We always hear about people being “disappeared” in other countries. Do you believe it happens here as well? Are journalists at risk?

We had over 100 people who died mysteriously and just sometimes just before they were going to testify [regarding the Pres. Kennedy assassination]. Whether to the New Orleans jury or to the House select committee. But these were always people who had some particular inside information. Nobody who wrote a book about it was ever killed. They were speculating and they can be dismissed as conspiracy theorists. And they don’t really have a firsthand knowledge. The only kind of news people who might be threatened are people who actually went out and interviewed somebody and got some of that direct inside information and were about to report. One or two people have died who were thought by some to have been related to 9/11.

What about the people in the press who got the military grade anthrax right after 9/11?

Yes, it did look like a warning shot. The president and the vice president asked Tom Daschle to have this innocuous investigation carried out only by the Joint Intelligence Commission. Daschle went along with it. Daschle was one of the ones who got anthraxed. Brokaw was another one. So it was a message to news reporters: don’t do anything.

If you were to speak to the Christian community, what is a person’s responsibility as a Christian or as a conscious spiritual being?

I really need to address the Christian community in particular because America is primarily a Christian nation and I’m a Christian theologian. I would say two things here. Christians should have motivation more than anyone else to look into 9/11, and if they agree it was an inside job, expose the truth. First of all because 9/11 from the beginning and still remains the pretext for all the things that we are doing and not doing in the world. It’s the pretext for focusing on the so-called War on Terror rather than dealing with global warming, or the war on poverty or the health crisis, and all these other things, education… And it’s the pretext for the attacks on Lebanon, anybody you can label a terrorist the United States gives you a free pass to attack them because they’re kind of like the terrorists who attacked us and we’ve got to get rid of all the terrorists in the world. So it’s the pretext for everything that has happened that has made the world a far more dangerous place than it was before 9/11. So just on a purely moral basis recognizing that 9/11 is the pretext for this, all Christians should say, well if there’s one chance in a thousand that 9/11 was an inside job we need to know it, so I will read the evidence.

Secondly Christianity began as an anti-imperial religion. Jesus was crucified on a cross. The cross at that time was the Roman means of execution of people who were considered politically dangerous to the empire. So it was only the Romans that had the power to execute. We’ve had recently a movie that says it was the Jews who did it. No, the Jews did not, the Jewish authorities did not have the authority to crucify anybody, only the Romans could do it. So Jesus was crucified as a political threat to the empire. I have a whole chapter in the new book, which builds primarily on Richard Horsley’s book called Jesus and Empire, so if nothing else I hope you will publicize this fact.

Christianity was anti-imperialistic during its first three centuries. Only in the fourth century did it start supporting empire, with Constantine.

Where do you pull an example from the Bible? What about, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s”?

Right, a most misinterpreted passage. It was a trick question. The most volatile issue at the time and the reason people were crucified and groups were killed or slaughtered, is they refused to pay the tribute to Rome, that was the political issue. And so if Jesus had said, don’t pay the tribute, that would have been grounds right there for execution, for rabble rousing. But on the other hand if he said, do pay it, then he’s a collaborator. And so what does he say? He says, “Render unto God the things that are God’s, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Well for a Jew in the first century, everything belongs to God, nothing belongs to Caesar. So it was a way of saying to his fellow Jews, of course don’t pay it. It’s got Caesar’s picture on it, but that doesn’t mean it belongs to Caesar. So that’s been used and constantly quoted. If you read the chapter you’ll see there are many illustrations and passages that once you understand the Roman occupation you see that Jesus was preaching what Horsley called an anti-imperial gospel.

And then the Book of Revelations, is a full-out anti-imperial book. The beast—that’s Rome, all the imagery is Rome. And that’s one of the earliest books of the New Testament, written before most of the gospels, so it shows you that early, before they had started to make their peace with empire as you get in the book of Luke. Luke acts much more friendly towards empire.

This is revolutionary stuff.

It is, and what we call the Peace Churches—the Quakers, the Mennonites, the Amish—they’ve always made this point that the fall of the church happened with Constantine, when he adopted Christianity and created the Holy Roman Empire, that was the ruin of the church. So they’ve always been anti-empire, and the mainstream churches, unfortunately, have not really taken a stand on this even after we’ve known better.

One good thing that may come out of all this is that churches may recover the original gospel and start to take it seriously.

Are there parts of the gospel that aren’t in the Bible that support this position?

Sure. Elaine Hagels wrote a book several years ago in which she talked about the Gnostic Gospels, and she was focusing on the feminist issue and the rise of patriarchy and showed that some of the ones that didn’t make it made women too equal. Now whether those gospels also had more of an anti-imperialist ring, to my knowledge she didn’t focus on it because that wasn’t the issue at the time, and I don’t know anybody who’s gone back and looked at that.

But in your mind you believe that Christ was preaching against the empire, because a lot of the evils of the world had sprung out of the expansion of empire.

Right, and he was preaching against the collaboration with the empire and the corruption of the temples. He was against, if one wants to say the Jews, the chief priests and rabbis of the temple. But these were not, they were outsiders who were brought in, they were Hellenistic Jews, so they were not people of the people, they lived in grand houses and were really stooges of the empire, and so he was preaching against them and against the money changers and that whole system of collaboration.

You have really synthesized a lot of information.

I’ve been working on this full time for three years. So sure, I’ve got an enormous amount of information. And I would issue a challenge to anybody who just wants to dismiss it a priori : Read my three books, write enough back to me to show me that you’ve read them and understood them, and then tell me you don’t have any doubts about the official theory.” I’ve thus far not run into anybody who’s done that. I’ve run into people who’ve dismissed it without reading the books. I’ve run into a lot of people who’ve said, “I began your book convinced I was going to reject it.” But if anybody will listen to an hour-long lecture, that’s all it takes.

Do you ever have concerns for your safety?

I don’t worry about that because there are two choices—they can either leave me alone or they can take me out. If they leave me alone I get to enjoy my old age and write my systematic theology. If they take me out, my 9/11 books rise to number one on the New York Times bestseller list. So it’s a win/win situation.

David Ray Griffin has been dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, but as he points out, conspiracy is when two or three people conspire in secret to do something illegal or immoral, and our newspapers are full of conspiracies—local bank robberies, Enron defrauding its customers—so we’re all conspiracy theorists. The question in this case is, which conspiracy has the best evidence to support it?

End