EVIDENCE

THAT

CHRIST NEVER DIED ON CROSS

 

PASSOVER PLOT?

MOCK CRUCIFIXION?

HOW WAS JESUS NAILED?

THE NAIL WOUNDS

WAS JESUS FATALLY WOUNDED IN THE SIDE?

DID PASSION KILL JESUS?

DID THE SOLDIERS HELP JESUS TO LIVE?

PASSOVER PLOT?

 

The Passover Plot by Hugh Schonfield sold over three million copies.  What I don’t like in this book, is how it is an interpretation of what might have happened to Jesus that occasionally rests on the gospel evidence and then on conjecture.  If you wish to get rid of Christianity, it is better to just treat the gospels as if they are telling the truth and base a heretical interpretation on this basis alone.  That would show that the gospels are not evidence for any supernatural event surrounding Christ.  If they fail to verify the resurrection and they do fail dismally, then their other supernatural claims are dubious for they are lesser claims and the resurrection was what Jesus is supposed to be all about.

    The book says that Jesus was completely sincere for there is no indication of duplicity in him (48).  That is disproved by the answer he gave to the Jews who surmised that he was casting out devils by Satan for a mysterious purpose – he replied that Satan would not do that.  Of course he would.  Besides, possessing people doesn't do Satan much good.  He would be better expending his energy putting bad suggestions into people's heads.

    No evidence is granted for the assumption that Jesus was not born of a virgin (58) even though Schonfield said he would make it clear when he was into speculation (16).

    He says that the more hostile Jews would not have sought for Jesus to be executed but for him to be locked up like the Baptist had been (98).  Then, why did they not do so especially if the assertion that only a few took Jesus seriously though many liked to listen to him (98) is true?  And why didn’t they do this at the start of his ministry?  The gospels say that things had turned sour between Jesus and the Jewish leaders at the start.

    He takes it for granted that the story in John of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead was imagined because of the parable in Luke of the rich man and Lazarus which he assumes to be a memory of Lazarus seeming to come back to life (132).  First, the two names being the same is not evidence for this and second, Luke never said that Jesus raised a Lazarus.  That is too much.

    He says the council had to be careful with how it treated Jesus in case they would cause an uprising (141).  They would have dealt with him secretly if they had.  And if Pilate thought that their bringing Jesus to him was a trap meant for him like the book surmises (141) he would not have tried Jesus nor would they have brought Jesus to Pilate for they would never have gotten away with a scam like that.

    Would the man who allegedly drugged Jesus really have allowed himself to have been spotted at the tomb?  (page 200).

    The good points of the book are these. 

    Schonfield admits that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Holy Land that took place when the Jews revolted against Rome in 66 AD saw to it that documentation and memory could not be used anymore to support the Jesus story (15).  It is good that he says that the Jews believing that the time predicted by the prophet Daniel for the coming of the Messiah had caused tremendous messianic excitement in the time of Christ (26).  This would have affected their critical faculties.  They desperately wanted deliverance from the cruel Romans who once crucified two thousand at Jerusalem (36).  They could have fell for a completely imaginary or reasonably careful fraudulent Messiah.  Daniel 7 was likewise taken by them to speak of the Messiah coming to destroy Rome the evil empire.  Josephus said that the scriptures inspired tremendous messianic fervour (219).

    It is good of him to point out that there was no obvious importance in the name of Jesus or Joshua which was given to Mary’s baby because it was a common name (60).  And he speaks of the Genesis Apocryphon from the Dead Sea Scrolls which said that Lamech suspected that his wife had been impregnated by an angel.  And that when Abraham was born a great star came up in the east.  King Nimrod wanted to kill the child so his mother fled with him in secret.  These legends could have inspired the gospel stories.

    Since the times given in John conflict with the other gospels it is argued that John was going by the Roman way of reckoning time.  Thankfully, the book says that it is very unlikely that Pilate would have had to try Jesus in the middle of night before it was morning (148).

    It does not bother Schonfield to suggest that Jesus might have known about Judas pilfering from the apostles’ common purse which strains his argument that Jesus was a genuine and honest person (155). 

    Page 160 contends that there were fourteen, not thirteen at the last supper – the beloved disciple spoken of only in John making up the fourteenth person.  But John never says that this man is not one of the twelve.

    The gospel of Mark states that a young man was found semi-naked with Jesus in the garden where Jesus was arrested.  If the young man mentioned in Mark really had been in the garden when Jesus was apprehended in order to warn him like the books says he might have been (166) he would not have been there when the band arrived.  The young man was possibly invented by libertine Christianity which may have thought Jesus had been having gay sex that night.  It is hard to see any other reason why he would have been with Jesus in a state of near undress. 

    Would Pilate really have been scared to execute a man without evidence in case the emperor would hear of it?  (175).  He allegedly did just that.  Pilate was notorious for mass murders of innocent people.

    Page 180, we read that the Jewish leaders would not have come to attend the execution of Jesus for they would have been to blame for it.  The synoptic gospels – the first three gospels – say they were.  It is certainly true that if the gospels were right to blame these leaders they would not have been present.

    Pilate and Joseph of Arimathea could have urged discretion about what was done to the corpse of Jesus (191).  The gospels never say that the failed to be discreet which is important for possibly explaining why the body vanished for it was never buried.

    Joseph asked for the soma, the body of Jesus and Pilate tells him he can have the ptoma, the corpse (192).  Did Joseph believe that Jesus was not dead?  When Joseph asks for Jesus as if he were not dead or necessarily dead and Pilate answers him using a word for Jesus indicating that he thought or pretended to think he really was dead what can we think?  Christians will object that Joseph would hardly ask Pilate for the living body of Jesus for he wouldn’t have wanted Pilate to think Jesus was alive.  The answer is perhaps that the gospel was in Greek – a different language to that used by these men.  So Pilate might not have noticed what Joseph meant.  The Gospel is saying that that though Joseph asked for body he meant a living one and this meaning was not put across to Pilate who interpreted body as meaning corpse.

    The way the story of the stabbing of Jesus with a lance (193) is told shows that it was not believed so the gospeller has to say he saw it.  So many testimonies stood against that one in John.  He was lying for he did not even give his name and anonymous testimonies are as useless as anonymous letters.  If he cared about Jesus he would have went to some safe place for he travelled enough and so he could have been able to put his name on the gospel.  He gave the impression as well that the witness wasn’t himself.  Why write, “A witness saw this”, instead of, “I saw this”?  Why turn a piece of evidence into hearsay – hearsay is no good?  If he had been claiming to have seen it himself then he was a liar.

    He says the women did not expect a resurrection when they came to anoint him (193).  They were not reliable witnesses to the resurrection when they refused to believe that Jesus would rise as he said he would accusing him of being a false prophet if he was a true prophet.

    Page 198 says something very important, Isaiah 53, which Christ thought was written about him says that the servant was buried with the wicked and buried with the wealthy in his DEATHS.  This infers that he servant was to die at least twice, he was going to survive the first death – which was probably a coma or something and many did think you were dead when in a coma.  Jesus could have schemed to die a fake death over this prophecy.

    It is significant that we read that bodies could have been stolen for magical purposes regardless of the penalty of death that hung over such actions (198).

    It is noticed that the stories of the appearances of Jesus are so vague that they could even withstand a spiritualist interpretation (205).

    A contradiction is seen between the disciples not being sure that Jesus rose when they saw him in Galilee in Matthew and the account that they met him for the first time in Jerusalem the day he rose (203).  Had Jesus appeared in Galilee to the disciples they would have been sure it was him because they would have seen him before leaving Jerusalem.

    The historian Josephus who lived through it all estimated that in the siege of Jerusalem which happened after Jesus resulted in one million one hundred thousand deaths (219).  One reason the number was that enormous what that loads of pilgrims had come to worship in the holy city (220).  Christianity was headquartered in Jerusalem.  The Jews were wiped out in Caesarea (221 or Josephus, Jewish Wars II, 18:49, 29:1).  Galilee was covered in corpses and many were enslaved (221 or Josephus, Jewish Wars III, 4:1, 10:9).  These were Jesus’ haunts.  Now for an important quotation: “If Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and therefore before A.D. 37, very few who had seen and heard him can have been alive forty years later” (221).  These people wouldn’t have had the importance and power to be able to write an exposure of Christians lies that could become big enough to strike it in dangers blow.  And people had more important things to think about than religious disputes.  The Christians would have left through persecution and we know through Eusebius there were not many of them in the Holy Land so who is going to worry about a sect that was no threat to the Jews?

    If Mark was composed in Italy, Matthew in Egypt, Luke in Greece and John in Asia Minor (282) it only makes the situation worse for the gospels were written far away from the people who might have known Jesus.

    The Testimony Book, an early book about the teaching of Christ was supposed to have been out by 50 AD and have been a short scroll that was easy to copy (266).  The fact is there is no evidence of its existence.  There is no reason why Matthew, Mark and Luke could not have invented the teachings of Jesus.  The hypothesis of an older book is based on the syntax used but that would only mean they plagiarised something which might have had nothing to do with Jesus at all.

    It is more likely that the Church at that time scorned books except the Old Testament in case they would stifle the living word of the Spirit – the Church was thoroughly Pentecostal.  Why else would the body of the first Christian writings be so small barring the possibility that the Church burned them later for they were unfavourable to its agenda?

    Papias was said to have said that Matthew put the oracles written in Hebrew together.  This is assumed to refer to his gospel.  But the book says that oracles or logia refer to the Old Testament prophecies of Jesus (267).  So Papias then did not know Matthew’s gospel but only Matthew’s compilation of the Old Testament texts that allegedly taught the gospel.

    Schonfield assumes that when Jewish tradition says that Jesus had five disciples, Matthai, Naki, Netsar, Buni and Todah that it means the five authors of the first Jesus books (270).  But that interpretation is not likely or necessary.  Why say the disciples when you mean authors?

    Page 299, Pilate lost his job in 36 or early 37 AD.  He had to answer for accusations made by the Jews and the Samaritans.  Caiaphas lost his as well at the Passover time in 37.  Jesus could not have possibly been killed later than Passover of the year 36.

    In 62 AD, the high priest was defrocked and replaced for committing illegal acts to get rid of James, Jesus’ brother including convening an illegal council (299).  If this had happened with Jesus as the gospels say then why didn’t the high priest get into bother then?  Christians answer problems like this with a whole pile of ifs and maybes and have solutions that are more complicated than non-religious ones.  They offend the law of economy that the likeliest thing is the simplest.

 

   

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MOCK CRUCIFIXION?

 

Perhaps Jesus was able to return from the dead because he was not really nailed to the cross?  Was the crucifixion a conjuring trick – we watch more impressive and difficult ones on television every week.

    The gospels only give their interpretation of what happened at Calvary.  They only assume that the nails went in.  They do not state that there was no way the crucifixion could have been faked – Jesus showing the hand marks after his death proves nothing for they could have been faked and the gospel is not clear if these were crucifixion nail marks.  If Pilate was anxious to risk his own head for Jesus and his men were corrupt then anything could have happened.

    Jesus stressed that all his actions and his words were in concord with the will and plans of God (John 11:42; 5:19).  Let us then take his prayer to God in the Garden of Gethsemane to save him from enduring the agony of crucifixion as advising us that he would not really be crucified.  The gospels name nobody who saw the nails going in.  We have no evidence but gossip that Jesus was really nailed.  Even the gospel of John which claims to have been written by a witness of Jesus’ death does not clearly say he was nailed.  Many crucifixion victims were just tied to the cross to die of suffocation.

    On his way to Calvary, Jesus told some women not to weep for him but for themselves inferring that there were more important things to weep for.  He said terrible trouble would come to the people.  If he intended to rise from the dead he could not have meant that for death is terrible even if people do rise again.  And the death of the precious Son of God even more so and he would be worth more than a million lives.  Jesus was hinting that he would not die at all as well as well as that he was not God. 

    Jesus could have been replaced with a real corpse when Joseph was asking Pilate if he could have the body.  We are not told that a close eye was kept on the cross after Jesus died.  The new body would have had the face messed up so nobody would know and maybe it was stolen from the tomb.  Perhaps, it was thought that he was buried with or after Jesus and when the tomb was said to be found empty that it was Jesus’ niche was meant.  In that case, nobody would have been stolen and Jesus being stolen would have been a case of mistaken identity.  Maybe Jesus robbed the tomb himself and scared the guards who thought he was a ghost?  Remember, Matthew only assumes that they told the Jews they saw an angel.  Maybe they said they saw Jesus meaning that Jesus was an angel or thought that the angel was Jesus.

    The John Gospel never says that Thomas put his finger in the nail wounds and his hand in the side wound though he said he would and Jesus asked him to.  Thomas would probably have regarded seeing them as enough.  Thomas might have settled for just touching the marks for penetration would seem cruel and callous.  We don’t know if the wounds were self-inflicted or deep or real.  We don’t know the circumstances so Thomas could have been duped by a magic trick or an illusion.  He may have been a sceptic but we have all seen sceptics being convinced by clever fortune-tellers.

    If Luke is telling the truth when he says the resurrection was not mentioned for forty days then maybe it was to give Jesus time to be away and hidden and settled first far away.

    The gospels cannot even prove the crucifixion for the first three gospellers were not even there and the author of John was not watching everything and has no authority anyway for that belonged to the apostles and he was not a member.  We are to believe on the apostles’ word and that’s that.

 

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HOW WAS JESUS NAILED?

 

Let us see how Jesus’ position on the cross gives us grounds for suspicion. 

    Jesus could have been nailed facing the cross which would have made him harder to recognise for his face would have been covered by the vertical post and the crossbeam and maybe by the strange sign that Pilate put up.  It could have been somebody else.

    The remains of a crucifixion victim seem to show us that a seat or sedile was used for the victim to sit on.  This took the form of a board to sit on or it could have been a bar jutting out that the groin rested on.  If Jesus had had a seat, if his feet were fastened to the cross by being crossed with a board with a nail in it which did not touch the feet or which did them no serious damage he could have survived the crucifixion easily.  The board crossing the feet would have ground down his flesh leaving a slash perhaps down to the bone on the top of the feet.  Jesus’ marks in the feet might have been minor which would satisfy the prophecy in Psalm 22 where someone seems to say the subject will have his hands and feet wounded .  Psalm 22 pictures its subject as walking and praying with the people later without any hint of a resurrection so his feet were relatively fine.  It was not a nailing then it had in mind.

    The first representation and description of the crucifixion, a picture drawn on a pillar in Rome from 193 to 235 AD mocking Jesus, shows Jesus with a donkey’s head standing on a shelf while on the cross.  Some say his hands must be nailed for no ropes were drawn but it was a quick drawing and the details about nails and ropes would have been left out.  A Roman would know how Jesus had been crucified.  The earliest description comes first.  If his feet were nailed to a shelf they would not have been seriously harmed for the victim would not be pushing up and down on the hand wounds making them worse and unbearably painful.  So if Jesus’ hands were nailed they would have been fine apart from being very painful.  However, there no cause to assume that any nailing at all took place in regard to Jesus. 

    The Jehovah’s Witnesses think that Jesus was nailed to a post without a crossbar.  Their reason is that the cross was a religious symbol even in pre-Christian times.  It is just prejudice.  The Bible says that Jesus was nailed to a tree (Acts 13:29) but a crossbar could still have been used.  If the tree was alive its leaves would have been a good cover for the victim if he was impersonating Jesus or any other form of trickery. 

   

 

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THE NAIL WOUNDS

 

Is the picture we have of a Jesus who was nailed hand and feet to the cross accurate or another unwarranted legend?

    Only the John Gospel seems to say that Jesus had nail marks in his hands and was nailed.  The other gospels only say he was crucified and most victims were simply tied to the cross.  Jesus was probably tied if the modern scholars who think that Pilate was in a catch-22 situation (that he wanted to save Jesus but was forced to decree his crucifixion) are right.  Pilate may have wished to prevent Jesus dying quickly so that he could be taken down if his fans came out in force.  The gospel reports that Thomas said he would have to see the wounds and Jesus showed him his hands.  This seems to make it probable that John means that Jesus showed him the nail marks unless Jesus was sure Thomas would not want to see any more or be cruel.  It seems unlikely that John would be simply reporting that Thomas thought there were nail marks not knowing that the only marks Jesus could show him were rope-marks but maybe John did not know what kind of marks Thomas meant.  Jesus was a carpenter since childhood and one would expect him to have nail-marks from accidents.  These could have been the wounds Thomas was looking for.  They probably were for John never mentions a nailing to the cross which is strange since he details the stabbing of Jesus on the cross.  Anyway if I am wrong, only Thomas bears witness to the hand wounds and he was an unreliable witness for he had previously scoffed at the apostles’ testimony and we have in John’s gospel what could be a second hand or third hand or even hundredth hand testimony that Thomas saw the wounds.  And it is not said that Thomas ever said he saw the wounds.  This story is full of the hallmarks of fraud and deceit for it has no concern for real evidence or honesty nor can it refer to anything that is verifiably a document from Thomas.  You will see the same pattern in the entire New Testament which suggests strongly that Jesus never existed for the evidence had to be fabricated and had to blatantly break the rules for what evidence should be so it should not count as evidence at all.

   The remains of a crucified man show that he was probably nailed by the ankles to the cross and his arms were tied (page 49, 68 The Jesus Inquest).

    John only says that Thomas said that he could put his finger in the nail marks (John 20:25, RSV, Catholic Edition) which does not mean he thought he could push the finger right through the hands.  The soft flesh of the finger would press a tiny bit into the mark.  Touching the mark firmly would be described by many as putting your finger into the mark and it is in a sense.

    The feet were probably just tied to the cross for the gospels would not be able to resist telling us about the nailed feet.  They knew nailed feet would make it a bit more likely that Jesus really died.

    There is no evidence that Jesus had feet with nail holes apart from a passage in Psalm 22 that the Bible never says means Jesus.  The Bible uses bits of the Psalms as alleged prophecies and discards unsuitable bits even when they refer to the same person so the fact that some bits of the Psalm were taken to be about Jesus does not mean that the whole lot was.  People on a diet like Jesus’ could surprise you with what they can do despite serious wounds (The Turin Shroud is Genuine, page 139).  Luke says Jesus showed his friends his hands and his feet but here could have been rope marks or anything on them.  The ropes would cut into the flesh with the endless pushing up and down on the cross to relieve the lungs and the muscles.  Luke never says that the Lord was nailed which is a strange omission for a gospel that endeavours to prove that Jesus rose.  Luke is probably inferring that he was not nailed.  And many were often just tied to the cross.  The apostles had nothing to do with any gospel that fails to prove that Jesus was dead for that was their job to prove that and to verify the resurrection. 

    The women who grabbed the risen Christ by the feet in Matthew 28 would not have done so had there been nail wounds in them.  This would mean that the man was an impostor or an illusion if Jesus had been nailed in the feet.

    Even if he had been nailed hand and foot these injuries should not have killed him.  He could not have bled to death.  It was asphyxiation and not the loss of blood that crucified people died from.  The suggestion that Jesus would have died of bleeding or of cold on the cross or in the tomb is mere conjecture.

 

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WAS JESUS FATALLY WOUNDED IN THE SIDE?

 

Though nothing in the accounts say it, Christian defenders like to say that if Jesus had been alive on the cross when he was pierced in the side and blood and water came out according to John then that would have killed him.

   Most scholars approaching the story from the viewpoint of professional historical analysis conclude that the piercing story is unhistorical.  It never happened.

    According to the testimony of John, Jesus was pierced on the cross by a spear in the side after he was accepted to be dead.  Blood and water came out.  John alone reports this.  He is not enough on his own as a witness as even his own gospel said when Jesus said that the law is right to require at least two independent witnesses.  John had to make do with one witness when he believed that only at least two were any good.  It certainly indicated that he dishonestly wanted people to forget about the rule and wanted to trick them into believing what he wrote.  The side wound story just isn’t reliable.

    John applied Zechariah’s prophecy that the people would look on the one they have thrust through and mourn for him to Jesus.  This infers a distance of time for they thrust and look and then realise their mistake which would take time.  It implies that Jesus died long after he was pierced.  Did Jesus live for years after this time?

    The way John abused prophecy makes him unreliable and shows that he probably invented the spearing and the leg breaking of the thieves to force his story to seem to have been prefigured in the scriptures.  Neither the Psalm or Zechariah really prophesied about Jesus as you can see from my book False Prophets. Why spear Jesus instead of breaking his legs like the rest?  It makes no sense. 

    John gives the impression that the blood and water came out separately alongside one another which would be a sure sign that he or his witness was never there at all for he or his witness was fibbing.  He says there is only his witness’s word for it.  Why didn’t Mary write a statement that it was true?  She was there so she must not have seen it which would imply it never happened.  John was heretical in demanding that we accept this testimony of his for the Old Testament Law of God said that there had to be two independent and thoroughly checked witnesses to a crime or anything before it could be believed.  He did not even tell us who he was so we know nothing about him and so he made a virtue out of credulity which says enough about him. 

    The witness emphasised that it was true about the blood and water so that we might believe (John 19:35).  Believe what?  In Jesus as a messenger of God for he then mentions prophecies that no bones would be broken and that he would be pierced.  He could not have meant that the blood and water proved that Jesus was dead because a person is more certainly dead when nothing comes out unless he meant he was alive.  He practically shouted at us that he did not take the stab as proof that Jesus was dead.  The piercing prophecy is very ambiguous.  If the stabbing was never mentioned in the gospels the Christians would be saying the prophecy means the nailing of Christ to the cross.

    It was deceptive of the witness to say we should believe him when he could not even give his name and when he said stupid things like Pilate declaring that Jesus was innocent of any crime after Jesus confessed to the crime of claming to be a king to his face!

    And stabbing is so rare that one questions if Jesus was stabbed at all.  In 290 AD, two godly crucifixion victims Marcellus and Marcellinus were stabbed because they irritated the soldiers by praising God.  But never was it known for anybody to be stabbed to ensure they were dead.

    John says that it was accepted that Jesus was dead before he was pierced.  This makes it improbable that Jesus was stabbed at all.  When they did not break his legs to make extra sure they would have hardly stabbed him through the heart.  The cut in the side could have been for checking if Jesus was alive to see if he would react to get him off the cross before it was too late.

    It may be that there was no stabbing when only John mentions it.  The older gospels wanted to present the resurrection as a miracle and if a man is crucified and then thrust through after death it is more of a miracle.  But just as easily, this might be a clue that the wound was fairly superficial and bore no relevance.  Thomas said he wanted to put his hand in the side of Jesus and Jesus asked him to do it so it might have been a centimetre in depth or just a wide gash but not that deep.

  Let us pretend that we can believe in the wounding story.

    It is thought that if this piercing was incapable of killing Jesus it would have been done again through the heart for the Romans wanted to ensure Jesus was dead so it did kill Jesus if he was not dead.

    We would have been eagerly told if the lance alone could have killed Jesus or if there was a second thrust through the heart if the first was not deep enough but we are not.  If the Shroud is genuine then they never intended to kill him for the cut would not have touched the heart (The Turin Shroud is Genuine, page 68). 

    If Jesus was pierced, then it was done to see if he would react to the pain for people thought then that dead men could bleed.  When he didn’t react they were more certain that he was dead.  The wound need not have been deep. 

    The Roman executioners thought a dead man could bleed so they might not have made another thrust through the heart when the blood came out.  Blood can come out of wounds by means of gravity soon after death (page 83, The Turin Shroud is Genuine) and that misled them.

   Perhaps the piercing was not near the heart but done lower down and pierced the bladder.  Maybe this was the water that was seen coming out .  Jesus might have drank a lot of water during his trial after being weakened during his ordeal in the garden of Gethsemane. 

   Some say that the bladder would have been accidentally emptied due to the trauma and abuse Jesus had got.  But perhaps the wound is a sign that it was not that bad after all.  The bladder would have been hard to strike from an upward angle for the bone would protect it but maybe Jesus was crucified on ground level.  They chose a safe place to go through the motions of making sure he was dead.  The John gospel did not try to shut up those who would have used that explanation which suggests either that since the author had just made the stab story up which was why it didn’t occur to him that his Jesus might have been stabbed in the bladder – lies are improved over time as criticisms are taken into account – or that he wanted to hint that Jesus was pierced in the bladder.

    The wound could have been made in the large intestine indicating that when water came out that Jesus had some kind of sickness for that is very abnormal.  It is thought that Jesus could have lived up to a week after receiving this wound.  I prefer the bladder hypothesis.

    The witness could have been mistaken about the water for he saw something terrible and which was traumatic for him. 

    Christians argue that Jesus emitted blood but did not bleed.  The water was blood serum which separates from the blood during decomposition and it and some blood came out.  But blood serum is not called water any more than tea is water.  The liquid could have been saliva from Jesus’ mouth or the drink he took that might look like water from a bit of a distance which came out just as the wound emitted blood.  It could have been a trickle of sweat.

    Jesus was not dead long enough for the blood to separate from the plasma or did they nail a dead man and say the reason he was motionless was because he was drugged?  The disagreements between what Jesus said on the cross in the gospels and the improbabilities could be taken as evidence that his actions during the crucifixion were made up. 

    Anyway, the fluid could have gathered between his lungs and ribs because of the scourging so it does not prove that Jesus was dead (The Turin Shroud is Genuine, page 116).  This would mean the wound need not have been serious.

   There is nothing about the side wound to make us confident that Jesus was really dead.

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DID PASSION KILL JESUS?

 

If Jesus died on the cross that would have been a miracle for unless he was poisoned there was nothing done to him that need have killed him.

    Jesus said that he was sorrowful even unto death in the garden prior to his arrest (Matthew 28:38).  He meant that the sorrow could kill him.  But he does not say it would kill him.  If cancer could kill you and you do something about it, it could and couldn’t kill you at the same time.  The agony in the garden gives us no reason to suppose that it led to Jesus’ premature death on the cross.  The scholars who suppose that Jesus had had a heart attack in the Garden under the pressure are merely assuming.  Jesus recovered well enough to endure his scourging and the mocking and to carry the cross a bit, his health was fine.

    The scourging at the pillar need not have made Jesus die faster on the cross for it was part of the standard procedure and many lasted for several days on a cross after it.  Pilate probably would have made the men go easy on Jesus if the gospels are right to say that Pilate wished him no harm.  Some say that the scourging could have been worse than that that was usually meted out for Pilate hoped to make the Jews pity Jesus and relent.  The gospels would tell us if it was for they liked to present the Jews as monsters and anyway it was not hard to make a scourging look worse than it did especially when the people would have seen Jesus on a balcony at a distance.  Jesus was scourged and Pilate sought to release him after it.  Pilate who knew that the Jews who believed in stoning people to death would not have been that easily manipulated.  They had made up their minds that they wanted Jesus to die a cruel death.

    If Simon of Cyrene really helped carry Jesus’ cross for him then that would have made Jesus strong enough to survive the crucifixion. 

    We have no evidence that Jesus took a heart attack or was poisoned or nailed or seriously injured and that that was why he died.  These possibilities have to be ignored for they are only speculation.  We have to work on the records.

    Jesus yelled before he apparently died.  He should have died of suffocation if he should have died at all.  Crucifixion killed its victims by the pressure it put on the chest and they kept having to rise up and down on the cross to relieve the pressure and eventually they got too exhausted to do that and asphyxiated.  But back to Jesus, then he could not have yelled.  This suggests that the death was merely a faint.  It certainly suggests that he wasn’t nailed and or that he had a sedile to rest on for he would have died of suffocation then and been unable to shout.

    The gospels never say the Romans who crucified him wanted him dead and it is admitted that Jesus had at least one ally among them who would certainly have wanted him to make it.

    The word translated resurrection or resurrected is anhistemi which means to wake up (page 201, Jesus Lived in India).  You do not need to be dead to wake up so there was no inevitable death.  The word anastasis for physical body coming back to life was not used at all in the New Testament which does not fare well for Christian theology (Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?)

    John records that Jesus crucified handed over his spirit to God praying, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”  But the living do that too.  It was a quote from the Psalms and this Psalm was written for a man offering his life to God WITHOUT any notion of dying.  Is this a clue that Jesus never died?  Jesus said he would lay down his life to take it up again (John 10:17) which could just mean he would do it on the last day.

    John has Jesus telling the apostles that he will go away to prepare a place for them and come back for them.  The Church interprets this as referring to preparing a place in Heaven for them after he goes away from the world by dying on the cross.  But Jesus has no need to take time to prepare a place for God who empowers can make a place just with a snap of his fingers.  Moreover, Heaven should be prepared already like a B&B that is ready for anybody who is suitable to avail of it.  What Jesus is saying is that he will survive the cross and where he goes to hide after the apostles will follow.  He will go to live far away and they will join him. 

 

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DID THE SOLDIERS HELP JESUS TO LIVE?

 

The crucifixion of Jesus could have been engineered to make it look worse than it did.  The intention could have been to prevent it from killing Jesus.

    Jesus was crucified by very corrupt and deceitful men who were callous to the decree that they could play games for his clothes as he hung on the cross.  Can you believe that somebody as rich as Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus who was even more rich (The Turin Shroud is Genuine, page 122) would have stood by and let Jesus die when they disapproved of the crucifixion when they could have bribed the Romans to save Jesus and fake his death?  Matthew says the soldiers loved bribes and Josephus tells us that Pilate was as bad.  The Talmud implies that rich people could give soldiers a backhander to rescue people from their crosses (The Turin Shroud is Genuine, page 78).  If that happened with Jesus who would know about it?  Nobody!

    How can you be sure Jesus was really executed when there were nothing but frauds dealing with him?

    It gets more suspicious when you read that Pilate was kind enough to try and save Jesus at the risk of his own job and life.  And Matthew says that the centurion and his men acclaimed Jesus as the Son of God when they saw the earthquake that coincided with his death (27).  An earthquake alone could not convert them so they must have been believers before they nailed Jesus and the quake increased their faith.

    Why did the centurion say Jesus was the Son of God using the past tense meaning Jesus was dead just because he thought he saw him breathing no more?  Obviously there was not much of an effort made to make sure Jesus was dead.  It was known that pulses were not taken for nobody knew how reliable they were for you could think you felt no pulse for a person who was really alive.

    Jesus prayed for the Romans saying, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”.  Or so Luke says.  Some scholars say he meant the Jews and the Romans but the gospels are clear the Jews knew fine well what they were doing and as Jesus was on the cross naturally it would have to refer to those who hammered the nails in.  There would be no point in Jesus praying for people who never repent.  The Son of God who is perfect would only pray when he can be answered or for people there is hope for, for he always does what is best.  Jesus said at the tomb of Lazarus that his father in Heaven always hears him.  So Jesus is prophesying the conversion of the men who nailed him.  He uses the present tense too when he could have said, “Father, I ask that you will forgive them for they know not what they do”.  He wants them pardoned now indicating that though they did not know they were doing wrong they were good men.  They may have believed in Jesus but believed that it was Jesus’ will that they crucify him.  Jesus said that only true believers could be forgiven so he is saying they are true believers.  For Jesus to pray forgiveness on men for crucifying him while he arranged for himself to be captured and crucified is hypocrisy at its worst.

    Pilate knew that Jesus should have lasted longer on the cross and was astonished that he died so fast (Mark 15:44).  It was a centurion who was probably the one who had come to support Jesus who told Pilate that he was dead (Mark 15:45).  This is important for he would have been keen to get Jesus off the cross before he really died if he was comatose.  There is no proof that the spear in the side would have dispatched Jesus if he was still alive after being certified dead and the water emerging from the wound perhaps indicates that Jesus was not stabbed in any vital organs but in the large intestine which was holding the water and the blood came from the wound.

    The events surrounding Jesus’ passion and death coincided with his superstitious misreading of the Old Testament texts which he surmised were about him.  This points to some collaboration between Jesus or his friends and the soldiers so it is reasonable to suppose that they would have helped him to live. 

    The gospels say that Jesus got away with attracting large crowds, claiming to be the Son of God and superior to the state and to be the Messiah for about three years while Rome was merciless with anybody who could be a rival.  I don’t believe that he did but if he did then it shows he had the Romans in his back pocket and could have gotten away with anything and used them to fake his death.  The death had to be faked for Pilate was behaving illegally by letting him go about which shows that Pilate would have stooped to any level to save him.

    Jesus asks for wine in John and seems dead afterwards.  It could have been laced with opium which was readily obtainable in his country (page 183, Jesus Lived in India) and it would have induced him into a coma that made him look dead.  If the soldiers wanted to save him they had to help him play dead and time was running out for he had to be dead before the Sabbath for they did not want to break his legs to hasten death.  Jesus who reportedly went out of his way to suffer might not have refused the wine he was offered before he was crucified if it was like smelling salts and would make him suffer more by making him more alert.  The Romans would have forced it on him for they were cruel and did not have it around for nothing unless they wanted to save him.  It was no ordinary wine for it was offered for a reason and not out of friendship.  He refused it and was allowed to for it was too early to knock himself out.  It is important that two others were crucified with Jesus it is not said that they were offered the wine.

   The problem with the opium is that Jesus was in very bad shape physically and for it to make his body seem dead would mean he would slip into a coma from which he would have been very unlikely to recover (page 70, The Jesus Inquest).  Perhaps he didn't recover but the believers thought he would and only pretended they buried him while they had taken him to a safe place to pretend they had revived him.  Perhaps if he died they thought it was necessary to prevent shame by getting somebody to pretend to be the resurrected Jesus.  Perhaps between some seeing this "Jesus" and the desperate need to believe some actually hallucinated other appearances of Jesus.  But there is a chance that Jesus could have come out of the coma.

    Another possibility is that Jesus was knocked out by a dose of mandrake.  Mandrake was used as an anaesthetic and was put in vinegar as we know from a doctor’s journal of the time.  Jesus drank vinegar before he “died”. 

http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/146%20mandrake.schtml gives us the research of Gloria Moss that there would be morphine in the opium that would increase the breathing rate of Jesus while the gospels say he gave up the ghost or stopped breathing on the cross.  She said that morphine is absorbed slowly and Jesus went out like a light rapidly.  She says the vinegar would have reduced the power of the morphine.  She prefers the view that the sponge was laced with mandrake which works as a general anaesthetic when mixed with the alcohol in the vinegar and that could have knocked Jesus out.  She states that the power of the mandrake root was known in those times and before. 

    Now, the sponge could have contained only a small amount of vinegar with the bulk of the liquid being made up of opium.  Plus it is possible to breath rapidly but very lightly so that nobody knows you are breathing.  Remember, Jesus would have been very sick and weakened.  Furthermore, the gospels only say that Jesus gave up the ghost and are not being scientific but assuming on the basis of what was seen that Jesus died.  That does not mean they were right.  Nobody held a piece of glass to his mouth to see if it would steam.  The gospel may say Jesus took the vinegar and then died but there could have been an interval between both events giving time for him to absorb the morphine.  He would have absorbed it faster through hunger and thirst and it would have affected him easily for he was exhausted and feeling faint.  There is absolutely no evidence against the view that Jesus was drugged.  It is more possible that he was than that he wasn’t when he got the drink.

    Perhaps Jesus called out that God had forsaken him probably meaning that God was going to let him die, to avert suspicion or perhaps Jesus thought that he was dying and forsaken in the sense that God was not going to let his plot succeed.  He would have been asphyxiating if the crucifixion killed him and a dying saint is more likely to shout in surrender to God than to say something like that when shouting takes a huge effort.

    The Mishna decreed that for Jews, the proof of death was when animals would start eating the body (The Turin Shroud is Genuine, page 78).  If Jesus had been executed for the Jews then it would have been done in such a way as to satisfy all the Jews that he was dead but it wasn’t.  Unless something was up Jesus would have been thrown to animals.

    Jesus was crucified on the Sabbath Eve as an excuse for taking him off the cross fast for bodies were not left up over the Sabbath.  If they had waited to Sunday to crucify him he would have had to stay on the cross until he was eaten.

    There is no evidence that Jesus was on the cross long after he “died” though Mark says he was there until evening.  But if you read the gospels they never say what hour Jesus died though they say what happened at the ninth hour.  Those who say that Jesus died about three and was removed about six (eg. The Turin Shroud is Genuine, page 123) are just guessing.  He could and would have been taken down quick so that the Sabbath rest would be prepared for in time.

    Perhaps the burial of Jesus was a hoax.  If Jesus had been taken to the tomb alive by mistake the Romans would have had to rescue him and spirit him away to safety and keep him away permanently and blame the disciples before it was too late and certainly before the women would come to finish the anointing of the body.

   Jesus' burial may have been a hoax in order to get him to safety. 

 

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Conclusion: There is no evidence that Jesus really died on the Cross.  It is possible that he was taken from the cross alive or was never in fact crucified.  Or he may have been crucified but not nailed.  No wonder he was able to show up again soon after!   We can assume any one of these without saying that there are errors in the Bible but just saying that its interpretation of what happened was right.

 

WORKS CONSULTED

 

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

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

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

Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch, East Sussex, 1995

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

In Search of Certainty, John Guest Regal Books, Ventura, California, 1983

Jesus and the Four Gospels, John Drane,ion Books, Herts, 1984

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

Jesus the Evidence, Ian Wilson Pan, London 1985

Mind Out of Time, Ian Wilson, Gollanez, London, 1981

Mother of Nations, Joan Ashton, Veritas, Dublin, 1988

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

The Encyclopaedia of Bible Difficulties, Gleason W Archer, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1982

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln, Corgi, London, 1982

The Jesus Conspiracy, Holger Kersten and Elmar R Gruber, Element, Dorset, 1995

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

The Messianic Legacy, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln, Corgi, London, 1987

The Metaphor of God Incarnate, John Hick, SCM Press Ltd, London, 1993

The Passover Plot, Hugh Schonfield, Element Books, Dorset, 1996

The Resurrection Factor, Josh McDowell, Alpha Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1993

The Resurrection of Jesus, Pinchas Lapide, SPCK, London, 1984 

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

The Turin Shroud is Genuine, Rodney Hoare, Souvenir Press, London, 1998HoarHo

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

The Vatican Papers, Nino Lo Bello, New English Library, Sevenoaks, Kent, 1982

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

The Womb and the Tomb, Hugh Montefiore, Fount – HarperCollins, London, 1992

Verdict on the Empty Tomb, Val Grieve, Falcon, London, 1976 

Who Moved the Stone? Frank Morison, OM Publishing Cumbria, 1997

Why People believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer, Freeman, New York, 1997

 

 

BIBLE VERSION USED 

The Amplified Bible 

 

THE WWW 

 

Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?  Dan Barker debates Mike Horner. 

www.ffrf.org/debates/barker_horner.html

 

A Naturalistic Account of the Resurrection

http://www.phlab.missouri.edu/~c570529/PhilosoStop/resurrection.html

 

Earliest Christianity, G A Wells, Internet Infidels

www.infidels.org/library/modern/g_a_wells/earliest.html

 

A Resurrection Debate by G A Wells, 

www.infidels.org/library/modern/g_a_wells/resurrection.html

 

Still Standing on Sinking Sand, Farrell Till, 

www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1997/1/1sink97.html

 

Why I Don’t Buy the Resurrection Story, by Richard Carrier

www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/index.shtml

 

The Resurrection by Steven Carr 

www.bowness.demon.co.uk/resr.htm 

 

The Evangelical Apologists: Are They Reliable? Robert Price

www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/beyond_born_again/chap5.html

 

Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?  Dan Barker versus Mike Horner  www.ffrf.org/debates/barker_horner.html 

 

Jesus Slept!  This page asks if Jesus could have been doped on the cross meaning that the explanation for the resurrection was that he was never dead. 

http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/146%20mandrake.schtml  

 

Beyond Born Again

http://www.infidels.org//library/modern/robert_price/beyond_born_again/chap6.html 

 

Did Early Christians use Hallucinogenic Mushrooms?  Archaeological Evidence.  Franco Fabbro.

http://people.etnoteam.it/maiocchi/fabbro.htm 

 

Blessed Easter

www.mindspring.com/~bab5/BIB/lessons.htm  

 

Craig’s Empty Tomb and Habermas on the Post-Resurrection Appearances of Jesus

www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/indef/4e.html  

 

The Case For Christianity Examined: Truth or Lies? 

www.askwhy.co.uk/awstruth/ChristianCase.html  

 

Challenging the Verdict

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

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

     

 13/06/08

 

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