Last week, ardent right-wing conspiracy theorist and prominent birther Jerome Corsi appeared on “The Eric Metaxas Show,” where he compared his interrogation at the hands of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team to Jesus Christ’s interrogation by Pontius Pilate.

Despite the fact that Corsi has long been an unapologetic conspiracy theorist who once suggested that the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia was “involved in pedophilia,” Metaxas heaped praise upon Corsi and treated him as if he was a legitimate journalist who was being unjustly persecuted because of his principled commitment to uncovering the truth about the “deep state.” At one point, Metaxas even likened Corsi to anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, about whom Metaxas wrote a biography in 2009.

Corsi, who has been ensnared in Mueller’s investigation reportedly over his ties to Roger Stone, Wikileaks, and the publication of stolen Clinton campaign emails prior to the 2016 election, recalled being questioned by Aaron Zelinsky, a member of Mueller’s prosecution team, during which Zelinsky accused Corsi of being a liar who “doesn’t know the difference between truth and false.”

“I said, ‘Mr. Zelinsky, you don’t have any idea what you just reminded me of,'” Corsi claimed to have responded. “When Jesus Christ was being interrogated by Pontius Pilate, Christ says, ‘I am the truth, I am the way, whoever follows me will follow the truth.’ And you know what Pontius Pilate asks him? ‘What is truth?’ And there Zelinsky is telling me he’s the arbiter of truth.”

Metaxas was aghast “that someone that young, in his tremendous arrogance, would dare to talk to you in that way.”

“It reminds me of the Red Guards,” Metaxas said. “You find this kind of ideological mania in places like Mao’s China, the Cultural Revolution, and it’s a frightening thing—that kind of power in the hands of the young, foolish, arrogant people.”

“If these ideological purists take over,” Corsi warned, “it’s only a matter of time before they ban the teaching of the Bible.”

“That’s quite right,” Metaxas replied. “We’re there. People need to understand that that threat is very real.”