Religion is not faith. This is not a hypothesis. You might have to wrangle this on your own a bit. but the basic idea is that faith is a person predisposition to believe in something that is not factual – doesn’t even need to touch the realm of factual. Not to get too technical,but faith and belief are not synonymous, but closely related: belief is a little more “granular” and can be mundane: when mountaineering, I have to believe that the knot you tied in our belaying rope was tied well – because I did not tie it myself, and I did not see you tie it. This goes against empiricism (the “scientific method”. Belief can be based on personal trust, or, trust in general. Faith is a little broader, “wilder”: if the knot fails and I fall, I have faith that some superpower will save me from death. This faith is not based on anything to human as trust, or even science, or even reasoning. None of these exist in faith. For this reason, all debates on the factuality or logic or historical accuracy of something called faith are simply ignorant, and can safely be ignored. Neither, then, do you have to defend your faith to anyone, because faith is fundamentally indefensible: it did not come at the end of some trail of reason: it was gifted to you. Again, the only reason this brief discussion might inspire you to debate is because you have never experienced faith. Faith MUST be experienced, not taught, not learned in a treatise, or a book – although faith can be “found” or discovered in any of these – just not by virtue of any of these.

Religion is purely a political organization. You could say a religion is founded on faith, but it is better to say that religion uses faith to recruit and sustain membership – because an organization lives on membership. The definition of an organization is the governance of members. In this light, “science”™ can be a religion, because it can be based on the faith of the people in well-known institutions of “science”™ . In reality, science is simply a method of inquiry, with no greater goal than further inquiry. It’s a method of studying the world around you. It is in now way anathema to faith, as attested by some of the greatest scientists ever: Carrlous Lineaus, who gave use the natural classification system we use today (genus, species, family, class….), said that science is the uncovering of G*d’s plan. Human scientists don’t invent a thing – they continue to apply features of the natural world they have “discovered” (I prefer “uncovered”), until they are able to apply such natural features to something like flight. Airplanes do not stay in the air by virtue of any human invention: the simply use the forces of nature, beyond human control, to stay in the air. And this is why we don’t have faith that airplanes won’t crash. They do crash, all the time. Is that because aerodynamics fail? Is that the fault of gravity? Nope. It’s the inaccuracy in human calculations of those forces of nature, when the “weather” changes.

But this little piece is not about the debate on faith v. religion. It’s about the creation of Christianity. Yes, creation of a superpower organization, with almost nothing to do with the mascot, Jesus. Jesus did not have any religion;nor did his followers: they had faith in him and what we was saying. They were not bound by by-laws and rules of operation; they did not have a manual – of course, the “Bible” did not exist in any way during Jesus’ ministry, nor did Jesus ever write a single word. Therein lie the roots to the hypocrisy of what we now call the Christian religion: it shows all of the trappings of a political organization, and none of the characteristics of a faith.

During the Second Temple period (around 500 BCE to 70 CE), Aramaic became the everyday spoken language of Jewish people in the Middle East, while Hebrew was largely reserved for prayer, study, and liturgy.

Because many ordinary people could no longer understand the weekly Hebrew reading of the Torah, a tradition began of reading an Aramaic translation—called a Targum—alongside the Hebrew so the congregation could understand it. The most famous and authoritative of these is Targum Onkelos. Today, if you look at a printed study version of the Torah (a Chumash), the Aramaic Targum is still traditionally printed right next to the original Hebrew text.

The other major source of this confusion is the Talmud, which is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism. While the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) is in Hebrew, the vast majority of the Talmud’s commentary and debate (the Gemara) was written hundreds of years later in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic.

Jesus was from Galilee. Aramaic was absolutely the everyday language of the street, the marketplace, and the home in 1st-century Galilee. Jesus’ native tongue was a Galilean dialect of Aramaic, and when he preached to the crowds, he almost certainly did so in Aramaic. The first shocker for many Christians – most Christians, probably, was that Jesus was not a “Hebrew”, nor did he learn Hebrew in a “schul”, as do most modern Jews. the fact that the Gospels depict Jesus standing up in the synagogue to read from the scroll of Isaiah means he possessed a level of literacy and religious education that was quite exceptional for a working-class tradesman. Rather than attending a formal school system that every child went through, he likely learned to read Biblical Hebrew by extensively participating in his local synagogue and studying closely with local religious leaders. In fact, no entire nation or region spoke Hebrew as its universal, native everyday language in the 1st century. By that time, Aramaic and Greek had largely taken over as the primary languages of the streets, commerce, and the home. However, a living, everyday dialect called Mishnaic Hebrew (or Rabbinic Hebrew) was still spoken natively by some communities. This was primarily concentrated in the southern region of Judea, specifically in and around Jerusalem and the southern Judean hills. So, while there was no Hebrew-speaking nation, there were absolutely bilingual pockets of Judeans who still spoke a living, evolving dialect of Hebrew in their homes and marketplaces right up until the Jewish-Roman wars of the 1st and 2nd centuries.

Now, why does any of this matter? For one, these facts are virtually unknown by any Christian – because the religion of Christianity considered it not useful to know? Or, do we have the beginnings of (possibly innocent) misinformation here – the greatest political tool of all time! I like to say, what people don’t know, won’t help them. Here I want to break with the tradition of Christian ignorance.

Because the New Testament was written in Greek, the authors had to translate almost everything Jesus said for their audience. However, in a few deeply emotional or powerful moments, the Gospel writers—particularly Mark¹—preserved the raw, original Aramaic syllables precisely as Jesus spoke them, usually providing the Greek translation immediately after.

Here are the specific Aramaic words and phrases preserved in the text:

When performing healings or in moments of extreme distress, the original Aramaic was often kept, likely because the early Christians remembered the exact sound of his voice in these pivotal moments.

Aramaic Phrase	Translation	Context
Talitha koum	“Little girl, get up!”	Raising the daughter of Jairus from the dead (Mark 5:41).
Ephphatha	“Be opened.”	Healing a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment (Mark 7:34).
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani	“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”	Jesus’s final words of anguish from the cross, quoting Psalm 22 (Mark 15:34).

Jesus also used common Aramaic idioms and terms during his teachings and prayers that became so foundational to early Christians that they kept the original words rather than finding Greek equivalents.

Aramaic Word	Translation	Context
Abba	“Father”	Jesus’s intimate term for God while praying in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:36).
Raca	“Empty-headed” or “Fool”	Used in the Sermon on the Mount to warn against insulting others (Matthew 5:22).
Mammon	“Wealth” or “Money”	Used to warn that a person cannot serve both God and Mammon (Matthew 6:24).
Korban	“Dedicated to God”	A religious vow used to dedicate property to the temple, which Jesus criticized when used to avoid caring for parents (Mark 7:11).

My first point then, is that, intentionally or not, the early Church (Church = institution) allowed (or intended) the creation of a mass following of ignorant people – not because anyone “ignored” the truth, but because the truth vanished – was erased – by what we now would call the “expert class” – people who knew better than to unleash the unbridled truth on a bunch of peasants. Language – notably mis-translation, or even the best translation – can be used as the root of control and power.

A new point, but along the same lines, is that the Gospel writers were the same people as the Disciples. Patently false. The Gospels were originally written anonymously. The titles “The Gospel According to Matthew” or “According to John” were not on the original documents.

Those titles were attached to the texts much later—primarily in the late 2nd century by early church leaders (like Irenaeus). They assigned the names of famous apostles to these anonymous texts to give them authority and defend them against rival Christian groups. The actual authors were likely highly educated, Greek-speaking Christians of a later generation.

The strongest piece of evidence against this “contrived” authorship: the Gospel of John is written in highly sophisticated, philosophical Greek. A 1st-century Galilean fisherman would have spoken Aramaic, had no formal schooling, and would have been entirely illiterate—even in his native tongue, let alone in written Greek. Even the New Testament itself admits this: in Acts 4:13, the religious leaders in Jerusalem are surprised by Peter and John because they were agrammatoi (literally “unlettered” or “uneducated” commoners). The idea that an illiterate tradesman penned a masterpiece of Greek theology decades later is indeed rejected by scholars.

So what we are looking at in the Gospels. the foundation of the Christian Religion, was the use of persuasive, “expert”, speech writers. I am reminded of Ronald Reagan, who was completely “invented” by William F. Buckley, intentionally, through his articles and speech writing. Reagan, an actor, could NEVER have come up with such a deep and complex political philosophy as the “religious right”. Likewise, every word that came out of George W. Bush’s mouth (at least in the formal speeches), was written by- commissioned for – Peggy Noonan, of the Wall Street Journal. Of course, when NOT written by Peggy, the words of W were often very dumb, and provided chinks in the Right narrative.

How do you feel about Reagan and Bush now? Because likely as not, you did not know about their speech writers. Even odder is that, despite what you actually know about the academic backgrounds of these men – you never thought to even suspect. Herein lies the power of speech and text in the formation of a religion – and yes, I am now comparing political movements directly to religion, because, for me, they are one in the same: in this case, they play on the People’s search for faith – for something to believe in – as the main tool in creating a control structure. Please get me straight here – I am NOT dismissing the Christian faith at all! I am calling out the Christian religion here, as one of the most violent and oppressive power structures of our history, and I hope it is clear that this religion stands in direct contrast to the words and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

1. In the Book of Acts (12:12), when the Apostle Peter miraculously escapes from prison, he immediately goes to the house of “Mary, the mother of John, also called Mark,” where the disciples are meeting and praying secretly.Mark relied on a direct, firsthand source to write his Gospel.
   According to the earliest surviving church records—specifically a bishop named Papias writing around 125 CE—Mark served as the companion, translator, and scribe for the Apostle Peter during Peter’s final years in Rome. Papias recorded that Mark carefully wrote down everything Peter preached about his time with Jesus. So when you read the Gospel of Mark, tradition says you are essentially reading Peter’s firsthand memories. During Jesus’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, Mark 14:51-52 randomly mentions a “young man” wearing only a linen cloth who was grabbed by the guards, slipped out of the cloth, and fled naked into the night. Because this oddly specific, embarrassing detail appears in no other Gospel, many believe it was John Mark’s way of signing his work to say, “I was there.” ↩︎