Miracles, Myths and Mysteries of Christianity
The New Testament—History?
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Abstract
The Saviour Jesus
When an honest bishop admits that the account of Christ is not literally true, and this is reported in the press, there is always outrage from offended Christians, but evidence for him is minscule, and for belief in him as God would not satisfy a dodo. On examining the gospels carefully we find many inconsistencies concerning the details of the life of Jesus. If he was the Jew of the Synoptics, he was not the Jew hater of the fourth gospel. Matthew tells us his nativity was during the time of Herod, chosen as Governor, and later king, of Judaea in the Roman province of Syria by Mark 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.
Matthew based his version on the Old Testament. The gospels are not clear whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem or Nazareth, and the date of his birth has been placed from 4 BC to 7 AD. The original evidence for the virgin birth is not in Mark and John. It is found in Matthew and Luke and both contradict it when they trace the descent of Jesus from David through Joseph, (Mt 1; Lk 3).
The main benefit Christians think they enjoy for their unquestioning belief is life after they are dead. What evidence is there that we are alive after we are dead? None, but our praying for life after death is easily explained. Normal people in this world instinctively like to cling to life. Schopenhauer called it the will to live. They want to meet their friends again. It is a false hope, but, in a sense, nobody dies. Everything that is in the body and in the man turns into the crucible of Nature, goes to make trees and grass and weeds and fruit, 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 mother, and their friends in heaven. They want to be assured they will all meet again. In a huge self-deception, the faithful tell each other it is true, without having the least idea that what they say is valid, except, of course, the reassurances they have likewise had. As a rule, the less the faithful know, the surer they are. In fact, we do know how our lives began, and how they end. It began in a single cell in the body of our mother, who had some 10,000 of those cells. It was fertilized by a spermatozoon from the body of our father, who had millions of them, any one of which, under certain circumstances, would fertilize a cell. They multiplied and divided until a child was born. And in old age or accident or disease, they fall apart and the body and soul is gone—the soul just as categorically because it is just the old name for the psyche, the personality.
The miracles of the primitive church were mere fictions, which the pious and zealous Fathers, partly from a weak credulity and partly from reasons of policy, were induced to espouse and propagate for the support of a righteous cause. The primitive Christians were perpetually reproached for their credulity, and Julian says that “the sum of all their wisdom was comprised in the single precept—believe”.
Christ rises again on the third day and ascends in company with Adam and numerous saints into heaven. Matthew and John do not mention the Ascension. Mark says that “Jesus was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God,” but the twelve verses in which the account appears are admitted in the revised edition to be spurious. Luke is the only gospel that gives the story, He “was carried up into heaven”. Acts says, “He was taken up, and a cloud received him out of sight”. Both Luke and Acts were written by the same man, so we really have the testimony of only one man, with no corroborating evidence, to this astonishing spectacle.
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.
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.
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.
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. It, and even the three days’ sojourn there, is in the Iranian myth that spread into Europe with the Iranian invasions, then again with the success of the Persians. The descent into hell was not added to the Apostles’ Creed until after the sixth century. The Apostles’ Creed was not framed by the apostles.
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.
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.
Jesus in History
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. 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.
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.
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 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.
Non-gospel evidence is slight indeed for Christ. Neither Philo, nor the two Plinys, nor any other writer of the age, mention the name of Christ, much less the ten thousand other wonderful things mentioned by the interpolator of Josephus. The only significant evidence for Christ is in the New Testament and that is unreliable and overlaid with mythology or obfuscation, whatever Christians might believe in the efficiency and honesty of the Holy Ghost in preserving the truth. Any historical evidence of the original Christ that existed anywhere was destroyed by Christians to hide the truth when they were able. Christ has been overlaid with mythology taken from contemporary religious belief, notably the sun gods. Any historical Christ has been deliberately disguised to hide him from the historians.
