USA: National Security Strategy, Juan's Wet Dream

juan juan.g71 at gmail.com
Mon Dec 25 07:39:00 PST 2017


On Mon, 25 Dec 2017 18:17:50 +1000
"James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:

> On 12/25/2017 4:26 PM, juan wrote:
> > On Mon, 25 Dec 2017 10:50:59 +1000
> > "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 	to address the mental christian vomits of supreme right wing
> > 	'libertarian' donald
> > 
> > 	http://www.worldfuturefund.org/History/jesushistory.html
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > JESUS CHRIST - NO HISTORICAL EVIDENCE
> > 
> > IN ONE OF THE MOST CAREFULLY DOCUMENTED PERIODS OF ROMAN AND ANCIENT
> > HISTORY
> > The time that Jesus Christ supposedly existed is one the most
> > heavily documented periods in ancient history.  Yet there is
> > virtually zero historical evidence of his supposed existence in any
> > contemporary historical record. 
> 
> We have almost as much evidence for the existence of Jesus the man as
> we have for Pontius Pilate.


	that's a stupid lie - why are you a stupid liar? - there's no
	evidence for joo turd jesus, apart from all the forged stuff.
	And all the forged stuff clearly proves that the jesus myth is a
	sick fraud. 

	On the other hand, why would people bother forging documents
	about one obscure roman bureaucrat? The little information
	there's about pilate only tells you that he existed, not that
	he crucified any joo scammer-witch-doctor jesus


------------

https://www.atheists.org/activism/resources/did-jesus-exist/



This article written by former Interim President and current member of
the Board of Directors Frank Zindler and is reprinted from the Summer
1998 edition of American Atheist magazine.

    I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some
    writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against
    people who try from time to time to deny it. It would be easier,
    frankly, to believe that Tiberius Caesar, Jesus’ contemporary, was
    a figment of the imagination than to believe that there never was
    such a person as Jesus. – N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of
    God (Fortress, 1996)

For most of my life, I had taken it for granted that Jesus, although
certainly not a god, was nevertheless an historical personage – perhaps
a magician skilled in hypnosis. To be sure, I knew that some of the
world’s greatest scholars had denied his existence. Nevertheless, I had
always more or less supposed that it was improbable that so many
stories could have sprung up about someone who had never existed. Even
in the case of other deities, such as Zeus, Thor, Isis, and Osiris, I
had always taken it for granted that they were merely deified human
heroes: men and women who lived in the later stages of prehistory –
persons whose reputations got better and better the longer the time
elapsed after their deaths. Gods, like fine wines, I supposed, improved
with age.

About a decade ago, however, I began to reexamine the evidence for the
historicity of Jesus. I was astounded at what I didn’t find. In this
article, I would like to show how shaky the evidence is regarding the
alleged existence of a would-be messiah named Jesus. I now feel it is
more reasonable to suppose he never existed. It is easier to account
for the facts of early Christian history if Jesus were a fiction than
if he once were real. Burden of Proof

Although what follows may fairly be interpreted to be a proof of the
non-historicity of Jesus, it must be realized that the burden of proof
does not rest upon the skeptic in this matter. As always is the case,
the burden of proof weighs upon those who assert that some thing or
some process exists. If someone claims that he never has to shave
because every morning before he can get to the bathroom he is assaulted
by a six-foot rabbit with extremely sharp teeth who trims his whiskers
better than a razor – if someone makes such a claim, no skeptic need
worry about constructing a disproof. Unless evidence for the claim is
produced, the skeptic can treat the claim as false. This is nothing
more than sane, every-day practice.

Unlike N. T. Wright, quoted at the beginning of this article, a small
number of scholars have tried over the centuries to prove that Jesus
was in fact historical. It is instructive, when examining their
“evidence,” to compare it to the sort of evidence we have, say, for the
existence of Tiberius Cæsar – to take up the challenge made by Wright.

It may be conceded that it is not surprising that there are no coins
surviving from the first century with the image of Jesus on them.
Unlike Tiberius Cæsar and Augustus Cæsar who adopted him, Jesus is not
thought to have had control over any mints. Even so, we must point out
that we do have coins dating from the early first century that bear
images of Tiberius that change with the age of their subject. We even
have coins minted by his predecessor, Augustus Cæsar, that show
Augustus on one side and his adopted son on the other.Citation 1 Would
Mr. Wright have us believe that these coins are figments of the
imagination? Can we be dealing with fig-mints?

Statues that can be dated archaeologically survive to show Tiberius as
a youth, as a young man assuming the toga, as Cæsar, etc.Citation 2
Engravings and gems show him with his entire family.Citation 3
Biographers who were his contemporaries or nearly so quote from his
letters and decrees and recount the details of his life in minute
detail.Citation 4 There are contemporary inscriptions all over the
former empire that record his deeds.Citation 5 There is an ossuary of
at least one member of his family, and the Greek text of a speech made
by his son Germanicus has been found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.Citation 6
And then there are the remains of his villa on Capri. Nor should we
forget that Augustus Cæsar, in his Res Gestæ (“Things Accomplished”),
which survives both in Greek and Latin on the so-called Monumentum
Ancyranum, lists Tiberius as his son and co-ruler.Citation 7

Is there anything advocates of an historical Jesus can produce that
could be as compelling as this evidence for Tiberius? I think not, and
I thank N. T. Wright for making a challenge that brings this disparity
so clearly to light.

There is really only one area where evidence for Jesus is even claimed
to be of a sort similar to that adduced for Tiberius – the area of
biographies written by contemporaries or near contemporaries.Note A It
is sometimes claimed that the Christian Bible contains such evidence.
Sometimes it is claimed that there is extrabiblical evidence as well.
Let us then examine this would-be evidence. The Old Testament “Evidence”

Let us consider the so-called biblical evidence first. Despite the
claims of Christian apologists, there is absolutely nothing in the Old
Testament (OT) that is of relevance to our question, apart from the
possible fact that some prophets may have thought that an “anointed
one” (a rescuer king or priest) would once again assume the leadership
of the Jewish world. All of the many examples of OT “predictions” of
Jesus are so silly that one need only look them up to see their
irrelevance. Thomas Paine, the great heretic of the American
Revolution, did just that, and he demonstrated their irrelevance in his
book An Examination of the Prophecies, which he intended to be Part III
of The Age of Reason.Note B The New Testament “Evidence”

The elimination of the OT leaves only the New Testament (NT) “evidence”
and extrabiblical material to be considered. Essentially, the NT is
composed of two types of documents: letters and would-be biographies
(the so-called gospels). A third category of writing, apocalyptic,Note
C of which the Book of Revelation is an example, also exists, but it
gives no support for the historicity of Jesus. In fact, it would appear
to be an intellectual fossil of the thought-world from which
Christianity sprang – a Jewish apocalypse that was reworked for
Christian use.Citation 8 The main character of the book (referred to 28
times) would seem to be “the Lamb,” an astral being seen in visions (no
claims to historicity here!), and the book overall is redolent of
ancient astrology.Citation 9

The name Jesus occurs only seven times in the entire book, Christ only
four times, and Jesus Christ only twice! While Revelation may very well
derive from a very early period (contrary to the views of most biblical
scholars, who deal with the book only in its final form), the Jesus of
which it whispers obviously is not a man. He is a supernatural being.
He has not yet acquired the physiological and metabolic properties of
which we read in the gospels. The Jesus of Revelation is a god who
would later be made into a man – not a man who would later become a
god, as liberal religious scholars would have it. The Gospels

The notion that the four “gospels that made the cut” to be included in
the official New Testament were written by men named Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John does not go back to early Christian times. The titles
“According to Matthew,” etc., were not added until late in the second
century. Thus, although Papias ca. 140 CE (‘Common Era’) knows all the
gospels but has only heard of Matthew and Mark, Justin Martyr (ca. 150
CE) knows of none of the four supposed authors. It is only in 180 CE,
with Irenæus of Lyons, that we learn who wrote the four “canonical”
gospels and discover that there are exactly four of them because there
are four quarters of the earth and four universal winds. Thus, unless
one supposes the argument of Irenæus to be other than ridiculous, we
come to the conclusion that the gospels are of unknown origin and
authorship, and there is no good reason to suppose they are eye-witness
accounts of a man named Jesus of Nazareth. At a minimum, this forces us
to examine the gospels to see if their contents are even compatible
with the notion that they were written by eye-witnesses. We cannot even
assume that each of the gospels had but one author or redactor.

It is clear that the gospels of Matthew and Luke could not possibly
have been written by an eye-witness of the tales they tell. Both
writers plagiarizeNote D (largely word-for-word) up to 90% of the
gospel of Mark, to which they add sayings of Jesus e and would-be
historical details. Ignoring the fact that Matthew and Luke contradict
each other in such critical details as the genealogy of Jesus – and
thus cannot both be correct – we must ask why real eye-witnesses would
have to plagiarize the entire ham-hocks-and-potatoes of the story,
contenting themselves with adding merely a little gravy, salt, and
pepper. A real eye-witness would have begun with a verse reading, “Now,
boys and girls, I’m gonna tell you the story of Jesus the Messiah the
way it really happened…” The story would be a unique creation. It is
significant that it is only these two gospels that purport to tell
anything of Jesus’ birth, childhood, or ancestry. Both can be dismissed
as unreliable without further cause. We can know nothing of Jesus’
childhood or origin! Mark

But what about the gospel of Mark, the oldest surviving gospel?
Attaining essentially its final form probably as late as 90 CE but
containing core material dating possibly as early as 70 CE, it omits,
as we have seen, almost the entire traditional biography of Jesus,
beginning the story with John the Baptist giving Jesus a bath, and
ending – in the oldest manuscripts – with women running frightened from
the empty tomb. (The alleged postresurrection appearances reported in
the last twelve verses of Mark are not found in the earliest
manuscripts, even though they are still printed in most modern bibles
as though they were an “authentic” part of Mark’s gospel.) Moreover,
“Mark” being a non-Palestinian non-disciple, even the skimpy historical
detail he provides is untrustworthy.

To say that Mark’s account is “skimpy” is to understate the case. There
really isn’t much to the gospel of Mark, the birth legends,
genealogies, and childhood wonders all being absent. Whereas the gospel
of Luke takes up 43 pages in the New English Bible, the gospel of Mark
occupies only 25 pages – a mere 58% as much material! Stories do indeed
grow with the retelling.

I have claimed that the unknown author of Mark was a non-Palestinian
non-disciple, which would make his story mere hearsay. What evidence do
we have for this assertion? First of all, Mark shows no first-hand
understanding of the social situation in Palestine. He is clearly a
foreigner, removed both in space and time from the events he alleges.
For example, in Mark 10:12, he has Jesus say that if a woman divorces
her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. As G. A. Wells,
the author of The Historical Evidence for JesusCitation 10 puts it,

    Such an utterance would have been meaningless in Palestine, where
    only men could obtain divorce. It is a ruling for the Gentile
    Christian readers… which the evangelist put into Jesus’ mouth in
    order to give it authority. This tendency to anchor later customs
    and institutions to Jesus’ supposed lifetime played a considerable
    role in the building up of his biography.

One further evidence of the inauthenticity of Mark is the fact that in
chapter 7, where Jesus is arguing with the Pharisees, Jesus is made to
quote the Greek Septuagint version of Isaiah in order to score his
debate point. Unfortunately, the Hebrew version says something
different from the Greek. Isaiah 29:13, in the Hebrew reads “their fear
of me is a commandment of men learned by rote,” whereas the Greek
version – and the gospel of Mark – reads “in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the precepts of men” [Revised Standard Version).
Wells observes dryly [p. 13], “That a Palestinian Jesus should floor
Orthodox Jews with an argument based on a mistranslation of their
scriptures is very unlikely.” Indeed!

Another powerful argument against the idea that Mark could have been an
eye-witness of the existence of Jesus is based upon the observation
that the author of Mark displays a profound lack of familiarity with
Palestinian geography. If he had actually lived in Palestine, he would
not have made the blunders to be found in his gospel. If he never lived
in Palestine, he could not have been an eye-witness of Jesus. You get
the point.

The most absurd geographical error Mark commits is when he tells the
tall tale about Jesus crossing over the Sea of Galilee and casting
demons out of a man (two men in Matthew’s revised version) and making
them go into about 2,000 pigs which, as the King James version puts it,
“ran violently down a steep place into the sea… and they were choked in
the sea.”

Apart from the cruelty to animals displayed by the lovable, gentle
Jesus, and his disregard for the property of others, what’s wrong with
this story? If your only source of information is the King James Bible,
you might not ever know. The King James says this marvel occurred in
the land of the Gadarenes, whereas the oldest Greek manuscripts say
this miracle took place in the land of the Gerasenes. Luke, who also
knew no Palestinian geography, also passes on this bit of absurdity.
But Matthew, who had some knowledge of Palestine, changed the name to
Gadarene in his new, improved version; but this is further improved to
Gergesenes in the King James version.

By now the reader must be dizzy with all the distinctions between
Gerasenes, Gadarenes, and Gergesenes. What difference does it make? A
lot of difference, as we shall see.

Gerasa, the place mentioned in the oldest manuscripts of Mark, is
located about 31 miles from the shore of the Sea of Galilee! Those poor
pigs had to run a course five miles longer than a marathon in order to
find a place to drown! Not even lemmings have to go that far. Moreover,
if one considers a “steep” slope to be at least 45 degrees, that would
make the elevation of Gerasa at least six times higher than Mt. Everest!

When the author of Matthew read Mark’s version, he saw the
impossibility of Jesus and the gang disembarking at Gerasa (which, by
the way, was also in a different country, the so-called Decapolis).
Since the only town in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee that he knew
of that started with G was Gadara, he changed Gerasa to Gadara. But
even Gadara was five miles from the shore – and in a different country.
Later copyists of the Greek manuscripts of all three pig-drowning
gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) improved Gadara further to Gergesa, a
region now thought to have actually formed part of the eastern shore of
the Sea of Galilee. So much for the trustworthiness of the biblical
tradition.

Another example of Mark’s abysmal ignorance of Palestinian geography is
found in the story he made up about Jesus traveling from Tyre on the
Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, 30 miles inland. According to Mark
7:31, Jesus and the boys went by way of Sidon, 20 miles north of Tyre
on the Mediterranean coast! Since to Sidon and back would be 40 miles,
this means that the wisest of all men walked 70 miles when he could
have walked only 30. Of course, one would never know all this from the
King James version which – apparently completely ignoring a perfectly
clear Greek text – says “Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon,
he came unto the Sea of Galilee…” Apparently the translators of the
King James version also knew their geography. At least they knew more
than did the author of Mark! John

The unreliability of the gospels is underscored when we learn that,
with the possible exception of John, the first three gospels bear no
internal indication of who wrote them. Can we glean anything of
significance from the fourth and latest gospel, the gospel of John? Not
likely! It is so unworldly, it can scarcely be cited for historical
evidence. In this account, Jesus is hardly a man of flesh and blood at
all – except for the purposes of divine cannibalism as required by the
celebration of the rite of “holy communion.”

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word
was god,” the gospel begins. No Star of Bethlehem, no embarrassment of
pregnant virgins, no hint that Jesus ever wore diapers: pure spirit
from the beginning. Moreover, in its present form, the gospel of John
is the latest of all the official gospels.[Note F]

The gospel of John was compiled around the year 110 CE. If its author
had been 10 years old at the time of Jesus’ crucifiction in the year 30
CE, he would have been 80 years old at the time of writing. Not only is
it improbable that he would have lived so long, it is dangerous to pay
much attention to the colorful “memories” recounted by a man in his
“anecdotage.” Many of us who are far younger than this have had the
unpleasant experience of discovering incontrovertible proof that what
we thought were clear memories of some event were wildly incorrect. We
also might wonder why an eye-witness of all the wonders claimed in a
gospel would wait so long to write about them!

More importantly, there is evidence that the Gospel of John, like
Matthew and Luke, also is a composite document, incorporating an
earlier “Signs Gospel” of uncertain antiquity. Again, we ask, if “John”
had been an eye-witness to Jesus, why would he need to plagiarize a
list of miracles made up by someone else? Nor is there anything in the
Signs Gospel that would lead one to suppose that it was an eye-witness
account. It could just as easily have been referring to the wonders of
Dionysus turning water into wine, or to the healings of Asclepius.

The inauthenticity of the Gospel of John would seem to be established
beyond cavil by the discovery that the very chapter that asserts the
author of the book to have been “the disciple whom Jesus loved” [John
21:20] was a late addition to the gospel. Scholars have shown that the
gospel originally ended at verses 30-31 of Chapter 20. Chapter 21 – in
which verse 24 asserts that “This is the disciple which testifieth of
these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is
true” – is not the work of an eye-witness. Like so many other things in
the Bible, it is a fraud. The testimony is not true. Saint Saul And His
Letters

Having eliminated the OT and the gospels from the list of possible
biblical “evidences” of the existence of Jesus, we are left with the
so-called epistles.

At first blush, we might think that these epistles – some of which are
by far the oldest parts of the NT, having been composed at least 30
years before the oldest gospel – would provide us with the most
reliable information on Jesus. Well, so much for blushes. The oldest
letters are the letters of St. Saul – the man who, after losing his
mind, changed his name to Paul. Before going into details, we must
point out right away, before we forget, that St. Saul’s testimony can
be ignored quite safely, if what he tells us is true, namely, that he
never met Jesus “in the flesh,” but rather saw him only in a vision he
had during what appears to have been an epileptic seizure. No court of
law would accept visions as evidence, and neither should we.

The reader might object that even if Saul only had hearsay evidence,
some of it might be true. Some of it might tell us some facts about
Jesus. Well, allright. Let’s look at the evidence.

According to tradition, 13 of the letters in the NT are the work of St.
Saul. Unfortunately, Bible scholars and computer experts have gone to
work on these letters, and it turns out that only four can be shown to
be substantially by the same author, putatively Saul. g These are the
letters known as Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians. To these
probably we may add the brief note to Philemon, a slave-owner,
Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians. The rest of the so-called Pauline
epistles can be shown to have been written by other and later authors,
so we can throw them out right now and not worry about them.

Saul tells us in 2 Corinthians 11:32 that King Aretas of the Nabateans
tried to have him arrested because of his Christian agitation. Since
Aretas is known to have died in the year 40 CE, this means that Saul
became a Christian before that date. So what do we find out about Jesus
from a man who had become a Christian less than ten years after the
alleged crucifixion? Precious little!

Once again, G.A. Wells, in his book The Historical Evidence for Jesus
[pp. 22-23], sums things up so succinctly, that I quote him verbatim:

    The…Pauline letters…are so completely silent concerning the events
    that were later recorded in the gospels as to suggest that these
    events were not known to Paul, who, however, could not have been
    ignorant of them if they had really occurred. These letters have no
    allusion to the parents of Jesus, let alone to the virgin birth.
    They never refer to a place of birth (for example, by calling him
    ‘of Nazareth’). They give no indication of the time or place of his
    earthly existence. They do not refer to his trial before a Roman
    official, nor to Jerusalem as the place of execution. They mention
    neither John the Baptist, nor Judas, nor Peter’s denial of his
    master. (They do, of course, mention Peter, but do not imply that
    he, any more than Paul himself, had known Jesus while he had been
    alive.)

    These letters also fail to mention any miracles Jesus is supposed
    to have worked, a particularly striking omission, since, according
    to the gospels, he worked so many.

    Another striking feature of Paul’s letters is that one could never
    gather from them that Jesus had been an ethical teacher… on only
    one occasion does he appeal to the authority of Jesus to support an
    ethical teaching which the gospels also represent Jesus as having
    delivered.

It turns out that Saul’s appeal to the authority of Jesus involves
precisely the same error we found in the gospel of Mark. In 1 Cor.
7:10, Saul says that “not I but the Lord, [say] that the wife should
not separate from the husband.” That is, a wife should not seek
divorce. If Jesus had actually said what Saul implies, and what Mark
10:12 claims he said, his audience would have thought he was nuts – as
the Bhagwan says – or perhaps had suffered a blow to the head. So much
for the testimony of Saul. His Jesus is nothing more than the thinnest
hearsay, a legendary creature which was crucified as a sacrifice, a
creature almost totally lacking a biography. Extrabiblical “Evidence”

So far we have examined all the biblical evidences alleged to prove the
existence of Jesus as an historical figure. We have found that they
have no legitimacy as evidence. Now we must examine the last line of
would-be evidence, the notion that Jewish and pagan historians recorded
his existence. Jewish Sources

It is sometimes claimed that Jewish writings hostile to Christianity
prove that the ancient Jews knew of Jesus and that such writings prove
the historicity of the man Jesus. But in fact, Jewish writings prove no
such thing, as L. Gordon Rylands’ book Did Jesus Ever Live? pointed out
nearly seventy years ago:

    …all the knowledge which the Rabbis had of Jesus was obtained by
    them from the Gospels. Seeing that Jews, even in the present more
    critical age, take it for granted that the figure of a real man
    stands behind the Gospel narrative, one need not be surprised if,
    in the second century, Jews did not think of questioning that
    assumption. It is certain, however, that some did question it. For
    Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho, represents the Jew Trypho as
    saying, “ye follow an empty rumour and make a Christ for
    yourselves.” “If he was born and lived somewhere he is entirely
    unknown.”

    That the writers of the Talmud [4th-5th centuries CE, FRZ] had no
    independent knowledge of Jesus is proved by the fact that they
    confounded him with two different men neither of whom can have been
    he. Evidently no other Jesus with whom they could identify the
    Gospel Jesus was known to them. One of these, Jesus ben Pandira,
    reputed a wonder-worker, is said to have been stoned to death and
    then hung on a tree on the eve of a Passover in the reign of
    Alexander Jannæus (106-79 BC) at Jerusalem. The other, Jesus ben
    Stada, whose date is uncertain, but who may have lived in the first
    third of the second century CE, is also said to have been stoned
    and hanged on the eve of a Passover, but at Lydda. There may be
    some confusion here; but it is plain that the Rabbis had no
    knowledge of Jesus apart from what they had read in the
    Gospels.Citation 11

Although Christian apologists have listed a number of ancient
historians who allegedly were witnesses to the existence of Jesus, the
only two that consistently are cited are Josephus, a Pharisee, and
Tacitus, a pagan. Since Josephus was born in the year 37 CE, and
Tacitus was born in 55, neither could have been an eye-witness of
Jesus, who supposedly was crucified in 30 CE. So we could really end
our article here. But someone might claim that these historians
nevertheless had access to reliable sources, now lost, which recorded
the existence and execution of our friend JC. So it is desirable that
we take a look at these two supposed witnesses.

In the case of Josephus, whose Antiquities of the Jews was written in
93 CE, about the same time as the gospels, we find him saying some
things quite impossible for a good Pharisee to have said:

    About this time, there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought
    to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and
    was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won
    over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When
    Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing
    amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the
    first place come to love him did not give up their affection for
    him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the
    prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous
    things about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after
    him, has still to this day not disappeared.Citation 12

Now no loyal Pharisee would say Jesus had been the Messiah. That
Josephus could report that Jesus had been restored to life “on the
third day” and not be convinced by this astonishing bit of information
is beyond belief. Worse yet is the fact that the story of Jesus is
intrusive in Josephus’ narrative and can be seen to be an interpolation
even in an English translation of the Greek text. Right after the
wondrous passage quoted above, Josephus goes on to say, “About the same
time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder…” Josephus
had previously been talking about awful things Pilate had done to the
Jews in general, and one can easily understand why an interpolator
would have chosen this particular spot. But his ineptitude in not
changing the wording of the bordering text left a “literary seam” (what
rhetoricians might term aporia) that sticks out like a pimpled nose.

The fact that Josephus was not convinced by this or any other Christian
claim is clear from the statement of the church father Origen (ca.
185-ca. 154 CE) – who dealt extensively with Josephus – that Josephus
did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah, i.e., as “the Christ.”
Moreover, the disputed passage was never cited by early Christian
apologists such as Clement of Alexandria (ca.150-ca. 215 CE), who
certainly would have made use of such ammunition had he had it!

The first person to make mention of this obviously forged interpolation
into the text of Josephus’ history was the church father Eusebius, in
324 CE. It is quite likely that Eusebius himself did some of the
forging. As late as 891, Photius in his Bibliotheca, which devoted
three “Codices” to the works of Josephus, shows no awareness of the
passage whatsoever even though he reviews the sections of the
Antiquities in which one would expect the disputed passage to be found.
Clearly, the testimonial was absent from his copy of Antiquities of the
Jews.Citation 13 The question can probably be laid to rest by noting
that as late as the sixteenth century, according to Rylands,Citation 14
a scholar named Vossius had a manuscript of Josephus from which the
passage was wanting.

Apologists, as they grasp for ever more slender straws with which to
support their historical Jesus, point out that the passage quoted above
is not the only mention of Jesus made by Josephus. In Bk. 20, Ch. 9, §1
of Antiquities of the Jews one also finds the following statement in
surviving manuscripts:

    Ananus… convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before
    them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the
    Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed
    the law and delivered them up to be stoned.

It must be admitted that this passage does not intrude into the text as
does the one previously quoted. In fact, it is very well integrated
into Josephus’ story. That it has been modified from whatever Josephus’
source may have said (remember, here too, Josephus could not have been
an eye-witness) is nevertheless extremely probable. The crucial word in
this passage is the name James (Jacob in Greek and Hebrew). It is very
possible that this very common name was in Josephus’ source material.
It might even have been a reference to James the Just, a first-century
character we have good reason to believe indeed existed. Because he
appears to have born the title Brother of the Lord,Note H it would have
been natural to relate him to the Jesus character. It is quite possible
that Josephus actually referred to a James “the Brother of the Lord,”
and this was changed by Christian copyists (remember that although
Josephus was a Jew, his text was preserved only by Christians!) to
“Brother of Jesus” – adding then for good measure “who was called
Christ.”

According to William Benjamin Smith’s skeptical classic Ecce
Deus,Citation 15 there are still some manuscripts of Josephus which
contain the quoted passages, but the passages are absent in other
manuscripts – showing that such interpolation had already been taking
place before the time of Origen but did not ever succeed in supplanting
the original text universally.

Pagan Authors Before considering the alleged witness of Pagan authors,
it is worth noting some of the things that we should find recorded in
their histories if the biblical stories are in fact true. One passage
from Matthew should suffice to point out the significance of the
silence of secular writers:

    Matt. 27:45. Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all
    the land unto the ninth hour… Jesus, when he had cried again with a
    loud voice, yielded up the ghost. 51. And, behold, the veil of the
    temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth
    did quake, and the rocks rent; 52 And the graves were opened; and
    many bodies of the saints which slept arose, 53 And came out of the
    graves after his resurrection [exposed for 3 days?], and went into
    the holy city, and appeared unto many.

Wouldn’t the Greeks and Romans have noticed – and recorded – such
darkness occurring at a time of the month when a solar eclipse was
impossible? Wouldn’t someone have remembered – and recorded – the name
of at least one of those “saints” who climbed out of the grave and went
wandering downtown in the mall? If Jesus did anything of significance
at all, wouldn’t someone have noticed? If he didn’t do anything
significant, how could he have stimulated the formation of a new
religion?

Considering now the supposed evidence of Tacitus, we find that this
Roman historian is alleged in 120 CE to have written a passage in his
Annals (Bk 15, Ch 44, containing the wild tale of Nero’s persecution of
Christians) saying “Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted
as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a
class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled
Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death
penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius
Pilatus…” G.A. Wells [p. 16] says of this passage:

    [Tacitus wrote] at a time when Christians themselves had come to
    believe that Jesus had suffered under Pilate. There are three
    reasons for holding that Tacitus is here simply repeating what
    Christians had told him. First, he gives Pilate a title, procurator
    [without saying procurator of what! FRZ], which was current only
    from the second half of the first century. Had he consulted
    archives which recorded earlier events, he would surely have found
    Pilate there designated by his correct title, prefect. Second,
    Tacitus does not name the executed man Jesus, but uses the title
    Christ (Messiah) as if it were a proper name. But he could hardly
    have found in archives a statement such as “the Messiah was
    executed this morning.” Third, hostile to Christianity as he was,
    he was surely glad to accept from Christians their own view that
    Christianity was of recent origin, since the Roman authorities were
    prepared to tolerate only ancient cults. (The Historical Evidence
    for Jesus; p.16).

There are further problems with the Tacitus story. Tacitus himself
never again alludes to the Neronian persecution of Christians in any of
his voluminous writings, and no other Pagan authors know anything of
the outrage either. Most significant, however, is that ancient
Christian apologists made no use of the story in their propaganda – an
unthinkable omission by motivated partisans who were well-read in the
works of Tacitus. Clement of Alexandria, who made a profession of
collecting just such types of quotations, is ignorant of any Neronian
persecution, and even Tertullian, who quotes a great deal from Tacitus,
knows nothing of the story. According to Robert Taylor, the author of
another freethought classic, the Diegesis (1834), the passage was not
known before the fifteenth century, when Tacitus was first published at
Venice by Johannes de Spire. Taylor believed de Spire himself to have
been the forger.

So much for the evidence purporting to prove that Jesus was an
historical figure. We have not, of course, proved that Jesus did not
exist. We have only showed that all evidence alleged to support such a
claim is without substance. But of course, that is all we need to show.
The burden of proof is always on the one who claims that something
exists or that something once happened. We have no obligation to try to
prove a universal negative.Note J

It will be argued by die-hard believers that all my arguments “from
silence” prove nothing and they will quote the aphorism, “Absence of
evidence is not evidence of absence.” But is the negative evidence I
have referred to the same as absence of evidence? It might be
instructive to consider how a hypothetical but similar problem might be
dealt with in the physical sciences.

Imagine that someone has claimed that the USA had carried out atomic
weapons tests on a particular Caribbean island in 1943. Would the lack
of reports of mushroom-cloud sightings at the time be evidence of
absence, or absence of evidence? (Remember, the Caribbean during the
war years was under intense surveillance by many different factions.)
Would it be necessary to go to the island today to scan its surface for
the radioactive contamination that would have to be there if nuclear
explosions had taken place there? If indeed, we went there with our
Geiger-counters and found no trace of radioactive contamination, would
that be evidence of absence, or absence of evidence? In this case, what
superficially looks like absence of evidence is really negative
evidence, and thus legitimately could be construed as evidence of
absence. Can the negative evidence adduced above concerning Jesus be
very much less compelling?

It would be intellectually satisfying to learn just how it was that the
Jesus character condensed out of the religious atmosphere of the first
century. But scholars are at work on the problem. The publication of
many examples of so-called wisdom literature, along with the materials
from the Essene community at Qumran by the Dead Sea and the Gnostic
literature from the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt, has given us a much
more detailed picture of the communal psychopathologies which infested
the Eastern Mediterranean world at the turn of the era. It is not
unrealistic to expect that we will be able, before long, to reconstruct
in reasonable detail the stages by which Jesus came to have a
biography. They Should Have Noticed

John E. Remsburg, in his classic book The Christ: A Critical Review and
Analysis of the Evidence of His Existence (The Truth Seeker Company,
NY, no date, pp. 24-25), lists the following writers who lived during
the time, or within a century after the time, that Jesus is supposed to
have lived: Josephus 	Juvenal 	Lucanus Philo-Judæus
	Martial 	Epictetus Seneca 	Persius
Hermogones Silius Italicus Pliny Elder 	Plutarch 	Statius
Arrian 	Pliny Younger 	Ptolemy Petronius 	Tacitus
	Appian Dion Pruseus 	Justus of Tiberius 	Phlegon
Paterculus 	Apollonius 	Phædrus Suetonius
Quintilian 	Valerius Maximus Pausanias 	Dio Chrysostom
	Lysias Florus Lucius 	Columella 	Pomponius Mela
Lucian 	Valerius Flaccus 	Appion of Alexandria
Quintius Curtius 	Damis 	Theon of Smyrna
Aulus Gellius 	Favorinus 	

According to Remsburg, “Enough of the writings of the authors named in
the foregoing list remains to form a library. Yet in this mass of
Jewish and Pagan literature, aside from two forged passages in the
works of a Jewish author, and two disputed passages in the works of
Roman writers, there is to be found no mention of Jesus Christ.” Nor,
we may add, do any of these authors make note of the Disciples or
Apostles – increasing the embarrassment from the silence of history
concerning the foundation of Christianity. Notes

    It is sometimes claimed that the “miraculous” spread of
    Christianity in the early Roman Empire is evidence of an historical
    Jesus – that such a movement could not have gone so far so fast had
    there not been a real person at its inception. A similar argument
    could be made, however, in the case of the earlier rapid spread of
    Mithraism. I am unaware of any Christian apologists who would argue
    that this supports the idea of an historical Mithra! A profusely
    annotated paperback edition of Paine’s book is available from
    American Atheist Press for twelve dollars. (Order No. 5575, click
    here) [back] An apocalypse is a pseudonymous piece of writing
    characterized by exaggerated symbolic imagery, usually dealing with
    the expectation of an imminent cosmic cataclysm wherein the deity
    destroys the wicked and rewards the righteous. Apocalyptic writing
    abounds in hidden meanings and numerological puzzles. Parts of a
    number of Judæo-Christian apocalypses other than Revelation have
    been preserved, but only the latter (if one does not consider the
    Book of Daniel to be entirely apocalyptic) was accepted into the
    Christian canon – and it almost didn’t make it, having been
    rejected by several early Church Fathers and Church Councils. The
    opposite theory, often referred to as “Griesbach’s hypothesis,”
    that the author of Mark had “epitomized” the two longer gospels,
    keeping only the “essential” details, is today almost entirely
    rejected by bible scholars. While the arguments to support this
    nearly universal rejection are too involved to even summarize here,
    it may be noted that shortening of miracle stories is completely
    out of keeping with the principles of religious development seen
    everywhere today. Stories invariably get “better” (i.e., longer)
    with the retelling, never shorter! There is compelling evidence
    indicating that these alleged sayings of Jesus were taken from
    another early document known as Q (German, for Quelle, ‘source’).
    Like the so-called Gospel of Thomas found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt,
    Q appears to have been a list of wisdom sayings that at some point
    became attributed to Jesus. We know that at least one of these
    sayings (“We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced…” Matt.
    17:11; Luke 7:32) derives from Æsop’s Fables, not from a sage of
    Galilee! I say “official gospels” because there are, in fact, many
    other gospels known. Once people started making them up, they sort
    of got stuck in over-drive. Only later on in Christian history did
    the number get pared back to four. Even the letters supposed to
    contain authentic writings of Saul/Paul have been shown by a number
    of scholars to be as composite as the gospels (e.g., L. Gordon
    Rylands, A Critical Analysis of the Four Chief Pauline Epistles:
    Romans, First and Second Corinthians, and Galatians, Watts & Co.,
    London, 1929). According to such analyses, the core Pauline
    material in these letters is what might be termed a pre-Christian
    Gnostic product. This material is surrounded by often contradictory
    material added by proto-Catholic interpolators and redactors who
    succeeded thus in claiming a popular proto-Gnostic authority for
    the Church of Rome. In any case, the Greek text of these letters is
    heavy with terms such as Archon, Æon, etc. – jargon terms popular
    in the more astrologically conscious forms of Gnosticism. It would
    appear that the Christ of Paul is as astral a being as the Lamb of
    Revelation. Like the god of Revelation, the god of Paul
    communicates via visions, not physically, face-to-face. Originally,
    this would have been the title born by a member of a religious
    fraternity associated with the worship of Yahweh, who in Greek was
    always referred to as kurios (‘Lord’). This was carried over into
    primitive Christianity, where we know from I Cor. 9:5 that there
    existed a governing class coordinate with apostles that was called
    “Brothers of the Lord.” Misunderstanding of the original meaning of
    the title led to the belief that Jesus had siblings – an error that
    can be found already in the earliest of the canonical gospels.
    Interestingly, the embarrassing passages in the gospels where Jesus
    is rude to his mother and brethren would seem to derive from a
    period where a political struggle had developed between
    apostolically governed sects and those governed by “Brethren of the
    Lord,” who claimed authority now by virtue of an alleged blood
    relationship to Jesus – who had by then supplanted Yahweh as
    “Lord.” The apostolic politics of the gospel writers could not
    resist putting down the Brethren Party by having Jesus disregard
    his own family. If Jesus didn’t pay serious attention to his own
    family, the argument would go, why should anyone pay attention to
    their descendants? This is the only plausible explanation for the
    presence of such passages as John 2:4 (“Woman, what have I to do
    with thee?”) or Mark 3:33 (“Who is my mother, or my brethren?).
    Latinists often dispute the possibility of the passage being a
    forgery on the grounds that Tacitus’ distinctive Latin style so
    perfectly permeates the entire passage. But it should be noted that
    the more distinctive a style might be, the easier it can be
    imitated. Then too, there is a lapse from normal Tacitean usage
    elsewhere in the disputed passage. In describing the early
    Christians as being haters “of the human race” (humani generis),
    the passage reverses the word order of normal Tacitean usage. In
    all other cases, Tacitus has generis humani. Curiously, in the
    present case, it would seem that such proof is in fact possible.
    Since Jesus is frequently referred to as “Jesus of Nazareth,” it is
    interesting to learn that the town now called Nazareth did not
    exist in the first centuries BCE and CE. Exhaustive archaeological
    studies have been done by Franciscans to prove the cave they
    possess was once the home of Jesus’ family. But actually they have
    shown the site to have been a necropolis – a city of the dead –
    during the first century CE. (Naturally, the Franciscans cannot
    agree!) With no Nazareth other than a cemetery existing at the
    time, how could there have been a Jesus of Nazareth? Without an Oz,
    could there have been a Wizard of Oz?

References

    Illustrated in Robin Seager, Tiberius, Eyre Methuen, London, 1972.
    For more detailed numismatic documentation of Tiberius, see also C.
    H. V. Sutherland, Roman History and Coinage 44 BC-AD 69, Clarendon
    Press, Oxford, 1987; by the same author, Coinage in Roman Imperial
    Policy 31 B.C.-A.D. 68, Sanford J. Durst Numismatic Publications,
    NY, 1978. Illustrated in Seager, op. cit. Illustrated in Seager,
    op. cit. Examined in Sutherland, 1987, op. cit. See also Victor
    Ehrenberg and A. H. M. Jones, Documents Illustrating the Reigns of
    Augustus & Tiberius, 2nd Edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955.
    See Inscriptiones Latinæ Selectæ, edidit Hermannus Dessau,
    reprinted in 4 vols. by Ares Publishers Inc., Chicago, 1979.
    Illustrated in Seager, op. cit. See Acta Divi Augusti, Regia
    Academia Italica, Rome, 1945. In her Anchor Bible Volume 38,
    Revelation (Doubleday, Garden City, NJ, 1975), J. Massyngberde Ford
    proposed that the core of Revelation was material written by Jewish
    followers of John the Baptist. Even if the Baptist had been an
    historical figure (which is extremely doubtful), this still would
    make Revelation in essence a pre-Christian, Jewish apocalypse. For
    more astrological aspects of Revelation, see Bruce J. Malina, On
    The Genre And Message Of Revelation: Star Visions and Sky Journeys,
    Hendrickson, Peabody, MA, 1995. George A. Wells, The Historical
    Evidence for Jesus, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1982, p. 13. L.
    Gordon Rylands, Did Jesus Ever Live?, Watts & Co., London, 1929, p.
    20. This so-called Testimonium Flavianum appears in Bk 18 Ch 3 §3
    of Josephus: Jewish Antiquities Books XVIII-XIX, IX, translated by
    L. H. Feldman, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press,
    Cambridge, MA, 1981, pp. 48-51. J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus
    Completus, Series Græca, Tomus CIII. Photius Constantinopolitanus
    Patriarcha, Garnier Fratres, Paris, 1900, Cod. 47, 76, and 238.
    [back] Rylands, op. cit., p. 14. William Benjamin Smith, Ecce Deus:
    Studies Of Primitive Christianity, Watts & Co., London, 1912, p.
    235.









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