On the Origin of Jesus Part 3: Mythical Jesus

This is a subject that I haven't really made my mind up about yet, because there is no conclusive evidence, but I'll have a crack at it anyway.

There are three main things to take into consideration when analysing the idea that Jesus was mythical. First, that there are no secular sources that mention a miracle-working Jesus (I've dealt with Josephus before). Second, that the earliest Christian writings (Paul's Epistles) do not provide any evidence for a recent historical Jesus. Lastly, that many aspects of the Jesus story have close parallels in other Middle-eastern religions, with stories about messiahs, dying gods, which Christian apologists have tried to explain-away since the beginning of the religion. In the second century C.E. early church fathers were dealing with criticisms that their religion had plagiarised the pagan religions, and their primary response was that Satan had anticipated Christianity, and copied aspects of it to make it look like Christianity had copied paganism. This is one of the most pathetic defences of any religion that I've ever seen.

In my  last post I mentioned that the fingerprints of oral tradition, aka. folklore are smeared all over the gospel accounts. It has been suggested by apologists that the contradictions between the four gospel accounts are evidence that they're true, which I find ludicrous. That argument could possibly be used if the accounts were written down by eye-witnesses, because people often make mistakes in their observations. However, the gospel accounts were not written by eye-witnesses, quite far from it in fact. Depending on which gospel you look at, we're talking between 2 and 4 generations passed between the alleged death of Jesus and the time the gospel was written down. I find it quite absurd to suggest that the gospel accounts we have written down, were passed down orally through 2-4 generations and then written down in more-or-less the same form. I find it far more reasonable that the variation arose from many decades of telling the same basic story. We have no indication of when the original story arose, or what that story even was, as there is no archaeological evidence to support the Jesus story, and many aspects of it are quite plainly fictitious. The gospels themselves place the Jesus story at contradictory places in history, which to me seems to be an attempt by each of the authors to place a myth within a historical context.

There seems to be 4 common views of the historicity of Jesus, I find 3 of them plausible.
1: Jesus never existed.
2: Jesus existed, but we can't know anything about him, due to the contradictory nature of the sources.
3: Jesus existed, and we can discern some core ideas about his identity, but he is not the same Jesus as the gospels portray.
4: Jesus existed, and the gospels portray him accurately.

1-3 I find all equally viable explanations, number 4 however seems to ignore the evidence. This is unfortunately the position that the majority of lay-Christians hold to, probably because they really don't know much about their own religion.

Friday Fundies

 This one is a quote from a thread debating the infamous creationist film 'Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed'. It's a perfect example of circular reasoning, using the bible to justify the bible, offering bible verses to 'prove' what he said, and then challenging his opponents to prove him wrong 'biblically'. It's possible to justify anything using the bible, which is to be expected since it is a compilation of many different works, by many, many authors. Fundies just don't seem to be able to grasp the mental concept that the bible isn't meant to be taken as literal truth. The truth of the matter is much more complex than their simpleton brains could possibly comprehend.

Quote# 44002

(In the Evolution Debate thread, Wayne keeps trying to prove to us "blind" people that humans are not animals "cuz the bible sez so!)

First,, the bible is the Word of God and the Word of God is Jesus Christ in the flesh....... AND it IS the beginning and the end of all matters. Want the verse that proves it or do you know it? Man is created from the dust of the ground. Show me how I'm wrong biblically.

Source

Comic: The Downfall of Mormonism

I found this delightful comic on reddit, and thought I would share it with you all. It perfectly shows what SHOULD be happening, unfortunately though, there are a lot of gullible people out there, who simply take peoples word and never look into anything for themselves.

Does being a dick pay off?

After watching Phil Plait's speech from TAM, I've been thinking about the whole concept of being friendly to antagonists a whole lot more. I rewound my brain to remember whether people insulting my beliefs had anything to do with my deconversion. It may have had some small effect on my pride, but to be quite honest, there was probably only one single person who impacted my deconversion more than all the others combined. I don't even know his name, but we used to debate on Myspace group forums about religion, evolution, science and everything in between. Even though I said a lot of things which I would now regard as being rather moronic, he seemed to keep his cool amazingly, while I was the one going off the rails, not with insults but with incoherent ranting, and copy/pasting things I had seen on apologetics websites.

One time I sent him a private message to convince him to read an apologetics book, which I mentioned in my deconversion post over a year ago, 'I don't have enough faith to be an atheist'. He in turn recommended a book to me, 'The Age of Reason' by Thomas Paine. I highly doubt that he ever read the book I recommended to him, and I hope he doesn't, because when I re-examined the book years later it wasn't all I thought it had been.
Some 4 years after he recommended that I read Thomas Paine, I bought a copy of the book, read it and was completely intrigued the entire way though. I had never looked at the bible that way before. Even though Paine was fervently arguing for the Deistic position, by the time I had finished reading The Age of Reason, I was agnostic about whether god existed or not. At that point I no longer considered myself a Christian, but still had a desire to believe in god.


I'm certainly not advocating the complete elimination of offensive words, because a well-placed insult can add a great dramatic flair to a passionate argument, especially when it comes to things like Chiropractors manipulating the spines of infants and young children I can't help but throw wild insults, that shit makes me sick!

God is Superfluous

I'm just going to take a minute to explain methodological naturalism before I get to the point of this post. Methodological naturalism is the practical assumption that all science works from, when there is a gap in scientific knowledge it is assumed that there is a natural explanation for that phenomenon. If scientists sometimes assumed that a particular unknown was the result of a supernatural intervention it would effectively place a brick wall in the path of progress.

As you should know, science has effectively replaced religion in terms of understanding the natural world. We now know that Zeus doesn't throw lightening bolts, Neptune doesn't control the seas, our sun isn't a deity and Yahweh didn't create life on earth or fashion mankind out of the dirt. All of those things have completely natural explanations, those gods are superfluous. We don't have to stop there though, apologists have tried to find god in the realm of physics too, attempting to attribute the big bang to a supernatural origin. Unfortunately for them though the data strongly indicates to us that no such miracle occurred to kick-start our universe into being. Stephen Hawking wrote in 1988 "In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that the negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero." Apologists will then most likely posit the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing', and the simple answer is "Nothing is unstable" -Frank Wilczek. According to the principles of quantum mechanics, not only is 'nothing' unstable, but it seems nothing is also impossible. Thus, gods are superfluous in explaining the origin and existence of the universe too.

If we have relinquished the role of gods in explaining the origin and nature of the universe, and we can't detect any supernatural interactions with the physical world, for what purpose do we (as a species) still believe in gods? Is it to satisfy some deep-seated desire for a transcendent meaning to life? Or is it simply just wishful thinking?

3D Imaging of Oldest Fossils

New Scientist has an article about the work being done making 3D images of what are thought to be the oldest fossilised animals on earth. These fossils are sponges from pre-Cambrian strata, which makes them another piece of evidence that creationists/ID proponents will ignore. The 'Cambrian Explosion' popularised by creationists is now even more of a joke than it was before.

The Resurrection Account in Mark

On a similar note to the post below this one, I found a video on YouTube by a user named KingHeathen, and he mentioned something that I did know but hadn't played connect-the-dots with.
Mark chapter 16 begins with the account of Mary, Mary and Salome visiting the tomb of Jesus to find the stone already rolled away and Jesus' body missing. There is a "young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment", who tells them that Jesus is risen. The book of Mark ends with this at verse 8 "And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they  trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for  they were afraid."
Most decent Bibles will then have a little note that says something like this after verse 8.
"The most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20."
Mark 16:9-20 is the part that mentions Jesus appearing to many people after the resurrection and ascending into heaven.
As we know, Mark is the earliest gospel of the 4 in the Bible, and these last verses are a later addition. So, the earliest gospel doesn't really mention the resurrection in any detail, all we hear is from a man sitting inside Jesus' tomb explaining that the reason there is no body is because he rose from the dead.

So, who was the man in the white robes? We aren't told, Mark and John simply say that he is a man dressed in white. Matthew and Luke say that his appearance was like lightening. As a matter of fact, Luke and John say that there were two men inside the tomb, but that's beside the point. From what it seems, all the accounts of Jesus appearing to people and ascending into heaven were later additions to the gospels, because the earliest gospel (Mark) didn't contain them.

Just a thought.

Here's the video that I mentioned anyway

On the Origin of Jesus Part 2: Oral Tradition

Reading Alan Dundes' book has given me a whole new insight into this topic so I've decided to do a second part.
Between the death of Jesus and the time the gospels were written as I mentioned last time, Paul was the only person to write about Christianity. Paul's writings only contained a small number of the details that are known as the story of Jesus, and they are often slightly different to the what is contained within the gospels (which differ from one another), the point of this post is to highlight the origin of these variant texts.

Just to give you an idea of the kind of thing I'm talking about I'll give some examples.

How many women visited Jesus' tomb?
Mark     - 3: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome
Matthew- 2: Mary Magdalene and the other Mary
Luke     - more than 3: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and the others with them
John     - 1: Mary Magdalene

When was the Stone Rolled away?
Mark, Luke and John- The stone had been rolled away when they arrived
Matthew- After they arrived, an angel appeared, rolled the stone away and sat on it.

I'm not going to spend any more time showing you more of these, but here's a short list of variant texts to do with the resurrection of Christ. You can take my word for it that the gospels are full of this kind of thing, or you can go look them up yourself, they aren't exactly hard to find.

Apologists have tried to reconcile these apparent contradictions by saying things like "they're divergent accounts, and prove that it's correct!" as a mantra. I believe Josh Mcdowell was a huge proponent of that idea. The problem with this idea is that it is just plain wrong. We've established that none of the new testament writers were eye-witnesses to anything that happened, so where did the textual variations come from? The details of the story were passed down 2-4 generations before they were written down, which is more than enough time for discrepancies and errors to creep in. How much of the story is genuine? We'll probably never know. As far as I'm concerned, there are only 4 details that are almost certainly true, that he lived, had a crowd of followers, was influential and that he died.