The True Myth Journal
Weekly updates on exploring how Jesus Christ is the best possible hero.
The Week of 01/04/2025–01/10/2026
This week we didn’t draft any manuscript chapters together. Instead, we leaned into the “Excavation” phase—laying the conceptual footing beneath the book before we start framing walls.
We met and agreed that Matt should push deeper into the foundational categories behind our thesis: myth, creation, the sacred and the profane, and what we mean by “religion.” Josh stayed in the weeds on supporting research and structure, focusing on sources that help clarify (and defend) the universality claim without collapsing everything into mere semantics.
Below is the status of the book and the research notes we filed this week.
Book Progress: Between the Whip and the Cheek
Current Focus: Research for Chapter 1: Two Pictures, One Person?
Words Written This Week: 0 (Drafting has not started).
Total Manuscript Word Count: 0
Current Status: Excavation & Research.
New in the Library
We added 3 new research notes to the Digital Garden this week. These are the raw materials building the world of Between the Whip and the Cheek.
The Jesus of the Whip, Part 2 by Joshua Buzzard
“Jesus, the True Suzerain, enters his Temple wielding a phragellion—but one made of ‘weak’ rushes—to mock the Roman reliance on iron and lead. He demonstrates that his authority is so absolute that he can drive out the ‘armies’ of commerce... with nothing more than the scraps of the shepherd’s field.”
In this entry, Joshua examines the material composition of the whip. By contrasting the Roman flagrum (leather and lead) with the biblical schoinion (twisted rushes), he argues that Jesus was not starting a riot but engaging in pastoral subversion. The whip was a satirical scepter, mocking the heavy-handed violence of Caesar with the “weakness” of a shepherd’s tool.
2. The Jesus of the Whip, Part 3 by Joshua Buzzard
“The first time Jesus cleansed the Temple, he walked away. But the second time, he forced a terrifying question: If the Shepherd drives the sheep away from the slaughter, who is left to face the knife?”
Moving from the material to the legal, this post reframes the Temple as the “Treaty Archive” of the Mosaic Covenant. Joshua argues that the “Den of Robbers” was not about petty theft, but about the priesthood using the Temple as a hideout while they broke the Covenant. Jesus appears here not just as a reformer, but as the “Overflowing Scourge” of Isaiah 28, annulling the nation’s “Covenant with Death.”
The Sacred, the Profane, and the Myths We Live By by Matthew J Coombe
“It may seem intuitive that people are inherently religious—perhaps even a brute fact—but resistance is often strongest when it comes to the claim that scientifically minded people live by a creation myth. People may deny living by a creation myth, but they cannot escape living from one.”
This entry is a conceptual excavation. Matt clarifies the categories we’ll need for the larger argument: why humans seem “incurably religious,” why religion can’t be reduced to belief in a god, and why creation myths are not primitive science but narratives of order, meaning, and moral weight. The central claim is not merely that everyone has a myth, but that every worldview must establish some sacred/profane distinction—and the real question becomes whether a given myth can actually bear the moral weight we demand of it.
Looking Ahead
Looking forward, we will continue drafting these pieces and working our way through research for the book. We are getting closer to launching the podcast, though we want to make sure we adjust to the load of writing before adding another component.
Until then, Matthew J Coombe & Joshua Buzzard