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From Judaism to Christianity 2

The Gospels
Paul
Non-Christian Evidence

Abstract

Christians believe the Jewish scriptures prophesy Jesus, whom they call Christ, the Greek word for messiah. The Christ Myth of the Christians was devised to create a christ, necessarily Jewish, potentially acceptable to non-Jews, and the Jesus Myth was crudely refashioned for that purpose. What was its origins? As shown by the presence of Magi at the nativity, the Persian religion influenced the notion of a Saviour (Saoshyant) delivering the world from evil, and the shepherds at the nativity of Jesus copied the shepherds at the earthly birth of the Persian God, Mithras. Jewish prophets indeed pictured a God-sent warrior king leading the Jews to leadership of the world, but the Christian messiah is depicted as meek and pacific. Messianic prophecies, read them in their full context, either do not pertain to a pacific teacher or are not messianic!

Persian Magi with Phrygian Caps: Mature, Young, Old!

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.