Pulling The Thread Podcast: Tracing Jesus Before Christianity Emerged, Jesus the Jew within Judaism! · Jeramiah Giehl

Messianic MythBusters: How The Church Got It Wrong? Beyond the Stained Glass... Rethinking Christianity, Ebionites, New Covenant & Theological Debates with Richard Cortes: Episode 23

·1 hr 26 min·5 clips

The episode says Isaiah 7:14 uses "alma," not "betula," and that the child-sign is about maturity, not virginity.

This follow-up interview opens by circling back to the previous conversation with David LeBlanc and Richard Cortez. That recap resets the ground on Jesus, the festivals, and the tabernacle. From there, the conversation shifts into a challenge to common Christian and Messianic assumptions about Jesus. Cortez says he keeps meeting listeners who come in with a Torah-heavy picture of Jesus, something he compares to the Ebionites. That concern becomes the starting point for the larger argument. The episode keeps asking what happens when Jesus is read outside later doctrine and placed back inside Jewish history. The hosts spend time on mashiach as a Jewish category rather than a personal salvation formula. In that frame, mashiach is tied to deliverance, nationhood, land, kingship, temple purity, and peace. They contrast that with the Christian habit of turning the messiah into a divine savior figure. The discussion also brings in Roman, Greek, and broader pagan mythology as part of the origin story critics raise. One claim is that this savior-man pattern was already familiar in the ancient world. Another is that it clashes with Torah language about how God should and should not be worshiped. The conversation points back to the first of the Ten Sayings as the deepest boundary. Cortez treats that boundary as a direct critique of worship practices built around Jesus as God. The talk then pivots to Peter and the hunger scene, which he reads as part of a broader push against the oral law and toward a different grace-era framing. The episode keeps returning to the same definitions so the distinctions stay clear. By the end, the conversation is steering listeners back toward a Jewish understanding of the Bible as the key to the whole argument. The tone stays skeptical of religious performance and institutional authority, but it keeps returning to the scriptural frame instead of dressing it up. The result is a conversation about Christianity's origins that insists on Jewish context first.

As heard by us

A blunt, searching case for reading Jesus in Jewish context.

The episode keeps pulling Jesus back into Jewish history instead of later Christian framing. It starts with the festivals, then moves through the tabernacle, Messianic belief, the Ebionites, and the argument that a man-savior idea was borrowed from Roman and Greek myth.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a follow-up conversation on Jesus, festivals, and the tabernacle from a Jewish-context lens, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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