Miracles, Myths and Mysteries of Christianity
The New Testament—History?
Public domain. Copy freely
Abstract
The Saviour Jesus
Most scholars and some theologians will not deny that the bible story of the birth of Jesus Christ is not true. Yet it is such an attractive story, 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 tales can be explained straightforwardly by reference to the times, yet Christians, especially unscholarly ones, cannot believe otherwise. On examining the gospels carefully we find many inconsistencies concerning the details of the life of Jesus. If he was the man of the Synoptics, he was not the mysterious being of the fourth gospel. Matthew tells us his birth was during the time of Herod, installed as Governor, and later king, of Judaea in the Roman province of Syria by Antony, in 40 BC. In Luke, the birth is said to have taken place in 6 AD when Augustus was Emperor, a decade after the death of Herod. Herod died at Jericho in 4 BC after a period of absence on account of illness from Jerusalem.
At the crucifixion Luke writes that “there was darkness from the sixth to the ninth hour”. Those who say the darkness was a solar eclipse do not understand the motions of the celestial bodies. The Passover moon was full. Furthermore, a solar eclipse lasts only about six minutes. When Alexander the Great died, there was darkness and thunder. At the conflict between Buddha, the saviour of the world, and the Prince of Evil, a thousand appalling meteors fell, darkness prevailed, the earth quaked, the ocean rose, rivers flowed back, peaks of lofty mountains rolled down, a fierce storm howled around and a host of headless spirits filled the air. At the death of the Hindu saviour, Krishna, a black circle surrounded the moon, and the sun was darkened at noon-day, the sky rained fire and ashes, flames burned dusky and livid, demons committed depredations on earth. At sunrise and sunset thousands of figures were seen skirmishing in the air, and spirits were to be seen on all sides.
Luke says Mary and Joseph took Jesus to Jerusalem openly soon after the supposed decree (Luke 2:22). Matthew says that Jesus was born in the days of Herod, while Luke says it was when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. Herod died in 4 BC, while Cyrenius did not become governor of Syria until 7 AD. Christ was modest about his miraculous birth. He never mentioned it.
Such extraordinary events as rising through the air into the heavens, disembodied voices from the clouds, miraculous darkness covering all the land for several hours, must have formed topics of general conversation and must have found a place in the literature of the day. Nothing. Cures being wrought must have interested the writers on medicine. Nothing. It is incredible that no one except the four interested partisans, who are supposed to have written the gospels, should ever have referred to them.
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 keep on living as long as they are healthy. 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 is eaten by all kinds of life, 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 father, 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.
Myths and Miracles
The people who lived contemporary with Jesus Christ tended to believe in anything—it was a credulous age. Faith in miracles comes from ignorance or a confusion of belief with knowledge. Miracles are imaginary deviations from the known laws of Nature—proved by experience to be firm and unalterable—by the power of a god. If they could have been present at one of Uri Geller’s shows, these credulous ancients would have certainly wanted to worship him as a god. But no intelligent person today could accept such miracles as other than tricks. All accounts of miracles should be banished altogether to their proper region—that of fiction or legend. Nature does not allow her laws to be fooled with.
Christians claim that one of the younger Pliny’s letters to the emperor Trajan, written before Pliny’s death in 114 AD but after he was sent to Bithynia in 111 AD, probably in the year 112 AD, is evidence of an historical Jesus Christ (Letters 10:96), but it simply says that Christians had cursed their “Christ” to avoid being punished, but it does not show this Christ ever existed.
According to the very books which record the miracles of Jesus Christ, he never claimed to perform such deeds. Paul declares that the great reason why Israel did not believe Jesus to be the Messiah was that “the Jews required a sign”. Had he performed the miracles that his followers said he did, such signs must have persuaded the Jews he was their Messiah, and since they were not persuaded, he performed no miracles. His miracles were evidently concocted and recorded for him. When told that, if he wanted people to believe in him, he must first prove his claim by a miracle, he said:
A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign, and no sign shall be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.
This answer, not satisfying the questioners, they came to him again, and asked:
If the kingdom of God is, as you say, close at hand, show us at least some one of the signs in the heavens which are to precede the coming of the Messiah?
It was generally understood then that the end of the present age was at hand, and was to be heralded by signs from heaven. The light of the sun was to be put out, the moon turned to blood, the stars robbed of their brightness.
Following the failure of Christ to appear at the millennium as promised in Revelation, people started inquiring into the truth and origin of Christianity. For the church, Christendom was seriously menaced and it instituted the Inquisition. Large sums of money were offered for the discovery of ancient manuscripts, which would bear testimony to the divine authority of the church. Supply meets the demand and monks saw a source of income—they started to manufacture manuscripts. The mendacious writings of anonymous monks have been exposed even by Catholic historians. Cardinal Newman, in his Grammar of Assent, says:
Most of our Latin classics are forgeries of the monks of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
A learned scholar and a writer high in the Jesuit College in Paris, Father Hardouin, has exposed the the ecclesiastical history of the first twelve centuries is fable. The lists of popes before 1227 are fictitious. Gregory the Great, elected at this date, is the first of whom we have any historic notice. That leaves a fraudulent list of some 180 popes who never had an existence other than in the imagination of the compilers.
Historians of this early period, curiously enough, have recorded miracles and wonders alleged to have been performed by other persons, but not a word is said by them about the miracles claimed by Christians to have been performed by Jesus Christ. The Emperor Vespasian, a contemporary of Christ, performed wonderful miracles. Tacitus says that he cured a blind man in Alexandria by means of his spittle, and a lame man by the mere touch of his foot. Æsculapius, son of Apollo, the Greek god, was a great performer of miracles, who cured, the sick and raised the dead. Apollonius, of Tyana, in Cappadocia, born about four years before Christ, among other miracles restored a dead maiden to life. Simon Magus, the Samaritan who appears in Acts of the Apostles, by his proficiency in performing miracles was called “the Magician” and “Magus”. He travelled about and made many converts, professed to be “the Wisdom of God”, “the Word of God”, “the Paraclete” or “Comforter”, “the image of the eternal father manifested in the flesh”, and his followers claimed that he was the “first born of the Supreme”. All these were titles in later years applied to Christ. They also had a gospel called The Four Corners of the World, from which Irenaeus may have borrowed his reason for the choice and number of the four gospels.
Jesus in History
If all the wonderful things said about Jesus Christ were true, we should naturally expect to hear something about him in the writings of the period. Not one of the classic writers in the first century, writers of the Augustan age of letters, writers in satire, history, natural history, medicine, astronomy, miracles, fables, not one unequivocally mentions Jesus Christ or his apostles or his miracles.
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.
In Antiquities by Josephus, we find:
He was the Christ, and when Pilate… had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him.
These are expressions, not of a Jew, but of a Christian, and the writer could hardly have remained a Jew after making these declarations. Forgeries were easy in those days, when all books were written on skins, to which fresh pieces could easily be fastened. Once the Christians took power they controlled the production of books and expurgated them or improved them at will.
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 Jesus Christ has been deliberately disguised to hide him from the historians. Any historical evidence of the original Jesus Christ that existed anywhere was destroyed by Christians to hide the truth when they were able. Jesus Christ has been overlaid with mythology taken from contemporary religious belief, notably the sun gods.
