To argue A Historical Jesus never existed.
“Impossible!” “I saw Jesus on south park!” “Word to Jesus man, Jesus is the Word! Read the damn bible”, “Jesus drives for Nascar!” "Jesus is mentioned over and over by period authors" I laugh in the face of all those crazy claims. Not because I think its impossible. But because I see no reason why I or you, should accept that this particular historical and named figure or any other historical and named figure actually existed without some evidence to back that claim up first.And because I saw Jesus on south park too..
There’s different levels of evidence and I suppose an argument might be that I’m setting the bar a little to high and that history needs to be given some freedom after so many centuries have gone by. And maybe I should read more scripture, let god into my heart, wrap aluminum foil around my forehead to repel all the Atheist mind tricks broadcasted at me everytime I hold a spoon and forget this whole crazy game of who has the bigger, blacker truth..
And if I didn’t think the arguments I have created an air tight case, I might give that a little thought. But lucky for you im a smug and cocky bastard and im absolutely confident Christianty’s one of histories biggest mind-fucks.
First, there’s absolutely no foundation or physical evidence to support a historical Jesus.
Big claim? Maybe.. To big?
Immediately, I know what you’re thinking.
What the hell ever happened to those Burger King commercials, they were fucking brilliant and were probably the only reason I or anyone else I know ate that shit back then. But I’ll post about that some other time. Right now lets get back to me working my ass off to get into a Christian hell.
There’s no artifacts, ruins, art, self made carpentry, not even a widdled piece of wood or self written manuscripts at all linked to God # 2. In fact every single one of the claims about Jesus come from other people’s writings.
Lets narrow in on that for a sec. The exact beginning of the four Gospels (thanks Tom!) has always been a mystery as im going to try and show using History and actual facts And I wont make any claims that can’t be backed up through a very simple search for those Christians reading who still get caught up sounding out the words.
At no point in history does any one person claim to really know who wrote either of the four Gospels, when or where and have the evidence to trace it back to those people. We’d all of converted a long time ago if they that kind of evidence. All four could have been scribed anywhere from Upper Egypt to Narnia. The unsubstantiated dates for them range from about the earliest guestimate of 50 CE, to 150CE at the upper most, with a minority thinking somewhere well through the 4th century CE give or take. Google it if you want.
Moreover there isn’t a single contemporary Roman record that anything about Pontius Pilate executing a man named Jesus-anything. Devastated yet? One does hope.
Historians have long acknowledged that there isn’t a single contemporary word that mentions Jesus at all in fact. Plenty of day to day shit about squabbles between Romans and Jews and other mundane events like taxes, letters about other figures from the time.
But no baby Jesus.?
Other accounts.
All accounts we have about Christian God # 2 were written well after Jesus was supposed to of died. They’re all made by veiled unknown authors, people who never claimed to meet Jesus at all, or fraudulent, mythical writings that history scoffs at and doesn’t pay much credence too. But those are neither here nor there and I wont focus to much on those realities in this post.
The actual dates will be more then good enough to prove the point. They’ll show that even if these sources weren’t citing make-believe, they unfortunately still wouldn’t be a reliable source of evidence for a historical Jesus because they all come from word of mouth long after God #2 apparently took one for the team on the cross..
In other words its Hearsay.
Modern scholarship, as well as any Court of law in most western countries would never normally allow word of mouth as testimony in a trial.. (Hear)-(say) provides not a shred of valid evidence to support a claim and is therefore widely dismissed. You can’t prove the bible by using the actual book and theology in question after all. No matter how good you think you can quote it.
For example, the consensus of a majority the bibles historians date the earliest Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, at about a little after 70 C.E. The last, the Gospel of John after 90 C.E. [Pagels, 1995; Helms] look that up. This would make it more then 40 years after the mythical crucifixion of God #2 was supposed to of taken place.
Various Christian denominations (take your pick) claim the authors as “Mark, Luke, Matthew, & John” (Again, Thanks Tom for enlightening me about what to look for and where.) But most academic scholars simply acknowledge that there isn’t any evidence at all for this and that the dates they’re traced to make this claim incredibly unlikely if not impossible considering most people back then lived till about 35/40. Contrary to the (99% of scholars who believe Jesus existed of which I can’t find any evidence for, or the statistics to back that claim of yours up Emanuel, sorry man. I did look for you.).
But embarrassingly enough a lot of Bibles still label the stories as "The Gospel according to St. Matthew," "St. Mark," "St. Luke," St. John."
If you don’t think that’s screwed logic in and of itself you’re mixing your medication with the wrong kitchen cleaners. No apostle, not a one could of ever announced his own sainthood before the Church's establishment of the idea of saints in the first place.?
Of the four Gospels, obviously one of them had to come first, and one of the reasons that Mark is considered the first of the four because its the least detailed of the set.
The author of Mark seems surprisingly oblivious of any virgin birth story and makes no mention at all of it. The birth stories in Matthew and Luke are both completely different from each other, while they both contain the core of Mark.
Also, who ever the author is of the Gospel of Luke, he flat out admits himself as an interpreter of earlier material and not an eyewitness to any of the actual events. In other words he bases his writings on other Christian writings. (Luke 1:1-4).
http://www.biblegateway.co
The stories by themselves can’t possibly serve as examples of eyewitness accounts since they came as products of thought from totally unknown authors, and not from the characters in and around the Gospels themselves. The Gospels describe stories, written almost completely in the third person. People who want to portray themselves as eyewitnesses write in the first person, not in the third?
Mind Readers.
Most of the passages that are directly linked to God # 2 could only have been invented by a bored author if you wanna stick with common sense.
Do you.. hate common sense?.
For starters, a lot of the statements God #2 was supposed to of made were made by him while he was allegedly alone. If that’s the case, who heard him? Take out your bubble wrap cause the crazy doesn’t stop there..
Its even more obvious when the evangelists report about what Jesus thought in his own head. Who did God #2 confide all his thoughts too then when the Gospels were written well after his own death and resurrrection? To anyone who has ever taken a creative writing class, each Gospel uses common techniques that any fictional writer would use even today.
No Silly Rabbit.. Tricks are for kids..
The first mention of Jesus by Josephus came from Eusebius (an early bishop and Christian historian) -- (none of the earlier church fathers even mention Josephus' Jesus, weird, eh?) As you can see for yourself, or run your fingers over and make a pretty good guess, Christians embarrass themselves when they violate the rules of historiography by using after the fact writings as evidence of the event itself. Not one of these writers gives a source or backs up its assertions about Jesus. Although its not exactly hard to see why.
We can cut to the chase right now just by quoting dates the documents that do exist and the birth dates of the authors attributed to those documents that are so often thrown around to support a historical Jesus. .
But first lets reiterate that it doesn't matter what these people wrote about Jesus, an author who writes after the alleged happening and gives no detectable sources for his material can only give example of hearsay and would be labeled complete fiction if it didn’t already have so many sheep behind it willing to jump off a cliff if the next version of the bible tells them too.
All of these references to Jesus could very easily have come from the beliefs and stories from Christian believers themselves. Unless you wanna make the assertion there wasn’t a single believer in Christ from the time of his death till after the Gospels were written, and if that’s your game, I’d really like to see how that works out for you. And as we know from myth, superstition, and faith, beliefs never require facts or evidence to dig themselves into the popular psyche.
What’s even more interesting then what people wrote about Jesus is what they didn’t write about him. Consider for a second that not a single historian, philosopher, scribe or follower who lived before or during the same time as Jesus ever mentions him?
If that doesn’t kick the bitch outta bed lets go in another direction.
Other Jesus’s
One of the usual arguments is that if we can’t rely on the later writings about Jesus, then we can’t rely on any real historical foundation for other figures such as Alexander the Great (who was also known as the son of god), Augustus Caesar, Napoleon, etc.
Fortunately there’s a vast difference between historical figures and Jesus. There’s either artifacts, writings, or eyewitness accounts for real people. For Jesus we have fuck all.
Alexander, for example, cut his way through continents and cultures. He destroyed and created cities behind him. We have buildings, libraries and temples built by him. We have treaties, and even a letter from Alexander to the people of Chios, engraved in stone, dated all the way back to 332 B.C.E.
Real people leave us with contemporary evidence, but for Jesus we have nothing there to back up his existence besides after the fact documentation by people who never even met him. If we wanted to present a fair comparison of the type of information about Jesus to another example of equal historical value, we couldn’t do any better than to compare Jesus with Horus, or Hercules.
An Atheist recently told me there’s problems with that argument. Here’s why I disagree.
The "evidence" for Hercules closely follows everything we have for Jesus. We have historical people like Hesiod and Plato who mention Hercules in their writings. Just like the Gospels paint a pretty story of Jesus. We have epic stories of Homer who describe the life of Hercules. Aesop(sp?) tells stories and quotes the words of Hercules directly.
And just like we have a brief mention of Jesus by Joesphus in his Antiquities, Joesphus also mentions Hercules (more times than he does Jesusin the very same work.
Tacitus mentions a “Christus”, But he also mention Hercules more times in his works then he does Jesus.. And most importantly, just as we have no artifacts, writings or eyewitnesses about Hercules, we don’t have any about Jesus. All information about Hercules and Jesus comes from stories, beliefs, and hearsay.
Should we believe in a historical Hercules, just because ancient historians mention him and we have colorful stories and beliefs about him? That sounds insane doesn’t it?.
The same logic has gotta apply to Jesus if we want any consistency in history
Some critics don’t think a historical Jesus could have been created completely outta myth and still continue today without some truth in there to keep it going because they can’t think of any precedence for it.
But think about it,
We have a lot of examples of myth from history, what about the other way around? This doubt falls flat on its face in front of the most obvious example. The Greek mythologies where Greek and Roman writers including Diodorus, Cicero, Livy, etc., assumed that there must have existed a historical root for figures such as Hercules, Theseus, Odysseus, Minos, Dionysus, etc. These writers put their mythic heroes and demi-gods into an invented historical time line and traced their birth back generations.
Herodotus, one of my favorites, for example, tried to determine when Hercules lived.
The Egyptian god Horus, god of light and goodness has many parallels with Jesus too. [Leedom, Massey]
Osiris, Hercules, Mithra, Hermes, Prometheus, Perseus and a lot of others compare to the Christian myth wit the very same evidence there behind them. All allegedly had gods for fathers, virgins for mothers; had their births announced by stars; had been born on the solstice around December 25th; had tyrants who tried to kill them in their infancy; met violent deaths; rose from the dead; and nearly all got worshiped by "wise men with beards" and had allegedly fasted for forty days. [McKinsey, Chapter 5]
None of these myths say about a historical reality, but they do say a lot about believers, how they believed, and how their beliefs spread from culture to culture in that part of the world.
Belief can’t replace historical fact, and claims that come from nothing but word of mouth don’t amount to an honest attempt to get at the facts. Even with eyewitness accounts we gotta be careful. We don’t believe every Martian sighting or report of Bigfoot that makes the news, and at least they’re considerate enough to provide the blurry pictures too.. So why don’t we apply the same critical thinking skills most of us apply to those subjects to Religious claims? Why do so many people just assume a historical Jesus really existed?
Of course a historical Jesus might have existed after all, Maybe based loosely on a living human even though his actual history got lost, but this amounts to nothing but vivid speculation.
So if anyone wants to sit there and claim to have evidence of an actual flesh and blood witness to a historical Jesus, im all for having it shoved in my face,
But first I’d need to ask for the author's birth date.
Anyone who's birth occurred after an event can’t by any stretch of the imagination or logic act as an eyewitness, or evidence of an event, or person.
As a side note to cap this off, I’d like to leave you with a few words from Jesus about all this crazy speculation Christians do.
"If I [Jesus] bear witness of myself, my witness is not true." (John 5:31)
"I [Jesus] am one that bear witness of myself..." (John 8:18)
According to these scriptures, Jesus was a false witness.
