Film: The God Who Wasn’t There
Borrowing the lively approach of documentaries such as Fahrenheit 9/11 and Super Size Me, ex-Christian fundamentalist Brian Flemming’s exposé, The God Who Wasn’t There, shines an unflinching spotlight on Christianity and the existence of Christ. Flemming interviews religious experts and Christians of varying backgrounds, ultimately asserting that Jesus Christ is more than likely a fictional character based on legend and that Christian doctrine is rife with contradiction.
Any objective person would likely come to the same conclusion as the above exposé. Consider the following:
Not A Single Account Of A Jesus
We have not one Jewish, Greek, or Roman writer, even those who lived in the Middle East, who ever mention Jesus during his supposed lifetime. This appears quite extraordinary, and you will find few Christian apologists who dare to mention this embarrassing fact.
Virtually all of the mythical accounts of a savior Jesus have parallels to past pagan mythologies, which existed long before Christianity, and from the Jewish scriptures that we now call the Old Testament.
Take, for example, the works of Philo Judaeus who’s birth occurred in 20 B.C.E. and died 50 C.E. He lived as the greatest Jewish-Hellenistic philosopher and historian of the time and lived in the area of Jerusalem during the alleged life of Jesus. He wrote detailed accounts of Jewish events in the surrounding area. Yet not once, in all of his volumes of writings, do we read a single account of a Jesus “the Christ.” Nor do we find any mention of Jesus in Seneca’s (4? B.C.E. - 65 C.E.) writings, nor from the historian Pliny the Elder (23? - 79 C.E.).
The Egyptian mythical Horus, god of light and goodness has many parallels to Jesus. Osiris, Hercules, Mithra, Hermes, Prometheus, Perseus and others compare to the Christian myth. According to Patrick Campbell of The Mythical Jesus, all served as pre-Christian sun gods, yet all allegedly had gods for fathers, virgins for mothers; had their births announced by stars; got 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” and had allegedly fasted for forty days. (excerpted from Jim Walker’s “Did a Historical Jesus Exist?”
“Jesus is a mythical figure in the tradition of pagan mythology and almost nothing in all of ancient literature would lead one to believe otherwise. Anyone wanting to believe Jesus lived and walked as a real live human being must do so despite the evidence, not because of it.” - C. Dennis McKinsey, Bible critic (The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy)
“It is important to recognize the obvious: The gospel story of Jesus is itself apparently mythic from first to last.” - Robert M. Price, professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute (Deconstructing Jesus, p. 260)
“Whether considered as the God made human, or as manmade divine, this character (Jesus) never existed as a person.” - Gerald Massey, Egyptologist and historical scholar (Gerald Massey’s Lectures: Gnostic and Historic Christianity, 1900)
Greatest Story Ever Sold
Many scholars believe that Jesus never existed. No first-century writer confirms the Jesus story. The New Testament story is filled with miracles and other outrageous claims. The Jesus story, consisting mostly of material borrowed from pagan religions, appears to be cut from the same fabric as all other myths and fables.
“The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.” - David Hume
“Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favor, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one.” - Richard Dawkins, the first Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University
The second coming of Jesus Christ has been predicted many times over the past two millennia. There is strong evidence that this person never even existed. When in this Information Age it becomes apparent to the masses that the New Testament story is largely a fabrication built upon elements of earlier fictitious stories, there will be an escalating, impassioned, and deserved backlash. When people discover that they have been taken for a ride - lied to - it’s not going to be pretty. It is likely that “the greatest story ever told” is, in truth, the greatest story ever sold.
The Jesus Puzzle
Earl Doherty begins his book, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity begin with a mythical Christ?, with twelve theses, “The Twelve Pieces of the Jesus Puzzle.” He enumerates twelve points which together only make sense if Jesus never existed. If the Jesus of Christian tradition once existed as an actual physical being, these twelve points constitute an inscrutable mystery, and an insoluble problem.
The Twelve Pieces Of The Jesus Puzzle
1. Jesus of Nazareth and the Gospel story cannot be found in Christian writings earlier than the Gospels, the first of which (Mark) was composed only in the late first century.
2. There is no non-Christian record of Jesus before the second century. References in Flavius Josephus (end of first century) can be dismissed as later Christian insertions.
3. The early epistles, such as Paul and Hebrews, speak of their Christ Jesus as a spiritual, heavenly being revealed by God through scripture, and do not equate him with a recent historical man. Paul is part of a new “salvation” movement acting on revelation from the Spirit.
4. Paul and other early writers place the death and resurrection of their Christ in the supernatural/mythical world, and derive their information about these events, as well as other features of their heavenly Christ, from scripture.
5. The ancients viewed the universe as multi-layered: matter below, spirit above. The higher world was regarded as the superior, genuine reality, containing spiritual processes and heavenly counterparts to earthly things. Paul’s Christ operates within this system.
6. The pagan “mystery cults” of the period worshiped savior deities who had performed salvific acts which took place in the supernatural/mythical world, not on earth or in history. Paul’s Christ shares many features with these deities.
7. The prominent philosophical-religious concept of the age was the intermediary Son, a spiritual channel between the ultimate transcendent God and humanity. Such intermediary concepts as the Greek Logos and Jewish Wisdom were models for Paul’s heavenly Christ.
8. All the Gospels derive their basic story of Jesus of Nazareth from one source: whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark. The Acts of the Apostles, as an account of the beginnings of the Christian apostolic movement, is a second century piece of myth-making.
9. The Gospels are not historical accounts, but constructed through a process of “midrash,” a Jewish method of reworking old biblical passages and tales to reflect new beliefs. The story of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion is a pastiche of verses from scripture.
10. “Q,” a lost sayings collection extracted from Matthew and Luke, made no reference to a death and resurrection and can be shown to have had no Jesus at its roots: roots which were ultimately non-Jewish. The Q community preached the kingdom of God, and its traditions were eventually assigned to an invented founder who was linked to the heavenly Jesus of Paul in the Gospel of Mark.
11. The initial variety of sects and beliefs about a spiritual Christ shows that the movement began as a multiplicity of largely independent and spontaneous developments based on the religious trends and philosophy of the time, not as a response to a single individual.
12. Well into the second century, many Christian documents lack or reject the notion of a human man as an element of their faith. Only gradually did the Jesus of Nazareth portrayed in the Gospels come to be accepted as historical.
The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity begin with a mythical Christ? By Earl Doherty (Ottawa Canada: Canadian Humanist Publications, 1999)
Religion’s Greatest Enemy
“Information is religion’s greatest enemy, and in an age when information is just a few keyboard strokes away from anyone with a computer, this is going to pose a greater threat to Christianity than anything it has yet ’survived.’ - Farrell Till
“My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity.” - Bertrand Russell
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