Was Christ a Fiction? 1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, September 10, 1999
Thursday, 08 September 2005
Abstract
Jesus Never lived.
The clergy pour scorn on the denial of the historicity of Jesus. Yet, “Did Jesus Ever Live?” is a serious question. From the time of Bruno Bauer to the end of the twentieth century, scholars argued that no historical evidence existed to prove that Jesus ever lived at all. Bauer thought scripture offered no sure evidence that he lived. People whose historical existence was as certain as the sun to whole ages—Hercules, King Arthur, Homer, William Tell—have proved to be legendary. Adam is a legend, Samson is a legend, Moses and Abraham are legends. If the historicity of Jesus is so certain, where are the indisputable witnesses to it? Among the scholars that thought the life of Jesus was a complete fabrication were the following.
J M Robertson, an English theologian, who argued in The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions (1916) and The Jesus problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory (1917) that all the elements of Christianity can be derived from the mystery religions. Christianity was built on the model of the mysteries because they were fashionable and to combine them with the Jewish scriptures that were also widely admired. Jesus is, thus, a Jewish Osiris, Mithras or Adonis created for gentile use.
Arthur Drew, a German Hegelian philosopher, in his books Christ Myth (1924) and Legend of Peter (1924), argued that first century Christianity was a social ethical movement which needed no founder to explain its rise. A long standing feature of the Semitic world was an annual sacrifice of a “Son of the Father”—Barabbas, originally called Jesus Barabbas. This may account for the myth that an historical person, Jesus, actually lived.
G A Wells, of Birkbeck college, London, in Did Jesus Exist? also concluded that Jesus never existed. If he had existed, we should have a more detailed description of him. The lack of many details of him that we could reasonably expect of a historical person leaves us with two options:
- He did exist but made no significant impact.
- He did not exist but was invented like Osiris to explain Pauline religion.
Latterly, Earl Doherty has presented similar arguments in The Jesus Puzzle, and on his excellent website. Former evangelical theologian, Robert Price, thinks there is no convincing historical evidence that Jesus ever lived.
Evangelical Fly Fishing
Robert M Price is a former evangelist turned battling skeptic who declares Jesus Christ to be a fiction, in more ways than one. The worst way is that Jesus is really the fly used by evangelists, priests and other crooks whose real interest is to catch people to control them.
As Price puts it, Christ is shorthand for the institutions on whose behalf he is invoked. When an evangelist invites you to have faith “in Christ”, they are smuggling in other issues—Chalcedonian Christology, the doctrine of the Trinity, the Protestant idea of faith and grace, a particular theory of biblical inspiration and literalism or inerrancy, habits of church attendance, anti-Darwinism and other questions that theologians have debated for centuries and still have not agreed.
No evangelist ever invites people to accept Christ by faith and then to start examining all these other associated issues for themselves. They are non-negotiable, but yet are not taught by the godly chap the punter signed up for. To be saved they have to toe the party line. So the gullible or weak punter signs up for Christ and gets a mass of largely conservative political doctrine on someone else’s say-so.
Christ is a fiction because he is not simply the god-sent saviour of souls but an umbrella for unquestioning acceptance of what some institution tells us to believe, usually ready made right-wing politics. This is what Christianity always was as Paul proves when he wants “the taking of every thought captive to Christ”, and insists on the “obedience” of faith. Christ is a euphemism for the dogmatic party line of an institution.
Price also shows that Jesus as the personal saviour, with whom people have a “personal relationship” is fictional—a comfort blanket or Harvey the Rabbit for children and grown ups alike. If it proves a psychological help, the personal Jesus might be of value, but all the rest of the package has to be accepted too, as noted above, and that often ends up no longer purely personal.
It is hard for anyone of a reasonable nature to discredit all this but Price has other ways in which Jesus is fictional too, and one at least virtually implies that history is bunk! He says Christ might not be based on any historical individual, not only in the sense that the “Christ of faith” is an invention of theologians—a Christian lucky rabbit’s foot with lashings of gravitas—but, no Jesus ever lived in first century Nazareth. There only ever was a Christ of faith and there was no Jesus of history.
The Fiction of the Gospels
Christianity perfectly illustrates evolution in religion. Central ideas pass from age to age, but here and there a refinement is made and occasionally a breakaway gives a novel synthesis of the central tenets. The chief teachings of Jesus, even his phrases and moral sentiments to a great extent, were paralleled in the literature of the time and common to priests of Isis, Serapis, Esmun, Apollo, Mithras, Ormuzd, and Yehouah, as well as wandering Stoic apostles. Not one point in the teaching of Christ was new to the world. The chief doctrinal features of the Christ of the gospels—the birth, death, and resurrection—were familiar myths at the time, and were taken from Paganism.
Who wrote the gospels? No one knows. They do not claim to be written by any named authors. They are entitled “According to X”, where X is Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. They do not claim to be “by Matthew”, etc. Even if they professed to be written by definite people, it would not follow that they were. And even if Luke was written by a man called Luke, he admits in Luke 1:1-3 that he is not an eyewitness but is writing, as “many” others have done before him, an account of what they have heard about Jesus.
Historians ask two questions about any reporter, “Did he know the facts?”, and, “Is he truthful?”. Did the men who wrote the gospels know the facts? Were they truthful? The vampires who foster superstition in the minds of the young and the simple are categorical that the writers were eyewitnesses and, as God’s instruments, could be nothing other than honest. Yet, the gospel writers were doing exactly what the priests and preachers have done since—lying to win over gullible minds.
It will not do, and is no defence to say, “But we know it is true.” That too is a lie. They do not know it, however convinced they think they are. Millions of people are convinced they are being abducted nightly by aliens, but no one else sees them. The proper word for such conviction is delusion. They are not remotely likely to be true.
The growth of such legends can be seen in fairly recent times. The Persian reformer, Ali Mohammed, called the “Bab” (Gate), a founder of the religion which became the Bahai faith, gained adherents in the west and biographies of him were written after his martyrdom at the hands of the Persian Shah. In 1844 AD, after a series of visions, he set out to reform the Moslem creed and to bring people back to the worship of a purely spiritual God. He and hundreds of his followers were put to death, in 1850, by the Persian government with the connivance of the ayatollahs. The first biographies written about him were simple accounts of the life of a saintly Moslem, but biographies toward the end of the nineteenth century were embellished with all sorts of miraculous and unbelievable additions.
Enthusiasm, even innocently, always glorifies its cause with miracles. This magnification of an exceptional but perfectly human person happened little more than a century ago. Why then couldn’t it happen in far more gullible and less well recorded times? The gospels were not written until some decades after Jesus’s death, and must be read with caution, for even the best people can be found to be unreliable witnesses with the passage of time. When Spiritualism first became a fad, an eminent British judge published some such experiences he had earlier had. Questioned, he was compelled to admit his memory was wrong in every important detail.
So, if the gospels were not written until several decades after the death of Jesus, if the stories about him passed from mouth to mouth for a generation after his death, absolute faith cannot be placed in them, and those who urge it are dishonest. In those days, few ordinary people could read and write. Moreover, the Romans had scattered the Jews over the earth in the year 70 AD, and the Hebraic Jews had earlier scattered the first Hellenized Christians. The story passed from mouth to mouth in these confused circumstances for several decades.
Internal Tests and Consistency of the Gospels
Christian writers try to apply what they call internal tests of the consistency of the New Testament. They say the description of places, customs and daily life in Judaea is so confident and precise in the gospels that the writers were evidently familiar with the country at the time.
Consider these. Prescott, the American historian of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, who vividly portrayed these countries never saw either land—he was blind. Take the book of Daniel, as vivid and precise and circumstantial in the descriptions of its time and place in ancient Babylonia as any gospel. It is a known forgery, written centuries after the time it describes. The same is true of much of the Old Testament. H G Wells minutely and accurately described Labrador in one of his novels. Few people doubted he had been there. He had not! He read and researched the place and used his creative imagination. So internal consistency is no guarantee of authenticity. Such tests are useless. They would break down hopelessly in Homer. They would prove that Dante had really visited hell. They would make Keats a native of Corinth.
In any case, the Christian claims for these tests are false. The gospels display only a general and often inaccurate knowledge. Blatant errors in them do not support the idea that their authors lived in Palestine at the time. The Christian response is to completely change their tack and say that careless errors are human and prove that the gospel writers did live in Palestine! Mark, the oldest gospel, is inaccurate in Jewish customs and imprecise in topography.
The appearances, the principal evidence Christians offer, cannot be proved by anybody to have been in Mark originally—what we now read has been added, as not even Christian scholars attempt to dispute. A sketch of the life of Jesus, the framework of the first three gospels, is most purely seen in Mark. Matthew and, to a lesser extent Luke, used a collection of teachings to augment the sketch. If Christians dismiss this as hypothetical, let them reflect on their own position. They trust the gospels without any evidence, and without making the least inquiry into their authority. Preachers dogmatically assert the gospels were inspired, though the opening verses of Luke declare he used sources, and Christians take their word as simply as a child.
Criticism of the gospels began when Christian clergy tried to prove the historicity of Jesus. It backfired, casting doubt on the whole myth. The miraculous birth, the resurrection and ascension, the nature miracles and the healing miracles had to be abandoned by Christians who refused to abandon their reason. The response of the other set of Christians was to denigrate the investigation.
All the gospels were written long after the supposed events. There is no evidence that the gospels existed much before the end of the first century and much to suggest they did not, except perhaps Mark. Mark seems to have been written between 65 and 70 AD, Matthew and Luke in the last decade of the first century, and John in the second century, a hundred years after the hero had died! Mark knows nothing about the miraculous birth of Christ, the first account of which turns up at least ninety years after the supposed event! No Christian writer mentions or makes any clear and certain quotation from any gospel until a hundred years after the death of Jesus. That is serious, surely.
Clement of Rome wrote an important letter about 96 AD, and a second letter bearing his name, though probably a Christian forgery, was written later. About the same time was also written the so-called Epistle of Barnabas and the Teaching of the Apostles. None of them quote from, or refer to, the gospels. The Shepherd of Hermas, and letters of Bishops Ignatius and Polycarp, in the second century, do not mention the gospels or makes a clear quotation from them. They quote certain words which roughly correspond to some gospel expressions but, by the second century, sayings of Christ circulated in the Church. The Sayings of Our Lord (or Logia), a second-century fragment containing seven sayings, only two of which are from the gospels, suggesting the writer did not know the gospels.
A hundred years ago, long before the Jesus Seminar participants were born, a committee of historians and clergy were appointed to study this question by the Oxford University Society of Historical Theology. They confirmed that there was no trace of gospels until about the middle of the second century AD. It never impinged on an active brain cell in the head of the average Christian punter or deterred the dishonest parasites who read them sermons.
Not until about 140 or 150 AD do Christian writers refer to and quote from the gospels. They are known to Justin, Marcion and Papias. Papias, the Bishop of Herapolis, is known to us only from quotations by the fourth century historian Eusebius, a man who freely admitted that lying was acceptable to the church, if it led to the greater glory of God! This fourth-century quotation by a lying Christian historian of a second-century obscure bishop is the only serious evidence for the gospels! Papias says that he learned from older men that Mark and Matthew really wrote gospels. It is not evidence that any historian would credit, and the clergy do not believe it.
The Christian usually knows nothing about the first century world and so cannot appreciate any of this. They imagine a loyal group of virtuous men and women meeting secretly here and there, at Corinth or Ephesus or Thessalonica, to break bread and pray to Jesus. In truth, from about 50 to 150 AD, early Christianity was an intense ferment of contradictory speculations. Greek, Persian, Jewish, Egyptian, and all kinds of religious ideas were blended to form varieties of Christianity. A score of these varieties and their intellectual leaders are known. Gradually they were thrust outside the Church and called Gnosticism but in the first century and the early part of the second Christian they were Christianity.
The gospels took shape in this world. Men like Paul went from group to group, much as cheap evangelicals do today, and preached the new gospel for money. To judge by his epistles, Paul had little to say about an earthly life of Jesus—his Jesus was Christ, a god, virtually from the beginning. That someone sat down one day and, under inspiration, wrote a gospel is a childish belief spread by dishonest manipulators, who themselves know differently. Luke’s gospel admits the truth.
For decades, stories about a man called Jesus circulated, some describing him as a Jewish bandit and others as a dying and rising god. The faithful talked about Christ’s impending return and skeptics decried it. There were too many consistent stories about the bandit for the Christian bishops to ignore. They could not simply deny them without creating the worse problem of how the god had got such a bad reputation. They had to explain the tales as misunderstood stories about the god. They therefore retold them to their flocks, keeping as much of the original as they could whilst making the tale acceptable. They found an excellent way of doing this was by converting the original story into some kind of miracle, thus killing two birds with one stone.
Here and there, some of the few who could write put upon parchment what was being said. Our four gospels are just four that were selected in the fourth century out of a large number of contradictory stories about Jesus, going about. There was no central authority to check them, so sometimes contradictory explanations were made and the New Testament now has both. There was not the slightest approach to what we call standardization.
You may think it probable that Jesus really did this or that, but you cannot call it an historical fact because it is in the gospels. For forty or more years the faithful waited for the return of their resurrected god, but it never happened. It was for this reason that the gospels were written, to aid the cognoscenti of the religion, the bishops and priests, but to judge by their absence in correspondence, they were kept as apocrypha for almost a century before the church began to refer to them openly.
Jewish And Pagan Witnesses
In the way of non-biblical witnesses to Christ, we have only “twenty-four lines” from Jewish and Pagan writers, four of which are accepted as spurious. Of the twenty genuine lines twelve (which most people also regard as spurious) are in the Jewish historian, Josephus. The immense Latin literature of the century after the death of Jesus has only eight lines about him and each of these is disputed.
While the rebellion of Jesus might have caused a temporary stir in Rome, his crucifixion would have been heard of with relief and dismissal, and his teachings would have made no impact at all on any Roman writer. Yet it never strikes the Christian as strange or ironic that God should have lived on earth, for the salvation of everyone and died as the ultimate sacrifice, dwarfing every event in human history, without arranging for more publicity than half a dozen disputed lines.
The silence, from the Christian point of view, is blaring. Since Christians were apostates from Essenism, Jewish writers were hostile to them, both as apostates and as Essenes. Philo and Josephus spoke about the Essenes but had reason not to give any publicity to the Christian heresy that pretended to be Judaism for gentiles. Philo was born about the same time as Jesus. He was interested in the Essenes or their brothers the Therapeutae and people of a contemplative nature, as Jesus is traditionally depicted, and might be expected to mention Jesus and his followers. If he ever did, it was censored at a later date by the Christians.
The historian, Flavius Josephus, was a Palestinian Jew, born at Jerusalem in 37 AD, a man of high connexions and great culture. He was intensely interested in religious questions, and he gives a detailed an account of the Essenian monks, with whom Jesus was connected, in one of his works. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, he resided in Rome and wrote his works, the chief of which are his History of the Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. In one or other of these lengthy and exhaustive works he would, though a Pharisee, reasonably be expected to speak of Jesus and his followers. He even includes, in Jewish Antiquities, a full and unflattering portrait of Pontius Pilate, and he tells of other zealots and reformers in the Jewish history of the time. In the Jewish Antiquities, 18:3 is the following passage:
About this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed be should be called man. He wrought miracles, and was a teacher of those who gladly accept the truth, and had a large following among the Jews and pagans. He was the Christ. Although Pilate, at the complaint of the leaders of our people, condemned him to die on the cross, his earlier followers were faithful to him. For he appeared to them alive again on the third day, as god-sent prophets had foretold this and a thousand other wonderful things of him. The tribe of the Christians, which is called after him, survives until the present day.
This passage is so obviously spurious that no competent theologian or historian accepts it. Josephus was a zealous Jew and most of this is rank blasphemy from the Jewish point of view. It hints that Jesus was divine, that he taught the truth, that he wrought miracles, that he rose from the dead, and that the messianic prophecies of the scriptures expressly refer to him. To imagine Josephus writing such things is preposterous. It is a Christian interpolation.
Was a real reference to Jesus cut out by the Christian censor and replaced by this clumsy forgery? Probably. Making a zealous Jew recognize Jesus as “the Christ” at the height of the bitter feud of Jews and Christians was clumsy enough but he would hardly pick any random page of the historian for his purpose. It is likely that he found there a reference to Jesus that he blue-penned, and substituted his own piece, but left untouched the last sentence of the passage, which would be just as odd for a Christian to write.
The next most important reference to Jesus is in the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus (15:44). He mentions the fire which burned down the poorer quarters of Rome in the year 64 AD. Nero is thought to have ordered the fire, which caused great misery at the time, and, Tacitus says, the Emperor diverted suspicion by blaming the Christians for it and persecuting them:
To put an end to this rumour therefore, Nero laid the blame on, and visited with severe punishment, those men, hateful for their crimes, whom the people call Christians. He, from whom the name was derived, Christus, was put to death by the Procurator Pontius Pilatus in the reign of Tiberius.
Tacitus goes on to describe how “an immense multitude” of Christians were put to death with fiendish torments, and were convicted “not so much of the crime of arson as of hatred of the human race”.
This passage has many peculiar features. There cannot possibly have been “an immense multitude” of Christians at Rome in 64 AD. Only a few thousand were there a hundred years later. Though it looks like a Christian interpolation, Tacitus has one of the most distinctive and difficult styles in Latin literature, and, if this whole passage is a forgery, it is a perfect imitation. However, only the few words about the crucifixion matter, and a good Latin scholar could easily forge those. Some scholars believe it to be a forgery in its entirety, and that there was no persecution of Christians under Nero. The short sentence about Pilate may be an interpolation, but the peculiarities of the style of Tacitus count against the whole passage being forged.
Tacitus is supposed to have written this about the year 117 AD, ninety years after the death of Jesus. What does it prove? Only that after the year 100 there was a general belief in the Christian community that Jesus was crucified at the order of Pontius Pilate. That was not new at the time, the reference to Pilate in 1 Timothy, whether Pauline or not, probably being as old as that. And three of the gospels were then written, though were not apparently widely available.
Some Christian writers argue that Tacitus must have seen the official record of the crucifixion. Tacitus was not the man to look up the archives, ninety years later, for such a thing or the type to be interested in such a point. He did not do such research, being much more of a gossipy type of historian rather than a meticulously researched one. If the passage is genuine, it shows only that there were in 117 AD Christians in Rome who said these things—nobody doubts it.
Another Roman historian of about the same date, Suetonius, has an obscure passage, in his Life of Claudius (chapter 26), which seems to refer to the Christians:
Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome because, at the instigation of Chrestos, they were always making trouble.
This sentence would be quite meaningless as a Christian interpolation, but Chrestos was quite a common Greek name, and it might have nothing to do with Christ. It would be too remarkable a coincidence to find the Jews rioting about someone named Chrestos just about the time that they might have been rioting about the messiah, or Christ in Greek. Suetonius, unfamiliar with the word Christos, has understood it to be Chrestos. Claudius died in the year 54 AD, and it is possible that sectarian fighting between Jews and Christians at Rome over messianism caused the rioting. Possibly the riots were between Hellenized and Hebraic factions of Christianity, like those we read of in Acts, into which other Jews were drawn. In any event they tell us no more, at best, that some Jews as early as this thought the messiah had been. And, if Suetonius did not understand the word Christos when he wrote in 120 or 130 AD, Christianity cannot have been known to him even so late.
Of the twenty lines, there remain only five in a letter of Pliny the younger to the Emperor Trajan. They say that the Christians were numerous enough in the province of Bithynia (in Asia Minor), of which Pliny was Governor, to cause him concern, but he speaks of them as respectable, law-abiding folk who meet to sing hymns at daybreak to Christ “as a God”. A number of scholars have disputed the authenticity of the passage or the whole letter, and it hardly seems plausible that a Proconsul should write to the Emperor about such a matter. If true, by 113 AD a good many Christians were in Asia Minor. Christian apologists reveal the desperate poverty of their case when all they can quote, to prove that Jesus really lived nearly a century before, are these few sentences.
So, no non-Christian writer of the first century mentions Christ—Josephus being equivocal and adulterated—and references in the second century are proof only of what Christians had come to believe a century later. The Christians remained a obscure sect in a world that was seething with sects. That is all we can infer.
-->
Moses and Exodus
