Christianity
How Christianity Derived from Persian Zoroastrianism via Judaism
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee Contents Updated: Thursday, 25 July 2002
Jews and Magi
With the fall of the Persian empire, the Magi had spallated. By the first century BC and the following century, Egypt, Palestine, and adjacent parts of the Near East swarmed with itinerant mountebanks (“goëtae”) who practiced thaumaturgy, performing tricks of magic to make the yokels gawk and part with their money. They evolved a variety of speculations from the original Zoroastrianism, fusing with Greek and Jewish ideas but retaining a redeeming figure—the original Saoshyant.
They would validate his existence with “prophecies” culled from the sacred writings of the Jews, and they would promise to open the temples of holiness to everyone, including the unholy—thereby providing the masses with a broader-based creed than any existing in western Asia. They were in the salvation-business and promised some sort of posthumous happiness to generous contributors in the name of whatever deities the given set of dupes venerated. The more talented ones often succeeded in setting themselves up in a first-class business with numerous adherents. Many were Jews.
Jews were scattered throughout the ancient world long before 70 AD. The Hellenized aliens from the East spoke Greek and were the “Graeculi” of Cicero’s sarcasms and Juvenal’s satires. In 179 BC, P Cornelius Scipio Hispalus, the Urban Praetor, tried to expel Jews from Rome, who had not become Roman citizens, because of their numbers and because they were a bad influence—they were Syrians and Levantines—Canaanites in short—who could have been expected to favour the Carthaginians in the Punic wars. After his year of office, the decree was revoked. In Cicero’s time, Jews in Rome were taking advantage of economic crises and were influential enough to campaign effectively against provincial governors who tried to take action against them. They favoured Julius Caesar, whose revolution destroyed the Republic, but who had given the Jews privileges, and bewailed his death as a calamity. Strabo, writing in c 35 BC, stated that by 87 BC, the habitable world—the œcumene—was “full of Jews” who had “penetrated every city” and become so ubiquitous that:
It is hard to find a place in the œcumene that has not admitted this tribe of men and has not been possessed by them.
He also noted that they had privileges and were allowed to function as an enclave largely independent of the local government. Josephus in Antiquities was proud of the universal success of his fellow Jews.
The Christ Myth
There is no historically valid evidence for the existence of “Christians” during the first century AD:
There were no Christians, either Gentile or Jewish, living during the first century.Nicholas Carter, The Christ Myth
The arsonists executed by Nero were Jewish messianists who tried to burn Rome to validate one of the prophecies in the Pseudo-Sibylline Oracles. There were many would-be christs. Christianity is an Hellenized form of Judaism. Plying their trade among Jewish peasants, the Jewish Magi often took the logical step of representing themselves as christs (messiahs), divinely ordained to become kings of the Jews and over the whole world that Yehouah had promised his Chosen.
They often took the name “ysw”, Joshua, popular among Jews because it was the name of the hero of the scriptural stories about the conquest of Canaan and the slaughter of the Canaanites. The name, transmitted through Greek and Latin appears in English as Jesus.
The Christ Myth of the Christians was devised to create a christ (necessarily Jewish) who could be made acceptable to non-Jews, and the Jesus Myth was crudely amended and refashioned for that purpose. What can have been its origins? As shown by the presence of Magi at the birth of the non-Jewish christ, there was an influence of the Zoroastrian cult, which by that time had assimilated both astrology and the notion that a Saviour (saoshyant) would come to deliver the world from evil, and the shepherds who witnessed the nativity of Jesus were copies of the shepherds who witnessed the earthly birth of the Zoroastrian Son of God, Mithras.
Plainly the Zoroastrian concept of the Saoshyant was at its core, but what generated the specifics? The central character of the folk-tales that comprise the Jesus myth described in The Hidden Jesus was an otherwise forgotten man who led a Jewish revolt against Roman rule around 21 AD and was hung for being acclaimed the king of the Jews.
But Legendary figures like King Arthur are rarely single people in history but are coathangers on to which the coats of lesser heroes are hung. Sometimes, as in the Hans Anderson story, there are no coats but tales of various degrees of gaudiness.
Legends attributed to Judas the Gaulanite, to whose sect of Galilaeans Jesus belonged, might have been given to Jesus. The idea of the virgin birth might have come from Jesus ben Pandera, a Jewish magician who won, and then lost, the favour of Queen Alexandra Helene (Salome), the widow of Alexander Jannaeus, c 70 BC. Jesus ben Ananias was flogged by the governor of Judaea but continued to prophesy disaster until a Roman missile killed him during the siege of Jerusalem in 68 AD. Another agitator, whose name may have been Jesus, led his disciples into Jerusalem during the celebration of the Passover and was well received by the populace, but soon suppressed.
Jesus Ben Pandera
One at least of the figures that contributed to the composite hero of the Jesus Myth was an Essene, who denounced the Pharisees—Jesus ben Pandera, a thaumaturge and agitator. The actual biblical Jesus might conceivably have been this man misplaced by a century, though it seems unlikely. He, at first imposed on Alexander Jannnaeus’s widow, Shelamzion (Salome, Alexandra Helene). Her husband, Alexander Jannaeus (Yannai), had so disliked Pharisees that he crucified 800 of them, but this Jesus then fell out of favor when she switched her allegiance and began to support the Pharisees. In 70 BC, Jesus ben Pandera was hanged.
The hanging of Jesus ben Pandera probably meant he was bound to a stake and left to die slowly by desiccation in the hot sunlight. Conceivably, this Jesus was thought of as a messiah by his supporters after his death and became a model for the myths of Jesus who was crucified about a hundred years later.
The Jewish record of Jesus ben Pandera is hostile to him as are all Jewish accounts of christs who failed. It is preserved in a book called Sepher Toledoth Yeshu (Book of the Lineage of Jesus), extant in several recensions, which differ in various details. All versions of the romance affirm that this Jesus really performed miracles, because he had learned the secret name of Yehouah, which enabled him to raise the dead, but he lost his power when he was in some way deprived of either his recollection of the name or of the parchment on which he had laboriously copied its four letters and which he had inserted in an incision in his thigh.
The record of Jesus ben Pandera has mightily embarrassed professionals in the Jesus-business ever since it was rediscovered in the sixteenth century. One expedient is to feign ignorance of it and hope the customers will not have heard of it. The more common expedient is to claim that the story of Jesus ben Pandera was devised by the wicked Jews during the Middle Ages to undermine faith in the Saviour of the New Testament.
No one who intended to contradict a story about a Jesus who flourished when Palestine was a Roman province would transpose the story to an earlier period when Judaea was ruled by an historical Jewish King and Queen. Moreover, the holy men who made that claim were, if at all educated in their profession, consciously lying. One cannot suppose that students of theology would not read so important a Father of the Church as Origen, from whom they would necessarily learn that the story about Jesus ben Pandera was known to Celsus when he wrote, c 170 AD. Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, composer of Onward, Christian Soldiers, a graduate of Cambridge, told everyone the story of Jesus ben Pandera was unknown to Celsus!
That this Jesus might have been the basis of the Jesus myth is suggested by some curious words of Justin Martyr. Justin says:
For of all races of men there are some who look for him who was crucified in Judaea, and after whose crucifixion the land was straightway surrendered to you as spoil of war.1 Apol 32
The implication is that the Jewish War followed immediately (straightway) after the crucifixion. Conventional chronology places it over thirty years after the crucifixion. More important is that Judaea was not Roman as a spoil of this war. It was already Roman, and the Jewish War was a rebellion against them. So, Justin must have meant the crucifixion was just before the conquest of Judah by Pompey in 63 BC when Judaea really was a spoil of Pompey’s conquests. It would thus tie in better with the crucifixion of 70 BC.
Neither Pharisees nor Essenes were keen on women, and could not have been enthusiastic about being ruled by one, but the Pharisees must have favoured Shelamzion because the rabbis’ praised the queen in a midrash on Deuteronomy 11: 13-14 (Sifre Deut 42), admittedly composed years after the incident but illustrating a lasting and therefore strong tradition.
The Hosea Peshar was the Essene answer to the Pharisee propaganda, countering the idea of the Pharisees that Shelamzion’s reign was idyllic. It denies the queen’s reign was prosperous as suggested by the Deuteronomy midrash, and implied that the queen was the wanton woman of Hosea. They refer also to the wars between the Queen’s sons after her death and to the famine that followed. The Essenes plainly hated her, as did the author of the source used by Josephus—Nicolaus of Damascus, who wrote a long history and might have been an Essene, if Damascus is taken to be code for Qumran, and his dislike of Shelamzion suggests it.
Yet the Essenes and the Pharisees had a common root. Both were concerned with the same problem of purities, a major concern of Zoroastrianism which believed in an evil creation, and differences over it led to their split in the Hasmonean period. Yose ben Yoezer, an early Pharisee, in four of his halakhot in the early Hasmonean period agrees with the interpretations of the Damascus Document, the Temple Scroll and other fragments of the scrolls sect.
The Christian Jesus
So, we come down to the “time of” the Christian Jesus, when it seems another Essene leader was crucified. N T Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God writes:
I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against people who try from time to time to deny it. It would be easier, frankly, to believe that Tiberius Caesar, Jesus’s contemporary, was a figment of the imagination than to believe that there never was such a person as Jesus.
The evidence for Jesus is a set of tendentious books and a movement that they seemed to generate. Jesus has several apparent biographies written by contemporaries or near contemporaries. Do they prove there was a historical man behind them? Was Wright right? He is a Christian, and contrary to his statement of faith, Frank R Zindler in The American Atheist argues that this Jesus never existed. Mythical figures obviously did not exist but they still have components. There was indeed probably a component at this time, but Christians have deliberately tried to obscure his real nature.
Of course, it is not up to the skeptical investigator to show Jesus was not historical but the burden of proof of the historicity of Jesus and his godly powers is on the believers. If someone claimed they were able to live far beyond their means because they had a spirit guide who showed them how to find pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, the police, judge and jury would be rightly skeptical. Why should anyone be less skeptical of the Christian claims which are even more astonishing? Unless uncontrovertible evidence for impossible claims are produced, the sensible person will be skeptical and treat the claim as false. No one who is not a fool would do any less.
N T Wright is happy to accept the historicity of Jesus simply because it would be hard for him not to. That is not a sound reason. It is hard to believe that particles can behave like waves and vice versa in modern science but it can be demonstrated to be so by experiment. It might be hard to believe that Santa Claus does not exist, if the thought has never been successfully countered by reason since childhood. Yet no sane person argues that there really is a Santa Claus. It is a child’s entertainment and fantasy to amuse them when winter days are short and dark. Jesus is in precisely the same category, and not in the category of being provable by evidence like the wave behaviour of particles.
N T Wright might accept that coins survive from the first century with the image of Tiberius Cæsar on them but none exist with Jesus on them. “Jesus was not an emperor!” we can hear the Christians protesting. Quite so. Tiberius Caesar was an emperor and has all the evidence we can expect from an emperor to prove that he existed—statues, depictions, accounts of his speeches and deeds, biographies, contemporary letters, inscriptions and citations, even his house and gardens. Coins exist showing him as a youth and then gradually getting older until he was succeeded by other figures, Caligula and then Claudius, on subsequent coins. None of the evidence for an historical Jesus is as compelling as this evidence for Tiberius.
Accepting the evidence for Tiberius is better than that of Jesus, would N T Wright accept that the emperor was a god, or became one, like Jesus, after death? During their lifetimes, emperors before the time of Diocletian, no matter how absolute their power, never claimed to be gods, only principes and imperatores—First Citizen and General of the Armies. But the first emperor, Augustus, who preceded Jesus, was deified after his death, amusing educated Romans. Deifying emperors, clever enough to die naturally, became customary. Vespasian died jesting that he was simply becoming a god. So there is contemporary and varied evidence that these men were accepted as gods after they had died. There is no such varied evidence that Jesus did. Were the followers of Jesus copying the Roman emperors in making a god of their own dead leader?
Christians believe the Jewish scriptures prophesy Jesus, whom they call Christ, the Greek word for the Jewish Messiah. It is true that some Jewish prophets thought that a God-sent warrior king would lead the Jews to leadership of the world. The Christian messiah is the very opposite of the Jewish concept, and it is easy to distinguish the messianic prophecies in the Jewish scriptures as not pertaining to a pacific teacher by reading them in their full context. Some prophecies of the Christian type of messiah are simply not prophecies at all, but personifications of Israel as in the suffering servant of God, or simply statements of current myth or history, such as the birth of the child called Immanuel. Thomas Paine, the theoretician of the American Revolution, demonstrated the irrelevance of supposed Christian messianic prophecy in his book An Examination of the Prophecies.
The Gospels
The titles of the gospels, “According to Matthew”, and so on, were not added until late in the second century. Although Papias c 140 AD knows all the gospels he has only heard of Matthew and Mark, Justin Martyr (c 150 AD) knows of none of the four supposed authors. It is only in 180 AD, with Irenæus of Lyons, that we learn who wrote the four “canonical” gospels and discover that there are exactly four of them because there are four quarters of the earth and four universal winds. Thus, unless one supposes the argument of Irenæus to be other than ridiculous, we come to the conclusion that the gospels are of unknown origin and authorship, and there is no good reason to suppose they are eye-witness accounts of a man named Jesus of Nazareth. At a minimum, this forces us to examine the gospels to see if their contents are even compatible with the notion that they were written by eye-witnesses. We cannot even assume that each of the gospels had but one author or redactor.
The gospels of Matthew and Luke could not possibly have been written by an eye-witness of the tales they tell. Why would eye-witnesses have to plagiarize the essentials of the story, merely adding additional detail and colour, and whatever supported their own spin on the tale, as Matthew and Luke did to Mark’s account? Any eyewitness who used the self same words of someone else would know they were spoiling their eyewitness credibility and would not do it, but Christians are too gullible to realize this. Matthew and Luke plagiarize, largely word-for-word, up to 90% of the gospel of Mark, to which they add sayings of Jesus. These alleged sayings of Jesus were taken from another early document designated as Q. Like the so-called Gospel of Thomas found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, Q was a list of wisdom sayings that at some point became attributed to Jesus. One of these sayings, “We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced (Mt 17:11; Lk 7:32)” comes from Æsop’s Fables!
The gospel of Mark, the oldest surviving gospel, dating possibly as early as 70 AD, begins the story with John the Baptist, and ends—in the oldest manuscripts—with women running frightened from the empty tomb. The last twelve verses of Mark are not found in the earliest manuscripts, though only they report the supposed post-resurrection appearances. The details Mark gives are unreliable and cannot be confirmed, either because they are misinterpretations of an Essene code, or because, as tradition has it, Mark was not a Palestinian but a Roman translater or interpreter of Peter, and did not really know the details but simply recorded what he thought he had heard Peter say. Both might be true.
Mark shows no first-hand understanding of the social situation in Palestine. He is clearly a foreigner, removed both in space and time from the events he alleges. For example, in Mark 10:12, he has Jesus say that if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. As G A Wells, the author of The Historical Evidence for Jesus puts it:
Such an utterance would have been meaningless in Palestine, where only men could obtain divorce. It is a ruling for the Gentile Christian readers… which the evangelist put into Jesus’s mouth in order to give it authority. This tendency to anchor later customs and institutions to Jesus’s supposed lifetime played a considerable role in the building up of his biography.
The most absurd geographical error Mark commits is when he tells the tall tale about Jesus crossing over the Sea of Galilee and casting demons out of a man (two men in Matthew’s revised version) and making them go into about 2000 pigs which committed suicide in the sea. This marvel occurred in the land of the Gerasenes in the oldest Greek manuscripts of Mark. Luke, who also knew no Palestinian geography, follows Mark. But Matthew, who had some knowledge of Palestine, changed the name to Gadarenes, and this is further improved to Gergesenes in the KJV.
Gerasa, the place mentioned in the oldest manuscripts of Mark, is located about 31 miles from the shore of the Sea of Galilee! The author of Matthew saw the impossibility of Jesus disembarking at Gerasa, which was actually in the country inhabited by Greeks called Decapolis. Since the only town in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee that he knew of that started with “G” was Gadara, he changed Gerasa to Gadara. But even Gadara was five miles from the shore and still in the Greek country. Later copyists of the Greek manuscripts of all three gospels improved Gadara to Gergesa, a region now thought to have once formed part of the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. So much for the trustworthiness of the biblical tradition.
The gospel of John was compiled around the year 110 AD. The author, even assumed to have been a young man when Jesus was crucified, must have been over 90 years old. If this John really had written the book at such an old age, questions arise about his competence at such an old age and why an eyewitness had to leave his evidence so late and subject to the ravages of time and frailties of memory.
More important, John is also composite, comprising a “Signs Gospel” of uncertain antiquity together with aditional material. That the author used someone’s else’s material shows again that it is not an eyewitness testimony as Christians always pretend the gospels are. The “Signs Gospel” seems to have been a list of miracles and could have been miracles supposedly done by other gods such as Dionysos and Asklepios, and transferred to Jesus.
Scholars have shown that the gospel originally ended at 20:30-31. It is in John 21:20 that the author writes, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and it is John 21:24 that the author writes:
This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true.
Since this chapter is an addition, no one knows whether what went before is authentic, or the work of an eye-witness. It looks fraudulent. The testimony is not true. Gospels only carry conviction to adults whose desires they flatter. But gospels persistently administered to children can leave a strong emotional impression that children often cannot overcome when they are adult. That is a crime. It is indoctrination.
Paul
A book included in the New Testament, Acts (Acta Apostolorum), contains stories about a few itinerant evangelists. Many Christian sects produced letters attributed to a Jew named Saul to attest to their orthodoxy. Saul changed his Jewish name to a Roman one, hob-nobbed with kings and Roman governors, was often mysteriously released from jail, and suddenly confessed he was a Roman citizen. It is all suspicious. Paul was most likely a Roman agent, meant to sow doubt and dissension among Jews. Later, unscrupulous men saw a money spinner in incipient Christianity.
Christians do not and cannot bring themselves to consider evidence in a proper fashion—namely in the right order. They believe, then consider the evidence in the light of their belief, and discover that it is sufficient for their already established belief! Thus they will accept that a God—Jesus—can appear to a man—Paul—in the form of a vision because their God can do such things, but no ordinary man can, and, if a man like Paul appeared to any modern Christian and said that he had been commissioned by his God in a dream to do something, and that was proof of the reality of his God, he would be certified.
The point of Paul’s evidence is that it is not acceptable, because he did not know Jesus except as a vision. No credible institution could accept such evidence, except the church, and everyone has to suspend their understanding of reality to believe the church. Paul openly declared he never met Jesus “in the flesh”. No court of law would accept visions as evidence, and neither should we, whatever the church with its vested interest might want us to think.
Scholars and computer experts have analysed Paul’s letters, and only four can be shown to be substantially by the same author, putatively Paul/Saul—Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians. Arguable still are Philemon, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians. The rest are written later, and can be ignored as Pauline letters.
Even the letters supposed to contain authentic writings of Paul are as composite as the gospels. L Gordon Rylands, A Critical Analysis of the Four Chief Pauline Epistles: Romans, First and Second Corinthians, and Galatians, showed the Pauline material in these letters is pre-Christian Gnostic. Around this is often contradictory material added by proto-Catholic interpolators and redactors who succeeded thus in claiming a popular proto-Gnostic authority for the Church of Rome. The Greek text of these letters is heavy with terms such as Archon, Æon, and so on, jargon terms popular in Gnostic cosmogonies. It would appear that the Christ of Paul is as astral a being as the Lamb of Revelation. Like the god of Revelation, the god of Paul communicates via visions, not physically, face-to-face.
Paul never alludes to the parents of Jesus, let alone to the virgin birth. His letters never refer to a place of birth, and never refer to Jesus as “of Nazareth”. They give no indication of the time or place of his earthly existence. They do not refer to his trial before a Roman official, nor to Jerusalem as the place of execution. They mention neither John the Baptist, nor Judas, nor Peter’s denial of his master. They mention Peter, but do not imply that he, any more than Paul himself, had known Jesus while he had been alive.
A striking feature of Paul’s letters is that he gives no impression that Jesus was an ethical teacher. Appeals to the authority of Jesus to support an ethical teaching he is giving that the gospels also represent Jesus as having delivered are so infrequent that it seems more likely that they were later additions convenient to the church. Paul’s letters also fail to mention any miracles Jesus is supposed to have worked, an odd omission, since he worked so many, according to the gospels and they are taken as proof of his divinity.
Non-Christian Evidence
Christians claim that the Jews knew of Jesus and that Jewish writings hostile to Christianity prove the historicity of Jesus. L Gordon Rylands, in his book Did Jesus Ever Live? pointed out long ago:
All the knowledge which the Rabbis had of Jesus was obtained by them from the Gospels. Seeing that Jews, even in the present more critical age, take it for granted that the figure of a real man stands behind the Gospel narrative, one need not be surprised if, in the second century, Jews did not think of questioning that assumption. It is certain, however, that some did question it. For Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho, represents the Jew Trypho as saying, “ye follow an empty rumour and make a Christ for yourselves.” “If he was born and lived somewhere he is entirely unknown.”
That the writers of the Talmud had no independent knowledge of Jesus is proved by the fact that they confounded him with two different men. Evidently no other Jesus with whom they could identify the gospel Jesus was known to them. One of these, Jesus ben Pandera, reputed a wonder-worker, we have met. He was hung on a tree on the eve of a Passover around 70 BC at Jerusalem. The other, Jesus ben Stada, whose date is uncertain, but who may have lived in the first third of the second century AD, is said to have been stoned and hanged on the eve of a Passover, but at Lydda. There is confusion here but the Rabbis had no knowledge of Jesus apart from what they had read in the gospels.
Although Christian apologists have listed a number of ancient historians who allegedly were witnesses to the existence of Jesus, the only two that consistently are cited are Josephus, a Pharisee, and Tacitus, a Pagan. Since Josephus was born in the year 37 AD, and Tacitus was born in 55 AD, neither could have been an eye-witness of Jesus, who supposedly was crucified in 30 AD. These historians might have had access to reliable sources, now lost, which recorded the existence and execution of Jesus.
In the case of Josephus, whose Antiquities of the Jews was written in 93 AD, about the same time as the gospels, we find him saying some things quite impossible for a good Pharisee to have said. No loyal Pharisee would say Jesus had been the Messiah as Josephus was made to say. That Josephus could report that Jesus had been restored to life “on the third day” and not be convinced by this astonishing bit of information is beyond belief.
Worse is that the story of Jesus intrudes into Josephus’s narrative and can be seen to be an interpolation even in an English translation of the Greek text. Right after the citation about Jesus, Josephus goes on to say, “About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder.” Josephus had no regard for messianic claimants and could hardly have regarded the downfall of one of them a sad calamity. The sad calamity is the unsuccessful revolution that Jesus led and that has been suppressed. The Romans took awful punitive action. That is when Jesus was crucified, but almost all trace of it has been expunged by the Christain bishops since.
The fact that Josephus was not convinced by this or any other Christian claim is clear from the statement of the church father Origen (c 185-254 AD)—who dealt extensively with Josephus—that Josephus did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah. Moreover, the disputed passage was never cited by early Christian apologists such as Clement of Alexandria (c 150-215 AD), who certainly would have made use of it if he had it!
The first person to mention this passage was the church father Eusebius, in 324 AD. Eusebius himself probably inserted it. As late as 891 AD, Photius in his Bibliotheca, which devoted three codices to the works of Josephus, shows no awareness of the passage even though he reviews the relevant sections of the Antiquities. This testimonial cannot have been in his copy of the book.
Apologists point out that Josephus mentions Jesus elsewhere, in a passage which does not intrude into the text like an interpolation. It is a genuine passage but modified. The crucial word in it is the name James (Jacob in Greek and Hebrew) which must have been in Josephus’s source. It might have meant James the Just who lived at the time and becomes in the New Testament a “brother of the Lord.” “Brother of the Lord” might have been a real title of the Essenes of the Jerusalem church, or other brotherhoods at the time, “the Lord” properly being God himself. Josephus might have spoken of a “James, the Brother of the Lord,” and this was changed by Christian copyists to brother of Jesus—adding also “who was called Christ.”
Some manuscripts of Josephus contain the passages, but others still exist that do not—showing that the interpolated texts never succeeded in supplanting the original text universally. As late as the sixteenth century, according to Rylands, a scholar named Vossius had a manuscript of Josephus from which the Testimonium Flavianum was missing.
Note some of the things Pagan authors should have recorded if the gospel stories are true. One passage from Matthew should suffice to point out the significance of the silence of secular writers:
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour… And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.Mt 27:45,51-53
Greeks and Romans must have noticed—and recorded—this darkness occurring when a solar eclipse was impossible. They must have recorded such a severe earthquake and signs of it might still be expected to remain. Resurrected dead men walking around the city must be the most astonishing and memorable event of all. Where are these resurrected people? Did they die again? No one can believe any of this. It is mythology, and only those who believe in myths believe this—the Christians. None of this make belief proves that Jesus is made up, but it shows that from the beginning he was being mythologized. The Christians did not want to remember him for what he was. So they made up something else.
Tacitus, the Roman historian, in 120 AD wrote a passage in his Annals (Book 15:44) mentioning “a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians”, after one Christus who had been executed “in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus…” If Tacitus wrote this, he is here simply repeating what Christians had told him and had not consulted the archives. He calls Pilate a procurator but Pilate was not a procurator, a later office held by governors, but a prefect. He calls the leader Christus as if it were a proper name. This honorific title could not have appeared in the archives.
Tacitus never again alludes to the Neronian persecution of Christians in any of his voluminous writings, and no other Pagan authors know anything of the outrage either. No ancient Christian apologists made no use of the story in their propaganda—an unthinkable omission by motivated partisans who were well-read in the works of Tacitus. Clement of Alexandria, who made a profession of collecting just such types of quotations, is ignorant of any Neronian persecution, and even Tertullian, who quotes a great deal from Tacitus, knows nothing of the story.
Robert Taylor says the passage was not known before the fifteenth century, when Tacitus was first published at Venice by Johannes de Spire. The counter argument is that the whole passage matches the distinctive style of Tacitus. A distinctive style can, however, be easily imitated in a short passage, and there is an important lapse from normal Tacitean usage in that these Christians are humani generis, haters of the human race. Tacitus universally writes generis humani.
All this evidence to support the claim that Jesus was an historical figure is without substance, though it does not prove he did not exist. The burden of proof is always on the one who claims that something exists or that something once happened. The best proof that Jesus did exist is not what Christians want to admit, even today. It is what the gospels tell us. Jesus was a rebel who led a rebellion against the Roman occupation of Judaea and died for it in the way prescribed by Roman law. If the Christians invented the story of Jesus, it is incredible that they would have chosen the figure described in the gospels. Jesus was therefore not invented, but nor is he the Jesus that Christians want.
Jesus is called “Jesus of Nazareth”, but Nazareth did not exist in the first centuries BC and AD. Exhaustive archaeological studies have been done by Franciscans to prove the cave they possess was once the home of Jesus’s family, but the site is a necropolis—a city of the dead—used during the first century AD perhaps for the dead of Sepphoris, the Hellenistic city a few miles off. The Franciscans dissent from this conclusion, but they could do nothing else.
If Nazareth was a cemetery at the time, how should the name, Jesus of Nazareth, be interpreted? One wonders whether the rebel Nazarenes used cemetaries to hide in. The Jews considering them unclean and the Romans having immense respect for the dead, a cemetary might have been an excellent hiding place for bandits. A memory of this might have motivated the later Christians of Rome to live in catacombs used normally for burial.
Popular Belief
Tertullian, to show that Romans persecuted Christians for their piety, claimed in 197 AD that the younger Pliny had written a letter to Trajan about a Christian sect in Bithynia, c 112 AD, who were suspected of conspiracy, but convinced Pliny they were innocent. Pliny’s letter was “discovered” by a Dominican holy man, Iucundus of Verona, at the very end of the fifteenth century AD. It was “lost” a decade later in 1508! What we have of it now are copies made from this uncertain manuscript.
Though the letter is probably a forgery or grossly interpolated by the Christian monks who were famous for such inventions, as scholars concur, the Christians’ apologies for their cult are what they would say in such circumstances. If they had secrets, they were able to prevent Pliny from finding them. Gospels cannot have been in general circulation until after this date, unless they were able to keep them from Pliny’s policemen. If they were the gospels we now have, they would certainly not have produced them in support of their claim that they were just innocent, law-abiding, innocuous members of the lower classes. Modern Christians see them as utterly innocent, as we know, but they actually tell the story of a rebel against civic order who was crucified for his presumption. Pliny must have taken a dim view of that had he found them.
Pliny was a kindly man, who liked to think the best of everyone, and his Christians succeeded in convincing him they were guilty of nothing but a silly superstition, beneath the notice of a Roman government. These Christians sang hymns to the rising sun, sounding more like Mithraists than Christians, showing perhaps a common root, but also that those Christians were not the same as they now are. He was glad that the cult lost its popularity after he took judicial notice of it. His letter is the earliest historical evidence for the existence of Christians as distinguished form “Christiani”, messianic Jews.
In his reply to Pliny’s letter, Trajan thinks that the Christian cult is indeed a subversive conspiracy, but that most of the Christians are just ignorant and inoffensive proletarians who will come to their senses and leave the cult, if governmental action is directed only against the leaders, who were the conscious conspirators.
Tertullian also used the trick common these days among conspiracy theorists that certain documents exist in the appropriate archives revealing all. The whistle blower, Tertullian here, claimed that Pilate’s records could still be consulted in the Imperial archives, and they proved the story in the gospels. The point of such claims is that when the documents never existed, and so no one could find them, a cover up is proved! Alternatively, the documents are indeed found and tell quite a different tale, again proving a cover up, and forgery! Among certain gullible personalities, especially where suspicions have been already planted against officialdom, there is no way of convincing such people they are being tricked. On the contrary, every attempt to show they are wrong looks to them like trickery.
Tertullian like Paul had supernatural advisors. The ghost of a woman martyred in the arena advised Tertullian, but she was a male ghost because Jesus had equipped her with masculine organs so that she, for her faith, would be accepted in an all-male heaven.
In 135 AD, Simon Bar Kosiba was brutally defeated as the latest Messiah, after a long rebellion that tied down twelve legions. Many Jews in the empire were killed in mob riots, and the promotion of Christianity seriously began, perhaps because gentiles now had good direct evidence that they had had nothing to do with the insurgent, nor with the Jews because they were a non-Jewish group, a fact that previously had looked unlikely whatever they had pleaded.
Marcion was a wealthy shipowner at Sinope, now the Turkish town of Sinop on the south shore of the Black Sea, but then the largest port and commercial center east of Byzantium. Sinope was founded as a Greek colony and long remained a Greek city, but there had been a continuous influx of other peoples.
When Christian propaganda reached him, he saw, as all reasonable men must, that the ferocious, vindictive, and cruel god of the Jewish scriptures was utterly incompatible with the god of mercy and love of Pauline Christianity, and he accordingly decided that Yehouah was only the Demiurge, creator of the material world, but inferior to the good and supreme god who sent his Son (an avatar of himself) to save mankind from the Demiurge.
A consequence of this theory was a dichotomy between the body (material and therefore subject to the Demiurge) and a soul (purely spiritual and so in the domain of the Supreme God). That led to the asceticism and denial of nature that characterized most of the Christian sects and makes them so repulsive to healthy men.
In Marcion’s view, the avatar, Jesus, appeared in the guise of a man of about thirty, but the ignorant apostles mistook him for a Jewish warrior christ, and the Jews showed their irremediable perversity by crucifying a supernatural imitation of him—because a god could not be killed. He had, however, been recognized by Paul. Marcion had a version of the gospel attributed to “a man from Lucania”, “Luke” in English, as though it were a man’s name, and a collection of letters attributed to Paul that justified Marcion’s theology. He may have had other holy books, and he wrote a work, Antitheses, conclusively proving that Yehouah was the antithesis of the Pauline god, and that the Old Testament was incompatible with Christianity.
He went to Rome, then the capital of the civilized world, but found Christians already established there. He founded his own church (c 150 AD), which naturally appealed to those who disliked the Jewish baggage that the religion carried, especially in the aftermath of the Bar Kosiba rebellion. So, Marcion’s Church attracted a good following and it may have been, for a time, the largest Christian sect, with congregations throughout the Empire.
The Fathers of the Church, who were determined to keep the Old Testament as the basis of their cult targeted the Marcionites with bitter animosity, and so they declined in the third and fourth centuries. But they survived even after the Fathers of the Church were at last able to start persecuting with the police powers of the state at their disposal. Why the Church Fathers wanted to burden their cult with the fictions of the Old Testament, which blatantly contradicted their own doctrine, seems peculiar.
The Marcionists were absorbed by the more drastic and ascetic church founded by “Manichaeus, the disciple of Jesus Christ” but Prudentius, a Christian poet, writing at the opening of the fifth century, could lament that the secular powers had not yet killed all the vile heretics who had been trapped by Marcion’s evil insanity. Modern holy men like to pretend that Mani was not a Christian, forgetting that he has as much right to the title as they have, especially since many evangelical sects have re-instituted Gnosticism.
Stephen as Christ
N Carter presents a different theory about the origins of Christianity sometime in the first century. He takes his departure from the Stephen who appears in Acts 6:5-7:60, and is mentioned occasionally in subsequent chapters. The man’s Greek name suggests he was a Hellenistic Jew, and since he did great wonders and miracles among the people, he sounds as though he were just another of the “goëtae” who swarmed through Asia Minor at that time, acording to professor Morton Smith in Jesus the Magician.
In Acts, Stephen delivers a summary of the Jewish tradition about Abraham and his successors, and then upbraids the orthodox for their rejection of Jesus. His speech receives divine approval, for, looking up through a rift in the atmosphere, he sees God with Jesus at his right hand. The Sanhedrin, however, condemn him and the mob stones him, the punishment for blasphemy.
Carter dismisses the story in Acts as a Christian concoction. He believes that Stephen and his companions, all of whom bear Greek names, were members of the “New Letzim,” who had assimilated the Stoic doctrine with its emphasis on all humanity and wished to bring Judaism into accord with it, insisting that the One God of the Universe is everybody’s God.
Carter thinks these Letzim came to see Stephen as a messianic figure, resulting in “the transformation of the martyred Stephen into both a Jesus and a Christ in the minds of his worshippers, by at least the turn of the second century”. “Jesus” was not the name of the man, but his title, meaning “saviour”.
In The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, John Allegro argues Christians made abundant use of Amanita muscaria, portrayed in some early Christian frescoes as the Tree of Life.
Amanita muscaria induces vivid hallucinations. Its psychedelia yielded the images of the supernatural in much of the ancient world, and, according to R Gordon Wasson, inspired the religions of India and Persia. It was most likely the soma of the Vedas and perhaps the haoma of the Persians. The preoccupations of the tripper condition the divine revelations produced by the drug, by recombining and magnifying them in the mind and projecting them into the perceived world. The active principle, muscarine, easily extracted by chemistry, alone is almost always deadly, unless atropine is promptly administered as an antidote. But infusions of the fungus are not lethal even in large doses because they contain both muscarine and atropine.
Ornaments shown as decorating Christmas trees in Bavaria are really pictures of the Amanita muscaria, suggesting that some Christians knew why the sacred mushroom was sacred in the Middle Ages. The sacred mushroom is called the flesh of the gods by many primitive peoples. Infusing the eucharistic wine with the sacred mushroom would have given communicants pleasant or monstrous visions that the priests would have suggested were visions of the communicant’s post-mortum fate caused by the flesh of their god, Jesus.
Despite the objections of modern Christians, the Romans of the early empire saw Christians as conspirators who used parables to hide their conspiracies against the Roman Empire. The earliest datable reference to a Christian “love feast” or agape, was made by Tertullian in his Apologeticum written around 197 AD precisely to show that Christians were innocent and not political conspirators, as the Romans suspected. Amanita muscaria was likely to have been used in the love feasts.
Lies and Conspiracy
Christianity was spread as a conspiracy against the Roman Empire, as the historical evidence has always indicated. The Romans were a practical people who tried to disturb the native cultures of their subjects as little as possible and were not interested in whatever superstitions the natives believed. They tolerated all sorts of cults as absurd as Christianity and would have tolerated it too, if they had not had good grounds for believing it to be politically subversive. Most of the evidence for the conspiratorial activities of the Christians has been destroyed together with the historical works in which it was recorded, by the Fathers of the Church as soon as they had climbed to political power.
Had Christianity been what it has become, a belief in a personal but invisible friend helping the believer find their way to immortality, when it was being peddled to the proletariat in the Roman Empire, intelligent Greeks and Romans would have been amused by it—a god who stupidly got himself crucified and then arose from the dead and sneaked off to become an invisible companion to everyone who felt they needed one! That is not how the Greek and Roman rulers saw Christianity.
The brand of Christianity that the Fathers put over stole the Old Testament and identified the Christian god as the Jewish god, Yehouah. The first concern of the fathers, as soon as they got their hands on governmental power, was to exterminate the Marcionists, the Manichaeans, and all the Christian sects that refused to accept Yehouah as their god.
After the Christian triumph, its most pervasive arguments became the monuments of Pagan greatness that the sect had not destroyed—feats of engineering like roads, bridges and aqueducts, amphitheatres, baths and other public buildings, sculpture and painting that had escaped proletarian righteousness, delightful literature, sensible laws and social organizations, and the tactics and discipline that made formidable armies of Germanic barbarians. All these achievements the marvelling invaders credited to the Christians, who also adapted ancient showmanship to their own impressive ceremonies.
The Christian bible seemed to be true history, and it referred to places in the real world, such as Rome and Egypt, of which the Germans had heard, and to historical persons, such as Augustus, who had ruled the empire that had once ruled the world. If the terrible god whose deeds were recorded in imperishable writing by eye-witnesses, behaved capriciously, unjustly, and brutally, so, according to traditions that had been handed down by word of mouth in many versions, had Odin, a god of the northern barbarians before they became Christians.
If the Christians’ old god had an eccentric son, who chose to sacrifice himself to himself, why Odin had done that, too—so some poet said, though he did not name a time and place, as the Christian history did so precisely! If this son was born of a virgin, there was nothing unusual in it, for Heimdall had been born of nine virgins, plainly the ennead that represented the original Goddess. Simple-minded people mortgaged their future and never suspected what they had done. Christianity was imposed on the converts gradually. Established customs and conventions were not radically changed but slowly eroded.
It was the new religion that was barbaric. There was no honour in it, merely lies. It hated the mores and standards of civilization itself. Professional holy men appealed to the proletariat of the empire with talk of love and brotherhood, to make “foolish the wisdom of this world”, (1 Cor 1:20), thus negating all learning, all culture, and repudiating reason itself.
Clement in a frank admission, in a letter preserved and discovered in a remote monastery by professor Morton Smith, says that “we holy men have a duty to conceal the facts and lie to our congregations, under oath if necessary, perjuring ourselves to help disseminate the True Faith”. Eusebius was another scoundrel whether he was convinced of his own righteousness or not. Concerning Eusebius, the Victorian Christian scholar, J B Lightfoot thought the execution of his church history fell short of its conception, its faults obscuring its merits. It is in some ways like the bible itself in that Eusebius had no predecessor and no successor, so his work stands alone, uncriticized and unverifiable. None of Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret ventured to check what Eusebius had said. So throughout the years of Christendom, what little was known about the early years of Christianity came only from Eusebius. Typically, he did not argue with the words of those who he disagreed with but simply cited their opponents’ refutations. Nor did he know much about important figures of the early church who lived only a few years before he lived himself, like Tertullian, citing only the Apologeticum from a poor Greek version. He knew little about Hippolytus, even the name of his bishopric, and Cyprian, a prominent Christian who died (258 AD) not long before his own birth, and even the popes. Gibbon did not trust him:
The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius himself, indirectly confesses [HE 8:2; Mart Pal 12] that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace of religion. Such an acknowledgment will naturally excite a suspicion that a writer who has so openly violated one of the fundamental laws of history, has not paid a very strict regard to the observance of the other.Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 16
He did observe on the “evil piled upon evil” which disgraced the church—ambitions, intriguing for office, factious quarrels, cowardly denials and shipwrecks of the faith—and considered the persecution under Diocletian as retribution for them, but he merely condemned them in general terms, without entering into details, restricting himself to “profitable” topics. It discredits his conception of history, and casts doubt on his intellectual honesty. Gibbon noted his credulity as being artful, like a lawyer’s cunning. Another serious impediment to him as a historian is the loose and uncritical way he used his materials, not always discriminating good and bad among his documentary sources. Christian eulogizing of him is simply their normal illusion that all Christians are saints. Real life does not bear it out.
Pious dolts imagine themselves faithful servants of a god with cruel fates for unbelievers, who has instructed them to preach the gospel and thus make the whole world conform to their will, which happens to be God’s too. Preaching is their way of getting what they want in society instead of by politics. Since their aims are supposedly the will of god, evangelism is righteous, and resistance to them is Satanic and must be crushed.
The righteousness syndrome is characteristic of Christians. They often describe it in terms of love, supposedly an unnatural fondness for those you would otherwise despise, but nonetheless a holy gift of God. In ordinary non-righteous use, love is a special fondness one person feels for another, usually intimate friend or relative. From an ignorant or wilful disregard for its original meaning, which was to love others of the same persuasion in the small groups Jews had divided themselves into, and hate others, especially the Romans and their collaborators, Christians go about telling us we must love our enemies. No one requires a PhD to recognize that this is not only impossible, but no modern Christian ever seriously practices it.
Those who have been grievously wronged by someone might voice the righteous thought that they forgive their enemies, but they would need a lifetime of Couéism to truly remove any doubt they had about their sincerity. Idiotic falsehoods like love your enemies lead nowhere because few, even Christians, believe it. What we have to do is to live with our enemies as civilized people, each respecting the other and not turning to robbery and murder to solve disputes. It is not love, but a practical rule for living with others. The truth about Christians in practice is that they love their co-religionists so much that they want to rip the innards from everybody who rejects their odious God and His double standards.
Among the worst of the Christian double standards is the simultaneous acceptance of Jewish scriptures and the New Testament. The Jewish scriptures, supposedly the early part of God’s word, showing how he got His plan of salvation all wrong at the start, is filled with the foulest crimes, from treacherous assassinations to insane butchery and rape, repugnant to civilized people, but approved by the Christian god, who commanded much of it. Judging by the record of the Jewish scriptures, S Thomas Aquinas had to admit that it is entirely proper and right to murder innocent people, rob people of their property, and rape women, if God commanded it. William of Occam and the Nominalists could only conclude that, because what God commanded was often manifestly unjust, whatever God commanded must be just however it might seem to us.
This must be the basis of the awful crimes committed by Christians throughout the history of Christendom. Popes and bishops asked themselves, “What would God do here?” They answered, “He would burn them alive in Hell”, so they saved God a modicum of the trouble by beginning the process here on earth. The bible has suggested and thus instigated many appalling crimes and is among the most morally corrupting books ever printed.
Christian morality provides a perfect disguise for any scoundrel who simulates belief in the superstition to fleece the sheep. Surrounded by like-minded people, it is usually impossible to determine whether or not he actually believes all or part of the nonsense he professes, but either way the sheep are easily fleeced.
