Signal Through the Noise — Foreword
One Person’s Journey Through the Noise
I have struggled with religion my entire life. I could never wrap my head around the fact that with all of the world’s religions, every single one of them believed they had it right and everyone else had it wrong. Not just a little wrong — completely, damnably wrong. And when you would ask a Christian why they believed what they believed, they would say: because the Bible says so. Because the Bible is the word of God. Many would cite specific verses, even weaponizing them at times, which would only serve to push me away. They would talk about faith. And I respect faith. But here is what I could not get past:
The Bible is not the word of God. It is the word of man — many men, in fact — and it has been distorted in ways that were completely inevitable given how it was created.
That is not a radical statement. That is a historical fact. And once I started understanding the actual history of how the Bible came to exist, I could not un-know it. What follows is my attempt to lay out, in plain everyday language, exactly what happened — because I think most people have never been given a straight account of it. Not because anyone is hiding it, but because it is easier and more comfortable to just say ‘the Bible is the word of God’ than to explain what actually occurred between the life of Jesus and the book sitting on your nightstand today.
I am going to walk you through it in phases. And I want you to hold one image in your mind the entire time:
The Telephone Game.
You remember the Telephone Game. Everyone sits in a circle. One person whispers a sentence to the next person, who whispers it to the next, all the way around the circle. By the time it gets back to the start, the sentence is unrecognizable. Now — here is the thing about that. That is with a short sentence. That is with people who are paying attention. That is in the same room, in the same language, in a matter of minutes. That is with people who are actually trying to get it right.
What happened with the story of Jesus was the Telephone Game played out over roughly 80 years, across thousands of miles, between people who did not all speak the same language, many of whom could not read or write, during a period of war and persecution — and then those imperfect stories were written down, re-copied by hand for another 1,400 years, translated through multiple languages, edited and curated by committees with political agendas, and finally illustrated by artists who made everyone look like their own neighbors.
Let me take you through it step by step.
Phase I: The Stories Spread by Word of Mouth — For Decades
Jesus died somewhere around 30 to 33 CE. That much is agreed upon by virtually every historian. Here is what is also agreed upon: he wrote nothing. None of his twelve disciples wrote anything either — at least nothing that survived. So for the first several decades after his death, everything about Jesus — his teachings, his stories, his sayings — existed only in the memories of the people who had been there, and the memories of people who had heard from people who had been there.
Here is how long that went on before anyone wrote any of it down. The first written account of Jesus that we have is not even a Gospel — it is one of Paul’s letters, written approximately 18 to 21 years after the crucifixion. And Paul, famously, never met Jesus while he was alive. The first actual Gospel — the Gospel of Mark — was written approximately 37 to 40 years after Jesus died. The last Gospel — the Gospel of John — was written approximately 60 to 80 years after his death. Think about that. Eighty years of campfire stories before the last Gospel was written down.
📌 FACT CHECK: The first Gospel (Mark) was written c. 65–70 CE — approximately 35–40 years after the crucifixion. The last Gospel (John) was written c. 90–110 CE — approximately 60–80 years after.
Now think about the Telephone Game again. Except this time, instead of one room and one language, we are talking about stories spreading across Galilee, Judea, Syria, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Rome — in Aramaic, then in Greek, then in whatever local dialects existed wherever Christians had settled. And we are talking about 35 to 80 years before anyone wrote anything down.
On top of that: here is something most people do not know. Approximately 90% of the population in first-century Galilee was illiterate. The disciples were fishermen, laborers, and tradespeople. They were not scribes. Their job was to remember and retell — which is a noble skill, but it is not a recording device.
And here is where very normal, very human things start to happen. People embellish. Not because they are liars — but because that is how memory and storytelling work. You tell a story and you want it to be vivid. You want it to land. You want people to feel the weight of what happened. And the more times a story is told, the more the dramatic moments grow and the ordinary moments fade.
For all we know, Jesus had a side occupation as a small-scale grape farmer and winemaker. Wine was used as a safer alternative to drinking contaminated water in first-century Galilee — this was common practice. He may have shared that wine with people who could not afford it, and done the same with food. A genuinely generous and remarkable thing to do. But over 35 to 40 years of storytelling, through multiple languages and multiple retellings, a man who gave away the wine and bread he produced could very plausibly become a man who created wine from water and food from almost nothing. The core truth — radical generosity with resources — survives. The specifics transform into something miraculous.
The same process is well documented in American history. The story of George Washington chopping down a cherry tree and being unable to tell a lie was invented by a biographer named Mason Locke Weems in 1800, more than twenty years after Washington’s death. Within a generation, millions of Americans believed it as literal history. No one was lying. The story was just more useful than the truth.
Now do that across 80 years, five languages, and thousands of miles. That is Phase I.
Phase II: The Stories Are Written Down — and Then Copied by Hand for 1,400 Years
Once the stories finally made it onto paper, you might think the hard part was over. It was not.
Before the printing press — which did not exist until around 1455 CE — every single copy of the Bible was made by hand. One scribe, sitting by lamplight, copying letter by letter from a manuscript that was itself a copy of a copy of a copy. For 1,400 years.
We currently have approximately 20,000 surviving handwritten manuscripts of New Testament texts across all languages. And across those manuscripts, scholars have identified somewhere between 400,000 and 750,000 places where the manuscripts disagree with each other — what scholars call ‘textual variants.’ To put that in perspective: the entire New Testament contains roughly 138,000 words. There are more documented differences between manuscripts than there are words in the text itself.
Now, the vast majority of those differences are trivial — spelling variations, accidentally skipped words, that kind of thing. But some of them are not trivial at all. Some of the most beloved passages in the entire Bible were added by later scribes and are absent from the oldest surviving manuscripts:
The story of the woman caught in adultery — ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ — one of the most famous scenes in all of scripture, is absent from the oldest and most reliable manuscripts of the Gospel of John. Most scholars agree it was added by a scribe centuries later.
The longer ending of Mark — the final twelve verses of Mark’s Gospel, including the instructions to handle poisonous snakes and drink deadly poison as tests of faith, do not appear in the two oldest complete manuscripts of Mark. The original Gospel ended abruptly, and a later scribe added a more satisfying conclusion.
These are not fringe claims. They are documented in every major scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament, including the versions used by professional translators today. They are agreed upon by scholars ranging from the most conservative evangelical textual critics to the most skeptical secular historians.
Think about tens of thousands of scribes, copying over 1,400 years. Some were professionals. Many were not. Some fell asleep and repeated a line. Some misread a word because the previous scribe’s handwriting was unclear. Some ‘corrected’ a passage because they thought they remembered it differently. And some — a small number, but documented — deliberately changed a passage because the text as it stood did not fit their theology.
Every one of those changes, once copied, could spread to every subsequent manuscript that descended from that copy.
Phase III: The Passage of Time Changes What Words and Sayings Mean
Imagine someone from rural Georgia in the 1850s tells you to ‘carry’ your friend somewhere. In that dialect, ‘carry’ means to give someone a ride — to drive them. If you do not know that, you might think they mean to pick the person up and physically carry them. Same word, completely different meaning, just 150 years and a few hundred miles apart.
Now apply that to sayings from a culture that existed 2,000 years ago, in a language that is no longer spoken in its original form, from a geographic region with completely different customs, weather, agriculture, and social structures than anywhere the story later landed.
Jesus spoke in Aramaic. He used idioms, metaphors, and word-plays that were specific to first-century Galilean Jewish culture. When those sayings were translated into Greek by authors writing 35 to 80 years later — authors who may not have been fluent Aramaic speakers — the precise meaning of some of those idioms did not necessarily make the crossing intact.
A real example: in Aramaic, the word gamla means both ‘camel’ and ‘rope.’ The famous saying about a camel going through the eye of a needle — which has been debated and explained by theologians for centuries — may originally have been a saying about threading a rope through a needle’s eye, which requires absolutely no explanation. One word, two meanings, and the more dramatic translation became the one that survived.
Add to that the very human fact that a saying which made perfect intuitive sense to a Galilean farmer in 30 CE may require an entire theological treatise to explain to an English-speaking person in 1611 CE — and may mean something slightly different still to a reader in 2025.
Phase IV: The Language Translations — Each One Another Telephone Game
Jesus spoke Aramaic. The Gospels were written in Koine Greek. Jerome translated them into Latin in approximately 400 CE. The Latin Vulgate was then the official Bible of Western Christianity for over a thousand years — meaning for over ten centuries, most people who read the Bible at all were reading a 4th-century translation of a 1st-century Greek translation of stories originally told in Aramaic.
The first English Bible — the Wycliffe Bible — appeared in 1382 CE, roughly 1,350 years after Jesus died. And here is the part that stops most people: Wycliffe did not even translate from the original Greek. He translated from Jerome’s Latin. So the English Bible that most people read for the next century was a translation of a translation of a translation of oral memory.
The King James Bible, published in 1611 CE and still the most widely recognized English Bible in the world, was produced by 54 scholars working under the instructions of King James I of England. Those instructions included explicit directions to use words that supported the institutional structure of the Church of England. The translators were not simply rendering Greek into English — they were making choices, and those choices were shaped by the political and religious environment of 17th-century England.
Every translation is also a commentary. Every word choice reflects what the translator understood, assumed, or believed the original meant. And with a text that had already passed through oral transmission, scribal copying, and multiple earlier translations, the margin of interpretive error compounds at every step.
Here is a concrete example of what translation drift looks like. The Hebrew Bible uses the word re’em — a real animal, the wild aurochs, a large and formidable wild ox that was documented in ancient times. Through a series of translations from Hebrew to Greek to Latin, this real animal became a unicorn. The word ‘unicorn’ appears nine times in the King James Version of the Bible — not because anyone invented a mythological animal, but because a chain of imperfect translations converted a wild ox into a creature that does not exist. If that can happen to a word for an animal, imagine what can happen to abstractions like ‘justice,’ ‘righteousness,’ ‘eternal life,’ and ‘the Kingdom of God.’
Phase V: The Selection and Omission of Stories — By Human Hands, With Human Agendas
Here is something that surprises a lot of people. The 27 books of the New Testament were not always the Bible. The process of deciding which books were ‘in’ and which were ‘out’ took over 300 years and was not finalized until 397 CE at the Council of Carthage — roughly 367 years after Jesus died.
In those 367 years, different Christian communities used different collections of texts. There were dozens of early Christian writings circulating — Gospels, letters, revelations, teachings — that different communities considered scripture. Some of those texts were eventually included in the canon. Many more were not. Some of those excluded texts were deliberately suppressed. Others were simply lost.
In 1945, an Egyptian farmer near the town of Nag Hammadi broke open a sealed clay jar and found 52 early Christian texts that had been buried in the desert for approximately 1,600 years. Among them was the complete Gospel of Thomas — a document containing 114 sayings attributed to Jesus with no miracles, no birth narrative, no death narrative, and no resurrection story. Just teachings. Two thirds of those teachings parallel sayings in the canonical Gospels — meaning they were clearly drawn from the same oral tradition. A community of early Christians had preserved this text because they considered the teachings of Jesus to be the essential thing — not the miraculous biography.
Those texts were buried around 367 CE, almost certainly in response to a letter from the Bishop of Alexandria declaring them non-canonical and ordering Christians to stop using them. We found them because they were hidden in the desert. We will never know how many similar texts were simply burned.
The people doing the selecting and excluding were human beings, working in specific political and theological contexts, with specific agendas and specific beliefs about what Christianity should be. The Roman Emperor Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of the empire in 313 CE. The institutional church had enormous power, enormous politics, and enormous incentive to control which version of Jesus’s story became the official one.
Think about that the next time someone says the Bible is the complete and unaltered word of God. It is a selection of texts, chosen over 367 years by human beings with human motives, from a much larger body of early Christian writing — much of which no longer exists.
Phase VI: The Whitening — How Jesus and His World Were Made to Look Like the Audience
Jesus of Nazareth was a first-century Galilean Jew. His skin was olive to brown. His hair was dark and likely curly or close-cropped. His eyes were brown. He was, in the most straightforward terms, a Middle Eastern man — indistinguishable in appearance from his disciples and from the crowds he taught.
We know this not from faith, but from forensic science. In 2001, forensic anthropologist Richard Neave reconstructed a first-century Galilean Jewish face for a BBC documentary, working from actual skulls found in the region. The result: a man with olive-to-brown skin, dark curly hair, dark eyes, broad features, and a height of about 5 feet 5 inches. That is the historical Jesus — not the pale, long-haired, blue-eyed European figure that has graced the walls of churches around the world.
His name was not even Jesus. His name was Yeshua — a common Hebrew and Aramaic name meaning ‘God saves.’ His mother was Miriam. His father was Yosef. His disciples had names like Shimon, Yochanan, Yakov, and Mattityahu. These were Galilean Jewish peasants with Semitic names and Semitic faces. By the time their stories had passed through Greek, Latin, and English translations and been illustrated by European artists over fifteen centuries, they had become Peter, John, James, and Matthew — men who looked like they belonged in medieval Florence.
The transformation of Jesus’s image into a white European figure happened gradually, across centuries, as artists did what artists naturally do: they painted people who looked like the world around them. A Dutch painter painted a Dutch Jesus. An Italian painter painted an Italian Jesus. A German painter painted a German Jesus. None of them were lying. They were simply making Jesus relatable to their own audience — which is also, not coincidentally, how oral tradition works.
The most influential single image of Jesus in modern history was painted in 1940 by a Chicago commercial illustrator named Warner Sallman, a man of Swedish and Finnish descent who had never left Chicago. His painting — the Head of Christ — depicts a soft-featured, light-eyed, light-brownish-haired man with flowing locks and a gentle expression. It has been reproduced over 500 million times and hung in churches, schools, hospitals, courtrooms, and living rooms across the world. It is, by almost any measure, the most widely distributed image of a single person in human history. And it was painted by a Scandinavian-American ad man in 1940 from his imagination, based on no historical evidence whatsoever.
It is worth noting that a popular internet claim holds that the image of Jesus was modeled after Cesare Borgia — the infamous son of Pope Alexander VI — and that the Pope commissioned the change to Europeanize Jesus. This is a compelling story, but historians and art scholars, including Snopes’s fact-checkers, have found no credible evidence to support it. Depictions of a long-haired, bearded, pale European Jesus predate Cesare Borgia by centuries — the real process was more gradual and more mundane: European artists painted Jesus to look like European people, for 1,500 years, and then an American commercial artist finished the job in 1940.
The result is that the dominant global image of Jesus Christ is a Scandinavian-American advertising illustration from the middle of the 20th century, based on no historical record, depicting a Middle Eastern Jewish man as a Northern European, reproduced half a billion times.
If the physical image of Jesus could be that thoroughly transformed — and we can document every step of how it happened — what does that tell us about what happened to the words attributed to him over the same period of time?
So What Do We Do With All of This?
I want to be clear about something. None of this means Jesus did not exist. He did — that is historically documented. None of this means the teachings that survive in the New Testament are worthless. They are not. And none of this is an attack on people of faith. Faith is a personal and often beautiful thing.
What this is, is an honest accounting of what happened between the man and the book. And once you accept that accounting — once you accept that the Bible is the word of many men, shaped by the very human forces of memory, embellishment, copying error, translation drift, political selection, and cultural overlay — the question becomes: is there a way to cut through all of that noise and find something more reliable?
I think there is.
Here is the insight that got me there. If you do a character count of the New Testament — if you measure not just what it says but how much it says about each thing — a pattern emerges. Certain themes appear everywhere. They are in all four Gospels. They are in Paul’s letters. They appear in texts that were written independently of each other, decades apart, in different communities, for different audiences. These are not single miracle stories that someone added in the 4th century. These are not passages a scribe interpolated. These are the themes that the entire tradition, across its most independent sources, kept returning to again and again.
Think about it this way. A scribe with bad handwriting can corrupt a specific story. A translator making a political choice can shift the meaning of a specific word. A committee with a theological agenda can include one text and exclude another. But none of those forces can systematically make a theme dominate 20% of the entire corpus by accident. That kind of sustained, multi-source, independent emphasis is not the result of human noise. It is what gets through despite human noise.
That is the signal.
The analysis that follows in the technical article does exactly this: it takes the full text of the New Testament, measures the character count dedicated to each major theme, and identifies the top 40 teachings by that measure. It then does something similar for the Old Testament and other major world religious texts.
What it finds is both surprising and strangely reassuring. When you strip away the miracles, the politics, the scribal additions, the translation choices, and the institutional agendas — when you just ask ‘what did this tradition spend the most time talking about?’ — what remains is a remarkably coherent, remarkably human, and remarkably consistent set of moral teachings.
And here is what is perhaps the most interesting part: when you do the same analysis on the Quran, on Buddhist texts, on the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, on the Hebrew prophets — the top teachings converge. Across independent traditions, in different centuries, in different languages, with different theologies, the things that commanded the most sustained attention are almost identical.
That convergence across independent sources is, in my view, the best evidence we have for what actually matters.
Not the miracles. Not the specific stories. Not the names that were changed in translation. Not the image that was painted by a Chicago ad man in 1940.
The signal.
That is what the rest of this document is about.
— End of Foreword —
A more academic explanation can be found here