Animals: Tradition - Philosophy - Religion Article used with permission from All-Creatures.org

Drawing on her background in ancient philosophy, Joan Harrison reviews and critiques the documentary "Christspiracy." Joan’s perspective is sure to inspire you to check out this excellent film—or give it a well-deserved rewatch!

"Christspiracy" - A Review
From Joan Harrison
March 2026

The Ascension from an Ethiopian illuminated manuscript of the Four Gospels, late 14th–early 15th century; image from The Met

"And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood. Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones. (1 Enoch 7:5-6)

"It was necessary that man should be the last of all created beings; in order that being so, and appearing suddenly, he might strike terror into the other animals. . . . /E/very mortal thing which lives . . . did he put in subjection to him, . . . " " . . . there is no animal in the enjoyment of perfect liberty and exempt from the dominion of man." (Philo Judaeus, On the Creation, XXIII and XXXIX)

"The world hateth me because I testify of it that the works thereof are evil." (John 7:7)

The documentary "Christspiracy," is visually breathtaking and stunningly thought-provoking. It attempts the impossible—to prove cinematically what is provable only through formal apodeixis—and it almost succeeds. And though persuasion is not proof, the film has proven its power to persuade. Nor does it preach to the choir, for even many known facts that it brings to light—that Jesus ardently rejected animal sacrifice, or that the Hebrew and Greek scriptures were massively tampered with over centuries, or that governments and religions are and have been forever in collusion to profit off the killing of animals, or that the issue of animal sacrifice is what chiefly ignited the internecine struggles between pagan antiquity and nascent Christianity,¹ something documented by renowned historian Sir Edward Gibbon—are probably unknown to the general public which, judging from comments and reviews, is already finding the film of great interest.

The documentary draws a parallel to the animal sacrifice that's being restored in Israel.² It discloses the hidden significance of the red heifers imported there from Texas in September of 2022, a year before Hamas' attack on October 7, 2023. A Hamas spokesman, Abu Ubaida, reportedly said that the heifers triggered that attack because they're a harbinger of the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple on the site of the Al Aqsa Mosque. That the temple at the time of Jesus revolved around animal sacrifice and was in essence a slaughterhouse is known from the Talmud and other ancient writings and is noted by Andrew Linzey in the film. Those in Israel today who are striving to rebuild the temple, seek also to bring back full-time animal sacrifice.

Kameron Waters asks, "Is there a spiritual way to kill an animal? I'll put it this way, how would Jesus kill an animal?"—questions that initiate the filmmakers' investigative journey and serve as its unifying thread. Though as such they may seem contrived for anyone who’s seen any of Kip Anderson’s other blockbuster exposes—"Cowspiracy," "Seaspiracy," or "What the Health?"—it's easy enough to suspend judgment. The journey takes the viewer to Rome, Oxford, Nepal, Israel, and India, where various methods of killing animals in the name of religion, including kosher and halal slaughter, are examined, along with secular methods touted as "humane." The falsehood and hypocrisy that cloak the animal abuse contaminating organized religions and secular consciousness today are laid bare.

The sacrificial beheading of hundreds of thousands of buffalo, goats, chickens, and pigeons at Gadhimai, Nepal, a ritual bloodbath that occurs once every five years, is part of the drama. When confronted with the barbarity of killing so many innocents, one of the devotees angrily points out that that tradition pales when compared with the American tradition of slaughtering 46 million turkeys each year for Thanksgiving. Touché! He might also have mentioned, if he'd known about it—even most Jews don't, or at least didn't until recently—the annual slaughter right before Yom Kippur of about 100,000 chickens on the streets of Brooklyn alone, not to mention other cities in the United States and Israel, in a gory atonement ritual called kaporos.³ The baby bird dies emitting mournful peeps while being swung thrice around the head of the chanting penitent, so that he may transfer his sins onto the creature by slitting her throat and tossing her body into the trash dead or alive. If I may interject a thought about this, the notion that sin can remove sin is apparently still widely held and could use examining.

The investigators are eventually shadowed and otherwise harassed, their spaces ransacked, by an anonymous entity the source for which a private investigator suggests is the USDA Beef Board and the Animal Agriculture Alliance, both of which FOIA documents reveal were living in dread of the film's swaying people away from meat!

The film questions some of the most entrenched interpretations of scripture and points to a different way of reading biblical texts, though in the manner of a fast-paced mystery thriller, so that the evidence provided is often difficult to process, or at times even to grasp. It needs to be seen more than once. I watched it four times, and each time it inspired me to dig more deeply.

The film highlights the importance of animals for Jesus' ministry and crucifixion both, something canonical texts, or at least the scribes who tampered with them,⁴ strove to conceal, in particular the fact that Jesus was crucified because he rejected the entire edifice of animal sacrifice and because he, like his brother James, rejected animal food.⁵ The film documents a rift between Paul and James centered on those issues. James is murdered, as are his followers, and his writings burned. Paul becomes the defining power and instrument of falsification.

Yet the film’s ending is uplifting and seems to point to a true Christianity rising up out of the false Christianity that is unmasked—a true Christianity based on ascetic, vegetarian Essene Judaism rather than second temple Judaism which, as stated, was all about animal sacrifice.

The sceptic, however, might be tempted to ask questions such as these:

If Jesus rejected animal food, why does he eat fish and a honeycomb at Luke 24:42-43? And if Nazareth doesn't exist as Nazareth before the death of Jesus, how are the passages at Matthew 2:23, and Luke 1:26 and 4:16 to be explained? If Jesus was as opposed to animal sacrifice as the cleansing of the temple and certain non-canonical scriptures suggest, why does he tolerate it at Matthew 5:23-24 and 8:4? Finally, Andrew Linzey regards the notion of "dominion" as "stewardship," something the documentary affirms. The Hebrew word for "dominion," however, seems to have the sense of ruling, treading down, dominating, and subjugating. The lexicons don’t show anything about stewardship. Where is the stewardship notion coming from?

Those are questions I asked Kam by email and he responded to each one with an abundance of insight and resources. He’s also been tirelessly making videos elaborating on many points from the documentary. Though the thesis about Nazareth still does not seem convincing to me, Josephus' omission of the town from his list of towns in the Galilee is striking and needs to be explained, as does its absence from other secular works for years after the death of Jesus.

As for dominion as stewardship, however, an identity also upheld by Matthew Scully in his 2002 book, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, and generally embraced by the animal rights community, I seriously doubt that that's its meaning in Genesis 1. (See my paper, "Is the Serpent Innocent?: A Meditation on Genesis 1-3," at https://all-creatures.org/tradition/tradition-is-serpent-innocent.html).

The film covers huge ground and elevates discourse about animals to a cosmic level. It shows how animal abuse, especially animal agriculture, in one way or another is at the heart of many major social/political injustices—world hunger, the global water shortage, environmental degradation, wars, climate catastrophe, slavery, the degrading of women, and so forth—and employs historical and prehistoric data along with etymological, economic, psychological, and political insights, to bring truths generally dealt with separately together into a kind of epiphany. Donald Watson’s point that our entire civilization is built on the suffering of animals as earlier civilizations were built on the suffering of slaves seems validated.⁶ And even where the film’s tenets seem far-fetched, it at least establishes possibility. Those seeking apodictic certainty will obviously need to look elsewhere. As a catalyst for stimulating such a search, "Christspiracy" is unsurpassable.

Endnotes

1 Augustine—who was born 17 years after the death of Constantine the Great, was middle-aged when Theodosius I permanently outlawed animal sacrifice and shut down all pagan temples, and lived through Alaric's sack of Rome in late middle age—attests to the same in The City of God. The Romans who insisted that Christianity was the cause of the fall of Rome meant by “Christianity” primarily the rejection of animal food and the abolition of animal sacrifice—a practice the early Christians unanimously regarded as idolatry and demon worship. The end of animal sacrifice hugely disrupted the Roman economy, a meat economy, and thus helped pave the way to Rome's supersession. See also Kameron Waters' video on Pliny's letter to Trajan that discloses the real reason the early Christians were persecuted [https://www.facebook.com/reel/2936943219834203]. Saint Polycarp (c69-155 AD), a contemporary of Pliny, and a disciple of John the Apostle, was also killed for refusing, inter alia, to sacrifice animals. See "The Martyrdom of Polycarp."

2 According to Jewish law, animal sacrifice is forbidden everywhere other than the Jerusalem temple (Deuteronomy 12:10-14; Leviticus 17:3-9). Jewish sacrificing of animals therefore ceased in principle after Titus destroyed what is called the second temple in the year 70, as it had ceased in principle following the Babylonian destruction of Solomon's temple in 586 B.C. (According to Jeremiah, Josephus, and rabbinic tradition, both temples were destroyed on exactly the same day—the 9th of Av as tradition would have it [Tisha B'Av], commemorated by Jews all over the world as a day of mourning, though the 10th of Av according to Josephus. Biblical texts are similarly inconsistent about the date.) Levite priests, however, are currently being trained to sacrifice lambs and goats in Israel and the United States in preparation for the rebuilding of the temple. And a young New York City animal activist who'd been raised orthodox hinted to me some years ago, that sheep were sacrificed privately every Passover by certain of the orthodox, a practice that had gone on for a long time.

3 For information about the kaporos ritual and animal activists' struggle to end the use of chickens in it, go to the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos (https://www.endchickensaskaporos.com/). The Alliance is an offshoot of United Poultry Concerns, founded by Rina Deych and the late Karen Davis, and its members rescue hundreds of chickens each year from the Brooklyn carnage. See also Donny Moss' 2015 video of activists protesting the Crown Heights event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpEsbOXdrdQ.

4 See the Hebrew and Greek texts of Jeremiah 8.8, for example, a passage the King James translators starkly whitewashed. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza speaks at length of scriptural tampering at the hands of scribes and rabbis.

5 See Keith Akers, The Lost Religion of Jesus: Simple Living and Nonviolence in early Christianity (2000). Keith Akers appears briefly in "Christspiracy" to discuss the question of whether Jesus ate fish. See also Rynn Berry, Food for the Gods: Vegetarianism and the World's Religions (1998).

6 Donald Watson was a British conscientious objector who coined the word "vegan" in 1944 by putting the first three letters and the last two of "vegetarian" together, with the idea that a "vegan" is a strict vegetarian. A strict vegetarian rejects not only the eating of animal flesh, rather, all products of animal bodies. Today the meaning of "vegan" is often extended to include a rejection of all products of animal exploitation—a daunting task when even cars, computers, cameras, and many other ordinary consumer products may contain parts of animals, so that “to the extent practically possible” is generally understood. Watson, along with his wife and some friends, founded the first Vegan Society that same year, 1944.

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: March 19, 2026
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