Miracles, Myths and Mysteries of Christianity
Abstract
The New Testament—History?
Public domain. Copy freely
The Saviour Jesus
The supposed evidence for Christ is slight and unreliable. The narrators of the gospels differ considerably in their accounts, which can only be explained if the later ones tried to correct and reconcile with common sense, the mistakes, and absurdities of the earlier ones, imagining that believers would prefer the later version. The contradictions between the Jesus of the gospels especially between the fourth gospel and the first three, Synoptic gospels, are numerous. If he was the man of the Synoptics, he was not the mysterious being of the fourth gospel. In Matthew, his nativity occurred during the sovereignty of Herod, installed as Governor, and later king, of Judaea in the Roman province of Syria by Antony, in 40 BC. Herod died at Jericho in 4 BC after a period of absence on account of illness from Jerusalem. In Luke, the birth is said to have taken place in 6 AD when Augustus was Emperor, a decade after the death of Herod.
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. Luke says Mary and Joseph took Jesus to Jerusalem openly soon after the supposed decree (Luke 2:22).
Christ could do no less than other saviours of mankind. He has to descend into hell, though nothing in the canonical gospels describes it. It appears in an account in the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus. Having descended to hell, Satan and the Prince of Hell try to close the gates of hell against him, but a voice of thunder, accompanied by the rushing of winds, booms:
Lift up ye gates, O ye Princes, and be ye lifted up, O ye everlasting gates, and the King of Glory shall come in.
Many gods descended into hell, and remained there for the space of three days and three nights—Krishna, the Hindu saviour, Zoroaster, the Persian saviour, Osiris and Horus of Egypt, Adonis, Bacchus, Hercules, Mercury, and Baldur. It is a reflexion of the sun declining to its lowest altitude at the winter solstice where it seemed to remain for three days before beginning to rise again when it began its annual ascension. The descent into hell was not added to the Apostles’ Creed until after the sixth century. The Apostles’ Creed did not exist as a creed in their time.
Matthew recorded that, at the death of Christ, the earth quaked, the rocks were rent, and the graves were opened. Could such peculiar events have occurred and yet no notice be taken of them? History records nothing.
Such extraordinary events as miraculous darkness covering all the land for several hours, feeding thousands of people with a few small loaves and fishes, rising through the air into the heavens, 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.
Myths and Miracles
The people who lived contemporary with Christ tended to believe in anything—it was a credulous age. Miracles are imaginary deviations from the known laws of Nature—proved by experience to be firm and unalterable—by the power of a god. Faith in miracles comes from ignorance or a confusion of belief with knowledge. If they could have been present at one of Uri Geller’s shows, these credulous ancients would have certainly wanted to worship him as a god. But no intelligent person today could accept such miracles as other than tricks. All accounts of miracles should be banished altogether to their proper region—that of fiction or legend. Nature does not allow her laws to be fooled with.
In Annals 15:44, Tacitus describes how Nero blamed the Christians for the fire of Rome in 64 AD. Tacitus says that the name “Christians” originated from “one Christus” who was “put to death under Pontius Pilate, and had left behind him a sect called after him”. Even if this book is authentic—as it was never mentioned in history until its late discovery, it has been suspected of being a papal forgery—it tells us nothing except that some people believed in the death of a man they revered called Christ. Tacitus merely asserts what he knew from the members of the Christian sect, the claims being made by the Christians themselves and appearing in the gospels Mark, Matthew and Luke which had been written before the Annals. The Annals were published after 115 AD and were certainly not written before 110 AD. Tacitus was not a great historian in modern terms, being prejudiced and partial. He accused Christians of abominations.
Innumerable miracles are ascribed to Buddhist saints. Their garments and staffs were supposed to imbibe some mysterious power, and blessed were they who were allowed to touch them. A Buddhist saint, who attained the power called perfection, was able to rise and float along through the air, his body becoming imponderous. Buddhist annals give accounts of miraculous suspensions in the air. We are also told that in 217 BC nineteen Buddhist missionary priests entered China to propagate their faith, and were imprisoned by the emperor, but an angel came and opened the prison door and liberated them.
The miracles of the primitive church were mere fictions, which the pious and zealous Fathers, partly from a weak credulity and partly from reasons of policy, were induced to espouse and propagate for the support of a righteous cause. The primitive Christians were perpetually reproached for their credulity, and Julian says that “the sum of all their wisdom was comprised in the single precept—believe”.
Christ rises again on the third day and ascends in company with Adam and numerous saints into heaven. Mark says that “Jesus was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God,” but the twelve verses in which the account appears are admitted in the revised edition to be spurious. Matthew and John do not mention the Ascension. Luke is the only gospel that gives the story, He “was carried up into heaven”. Acts says, “He was taken up, and a cloud received him out of sight”. Both Luke and Acts were written by the same man, so we really have the testimony of only one man, with no corroborating evidence, to this astonishing spectacle.
Jesus in History
Not one of the classic writers in the first century, writers of the Augustan age of letters, writers in satire, history, natural history, medicine, astronomy, miracles, fables, not one unequivocally mentions Christ or his apostles or his miracles. If all the wonderful things said about Christ were true, we should naturally expect to hear something about him in the writings of the period.
Josephus was a Jew, and lived in the country where all these things are said to have occurred, and wrote a history of the period. Yet, he makes no mention of even the existence of Christ. In book 18:3:3 of his Antiquities, an unknown editor has put between the account of the sedition of the Jews against Pontius Pilate and that of Anubis and Pauline in the Temple of Isis, an insertion relating to Christ, which is clearly a forgery. Josephus, a Jew, is made to say:
Now, there was about this time Christ, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works; a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure.
It is not likely that a Jew writing under the patronage of the Romans would show such a respect towards Christ, who was known among both nations as seditious, and talk about his teaching the truth!
The Christus whom messianic Jews in Rome fought over in the time of Claudius need not have been a messiah present in the city, but some claimant in Judaea. A few years before, Theudas had been crucified after leading his failed uprising and might have been the one inflaming Jewish passions, but it could have been Christ—Jews fighting with the proto-Christians. Christians identify the expulsion of the Jews with the expulsion from Rome of Apollos and Priscilla in Acts. All that can be concluded is that it is possible some were Christians.
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. Any historical Christ has been deliberately disguised to hide him from the historians. Christ has been overlaid with mythology taken from contemporary religious belief, notably the sun gods. Any historical evidence of the original Christ that existed anywhere was destroyed by Christians to hide the truth when they were able.
