What sermons even handedly examine the God hypothesis?

Carl Sagan

Miracles III

The gods are readily revealed to the inhabitants, for here statues sweat and move and prophesy, and often shouting occurs in the temple when the sanctuary is locked, and many have heard it.
Lucian, The Syrian Goddess

Miracles for the Jews
The Apostles and After
The Fallacy of Miracles
Satan as Miracle Worker
Christian Arguments
History Ignores Jesus’s Miracles

Abstract

The age of miracles is gone. It has died as science and human understanding has progressed. People today are ready to accept that some things are uncaused, and any such event could not therefore have been caused by God. Uncaused events are known in science such as the emission of an electron by an excited atom, or a sub-atomic particle by an unstable atomic nucleus. Nature is the miracle. Understand her and there is no need of all the other petty conjuring tricks that simple, primitive and uneducated people call miracles. Illiterate, ignorant and superstitious people recount miraculous acts, invent a god to bring order into an imperfect world, then have him violating his own laws for trivial reasons. The wonders of nature ought to inspire observers with amazement at Nature, not some figmentary Creator assumed to be necessary to explain it. The wonders of Nature are not, for Christians, miraculous enough.

Miracles for the Jews

Christians note first that, according to the Rabbis (BB 15a), the whole story of Job with all its miracles and wonders is a myth.

J Kuhn drew attention (1929) to the similarities between the later chapters of the Wisdom of Solomon (c 50 BC) and Revelation, conventionally dated around 100 BC. It illustrates the Essene view of the relationship of heaven and earth and might have explained Plutarch’s bewilderment. The Wisdom of Solomon is apocalyptic and looks to a day of the “visitation” of God and a “day of decision” when the good and wicked are separated out, yet the future seems then to continue. The reference to “fashioned anew” (WS 19:6) is the meaning of the kingdom of God expected by Jesus. The world would be refashioned without corruption, thus matching heaven. It could only imply that earth and heaven were united, or earth became a part of heaven. For those chosen to inhabit the new world, history would continue but it would be forever peaceful and uncorruptible. The propaganda of the Persians to the colonists of Yehud was being accepted as a heavenly prophecy when it was a promise that Yehud would flourish under Persian hegemony:

And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.�They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.�They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of Yehouah, and their offspring with them.
Isaiah 65:19-23

J Fictner (1938) notes that fire in Daniel did not harm the righteous thrown into it but killed the wicked who threw them in (Dan 3:21f). In the Wisdom of Solomon, fire does not just not harm the righteous but benefitted them as a moral lesson (WS 16:22-28). Moreover:

What was not destroyed by fire was melted when simply warmed by a fleeting ray of the sun, to make it known that one must rise before the sun to give thee thanks, and must pray to thee at the dawning of the light.
Wisdom of Solomon 16:27f

J P Ross tells us that the mentality of the authors of the Jewish scriptures was that nature had no independent existence. Everything that happened in it was an act of God. Nature was supernatural! It meant that people describing an alleged miracle could write whatever they would have expected to have seen. They expected miracles and felt free to describe the most remarkable things as “natural”. When every incident was an act of God, the object then was to decide what that act said about the attitude of God. That was what the Essenes set themselves to do. They believed they had the right methods of interpreting God’s acts. Even the acts of men were controlled by God, offering theologians problems about free will.

Barnabas Lindars SSF, notes that Exodus is not history but the cult legend of the Jews solemnly recited at their national festival. The deliverances of Israel at times of crisis were explained by the miraculous acts of God and became salvation history and sacred history. Yehouah is assisiting His people in the holy war. When Israel lost out, Yehouah was angry with the Israelites and was punishing them—again the miraculous intervention of God explained the act. In prophecy, miracles get more outrageous until eventually comes apocalypse when they equal the creation of the world but in reverse!

Lindars emphasises the folklore motif of the three fold tale proclaiming that events in the Elijah and the Elisha cycles are not history. In the story of fire from heaven falling on Ahaziah’s messengers (2 Kg 1), “the fact that there are three of them is a sure sign of folk tale”. Whatever Elijah was doing stretching himself on the dead son of the woman of Zerephath, he did it three times. “Folk lore loves to have things in threes!” writes Lindars. Moreover the same stories about widows and sons recur for Elisha (2 Kg 4:1-7), though some differences are introduced to make them seem independent.

The story of Elijah with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel occurred in a drought, and Lindars sees it as a rain making ritual. Baal is Yehouah, the god of the winter sun and therefore of the rainy season. He has to be roused from sleep to bring the winter rain in a storm. Elijah’s four pots of water poured on the sacrifice are to induce it, like the water pouring at the feast of tabernacles held at the beginning of October just as the first rains were arriving. Elijah repeats the ritual three times, praying. Then a bolt of lightning announced the awakening of God and the start of the rains. Fire from heaven is, of course, lightning. The people called out Elijah’s name, “Yehouah is (my or our) God”, showing that Elijah was just a personification of this whole procedure.

In the Elisha cycle, beginning where the Elijah cycle is ending (2 Kg 2), there is a threefold visit told in thoroughly folkish manner, Elijah parts the Jordan with his mantle, perhaps another seasonal ritual, this time to regenerate the flow of the Jordan in April (cf Joshua 3-4), then Elijah is taken up in a whirlwind and a fiery chariot with a mention of horses, all suggesting solar mythology. Lindars says:

The miraculous elements have a deeper purpose than recording miracles to impress the credulous.

It does not matter that it seems to be to provide a mythical basis for ancient seasonal rituals. What matters is that here a good Catholic scholar tells us that the normal purpose of miracles is “to impress the credulous”! Elisha begins a ministry of miracles including bringing down bears to kill naughty children and feeding 100 men with only twenty loaves of the first fruits. This is plainly enough simply a sacramental meal—a eucharist! Lindars concludes:

The miraculous element in the gospel tradition need not be denied outright, but it has certainly been exaggerated, and needs to be treated with agnostic reserve.

The theology of redemption has never been allowed to rest upon such flimsy supports alone!

So, there we have it. The miracles of the bible are a flimsy basis for belief. Do the sheep know what the shepherds really think?

The Apostles and After

Professor Lampe notes that both Mark and John deny the value of signs and wonders, but Luke marvels at them, thinking them good evidence. In Acts, he writes that through the “hands of the apostles many signs and wonders took place among the people”. Lampe is impatient with conversions by conjuring tricks, the way Britain was evangelized, according to the Venerable Bede.

One of the tiresome features of a particular kind of Christian apologetic, common to the Church from the second century onwards, is a tendency to assume that the truth of Christian doctrine may be proved by the ability of believers to perform apparently impossible feats.
Professor G W H Lampe, DD

Lampe speaks of early Christian preachers “confronting the heathen and endeavouring to convert them” in the most direct way by performing a miracle. Do modern Christians really think that these peripatetic preachers could call upon God to break His laws of Nature at a whim? In as much as these romances are true at all, these miracles must have been conjuring tricks such as those used by Indian fakirs ad professional stage magicians. The first of these were precisely the travelling magi abandoned with the collapse of the Persian empire, whence the very word “magic”.

In the Acts of John, S John addressed the Ephesians from a high pedestal, inviting them to call upon Diana to strike him dead. If they refused, he promised to call upon Yehouah to kill them all! The fearful and gullible crowd—typical Christians—were persuaded, pleading with the apostle not to call upon his God to slay them, convinced by his confidence that he could! His response seems to have been to pray for the evil goddess to be put to flight, inciting the crowd to wreck the temple of Diana and kill the priest. In the Acts of Peter, the apostle defeats Simon Magus in a miracles contest rather like Vincent Price and Peter Lorre in occult movies. Lampe says:

All this belongs to the realm of popular fiction.

The shepherds will happily say that now about stories in books that were not accepted as canonical, but they must still have been influential in persuading the simple to convert to Christianity. It is what Christians call truth. Eusebius relates the legend of Abgar, king of Edessa, whom Thaddeus supposedly healed merely with the name of Jesus. When Pagans retorted that their own legendary heroes had done more remarkable things, the preachers replied that they were the work of demons, whereas their own tricks were the work of God. They were too stupid to notice that by this argument they destroyed miracles as evidence of divinity. Pagans were not only skeptical that the Christian incarnated God could still a storm with a rebuke, but whether he could even have healed a boil in this manner.

Christians assume the truth of their mythical story books to prove what they say. Lampe cites Eusebius as believing the miracles of Jesus on the grounds that otherwise a large number of people must have been involved in a conspiracy of lies. He meant the twelve apostles and the seventy others sent evangelizing—82! It is an argument still used, though the 82 people are not specifically mentioned but rather the 500 mentioned by Paul. The whole assumes a lot of impossible things and ignores history itself, including that Eusebius was writing 300 years later.

In fact, the apostles supposedly who martyred themselves to the cause, are not witnesses but part of the legend. No one knows anything about them that is not mythical. Mythical characters cannot be called upon as proof of the historicity of the myth. The original evangelists, whether the twelve or the 82 did not spread Christianity to the extent described, if at all. By the time that Eusebius wrote his Church history, Christianity had spread on the popular appeal of Judaism and the mystery religions of which it became an amalgam. The canon of accepted books was effectively set after Marcion tried to get rid of Christianity’s Jewish roots, around 150 AD, so the mythology of Christianity was fixed relatively early on. That is why the Christian story was able to spread relatively uniformly, but even so, the New Testament itself testifies to deep differences in the early years.

Galen and Strabo observed that religions are necessary for the hoi polloi, and are generated by myths, parables and miracles. Galen, in an Arabic fragment of his commentary on Plato, specifically says, according to Maurice Wiles:

Most people are unable to follow any demonstrative argument comsecutively. They need parables, and benefit from them—just as now we see the people called Christians drawing their faith from parables and miracles…

While simple Christians took it that “with God all things are possible” and so miracles were almost natural, their critics wanted to know how God could make the diagonal of a square equal to the length of its side. The argument completely evaded Christian comprehension, and the response of Christians to pages like these proves that they are “unable to follow any demonstrative argument consecutively”.

But, Origen admitted in his Commentary on John that the miracles of Jesus, even in his day, were losing their power to persuade and were becoming merely tales (mythoi). He accepted the miracles, but as metaphors. The eyes of the spiritually blind were those that were being opened, and so on, including Paul, the apostle to the gentiles who was similarly “cured”. Celsus had noted the self-defeating nature of the Christian argument that rival miracles were demonic. It is therefore an argument known for 18 centiries but still ignored by the faithful. They must have their miracles as proof of divinity. Origen had no answer except to reassert that Christ’s miracles were divine but others were demonic.

Since the Christian argument from miracle could so easily be turned back on to them, they had to have supporting arguments ready. “Distracting arguments” would be better descriptions. The miracles of Jesus were divine because of his exemplary character. In effect, Christians were invited to believe in the divinity of Christ because of his miracles, and believe that his miracles were a sign of his divine nature and not a demonic nature because of his divine nature!

Admittedly, Origen was a man who could argue, but often he had to resort to assertion, and elsewhere, he denied what Christians still want to accept. Thus Origen declares that God cannot do what is shameful or contrary to Nature. So, he evades the question and re-admits miracles by saying that Nature can be transcended. Christians think they win arguments by defining the terms to suit themselves. They cannot make their arguments coherent by a miracle!

The corollary of the accusation that false prophets perform miracles is the statement (Jn 10:41) that “John [the Baptist] did no miracle”. It looks like Christian denigration. Yet, in the Mandaean tradition there are indeed few miracles attributed to John although Hivil Ziva does raise him up to heaven. John was remembered as a prophet. The Mandaeans are considered to be influenced by Gnosticism and the Gnostics are so reserved about the value of miracles that they say in Pistis Sophia, a Gnostic Christian work, that miracles like raising the dead and healing the sick are the work of the Archons—the evil rulers of the spheres of heaven, effectively demons. Paul the apostle is fond of citing them.

The Fallacy of Miracles

Is Jesus divine because of his miracles, particularly that he raised the dead? If so, then why is he singled out as special when others have done the same long before? Moses parted the sea, changed a stick into a serpent, and changed water into blood. Must he not have been divine? We have seen Elisha and Elijah do the same sort of miracles as Jesus—Elisha raised the dead, resurrected himself, healed a leper, fed a hundred people with twenty barley loaves and a few ears of corn, and healed a blind man (2 Kings 4:35; 13:21; 5:14; 4:44; 6:11), while Elijah made an inexhaustible bowl of flour and an inexhaustible jar of oil, and also raised the dead (1 Kings 17:14, 22). Why are they not equal to Jesus, if such miracles denote divinity? Indeed, someone in the Jewish scriptures far surpasses Jesus in raising up dead bodies—Ezekiel raised “a great, an immense army”, and all in one go (Ezekiel 37:1-10). In fact, the miracle of stopping the sun in its daily rotation (Joshua 10:12-13) was a vastly greater miracle than just raising the dead, as their relative incidences in the bible show.

What of miracles caused by supernatural entities other than God? They might be caused by good or evil spirits, or by more than one of them. It cannot be said with assurance that God is necessarily the cause. Even Jesus himself says miracles do not prove divinity:

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders, insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
Matthew 24:24

The elect, unfortunately for them, are too smug to consider that they might have been deceived. Moule, in his book of scholarly papers presented to fellow scholars at a Cambridge University seminar, notes that there were other miracles reported other than those in the bible. Either other gods could bring them about, or, if only the Christian God could, then He appeared to other people using different names! Either way, Christianity had no sound basis for dismissing these foreign gods.

Woods bluntly says that miracles cannot be assumed to be divine. First, how can Christ’s miracles, assuming they are true, do anything toward proving his personal divinity, when he did not claim to be their author but, like the apostles who are reported to have performed the same miracles, merely the agent or instrument in the hands of the Father? “The Father he doeth the work”, is his own declaration. And the apostles seem to have accepted his word and his view of the matter. For proof listen to Peter:

Ye men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles, and wonders, and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves do know.
Acts 2:22

A man who was among the closest to Jesus, Peter, declares with assurance that miracles were not performed by Jesus as a god, but as “a man approved of God”. Peter banishes at once all thought of his miracles attesting to his divinity. God performed all the signs and wonders on Jesus’s behalf. Indeed, Peter unequivocally declares that Jesus was not a god but a man—special perhaps, but still a man!

An alternative criterion of a divine miracle is its nature. It is divine when it has a character suitable for the good God. It is a moral criterion. Healing miracles are all of the right character, Christians always think, but critics of Christianity look askance and say, “If God can heal a few paralytics, blind, deaf and dumb people in the bible stories, then He is a monster for letting anyone suffer at all”. God can prevent suffering like this but does so only in a few gratuitous demonstrations of His power. It is anything but moral for an almighty God of love to act in this arbitrary way.

Needless to say, Christians will not see it. For example, Professor Woods says the gospel miracles show a “subtle harmony” of “a will which is good”, and, “though the acts are infrequent” they show an “unchanging purpose” of this good will, and though they are “exceptional” they “perfect” nature by making it “whole”. This is at best nervous and desperate waffling that simply does not hold up, and at worst is the rambling of a deranged mind. If God can “infrequently” and “exceptionally” “perfect” nature through His “subtle harmony” making it “whole” merely to demonstrate His “unchanging purpose” instead of actually completing whatever His “unchanging purpose” is, then we need to know why He does not do the job and make all things whole once and for all.

The plain truth is that the miracles thought of in this way prove there is no almighty good God because any such God could not be playing games. If He could do it, He would do it! God made Nature, according to Christian belief. Why did He not make it perfect? Either He is not good, or He is not almighty.

If we begin to think that divine miracles may easily be done, the problem of evil is intensified.
Professor G F Woods

In a world created and sustained by an all powerful perfectly good and loving God, the absence of miracles occurring by the second rectifying the imperfection of the original Creation is a problem for Christian theologians to answer. They will answer it to the satisfaction of their sheep who pride themselves on believing anything that no one need believe. Not to the satisfaction of others.

Satan as Miracle Worker

So, evil gods such as Satan, accepted within Christianity, could also induce miracles. Indeed, among all the workers of miracles reported in the bible the Devil turned out among the best, in which case the miracles of Jesus are no proof that he is good. He could have been the Devil denigrating Yehouah’s eternal laws given to His prophet Moses. Christians then are the dupes of Satan in opposing God! Christians have happily broken God’s laws ever since Jesus and Paul abrogated them without giving a thought to the possibility that God could hardly have looked more foolish by sending a book of His absolute laws then sending his own son to break them in public. So, through miracles, the Devil beguiles a billion simple and uncritical people into being Christian and doing his bidding, causing every possible vile mess in the world, as we have recently seen. Yet Christians will insist on miracles being a holy sign.

No miracle could beat the Devil “transforming himself into an angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14). It must better even Christ’s transfiguration. According to Paul (2 Thess 2:9) he was endowed “with all power and signs, and lying wonders”. If he had “all power”, no other being could have had more. All is everything, and God would no longer have been almighty. You could argue at best that God could only have equalled the Devil by also having “all power”, either being able to draw upon such power as there was. How then does miraculous power prove a supernatural being is a god and not a devil? S John (Rev 13:13) says the “Evil One” has power to make,

fire come down from heaven in the sight of men,

and

to deceive those that dwell on the earth by means of those miracles which he hath power to do.

Though here the devil’s power sounds more restricted, we can still ask, What can a miracle prove to mankind, what end can it serve, or what good can possibly arise from the display of the miracle-working power, when a demon can “deceive those that dwell upon the earth?” How do we know the apostles themselves were not deceived in ascribing some of the miracles they record to Jesus instead of the devil? A miracle can prove nothing and performing it can accomplish nothing.

Yet, to reject the miracles is not to reject Jesus as historic. No person who is acquainted with Grecian history doubts that Alexander the Great was born in Macedonia, and founded a city in Egypt bearing his own name. Yet not one of those readers will credit for a moment what one of his biographers relates of him, that he stopped the sun in its course, or that he had no human father.

We all accept Pythagoras as a real being while we reject the story of his walking on the air. Are we morally bound to accept Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome, as mere fabulous beings, because their biographers relate the incredible story of their being suckled by a wolf?

Many other illustrations might be given in proof of the falsity of the assumption that, because a portion of a man’s biography is found to be incredible, the whole must be rejected as false, as unworthy of credence. This would be to annihilate history. For no biography of any person, and no history of any nation, can be accepted as fully pure, unmixed truth. There is always more or less chaff with the grain and it is our duty to separate them. An important criterion is to reject the miraculous!

Christian Arguments

We hear from Christians that the best evidence for Jesus’s miracles is that they are often cited, or multiply attested, as the scholars prefer to put it to sound cleverer. The multiple attestations are… Matthew, Mark, Luke and John… Oh, and Josephus says he worked wonders. Who would claim that Matthew and Luke are independent of Mark? The so-called multiple attestation of the miracle stories gets to look weak from the outset, and is only slightly improved by claiming that the gospel authors got them from different sources. Looking at all the miracles, only one is testified to by all four gospels. Is this multiple attestation?

The success of Jesus in gaining large numbers of followers also proves the miracles, apparently. Quite why a man can only get many followers by being a miracle worker is difficult to understand. Perhaps the apologists mean that Jesus could only claim to be a miracle worker and get lots of followers if he really did miracles. Doubtless this is true, but who says Jesus claimed to do miracles other than people that wrote about him afterwards—people trying to get lots of followers! The synoptic gospel writers succeed in depicting Jesus as a modest man, and as an Essene he must have been, humility being their main yardstick of personal devotion. Of course John pictures Jesus as an egomaniac, and John’s version is the favourite one these days. Wonder why?

Christians also argue the recording of Jesus’s miracles is quite close to their date by the standards of the time. Miracles were often attributed to great men but rarely so soon after they had died—more usually centuries later. The reason is that many of the miracles were misinterpretations of “deeds” described metaphorically. They were simply acts of conversion of critics, doubters and even opponents to the belief in the coming kingdom. So, they really happened but they were not miracles. Only Christians who took the metaphors literally thought they were.

The apologists tell us the criterion of embarrassment applies if some story created theological difficulties for the church such as the baptism of Jesus by John seeming to make Jesus sinful and subordinate to John. Thus, Christians tell us it is unlikely that the church would have gone out of its way to create the Beelzebul dispute (Mk 3:20-30, Mt 12:22-32) suggesting that Jesus was an agent of Satan. The honesty of the gospel writer in depicting Jesus here as being criticised proves the church was not inventing miracles to make Jesus seem better than he was.

That, though, is not the point. In all these cases, the church had no choice but to include the passage because the story was being circulated. It had to be included to rebut it. Jesus was attacked by some of the Nazarenes because the band was not being successful and was splintering. The speech Jesus is shown as making was actually a unity speech. Jesus himself rebuts the accusation about Beelzebub in the gospels, but the accusation must have been made and the tale circulated by Palestinian Jews who had left Palestine because of the war.

The only miracle common to all the gospels is the feeding of the multitude. Christians maintain the feeding of the multitude is supported by “an unusually strong attestation of multiple sources”. (John P Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus). Who the people are and where they have come from is unclear in the story, but the Scrolls from the Dead Sea caves explain the situation—they are attending the Essenes’ Festival of Renewal at Pentecost.

The disciples are the ones who supply or locate the food available because they are acting as ministers to the main body of Nazarenes. Jesus commands the crowd to assemble on the grass, then behaves as the Head of a Jewish household starting a meal. Even Christian commentators have seen the central actions of Jesus as akin to the Last Supper and the Christian eucharist. Jesus is the head of the household, the Nazarenes being organized as a brotherhood.

The detail that the bread is barley (krithinos) bread is found only in John’s version (6:9,13) of the gospel story. The same Greek adjective krithinos occurs in the Septuagint version of Elisha’s feeding miracle. It might be a harmonization with the scriptures or intended to place the event at Passover, rather than Pentecost when it really happened. Most likely, however, is that the Essenes used barley bread in their rituals because they were the Poor Ones (Ebionim) and poor people ate cheap bread.

Jesus regularly spoke of the coming kingdom of God under the image of a banquet in parables, sayings and actions. Besides the feeding miracle and the Last Supper, Jesus seemed to be often attending meals and banquets. The Essenes, of course, were united in a table fellowship that imitated the eschatological banquet (messianic meal) and this is one of the strong pieces of evidence that Jesus was offering salvation in God’s kingdom to all repentant Jews. They could not be offered the messianic meal unless they had repented and been baptized.

The attestation of the feeding miracle in all four gospels indicates that it was important to the first Christians, and based on some real Essene practice. It was not a miracle except in the sense that Catholics will describe the service of the mass as a miracle. The people who participated will have felt that they were partaking of the bread of life and guaranteeing themselves a place in God’s kingdom. That will have had the additional benefit of making them willing martyrs for the cause.

Plainly, Jesus was reputed to have worked miracles during his lifetime. Jews such as the Talmudists accepted the miracles of Jesus (Baraitha Bab Sanhedrin 43a). What though were the miracles? The central one that gave him his fame as a doer of “paradoxa erga” was the temporary capture of Jerusalem from the Romans. This was a startling enough deed and could not have been viewed with any equanimity by Romans. For that reason it was suppressed. Indeed, the whole life of Jesus was suppressed for a century, while the new faith was organized as a mystery. The revelation to initiates after a period of tuition would have been that God had appeared as a rebel against the established order showing that its days were numbered.

History Ignores Jesus’s Miracles

The absence from three hundred histories of that age of the slightest allusion to Jesus or any of his miracles proves with a cogency that no sophistry can contradict that there never was the miraculous being that his disciples claim. The absence of every event of his life from any record except those by his own disciples settles the conclusion beyond argument. The godlike achievements ascribed to him are fictional. He was not famous enough in his day to be an object of general attention.

Christian censors destroyed many famous old histories which naturally no longer exist. Why, though, would they destroy any history that told of the exploits of Jesus? They would not have—unless the reports were not what the bishops of the church wanted anyone to read. Again we have a choice. Either Jesus was a nonentity or altogether imaginary, or his true story was not the one in the gospels and had to be expunged. Such a choice banishes the last shadow of faith in Christian history.

A few lines are found in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews alluding to Jesus, but it is a forgery. All responsible critics, even of the Christian school, reject it as an interpolation. The passage is not found in any edition of Josephus before Eusebius. Since he used Plato to argue that falsehood might be used as a medicine for the benefit of the churches, the suspicion has fallen upon him as being the forger. Another Christian Father, Origen, who lived before Eusebius, admitted Josephus made no allusion to Jesus. Of course the passage was not, then, in Josephus.

Anyway, in this passage we read that Jesus was a doer of “paradoxa erga”. Here is that word “erga” meaning “works”, or is it “miracles”? We must admit it hardly means miracles. “Paradoxa” means “contrary to favourable opinion”, so Josephus, if he wrote it, is saying that Jesus’s works were unacceptable, not that they were wonderful. They were unacceptable to Romans because Jesus was a zealot.

We have to conclude that Jesus led an obscure life or his own followers have erased his history from the records. Not even Christ’s famous biographers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, are noticed in history till well over a century after the birth of Jesus. And then the notice was by a Christian writer, Irenaeus.

On the face of it Jesus was so obscure that the authorities had to pay one of his disciples to turn traitor and betray him so that they could arrest him. A god, from off the throne of heaven appears on earth and, despite his miracles and a final public crucifixion near a great and crowded city, no one except a few immediate friends noticed! And even his friends, who believed him to have been God, forgot when he was born and which year he died. Plainly Jesus received little attention outside of the circle of his own credulous followers. How can anyone not believe then that much of the gospel story has been invented later to elevate Jesus in the supernatural rankings believed by his followers.

Jesus’s history would stand before the world as much more instructive if stripped of the wild, the weird, and the miraculous. He would be much more interesting viewed and respected as a man than worshipped as a god, guilty of the frequent violation of his own laws. The Hidden Jesus: The Secret Testament Revealed (AskWhy! Publications £12.99 $30) tells this story of Jesus as a historical figure and explains the critical principles which support the reconstruction.

Page Tags: Jesus's Miracles, Miracles of Jesus, Miracles, Healing Miracles, Miracles from Older Miracles or Prophecies, Fallacious Argument from Miracles, Christian, Christians, Miracle, Miraculous, Nature

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.