The book is called “The New Testament Sliced And Diced.”

Most people who come out swinging against Christianity and are not pushing an alternate religion are atheists or agnostics.

I’m a Jew.

We’ve been at this for 1,800 years.

The first guy we know of who read what was the New Testament as it stood was Meir, a famous sage. This was a few years before the Bar-Kokhba War against the Romans which broke out in 132 CE. Meir gave the book the name by which it has been known among Jews ever since: “Aven Gilyon.” A modern translation of that would be “Worthless
Tripe.”

The next guy whose extensive comments are recorded was called Trypho, about 50 years later. He listened to what an acquaintance who apparently had converted to Christianity had to say and concluded: “Do you realize that you are out of your mind?”

A comedy which was read down through the centuries appeared around that time about a Roman soldier named Panthera. He was identified as the true father of the protagonist. Prior to WWI a grave was found in Germany of an archer named Panthera who had been stationed at Sidon at the time in question. At least the name was not pulled out of a hat.

In the New Testament, written in Greek, the protagonist is called Iesous. He has no name in Hebrew. The Indians call him “Yeshu” in Hindi. That’s the name that was picked up in  Israel. Apparently it’s a sobriquet for Krishna and was known in Egypt where there were many Hindus and Buddhists. The Jews first heard of Yeshu there.

In my book I go through the New Testament and tell where the writers scalped the elements for their book. Petra was the gatekeeper of heaven among the ancient Egyptians and he was just pasted in. In Greek “Petra” is a feminine name so they had to go to “Petros,” but they didn’t entirely erase Petra and this has caused much confusion ever
since. The father god is Zervan, out of Iran. You can identify gods by their images. It’s a simple and surefire process.

It sounds as if Christians won’t like this book. What have you got against them? Why pick this fight?

Your question “why pick this fight?” trivializes the subject.

Christianity was spread everywhere on the principle of “convert or die.” Most people did in Europe after long periods of butchery but some refused such as original Prussians who  were annihilated in a 60-year campaign. The murdered Jews totalled 3.5 million. In Switzerland for example the mobs just went door to door throughout the land and killed every one. In the end the Jews were the last people standing in Europe who had not  buckled under.

But that’s history and that’s not what I “have against Christianity.”

Israel is not obligated to any kind of political system. The decision is up to the people. They started out with a kind of structured anarchy, which I think was the best and would have gone naturally to democracy. They lost their nerve and brought in monarchy. But this was a limited monarchy, unlike say Egypt and most; the king was not above the law.

The Christians come along with a belief that Israel, our country, should have an absolute monarch above the law. They have as much right as Khrushchev had in his statement to the Americans “we will bury you.” That’s the crassest form of cultural imperialism. The claim is based on the New Testament and that’s why I looked at the book with the question: where did they get off with this?

Any proposal, and Israel is a democracy so anyone can form a party and push for anything, to establish an absolute monarchy and abolish democracy would have to go a referendum and it would never pass, not now, not in a million years. So what is the point?

So it’s not that you’re just trying to make Christians angry?

Feelings is the last thing I’m looking to stir up. But if anyone is angry and thinks I have erred in any way, let me know. I will correct any factual errors.

Since this book is obviously not aimed at Christians, who is it aimed at?

This will appeal to the curious, not the committed.

Complete this sentence for us: if you like _________________, you’ll love this book.
John M. Robertson.

Robertson, also known as a scholar on Shakespeare, was one of a group of debunkers who flourished about a century ago.

Did you have to do a lot of scholarship of your own for this book?

I’ll go back to the 50s in Canada. I was a lousy student but I had a flair for writing which I discovered doing lyrics for our rock ‘n’ roll group.

By the time I drifted into university I had some vague notion of becoming a playwright. Then I read a book “If This Is Man” by Primo Levi and discovered the Holocaust.

I knew all about war. That’s all we as kids talked about growing up, not hockey believe it or not. There had been three, one after the other, and we were being prepared how to survive another one. I still recall, if memory serves me correctly, that you can eat chicken two weeks after the bomb falls.

The Holocaust was not a war, it was simple mass murder of non-combatants. It made no sense to me. I started to read on tract and branched into many subjects. I picked up on Christianity en passant. I made my living as a journalist.

I don’t think I would have ever have written a book had not the Internet come along. I had done some fairly long items as series in newspapers or magazine articles but I simply looked at a book as a waste of time. You needed to find a publisher and that took years and even then you might get 500 copies printed without any serious promotion. When it become possible to self-publish I said I’ll give it a shot. I already had on my computer an enormous store of files on every subject so I could turn the non-fiction around pretty fast. In this last year I’ve put up nine books (one fiction).

Tell us a little about your other books.

I did an earlier book on Christianity entitled “The Jesus Myth: A Quick Study.”

I’ve also waded into Islam in a book entitled “Two Jewish heroines and the triple moon god.”

Since you’ve studied Christianity, Islam and Judaism, we’d love to hear your opinion on the prospect of peace between the three religions.

I think peace is made between peoples who want it regardless of their religion. I live in Israel now and we’ve already taken out nuclear bomb plants, one in early development, in Iraq and Syria. We may have to do another one, in Iran. Nuclear proliferation threatens everyone because once you have fissionable material, and the more countries able to produce bombs the more of this will be around at least for sale, the greater the chance of it being used. Differences in religion, race, language, culture, or class are often used for pretexts for war, but they don’t explain the root cause. The ancient Greeks were the same in religion, race, language, culture, and class, yet they never stopped making war on one another.

Tell us a little more about yourself.

I am Canadian, 71, journalist by trade, now resident in Israel.

My specialty was or is sh*t-disturbing.

One example. In my home province of New Brunswick there was annual forest spraying. All the dailies were owned by the largest owner of pulp mills in the province. Information on the detrimental effects of the spraying was suppressed.

I was editor of a weekly and we ran a campaign mainly to get the facts out. There were people complaining of children getting sick and dying after being exposed to the spray and I even had a farm couple who lost their milk quota because their 10 cows were sprayed, got very sick, and could no longer give milk. Everyone in authority told them that they were crazy, that the spray was “safe.”

The problem with running campaigns is that people shut off. They’ve heard it all before and after a while there is not much more new that you can say.

What to do? This is before the Internet. The pesticides were coming from Japan. I wrote an open letter to Emperor Hirohito. It got huge play in Japan. Local people grabbed the paper to see what the editor said to the emperor. It was only what I saying all along, but now people were reading every word avidly.

Have you got a website where we can keep up with your work?

https://sites.google.com/site/2inimeg/.

What’s next?

I’m now working on another book of fiction. It’s a satire on the near-death experience.