Sunday sermon - The "Life" of Jesus

Since it is Easter SOYMB thought it appropriate to discuss Jesus. Millions of people claim that they belong to the Christian religion, but few of them know anything about the alleged life of the founder of their religion, a fellow named Jesus. Why is this so? Since secular history is silent on the historical actuality of the alleged life and teachings of Jesus, our only source of information on him is the Bible. The Bible is claimed to be the very word of god, but few Christians have ever read the Bible to see what it says. If they would read the Bible, most of them would probably be surprised and shocked as to what it says.

 The new Pope sticks to fantasy to promote the existence of Jesus using a rare television showing of the Turin Shroud, that supposedly depicts the image of the crucified Jesus but which has been scientifically proved to be of medieval origin, rather than biblical. "The face of the shroud communicates great peace," the pope said "It is as if he is saying: 'have confidence, do not lose hope, the power of God's love, the force of the resurrected, conquers all'." All that from an image that is barely discernable except in the negative!

"If Christ has not been raised, then your faith is groundless" Paul, 1 Corinthians 15.17

Christianity is patently untrue. Its basic premise—that an all-powerful god who had created the universe caused a virgin to have a son by him who became a religious preacher and miracle-worker in an obscure border area of the Roman empire, was killed and then rose from the dead and eventually ascended into the sky and disappeared—is not only ridiculous but also biologically and physically impossible. It just never happened.
But was there even ever a historical person called Jesus? Although there may be a dispute about the interpretations of the sayings attributed to him with some denying his divinity and believing that he was merely a Jewish apocalyptic cult-leader, most people accept that there as a person called Jesus who lived in Roman-occupied Palestine. Yet there exists much debate on the historicity of Jesus. There are no contemporary accounts of Jesus. None, whatsoever. The accounts of his life are certainly fabrications as they were written by people who weren’t there, well after the events they supposedly record. The gospel truth is that there is no Gospel Truth. Jesus may or may not have existed, but even if he did, the accounts we have are certainly not correct and we can’t really claim to know anything about this figure. Even if he did exist, he may as well have been mythological. The existence of Jesus is attested by no physical or eyewitness evidence, only by late, second-hand documents of uncertain provenance which are thin on historical detail and long on myth. It has long been acknowledged even by Christian theologians that the Bible does not give a coherent account of the life and sayings of Jesus. There are just too many contradictions and inconsistencies within and between the various books which make up the New Testament. Not only that, many of the historical and geographical references involving Jesus are not confirmed by modern scholarship. Christian apologists often insist that the evidence for Jesus’ existence is so strong that to deny he ever lived would force one to deny the existence of many other historical figures as well, such as Julius Caesar.
The evidence for Julius Caesar is abundant and rock-solid. First of all, we have Caesar’s own words in The Civil War a Latin classic for two thousand years, co-written by Caesar himself . In contrast, we do not have anything written by Jesus, and we do not know for certain the name of any author of any of the accounts of his earthly resurrection. Second, we have many of Caesar’s enemies, including Cicero, a contemporary of the event, reporting the crossing of the Rubicon, whereas we have no hostile or even neutral records of the resurrection until over a hundred years after the event, which is fifty years after the Christians’ own claims had been widely spread around. Third, we have a number of inscriptions and coins produced including mentions of battles and conscriptions and judgments, which provide evidence for Caesar. On the other hand, we have absolutely no physical evidence of any kind in the case of the resurrection. We have not even a single established historian mentioning the event until the 3rd and 4th centuries, and then only by Christian historians. And of those few others who do mention it within a century of the event, none of them show any wide reading, never cite any other sources, show no sign of a skilled or critical examination of conflicting claims, have no other literature or scholarship to their credit that we can test for their skill and accuracy, are completely unknown, and have an overtly declared bias towards persuasion and conversion.

Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher who lived from about 20 BCE to 50 CE. His own beliefs were influenced by Platonic elements that were in some ways similar to Christianity, and his writings show interest in other offshoot sects such as the Essenes and the Therapeutae; he wrote about Pontius Pilate and he was, by some accounts, living in or near Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’ death and miracles. Yet none of his works contain any mention of Jesus or Christianity. Justus of Tiberius, a native of Galilee who wrote a history around 80 CE covering the time Jesus supposedly lived, does not mention him. The Roman writer Seneca the Younger, who was born around 3 BCE and lived into the 60s CE, wrote extensively about ethics but says nothing about Jesus or his teachings. The historian Pliny the Elder, born around 20 CE, took a special interest in writing about science and natural phenomena, but his thirty-seven-volume Natural History says nothing about an earthquake or a strange darkness around the supposed time of Jesus’ death.

To assume that not a single person who witnessed these monumental events would have felt compelled to write them down, or that no one bothered to preserve those records if they had, violates all standards of credulity. Jesus’ healings alone, if news of them became generally known, would have attracted a flood of people from every corner of the Roman Empire desperate to be cured of their ailments; and if in addition news got out of his ability to revive the dead, as the gospels say it did, those crowds would have been multiplied tenfold. And events such as the darkening of the sun and the resurrection of the saints, if they really happened, would have left a vivid imprint on humanity’s collective memory and would have produced records.
The very first extra-biblical documents that do mention Jesus are two brief passages in the works of the historian Josephus, written around 90 CE, but the longer of the two is widely considered to be a forgery and the shorter is likely to be one as well. And there are good grounds to dispute either the authenticity or reliability, or both, of every other historical source cited as support for the existence of Jesus.

If Jesus Christ had been an actual, historical person, we would expect to have first-hand, contemporary documentation: records of his words and deeds written by people who actually saw him, or who were at least alive during his lifetime. We would expect the record of his life to be plentiful from the very beginning. On the other hand, if he was only a legend later turned into a real person, we would expect not to have any first-hand witness to his life. We would expect the historical record to be scanty and details elusive or non-existent at first, these details appearing only later as the stories about him grew in the telling. We would expect clear references to him not to appear until long after his supposed death. And of course, this scenario is exactly what we do in fact find.
We all have read the tales told of Jesus in the Gospels, but few people really have a good idea of their context. First-century Palestine was a religious and ethnic melting pot, a crossroads where many peoples, beliefs and cultures intermingled. It was also a time of upheaval – Jewish resentment against Roman rule was building, new sects were splintering off everywhere, and messianic expectation had risen to a fever pitch. Many new religions arose from this ferment, but most of them faded away or were stamped out by their competitors or the authorities. At the birth of Christianity men not only longed for a new structure of society, for peace, justice, and happiness on earth, but they trembled at the expectation of the early occurrence of world-wide catastrophe which would put a terrible end to all existence. These were also times replete with crack-pots and quacks of all varieties, from sincere lunatics to ingenious frauds, even innocent men mistaken for divine, and there was no end to the fools and loons who would follow and praise them. Monty Python’s Life of Brian was indeed an accurate representation of the period. The gullible, the credulous, and those ready to believe or exaggerate stories of the supernatural are still abundant today, they were much more common in antiquity, and taken far more seriously. The age of Jesus was an era filled with con-artists, gullible believers, martyrs without a cause, and reputed miracles of every variety. In light of this picture, the tales of the Gospels do not seem very remarkable. Even if they were false in every detail, there is no evidence that they would have been disbelieved or rejected as absurd by many people, who at the time had little in the way of education or critical thinking skills. They had little way to check a story. If they were not a witness, all they had was a man's word. Whatever skeptical observers there were, their voice was little heard.
Nearly every event in the life of Jesus is paralleled either in Greek mythology (virgin birth, resurrection) or, particularly, in the lives of Old Testament figures who also walked on water, fed thousands, raised the dead, rode on asses and ascended into heaven on a cloud (Jesus does, however, seem to have been unique in walking through walls). It is clear that the authors invented a life for Jesus which corresponded to Old Testament traditions and predictions. The historic evidence tends to lead to a conclusion that Christianity did not begin as a response to a historical man. Rather, early Christianity was a diverse tradition originally consisting of a variety of unrelated elements – Hellenistic wisdom, Jewish messianic and apocalyptic expectation, Platonic philosophy, the Jewish Wisdom, gnostic and mystery-cult elements, and the cosmic Son of God and the allegorical gospels – that only gradually coalesced into a more unified expression, eventually solidifying into a single church. The religion that emerged from these disparate elements was, of course, called Christianity. At some point, this church latched onto a particular thread that had developed within the movement – Jesus as a historical person – and declared it to be dogma, stamping out competing sects and eradicating heretical elements, and rewriting history through the lens of its own new interpretation. It is this gospel-tinted lens that has survived to this day, coloring the preconceptions of modern-day Christians.
If somebody named Jesus called upon his fellow Jews to reform their ways as the end of the world was nigh and perhaps healed a few cases of people suffering from psychosomatic illnesses searching for any authentic material from the mass of unhistorical narratives is now a near impossible task. Saying that there is no historical evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ is not the same as saying that no person called Jesus existed. For all we know – for all anybody knows – there may well have been at least one itinerant Jewish preacher in Galilee some two thousand years ago who called himself Jesus even though there is no concrete evidence for this. In the end, of course, it is not a matter of great importance whether or not there was an “historical Jesus” since if there was he would not have been the “Son of God”. And he wouldn't have walked on water, turned water into wine or raised the dead either.