helpless as any child.
The guilt Jesus feels becomes a heavier and heavier burden for him over time. He does not know any way out and neither have the courage to take his own life. So, Jesus waits for his time to come, the moment when other people make the choice for him.
This puts the Jesus character in a completely different light, where he plays a role for the person being initiated, as confronting the complex psychological issues of authority, guilt and abuse. If people could not stand these teachings, then they could not enter the social circles that used initiation as a requirement. Such people were also probably too embarrassed to reveal these teachings to others if they failed, to not oust themselves.
Still, this did not mean that the priests in mystery cults were without such human flaws. On the contrary, becoming a priest might be a way for abusers to hide behind a mask and find pray easily. It is a well known problem even today, that priests abuse children, despite efforts to filter these people out, because the filtering process makes people more trusting toward priests. The trust of people is precisely what pedophile priests use to find opportunity to live out their desires.
Once a person becomes a priest in a mystery cult, any sign of weakness produces mistrust in the entire initiation process. Therefore, the mystery cult seeks to further heal the person internally through demanding self-reflection in literatury work, which is how we get many of the texts in Early Christianity.
The Jesus character might have been invented as part of a text that a pedophile priest writes to reflect over his sins.
Love is not a simple thing that is one-sided positive for other people. An abuser is often somebody that loves others and at the same time is afraid of giving the loved ones more control, because the abuser is afraid of being left alone. Once abuse has happened in a relationship, there is no way back for the abuser. There are only three options for the abuser: To ask for forgiveness, ignore it and hope it goes over, or to become even more abusive.
In some cases, the abuser kills the person they love the most, to avoid rest of society figure out about the abuse.
This is why Early Christianity puts to much weight on the idea of receiving forgiveness. Forgiveness of sin is particularly important for people with abusive tendencies. Without forgiveness, the abuser loses control over their social life.
In many religions, there is no requirement that worshippers ought to love the deity they worship. Loving Jesus is a particular phenomena for Christianity, but it also happens in other religions. Yet, a common feature of cults is that they are ruled by some authority figure that the people in the cult are supposed to love.
The fact that the language people use in these Early Christian cults toward their leader overlaps with the language describing their deity, is a sign of abuse happening behind the scences, particularly the love between children and a male savior figure. In Christianity, it is not like with Santa Claus where children love the gifts that Santa brings, but they are expected to love Jesus back without any conditions, because they are told that Jesus loves them, also without conditions. However, children do not receive physical proof of this love. It has to be imagined as a personal relationship with an invisible person.
So, when a child is abused by a priest, they imagine the priest having the same loving relationship to an invisible person, that they both share as a love object. The abuse comes as a shock, because the mental model of a child is like a triangle, where two sides show love, yet they experience abuse along the third side. This makes the child question their own love for Jesus and creates fear for ousting the abuser in public.
This is how pedophiles lure children in: They present love as something one-sided positive and pure, while looking out for opportunities and easy victims that do not have social status enough to tell others. Keep in mind that despite the well-known fact of abuse in Christian churches, most abuse happens without the child reporting it to anyone else. The evidence might look like a mountain, but it is just the tip of the iceberg.
In extreme cults, it is common that people practice "love bombing". This is a form of love where a person is bombarded with affection. It often creates an addiction for love which the person later can not satisfy. When the person exits the group, they are cut off from communicating with other members, which feels as a threat to the people inside the group that are doubting their conviction.
When cults go to the extreme, displaying an affection of love in public can even mean a threat. For example, when somebody higher up in status says "please" it can be a code for an order that has to be fulfilled without hesitation or reflection.
Dangerous love is when love as a language becomes one and the same as the abuser's language. This makes it impossible for members to imagine a world outside the group with love in it. Love in this sense can be perceived as something incredibly beautiful by members of the cult, yet at the same time mean something dangerous.
Jesus as a tragic anti-hero is gifted with powers to perform miracles and healing people. Despite having this power, Jesus struggles with human flaws and dark traits. This guilt from living this way, with the contrast between light and dark, makes Jesus jealous of the poor and powerless.
This is part of the abuser's mental world, that sees the victim's inner world as desirable. The abuser knows they can not achieve such peace of mind on their own, so the abuser instead seek to destroy the peace of others. At least, according to the logic of the abuser, they can bring other people down to their own level.
Jesus tells others that they will get tortured for eternity for sinning against him.
For Justin Martyr living the 2nd century, it was Jesus and not Satan, that tortured people for eternity. In early paintings of Jesus he is depicted with one half face as we know him in later art, but the other half face showing anger:
So, Jesus in Early Christianity is not the non-dualistic deity that he became in Late Christianity. In Early Christianity, Jesus is dualistic and associated with the planet Venus (the morning star) or as "the light-bringer". Another character in the bible associated with Venus that means "the light-bringer" is Lucifer, that became associated with Satan at a later point in time.
In the beginning, Jesus might have not been intended as a character for people to admire, but as a tragic anti-hero that struggles with drug addiction and like other addicts, is being honest about his own jealousy toward ordinary people. This is why Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is inside you, because his kingdom, from above that he inherits, is not the one that he truly desires.
Jesus says "blessed are the meek, because they will inherit the earth", not because it is a divine promise, but because he expresses his jealousy and love for the peace of mind that ordinary people have. His desire for this peace is so strong that if you let him get close to you, then he is going to destroy you. This process is described as thieves breaking into the kingdom of heaven to rob it of its treasures. Jesus will say things like eternal torture is awaiting in the afterlife to hurt and bring people out of balance.
People reading these texts in the beginning know that it is a fictional character, which is meant to make you reflect on abusive behavior and its complexities. Otherwise, who would even think about eternal torture?
All the guilt that Jesus carries reaches a climax where he gets judged, whipped and crucified for his crimes. This represents the self-destructive tendency that people desire when they feel guilt, but without daring to take the initiative themselves. They are waiting for society to figure out the truth.
While Jesus fears his fate, he is also not trying to flee from it. By staying nearby the place of judgement, where he can be discovered, he is living out the excitement of getting away with doing something wrong, yet at the same time, looking forward and fearing the outcome.
When the judgement comes, it comes as a relief, because all the guilt that Jesus carried, is coming to an end. He is finally getting saved from himself.
It is a complex psychological process, where redemption is perceived through the lens of one's own death. This is why Early Christians say they are crucified with Jesus, because this death is the death of their ego, that carries the guilt of sins. Later, this was interpreted as Jesus carrying all the sins of mankind, but Early Christians believe that it is only through Jesus' death they can personally be saved. Without this death being a personal process, it has no value. Just like you can not go into therapy on behalf for somebody else.
Nothing about this says that Jesus ought to be a perfect human being. On the contrary, many Early Christians believe that it is vital for Jesus to be both from divine origin and also fully human. This includes the kind of human flaws that most of society do not want to be associated with.
The language used here bends the mental landscape of people to accept living with more abuse. It was a successful receipt in the sense that pedophilia by priests is covered up by churches in many cases, where in the ancient world people, who were commonly loving each other across the spectrum of genders, for certain relationships such as between an adult and young child or a mother with her child, they would get a death penalty. People were actually put to trial and executed for similar crimes that some churches today gloss over. This speaks greatly of how transformative Christianity was to how people perceive justice over time.
For rights of woman and children, it was a disaster that would echo in centuries after these stories were first told. Instead of persecuting abuse performed by priests, society turned against women (and you can guess why). Women, taking responsibility for raising children, were the most likely people to report abuse.
Jesus despite his divine powers has human flaws and carries an immense amount of guilt, because he can not control himself from abusing other people. He struggles sleeping (having no place to rest his head) and takes walks in the dark, due to being afraid to getting caught. Death is perceived as the end for Jesus, but he did not take into account his divine heritage.
The divine powers resurrects Jesus from the dead. At this point, Jesus gives up and his intense love for people that trigger his abusive behavior, is moving emotionally behind a wall, where the divine heritage is finally accepted by Jesus. Jesus does not even want a woman to touch him, because he is not yet to ascend toward heaven. While accepting his destiny as a divine heir, Jesus is still not trusting himself around others.
This is a metaphor for despite all the flaws that human have, we are magnificent creatures. Like Jesus or Medea are from divine origin, we are born into a world of cultural knowledge and this culture, combined with human nature, puts us back on the feet. The gifts that one receives can feel like a contrast to the flaws and egotism of people. Yet, in the end, even death can not hold us down. Humanity keeps thriving, despite of facing staggering difficulties.
This concludes the initiation ritual. Jesus, being experienced in carrying the guilt of sin, forgives all people, no matter what they have done. He opens the access to salvation and says "follow me". Jesus invites his believers to follow his footsteps and participate in his death. It is because salvation is only through death, the needle eye that the camel goes through, where the rich is being saved.
While this might sound a bit like coming out of Platonic love, it reads differently when interpreting it as a pedophile priest that wants you to forgive no matter what the preist is doing to children.
7. Using literary works as a form of confession of sins and psychological journey - a profile of the pedophile priest
This work, which influenced history greatly, was possibly written by some priest that sought redemption for his pedophile behavior. It is a satirical work, which tells two stories at the same time: The complex psychology of guilt and the deception of the masses. Previously, the guilt of Jesus has been described shortly, but it is far from the whole story.
The disciples of Jesus are young men, possibly boys, who leave their parents to follow Jesus around. They have been tricked and made addictive to drugs, that only Jesus can provide. Jesus is a pirate, a child trafficker and is crucified with people receiving similar judgements on each side. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is extracting semen from a young boy, which is used as a drug that functions like an anesthesia. The technical details of how to make this drug is described by Galen, the physician of the Roman emperor. It is called a "viper" because people get thirsty from it, like when they get bitten by snakes. Jesus dies on the cross after receiving the antidote shortly before and is taken down and buried. Normally, crucifixion takes several days where people die from over-exhaustion of the difficulty of breathing. However, since it is the Passover, Jesus' body is taken down the same day, believing he is dead, due to the drug.
The poison brings people to the edge of death and they need an antidote to be brought back. Since Jesus receives the antidote too late, it is unsure whether he survives or not. The missing body is a traditional theme in Hellenistic translation fables, where one solution is that Jesus could have woken up from the antidote, or somebody could have taken his body and buried it elsewhere. Hellenistic translation fables are meant to honor an important character and present the person as divinized.
In this text, the priest is confessing his own desires and expressing his fears of being discovered. He expresses love to people of a typical way of an abuser, but more than anything (which is also typical of an abuser): He wants to be loved back. Maybe this priest writes this text exploring his own emotions and feelings, keeping his pedophilia in secret, or it could be a text that others pushes him to write, as a redemption of something he has done. A such text might have been written as a story with elements to cover up the meaning for outsiders. However, the element of satire and medicine knowledge could be a way to make the punishment lighter, or perhaps as a self-explorative story.
The complex connections between Sybillist oracles, Simonianism and early influential Christians, suggests that this story might have been written by a Simonian that breaks away to teach about Jesus, which is a character heavily based on sayings by oracles and possibly sections from Josephus' historical works. Perhaps somebody were caught doing something and need to start over, since they are no longer accepted in the Simonian community. It is kind of like when losing a license to teach, which was how these people made a living. This might explain the hostile tension between Samaritans and Jews in the story. They do not go well together because the author has made enemies among the Simonians.
Speculatively, this might also explain why Pliny the Younger reports people who says they were Christians a few years back, but no longer believe what they were taught. Perhaps these ex-Christians figured out the truth about the controversy behind the story from Simonians.
Early Christianity stays under the rader during early 2nd century, but is brought into light when Marcion of Sinope, a wealthy corn trader for the Roman army, joins a Simonian school in Rome (which was a large sect at the time), but hears about Jesus, possibly for the first time. He wants a religion similar to Simonianism, but without Simon, due to the Bar Kokhba revolt, to ease his trading relationships with the Romans. Marcion invests in the Jesus sect, thinking he can buy the movement and releases his own cannon. The reason Marcion does not invest in Simonianism, is because the sect is too huge for him to buy influence. This triggers a controversy among Early Christians that disagree about how to deal with Marcionism. Marcion of Sinope is accused of buying the Holy spirit, which gets turned upside down, and the savior figure of Simonianism, Simon Magus, is accused of the same thing in Acts of The Apostles.
This could explain Acts of The Apostles as a text written in defense of Marcion of Sinope, which forges history to make the Jesus sect seem like an authentic movement. It could also explain how this sect is small at the beginning on the 2nd century. There are just a few priests that are dropping out of Simonianism after being caught in pedophilia, and people can read between the lines, plus rumors, to see the abusive language. Early Christianity with Jesus as a savior figure does not get traction before money gets involved. After this point, there is an extreme amount of forged texts and fake history produced by Early Christians.
Overall, this also explains the mess of Early Christianity during the 2nd century. Compared to other religions, e.g. Buddhism, Early Christianity is extremely messy and influential people who seem to deliberately try to mess it up further.