# Ammon Hillman

David Charles Ammon Hillman is an American classicist, known for his re-interpreting of Christianity. He was a professor at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, before his firing after translating a production of Medea that the school's faculty found unsettling. In May 2024, he appeared on the Danny Jones Podcast, making his fringe views on Christianity, Ancient Greek and Roman pharmacy, and the life of Jesus more widely known. The podcast has since amassed over 2.5 million views on YouTube.

## Early life

David Charles Ammon Hillman was born to Baptist parents in Tucson, Arizona. By the time Hillman was 17, he was teaching Sunday school and preaching at a mission, as well as studying Koine Greek and Latin. He completed an undergraduate degree in classics at the University of Arizona, and spent three months at the Dallas Theological Seminary. His exposure to classical authors such as Aristotle led him to becoming an apostate. He later pursued a master's degree in animal science, but abandoned it.
Hillman then went on to attend the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning a master's degree in bacteriology, as well as a Ph.D. in classics with a specialization in Ancient Greek and Roman pharmacy. During this period, he spent a lot of time going over medical texts in Latin and Greek, coming across evidence that the Greeks knew about herbal concoctions such as opium, and that they used these substances recreationally.

## Career
### 2008–2015: Career beginnings and firing from St. Mary's University of Minnesota

While writing his classics dissertation at UW–Madison, Hillman was forced by his "overly conservative" advisors to delete an entire chapter he wrote on the widespread recreational drug use in the ancient world. This event inspired him to write his first book, The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization in 2008. The book describes how Ancient Greeks and Romans used herbal substances for healing and creative purposes.
Hillman began teaching as an adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, becoming a popular instructor among the students there. In the autumn of 2015, he was hired by the university's theater professor, Judy Myers, to write an original translation of the Ancient Greek tragedy Medea. In the production, which Hillman described as "authentic" and written to "maintain the historical integrity of the play," phallic ancient world objects known as fascina were used as props by cast members. The school's administrators found the play's message, as well as the use of the fascina, uncomfortable, banning the use of the objects as well as later terminating Hillman from his position entirely. Many students, as well as fellow professors, protested the firing, claiming that the school was actively censoring Hillman's freedom of speech.

### 2024: Danny Jones Podcast

Hillman appeared on the Danny Jones Podcast on May 20, 2024, discussing his views on Christianity and the life of Jesus. He asserted that the Septuagint - written in Greek - was not a translation, but the original, and evidently fictional, source of the Bible, which was later rather inaccurately translated into the much simpler Hebrew language in an attempt to make it more plausible as a record of the ancient history of the Hebrew-speaking peoples.
Hillman points to numerous amusingly mistranslated phrases in all the Hebrew versions of the Bible. These mistranslations, Hillman says, render the Hebrew versions of some stories completely incoherent, whereas the original Greek versions are perfectly comprehensible.
The "Red Heifer" supposedly required to bless a newly constructed temple (according to the Hebrew version) is one such mistranslation which has become quite well-known and even taken on great importance to some Jewish and Christian Zionist fundamentalists. In the original Greek, as Ammon Hillman points out, this is not a "heifer", but an "unmarried girl", whose eyes are red from taking psychedelic drugs as part of an oracular mystery rite.
Hillman says that anyone with sufficient knowledge of the Ancient Greek language and pharmaceutical terms is able to go back to the original source, that is, the Septuagint, as he has, and hence understand many Biblical stories in ways quite different to conventional mainstream interpretations from Hebrew and Latin scholars. For example, Hillman says that the Septuagint reveals that the Twelve Apostles were all teenagers, ranging in age from around 12 to 19, at the time of the Last Supper. According to Hillman, the original Greek text of the Secret Gospel of Mark reports that Jesus, when arrested by the Roman guards, says to the guards, in Greek, "I am not a child sex trafficker!"
The question Hillman raises is whether or not Jesus (then aged 31 or 32) was in fact trafficking his teenage followers for ritualistic, child sexual abuse, and/or drug-related purposes, and also whether this type of allegation, true or not, may have been part of the reason why the Romans and the Jews were all so eager to crucify Jesus.
Hillman points also to the verse in the Gospel of Mark, where it is said that a naked youth, described in later translations as "wearing nothing but a linen garment", is seen running away from the site of Jesus' arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. Hillman says that what the Greek actually describes the naked youth as wearing was not a "linen garment", but rather a specific type of medicated bandage around his genitalia. This type of bandage was used as part of a medical process to extract an antidote to the Dipsas venom, a psychedelic drug based on snake venom which was taken as part of a traditional oracular religious rite, well-known in Greek and Alexandrian culture at the time as "Christing".
Hillman also suggests, based on the Greek text, that Jesus' death on the Cross may have been unusually rapid, compared to other victims of crucifixion, perhaps because he had taken the Christing drug, and was suffering from his lack of the antidote, having failed to extract it from the naked boy in the Garden of Gethsemane due to their premature interruption by the Roman guards.

## Personal life

Hillman is a single father to two children.