00:00In the library of a theological seminary, a researcher
00:04opens the church history of Eusebius of Caesarea, the 4th century chronicler who
00:10documented the first 300 years of Christianity. He's tracing the bishops of Jerusalem, the city
00:17where the faith was born, the mother church, the apostolic see that should have the richest,
00:24deepest, most continuous tradition in all of Christendom.
00:28He finds a list, 15 names, Marcus, Cassian, Publius, Maximus, Julian, Gaius, Symmachus,
00:37and eight more. And he looks for more. Biographies, letters, sermons, doctrinal summaries, records
00:44of their deaths, quotations from their enemies, anything. Instead, there's just silence. There's
00:51nothing. Fifteen bishops spanning nearly two centuries, 200 years, and not a single word they wrote
01:00survives. Not a single story about them is told. Not a single teaching is attributed to them. They're
01:07names without substance, just placeholders, ghosts. He checks Rome. The Roman church suffered the same
01:15imperial persecutions, yet it preserved letters, martyr accounts, theological treatises. Succession was
01:23thick with biographical detail, dripping with subtext and facts. He checks Antioch, a continuous
01:31literary tradition stretching all the way back to the apostles. Alexandria, Clement, Origen, libraries
01:38of theology. But Jerusalem alone is a void. Not a damaged record. A vacuum. The researcher realizes this
01:48is not the result of records being lost. This is the result of records being erased. And the question that
01:56launched a 1700-year-old cold case forms in his mind, who were the ghost bishops of Jerusalem? And what
02:04did they believe that was so dangerous it had to be scrubbed from the pages of history? Welcome back to
02:10Pre-Nicene Perspective, the authority in Pre-Nicene Christian news, history, and analysis. Now your host, Darren Kalama.
02:19Today we're bringing you the first episode in a series called Sleight of Hand, Sleight of Scripture.
02:25It's based on a recent series of groundbreaking academic papers covering the Pre-Nicene era.
02:31We open with the investigation of the disappearance of the first true Christian bishops,
02:37in the conspiracy to replace their Bible, their God, and their very existence with an alien faith.
02:45To understand what was erased, you must first understand the city where it happened. The year is 135 A.D.
02:53The Bar Kokhba revolt, the last great Jewish uprising against Rome, has just been crushed with finality.
03:02Hundreds of thousands dead. The Emperor Hadrian's retribution is absolute. He levels Jerusalem to its
03:09foundations and literally plow salt into the earth. Then he builds atop the rubble a pagan colony,
03:17renames Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina, a temple to Jupiter, rises on the site of the now-destroyed
03:24Jewish Holy of Holies, and the 10th Legion garrisons the streets. And Jews, any Jews, are banned from the
03:34city on pain of death. No lawyers, no trial, no jury, straight to execution on site. And after two
03:41revolts and decades of terrorism, General Severus and his 10th Legion are in no mood to play games.
03:48But Hadrian's edict is not just an expulsion of people, it's also an expulsion of texts and scrolls.
03:55And it's no small irony that in issuing these edicts, Hadrian did to them exactly what they will later do
04:02to
04:03others. In a city built on the eradication of Judaism and garrisoned by Roman soldiers,
04:09crowned with a pagan temple, cleansed of every Jew, possessing the enemy's sacred writings is not a
04:16religious offense. It's a capital crime. The Septuagint, the Torah scrolls, the prophets. To hold a
04:24scroll of Isaiah within the walls of Aelia Capitolina is to hold evidence of sedition in your hands.
04:31You don't need a specific edict. The city itself is the prohibition. Now consider,
04:38what kind of Christian community can survive in such a place? A community that regards the
04:43Old Testament as sacred scripture that reads the law, chants the Psalms, traces Jesus to David,
04:50worships the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob cannot exist here. Their Bible is the enemy's Bible. Their
04:58God is the enemy's God. They are structurally excluded. There's no loopholes comprised of five
05:05dollar words or special exemptions. Simply put, it's over. But there is another kind of Christian
05:13community. One whose canon contains no Jewish content whatsoever. One whose gospel, the Evangelion,
05:21speaks only of the unknown Father revealed by Jesus. One whose collection of apostolic letters,
05:28the Apostolicon, the ten unalloyed epistles of Paul, contains no covenant with Abraham, no mosaic law,
05:37no Davidic genealogy. One whose God is not Yahweh at all, but God our Father. A deity wholly separate,
05:45holy good, holy alien to the wrathful, tribal God of the Hebrew scriptures.
05:52And for these Christians, Hadrian's ban is not persecution. It's liberation. A paper published
06:00this year by Chancellor A.W. Mitchell in the Journal of Pre-Nicene Christian Studies argues a thesis that
06:07rewrites the history of Christianity. Records confirm that from 135 A.D. onward,
06:13the only Christian community that could legally exist within the walls of Jerusalem was one whose
06:20Bible lacked the Torah, whose Christ lacked Davidic descent, and whose God was not Yahweh. Their
06:28canon was functional anyway. What later polemicists would condemn is Marcionite. But Hadrian did not
06:36command Jerusalem to become Marcionite. You see, he didn't need to. His edict made the unalloyed
06:43gospel of God our Father the only Christian, the only de facto faith that could survive within those
06:49walls. And as a result, for 200 years, from Hadrian all the way to Constantine, the bishops of Jerusalem
06:57were custodians of this faith. They were the original Christian episcopate. And the 15 ghost names
07:04in Eusebius' list, Marcus, Cassian, Publius, and the 12 who followed, well, they were the men who led it.
07:11Now every investigation encounters false leads, theories that seem plausible, stories that the
07:18people in charge want you to believe. So before we can identify the real crime, we must walk through
07:25the official explanations. But will they collapse under scrutiny? Let's start with the standard account,
07:32the one taught in seminaries for centuries. It goes a little bit like this. The bishops of Jerusalem
07:37between 135 and 325 were Orthodox Christians in the Nicene sense. They believed in Yahweh. They read the
07:46Old Testament. They traced Jesus to David. They just happened to leave no trace. The records were lost during
07:54the periodic Roman persecutions, fires, confiscations, the chaos of the third century. It's unfortunate,
08:02but it's not suspicious. A second explanation, slightly more sophisticated and nuanced,
08:09acknowledges that something unusual happened in Alia Capitolina. Yes, the Jewish Christians work spelled by
08:16Hadrian, and a Gentile church took their place. But this Gentile church was simply the natural
08:23predecessor of what became Nicene Orthodoxy. The bishops were proto-Orthodox. The gap in the record is a gap in
08:31preservation, not in theology. Nothing was erased because nothing was there to erase. So Mitchell decided to
08:39test these explanations against the physical evidence. He started with the apologetics claim, number one, that the
08:47records were lost. But if Roman persecutions destroyed the records of Jerusalem, why did the same persecutions
08:54not destroy the records of Rome? You see, the Roman church preserved letters, martyrdom accounts, theological
09:01treatises, and succession lists with biographical details spanning the same period. Antioch preserved a
09:08continuous literary tradition. Alexandria gave us Clement, Origen, and their libraries.
09:15So the destruction, if it happened, was surgically selective, striking one city and sparing all the
09:22others across two centuries. But that's not a loss, that's targeting. Apologetics claim, number two,
09:30the bishops were simply Orthodox Christians about whom we happen to know nothing. Well, if that's true,
09:37if the fifteen bishops of Jerusalem were Orthodox Jewish Christians, why does no one quote them?
09:44The church fathers were relentless in claiming precedence. They cited everyone that they could find who
09:51agreed with them. A line of fifteen Orthodox bishops in the Holy City, the Apostolic Sea of Seas,
09:58would have been a rhetorical goldmine. Irenaeus, who wrote extensively against heretics and built his case
10:05on apostolic succession, never mentions a single one of them, not one. A man who invokes the four winds and
10:13the faces of the cherubim to defend his four-gospel canon cannot find a single sentence from fifteen
10:21Jerusalem bishops over the course of two hundred years to support him? Either the fifteen bishops left
10:28no theological writings at all, which would be unique among major episcopal sees, or the writing said
10:36something the victors would not, could not quote. Apologist claim number three, the Jerusalem church
10:43was never anything but Yahwist. Now, this is the deepest assumption, the one that goes unstated,
10:49because it seems unassailable. But consider the structural reality of Alia Capitolina. In a city
10:56where possessing the Septuagint was a capital offense, a Christian community that revered the Old Testament,
11:03could not assemble, could not read its scriptures aloud, could not educate its children in the law and
11:10the prophets. Simply put, it couldn't exist. The only Christians who could legally function within
11:16those walls were the ones whose canon contained no Jewish content. And the only Christian canon in the
11:24second century that contained no Jewish content was the canon of the Evangelion and the Apostolicon,
11:32what we know today as the first Christian Bible. The claims of the apologists do not survive the
11:38evidence. The standard explanations are not explanations, they're camouflage. But if the
11:45explanations offered up by the Judaizers are false, what's the true story? The investigation begins
11:52with the first name on the list, the first ghost, Marcus. Eusebius tells us Marcus was the first
11:59gentile bishop of Jerusalem after the Hadrianic destruction. And that's all he tells us.
12:06No origin, no writings, no death. But the name's position at the very hinge of the transition,
12:13the year 135, is itself evidence. Think about this. Marcus was installed at the moment that the Jews were
12:21expelled and the city was purged, cleansed of every text that even mentioned Yahweh. He wasn't a Yahwist
12:29bishop inheriting a Yahwist congregation. He was a new kind of bishop in a new kind of city, a city
12:37with a brand
12:38new name and a religion founded on Paul's single gospel. Mitchell's paper argues that Marcus was, in a very
12:45real sense, the first Christian bishop in the world, the first leader of a major apostolic see who did
12:52not worship Yahweh, who possessed a canon free of the Torah, and who governed a church centered on God
12:59our Father as revealed by Jesus. And this is what the Apostle Paul would have understood as Christianity,
13:06and Marcus was the first to actually lead it. But Marcus inherited more than a pulpit. He inherited a
13:13treasury. Before the destruction in Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Mother Church was the wealthiest in the
13:20Christian world. Paul's multi-year collection from the Diaspora, documented in Romans 15,
13:271 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, had poured funds into Jerusalem for years. When the Yahwist bishops were
13:34expelled in 135, that treasury didn't vanish. The incoming Gentile leadership, Marcus and his community,
13:41assumed control of the accumulated assets. Marcus held the purse of the Mother Church.
13:48And when he read the Apostolicon, Paul's letters in their original unalloyed form,
13:53what he found there was not pastoral advice. It was a war report. In fact, you can pick up any
14:00Bible
14:00and read it for yourself. Galatians rails against false brethren who infiltrated to spy out our
14:08liberty and bring us into bondage. 2 Thessalonians warns of forged letters,
14:14already circulating under Paul's name. Even the Marcionite prologues to Romans,
14:20preserved independently in Latin manuscripts in the Vatican Library, states bluntly that the Roman
14:26Church had been reached by false apostles and led away into the Law and the Prophets. And after reading
14:33this, Marcus concluded that the Roman Church had fallen, exactly as Paul predicted. The different
14:40gospel of Yahweh had triumphed in the capital. And he, the bishop of the Mother Church, custodian of the
14:48true succession, holder of the Apostolic Treasury, well, he had the authority and the resources to respond.
14:56We hope you enjoyed this episode of Pre-Nicene Perspective, and invite you to share it with others.
15:02To get your own free copy of the Pre-Nicene Bible, visit theveryfirstbible.org.
15:08So, thank you very much.
15:08If I was actually working with you, I would like to talk to my friends with him,
15:13I think you must be able to share it with others.
15:13I would like to ask that the Holy Spirit to see the Holy Spirit to come.
15:14So, we hope you enjoyed this episode of Pre-Nicene Perspective,
15:14and we're still in a session, and we'll solve this episode of Pre-Nicene Perspective.
15:14So, we hope you enjoyed this episode of Pre-Nicene Perspective,
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