(1)
In the '80s this controversy erupted once again when GA
Wells published Did Jesus Exist? and later The Historical Evidence
for Jesus, both of which sought to prove that Jesus is a nonhistorical
character. An attempt to repudiate Wells was made by Ian Wilson in Jesus:
The Evidence, an entire book written to establish that Jesus did exist.
(There is a chapter titled, "Did Jesus Even Exist?," which in itself immediately
places a possibly hitherto unknown doubt in the reader's mind.) It should be
noted that no such book would be needed if the existence of Jesus Christ as a
historical figure were a proven fact accepted by all.
(2)
As regards the work of Erich von Daniken, Zecharia Sitchin
and others, it should be understood that few of the stories of godmen can be
taken literally to reveal actual superhuman "masters" or alien presences and
influences. Most of these characters are, to learned mythologists, clearly
myths. (See below)
(3)
"Evemerism," named after Evemeras, a 4th Century B.C.E.
Greek philosopher who developed the idea that, rather than being mythological
creatures as was accepted by the reigning intellectuals, the gods of old were in
fact historical characters, kings, emperors and heroes whose exploits were then
deified. Evemerists have put forth a great deal of literature attempting to
prove that Jesus was a great Jewish reformer and revolutionary who threatened
the status quo and thus had to be put to death. Unfortunately for historicizers,
no historian of his purported time even noticed this "great reformer." In
Ancient History of the God Jesus, Dujardin states, "This doctrine
[Evemerism] is nowadays discredited except in the case of Jesus. No scholar
believes that Osiris or Jupiter or Dionysus was an historical person promoted to
the rank of a god, but exception is made only in favour of Jesus. . . .It is
impossible to rest the colossal work of Christianity on Jesus, if he was a man."
The standard Christian response to the Evemerists has been that no such Jesus,
stripped of his miracles and other supernatural attributes, could ever "have
been adored as a god or even been saluted as the Messiah of Israel." (Dujardin)
This response is quite accurate: No man could have caused such a hullabaloo and
hellish fanaticism, the product of which has been the unending spilling of
blood. The crazed "inspiration" that has kept the Church afloat merely confirms
the mythological origins of this tale. "The general assumption concerning the
canonical gospels is that the historic element was the kernel of the whole, and
that the fables accreted round it; whereas the mythos, being pre-extant, proves
the core of the matter was mythical, and it follows that the history is
incremental. . . . It was the human history that accreted round the divinity,
and not a human being who became divine." (Massey, The Historical Jesus and
the Mythical Christ, henceforth, "MC") The bottom line is that when one
removes all the elements of those preceding deities and myths that contributed
to the formation of this Jewish god-man - which is what Evemerists insist on
doing - there is nothing historical left to point to. As Massey says, ". . . a
composite likeness of twenty different persons merged in one . . . is not
anybody." (MC)
(4)
"Those who denied the humanity of Christ were the
first class of professing Christians, and not only first in order of time, but
in dignity of character, in intelligence, and in moral influence." (Taylor)
While those who held onto the millennia-old gnostic Mythos of Christ preceded
the carnalizers, or sarkolaters (those who made Christ into flesh), having
long-established rituals and doctrines, it was they who were accused of
being heretics by their younger, ignorant, carnalizing cousins, who were in
reality the true heretics. Taylor: "The deniers of the humanity of Christ, or,
in a word, professing Christians, who denied that any such man as Jesus Christ
ever existed at all, but who took the name Jesus Christ to signify only an
abstraction, or prosopop‘ia, the principle of Reason personified; and
who understood the whole gospel story to be a sublime allegory . . . these were
the first, and (it is not dishonour to Christianity to pronounce them) the best
and most rational Christians."
(5)
Rev. Robert Taylor, The Diegesis. Rev. Taylor was
an English clergyman widely known for his "heretical" sermons, which he began to
deliver after discovering, through a superior classical education, that Christ
was a mythological character. He was twice imprisoned in England in the 1820's
for "blasphemy." Taylor was one of the early "freethinkers," although he
maintained he was a "Deist," and, therefore, not an atheist. Taylor suffered
tremendous persecution for his stance, yet from his prison cell, he composed
The Diegesis, a remarkable and scholarly dissertation of the highest
quality.
(6)
Ibid.
(7)
With acknowledgment to Randel Helms, author of Gospel
Fictions.
(8)
The Origin and Evolution of Religion by Albert
Churchward.
(9)
Forgery in Christianity by Joseph Wheless: "As
said by the great critic, Salomon Reinach, 'With the exception of Papias, who
speaks of a narrative by Mark, and a collection of sayings of Jesus, no
Christian writer of the first half of the second century (i.e., up to
150 A.D.) quotes the Gospels or their reputed authors.'" In The Book
Your Church Doesn't Want You to Read, John Remsburg states: "The Four
Gospels were unknown to the early Christian Fathers. Justin Martyr, the most
eminent of the early Fathers, wrote about the middle of the second century. His
writings in proof of the divinity of Christ demanded the use of these Gospels
had they existed in his time. He makes more than 300 quotations from the books
of the Old Testament, and nearly one hundred from the Apocryphal books of the
New Testament; but none from the four Gospels. Rev. Giles says: 'The very names
of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are never mentioned by him
(Justin) - do not occur once in all his writings.'" In A Short History of
the Bible, Keeler says, "The books [canonical gospels] are not heard of
till 150 A.D., that is, till Jesus had been dead nearly a hundred and twenty
years. No writer before 150 A.D. makes the slightest mention of them."
(10)
Wheless quotes the Catholic Encyclopedia:
"Enterprising spirits responded to this natural craving by pretended
gospels full of romantic fables, and fantastic and striking details; their
fabrications were eagerly read and accepted as true by common folk who
were devoid of any critical faculty and who were predisposed to
believe what so luxuriously fed their pious curiosity. Both Catholics and
Gnostics were concerned in writing these fictions. The former had no
motive other than that of a PIOUS FRAUD." (NB: "C.E." denotes "Common Era" and
is equivalent to "A.D.," whereas "B.C.E." denotes "Before the Common Era" and is
equivalent to "B.C." )
(11)
Wheless, op cit. Mangasarian states: "The church
historian, Mosheim, writes that, 'The Christian Fathers deemed it a pious act to
employ deception and fraud.' [Ecclesiastical Hist., Vol. I, p. 347.] Again, he
says: 'The greatest and most pious teachers were nearly all of them infected
with this leprosy.' Will not some believer tell us why forgery and fraud were
necessary to prove the historicity of Jesus. . . . Another historian, Milman,
writes that, 'Pious fraud was admitted and avowed by the early missionaries of
Jesus.' 'It was an age of literary frauds,' writes Bishop Ellicott, speaking of
the times immediately following the alleged crucifixion of Jesus. Dr. Giles
declares that, 'There can be no doubt that great numbers of books were written
with no other purpose than to deceive.' And it is the opinion of Dr. Robertson
Smith that, 'There was an enormous floating mass of spurious literature created
to suit party views.'"
(12)
Wheless: "The clerical confessions of lies and frauds in
the ponderous volumes of the Catholic Encyclopedia alone suffice . . .
to wreck the Church and to destroy utterly the Christian religion. . . . The
Church exists mostly for wealth and self-aggrandizement; to quit paying money to
the priests would kill the whole scheme in a couple of years. This is the
sovereign remedy."
(13)
In one of his works, Eusebius provides this handy
chapter entitled: "How it may be Lawful and Fitting to use Falsehood as
Medicine, and for the Benefit of those who Want to be Deceived." (Wheless)
Wheless also calls Justin Martyr, Eusebius and Tertullian "three luminous
liars." Keeler: "The early Christian fathers were extremely ignorant and
superstitious; and they were singularly incompetent to deal with the
supernatural."
(14)
Wheless. "If the pious Christians, confessedly,
committed so many and so extensive forgeries and frauds to adapt these popular
Jewish fairy-tales of their God and holy Worthies to the new Christian Jesus and
his Apostles, we need feel no surprise when we discover these same Christians
forging outright new wonder-tales of their Christ under the fiction of the most
noted Christian names and in the guise of inspired Gospels, Epistles, Acts and
Apocalypses. . . . Half a hundred of false and forged Apostolic 'Gospels of
Jesus Christ,' together with more numerous other 'Scripture' forgeries, was the
output, so far as known now, of the lying pens of the pious Christians of the
first two centuries of the Christian 'Age of Apocryphal Literature' . . .
'Almost every one of the Apostles had a Gospel fathered upon him by one early
sect or another.' . . .If the Gospel tales were true, why should God need pious
lies to give them credit? Lies and forgeries are only needed to bolster up
falsehood. . . But Jesus Christ must needs be propagated by lies upon lies; and
what better proof of his actuality than to exhibit letters written by him in his
own handwriting? The 'Little Liars of the Lord' were equal to the forgery of the
signature of their God - false letters in his name, as above cited from that
exhaustless mine of clerical falsities, the Catholic Encyclopedia
[C.E.] . . . The forged New Testament booklets and the foolish writings of the
Fathers, are the sole 'evidence' we have for the alleged facts and doctrines of
our most holy Faith, as is admitted by C.E."
(15)
The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets,
by Barbara Walker, p. 471. Rev. Taylor, in The Diegesis, reports a
slightly different version of Leo X's admission: "It was well known how
profitable this fable of Christ has been to us." (footnote, p. 35.)
(16)
Massey, MC: ". . . It was the Gnostics who had
faithfully preserved the true traditions. It was they who continued the mythos
intact from Egypt; they who made the images in the Christian iconography, and
reproduced the Iao-Chnubis and the Kamite Horus on the talismanic stones and the
catacombs of Rome . . . "
(17)
"The entire 'Pauline group' is the same forged class . .
. says E.B. [Encyclopedia Biblica] . . .'With respect to the
canonical Pauline Epistles, . . .. there are none of them by Paul;
neither fourteen, nor thirteen, nor nine or eight, nor yet even the four so long
"universally" regarded as unassailable. They are all, without
distinction, pseudographia (false-writings, forgeries). . . ' They are thus
all uninspired anonymous church forgeries for Christ's sweet sake!"
(Wheless)
(18)
Walker: "The most 'historical' figure in the Gospels was
Pontius Pilate, to whom Jesus was presented as 'king' of the Jews and
simultaneously as a criminal deserving the death penalty for 'blasphemy' because
he called himself Christ, Son of the Blessed. . . . This alleged crime was no
real crime. Eastern provinces swarmed with self-styled Christs and Messiahs,
calling themselves Sons of god and announcing the end of the world. None of them
was executed for 'blasphemy.'" Massey (MC) avers: "The great judge of the dead
in Amenti [Egyptian place of afterlife] was designated the Rhat (Eg.), whence
the Greek Rhadamanthus. The Rhat with the letter L instead of R is the Lat, and
with the masculine article Pi, becomes Pilate, for the judge in Amenti."
Mangasarian states: "A Roman judge, while admitting that he finds no guilt in
Jesus deserving of death, is nevertheless represented as handing him over to the
mob to be killed, after he has himself scourged him. No Roman judge could have
behaved as this Pilate is reported to have behaved toward an accused person on
trial for his life." As to the "Acts of Pilate," an "apocryphal" and spurious
document that purports to relate the trial of Jesus before Pilate, in accordance
with the canonical gospel accounts but with greater detail, Mead relates that a
scholar named Rendel Harris opined that the scenes in the "Acts" were directly
lifted from the Iliad: ". . . Pilate has been turned into Achilles, . .
. Joseph is the good old Priam, begging the body of Hector, and the the whole
story is based upon the dramatic passages of the twenty-fourth book of the
Iliad." (Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?) Jacolliot evinces, " . . . the Iliad
of Homer is nothing but an echo, an enfeebled souvenir of the Ramayana, a Hindoo
poem in which Rama goes at the head of his allies to recover his wife, Sita, who
had been carried off by the King of Ceylon."
(19)
Massey, ibid., states: "It is demonstrable that Herod is
a form of the Apophis serpent called the enemy of the sun. In Syriac Herod is a
red dragon. Herod in Hebrew signifies a terror. Her (Eg.) is to
terrify, and herrut (Eg.) is the snake, or typical reptile."
(20)
Ancient History of the God Jesus by Edouard
Dujardin, p. 33.
(21)
Ibid., p. 36.
(22)
"Is it conceivable that a preacher of Jesus could go
throughout the world to convert people to the teachings of Jesus, as Paul did,
without ever quoting a single one of his sayings? Had Paul known that Jesus had
preached a sermon, or formulated a prayer, or said many inspired things about
the here and the hereafter, he could not have helped quoting, now and then, from
the words of his master. If Christianity could have been established without a
knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, why then, did Jesus come to teach, and why
were his teachings preserved by divine inspiration? . . . If Paul knew of a
miracle-working Jesus, one who could feed the multitude with a few loaves and
fishes, who could command the grave to open, who could cast out devils, and
cleanse the land of the foulest disease of leprosy, who could, and did, perform
many other wonderful works to convince the unbelieving generation of his
divinity - is it conceivable that either intentionally or inadvertently he would
have never once referred to them in all his preaching? . . . The position, then,
that there is not a single saying of Jesus in the gospels which is quoted by
Paul in his many epistles is unassailable, and certainly fatal to the
historicity of the gospel Jesus." (Mangasarian) Massey: "The 'sayings' [logia]
were common property in the mysteries ages before they were ever written down."
(MC) Meaning they were not original with Jesus, also leading one to
conclude that "Paul" and crew were not initiates into the mysteries, since they
were ignorant of these ages-old logia.
(22a)
". . . the New Testament is not a single book but a
collection of groups of books and single volumes, which were at first and even
long afterwards circulated separately. . . . the Gospels are found in any and
every order. . . . Egyptian tradition places Jn. [John] first among the
Gospels." (Mead, The Gospels and the Gospel)
(23)
Wheless: "Both genealogies are false and forged lists of
mostly fictitious names."
(24)
Wheless: "Like the whole 'Sermon on the Mount,' the
[Lord's] Prayer is a composite of ancient sayings of the Scripture strung
together to form it, as the marginal cross-references show throughout." We might
add that the "Scripture" is not only from the Old Testament but is part of the
ancient Mythos/Ritual. Many of the concepts within the Sermon, which is held up
by Christian defenders as the core of Jesus's teachings and a reflection of his
compassion, can also be found in the Vedas as spoken by the compassionate
Krishna, in the doctrines of the Therapeuts, and in the "Dhammapada" attributed
to the equally compassionate Buddha. There is nothing new here that would merit
such attention as has been given this Jesus character. Also, there is apparently
within the Egyptian Hermetic or Trismegistic tradition a discourse called "The
Secret Sermon on the Mount," so it would seem that "Sermons on the Mount" were
also a common occurrence within the Mythos and Ritual. (Mead, Did Jesus
Live)
(25)
There have been "Passions" of many gods. Dujardin:
"Other scholars have been impressed by the resemblance between the Passion of
Jesus as told in the gospels and the ceremonies of the popular fˆtes, such as
the Sac‘a in Babylon, the festival of Kronos in Greece, and the Saturnalia in
Italy. . . . If the stories of the Passions of Dionysus, Attis, Osiris and
Demeter are the transpositions of cult dramas, and not actual events, it can
hardly be otherwise with the Passion of Jesus." (See footnote 93 below.) As
concerns the accounts of the resurrection, Graves states, "With respect to the
persons who first visited the sepulchre, Matthew states that it was Mary
Magdalene and another Mary; but Luke says it was 'Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and
Mary the mother of James, and other women;' while, according to John (and he
virtually reiterates it), Mary Magdalene went alone. It will be observed, then,
that the first 'inspired' and 'infallible' witness testifies there were two
witnesses; and the second that there were four; and the third witness declares
there was but one. What beautiful harmony! No court in the civilized world would
accept such discordant testimony!"
(26)
In the canonical gospels, Jesus himself makes many
illogical contradictions concerning some of his most important teachings. First,
he repeatedly states the he is sent only "to the lost sheep of Israel," and
forbids his disciples to preach to the Gentiles. Then he is made to say, "Go ye
therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and
of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." (It is also interesting to note that the
Trinity was not adopted by the Church until the 4th century, long after
"Jesus's" purported statements concerning it. These proselytizers, then, were
awfully slow in their preaching of this doctrine!) Next, Jesus claims that the
end of the world is imminent and warns his disciples to be prepared at a
moment's notice. Then he tells them to build a church from which to preach his
message. Now, if the end of the world is coming, why should they build anything?
We know that this "prophecy" didn't happen; nor has Jesus returned "soon," as
was his promise. Even if he had been real, he would not have been worthy of
listening to. "The Gentile Church of Christ has therefore no divine sanction;
was never contemplated nor created by Jesus Christ. The Christian Church is thus
founded on a forgery of pretended words of the pretended Christ." (Wheless)
"Again, 'several of the reported sayings of Jesus clearly bear the impress of a
time he did not live to see.'" (Mead)
¸ 1998 Acharya S (acharya_s@yahoo.com)
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