World-class historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson joins Jillian Michaels on her podcast.
JILLIAN MICHAELS, HOST: And then the message, you’ve got to remember that the message to— I thought we didn’t even know this guy, this is going to infuriate people and I’m so sorry and I stay out of it, but I thought we weren’t even really sure whether or not Jesus existed and the apostles wrote this stuff hundreds of years ago.
HANSON: The Romans knew, we have Roman documents completely separate from religion, that he was a magnetic, he was a romantic, wonderful person to the people who knew him and he had staged a revolution and that presented a problem in this troublesome province. And how the Romans ran Judea, as they ran everything, they had client kings, Herod. So they would go to the Jews or the Gaul, anybody, and say, you’re going to be the regent here, this is the protocol, we have Roman legions to keep you in line, but we want this, and it’s basically a question of taxes, control, and in exchange for that we give you roads and aqueducts and habeas corpus and civilization. And that was the deal. So in Judea—
MICHAELS: This sounds like the way, by the way, that we go into the developing world.
HANSON: Yes. And so there were regent kings and then you always had a provincial Roman official, like Pilate, who had a temporary, you know, assignment and he was the ultimate judge. So his whole point was, I don’t want to get into this stuff between this new offshoot of Judaism called Christianity and this guy Jesus and the Orthodox, but I do know, I don’t know what he did, but I know that it’s troublesome.
He’s got a new religion and unfortunately it’s turned the other cheek, brotherhood of man, blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor, that’s not Roman. We have a Roman military ethos that the strong inherit the earth and if an enemy offends you, you hit him twice. And this guy is preaching something very different.
And oh, by the way, the local Orthodox, he doesn’t like him either. So we’ll just wash my hands of it and say, how do we kill two birds with one stone, i.e. not have them angry at us and not have this revolutionary new sect. So what we’ll do is we’ll get Pilate and he’ll say, well, I washed my hands of it, but since these guys think he’s guilty, I’ll let him kill him and then we’ll blame them.
But at the same time with the apostles and the next two generations, they were being killed systematically in Rome by Romans that had nothing to do with Jews. Right. Yeah.
So when anybody says that the Jews killed Jesus, it’s more like the Romans wanted a quiet province and they did not like Jesus and what he represented was anti-Roman. It was a popular revolt they thought could happen. And there was an orthodoxy that they had come to terms with and used them to keep the peace.
So they said basically, well, in Judaism, in Judea, the Jewish establishment, the religious establishment doesn’t like him any more than we do. So we can get rid of him and then say the Pharisees basically did it.
MICHAELS: This is so wild. I’m sorry. I know it’s not wild for people who know this information, but I genuinely thought, okay, the Jews had the Old Testament, the Torah, and then maybe there was this guy, Jesus.
The apostles wrote stuff, but the first guy who wrote something was like 90 or so years later. We think maybe there’s some Dead Sea Scrolls kind of mentioned this guy, Jesus. But then Constantine had a, with the council of Nicaea or something like that.
HANSON: He had a vision at the Milvian Bridge that all of a sudden he saw crossing the sky and he flipped the entire empire. So under Diocletian and other recent emperors, they were completely banned and they were executed because they were too revolutionary, Christianity. Because they could deal with the Jews because the Jews, Judaism was localized in a particular area at that time and it was a particular group of people.
But Christianity said that anybody could get to heaven through the combination of what would become the New Testament and the Old Testament. And so the Romans said, you know what, this has an ability to be, it’s kind of like what Islam would do later. This can infect everybody because it’s not ethnic or anything.
It’s very dangerous. And then all of a sudden Constantine was flipped 300 years after the death of Christ. And then they took all of the Roman rituals that had been used to oppress Christianity and turned them upside down.
So when you see a cardinal with a purple and the pointed hat, that’s all from the Roman legate and provincial system. And when you look even today, the organization of the Roman Catholic Church, it mimics the divisions in the empire, they took the whole administrative system that the empire had and they flipped it over to advance and institutionalize Christianity.
