Gospel Evidence for Jesus is Worthless

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PROPHETIC EVIDENCE

JESUS’ TEACHING MADE UP

FOUNDATIONAL ERRORS IMPLY THERE WAS NO JESUS

THE OBSCURE CHRIST

EVANGELICAL EVIDENCES

THE EMBARRASSMENT ARGUMENT

THE SOBRIETY ARGUMENT FOR JESUS’ EXISTENCE

 

 

The Four Gospels purport to be evidence for Jesus Christ and his life and death and resurrection.  The very fact that they put so much time into discussing what Jesus supposedly said about preparing for the second coming when he comes in glory to destroy evil forever and judge the living and the dead indicates that they expected this to happen in a matter of months or even weeks!  For that reason, those who had the gospels wouldn’t have published them preferring instead to prepare those who were already Christians for the second coming instead of trying to get more converts in.  Also it is wise to be careful with prophetic books and not publish them widely in case the prophecies are proven false.  We can be confident that the four gospels were kept confidential for decades.  That made it easier for the Church to fool the world with its story of a Jesus who was as real as the man on the moon.  There is proof that the bones of the Jesus story were got not from a Jesus of history but from erroneous interpretations of the Old Testament predictions and statements that were mistaken for predictions or twisted to make them look like predictions.   There is proof that the teaching was stolen from other teachers.  Some of the Jesus story came from the lives of Jewish holymen.  There is proof that the gospels lied that Jesus was popular.  The arguments for them being honest and telling the truth are weak and futile.  The gospel evidence for Jesus is worthless.  We have no evidence – except for some dubious evidence about the crucifixion and one or two other big things – outside the gospels that the gospels are telling the truth.

 

Some scholars think that many of Jesus' gospel teachings are authentic and they assume that these teachings can be identified amid the mythmaking and miracle story dross.  This is nonsense for these teachings are inseparable from the claim that Jesus did miracles.  In the Sermon on the Mount for example Jesus' teachings were so insane that it was a miracle that he was not lynched and nobody would have listened to him.  He also mentioned miracles in the Sermon saying that if anybody did miracles and didn't see him as Lord though calling him Lord then he would reject that person.  Why believe any of the Sermon when doing so depends on the miracle people who had better things to do listening to tripe?  The sayings of Jesus could have been made up just like the Jews had made up the sayings of David and Solomon in the Book of Proverbs.  The Gospel placenames such as Arimathea and Magdala and Emmaus and Cana have never been identified.  Even the story how Jesus got his disciples had to be a miracle - they met him briefly and were smitten and went after him.  Christians have observed the similarity between many of the the Jesus stories and the Old Testament stories of prophets and holy men.  For example, Luke has Jesus raising a woman's son from the dead on the same hill as Elisha the prophet had allegedly raised a woman's son from the dead centuries before.  It is more reasonable to believe that the gospel writers were looking for tales to invent and so they used the Old Testament stories than to believe the Christian claim that God set up Jesus' life to match the stories as if the stories were some kind of prediction about Jesus.

 

The evidence for Jesus and his deeds is not as good as the evidence say for the life of somebody and their actions today.  If Jesus lived today and we were living two thousand years into the future we would have evidence about him from his bebo profile.  Does that not show you how poor and unsatisfactory the evidence Christianity gives you for him and his deeds is?  Does it not show that there is something badly amiss?  Credibility is the last thing Christianity can ever cloak itself with.

 

It is normal not to believe some things you should believe or to believe that what is false is actually true.  That is life.  Yet Christianity says we are under obligation to believe what it believes about Jesus!  We are not allowed the same privileges with Jesus.

 

PROPHETIC EVIDENCE

 

Prophecies in the Old Testament that were not concerned with Jesus were used to make the Jesus story which shows that the Jesus story is untrue.  That was where the plot for the gospels came from.

 

Surprisingly, the evidence from bible prophecy indicates not necessarily that Jesus never existed but that lots of things were made up about him because of them and that he may never have existed. 

 

Jesus had a lot of harsh things to say about Jewish tradition.  Yet this tradition was to blame for much of the unjustified messianic interpretation of Old Testament texts.  Jesus himself according to the gospels interpreted prophecies according to tradition even though he scorned that tradition left, right and centre and eventually ended up on the cross over his distain.

 

Christians pored over the Old Testament and weaved its plots into the Jesus story.

 

The annunciation was invented from the story of the angel appearing to the barren wife of Manoah to inform her of the miracle birth of Samson (Judges 13).  The angel tells her that she will have a baby and what he will be and that he will save his people from the Philistines.  The angel told Mary the same things but said that Jesus would save his people from sin.

 

Mary’s Magnificat was plagiarised from that of Hanna (1 Samuel 2).  Both women had miracle births.

 

Jesus allegedly cured a man with a withered hand.  The man had one withered hand and he was cured in a house of worship.  In 1 Kings 13, Jeroboam is in the Temple and his hand is miraculously restored.

 

Moses’ face was transfigured and Jesus was transfigured on the Mount of Olives. 

 

The story of Elisha multiplying twenty barley loaves to feed one hundred men and Elisha telling somebody else to distribute the food and some being left over after they had eaten must have suggested the New Testament story of Jesus multiplying bread and fish for thousands and getting the apostles to give it out and some being left over.

 

Jesus calming the storm comes from Psalm 107 which describes men in a boat being caught in a storm and crying to the Lord who calms the storm.  This Psalm is just recounting the experience of many and is not to be understood as a prediction for you can’t see predictions everywhere.

 

God is everywhere and on the sea so the book of Job poetically says that God walks on the sea (Job 9:8).  He is not predicting anything about Jesus for the context intended that these descriptions of divine power were to show how powerful God is.  Jesus could not have shown that before he physically walked on water.  The fact that Mark says that Jesus did not intend to be seen but planned to walk by the boat on the water that night proves the story was an invention for a real miracle worker only uses his powers as signs of love and not just for short-cuts.  Job then inspired the tale of Jesus walking on the water.

 

Elisha raised a dead boy and so did Jesus.  The spirit of God came upon Samson and upon Jesus.

 

The entry into Jerusalem on a donkey was taken right out of Zechariah which says a king will do this.  But if Jesus was really welcomed as a king then why didn’t he become one and be made one?  Anybody could ride into Jerusalem on a donkey and say they are a king and not take over like Jesus.  He would have had to have been enthroned to be a real king.

 

Even the Psalm where the author complains that his friend who ate bread with him at table has been called a prophecy of Judas betraying Jesus after the last supper!

 

The events surrounding the death of Jesus were inspired by Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53.

 

Jesus might not have existed when his life story was constructed from ancient texts.  If he did exist we have lost the historical Jesus. 

 

But what if Jesus purposely fulfilled the prophecies?  Maybe he did but it is easier for a person to write his story in line with them than it is for him to fulfil them even if they are easy.  We don’t have the independent and unbiased testimony necessary to claim that Jesus did the fulfilling himself.  The gospels incredibly claim that Jesus did engineer his life to fit prophecy when he could.  He speaks of doing things so that the prophets might be fulfilled as if he needed to do something to fulfil them.  If the future can be seen you don’t need to deliberately fulfil it.  You have to have very serious reasons for saying a person miraculously fulfilled prophecy for it is so unnatural and abnormal and there is something badly wrong when it easy.  If Jesus miraculously fulfilled prophecies easy to fulfil then miracles are a sign that miracles are no good for being signs for anything else.

 

The prophecy of Daniel about the 70 weeks is supposed to give the year in which the Messiah would die.  This could have led to somebody in the later first century thinking that the Messiah despite the absence of evidence lived some years before and died in that year.  He would have then depended on supposed divine visions and revelations to get details about this obscure Christ and used the prophecy to prove that Jesus existed on the assumption that scripture cannot err.  He would have worked out that the Messiah must have been raised from the dead when he failed to fulfil the prophecies about the glorious power of the Messiah over the world so he would come again to do that.  Maybe Daniel’s prophecy was the reason the Jesus story started off.

 

A man whose life story contains a lot of alleged happenings that mirror happenings in books written years before could have been made up.  Or at least much of his story could have been made up.  Some would say in Jesus’ case that this need not call the reports into question for the Old Testament prefigured him or that Jesus’ life was mapped out by God to copy some OT events.  But the Old Testament and Jesus never said it did that.  Jesus said it prophesied about him but that is different and implies he just happened to fulfil them and did not do it on purpose.  Jesus’ life matching the Old Testament “history” is more likely to mean the gospellers and their predecessors had to invent a history for him and scoured the Old Testament to get ideas.  We know that in the Book of Mormon, that a character called Alma whose life story is uncannily almost identical to Paul’s though he was born before Jesus and Paul and in America has to be fictional for it is just too close to be true.  And Christians bigotedly say this of Alma though their Jesus tale was as bad.  We know the Jesus story was written by somebody that had the Old Testament though it claims to have been written before Christ.  Alma and Jesus have their fictitiousness in common.

 

It is startling but true that novels from the time of Jesus have stories of lovers which are parted by death and the dead female is buried and stolen from the tomb by grave robbers upon discovering that she is alive and the grave clothes are left behind and people think he or she has risen from the dead and when he thinks she may have survived he goes and searches for her and when he finds her he is totally unable to believe that she is not a ghost (WWW, Robert M Price, Christ a fiction).  Christians will claim the Jesus story inspired this  but the Jesus story could just as easily have been inspired by it.  Love stories are always going to be better known than Jesus stories so Jesus’ story did come from the love story. 

 

Bible Christians still say the Devil made fake dinosaur bones to fool the world into rejecting the book of Genesis – and if Christians could say that then how do you know that those who said Jesus existed, died and rose were not as stubborn?  They were unreliable if they were.  How do we know that the apostles who may have had a say in the formation of the New Testament were not just as bad?  Maybe they would just have been as biased.  Perhaps they said that the Devil destroyed the evidence for Jesus’ existence.  Perhaps they claimed that when the body of Jesus turned up that it was a satanic hoax geared to discredit the resurrection?  It is absolutely true that the gospellers did not use eyewitness testimony as much as they used the Old Testament prophecies to figure out what Jesus must have done and what happened in his life.  Matthew went to the Wisdom of Solomon and Zechariah to create the details about Jesus and his passion that were lacking in Mark.

 

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JESUS’ TEACHING MADE UP

 

 

Strong evidence that Jesus was made up comes from the fact that his teaching was stolen from other teachers and authorities. 

 

The similarities between Jesus’ teaching and the wording he used and that of James in the epistle of James would make one suspect that the teachings were copied and stolen from James. James never quotes Jesus but just uses his own authority.  This supports this hypothesis.

 

A critic of GA Wells, James Patrick Holding stated that Jesus must have existed though GA Wells thinks he didn’t because there couldn’t be a Church that gets its ethical teaching from a non-existent teacher (Wells Without Water).  But this is a distortion of logic because it is possible to hallucinate that a man risen from the dead has appeared to you and made you a prophet.  The Mormon Church was full of prophets in the early days and look at it now.  Joseph Smith was only one of many prophets in that faith.  When Joseph Smith could get ethical teachings from a fictitious God who used to be a man and who is totally different from the Christian God why couldn’t this happen in the more credulous first century?

 

The parable of the Prodigal Son appeared in the Deuteronomy Rabbah 2:24, a commentary on the Law.

 

Hillel taught that we must treat others as we like them to treat us which fullness the Law and the Prophets (Shabbath 31a) which is almost identical to what Jesus allegedly said years later.

 

As Karen Armstrong noted in her book, The First Christian, “The more we read of the rabbis, the more we see that Jesus’ teaching is for the most part well within the rabbinic traditions and not strikingly original.  Like the Pharisees, he is insistent that ‘Charity and deeds of loving kindness are equal to all the mitzvot in the Torah’ (Tosefta Peah 4:19)” (page 30). 

 

It is hard to see how the crowds could have been as spellbound by Jesus as the gospel says when he only served up what was on the menu for the previous hundred years. 

 

It was child’s play to put teachings into Jesus’ mouth that he never gave.

 

It was no bother to the Gospellers to invent the sermons that Jesus allegedly preached and the teachings he uttered.  They did not give dates for when Jesus said this or that.  Memories are short and minds wander during lectures.  Not everybody would catch all that was said.  Do you remember exactly what the priest preached at Mass two weeks ago?  But Jesus’ teachings were recorded long after they were allegedly given which does not vouch for accuracy.  And the Gospellers did not care when they did not say anybody was taking notes at the sermons and that they used those notes.  Luke says he consulted records but gave no proof that the records were authenticated.  The fact that the teaching was not verified though Jesus said his teaching was one of the proofs that he was the Son of God proves that Jesus was a fake.  Jesus implied that even if his doctrine was not hitting the bull’s-eye then his miracles had to be fake.  He proclaimed that miracles proved nothing if they came from a man whose doctrine was mistaken.  To believe in Jesus is to trust Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and not Jesus at all.  They are the gods of Christendom.  They have the audacity to claim to be servants of the Son of God.

 

Jesus talks too much.  He is too obscure and repetitive at times.  This garrulousness is a device to avoid saying too much about what he is supposed to have got up to.  The less said about a man’s actions the better if he does not exist or was no saint.  His discourses could not have been constructed from memory so they must have been made up.  If they were, then there is no reason why the stories of Jesus’ deeds could not also have been made up.  It is evidence that they probably were.  Don’t say the information came from notebooks for there is no evidence that Jesus had anything recorded.  There is evidence that he did not expect the people to depend on memory (Matthew 10:27).  He did not have his apostles taking notes or memorising for he said the Holy Spirit would come and remind them of what he had been saying (John 14:26).  Never is any hint given that notes were kept though Christian books lie that the apostles did keep notebooks.  We are told that the word was to be shouted from the rooftops (Matthew 10:27) when he should have said be read from the rooftops but didn’t.  We are told that he would send the Holy Spirit to remind the apostles what he said indicating that no books would be kept or needed to be.  When the points in Jesus’ parables could all have been expressed in one paragraph and many of the parables are repetitive it is a sign of inauthenticity and artificial gospel-mongering.

 

Jesus told the apostles that he spoke in parables to prevent understanding among the outsiders.  If that is true then the stories about crowds coming to hear him are fiction for you don’t come to listen to a man who can’t speak plainly to you.   

 

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FOUNDATIONAL ERRORS IMPLY THERE WAS NO JESUS

 

There are four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  They purport to inform us about the life of Jesus Christ.  Have we any evidence that these men were more interested in what they wanted us to believe than in what the evidence said?

 

If the idols and alleged mentors of the four evangelists, the apostles were deranged with credulity or incapable of religious honesty then so were they.

 

A foundational error is an indication in the story that undermines a large part of the story.  If the foundation is faulty the whole structure built on it falls as well.  For example, if we find a clue in the gospels that the trial of Jesus never happened that is a foundational error and means that a large part of the gospels is make-believe or cannot be believed even if it is not.  If we find a clue that the apostles did not go about with Jesus that means that the gospels are entirely false for the gospels supposedly comprise their testimony. 

 

We find foundational errors for everything in the gospels.

 

One indication of the value of foundational errors is to be seen in the following example.  We read in the gospels that Jesus condemned divorce.  Now what is supposed to have started Jesus saying divorce was always adultery and wrong was the Pharisees coming up to test him asking, “Does the law allow a man to divorce his wife?”  That makes it very very likely that if they did not do this, that somebody made up the diatribe against divorce.  If the thing that started Jesus off never happened and this can be shown then we can safely dismiss the rest of the story as fiction.  The start is the foundation of the story and no story that lies on a bad foundation should be accepted.  We might be wrong yes but if we keep the rule about foundational errors rejecting the whole account is all we can do.  It keeps things simple and we must always go after the simplest suggestion which is to reject the whole story when a foundational error is the rock the story is built on.

 

Some will object that maybe the account of what Jesus said was true but the gospel erred in assuming that the Pharisees started the discussion off.  That is possible.  It might be right.  But we cannot accept it.  The rules of evidence require that we focus on what the records say and leave speculation out.  What is written and what is seen matters more than what we think.  We have no evidence that the objectors are right.  So it is undeniable, if the gospel says the Pharisees started the ball rolling and is wrong then we have to hold that the discourse Jesus made against divorce was never uttered.

 

Incidentally,  the Pharisees would not have come up to Jesus and asked him that for they knew that he knew the law well enough to know that it did allow divorce and they knew he claimed he did not contradict the law and was careful with his words.  The gospel says they were trying to test him to see if he would reiterate the teaching of the law which is simply not plausible.

 

If the gospels commit foundational errors then their idol may have not existed.  As a rule, the more foundational errors we find the less likely it is that their Jesus was a historical entity.  We will see that hardly anything in the gospels is free from such error.  The gospels are fairy-tales.  Their realistic look is a fabrication, an illusion.  Jesus did not exist.

 

The Gospels say that the Jewish leaders and the Romans were desperate to kill Jesus but then say that they let him go about.  The Jewish leaders were subjected to terrible abuse by Jesus who once called them vipers to their faces (Matthew 23).  This would have turned the people against Jesus if it really happened because at the end of the day the crowds who followed him were devoted Jews and only went after Jesus because he taught them their religion.  For Jesus to attack the leadership would have meant a total loss of popularity.  To attack the scribes and the Pharisees and the Jewish priesthood was to attack Judaism.  Also if you take the gospels literally when they say the Jews said Jesus was illegitimate or born of adultery then they wouldn’t have followed him either for according to their faith a bastard wasn’t fit to go near the Temple and had to be banned according to the commands of God in the Law of Moses never mind being a prophet or the son of God.  For Jesus to claim to be a prophet or the Son of God would have been extremely offensive to the Jews if he had been born of parents who were or were thought to be not married to each other.

 

To say the Jewish leaders and Romans wanted to kill Jesus above all things while giving him his freedom to teach for three years is a foundational error for they wouldn’t have tolerated him five minutes never mind three years.  If the gospels are wrong about Jesus’ freedom then everything they say about him is untrue.  He could not have worked and preached if he would have been dragged away to the dungeon the moment he opened his mouth.

 

Another foundational error is the assertion that the Jews had to scheme to arrest and dispose of Jesus quietly for there would be a revolt while it is also said that the public knew what happened to him.  If Jesus was destroyed quietly then the story of the passion is fictitious for nobody would have known what happened and he would have been taken without the apostles being about.

 

The gospels say that Jesus was popular with the people and it was hoped and suspected by most that he would be the Christ, an illegal claim that guaranteed the death penalty from the ruthless Roman rulers.  If he had been he would have been crucified a lot lot sooner

 

Another foundational error is that Jesus was allowed into Jerusalem on a donkey acting like a messianic king.  John says the apostles never realised that this fulfilled an Old Testament prophecy until after Jesus had risen (12:16).  But they would have found out from the crowd many of whom would have known what Jesus was trying to get across by his behaviour.  The apostles had to have known that the Messiah was to do what Jesus did for there was tremendous stress on the Messiah in those days.  The gospel is just trying to rationalise why the entry into Jerusalem was not mentioned at the start.  The real reason was that it never happened.

 

Another foundational error is the claim of the gospels that the apostles were the foundation of faith in Jesus and his witnesses even though they had abandoned him.  It would take a lot of credulity to forsake a miracle-working prophet who knew the future and who could raise the dead like the gospels say.  They were not reliable so how could they be the foundation?  The Church believes the apostles when they allegedly accepted the testimony of the women and their friends when they said they saw the risen Jesus – we have no evidence but a gospel assertion that they did say that – but it does not believe the apostles were right the time they did not believe these people (Mark 16:14). 

 

Suppose somebody believes in something under threat of persecution, and later disbelieves it under pain of Hell.  Suppose I am expected to believe in something just because somebody could have suffered for believing it.  Suppose I accept the deranged logic of Christianity that the apostles told the truth about the resurrection because they suffered for it.  Then clearly I should believe the somebody that disbelieved under pain of Hell.  The apostles did that.  Paedophiles suffer for their faith that child-molestation isn’t wrong.  Christians are praising them by saying the apostles suffering for faith means anything.

 

Besides somebody believing something and suffering and dying for it doesn’t obligate anybody else to believe what they believe and Christianity dares to say that we are obligated to believe in what the apostles believed or rot in Hell.  Their logic is fully of sugary bigotry.

 

Matthew 15:29-39 has Jesus going up a hill to avoid the crowds presumably.  But anyway they find him indicating that far from being the Son of God he was below average intelligence and so dense that he could not make away though he knew they were coming.  They brought their sick a long way and up the hill over him.  This story cannot be true for if Jesus had been a healer he would not have caused them all this bother.  Christians say he probably came down the hill to save the sick from the burden of being carried up but the story does not say that and in fact says he sat down up the hill when the crowds came along.  Jesus worrying about what others would think if he did not pay the tax (Matthew 17:27) is too unbelievable to be true.  He was the last person that could be accused of being like that.

 

Another foundational error is the fact that the Gospels claim to have been constructed out of a huge body of data about Jesus.  But where is this data?  Nobody has tried to preserve it which is extraordinary considering that the Church was persecuted and needed to write down all it could.  Why did Paul not care?  Was it because there was no data?  It had to be.  The Gnostics alone cared about the traditions that were not in the gospels but the Church scorned them as heretical humbug.  And it was certainly right to do so for the traditions were often nonsensical.  But when the Gnostics were able to keep traditions however bad they were why could the orthodox not have done the same?  The whole thing suggests that the gospels were made up.

 

Another foundational error is the assertion that the Jews and Romans were obsessed with destroying Jesus’ work and let the apostles preach in public and let his brothers by blood live though they carried royal blood in their veins. 

 

The gospel story that false witnesses spoke against Jesus at his trial (eg. Mark 14) shows that the gospellers were untrustworthy when it came to giving little mundane details meaning that they cannot be relied upon in more serious matters.  There were no false witnesses for none were needed, Jesus had committed the sacrilege of claiming to be the man closest to God while preaching what was considered to be heresy – a crime.  The High Priest tore his robes when Jesus made the claim before him though Jesus had made it before.  The purpose of the trial was to set Jesus up and if the false witnesses did not exist the trial didn’t happen so there was no trial and no crucifixion for the trial prepared the way for the cross.  Get it?  No crucifixion, no Jesus.

 

John’s author mentioned that he wrote the gospel so that we might believe.  If he expects us to believe on the strength of his word alone then his standards for what is to be considered credible is low, much too low.  He made his Jesus say that he did not accept human testimony such as the Baptist’s.  This is a hint that his book was tongue-in-cheek for it was just a human testimony.  It shares a very small number of things with the other gospels so it is saying that they are religious novels too.

 

The Final Response page on the Internet by Steven Carr shows how much of the life of Jesus was stolen from the Old Testament.  The Christians regarded the Old Testament as a prophecy of Jesus and so they felt justified in doing things like making out that when Elisha multiplied food to feed a crowd that Jesus must have done the same though they never heard of it.  We also see that it is odd that Jairus, the man whose daughter Jesus raised from the dead, has a name meaning he awakens.  This suggests that somebody made up the story first and the name of the man later because the story was about a resurrection.

 

The gospel books claimed to be for backing up the faith and yet one gospel has one woman seeing the risen Jesus and another one has more.  You need to mention all the witnesses you can if you want to be credible.

 

Had the synoptic gospellers been interested in verification they would not have used the same stories so much.  Many of the accounts are nearly word for word identical.  They would have found different ones if they did any investigating.  If they wanted to say that the other stories were true all they had to do was to outline them and say so.  You never tell what is already reputed or known about an important person unless there is nothing else to tell or to add which would mean that the person is a myth.

 

The gospels claim they are for instructing the world.  Therefore, they thought that Jesus’ errors were not errors.  And his errors are as prominent as sore thumbs.  For example, he said that when God said that he was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob it proved that there is a resurrection!  They closed their minds to believe lies.  The lies must have been made up pretty late and were not doing the rounds as tradition first for they would have been corrected and improved.  They are further evidence for Jesus possibly being non-historical. We have no reason to believe that he was a real man when liars wrote his gospels for him.

 

We know that Mark was inventing his gospel for he never said there were guards watching the tomb of Jesus which Christians would have had to say even if it were not true for their resurrection story had no credibility without that claim.  Matthew was the inventor of the guards story.  What else did he invent?

The resurrection narratives are completely lacking even in basic routine scientific verification.  For example, no effort was said to have been made to ensure that it was really Jesus who died on the cross – we are not told if anybody who knew Jesus had a good view of his face which was disfigured anyway.  We read of a testimony that Jesus was pierced in the side on the cross but no proof is given that in his highly strung state at the cross that the alleged witness only thought he saw that.  Maybe Jesus was just hit with a bloody lance and it looked like he was wounded in the side.  Jesus would have been sweaty so that explains the blood and the water the witness saw.

 

The lack of verification indicates that the stories were made up by the gospellers for if something had really happened all objections would have been carefully refuted and they would have invented stories to remove all doubts.  There is no evidence that the very early Church let the public read the gospels and plenty of indications that they did not.  Another problem is the fact that Luke and Matthew report different things regarding the birth of Jesus and thereabouts.  All four gospels differ on the events surrounding the resurrection.  Yet they and Jesus believed that before anything could be accepted as reliable there had to be at least two level-headed and honest witnesses as the God of the Law of Moses commanded.  The gospels then defied the law and showed themselves to be capable of religious fraud.  Luke reported that Jesus once said that having the Law of Moses and the Prophets was more important than listening to anybody who managed to return from the dead which shows that those gospel-mongers who stressed the importance of Jesus himself were frauds.  The supposedly most reliable account of Jesus’ life is his passion and crucifixion.  But these stories are full of things that should have been said to silence critics but which were not showing that the stories were invented.  Stories should get more convincing as critics are responded to.

 

The authors of the gospels were perfectly capable of believing or claiming that Jesus existed, worked miracles or rose, against the facts.

 

When all the big things in the Jesus story are fiction it follows that the lesser stories cannot be trusted at all either.

 

The gospels give us no reason to believe in the existence of Jesus.  Even if they did we could safely ignore them for we have proof that even the apostles taught that they never knew of a man called Jesus when he was alive before his crucifixion.

   

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THE OBSCURE CHRIST

 

The gospels go on as if Jesus was as well known and as popular as tea bags are today (Matthew 4:23-25; Matthew 21; John 6:10; John 12:19).  His parable of the mustard seed which he thought was the smallest seed in the world shows how little an impact he was claiming to be making and he said the seed would later grow to make a huge tree.

 

Jesus was a heretic according to the standards adhered to by the Jews and the Law enforced the murder of heretics (Deuteronomy 13, 18).  The Jews Jesus moralised at were more than keen to comply (Luke 4:28-30; John 11:48; Acts 7:54-60).  Jesus showed he thought himself to be Christ from his baptism (John 1) and the Bible says he never lied so he had to admit he was the Messiah if that is what he was.  Moreover, false messiahs could drive Rome to destroy the nation (John 11:48).  The Jews could not afford to let Jesus live.  If there had been a Jesus he would have been assassinated by a lone assassin.  That way the Jews would not have needed to resort to the scandal of getting Jesus crucified or getting the blame.

 

Rome could not let Jesus live or go about freely even if he were only a spiritual king for that could be a cover for subversive activity for once he had the crowd under his spell he could display another side to his character and start off a rebellion.  Since 6 AD there had been so much turbulence that there was no way the Romans could have been expected to even think about tolerating Jesus and all the prefects in Palestine and especially Pilate were well known for their appalling barbarity and extreme intolerance (page 368, The Encyclopaedia of Unbelief).  And a spiritual king can be more dangerous than a political king for the former claims to be inspired by God.  Also the Romans had abolished the Jewish monarchy and to claim to be the Messiah was to claim the Israelite throne (The Myth-Maker, page 37, 1986 Edition, Wiedenfield and Nicholson, London).  That of course makes claiming to be the Messiah ten times worse.  Why did he not drop or change the title and call himself King of Hearts or something?  He couldn’t because he was not that kind of a king but a political Messiah.  The Gospels are lying about Jesus being free.  This is proof that nearly everything about Jesus in the gospels had to have been made up.  Jesus’ popularity shows that he gave no teaching that left the people spellbound and did no miracles.  This again eliminates nearly everything written about him.  A man who has so much legend about him is not likely to have ever existed.

 

Jesus said that he had nowhere to lay his head meaning that he had nowhere comfortable to have a sleep (Luke 9).  That shows how unpopular he was and that nobody gave a toss about him.  He also said that a prophet has no honour among his own country and that he was no exception (John 4:44).

 

The entry of Jesus into Jerusalem to be welcomed by all its citizens is untrue for days later they were begging for his execution.  And Jesus was never anointed as king so how could the people welcome him as king?  They would not have hailed him as king for that would guarantee that Rome would destroy their idol and get them into trouble too for welcoming him to Jerusalem.  And what about the real king, Herod?  Jesus could not be king unless he vanquished him first.

 

In Luke, we read that King Herod was anxious to meet Jesus.  If that is true then Jesus was not well known and hard to pin down.  Whoever the king wants to see the king sees – but only if he or she exists.  Pilate was as keen and never met him until the trial either.  That must have been because there never was a Jesus for them to meet.

 

If Pilate wanted to save Jesus like the New Testament says then why didn’t he get some witnesses to defend him?  Jesus must have been reclusive or a myth when there were none.  Why didn’t the Sanhedrin find some pro-Jesus witnesses at least to keep up appearances and have them taken apart by their coached false witnesses?

  

John 16:3 and Acts 3:17 speak of the leaders not knowing Jesus by spiritual experience meaning who he is so it cannot be said that the gospels purposely contradict themselves on his popularity.  The Bible uses know in the ordinary way and know in the sense that God inspires you to know who Jesus is.

 

The New Testament describes the apostles as very timid men and then it contradicts this by attributing the courage to risk their lives by being at Jesus’ heels all the time to them.  The stories of Jesus and his entourage are make-believe.

 

If Jesus had been so popular then why did Mark, the first gospeller write so little about him?  And why did he waste time and ink recording silly parables with morals in them that we all know anyway?  Did his imagination go dull on him when he was inventing his saviour?  It must have.

 

If the gospels lied so much about Jesus then he could just as easily have been invented.  When you make up a God you have a better chance of promoting him by saying he was once well known.  The lies mean nothing in the gospels should be taken as evidence for Jesus.  When a person lies a lot it does not mean that all they say is a lie but that all that might not be a lie should be neither believed or disbelieved.

 

He Walked Among Us (pages 29, 30) claims that there was not much attention paid to Jesus for in those days the secular press ignored miracle stories just like it does today.  This is nonsense for the Jews were very religious and such stories would have been enthusiastically demanded as signs that God was going to remove the Romans from Palestine.  They were gullible times.  People don’t have much interest in religion these days and still there is a high demand for miracle stories but stuff like healing and astrology do get a very prominent place in papers.  Anything to do with mental or physical health will always be popular and is destined for the papers if there enough people interested in it.  The book claims that the Romans ignored Jesus for he did not attract huge crowds and that gave them no concern.  If he did miracles he had to attract them.  The book is in conflict with the gospels here which brag about the crowd.  The book says that anywhere the people wanted to make a king of Jesus he slipped away.  That would have been enough to get him the attention of the Romans.  The book will contradict the gospels before it would admit that Jesus’ miracles were shown to be fake by the lack of interest in them. 

 

The silence or near-silence of non-biblical writers about Jesus refutes his alleged flavour of the century status.  Jesus if he existed was an obscure ordinary man.

 

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EVANGELICAL EVIDENCES

 

Is the Christian view that the gospels are justification for Christendom’s beliefs about Christ and its assumption that he existed right?

 

Some say that when you have the gospel of Mark 15:21 saying that Simon who helped carry the cross of Jesus was the father of Alexander and Rufus and goes into such detail as if to indicate that these people were well known that the gospels are believable (page 101, The Reason for God).  But this gospel was written in Rome.  Nobody in Rome cared who Simon, Alexander and Rufus were.  In fact, the mention of them makes the gospel seem contrived to match what a historian would expect.

 

Modern scholarship proves that the gospels are unreliable.  It exposes the gullibility of the people and the New Testament writers.  It exposes their duplicity.  Religionislies.com proves that the gospels were hidden which would have boosted the Christian hoax if it were a hoax.

 

We now know that the Jewish Scriptures reached their final form a long time after Christians would make you believe they were written.  The gospels present Jesus as teaching love your neighbour as yourself and treat others as you would like them to treat you as summaries of the Law and the Prophets despite the fact that these works are full of God’s hatred for unbelievers and his thirst for blood.  This might suggest that a legend about a man having lived centuries before when the Law and Prophets were taking shape and were not so violent and nasty and was worked into the gospels.

 

The Romans did not tolerate anybody who was suspected of being the Messiah like Jesus was full stop, therefore the story of the ministry was entirely made up.  It is no use pointing out things that are allegedly marks of authenticity because they match other records or because they seem to have been too shameful to have been invented for an invented history of your grandfather would have the same elements even if it were unintended. 

 

Jesus told lies and made no prophecies of the future that were provably made before the event and the gospels still said he was a true reliable prophet of God.  The Jews were falsely accused by Jesus of blasphemy for saying that Satan could be doing exorcisms though Jesus for a mysterious evil purpose.  It was false for it was possible.

 

Nine-tenths of Jesus’ life is omitted from the gospels.  Perhaps Jesus did nothing interesting up to his ministry or never talked about it?  But he must have ministered to people before his big ministry.  So, that is not it.  The gospels tend to be quite potty in the information they have selected so is that why they tell us so little?  Yes to a large extent though it seems potty books would give some details of his pre-ministry life if it were potty to do so but then when it is potty you never know.  We can think that the gospellers always reasoned that it was best to say little about Jesus for he never existed and the less lies told the less chance you have of being caught out.  Christians object that they would have described loads of private miracles and portrayed Jesus as not being a public figure if they did but if that had already been done by some with some measure of success which is how inventing fake historical characters starts they would have been able to go a step further and be more daring.  It is obvious that they used the reasoning to a large extent too from the material they chose.

 

It is most likely that the explanation for Jesus’ hidden life is that he never had a life at all.  We are not told what Jesus qualifications were for his schooling and training are mysteries to us.  We would be if Jesus was the supreme revelation from God.  If there had been a Jesus we would be for it would not have been overlooked. 

 

It is argued that if Jesus were an invention he would have been given more impressive credentials.  He would have been declared a priest of the line of Aaron, etc. etc. (page 142, Jesus Hypotheses).  But most lies are believable anyway.  But at the same time, what better or more lofty credentials could one have than to be declared Son of God and king of the Jews and priest and Messiah and supreme prophet allegedly by God himself?  It is simply not true that the gospels were restrained in their opinion of Jesus.

 

It is argued that Nazareth, an unimportant place, is prominent in the gospel story inferring that Jesus must have existed for why single out this place and make it so important that it had to be the base for a Messiah?  They will even say that Matthew invented (true) a prophecy to explain this anomaly (false).  But obscure or non-existent prophets have to be plotted in out-of-the-way places.  You wouldn’t like to say that Jesus was based in Bethlehem or Jerusalem if he never lived.  Matthew could have invented the prophecy for hundreds of reasons or perhaps he thought it was in the Bible though it was not.  If Nazareth did not exist in those days and might have been an embryonic settlement of Nazarenes, consecrated secretive and loner men, then it was natural to plot Jesus there.  There is something wrong when Jesus never visited the neighbouring town of Sepphoris when it was so close and so big and busy and the capital of Galilee.  Perhaps there was a mysterious and religious Jesus there and the inventor of Christ just made it out that it was this man he meant though it was not if anybody contradicted his account. 

 

The evangelists might have been afraid to attribute big fancy miracles to Jesus – like turning all the flowers of the Mount of Olives into peacocks – because people would be asking them where his miracle powers are now.  Jesus’ miracles may not have included making a new mountain rise out of the ground in a second but they are just as absurd as that in their own way.  For example, would God magically wither a fig tree just because Jesus looked for figs on it and found none?

 

There are few statements in the New Testament which conflict with history or archaeology.  When you want your book to be the best chance at becoming irrefutable you will keep it in harmony with history and geography.  Even many novelists use real names and real geographical places in their works of fiction to make them more believable and to give the readers a better feel. 

 

The Gospellers were afraid of God.  Since God works against lies and errors you have to make what you say as believable as possible and that is what they would have done. 

 

The John Gospel does not have a great structure or planning or selection of data for to be written by one who knew all about Jesus.  Yet the very last verse in it says that the information was extremely plentiful.  Then why is there so much in the passion narrative that is a duplicate of material in the other gospels?  Why does Jesus tend to go on a bit and ramble and be boring, repetitious and vague?  Why cannot he have better and more stories about Jesus than he does?  The answer is that the Jesus stories were scarce and the gospel had to be padded out with silly or invented ones.  And when a famous person has no story that many people can vouch for then that person is a myth.  It is no use pointing to characters who are accepted as historical on the testimony of one writer or whatever.  That does not prove that there was a Jesus.  Believing in a man’s reality is only as good as what evidence exists for or against it.  A single witness is believable but not very believable if he or she testifies to somebody existing even when the subject is a believable one. 

 

The Jews were prejudiced against the notion of God becoming man.  Christians say that the gospel story that God did this must mean that it is true because Jesus’ witnesses were Jews.  This is rubbish.  Every religion has its heretics.  Jesus fought to root out prejudice.  The Old Testament never said that God would never become a man.  Real Jews stick to what the scriptures say.  And besides Jesus never claimed to be almighty God.

 

The absurd notion that it is easier to believe in a miracle resurrection than to believe that Jesus was accidentally buried alive and escaped from the tomb despite the stone and the soldiers is one of the many rationalisations for the veracity of the gospels that Christians come up with.  So if your wallet disappears and you are sure that nobody that was in the house that day to your knowledge did it that means it is a miracle.  It is easier to believe it was a miracle than that somebody got into the house without being seen.  This is not rational thinking.  It is brainwashed thinking.  The natural explanation no matter how complicated should be considered true as long as it avoids belief in a miracle.  Christians are exposed to conditioning.

 

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THE EMBARRASSMENT ARGUMENT

 

It is supposed that since the gospels say things about Jesus that were embarrassing for believers and the Church that he must have existed.  So evidence against Jesus becomes evidence for him!

 

The gospels could have left them out even if they were true.  The stories might be mistakes.  Many religions and apparitions contain unsavoury material.  Such mistakes do happen.  So the unsavoury gospel yarns could be mistakes and you can make mistakes whether or not it is a real person you are writing about.

 

The unsavouries are an indicator of fallibility and that there couldn’t have been much good to tell about Jesus when they had to settle for a lot of unflattering stuff – the supposedly embarrassing material makes us think there was no Jesus when stories about him were hard to come by.  Then again, Hinduism has lots of shocking stories about its favourite god, Krishna, so there was a strong religious tradition for attributing evil or bizarre antics for gods though you wanted people to start devotion to them.  The idea was that gods could do things people were not allowed to do and still be considered good.  In a sick way, people like Gods they say are perfect but who still exhibit flaws.  Its human nature.  That is why Gods doing malicious things while claiming to be paragons of holiness got more popular not less.  Good in the religious sense is boring. 

 

The embarrassment argument is totally worthless regarding attempts to prove the Jesus tale and indicates that it is questionable.

 

Perhaps the shaming bits and pieces about Jesus were not shaming to the early Church when it put them in the gospels.  It didn’t have to include them.  People might not have realised that they should have been ashamed.  The moral sense in those days was very dull.  The Church had long enough to see that Jesus could have his popularity despite some of the unsavoury stories about him so it would have ceased to have even noticed that the stories were shocking and would not have desired to hide them.    This is what has happened throughout most of Christian history.  People have heard about the terrible things God and Jesus did and yet they did not register these actions as evil and distasteful.  They would have felt uncomfortable but as they were desensitised by Church conditioning to overlook and applaud what they seen, rightly or wrongly, as evil in the scriptures they took little heed.

Jesus’ racist spitefulness towards the distraught Canaanite lady (Matthew 15), his saying that he came only to save Israel, his agony in the garden, his triumphant ride into Jerusalem which implies that he was claiming to be a political Messiah, his crucifixion, his having a sign above his head calling him the King of the Jews – allegedly implying the same - on the cross and his shouting that God had abandoned him on the cross and his tomb being left unguarded between the supposed resurrection and his appearances are listed as proof that he was a real person.  The bizarre thing is that the reasoning that the embarrassing things are most probably true is usually promoted by people who scoff at Jesus’ miracles.  What could be more embarrassing than saying a person did miracles if they did not do it?  If you can make up miracles you can make up anything – end of story.  We know on many grounds, for example, from the fact that it would be beneath God’s dignity to do miracles, that the wonders did not take place.

 

One major embarrassment was Jesus choosing an apostle, Judas, who betrayed him which led to Jesus’ death by crucifixion.  But it could be that Judas never meant Jesus to die and was only after the money.  The Gospels hint as much.  Judas could have believed that God would take care of Jesus.  And Jesus said that the apostles were to witness to him on earth and Judas did that in his own way.  He did not see the risen Jesus but he made the resurrection happen.  And the gospels would have us believe that he knew Jesus could and would rise and that is enough for him to be a giver of evidence for Jesus. 

 

John baptising sinners and Jesus getting baptised seems embarrassing but the Church would have said that it was done for some reason other than to be cleansed of sin.  Perhaps Jesus was showing he was renouncing ordinary life and beginning a new career as a wandering prophet.  The Church said he got baptised on our behalf to show he planned to atone for our sin though he was innocent.

 

The gospels themselves give accidental clues that Jesus never existed especially when they say embarrassing things about Jesus that scholars think they would not have made up.  But they did make everything up.  Here is one instance.  To believe that Jesus was able to cause trouble in the temple and put animals out and stop people coming in means he had a huge army with him to help him for the temple was a very big area is too much.  He would have been apprehended as soon as he threw over the first stall if not as soon as he walked in the gate.  In fact he would not have got in for the Temple was protected against rioters.  The guards knew how to spot suspicious gatherings and could nip such in the bud. 

 

If Jesus was violent in the Temple he would have been arrested there and then which means that the stories of the last supper and his later arrest and crucifixion and resurrection are untrue for he was in jail.

 

It is held that the crucifixion must have really happened because there was no way the Church would have made it up for it was so shameful and nobody was likely to recognise a crucified criminal as the Son of God.  People do unlikely things and we are told the crucifixion did nothing to stop converts running to the Church after the supposed resurrection.  The Bible itself then rejects the argument.  Dying gods were in fashion among the pagans.

 

The Church answered the critics by arguing that the Old Testament predicted that the crucifixion would befall the Son of God.  So the Church had nothing to worry about - it was nothing that it couldn’t handle.  To admit that the Son of God died at all in any way would have been embarrassing but the Church solved that embarrassment by inventing the idea of Jesus having to undergo the shame of the cross for our sins. 

 

There was nothing to stop the Church from inventing the crucifixion simply because it wanted to teach that the blood of Jesus saves us from all sin.  And perhaps the apostles were first told of the crucifixion of the saviour in visions and they didn’t invent it. 

 

Anyway, any harm done by the shame would have been excelled by the advantage of making people feel that Jesus took on all that pain to atone for their sins.  The embryonic Church promoted the crucifixion of Jesus without much evidence to help it demonstrate that it did not prove that he was a liar when he said he was the Son of God.  When that happened the crucifixion yarn could not be seen as a major problem. 

 

What is embarrassing is how the gospels say that Jesus wanted to be crucified.  He did not protect himself with his miracles or threaten those who would crucify him.  He did not walk away when he had the chance before his arrest though he knew what was coming.  He was deliberately provocative during his trial.  Jesus told Peter that he was a Satan when Peter said he hoped Jesus would not be crucified.  A Jesus who deliberately courts death on a cross is a fatal blunder and Paul would have denied that Jesus did this.  Paul stated that Jesus was a victim who was killed by demons which refutes the view that Jesus pulled his crucifixion on himself. 

 

I am perturbed by people who say the cross story proves that Jesus lived for they would not make that up for it was too shameful and these people have no problem believing the miracles were made up or that Jesus’ claim to be God or the Son of God was made up.  It is embarrassing to have to make up things like that so why not the cross as well?

 

The bit about Joseph and Mary leaving the boy Jesus in Jerusalem by mistake is said to be true for it was too embarrassing on all three to have been made up (page 150, Jesus Hypotheses).  But maybe the gospeller did not care how he made Jesus’ parents look but wanted to show that Jesus was too wise to listen to everything they said.

 

It is also said that if the birth of Jesus had been invented a secret birth in Bethlehem would have been created (page 164, Jesus Hypotheses).  Such arguments are simplistic.  Lots of fictitious stories say that many people had witnessed the events.

 

Jesus asked God why he forsook him on the cross.  This was a quote from a psalm.  A Jew who habitually prayed the blasphemous psalms might not have realised what he was saying when he asked God why he had forsaken him and could easily have made the mistake of putting this insult in the mouth of a non-existent Messiah.  Catholics pray, “Lead us not into temptation”, which accuses God of wanting us to sin which is against the Bible and even say that Jesus made this prayer. 

 

All of the unpleasant tales can be reconciled with an interpretation satisfactory to the Christian though not often to the objective person who looks hard enough but they were not written for geniuses but simple people.  The early Church might have written away and just prayed for guidance to solve the apparent problems of the New Testament.  There would have been much confusion for they would not have got far in theological development and so the problems are unlikely to have bothered them.  Cardinal Newman said that a thousand difficulties did not make one doubt and had his own problems with Catholic theology.  The embarrassment argument is completely irrelevant.  The blusher bits don’t make it probable that the gospels have truth or a ring of truth.  For example, in the story of the Canaanite woman Jesus might have told her that he meant no offence by saying that she was a dog before he said it.  A Christian would argue this way but it is really changing the story.

 

The sign, “The king of the Jews,” that Pilate reportedly put over Jesus on the cross is continuously put forward as evidence that the gospels were being truthful at least with this for it is supposedly embarrassing.  It implies Jesus was a political king while the Christians saw him as a spiritual king.  But the truth is the Christians believe Jesus is a political king by right and will be in actuality when he returns to earth.  The fact that the gospels like Pilate proves they are saying he erected the sign because he believed Jesus really was a king by right.  They said Jesus claimed to be the anointed one or Christ which means political king so why should they have a problem with the sign?  Why would they be embarrassed about the sign if say Pilate put it up in mockery or faith?

 

The gospels present Jesus as a non-political king so they had nothing to be ashamed of in the King of the Jews title and entry into Jerusalem bit.  They were writing for pillocks anyway.  As for his brutality towards the pagan woman and others the Jews were used to having a nasty vindictive racist god.  The embarrassing bits were not in the least embarrassing at all.

 

The embarrassment of the contraception ban in the Catholic Church does not mean that what the Catholic Church teaches about contraception is right or sincere.  Jesus said that the meek shall inherit the earth – so if you react to an enemy by being positive and kindly instead of with bitterness and hatred you shall inherit the earth.  That is a clear mark of insanity for the enemy will laugh at the meek and destroy him or her.  Equally insane is Jesus’ teaching that if you won’t look after the property of another you wouldn’t look after your own either and neither God or man would trust you with it (Luke 16:12).  We are accustomed to stupidity in the gospels so it is foolish to use that shameful stupidity as evidence that Jesus must have lived.  And yet Jesus said that if his doctrine is false his resurrection could not really happen for it depends on the teaching being right for a sign that sinners are being saved cannot be valid if the message of salvation is doubtful.

 

Some of Jesus’ disciples had names suggesting that they were his lieutenants and that he was involved in stirring up a revolt against the Romans.  The realistic parts of the gospel can be explained without a real Jesus.  A fictitious character can be invented by stealing the details and events from some real person’s life and the myth might even bear a similar name to the model.

 

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THE SOBRIETY ARGUMENT FOR JESUS’ EXISTENCE

 

It is argued by Christian scholars that since the gospels are not characterised by absurd plots and claims that they must be history.  There is nothing in them for example, about Jesus becoming the Emperor of Rome or turning the Mediterranean Sea into blood or battling vampires and chatting with dragons.

 

This argument sounds rational but is quite bizarre.  It says stories grow more embellished over time.  So it all happens one step at a time.  But that means there will be miracle stories that are sober and they are not history.  It means that for a time the miracle stories though made up will be pretty tame.  It means that the gospels could have been put down on paper at a time when the stories were tame or the authors just used the tame stories. 

 

The argument is a flop for it assumes too much.  It assumes needlessly that the gospels would not have been written down until the stories about Jesus evolved to an outrageous stage.  We must remember too that most of the miracle stories of the Bible are pretty tame too so the Christians would have preferred these types of stories for they would have been more used to them.  Tame miracle stories only mean you like tame miracle stories not that you are being truthful.

 

The New Testament writers lied about Jesus’ life and miracles.  They lied also about little historical details.  They claimed that Jesus cured ten lepers – the number is a small detail.  If they concocted small details they cannot be trusted with details of import for perhaps they left out some detail that throws the miracles or resurrection into a different light.  Jesus himself said that anybody that lies in small things cannot be trusted in more important things – he was suggesting that lies always destroy trust so he forbids lies even when you feel forced by the circumstances to tell them for that is still harming trust.  Jesus refuted the popular Christian belief that there are minor errors or lies in the Bible and yet it is still the word of God.

 

The early Christians had plenty of time to learn what to say and what not to say.  The gospellers would have heard people who attributed lots of miracles to Jesus being greeted with, “If Jesus healed so much when he was on earth why cannot he do it as much now?”  This taught them to avoid drawing out the response that people would make if they presented a Jesus who feverishly cast magic spells around him like his life depended on it.  They knew that the more restraint the better it would be for intellectuals would be convinced easier.  But they knew some silly stories were necessary but they had to be restrained.

 

There are piles of books on the market without absurd plots.  The gospellers knew, as all mature people do, that it is better not to make a story too far-fetched.

 

Nevertheless, the gospel miracles are silly to some degree however small.  They could not have happened for there is no God crazy enough to do them.  The devil would rather promise everlasting happiness for doing as much evil as you can and do miracles for that purpose so its not him.  So there is nothing to do them unless you want to blame psychic powers.

 

All miracles are useless for they help one when all of us should be helped when we don’t have free will.

 

If useless miracles have happened then we must believe every outlandish miracle report.  The same applies to miracles that look useless to us so there is no use in pretending that if they are done for a reason we cannot figure out that it is different. 

 

This makes all the New Testament miracles and signs bizarre and unbelievable.  And why are they ridiculous?  Because when you believe in a miracle you believe in it because of the witnesses so it is the witnesses and not the miracle you are believing because the miracle gives you no reason to believe but they do.  God would want you to put belief in him and not in human testimony first so if he does miracles you would see ones yourself.  If Jesus did miracles he would prove it to you today.  It does not matter if he forces you to believe because he cannot force you do to good and love him or so he says.  Religion proclaims miracles to get people to join up.  Miracles are about deceitful organisations looking for control over your thinking.  They are about men not God. 

 

The Church says the resurrection of Jesus was the greatest miracle ever and it could not be a hoax from men or Satan.  If that is true then the gospellers thought it was a better miracle than turning Mount Everest into bread and so the sobriety argument does not support them but refutes them.  Jesus battled demons.  Is this really any worse than battling vampires?  Is feeding 5000 men with a few baskets of food more sensible than believing that Lord Krishna in India was able to duplicate himself so that there was a huge number of Krishnas on earth?

 

The argument that a strange story is likely to be true when it is sober and could be a lot stranger doesn’t apply in the case of miracles because strange events are natural and miracles require a supernatural source.  The former are more likely than the latter.

 

The gospels taught foolish doctrines which stand as evidence that they are not as sober as Christians boast.  They approved of Jesus’ wacky exegesis which said that God’s title, “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” proved the resurrection of the body.  The John gospel deceptively said that Jesus saying that he was one witness for himself and God another fulfilled the legal demand for two witnesses before a testimony could be accepted.

 

 “If the gospellers made up the miracles and other deeds of Jesus then why do Matthew and Luke and Mark have many stories in common?  Why did they not dream up new stories?  The answer is because they were telling the truth.” 

 

There could have been any number of reasons for that.  Perhaps they just served up some of the same old lies to make it look like that it wasn’t just their opinion that Jesus did and said such and such.  If I write an irrefutable fake gospel that has overlaps with some other gospel does that really make it likely to be genuine?  If Christians wouldn’t accept it then they have no right accepting their own.  Sobriety is of little importance when lies can be demonstrated to have been told.

 

The use of similar stories, the material common to the gospels, suggests that the life-story is a pack of lies when it is about a person they could have got different stories about. 

 

Read my book, New Testament is not Inspired, to see how the New Testament while claiming to reverence reason actually reverences credulity.

 

The New Testament tells serious lies which make all the sobriety in the world no help to it. 

 

The sobriety argument for the existence of Jesus is a failure.  When you attempt to apply it to the gospels it makes you more certain that there was no Jesus. 

 

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Friday, 25 January 2008

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

Decoding Mark, John Dart, Trinity Press, Harrisburg, PA, 2003

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

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 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 Paul versus St Peter, A Tale of Two Missions, Michael Goulder, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, 1994

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 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 Reason for God, Belief in an Age of Scepticism, Timothy Keller, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2008

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 

 

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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

 

A Sacrifice in Heaven, 

http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/supp09.htm

 

The Evolution of Jesus of Nazareth

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

 

The Jesus of History, a Reply to Josh McDowell by Gordon Stein

 www.infidels.org/library/modern/gordon_stein/Jesus.html

 

Josh McDowell’s Evidence for Jesus – Is It Reliable?, by Jeffrey J Lowder   www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/jury/chap5.html

 

A Reply to JP Holding’s “Shattering” of My Views on Jesus

www.infidels.org/secular_web/new/2000/march.html

 

Robert M Price, Christ a Fiction

www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/fiction.html

 

Earliest Christianity G A Wells 

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

 

The Second Century Apologists

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

 

Existence of Jesus Controversy, Rae West 

www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk/littleton/gm1_jesu.htm

 

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

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

 

Jesus Conference,

www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_sd/jconf_hall.html 

 

Jesus Conference,

www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_sd/jconf_stuckenbruck.html 

 

The Testament of Levi Concerning the Priesthood and Arrogance

www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-08/anf08-07.htm#P378_53868. 

 

Sherlock Holmes Style Search for the Historical Jesus 

www.fortunecity.com/greenfield/bp/890/history.html  

 

The Ascension of Isaiah

www.earth-history.com/sacred-ascension-Isaiah.htm 

 

Apollonius of Tyana: The Monkey of Christ?  The Church Patriarchs, Robertino Solarion   www.apollonius.net/patriarchs.html

 

What About the Discovery of Q? Brad Bromling

www.ApologeticsPress.org  

 

Wells without Water, Psychological Buffoonry from the Master of the Christ-Myth, James Patrick Holding 

www.tektonics.org/JPH_WW.html

 

Critique: Scott Bidstrp [sic] on The Case for Christ by James Patrick Holding

www.tektonics.org/bidstrup02.html

 

GA Wells Replies to Criticism of his Books on Jesus

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

 

The Ossuary Scam: A Critical Analysis of the “James” Ossuary

http://www.atrueword.com/index.php/article/articleprint/15/-1/1/

 

The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus, Acharya S

www.truthbeknown.com/origins.htm

 

Top of the Document