Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, October 04, 1999
Monday, 12 September 2005

Introduction

All Christians and many non-Christians cling to notions of the perfection of Jesus. He alone among human beings is revered as all-loving, and faultless—an unparalleled model for mankind. The impeccability of Jesus is so entrenched that to disparage his worth is denounced as bad taste. To suggest he could be wrong is considered blasphemy. In popular opinion, Jesus never made a mistake. All his teachings were infallible. Jesus is the one man who has lived unblemished by the world, free from human follies, he alone able to redeem mankind by his example. No other view is nequivocally tolerated. Doubting Jesus is more impious than mocking God Almighty. Christians and Jews seem happy to accept that when mankind was primitive, God was too. But detractors of Jesus are immoral, irrespective of the proof they present. Yet it is irrefutable that, if Jesus made mistakes, he is neither the Son of God nor infallible.

What do they fear, if their hero is indisputably proved to be imperfect? The most important thing is loss of pride. They have committed themselves to believing and perhaps to evangelizing for many years and then find it was not just a waste of time but actually wrong. That is a hard lesson! No one would disagree.

Also important is disloyalty. Christians have an image in their heads and they feel a loyalty towards it. No one can argue that merited loyalty is not admirable. Pride and loyalty can both be important aspects of our personality—if they are not misplaced! To take pride in and to be loyal to a cause which is wrong is to be wrong headed not proud or loyal.

So what would happen if Christians were satisfied Jesus was not God? Would they set off on a debauched rampage? The suggestion is ridiculous. Most practising Christians want to do what is right. If they were forced by irrefutable evidence to accept that Jesus was not what they believed, they would not automatically become harlots and villains. They might feel lost and dismayed but they would not lose their nature because their god had lost his apparent divinity. The natural thing that they would do is to seek something better to replace what they had. Freed from falsehood they will come to serve Nature—from which they were seduced in the first place—with the same devotion they had for Jesus, the god they did not know was false.

Much of the New Testament itself is false, has been distorted or has been misinterpreted by the church. Christians of different sects interpret the New Testament in different ways. All we know for sure, as far as Christianity historically is concerned, is what is written. So each account in the New Testament has to be taken as it is read. Some Christian cults might say we are wrong and some might say we are right. It simply goes to prove that, if the bible message is divine, it fails to impress itself uniformly on its believers.

Was Jesus God?

For a long time Jesus was looked upon as God, or the Son of God. No one had any doubt of his divinity. If they had, they deferred to the superstitious majority, kept their mouth shut and kept their head. This idea that Jesus was God has been steadily declining for several hundred years. Intelligent people have mainly given it up, though some people often considered intelligent, who are paid for preaching it, still pretend to adhere to it. No rational defence can be made of the dogma of the divinity of Jesus. It is one of many theological absurdities from times when gods were popular.

Curiously, considering the Christian belief that Jesus is a god, many of the passages in the texts bearing upon the divinity of Jesus Christ virtually deny it. Three quarters of the texts in the gospels and epistles which relate to the divinity of Christ teach a contrary doctrine or invest Jesus with finite human qualities incompatible with the attributes of a divine being.

• Jesus repeatedly denied he was divine.
• His immediate followers did not see him as a god.
• Any being not possessing the essential attributes of a self-existing god and creator, infinitude, omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence or possessing any characteristic incompatible with any one of these attributes, cannot be a god but must be a finite being.
• The evangelists give him qualities which we recognize as human, not divine.
• The evangelists report various actions in his life which are irreconcilable with his being a god.
• Jesus’s birth was human.
• He was of flesh and blood, like human beings.
• He hungered, like human beings.
• He became thirsty (Jn 19:28), like human beings.
• He slept, like human beings.
• He sometimes became weary, like human beings. (Jn 4:6)
• He was occasionally tempted, like human beings. (Mt 4:1.)
• His soul became exceeding sorrowful (Mt 26:38), like human beings.
• He wept, like human beings. (Jn 11:35)
• He was originally imperfect so could not have been a god, but “made perfect through suffering” (Heb 2:10).
• He “increased in wisdom and stature” (Lk 2:52) showing he was finite and changeable.
• He finally died and was buried, like all human beings.

He could not, from these considerations, have been a god. Any god of infinite powers and infinite attributes could not have had all, or any, of these finite human qualities. Christians try to disprove these arguments by assigning the Jesus a twofold nature—an amalgamation of the human and divine, but such an amalgam meant he was both entirely a man and entirely a god, simultaneously!

How can a being be entirely human and entirely divine at the same time? How can Jesus be both God and man? If Jesus was able to act like a god, say by doing miracles, then he was not a man. This is fundamental because if Jesus was not a man then he did not suffer as a man, and the whole theory of atonement collapses. If he was a man, then the miracles cannot have been true and could not have offered proof of his divinity. Then, Jesus was God—so he was not man. Jesus was man—so he was not God. How can a God who is infinite exist in a form that is finite—man? Even the Christians cannot reply.

This senseless hypothesis of the theologians to vindicate the dogma of the divinity of Jesus is worse than that of the super men or demigods of the ancient heathen, who had the human and divine qualities the naïve worshippers of Jesus claim for him. The evidence adduced to prove the divinity of Jesus proves the divinity of Apollo, of Hercules, of Prometheus, of hundreds of mythological heroes. Are Christians prepared to admit Jesus was phony? If not, then they explain clearly to the world why not, rather than obfuscating as they do endlessly. Their doctrine is evidently absurd.

The Christian holy book itself settles the matter. The Father testifies unequivocally against the divinity of the Son repeatedly in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, in such declarations as:

I am Yehouah, and beside me there is no saviour.

Isa 43:11

I, Yehouah, am thy saviour and thy redeemer.

Isa 49:26; 60:16

If God categorically declares this, how can Jesus Christ be the saviour or the redeemer? The Father also declares, according to Isaiah and Hosea that the Son cannot be God either.

There is no god else beside me, a just god and a saviour, there is none beside me.

Isaiah 45:21

Yet I am the Lord thy God from the land of Egypt, and thou shalt know no god but me, for there is no saviour beside me.

Hosea 13:4

These passages prohibit any man from being worshipped as god. Now the theologians will argue that the Son was the Father as part of the “Three in One”, the Christian Trinity, but that returns us to the problem of a god being simultaneously a man. And, having told us repeatedly through his inspired prophets that there is only one god, why should God decide then to confuse everyone by appearing in another form, that of the Son? After all those warnings, only the devil could appear in the guise of a man to test whether the mortals were actually listening to God’s prophets.

The mother also testifies against the son. After a long search, Mary found her son Jesus in the temple, disputing with the doctors, and reproved him for staying from home without the consent of his parents, declaring, “Thy father and I sought thee, sorrowing” (Lk 2:48). A sweet story about a naughty child but, knowing Jesus to be the son of God, could she have really been worried about him, could she have really scolded him like this, could she really have said that God was sorrowing, and could she have really felt the need to berate a god, or even a son of a god, for doing as he wanted?

She speaks to him of Joseph as his father when, whatever the world knew or did not know, both she and Jesus must have known that he was really the son of God, not Joseph. Who else among mortals but the mother could know who the father of the child Jesus was? As she seems to acknowledge it was Joseph, she thus repudiates the story of Jesus’s conception by the Holy Ghost, the basis of his claim to divinity. This ought to settle the question, but it does not for Christians who will believe that down is up and dogs are cats when their priests and ministers tell them so.

Nevertheless, perhaps they will listen when their own God the Son himself speaks. There is not one attribute considered peculiar to a divine being that Jesus does not reject as applied to himself, often in explicit language. In all reasonableness, if it was part of God’s message to show that he had incarnated himself to die as an atoning sacrifice, what purpose is served in denying it? Yet Jesus clearly and often denies he is a god or God, or even an aspect or part of God, thus denying the Trinity, a later invention of the church.

• He denies he is omnipotent by declaring: “The Son can do nothing of himself” (Jn 5:19). Any omnipotent being needs no help.
• He denies he is omniscient by declaring (Mt 24:36.) his ignorance of the day of judgement, the most important event in the world’s history: “Of that day and hour knoweth no man, neither the Son, but the Father only”. Any omniscient being must possess all knowledge.
• He denies he is omniscient by declaring: “I am glad for your sakes I was not there”, meaning at the grave of Lazarus. Any omnipresent being was there.
• He denies he has any independent existence by declaring (Jn 6:57): “I live by the Father”. A being who lives by another cannot be independent.
• He denies he has God’s goodness by declaring (Mk 10:18): “Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is God”.
• He rejects divine honours, reserving them for God alone. I “honour my Father” (Jn 8:49) and “I receive not honour from men” (Jn 5:41).
• He advocated (Jn 4:21), for true believers, worship of the Father not himself: “The true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth”.
• He yielded (Mt 6:13) supreme dominion to the Father: “Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever”.
• He admitted (Jn 7:16) he taught only under authority of the Father and that he came because he had been sent, plainly accepting a lower rank: “My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me”.
• He sought protection (Jn 17:15) for his followers from the father: “I pray that thou shouldst keep them from the evil”. No god would be unable to defend his own followers.
• He repeatedly acknowledged his dependence on the Father. “I can do nothing of myself”. “I came to do the will of him that sent me”. “The Father that dwelleth within me, he doeth the work”. “A god within a god” is an old Pagan doctrine. Literally hundreds of quotations make the Son inferior to the Father, as “the Son knoweth not, but the Father does” (Mk 8:32). My “Father is greater than I”. The Son can do nothing of himself (Jn 5:19). No rational person can conclude other than that the church later elevated the dying and resurrected god to the level of the Absolute.
• He declared (Jn 6:45) that even spiritual communion was the work of the Father.
• He acknowledged himself controlled (Jn 5:30) by the Father.
• He acknowledged (Heb 16:5) that even his body was the work of his Father. In other words, that he was dependent on his Father for his physical life.
• He called the Father “the only true god” (Jn 17:3) but calls him my “Father and my God” (Jn 20:17). Believe all that you like about the ability of a god to descend from the infinite to the finite, but will it then speak to itself as if it, itself, was a different being? This language shows that Jesus laid no claim to being God, and indeed that, even if he was a supernatural being, he recognised quite certainly that God was the supreme god and not a disembodied aspect of himself.
• He uniformly directed his disciples to pray, not to him, but the Father (Mt 6:6).
• He even acknowledged John the Baptist to be greater than he (Mt 11:11). Can almighty God even in the disguise of a man honestly say that to another mere man?
• The disciples testify against the son. Philip addressed Nathanael, saying (Jn 1:45): “We have found him of whom Moses, in the law and the prophets, did write—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph”. So, Jesus was the son of Joseph, Philip the disciple says it clearly and the beloved disciple reports it clearly.
• His disciples never speak of him as a god but as a man, carefully distinguishing him from God. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 2:5). “Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God” (Acts 2:23). Can anyone properly call God, even in disguise, “a man approved of God”? In Acts 17:3 we find: “By that man whom he (the Father) hath ordained”. Was God the Father ordaining himself? Did he feel silly doing it?
• Paul (1 Cor 4:8) excluded Jesus from the Godhead: “Unto us there is but one God—the Father”. He does not say: “There is but one God, the father, the son and the Holy Ghost!”
• If John’s declaration (Jn 4:12) be true, that “no man hath seen God at any time”, then how could Jesus be God? He was seen by thousands of men, and seen hundreds of times.
• God the Father is declared to be “the One”, “the Holy One”, “the only One” more than one hundred times, as if purposely to exclude any other being from the Godhead.
• Many texts have been found which declare, either explicitly or by implication, that God the Father has no equal, thus denying the divine equality of the Son. “To whom will ye liken me, or shall I be equal with, saith the holy One” (Isa 11:25).
• Jesus in the New Testament is called “man” and “son of man”, eighty-four times. He is called God three times, and calls himself “the Son of God” only once.
• The Father is spoken of in the relation of God to the Son, as “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 3:2). “Ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor 11:3). Now, unless Jesus is merely a man, these expressions imply a plurality, indeed a hierarchy, of gods. They are incompatible with the belief that Christianity is monotheistic, Trinity or no Trinity.
• Many texts make Christ the tool or servant of God. He is “the image of God” (Heb 1:3), “the appointed of God” (Heb 3:1), “the servant of God” (Mt 12:18). All again imply that Christ is inferior to God and just to speak of God being his own servant is quite nonsensical.
• There are many divine titles applied to the Father which are never used in reference to the Son, as Yehouah, The “Most High”, “God Almighty”, “The Almighty”.
• Moses, acknowledged to be merely mortal, is called a god twice (Ex 4:16; 7:1) showing that merely because the holy book says a being is a god does not mean it is true. In fact, Moses is either a famous leader on his way to immortality as a god but stopped en route, or he is an old Pagan god reduced to the level of a mythical man.
• The divine titles used of Jesus Christ such as Lord, God, saviour, redeemer, intercessor were used before the birth of Christ, but applied to men—the title of Lord is used of noblemen still—some of them are used thus in the bible itself.

The term saviour is applied to men, both in the singular and the plural (2 Kg 13:5; Neh 9:27). Since the most important divine titles applied to Jesus even in the New Testament were earlier used of men, they cannot be evidence of divinity as Christians think.

Or a Good Man?

Christians say to anyone who denies Jesus is a god:

You will have to admit that Jesus was a good man.

Many people believe that Jesus was simply a man—a good man but still human. They look upon him as a part of humanity, a product of human nature. He has a human father and mother. His extraordinary deeds are merely exaggerated. Such people have a superstitious reverence for Jesus as “the one perfect man.” It is common to speak of Jesus as though he touched the borders of every human experience, and sounded the depths of joy and woe. They forget that Jesus had a great many crude, foolish ideas, and did a great many deeds that should not be repeated to children.

Does a good man pay fair wages? Jesus recommended paying a man who worked only for the last hour of the day in the cool of the evening the same wage as a man who had toiled for ten hours in the heat of the day. Does a good man go around irrationally cursing fig trees because they are out of season? Does a good man advocate that people hate their fathers and mothers? It is a mistake to look upon Jesus as a fit person to lead our century to a higher life.

Some people see nothing remarkable in the career of Jesus. They think he was a lunatic, who thought he was the Messiah of his people. Had he lived today instead, he would have thought he was Napoleon. Some others see him as a seditionist hoping to overthrow Roman rule in Palestine. This latter is the nearest to the truth but whichever is the truth, Jesus is now a myth.

How can anyone read the New Testament story of Jesus and not regard him as a myth. There is a difference between knowledge of the bible and knowledge. A person may know all there is in the Bible, and know little. So much of the Bible is either pure fiction or doubtful history that one is not sure when he has got hold of what is reliable. Probably no person in the Bible is less a historical figure than Jesus. He performs amazing miracles. No one else ever performed miracles like these. Christians say it proves he is a god. But miracles are not proof of divinity, but of falsehood. Because it is impossible for the dead to come back to life, we know it is not true when the bible says they did. In either gospel he is more the product of the novelist than the work of the biographer.

The crucifixion, the great sacrifice Jesus made for mankind, was not voluntary. Even the gospels claim he was betrayed. Nothing stopped him, if he wanted to appear truly noble, from giving himself up to his enemies. He made no sacrifice but was captured and crucified at the command of the Romans. The deluded Nazarene was working to establish the kingdom of heaven, the political independence of God’s kingdom, the Jewish kingdom, because Jews were God’s chosen people. He failed and suffered the prescribed punishment in Roman law—an intentionally cruel fate, suffered by hundreds of others. History would have written his name among the victims of political revolutions, if it had preserved it at all, but the priests made Jesus the leading part in a theological drama, and immortalized his name.

What is so significant about the death of Jesus on the cross? It was a horrible end but many have died more horrible deaths and equally horrible ones both before and since. Indeed some of the worst tortures ever devised were used by men of God and in God’s name. It was a life lost but many lives besides Jesus’s have been sacrificed over the years. As a sacrifice it was quite a short one. Some people have to sacrifice their lives for a lifetime. A good mother sacrifices her life for her family. She does so constantly, every hour, life-long. It never ceases. She gives her children love and devotion that outshines the gratuitous sacrifice of a god.

Brave dying proves less than brave living. The sacrifice of a lifetime shows the courage that commands our deepest admiration. Somebody who has offered themselves for years upon the altar of duty has performed a deed beside which a moment’s suffering is nothing. But heroism is only seen when suffering is apparent.

A man would shrink from being nailed to a cross, but why would a God? Human weakness would cry out for sympathy and help when severed nerves protest to an agonized consciousness, but why should a god in its divine strength ask for pity or aid. If Jesus was God he should have died in divine silence. Jesus died disappointed. The cross proves that Jesus was human, when he cried out:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.

It is foolish to waste our sympathy on a god who chose to suffer to save us from His own willful injustice. Actual human beings make a greater sacrifice and do a nobler duty, daily! At one time the role of the woman as mother was revered. But that was before women were conditioned to weep in sorrow at the sacrifice of Jesus or Tammuz or Adonis or Orpheus—they are all the same. They all die to expiate human sin. But there is no such need. Where is the evidence that human sin needs to be expiated or indeed can be, by anyone other than the sinner? The need for any sacrificial offering to God does not exist. The idea of an atoning sacrifice is a relic of a barbarous faith. The one sacrifice that is worth having is that of a mother’s devotion.

It is bizarre that Jesus did not answer the most important questions put to him. He did not reveal the things that people wanted to know for certain. Why not? Because he could not. Christians want us to believe that when the Bible is silent it is because we cannot hear, but the silence of Jesus before Caiaphas, Pilate and Herod condemns him as an imposter. He had to prove that he was the Christ, the Son of God, as he claimed to be. If he was God’s saviour, it was his duty. Christians say we would be saved if we believed. So why did Jesus, or God, make it so hard for us to believe by not clearly answering when he had the chance? The conclusion has to be that Jesus was an imposter as God’s saviour, or God deliberately wants many of us to go to hell.

Christians say that the resurrection of Jesus proves his claim to be the Messiah. But what proves the resurrection? Certainly not the contradictory stories of the gospels. The story of the resurrection of Jesus from the tomb merely proves that somebody lied, or to be generous, was mistaken, and someone else believed the lie or error to be true. Some strange psychological dependence has made a minority of people believe ever since and they have forced many others to accept their delusions too. Resurrections have never been successful. The inhabitants of graves come out only to walk the corridors of their lives for a brief period, then they return to silence and rest—and these happenings are invariably fictional or hallucinations of distraught minds. Stories of ghosts are always short. Ghosts never stop long or do anything noticeable in the world.

Modern disciples do not resemble closely the ancient disciples of Jesus. In fact it is hard to find a reason why Christian preachers call themselves disciples of Jesus at all. According to the narrative of the New Testament Jesus was not in love with money and what money will buy. He did not have a high appreciation of expensive things. He did not complain about the service in restaurants or the poor quality of the food. Jesus urged his disciples to be like him. He said to them:

Provide neither gold nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes… It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master.

Mt 10:9-10; 25

Whether or not the earliest disciples took much notice of their master, we do not know, but his modern disciples do not obey his commands. Clergymen today are no less interested in their wages than anyone else. They deliberately disobey the injunctions of Jesus to his disciples, and think they are doing their duty to do so. They do not bother taking any notice of the commands of Jesus. They readily explain that they cannot do as Jesus commanded his first disciples—it is too hard in modern circumstances. Christian clergymen bluntly deny that God’s commands can be obeyed. Does that mean all of God’s commands don’t have to be obeyed, if we can find a reason not to? If it is just some of them, not them all, how can we tell which ones we can ignore or excuse? The truth is these ministers of the church are hypocrites. They have the blessing of the Holy Ghost but refuse to obey God’s, or the Son of God’s (they are the same, aren’t they?) orders.

Christian ministers look after themselves. They are well housed, well fed, well dressed, and have a comfortable life and income without doing any work. They must laugh at the Jesus of the New Testament. They pretend to honour the naïve peasant of Galilee, to get a comfortable living, but must think him a dolt. If it paid better to tell the truth and to take an honest position in the world, most ministers would not be hypocrites, but while Christianity ignores the precepts of its master and pays its clergy, they will profess to follow Jesus and do as they please.

Jesus’s Imperfections

The imperfections of men elevated to the level of a god are always hidden from or ignored by their worshippers. Errors, both in their moral lessons and practical life, have thus passed from age to age uncriticised. Their awe stricken followers, taught that they were divine teachers, assume that their teachings must all be true instead of examining them properly to find out whether they are, in fact. Usually the gawping followers construct tortuous arguments to prove they are when they find they are not.

When they discover such an error in a god’s teaching, the theologians of the religion interpret the text in some new and unwarranted way. If this proves difficult, they insist with a godly zeal that the text is correct in some mystic way which only god knows and so they pass off error as truth. Disciples have thus been misled and blinded. Their religious teachers tell them that everything taught by their divine exemplars is perfect truth, in perfect harmony with science, sense, and true morals. The millions of believers in Jesus Christ have been taught in this way, and often struggle to distinguish truth from God’s Truth.

On the face of it the Jesus of the New Testament preaches and adopts many unwise practices. He teaches that no thought is to be taken for the morrow as to food, drink, or clothing—an practice contrary to good health and economic wisdom, unless the objective is to enter the other world as soon as possible, or to justify those determined to be a burden on society. He encouraged the ignorant and cruel method of treating disease as the work of demons to be expelled savagely. He apparently drives unclean spirits at their own request out of a violent lunatic, who spent his life among the tombs, into a herd of 2000 swine, which then ran down a hill into the sea and were drowned. The owner of the herd must have been left destitute and, as Jesus is said to have been chronically poor himself, it seems he offered no compensation.

Now often a correct historical understanding of the situation and teaching of Jesus explains it satisfactorily but not in any way acceptable to the Christian clergy. Such interpretations are valueless for a Christian because it shows up Jesus for what he really was and not what Christians want to believe him to have been. Here we shall look at the teaching of Jesus the Christian god, to show its absurdity as interpreted 2000 years and countless miles out of time and place.

The Sermon On The Mount

The Sermon on the Mount is supposed to contain an essential summary of Christian morality based on the gospels. Mark, the oldest gospel, does not mention it and Luke, who makes it a Sermon on the Plain, writes an account largely different from that of Matthew. Modern divines say it is not a single discourse, but a collection of sayings of Jesus put in a dramatic form by the writer of the gospels. This, they say, does not in the least detract from its value.

It attempts to be is an account of the new converts being read the rules of the Essenes at the Essene festival of the Renewal of the Covenant held annually at Pentecost. If Matthew was an Essene, as is possible, the account might be reasonably sound, and the accusation that it is a compilation of different sayings arises because others have remembered and recorded the sayings elsewhere out of context. Otherwise it is Matthew’s attempt to assemble the sort of speech that might have been made on the occasion from Jesus’s separate sayings. In either case, it is comparable with the Essenian books of rules like the Damascus Rule and the Community Rule.

It opens with the famous Eight Beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, and so on. The Greek text of this first beatitude is confused, containing no verb at all, but the phrase, “poor in spirit”, is unmistakable. To be consistent with other parts of the gospels, and the tenets of the Essenians, it ought to be a frank glorification of poverty. Of the utmost significance in showing the identity of the Nazarenes and the Essenes, this odd phrase is found precisely in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the only place it is found other than in the Sermon on the Mount. It does not mean poor spirited, that is of poor spirit or depressed, but those who have deliberately adopted the spirit of poverty—the Poor Ones or Ebionim. It equates spiritual wealth with material poverty just as Plutarch does when he asks:

What disease shall we say that the rich man suffereth from but spiritual poverty?

On Covetousness 4

The stoic philosopher and contemporary of the gospel writers, Epictetus, who recognised the oppression of the slaves and formulated passive ways for them to resist spiritually while suffering physically, says:

Any person may live happy in poverty, but few in wealth and power.

Fragments 128

The message is identical to that of Jesus and the earliest Christians whom he influenced. The poor man or slave is free in his inner spiritual independence but can never aspire to practical freedom. On the other hand, the rich man is spiritually bound. This philosophy suited the Christians of the Roman gentile world, but the original “Christians”, the Essenes, were not so passive. Mostly they were, but they awaited the time when God would rouse them to fight against their enemies—the very Romans the Christians sought to convert!

The next sentence is “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted” which is almost a quotation from Isaiah 61:1-2, and similar sentiments elsewhere in the prophets and the psalms. Every moralist who believes in God makes a commonplace of it. So it is with the blessing of “the meek”. The psalms and prophets are full of it, and every Stoic repeats it. Seneca says:

I will be meek and yielding to my enemies.

On the Happy Life 20:5

Plutarch writes:

A calm and meek and humane temper is not more pleasant to those with whom we live than to him who possesseth it.

On Restraining Anger 16)

But a glance at the passage in Isaiah shows that the point of it is to declare the Day of God’s Vengeance when the captives will be freed, the prison of those bound will be opened and the land will be rebuilt as it was. It is not a call for people to remain meek but quite the opposite. The meek would enslave their previous oppressors!

After the Beatitudes the writer makes Jesus address his audience as “the salt of the earth”, and “the light of the world”, and so on. It is obviously an address to disciples, yet at the close, we are told, “the people were astonished at his doctrine”. The people would be astonished to hear that Jesus was advocating a rebellion against the Romans.

Jesus is then said to have assured his hearers that he advocated no change whatever in the law, the most essential injunctions of which Christians say he spent his career denouncing:

Till heaven and earth shall pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled.

Mt 5:18

The law is the law of Moses, the law of the Jews that even Christians accept does not apply to gentiles, which is why they were keen to depict Jesus as abrogating it. This passage says unequivocally that he did not abrogate it, but it still only applied to Jews and Jesus was only addressing Jews. He was never interested in promoting a universal religion. So when Jesus quotes the law as saying that you must not kill, he means Jews must not kill Jews, not that Jews must not kill their tyrannical oppressors. Promoting unity in his penitents, he says they should not even be angry with their brothers. Nor is it a new teaching, as Christians always believe about everything said by their hero. The Mosaic law ran:

Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart… thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

Lev 19:18

He goes on to say that the old law was that they should not commit adultery, but it is a sin even to desire a woman. The devout Christian must have puzzled about this because twice in the Jewish scriptures known to them as the Old Testament is found the same law:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife.

Ex 20:17; Dt 5:21

The later books of the Old Testament leave no room for doubt about it, saying exactly what Jesus is supposed to have said:

Lust not after her beauty in thine heart.

Prov 6:25

Gaze not on a maid… gaze not on another’s beauty.

Ecc 9:5,8

The Talmud goes even further than Jesus:

Whosoever regardeth even the little finger of a woman hath already sinned in his heart.

Berachot 24:1

Seneca, Epictetus and all the Stoics are as stern about all crafty thought, for example:

It is the intention, not the outward act, which makes the wickedness.

Seneca On the Happy Life 16

Next, though Mark and Luke make Jesus forbid divorce under any conditions. Matthew allows it for “fornication”. The Churches have therefore been perpetually confused about the sinfulness of divorce. The Jews at the time of Jesus were just as divided as the primitive Christians evidently were, and Christians are today. Some rabbis—unknown to Matthew—forbade divorce altogether, some allowed it for adultery, others admitted many grounds for divorce. For the Essenes, there could be no divorce because, if their were, God could divorce Israel, who from the scriptures they took to be personified as His wife. God had said he would never abandon Israel, so could mortal Jews do any less? This is what Jesus taught, but on a theological basis not a social one.

Several verses on oaths follow and the writer again makes a mistake in thinking that the Old Testament and the Pharisees did not forbid swearing. One of the Ten Commandments is:

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain

Elsewhere, the Old Testament says:

Accustom not thy mouth to an oath.

Ecc 23:9-11

Civic or official oaths in Judaea were limited to the initial oath of an Essene and that was more of a personal intention rather than a formal oath. In Christian countries oaths are met everywhere. Christian societies even prosecuted anyone who acted on Christ’s injunction and refused to take an oath. People who sought justice in British courts of law were contemptuously dismissed because they had scruples about taking an oath. The stoics, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, condemned oaths just as Jesus did. Popes, priests and parliamentarians insist on them.

Next is the famous council that refutes what Christians consider the barbaric law of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. People must turn the other cheek to anyone who hits them and must give a cloak also to anyone who purloins your coat. In Christendom, anyone who actually acted on these injunctions was either canonized as a saint or locked in a madhouse. Although the “eye for an eye” principle is found three times in the Old Testament (Ex 21:24; Lev 24:20; Dt 19:21), the Pharisees took it as a law of recompense not necessarily to be applied, because the later books of the Old Testament say, over and over again, what Matthew gives as a new law:

I gave my back to the smiters and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair.

Isa 1:6

Let him give his cheek to him that smiteth him.

Lam 3:30

The Talmud gives the following as if it were a common proverb:

If any demand thy ass, give him also the saddle.

Baba Kamma 92:2

Every single Pagan moralist at one time or other praised passive resistance. They said that you must smile when the angry man insults or strikes you. Plato has this passive recommendation for dealing with an assailant:

Let him strike thee!

Gorgias 527

The Christian Republican president of the USA at the start of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt, bellowed with laughter at Jesus’s passive principle. Jesus is represented as refuting, in the Sermon on the Mount, the saying:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy.

Yet, no such passage occurs anywhere in the Old Testament. Jesus believed the end of the world was nigh and he was an Essene. It was the Essenes who hated their enemies, the children of Darkness. He is addressing repentant apostate Jews seeking the kingdom of God and this saying has to be understood in that context. Essenes had no regard for Jewish backsliders, whom they regarded as enemies but, with God’s kingdom imminent, Jesus insisted that any Jew, who repented before God, could be saved. The gist of the saying is therefore that, though Essenes hated their enemies, no Jew was the irredeemable enemy of another Jew. Even the worst could repent and join the forces of light.

Christians have to cultivate ignorance to preserve their faith. They deliberately do not read Plato, Epictetus, Plutarch, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. Without reading them, they know, presumably by a miracle, that the morality of the gospel is superior. They are certain of the originality of Christ without enquiring whether anyone else said the same things. They do not read the Talmud because they would find that many of the sayings of Jesus were platitudes of the rabbinical schools. They might, however, be supposed to read the Old Testament and every point of Christian morality is found in it. Do they read it? If so, why do they regard the son of God as so original? Much of what he taught can certainly not be seen as universally applicable…

Moral and Religious Errors

1. Many of Jesus’s admonitions taken out of their original context may be classified as moral extremism. What is said is over said, as:

Take no thought for the morrow.

Mt 6:34

If this injunction were carried out in practical life, nothing would be done and the result would be universal starvation in less than twelve months. Fortunately, this is one of the many Christian precepts that Christians habitually ignore. In context, it is perfectly understandable because Jesus considered that the righteous on the morrow would be in the kingdom of God, as the previous verse, considered his most important injunction, makes clear:

Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all else shall be added unto you.

Mt 6:33

Jesus’s teaching could not be clearer than that the kingdom of God on earth—when the righteous would be raised into glory—was imminent. Once this is understood many of his apparently extreme moral teachings become perfectly rational, but they are terrible advice for anyone expecting to continue living in the present world on the morrow.

2. The disciple of Christ is required to:

Resist not evil,

Mt 5:39

but when smitten on one cheek, to turn the other also, an extravagant commandment, requiring the follower to suffer maltreatment even when life might be the consequence—Christ’s early followers so understood it—which few indeed of his modern disciples even attempt to observe. In context, the commandment was intended only as a rule of behaviour between Jews so that they would not be excluded from the coming kingdom by some such sin as anger. It did not apply to gentiles who would be lucky to get into God’s kingdom at all, though it was not impossible for them.

3. The disciple of Christ is required, when his cloak is formally wrested from him, to give up his coat also (Mt 5:40), and to carry out the principle, if the marauder demands it, he must next give up his boots, then his shirt, and thus strip himself of all his garments, and go naked. This looks like an invitation and bribe to robbery, but it refers to a legal claim not a robbery and, in context, it is the advice of a man who belongs to a sect with a vow of poverty. The Essenes, like the Nazarenes, were “poor in spirit”, not meaning that they were miserable but that they indulged in the joys of poverty. They would rather give up what rags they had, should anyone demand them than to indulge in an angry legal exchange with a fellow Jew which would jeopardise the entry of both into God’s kingdom.

4. Another positive command which the modern Christian by common consent ignores is:

Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth,

Mt 6:19

and plainly it is the advice both of a man with a belief in the spiritual benefits of poverty and one who did not expect normal existence to last long.

Another command which bespeaks more piety than wisdom is;

Sell all that thou hast… and come and follow me.

Mt 19:21

Those who have attempted to comply with it have reduced their families to beggary and want, yet it is again understandable when the sect are seen as the Poor Ones and the end of the world and the kingdom of God was nigh.

5. Disgraceful advice once more is:

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

1 John 2:15

But if anyone does not love the world then they must hate it, as the two principles are opposites, and certainly the Christians are taught they are out of the world and the world hates them:

If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.

Jn 15:19

Breathing forth the same spirit, Christians even have to hate their closest relatives and their own earthly life to follow their master:

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

Lk 14:26

Many learned expositions have been penned by Christian writers to make it appear that “hate” in this case does not mean “hate”. These Christians are blatantly admitting God is incapable of saying, or inspiring his disciples to say, exactly what he meant, and to say it so plainly as to leave no ground for dispute about the meaning. Merely from hateful words “proceed envy, strife, evil surmising, and persecution” (1 Tim 6:4). Christian teaching is contradictory.

Yet, to an Essene, there is no contradiction because anyone wishing to inherit eternal life in God’s coming kingdom on earth had to be ready to die in the battle for it against the Romans in this imperfect world. Yet the saints had to be perfect in the imperfect world. They entered the kingdom through righteousness not by hate, envy and so on to each other. The families of some converts were resisting their conversion, and that in turn was jeopardising the success of the revolution and therefore the chances that the kingdom would come. Essenes hated their enemies, and the families of such converts would have been so regarded, as ones resisting the kingdom of God.

6. Christians had to:

Rejoice and be exceeding glad,

Mt 5:12

when persecuted. Such advice must prompt the religious zealot to court persecution to be happy, and consequently to pursue a life provoking persecution. The Nazarene rebels expected to be persecuted by the Romans and the collaborating Sadducees. That is what the history of Jesus is all about.

7. The spirit of martyrdom of one’s physical life for a hypothetical spiritual after-life made millions suicidally reckless, and still provokes frenzied bigots to seek instant heaven via the fiery faggot or the body bomb. Yet it is encouraged in Christians though thankfully mostly they take no notice:

Whosoever shall seek to save his life, shall lose it.

Lk 17:33

They must not try to save their natural life for fear of losing the spiritual life in the holy poke. It is religious fanaticism pure and simple, because that is what the followers of Jesus were—they were zealots.

8. There has to be something wrong when a religion could excite the universal hatred of mankind. Yet Christians are told:

Ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake.

Mt 10:12

So, nothing in it was suited to the moral, religious, or spiritual taste of non-Christians anywhere. Whatever its adapts loved, everyone else must hate. Their doctrines or their conduct must have been repulsive! Here is more of the extravagance of religious fanaticism, but it is an addition of the early church to Matthew as the egomania of it proves. Jesus the Essene only spoke in God’s name, and the Nazarenes were not hated by most Jews. They were hated by the Romans.

9. Christ encourages in his disciples a spirit of contempt for the opinions of others who would not support them:

Shake off the dust of your feet,

Mt 10:14

against those who cannot see the truth or utility of your doctrines. A proper regard for the rules of good manners would have forbidden such rudeness toward strangers for a mere honest difference of opinion. In context, however, Jesus was hoping for a revolution to bring in God’s miracle and His kingdom. If successful, it would benefit all Jews, and they were contemptuous of any Jew who did not support them.

10. Jesus advises his followers to sponge on their friends and force themselves on their enemies, who seem to have been much more numerous.

Take nothing for your journey, neither staff, nor scrip, nor purse.

Mk 6:8

A preacher who tried to carry out this advice today would be soon arrested as a vagrant and a beggar. Once again the Christians, wallowing in their ignorance, fail to understand that the Essenes, who were “the Poor”, helped each other. Jesus’s instructions to his converts precisely match the description of Essene practice given by Josephus, and offer solid proof that they were all part of the Essene order in first century Palestine.

11. Jesus apparently says:

Go and teach all nations,

Mt 28:19

but since he is dead when he says it, we are on safe ground in realising it is an addition of the later church. After 2000 years most of the human race have no interest in Christianity. Jesus had no regard for nations outside of God’s chosen people, the Jews.

12. We read of Jesus pronouncing at the end of Mark:

And he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.

Mk 16:16

This is the perfectly good and holy son of God speaking! What bullying, intolerance, bigotry and relentless cruelty are here displayed! No philosopher would give utterance to, or endorse, such a sentiment. It denies what everyone who looks at Christian families can plainly see—that most people are conditioned into their beliefs and have no free will in altering them unless they are unusually objective and determined. This denial of human society has been followed by persecution, misery, and bloodshed. It is one of the final twelve verses of Mark that have been fraudulently added later by gentile Christians.

Since this appears in the part of Mark’s gospel accepted as a forgery, it might not be a teaching of Jesus. Jesus did expect Jews to believe that God would uphold his part of the covenant with his people, but the belief was not necessary in itself as Mark 16:16 says—righteousness not belief was what admitted Jews to God’s kingdom. Righteousness required righteous living or, when living had not been righteous, genuinely sincere repentance to purify the soul, symbolised by a corresponding purification of the body in baptism. The professional Christians who set up the church after Jesus died changed righteousness into belief because belief gave them control as mediators whereas righteousness had to be personally decided.

13. Jesus entirely denies the need for people to work to live, a remarkable denial of what most modern Christians would want to be Christian truth, and take it so to be despite the teaching of the son of God:

All things whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.

Mt 21:22

When food or raiment is wanted by the faithful Christian, God would bestow it on them when they went down on their knees and asked him. What Christian other than a professional Christian, for whom it is made true by the gullibility and generosity of their flocks, ever practiced this, though believing as hard as it was possible to do? They know, by their own practical experience, that this declaration is false. This promise has been falsified millions of times by millions of praying Christians, yet because infrequently it seemed to come true, they still believe. Note, Jesus promises “all things” not merely the occasional coincidence! In context, he is using the cursing of the fig tree to steel the resolve of his band to fight the Roman garrison defending Jerusalem. He is simply encouraging them to believe they can defeat the Romans if they pray for it hard enough—if they are sufficiently determined.

14. Christian take much of what Christ taught as the irrelevant, idle or incoherent utterings of an idealist babbler, for they pay no more practical attention to it than to the barking of a dog. Here are commands treated in this manner:

Be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.

Mt 23:8-9

Christians must not defer to any man as “master” or “father”! Can you believe this? “Mister”, which is simply a variation in pronouncing “master” is the most common title in Christendom, and every Catholic and many Anglo-Catholics call their local priest, no more than a fellow human being, father. And what Christian refuses to call their natural father as “father”? The advice is Essenic. Essenes called no man God (Father being a word meaning God) and they were a brotherhood in which people were carefully ranked each year but had only one Master. The leader of a village group (or camp) of Essenes was called the Master (“Mebaqqer”).

15. No one in the modern world could be saved if the criterion were to be the next command:

Whoever shall say to his brother, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

Mt 5:22

Yet, Jesus himself called the Pharisees fools!

Ye fools and blind.

Mt 23:17

Now the contradiction is easily explained when it is understood that Jesus spoke only of his own followers when he spoke of brotherhood, but that would not do for the clerics who have determined that Jesus was founding a universal church which included the whole of mankind.

There is probably no one alive, even Christians, who has not called somebody a “fool”, truthfully or as an insult. Even God himself could not be saved:

God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?

Lk 12:20

So, though God, through his Holy Ghost, has imposed this requirement on to us all, even he himself could not fulfil it. The historic Jesus was deeply concerned to keep his brotherhood united in their opposition to the Romans. He wanted to discourage petty strife between Jews.

16. It is curious that Christian judges require us to swear on the Holy Bible before giving evidence in courts of law because, by so doing, they make the witness condemn their soul to eternal damnation:

Swear not at all, neither by heaven nor earth.

Mt 5:34

Christians are not allowed to swear at all! Essenes believed in truth. They swore only once, on entering the brotherhood, and thereafter were bound to be truthful. At the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was reading the rules of Essenism to his recruits. They had no time to be fully inducted into the order, a process which normally took three years, because Jesus was expecting God’s terrible Day of Vengeance—when people would be judged and admitted or rejected from the kingdom—within three years, so they were simply told the rules.

17. If Christians were always praying they would have no time to do anything else, but the Christian Jesus wants to persuade us that:

Men ought always to pray.

Lk 18:1

Christian commentators tell us, the Holy Ghost does not literally mean “always”. The Holy Ghost is evidently being careless yet again. It is impossible to believe that Jesus could have said “always” in any context, but since “always” meant not long to Jesus who was expecting the end of the present world, it becomes more practicable.

18. To judge by the inept and self-seeking people that offer themselves as our leaders, the next command of the Christian Jesus could have been a most valuable principle had it ever been followed:

Whosoever will be chief among you let him be your servant.

Mt 20:27

It never has and Christians from the apostles onwards have generally been chiefs. That some have also been servants is a credit to humanity not to Christianity.

19. Did anyone ever really love their enemy?

Love your enemies.

Mt 5:44

No one ever did! It is a moral impossibility. Who could love putrefying food, mildewed clothes or leprosy germs? When enemies oppress you, it is impossible to love them. Jesus could not have loved his enemies when he called them “fools, liars, hypocrites, generation of vipers”, and yet he is held up as our example in love, meekness, and forbearance. Jesus did not love his enemies, the Romans, and their intransigent Jewish helpers. He is urging his converts to love the enemies they might have made among fellow Jews before conversion. He wanted Jews to love each other that they might achieve the kingdom of God by defeating their earthly enemy, the Romans, to bring about God’s response of a heavenly host. In universal terms—never Jesus’s—the advice of the Roman slave Publius Syrus is more wise and sensible:

Treat your enemy kindly, and thus make him a friend.

20. Jesus replied to Peter who had enquired whether he should forgive a sin of his brother against him seven times:

I say not unto thee seven times but seventy times seven.

Mt 18:22

To forgive someone for 490 sins is excessively patient, so excessively patient that it is a practical impossibility that few Christians would consider worth attempting. Yet once again it illustrates Jesus’s desire to keep the Nazarenes from falling out—Peter does not speak of an enemy, though many assume it is, but a brother. The dispute requiring such infinite patience is one within the brotherhood and potentially divisive. Jesus is urging his followers to do their utmost not to fall out amongst themselves.

21. Christians have to try to be like God, himself:

Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect,

Mt 5:48

another extravagant instruction that few, if any, Christians make any attempt to follow. What is the use of trying? The distance between human imperfection and a perfect God is, and ever must be, infinite. Only God can be perfect. What then was the Holy Ghost doing urging people to do the impossible, yet again? In historical terms, this injunction is excellent evidence that the Nazarenes hearing the Sermon on the Mount were being read the rules of the Essenes. This precept is one which the Essenes had adopted because they were trying to form a bridgehead for heaven on earth. From it God would restore Israel and inaugurate His kingdom. They called themselves the “Perfect of the Way” and “perfection” is one of the constant themes of the scrolls.

22. Since Christians today are sure that most of the injunctions of Jesus in the New Testament are to be ignored, what are we to think of those earlier Christisans who thought they should take them seriously?

There be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.

Mt 19:12

Christian commentators assure us that Jesus is not urging his followers to become eunuchs, though that is not what the unfortunate Origen thought. He castrated himself in his religious fervour, failing to see that it was just a metaphor. So the sloppiness of Holy Ghost is responsible for poor Origen’s loss of his vital bits!

Jesus and the Essene leadership were chaste celibates because they considered it impure to have sexual relationships when the kingdom of God was imminent. He warned sternly that the Nazarene converts might lose their place in the kingdom if they thought lustful thoughts. He seemed to encourage his disciples to pluck out an eye and cut off a hand to make it impossible to commit lustful acts with those members. Logically he could have added that the disciples should cut off their heads to carry out the same principle even more effectively. The serious basis of all this was that he considered those admitted into God’s kingdom would be like angels—indeed would be angels. Angels were non-sexual beings and to help heaven to join earth, the Essenes thought they too should be non-sexual. It seems unlikely that the Essene monks actually castrated themselves like the Galli of the goddess Cybele—but perhaps Origen knew better.

23. The Christian fear of God (Eph 5:21; Heb 12:28; 1 Peter 2:17; Rev 14:7), stemming from Christ’s injunction on the cross to his fellow transgressor to fear God (Lk 23:40), implies that God is the angry tyrant of the Jewish scriptures not the loving creature that Christians claim. Thinking people could neither love or worship a God they feared. Fear of gods is an ancient superstition which has always been the great lever of the priesthood in manipulating their poor ignorant flocks. It has historically filled the world with people whose ability to think for themselves is crippled with guilt making them cowardly, trembling slaves, fearful of loosing their souls in God’s vengeance.

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