Christianity
Miracles, Myths and Mysteries of Christianity
Abstract
The New Testament—History?
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The Saviour Jesus
The supposed evidence for Jesus is slight and unreliable. The narrators of the gospels differ considerably in their accounts, which can only be explained if the later ones tried to correct and reconcile with common sense, the mistakes, and absurdities of the earlier ones, imagining that believers would prefer the later version. A careful examination of the New Testament reveals many discrepancies concerning the details of the life of Jesus. If his method of teaching was that of the Synoptics, it was not that of the fourth gospel. He was born, according to Matthew, during the sovereignty of Herod, who was appointed Governor of Judaea in the Roman province of Syria, in 40 BC under Antonius Marcus, and later was king. In Luke, the birth is said to have taken place in 6 AD when Augustus was Emperor, a decade after the death of Herod. Herod died at Jericho in 4 BC after a period of absence on account of illness from Jerusalem.
The main benefit Christians think they enjoy for their unquestioning belief is life after they are dead. What evidence is there that we are alive after we are dead? None, but our praying for life after death is easily explained. Normal people in this world instinctively like to cling to life. Schopenhauer called it the will to live. They want to meet their friends again. It is a false hope, but, in a sense, nobody dies. Everything that is in the body and in the man is eaten by all kinds of life, goes into something else, and, in that way, goes on and on. The matter that is in us will exist in another form when we are dead, but we personally will be gone. That, though, is not the kind of immortality people want. They want to see their mother, and their friends in heaven. They want to be assured they will all meet again. In a huge self-deception, the faithful reassure each other, without having the least idea that what they say is valid, except, of course, the reassurances they have likewise had. As a rule, the less the faithful know, the surer they are. In fact, we do know how our lives began, and how they end. It began in a single cell in the body of our mother, who had some 10,000 of those cells. It was fertilized by a spermatozoon from the body of our father, who had millions of them, any one of which, under certain circumstances, would fertilize a cell. They multiplied and divided until a child was born. And in old age or accident or disease, they fall apart and the body and soul is gone—the soul just as categorically because it is just the old name for the psyche, the personality.
At the crucifixion Luke writes that “there was darkness from the sixth to the ninth hour”. Those who say the darkness was a solar eclipse do not understand the motions of the celestial bodies. The Passover moon was full. Furthermore, a solar eclipse lasts only about six minutes. When Atreus, of Mycenae, murdered his nephews, the sun, unable to endure a sight so horrible, turned his course backwards and withdrew his light. When Prometheus was crucified by chains on Mount Caucasus, the whole frame of Nature became convulsed—the earth quaked, thunder roared, lightning flashed, winds blew and the sea rose. When Æsculapius was put to death, the sun shone dimly from the heavens, birds were silent and trees bowed their heads in sorrow.
Mark, Luke and John do not mention the slaughter of the children by Herod, in fear of a Christ as a rival, and Josephus, who dwelt on the crimes of Herod, knew nothing of it because it never took place. The original evidence for the virgin birth is not in Mark and John. It is found in Matthew and Luke and both contradict it when they trace the descent of Jesus from David through Joseph, (Mt 1; Lk 3).
The biographers of Jesus in the New Testament, not wishing their master to be outdone in his legendary history, made him a performer of miracles. Without them Christianity could not have prospered, but because of them Jesus was accused of being initiated in magical art in the heathen temples of Egypt.
Myths and Miracles
Faith in miracles comes from ignorance or a confusion of belief with knowledge. The people who lived contemporary with Jesus tended to believe in anything—it was a credulous age. Miracles are imaginary deviations from the known laws of Nature—proved by experience to be firm and unalterable—by the power of a god. If they could have been present at one of Uri Geller’s shows, these credulous ancients would have certainly wanted to worship him as a god. But no intelligent person today could accept such miracles as other than tricks. All accounts of miracles should be banished altogether to their proper region—that of fiction or legend. Nature does not allow her laws to be fooled with.
Christians claim that one of the younger Pliny’s letters to the emperor Trajan, written before Pliny’s death in 114 AD but after he was sent to Bithynia in 111 AD, probably in the year 112 AD, is evidence of an historical Jesus (Letters 10:96), but it simply says that Christians had cursed their “Christ” to avoid being punished, but it does not show this Christ ever existed.
Miracles were not uncommon among the Jews before and during the time of Jesus. Casting out devils was an everyday occurrence, and miracles were frequently wrought to confirm the sayings of the rabbis. One is said to have cried out, when his opinions were disputed, “May this tree prove that I am right”, and the tree was uncannily torn up by the roots and hurled to a distance. And when his opponents declared that a tree could prove nothing, he said, “May this stream then witness for me”, and at once it flowed the opposite way.
Leaders of religion, even today, recommend themselves to the public by working miracles, often simple conjuring tricks. To stand any chance of success, in the stories told of him even if not in reality, the expected messiah had to work miracles.
Jesus could do no less than other saviours of mankind. He has to descend into hell, though nothing in the canonical gospels describes it. It appears in an account in the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus. Having descended to hell, Satan and the Prince of Hell try to close the gates of hell against him, but a voice of thunder, accompanied by the rushing of winds, booms:
Lift up ye gates, O ye Princes, and be ye lifted up, O ye everlasting gates, and the King of Glory shall come in.
Many gods descended into hell, and remained there for the space of three days and three nights—Krishna, the Hindu saviour, Zoroaster, the Persian saviour, Osiris and Horus of Egypt, Adonis, Bacchus, Hercules, Mercury, and Baldur. It is a reflexion of the sun declining to its lowest altitude at the winter solstice where it seemed to remain for three days before beginning to rise again when it began its annual ascension. The descent into hell was not added to the Apostles’ Creed until after the sixth century. The Apostles’ Creed was not framed by the apostles.
Jesus in History
If all the wonderful things said about Jesus were true, we should naturally expect to hear something about him in the writings of the period. Not one of the classic writers in the first century, writers of the Augustan age of letters, writers in satire, history, natural history, medicine, astronomy, miracles, fables, not one unequivocally mentions Jesus or his apostles or his miracles.
Non-gospel evidence is slight indeed for Jesus. Neither Philo, nor the two Plinys, nor any other writer of the age, mention the name of Jesus, much less the ten thousand other wonderful things mentioned by the interpolator of Josephus. The only significant evidence for Jesus is in the New Testament and that is unreliable and overlaid with mythology or obfuscation, whatever Christians might believe in the efficiency and honesty of the Holy Ghost in preserving the truth.
Praying to God for material or spiritual benefits implies He requires His children to beg for His care. Man can do wonders in the war of conquering nature, but he has not been able to alter natural laws, nor is there any honest evidence that Nature’s laws have been changed at any time in answer to prayer.
The Christus whom messianic Jews in Rome fought over in the time of Claudius need not have been a messiah present in the city, but some claimant in Judaea. A few years before, Theudas had been crucified after leading his failed uprising and might have been the one inflaming Jewish passions, but it could have been Christ—Jews fighting with the proto-Christians. Christians identify the expulsion of the Jews with the expulsion from Rome of Apollos and Priscilla in Acts. All that can be concluded is that it is possible some were Christians. Jesus has been overlaid with mythology taken from contemporary religious belief, notably the sun gods. Any historical evidence of the original Jesus that existed anywhere was destroyed by Christians to hide the truth when they were able. Any historical Jesus has been deliberately disguised to hide him from the historians.
