Miracles, Myths and Mysteries of Christianity
The New Testament—History?
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Abstract
The Saviour Jesus
Honest theologians will not deny that the bible account of the nativity of Christ Jesus is invented. Yet it is such an attractive account, especially to children, that belief in it has become the first test of the Christian. Angels, wandering stars and virgin births simply do not occur in Nature and the legends can be explained straightforwardly by reference to the times, yet Christians, especially unscholarly ones, cannot believe otherwise. The disagreements between the Jesus of the gospels especially between the fourth gospel and the first three, Synoptic gospels, are numerous. If he was the man of the Synoptics, he was not the mysterious being of the fourth gospel. His nativity is said, in Matthew, to have took place during the reign of Herod, who was appointed Governor of Judaea in the Roman province of Syria, in 40 BC under Antony, and later was king. Herod died at Jericho in 4 BC after a period of absence on account of illness from Jerusalem. In Luke, the birth is said to have taken place in 6 AD when Augustus was Emperor, a decade after the death of Herod.
Astonishingly, centuries before Christ Jesus, people regarded Osiris, Attis, and others as they now regard Christ Jesus, as a risen saviour and confidently hoped to rise from the grave as did their god. Zoroaster, the Persian saviour, ascended to heaven. The coverings of the body of Buddha, son of the virgin Maya, unrolled themselves, and the lid of his coffin was opened by superhuman agency, when he ascended bodily into heaven. The Phrygian saviour, Attis and the Persian saviour and mediator between god and man, Mithras, died and rose again. Memnon, whose mother Eos wept tears at his death, as Mary is said to have done for Jesus, rose. The ancient Greeks and Romans thought that the births and deaths of great men were announced by celestial signs.
The biographers of Christ 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 Christ Jesus was accused of being a “necromancer, and a magician, and a deceiver of the people”, in the words of Justin Martyr.
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 do not like the idea that friends and relatives are lost forever in death. It is a false hope, but, in a sense, nobody dies. Everything that is in the body and in the man goes into something else, turns into the crucible of Nature, 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 sisters, and their friends in heaven. They want to be assured they will all meet again. In a huge self-deception, the faithful tell each other it is true, 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.
The miracles of the primitive church were mere fictions, which the pious and zealous Fathers, partly from a weak credulity and partly from reasons of policy, were induced to espouse and propagate for the support of a righteous cause. The primitive Christians were perpetually reproached for their credulity, and Julian says that “the sum of all their wisdom was comprised in the single precept—believe”.
Myths and Miracles
Miracles are imaginary deviations from the known laws of Nature—proved by experience to be firm and unalterable—by the power of a god. The people who lived contemporary with Christ Jesus tended to believe in anything—it was a credulous age. Faith in miracles comes from ignorance or a confusion of belief with knowledge. 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.
Christ Jesus rises again on the third day and ascends in company with Adam and numerous saints into heaven. Matthew and John do not mention the Ascension. Mark says that “Jesus was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God,” but the twelve verses in which the account appears are admitted in the revised edition to be spurious. Luke is the only gospel that gives the story, He “was carried up into heaven”. Acts says, “He was taken up, and a cloud received him out of sight”. Both Luke and Acts were written by the same man, so we really have the testimony of only one man, with no corroborating evidence, to this astonishing spectacle.
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.
Innumerable miracles are ascribed to Buddhist saints. Their garments and staffs were supposed to imbibe some mysterious power, and blessed were they who were allowed to touch them. A Buddhist saint, who attained the power called perfection, was able to rise and float along through the air, his body becoming imponderous. Buddhist annals give accounts of miraculous suspensions in the air. We are also told that in 217 BC nineteen Buddhist missionary priests entered China to propagate their faith, and were imprisoned by the emperor, but an angel came and opened the prison door and liberated them.
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 in History
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 Christ Jesus or his apostles or his miracles. If all the wonderful things said about Christ Jesus were true, we should naturally expect to hear something about him in the writings of the period.
Josephus was a Jew, and lived in the country where all these things are said to have occurred, and wrote a history of the period. Yet, he makes no mention of even the existence of Christ Jesus. In book 18:3:3 of his Antiquities, an unknown editor has put between the account of the sedition of the Jews against Pontius Pilate and that of Anubis and Pauline in the Temple of Isis, an insertion relating to Christ Jesus, which is clearly a forgery. Josephus, a Jew, is made to say:
Now, there was about this time Christ Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works; a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure.
It is not likely that a Jew writing under the patronage of the Romans would show such a respect towards Christ Jesus, who was known among both nations as seditious, and talk about his teaching the truth!
Pagans often called their gods “Chrestos” in an affectionate way and Romans called many people from Syria and Egypt Jews. These were often Hellenised people of the Levant whose beliefs were a mixture of Paganism and sectarian Judaism. When Suetonius used the name Chrestus, he might have been referring to jealousies among these Jews over some Pagan god called “Chrestos”. More likely is that he confused the word he knew, “Chrestus”, for the word he did not know, “Christus”, and the troubles were fights between messianic Jews and Jews who preferred not to invite close inspection by Romans of Jewish hopes.
Praying to God for material or spiritual benefits implies He is not omnipotent, not all-foreseeing or not voluntarily good to his faithful. 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. Any historical evidence of the original Christ Jesus that existed anywhere was destroyed by Christians to hide the truth when they were able. Any historical Christ Jesus has been deliberately disguised to hide him from the historians. Christ Jesus has been overlaid with mythology taken from contemporary religious belief, notably the sun gods.
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Moses and Exodus
