I Surrender
Ed Reither
After years of research, countless books, deep archival dives, and extended conversations—after turning over the names, stories, and inherited assumptions about Abraham, Israel, the Hebrews, and the foundations of Christianity—I’ve come to a felt conclusion: I can no longer keep digging into old books looking for the truth of history.
This isn’t the surrender of defeat. It’s the surrender of clarity.
I’ve reached a recognition that the so-called “historical record” we’re handed—especially when it comes to the origins of the Hebrew people and the foundational claims of Christianity—is stitched together from myth, national memory, theological need, and Enlightenment-era reinterpretation. The deeper I went into the libraries, into the sources, into the debates and revisions and cross-references, the more the historical floor gave way beneath my feet. What looked at first like firm ground was, in time, a hopeful mirage: names and dates floating in a story—not always neat, but always with the promise of being true.
And yet, those stories endure. They endure not because they are accurate, but because they are meaningful. They are the echo of the human heart trying to make sense of being alive.
The story of Abraham, of Israel, of Jesus and the Church—these aren’t just old tales. They are songs strung together like beads of belief. They hold within them the psychological and spiritual efforts of a people groping toward orientation. And in that sense, they have value. But to treat them as history—as the factual trails of reality—is to confuse meaning with fact, symbol with record.
The academy has, for the most part, not only played along but solidified myth. It has granted authority to these stories through the language of scholarship, tracing citation upon citation, authority upon authority in endless circles. But few dive deep enough to let the whole architecture fall apart. To do so is to risk reputation and identity. And so, the system holds: scholars, clergy, and readers of all degrees alike keep the myths alive. Not always out of dishonesty, but out of deeply embedded forms of investment—emotional, institutional, existential—of self.
What I’ve come to see is that my conclusions about Hebrew history align almost precisely with what I’ve long understood through my research into Christianity. The stories of both traditions are mythological in structure, later formalized and marketed as historical fact during the age of scientific rationalism and national identity-building. These were never innocent truths. They were cries and songs of survival, belief-systems embedded in the deep needs of the human psyche.
But those same mythic structures today serve a darker function. The old temples may be gone, but their echoes live on in the unconscious mind. They show up now not as sacred spaces, but as ideological strongholds—fueling tribal fears, wars, political delusion, and dangerous certainties. What once helped humans navigate mystery now too often imprisons them within it.
And if we as a collective don’t see this—if we don’t wake up to the real function of these inherited myths—then we will keep confusing ideas with substance. No amount of revelation or scientific achievement, no amount of prayer, belief, or psychedelia will matter if the deep current of unconscious belief continues to pull civilization toward chaos. We are watching the tail of the dragon of history sweep across our time again, and it’s dragging behind it millions of unaware, ill-informed, and emotionally reactive hearts.
So, I surrender—not to myth, not to history, but to the clarity that comes from letting go. I surrender the need to understand—for myself primarily—the need to trace, to recover what cannot be fixed in time.
I surrender. Not because I’ve given up. But because I’ve reached an understanding, and I see what’s worth holding on to—and what isn’t and never was.