FOUNDATION OF SAND

WHY THE APOSTLES TESTIMONY TO CHRIST IS NO GOOD

 

 

 

The Christian Church says that the twelve apostles who allegedly lived to spread the message of the saving life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ were reliable for the New Testament documents show it and because they died as martyrs for their faith and people don’t suffer and die for lies.  Belief in the resurrection is really belief in the testimony of the apostles more than in belief in the resurrection and curiously Jesus said that faith in men was bad and faith in himself and God was good!  The Church’s argument is silly for a whole variety of reasons which we intend to explore.  The apostles were sent out as witnesses to Jesus if they are not reliable or convincing then Jesus was a fake for having appointed witnesses who were unacceptable.  He appointed false apostles and exposed himself as a failure.

 

THE ACCIDENTAL INNUENDOS OF MORMONISM

WHY DID THE APOSTLES DIE?

MARTYRDOMS OF PETER AND PAUL – MERE LEGEND

APOSTLE MARTYRDOM CLAIMS ARE LIES

OTHER DISCIPLES WHO WERE SUPPOSEDLY MARTYRED

CONCLUSION

 

Top of the Document

THE ACCIDENTAL INNUENDOS OF MORMONISM

 

There are several parallels between what Joseph Smith did between 1830 and 1844 and Jesus Christ.  Mormonism, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, shows what could have happened with Christianity.

 

Joseph Smith had twelve witnesses, including himself, to the non-existent gold plates of the Book of Mormon.  David Whitmer, one of them says that his mother and an old man saw them as well.  Nearly all these people risked their lives and health and marriages and got into shocking trouble for what they said they witnessed.  But they were certainly gullible liars.  There were even reports of visitations by angels and testimonies from God that the Book of Mormon was true.  None of them retracted what they said.

 

This matches the testimony of the people in the New Testament that Jesus rose from the dead and was seen.  The difference is that we cannot prove that these people suffered for the truth or died for it and we have no first-hand reports as we do with the Mormons.  Mormonism so far is more credible and it is not Christianity.  The apostles might have been stoned but we are not told that it was solely because of the faith.  Perhaps it was for religious freedom?  The Christian claim that the apostles of Christ suffered and died for their faith shows they were telling the truth is not believable for you can present millions of witnesses in suffering and blood for religious nonsense and they are being unfair and dishonest in using this argument.  Atheism has its martyrs too – people who gave their lives to draw attention to a stance they believed would only benefit the world.

 

It is difficult to define who is a martyr.  It is hard to see how somebody who is in danger and who takes precautions could be a true martyr for they were killed unwillingly especially if there was no point in them retracting their beliefs for it wouldn’t help. 

 

Joseph’s Smith’s Church started off with six members and there were thousands by the time he was shot dead in 1844.  Christianity could have taken off like that too despite there having been no Jesus just like Mormonism mushroomed despite the bad reputation of Joseph Smith and the errors in his new Bible and the constant tampering with revelations he changed his mind about and failed prophecies and the things his neighbours knew about him.  If the Latter-day Saints could start off without real golden plates and in the midst of opposition and scandal then the Christian Church could have started off without a real resurrection or even a Jesus and be a hotbed of indignity.

 

The Mormon Church was led by Brigham Young after Smith’s demise.  This death was a failure for Smith died before he could finish the Inspired Version of the Bible and appoint a successor which led to much trouble.  God would have had it better organised if Smith had been a real prophet.  Like the Christians who brought Christianity to birth, the Mormons could not see failure when it stared them in the face.  Jesus’ suicidal death was a failure too.  But anyway, the Church made Smith into a saint after his death and boasted about his incredibly holy life and alleged martyrdom and even started to teach that Smith was next to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Jesus could have been whitewashed in a similar way.  It would have been easier with him for communications and papers existed in Smith’s day and Mormonism was still wonderfully successful.  All false prophets have their defenders who can make murder look like nursing babies. 

 

Mormonism shows what religion can get away with and it was harder for it to do it being a product of the fairly advanced 19^th century but it managed it relatively easily.  For Christianity to achieve the same thing in simple backward times would have been effortless.  Two equal but contrary evidences cancel each other out.  That is one reason why it is the duty of the religionist, assuming we should have religion at all, that things like Jesus and Bibles should not be a part of religion which should be kept in the boundaries of reason only. 

 

Top of the Document

 

WHY DID THE APOSTLES DIE?

 

We know that when Christians say that the apostles perished for their faith in Jesus they obviously believe that the apostles dying for Jesus indicates that they knew that Jesus existed and had met him.  To say their deaths prove they believed that Jesus rose from the dead is indirectly to say they believed that there really had been a Jesus unless you accept the view that there was no indication that there ever was a Jesus until apparitions of him risen started to happen.  There is every reason to believe that the existence of Jesus rests on visions meaning that even if the apostles did die for their faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead they still give us no reason or right to believe in a historical Jesus.  We can prove that there is no reason to even consider the argument that Jesus rose for the apostles died for saying they saw him rise for the argument is based on lies and distortions.

 

If we cannot prove that the apostles must have died for their faith then there is no point in believing in Christianity.  You need very strong evidence to be justified in agreeing with people that a man came back from the dead.

 

A early minister in Rome, Clement, author of the First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, declared in 96AD or possibly before 70 AD that it was apostolic doctrine that Jesus was sent by God and Jesus commissioned the apostles to preach his gospel and his resurrection (chapter 42) meaning that any gospel or writing that is not from the pen of an apostle is dangerous and best ignored.  It is clear that the apostolic witness for Clement was valuable but did not back up the four gospels which are anonymous and two of which are not of apostolic origin but condemned any attempt by a non-apostle to write any.  Some will object that Clement later said there would be accredited bishops and deacons but the Church never claimed infallibility for bishops and deacons.  They were necessary as helps to the apostles and to preserve their heritage but infallibility could only belong to the apostles and anything they directly wrote.

 

The apostles of Jesus were his official witnesses, the ones who said that they had the right from him to determine without error, thanks to the protection of the Holy Spirit, what should be believed about Christ a privilege that didn’t exist for anybody else.  Perhaps one of the most superficially powerful arguments for the Christian story being true is that the apostles, all except John, were executed for their faith in Jesus and in his power to save and in his resurrection.  The Christians cannot get it into their heads that maybe the apostles did say Jesus rose and were so contradictory that it was left to the gospellers to sort the mess out so it follows that we should forget about the apostles and see if the four gospellers were martyred for standing by what they wrote – after all when you say you believe in the apostles it is really the gospellers you believe in and no more.  There is no evidence that any of the four gospellers was martyred or was really an apostle or knew the apostles well or was authorised by them.  Christians present evidence that John the apostle wrote John and Matthew the apostle wrote Matthew but the evidence is weak and ambiguous and if they really wrote them they would not have been anonymous leaving it to people in the second century to guess who wrote them.  Christians habitually present evidence for things that have nothing to do with what they want to prove at all and this is the secret of Christianity’s success apart from the fact that the Roman Empire realised that uniting the Empire in one religious cult was politically preferable and gave the Christian deception support to the exclusion of any other religious deception.

 

But anyway the Christian argument about the apostles being martyrs so Christianity is true for people don’t die for lies is weak and anti-intellectual.  The argument for the martyrdom is the main evidence for the resurrection that has made converts to Christianity for years.  Accordingly, it follows that when God inspires a Christian to believe in accordance with the Bible principle that faith is a revelation from God (as the apostles said), it inspires the Christian to believe because of an inexcusable error meaning God is a liar.  A martyr has to have a choice between saying Jesus was a fraud and death and choose death to be a true martyr and there is no evidence that any apostle died like that. 

 

The principal failure is that before you can say the apostles’ martyrdom proved their veracity when they testified to the risen Jesus, is that you have to prove that they had enough knowledge of themselves and of the mind to be sure that their visions were real.  Had they had incoherent visions they would have worked out a story to be held in common that reconciled anything that could be reconciled and focused on that for the people don’t want to listen to gibberish.  They would have met together and voted on what experiences were to be considered real and which ones were delusions or tricks from Satan.  That way agreement could have been reached.  They believed like the Catholic Church of today that the Spirit guided their voting.  That was how they chose Matthias to replace Judas the as an apostle after Judas died.  The proof that the apostles were careful or competent in assessing their experiences and knew how to is not there.  The Bible says that David and Solomon were prophets of God and departed from the faith as did Jesus’ apostle Judas.  All these threw everything away and invited terrible punishments for going against God and yet the Church expects us to be sure that the apostles died for their loyalty to Jesus.  If prophets can go astray knowing how bad it will be for them why can’t apostles be martyred for lies?  David and Solomon were given more importance in the Bible than the apostles which makes it worse.

 

The book of Acts infers that the leading apostles enjoyed suffering and risking their lives.  They could have left Jerusalem and run the Church from afar when it got dangerous but they didn’t.  They were masochists and they got a perverted sexual thrill out of their activities.  For example, when Paul got beaten and jailed for casting a demon out it is clear that all he had to do was cast it out discreetly and not attract unwanted attention so he liked what he got. 

 

The apostles also followed a domineering individual, Jesus, who taught with authority unlike the scribes and Pharisees (Mark 1:22) meaning that he gave them no reasons for heeding his moral and theological directions but just expected obedience.  Even God has no right to do that so the apostles were fanatics who delighted in getting people to obey their idol.  Such men are hardly acceptable as martyrs.  They also followed a man who committed suicide by walking into the hands of the Jews, again Jesus.  Also, it was always principally the cross and the teaching of Jesus that opposed corruptions in the Jewish religion that brought persecution on the early Church (Galatians 6:12).  If anybody died there is no evidence that they died for facts but for interpretations, interpretations of the cross and of the alleged doctrine of Jesus.  The Jewish Christians who Paul condemned for standing by traditional Judaism just to avoid persecution prove that there was no persecution for saying that Jesus rose from the dead.  Nobody cared.

 

The reason the early Christians provoked the hostility of the Romans was because Christianity slandered every other religion as being of the Devil.  Their aim was to replace all other religions which roused the wrath of Rome (page 47, A Concise History of the Catholic Church).  The Romans never tolerated intolerant religion for peaceable religions meant less trouble and division in the Empire.  If the apostles were martyred it was not for their faith in Jesus’ resurrection but for their intolerance in the sense that they believed that anybody who did not believe in the resurrection and the rest of the faith was a hindrance to God and would not be saved.  The Christian reply: “But they must have been very sure of the resurrection when they were so sure that it was necessary to be intolerant about it”.  But intolerant people are usually unsure of themselves which is why they are so vicious and good at lying to themselves and stubborn.   The apostles’ belief and feeling was that intolerance was certainly right and this was what they were trying to support more than anything else.  That is what all martyrs, Catholic, Mormon or Muslim, die for principally and that is why their deaths do not give evidence that their beliefs were true only that they thought they were true.  There was no difference between them and the apostles.  The Romans didn’t mind what the apostles believed as long as it was kept within the law.  Intolerance is hardly a virtue that entitles them to be looked up to as martyrs.  

 

Even if Paul had been martyred by blood he was not a good witness for there is absolutely no evidence that he was a true apostle.  We have no psychiatric reports on his visions or proof that the apostles fully accepted him.  He was not present when the tomb was found empty and he did not see visions with the rest.  His vision is dubious for it happened when Jesus had returned to Heaven implying the visions were over and when Jesus said he would have only twelve apostles in imitation of Jacob who had twelve sons with which to set up the chosen people of Israel.  Paul thought he was the thirteenth.  It was only his word for it which the apostles would have been disgusted by for they followed the Law in saying that there had to be at least two witnesses.  Even Acts fails to paper over the hostility between him and the others.  Galatians hints that Peter and Paul had two separate Churches or rival religions.  If the apostles expected a new apostle to come what did they elect Matthias to replace Judas for to maintain the number twelve?

 

If the apostles being martyred is such a great proof for the resurrection and for Jesus’ existence then the early Church must have been gullible for it believed before these men were sent off to the next world.  Strange that the Jehovah’s Witnesses who were martyred under Hitler in World War 2 over a Bible interpretation that none of the other Churches agreed with and which was plainly wrong and which was something they were familiar with and which they claimed to see in their Bible which they read very frequently are still insulted as heretics and fanatics.  It is thought by Christians that their testimony in blood is unworthy of consideration as is the faith they died for.  And this even though most of the Witnesses were as normal as anybody else and the apostles who we know less about are heroes and revered martyrs!  The apostles are allegedly martyred and it proves them right while the Jehovah’s had something more concrete than visions and who died in greater numbers are wrong in the eyes of the Church.  But if the martyrdom of the Jehovah’s does not make them right then the martyrdom of the apostles means very little for it means a lot less then theirs.  We again see the nasty and self-centred double standards that are rife in Christian apologetics.

 

To argue the apostles were telling the truth because they were martyred is to try and trick people because it is obvious that they might have been fooled themselves and we have no real evidence that they died for belief in a Jesus who physically not spiritually rose from the dead so even if they died for Christianity we don’t have any hard evidence for what Christianity this was.  The gospels only say the body was missing and that Jesus was raised but they never actually state that the body was resurrected for they don’t know.  Apostles dying for visions would mean nothing for visions are easy to explain and are commonplace.  Jesus himself said that the resurrection would be the only proof for even fakes could do real miracles for presumably only God could have power over life and death. 

 

How a religion that teaches that the wages of sin is death and says the world brings death on itself for it prefers to sin than to follow God despite the cost, can hold that martyrdom can be a sign of sanity and sincerity is a mystery.  If we are so anti-God and pro-self it is more likely that when we appear to die as martyrs the real reason is to do God some injury.  The apostles themselves taught what the Church teaches about how man hates God from conception so that tell us what to make of them!

 

Top of the Document

 

MARTYRDOMS OF PETER AND PAUL – MERE LEGEND

 

The earliest account of the violent death of Peter that we have says that he was killed for political reasons (from internet’s Why I Don’t Buy the Resurrection Story).

 

“The martyrdom of St Peter is alluded to in St John’s Gospel (xii, 36: xxi, 18).  That it took place at Rome is highly probable from the epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, Ignatius’ letter to the Romans and the unanimous tradition of second century writers, besides the memorial monument at the cemetery on the Vatican hill, built around AD 160-70 and recently excavated” (page 18, The Early Church).

 

This is wrong.  All the John gospel says is that Peter will stretch out his arms and be taken where he does not want to go.   There is no evidence that Peter was ever in Rome.  He wrote a letter from Babylon but there is no reason to deny that this was the real Babylon, the village near the infamous city.  Take the simplest meaning please, you have to.  Yet some understand Babylon as a code for Rome.  Read my book, The Impostor in the Vatican.  This refutes the lies of the Roman Catholic Church through which the pope, the pretended successor of Peter who was supposedly the first bishop of Rome and first earthly head of the Church, gains his incredible power.  However, it is clear that the New Testament is easily misinterpreted and could have suggested to many that Peter was martyred.  The result was, Peter died an obscure death and because the Bible was thought to say so many were convinced that he was martyred like Jesus.  The Bible could have started the legend about the martyrdom.

 

The alleged predictions of martyrdom from Jesus don’t necessarily have to mean blood martyrdom but may have caused the legend through people misunderstanding.  Evangelicals though claiming to support the Bible only still believe the martyrdom stories though they come from legendary material that is full of wildly over the top stories which is dishonest.  It means their faith in the apostles’ testimony does not come from the Bible but from outside it though the Bible claims to provide evidence.  Their faith in the Bible is so great that they have prefer secular evidence though they claim it is full of evidence that it is the voice of God!

 

Clement of Rome in his first century Epistle to the Corinthians was supposed to be a pope according to the speculations of the Roman Church.  The Catholic Church lies that he wrote that Peter and Paul were martyred together in Rome.  He never wrote that these individuals perished to testify to Christ by their blood or that they died by execution at all.   The Greek word martyria means testimony.  It is the word the debate is about but Jesus in John 18:37 uses it for witness without any connotations of bloodshed.

 

About 96 AD or before 70AD, the epistle of Clement of Rome to Corinth stated that Peter was the victim of abuse until death and was a martyr.  But it does not say the abuse was what killed Peter.  Peter is believed to have been killed about 64AD which would mean that Clement might have written just a few years later.  If he wrote that soon, we will see he is proof that Peter never was martyred or Paul either. 

 

Here is what Clement wrote: “Because of jealous people and those bitten with envy the best and most just pillars of the Church were persecuted and persecuted even to death.  Let us remember the holy apostles Peter who because of jealousy that was unfair suffered not a few but many trials and thus haven given his testimony went to the glorious place of his reward.  Because of jealous trouble-makers Paul showed how to win the prize for those who endure, seven times he was in bonds, he was exiled, stoned, a bringer of the message to east and to the west, he became famous as was due to him because of his faith, he preached the right way to live to the world, and when he had reached the limits of the west he witnessed before the rulers, and this way passed away from the world and was taken up to the holy place - one of the greatest examples of loyalty and endurance” (1 Clement 5).

 

Where we have references to giving testimony or witness many translate martyr.  The word martyr means witness and did not come to mean a person who witnessed by shedding blood in death until decades later.  In Acts 7:58 the people who testified against Stephen are called martyrs and they did not die.  (Check all this out in Putting Away Childish Things, pages 182-183).  Yet many say Clement stated that the apostles except John died for their faith (page 304, Lectures and Replies).  Clement says nothing about the time Peter died or how he died.  His silence is proof that Peter never died for the faith for he would say so if he had.  Even the Roman Catholic apologetic book, Lectures and Replies (page 304), admits that Clement never said that Peter or Paul lived or died in Rome. 

 

In my Skeptical Dictionary I wrote, “Clement of Rome is misinterpreted as saying Peter and Paul were martyrs in Rome but the word he used does not mean blood martyrs but just witnesses and he never says how they died but that they were pestered to death like Joseph of the Bible (1 Clement 4 – “Jealousy persecuted Joseph to death”) who was not pestered to death for he lived a happy life after the pestering (so the expression is very loose and poetic and not literal) or even where they died.  Like Joseph, Peter and Paul were persecuted but ended their days in peace.  The early Church father Hippolytus was one of the best earliest sources that denied the martyrdom that Christians alleged visited most of the apostles.  The account may contain some legend but there is no doubt that the sources that say that most of the apostles died natural deaths must be right for Christians wouldn’t have wanted that to be true and it is easier to remember martyrdoms than the more boring natural deaths.  Martyrdoms make more impact.”

 

(Hippolytus specifically stated that the apostle John died an old man and the apostle Matthew died peacefully in Parthia.  Two alleged gospel writers and they were not even martyrs.)

 

Read what Clement wrote again.  You will read that the two apostles were persecuted because of jealously and envy.  This is impossible to believe.  The enemies of the Church feared the corruption of Jewish doctrine and also that the Christians were up to no good and hated humanity.  The latter was the fear of the Gentiles as many sources attest.  So Clement only makes sense if you hold that CHRISTIANS persecuted the apostles.  They were jealous of them and so gave them a hard time.  It would be foolish to imagine that Gentiles or Jews were that petty and easily provoked to jealousy.  This means that the stories which blame the pagan Romans for killing them are lies.  However, there can be no doubt that Clement believed that Peter testified that his witness was true when went through so much bother.  Jealousy was blamed for Paul’s problems too though the epistles show that the chief and real reason was that the Jews did not like him saying that Christians could be saved without the law of Moses.  Paul’s example of patient suffering is singled out for exuberant praise indicating that the story of Peter’s crucifixion is untrue.  Paul was allegedly beheaded and Peter went through what was a thousand times worse and Clement implicitly denies that this happened to Peter.  Peter would have got the praise had he been crucified and Paul would not have been glorified as one of the best examples of unflappable devotion to Jesus Christ.  Only Paul’s suffering is glorified.  His death isn’t mentioned.  Clement talks as if Peter had a hard life but died naturally for nobody focusing on how apostles suffer for the gospel will leave it out if they died a cruel death for the faith as if it were just a minor detail.   Clement does not encourage going forward to martyrdom in blood.  Would he mean that when Paul testified to the rulers and then went to the holy place in Heaven that the rulers killed him?  Of course not.   That would suggest that Paul was a suicide and provoked the rulers into slaying him.  Paul died after preaching to the limits of the West suggesting he died not in Rome but perhaps in Gaul or France or Spain.  Clement would have spelled it out clearly if he thought Peter and Paul were killed for their faith.  That he didn’t shows they were not.   

 

Clement of Rome would have known if Peter and Paul were blood martyrs in Rome.  That he indicated that it never happened to them shows that the current claims of the Vatican that Peter has been found below St Peter’s Basilica in Rome are yet another of Rome’s self-publicising distortions. 

 

Clement focused mostly on Paul which would testify against Peter being what Catholics say he was, infallible head of the Church, for then he would have focused mostly on Peter.  It is as if he had only the vaguest knowledge of Peter (page 11, St Peter and Rome).

 

If Peter had really been martyred by death, Clement would have highlighted this for that is more important than just suffering for the gospel which Clement brought up to make their testimony more convincing.   

 

Peter was supposed in a fanciful legend to have been nailed to a cross upside down in Rome.  Eusebius who was born in 260 AD was the first person worth listening to allege this.  The story first came in the forged Acts of Peter which date from the second last decade of the second century (page 185, Putting Away Childish Things).  The Catholic Church revised the Acts of Peter and the rewritten version was The Acts of Peter and Paul and this is all we have left of the Acts of Peter (page 49, St Peter and Rome).  It is no good for there is no way of checking out its allegations or even knowing what belonged to the original Acts.  The bastardised Acts reckoned that Peter chose the head downwards crucifixion position in honour of the crucifixion of Christ who was nailed the right way up.  This would have been a slower and crueller way to die.  Peter must have wanted to punish himself for something terrible when he wanted to die so cruelly.  Perhaps it was guilt over imposing such a system as Christianity upon the world.

 

Tertullian was the first ever to state that Peter was crucified but he gives us no reason to believe him or any evidence. He wrote too long after the event, about 140 years, to be worth paying attention to.  The absurdity about John miraculously surviving a boiling in oil is in the same account in Against Marcion which further undermines what Tertullian wrote for it shows he was ignoring evidence and focusing on legend.

 

The story of Paul’s Roman martyrdom when he was beheaded first came from the late second century Acts of Paul which was notorious for tall stories (page 204, Putting Away Childish Things).  We cannot even hope that there is a kernel of truth in it and that Paul was decapitated in Rome.  Clement says that Paul gave his witness while passing from the world to Heaven which is a lot different from saying he gave his witness by dying.  Clement would have said that if Paul died for his faith.  He would have said he was decapitated for his faith for a person who is said to die for their faith could be killed by ill-health because of their faith which wouldn’t be very impressive for lots of people needlessly harm their health and seem to enjoy doing so. 

 

Paul was allegedly beheaded in Rome.  In his epistles, he says that he has risked his life for Jesus but no indication is given that these risks were that grave.  A person would take risks for lies within reason.  When the story goes that his head made a miraculous fountain wherever it hit the ground the three times it bounced that makes it questionable. 

 

The Second Letter of Timothy has Paul saying in chapter 4 that his life is nearly over.  He says it is already being poured away like a libation.  You don’t really talk that way if you are in jail awaiting execution.  You talk that way if you are dying of some sickness or old age.  He went on to say that the first time he had to present his defence nobody came to witness in his favour.  He said that because of his message he was rescued by God from the lion’s mouth for God inspired him what to say.  So he escaped execution then.  Then armed with this evidence he confidently says, “The Lord will save me from all evil attempts on me and bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom.”  The letter shows that Paul was confident he would never undergo a blood martyrdom and was living in such a way that it couldn’t happen or too close to death for it to happen.  The letter is suspected by most of having been written after Paul’s death.  If so, Paul was never a blood martyr.

 

The argument that Rome was the only place to claim that it was the scene of Peter’s martyrdom proves nothing because Peter could have had an obscure martyrdom elsewhere and the Rome claim was late in origin.  It was made up by the papacy which wanted to claim to be the leader of the Church and successor to Peter.

 

“Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, remarks in a letter to the Church in Rome soon after the middle of the second century that Peter and Paul had planted the Church at Corinth and had taught there in like manner, but that they had also in like manner gone to Italy and taught there, and had died as martyrs at the same time” (page 209, Handbook to the Controversy With Rome, Vol 1).  But again the word martyr has been misinterpreted.  Dionysius simply wrote that the pair preached together and bore witness (his word for testified is rendered martyred) in Italy at the same time (page 16, St Peter and Rome). 

 

Irenaeus said that Peter and Paul were ministering in Rome when St Matthew’s gospel was published and then he says that the year of publication was 41 AD at the most.  But it is proven and accepted by all that Peter and Paul did not do this.  Irenaeus believed that Jesus had his public ministry for almost twenty years and that Jesus was an old man when he was put to death (page 24, St Peter and Rome).  All this confusion tells us not to listen too much to him. 

 

Ignatius in 115 AD pleads not to be saved from martyrdom and says this is in imitation of Peter and Paul (page 208, Handbook to the Controversy with Rome, Volume 1).  Ignatius certainly means a painful witness by this.  Ignatius does not hint that it is a witness by dying that he wants to emulate in them.  The translators always rendered a word meaning good person to be martyr in the sense of a person who died to testify in Ignatius except when the context wouldn’t let them (Putting Away Childish Things, page 208).  That is terribly dishonest.  If we want to pretend he meant blood martyrs then he only says that Peter and Paul pleaded not to be saved if they could be martyred.  But that does not make them martyrs but suicides.

 

If Peter and Paul committed suicide by refusing to try and get out of a death-sentence then they did not die for Jesus but because they were suicidal.  What was wrong with them - a guilty conscience for creating a lying religion perhaps?  If Peter really asked to be crucified upside down so that his crucifixion would not mirror Christ’s then this was not a holy martyrdom but a masochistic sickness and showed he was mentally ill and not a true martyr. 

 

The story of Peter and Paul dying as blood martyrs is mere legend.  Local gossip would be more reliable.

 

It is worth mentioning that the early traditions of the Ebionites insisted that Peter and Paul were in serious doctrinal opposition.  One was a heretic to the other.  Catholics just pick the legends they want to believe and ignore theirs.  If the Ebionites were right then the legends that say Peter and Paul were martyred together in Rome are false for they could not stand one another.  What else have the Peter and Paul legends been lying about?  The Elkasites were a branch of the Ebionites which flourished at Rome and seem to have had their origin at the time Jerusalem was destroyed.  They loathed Paul who they condemned under the name of Simon Magus as a cover (see St Peter and Rome) and presented Peter and Magus as enemies.  Or did Simon change his name and start pretending to be an apostle of Jesus?  Paul had his opponents even in his own time who were like these sects so what the sects say comes before anything Justin Martyr said about the apostles being a good team or whatever.

 

Top of the Document

 

APOSTLE MARTYRDOM CLAIMS ARE LIES

 

Tertullian was one of many in the early Church who pleaded with people faced with possible death for their faith to make no effort to escape but to welcome this death.  This movement needed the lie about the sainted apostles nearly all dying for the faith to encourage this so it invented the lie.  It was noticed that if people died for the faith that more people were drawn to the faith and so martyrs were a great advertisement.  Christians believe this evil man when he declared the apostles to be martyrs of blood. 

 

The Epistle to the Hebrews may be from 70AD or shortly before the Temple was destroyed.  It was written to Jewish Christians because the argumentation against priests and Temples and sacrifices in it and its extensive use of the Old Testament would not have been deployed for Gentile Christians who were unfamiliar with this ritualism.  It would have been written to Jewish Christians in Palestine for that is where most of them were and the letter was known as the Epistle to the Hebrews from the first meaning it would have been sent to Jerusalem the HQ of the Jewish Christians for it was for all of them.  It was written to Jewish Christians in Palestine but meant for Jewish Christians everywhere and there were some of them in Rome.  Hebrews 12:3 tells them to think of Jesus who endured a lot of abuse from sinners so that they may feel stronger knowing Jesus went through worse than they did at the hands of hostile people.  Verse 12:4 tells us something very interesting.  It says that none of them have resisted this abuse until their blood was shed.  This tells us that the account in Josephus about James dying at the hands of a lynch mob over religious differences in 64 AD and the Book of Acts saying about the other James dying in 42AD by the sword of Herod’s emissary are both lies.  It also indicates that the stories in Acts about the murderous persecution of the Church and its claim that Paul was a murderer of Christians is fiction. Basically it means that some Christian inserted in Josephus the entire stuff about James the brother of Jesus being persecuted to death.  That means that Josephus never mentioned Jesus at all for the other place where he says that Jesus was the Messiah and rose from the dead etc was something a man in his position could not write gives us no reason to think that any of it was really written by Josephus.

 

Luke 21 says Jesus told the apostles that some of them would be put to death.  (Matthew 24 tells us that Jesus said what was in Luke 21 to the disciples.)  But Jesus says the enemies of those who will not be, will be unable to contradict their wisdom and they will survive and not a hair of their heads will be harmed.  Christians say he means they will be preserved for the resurrection but there is no need for that interpretation and it is too much for the context.  Luke is saying that only a few of the apostles will be killed and he does not make it clear if they will be really martyrs or not which indicates that they will be lynched or something meaning that they do not mean to die.  The impression given is that since the apostles defended themselves so well that they did not mean to get killed so the murdered ones died against their wills and not as demonstrations that what they said was true.

 

We know very little about the ultimate fate of the apostles.  One reason for this is that “there are hardly any Christian writings dating between the years 100-150” (page 231, Asking them Questions).  Only Peter, James and John are more than names to us of the apostles and everything else is legend (page 17, The Early Church, Henry Chadwick).  So there are only three witnesses, Peter, James and John who are worth thinking about.  We don’t know if the apostles stuck together and agreed with one another all the time in matters of faith and morals.  Only Peter, James and John were the nearest to being witnesses that we can consider and yet they were far from acceptable to us.  Even if they were honest we have no reason to take them seriously.  Two seemingly reliable people lying about the resurrection say of Buddha would have more right to be believed.  The evidence for the resurrection is too feeble.

 

A Church of Ireland booklet, St Peter and Rome, quotes a Professor Lipsius with approval when he said that the truth about the lives and deaths of the apostles was lost with all the fantastical and pious make-believe that was manufactured in the early centuries of the Church (page 29). 

 

St Andrew was allegedly crucified on a cross in an X shape.  This is a late and untrustworthy tradition (page 344, The History of the Church). 

 

Acts 12:2 says that the apostle James the brother of John was slain by the sword or beheaded but we are not told why except that it pleased the Jews.  Herod who was to blame didn’t even know it would please the Jews until it was done, we are told.  We are not told that he died because he got the chance to recant his claims about Jesus and refused to so there is no reason to consider him a true martyr.  James may not have seen the swordsman coming.  Yet Christian lie that all the apostles but John were martyrs.  Acts comes closer to presenting Stephen as a martyr which suggests that James was not one for it would be delighted to say that he was.  We know that Jesus allegedly chastised James for being too anxious for religious power.  He may have only said he saw the risen Lord to get power over the lives of others.

 

Jesus told the apostles that they would be thrown out of synagogues and executed but he did not add the crucial words “for your belief” (Matthew 24:9; John 16:2).  Even if none of the disciples had been put to death this would have led people to say they were.

 

Did the gospels put in the story of Jesus predicting that the apostles would be martyred because they were martyred?  Maybe or maybe not.

 

Some think that because James and John agreed to accept the cup Jesus agreed to drink from and to be baptised in the same baptism as him (Mark 10:35-40) that Jesus is saying they will be martyred like him.  But Jesus was not a martyr but a suicide.  And the story says that James and John were worldly and cocky so they knew that the baptism was suffering to get glory not death.  Jesus would not have tricked them into saying they wanted to be martyred.  The cup could be suffering but the baptism is the life of God.  Then Jesus lectures them all on the need for humility and not looking for power.

 

The late first century Book of Revelation speaks of martyrs by blood and the apostles and never mentions the apostles having gone through the same.  When the saints call for vengeance on those who killed them for their faith one would expect the apostles to be mentioned.  Revelation shows anger against persecutors and with its loyalty to the apostles it would be inevitable for it to have raged against the killers of the apostles if the apostles had really been murdered.

 

A book by Dr William Steuart McBirnie, The Search for The Twelve Apostles, concluded that the story that John the apostle was boiled in oil and survived is dubious for it came from Tertullian who gave no hint that there was any evidence for it and that John died an old man safe and sound in Ephesus according to the best sources.  He found so many ridiculous legends about Matthew that where Matthew died by martyrdom could not be worked out for sure.  Heracleon and Clement of Alexandria say the only probable thing about Matthew, which was that he died naturally.  McBirnie argued that since Bartholomew was supposedly martyred in Armenia and in India according to other accounts that India may have meant Armenia for the ancients might have been using the India loosely.  This is wishful thinking for he was desperate to believe in martyred apostles but all he found was excessive legend and incoherence and deception in the stories so nobody knows the truth.  As Henry Chadwick stated only Peter, James and John are more than names (page 17, The Early Church).

 

The apostles were made the special witnesses of Jesus.  If they died for their faith in Jesus that would be their supreme witness, when this supreme testimony cannot be verified it makes us sure that the apostles were charlatans and unlikely to have died for their faith for God would not have let the evidence slip away.  We don’t even know if they all remained true to the faith.  Peter departed from the faith according to Galatians and Paul never says he reformed when he reprimanded him.  Peter was accused by Paul of living like a Gentile and hypocritically imposed Jewish Law on the Gentiles.  In essence, Peter had created a distorted religion, a new religion. 

 

Top of the Document

 

OTHER DISCIPLES WHO WERE SUPPOSEDLY MARTYRED

 

 

Stephen the first martyr never died for testifying to Jesus but for criticising the Jews for not keeping the law (Acts 7).  Jesus may have been a part of his faith but there is no hint that he died for Jesus.  He does not qualify as a Christian martyr.

 

Acts 12 says that James the apostle was beheaded by Herod Agrippa in Jerusalem in what is probably 42 AD.  Many would have seen that this should please the Jews so we cannot say James chose death rather than renounce Christianity.  We don’t know the reason so we cannot say he was a martyr.  But when Luke did not tell us he was a martyr then he probably was not one.

 

There is another James who Paul calls an apostle (Galatians 1:19) but grammatically it could be that he is excepted according to Biblical Dictionary and Concordance, NAB page 95) but who was not one of the Twelve.  It is baffling that he was not chosen to replace Judas.  He was much better suited than the mysterious and obscure Matthias.  It must have taken the apostles a long time to trust him.

 

Eusebius says that Hegessipus (who wrote about 170 AD) wrote that this James the brother of Jesus was martyred for the same reason as Jesus (The History of the Church, page 129).  That is all he says.  But at least it shows that James did not die for the resurrection or the miracles of Jesus.  Hegassipus said that James was asked by the Jews who respected him to stop the people believing in Jesus.  They thought years after James’ work in the Temple and listening to him that he did not believe himself.  Evidently, they must have been right.  The Jews looked on his religious teachings as having authority.  But James let them think he was going to do as he said and instead testified to Jesus as the Christ.  Then they threw him down and stoned him though he was dying from the fall and one of them killed him by hitting him over the head with a club as he prayed that God would pardon them.  James clearly did not expect this to happen.  We are not told that he had the chance to retract so we cannot be sure he really was a witness to Jesus by his death.  And who would want to save their own lives by abjuring Jesus so as to live with such terrible injuries?  Josephus said that James was tried for breaking the Law but Hegessipus says that James was lynched.  Eusebius interestingly says that since nobody mentioned Josephus’ version before his time that some doubted if it were authentic (The History of the Church, page 61).  Jesus was killed for claiming to be a Messiah.  Did James do the same?  We know he was not killed for changing Judaism for he would not have been in the Temple if he had been.  We know he was not killed for miracles for none are mentioned and the Jews would have welcomed his. 

  

But even if Hegesippus said James was a martyr in blood for Jesus this writer was one of those people who just go after what they want to hear (page 18, St Peter and Rome). 

 

The doctrine that those who do not believe in Jesus will rot in Hell forever was in the Christian religion from the start.  This was a more frightening doctrine then than now for in those days life was short indeed and evidence that God ways were too seemingly mean to bear was there every time you opened your eyes so there was great pressure put on people to join the faith and to stay in it and maybe even die for it.  The martyrs were not true martyrs when they had so much unbearable pressure to prejudice their minds against any contrary evidence for Jesus and his revelations and to compel them to die for him.  For their martyrdoms to stand as evidence for anything about Jesus we have to be sure they went to their deaths freely and without mental disorders and there is no reason to think they did.  Strange that the Church argues that a person can go to everlasting punishing for sin for he or she chooses this fate by sinning and then says that the apostles would not suffer for a lie or die for it!  Christian apologetics are all incoherence and outright lies.  The Bible doctrine that man on his own can do nothing without sin and that only by the help of God can man do good and that most people deserve to rot in Hell forever and indeed will  would have terrified people into believing in Jesus even if the only evidence for his existence was a few dubious ghost stories for they were so desperate for a saviour.  It would be natural for people to believe upon hearing the dreadful gospel that their only hope was for somebody like Jesus to obey God’s law in their place so that they could escape their fiery fate for there was nobody else on offer and the first person who allegedly knew how to save would be the one who counts.   No other fictitious god would have had the incredible and supremely effective psychological impetus and attraction that Jesus had so he is more likely to have been a fiction than them.

 

It is worth remembering that the testimonies about these great witnesses who spilled their blood in death for their faith come from the book of Acts and The History of the Church by dubious Eusebius.  The Book of Acts seems to have a relatively small number in mind unlike Eusebius who inflated the persecutions as best he could.  Now what did the latter know?  And the first did not claim to be an eyewitness and neither did the second.  And the Law of Moses has God saying that two independent eyewitnesses alone can entitle a story to be believed.  God would not like the reliance of Christian apologists on flimsy testimony. 

 

Pity the Christians always forget to bring our attention to Tertullian’s statement from 197 AD that Christians were never given the chance to speak in their defence when they were on trial for their freedom and lives (page 7, Documents of the Christian Church).  They were put to death just for getting caught not for having the truth.  They were not martyrs when they could not speak for Christ and bring their deaths on themselves as the alternative to abjuring him or any part of his doctrine.

 

The early Christians did not focus on the miracles of Jesus when trying to show that their religion was plausible or true.  These miracles played only a small and infrequent part in such discussions (page 70, The Early Church).  What they concentrated on was the alleged prophecies of Jesus in the Old Testament which they said he fulfilled and secondarily the rapid spread of the faith (page 70, ibid).  The Christians used excerpts of the prophecies in their missionary work and they tended to alter the wording to make it fit Jesus even better and at the time of Justin Martyr in the mid-second century this deception was so successful that he felt the need to argue that the Christian corruptions of the prophecies were authentic and that it was the Jews who were corrupting (page 102, ibid) thus accusing the scriptures Jesus himself accepted of inauthenticity.  This tells us that the early Christians were converted not by the resurrection of Jesus but by his alleged fitting into the mould for the Messiah that was supposedly spelled out by God when he spoke through the Hebrew prophets.  That means they principally died for an idea that was wrong.  They believed in Jesus for the wrong reason.  Their martyrdoms do not prove anything about the supernatural origin of the Christian faith or the existence of the Nazarene. 

 

Paul taught the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as the heart of the Christian gospel and the truths on which all the Christian doctrines depend.  Paul taught in scripture in Galatians 1 that even if he and the apostles and angels from Heaven changed the gospel in any way they were to be treated as anathema or accursed (shunned) plainly admitting that he was more concerned about dogma than anything and even God wasn’t allowed to contradict him!  For Paul the resurrection was not important but believing in it was!  Is he and the other apostles who tolerated this nonsense really worth believing when they said Jesus rose?

 

 

Top of the Document

 

 

CONCLUSION

 

We know too little about the apostles.  We have no right to say they were honest men for men we know more about and trust have been found dishonest.  We don’t know enough about the apostles and the martyrdom stories are unreliable and can be refuted so we cannot say their visions of Jesus raised from the dead really took place on the basis that they died for them.  

 

 

Top of the Document

 

WORKS CONSULTED

 

A Concise History of the Catholic Church, Thomas Bokenkotter, Image Books, New York, 1979 

Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible, John W Haley, Whitaker House, Pennsylvania, undated

Asking them Questions, Various, Oxford University Press, London, 1936

Belief and Make-Believe, GA Wells, Open Court, La Salle, Illinois, 1991

Concise Guide to Today’s Religions, Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, Scripture Press, Bucks, 1983

Conspiracies and the Cross, Timothy Paul Jones, Front Line, A Strang Company, Florida, 2008

Did Jesus Exist? GA Wells, Pemberton, London, 1988

Did Jesus Exist?  John Redford, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1986

Documents of the Christian Church, edited by Henry Bettenson, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979  

Early Christian Writings, Maxwell Staniforth Editor, Penguin, London, 1988 

Encyclopaedia of Heresies and Heretics, Leonard George, Robson Books, London, 1995 

Encyclopaedia of Unbelief, Volume 1, Ed Gordon Stein, (Ed) Prometheus Books, New York, 1985

Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1, Josh McDowell, Alpha, Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1995

Handbook to the Controversy With Rome, Volume 1, Karl Von Hase, The Religious Tract Society, London, 1906  

He Walked Among Us, Josh McDowell and Bill Wilson, Alpha Cumbria, 2000

In Defence of the Faith, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1996 

Introduction to the New Testament, Roderick A F MacKenzie, SJ, Liturgical Press, Minnesota, 1965 

Jesus, AN Wilson, Flamingo, London, 1993 

Jesus and the Goddess, The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, Thorsons, London, 2001

Jesus – God the Son or Son of God? Fred Pearce Christadelphian Publishing Office, Birmingham, undated 

Jesus – One Hundred Years Before Christ, Professor Alvar Ellegard Century, London, 1999 

Jesus and Early Christianity in the Gospels, Daniel J Grolin, George Ronald, Oxford, 2002

Jesus and the Four Gospels, John Drane, Lion, Herts, 1984 

Jesus Hypotheses, V Messori, St Paul Publications, Slough, 1977 

Jesus Lived in India by Holger Kersten, Element, Dorset, 1994  

Jesus, Qumran and the Vatican, Otto Betz and Rainer Riesner, SCM Press Ltd, London, 1994

Jesus the Evidence, Ian Wilson, Pan, London, 1985 

Jesus the Magician, Morton Smith, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1978

Jesus under Fire, Edited by Michael F Wilkins and JP Moreland, Zondervan Publishing House, Michigan, 1995 

Lectures and Replies, Thomas Carr, Archbishop of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1907 

Let’s Weigh the Evidence, Barry Burton, Chick Publications, Chino, CA, 1983

Miracles in Dispute, Ernst and Marie-Luise Keller, SCM Press Ltd, London, 1969

Nag Hammadi Library, Ed James M Robinson HarperCollins New York 1990 

On the True Doctrine, Celsus, Translated by R Joseph Hoffmann, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1987 

Putting Away Childish Things, Uta Ranke-Heinemann, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1994 

Runaway World, Michael Green, IVP, London, 1974 

St Peter and Rome, JBS, Irish Church Missions, Dublin, undated

Saint Saul, Donald Harman Akenson, Oxford University Press, New York, 2000

The Bible Fact or Fantasy, John Drane, Lion, Oxford, 1989 

The Bible Unearthed, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, Touchstone Books, New York, 2002. 

The Call to Heresy, Robert Van Weyer, Lamp Books, London, 1989 

The Case For Christ, Lee Strobel, HarperCollins and Zondervan, Michigan, 1998 

The Case for Jesus the Messiah, John Ankerberg Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1989 

The Early Church, Henry Chadwick, Pelican, Middlesex, 1967 

The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics, Leonard George, Robson Books, London, 1995 

The First Christian, Karen Armstrong, Pan, London, 1983 

The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels, Penguin, London, 1990 

The Gnostic Paul, Elaine Pagels, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1975

The History of Christianity, Lion, Herts 1982 

The History of the Church, Eusebius, Penguin, London, 1989

The House of the Messiah, Ahmed Osman, Grafton, London, 1993

The Jesus Event and Our Response, Martin R Tripole SJ, Alba House, New York, 1980 

The Jesus Hoax, Phyllis Graham, Leslie Frewin, London, 1974 

The Jesus Inquest, Charles Foster, Monarch Books, Oxford, 2006

The Jesus Mysteries, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, Thorsons, London, 1999 

The MythMaker, St Paul and the Invention of Christianity, Hyam Maccoby, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1986 

The Reconstruction of Belief, Charles Gore DD, John Murray, London, 1930

The Search for the Twelve Apostles, William Steuart McBirnie, Tyndale House, 1997 

The Secret Gospel Morton Smith Aquarian Press, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1985 

The Truth of Christianity, WH Turton, Wells Gardner, Darton & Co Ltd, London, 1905 

The Unauthorised Version, Robin Lane Fox, Penguin, Middlesex, 1992 

The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press, New York, 1973 

Theodore Parker’s Discourses, Theodore Parker, Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, London, 1876 

Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Kittel Gerhard and Friedrich Gerhard, Eerdman’s Publishing Co, Grand Rapids, MI, 1976

Those Incredible Christians, Hugh Schonfield, Hutchinson, London, 1968 

Who Was Jesus?  A Conspiracy in Jerusalem, by Kamal Salabi, I.B. Taurus and Co Ltd., London, 1992 

Who Was Jesus?  NT Wright, SPCK, London, 1993

Why I Believe Jesus Lived, C G Colly Caldwell, Guardian of Truth, Kentucky 

 

Top of the Document

 

 

The WWW

 

Who is GA Wells? Rev Dr Gregory S. Neal

www.errantskeptics.org/G_A_Wells.htm

 

The Silent Jesus

www.askwhy.co.uk/awcnotes/cn4/0325SilentJesus.html#Justin

 

Apollonius the Nazarene, The Historical Apollonius versus the Historical Jesus 

www.apollonius.net/bernard1e.html

 

Why Did the Apostles Die? Dave Matson, 

 www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1997/4Why97.html 

 

The “Historical” Jesus by Acharya S

www.truthbeknown.com/historicaljc.htm

 

How Did the Apostles Die? 

www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1997/4/4front97.html

 

History’s Troubling Silence About Jesus, Lee Salisbury

www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=102

 

Steven Carr discusses the Christian and apostolic martyrs

www.bowness.demon.co.uk/martyrs.htm  

www.bowness.demon.co.uk/martyrs2.htm

 

Challenging the Verdict

A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ

http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsOne.htm 

http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsTwo.htm 

http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsThree.htm#Twelve

 

The Martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, Peter Kirby

http://home.earthlink.net/~kirby/

 

The Martyrdoms: A Response, Peter Kirby

www.bowness.demon.co.uk/martyrs3.htm

 

BIBLE VERSION USED

 

The Amplified Bible

The King James Version    

 

Sunday, 17 July 2005

  

Top of the Document