Author Archives: René Salm


About René Salm

René Salm is the author of two books on New Testament archeology and manages the companion website www.NazarethMyth.info.

“New eyes” on the first century BCE

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The First Christians / pt. 3 The tradition dates Jesus of Nazareth’s birth to about 4 BCE. That was a full sixty years after the death of Yeshu haNotsri, whose given name was apparently Yochanan ben Abshalom in Hebrew, that is, John the son of Absalom. As we have seen, this prophet was a member of the Hasmonean royal family. Two of his uncles were kings (Aristobulus I and Janneus), his grandfather was John Hyrcanus I (r. 134–104), his own sister was married to Judas Aristobulus II—the king during whose reign John was executed—and his maternal uncle was none other than Joshua ben Perachiah, the head of the Sanhedrin (nasi) and the most powerful religious figure in the land. Despite all these … Continue reading →

Help with Wikipedia editing

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Would somebody who has read chapter 12 (“The 1962 Forgery of the Caesarea Inscription”) of my book NazarethGate, and who has some expertise editing Wikipedia, please amend the Wiki Nazareth page that presently reads: “A Hebrew inscription found in Caesarea dating to the late 3rd or early 4th century mentions Nazareth as the home of the priestly Hapizzez/Hafizaz family after the Bar Kokhba revolt (AD 132–135).” In fact: the inscription was discovered by the noted forger Dr. Jerry Vardaman (of microletter infamy). He was arrested by the Israeli authorities within hours of his “discovery” of the Nazareth inscription in Caesarea Maritima in 1962. (He was later arrested again on an excavation in Jordan.) There are many additional reasons why the … Continue reading →

Gnostic elements in Judaism

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The First Christians / pt. 2 Very occasionally in Jewish scripture, man crosses the chasm separating him from God. Doing so is fraught with danger, for we recall that Moses could not even look upon the face of God (Ex 3:6), and when the prophet Isaiah “saw the Lord sitting on a throne” he exclaimed: “Woe is me! I am lost, for… my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts!” (Isa 6:1 & 5.) If merely seeing the Lord is anathema, then for man to ascend to heaven is far beyond the pale of Judaism. And, indeed, the later rabbis severely proscribed any consideration or study of such “ascents,” whether visionary or not. However, at least two anomalous figures in … Continue reading →

The Alternative Chronology

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The First Christians / pt. 1 Most of the posts on this website depend on an alternative chronology in which the founding prophet of Christianity lived in the time of Alexander Janneus. The massive reorientation on the part of the reader that this alternative chronology requires involves a breathtaking time shift of one hundred years, something no New Testament scholar considers or even can consider—for the alternative chronology gives the lie to the New Testament itself. “Moving” the founding prophet back one hundred years in time requires one to deny the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth—which is Jesus mythicism. At the same time, the alternative chronology solves intractable problems that have bedeviled as well as astonished scholarship for generations. Among them are … Continue reading →

The “alternative chronology” and Yeshu ha-Notsri—An update

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Yeshu didn’t exist? Since the 2015 publication of my second book, several treatments of the thesis that the Hasmonean figure Yeshu ha-Notsri was the founder of Christianity have appeared in print. They appear to be responses to, or inspired by, posts on this blog and perhaps also to the final chapter of NazarethGate, entitled “In Search of the Rejected Seer.” At seventy-five pages, that chapter remains the most detailed investigation of the Yeshu-was-Jesus thesis (also referred to as the “alternative chronology”). One of the recent treatments of the alternative chronology is A. Jordan’s book entitled Jesus the Nazarene, reviewed on this website in several posts beginning here. Though methodologically flawed, Jordan’s book represents a first step in grappling with the … Continue reading →

“Jesus the Nazarene”—Book Review and Excursus (conclusion)

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A. Jordan, Jesus the Nazarene: The Talmud and the Founder of Christianity         Wipf & Stock, Eugene Oregon. 2023: 173 pp. This is the final installment of a book report on A. Jordan’s Jesus the Nazarene, which is the first of its kind: a Jewish endorsement of the mythicist theory. The author argues that a single prophet living in the early first century BCE founded the Christian religion, that he is known in Jewish sources as Yeshu ha-Notsri, and so on. (A list of ten points was given here.) Some positives of the book: (1) Jordan takes seriously what the Talmud has to say about the Hasmonean-era Jesus/Yeshu. Very few New Testament scholars do so. (2) In the course of Jesus … Continue reading →

“Jesus the Nazarene”—Book Review and Excursus, Pt. 2

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A. Jordan, Jesus the Nazarene: The Talmud and the Founder of Christianity         Wipf & Stock, Eugene Oregon. 2023: 173 pp. The prior post presented the views of the linguist, A. Jordan, regarding The Talmudic “Jesus.” Like me, Jordan sees the Jesus of the Talmud—generally called Yeshu ha-Notsri in Jewish records (never “Jesus of Nazareth”)—as being the “real” Jesus. The Talmudic Jesus lived in the early decades of the first century before the common era and had a completely different biography than Jesus of Nazareth, though some elements seem to have survived in the Christian gospels: the radical nature of the prophet’s teachings, his opposition to the Pharisees, success in gaining converts, trial, and execution by crucifixion. In this post we … Continue reading →

“Jesus the Nazarene”—Book Review and Excursus

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A. Jordan, Jesus the Nazarene: The Talmud and the Founder of Christianity Resource Publications (Wipf & Stock), Eugene Oregon. Paperback. March 2023. 173 pp. Wipf & Stock publishers have kindly furnished a complimentary copy of the title above for review. I requested the recent book because it expands on the thesis that Yeshu ha-Notsri (“Jesus the Nazarene”) was the founder of Christianity who lived in the early part of the first century BCE, a thesis explored on this website and in the final chapter of my book NazarethGate: Quack Archeology, Holy Hoaxes, and the Invented Town of Jesus (American Atheist Press, 2015). This series of posts is something more than a book report. It touches on issues such as “Was … Continue reading →

In favor of the “one state solution” in Palestine

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While many good people are Jews, and many Jews are indeed good people, the Zionist experiment of the last seventy-five years is an apartheid venture based upon exclusion, oppression, and ethnic cleansing. A political entity for Palestinians was never Israel’s aim, as we latterly see from that state’s aggressive settlement policies. The two-state solution is now dead. The only viable path forward is the one state solution. That state will not be religiously aligned but one in which Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others live together in peace and security. While both Jews and Muslims claim rights to the same land, the problem is not the claim but the exclusivity of the claim coming from either side. This exclusivity was never … Continue reading →

Blog returning to sleep mode…

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In March 2022 I began the latest series of posts, “A New Account of Christian Origins.” Numbering sixteen entries, the series has covered a lot of territory—from my views regarding the emergence of the Catholic religion in the middle of the second century CE, to the non-existence of Paul, of Marcion, and of the earliest Church Fathers (Clement of Rome, Papias, Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp of Smyrna). While freely admitting that I may not be correct regarding all of these propositions, I am fairly confident that the most important will stand the test of time. At the very least, the onus is shifting onto the tradition to demonstrate to an increasing number of skeptics that the major figures in … Continue reading →