G W Bush thought God was his co-pilot. He left Him in charge of the plane.

Manipulating the Good News 3

Missing Records
Lack of Evidence
Comment

Abstract

If Nero persecuted Christians, it was the only example of Roman intolerance up to the Jewish War. Origen, the early Christian apologist, declared that the number of martyrs was inconsiderable. The Christian fathers, Acts, Justin and Origen all say little or nothing about the Christian persecutions of Nero, because the victims were predominantly Jews. Acts concludes by saying that Paul was not forbidden to teach in Rome, he did it with all boldness—and the year was around 64 AD. How Christians have manipulated their good news to create myths—aka lies—still told.

The passage on Jesus in Maimonides' Hilkhoth Melakhim repeatedly censored

Missing Records

Christians explain the lack of official records of the events of Jesus’s life by claiming that they were totally unimportant at the time. For a vast empire, insignificant events occurred in a distant country of which Romans knew nothing and cared less. To children in Sunday school this sounds quite convincing. But it is not true and should not be repeated by honest adults.

Palestine was not a minor country of little importance to the Romans. The Jews were already widespread as merchants and artisans in the Empire and Judaea was strategically important astride the trade routes to Persia, Arabia and India, and the military corridor by land from Africa to Asia. The countries to the east had been serious rivals to Rome not long before and were still strong and independent. They remained a threat at the time of Barabbas though later the Romans briefly annexed them.

Romans mistrusted Jewish links with these countries. Many Jews still lived in Parthia preferring to remain even though Cyrus the Persian had allowed them to return from Babylonian exile. And the Jews, though inhabiting only a tiny country, had a record of militancy that, combined with their strategic position, meant they could not be ignored. Thus events in Judaea were watched keenly by Roman observers at diplomatic and military levels if not by the hoi polloi, and statesmen demanded regular and accurate dispatches.

Jesus was proclaimed a king as even the gospels admit and as such he was a rival to Caesar and a threat to the Empire. That was no trivial crime and required detailed reports from the Roman governor to the Emperor. If, though, as Christians maintain, it was not worth recording and indeed was not recorded, it seems curious that early opponents and critics of Christianity failed to question the absence of independent evidence of Jesus’s existence. The Christian apologists did not attempt to answer any such questions, so apparently they were not put. Only in modern times have critics argued that Jesus never existed at all.

In the early days of Christianity, its critics’ main argument was a different one—Jesus was a bandit and a magician and, remarkably, that the records of the time proved it! A Jewish source says Jesus was crucified at Lydda as a false teacher and a beguiler. Celsus and Lucian early in the second century and Sossianus Hierocles late in the third tell us that Jesus was a sorcerer and a fomenter of rebellion who committed highway robbery at the head of a band of men. These documents existed because later scholars refer to them. But where are they now? Gone! Nothing of this remains now because Christians, when they came to power under Constantine, began to destroy anything contrary to their own view.

The death penalty was prescribed for anyone owning or trying to preserve any books describing Jesus as a magician or an agitator!

The writings of Arius and Porphyry were ordered to be burnt. De Judaeis by Antonius Julianus completely disappeared. We only know it existed because Josephus mentions it. Another book, vital because it was written at the end of the first century by Justus of Tiberias, who organised the revolt in Galilee, has also gone. But Photius, Bishop of Tyre in 448 AD, commenting on Justus’s book which still existed then, expressed surprise that it made no mention of Jesus. Justus knew the events of that period from direct experience and could hardly have avoided mentioning the execution of a claimant to the Jewish throne. But the Christian censor had been at work for a century. Thus Photius tells us that when the writings of Eunapius, a critic of Christianity, were republished after the death of Julius the Apostate, all anti-Christian references had been expunged.

The passage on Jesus in Maimonides' Hilkhoth Melakhim deleted by the censor, then rewrtitten in the margin by an owner of the book, and the marginal note censored again by a later censor

Passages were removed from Lucian. The works of Celsus and Sossianus Hierocles were suppressed and we now only have quotations made from them by Christian polemicists. Many old manuscripts in museums and archives are testimony to the Christian censors blotting out sentences or sometimes obscuring whole pages by spilt ink.

Besides official censorship, Christian editors and copyists, altered passages as they saw fit. Even Josephus which has managed to survive has been “improved”. The paragraph in Antiquities of the Jews bearing witness to Jesus was not in its present form in 250 AD and is thought by many to be a Christian forgery.

The missing books of Tacitus possible owe their disappearance to their having references to Jesus. The books of Tacitus come to a halt at the siege of Jerusalem. The Romans considered both Christians and orthodox Jews to have participated in the Jewish War, and Sulpicius Severus, a Christian writer, does not demure. He asserts, in his Chronicle written in the fifth century, that the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple to stop it from being an inspiration to the Jews and to the Christians. (These Christians could only be those of the Jerusalem Church, the Nazarenes or Ebionim.)

However this is not confirmed by the works of Josephus as they stand today and it is an amazing statement to be made by a Christian especially at such a late date. Because it is quite contrary to anything the Church would want to maintain, it could not be an invention of the time. Yet, if it is based on a contemporary source, it must have been a prestigious one to carry weight against Josephus. The only source with such prestige is Tacitus. Since it is just at this point that the works of Tacitus are lost, there is again a strong hint of Christian suppression.

Pogrom. Christian knights persecute Jews

Jews also had to alter their records if the Christian censor was not to burn them. Explicit references to Jesus were replaced by references to “a certain one”. The version of the Old Testament written in Greek, the Septuagint, was also tampered with by the Christians who then accused the Jews of altering their own version. In the pogroms of the Middle Ages, Jewish Scriptures were burnt by the cartload. In 1263 AD King Jayme I of Aragon in Spain ordered that all Jewish books should be destroyed.

The greatest act of Christian vandalism of all was the destruction in the fifth century of libraries like that of Alexandria and the Pagan schools that had propagated Greek scholarship. This wholesale destruction of accumulated wisdom in the name of God precipitated the dark ages from which we did not recover until the Renaissance. Are the churches are different now? The Catholic, John P Meier, with the approval of the Imprimatur, advised in A Marginal Jew, in 1991 AD that Secret Mark, the Gospels of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter, the Egerton Gospel and all other non-canonical texts about Jesus were worthless and might be thrown “back into the sea”. We can be certain that if Christians had anything to do with it many modern discoveries would never see the light of day. They would be incinerated.

Lack of Evidence

The lack of evidence makes it impossible to prove that Jesus ever existed.

There are no proven, legitimate references to the existence of Jesus in any contemporary source outside of the New Testament. Even the New Testament is really not a contemporary source, as it was written from 30 to 120 years after Jesus died.
There is no evidence that the town of Nazareth ever existed at the time.
The earliest New Testament accounts do not refer to any details of the life of Jesus. The authentic Pauline epistles imply only that he was a god.
The existence of Jesus is not necessary to explain the origin or growth of Christianity (see Earl Doherty’s detailed arguments).

The most convincing evidence that Jesus lived is the fact that he died as an opponent of the Roman state. No myth, to explain the worship in the Roman empire of a celestial or cosmic god called Christ, would have been invented with the immense disadvantage that the god died opposing the state. It was this embarassing fact that the early church desperately tried to ignore that led to the lack of citations by Paul and other early Christians to the life on earth of the god. It shows that Jesus was historical, but was not the person that Christians think he was!

Comment

From John

Remsburg (The Christ) gives good reasons to think of it as a interpolation. He is discussing “Nero, in order to stifle the rumor, ascribed… but only to gratify the cruelty of one man (Annals Book XV sec. 44)”.

In the middle of that passage which takes up quite a long paragraph, there is this brief sentence that he puts in italics, “The founder of that name was Christus, who, in the reign of Tiberius, was punished as a criminal by the procurator, Pontius Pilate”. He states that “This passage, accepted as authentic by many, must be declared doubtful, if not spurious, for the following reasons:”

It is not quoted by the Christian fathers.
Tertullian was familiar with the writings of Tacitus, and his arguments demanded the citation of this evidence had it existed.
Clement of Alexandria, at the beginning of the third century, made a compilation of all the recognitions of Christ and Christianity that had been made by Pagan writers up to his time. The writings of Tacitus furnished no recognition of them.
Origen, in his controversy with Celsus, would undoubtedly have used it had it existed.
The ecclesiastical historian Eusebius, in the fourth century, cites all the evidences of Christianity obtainable from Jewish and Pagan sources, but makes no mention of Tacitus.
It is not quoted by any Christian writer prior to the fifteenth century.
At this time but one copy of the Annals existed, and this copy, it is claimed, was made in the eight century—600 years after the time of Tacitus.
As this single copy was in possession of a Christian the insertion of a forgery was easy.
Its severe criticisms of Christianity do not necessarily disprove its Christian origin. No ancient witness was more desirable than Tacitus, but his introduction at so late a period would make rejection certain unless Christian forgery could be made to appear improbable.
It is admitted by Christian writers that the works of Tacitus have not been preserved with any considerable degree of fidelity. In the writings ascribed to him are believed to be some of the writings of Quintilian.
The blood-curdling story about the frightful orgies of Nero reads like some Christian romance of the dark ages, and not like Tacitus.
In fact, this story, in nearly the same words, omitting the reference to Christ, is to be found in the writings of Sulpicius Severus, a Christian of the fifth century.
Suetonius, while mercilessly condemning the reign of Nero, says that in his public entertainments he took particular care that no human lives should be sacrificed, “not even those of condemned criminals”.
At the time that the conflagration occurred, Tacitus himself declares that Nero was not in Rome, but at Antium.

Remsburg continues:

Many who accept the authenticity of this section of the Annals believe that the sentence which declares that Christ was punished in the reign of Pontius Pilate, and which I have italicized, is an interpolation. Whatever may be said of the remainder of this passage, this sentence bears the unmistakable stamp of Christian forgery. It interrupts the narrative; it disconnects two closely related statements. Eliminate this sentence, and there is no break in the narrative. In all the Roman records there was to be found no evidence that Christ was put to death by Pontius Pilate. This sentence, if genuine, is the most important evidence in Pagan literature. That it existed in the works of the greatest and best known of Roman historians, and was ignored or overlooked by Christian apologists for 1,360 years, no intelligent critic can believe. Tacitus did not write this sentence.

I think you’ll be impressed also with 40 writers he lists during the time, or within a century after the time that Christ is supposed to have lived, but are silent upon the Jesus we are looking for. I can remember another writer by the name of Stein mentioning 60 writers, but I don’t know if he lists them individually as Remsburg does.

According to Robb of Robb Marks bookseller The Christ is the most sought after book he has. The publisher is Prometheus, and I’m sure you’re aware of their skeptical press. I really admire this mans work. I think you’ll be as impressed with him as I. Anyway, if you want the book, I would get in touch with Robb before I bought it from Prometheus itself, because Robb sells these books actually cheaper than the Prometheus press due to his very low postage rates. He’s a good man to deal with.

A little history on John E Remsburg (1848-1919). From the flap cover it mentions that he was “one of the most popular and widely traveled freethought lecturers of the late nineteenth century. Raised in poverty in small-town Ohio and largely self-educated, Remsburg entered adulthood as one of the youngest soldiers in the Union Army. During the Civil War, he acquitted himself with distinction in the battle of Fort Stevens and received a special certificate of commendation from President Lincoln himself. After the war, he became a school teacher and eventually superintendent of public education in Kansas.

By 1880 Remsburg had become a committed freethinker when he published Thomas Paine: The Apostle of Religious and Political Liberty. At this time he also began lecturing on freethought and quickly proved to be a great success. When he retired, twenty years later, he had delivered more than 3,000 lectures and addressed audiences in over 1200 cities and towns in North America. Among Remsburg’s other significant books were ‘The Bible’ and ‘Six Historic Americans.’

It is nice to share information with like-minded individuals. I’ve always enjoyed reading freethought works, and have a couple of hundred that I still reference quite a bit when I get time for on-line debates such as the format that the Secular Web now has. I will always put Remsburg work in the top five, easily.

You seem like a very well read man, and I have one more recommendation for you that I’m sure you will like to get also if you haven’t already purchased it because it will literally cause your heart to start pounding because of the discoveries it brings forth. It’s called Forgery in Christianity by Joseph Wheless, and I’ve never found so many nails to drive in a casket than what I found here. He spends a great deal of time quoting early church fathers, and if I only had one book that I could offer a Christian to read, and I could get them to read it, it would be this very book. Be forewarned, do not start reading this book unless it is early morning or afternoon, because once one reads the first 10 pages, including the foreward, you will not put it down until you complete it! I’ve steered friends to this book, and more times than not, I hear the same response of them not eating, working, sleeping until they have at least completed half of it. I hope I’m not wrong this time, but I think surely this one is on the www.infidels.org site under historical documents. It’s 406 pages.

After this, I’m headed back to your site. It’s good to know you’re a freethinker, Mike. Thank you for your time, and for a great site. John

Thanks for the comment and references. All I can say is that these reasons look convincing enough. My feeling is that Christians would not insert something that said they hated the human race and named names. For the same reason, the Christians repeating earlier sources might have been embarrassed by it and omitted mentioning it. But the weight of evidence you cite is er… weighty! Best wishes, Mike.

Page Tags: Bible Fraud, Manipulating the Good News, Censorship, Messianic Judaism, Messianic Jews, Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Jewish, Jews, Roman, Fraud, Rome, Missing Records

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.