WHERE IS JESUS IN ACTUAL HISTORY?

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WHERE IS JESUS IN ACTUAL HISTORY?
by Michael R. Burch

Jesus was mentioned in a few historical sources other than the bible, but there are very good reasons to doubt those sources.

Lies repeated remain lies. Rumors repeated remain rumors. Gossip repeated remains gossip. Big fish stories that keep getting bigger and bigger, and fishier and fishier, are not credible.

And we know the lies, rumors, gossip, and big fish stories being spread about Jesus are not credible.

Here’s why…

• No contemporary of Jesus, who lived while Jesus was alive, wrote a single word about Jesus outside the bible. That makes absolutely no sense because:

  • The bible says Jesus performed miracle after miracle, including turning water into wine before a wedding crowd, feeding multitudes with a few loaves of bread and a couple fish, healing lepers and the blind, raising the dead on multiple occasions, etc.

  • Since thousands of people were attending Jesus’s sermons, he must have been very popular. The bible mentions one crowd of 5,000 people and another of 4,000.

  • Hell, Jesus was beyond famous! The bible says cheering crowds hailed Jesus as the King of the Jews when he entered Jerusalem.
    
    The crowds cried, “Hosana!” (“Save us!”)

  • The bible is telling us that the cheering crowds saw Jesus as their Savior, as the long-prophesied Messiah.

  • The bible says Jesus cleansed the temple, driving away the moneychangers and the animals, during the Passover when the temple was the focus of everyone’s attention. Jerusalem would have been swelled to the gills with visitors, in addition to its normal population. The number of people in Jerusalem for the Passover has been estimated at 100,000 to 125,000 souls. And every one of them would have known about the quadruple commotions of Jesus’s triumphal entry, his temple cleansing, his two to six trials (depending on which gospel we read), and his earth-shaking (literally!) crucifixion and death.

  • Put yourself in the shoes of the 125,000. This is what an entire city witnessed:

    • Jesus makes his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, being hailed as King, Messiah and Savior, to wild acclaim!

    • Jesus cleanses the temple, creating a huge commotion: the King of the Jews, the long-awaited Messiah and Savior opposes the corrupt temple system! The city would have been abuzz with wonder and speculation.
      
      Could it really be happening?
      
      “The Messiah! The Savior!”

    • Jesus is arrested and tried up to six times in a matter of hours, then is sentenced to death during the sacred Passover celebration.
      
      “This is contrary to both Jewish law and the Torah YWH, the word of God!”

    • The cheering crowds that had just hailed Jesus as their King, Messiah and Savior are offered a chance to save him, but suddenly they prefer the murderous insurrectionist Barabbas.
      
      Why?

    • The name Barabbas seems very fishy because it means “son of the father,” as if the crowds are choosing the murderous son of a human father over the perfect son of god. This seems like an obvious theological invention. In fact, in some extra-biblical accounts the murderous insurrectionist (whom the Romans would never have pardoned) was called Jesus Barabbas.

    • Jesus dies in agony on a cross, as the heavens and earth proclaim him the true Messiah.

    • To confirm that the Messiah has been executed, there is a three-hour worldwide eclipse (the longest eclipse on record was slightly over seven minutes), a rock-splitting earthquake, and a ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE with “many” reanimated corpses appearing to “many” people in Jerusalem.

    • What does all this mean?

    • It means that you and 125,000 other people now know without a doubt that Jesus really was the Messiah.

    • Except that no one — not a single soul — mentioned any of these “miracles.”

    • Suppose you were able to write. Wouldn’t you write about these stunning events, which proved that Jesus was the Messiah?

  • How many Jerusalemites were able to write at the time? Experts estimate a literacy rate of 3-10% among first-century Jews. Let’s come up with high-low numbers. Our low figure is 3,000 potential writers and our high figure is 12,500 potential writers.

  • And yet we have not a single word written by any of them.

  • I find that rather amazing. No, unbelievable.

  • Furthermore, why don’t we have a single word written by Jesus himself? Was Jesus Christ, the Creator of the Universe according to the gospel of John, illiterate? That seems unlikely. Was an all-powerful god unable to preserve what Jesus wrote? Also unlikely.
    
    But what if it was all made up, a myth? Then such things make perfect sense.

  • The bible says that when Jesus died there was a three-hour eclipse “over all the earth” (Luke 23:44) that would have made half the planet think the world was ending, followed by an earthquake so powerful that it “rent” rocks and opened graves, then by a ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE with “many” revivified corpses rising from the dead to chat with “many” people in Jerusalem. And yet no one wrote a single word about any of these stunning events:
    
    “Ho hum. There goes Jesus, raising the dead by truckloads. Let’s not tell anyone. Ho hum.”

  • One thing I point out that I haven’t heard elsewhere is that rocks have a lot more structural integrity than first-century houses. So an earthquake that split rocks would have leveled Jerusalem.

  • Ditto for an earthquake that upheaved “many” graves.

  • Obviously these “miracles” were made-up nonsense. But if the authors and redactors of the christian bible were such outrageous liars, did they also make up Jesus and the apostles?

DID THE AUTHORS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT INVENT JESUS AND THE APOSTLES?

There are valid reasons to believe Jesus Christ and the apostles were the inventions of the authors and redactors of the New Testament…

• There is no evidence outside the bible that Jesus or the apostles ever actually lived. What we have falls into the categories of hearsay, fantasy and forgeries.

• When historians in faraway Rome, such as Tacitus, mentioned Christ, they were undoubtedly repeating what Roman christians said about their alleged Messiah. That is hearsay, not evidence. But there were many literate Jews and Romans in Palestine. Why did none of them write a single word about this wonder-working “messiah” while he was alive?

• Which speaks more loudly: a distant lone Roman historian repeating hearsay, or 3,000 to 12,500 literate Jews and Romans who didn’t bother to write a single word about the amazing things happening right before their eyes, if they really happened?

• As for forgeries, the bible itself admits the problem:

  • The author of Revelation put a curse on anyone who changed his words. (Revelation 22:18-19)

  • The apostle Paul warned christians about letters being forged in his name (2 Thessalonians 2:3, 3.17).

  • Ironically, the majority of bible scholars deem 2 Thessalonians to be a forgery!

  • Even worse, most scholars consider half of Paul’s epistles to be forgeries, along with the epistles of James, John, Jude and Peter.

  • Why did Paul have to say over and over again that he wasn’t lying?

  • Obviously, Paul was being accused of lying by other christians, probably the followers of James and Peter. But were warring forgers pretending to be Paul, Peter and James?

  • Bart Ehrman, the author of Forged, paints a bleak picture, saying only seven out of 27 books of the New Testament were written by a person who names himself correctly, those seven being Paul’s letters: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon.
    
    And parts of those epistles show evidence of alterations by other hands.
    
    In his books Ehrman has given examples of “official” christian scribes changing the texts to make them agree with their own dogma and to stand up better to heretical arguments.
    
    One such change, I suspect, is the addition of verses that claim the resurrected Jesus ate fish and allowed his disciples to touch him, “proving” that the resurrection was physical rather than merely spiritual.

  • Dionysius of Corinth, a second century bishop, complained that his letters and even “the word of the Lord himself” had been altered by “the devil’s apostles.”

  • The Greek philosopher Celsus observed that christian scribes who were altering the texts “three or four or several times over” were doing so as if in a drunken frenzy.

  • The early church father Origen responded that “true christians” would never do such a thing, but then in private admitted “they make additions or deletions as they please.”

  • We have to keep in mind that we don’t have any of the original manuscripts. What we have are copies of copies of copies from the third century AD, at earliest. How many alterations were made for three centuries before the oldest extant manuscripts were created?

• The famous Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37 AD - c. 100 AD) did mention Jesus, but the vast majority of scholars (92%) consider what he wrote to have been forged, either in whole or in part.
  
  I will argue strongly for “in whole.”
  
  Here’s why:

  • The infamous Testimonium Flavianum is a clumsy insertion that breaks up what would have otherwise been smooth narration. The Testimonium clunks in like this:

    • Calamity #1

    • Out of the blue, a completely unrelated glowing christian advertisement for Jesus! Joy! Joy! Joy!

    • “About the same time another sad calamity…” and on to Calamity #2

  • The Testimonium employs christian jargon that a non-christian Jew like Josephus would not have used.

  • If Josephus had believed anything about Jesus, he would have written a LOT more about him. Consider how much Josephus wrote about John the Baptist, a much lesser figure than the long-awaited Messiah, in Jewish eyes.

  • The Testimonium does not appear until the fourth century AD. In fact, more than a dozen early christians, including Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Origen and Tertullian, read and commented on the works of Josephus, yet none of them mentioned the Testimonium confirming that Jesus was the Messiah, which would have been major news and the answer to christian prayers, if it had existed at the time.

  • Hell, Origen even criticized Josephus for not mentioning Jesus!

  • When the Testimonium finally was quoted in the fourth century, the first person to quote it was the notorious Bishop Eusebius, who has been accused of deliberate lying, fraud, forgery, lack of integrity, etc.

  • And there is reason to believe that Eusebius used Origen’s copy of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews to create his infamous forgery.

  • Hell, Eusebius even forged letters purportedly “written” by Jesus!

  • Jacob Burckhardt called Eusebius “the first thoroughly dishonest and unfair historian of ancient times.”

  • In any case, Josephus was not a contemporary of Jesus. He was born after the death of Jesus.

  • By time Josephus wrote Antiquities of the Jews (circa 94 AD), Jesus had been dead for over half a century, if he ever lived.

  • Josephus grew up in Jerusalem shortly after the alleged death of Jesus and was a student of Jewish religions who wrote about the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, but nary a word about christians or christianity. This failure of Josephus to write about christianity doesn’t get the attention it deserves. If he knew about Christ, why didn’t he know about the religion he founded?

  • That defies explanation because according to Acts the apostle Peter was walking around healing all the sick people in Jerusalem and surrounding cities with his shadow! Peter would have been the most famous person in Judea if that were true. But obviously it wasn’t, because Josephus knew nothing about Peter or the wonderworking christian church in his own backyard.
    
    Can a true religion be based on such outrageous lies?
    
    The book of Acts is fan fiction, not fact.

  • A second Josephus entry that seems to refer to James, the brother of Jesus “who was called the Christ,” appears to contain a scribal notation that got inserted into the text.

    • The Jesus being cited was Jesus the son of Damneus, and he had a brother named James. Richard Carrier theorizes that “who was called the Christ” was jotted down by an overeager christian scribe, then accidentally got included in the text, which reads better and less clunkily without it.

    • Furthermore, the phrase, coming out of the blue, would have made no sense to Josephus’s readers. He would have needed to clarify what he said, if he meant Jesus of Nazareth.

    • Again, no religious Jew says, “this man was the Christ/Messiah,” then rushes off to waste thousands of words on much lesser figures.

    • Without clarification, readers would have assumed that the Christ/Messiah in question was Jesus ben Damneus!

    • But Josephus never called anyone either the Christ or the Messiah, not even his personal candidate, Vespasian.

  • Also, was Judas the Galilean more notable than Jesus the Galilean? Was the fourth Jewish sect Judas founded, the Zealots, more noteworthy than the christians that Josephus entirely failed to mention?

  • Why did John the Baptist get so much more press than someone whose sandals he wasn’t worthy to unlatch? And if John the Baptist actually said that and proclaimed Jesus the Messiah, why did the cult of John the Baptist compete with the christian cult until at least the second century?

  • Josephus mentioned at least 14 messianic figures. Were they all more notable than Jesus Christ?

    • Hezekiah/Ezekias (Jewish War 1.204-205)

    • Judas aka Theudas (Ibid, 2.56)

    • Simon of Perea (Ibid, 2.57-59)

    • Athronges/Athrongeus the Shepherd (Ibid, 2:60-65)

    • Judas the Galilean, (Ibid, 2.118)

    • Eleazar son of Dineus (Jewish War 2:253; Antiquities 20:161)

    • Judah the Essene, who has been theorized to be the Teacher of Righteousness (Jewish War 1:78–80; Antiquities 15:371–79)

    • The Egyptian (Jewish War 20.261-263; Antiquities 20.169-171)

    • Menachem (Jewish War 2:433-448)

    • Eleazar son of Jairus (Ibid, 2.447)

    • John the Baptist (Antiquities 5:2)

    • Theudas (Ibid, 20.97)

    • James and Simon (Ibid, 20.102)

  • It seems incomprehensible that other messiahs got far more press in first-century Judea than Jesus Christ … unless he was made up later.

• Rather incredibly, one clear forgery and one nonsensical scribal notation are the only extra-biblical references to Jesus in the entire first century AD.

• The earliest non-christian writings about Jesus appeared nearly a hundred years after his alleged birth — and the early writers were either discussing the christian religion, not the marvels of Jesus, or, if they mentioned Christ at all, what they wrote were just snippets in passing, not what one would expect if the authors were aware of real marvels. Where is anyone outside the christian cult who said Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, fed the multitudes, raised the dead, died on a cross, was resurrected, then ascended to heaven? This is what we would expect, but no one recounted such wonders until centuries later.

• And none of the literate Jews and Roman who would have witnessed the stunning events described in the bible, if they had actually occurred, wrote a single word about Jesus. The bible tells us that Jesus was wildly famous — throughout all Palestine, Syria and the Decapolis — and yet thousands of literate Jews and Romans failed to write a single word about him? We have many writings by first-century Palestinian Jews and Romans about far lesser matters, but not a single word about the earthshaking exploits of Jesus? It makes no sense unless the events never happened.

• And why did no one within the bible mention the stunning ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE other than Matthew, or the stunning “ascension,” other than the author of Luke and Acts? The two most incredible things human eyes have ever seen, but only one person knew about them?

• Also, we must consider when the biggest “miracles” finally caught on. The cross wasn’t mentioned in relationship to christianity until the second century; the “virgin birth” was even later; the loopy “trinity” circa 325 AD, and so on.

• As David Fitzgerald pointed out in Nailed, "Not a single historian mentions the resurrection until the 3rd and 4th centuries, and then only Christian historians."

• Especially damning are the first-century writers who didn’t write about Jesus:

  • Philo (c. 20 BC - c. 50 AD) was a prolific Jewish writer who wrote about the Essenes and other fringe Jewish sects, but didn’t write anything about Jesus or christianity. Philo visited Jerusalem, had family there, and wrote stern criticism of Pilate, so his silence about Jesus is surprising, if Jesus did anything of note relating to Pilate. Philo also wrote about Carabbas, a madman who was mocked as a king, much like Jesus. Was Carabbas, who never performed a miracle, more famous than the wonderworking Jesus?

  • Josephus (37 AD - c. 100 AD) as previously mentioned.

  • Justus of Tiberias (died c. 101 AD) was a native of Galilee who lived not far from Nazareth, wrote a history of Judah that covered Jesus’s alleged lifetime, and served as personal secretary to Herod Agrippa II, who allegedly met the apostle Paul. And yet amazingly, if Jesus did a hundredth of the things the bible claims, Justus didn’t write a single word about Jesus.

  • Nicholas of Damascus (early first century AD) was an adviser and court historian to Herod the Great, and wrote a history of the world in 144 books, but never breathed a word about a magical star, the Magi, etc.

  • The Talmud never mentions Jesus of Nazareth until the 6th to 7th century AD.

  • Seneca the Younger (c. 3 BC - 65 AD) wrote extensively about eclipses and other natural phenomena, but mentioned nothing about the alleged events surrounding Jesus’s alleged death. Seneca in On Superstition skewered every known religious sect, including Judaism with its Sabbath restrictions, but never mentioned christianity. Augustine in City of God was obviously uncomfortable with Seneca’s failure to mention christianity. So were other christians who forged letters between Seneca and the apostle Paul!

  • Pliny The Elder (23 - 79 AD) never mentioned the magical course-changing Star of Bethlehem or a three-hour eclipse.

  • Other people who could be expected to write about Jesus and/or christianity, but didn’t, include Pontius Pilate and other Judea-based Roman officials, Herod Antipas, Gallio (died 65 AD), Petronius (c. 27 - 66 AD) and Pausania (c. 110 - c. 180) a Greek geographer and travel writer who visited Jerusalem and was very interested in local legends, gods, holy relics, sacred mysteries, earthquakes, eclipses, etc.

• The ascension would have been the most wondrous event ever witnessed by human eyes, if it had actually happened, and no one viewing the event could have ever forgotten it, yet of the gospels only Luke’s mentions an ascension, which he said took place on the same day as Jesus’s resurrection, in Bethany, witnessed only by Jesus’s disciples, with no angels present. But very curiously and very suspiciously, the book of Acts, written by the author of Luke, completely contradicts its original author, by claiming that Jesus ascended from the Mount of Olives, before a crowd of around a hundred followers, with two angels preaching a sermon, 40 days after the resurrection. Clearly, someone forged the Acts ascension.
  
  Can a true religion be based on such outrageous lies and forgeries?

• What we have are the dubious testimonies of New Testament authors who were actively trying to win converts and bolster the faith of doubtful christians, once Jesus failed to return as he had vowed, according to the gospels and the understanding of Paul in his epistles.

Jesus and the apostles seem like fabrications, like myths. It seems clear that the authors of the gospels were scouring the Old Testament for things they could claim to be “prophecies” about Jesus, after which they wove ludicrous stories that made those prophecies appear to come true.

LATER RATHER THAN SOONER

Several years ago I became suspicious about the dating of the gospels, due to the “lateness” with which certain gospel inventions such as the “virgin birth” and “ascension” appeared in the writings of the early church fathers. Then I became aware of the research on this subject by Bruce Metzger in The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance. Metzger’s research confirmed my suspicions.

• Clement of Rome, in his first letter (c. 95 AD) cited the OT extensively, along with Hebrews and Paul’s epistles, but apparently had no knowledge of any of the gospels.

• Ignatius of Antioch in letters (c. 107 AD) showed knowledge of Paul but no clear knowledge of any gospel.

• Papias (c. 60 - c. 130 AD) showed problematic knowledge of the gospels. He thought Matthew wrote in Hebrew and his comments about Matthew do not match the bible’s gospel of Matthew. Papias thought Peter was the source of Mark’s gospel but Mark’s numerous errors tell us that he didn’t have an eyewitness.

• Polycarp (c. 69-155 AD) also showed no clear knowledge of the gospels, nor of some of their main concepts, nor of Jesus’s goodhood, much less the “trinity.” Polycarp believed Jesus was subordinate to the Father. Believing in three persons does not mean those persons are equals. Some of the early church fathers believed the Holy Ghost was subordinate to Jesus and/or emanated from him, making the Holy Ghost the junior partner of the three.

• There are only scattered snippets, here and there, of New Testament verbiage in patristic writings for around 120 years after Jesus' death, or circa 150 AD. These snippets are not “proof” that the gospels existed. They could have been sayings in circulation that ended up in the gospels later. Or there could have been a source or sources that both the early church fathers and the gospel writers drew from. It’s even possible that the gospels were quoting the fathers!

• Thus, as of 150 AD and possibly later, the early church fathers seemed to lack knowledge of complete gospels and of important events and concepts that would pop up in the gospels randomly until the third and fourth centuries. The lack of a Trinity verse in the New Testament is a good example of how long, drawn-out and faulty the process was. As late as 1552, charlatans were still trying to sneak a fake Trinity verse, the notorious Johannine Comma, into the English New Testament of Erasmus.

• As Metzger observed, “… it is sometimes exceedingly difficult to ascertain which New Testament books were known to early Christian writers; our evidence does not become clear until the end of the second century.”
  
  Is the uncertainty due to the fact that the NT books were in a state of flux, or complete chaos?

• And it’s not just the early church fathers who lacked knowledge of the gospels, because Paul and the other writers of the epistles seemed to know nothing about the virgin birth, Jesus raising the dead, the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, the ascension, the Trinity, etc.
  
  Paul said he received his gospel directly from god. Was he lying or did anonymous liars invent that nonsense later?
  
  The real god would have know that Adam and Eve were myths, and that trillions of animals suffered and died before human beings existed, making Paul’s gospel that Jesus was a “second Adam” come to “atone” for the sin of the “first Adam” nonsensical.

• Metzger attributes the creation of the biblical canon to the Church's emphasis on "the final authority of apostolic writings as the rule of faith."
  
  However, it turns out that a large number of the canonized books were forgeries!
  
  Were the apostles themselves forgeries?
  
  Can a true religion be based on lies?

• Many christians believe the Holy Ghost participated in the canonization process.
  
  Apparently the Holy Ghost is a fan of forgeries!

ORDERING THE GOSPELS

• Since Mark is widely considered by experts to be the first-written gospel, the facts about the early fathers above suggest that Mark may have been written close to the end of the first century. Furthermore, there are a large number of parallels between Josephus’s portrayal of Jesus, son of Ananias, in the Antiquities (c. 94 AD) and Mark’s portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.
  
  (1) Both are named Jesus.
  (2) Both come from the lower classes
  (3) Both are called demon-possessed.
  (4) Both are thought to be madmen and deranged.
  (5) Both are depicted as being daily in the Temple.
  (6) Both preach in the Temple.
  (7) Both quote from Jeremiah 7.
  (8) Both pronounce woes on the people.
  (9) Both pronounce doom on the temple.
  (10) Both are arrested by the Jewish religious elites.
  (11) Both remain silent in the face of charges.
  (12) Both are physically abused at their Jewish hearings.
  (13) Both are delivered to the Roman procurator.
  (14) Both are interrogated by same.
  (15) Both are asked to disclose their identities.
  (16) Each procurator wants to release his madman.
  (17) Nonetheless, both are scourged.
  (18) Both are killed by Roman soldiers.
  (19) Both let out a woeful cry before dying.
  (20) Both die with a loud cry.

• Matthew obviously used Mark as a source while correcting Mark’s mistakes of grammar, geography, Jewish religion and culture, etc. Luke may have used Matthew as a source while correcting Matthew’s mistakes, making Matthew likely second in seniority. Matthew let us know he was writing well after the fact by saying things were said “until this day” and “unto this day.” Matthew also has anachronisms when he mentions a “church” (which did not exist when Jesus was alive) and each disciple taking up his “cross,” which would have stumped them before the crucifixion.

• Luke was obviously using both Mark and the Antiquities as a source, and may have been written as late as 130 AD according to David Fitzgerald.

• John may date from 150-200 AD. The idea of Jesus being the Creator of the Universe reflects a later christian fantasy not found in the other gospels.

• If the authors of the gospels were eyewitnesses, or had access to eyewitnesses, why would they need to plagiarize each other and Josephus?

• And if they had eyewitnesses, how could they have made such wild geographic mistakes?

  • Mark had a herd of pigs leaping into a “sea” that was really just a small lake, over 30 miles away.

  • Matthew tried to correct Mark’s error, but still had the pigs eight miles from the “sea.”

  • Did the pigs commit suicide at the place of the Gerasenes, Gadarenes or Gergesenes? It depends on the author, the redactor and the manuscript.

  • The so-called “Sea of Galilee” is actually small lake — too small for life-threatening waves — and it can be crossed in two hours in a canoe, making Mark’s story of a nine-hour journey nonsensical.

GOSPEL ERRORS AND CONTRADICTIONS

• Luke wanted Jesus to be born in Bethlehem, in order to fulfill an OT prophecy about the birthplace of the Messiah, so he invented a “universal tax” during the reign of Augustus Caesar that never happened. Moreover, why didn’t any of the other gospel writers know about the census? Luke placed the Judean census and taxation under the governorship of Cyrenius, circa 6 AD, but that’s at least ten years too late for Herod the Great, who died in 4 BC, to have tried to kill the baby Jesus in Matthew’s loopy “massacre of the innocents.” Luke’s and Matthew’s birth narratives are completely irreconcilable and it’s obvious that Luke’s virgin birth nonsense was spliced in after the fact.
  
  In any case, the first universal Roman census was seven decades later, in 74 AD.
  
  Moreover, no Roman census ever required anyone to return to their ancestral birthplaces, a preposterous idea.
  
  Furthermore, Galilee was not a Roman province at the time of the census in question, so Joseph would not have been required to do anything.

• Only Matthew has the ludicrous “Star of Bethlehem” which somehow led the Magi west to Herod the Great in Jerusalem, then changed direction and led them south to a specific house in Bethlehem.

  • But how does a star point to a specific house?

  • Why didn’t god have the star lead the Magi directly to the correct house, rather than to Herod, which resultied in the massacres of so many baby boys?

  • Why didn’t god warn the Magi before they spilled the beans to Herod?

  • Why didn’t god recognize his mistake and warn all the parents, not just Joseph?

  • This ludicrous story makes god seem like Herod’s accomplice in the “massacre of the innocents.”

  • The ancient world had many astronomers, but no one mentioned the most amazing star of all time! Ditto with the three-hour eclipse when Jesus died.

  • And why didn’t any other author of the NT know anything about any of this?

  • Luke refuted Matthew’s nonsense, as noted below.

• Only Matthew has the “massacre of the innocents” which led to the “flight into Egypt.”
  
  Why?
  
  Matthew wanted to portray Jesus as the new-and-better Moses, and he wanted Jesus to “fulfill” an OT verse that said “out of Egypt I have called my son.” But that wasn’t a prophecy, just a statement of fact about Israel as a nation coming out of Egypt at the time of the Exodus. (We now know that there was no Exodus, but the authors of the NT didn’t know that.) The bible calls Jacob/Israel the “son of god.”
  
  But Matthew’s brainstorm is completely incompatible with Luke, who says Jesus and his family stayed in Jerusalem for around a month, then returned to Nazareth without incident. Meanwhile Mark and John say nothing at all about a “virgin birth” or Jesus being born in Bethlehem.

• Mark says Jesus’s family, including his mother, were concerned about his state of mind and came to counsel him and probably take him home. But of course this makes no sense if Mary and her family knew that Jesus had been fathered by god. Furthermore, John says Mary knew that Jesus could turn water into wine before he began his ministry. Here we have a contradiction due to the fact that Jesus was fully human in Mark, but the other gospels turned him into Superman.

• One of the strangest gospel contradictions is that the synoptic gospels agree that Jesus was a preacher of pithy parables, while John never has Jesus preach a parable but turns him into a preacher of long, dull, windy, endlessly repetitive sermons. Probably like the author of John himself.

  • And how could anyone remember Jesus’s long, windy discourses word-for-word?

  • How could anyone know word-for-word what Jesus said in private to Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman at the well?

  • How could the author of John know Jesus’s words in his private prayers?

• Other radical changes in John include:

  • John deletes the virgin birth like yesterday’s garbage and says Jesus not only pre-existed the creation of the universe, but was the Creator of the universe!

  • John moves the temple cleansing — the reason for Jesus’s death in the other gospels — to the beginning of Jesus’s ministry and invents a new reason for his execution: the raising of Lazarus from the grave, something the other gospels never mention!

    • Is it possible that the authors of the bible didn’t know why Jesus was executed because they invented the crucifixion, then struggled to explain why he had to die? Is this invention the reason the cross wasn’t mentioned in relationship to christianity until the second century?

  • John extends Jesus’s one-year ministry to three years, by mentioning three different Passovers.

  • John changes the Last Supper to the Day of Preparation before the Passover.

  • John has Jesus die on a different day than the other gospels!

  • Because both meals take place on Fridays, John has Jesus dying in a different year as well!

  • John wisely avoids Matthew’s ludicrous ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE like the plague.

• Thus we find a very different Jesus in each gospel:

  • The Jesus of Mark is human and becomes frustrated, angry and agitated. His own family fears he’s lost his mind, including his mother. This could not be true if Mary knew Jesus was fathered by god, knew he could turn water into wine, and knew him from experience to be perfect in every way.

  • The Jesus of Matthew is a super Rabbi, with none of Mark’s human flaws.

  • The Jesus of Luke is faultless and unflappable, immune to doubts and fears.

  • The Jesus of John is God Incarnate and thus in control of every situation.

GOSPEL TRIAL AND CRUCIFIXION ERRORS AND CONTRADICTIONS

Yes, the bible’s crucifixion stories sound like the “Suffering Servant” of Isaiah, but Isaiah told his readers several times that the “Suffering Servant” was the nation of Israel.

Furthermore the bible’s crucifixion accounts contradict each other and don’t hold water.

• If Jesus had been hailed as the King of the Jews upon his “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem, the no-nonsense Romans would have arrested him immediately.

• Matthew misinterpreted an OT prophecy and had Jesus enter Jerusalem on a donkey and her colt, like a circus act. The prophecy meant just a colt, which was the foal of a donkey, and therefore also a donkey.

• No one living at the time wrote anything about cheering crowds hailing Jesus as the King of the Jews, only to see him executed, resulting in a supernatural three-hour eclipse, rock-splitting earthquake and ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE. Since first-century Judea had many literate Jews and Romans, this defies plausibility, like no one mentioning that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon albeit with far more spectacular special effects.
  
  Obviously, everyone would have noticed, yet no one did.
  
  The ancient world had many astronomers, but none of them mentioned a three-hour solar eclipse that would have sent half the world into mass panic. (BTW, any solar eclipse was impossible because Passovers take place when the moon is full and out of position to block the sun.)

• Why was Jesus arrested?

  • In Mark, the Pharisees begin plotting Jesus’s demise after he heals a man’s withered hand.

  • In Luke, the Jewish leaders start plotting after Jesus cleanses the temple.

  • Matthew even knows what the plotters are thinking!

  • John invents Jesus’s resurrection of Lazarus, who had been dead for four days, and makes this the reason for his arrest. The other gospels are entirely unaware of this stunning “miracle.”

• The gospels’ “trials” are farces:

  • How many trails did Jesus undergo? Up to six, but the gospels do not agree on the number of trials or who conducted them.

  • The Sanhedrin was not allowed to meet at night.

  • The Sanhedrin was not allowed to try people during the Passover.

  • Trials could not be held in private homes.

  • Someone had to defend the accused.

  • The accused could not be mocked and beaten.

  • The witnesses had to agree.

  • A capital crime could not be tried in a single day.

  • The gospels say the vote was unanimous but Joseph of Arimathea was one of the council.

• Once the Sanhedrin had convicted Jesus, why did they need to take him to Pilate? John 18:31 says the Sanhedrin lacked the ability to put someone to death. But this was untrue and contradicts the account of the adulteress Jesus saved from being stoned to death.

• The gospels portray Pilate as a wishy-washy, indecisive politico who gets pushed around by the Jewish elites, but we know from Josephus and Philo that Pilate was the exact opposite. Their terms for Pilate included: inflexible, cruel, extremely offensive, stubbornly relentless.

• The Romans did not usually crucify thieves; more likely punishments were paying damages or floggings. (I will note that this has been disputed, with some saying “never” and others saying “seldom” or “rarely” to the crucifixion of thieves.) The invention of the two thieves was to “fulfill” a “prophecy” that was not really a prophecy, that the “Suffering Servant” was numbered with the transgressors. But the “Suffering Servant” was Israel, as the prophet Isaiah pointed out several times.

• The Romans did not have a tradition of releasing a criminal during Passover. The author of the first gospel, Mark, loved irony and the name of the released criminal, Barabbas, means “son of the father.” Mark was ironically observing that in his work of fiction the crowd preferred the son of a human father to the “son of god.” Some extra-biblical versions of the story even have the freed man’s name being Jesus Barabbas.

• Why was Barabbas released? Because Jesus was being portrayed as a scapegoat for the sins of humanity, and at Yom Kippur when one scapegoat was killed as a blood offering, another was released and allowed to live.

• Why the three-hour eclipse “all over the land,” the rock-rending earthquake and the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE? Because the Roman poet Virgil in his Georgics wrote that when Julius Caesar died, the sun was blotted out, there were massive earthquakes, and the spirits of the dead were everywhere.

• We see a work of fiction being woven, in order to make it seem that Jesus was fulfilling “prophecies,” while replacing animal scapegoats with a human “sacrifice,” and making his death seem as earth-shaking (literally!) as Julius Caesar’s.

• When did Jesus die?

  • On the ninth hour on the afternoon of the Passover according to the synoptic gospels.

  • The day before the Passover according to John.

  • But all four gospels have Jesus die on on a Friday, so that he can be resurrected on Sunday, the christian Sabbath.

  • Thus, the authors of the gospels have Jesus dying several years apart!

• When was the temple veiled ripped in half, from top to bottom?

  • Matthew and Mark say the temple veil was ripped after Jesus died.

  • Luke says it happened before Jesus died.

  • But of course no one could have seen the crucifixion and the temple veil at the same time.

  • And the temple veil was not actually ripped, because it would have been major news but no one outside the bible mentioned it.

  • The temple veil being ripped was yet another theological invention.

• How was Jesus portrayed on the cross?

  • Forsaken by god, silent and miserable, in Mark.

  • Surrounded by stupefying miracles that no one noticed, in Matthew.

  • Implacable, calm and serene, in Luke.

  • Completely in control, orchestrating everything that happened, in John.

• The Romans left the victims of crucifixions to rot. They did not receive proper burials.

• After the alleged “resurrection” the book of Acts says Jesus strolled around Jerusalem for 40 days, yet the Romans and Jewish elites did nothing to apprehend him or his accomplices, now suddenly around a hundred rather than just eleven disciples.

• In conclusion, there is no evidence that Jesus and the apostles ever actually lived. If Jesus did live, he was so obscure that no one wrote a single word about him while he was alive. The crucifixion accounts seem to have been designed to make non-prophecies “come true.” Mark clearly based the first gospel’s trial sequence on that of Jesus ben Ananias, and the other gospels copied his plagiarized account with minor variations here and there. The cross was not mentioned in relation to christianity outside the bible, until the second century AD. Ditto for the “virgin birth.” The “trinity” came even later, circa 325 AD.

Can a true religion be based on lies?

by Michael R. Burch

PS — At the beginning of my article, I wrote: “No contemporary of Jesus, who lived while Jesus was alive, wrote a single word about Jesus outside the bible.” But do we have anything written by a contemporary of Jesus within the bible? I discuss this issue here:

Was the apostle Paul one of the bible’s anonymous authors?

SOURCES

The Bible

Jacob Burckhardt

Richard Carrier

Forged, Bart Ehrman

Nailed, David Fitzgerald

Antiquities, Josephus

The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance, Bruce Metzger

#BIBLE #MRBBIBLE #MRBHISTORICAL #MRBMYTH #MRBMYTHICAL