There is a classicist named Ammon Hillman (a.k.a. David Hillman) who wrote a decent dissertation on ancient pharmacology and then went on to make absurd claims about the Gospels and early Christianity that verge into pedophilia and an obsession with genitals. And yes, your intuition is working here: all his weird theories about this are just as false as they sound. Yet he’s been pushing this everywhere he can online (for a summary and critique there is a whole channel on this, including treatments at MythVision and History Valley). I happen to know other classicists have been rolling their eyes at this nonsense but don’t want to get entangled in legitimizing “the creepy paedo-porn guy.” So various parties offered to arrange a debate between Hillman and me (because I am immune to university politics). Hillman flat out refused to debate me. Apparently he won’t debate an actual expert. And I’m not the only one who offered: he also refused Luke Gorton; but after I published this article, he relented and their debate on the Danny Jones show did not go well for him and he is now refusing to debate him again. So I think I know why Hillman is so not keen to debate real experts. And so will you before you finish this article.

I must forefront all this with a warning: because I have to assess the value of what Hillman says, and what he says is gross, I’m going to have to quote and discuss some graphic and gratuitous sexual content. If that’s not kosher to you, you can skip this article, and all content ever generated by Ammon (aka David) Hillman, and count yourself lucky. Everyone else, trudge on.

Since Hillman won’t debate me, I will debate his empty chair: his wildly dubious chapter in Toxicology in Antiquity, “Ancient Mystery Initiation: Toxic Priestesses and Vaginal Communion,” which includes his absurd declaration (pp. 383–84) that Jesus was taking drugs and “had to derive his antidote by the performance of a sexual act on a 9–12-year-old boy” because he “needed the semen of a young boy to balance the symptoms brought on by imbibing” hallucinogens that pagans usually snorted from vaginas (none of which is true), plus some false things he has said elsewhere about Mark describing this (he doesn’t). I have no interest in anything else Hillman says, because this alone proves he is catastrophically unreliable and thus cannot be cited even for a sensible claim, much less a controversial one. You should never be listening to or referencing this guy. At all. For anything.

Methodology

The following is not a complete fisk of Hillman’s published nonsense. Cranks never deserve that. What I will give you is a representative dive into how he misstates the facts, and browbeats anyone who can’t check him. And you’ll see it won’t even matter if he’s changed any of his positions since Toxicology, because the “errors” I will document illustrate the same dishonesty or incompetence he is displaying online. Which all entails the same things about his reliability. Hence I will walk you through enough examples for you to know that you cannot trust anything he says.

My procedure here is the same as I recommend in Galatians 1:19, Ancient Grammar, and How to Evaluate Expert Testimony: Hillman’s claims have already been debunked (see links above), but not in as much detail by anyone with a Ph.D. in ancient history and languages. Unlike me. I have studied the Greek language since my Berkeley B.A. in history and minor in classical civilizations, resulting in an honors thesis that won me a full-ride fellowship in the ancient history Ph.D. program at Columbia University, where I studied Roman-era Greek (including linguistics, paleography, and papyrology) under renowned classicists and historians (W.V. Harris, Alan Cameron, Roger Bagnall, Raphaella Cribiore, Gareth Williams, Leonardo Tarán, Nancy Worman, and others), and majored in ancient religion, historiography, and philosophy, and completed a dissertation on ancient science. So I am an expert confirming to you, personally, what Hillman is not telling you. And I am not alone. Other experts have critiqued Hillman in other ways, from Dan McClellan and Kipp Davis to Joel Korytko. As far as I know, no expert backs what he says here.

Danny Jones had Hillman on and later confessed to Joe Rogan that he could not vet his wild claims because Jones doesn’t know ancient Greek and “couldn’t” get an actual expert in Greek to debate him (and didn’t like it when he did). So I am here to tell you what Hillman is saying that isn’t true. And per the method I lay out in Ancient Grammar, I will provide you with the tools (evidence and links) that you need to tell, on your own, which of us (him or me) is snowing you. It is particularly disgusting to me when experts use their degrees to gaslight people whom they know can’t check to see they aren’t telling the truth. It’s abusive, sleazy, and fundamentally unprofessional. So you need to know if this is what Hillman is doing to you.

1. That Vagina Bong Nonsense

Hillman’s postdoc claims about ancient pharmacology generally are untrustworthy (see the Bryn Mawr review by Philippe Charlier for perspective). He practices the tactic of Motte and Bailey, framing himself as just making obviously true claims (e.g. hallucinogens were known and sometimes used in antiquity—they were) but then surrounding those with obviously false claims (e.g. everyone was using them all of the time and everything from Christianity to democracy, even Greek philosophy, was built on them—they weren’t) and then complains that calling out the latter amounts to denying the former (it doesn’t). So you have to be on your guard against that shell game. It’s a game almost every crank plays. And you might catch Hillman (and his fans) doing this a lot. Don’t let them. Always call out this fallacy the moment you see it.

So we should not be surprised that Hillman turns out to be completely unreliable on the claim that people were using women’s vaginas as bongs to take drugs (or vaginal fluids as drugs). There is absolutely no evidence this ever happened anywhere in antiquity. It would be tedious to go through the hundreds of random made-up claims he uses (in his chapter and online) to try and “create” this fact and sell you on it (all of which counting on you not checking anything). What I will do instead is single out some representative examples of how he snows you, which provide you with a framework to follow so you can check any other claim you feel the need to.

Representative of everything I’m talking about is how Hillman abuses you as audience and Apollonius as a source (p. 366):

• Hillman claims Apollonius, in Argonautica 4:1135ff., describes priestesses drugging babies. It does not. It describes the nymph Makris salving the parched lips of the baby Dionysus with honey. It explicitly says “honey” from “bees” and nothing else. Earlier Apollonius mentions she nursed him, which always means nourished, not drugged (4.540). Nowhere in this text is Dionysus or any baby drugged. (Nor in 4.869–872, on which Hillman pulls the same stunts regarding Achilles.)
• Hillman claims this passage “refers to the Mystis (μύστις), the mystery priestess who nursed Dionysus.” There is no one named or called Mystis here. The root μυστ- appears nowhere in the whole of the Argonautica (see screenshot of my search of the TLG below). And there is no reference to mysteries or even priestesses in book four.

• Hillman then claims “Mystis (whose name means “initiator”)” refers to people “credited with the production and administration of a serous vaginal exudate that was mixed with sacramental compound drug concoctions.” None of this is true. While mystis could refer to an initiate or initiator, it actually meant secret rite (from the verb muô, to close, shut). And even when mystis thus referred to initiates in those “mysteries,” it never meant anything to do with drugging vaginas. And no such thing happens in Apollonius, anywhere. And again, no one named or called mystis is in Apollonius anyway. Notice how Hillman has given the impression that this is all in the source he cited. None of it is. Literally none of it.

In fact the Greek passage Hillman quotes here (but doesn’t even attempt to translate for you) says not a single thing he claims. It actually says local “nymphs gathered up in their white folds the many-colored blossoms they had picked,” meaning they were tucking flowers into their white frocks (see below). So how does he get vaginas?

• Hillman insists the word “white” here refers to “the menstrua alba of young girls.” It does not. Even apart from the fact that in no honest, competent way does the context warrant that sense here, Hillman has screwed up the grammar. He cites §5 in the standard Liddell & Scott Lexicon, but “overlooks” the fact that the LSJ indicates that sense only occurs in the neuter plural (ta indicates neuter plural, likewise leuka), not the masculine—and only as a noun, not an adjective. Here it is masculine singular, and an adjective. It modifies kolpos, “fold, lap, bosom,” which can in medical contexts mean vagina but only when paired with the word “womanly” (gynaikeios), hence “womanly fold” not just “fold” (below I screencap an example from the medical author Rufus), or when paired with an explicit reference to birth, hence “born from her lap” not just “lap” (e.g. Callimachus). Neither of which is happening here. This is not a medical book anyway. It’s a poem about nymphs bringing flowers to a sacred site. It is not describing women giving birth or stuffing miscellaneous flowers up their vaginas. Competent translation entails attending to (not ignoring) context. But Hillman chooses crank translation instead.

So, no drugged babies or vaginas in Apollonius. Though paedo points, I guess, for contriving an elaborate excuse to juxtapose drugs, babies, and vaginas; and bonus points for making them the vaginas of “young girls,” when nymphs were actually thousands of years old. But none of this is real. It’s all made-up in Hillman’s mind. So, figmentary points for figmentary ideas, I guess.

Take care to notice all the tricks Hillman is pulling here: his only evidence for his claim about nymph vaginas is this single passage in Apollonius, yet he has misstated which word is in the text; he has misstated what the text says; and he got the grammar wrong; all to convince you that when Apollonius says nymphs carried flowers to a shrine, it means priestesses drugged their vaginas in mystery cults. In fact there are no vaginas, priestesses, drugs, or any references to mystery cults. By playing games of juxtaposition and conflation and stream-of-consciousness make-up-whatever, Hillman has fabricated a passage that does not exist, to con you into believing that a completely outrageous falsehood born of his own pornographic mind is “attested” in ancient sources. This is how he routinely operates. So you need to pay close attention to how he did this, so you know how to catch him doing it every other time.

Hillman does the same thing when he tries to trick you into thinking the word ios means “purple venom” because two different similar-sounding words that aren’t related to each other (ion and ios) mean, separately, violet (as in the flower) and any fast-acting poison (not necessarily venom). None of Hillman’s sources about venom say it is even purple much less connected to violets. None of his sources on violets or even the color purple say they are talking about poisons. It’s all the worse that you will often catch him playing on the ambiguity of the word “purple” to term-switch between “violet” (ion) and “red” in order to claim references to blood are references to ios (poison). Of course spectrally violet is nowhere near the color of blood (literally), and though the ancient Greek word for purple could overlap with red, it can’t for the flower. So there is no logical way to get from “violets” (the flower) to “blood red.” Nor are violets poisonous. Nor are they snakes. Nor is snake venom purple (hence he has to concoct elaborate fantasies about how it must have been mixed with purple dye). Hillman’s train of thought across all of this is poppycock.

And he pulls the same tinfoil hattery with language to get purple vagina bongs. For example:

• Hillman claims “a good example” (note: he says a good example) of his made-up ios-rite “can be found in Euripides’ account of the union of Apollo and Creusa, Ion 887ff.” where, he insists, “Creusa inserts meadow saffron into her vagina” (p. 368).

Really?

No.

Once again, Hillman’s source is just describing a man finding a woman gathering flowers and then leading her to bed (and not a wedding, or any religious rite, as Hillman also falsely claims). The context cannot be tweaked here. “You came to me, your hair gleaming with gold, when I was plucking into the folds of my robe saffron flowers to adorn with gold gleaming” is clear in its meaning. In Greek, this translates ἦλθές μοι χρυσῷ χαίταν μαρμαίρων, εὖτ᾽ ἐς κόλπους κρόκεα πέταλα φάρεσιν ἔδρεπον, ἀνθίζειν χρυσανταυγῆ, where autumn saffron not meadow saffron is referenced (see below), and kolpous this time is in the plural for a single woman. So does she have multiple vaginas?

In the context of giving birth the plural of kolpos can refer to the entire reproductive system (from the womb on down). But that’s not the context here. Here the context is flower-picking. So the sense is dictated by context: she has multiple folds in her gown. Indeed this passage explicitly says “gown” (folds in her pharos, often in poetry plural, meaning a cloak or apron—never vagina). And it is “saffron flowers” (krokea petala) that she is “picking” (drepô)—not a drug or poison, but a condiment (saffron in the vagina wouldn’t do anything pharmacologically more than eating it would). Her many vaginas (or entire reproductive system) stuffed with drugs also can hardly have been “adorning” anything “with gold” either.

Oh, did you not catch the clever poet contrasting the boy’s golden hair gleaming with her golden flowers adorning? Right. The poet is describing visual imagery. She isn’t stuffing flowers out of sight. She is displaying them. Adorning, not drugging.

And then:

• Hillman claims “the vagina (κόλπος) and breasts of priestesses became biological synthesizers of sacred communal substances,” a truly strange assertion, for which he cites only a single source: Horace’s Epodes 17.35, where Hillman insists “the Latin term for the body as a vessel used to prepare drugs was officina and was used by Horace to describe the power of the witch Canidia in her use of Colchian drugs” (p 369).

Not a single thing he says here is true. Remember the word “lap” (kolpos) only means vagina when paired with the word “womanly” or a reference to birth, which isn’t happening in either passage he cites (and not only because his source is in Latin, not Greek). Epode 17 never says any of this. No lap or bosom or vagina is here at all. Line 35 says of Canidia “you’re a workshop aglow with Colchian poisons, till I turn to dry ashes” and am blown away. There is no mention of vaginas or “the body as a vessel.” That Horace, a poet, says “she” is a workshop is a poetic device called personification. Horace is not describing Canidia processing poisons in her body (at all, much less using her vagina). He is just describing her furious activity in producing poisons and magicks until he is burned away by them. So, Hillman has no evidence whatsoever for his wild claim here. He just cited a random unrelated verse and hoped you didn’t go and read it—or don’t know how Latin works, or how poetry works, or that a fantastical poem about a witch tormenting the narrator is not a technical manual on vagina magic.

I won’t tour any more examples. It’s all like this. Nothing he claims is true. None of his sources say what he claims. Indeed, you’ll find Hillman pulls stunts like this all the time, like when in some rambling video or other he tries to argue that any ancient Greek passage about sitting on a throne can be read as “taking drugs” because ta throna can mean drugs (and somehow “sitting” or whatever verb it is can be spun as “taking” or “being on” or whatever). What he doesn’t tell you is that this sense only exists in the neuter plural. When the word means seat or chair (and hence, by metonymy, kingdom or reign) it is masculine singular (or masculine plural when many thrones/domains are meant, like in Colossians 1:16 and Revelation 20:4).

These technical matters of Greek grammar require expertise to spot. So Hillman is counting on his dupes not knowing Greek, or not bothering to check what he is claiming about the Greek. Of course his claim also falls afoul of all the other rules of competent translation (like attending to the grammatical and situational and cultural context of a word—see, again, Colossians 1:16 and Revelation 20:4). For example, Luke 22:30 is obviously just an abbreviation of the twelve-thrones saying of Matthew 19:28 which is obviously an embellishment of a doctrine Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 6:3, “we will [even] judge angels.” It’s about holding seats of power in judgment (twelve different seats, one for each tribe). It is not about taking drugs. Wrong context. Wrong grammar. So Hillman’s exegesis here would flunk him out of any accredited course in ancient Greek.

When he suspects you are going to catch him pulling these sorts of tricks, he will pull out another more sweeping claim: that he knows a secret language called the Vox Orphica and this allows him to completely change the meaning of any word he wants anywhere to anything. This is a scam. But I’ll get to that last. Let’s move through the rest of his bunk first.

2. That Jesus the Drug Addict Nonsense

I shouldn’t insult your intelligence by wasting time on Hillman’s nonsense case for Jesus taking drugs, in particular a completely illogical mixture of hallucinogens, poisons, and colored dyes (because, reasons). That never happens in the Gospels, and Hillman’s attempts to “get it” to be happening in the Gospels is all linguistic distortion and tinfoil hat that, once again, would get you flunked out of any course in ancient Greek or literature. But alas, he is snowing you, and too many are falling for it, so I have to give you a dose here to inoculate you against this disease.

Hillman claims “the first generation of Christians following Jesus openly acknowledged drinking drug concoctions derived from snakes” in Mark 16:18 (p. 383). Openly? No. Not even covertly. Not even at all. This is all made up. First, of course, that verse is a fake. It was likely inserted into the manuscripts of Mark in the 3rd century, and most likely originated in a commentary on the Gospels from the mid-to-late second century that never intended this to be mistaken as Gospel text (see my chapter on all this in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). It probably was just a rephrase of Luke 10:19 which claims a miraculous immunity to poisons, not their use for anything. But whatever. Likewise, later traditions (e.g. Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 36.1, and Papias in Eusebius, History of the Church 3.39.9) only reference a mythical immunity to poisons, not the intentional use of poisons as drugs. But again, whatever. Let’s play the game.

Mark 16:18 is in a list of miraculous powers early Christians would claim to have, including that “they will pick up snakes, and when they drink anything deadly, it will not hurt them at all.” There is no reference here to using poisons as drugs, or using them in any way at all. It just says things won’t hurt or kill them because of their faith. And it “openly” says this of handling snakes (ὄφεις ἀροῦσιν), not processing their venom, and that nothing “deadly” (θανάσιμόν) that they drink will harm them (πίωσιν οὐ μὴ αὐτοὺς βλάψῃ), not “things they drink will do something useful for them” or any other thing that could have buttressed Hillman’s fantasy. In fact Pseudo-Mark chose the opposite sense: to never blapsein someone means not just never cause harm, but to never alter or distort their mind, too. Which rules out any conception of this encompassing hallucinogens.

Hillman ignores all this and claims, instead, that the word “deadly” was a medical term for poisons. That’s not quite true, because he is misrepresenting an adjective as a noun. The word is “deadly,” not necessarily “poison” (the author says “deadly thing,” θανάσιμόν τι). This therefore cannot be the medical term for poisons. As a noun substitute (which it absolutely is not here) it could mean poisons, and hence poisonous “drugs.” And so could the adjective-noun phrase the author actually used. And the context does make that the sense here. But it does not specify snake venom as Hillman mis-implies. It generically encompasses all deadly substances. Moreover, snake venom was already listed, so the author clearly does not mean snake venom with this phrase. He means all other poisons apart from the snake venom he already mentioned by metonymy. And the context plainly establishes that he means these are bad things, things that would cause harm (but for the Christian faith), exactly as Papias and Hippolytus clearly understood (so all Christian witnesses are against Hillman here).

This is all just a bundle of bait-and-switch fallacies: say some trivially true things (like that Pseudo-Mark means “poisons”), then tack on a bunch of false things (like that he means ingesting a processed and carefully-dosed snake venom in conjunction with a hallucinogen), and hope that the truth of those trivial things will rub off onto the false things. It doesn’t. Unless you’re easily duped by shell games. But please don’t be that fool. You know better. What Hillman is doing is exactly the wrong way to translate texts. Ignoring grammar. Ignoring context. Ignoring history. And putting words in an author’s mouth. Just like the Preterist and Israel Only folks do. Hillman is breaking every rule he would have been trained in school to follow. Which would be professional incompetence if it didn’t appear that he knows what he’s doing and thus is doing this on purpose. Which I think the savvy will peg as dishonesty. This is the same shit that Christian apologists do in the other direction, which rightly pisses you off. Same game. Same disinformation. You should be just as pissed off.

Hillman then uses the same Christian-apologetics-style trickery again when he claims that Jesus’s Gethsemane prayer is about him drinking processed snake venom and hallucinating angels—absolutely none of which is happening in the text. There is no angel, no vision—not in Mark’s account, nor Matthew’s revision of it, nor even in Luke’s 2nd century revision of theirs, because Hillman glosses over the fact that the angelic vision now in Luke’s text was most likely a textual corruption of the late second century (a conclusion with a grade of A—the highest confidence—in the most recent text-critical edition, and as defended in Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, pp. 225–26; there is no evidence these verses were in Marcion’s text either). This is important because Hillman spins another ridiculous argument here that (somehow) the fact that Jesus (supposedly) sweated blood confirms his use of a drug—but that’s part of the interpolation. It’s fake. Luke never wrote that. It was inserted half a century or so after Luke composed his edition. But even if he did write it, he clearly invented it a century after the fact. Because both Mark and Matthew, his only known sources, never heard of it (even though some scribes tried to sneak this text into late manuscripts of Matthew: Aland & Aland, The Text of the New Testament, p. 310).

But this is also a non sequitur. Red sweat has no actual correlation with any hallucinogen. And the text does not even mean that anyway. The author’s metaphor is not from the color of blood but how his sweat forms drops and hits the ground the way blood does (this is obvious to anyone with any savvy in literature and metaphor who just reads the text as written). Hillman tries to avoid all this by instead implying the sick idea that Pseudo-Luke might really mean some purple goo was leaking out of Jesus’s ass (“the physical substance that exudes from Jesus in the Garden is also used to describe the exudate of the anus of Dionysus” in the Frogs of Aristophanes—that never happens in the Frogs of Aristophanes). Or perhaps, less intelligibly, leaking out of Jesus’s pores “as if like” Dionysus’s ass. But that would be abject pseudoscience. So I assume Hillman doesn’t mean that.

There is no goo or purple or anus in Luke 22:43–44. Nor in Aristophanes—and notice Hillman does not tell us where in the Frogs this weird thing is supposed to be happening. Not a single relevant word connects between Luke 22:44 and the Frogs, except that “dripping blood” (haimatostagês, a word not in Luke) shows up in Frogs 471–472, but in no connection with anyone’s ass. Nor is there any “ephemera” that Hillman claims Jesus was drinking that is supposed to have caused this. In the Frogs the line is (spoken to Dionysus) “Acheron’s gore-splattered crag is keeping watch on you” (Ἀχερόντιός τε σκόπελος αἱματοσταγὴς φρουροῦσι). Only after this, after Hell’s janitor thus threatened him, does he sick monsters on Dionysus that literally scare the shit out of him, and a humorous discourse follows about his heart dropping into his bowels. But none of that is in connection with the previous mention of blood. So, sorry. No hemorrhoids. No bleeding ass. No “ephemera.” Not a single thing Hillman is claiming is in that text.

There is also no drinking in Gethsemane (or before—and you can check: Jesus is never said to drink anything in any account of the last supper). Hillman is eyerollingly acting like a biblical literalist and just “declaring” that what is in fact a metaphor is supposed to be meant literally. It isn’t. Jesus never drinks anything at Gethsemane. There is no cup (or any physical container to be drinking poisonous concoctions from). There is no drinking (not in Mark, Matthew, or Luke). The mention of a cup is a metaphor, not an actual cup (much less with a hallucinogen in it). This is obvious from how John 18:11 understands the metaphor: Jesus is not talking about a literal cup, but “drinking the cup” is a metaphor for accepting his death and fate. One might infer it is a metaphor popularized by, and thus in a sense evoking, the cup of Socrates (whose execution for blasphemy involved drinking hemlock, also not a hallucinogen, but whose story the Gospels did emulate: OHJ, ch. 5 §46). But that’s still not literal (Jesus was not executed by voluntarily drinking a cup of hemlock). Normally I’d say this shows Hillman is just catastrophically bad at literary analysis or biblical exegesis—a rank amateur even—unless he’s deliberately misstating these things to con you. You decide.

I can give you a hand, though. Because perhaps the most blatant evidence of Hillman’s deceptive and manipulative behavior is in how he uses the Roman pharmaceutical author Scribonius Largus at this very point. Hillman claims (p. 383) that somewhere in his Compositions, §188 or §193, Largus:

describes a series of symptoms suffered by the use of drugs (mala medicamenta) associated with the ios-rite mysteries that is similar to those suffered by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane after he ‘drank of the cup’, and experienced a vision of an angel.

This isn’t true. We already saw that Jesus drinking something isn’t in any version of this text, and seeing an angel isn’t in any first century version of the text. But the section of Largus that Hillman is citing also has nothing at all to do with the mysteries, or Hillman’s made-up snake-venom “ios-rites.”

The two sections of Largus that Hillman cites are part of a chapter on antidotes against “all” bad drugs (mala medicamenta), not any specific one. And §188 is in the middle of a list of these, describing the antidote for aconite, which mentions cold sweat as a symptom of botanical aconite poisoning (see pp. 76–77 of Helmreich’s edition). Aconite is not a hallucinogen and has no effects relevant to anything Hillman is arguing here—other than that it can cause a cold sweat, like a thousand other things, including just being nervous. So this would appear to say nothing pertinent to Hillman’s point. The other section he cites, §193, is many items further down the list, and about the antidote to a drug called ephêmeron, better known today as crocus, which is sometimes confused today (but not then) with the culinary saffron picked by Creusa earlier, which was then called “crocus,” while this other crocus was then called colchicum (and when processed as a poison, ephêmeron). Hillman sometimes plays on this conflation of modern and ancient vocabulary. But correcting his mistake leads us to this, another botanical poison that is also not a hallucinogen (see Helmreich, p. 78). This can cause you to spit, then vomit, then shit blood (in that chronological order). None of which is “sweating” blood, and in no way is Pseudo-Luke describing Jesus vomiting and shitting blood.

This is made up bullshit. But it seems clear to me that Hillman is counting on you not being able to find and read an obscure Latin pharmaceutical text, so he can make you believe anything he wants about what it says (that in fact it doesn’t say). Which looks to me like professional malpractice. Of course, I suppose Hillman will claim when cornered that “he didn’t mean” to trick you into thinking Largus said any of these things, that he “really” meant that Largus doesn’t say any drugs were used in mystery rites (rather he “mentions drugs” that Hillman thinks were used that way), and Largus never discusses any hallucinogen here, he just “describes drugs” that cause sweating and internal bleeding and if you mistook him as saying Largus was describing a poison that causes visions and sweating blood (and thus explains the text of Pseudo-Luke 22:43–44) “you” are the idiot who misunderstood him. But when he pulls that stunt on you, you can ask yourself if you think you’re being conned. I certainly felt like I was when I checked his claims here and found out the truth.

Hillman does this so much that his reliability is truly blown. Many a page of his chapter contains dubious claims about ancient Greek, like when he tries to tell his readers with a straight face that Jesus’s “name in Greek is ‘Jason'” (p. 384). It’s not. The words are nothing alike, in either meaning or etymology. Jesus is actually Joshua, and means in Hebrew “Yahweh Saves.” Though Hillman has crank things to say about Hebrew being a fake language, even in Greek Jesus is an eta-root second declension noun with a sibilant stem, IHSOUS. Jason (the hero of the Argonauts) most likely means “healer” and in Greek is an alpha-root third declension noun with a nasal stem, IASWN.

Why in all Acheron’s bloody crags Hillman thought to tell his readers otherwise escapes me. Because I cannot ascertain any point to his doing that, other than to make the really illogical argument that anything said about any man named Jason can “then” be assumed true about Jesus. Although that does appear to be the argument he is making: for he makes this bizarre claim when seeming to argue that Jesus must have engaged in the same drug rituals as Jason. Hillman even claims Jason was involved in “the cult drug compound used in the mystery rite” (the one Hillman completely made up) that was “otherwise known as the ‘burning purple'” according to (Hillman says on p. 377) “Carl Ruck” (supposedly somewhere in pp. 381ff. of Great Gods of Samothrace). But Carl Ruck never said that (there or anywhere). Hillman’s citation is bogus. And even apart from Hillman’s fantasies about “burning purple,” there is no evidence of Jason engaging in any drug “rituals” at all. Just one time he is given a magical oil of invulnerability for his armor and body. Which is also not a hallucinogen. Nor exists.

There are countless fallacies here and everywhere in Hillman’s discourses. But the “Jason is the Greek for Jesus” thing alone is something usually only a rank amateur would say. Yet Hillman knows it is false. And says it anyway. This tells you how pervasively unreliable he is. You can’t trust anything he says. Least of all about the Gospels describing Jesus taking drugs. They don’t.

3. That Jesus as Child Rapist Nonsense

So pagans weren’t smoking vaginas. And Jesus wasn’t doing drugs. He also wasn’t raping kids.

Hillman says (p. 385):

Based on the technical vocabulary employed by the Christian texts themselves, it is likely that Jesus was performing fellatio on the naked boy that was with him in the Garden of Gethsemane in order to secure the antidote to the sacramental cup from which he drank before he had his vision of an angel.

Which reiterates his claim that Jesus “had to derive his antidote by the performance of a sexual act on a 9–12-year-old boy” (p. 383) and “the gospel of Mark records that Jesus was arrested in a public cemetery after midnight in the company of an anonymous naked male child” (citing Mark 14:51–52). In videos Hillman has tried to defend this baloney with esoteric interpretations of the Greek that are, again, completely crank.

Here is the truth (and everything you need to check it by). First, my own word-by-word translation:

Καὶ νεανίσκος τις συνηκολούθει αὐτῷ

And a certain young man was closely following him [Jesus]

περιβεβλημένος σινδόνα ἐπὶ γυμνοῦ

having thrown a linen garment around his naked[ness]

καὶ κρατοῦσιν αὐτόν ὁ δὲ

and they grabbed him, and,

καταλιπὼν τὴν σινδόνα

leaving behind the linen garment,

γυμνὸς ἔφυγεν.

he fled naked.

There is no mention here of fellatio. Mark says nothing about this young man before this. All Mark says of him is that he was some unnamed guy who was close by Jesus at his arrest, who was wearing no underwear but just a linen tunic, and when the authorities grabbed him (why only him and no one else there is one of many implausibilities of Mark’s narrative), he ran, at which his tunic tore or fell off him, and he bucked it out of there naked. The next we hear of this young man, he is wearing a white robe at the empty tomb, where he reports the resurrection and gives the women their instructions.

Hillman’s rereading of this rests on his usual poppycock:

• Hillman’s misinformation here starts with his incompetent translation of “young man” as “9–12 year old boy.” That is false. Indeed it is either a rank amateur mistake, or a lie. Your call. But the word neaniskos very specifically excluded boys of that age. It only ever referred to men (specifically any male who had passed puberty) who were below middle age (so, anyone from roughly 15 to 30). Indeed the term routinely referred to men of military age, and at their peak. Not children. This is well settled in the scholarship. And Hillman’s misinformation then concludes with his false claim that Jesus was drinking poisonous hallucinogens at Gethsemane, or anywhere else (we already saw Hillman made that up).
• In between is the bizarre claim Hillman makes in his videos that the word here for “linen garment” actually refers to a little cloth on this guy’s genitals. And trigger warning for the rest of this paragraph: I have to repeat Hillman’s pornographic ideas here (and making us do that may be what Hillman gets off on, like some nonconsensual sex game). So, prepare yourself. Or skip to the next bullet. Hillman says that Mark is describing this man’s penis and balls wrapped in a bandage soaked in an antidote, through which Jesus needs him to ejaculate into his mouth because semen is (somehow) needed to push the antidote out of the rag into his mouth, to save him from the snake-venom-based hallucinogen Jesus drank that Mark never mentioned anywhere. I’m serious—this is literally what Hillman claims, and in gross detail. Never mind the stupid science (there is no possible “antidote” anyone needs injected this way) or the dumb drug fantasy (there is no poisonous hallucinogenic concoction that Jesus needs any antidote to in this story) or the missing text (Mark never describes Jesus even touching this guy, much less in this convoluted sexual way). Even what is in the text of Mark does not support any of this.
• The word for garment in Mark, sindôn, does not and cannot ever mean “a bandage” (much less on some small part of the body). It means a sheet, or a large towel. And when something worn, it means a tunic or undershirt (like a night dress or a slip). For example, the burial shroud of Jesus is a sindôn (as Mark himself says, and I think on purpose—more on that shortly). Other words were always used for smaller applications. For example, John calls the towel around Jesus’s face a soudarion. Lots of other words meant, similarly, a bandage. But not sindôn. There is just no way to get this to be a little bandage on a penis. And Mark never says penis anyway. Mark rather says this sindôn was around his nakedness (lit. “naked” sc. body), both by preposition and by verb, “cast around, thrown over.” And he fled naked once he lost it—all of which imagine a garment over his whole body. An ancient author would be more specific if he meant otherwise—so we can be sure he did not mean otherwise. And any real expert would know all this. So again: is Hillman shockingly incompetent—or a liar? You decide.

So this is all made-up. Again.

Still, so that you can understand how real experts know this, here below is a passage from the medical author Galen about what a sindôn is, from Method of Medicine 10.724 (this is a photo I took of my own shelf copy, with my fingers holding the page; but you can also look at a highlighted and underlined image of the same text):

Here Galen describes using a sindôn to carry a sick man, requiring four men, each holding a corner with the patient wrapped within. Galen did not have to add any qualifiers to explain that he means a “large” sindôn, or anything like that. He knows just the word sindôn would evoke no confusion, because everyone then understood that word to mean a large sheet, not a little bandage. Indeed Galen says not to leave the patient “naked” (gymnos, same word as in Mark), but make sure he is covered so he stays warm, which entails every reader understood “naked” to mean the whole body, and covering a “naked” man as covering the body, not some small part of it. He says this again using exactly the same vocabulary as Mark in On Treatment by Bloodletting 11.304. Other places Galen uses it to mean a large towel, not little washcloth. Indeed, Galen uses the word sindôn almost thirty times, and never in any other sense than these. No one then understood sindôn as a little bandage. Galen even specifically distinguishes a sindôn as a cloth for the body (or a large towel or body-wrap) from mere “bandages” (epidesis) in Composition of Medicines by Type (13 §671).

So, Hillman is full of it.

By contrast, this is what a competent analysis of Mark’s “young man” pericope looks like:

It is a well-documented fact that Mark is often reifying Paul’s letters into stories (see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles for examples and scholarship). And Paul conspicuously equated our bodies of flesh to disposable garments, and our being naked at the loss of them, and then clothed again in glory when we receive our new resurrection bodies, which in Jewish literature were often described as like white robes (see Revelation 6:11, for example). The young man, someone in the prime of life, is identified distinctively as “a young man” both times so you will recognize his reappearance at the tomb and its significance: the arrest of Jesus symbolizes his death (and so, in parallel, the young man loses his humble “garment” of flesh and becomes naked), and the empty tomb symbolizes his resurrection (and so, in parallel, the young man reappears gloriously clothed in white). And in both cases the same word is used to describe his being clothed: the perfect participle of περιβάλλω, “having thrown around” him. Which makes three coincidences confirming Mark intends these to be the same man and their fates compared. There’s no room here for dumb drug sex stuff.

Mark’s story happens to reify Daniel 12:10, where the resurrected will “be made white” (ἐκλευκανθῶσιν) and Daniel 12:3 where they will “shine” like stars. Mark had already had Jesus tell everyone the resurrected will be like angels (Mark 12:25) who were often described as shining white, and presaged the resurrection in the transfiguration, when Jesus became shining white (Mark 9:3). But the biggest clue is Paul’s description of the coming death-and-resurrection (in 2 Cor. 5:1–5):

For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

The disposable tent (skênê) is the equivalent of a sheet surrounding us. And when we die we lose that, becoming naked (Paul using the same word describing the young man: gymnos), and thus we long to be reclothed in a new, better, “celestial” body like the stars in the sky (1 Cor. 15:40–54). That the idea of using clothing and nakedness metaphors (likewise plain vs. glowing raiment) was then commonplace for death and resurrection I document extensively in my chapter on the resurrection body in The Empty Tomb. And many other experts have come to the same conclusion about this young man (see Abraham Kuruvilla, “The Naked Runaway and the Enrobed Reporter of Mark 14 and 16: What Is the Author Doing with What He Is Saying?,” JETS 54.3 (September 2011), 527–45).

This all follows from rational literary and vocabulary analysis. Our conclusions follow from our premises, and our premises account for all the actual data, requiring nothing to be made up. And you can confirm we are not snowing you with false claims about the Greek or misleading citations. Yet we aren’t finding penises, fellatio, raped children, or bizarre drug rituals involving dirty socks in this passage of Mark. Go figure.

4. That Bonus Jesus Anal Sex Nonsense

There is a lot of gross, sick shit like this from Hillman (in this chapter and in his online rambles), including his farcical claim that Jesus had to resort to gay pedophilia because Christians were otherwise off on the idea of “prostitutes” (Hillman seems unaware that boys could also be prostitutes, and girls can as easily be raped as boys without being prostitutes) because the Gospel of Mark says “Mary [Magdalene] used a dildo-shaped drug applicator on Jesus called an alabastron” (pp. 383–84), which he did not, and “therefore” that’s why there are no vagina bongs in the New Testament (right … that’s why).

So I’ll end with this (which amounts to claiming that Jesus had anal sex with a drug-oiled dildo) because it is so fantastically egregious in its deceptions that it conclusively proves how little you can ever trust Hillman:

• The word alabastron does not mean dildo or applicator. It means “alabaster container,” alabaster being a kind of stone, and tron a suffix denoting tool, and together denoting a commonly known small jar for ointment (whether pharmacological or not), exactly as it is described in Mark (an alabastron “of” nard-oil, not an alabastron “covered in” nard-oil; and an alabastron that had to be “cracked open” to extract the oil; and “oil of pure nard,” μύρου νάρδου πιστικῆς, hence not even a “mixture,” much less a “poison” or “hallucinogen”). All of which entails Hillman is making a flunkable amateur mistake in reading Greek—unless it’s not a mistake and he is intentionally lying to you about the Greek. Your call.
• No one named Mary brings an alabastron to Jesus in Mark. Hillman is conflating this with a different scene in John, with no alabastron, and only oiling his feet with Mary’s hair (not his anus, and not with a jar—even the claim that there is a Hebrew, not a Greek, word that can mean both feet and penis is disputed, but still doesn’t get you an anus). So. Flunkable amateur mistake? Or liar? Your call.
• In John, the Mary who oils Jesus’s feet is not the Magdalene (the Mary from Migdol), but the Mary from Bethany (sister of Martha and Lazarus). These were conflated only in the Middle Ages. And no Mary is a prostitute in any Gospel (again, that was a Medieval fabrication). So, again. Flunkable amateur mistake? Or liar? Your call.
• In Mark an anonymous woman instead crushes an alabastron, not inserts it anywhere. And grammatically, she broke or shattered it before she poured its contents down onto Jesus’s head. So there is absolutely no way to get this sentence to mean what Hillman wants you to gullibly believe. This woman smashes the alabastron, and the oil it contains then pours down onto the kephalê of Jesus, which only ever means the top of the body, by which you count people or cattle. And yes, the verb absolutely means “pour down onto” (kata + cheô), not pump up into or any other nonsense. And crushed means crushed, not inserted. And so on. So. Flunkable amateur mistake? Or liar? Your call.

And nothing Hillman cites for this says what he claims either. To trick you into believing alabastron means dildo, Hillman claims a “Priapic dildo (alabastron / fascinum) was employed in magico-medical ritual as a pharmaceutical applicator,” none of which is true. There is no actual “magico-medical ritual” and none of his citations here say there was. But more importantly, by writing “alabastron / fascinum” after dildo, Hillman misleads his readers into thinking those are the same word (one Greek, the other Latin). But they are not. An alabastron I already explained. A fascinum, by contrast, just means an artificial penis—literally “little fasces,” in reference to the secular power symbolized by the rods and axes lictors carried before magistrates, but describing talismans of protection, which just happened to depict a penis (as a symbol of spiritual power). Some authors would use it thus as simply a synonym for any object shaped like a penis.

So when Hillman references Richard Burton’s 19th century (and thus hopelessly obsolete) Priapeia, you can check: Burton never uses the word alabastron, and never refers to a fascinus as a dildo in relation to any actual religious ritual. These are nowhere in Hillman’s citation of Augustine, either (see City of God 6.9). Augustine only complains about the Roman practice of brides preparing for sex with a statue of Priapus (known as Mutunus Tutunus). No magic. No religious ritual. No ointments. No alabastron. While Burton instead only references a joke: that Petronius, a satirist (and in the Satyricon, a satire) has the fictional sorceress “Oenothea introduce a leathern fascinum,” not an alabastron, “smeared with oil, pepper and crushed nettle seeds, into the anus of Encolpius as an aphrodisiac,” which is obviously comedy. Burning nettles up the ass? No one would ever really do that, nor does this describe anyone ever really doing that (this is slapstick). And it is not some mystery rite; it’s a perverted spell. Anyone who is competent in Classics knows Petronius is inventing a horrifically stupid and painful suppository “as” an aphrodisiac, to make fun of people who try weird and uncomfortable things for sex, and of wizards and their weird and uncomfortable mumbo jumbo. So for Hillman to tell you this is a real account of an actual thing is either massively incompetent—or outrageusly dishonest. Your call.

The key takeaway here is this: notice how Hillman has tried to fool you into thinking an alabastron is a fascinum, with a false juxtaposition, and some false source citations (as in, real sources that do not say an alabastron is a medicinally oiled dildo). Then he brazenly tries to trick you into thinking maybe that’s what Mark means, by conflating a story in John with no alabastron and clearly only an oiling of feet, with a story in Mark with an alabastron that is a container that is shattered and then dripped down onto the head, not shoved up an anus as an applicator—all hoping you don’t know Greek and thus are easily duped by his shining you on. It’s the same with Jesus and the young man. All bullshit. Either incompetence or malpractice. And you have to choose which.

Hillman’s Bogus Vox Orphica

As I mentioned, Hillman keeps claiming he is using some kind of secret language called the Vox Orphica (pp. 364–65), the “voice” of the Orphics (as one might call an “Orphic dialect”). But there is no such language. He made that up. He claims it’s “a term used by Otto Kern, editor of the Orphic Fragments,” and that “It denotes a technical language employed by mystery religion participants.” But he does not cite any actual source for this claim (no page number in Kern’s Orphic Fragments, or anything else by Kern or anyone). You can’t claim to know a secret language if you can’t point anyone to where or how you know it. There is a particular vocabulary used in mystery cults but it’s not a secret “language” (see OHJ, pp. 97–98). It’s just the same Greek language, whose words change meaning by context, so you have to know the context to ascertain the sense. You can’t claim to know what a secret language says as if by magic anyway. Whether code or context, you need to be able to cite examples proving any particular meaning for a word you are claiming, or be able to cite context that does. Hillman never does either, for any controversial claim he makes. He just makes those up. And he makes them up against all the evidence, not with any (as you’ve already seen).

This becomes clear when you find out all his citations for this don’t really say what he wants you to think. He claims, for example, that the medieval John Lydus in De Ostentis 2.6 evinces this vox as a special language of the mystery cults. But if you check, you’ll find no such thing there. The first time anything about “language” comes up in that section (which is in §3, not §2), John only refers to the Etruscan (or old Italian) language, not any secret language. Nor in either section does he mention anything to do with mystery cults—De Ostentis §2–3 pertains to divination by astronomy (ἀστρονομία, §2.12) and by entrails (θυοσκοπία, §3.2), and not, as Hillman claims, “complex interdimensional physics,” much less “the mysteries.” And you don’t have to take my word for it. You can read Lydus yourself (section §2 and section §3). And we know what Lydus means from a better earlier source as well: Cicero.

So maybe Hillman meant us to find this supposed “vox” in the only modern scholarship he cites on this, Otto Kern? But Kern never discusses this in his Fragments, much less provides any lexicon for translating it, either. So where is this secret language proved and detailed so we can read it? Hillman won’t tell you. Instead, if you search Kern’s Fragments for vox Orphica you will find only one use, in a footnote (p. 166, n. 100), and there only with a question mark, as he then cites evidence for a word having a particular meaning in an Orphic context (not an Orphic language), but is unsure because the evidence is weak. This is not a reference to a secret language, but to a word having a particular meaning in a particular context. And Kern correctly knows you can’t just claim that, you need evidence, for each specific word and meaning you are alleging. Hence Kern supplies the kind of evidence Hillman never provides when using the “term” vox Orphica, and unlike Kern, Hillman never admits when the evidence is weak or nonexistent. We see this again in the one other time Kern uses, instead, vox mystica, where for the word “bosom” he cites Dieterich’s work on Mithraism (pp. 123, 136) because it extensively documents evidence for that word having a particular sense in mystery contexts. Hillman never does this either.

You need to not be duped by this tactic. Never let Hillman “claim” a special meaning for a word is proved somewhere, if he never tells you where. And watch out for the bait and switch, where he will “claim” it is used in a source or by an author in a certain way, but still never where. So you cannot check him. That looks like he doesn’t want you to be able to check, while still “looking like” he cited a source. An honest scholar making an out-of-the-mainstream claim is morally responsible for defending that claim with evidence. And that means actual evidence—a precise citation to the actual passage(s) or peer-reviewed scholarship where a special meaning is demonstrated—not handwaving that merely looks like doing that but isn’t. That’s shady. And you know it.

Also don’t be duped by motte and bailey, either, where Hillman might (maybe in a video) cite real evidence that, let’s say, “milk and meat” had a particular contextual sense in mystery cults (like I cite sources and scholarship for in OHJ, for example, e.g. pp. 110–11, referencing the resources already discussed earlier on pp. 97–98), and then claim without evidence that some other word also has some other contextual sense in mystery cults, and just browbeat you into agreeing with him. The grift there is that when you challenge his second claim, he might cite the first claim as proof that the “voice” exists and therefore you cannot doubt the second claim, when in fact he has no evidence for the second claim like he does for the first (which should cause you to ask why). Obviously you should only believe the first claim, not the second. He may want to trade on having evidence for the one claim to con you into agreeing he has evidence for the second claim when in fact he does not. That’s also shady. And you know it.

Remember these terms and how they work: motte and bailey and bait and switch. Because I won’t waste any more time dealing with Hillman’s bullshit. Any time he tries responding to what I have exposed, I will simply call out the tactic(s) he deploys, by these or other commonplace terms. It will then be your responsibility to check whether that is indeed the tactic he just used (or to just not care and stop listening to him, as you really should). Other tactics I expect from him are excuse-making (coming up with what are actually irrelevant reasons to not provide evidence or not heed or debate an argument—since the truth should be defensible regardless), ad hominem (attacking me in some way rather than any relevant thing I said), false citation (citing some source or scholar as saying or proving a thing they do not), arguing by omission (leaving evidence out that, when put back in, refutes rather than supports his point), arguing from authority (claiming his qualifications excuse him from presenting evidence—when in fact they obligate him to), appeals to emotion (trying to rile you into emotionally supporting a point rather than giving an actually rational, evidence-based reason to), and (as always), straw man, red herring, possibiliter ergo probabiliter, and every other kind of non sequitur.

So from now on I’ll just call it and not explain. You can then check if the call is correct.

Conclusion

I’ll let you decide whether Ammon Hillman is a liar or a conman—or, let’s be honest, insane. When you watch his videos he does come across like a schizophrenic hobo rambling about spyware in his soup. Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan” sounds completely on the nose for the mindset here. The random pattern matching; the implausible leaps of logic; the absolute confidence in the bizarre result. But I’ve presented evidence you can check yourself (so you don’t have to trust me) to confirm everything he’s not telling the truth about, and how egregious and suspect that is. Would you ever trust anyone acting like that? Like all grifters or cranks, he mixes reasonable claims in with absurd claims that are demonstrably false (and often sickening). And when you remove those absurdly false claims, he has nothing new or interesting to say.

Hillman has no evidence the Gospels imagined Jesus as a drugged-out pedophile. None whatsoever. It’s all fabricated. And I believe he is immorally using his Ph.D. to manipulate and gaslight you into not checking so as to find that out. He handwaves instead of giving you real evidence or relevant citations; he misrepresents the citations he does give; and he uses tricks rather than sound logic. And he makes nothing but excuses to avoid ever facing a real expert who actually knows what they are talking about—while depending on your lack of expertise to fool you into believing him and listening to his sick pedophilic fantasies, under the guise of it being “academic” (it’s not).

You need to ask yourself why is Hillman doing this specifically—why, of all the fake stories he wants to make up and trick you into listening to, he chose graphically sexual and pedophilic fantasies that have no legitimate reason to be brought up? And why are you falling for it? Why are you listening to him? Why are you trusting him in anything at all? If you haven’t been, blessed be. But if you have been…seriously?