It will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.Jesus on wealth, Matthew 19:23
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 Jesus 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. He was born, according to Matthew, during the time of Herod, appointed Governor, and later king, of Judaea in the Roman province of Syria by Antonius Marcus, 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.
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 goes into something else, 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, believers reassure each other, 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 believers 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.
Matthew recorded that, at the death of Christ, many bodies of the saints, which slept, arose and came out of their graves and went into the holy city and appeared to many. If such extraordinary events had really happened, wouldn’t somebody have obtained from the resurrected saints some account of their experiences in the other world? History records nothing.
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 Æsculapius was put to death, the sun shone dimly from the heavens, birds were silent and trees bowed their heads in sorrow. 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. On the death of Romulus, founder of Rome, in his legend, the sun was darkened for six hours.
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). Mark, Luke and John do not mention the slaughter of the children by Herod, in fear of a Christ as a rival, and Josephus, who dwelt on the crimes of Herod, knew nothing of it because it never took place.
Myths and Miracles
The people who lived contemporary with Christ Jesus 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.
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 Jesus. 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 Jesus, which is clearly a forgery. Josephus, a Jew, is made to say:
Now, there was about this time Christ Jesus, 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 Jesus, who was known among both nations as seditious, and talk about his teaching the truth!
Belief in the influence of the stars over life and death, and in special portents at the death of great men, survived even to recent times. In Hamlet, Shakespeare writes:
When beggars die there are no comets seen The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
Such extraordinary events as miraculous darkness covering all the land for several hours, ghosts walking in the streets, feeding thousands of people with a few small loaves and fishes, 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.
Miracles were not uncommon among the Jews before and during the time of Christ Jesus. Casting out devils was an everyday occurrence, and miracles were frequently wrought to confirm the sayings of the rabbis. One is said to have cried out, when his opinions were disputed, “May this tree prove that I am right”, and the tree was uncannily torn up by the roots and hurled to a distance. And when his opponents declared that a tree could prove nothing, he said, “May this stream then witness for me”, and at once it flowed the opposite way.
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 Jesus or his apostles or his miracles. If all the wonderful things said about Christ Jesus were true, we should naturally expect to hear something about him in the writings of the period.
Praying to God for material or spiritual benefits implies He will be turned from his course by human petitions even thopugh He is supposed to be almighty. 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.
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 lies of the Patristic Fathers. 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.
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. Any historical evidence of the original Christ Jesus that existed anywhere was destroyed by Christians to hide the truth when they were able. Any historical Christ Jesus has been deliberately disguised to hide him from the historians. Christ Jesus has been overlaid with mythology taken from contemporary religious belief, notably the sun gods.
Moses and Exodus
