Christianity
Miracles, Myths and Mysteries of Christianity
Abstract
The New Testament—History?
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The Saviour Jesus
Honest theologians accept that the New Testament account of the birth of Christ Jesus is false. Yet it is such an attractive account, 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 accounts can be explained straightforwardly by reference to the times, yet Christians, especially unscholarly ones, cannot believe otherwise. The inconsistencies between the Jesus of the gospels especially between the fourth gospel and the first three, Synoptic gospels, are numerous. If his method of teaching was that of the Synoptics, it was not that of the fourth gospel. His birth is said, in Matthew, to have happened during the sovereignty of Herod, who was appointed Governor of Judaea, part of the Roman province of Syria, in 40 BC under Antony, and later became puppet king. 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.
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. Luke says Mary and Joseph took Jesus to Jerusalem openly soon after the supposed decree (Luke 2:22).
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 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 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 sisters, and their friends in heaven. They want to be assured they will all meet again. In a huge self-deception, Christians 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 Christians 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.
Christ Jesus 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.
Such extraordinary events as earthquakes at the death of a god, ghosts walking in the streets, 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.
Myths and Miracles
Faith in miracles comes from ignorance or a confusion of belief with knowledge. The people who lived contemporary with Christ Jesus 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. 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.
Christ Jesus 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, 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. 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 was an invention of a much later period.
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. On the death of Romulus, founder of Rome, in his legend, the sun was darkened for six hours. When the Mexican crucified saviour, Quetzalcoatl, died, the sun was darkened. When Julius Caesar was murdered, there was darkness for six hours.
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.
Justus of Tiberias, who was born about five years after the time assigned for the crucifixion of Christ Jesus, wrote a Jewish history, but it contained no mention of the coming of Christ Jesus, nor of the events concerning him, nor of the prodigies he is supposed to have wrought.
Jesus in History
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. 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.
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.
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 Jesus (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 Jesus. Neither Philo, nor the two Plinys, nor any other writer of the age, mention the name of Christ Jesus, much less the ten thousand other wonderful things mentioned by the interpolator of Josephus. The only significant evidence for Christ Jesus 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 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.
