Blessed Holy Week

Let us adore the Messiah's defiance

Mar 30, 2026

I recently watched Alex O’Conner (perhaps the leading millennial atheist internet commentator until repeated debates with Christian thinkers turned him agnostic) talking with survivalist/Spec Ops vet Bear Grylls on the subject of Christianity.

I found it very interesting that both agreed that even in the worst case scenario, where one takes basically everything Jesus is quoted as saying is apocryphal (which is unlikely, given considerable corroboration from multiple sources), the general idea of him in the Gospels would still be a powerful testament to the kind of impression he made on the people of his day.

In fact, one could recognize the crux of the story (the word “crux” itself likely not coincidentally being a direct etymological derivative of the Latin word for “cross”) by setting aside the sayings and miracles, and simply honing in on what’s called “The Cleansing of the Temple”, a particular occurrence just about as strongly corroborated as anything in Jesus’s ministry (and perhaps as strongly corroborated as virtually any other historical biographical fact from antiquity, for that matter), being depicted in all four of the Gospels, and also being the event that straightforwardly led to his famous death on the cross:

It stands as the virtually undisputed (historically speaking) in-a-nutshell story of Jesus; a young rabbi stood up to upper crust of his own society, accepting he was signing his own death warrant (a particularly torturous one, given Roman methods; scourging and the like) with such an anomalously compassionate and fervent resignation to this fate in service of God that the entire course of history was altered because of it.

He obviously wasn’t what the Jewish governance and religious leaders were hoping for; they seriously thought someone would show up and tell them that God was so proud of their corrupt system He’d vanquish their enemies.

But in retrospect, what more could we in the present have hoped for an ancient Messianic exemplar to be than just the least disputable thing Yeshua of Nazareth was?

There’s a reason for the season. Keep loving and standing up for the Truth, whatever may come of it.

Blessed Holy Week to you all.

For those who love Truth enough to seek a sound understanding of God at the logical level, which is to say, at the level of Logos, this publication strongly recommends Chris Langan’s Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU.

The author publishes here on Substack as well: