Was There a Jesus?

Proof that Jesus was a Myth

for the

evidence for his existence is only imagined

A CATHOLIC BOOKLET

THE ELLEGARD BOOK

AN ANCIENT TESTIMONY

THOSE WHO DENIED THE EXISTENCE

SILENCE IS GOLDEN

THE TRUTH DESTROYED

NON-BIBLICAL_WITNESSES_TO_THE_WEAK_EVIDENCE_

All of the evidence for Jesus the alleged founder of the Christian Church can be invalidated. At best there is no evidence, at worst the evidence indicates that Jesus never existed. From my other books which you can access through the homepage you will see that the Jesus story was unknown in the early Church, that the New Testament evidence for Jesus can be dismissed as worthless, you will see that the Jesus who the apostles knew was just a post resurrection apparition and you will see New Testament traditions that Jesus didn’t live in the first century but in times long forgotten.

Introduction

Jesus Christ did not exist. If he did there is no acceptable evidence for it. And if there is acceptable evidence then it is too flimsy to justify taking Jesus seriously as a person never mind a god or wizard. To the world, I offer Was There a Jesus? The truth can be known and should be. Unfortunately, defending the existence of Jesus and accepting him as a man and not a myth is where the money is and where the power lies. That is the real secret of the strength of the popular belief that he was a real person. Moses was invented and was similar to Jesus and had more supporters so why couldn’t Jesus have been invented as well? Hopefully when the philosophy contained in my The Gospel According to Atheism grows popular Jesus will be as little known as Henry James Prince, the nineteenth century Messiah in England.

The sources we have are the gospels and the rest of the New Testament writings which are regarded as scriptures or God’s word by the Christians. We have a few short writings from the first post-apostolic generation. We will test them all to see if they really assist the case for belief in Jesus as a historical Jesus.

We have some references from secular writings. The trouble is that they are either vague or could have been forged or could have been depending on Christian hearsay. For example, somebody put a piece about Jesus’s existence, miracles, messiahship and resurrection in the unbeliever Josephus’s work.

Tacitus said that Christ was put to death under Pilate. Unhappily for Christians, Pilate killed several Christs so there could be some confusion there. He said when he died the superstition was checked for a moment but broke out in Rome. This does not fit the Christian claim that the Church broke out in Palestine a few weeks after Jesus died. But Christians just focus on what suits them. And checked for a moment and then breaking out in Rome means that Tactitus was thinking of a long moment if he was thinking of Jesus Christ!! If you were a historian writing about events from decades or centuries before you would expect people to know that the expression for a moment would not be referring to a very short time but maybe a period of about a year. A year or more could be represented by a moment when you are dealing with a long period of time.

Tacitus speaks as if the Church broke out for the first time in Rome not Palestine.

Tacitus says it happened soon after the death of Christ, a year or so.

These contradictions of the history of the Church show that Tacitus was not in any position to be relied up in what he wrote about Christ. He could have been wrong to think that Pilate executed him.

The contradictions are inexplicable. Was a forger at work again? If so, then the forger needed to fabricate evidence for the existence of Jesus which would be a very telling thing to do!

Thankfully the body of writings is a small one which makes the task not too difficult. We will see that if Jesus did not exist then it was a case of definitely not existing or a case of having no evidence one way or the other which would mean we don’t know if he existed or not. Either is fatal to the Christian faith.

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A CATHOLIC BOOKLET

A Catholic Truth Society booklet called, Did Jesus Exist? gives many dubious arguments insisting that he did exist.

It insists that the gospels were written in the first century (4) against the evidence and ignores the possibility that they were confidential if they did exist that early. It says that Mark must be genuine and the work of Mark for if it were not it would have been ascribed to the apostle Peter (5) as if the authority that first made the ascription would necessarily have thought of Peter! There is no evidence for the Marcan ascription before late in the second century. And at best that evidence is merely gossip and hearsay.

Who was believed to have written it has nothing to do with its being authentic. What if everybody knew that Peter was against books and we don’t know? The forger would have decided then to pretend to be Peter’s associate who was writing the truth without Peter’s approval. Pages 8 and 9 respond to Wells (author of Did Jesus Exist? a book that says he did not) who wrote that if we believe in Lenin and no or hardly any evidence for him exists and nobody mentioned him we would have a strong argument from silence that he never existed. They tell us that this would show that Jesus did exist for we do have documents about him and nobody could invent a non-existent revolutionary who was spearheading the 1917 Revolution in Russia and get away with it. You can get away with it under certain circumstances and if you create a need to believe in the person.

Jewish tradition is held to back up the existence of Jesus on page 12 but this Jesus might not have been our Jesus but just somebody who he was based on. A fictitious character can be based on a real one and the character is still fictitious even if both characters bear the same name. If the Christians invented Jesus those who were embarrassed by this might have lied saying: “Oh Jesus was that guy that was hanged on the Eve of the Passover some decades ago. That was him you know.”

If you read the epistle of James you get the impression that the teaching of Jesus was plagiarised from that of James and perhaps events from the life of James were used to make stories up about Jesus.

A forged letter of St Paul’s, 1 Thessalonians 2:15 calls the Jews the people who put Jesus to death. Wells has expunged it as an insertion and is criticised for that (page 15). Wells is right for it was the Romans who crucified Jesus. (The Christian reply that the letter meant they indirectly crucified Jesus by getting the Romans to do it is unacceptable. It is just a speculative interpretation and makes words useless.) The statement of the booklet that Wells has no right to expunge it is slander. The passage accuses the Jews of killing Jesus and the prophets and of being foes to the whole world. This is simply anti-Semitic hysteria and incitement to hatred – the author might have lied to provoke hatred against the Jews. The next line says that the Jews sought to stop the apostles speaking to the Gentiles to convert them which is impossible to believe and it gloats that God’s wrath has visited them. Judaism was a racist religion and didn’t care what the Gentiles believed. Perhaps the text was revised by a rabid hate-monger for later it preaches love to enemies (5:15). There is no doubt that we cannot trust what the letter says about the Jews killing Jesus.

Now, the letter also says that the Jews killed the prophets. The Jews were accused of killing prophets by Jesus before he founded the Church. Jews in the context can mean the whole Jewish race past and present. That means the letter does not contradict the view that the Jews killed Jesus centuries before. It doesn’t help show that Jesus lived.

Perhaps it might be reasoned, “Jesus accused the Jews of killing the prophets meaning the Jews as a whole taking the Jews who had killed them in the past long before his generation into consideration. Maybe the Jews are being said to have killed Jesus in the same sense where the letter says they put Jesus to death though we know the Romans did it. The mention of the prophets would indicate that for the prophets mean the writers of the Old Testament and the author would have been specific if his own brand of prophets had been meant.”

Think again. Jesus is mentioned first and the prophets after, implying that Jesus might have died before these prophets. And why would the letter writer abuse the Jews here when it would have been enough and better to say it was an evil few? There were Jews in Thessalonica and he would have desired to convert them and not alienate them. The writer abused the Jews because they killed Jesus ages before and not in the first century for if Pilate had killed him he could have said so. It had to be ages for only centuries before could there have been a possibility that all the Jews had killed Jesus. He must have meant that the Jews killed him directly for we have no evidence that he could have meant indirectly through Pilate. Jesus might have been stoned and then crucified as a display by Jewish dissidents who did not mind that crucifixion was considered an unlawful method of execution for Jews for the writer never said that Jesus died on the cross. Or perhaps they nailed Jesus up as some kind of display knowing he was about to die anyway. It is important to realise that though the apostle Paul says only once that Jesus died on the cross (Philippians 2:8) and he says he bears the crucifixion marks of Jesus on his own body, he does not say that Jesus was nailed to the cross. If Jesus was tied there would still have been marks. Perhaps he was tied to the cross and stoned and these are the marks Paul means for Paul was certainly stoned a few times. These interpretations are probably right and they totally demolish the gospel account of the death of Jesus.

The Jews did not kill Jesus personally if he was crucified unless the Thessalonians author is supporting the Jewish Talmud which says that Jesus was hanged up for stoning on the Eve of the Passover.

The wrath the letter says was visited upon the Jews is probably the disaster of 70 AD which means the letter is a forgery for Paul was dead then. There is no other disaster that could have affected all the Jews at the time and the letter has it in for them all. So even if the letter did say Jesus was slain by Jews in recent times it would still not count as evidence for Jesus for it came from a liar’s quill.

Page 16 says that Paul said that a wife must stay with her husband and this is not from Paul but the Lord (1 Cor. 7) and this may be from oral tradition so Jesus must have existed. It says that this is the most simple and straightforward interpretation. That is a lie for Paul never hinted that he used oral tradition though he did expect others to use the verified tradition he started himself. Paul had a lot of visions so that is where it came from. The visions is the simplest explanation considering he had lots of them. He never asked the people to hold fast to the traditions about Jesus or even mentioned them but he did ask them to hold fast to the apostolic tradition embodied in himself. He did speak of visions, nothing else, so visions it is. The revelation about marriage came from a vision of Jesus.

The author of the booklet would have said if it had occurred to him that Wells was wrong to say that the persons who fleshed out Jesus the myth plotted him in the time of Pilate for that was a time of great suffering. He would say it would be silly to pick Pilate and then exonerate him and not to put Jesus in the time of Herod the Great which saw worse suffering. But the gospellers had to pick a time in which there was not so much excessive suffering but excessive crucifixions. And why not pick Pilate and then make excuses for what he did to please Roman readers? Also, the prophecy of Daniel concerning the seventy weeks seemed to the Church to have required that the Messiah die about the time of Pilate.

The author would be glad to know that Wells has come to believe not that Jesus existed but that he was based on some first century people on account of the Book of Q. Q is the alleged forerunner of Mark’s gospel which was allegedly used to help create the gospel and the other synoptic ones too. Q might only prove that there was some character that the Jesus character was modelled on but since it is so based on teaching that may be an overstatement. No two scholars agree on exactly what material in Mark constituted Q. A growing number hold that Q exists only in the imagination of the scholars for Mark could have invented and plagiarised from Pharisee teachers all the things he says Jesus said in his gospel without using any specific sources – people inventing stuff tend to subconsciously reproduce what they have heard or seen and that is all they need. The book of Q can be explained without a historical Jesus and it never says the son of God will be crucified on earth or gives any concrete statement that he was a real person and every single thing Mark, the first gospel, says happened during the execution of Jesus can be traced back to an Old Testament verse and anything that isn’t is just an elaboration of what was found in the Old Testament suggesting that the whole story was made up from the Jewish Bible (The Evolution of Jesus of Nazareth, http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/partthre.htm). Christians complain that literary dependence of the gospellers on Q needs proof and then they say then that the commonality between the synoptics can be explained by there having been a historical Jesus! (What About the Discovery of Q? by Brad Bromling D.Min). The similarity suggests the contrary, that there was no Jesus and myths and legends or lies had to be used to make up his story because there is too much similarity. Eyewitness reports would have been very difficult to make tally especially in the wording of what Jesus said. The Christians will grasp at any straw no matter how silly it is to get people to agree with them.

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THE ELLEGARD BOOK

The book by Professor Alvar Ellegard, Jesus - One Hundred Years before Christ, is a study of how the Jesus story could have been put together if Jesus was a myth. The theory is that Ignatius of Antioch, in the second century, was the first person to turn Jesus into a historical person and the gospels hobbled along later to give him more solidity. Let us put it under the microscope.

The letters of Paul never speak of Jesus coming again or returning (page 26) which is open to the possibility that Jesus never lived on earth meaning this future coming would be his first coming. James is called the brother of Jesus in Paul’s letters (Galatians 1:19). There is too much evidence in Paul that this was not meant literally for his Jesus was an obscure person who nobody knew about and who had started appearing to people. Jesus may have adopted James as a brother in a vision.

The reason the book gives for a Christ faction in the Greek Church in Paul’s time, is that a pre-Christian Essene form of Jesus worship was in existence (page 23). Perhaps. It would mean Jesus was known and worshipped long before the time the gospels say he lived. The faction must have believed in direct communication with Christ because anything else would involve accepting a man like the way it was with Peter or Paul or Apollos as the emissary of Christ so you wouldn’t say any of them were a Christ faction. The Christ faction were perhaps Gnostic in inclination for they believed that they could not sin so they lived immorally and had supernatural abilities and knowledge. Paul never attacks their rejection of the Jesus story – Gnostics were so radical that they believed that everybody rejecting the Jesus story and inventing their own story was a sign of spiritual insight for truth differed from person to person an attitude that the vast majority of Gnostics have and always have had - so he had no Jesus story. He did not say they must stop telling lies about Jesus on the basis that the evidence says it is lies because he could not.

When answering Marcion’s followers who contended that Paul was the sole witness to Jesus having been resurrected, Irenaeus replied that Paul said that the same God was inspiring him and Peter. Irenaeus should have used the text, 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, which says that Peter and some others saw the Jesus of the resurrection besides Paul. Irenaeus would have used it if it had been in his text of Paul. Irenaeus needed to back up what he said for his mere opinion would not have washed with the Marcionites. Page 19 says it is weak to argue, “Irenaeus would have used the text for it gave him better support”. There is good reason to hold that 1 Corinthians 15 has been tampered with as the followers of Marcion believed. Marcion and his followers had no problem holding that Jesus appeared to the other apostles for they were said to be apostates and liars anyway. The more apparitions the better. When they refused to believe that Jesus did appear to anybody but Paul clearly then they had historical grounds for saying that.

Because there is no evidence of the buildings called synagogues in Palestine in the first century and since they are mentioned a lot in the gospels and Acts and not in the first century texts it makes it likely that the gospels and Acts were either written or altered in the second century when there were such places. Sometimes the word was used to refer to gatherings before the second century but that is different (page 33).

He disagrees with Thiede’s claim that fragments of Mark were found at Qumran dating Mark to 50 AD because the fragments are too small and unclear to be sure that they are from Mark (page 185). Moreover, the Cave 7 where they were found may not have had the same history as the rest and could have been used by Christians for hiding texts in (page 186). I would add that it is possible that somebody put the fragments there in order for them to be “discovered” for the evidence for the lateness of the Gospels is conclusive. It was the location they were found in that led to them being dated so early. Plenty of ancient material for planting is available on the black market and even at some legitimate markets in the East. But in any case, the fragments could be from anything for they are so small and the excuse was made that they are earlier editions of New Testament material to excuse their differences with our current text.

It is possible that the parallels between the Shepherd of Hermas and the Gospels mean that the Shepherd was used to create the gospels (page 46). Or it could be that they have the same source. The wording is not the same. Strong evidence that Hermas helped originate the gospels comes from the fact that it avoids seeing the Son of God as a historical figure who people met and touched and laughed and cried with. The author dates Hermas to the sixties of the first century.

All that is wrong with this is that he does not look to see if Hermas would have used the gospels or the source that the gospels used. Also, when a simple verse gets more complicated wording in a parallel text it is most likely that the harder one is the later version. Things tend to get fancier the longer time goes on and Hermas is the least fancy version of the Christian gospel.

However, Ellegard notes that a gospel parable of Jesus inspired by Isaiah 5 is more complicated than the Hermas version which is closer to Isaiah meaning that Hermas inspired the Gospel version (page 48). When Hermas ignored Paul and his writings (page 48) it is astonishing if he would have plagiarised the gospels or used the source of the gospels. This may be only an indication that the gospels were edited and elements from other books were implanted in the second century.

The book claims that Jesus was transmuted into a historical person by the lies of St Ignatius of Antioch, a bishop of the early second century.

The textual parallels between Ignatius’s writings and the sayings ascribed to Jesus in the gospels are distinguished by the fact that Ignatius never attributes them to Jesus while the gospels do (page 204). I have argued elsewhere that these parallels could have arisen by chance and tradition and are very few.

Ignatius wrote that the Spirit of God knows where it comes from and goes to. In John this becomes the wind representing the spirit blowing where it goes and nobody knows where it comes from. It gets more complicated and poetic in John so Ignatius seems to have been reworked to create what is in John.

Ignatius said that we must receive the bishop as the one who sent him and regard him as the Lord. This corresponds with Jesus saying that whoever receives the person he sends receives him (John 13:20). Ignatius’ version is simpler than Jesus’ because he commands accepting the bishop as the Lord instead of everybody Jesus sends.

The author is right to argue that since Ignatius said that the Jewish prophets preached the gospel (Philippians 5:2) his reference to the need for gospels does not mean the books of the gospels we have (page 206). Philippians 8:2 has him protesting against people who said they would not believe in the gospels if what the gospels said was not in the ancient prophets. This does not mean books for few would have got the books and since they were so expensive and delicate they were only available to a few. He then said that the records were the cross, death and resurrection proving that he did not mean books. He said that Jesus drank after the resurrection which is not in the gospels (page 210) and shows he did not have them. If he had he would have regurgitated the account of Jesus eating fish in the gospel of Luke which was far more impressive and persuasive. If there had been gospels then the fish story being better known would naturally have been selected.

Some of the parallels in the book can be traced back to coincidence. A doctrine like, “The Son does all the Father wants”, could be mistaken as a parallel text to, “Whatever the Father does the Son does”. Times wording will be similar for the doctrine cannot be stated just in any old words but in much the same wording.

The evidence for the whole structure of Ellegard’s argument is not terribly convincing but it is convincing enough. There are coincidences that give it strength.

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AN ANCIENT TESTIMONY

In the book of Wisdom and in Proverbs, Wisdom is talked about like she was a person. Paul called Heaven, Jerusalem our mother. So personification is a popular device in the Bible which firmly imbeds it in Jewish and Christian tradition.

At Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, the ancient gospel of Thomas was found. It is a collection of sayings which allegedly came from Jesus. Fragments of this gospel written before 200 AD were uncovered before that. The sayings of the gospel look more primitive and therefore older than the related ones in the canonical gospels. We can tell for they are simpler and seem to show little knowledge of the context of the sayings that resemble the gospels. The original draft of the gospel is possibly first century (page 125, The Nag Hammadi Library in English).

This gospel says that Jesus was not a real person but a symbolic teacher of wisdom. The living Jesus was a symbol just like the Devil is a symbol of wisdom for the Church of Satan in San Francisco.

The first saying says, “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death”. So they all have spiritual meaning and if you think hard enough you can break the code. We have broken the code. We will see that the author must have been totally sure that Jesus never existed historically for he takes it for granted that we should be able to see that he is saying that so he shows that he believes that any open-minded and knowledgable person out there will agree with him. He presupposes that there are many disbelievers in the existence of Jesus out there. He knows of plenty. He knows of evidence but he does not see the need to draw attention to it.

The gospel can be interpreted as monistic, that all things are just the one God, but we need not go that far and remember the valid interpretation is the simplest. We need not think it envisages an undivided God without parts which is the creation so nobody can say that the reason it has an impersonal Jesus is because it follows a monistic impersonal God. The god of monism or pantheism is impersonal for he is stones as well as people so he cannot be a person.

Jesus is the leader of the disciples and their spiritual director. He could be a mental image like the god Hermes was to his fans that God used to give people visions and revelations inside their heads in their imagination.

Jesus said that the person who will drink from his mouth will become Jesus himself. If Jesus is a symbol for spiritual insight then the person who achieves spiritual insight makes it a part of him and kind of becomes it when he follows it. It may seem that to drink from his mouth means hear the word of God and absorb it. What it really means is to drink spiritual power or a life-force out of Jesus so that you become Jesus. Jesus then is a force not a person. He is not a man. The human Jesus never lived.

Jesus says he is all things and if you break a stone you find him inside (77). This assertion came after he said that that kingdom of God is like a precious pearl and since the kingdom is enlightenment he shows he is on about gaining wisdom. Then after the assertion he said that those who come to him look for truth. So when he said that we can break a stone to find him he meant that he was nature and we hear his word through nature and not through a man. There is spiritual insight in all things or all things are the power of wisdom. So Jesus is a metaphor for nature and not a man. Obviously, Jesus could not be all things if he were a real person. I can’t become a stone as well as a person if I am conscious only of being a person.

Jesus told his followers to make James the Righteous the true leader if he leaves. Jesus admits that he is the boss. But shortly afterwards, he tells Thomas that he is not his master and that he only thinks he is his master because he had not seen the light and is drunk in his ignorance. So if Jesus is not his real master and yet a master then Jesus does not exist and he only a symbol for the mental force from God that leads to psychological insight or the mystical illumination of gnosis. James was named as the brother of the Lord so the gospel is telling us he was the brother only in the sense that he was close to the Lord for the Lord is not a real man. Brother of the Lord is a honorary title. There is much evidence that the gospel is telling the truth and has inside knowledge of early Christianity.

The author evinces his great regard for Jesus when he says that Jesus wants us to follow James the Righteous after Jesus is gone. He is saying that Jesus ought to be listened to. Jesus is a force that will speak through the person of James in the future. Following James is following Jesus because James will become the incarnation of Jesus. This implies that Jesus is a spiritual force from God that is to communicate with man through the imagination. Jesus is saying that ongoing revelation is necessary and he only gives that revelation through a person.

Jesus criticises the apostles for referring to dead prophets instead of the living one in front of them which is himself (52). Does this tell us that the living Jesus is a man of flesh and blood? If the dead men were prophets then a real live Jesus would have regarded them as voices like his own, he would not have chastised the apostles. But if Jesus were only a personification in the imagination through which God speaks it would be preferable for people to go directly to him instead of to other people. The verse really refutes the notion of a literal Jesus. A Jesus who speaks last week would be in the same boat as a dead prophet for his word is in the past. But a non-literal Jesus would speak and remind and be with you all the time so his word would come first. The living one just means the force that reveals life and salvation for Jesus made it clear that it was mystical communion with God who is nature that saves so stones and men are not important but the divinity in them. So when he said he meant himself as the road to salvation he was not talking about his human self but the divinity inside. He was not referring to being human at all. If Jesus was a divine force speaking through a medium like say James like a spirit would then how does that square with the message of the gospel that each person has to get knowledge about Jesus on his own? Jesus speaks through James but you cannot learn from it unless you experience mystically what Jesus is saying. So to the person who does have the magical experience it is just hearing words but not the import of the words.

Jesus proclaimed that it was for James that Heaven and earth were created. This would have to be truer of Jesus than James if Jesus is a real person. So Jesus is not real and James is real. James will be the symbolic Jesus’ main mouthpiece after Jesus ceases to talk to the apostles. Think about this. What if Heaven and earth were made for James because he would be the only spiritual medium through which Jesus would speak? When Jesus leaves James, James will be boss. This has to be the correct understanding. Remember how the gospel condemned listening to prophets from the past. Then it says that we must listen to Jesus. Jesus then was not a prophet in the past at any time. He is a spiritual force that we commune with right now. It is the present voice not the past that matters. Thomas rejects any other gospel but Thomas for Thomas says we must listen to Jesus now and feel him inspiring us. Gospels with any different message and with stories of Jesus are not to be depended on.

Since Heaven and earth were made for James it suggests that James alone will give the pure word of God. This also is a hint that there was no historical Jesus. It is definitely a hint of great age for the saying about James is so strange and unnecessary there is no other explanation but that the saying was created when James was alive.

When it is James alone, Jesus is denying the gospel portrait of a saviour who came for all and who speaks to all by the power of the Holy Spirit and who had loads of followers. This is another indication of a pre-gospel origin because it ties in with the earliest strata that express the fact that the predecessors of the gospels did not have Jesus as a Palestinian superstar. A fact that was too well covered up to have been thought up later. And it was a fact for it was commonsense that nobody like Jesus would have been tolerated for five minutes by the authorities.

Salome asked Jesus who he was when he came up on her couch and ate from her table (61). Jesus told her that he was the one who exists from the undivided. God is the undivided and God is all therefore he who exists outside God is not a real person but a myth, a symbol.

Now it may be objected that a real Jesus could be used as a symbol and image and this means that the gospel is not challenging his real existence.

This is incorrect. It is not likely that a person will do that without making it clear that he does not intend his symbol to represent the true Jesus.

Why would anybody pick out sayings of a real Jesus that had no relevance for him and put them in this book in the mouth of a symbolic Jesus? There is no reason and no way it could happen! Jesus was a symbol that was taken too seriously by some that they turned him into a man.

Jesus said that Adam was not worthy of the apostles which was why he died (85). This hints that Jesus himself never died. When Jesus told the apostles that when they see a man who was not born of woman they will know that he is their father and they must worship this man (15). He means God and himself as the manifestation of God. He is saying he is not born of woman meaning he is not a real man or a real person. Since they have to know God in a mystical experience they have to know that same way that the man did not have a human origin. Since salvation is partly delivery from human ways of thinking and takes you to the abstract the man is not a man at all for a man is a block to salvation. Jesus means personified force by man not man the material being. He demands worship so he is saying he is a personified force as well.

Jesus says that only the solitary will be saved (75) indicating that depending on Jesus if he was a man or on apostles is wrong. You only use them to learn that you must do it on your own or as examples. This is a denial that the death or resurrection of Jesus saves us and the gospels which have a social Jesus.

Saying 30 claims that Jesus will be with the gods who seem to be enlightened human beings. He says that where there are three gods there are gods but where there is less he will be with them. This implies that very few can be saved by Jesus. Jesus is saying that he can get nobody to rest in. That is, there is nobody who fully accepts his principles.

In saying 86, Jesus says that foxes and birds have to rest but he has nowhere to rest. Since the gospel claims to have an oblique interpretation Jesus must mean he has nobody to rest in. This Jesus who kept his ministry quiet fits the evidence from the first century that Christianity was not founded by a popular well-known person.

So we have found a first century witness that Jesus was not a real person but a myth in the sense of a meaningful symbol - a vehicle of expression.

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THOSE WHO DENIED THE EXISTENCE

Second Peter states that the apostles did not give out cleverly devised myths when they revealed to the world the power and the coming of the Lord Jesus but were eyewitnesses to a visionary event, the transfiguration, that revealed the majesty of Jesus (1:16). In other words, a vision verified the power and coming of Jesus. It doesn't hint that it means the second coming of Christ. It just says coming. The vision he recounts said nothing or indicated nothing about a second coming. Second Peter is plainly saying that Jesus' power and coming had to be revealed to the apostles in a vision. He was not heard of before. This supports the idea that there was no Jesus known of until some people claimed to be having visions of this being who claimed to have been crucified and died and rose again.

Justin Martyr recorded that a Jewish theologian around 150 AD, called Trypho, said the Christ Christians believed in was an unfounded rumour and the Christians invented a Christ for themselves. He was certainly denying the validity of any Christian evidence about Jesus if not denying the existence of Jesus. But what he wrote can be interpreted as an outright denial that Jesus lived.

The unorthodox Christian scripture the Apocryphon of James or Secret Book of James seems to have originated before 150 AD (page 30, The Nag Hammadi Library in English). This work rejects the reliability of the gospels and the New Testament for it says only Peter and James were given the knowledge. It says that those who have seen and consorted with the Son of Man or Jesus are cursed and those who have not seen him are blessed. So we are told not to believe that Peter and James consorted with Jesus. They never knew him as a man. The reason people who haven’t known Jesus are blessed is because they can have visions of him and receive secret knowledge of him. (This knowledge gives salvation so it is spoken of as life while ignorance is symbolised as death or death and burial.) So we are told that anybody who claims to know a real flesh and blood Jesus or him as a man is not to be heeded. The gospels are to be dumped. It says that we must neglect reason. Probably it simply means that reason will not bring you to the truth not that reason has no value. So books like the gospels which try to make it reasonable to believe in Jesus are to be deplored. Jesus says in this treatise that the head of prophecy was stopped with John the Baptist. Then he said Peter and James need to understand what this means. So the head of prophecy is symbol. So earlier when we read that they are to scorn death and then contradictorily keep remembering the cross and death of Jesus we can only conclude that we are to scorn literal death and keep remembering the symbolic cross and death of Jesus. They stand for Jesus becoming saved and reborn through knowledge so that the old Jesus is symbolically crucified and dead and replaced by a spiritually alive Jesus.

James asks Jesus to protect him against temptation by the evil one and Jesus replies that through temptation they can be made equal to Jesus and like Jesus they will be crucified and buried by the evil one like he was. Since James the primary recipient of this answer was not crucified the crucifixion is symbolic. Here Jesus is saying he didn’t really die on the cross but died and was buried by the evil one. He means that before he was saved himself he was deluded and was dead in the sense that he wasn’t saved and in that sense he was buried by Satan. The Apocryphon has no need to say such things about Jesus unless it was thought to be true. It’s a very intelligent work as well. These Christians believed that only the being appearing to them to give them saving knowledge mattered not stories about a historical Christ. They even denied that he was crucified. When the biggest thing that happened to Jesus was a symbol and not real then its hardly likely that Jesus was real either.

Justin protested against the Roman opinion that Christians were really atheists because they worshiped an invisible God and not one of the human gods who lived in some inaccessible place like they had.

Justin says that Christians worship the Son and makes no effort to show that Christians also worship a human God. This proves that the Romans believed that Christ did not exist and that they felt that the Christian worship of Jesus was a pretence to cover up atheism for they could not seriously worship a man who never lived. Most people then did deny Jesus’ existence in those days. It also proves they were right for although Justin says he believes Jesus lived 150 years before he had no evidence for this contention. Those who would have known best, the educated and the rulers, denied Jesus’ existence. Most of the Christians had nothing historical to say about Jesus even by then. Their leaders were as bad. That got them into trouble for the pagans gave their gods elaborate life-stories.

Justin declared that Sunday was the day God made the world though Genesis says it was Saturday. He is denying that Jesus was a Jew for, being a Jew, Jesus would not have believed that. When believing people could not even get Jesus’ religion right it shows that he must have been invented.

Justin’s grave departures from the apostolic teaching do not inspire confidence in him as a worthy foundation for arguments for Jesus’ existence and we can only rely on him when he lets slip what he does not want us to know.

Justin made Jesus a god below God contradicting Jesus’ strict monotheism.

In Pompeii which was destroyed in 79 AD by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius two inscriptions were uncovered that ran as follows.

ROTAS

OPERA

TENET

AREPO

SATOR.

These words make sense, Arepo the sower holds the wheels with care (see Runaway World, page 25). That is what they mean. This says that Arepo is the sower who governs the wheels of existence and time carefully. Arepo is a god. He sows life and fortune in the universe. Christians however put hidden meanings first though when the inscriptions make sense this is an illogical thing to do. Hidden meanings come second not first.

The letters make up PATERNOSTER Latin for Our Father twice with the letters for Alpha and Omega twice as well. The arrangement then is as follows.

Arepo made the Our Father and the Alpha and Omega, first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, should be taken to mean that God is the beginning and the end. It is nonsense to say that the hidden meaning identifies Christ as the alpha and omega.

This cross tells us that the Father, God, is the subject of the cross. God is not crucified because he is beginning and end and beyond everything human. The cross symbolises balance for each arm is about the beginning and the end and each arm is the same. The cross is not the cross of Jesus but reflects the pagan tradition of using a cross to symbolise balance and the power that allows balance to be and which maintains it.

The word TENET also makes a cross in the original inscription. When Arepo holds the cross it shows that the cross represents not the death instrument of Jesus Christ but Arepos’ ability to hold all things in being like TENET holds the anagram together. Arepo is important for he holds the Greek letters, alpha and omega at the start and end of his name. A secondary meaning could be that Arepo holds the cross for he never rose from the dead. Some might take this as the real meaning but that is up to them.

The fact that the anagram could have read,

SATOR

AREPO

TENET

OPERA

ROTAS

proves that the SATOR was not Jesus for it would have been natural to begin with this word for Jesus used the parable of the sower to signify that Jesus is sowing the word of God. The anagram would have been intended for this missionary purpose had it been Christian. Also, the cross made by the word TENET is too obvious. If it had been a Christian symbol it could not have been employed for that reason UNLESS it honoured God but did not honour Jesus but Arepo instead.

Celsus was a Roman historian and writer and he declared that Jesus’ virgin birth and death and resurrection were fables as were the stories Christians told about Jesus when they were doing magic spells (page 53,54, Celsus, On the True Doctrine). This was in the sixties or seventies of the second century. If Jesus’ crucifixion and death were fables so was Jesus or at least he was very likely to be a fable! The Romans had no need to deny the crucifixion. Indeed they considered it a proof that Jesus was a fake. Their denial is very significant.

The Testament of Levi says that the Son of God will receive great honour in the world until he ascends. This denies that the killers if any could have been men for the whole world worshipped him. It puts Jesus outside the time span spelled out in the gospels for he must have lived in a long forgotten time when that happened.

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

The Church was bothered by converts who began saying that Jesus was not a person but an apparition or symbol seen by natural eyes or by the imagination from the very start.

The Christians say that you could write a book disproving the existence of Napoleon Bonaparte. Perhaps you could. But the book would be exalting small evidence over biggest and in contravention of the golden rule: take the simplest interpretation. It would be ignoring the sanity and consistency of the thousands of people who met Napoleon and the paintings of him and the books about him and the body he has left behind. But with Jesus there were no reliable witnesses and only one book about him was allegedly written by an eyewitness – a contention which rest on appallingly slender evidence - and which refuted itself by saying two independent witnesses were needed while nearly all its own information came from or was collated by one person who could not prove he was a witness. Reports about witnesses are not good enough. That is just the same as depending on gossip or hearsay – they need to be cross-examined and we need the reports. And all the earliest writings had serious disagreements with the gospels and there is no evidence that they knew the historical portions well at all. You only hide fictitious men’s biographies until the coast is clear. It is dishonest to put refuting Jesus on a par with refuting Napoleon. The evidence for Napoleon is stronger than the evidence for Jesus. We can answer every piece of evidence offered for Jesus and we can show that the strongest evidence denies his existence. The non-existence of Jesus is more possible than the non-existence of Napoleon.

A mock book was written by Archbishop Whately to disprove Napoleon when Napoleon was alive in 1819 called Historic Doubts relating to Napoleon Bonaparte. There is no way that the evidence against him can compare with that against Jesus or its weakness as is seen from the fact that nobody would want to invent a Napoleon but you can see why they would want to invent a Jesus and imagine that he existed. Christians like to tell you about this book disproving the existence of Napoleon Bonaparte to show how the methods used to disprove Jesus fail. But there were a lot less testimonies about Jesus and a lot more liars around him and speaking for him and no physical evidence that he lived. Napoleon was totally different. If you inflate the evidence for Jesus – for example, if you take the gospels word for it that everybody knew him and ignore the indications within and without the gospels that he was not that well-known – you can make him seem more convincing. That is the trick used by such books. But the fact remains that Jesus’ existence is not and cannot ever be as convincing as the existence of Napoleon. Rather than depending on four books that Napoleon was well-known we are depending on thousands published and unpublished by those who lived in his time. We have his letters and his death mask. If Jesus had really been anybody special his existence would be more provable than that of the likes of Napoleon. The existence of Jesus would not be forcing faith on us for Christianity is not based on faith in the existence of Jesus by itself but in faith in Jesus being God and redeemer. Jesus is important in the Church not just because he existed for that would not be enough to make him God but because of who he was supposed to be.

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SILENCE IS GOLDEN

In many pro-Christian books we read that Jesus must have existed when not one of the many bitter and barbaric enemies the early Church had, queried his existence. If Jesus had not existed it is thought, this would have been the ultimate weapon for the antichrists to use against Christianity to destroy it.

But there are many world religions and only one or none of them of them can be true. The intelligent must be able to use the truth to destroy the false ones and yet they still exist. It follows that people would still say their god was a real person even if he was conceived only in a twisted mind and get away with it.

The early Christians were blackened and slandered and butchered by their enemies. The New Testament says that their enemies preferred to kill and slander Christianity instead of trying to debunk it. Pliny declared in the second decade of the second century that the Christians were thought to be guilty of killing their children and eating them and revelling in debauchery at which incest was practiced. The enemies of the Christians would have felt that religion could not be eradicated by facts for many religions thrived despite being nonsense. So, they believed they had to use the strategy of persecution to vanquish the Church. Life is hard for Christians today with so many temptations and with our permissive society and that has contributed to the decline of the Church and poor reason has not been as successful in making it slump.

There was a plague that killed many in the Holy Land area in 54 AD and there was the all-out disaster in 70 AD meaning the people who would have known Jesus or if he existed or not were probably dead or exiled and had more important things to think about than him. We know for a fact that the Jewish survivors in 70 AD were enslaved or executed and Rome changed the name of the country to Palestine after the Philistines who had once lived there to express the extinction of the Jewish nation and any Jews round about were only interested in rebellion (page 9, Introduction to the New Testament, Fr R McKenzie, S.J., Liturgical Press, Minnesota, 1965) and not in debunking a Jesus who was nearly entirely a Gentile concern at that time. It is a fact that at the time the gospels might have been first thrown open to the public in the second century that Rome vowed that the Jews would never be of any importance in Palestine ever again after the bloodshed of the Bar Kochba revolt.

Sanders and Davies agreed that much of Galilee, Jesus’ main haunt, and all of Jerusalem and the temple was laid waste and that many thousands of people were either killed or kidnapped and sold into slavery and that the records would have been incinerated so finding out what happened to Jesus would have been extremely difficult for the evangelists. I would add that they would have had to make do with revelations from Heaven to fill in the gaps.

The Church suppressed anything that was antithetical to its dogma. There should be tons and tons of material condemning Christianity but there is not. The Church would have and must have destroyed it.

The Book of Acts testifies to the book burning being practiced in the earliest Church when converts burned their precious books of magic.

Even if Jesus did exist some would have tried to make it out that he never did exist. If the evidence for his existence was pathetic and the gospels were full of stuff that they could not accept the temptation would have been far too great. So where are these writings? Their non-availability means they have been stored and have yet to surface or they have been destroyed in which case then the Church was terrified of them. And if those who know they are right do not fear the errors of others.

But the great silence about the non-existence of Jesus does not really exist.

There was a silence all right but not a complete one.

In the early Church, there were many people who believed that Jesus Christ was not a man but a vision. They believed that the Jesus who we read of in the gospels was not a man. These people were mystics and were not far from being psychologists. Their Jesus only existed in the mind like modern witches use imaginary people to lead them to spiritual awareness. They were called antichrists who denied the coming of Jesus in the flesh in John’s time. In Paul’s day, they denied that Jesus had risen from the dead. We know their Jesus was a mental force and not a vision of a separate entity because the New Testament just condemns them and never tries to prove to them that Jesus was real as we would expect if they were saying there was a Jesus but he was only a ghost.

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THE TRUTH DESTROYED

What if debunkers had recorded the facts about Jesus that contradicted the gospels? What if they had written about what an evil man he was or that he never rose from the dead or never even existed?

The Christians would have burned their books vanquishing the truth. And they certainly did that when they admit they reduced books to ashes just for disagreeing with the orthodox position. They would have gone after deadlier books faster.

The Christian would say, “But they would also have come up with answers to their charges – at least the ones they could answer. The Christians had no need or desire wipe away all evidence that they had their critics. The New Testament mentions some lies told about Jesus and Christianity. It is likely that we would have evidence for the inflammatory books if they existed.”

Christians were troubled by dissent and heresy in the first centuries of the Church to an amazing extent. The Arian heresy was once the dominant religion in Christendom. The Church detested heresy and losing control over people so much that it removed anything that could lead to it. As long as anti-Christian books existed they posed a risk to the Church for they could become the ground in which a new heresy could take root.

In 303 AD Diocletian believing that Christians being near places of sacrifice provoked the displeasure of the gods and thereby endangered the Empire for it needed divine protection ordered that Christian Churches must be destroyed and their books handed over to the Empire for destruction (page 49, A Concise History of the Catholic Church). Because of the Romans, many important documents from the early centuries of the Church have been lost. This made the Church’s plot to foist its absurd faith on the world dramatically easier. We must also recall that much valuable information about Jesus was lost when Diocletian ordered the destruction of Christian, truly Christian and nominally Christian, scriptures and literature (page 124, Those Incredible Christians). The Christian Emperors, Theodosius and Valentinian were as bad in relation to heretical literature.

In the Encyclopaedia of Heresies and Heretics are the following statements:

The Arians taught that Jesus Christ was an angel and was not God. Constantine made a law commanding that “if anyone shall be caught concealing a book by Arius, and does not instantly bring it out and burn it, the penalty shall be death” (page 33).

“The staunch opposition of Catholic Christianity to the Manicheans following Augustine’s conversion led to their demise in Europe during the following centuries, as well as to the destruction of their literature” (page 200).

“In border regions like Armenia, Marcion’s teachings were reverently preserved for several centuries. But the triumphant Catholic Church destroyed all of Marcion’s writings. All that is left are fragments of his work, preserved in quotations that were included in the surviving books of his orthodox opponents” (page 201).

We read in Jesus the Magician (page 1) that in 326 AD Constantine, the Roman Emperor, had the books of heretical Christians destroyed. In 333 AD he gave an edict against Arian writings and mentioned that pagan ones were being destroyed too specifically the works of an anti-religionist, Porphyry.

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NON-BIBLICAL WITNESSES TO THE WEAK EVIDENCE

Here are non-biblical witnesses that Jesus lived before the first century and was a man of perfect mystery and therefore that there was nothing but flimsy evidence for him if any.

The Talmud says that Pinhas, the priest and grandson of Aaron who was the brother of Moses killed the man we know to be Jesus. We know that this Pinhas must be that person for the Talmud would not record a forgotten and unimportant person without clarification especially when there was a Pinhas in the Old Testament. It speaks of him as if he were somebody we can find out about so this must be the biblical Pinhas. This puts Jesus’ existence at fourteen centuries before the time given by the New Testament. The Koran says that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a sister of Moses because it calls her the sister of Aaron (Sura 19:28). Sura 3:5 says that Mary and Aaron had the same father. The gospel Mary had nothing in common with Aaron for she was not even a member of the priestly line. The Koran would say if it did not mean a literal sister so literal sister it is. The book never places Jesus in the time designated in the New Testament. The Koran though late is evidence for a tradition against the Christian one that said Jesus lived in the first century. It preserves a tradition that merely slips out of the Talmud. Muhammad would not have had the intelligence to discover that slip so the information came from another source.

The heretical Teachings of Silvanus says that Christ became man and attacked the tyrants and died for sin. These tyrants are not angels of evil but human rulers for Silvanus never speaks of evil angels ruling the world. So Jesus died at a time when the rulers of the world were dethroned. Jesus must have lived a long time ago – perhaps at the time of the tower of Babel or the flood when rulers were brought down. The Bible says that Jesus went to the underworld after he died but the Teachings say it was before (page 389, The Nag Hammadi Library in English). It says Jesus went to the underworld and released the children of death and then he broke the chains in that world causing its powers to flee so that he was able to die as a ransom for our sins. The demons were stopping him from dying for sinners which means he perished and rose again in the underworld for sinners. The underworld does not mean this world but the world Jesus went to which is called the Abyss meaning something like Hell. Silvanus denies that Jesus lived and suffered and rose on earth like the gospels say. Silvanus is from the late first century at the very earliest. It shows that many Christians did not believe Jesus lived in Palestine in the first century. Silvanus had no reason at all to say Jesus was put to death for sinners in Hell for he could have still done that on earth. That is why he should be believed that there is no evidence. He stressed reason which makes him a damn sight more reliable than anybody else in the first century.

There is a scripture called Melchizidek which was found at Nag Hammadi in 1945. It claims to record revelations given to this priest of Abraham’s time and it claims that Melchizidek was Jesus Christ. Their alleged author was killed by crucifixion and rose from the dead. The hostile angelic powers did this to him according to what a group of people said to him after he came back from the dead and was addressed as Melchizidek. Nobody knows when this book was written but when it predicts the coming of the heretics who will deny that Christ had real human body it may date to the first century. It lists Old Testament figures and puts Melchizidek right after Noah therefore it says that Jesus Christ lived at the time of Abraham – long before the birth of Moses. The existence of a Jesus who lived that long ago would be doubtful.

Tatian who composed a harmony of the four gospels in the middle of the second century argued with the Greeks that God becoming a man was not ridiculous because their own Gods became man. But these Gods were mythical and the Greeks he contended with didn’t mean any of it literally so unless Tatian believed that the gospels were only true as myths not as history only then can what he said make sense (The Silent Jesus on the WWW). Tatian told his pagan critics that they should believe in his Christian religion because it makes up stories about Jesus its god just like they do (The Second Century Apologists, http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/century.htm).

Theophilus of Antioch who may have been the Theophilus for whom the Gospel of Luke was written was unable to give Autolycus an example of a man who rose from the dead (The Silent Jesus). Certainly he believed that Jesus rose but believed that there was no earthly evidence for it but only the testimony of faith inspired by God. What he was looking for was something to persuade this man that it was not only a truth revealed by God but a historical one but he had nothing. He rejected the gospels as having apologetic value for those who wanted proof of miracles and prophecy and men coming back from the dead. He rejected the most important evidence for the existence of Jesus and that makes him as good as a person who denied the existence of Jesus outright.

Minucius Felix, a Christian defender of the faith in about 150 AD wrote Octavius. It’s records a debate in which a Christian called Octavius was engaged in, against a pagan called Caecilius, which the Octavius stated that the charge of praying to a crucified criminal made against Christians was a calumny (The Second Century Apologists, http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/century2.htm). This amounts to a denial that Jesus died on the cross and disposes of the most important evidence for his existence: his crucifixion. Octavius even says that the pagans are fools for adoring their vulnerable dying Gods. He denied the crucifixion for if Jesus was physically nailed to the cross and died the same would be true of him and so Octavius would not have used this argument. But it is certain that in doing so he was rejecting the physical crucifixion but could or would have talked as if he believed in a crucified and dead saviour who rose. Gnostic Christianity, the original Christian faith, would have taught that the crucifixion and death and resurrection of Jesus was a metaphor that nobody could understand the meaning of without having a mystical experience that transcended the senses and reason. Octavius was influenced by it.

If Jesus was mythically crucified and mythically a criminal worshipping him would not be a problem for the story is only a way to convey mystical truth. It is being accused of adoring a real Jesus who was really physically crucified that is the problem. Christians say it was a calumny that Jesus was a criminal and that was what he meant. No for Jesus did break the law so he was a criminal though that does not make him a bad man. He sneered too at people praying to gods who had been slain. Christians say he would have believed Jesus was divine so his case was different but no hint that Jesus was divine is given. His whole point is that beings that die cannot be divine. Octavius manages to convert his pagan philosopher opponent to Christianity which means he converted to a form that did not depend on a flesh and blood Jesus at all. The educated philosopher then knew that Jesus was a myth and his concern was the mystical Jesus in Heaven.

Felix said it was a disgrace Christians had to defend themselves against people who said they adored a crucified criminal and his cross (page 40, Jesus and the Goddess). He regarded it then as an inexcusable error. He was unable to answer an opponent who asked him if anybody ever really physically came back from the dead. He retaliated by accusing his opponent of slander instead of trying to answer the question – this was evasion. He was saying, “Though I am an apologist of the Christian faith and a scholar I know of no evidence for the death of Jesus and I don’t want to talk about it.” For Felix to say that means only that there was no evidence.

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Conclusion

There is no evidence that Jesus existed which on its own could mean that we should be agnostic about him. The evidence that Jesus did not exist is stronger than that he did exist. And the evidence for his existence is spurious and worthless. And whatever has the ring of truth makes sense only as been borrowed from the lives of real but very different persons. It is mad to expect people to suffer and die for him because of these facts though the gospels and the Christian religion demand it. My book, They Hid the Four Gospels, gives further proof that the gospel story was not known in the early years or even thought of.

The most convincing evidence shows that Jesus never existed. The evidence that he did is useless and is largely make-believe. The evidence that he didn’t is authenticated by the fact that it is more like accidental slips which makes it totally convincing. This is the biggest secret the world has ever had, the most important man to supposedly walk on this world in fact never lived.

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

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

Fundamentalism and the Word of God, JI Packer, Inter Varsity Press, Leicester, 1996

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

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

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

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

Jesus, AN Wilson, Flamingo, London, 1993

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

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

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

Jesus and 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

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 Historical Evidence for Jesus, G A Wells, Prometheus Books, New York, 1988

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

The Pagan Christ, Tom Harpur, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, 2004

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

The Historical Jesus

http://www.geocities.com/b_d_muller/index.html

BIBLE VERSION USED

The Amplified Bible

The King James Version

03 October 2007

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