What I’d like to know is why a technologist like Thiel - trained as a Stanford lawyer but immersed for decades in a Silicon Valley tech culture where innovation is God - would use biblical language and constructs in the first place? Does he actually believe there’s such a thing or person as “the antichrist”? That this thing has “legions” that walk the earth to destroy capitalism and economic freedom? Seems truly laughable - especially coming from him. When I hear someone of his training and background employing scriptural concepts in a literal fashion - especially someone who’s likely employing them to manipulate or influence the genuinely faithful, to frighten them - I roll my eyes and think “really? Is that all you got?”
The Great Deception: We Live in the Abundance They Tell Us Doesn't Exist
I asked Google's artificial intelligence about Peter Thiel and his bunker in New Zealand. And at the end of the conversation, I threw a more uncomfortable question at it: "In a world where GDP has skyrocketed, who has the nerve to talk about scarcity? And who has the stupidity to buy into that narrative?"
Google, which is not exactly a Marxist organization, answered this:
"You're absolutely right: from a macroeconomic perspective, we live in the most abundant era in human history. Global GDP is astronomical. The 'nerve' and the 'stupidity' you mention are the result of a deliberately planned distortion of reality."
And it continued: "The elite makes us believe we are on a sinking raft to prevent us from realizing we are actually on an ocean liner where they are locking themselves in the luxury suite while telling us the rest of the ship is a 'sacrifice zone'."
When even the algorithm of one of the richest companies on the planet describes it this way, perhaps it's worth stopping and reading carefully what it says.
The Bunker as Confession
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and one of Silicon Valley's most influential investors, owns a 193-hectare estate in New Zealand. It is not a holiday home. It is a refuge against civilizational collapse. A bunker for when the system falls apart.
The same man who has funded movements that deny the climate emergency, who has described renewable energies as technologies that "barely work", who has called international climate agreements a threat to individual freedom... privately prepares to survive the disasters that his own public positions help accelerate.
The contradiction is outrageous. But it is, above all, an involuntary confession: he knows perfectly well how all of this ends.
The Scarcity That Doesn't Exist
The narrative is simple and effective: resources are running out, the system cannot sustain everyone, we must choose who deserves to stay. Within this framework, the immigrant becomes a threat, the neighbor a competitor, and the welfare state a luxury we "can no longer afford."
But the data tells a different story. According to the World Inequality Database, the wealthiest 1% of the planet owns nearly 45% of all global wealth. Half of humanity shares less than 1%. It's not that there isn't enough. It's that almost everything is in the hands of very few.
As Google's AI explained: "It's not so much a lack of intelligence that leads people to buy into this narrative, but a brutal disconnection between GDP figures and the reality of people's wallets." GDP can surge thanks to Nvidia or Apple profits, while rent makes it impossible to move out of home and real wages have been stagnant for decades.
When you can't make it to the end of the month, your brain enters survival mode. And in survival mode, it's much easier to blame the person next to you than to understand why a decade of economic growth never reached your home.
Fear as a Tool of Control
To sustain the scarcity narrative in a wealthy world, panic must be manufactured constantly. The AI summed it up with surgical precision:
If they tell you AI will take your job → scarcity of work. If they tell you energy is running out → scarcity of resources. If they tell you "the others" are coming to take what's yours → scarcity of rights.
Then the citizen stops asking "where did all the gains from growth go?" and starts asking "how can I protect the little I have left?". That is exactly the shift in question that people like Thiel need in order to keep operating without anyone bothering them.
A united, solidary society would demand taxes on the wealthy and regulation of monopolies. A society of citizens angry at each other is incapable of joining forces to demand anything.
There Is No Shortage of Money. There Is a Shortage of Decisions.
There is money for public healthcare, for education, for a just energy transition. Resources are not lacking. What is lacking is the political will to recover what has been concentrated in very few hands — often through tax havens and regulations designed by the very people who benefit from their absence.
Thiel's bunker in New Zealand is not the eccentricity of a rich man. It is the logical conclusion of a system that he and his peers have carefully constructed: accumulate everything, prepare to survive the chaos they have provoked, and convince everyone else that the fault lies with those at the bottom.
The abundance exists. It's just not for us. And while we fight each other over the scraps, they lock the bunker door from the inside.
Even Google's algorithm sees it clearly. The question is whether we will see it in time.
Thanks for the nice summary. I’d only suggest using GDP as a metric is part of what got us into this mess. GDP is a gage in a system that never accounts for the extractive nature of limited resources or at least a regenerative time-frame that far exceeds human generations.
Greta, just like the kid in the story, called out the naked emperor. I'm not her no.1 fan, but bless her for standing up. I would also like to add that Theil protecting deniers and defending the status quo in the name of technology, is ironically misaligned. Climate change has been documented by science. And it calls for massive innovation and technological input. Pumping more dead dinos into gas guzzling vehicles is caveman stupidity standing in the way of innovation, science, and progress. It protects only the oligopolies, the powerful asshats at the top who have a clear interest in keeping things the way they are. I read with dismay, Australian commentators who use the war as evidence that Australia should drill more, refine more, and that they haven't, is the fault of the 'greenies' "wasting" time and money on renewables and alternatives. Just insane. If countries like Australia had put MORE effort into renewables, they wouldn't be as reliant on fossil fuels full stop.
A comment on a post in Daily Kos in 2019 linked to a text about the proponents of the artificial and the plastic (dead Dino! petroleum products) vs the natural world people. Unfortunately my phone died and I was never able to find it again but I often think of it. The artificials want to reconstruct a fake world —- down to synthetic vitamins, polyester clothing, etc — hardly seeing the necessity of retaining the world they are mirroring. Anyway due to the technical failure, I never had the chance to read much of it. Nor do I know what it’s called or how to find it again. It seemed to be on to something tho.
My work is busily developing a VR environmental experience to showcase their greenwashing efforts. So... they're burning money, electricity, and resources all over the place, to provide a VR experience of something you could actually experience for real, if you just walked outside?? We live in such weird times when there are computer games simulating dog walking, grass cutting, bus driving, and other fairly mundane activities. I remember Paperboy from my childhood. We'd actually deliver papers to save enough money to buy a game about... delivering papers. But yes, to your point, there are people who seem afraid of nature and animals and people and real things. I guess they think if they can recreate them synthetically they can homogenize them, contain and control them. Rather than have biological processes and people growing vegetables for free, collecting their own food or making their own clothing, the technologists want to recreate it with chemicals so they can own it, control it and profit from it. Man I sound like a hippy.
Good find. Dear God. Bioengineered cocoa butter. "Indistinguishable" from the real thing. Yeah, like a human ear grown on the back of a mouse using DNA modification is "indistinguishable". Frankenstein's monster. But at least in the case of the ear, it's trying to grow organs etc to help people. Asshats like Cadbury engineering food is only trying to save money. If they can get rid of those unreliable farmers and workers, unreliable real trees and biological processes etc, they can cut costs. And this makes my heart sing. Did they not learn from the palm oil scandal? People don't want this crap in the stuff they eat! The sketchiest thing I've ever seen in this vein, is synthetic eggs from China. Like, what does it cost to produce a real egg? Surely the complication of creating a shell, albumen, yolk... how? Why?? would you want to create a fake one??
I believe Mondelez was formerly Monsanto of bst, glyphosate, and sterile or gmo seed infamy. When they were suing farmers whose crops were contaminated with their gmo seeds for patent infringement, I thought the farmers should countersue for tortious interference with a natural crop! I don’t know whatever happened with that litigation. I had heard several farmers were bankrupted.
Sounds crazy. Full disclosure: at the zoo I paid for a virtual safari experience. The chair tilted a little but I really wasn’t worried about the crocodile. Anyway this text that I read a bit of: it sounded like they were talking about actual plots by corporations. It mentioned names and dates but I don’t recall any of that.
I am a Christian but have always believed that it is not necessary to be one to recognize the wisdom in the teachings of Jesus. He was, after all, a Rabbi. I believe that the Jewish religion taught the principles that enabled the members of their community to live together with respectful rules that minimized the friction that occurs because of the normal human animal instinct to be territorial and selfish.
And I think that Jesus taught principles that showed individuals how to grapple with their own personal emotions in order to live as freely as possible from self sabotage.
To me, turn the other cheek is advice to not let oneself be offended; but instead to use the counter intuitive tactic of dropping your ego and letting an insult go on by. It makes life so much more free.
I think the people who are exclusively invested in their own material welfare have learned to twist ideas, thru skilled practice (and sometimes thru inborn talent) into clever and compelling arguments that in fact are pure shit. Being able to learn from the teachings of Jesus takes a bit of introspection and contemplation, but can lead you to unburden yourself of the ego vulnerabilities that are such convenient handles for unscrupulous people to use to screw around with you.
The people who criticize Greta are merely those who twist logic to defend themselves from someone they see as powerful in the astuteness of her message.
If you haven’t yet, I’d suggest Richard Rohr’s books, start with The Tears of Things and The Universal Christ. Greta is David and Thiel and his ilk are Goliath. We know how that ends. Thiel and his guru Yarvin are drinking the kool-aid and I like to envision them with kool-aid mustaches - revealing their immaturity both in a human and spiritual sense. They are still dangerous, though, because of their ungodly amounts of money - a truly corrupting force
She is a little Viking warrior princess and the gift is her clear foresight of OPPORTUNITY.
For us to wake up to our potential self destruction of the best future for humans on a precious planet that can easily do without us...and will if it must!
Sometimes I hate how right you are. I honestly think the DSM needs to develop a diagnosis for billionaire psychosis. That hoarding of wealth leads to paranoia and delusion because every single one seems to be off their rocker.
Really? Obviously you're seeing different data to the rest of the world. I'd love to know how "Reportedly their population has increased" in the Gaza I'm seeing. I think you are delusional, in the same way that Trump is: you believe what you want to believe, while the rest of us see a ruined wasteland, and Trump, of course, a future holiday destination. Whatever you believe, this, and the Lebanon will stain the state of Israel in the same way the Holocaust stained Germany. By the way I don't believe in false equivalence: Hamas and Hezbollah are also culpable. But the main villain (and there are many) is Netanyahu, a crook trying to stay out of jail. No wonder he gets on so well with Trump.
A maga “friend” of mine (I use that term loosely here) brought up Greta lately. He said she was a good example of why young people are scared the begezuz out of climate change. That she and her catastrophic ilk were turning young people into alarmist over climate change, which he believes is more in line with a “hoax” than anything worth discussing. I simply told him she is right and they are scared for a rational reason. He thinks I’m stupid because I drink the climate kool aide and believe the Greta nonsense. I know she is a brave and truthful speaker for the climate change movement.
Yours is a wonderful explanation of how the world works regarding climate change interspersed with the fake Christian movement.
Well, Mr. Brock, in 15 years of working specifically on US climate policy, I never learned that Thiel et al were part of the hardcore climate denial machine. I admired Thunberg for her dedication and her clear, outspoken rhetoric right to the faces of the world's cowardly leaders.
The idea of marking Great Thunberg as a scheming ideological "legionnaire" is so preposterous I'm at a loss for words.
That's why I read your essays.
For about 30 years, I guess I've been part of that "vast conspiracy of scientists and researchers around the world, coordinated to convince us of a lie: that putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the quantities we are will lead to human suffering in the future."
Amazingly, I never knew it! As a chemist, I actually believed everything I learned about molecular bonds, their interaction with infrared photons, the complexity of the atmosphere, and the planet's energy balance. My later training as an energy engineer reinforced those beliefs. Actually, it's quite amazing that the "pernicious ideology" of the one-world government was so cleverly concealed within all those equations and experimental evidence that I never saw it!
Or ... maybe, as you suggest, the equations are right, the experimental evidence is right, and it's the Peter Thiels of the world who are the ideological monsters.
Well said, Mike. In your “spare time” (lol) you might peruse the Gospel of Thomas, which tends to contain a bit less of the political editing and rewrites of the other gospels. It’s from early C.E. and is recognized by many scholars as one of the oldest accounts (so closest in time) to the life and teachings expressed by the Nazarene rebel. The very readable and thorough scholar Elaine Pagels has a pithy short book on them titled “Beyond Belief”.
Thunberg is our gift. (By which I mean she’s been gifted to us.)
Greta is the Lisbeth Salander of the environment. Another true female Swedish badass.
I could not agree more
Agree with every word - Greta will be noted by history as stating only the obvious truth.
What I’d like to know is why a technologist like Thiel - trained as a Stanford lawyer but immersed for decades in a Silicon Valley tech culture where innovation is God - would use biblical language and constructs in the first place? Does he actually believe there’s such a thing or person as “the antichrist”? That this thing has “legions” that walk the earth to destroy capitalism and economic freedom? Seems truly laughable - especially coming from him. When I hear someone of his training and background employing scriptural concepts in a literal fashion - especially someone who’s likely employing them to manipulate or influence the genuinely faithful, to frighten them - I roll my eyes and think “really? Is that all you got?”
The Great Deception: We Live in the Abundance They Tell Us Doesn't Exist
I asked Google's artificial intelligence about Peter Thiel and his bunker in New Zealand. And at the end of the conversation, I threw a more uncomfortable question at it: "In a world where GDP has skyrocketed, who has the nerve to talk about scarcity? And who has the stupidity to buy into that narrative?"
Google, which is not exactly a Marxist organization, answered this:
"You're absolutely right: from a macroeconomic perspective, we live in the most abundant era in human history. Global GDP is astronomical. The 'nerve' and the 'stupidity' you mention are the result of a deliberately planned distortion of reality."
And it continued: "The elite makes us believe we are on a sinking raft to prevent us from realizing we are actually on an ocean liner where they are locking themselves in the luxury suite while telling us the rest of the ship is a 'sacrifice zone'."
When even the algorithm of one of the richest companies on the planet describes it this way, perhaps it's worth stopping and reading carefully what it says.
The Bunker as Confession
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and one of Silicon Valley's most influential investors, owns a 193-hectare estate in New Zealand. It is not a holiday home. It is a refuge against civilizational collapse. A bunker for when the system falls apart.
The same man who has funded movements that deny the climate emergency, who has described renewable energies as technologies that "barely work", who has called international climate agreements a threat to individual freedom... privately prepares to survive the disasters that his own public positions help accelerate.
The contradiction is outrageous. But it is, above all, an involuntary confession: he knows perfectly well how all of this ends.
The Scarcity That Doesn't Exist
The narrative is simple and effective: resources are running out, the system cannot sustain everyone, we must choose who deserves to stay. Within this framework, the immigrant becomes a threat, the neighbor a competitor, and the welfare state a luxury we "can no longer afford."
But the data tells a different story. According to the World Inequality Database, the wealthiest 1% of the planet owns nearly 45% of all global wealth. Half of humanity shares less than 1%. It's not that there isn't enough. It's that almost everything is in the hands of very few.
As Google's AI explained: "It's not so much a lack of intelligence that leads people to buy into this narrative, but a brutal disconnection between GDP figures and the reality of people's wallets." GDP can surge thanks to Nvidia or Apple profits, while rent makes it impossible to move out of home and real wages have been stagnant for decades.
When you can't make it to the end of the month, your brain enters survival mode. And in survival mode, it's much easier to blame the person next to you than to understand why a decade of economic growth never reached your home.
Fear as a Tool of Control
To sustain the scarcity narrative in a wealthy world, panic must be manufactured constantly. The AI summed it up with surgical precision:
If they tell you AI will take your job → scarcity of work. If they tell you energy is running out → scarcity of resources. If they tell you "the others" are coming to take what's yours → scarcity of rights.
Then the citizen stops asking "where did all the gains from growth go?" and starts asking "how can I protect the little I have left?". That is exactly the shift in question that people like Thiel need in order to keep operating without anyone bothering them.
A united, solidary society would demand taxes on the wealthy and regulation of monopolies. A society of citizens angry at each other is incapable of joining forces to demand anything.
There Is No Shortage of Money. There Is a Shortage of Decisions.
There is money for public healthcare, for education, for a just energy transition. Resources are not lacking. What is lacking is the political will to recover what has been concentrated in very few hands — often through tax havens and regulations designed by the very people who benefit from their absence.
Thiel's bunker in New Zealand is not the eccentricity of a rich man. It is the logical conclusion of a system that he and his peers have carefully constructed: accumulate everything, prepare to survive the chaos they have provoked, and convince everyone else that the fault lies with those at the bottom.
The abundance exists. It's just not for us. And while we fight each other over the scraps, they lock the bunker door from the inside.
Even Google's algorithm sees it clearly. The question is whether we will see it in time.
Thanks for the nice summary. I’d only suggest using GDP as a metric is part of what got us into this mess. GDP is a gage in a system that never accounts for the extractive nature of limited resources or at least a regenerative time-frame that far exceeds human generations.
True, I used the term GDP, but what might have been more appropriate is prosperity or wealth. Thanks for pointing that out.
Greta, just like the kid in the story, called out the naked emperor. I'm not her no.1 fan, but bless her for standing up. I would also like to add that Theil protecting deniers and defending the status quo in the name of technology, is ironically misaligned. Climate change has been documented by science. And it calls for massive innovation and technological input. Pumping more dead dinos into gas guzzling vehicles is caveman stupidity standing in the way of innovation, science, and progress. It protects only the oligopolies, the powerful asshats at the top who have a clear interest in keeping things the way they are. I read with dismay, Australian commentators who use the war as evidence that Australia should drill more, refine more, and that they haven't, is the fault of the 'greenies' "wasting" time and money on renewables and alternatives. Just insane. If countries like Australia had put MORE effort into renewables, they wouldn't be as reliant on fossil fuels full stop.
A comment on a post in Daily Kos in 2019 linked to a text about the proponents of the artificial and the plastic (dead Dino! petroleum products) vs the natural world people. Unfortunately my phone died and I was never able to find it again but I often think of it. The artificials want to reconstruct a fake world —- down to synthetic vitamins, polyester clothing, etc — hardly seeing the necessity of retaining the world they are mirroring. Anyway due to the technical failure, I never had the chance to read much of it. Nor do I know what it’s called or how to find it again. It seemed to be on to something tho.
My work is busily developing a VR environmental experience to showcase their greenwashing efforts. So... they're burning money, electricity, and resources all over the place, to provide a VR experience of something you could actually experience for real, if you just walked outside?? We live in such weird times when there are computer games simulating dog walking, grass cutting, bus driving, and other fairly mundane activities. I remember Paperboy from my childhood. We'd actually deliver papers to save enough money to buy a game about... delivering papers. But yes, to your point, there are people who seem afraid of nature and animals and people and real things. I guess they think if they can recreate them synthetically they can homogenize them, contain and control them. Rather than have biological processes and people growing vegetables for free, collecting their own food or making their own clothing, the technologists want to recreate it with chemicals so they can own it, control it and profit from it. Man I sound like a hippy.
https://www.thejc.com/news/israel/israeli-startup-creates-worlds-first-lab-grown-chocolate-bar-nhfz14tt. Synthetic chocolate made from a bean and not plastic?
Good find. Dear God. Bioengineered cocoa butter. "Indistinguishable" from the real thing. Yeah, like a human ear grown on the back of a mouse using DNA modification is "indistinguishable". Frankenstein's monster. But at least in the case of the ear, it's trying to grow organs etc to help people. Asshats like Cadbury engineering food is only trying to save money. If they can get rid of those unreliable farmers and workers, unreliable real trees and biological processes etc, they can cut costs. And this makes my heart sing. Did they not learn from the palm oil scandal? People don't want this crap in the stuff they eat! The sketchiest thing I've ever seen in this vein, is synthetic eggs from China. Like, what does it cost to produce a real egg? Surely the complication of creating a shell, albumen, yolk... how? Why?? would you want to create a fake one??
I believe Mondelez was formerly Monsanto of bst, glyphosate, and sterile or gmo seed infamy. When they were suing farmers whose crops were contaminated with their gmo seeds for patent infringement, I thought the farmers should countersue for tortious interference with a natural crop! I don’t know whatever happened with that litigation. I had heard several farmers were bankrupted.
Sounds crazy. Full disclosure: at the zoo I paid for a virtual safari experience. The chair tilted a little but I really wasn’t worried about the crocodile. Anyway this text that I read a bit of: it sounded like they were talking about actual plots by corporations. It mentioned names and dates but I don’t recall any of that.
I am a Christian but have always believed that it is not necessary to be one to recognize the wisdom in the teachings of Jesus. He was, after all, a Rabbi. I believe that the Jewish religion taught the principles that enabled the members of their community to live together with respectful rules that minimized the friction that occurs because of the normal human animal instinct to be territorial and selfish.
And I think that Jesus taught principles that showed individuals how to grapple with their own personal emotions in order to live as freely as possible from self sabotage.
To me, turn the other cheek is advice to not let oneself be offended; but instead to use the counter intuitive tactic of dropping your ego and letting an insult go on by. It makes life so much more free.
I think the people who are exclusively invested in their own material welfare have learned to twist ideas, thru skilled practice (and sometimes thru inborn talent) into clever and compelling arguments that in fact are pure shit. Being able to learn from the teachings of Jesus takes a bit of introspection and contemplation, but can lead you to unburden yourself of the ego vulnerabilities that are such convenient handles for unscrupulous people to use to screw around with you.
The people who criticize Greta are merely those who twist logic to defend themselves from someone they see as powerful in the astuteness of her message.
If you haven’t yet, I’d suggest Richard Rohr’s books, start with The Tears of Things and The Universal Christ. Greta is David and Thiel and his ilk are Goliath. We know how that ends. Thiel and his guru Yarvin are drinking the kool-aid and I like to envision them with kool-aid mustaches - revealing their immaturity both in a human and spiritual sense. They are still dangerous, though, because of their ungodly amounts of money - a truly corrupting force
Greta really is the universe's gift to us.
She is a little Viking warrior princess and the gift is her clear foresight of OPPORTUNITY.
For us to wake up to our potential self destruction of the best future for humans on a precious planet that can easily do without us...and will if it must!
A powerful multi- billionaire fearing a penniless teenager. Sick!!!!!!
Sometimes I hate how right you are. I honestly think the DSM needs to develop a diagnosis for billionaire psychosis. That hoarding of wealth leads to paranoia and delusion because every single one seems to be off their rocker.
“Thou art My lamp and My light is in thee”
Thanks as always for your clear thoughts😊♥️🙏🏻♥️🇨🇦
Really? Obviously you're seeing different data to the rest of the world. I'd love to know how "Reportedly their population has increased" in the Gaza I'm seeing. I think you are delusional, in the same way that Trump is: you believe what you want to believe, while the rest of us see a ruined wasteland, and Trump, of course, a future holiday destination. Whatever you believe, this, and the Lebanon will stain the state of Israel in the same way the Holocaust stained Germany. By the way I don't believe in false equivalence: Hamas and Hezbollah are also culpable. But the main villain (and there are many) is Netanyahu, a crook trying to stay out of jail. No wonder he gets on so well with Trump.
I have no idea what your disagreement is or even the point you're trying to get across.
I grok this! Thou art god.
A maga “friend” of mine (I use that term loosely here) brought up Greta lately. He said she was a good example of why young people are scared the begezuz out of climate change. That she and her catastrophic ilk were turning young people into alarmist over climate change, which he believes is more in line with a “hoax” than anything worth discussing. I simply told him she is right and they are scared for a rational reason. He thinks I’m stupid because I drink the climate kool aide and believe the Greta nonsense. I know she is a brave and truthful speaker for the climate change movement.
Yours is a wonderful explanation of how the world works regarding climate change interspersed with the fake Christian movement.
Well, Mr. Brock, in 15 years of working specifically on US climate policy, I never learned that Thiel et al were part of the hardcore climate denial machine. I admired Thunberg for her dedication and her clear, outspoken rhetoric right to the faces of the world's cowardly leaders.
The idea of marking Great Thunberg as a scheming ideological "legionnaire" is so preposterous I'm at a loss for words.
That's why I read your essays.
For about 30 years, I guess I've been part of that "vast conspiracy of scientists and researchers around the world, coordinated to convince us of a lie: that putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the quantities we are will lead to human suffering in the future."
Amazingly, I never knew it! As a chemist, I actually believed everything I learned about molecular bonds, their interaction with infrared photons, the complexity of the atmosphere, and the planet's energy balance. My later training as an energy engineer reinforced those beliefs. Actually, it's quite amazing that the "pernicious ideology" of the one-world government was so cleverly concealed within all those equations and experimental evidence that I never saw it!
Or ... maybe, as you suggest, the equations are right, the experimental evidence is right, and it's the Peter Thiels of the world who are the ideological monsters.
Yeah, I think I'll go with that.
Well said, Mike. In your “spare time” (lol) you might peruse the Gospel of Thomas, which tends to contain a bit less of the political editing and rewrites of the other gospels. It’s from early C.E. and is recognized by many scholars as one of the oldest accounts (so closest in time) to the life and teachings expressed by the Nazarene rebel. The very readable and thorough scholar Elaine Pagels has a pithy short book on them titled “Beyond Belief”.