Welcome to Karen Hunter is awesome. I am Karen Hunter and back in the day I would have, I had many

conversations with this woman. She is a professor of religion, an American social thought, and her name is Dr.

Anthea Butler. So during this season, during this Christmas season, I thought it would be nice

to bring that interview back. So stay tuned. We're going to do it in two parts. This is part one of a

conversation I had with Dr. Anthea Butler, Professor of Religion. Stay tuned. So tell me about you did a

beautiful job breaking down how we got to this modern day version of Christianity. Can you

give us a cliff note version of what you did on CNN over the holiday? Oh, oh, the CNN thing

of the Pope thing? Yes. Oh, yeah, that was great.

Well, actually, what happened was there's a six-part series. I'm trained like a church historian, so I know 2,000 years. So part of it is not 2,000 years of Jesus. Two thousand years of Jesus and, but actually it's more than that, 2,000 years of a bunch of messy people. Okay, so because that's what the church is a bunch of messy people and i know people don't like to hear that and

especially the papacy is kind of messy people. Okay, so because that's what the church is, a bunch of messy people. And I know people don't like to hear that, and especially the papacy, is kind of messy. So, you know, essentially we talked about the history of the papacy and what it did and all that. And up to the present time with Pope Francis, who's dealing with a lot of stuff in the church, you know, vis-a-vis all the sex abuse scandals. And if you think that this is like, oh, this is something that's only happened in the last hundred years and blah, blah, blah, no. If you go back to the rule of St. Benedict, he was trying to keep the older men from the younger ones because he knew that they were messing with each other. Okay. So go look that. Yeah, that kind of messy. So, I mean, church is not just, you know, a boring history. It's a really interesting history of Christianity. And I think a lot of times people just think about this as, oh, I'm just reading my Bible and that's it. And there's a lot more to learn. So when you think about Constantine and you think about, you know, we were celebrating Christmas because, you know, there was a pagan holiday that he was like, hmm, let's see if we can

meld these things together so we can make this easier. It was a strategy. It was a political

strategy, not a religious one. So the reason why we celebrate Christmas when we do,

and Easter, when we do, winter solstice, summer solstice, a lot of it has to do with pagan,

you know, Christmas trees and all of that, yuleogs, all of that, all pagan. But we willfully accept it, and it's weird. We don't even challenge it. Well, I think people willfully accept it because they don't know where it's coming from. First of all, second of all, you're too busy spending all the money you made all year long and getting your credit run up so you can buy Christmas presents, but that don't have nothing to do with Jesus neither. But, you know, I think really, you know, part of this is about people don't want to see these antecedents to Christianity that actually inform Christianity.

I mean, if you look at, you know, let's scare everybody.

Let's talk about ISIS and Osiris, right?

So if you look at ISIS and Osiris and a picture of Mary and Jesus together, you know,

this is the same kind of Madonna. Yeah, the Egyptian goddess, right? And her son, if you look at them

right together, they both have the same kind of iconography, right? So it's not a surprise that

Constantine does this, but I'd like to talk about the person who I think is really more

responsible, who I actually just thought his throne last month when I was in Germany. And that's really basically what

you get to the coordination in 800, where you marry church and state together. We think about

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