Date 07-01-2009
GMTime 03:53:25
Christianity Revealed
Miracles, Myths and Mysteries of Christianity
The New Testament—History?
Public domain. Copy freely
Abstract
The Saviour Jesus
When an honest bishop admits that the narrative of Christ is not literally true, and this is reported in the press, there is always outrage from offended Christians, but evidence for him is thin, and for belief in him as God would not satisfy a dodo. The discrepancies between the Jesus of the gospels especially between the fourth gospel and the first three, Synoptic gospels, are numerous. If he was the Jew of the Synoptics, he was not the Jew hater of the fourth gospel. In Matthew, his nativity occurred during the sovereignty of Herod, who was chosen as Governor of Judaea in the Roman province of Syria, in 40 BC under Antonius Marcus, and later was king. In Luke, the birth is said to have taken place in 6 AD when Augustus was Emperor, a decade after the death of Herod. Herod died at Jericho in 4 BC after a period of absence on account of illness from Jerusalem.
Matthew recorded that, at the death of Christ, the earth quaked, the rocks were rent, and the graves were opened. Could such peculiar events have occurred and yet no notice be taken of them? History records nothing.
The biographers of Christ in the New Testament, not wishing their master to be outdone in his legendary history, made him a performer of miracles. Without them Christianity could not have prospered, but because of them Christ was accused of being initiated in magical art in the heathen temples of Egypt.
Christ could do no less than other saviours of mankind. He has to descend into hell, though nothing in the canonical gospels describes it. It appears in an account in the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus. Having descended to hell, Satan and the Prince of Hell try to close the gates of hell against him, but a voice of thunder, accompanied by the rushing of winds, booms:
Lift up ye gates, O ye Princes, and be ye lifted up, O ye everlasting gates, and the King of Glory shall come in.
Many gods descended into hell, and remained there for the space of three days and three nights—Krishna, the Hindu saviour, Zoroaster, the Persian saviour, Osiris and Horus of Egypt, Adonis, Bacchus, Hercules, Mercury, and Baldur. It is a reflexion of the sun declining to its lowest altitude at the winter solstice where it seemed to remain for three days before beginning to rise again when it began its annual ascension. The descent into hell was not added to the Apostles’ Creed until after the sixth century. The Apostles’ Creed was not framed by the apostles.
At the crucifixion Luke writes that “there was darkness from the sixth to the ninth hour”. Those who say the darkness was a solar eclipse do not understand the motions of the celestial bodies. The Passover moon was full. Furthermore, a solar eclipse lasts only about six minutes. At the death of the Hindu saviour, Krishna, a black circle surrounded the moon, and the sun was darkened at noon-day, the sky rained fire and ashes, flames burned dusky and livid, demons committed depredations on earth. At sunrise and sunset thousands of figures were seen skirmishing in the air, and spirits were to be seen on all sides. When Prometheus was crucified by chains on Mount Caucasus, the whole frame of Nature became convulsed—the earth quaked, thunder roared, lightning flashed, winds blew and the sea rose. When Atreus, of Mycenae, murdered his nephews, the sun, unable to endure a sight so horrible, turned his course backwards and withdrew his light.
Myths and Miracles
Miracles are imaginary deviations from the known laws of Nature—proved by experience to be firm and unalterable—by the power of a god. Faith in miracles comes from ignorance or a confusion of belief with knowledge. The people who lived contemporary with Christ tended to believe in anything—it was a credulous age. If they could have been present at one of Uri Geller’s shows, these credulous ancients would have certainly wanted to worship him as a god. But no intelligent person today could accept such miracles as other than tricks. All accounts of miracles should be banished altogether to their proper region—that of fiction or legend. Nature does not allow her laws to be fooled with.
The main benefit Christians think they enjoy for their unquestioning belief is life after they are dead. What evidence is there that we are alive after we are dead? None, but our praying for life after death is easily explained. Normal people in this world instinctively like to keep on living as long as they are healthy. They want to meet their friends again. It is a false hope, but, in a sense, nobody dies. Everything that is in the body and in the man is eaten by all kinds of life, goes to make trees and grass and weeds and fruit, and, in that way, goes on and on. The matter that is in us will exist in another form when we are dead, but we personally will be gone. That, though, is not the kind of immortality people want. They want to see their sisters, and their friends in heaven. They want to be assured they will all meet again. In a huge self-deception, the faithful reassure each other, without having the least idea that what they say is valid, except, of course, the reassurances they have likewise had. As a rule, the less the faithful know, the surer they are. In fact, we do know where every individual life on earth began. It began in a single cell in the body of our mother, who had some 10,000 of those cells. It was fertilized by a spermatozoon from the body of our father, who had millions of them, any one of which, under certain circumstances, would fertilize a cell. They multiplied and divided until a child was born. And in old age or accident or disease, they fall apart and the body and soul is gone—the soul just as categorically because it is just the old name for the psyche, the personality.
Astonishingly, centuries before Christ, people regarded Osiris, Attis, and others as they now regard Christ, as a risen saviour and confidently hoped to rise from the grave as did their god. Zoroaster, the Persian saviour, ascended to heaven. Hercules, son of Zeus rose. Baldur, the Scandinavian lord and saviour rose. Bacchus, son of the virgin Semele rose. Prodigies attended the death of nearly all legendary heroes—it would not have been complete without them.
Celsus, in common with most Greeks, looked upon Christianity as a “blind faith” that “shunned the light of reason”. He said, Origen tells us, that Christians are forever repeating, “Do not examine, only believe and thy faith will make thee blessed. Wisdom is a bad thing in life, foolishness is to be preferred”.
Innumerable miracles are ascribed to Buddhist saints. Their garments and staffs were supposed to imbibe some mysterious power, and blessed were they who were allowed to touch them. A Buddhist saint, who attained the power called perfection, was able to rise and float along through the air, his body becoming imponderous. Buddhist annals give accounts of miraculous suspensions in the air. We are also told that in 217 BC nineteen Buddhist missionary priests entered China to propagate their faith, and were imprisoned by the emperor, but an angel came and opened the prison door and liberated them.
Jesus in History
If all the wonderful things said about Christ were true, we should naturally expect to hear something about him in the writings of the period. Not one of the classic writers in the first century, writers of the Augustan age of letters, writers in satire, history, natural history, medicine, astronomy, miracles, fables, not one unequivocally mentions Christ or his apostles or his miracles.
Non-gospel evidence is slight indeed for Christ. Neither Philo, nor the two Plinys, nor any other writer of the age, mention the name of Christ, much less the ten thousand other wonderful things mentioned by the interpolator of Josephus. The only significant evidence for Christ is in the New Testament and that is unreliable and overlaid with mythology or obfuscation, whatever Christians might believe in the efficiency and honesty of the Holy Ghost in preserving the truth.
Following the failure of Christ to appear at the millennium as promised in Revelation, people started inquiring into the truth and origin of Christianity. For the church, Christendom was seriously menaced and it instituted the Inquisition. Large sums of money were offered for the discovery of ancient manuscripts, which would bear testimony to the divine authority of the church. Supply meets the demand and monks saw a source of income—they started to manufacture manuscripts. The mendacious writings of anonymous monks have been exposed even by Catholic historians. Cardinal Newman, in his Grammar of Assent, says:
Most of our Latin classics are forgeries of the monks of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
A learned scholar and a writer high in the Jesuit College in Paris, Father Hardouin, has exposed the the ecclesiastical history of the first twelve centuries is fable. The lists of popes before 1227 are fictitious. Gregory the Great, elected at this date, is the first of whom we have any historic notice. That leaves a fraudulent list of some 180 popes who never had an existence other than in the imagination of the compilers.
Justus of Tiberias, who was born about five years after the time assigned for the crucifixion of Christ, wrote a Jewish history, but it contained no mention of the coming of Christ, nor of the events concerning him, nor of the prodigies he is supposed to have wrought. Any historical evidence of the original Christ that existed anywhere was destroyed by Christians to hide the truth when they were able. Any historical Christ has been deliberately disguised to hide him from the historians. Christ has been overlaid with mythology taken from contemporary religious belief, notably the sun gods.
