The Great Leap-Fraud

Previews and summaries are available at ajdeus.org.

The birth of Judaism

Faith is an immensely difficult topic in economics. Many authors evade it altogether and by doing so probably miss one of the most important building blocks of economic and cultural life. As a community building force, religion might have contributed to bettering the chances of survival for any given group. Because of its instinctual nature, religion can easily be abused for power, and people can easily be misled. With that purpose, frightening evil forces need to be held at bay by the gods of the men in power. Fear mongering was a strong tool in creating a faithful following and keeping them in line. The reasons why people are easily susceptible to religion, from a receiver’s point of view, is unexplored in social economics and needs fundamental research. It may unlock broad secrets about seemingly irrational decisions. Belonging to religious groups may turn out to be more rational than what atheists and agnostics might like to think. It builds a strong sense of belonging, which translates into a (false) sense of security in large communities, once they have crossed a threshold of size.

The research in ‘The Great Leap-Fraud’ focuses on the sender’s end of religion. It shows that establishing new religions is a rational, secular act with a purpose in mind. This finding wasn’t premeditated. Quite in contrary. This book was originally meant to be a chapter of a new approach to social economics where religion needed recognizing as a key force in the fight against poverty and terrorism. The trouble with the plan was that it soon became clear that the history of the Judaic religions was riddled with a chain of fraud. There are countless historians that are ridiculed for their doubts that they had dared to raise. However, while the notion of serial fraud seems to be almost universally accepted, probably too great a task and too overwhelming a risk to reputation and maybe even life would have been to start over and find out what the likely avenue might have been. If anything, this book probably stands for the overwhelming amount of material that needs to be absorbed in order to come up with a path of history through unbiased eyes.

Having stumbled over economic background information in the scripture, by chance, that didn’t make sense in the context of the narratives, sheer determination led to the surprising and frightening conclusion that both, Judaism and Christianity, rest on frauds. Unfortunately, the conclusion unavoidily leads to the thought that the version of religious history that is taught at school may be misleading, so much so that we learn little of value, if anything, from its study at the expense of the taxpayers. One of the reasons why that may be so is that we live in a world of experts, scholars that are focused on relatively narrow areas, which necessarily rely on conformed interfaces to what happened before and after their time of interest. If those interfaces are biased or follow a group think, then the study of religious history is in vain.

Despite overwhelming evidence that the words ‘Christ’ or ‘Christians’ had been used in a different context, for church historians they suffice as solid evidence for the existence of their own faith since the fictional birth of Jesus Christ. There were so many christs, messiahs, prophets and other sharlatans that it is difficult to even keep those apart that really existed. We might as well not be interested in church history because we can’t draw valid conclusions from cooked books. If it comes to history of religion, the issues of group think and bias are particularly strong, so much so that religious writers since inception of a faith had a vested interest in rewriting history according to their faith. Modern ‘experts’ of religion don’t seem to have an interest in writing it back as it inevitably leads to the collapse of their world view and belief system. Not being ‘wrong’ in religion is a matter of sheer survival. Hence, no means is too large to protect the ‘truth’. The chain of fraud is particularly strong where Theocracies had their hands on state archives – that is throughout the former territories of the Roman and Persian Empire.

Because of the scope of ‘The Great Leap-Fraud’, it is a matter of certainty that it is riddled with errors, some small, others catastrophic. However, striving for perfection would have inevitably led to these findings never being published. Having said that, the errors can be no worse than the ones of the universally accepted version of which we know that it is penetrated with fraudulent edits, rewrites, inventions, fabrications and plagiarism. The identification of heresies and their destruction is a critical element in a religion’s long term prospects, as long as it doesn’t end up on the wrong end of the equation. Hence, evidence of other beliefs, cultural treasures, books, and people must be destroyed thoroughly and without mercy. My hope is that critical ‘Renaissance’ historians with their heads full of questions will pick up the line of thought of this book and see their findings in a new light that will help them shape a much better foundation to history than what the consensus is today. It will provide for a (better) understanding of economic and social history that is desperately needed in the global fight against poverty and terrorism. Professor Andrew Rippin of the University of Victoria explained to me that “Scholarship tends to work in slow, minute steps -- and paradigm shifts are often only recognized after the fact.” The Great Leap-Fraud proposes such a shift for each of the Judaic religions, and it is far from certain that any of it will hold the test of unbiased, professional scrutiny. Our knowledge about religious history is advanced enough today that we know that much of it is based on authors that must be mistrusted, Eusebius being the prime example, should his work not have fallen to a fifth century re-edit. What we don’t know is how an alternative path would look like. One might say that we don’t dare to know because it requires an inconvenient paradigm shift. Put differently, what many professors in biblical studies have taught throughout their lives is patently false. Understandably, that notion is hard to swallow.

The here proposed version of religious history shows a single secular motif for the invention of the two Judaic faiths that makes more sense than the spiritual idea of divine intervention by a singular God that comes out of nowhere in the historical context. Here, religious history is connected to real people and Jewish ‘national’ interests. In the version of the consensus, neither the order of events nor the events themselves add up, and the best argument is that the less it makes sense the more it must have been induced by divine inspiration. The consensus of the history of Judaism and Christianity appeared out of order and full of unrelated and isolated events, so much so that only with a leap of faith can the religious history of the consensus be swallowed by students interested in the past. The most troubling thought is that we will all have learned nothing of value.

One might be tempted to believe that a rational assessment of sacred texts is off limits and can only lead to religion-bashing. Not so. Conducted with reason, it leads to a respectful assessment of the mistakes that civilizations have made with religious freedom and religious oppression, and it provides for an intellectual framework on how religious freedoms can be upheld without risking to eventually compromising all other freedoms.