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Religions & Scriptures
Did Jesus Have a Body?
Did Jesus Exist?
This is an updated investigation of the question, "Did Jesus Exist?" The earlier version—part of THE PROBING MIND series—appeared in the January 1987 American Atheist.
I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against people who try from time to time to deny it. It would be easier, frankly, to believe that Tiberius Caesar, 'Jesus' contemporary, was a figment of the imagination than to believe that there never was such a person as Jesus.
—N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress, 1996)
For most of my life, I had taken it for granted that Jesus, although certainly not a god, was nevertheless an historical personage—perhaps a magician skilled in hypnosis. To be sure, I knew that some of the world's greatest scholars had denied his existence. Nevertheless, I had always more or less supposed that it was improbable that so many stories could have sprung up about someone who had never existed. Even in the case of other deities, such as Zeus, Thor, Isis, and Osiris, I had always taken it for granted that they were merely deified human heroes: men and women who lived in the later stages of prehistory—persons whose reputations got better and better the longer the time elapsed after their deaths. Gods, like fine wines, I supposed, improved with age.
About a decade ago, however, I began to reexamine the evidence for the historicity of Jesus. I was astounded at what I didn't find. In this article, I would like to show how shaky the evidence is regarding the alleged existence of a would-be messiah named Jesus. I now feel it is more reasonable to suppose he never existed. It is easier to account for the facts of early Christian history if Jesus were a fiction than if he once were real.
Burden of Proof
Although what follows may fairly be interpreted to be a proof of the non-historicity of Jesus, it must be realized that the burden of proof does not rest upon the skeptic in this matter. As always is the case, the burden of proof weighs upon those who assert that some thing or some process exists. If someone claims that he never has to shave because every morning before he can get to the bathroom he is assaulted by a six-foot rabbit with extremely sharp teeth who trims his whiskers better than a razor—if someone makes such a claim, no skeptic need worry about constructing a disproof. Unless evidence for the claim is produced, the skeptic can treat the claim as false. This is nothing more than sane, every-day practice.
Unlike N. T. Wright, quoted at the beginning of this article, a small number of scholars have tried over the centuries to prove that Jesus was in fact historical. It is instructive, when examining their "evidence," to compare it to the sort of evidence we have, say, for the existence of Tiberius Cæsar—to take up the challenge made by Wright.
It may be conceded that it is not surprising that there are no coins surviving from the first century with the image of Jesus on them. Unlike Tiberius Cæsar and Augustus Cæsar who adopted him, Jesus is not thought to have had control over any mints. Even so, we must point out that we do have coins dating from the early first century that bear images of Tiberius that change with the age of their subject. We even have coins minted by his predecessor, Augustus Cæsar, that show Augustus on one side and his adopted son on the other.(1) Would Mr. Wright have us believe that these coins are figments of the imagination? Can we be dealing with fig-mints?
Statues that can be dated archaeologically survive to show Tiberius as a youth, as a young man assuming the toga, as Cæsar, etc.(2) Engravings and gems show him with his entire family.(3) Biographers who were his contemporaries or nearly so quote from his letters and decrees and recount the details of his life in minute detail.(4) There are contemporary inscriptions all over the former empire that record his deeds.(5) There is an ossuary of at least one member of his family, and the Greek text of a speech made by his son Germanicus has been found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.(6) And then there are the remains of his villa on Capri. Nor should we forget that Augustus Cæsar, in his Res Gestæ ("Things Accomplished"), which survives both in Greek and Latin on the so-called Monumentum Ancyranum, lists Tiberius as his son and co-ruler.(7)
Is there anything advocates of an historical Jesus can produce that could be as compelling as this evidence for Tiberius? I think not, and I thank N. T. Wright for making a challenge that brings this disparity so clearly to light.
There is really only one area where evidence for Jesus is even claimed to be of a sort similar to that adduced for Tiberius—the area of biographies written by contemporaries or near contemporaries.* It is sometimes claimed that the Christian Bible contains such evidence. Sometimes it is claimed that there is extra-biblical evidence as well. Let us then examine this would-be evidence.
*It is sometimes claimed that the "miraculous" spread of Christianity in the early Roman Empire is evidence of an historical Jesus—that such a movement could not have gone so far so fast had there not been a real person at its inception. A similar argument could be made, however, in the case of the earlier rapid spread of Mithraism. I am unaware of any Christian apologists who would argue that this supports the idea of an historical Mithra!
SIDEBAR: THEY SHOULD HAVE KNOWN
John E. Remsburg, in his classic book The Christ: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Evidence of His Existence (The Truth Seeker Company, NY, no date, pp. 24-25), lists the following writers who lived during the time, or within a century after the time, that Jesus is supposed to have lived:
Josephus
Arrian
Suetonius
Plutarch
Apollonius
Hermogones
Appian
Lucian
Aulus Gellius
Damis
Appion of Alexandria
Philo-Judaeus
Petronius
Juvenal
Pliny the Younger
Quintilian
Silius Italicus
Phlegon
Pausanias
Dio Chrysostom
Favorinus
Seneca
Dion Pruseus
Martial
Tacitus
Lucanus
Statius
Phaedrus
Florus Lucius
Columella
Lysias
Theon of Smyrna
Pliny the Elder
Paterculus
Persius
Justus of Tiberius
Epictetus
Ptolemy
Valerius Maximus
Quintius Curtius
Valerius Flaccus
Pomponius Mela
Accordingto Remsburg, "Enough of the writings of the authors named in the foregoing list remains to form a library. Yet in this mass of Jewish and Pagan literature, aside from two forged passages in the works of a Jewish author, and two disputed passages in the works of Roman writers, there is to be found no mention of Jesus Christ." Nor, we may add, do any of these authors make note of the Disciples or Apostles—increasing the embarrassment from the silence of history concerning the foundation of Christianity.
The Old Testament ''Evidence"
Let us consider the so-called biblical evidence first. Despite the claims of Christian apologists, there is absolutely nothing in the Old Testament (OT) that is of relevance to our question, apart from the possible fact that some prophets may have thought that an "anointed one" (a rescuer king or priest) would once again assume the leadership of the Jewish world. All of the many examples of OT "predictions" of Jesus are so silly that one need only look them up to see their irrelevance. Thomas Paine, the great heretic of the American Revolution, did just that, and he demonstrated their irrelevance in his book AnExamination of the Prophecies, which he intended to be Part III of The Age of Reason.*
* A profusely annotated paperback edition of Paine's book is available from Amazon.
The New Testament "Evidence"
The elimination of the OT leaves only the New Testament (NT) "evidence" and extra-biblical material to be considered. Essentially, the NT is composed of two types of documents: letters and would-be biographies (the so-called gospels). A third category of writing, apocalyptic,* of which the Book of Revelation is an example, also exists, but it gives no support for the historicity of Jesus. In fact, it would appear to be an intellectual fossil of the thought world from which Christianity sprang—a Jewish apocalypse that was reworked for Christian use.(8) The main character of the book (referred to 28 times) would seem to be "the Lamb," an astral being seen in visions (no claims to historicity here!), and the book overall is redolent of ancient astrology.(9)
*An apocalypse is a pseudonymous piece of writing characterized by exaggerated symbolic imagery, usually dealing with the expectation of an imminent cosmic cataclysm wherein the deity destroys the wicked and rewards the righteous. Apocalyptic writing abounds in hidden meanings and numerological puzzles. Parts of a number of Judæo-Christian apocalypses other than Revelation have been preserved, but only the latter (if one does not consider the Book of Daniel to be entirely apocalyptic) was accepted into the Christian canon—and it almost didn't make it, having been rejected by several early Church Fathers and Church Councils.
The name Jesus occurs only seven times in the entire book, Christ only four times, and Jesus Christ only twice! While Revelation may very well derive from a very early period (contrary to the views of most biblical scholars, who deal with the book only in its final form), the Jesus of which it whispers obviously is not a man. He is a supernatural being. He has not yet acquired the physiological and metabolic properties of which we read in the gospels. The Jesus of Revelation is a god who would later be made into a man—not a man who would later become a god, as liberal religious scholars would have it.
The Gospels
The notion that the four "official gospels that made the cut" to be included in the official New Testament were written by men named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John does notgo back to early Christian times. The titles "According to Matthew," etc., were not added until late in the second century. Thus, although Papias ca. 140 CE('Common Era') knows all the gospels but has only heard of Matthew and Mark, Justin Martyr (ca. 150 CE) knows of none of the four supposed authors. It is only in 180 CE, with Irenæus of Lyons, that we learn who wrote the four "canonical" gospels and discover that there are exactly four of them because there are four quarters of the earth and four universal winds. Thus, unless one supposes the argument of Irenæus to be other than ridiculous, we come to the conclusion that the gospels are of unknown origin and authorship, and there is no good reason to suppose they are eye-witness accounts of a man named Jesus of Nazareth. At a minimum, this forces us to examine the gospels to see if their contents are even compatible with the notion that they were written by eye-witnesses. We cannot even assume that each of the gospels had but one author or redactor.
It is clear that the gospels of Matthew and Luke could not possibly have been written by an eye-witness of the tales they tell. Both writers plagiarize (largely word-for-word) up to 90% of the gospel of Mark, to which they add sayings of Jesus* and would-be historical details.
*There is compelling evidence indicating that these alleged sayings of Jesus were taken from another early document known as Q (German, for Quelle, 'source'). Like the so-called Gospel of Thomas found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, Q appears to have been a list of wisdom sayings that at some point became attributed to Jesus. We know that at least one of these sayings ("We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced ...” Matt. 17:11; Luke 7:32) derives from Ӕsop's Fables, "The Fisherman and the Flute," not from a sage of Galilee!
Ignoring the fact that Matthew and Luke contradict each other in such critical details as the genealogy of Jesus—and thus cannot both be correct—we must ask why real eye-witnesses would have to plagiarize the entire ham-hocks-and-potatoes of the story, contenting themselves with adding merely a little gravy, salt, and pepper. A real eye-witness would have begun with a verse reading, "Now, boys and girls, I'm gonna tell you the story of Jesus the Messiah the way it really happened ... " The story would be a unique creation. It is significant that it is only these two gospels that purport to tell anything of Jesus' birth, childhood, or ancestry. Both can be dismissed as unreliable without further cause. We can know nothing of Jesus' childhood or origin!
Mark
But what about the gospel of Mark, the oldest surviving gospel?* Attaining essentially its final form probably as late as 90 CE but containing core material dating possibly as early as 70 CE, it omits, as we have seen, almost the entire traditional biography of Jesus, beginning the story with John the Baptist giving Jesus a bath, and ending - in the oldest manuscripts - with women running frightened from the empty tomb. (The alleged post-resurrection appearances reported in the last twelve verses of Mark are not found in the earliest manuscripts, even though they are still printed in most modem bibles as though they were an "authentic" part of Mark's gospel.) Moreover, "Mark" being a non-Palestinian non-disciple, even the skimpy historical detail he provides is untrustworthy.
*The opposite theory, often referred to as "Griesbach's hypothesis," that the author of Mark had "epitomized" the two longer gospels, keeping only the "essential" details, is today almost entirely rejected by bible scholars. While the arguments to support this nearly universal rejection are too involved to even summarize here, it may be noted that shortening of miracle stories is completely out of keeping with the principles of religious development seen everywhere today. Stories invariably get "better" (i.e., longer) with the retelling, never shorter!
To say thatMark's account is "skimpy" is to understate the case. There really isn't much to the gospel of Mark—the birth legends, genealogies, and childhood wonders all being absent. Whereas the gospel of Luke takes up 43 pages in the New English Bible, the gospel of Mark occupies only 25 pages—a mere 58% as much material! Stories do indeed grow with the retelling.
I have claimed that the unknown author of Mark was a non-Palestinian non-disciple, which would make his story mere hearsay. What evidence do we have for this assertion? First of all, Mark shows no first-hand understanding of the social situation in Palestine.He is clearly a foreigner, removed both in space and time from the events he alleges. For example, in Mark 10:12, he has Jesus say that if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. As G. A. Wells, the author of The Historical Evidence for Jesus(10) puts it,
Such an utterance would have been meaningless in Palestine, where only men could obtain divorce. It is a ruling for the Gentile Christian readers...which the evangelist put into Jesus’ mouth in order to give it authority. This tendency to anchor later customs and institutions to Jesus' supposed lifetime played a considerable role in the building up of his biography.
One further evidence of the inauthenticity of Mark is the fact that in chapter 7, where Jesus is arguing with the Pharisees, Jesus is made to quote the Greek Septuagint version of Isaiah in order to score his debate point. Unfortunately, the Hebrew version says something different from the Greek. Isaiah 29:13, in the Hebrew reads "their fear of me is a commandment of men learned by rote," whereas the Greek version—and the gospel of Mark - reads "in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men" [Revised Standard Version]. Wells observes dryly [p. 13], "That a Palestinian Jesus should floor Orthodox Jews with an argument based on a mistranslation of their scriptures is very unlikely." Indeed!
Another powerful argument against the idea that Mark could have been an eye-witness of the existence of Jesus is based upon the observation that the author of Mark displays a profound lack of familiarity with Palestinian geography. If he had actually lived in Palestine, he would not have made the blunders to be found in his gospel. If he never lived in Palestine, he could not have been an eye-witness of Jesus. You get the point.
The most absurd geographical error Mark commits is when he tells the tall tale about Jesus crossing over the Sea of Galilee and casting demons out of a man (two men in Matthew's revised version) and making them go into about 2,000 pigs which, as the King James version puts it, "ran violently down a steep place into the sea... and they were choked in the sea."
Apart from the cruelty to animals displayed by the lovable, gentle Jesus, and his disregard for the property of others, what's wrong with this story? If your only source of information is the King James Bible, you might not ever know. The King James says this marvel occurred in the land of the Gadarenes, whereas the oldest Greek manuscripts say this miracle took place in the land of the Gerasenes. Luke, who also knew no Palestinian geography, also passes on this bit of absurdity. But Matthew, who had some knowledge of Palestine, changed the name to Gadarene in his new, improved version; but this is further improved to Gergesenes in the King James version.
By now the reader must be dizzy with all the distinctions between Gerasenes, Gadarenes, and Gergesenes. What difference does it make? A lot of difference, as we shall see.
Gerasa, the place mentioned in the oldest manuscripts of Mark, is located about 31 miles from the shore of the Sea of Galilee! Those poor pigs had to run a course five miles longer than a marathon in order to find a place to drown! Not even lemmings have to go that far. Moreover, if one considers a "steep" slope to be at least 45 degrees, that would make the elevation of Gerasa at least six times higher than Mt. Everest!
When the author of Matthew read Mark's version, he saw the impossibility of Jesus and the gang disembarking at Gerasa (which, by the way, was also in a different country, the so-called Decapolis). Since the only town in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee that he knew of that started with G was Gadara, he changed Gerasa to Gadara.But even Gadara was five miles from the shore—and in a different country. Later copyists of the Greek manuscripts of all three pig-drowning gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) improved Gadara further to Gergesa, a region now thought to have actually formed part of the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. So much for the trustworthiness of the biblical tradition.
Another example of Mark's abysmal ignorance of Palestinian geography is found in the story he made up about Jesus traveling from Tyre on the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, 30 miles inland. According to Mark 7:31, Jesus and the boys went by way of Sidon, 20 miles north of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast! Since to Sidon and back would be 40miles, this means that the wisest of all men walked 70 miles when he could have walked only 30. Of course, one would never know all this from the King James version which - apparently completely ignoring a perfectly clear Greek text—says "Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the Sea of Galilee...” Apparently, the translators of the King James version also knew their geography. At least they knew more than did the author of Mark!
John
The unreliability of the gospels is underscored when we learn that, with the possible exception of John, the first three gospels bear no internal indication of who wrote them. Can we glean anything of significance from the fourth and latest gospel, the gospel of John? Not likely! It is so unworldly, it can scarcely be cited for historical evidence. In this account, Jesus is hardly a man of flesh and blood at all—except for the purposes of divine cannibalism as required by the celebration of the rite of ''holy communion."
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god," so the gospel begins. No Star of Bethlehem, no embarrassment of pregnant virgins, no hint that Jesus ever wore diapers: pure spirit from the beginning. Moreover, in its present form, the gospel of John is the latest of all the official gospels.*
*I say "official gospels" because there are, in fact, many other gospels known. Once people started making them up, they sort of got stuck in over-drive. Only later on in Christian history did the number get pared back to four.
The gospel of John was compiled around the year 110 CE. If its author had been 10 years old at the time of Jesus' cruci-fiction in the year 30 CE, he would have been 80 years old at the time of writing. Not only is it improbable that he would have lived so long, it is dangerous to pay much attention to the colorful "memories" recounted by a man in his "anecdotage." Many of us who are far younger than this have had the unpleasant experience of discovering incontrovertible proof that what we thought were clear memories of some event were wildly incorrect. We also might wonder why an eyewitness of all the wonders claimed in a gospel would wait so long to write about them!
More importantly, there is evidence that the Gospel of John, like Matthew and Luke, also is a composite document,incorporating an earlier "Signs Gospel" of uncertain antiquity. Again, we ask, if "John" had been an eye-witness to Jesus, why would he need to plagiarize a list of miracles made up by someone else? Nor is there anything in the Signs Gospel that would lead one to suppose that it was an eye-witness account. It could just as easily have been referring to the wonders of Dionysus turning water into wine, or to the healings of Asclepius.
The inauthenticity of the Gospel of John would seem to be established beyond cavil by the discovery that the very chapter that asserts the author of the book to have been "the disciple whom Jesus loved" [John 21:20] was a late addition to the gospel. Scholars have shown that the gospel originally ended at verses 30-31 of Chapter 20. Chapter 21 - in which verse 24 asserts that "This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true" - is not the work of an eye-witness. Like so many other things in the Bible, it is a fraud. The testimony is not true.
Saint Saul And Is Letters
Having eliminated the OT and the gospels from the list of possible biblical "evidences" of the existence of Jesus, we are left with the so-called epistles.
At first blush, we might think that these epistles—some of which are by far the oldest parts of the NT, having been composed at least 30 years before the oldest gospel—would provide us with the most reliable information on Jesus. Well, so much for blushes. The oldest letters are the letters of St. Saul—the man who, after losing his mind, changed his name to Paul. Before going into details, we must point out right away, before we forget, that St. Saul's testimony can be ignored quite safely, if what he tells us is true, namely, that he never met Jesus "in the flesh," but rather saw him only in a vision he had during what appears to have been an epileptic seizure. No court of law would accept visions as evidence, and neither should we.
The reader might object that even if Saul only had hearsay evidence, some of it might be true. Some of it might tell us some facts about Jesus. Well, alright. Let's look at the evidence.
According to tradition, 13 of the letters in the NT are the work of St. Saul. Unfortunately, Bible scholars and computer experts have gone to work on these letters, and it turns out that only four can be shown to be substantially by the same author, putatively Saul.*These are the letters known as Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians. To these probably we may add the brief note to Philemon, a slave-owner, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians. The rest of the so-called Pauline epistles can be shown to have been written by other and later authors, so we can throw them out right now and not worry about them.
*Even the letters supposed to contain authentic writings of Saul/Paul have been shown by a number of scholars to be as composite as the gospels (e.g., L. Gordon Rylands, A Critical Analysis of the Four Chief Pauline Epistles:Romans, First and Second Corinthians, and Galatians, Watts &Co., London, 1929). According to such analyses, the core Pauline material in these letters is what might be termed a pre-Christian Gnostic product. This material is surrounded by often contradictory material added by proto-Catholic interpolators and redactors who succeeded thus in claiming a popular proto-Gnostic authority for the Church of Rome. In any case, the Greek text of these letters is heavy with terms such as Archon, Ӕon, etc.—jargon terms popular in the more astrologically conscious forms of Gnosticism. It would appear that the Christ of Paul is as astral a being as the Lamb of Revelation.Like the god of Revelation, the god of Paul communicates via visions, not physically, face-to-face.
Saul tells us in 2 Corinthians 11:32 that King Aretas of the Nabateans tried to have him arrested because of his Christian agitation. Since Aretas is known to have died in the year 40 CE, this means that Saul became a Christian before that date. So what do we find out about Jesus from a man who had become a Christian less than ten years after the alleged crucifixion? Precious little!
Once again, G.A. Wells, in his book The Historical Evidence for Jesus [pp. 22-23], sums things up so succinctly, that I quote him verbatim:
The ... Pauline letters ... are so completely silent concerning the events that were later recorded in the gospels as to suggest that these events were not known to Paul, who, however, could not have been ignorant of them if they had really occurred.
These letters have no allusion to the parents of Jesus, let alone to the virgin birth. They never refer to a place of birth (for example, by calling him 'of Nazareth').They give no indication of the time or place of his earthly existence. They do not refer to his trial before a Roman official, nor to Jerusalem as the place of execution. They mention neither John the Baptist, nor Judas, nor Peter's denial of his master. (They do, of course, mention Peter, but do not imply that he, any more than Paul himself, had known Jesus while he had been alive.)
Theseletters also fail to mention any miracles Jesus is supposed to have worked, a particularly striking—omission, since, according to the gospels, he worked so many ...
Another striking feature of Paul's letters is that one could never gather from them that Jesus had been an ethical teacher... on only one occasion does he appeal to the authority of Jesus to support an ethical teaching which the gospels also represent Jesus as having delivered.
It turns out that Saul's appeal to the authority of Jesus involves precisely the same error we found in the gospel of Mark. In 1 Cor. 7:10, Saul says that "not I but the Lord, [say] that the wife should not separate from the husband." That is, a wife should not seek divorce. If Jesus had actually said what Saul implies, and what Mark 10:12 claims he said, his audience would have thought he was nuts - as the Bhagwan says - or perhaps had suffered a blow to the head. So much for the testimony of Saul. His Jesus is nothing more than the thinnest hearsay, a legendary creature which was crucified as a sacrifice, a creature almost totally lacking a biography.
Extra-Biblical "Evidence"
So far we have examined all the biblical evidences alleged to prove the existence of Jesus as an historical figure. We have found that they have no legitimacy as evidence.Now we must examine the last line of would-be evidence, the notion that Jewish and pagan historians recorded his existence.
Jewish Sources
Itis sometimes claimed that Jewish writings hostile to Christianity prove that the ancient Jews knew of Jesus and that such writings prove the historicity of the man Jesus. But in fact, Jewish writings prove no such thing, as L. Gordon Rylands' book Did Jesus Ever Live? pointed out nearly seventy years ago:
... all the knowledge which the Rabbis had of Jesus was obtained by them from the Gospels. Seeing that Jews, even in the present more critical age, take it for granted that the figure of a real man stands behind the Gospel narrative, one need not be surprised if, in the second century, Jews did not think of questioning that assumption. It is certain, however, that some did question it. For Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho, represents the Jew Trypho as saying, "ye follow an empty rumour and make a Christ for yourselves." "Ifhe was born and lived somewhere he is entirely unknown."
That the writers of the Talmud [4th-5th centuries CE, FRZ] had no independent knowledge of Jesus is proved by the fact that they confounded him with two different men neither of whom can have been he.Evidently no other Jesus with whom they could identify the Gospel Jesus was known to them. One of these, Jesus ben Pandira, reputed a wonder-worker, is said to have been stoned to death and then hung on a tree on the eve of a Passover in the reign of Alexander Jannæus (106-79 BC) at Jerusalem. The other, Jesus ben Stada, whose date is uncertain, but who may have lived in the first third of the second century CE, is also said to have been stoned and hanged on the eve of a Passover, but at Lydda. There may be some confusion here; but it is plain that the Rabbis had no knowledge of Jesus apart from what they had read in the Gospels.11
Although Christian apologists have listed a number of ancient historians who allegedly were witnesses to the existence of Jesus, the only two that consistently are cited are Josephus, a Pharisee, and Tacitus, a pagan. Since Josephus was born in the year 37 CE, and Tacitus was born in 55, neither could have been an eye-witness of Jesus,who supposedly was crucified in 30 CE. So we could really end our article here. But someone might claim that these historians nevertheless had access to reliable sources, now lost, which recorded the existence and execution of our friend JC. So it is desirable that we take a look at these two supposed witnesses.
In the case of Josephus, whose Antiquities of the Jews was written in 93 CE, about the same time as the gospels, we find him saying some things quite impossible for a good Pharisee to have said:
About this time, there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.12
Now no loyal Pharisee would say Jesus had been the Messiah. That Josephus could report that Jesus had been restored to life "on the third day" and not be convinced by this astonishing bit of information is beyond belief. Worse yet is the fact that the story of Jesus is intrusive in Josephus' narrative and can be seen to be an interpolation even in an English translation of the Greek text. Right after the wondrous passage quoted above, Josephus goes on to say, "About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder ... " Josephus had previously been talking about awful things Pilate had done to the Jews in general, and one can easily understand why an interpolator would have chosen this particular spot. But his ineptitude in not changing the wording of the bordering text left a "literary seam" (what rhetoricians might term aporia) that sticks out like a pimpled nose.
The fact that Josephus was not convinced by this or any other Christian claim is clear from the statement of the church father Origen (ca. 185-ca. 154 CE)—who dealt extensively with Josephus—that Josephus did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah, i.e., as "the Christ." Moreover, the disputed passage was never cited by early Christian apologists such as Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-ca. 215 CE), who certainly would have made use of such ammunition had he had it!
The first person to make mention of this obviously forged interpolation into the text of Josephus' history was the wily church father Eusebius, in 324 CE. It is quite likely that Eusebius himself was the forger - or at least the elaborator of the interpolation. As late as 891, Photius in his Bibliotheca reviewed the works of Josephus and betrayed no knowledge of the passage—or even any indication that he expected the passage to be there—indicating that the disputed passage was absent from his copy of the Antiquities of the Jews.(13) (Interestingly, he apparently did expect to find notice of Jesus in the writings of Josephus' contemporary Justus of Tiberias. Of the later, he noted sadly, that Justus makes no mention at all of Jesus' miracles and acts.) The question can probably be laid to rest by noting that as late as the sixteenth century, according to Rylands,(14) a scholar named Vossius had a manuscript of Josephus from which the disputed passage was wanting.
Apologists, as they grasp for ever more slender straws with which to support their historical Jesus, point out that the passage quoted above is not the only mention of Jesus made by Josephus. In Bk. 20, Ch. 9, §1 of Antiquities of the Jews one also finds the following statement in surviving manuscripts:
Ananus... convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned.
It must be admitted that this passage does not intrude into the text as does the one previously quoted. In fact, it is very well integrated into Josephus' story. That it has been modified from whatever Josephus' source may have said (remember, here too, Josephus could not have been an eye-witness) is nevertheless extremely probable. The crucial word in this passage is the name James (Jacob in Greek and Hebrew). It is very possible that this very common name was in Josephus' source material. It might even have been a reference to James the Just, a first-century character we have good reason to believe indeed existed. Because he appears to have born the title Brother of the Lord,* it would have been natural to relate him to the Jesus character. It is quite possible that Josephus actually referred to a James "the Brother of the Lord," and this was changed by Christian copyists (remember that although Josephus was a Jew, his text was preserved only by Christians!) to "Brother of Jesus"—adding then for good measure "who was called Christ."
*Originally, this would have been the title born by a member of a religious fraternity associated with the worship of Yahweh, who in Greek was always referred to as kurios ('Lord'). This was carried over into primitive Christianity, where we know from I Cor. 9:5 that there existed a governing class coordinate with apostles that was called "Brothers of the Lord." Misunderstanding of the original meaning of the title led to the belief that Jesus had siblings—an error that can be found already in the earliest of the canonical gospels.
It is of importance to note that other interpolations concerning James were common in ancient texts of Josephus. Origen thrice makes reference to passages in Josephus ascribing Jewish suffering at the hands of Titus to divine retribution for the slaying of James. According to William Benjamin Smith's skeptical classic Ecce Deus,(15) there are still some manuscripts of Josephus which contain the quoted passages, but the passages are absent in other manuscripts—showing that such interpolation had already been taking place before the time of Origen but did not ever succeed in supplanting the original text universally.*
*I deal exhaustively with interpolations into the texts of Josephus in my book THE JESUS THE JEWS NEVER KNEW: Sepher Toldoth Yeshuand the Quest of the Historical Jesus in Jewish Sources.
Pagan Authors
Before considering the alleged witness of Pagan authors, it is worth noting some of the things that we should find recorded in their histories if the biblical stories are in fact true. One passage from Matthew should suffice to point out the significance of the silence of secular writers:
Matt. 27:45.Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the landunto the ninth hour ... Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. 51. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; 52 And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, 53 And came out of the graves after his resurrection [exposed for 3 days?], and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.
Wouldn't the Greeks and Romans have noticed—and recorded—such darkness occurring at a time of the month when a solar eclipse was impossible? Wouldn't someone have remembered—and recorded—the name of at least oneof those "saints" who climbed out of the grave and went wandering downtown in the mall? If Jesus did anything of significance at all, wouldn't someone have noticed? If he didn't do anything significant, how could he have stimulated the formation of a new religion?
Considering now the supposed evidence of Tacitus, we find that this Roman historian is alleged in 120 CE to have written a passage in his Annals (Bk 15, Ch 44, containing the wild tale of Nero's persecution of Christians) saying "Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus ... " G.A. Wells [p. 16] says of this passage:
[Tacitus wrote] at a time when Christians themselves had come to believe that Jesus had suffered under Pilate. There are three reasons for holding that Tacitus is here simply repeating what Christians had told him. First, he gives Pilate a title, procurator [without saying procurator of what! FRZ], which was current only from the second half of the first century. Had he consulted archives which recorded earlier events, he would surely have found Pilate there designated by his correct title, prefect. Second, Tacitus does not name the executed man Jesus, but uses the title Christ (Messiah) as if it were a proper name. But he could hardly have found in archives a statement such as "the Messiah was executed this morning." Third, hostile to Christianity as he was, he was surely glad to accept from Christians their own view that Christianity was of recent origin, since the Roman authorities were prepared to tolerate only ancient cults. (The Historical Evidence for Jesus; p.16).
There are further problems with the Tacitus story. Tacitus himself never again alludes to the Neronian persecution of Christians in any of his voluminous writings, and no other Pagan authors know anything of the outrage either. Most significant, however, is that ancient Christian apologists made no use of the story in their propaganda - an unthinkable omission by motivated partisans who were well-read in the works of Tacitus. Clement of Alexandria, who made a profession of collecting just such types of quotations, is ignorant of any Neronian persecution, and even Tertullian, who quotes a great deal from Tacitus, knows nothing of the story. According to Robert Taylor, the author of another freethought classic, the Diegesis (1834), the passage was not known before the fifteenth century, when Tacitus was first published at Venice by Johannes de Spire. Taylor believed de Spire himself to have been the forger.*
*Latinists often dispute the possibility of the passage being a forgery on the grounds that Tacitus' distinctive Latin style so perfectly permeates the entire passage. But it should be noted that the more distinctive a style might be, the easier it can be imitated. Then too, there is a lapse from normal Tacitean usage elsewhere in the disputed passage. In describing the early Christians as being haters "of the human race" (humani generis), the passage reverses the word order of normal Tacitean usage. In all other cases, Tacitus has generis humani.
So much for the evidence purporting to prove that Jesus was an historical figure. We have not, of course, proved that Jesus did not exist. We have only showed that all evidence alleged to support such a claim is without substance. But of course, that is all we need to show. The burden of proof is always on the one who claims that something exists or that something once happened. We have no obligation to try to prove a universal negative.*
*Curiously, in the present case, it would seem that such proof is in fact possible. Since Jesus is frequently referred to as "Jesus of Nazareth," it is interesting to learn that the town now called Nazareth did not exist in the first centuries BCE and CE. Exhaustive archaeological studies have been done by Franciscans to prove the cave they possess was once the home of Jesus' family. But actually they have shown the site to have been a necropolis - a city of the dead - during the first century CE. (Naturally, the Franciscans cannot agree!) With no Nazareth other than a cemetery existing at the time, how could there have been a Jesus of Nazareth? Without an Oz, could there have been a Wizard of Oz?
It will be argued by die-hard believers that all my arguments "from silence" prove nothing and they will quote the aphorism, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But is the negative evidence I have referred to the same as absence of evidence? It might be instructive to consider how a hypothetical but similar problem might be dealt with in the physical sciences.
Imagine that someone has claimed that the USA had carried out atomic weapons tests on a particular Caribbean island in 1943. Would the lack of reports of mushroom-cloud sightings at the time be evidence of absence, or absence of evidence? (Remember, the Caribbean during the war years was under intense surveillance by many different factions.) Would it be necessary to go to the island today to scan its surface for the radioactive contamination that would have to be there if nuclear explosions had taken place there? If indeed, we went there with our Geiger-counters and found no trace of radioactive contamination, would that be evidence of absence, or absence of evidence? In this case, what superficially looks like absence of evidence is really negative evidence, and thus legitimately could be construed as evidence of absence. Can the negative evidence adduced above concerning Jesus be very much less compelling?
It would be intellectually satisfying to learn just how it was that the Jesus character condensed out of the religious atmosphere of the first century. But scholars are at work on the problem. The publication of many examples of so-called wisdom literature, along with the materials from the Essene community at Qumran by the Dead Sea and the Gnostic literature from the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt, has given us a much more detailed picture of the communal psychopathologies which infested the Eastern Mediterranean world at the turn of the era. It is not unrealistic to expect that we will be able, before long, to reconstruct in reasonable detail the stages by which Jesus came to have a biography.
REFERENCES
1. Illustrated in Robin Seager, Tiberius,Eyre Methuen, London, 1972. For more detailed numismatic documentation of Tiberius, see also C. H. V. Sutherland, Roman History and Coinage 44 BC-AD 69, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987; by the same author, Coinage in Roman Imperial Policy 31 B.C.-A.D. 68, Sanford J. Durst Numismatic Publications, NY, 1978.
2. Illustrated in Seager, op. cit.
3. Illustrated in Seager, op. cit.
4. Examined in Sutherland, 1987, op. cit. See also Victor Ehrenberg and A. H. M. Jones, Documents Illustrating the Reigns of Augustus & Tiberius, 2nd Edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955.
5. See Inscriptiones Latinæ Selectæ, edidit Hermannus Dessau, reprinted in 4 vols. by Ares Publishers Inc., Chicago, 1979.
Illustrated in Seager, op. cit.
7. See Acta Divi Augusti, Regia Academia Italica, Rome, 1945.
8. In her Anchor Bible Volume 38, Revelation (Doubleday, Garden City, NJ, 1975), J. Massyngberde Ford proposed that the core of Revelation was material written by Jewish followers of John the Baptist. Even if the Baptist had been an historical figure (which is extremely doubtful), this still would make Revelation in essence a pre-Christian, Jewish apocalypse.
9. For more astrological aspects of Revelation, see Bruce J. Malina, On The Genre And Message Of Revelation:
Star Visions and Sky Journeys, Hendrickson, Peabody, MA, 199.
10. George A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1982, p. 13.
11. L. Gordon Rylands, Did Jesus Ever Live?, Watts& Co., London, 1929, p. 20.
12.This so-called Testimonium Flavianum appears in Bk 18 Ch 3 §3 of Josephus: Jewish Antiquities Books XVIII-XIX, IX, translated by L. H. Feldman, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981, pp 48- 51.
13. J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, SeriesGræca, Tomus CIIl. Photius Constantinopolitanus Patriarcha, Garnier Fratres, Paris, 1900, Cod. 33, columns 65-66.
14. Rylands,op.cit., p. 14.
15. William Benjamin Smith, Ecce Deus: Studies Of Primitive Christianity, Watts &Co., London, 1912, p. 235.
How Jesus Got a Life
How Jesus Got a Life
If Jesus never existed, whence came his biography?
Napoleon: Monsieur Laplace! I have read with great interest your Traité de Mécanique Celeste--all five volumes—but nowhere have I found any mention of the Good Lord.
Laplace: Sire, I have had no need of that hypothesis.
Our worldis an unstable place. Nations rise, and governments topple. Unbalanced people the world around torture and kill each other for the sake of religion or other groundless causes. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and wars periodically scourge our globe. Continents drift about and collide with each other, and oceans form and disappear. Even planet earth itself has the wobbles. As it spins on its axis, the earth is not stable. Like the center peg of a toy top, the axis of the spinning earth slowly wobbles in a circle, tracing the surface of a double cone in space (see Figure 1).
If Jesus never existed, whence came his biography?
Napoleon: Monsieur Laplace! I have read with great interest your Traité de Mécanique Celeste--all five volumes—but nowhere have I found any mention of the Good Lord.
Laplace: Sire, I have had no need of that hypothesis.
Our worldis an unstable place. Nations rise, and governments topple. Unbalanced people the world around torture and kill each other for the sake of religion or other groundless causes. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and wars periodically scourge our globe. Continents drift about and collide with each other, and oceans form and disappear. Even planet earth itself has the wobbles. As it spins on its axis, the earth is not stable. Like the center peg of a toy top, the axis of the spinning earth slowly wobbles in a circle, tracing the surface of a double cone in space (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. As the earth's axis slowly shifts its orientation in space, it traces out the surface of a double cone in space. Because of the axial wandering, the points where the celestial equator (the projection of the earth's equator onto the celestial sphere) intersects the ecliptic (the apparent path make by the sun against the background of "fixed stars") move also, shifting clockwise around the ecliptic as seen from the northern hemisphere. It takes 25,800 years for the points of intersection to move all the way around the ecliptic.
This motion of the earth's axis is called precession, and it is, I believe, a major component of the causes long ago that led to the creation of Christianity. The character now known as Christ, or Jesus, was not born of a virgin; rather, it was the product of an unstably rotating earth. If the earth's axis did not precess, the Christ character would never have been invented. Christianity as we know it would not exist.
If I live long enough, in a future book I’ll call Inventing Jesus, I hope to demonstrate exhaustively the extraordinary chain of causes and effects that led from a wobbling earth to a divine biography—the so-called "Life of Christ." In this brief article, of course, I can do little more than state and explain the major points of this thesis and give a sampling of the evidence I have found to support it.
I. "Jesus Christ" never existed as a historical figure.
It is a curious fact that the oldest components of the so-called New Testament, the letters believed to have been written by one Saul/Paul, say almost nothing of any Jesus biography. Neither Bethlehem nor Nazareth is mentioned in these charter documents of the Christian religion. Only in the much later Book of Acts is it claimed that Saul (Paul) had an interview with "Jesus of Nazareth."* The later the document, the greater the detail of the Jesus story presented.
*This is in Acts 22:7ff, which alleges to be a first-person account of Saul's conversion:
"Then I heard a voice saying to me, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' I answered, 'Tell me, Lord, who you are,' 'I am Jesus of Nazareth,' he said, 'whom you are persecuting.' My companions saw the light, but did not hear the voice that spoke to me . . . " (New English Bible).
A contradictory, third-person account of Saul's conversion can be found in Acts 9:4ff:
"He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' 'Tell me, Lord,' he said, 'who you are.' The voice answered, 'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting . . . ' Meanwhile the men who were traveling with him stood speechless; they heard the voice but could see no one ... " (New English Bible).
It would appear that the version in chapter 9 was taken from a document older than that from which the chapter 22 account was derived. The Nazareth tradition had not yet been invented when the story in chapter 9 was put in writing.
There is no convincing evidence to make one suppose that any of the surviving "Gospels" were written by eyewitnesses. Indeed, study of the Gospels shows quite conclusively that they were not. For example, the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke incorporate nearly the entire Greek text of the Gospel of Mark, adding sayings taken from yet another document (the so-called "Q-Document"), and generally make the miracles recounted by Mark even more miraculous. Had Matthew and Luke been eyewitnesses, they would have written their own accounts, without recourse to plagiarism.
Mark's Gospel, the oldest ofthe official set of four, contains errors of geography* and custom** that would not have been made by an eyewitness. John's Gospel, the latest of the set, is both too late and too ethereal to be taken as a biographical account at all- eyewitness or otherwise. There is nothing about the Gospels to make one take them seriously from a biographic point of view: there is no good reason to think them other than ancient examples of the art of fiction.
*An example of Mark's ignorance of Palestinian geography is found in the story he recounts about Jesus traveling from Tyre on the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, thirty miles inland. According to Mark 7:31, Jesus and his gang went by way of Sidon, twenty miles north of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast! Since to Sidon and back would be forty miles, this means that Mark's messiah walked seventy miles when he could have walked only thirty. Although Mark seems unaware of the problem, the translators of the King James Version seem to have understood it quite well—adroitly obfuscating their translation accordingly:
"Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon …”
** Mark 10:12 tells us that a wife, if she divorces her husband and marries another, is guilty of adultery. While this was possible in some pagan societies, it was not an option open to Israelite women.
If the historicity of Jesus cannot be supported by the New Testament writings, what about extra-Biblical sources? Did any Greek or Roman or Jewish historians observe his career and write about it? Not one.
Although Josephus,* Tacitus,** Suetonius,*** and other ancient authors are often cited as evidence for a historical Jesus, it is clear that their accounts (even if they could be proven authentic) are derivative, not original. Josephus, the oldest of these historians, was born at least five years after the date of the alleged crucifixion! There are no eyewitnesses. Moreover, the ancient non-Christian accounts of Jesus all were written at a time when Christianity already was a thriving delirium, and our pagan authors can be taken only as being witnesses of the state to which Christian traditions had evolved in their times, not as witnesses of a historical Jesus of Nazareth.
*Josephus ben Matthias (ca. C.E. 37–ca. 100), Jewish historian and general.
**Cornelius Tacitus (ca. C.E. 56-ca. 120), Roman orator, historian, and politician.
***Gaius Suetonius Tranquilus (ca. C.E. 69-ca. 122), Roman biographer and historian.
There is no credible evidence indicating Jesus ever lived. This fact is, of course, inadequate to prove he did not live. Even so, although it is logically impossible to prove a universal negative, it is possible to show that there is no need to hypothesize any historical Jesus. The Christ biography can be accounted for on purely literary, astrological, and comparative mythological grounds. The logical principle known as Occam's razor tells us that basic assumptions should not be multiplied beyond necessity. For practical purposes, showing that a historical Jesus is an unnecessary assumption is just as good as proving that he never existed.
II. Christianity began as a mystery religion.
While modern Christianity trumpets its message openly and to all, with little regard for those uninterested in hearing its "good news," it was not so in the beginning. A careful reading of the Pauline Epistles and the Gospels (supplemented by modern documentary discoveries) shows that Christianity began as a mystery cult, replete with initiations, secrets, and multiple levels of indoctrination.
The word mystery (Greek, musterion: 'what is known only to the initiated') occurs twenty-seven times in the official New Testament, and almost all of these occurrences demonstrate the existence of a secret infrastructure in the nascent cult.
And the disciples came, and said unto him, "Why speakest thou unto them in parables?" He answered and said unto them, "Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given." (Matt. 13:10-11, King James Version)
The dangling verses now customarily printed at the end of the Epistle to the Romans (but placed elsewhere in various ancient manuscripts) tell of "that divine secret [musterion] kept in silence for long ages but now disclosed ... " (Romans 16:25, 26, New English Bible).
Paul the mystagogue is very evident in passages such as 1 Cor. 2:6ff:
Now we are speaking a wisdom among those who are mature [i.e., ready to be initiated], that is, a wisdom which does not belong to this age, nor the rulers of this age* who are about to pass away; but we are speaking God's wisdom in a mystery, wisdom which has been hidden and which God predetermined before the ages to contribute to our glory. None of this world's rulers knew this wisdom ... But as it has been written, things that no eye has seen and no ear heard and that have not occurred to human mind, things that God has prepared for those who love him—God indeed revealed them to us through the Spirit . . .**
*It is difficult not to see this as a reference to the end of the 2150-year·long astrological Age of Aries, over which Mithra had reigned as 'Time·Lord' or chronocrat. Paul, according to traditional dating, was writing almost exactly at the time the Age of Pisces was beginning, with Jesus as the new Time-Lord. The Greek for 'the rulers of this age' is archonton tou aionos toutou. This is reverberant with both astrological and Gnostic mysteries. In Gnosticism, the archons clearly are rulers of astrological derivation, and the aeons are both rulers and periods of time. It is suggestive also, that the church father Origen (ca. C.E. 185-ca. 254), in commenting on this passage in Corinthi· ans alludes to "the astrology of the Chaldeans and Indians" and "Magi" - Mithraic or Zoroastrian astrologers (Origen De Principiis, The Ante·Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson [Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1982], pp. 335–6).
**William F. Orr and James Arthur Walther, The Anchor Bible: I Corinthians (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1976), pp. 153–4
1 Cor. 4:1 speaks of "stewards of the mysteries of God."
Paul the would-be initiator of inductees into the mysteries peeks out at us also from the third chapter of 1 Corinthians. "I could not speak to you as I should speak to people who have the Spirit," he tells his not-fully-pliant initiates:
I had to deal with you on the merely natural plane, as infants in Christ. And so I gave you milk to drink, instead of solid food, for which you were not yet ready. Indeed, you are still not ready for it, for you are still on the merely natural plane.*
*1 Cor. 3:1-3, New English Bible
Paul's Corinthians were still being fed the superficial story; they were not yet ready to be told the hidden meanings of things, perhaps the full truth concerning the symbolic, not physical, nature of "Christ."
That there was indeed a secret Gospel and an initiation into the mysteries of the religion now known as Christianity is dramatically attested by the "Secret Gospel of Mark," found in a manuscript discovered by Morton Smith* in 1958 in the Monastery of Mar Saba southeast of Jerusalem. The Greek text found by Smith appears originally to have been composed at the end of the second century by Clement of Alexandria.**
*Subsequent to publication of this article in 1992, several scholars have claimed that “Secret Mark” is an elaborate forgery perpetrated by Morton Smith himself. Although many scholars now consider this document to be spurious, there are still strong defenders of its authenticity.
**Titus Flavius Clemens (ca. c.E.150-ca. 211), prominent early church father.
Clement is replying to one Theodore who has been upset by claims that there was a secret Gospel of Mark which differed from the canonic (official) version. Clement tells him that indeed there is a secret Gospel used by the Alexandrian church for initiation into the Christian mysteries. He gives several examples of material present in the secret Gospel but absent in the canonic one. One of the more interesting "secrets" revealed by Clement tells us:
Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.*
*Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 447.
III. Christianity was derived as much from Mithraism as from Judaism. Understanding the origin of Mithraism is crucial to understanding the origin of Christianity.
The mystery religion to which early Christianity seems most closely related is Mithraism. Mithra (also spelled Mithras), a Graeco-Persian invention, was born of a virgin on the winter solstice—frequently December 25 in the Julian calendar. Being a solar deity, Mithra was worshiped on Sundays; after Mithra had become amalgamated with Helios, he was depicted with a halo, nimbus, or glory around his head. In some cases it has been difficult to tell if ancient images were intended as depictions of Mithra or Jesus. The leader of the cult was called a pope (papa) and he ruled from a "mithraeum" on the Vatican Hill in Rome. A prominent iconographic feature in Mithraism was a large key, needed to unlock the celestial gates through which souls of the deceased were believed to pass. It would appear that the "keys of the Kingdom" held by the popes as successors to "St. Peter" derive from Mithra, not from a Palestinian messiah. The Mithraic priests wore miters, special headdresses from which the Christian bishop's hat was derived.
(The Latin name for this Phrygian/Persian hat was mitra--which also was an acceptable Latin spelling for Mithra!) The Mithraists consumed a sacred meal (Myazda) which was completely analogous to the Catholic eucharistic service (Missa, or Mass). Like the Christians, they celebrated the atoning death of a savior who was resurrected on a Sunday. A major center of Mithraic philosophy was Tarsus—St. Paul's hometown—in what now is southeast Turkey.
In 128 B.C.E. the Greek astronomer Hipparchus of Rhodes (fl. 146–127 B.C.E.) discovered the precession of the equinoxes (see Figure 2). Because the earth's axis is tilted approximately 23.5 away from a line perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun, the sun appears from the northern hemisphere to follow a path in the sky (the ecliptic) which for six months of the year is above the celestial equator and below it for six months. (The celestial equator marks the points on the "celestial sphere" which are directly overhead as seen by a person living on the earth's equator.) Twice a year, as the sun appears to move along its ecliptic path, it crosses the celestial equator. When the sun is at these points—the so-called vernal (spring) and autumnal equinoxes—the durations of day and night are equal.
This motion of the earth's axis is called precession, and it is, I believe, a major component of the causes long ago that led to the creation of Christianity. The character now known as Christ, or Jesus, was not born of a virgin; rather, it was the product of an unstably rotating earth. If the earth's axis did not precess, the Christ character would never have been invented. Christianity as we know it would not exist.
If I live long enough, in a future book I’ll call Inventing Jesus, I hope to demonstrate exhaustively the extraordinary chain of causes and effects that led from a wobbling earth to a divine biography—the so-called "Life of Christ." In this brief article, of course, I can do little more than state and explain the major points of this thesis and give a sampling of the evidence I have found to support it.
I. "Jesus Christ" never existed as a historical figure.
It is a curious fact that the oldest components of the so-called New Testament, the letters believed to have been written by one Saul/Paul, say almost nothing of any Jesus biography. Neither Bethlehem nor Nazareth is mentioned in these charter documents of the Christian religion. Only in the much later Book of Acts is it claimed that Saul (Paul) had an interview with "Jesus of Nazareth."* The later the document, the greater the detail of the Jesus story presented.
*This is in Acts 22:7ff, which alleges to be a first-person account of Saul's conversion:
"Then I heard a voice saying to me, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' I answered, 'Tell me, Lord, who you are,' 'I am Jesus of Nazareth,' he said, 'whom you are persecuting.' My companions saw the light, but did not hear the voice that spoke to me . . . " (New English Bible).
A contradictory, third-person account of Saul's conversion can be found in Acts 9:4ff:
"He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' 'Tell me, Lord,' he said, 'who you are.' The voice answered, 'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting . . . ' Meanwhile the men who were traveling with him stood speechless; they heard the voice but could see no one ... " (New English Bible).
It would appear that the version in chapter 9 was taken from a document older than that from which the chapter 22 account was derived. The Nazareth tradition had not yet been invented when the story in chapter 9 was put in writing.
There is no convincing evidence to make one suppose that any of the surviving "Gospels" were written by eyewitnesses. Indeed, study of the Gospels shows quite conclusively that they were not. For example, the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke incorporate nearly the entire Greek text of the Gospel of Mark, adding sayings taken from yet another document (the so-called "Q-Document"), and generally make the miracles recounted by Mark even more miraculous. Had Matthew and Luke been eyewitnesses, they would have written their own accounts, without recourse to plagiarism.
Mark's Gospel, the oldest ofthe official set of four, contains errors of geography* and custom** that would not have been made by an eyewitness. John's Gospel, the latest of the set, is both too late and too ethereal to be taken as a biographical account at all- eyewitness or otherwise. There is nothing about the Gospels to make one take them seriously from a biographic point of view: there is no good reason to think them other than ancient examples of the art of fiction.
*An example of Mark's ignorance of Palestinian geography is found in the story he recounts about Jesus traveling from Tyre on the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, thirty miles inland. According to Mark 7:31, Jesus and his gang went by way of Sidon, twenty miles north of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast! Since to Sidon and back would be forty miles, this means that Mark's messiah walked seventy miles when he could have walked only thirty. Although Mark seems unaware of the problem, the translators of the King James Version seem to have understood it quite well—adroitly obfuscating their translation accordingly:
"Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon …”
** Mark 10:12 tells us that a wife, if she divorces her husband and marries another, is guilty of adultery. While this was possible in some pagan societies, it was not an option open to Israelite women.
If the historicity of Jesus cannot be supported by the New Testament writings, what about extra-Biblical sources? Did any Greek or Roman or Jewish historians observe his career and write about it? Not one.
Although Josephus,* Tacitus,** Suetonius,*** and other ancient authors are often cited as evidence for a historical Jesus, it is clear that their accounts (even if they could be proven authentic) are derivative, not original. Josephus, the oldest of these historians, was born at least five years after the date of the alleged crucifixion! There are no eyewitnesses. Moreover, the ancient non-Christian accounts of Jesus all were written at a time when Christianity already was a thriving delirium, and our pagan authors can be taken only as being witnesses of the state to which Christian traditions had evolved in their times, not as witnesses of a historical Jesus of Nazareth.
*Josephus ben Matthias (ca. C.E. 37–ca. 100), Jewish historian and general.
**Cornelius Tacitus (ca. C.E. 56-ca. 120), Roman orator, historian, and politician.
***Gaius Suetonius Tranquilus (ca. C.E. 69-ca. 122), Roman biographer and historian.
There is no credible evidence indicating Jesus ever lived. This fact is, of course, inadequate to prove he did not live. Even so, although it is logically impossible to prove a universal negative, it is possible to show that there is no need to hypothesize any historical Jesus. The Christ biography can be accounted for on purely literary, astrological, and comparative mythological grounds. The logical principle known as Occam's razor tells us that basic assumptions should not be multiplied beyond necessity. For practical purposes, showing that a historical Jesus is an unnecessary assumption is just as good as proving that he never existed.
II. Christianity began as a mystery religion.
While modern Christianity trumpets its message openly and to all, with little regard for those uninterested in hearing its "good news," it was not so in the beginning. A careful reading of the Pauline Epistles and the Gospels (supplemented by modern documentary discoveries) shows that Christianity began as a mystery cult, replete with initiations, secrets, and multiple levels of indoctrination.
The word mystery (Greek, musterion: 'what is known only to the initiated') occurs twenty-seven times in the official New Testament, and almost all of these occurrences demonstrate the existence of a secret infrastructure in the nascent cult.
And the disciples came, and said unto him, "Why speakest thou unto them in parables?" He answered and said unto them, "Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given." (Matt. 13:10-11, King James Version)
The dangling verses now customarily printed at the end of the Epistle to the Romans (but placed elsewhere in various ancient manuscripts) tell of "that divine secret [musterion] kept in silence for long ages but now disclosed ... " (Romans 16:25, 26, New English Bible).
Paul the mystagogue is very evident in passages such as 1 Cor. 2:6ff:
Now we are speaking a wisdom among those who are mature [i.e., ready to be initiated], that is, a wisdom which does not belong to this age, nor the rulers of this age* who are about to pass away; but we are speaking God's wisdom in a mystery, wisdom which has been hidden and which God predetermined before the ages to contribute to our glory. None of this world's rulers knew this wisdom ... But as it has been written, things that no eye has seen and no ear heard and that have not occurred to human mind, things that God has prepared for those who love him—God indeed revealed them to us through the Spirit . . .**
*It is difficult not to see this as a reference to the end of the 2150-year·long astrological Age of Aries, over which Mithra had reigned as 'Time·Lord' or chronocrat. Paul, according to traditional dating, was writing almost exactly at the time the Age of Pisces was beginning, with Jesus as the new Time-Lord. The Greek for 'the rulers of this age' is archonton tou aionos toutou. This is reverberant with both astrological and Gnostic mysteries. In Gnosticism, the archons clearly are rulers of astrological derivation, and the aeons are both rulers and periods of time. It is suggestive also, that the church father Origen (ca. C.E. 185-ca. 254), in commenting on this passage in Corinthi· ans alludes to "the astrology of the Chaldeans and Indians" and "Magi" - Mithraic or Zoroastrian astrologers (Origen De Principiis, The Ante·Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson [Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1982], pp. 335–6).
**William F. Orr and James Arthur Walther, The Anchor Bible: I Corinthians (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1976), pp. 153–4
1 Cor. 4:1 speaks of "stewards of the mysteries of God."
Paul the would-be initiator of inductees into the mysteries peeks out at us also from the third chapter of 1 Corinthians. "I could not speak to you as I should speak to people who have the Spirit," he tells his not-fully-pliant initiates:
I had to deal with you on the merely natural plane, as infants in Christ. And so I gave you milk to drink, instead of solid food, for which you were not yet ready. Indeed, you are still not ready for it, for you are still on the merely natural plane.*
*1 Cor. 3:1-3, New English Bible
Paul's Corinthians were still being fed the superficial story; they were not yet ready to be told the hidden meanings of things, perhaps the full truth concerning the symbolic, not physical, nature of "Christ."
That there was indeed a secret Gospel and an initiation into the mysteries of the religion now known as Christianity is dramatically attested by the "Secret Gospel of Mark," found in a manuscript discovered by Morton Smith* in 1958 in the Monastery of Mar Saba southeast of Jerusalem. The Greek text found by Smith appears originally to have been composed at the end of the second century by Clement of Alexandria.**
*Subsequent to publication of this article in 1992, several scholars have claimed that “Secret Mark” is an elaborate forgery perpetrated by Morton Smith himself. Although many scholars now consider this document to be spurious, there are still strong defenders of its authenticity.
**Titus Flavius Clemens (ca. c.E.150-ca. 211), prominent early church father.
Clement is replying to one Theodore who has been upset by claims that there was a secret Gospel of Mark which differed from the canonic (official) version. Clement tells him that indeed there is a secret Gospel used by the Alexandrian church for initiation into the Christian mysteries. He gives several examples of material present in the secret Gospel but absent in the canonic one. One of the more interesting "secrets" revealed by Clement tells us:
Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.*
*Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 447.
III. Christianity was derived as much from Mithraism as from Judaism. Understanding the origin of Mithraism is crucial to understanding the origin of Christianity.
The mystery religion to which early Christianity seems most closely related is Mithraism. Mithra (also spelled Mithras), a Graeco-Persian invention, was born of a virgin on the winter solstice—frequently December 25 in the Julian calendar. Being a solar deity, Mithra was worshiped on Sundays; after Mithra had become amalgamated with Helios, he was depicted with a halo, nimbus, or glory around his head. In some cases it has been difficult to tell if ancient images were intended as depictions of Mithra or Jesus. The leader of the cult was called a pope (papa) and he ruled from a "mithraeum" on the Vatican Hill in Rome. A prominent iconographic feature in Mithraism was a large key, needed to unlock the celestial gates through which souls of the deceased were believed to pass. It would appear that the "keys of the Kingdom" held by the popes as successors to "St. Peter" derive from Mithra, not from a Palestinian messiah. The Mithraic priests wore miters, special headdresses from which the Christian bishop's hat was derived.
(The Latin name for this Phrygian/Persian hat was mitra--which also was an acceptable Latin spelling for Mithra!) The Mithraists consumed a sacred meal (Myazda) which was completely analogous to the Catholic eucharistic service (Missa, or Mass). Like the Christians, they celebrated the atoning death of a savior who was resurrected on a Sunday. A major center of Mithraic philosophy was Tarsus—St. Paul's hometown—in what now is southeast Turkey.
- Mithraism and Christianity have their origins in astrology and astronomy.
In 128 B.C.E. the Greek astronomer Hipparchus of Rhodes (fl. 146–127 B.C.E.) discovered the precession of the equinoxes (see Figure 2). Because the earth's axis is tilted approximately 23.5 away from a line perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun, the sun appears from the northern hemisphere to follow a path in the sky (the ecliptic) which for six months of the year is above the celestial equator and below it for six months. (The celestial equator marks the points on the "celestial sphere" which are directly overhead as seen by a person living on the earth's equator.) Twice a year, as the sun appears to move along its ecliptic path, it crosses the celestial equator. When the sun is at these points—the so-called vernal (spring) and autumnal equinoxes—the durations of day and night are equal.
Figure 3. Bas relief representation of the Taurobolium, the sacrifice of a bull by Mithras. Bas reliefs and statues of the ceremony are characteristic of the many underground Mithræa—the secret subterranean chambers in which the Mithraic mysteries were enacted. No written works of Mithraism are known, since like other mystery cults, it centered around a secret known only to persons initiated into its rites. Most of our knowledge about it is derived from the iconography of its temples and polemics of the church Fathers. A central element in them was the depiction of Mithra sacrificing a wild bull (the constellation Taurus).
Figure 4. In this picture of a famous painting in the Christian Catacomb of St. Domitilla (ca. 3rd-4th century), the astrological sign of Pisces is combined with the anchor symbol, which conceals a Tau cross surmounted by what appears to be the solar disc at the equinox. (Many of the earliest burials are marked not by one, but by two fishes that clearly are reference to the New Age of Pisces.) Early in the history of Christianity, the fish also was connected with baptism and served as a Greek acrostic for the phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”—and the symbol is proudly displayed on the rear ends of motorcars operated by fourth-century Christians yet today. Many similar pictures are known in which the Greek letters Alpha (a) and Omega (w) flank the cross, indicating that Christ is both the beginning and end—as is every point on a circle such as the celestial equator or ecliptic.
The cross, apparently, was originally the Greek letter chi (x), which reminds us of the intersection of the celestial equator with the ecliptic at an angle of 23.5 degrees. Other popular crosses were the Chi/Rho Cross (See Figure 5)
Figure 5. The Chi/Rho Cross can be seen yet today decorating pulpits and altars in many Christian Churches. Originally an abbreviation for the name of the time god Chronos, as attested in a papyrus copy of Aristotle’s Constitution of the City of Athens, the cross was reinterpreted as an abbreviation for Christos, the new god of time, according to my interpretation
and the Tropos Cross (See Figure 6).
Figure 6. The Tropos Cross on this sixth-century sarcophagus is a composite symbol composed of a Greek tau (T) surmounted by a rho (P), and is an abbreviation for the Greek words tropē and tropos. Tropē in Greek represents the “turning” of the sun in its path at the summer and winter solstices. Tropos can also mean ‘a turn,’ but it can also represent ‘a direction, way.’ The Way is a popular trope yet today in Christian rhetoric, and in the ancient Greco-Roman world it represented the Milky Way—the path leading up through celestial gates into the realm of the blessed dead. The Lamb, another early Christian symbol, probably had many sources and many symbolic meanings—among which much have been the death of the Age of Aries that gave birth to the Age of Pisces.
I. The Magi mentioned in the second chapter of Matthew's Gospel probably were Mithraic astrologer-priests, probably scouts looking for the new Time-Lord (Chronocrat) who was to rule the "new age" of Pisces.
The Mithraic clergy involvedactively in the astrology of the cult were known as Magi (Greek magoi), and are depicted as wearing Phrygian (pseudo-Persian) caps such as Mithra is supposed to have worn. It is my thesis that some of these Magi, realizing that the age of Mithra was drawing to a close (the equinox would move into Pisces some time during the first century C.E.), would have left their cult centers in Phrygia and Cilicia, in what is now central and southeast Turkey, from cities such as Tarsus to go to Palestine to see if they could locate not just the King of the Jews, but the new Time-Lord, the ruler of the new age of Pisces. (For reasons now unclear, Pisces was considered to have special connections with the Jews.) It is significant, I believe, that early depictions of the Magi's visitation of the Christ Child (including one in a church at Bethlehem) showed them wearing Phrygian (Mithraic) caps.
While it is clear that the story of the Magian visitation found at the beginning of the second chapter of Matthew's Gospel is more fairy tale than history (how does one follow a star?), it seems there is a kernel of historicity in it. I believe, however, that the Greek text has been misunderstood with regard to the point of origin of the Magi and just where they were when they saw the star that triggered their trip. The King James Version tells us of "wise men from the east," who "have seen his star in the east." Modern translations tend to have the wise men see "his star at its rising." The Greek word for 'east' used in these two passages is anatole and it can indeed refer to the east or to the rising of a heavenly body. But it can also be the name of a place--Anatolia. Anatolia could signify either the peninsula of Asia Minor (i.e, the area now called Turkey), or a particular province of Phrygia. It thus appears that Matt. 2:1-2 should actually read:
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came Magi from Anatolia to Jerusalem,
Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for in Anatolia we have seen his star, and are come to worship him.
This Palestinian visit from the Magi could have been the catalyst that triggered various Jewish groups—and perhaps some non-Jewish groups—into thinking that the messiah whom they had been awaiting had already come and had not been noticed. Lest this seem too far fetched, it should be noted that even in our own sophisticated age notices of Christ's "second coming" are of regular occurrence. It is not irrational to suppose that somewhere right now there is a small cult which believes that Jesus is back on earth.*
* On August 6, 1991, the supermarket tabloid National Examiner carried a front-page notice: "Vatican Report, Jesus may be back on earth." The article itself, on page 9, reported that "Stunned scientists and religious leaders believe Jesus Christ has returned to Earth!" There was some uncertainty, however, whether the second coming had come about in a biblical manner or whether Christ had been cloned scientifically from blood spots in the Shroud of Turin. Considering the large numbers of people who read this paper, it is all but certain that there are some people who will believe its extraordinary tales.
It is clear that the people who wrote the New Testament believed in reincarnation and "redivivus appearances" of such characters as Elijah. (Slightly later Christians expected the second coming of the emperor Nero!) This would have made it fairly easy for a Magian visit to convince people that their messiah had already appeared. A particularly illustrative example is found in Matthew's Gospel:*
*Matt. 16: 13-16; 17: 10-13, my translation.
Jesus ... asked his disciples, saying: "Who do men say that the Son of Man is?"
And they said, "Some say John the Baptist; some, Elijah; and others, Jeremiah, or one of the Seers."
He says to them: "But who do you say that I am?"
And Simon Peter, answering, said: "You are the Anointed, the Son of the Living God!"
And his disciples put a question to him, saying: "Why then do the scribes say 'Elijah must come first'?"
Now, Jesus answered and said to them: "Elijah indeed comes first, and will restore all things. Now, I say to you, Elijah has come already, and they did not recognize him, but have done him as many injuries as they could. Thus also the Son of Man is destined to suffer by them."
Then his disciples understood that he said this to them about John the Baptist.
Similar cases of "events" of cosmic significance occurring unnoticed are found in the Gospels of Thomas* and Luke:
* Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), pp. 124-5.
Gos. Thom. 51: His disciples said to him, "When will the repose of the dead come about, and when will the new world come?" He said to them, "What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it."
Gos. Thom. 52: His disciples said to him, "Twenty-four prophets spoke in Israel, and all of them spoke of you." He said to them, "You have omitted the one living in your presence, and have spoken only of the dead."
Luke 17:20-21: Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, he answered them, "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, 'Lo, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you."
II. Certain Jews probably were ready for the Magi when they came to visit.
During the last two centuries B.C.E., the Jews were awaiting a messiah, and were making checklists of passages from the Old Testament which they fancied described the who, where, why, and how of the person who would be their messiah. The actual texts from the Old Testament were often taken completely out of context, distorted, and misquoted, and there was little respect for the tenses of verbs. (A particularly egregious example of such scripture· twisting methodology can be seen in the Gospel of Matthew.)
The messianic checklists that different groups had been keeping would have been reinterpreted after the visit of the Magi: instead of telling what the messiah would do, I think they came to be interpreted as a record of what he had done. News that the messiah had already come would spread rapidly. The fact that no one had noticed the first coming was the reason the myth of the second coming had to be invented. Nothing actually had been accomplished by the first coming—except on parchment and papyrus!
An example of such a checklist has been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scrolls scholar Theodor Gaster tells us about
a catena of five Scriptural passages attesting the advent of the Future Prophet and the Anointed King and the final discomfiture of the impious. The first four are taken from the Pentateuch, and include an excerpt from the oracles of Balaam. The fifth is an interpretation of a verse from the Book of Joshua. An interesting feature of this document ... is that precisely the same passages of the Pentateuch are used by the Samaritans as the stock testimonial to the coming of the Taheb, or future 'Restorer.' They evidently constituted a standard set of such quotations, of the type that scholars have long supposed to have been in the hands of New Testament writers when they cited passages of the Hebrew Bible supposedly confirmed by incidents in the life and career of Jesus.*
* Theodore H. Gaster, The Dead Sea Scriptures, 3rd rev. and enlarged ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1976),p.363.
VII. Gnosticism helped to reinterpret the checklists and other pre-Christian literary creations, as documents pertaining to the life of the unnoticed messiah.
Before the so-called New Testament was completed, the leaders of the primitive Christian church had to do battle with a "heresy" called Gnosticism. The Gnostics were persons who believed in gnosis, a type of introspective knowledge. According to Kurt Rudolph, a leading authority on Gnosticism, gnosis is knowledge given by revelation, which has been made available only to the elect who are capable of receiving it, and therefore has an esoteric character. *
* Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 55.
It is now known that Gnosticism is older than Christianity, and an argument can be made that Christianity is a Gnostic heresy, rather than the other way around as traditionally taught.
Through self-induced "revelation," Gnostics and others could decide not only that their checklists should be reinterpreted, but even that materials completely unrelated to Christianity were actually filled with hidden knowledge of Christian significance. This is extremely important from a psychiatric point of view, for it allowed the authors of the messianic biographies to feel guiltless of fraud, despite the fact that there was little if any truth in their products. All that was needed was for some person, perhaps one who had fasted too long, to have a very strong feeling—possibly the result of a dream, autosuggestion, or even hallucination—that knowledge was being communicated to him from another world. Thereafter, even a list of gardening tools could have been transmogrified into a religious document of great profundity.
The Gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt provides some examples of how non-Christian materials could have been appropriated for Christian purposes. The so-called "Apocalypse of Adam," a non-Christian fantasy composed of Jewish elements, follows the same general outline and contains many of the same components as does the birth narrative found in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. It is clear that both stories are derived from a common mythological source—a source that Gnostic principles allowed to be adapted for Christian use by "St. John the Revelator."
The "smoking gun" of revelation-in-the-making also has been found at Nag Hammadi, and it is most instructive for anyone wishing to understand how non-Christian materials could have been transmuted into the documents now found in the New Testament. James M. Robinson, the editor of the Nag Hammadi materials published in English, tells us that
The Nag Hammadi library even presents one instance of the Christianizing process taking place almost before one's eyes. The non-Christian philosophic treatise Eugnostos the Blessed is cut up somewhat arbitrarily into separate speeches, which are then put on Jesus' tongue, in answer to questions (which sometimes do not quite fit the answers) that the disciples address to him during a resurrection appearance. The result is a separate tractate entitled The Sophia of Jesus Christ. Both forms of the text occur side by side in Codex III. *
* James M. Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library, 3rd rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper, 1988), pp. 8-9.
III. Jesus had to get his names before he could get his lives.
Before Jesus could be given a biography, he had to receive a name. Actually, he received several names and, as we shall see, all of his names were really titles. Thus, the name Jesus of Nazareth originally was not a name at all, but rather a title meaning (The) Savior, (The) Branch. In Hebrew this would have been Yeshua' Netser. The word Yeshua'means 'savior'and Netser means 'sprout,' 'shoot,'or 'branch'--a reference to Isa. 11: 1, which was thought to predict a messiah (literally, 'anointed one') of the line of Jesse (King David's father):
Isa. 11:1. And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots ...
While this reference to a branch from Jesse will doubtless seem obscure to modern readers, it would not have been obscure to ancient Jews such as those who composed the Dead Sea Scrolls (and wrote a commentary on Isa. 11:1); nor would it have been obscure to the early Christians. According to the church father Epiphanius, who was born on Cyprus around C.E. 315 and wrote a treatise against "heretics," the Christians originally were called Jessæans, precisely because of the messianic tie to Jesse.* It is highly probable, moreover, that the Arabic name for Jesus is ‘Isa—almost certainly derived from the Hebrew name for Jesse (ysy).
*J.P. Migne,Patrologiæ Cursus Completus, etc., Series Græca Prior, Patrologiae Græcæ Tomus XLI, S. Epiphanius Constantiensis in Cypro Episcopus, Adversus Hæreses (Paris 1863), columns 389–390.
Although for speakers of Hebrew and its close cousin Aramaic the meaning and prophetic significance of the title The Savior, The Branch would have been clear, after it had been wrestled into Greek as Iesous Nazoraios or Iesous Nazarenos, its titular significance must soon have been forgotten. The Iesous part came to be a simple name (Jesus in Latin) of the Tom, Dick, or Harry sort. The Nazoraios part, however, was misperceived as being derived from the name of a place—the imaginary village of Nazareth—much as the word Parisian can be derived from Paris.
And so, Yeshua‘ Netser came to be Jesus of Nazareth--a name of the Jimmy-the-Greek sort, a name thought to contain information on a person's place of origin. (There may have been an intermediate Wizard-of-Oz period, combining a title with a place name: The Savior of Nazareth.)
At the turn of the era, there was no place called Nazareth, and it is not entirely certain that the place now called by that name was inhabited during the period in question. The name appears neither in the Old Testament nor in the large "intertestamental" literature. Nor is it found in Josephus; despite the fact that he names several dozen towns. in Galilee—a place where he conducted military maneuvers. As far as I can tell, the place presently called Nazareth received its name from an imaginative Jessæan some time at the end of the second century or early third century. At the turn of the era, however, Nazareth was as mythical as the Mary, Joseph, and Jesus family that was supposed to have lived there.
It is interesting to note that archaeological excavations of the oldest Jewish-Christian churches in that area have revealed branches as a prominent decorative motif (shades of netser!) as well as zodiacs—some even surrounding the chi-rho symbol of Christ, exactly as zodiacs have been found surrounding images of Mithra. Further, the ruins of the baptistries bear evidence that initiation rites in early Christianity were every bit as interesting as those in Mormonism before the recent bowdlerization.
Like Jesus of Nazareth, the "name" Jesus Christ also began as two titles. As we have seen, the Jesus part of the name really is the title Savior.But what of Christ? The Greek word christos means 'anointed,' and is the equivalent of the Hebrew word meshiah.Thus, Christ and Messiah are equivalent terms, both referring to the peculiar Israelite practice of anointing their kings and high priests with oil. (The Greeks oiled their athletes instead.)*
*Note added in 2020: In research done for my rejoinder--Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth—to Bart Ehrman’s attack on an earlier version of this article, I found evidence that before the first-century great vowel shift called itacism changed the pronunciation and spelling of the Greek language, christos was spelled both as chreistos and chrēstos, and had nothing to do with anointing. Rather, it signified something like ‘good of its kind,’ ‘serviceable,’ ‘valiant,’ ‘true,’ ‘auspicious’ and ‘good.’
IV. Jesus got his lives from other peoples and other literatures.
There are at least six different Jesuses described in the New Testament: the one which the Apostle Paul "met" during an apparent epileptic seizure on the road to Damascus, the mysterious being of the book of Revelation, and the four palpably different messiahs chronicled in the canonic Gospels. The biographic dimensions of the Pauline messiah are so meagre that little need be said about him. (The book of Revelation character would require a whole book to figure out.) But what of the tales told by the four evangelists?
Much of the biographic material found in the New Testament is merely a reworking of material taken from the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint. A considerable part of the narrative structure of the Gospel of Matthew (and also of Mark, his source) can be thought of as a fleshing out and adaptation of a messianic checklist such as I have hypothesized would have formed the nucleus for a messianic biography. Over and over again, events and circumstances both trivial and important are recounted by Matthew and followed by the refrain "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets ... " While this refrain does not appear in Mark's narrative,it seems clear that the story skeleton used by Mark had been constructed from a checklist of Old Testament "prophecies" that would have to be fulfilled by the Messiah.
The many "sayings of Jesus" (logia) recounted in the Gospels would, if they could convincingly be derived from a single personality or source, be strong evidence that a historical Jesus once existed. But such is not the case. Back in the early 1990s, a group of prominent Bible scholars, sponsored by the Westar Institute in Sonoma, California and styling themselves "The Jesus Seminar,"* completed their six-year analysis of all the logia and reported that at least 80 percent of the sayings were not authentic!
*I myself was loosely associated with the Jesus Seminar (and the related Paul Seminar) during the late 1980s and early 1990s and presented a number of technical research papers to the group.
That is to say, they were able to find explanations for their composition which did not require a historical Jesus. * And what of the other 20 percent? All we can say is that their true origins are unknown. It has not been proven that they come from a man called Jesus.
*The rules of evidence employed by this team of scholars, along with their reasons for accepting or rejecting a particular logion,can be found in The Gospel of Mark Red LetterEdition by Robert W. Funk and Mahlon H. Smith (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1991).
To trace all the elements of the Jesus biographies to their sources will require a very large book. Here I can give only a few examples of how some material became incorporated into the braid of literature that has come to be known as "The Life of Christ."
The healing miracles probably derive from the testimonies given by persons who thought themselves to have been cured by the Greek god Asklepios (Asclepius in Latin). The venom with which the early church fathers attacked the cult of this pagan god indicates a close rivalry between the two cults and a certain embarrassment among Christians repeatedly being told that Asklepios had already done all of Jesus' tricks and had done them better.
Early in the development of the biographies, "Jesus" became identified with the "Son of Man" character who figures so importantly in late Old Testament books and apocryphal writings, such as the Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch. This allowed for large-scale accretion of literary material. It is interesting to note that the Son-of-Man literature underwent considerable evolution from its beginning up to its amalgamation with the Christ character. Originally, in Hebrew and Aramaic, the phrase son of man simply signified a human being—i.e., not some other species of animal. Later, it came to symbolize Israel the nation. Much prophetic literature referring to the Son of Man is actually referring to Israel the nation. (Israel was, after all, a nation of human beings; the goyim or 'nations' were not considered fully human.) Then, the term was individualized once again and was identified with the awaited messiah. Finally, it was grafted—with all its accumulated literature and associations—onto the Jesus vita.
Some of the Jesus biography was derived from pre-Christian Gnosticism, and some material was incorporated from Hellenic-Jewish wisdom literature. Some items, such as the doctrine of the logos ("the Word") came from the Stoic philosophers. The saying "to give is more blessed than to receive" (Acts 20:25) is actually an ancient Greek aphorism.* The saying in Matt. 11:17, "We have piped unto you and ye have not danced," derives from "The Fisherman and the Flute," one of Aesop's fables!** The saying that "wheresoever the carcass is, there the eagles will be gathered together" (Matt. 24:28 = Luke 17:37) is attested by a number of Greek (Lucian,*** Ælianus****) as well as Latin (Seneca,***** Martial, ****** and Lucan)******* literary antecedents. ********
*Koester,Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 63.
**Arnold Ehrhardt, The Framework of the New Testament Stories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 51-3.
***Lucian (ca. C.E. 120-ca. 180), Greek satirist and rhetorician
****Claudius Ælianus (ca. C.E. 170–ca. 235), Roman rhetorician.
*****Lucius Annæus Seneca (ca. 4 B.C.E.–ca. C.E. 65), Roman statesman and philosopher.
******Marcus Valerius Martialis (ca. C.E. 4O–ca. C.E. 103), Roman poet.
*******Marcus Annæus Lucanus (C.E. 39-65), Roman poet.
********Ehrhardt, Framework, p. 53-8.
Although the anonymous authors of the gospels of Matthew and Luke plagiarized almost all of the Greek text of the gospel belatedly attributed so someone called ‘Mark,’ they have many more alleged sayings of Jesus than are to be found in their source—including the famous sayings found in the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew) and “Sermon on the Plain” (Luke). Most scholars are in agreement that those sayings were plagiarized from a now-lost second source, a “Sayings Gospel”separate from ‘Mark.’ It has been reconstructed and is referred to as the Q Document, or just Q. “Q” stands for the German word Quelle, meaning “source.” There is much debate as to the “source of the Source”—i.e., were the sayings created by a Christian community or were they adapted for Christian use from some other source? For many reasons, I am of the opinion that the sayings were taken from a list of wise sayings used for the instruction of school boys.
As a final illustration of how easy it was to put words into Jesus' mouth, we may consider a passage in Saul/Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. In the ninth verse of the second chapter, he quotes a yet-unidentified "scripture":
But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.
In the Gospel of Thomas (actually a collection of sayings or logia, resembling the Q-Document from which Matthew and Luke drew supposed sayings of Jesus), this is reworked as logion number 17 and attributed to Jesus himself:
I shall give you what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard, and what no hand has touched, and what has never occurred to the human mind (Koester,Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 58).
The same saying was adapted by the author of the Q-Document and found its way into the official New Testament as Matt. 13:16, 17 and Luke 10:23,24:
Blessed are the eyes that see what you see and the ears that hear what you hear. . . many prophets and righteous men have desired to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it. (Material in italics found only in Matthew's version.) (Koester,Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 59)
It yet remains to go through the entire New Testament to extract all the materials supposedly containing information on the life of Christ and to trace them to their sources. It remains also to sort out which of the characters in that book are historical and which are fictional. The twelve disciples, for example, appear to be zodiacal figures, but John the Baptist may have been real. St. Paul probably was real, but St. Peter probably was not. The Virgin Mary and Joseph were invented for their roles, but Pontius Pilate was not.
Much work remains to be done to put the chroniclers of Christ out of business, although a surprising amount of it was done already a century or more ago, but now is lost or difficult to retrieve. This fact has prompted the popular writers Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln to comment:
Each contribution in the field of biblical research is like a footprint in sand. Each is covered almost immediately and, so far as the general public is concerned, left virtually without trace. Each must constantly be made anew, only to be covered again. *
*Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, The Messianic Legacy (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), p. 9. [Manuscript received November 19, 1991].
It is time now for the vacuum that is Christ, not the footprints of scholars, to be filled in with sand. It is past the time when mythical beings should be taken seriously. The time has arrived for biblical scholars to stand upon the same solid foundation on which the Marquis de Laplace stood when questioned by the Emperor of France. When asked about the historical Jesus, all should be able to reply: "I have had no need of that hypothesis."
I. The Magi mentioned in the second chapter of Matthew's Gospel probably were Mithraic astrologer-priests, probably scouts looking for the new Time-Lord (Chronocrat) who was to rule the "new age" of Pisces.
The Mithraic clergy involvedactively in the astrology of the cult were known as Magi (Greek magoi), and are depicted as wearing Phrygian (pseudo-Persian) caps such as Mithra is supposed to have worn. It is my thesis that some of these Magi, realizing that the age of Mithra was drawing to a close (the equinox would move into Pisces some time during the first century C.E.), would have left their cult centers in Phrygia and Cilicia, in what is now central and southeast Turkey, from cities such as Tarsus to go to Palestine to see if they could locate not just the King of the Jews, but the new Time-Lord, the ruler of the new age of Pisces. (For reasons now unclear, Pisces was considered to have special connections with the Jews.) It is significant, I believe, that early depictions of the Magi's visitation of the Christ Child (including one in a church at Bethlehem) showed them wearing Phrygian (Mithraic) caps.
While it is clear that the story of the Magian visitation found at the beginning of the second chapter of Matthew's Gospel is more fairy tale than history (how does one follow a star?), it seems there is a kernel of historicity in it. I believe, however, that the Greek text has been misunderstood with regard to the point of origin of the Magi and just where they were when they saw the star that triggered their trip. The King James Version tells us of "wise men from the east," who "have seen his star in the east." Modern translations tend to have the wise men see "his star at its rising." The Greek word for 'east' used in these two passages is anatole and it can indeed refer to the east or to the rising of a heavenly body. But it can also be the name of a place--Anatolia. Anatolia could signify either the peninsula of Asia Minor (i.e, the area now called Turkey), or a particular province of Phrygia. It thus appears that Matt. 2:1-2 should actually read:
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came Magi from Anatolia to Jerusalem,
Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for in Anatolia we have seen his star, and are come to worship him.
This Palestinian visit from the Magi could have been the catalyst that triggered various Jewish groups—and perhaps some non-Jewish groups—into thinking that the messiah whom they had been awaiting had already come and had not been noticed. Lest this seem too far fetched, it should be noted that even in our own sophisticated age notices of Christ's "second coming" are of regular occurrence. It is not irrational to suppose that somewhere right now there is a small cult which believes that Jesus is back on earth.*
* On August 6, 1991, the supermarket tabloid National Examiner carried a front-page notice: "Vatican Report, Jesus may be back on earth." The article itself, on page 9, reported that "Stunned scientists and religious leaders believe Jesus Christ has returned to Earth!" There was some uncertainty, however, whether the second coming had come about in a biblical manner or whether Christ had been cloned scientifically from blood spots in the Shroud of Turin. Considering the large numbers of people who read this paper, it is all but certain that there are some people who will believe its extraordinary tales.
It is clear that the people who wrote the New Testament believed in reincarnation and "redivivus appearances" of such characters as Elijah. (Slightly later Christians expected the second coming of the emperor Nero!) This would have made it fairly easy for a Magian visit to convince people that their messiah had already appeared. A particularly illustrative example is found in Matthew's Gospel:*
*Matt. 16: 13-16; 17: 10-13, my translation.
Jesus ... asked his disciples, saying: "Who do men say that the Son of Man is?"
And they said, "Some say John the Baptist; some, Elijah; and others, Jeremiah, or one of the Seers."
He says to them: "But who do you say that I am?"
And Simon Peter, answering, said: "You are the Anointed, the Son of the Living God!"
And his disciples put a question to him, saying: "Why then do the scribes say 'Elijah must come first'?"
Now, Jesus answered and said to them: "Elijah indeed comes first, and will restore all things. Now, I say to you, Elijah has come already, and they did not recognize him, but have done him as many injuries as they could. Thus also the Son of Man is destined to suffer by them."
Then his disciples understood that he said this to them about John the Baptist.
Similar cases of "events" of cosmic significance occurring unnoticed are found in the Gospels of Thomas* and Luke:
* Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), pp. 124-5.
Gos. Thom. 51: His disciples said to him, "When will the repose of the dead come about, and when will the new world come?" He said to them, "What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it."
Gos. Thom. 52: His disciples said to him, "Twenty-four prophets spoke in Israel, and all of them spoke of you." He said to them, "You have omitted the one living in your presence, and have spoken only of the dead."
Luke 17:20-21: Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, he answered them, "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, 'Lo, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you."
II. Certain Jews probably were ready for the Magi when they came to visit.
During the last two centuries B.C.E., the Jews were awaiting a messiah, and were making checklists of passages from the Old Testament which they fancied described the who, where, why, and how of the person who would be their messiah. The actual texts from the Old Testament were often taken completely out of context, distorted, and misquoted, and there was little respect for the tenses of verbs. (A particularly egregious example of such scripture· twisting methodology can be seen in the Gospel of Matthew.)
The messianic checklists that different groups had been keeping would have been reinterpreted after the visit of the Magi: instead of telling what the messiah would do, I think they came to be interpreted as a record of what he had done. News that the messiah had already come would spread rapidly. The fact that no one had noticed the first coming was the reason the myth of the second coming had to be invented. Nothing actually had been accomplished by the first coming—except on parchment and papyrus!
An example of such a checklist has been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scrolls scholar Theodor Gaster tells us about
a catena of five Scriptural passages attesting the advent of the Future Prophet and the Anointed King and the final discomfiture of the impious. The first four are taken from the Pentateuch, and include an excerpt from the oracles of Balaam. The fifth is an interpretation of a verse from the Book of Joshua. An interesting feature of this document ... is that precisely the same passages of the Pentateuch are used by the Samaritans as the stock testimonial to the coming of the Taheb, or future 'Restorer.' They evidently constituted a standard set of such quotations, of the type that scholars have long supposed to have been in the hands of New Testament writers when they cited passages of the Hebrew Bible supposedly confirmed by incidents in the life and career of Jesus.*
* Theodore H. Gaster, The Dead Sea Scriptures, 3rd rev. and enlarged ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1976),p.363.
VII. Gnosticism helped to reinterpret the checklists and other pre-Christian literary creations, as documents pertaining to the life of the unnoticed messiah.
Before the so-called New Testament was completed, the leaders of the primitive Christian church had to do battle with a "heresy" called Gnosticism. The Gnostics were persons who believed in gnosis, a type of introspective knowledge. According to Kurt Rudolph, a leading authority on Gnosticism, gnosis is knowledge given by revelation, which has been made available only to the elect who are capable of receiving it, and therefore has an esoteric character. *
* Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 55.
It is now known that Gnosticism is older than Christianity, and an argument can be made that Christianity is a Gnostic heresy, rather than the other way around as traditionally taught.
Through self-induced "revelation," Gnostics and others could decide not only that their checklists should be reinterpreted, but even that materials completely unrelated to Christianity were actually filled with hidden knowledge of Christian significance. This is extremely important from a psychiatric point of view, for it allowed the authors of the messianic biographies to feel guiltless of fraud, despite the fact that there was little if any truth in their products. All that was needed was for some person, perhaps one who had fasted too long, to have a very strong feeling—possibly the result of a dream, autosuggestion, or even hallucination—that knowledge was being communicated to him from another world. Thereafter, even a list of gardening tools could have been transmogrified into a religious document of great profundity.
The Gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt provides some examples of how non-Christian materials could have been appropriated for Christian purposes. The so-called "Apocalypse of Adam," a non-Christian fantasy composed of Jewish elements, follows the same general outline and contains many of the same components as does the birth narrative found in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. It is clear that both stories are derived from a common mythological source—a source that Gnostic principles allowed to be adapted for Christian use by "St. John the Revelator."
The "smoking gun" of revelation-in-the-making also has been found at Nag Hammadi, and it is most instructive for anyone wishing to understand how non-Christian materials could have been transmuted into the documents now found in the New Testament. James M. Robinson, the editor of the Nag Hammadi materials published in English, tells us that
The Nag Hammadi library even presents one instance of the Christianizing process taking place almost before one's eyes. The non-Christian philosophic treatise Eugnostos the Blessed is cut up somewhat arbitrarily into separate speeches, which are then put on Jesus' tongue, in answer to questions (which sometimes do not quite fit the answers) that the disciples address to him during a resurrection appearance. The result is a separate tractate entitled The Sophia of Jesus Christ. Both forms of the text occur side by side in Codex III. *
* James M. Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library, 3rd rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper, 1988), pp. 8-9.
III. Jesus had to get his names before he could get his lives.
Before Jesus could be given a biography, he had to receive a name. Actually, he received several names and, as we shall see, all of his names were really titles. Thus, the name Jesus of Nazareth originally was not a name at all, but rather a title meaning (The) Savior, (The) Branch. In Hebrew this would have been Yeshua' Netser. The word Yeshua'means 'savior'and Netser means 'sprout,' 'shoot,'or 'branch'--a reference to Isa. 11: 1, which was thought to predict a messiah (literally, 'anointed one') of the line of Jesse (King David's father):
Isa. 11:1. And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots ...
While this reference to a branch from Jesse will doubtless seem obscure to modern readers, it would not have been obscure to ancient Jews such as those who composed the Dead Sea Scrolls (and wrote a commentary on Isa. 11:1); nor would it have been obscure to the early Christians. According to the church father Epiphanius, who was born on Cyprus around C.E. 315 and wrote a treatise against "heretics," the Christians originally were called Jessæans, precisely because of the messianic tie to Jesse.* It is highly probable, moreover, that the Arabic name for Jesus is ‘Isa—almost certainly derived from the Hebrew name for Jesse (ysy).
*J.P. Migne,Patrologiæ Cursus Completus, etc., Series Græca Prior, Patrologiae Græcæ Tomus XLI, S. Epiphanius Constantiensis in Cypro Episcopus, Adversus Hæreses (Paris 1863), columns 389–390.
Although for speakers of Hebrew and its close cousin Aramaic the meaning and prophetic significance of the title The Savior, The Branch would have been clear, after it had been wrestled into Greek as Iesous Nazoraios or Iesous Nazarenos, its titular significance must soon have been forgotten. The Iesous part came to be a simple name (Jesus in Latin) of the Tom, Dick, or Harry sort. The Nazoraios part, however, was misperceived as being derived from the name of a place—the imaginary village of Nazareth—much as the word Parisian can be derived from Paris.
And so, Yeshua‘ Netser came to be Jesus of Nazareth--a name of the Jimmy-the-Greek sort, a name thought to contain information on a person's place of origin. (There may have been an intermediate Wizard-of-Oz period, combining a title with a place name: The Savior of Nazareth.)
At the turn of the era, there was no place called Nazareth, and it is not entirely certain that the place now called by that name was inhabited during the period in question. The name appears neither in the Old Testament nor in the large "intertestamental" literature. Nor is it found in Josephus; despite the fact that he names several dozen towns. in Galilee—a place where he conducted military maneuvers. As far as I can tell, the place presently called Nazareth received its name from an imaginative Jessæan some time at the end of the second century or early third century. At the turn of the era, however, Nazareth was as mythical as the Mary, Joseph, and Jesus family that was supposed to have lived there.
It is interesting to note that archaeological excavations of the oldest Jewish-Christian churches in that area have revealed branches as a prominent decorative motif (shades of netser!) as well as zodiacs—some even surrounding the chi-rho symbol of Christ, exactly as zodiacs have been found surrounding images of Mithra. Further, the ruins of the baptistries bear evidence that initiation rites in early Christianity were every bit as interesting as those in Mormonism before the recent bowdlerization.
Like Jesus of Nazareth, the "name" Jesus Christ also began as two titles. As we have seen, the Jesus part of the name really is the title Savior.But what of Christ? The Greek word christos means 'anointed,' and is the equivalent of the Hebrew word meshiah.Thus, Christ and Messiah are equivalent terms, both referring to the peculiar Israelite practice of anointing their kings and high priests with oil. (The Greeks oiled their athletes instead.)*
*Note added in 2020: In research done for my rejoinder--Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth—to Bart Ehrman’s attack on an earlier version of this article, I found evidence that before the first-century great vowel shift called itacism changed the pronunciation and spelling of the Greek language, christos was spelled both as chreistos and chrēstos, and had nothing to do with anointing. Rather, it signified something like ‘good of its kind,’ ‘serviceable,’ ‘valiant,’ ‘true,’ ‘auspicious’ and ‘good.’
IV. Jesus got his lives from other peoples and other literatures.
There are at least six different Jesuses described in the New Testament: the one which the Apostle Paul "met" during an apparent epileptic seizure on the road to Damascus, the mysterious being of the book of Revelation, and the four palpably different messiahs chronicled in the canonic Gospels. The biographic dimensions of the Pauline messiah are so meagre that little need be said about him. (The book of Revelation character would require a whole book to figure out.) But what of the tales told by the four evangelists?
Much of the biographic material found in the New Testament is merely a reworking of material taken from the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint. A considerable part of the narrative structure of the Gospel of Matthew (and also of Mark, his source) can be thought of as a fleshing out and adaptation of a messianic checklist such as I have hypothesized would have formed the nucleus for a messianic biography. Over and over again, events and circumstances both trivial and important are recounted by Matthew and followed by the refrain "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets ... " While this refrain does not appear in Mark's narrative,it seems clear that the story skeleton used by Mark had been constructed from a checklist of Old Testament "prophecies" that would have to be fulfilled by the Messiah.
The many "sayings of Jesus" (logia) recounted in the Gospels would, if they could convincingly be derived from a single personality or source, be strong evidence that a historical Jesus once existed. But such is not the case. Back in the early 1990s, a group of prominent Bible scholars, sponsored by the Westar Institute in Sonoma, California and styling themselves "The Jesus Seminar,"* completed their six-year analysis of all the logia and reported that at least 80 percent of the sayings were not authentic!
*I myself was loosely associated with the Jesus Seminar (and the related Paul Seminar) during the late 1980s and early 1990s and presented a number of technical research papers to the group.
That is to say, they were able to find explanations for their composition which did not require a historical Jesus. * And what of the other 20 percent? All we can say is that their true origins are unknown. It has not been proven that they come from a man called Jesus.
*The rules of evidence employed by this team of scholars, along with their reasons for accepting or rejecting a particular logion,can be found in The Gospel of Mark Red LetterEdition by Robert W. Funk and Mahlon H. Smith (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1991).
To trace all the elements of the Jesus biographies to their sources will require a very large book. Here I can give only a few examples of how some material became incorporated into the braid of literature that has come to be known as "The Life of Christ."
The healing miracles probably derive from the testimonies given by persons who thought themselves to have been cured by the Greek god Asklepios (Asclepius in Latin). The venom with which the early church fathers attacked the cult of this pagan god indicates a close rivalry between the two cults and a certain embarrassment among Christians repeatedly being told that Asklepios had already done all of Jesus' tricks and had done them better.
Early in the development of the biographies, "Jesus" became identified with the "Son of Man" character who figures so importantly in late Old Testament books and apocryphal writings, such as the Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch. This allowed for large-scale accretion of literary material. It is interesting to note that the Son-of-Man literature underwent considerable evolution from its beginning up to its amalgamation with the Christ character. Originally, in Hebrew and Aramaic, the phrase son of man simply signified a human being—i.e., not some other species of animal. Later, it came to symbolize Israel the nation. Much prophetic literature referring to the Son of Man is actually referring to Israel the nation. (Israel was, after all, a nation of human beings; the goyim or 'nations' were not considered fully human.) Then, the term was individualized once again and was identified with the awaited messiah. Finally, it was grafted—with all its accumulated literature and associations—onto the Jesus vita.
Some of the Jesus biography was derived from pre-Christian Gnosticism, and some material was incorporated from Hellenic-Jewish wisdom literature. Some items, such as the doctrine of the logos ("the Word") came from the Stoic philosophers. The saying "to give is more blessed than to receive" (Acts 20:25) is actually an ancient Greek aphorism.* The saying in Matt. 11:17, "We have piped unto you and ye have not danced," derives from "The Fisherman and the Flute," one of Aesop's fables!** The saying that "wheresoever the carcass is, there the eagles will be gathered together" (Matt. 24:28 = Luke 17:37) is attested by a number of Greek (Lucian,*** Ælianus****) as well as Latin (Seneca,***** Martial, ****** and Lucan)******* literary antecedents. ********
*Koester,Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 63.
**Arnold Ehrhardt, The Framework of the New Testament Stories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 51-3.
***Lucian (ca. C.E. 120-ca. 180), Greek satirist and rhetorician
****Claudius Ælianus (ca. C.E. 170–ca. 235), Roman rhetorician.
*****Lucius Annæus Seneca (ca. 4 B.C.E.–ca. C.E. 65), Roman statesman and philosopher.
******Marcus Valerius Martialis (ca. C.E. 4O–ca. C.E. 103), Roman poet.
*******Marcus Annæus Lucanus (C.E. 39-65), Roman poet.
********Ehrhardt, Framework, p. 53-8.
Although the anonymous authors of the gospels of Matthew and Luke plagiarized almost all of the Greek text of the gospel belatedly attributed so someone called ‘Mark,’ they have many more alleged sayings of Jesus than are to be found in their source—including the famous sayings found in the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew) and “Sermon on the Plain” (Luke). Most scholars are in agreement that those sayings were plagiarized from a now-lost second source, a “Sayings Gospel”separate from ‘Mark.’ It has been reconstructed and is referred to as the Q Document, or just Q. “Q” stands for the German word Quelle, meaning “source.” There is much debate as to the “source of the Source”—i.e., were the sayings created by a Christian community or were they adapted for Christian use from some other source? For many reasons, I am of the opinion that the sayings were taken from a list of wise sayings used for the instruction of school boys.
As a final illustration of how easy it was to put words into Jesus' mouth, we may consider a passage in Saul/Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. In the ninth verse of the second chapter, he quotes a yet-unidentified "scripture":
But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.
In the Gospel of Thomas (actually a collection of sayings or logia, resembling the Q-Document from which Matthew and Luke drew supposed sayings of Jesus), this is reworked as logion number 17 and attributed to Jesus himself:
I shall give you what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard, and what no hand has touched, and what has never occurred to the human mind (Koester,Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 58).
The same saying was adapted by the author of the Q-Document and found its way into the official New Testament as Matt. 13:16, 17 and Luke 10:23,24:
Blessed are the eyes that see what you see and the ears that hear what you hear. . . many prophets and righteous men have desired to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it. (Material in italics found only in Matthew's version.) (Koester,Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 59)
It yet remains to go through the entire New Testament to extract all the materials supposedly containing information on the life of Christ and to trace them to their sources. It remains also to sort out which of the characters in that book are historical and which are fictional. The twelve disciples, for example, appear to be zodiacal figures, but John the Baptist may have been real. St. Paul probably was real, but St. Peter probably was not. The Virgin Mary and Joseph were invented for their roles, but Pontius Pilate was not.
Much work remains to be done to put the chroniclers of Christ out of business, although a surprising amount of it was done already a century or more ago, but now is lost or difficult to retrieve. This fact has prompted the popular writers Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln to comment:
Each contribution in the field of biblical research is like a footprint in sand. Each is covered almost immediately and, so far as the general public is concerned, left virtually without trace. Each must constantly be made anew, only to be covered again. *
*Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, The Messianic Legacy (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), p. 9. [Manuscript received November 19, 1991].
It is time now for the vacuum that is Christ, not the footprints of scholars, to be filled in with sand. It is past the time when mythical beings should be taken seriously. The time has arrived for biblical scholars to stand upon the same solid foundation on which the Marquis de Laplace stood when questioned by the Emperor of France. When asked about the historical Jesus, all should be able to reply: "I have had no need of that hypothesis."
Loud Arguments from Silence
The REAL Bible—Who's Got It?
Modern Christians take it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth once existed as a man—a human being. Most modern scholars also accept this as axiomatic, even if they are Atheists who do not believe that Jesus the Man was also a god. The answer to the question ‘Did Jesus have a body?’ would be considered a no-brainer by believers and skeptical scholars alike. Of course Jesus had a body! If he once existed as a man, perforce he had a body.
While scholars would consider their answer to be a logical necessity, believers could adduce further proof of the corporality of Jesus from the New Testament of the Christian bible. Was not Jesus born of the Virgin Mary? Mary was a human mother, and women don’t give birth to ghosts!
Furthermore, even after Jesus was killed and resurrected, he had a physical body. Did not Doubting Thomas verify the fact when he thrust his hand into the risen Jesus’ side (John 20:27–28)? Did not Jesus eat a breakfast of bread and fish with the Disciples when he appeared to them on the shore of the Sea of Galilee (John 21:12–15)?
It is a curious fact that the answer to this simple question—so obvious to modern Christians — was not at all obvious to many ancient Christians. The earliest ‘heresy’ that we know of appears to be that of Docetism. The Docetists took their name from the fact that they believed that Jesus only seemed (Greek dokein ‘to seem’) to have a physical body and only seemed to suffer on the cross but was, in fact, a spirit.
So early and so serious was this opinion that some of our earliest Christian witnesses—the so-called Apostolic Fathers—were moved to denounce the Gnostics and anyone else who held Docetic beliefs. In or about the year 110 CE, St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, sent a letter to the Christians of Smyrna in present-day Turkey. In that epistle Ignatius told the Smyrneans that “[Jesus] suffered all these things for us; and He suffered them really, and not in appearance only, even as also He truly rose again. But not, as some of the unbelievers, who … affirm, that in appearance only, and not in truth, He took a body of the Virgin, and suffered only in appearance, forgetting as they do, Him who said, ‘The Word was made flesh’ [Jn 1:14]… I know that he was possessed of a body not only in His being born and crucified, but I also know that he was so after His resurrection, and believe that He is so now.” [Ignat Smyrn Chapters 2–3] [The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. I. The Apostolic Fathers—Justin Martyr—Irenaeus, Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, (reprint) 1985, p. 87]
Let us think about this for a moment. Jesus is supposed to have died somewhere around the year 33 CE. Within 77 years, church leaders were in serious dispute over whether or not he had had a body! Let us translate this to a modern context. Imagine Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford arguing over the question of whether or not William McKinley had had a body. But the facts of Christian history are even more absurd than is this modern scenario.
It is clear that Docetism was a problem even in the days when letters now attributed to the Apostles Paul, Peter, and John were being written. How do we know this? Consider the following verses:
Galatians 4:4–5.But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law… [A.D. 58]
Romans 1:3.Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh… [A.D. 60]
Romans 8:3.For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh… [A.D. 60]
Colossians 1:21–22.And you, who once were estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death… [A.D. 64]
1 Timothy 3:16.And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory. [A.D. 65]
1 Peter 3:18.For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit… [A.D. 60]
1 Peter 4:1.Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind; for he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin… [A.D. 60]
1 John 4:1–3.Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. [A.D. 90]
2 John 1:7. For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist. [A.D. 90]
Before going further, I must confess that the dates given with each quoted verse is the date assigned to it by the infamous Archbishop James Ussher [1581–1656] — the same guy who determined the biblical ‘fact’ that the world was created in the year 4004 B.C. Even so, a very large number of Christian scholars even today would assert that these dates are essentially correct.
It should be noted that in all of the verses I have quoted the writers seem to have gone out of their way to stress that Jesus had a body—something that one might think would be a given. Why would these sacred authors bother to mention such a fact? If I were writing about my childhood and talking about the exciting times I had with my grandfather, wouldn’t it seem more than odd if I mentioned even once, “By the way: my grandfather had a body”? What if I told you, “My grandfather had a mother”? Clearly the verses quoted were written to contradict rival Christians who were claiming that Jesus only seemed to have a body. Docetists were the antichrists of the first century.
Now let us think about this a bit more. If the Epistle to the Galatians was in fact written in the year 58, and Jesus was crucified in the year 33…
I can hear Franklin D. Roosevelt arguing with Herbert Hoover: “Did Theodore Roosevelt have a body?” “Did Mittie Roosevelt really bear Teddy?”
The fact that Docetic actors are standing on the Christian stage as early as the raising of the first curtain of our passion play is of considerable explanatory significance. If Jesus of Nazareth never existed as an actual man of flesh and blood, but rather began as a god who had come to earth to help the souls of men and women find their ways back to their heavenly home, there would arise lots of questions concerning what he had actually been like when he was on the earth. Very early on, we might expect to find squabbling theological factions engaging in arguments concerning his terrestrial nature.
Did a god perhaps take possession of the body of some human? This actually was an early ‘Adoptionist’ view of Jesus that is reflected in some manuscript readings of the story of the baptism of Jesus found in Luke 3:22. These have a voice from heaven tell Jesus as he emerges from the water “Thou art my Son, my Beloved; this day I have begotten thee.” After the crucifixion, the god abandoned the physical body of Jesus and flew back to heaven.
Did a god — as Orthodoxy now holds — impregnate a mortal woman in the way that Zeus had done on a number of occasions? Was Jesus then simultaneously a god and a man of flesh and blood? Was his mortal human mother then literally ‘the Mother of God’?
Or were the Docetists and Gnostics correct? When the god came to earth he only seemed to be the mortal man Jesus. Throughout his enactment of this divine drama, Jesus never had a mortal body, but continued to the end to be composed of whatever ectoplasmic essence it is that gods are made of. How could Jesus have been mortal if he was a god? How can a god die? Gods are immortal—that’s the main difference between gods and humans. If Jesus had had a physical body, ipso factohe could not have been a god. Q.E.D.
Scholars who believe without evidence that there once was a man called Jesus of Nazareth surely must experience a bit of Angst because of this silly situation. This must be made even more anxiety-provoking by the fact that René Salm has shown, in his AAP books The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus, and Nazareth Gate: Quack Archeology, Holy Hoaxes, and the Invented Town of Jesus that ‘Nazareth’ was not inhabited at the time Jesus should have been living there. No matter. I’m sure that Jesus of Cucamonga had a body made of flesh and blood.
While scholars would consider their answer to be a logical necessity, believers could adduce further proof of the corporality of Jesus from the New Testament of the Christian bible. Was not Jesus born of the Virgin Mary? Mary was a human mother, and women don’t give birth to ghosts!
Furthermore, even after Jesus was killed and resurrected, he had a physical body. Did not Doubting Thomas verify the fact when he thrust his hand into the risen Jesus’ side (John 20:27–28)? Did not Jesus eat a breakfast of bread and fish with the Disciples when he appeared to them on the shore of the Sea of Galilee (John 21:12–15)?
It is a curious fact that the answer to this simple question—so obvious to modern Christians — was not at all obvious to many ancient Christians. The earliest ‘heresy’ that we know of appears to be that of Docetism. The Docetists took their name from the fact that they believed that Jesus only seemed (Greek dokein ‘to seem’) to have a physical body and only seemed to suffer on the cross but was, in fact, a spirit.
So early and so serious was this opinion that some of our earliest Christian witnesses—the so-called Apostolic Fathers—were moved to denounce the Gnostics and anyone else who held Docetic beliefs. In or about the year 110 CE, St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, sent a letter to the Christians of Smyrna in present-day Turkey. In that epistle Ignatius told the Smyrneans that “[Jesus] suffered all these things for us; and He suffered them really, and not in appearance only, even as also He truly rose again. But not, as some of the unbelievers, who … affirm, that in appearance only, and not in truth, He took a body of the Virgin, and suffered only in appearance, forgetting as they do, Him who said, ‘The Word was made flesh’ [Jn 1:14]… I know that he was possessed of a body not only in His being born and crucified, but I also know that he was so after His resurrection, and believe that He is so now.” [Ignat Smyrn Chapters 2–3] [The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. I. The Apostolic Fathers—Justin Martyr—Irenaeus, Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, (reprint) 1985, p. 87]
Let us think about this for a moment. Jesus is supposed to have died somewhere around the year 33 CE. Within 77 years, church leaders were in serious dispute over whether or not he had had a body! Let us translate this to a modern context. Imagine Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford arguing over the question of whether or not William McKinley had had a body. But the facts of Christian history are even more absurd than is this modern scenario.
It is clear that Docetism was a problem even in the days when letters now attributed to the Apostles Paul, Peter, and John were being written. How do we know this? Consider the following verses:
Galatians 4:4–5.But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law… [A.D. 58]
Romans 1:3.Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh… [A.D. 60]
Romans 8:3.For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh… [A.D. 60]
Colossians 1:21–22.And you, who once were estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death… [A.D. 64]
1 Timothy 3:16.And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory. [A.D. 65]
1 Peter 3:18.For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit… [A.D. 60]
1 Peter 4:1.Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind; for he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin… [A.D. 60]
1 John 4:1–3.Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. [A.D. 90]
2 John 1:7. For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist. [A.D. 90]
Before going further, I must confess that the dates given with each quoted verse is the date assigned to it by the infamous Archbishop James Ussher [1581–1656] — the same guy who determined the biblical ‘fact’ that the world was created in the year 4004 B.C. Even so, a very large number of Christian scholars even today would assert that these dates are essentially correct.
It should be noted that in all of the verses I have quoted the writers seem to have gone out of their way to stress that Jesus had a body—something that one might think would be a given. Why would these sacred authors bother to mention such a fact? If I were writing about my childhood and talking about the exciting times I had with my grandfather, wouldn’t it seem more than odd if I mentioned even once, “By the way: my grandfather had a body”? What if I told you, “My grandfather had a mother”? Clearly the verses quoted were written to contradict rival Christians who were claiming that Jesus only seemed to have a body. Docetists were the antichrists of the first century.
Now let us think about this a bit more. If the Epistle to the Galatians was in fact written in the year 58, and Jesus was crucified in the year 33…
I can hear Franklin D. Roosevelt arguing with Herbert Hoover: “Did Theodore Roosevelt have a body?” “Did Mittie Roosevelt really bear Teddy?”
The fact that Docetic actors are standing on the Christian stage as early as the raising of the first curtain of our passion play is of considerable explanatory significance. If Jesus of Nazareth never existed as an actual man of flesh and blood, but rather began as a god who had come to earth to help the souls of men and women find their ways back to their heavenly home, there would arise lots of questions concerning what he had actually been like when he was on the earth. Very early on, we might expect to find squabbling theological factions engaging in arguments concerning his terrestrial nature.
Did a god perhaps take possession of the body of some human? This actually was an early ‘Adoptionist’ view of Jesus that is reflected in some manuscript readings of the story of the baptism of Jesus found in Luke 3:22. These have a voice from heaven tell Jesus as he emerges from the water “Thou art my Son, my Beloved; this day I have begotten thee.” After the crucifixion, the god abandoned the physical body of Jesus and flew back to heaven.
Did a god — as Orthodoxy now holds — impregnate a mortal woman in the way that Zeus had done on a number of occasions? Was Jesus then simultaneously a god and a man of flesh and blood? Was his mortal human mother then literally ‘the Mother of God’?
Or were the Docetists and Gnostics correct? When the god came to earth he only seemed to be the mortal man Jesus. Throughout his enactment of this divine drama, Jesus never had a mortal body, but continued to the end to be composed of whatever ectoplasmic essence it is that gods are made of. How could Jesus have been mortal if he was a god? How can a god die? Gods are immortal—that’s the main difference between gods and humans. If Jesus had had a physical body, ipso factohe could not have been a god. Q.E.D.
Scholars who believe without evidence that there once was a man called Jesus of Nazareth surely must experience a bit of Angst because of this silly situation. This must be made even more anxiety-provoking by the fact that René Salm has shown, in his AAP books The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus, and Nazareth Gate: Quack Archeology, Holy Hoaxes, and the Invented Town of Jesus that ‘Nazareth’ was not inhabited at the time Jesus should have been living there. No matter. I’m sure that Jesus of Cucamonga had a body made of flesh and blood.
Loud Arguments from Silence
Loud Arguments from Silence
When debating creationists, I often like to point out that gaps in the fossil record disprove the biblical creation myths. Since it is a favorite creationist argument against evolution to claim that gaps in the fossil record disprove the idea of one species changing into another over time, using this argument against creationism never fails to get attention. "If all living things were created within five days (as the first creation story in Genesis has it)," I like to point out, "or even all on a single day (as the second version says), then we should find the remains of all modern forms in the oldest rock layers, as well as in all the layers above them. We should be able to find everything from fish to Gish [referring to Duane T. Gish, the superstar creationist debater from the Institute for Creation Research, in Santee, California] in Precambrian as well as recent rocks. But we don't. That's because there were no people when those rocks were formed. Humans are among the latest animal forms to appear on our planet."
Of course, it is impossible to flummox a religious apologist. Sometimes I will be told the geologic column is an evolutionist's illusion, and that there are Gish-like remains in the most primitive rock layers: one simply has to know how to date the rocks correctly! But usually, I will be told I just haven't been looking hard enough or in the right places. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," I will be reminded. People in the audience—who typically know even less logic than science—usually think this is some sort of logical axiom, and it is usually better to go on to some other argument than to waste precious debating time trying to show that absence of Precambrian mammals and flowering plants is not "absence of evidence."
There is another species of this argument that one may encounter when trying to reason with a religious apologist. Recently, I had occasion to argue against the notion that Isaiah had the virgin birth of Jesus in mind when he told (Hebrew version) King Ahaz "Behold, the young woman—not virgin as the KJV (King James Version of the Bible, the favorite "inspired version" of Christian fundamentalists until their recent discovery that King James was gay) has it. The Hebrew text says the young woman“is pregnant”—not KJV will conceive—and will bear a son. The Hebrew further disagrees with the “infallible KJV” by explaining that SHE [or possibly you but not KJV they] “will call his name Immanuel." I pointed out the mistranslations and distortions of the KJV and noted further that Jesus never was called Immanuel. "That is simply an argument from silence," I was told. Just because we have no records of the Virgin Mary, Joseph, or even his mother-in-law (don't forget, Jewish rabbis had to be married in those days!) ever calling Jesus Immanuel doesn't mean they didn't do it. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. So there!
Well, what about "arguments from silence"? Do they always involve logical fallacy? Or do they simply suffer from the same limitations as all arguments involving scientific induction--viz., their inability to produce absolute proofs of the type that is common in deductive reasoning? If we grant the premises that "All men are mortal," and "Socrates is a man," we can with absolute certainty conclude that "Socrates is mortal." But no matter how much empirical evidence we may amass, we can never be absolutely certain that dawn will break tomorrow. Nevertheless, it is worth reminding ourselves that it is entirely reasonable—indeed, we can't avoid it—to stake our very lives on propositions for which absolute certainty is unattainable.
An argument from silence is entirely proper, for example, when it can be shown that if assertion Xwere a fact, written source Ywould have been compelled to mention it. The strength of the argument for proposition X varies directly in proportion to the strength of the argument that Ywould have been compelled to mention it. Thus, to assert that ''Auto-Repair Shop Q has never cheated a customer" is proved by the fact that the telephone book makes no mention of customer complaints against it is weak beyond description. On the other hand, to assert that ''Auto-Repair Shop Q did not exist in Kalamazoo during 1950-1951" is proved by the fact that there are no listings for it in Kalamazoo phone books for either year is a very strong argument. Legally, it would probably establish truth ''beyond a reasonable doubt."
Well-crafted arguments from silence can often redound to proclamations of considerable loudness—hence the title of this essay. Joseph Wheless, a Judge and Associate Editor of the American Bar Association Journal, made many devastatingly loud arguments from silence in his 1930 classic of freethought, Forgery in Christianity: A Documented Record of the Foundations of the Christian Religion. It will be instructive for our purposes to retail a few of his demonstrations.
Upon this Rock ...
The Founding of Mendacianity
Were it not for lies and forgeries, there would be no Christian religion. Infact, falsehood is so fundamental to this faith that it might better have been called Mendacianity. It should not be too surprising therefore—unless one is a Roman Catholic Christian—to learn that the biblical passage purported to record the founding of the Roman Catholic Church is a forgery. Even if he once existed as a historical figure, Jesus most certainly never uttered the words attributed to him in Matt. 16:18-19: "And I say unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." That these verses are an interpolation—an insertion forged by someone after the composition of the main text of the gospel that came to be attributed to an uncertain "Matthew"—can be demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt. (Quotation marks are placed around the names of the alleged evangelists because in truth no one knows who wrote any of the books of the New Testament. Almost all of the books are composite works resulting from the activity of several or more authors and editors. The four "canonical gospels" were not attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John until the middle or latter part of the second century CE.)
Much of the demonstration involves argumentation from silence that is very convincing.
First we have the silence of the entire remainder of the New Testament.Nowhere else—not even in the epistles traditionally attributed to Peter himself—do we find notice of Peter being the foundation of the Christian Church and the keeper of the keys of the gates of heaven. Secondly, we have the silence of the oldest church fathers. Not until around the year 211, in his tract "The Scorpion's Sting," do we have Tertullian, a Father of the Latin Church, alluding to the "fact" that "the Lord left to Peter and through him to the Church, the keys of it [heaven]." [The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume III. Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian. Reprinted by Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1980. "Scorpiace" X, p. 643.] The earlier church fathers know nothing of this fundamental doctrine. Certainly, if this passage had existed in their bibles, the earlier fathers would have made use of it for their political gain.
Let us look more closely into the testimony of silence to be found in the gospels. InMatthew, the Thou-art-Peter passage intrudes into the story copied from Mark about Jesus asking his disciples "Whom do men say that I am?"
(SeeSidebar 1below, comparing the texts of the so-called "Synoptic Gospels," the three genetically related New Testament books.)
It is generally agreed by scholars free of dogmatic bias that "Mark" is the source from which "Luke" and "Matthew" derived the Greek text for the core of their narratives—minus, of course, the stuff about the birth of Jesus and his supposed post-resurrection carryings on. "Mark" knows nothing of the Thou-art-Peter business.
The silence of "Mark" is especially noisy when one considers the church tradition that holds that Mark was Peter's assistant—the man who wrote down Peter's reminiscences!Is it conceivable that Peter would not have told his secretary of so important an honor? Is it conceivable that "Mark" could have forgotten such important information if Peter did tell him about it?
The muteness of Mark becomes downright raucous when one notices that the culmination of his story about reincarnation speculation deals not with the bestowal of an honor upon Peter, but with the execration of him: "Get thee behind me, Satan!" Not only is there no Thou-art-Peterto be found in Matthew's model and source, there is no room for such a thing.
The fact that there is no contextual room for the Thou-art-Peter verse raises an interesting question: how could this be considered "absence of evidence"? Does this not make the "argument from silence" compelling?
When we find an element in Matthew's tale that is in conflict with its context and then discover that the source from which “Matthew” obtained his story is structurally harmonious and lacks the jarring element, is that not a positive confirmation that the element in question is an interpolation? The only stronger evidence we can imagine would be the discovery of an ancient manuscript of Matthew itself in which the passage is missing. Of course, that too, would be an argument from silence—but a very loud one.
In a very fundamental way, the raison d'etre of all scriptures is to provide a means for priests to get what they need. Alleged to convey the commands of the gods to the common folk, the scriptures created by the priests are always found to look after the needs of the priests. Thus, the Torah (the first five books of the so-called Old Testament) sees to it that the parasitic priest caste will be well fed and cared for by the faithful.
To return to “Matthew,” no author would be so schizophrenic as to compose a single passage with such total contradiction as "Thou art Peter" followed in two breaths by "Thou art Satan." But an interpolator would not be as conscious of such a thing. His only concern would be to get what he needs put into the sacred text. He also would not be likely to remove much of what he finds in a sacred text—although examples of that can be found. (The deletion of Mark's "Get thee behind me, Satan" in Luke's parallel passage is not really a counterexample, since Luke is not also interpolating something into the text; he simply leaves out an embarrassing passage.) Thus, after the interpolation of gospel, the gospel became the schizophrenic document the Thou-art-Peter passage into Matthew's we know and puzzle over today. Matt. 16:23 still has Mark's "Get thee behind me, Satan"! It is almost a rule of biblical criticism that when one finds contradictions in a text, multiple authors or interpolators are to be inferred.
Turning to "Luke's version," we find that he too, like Mark his model, has no knowledge of the Thou-art-Peter episode. We have already noted that Luke dropped out the Satanic passage found in his source. Clearly, this omission is evidence of a pro-Peter bias. Is it plausible that an author so positively disposed toward Peter would have passed up the opportunity further to improve the latter's image—if even a shred of evidence existed for him to use? As reported in Matthew, the Thou-art-Peter episode took place in the presence of all the disciples and has the character of a mandate that all of them should obey. If the declaration had in fact been made, from that time on all the other disciples or apostles would perforce have known and honored the special place of Peter in the scheme of Christian proto-history. But no one—absolutelyno one - other than the clerical interpolator of Matthew has ever heard of this Petrine honor. Positively disposed to Peter as Luke was, he could not have omitted mention of the honor if he had ever heard of it. Clearly he never heard of it. His never having heard of it could be due either to his incompetence and unreliability as an evangelist or to the fact that the episode is fictional. Bible-believers can decide which option to choose.
Wheless (p. 182) sums up the argument from silence in a moderately amusing fashion:
"Luke" was not present when this monumental pronouncement of the "Rock and Keys" was allegedly made; Peter may have forgotten to tell him of it, or "Luke" may have forgotten that Peter told him. And Peter may have forgotten to tell of it and of his peerless "primacy" to his own "companion" and "interpreter" Mark, or Mark may have forgotten that Peter told him, and thus have failed to record so momentous an event. But John, the "Beloved discipIe" was right there, with Matthew, himself, one of the speakers and hearers in the historic colloquy,—and John totally ignores it. The silence of all three discredits and repudiates it. Moreover, and most significantly, Peter himself, in his two alleged Epistles, has not a word of his tremendous dignity and importance conferred on him by his Master; never once does he describe himself in the pride of priestly humility, "Peter, Servant of the servants of God," or "Prince of Apostles" or even "Bishop of the church which sojourns at Rome," or any such to distinguish himself from the common herd of peasant apostles. Peter must have been very modest, even more so than his "Successors. "
Furthermore, the official "Acts of the Apostles" never once notes this divinely commissioned "primacy" of Peter; and every other book of the New Testament utterly ignores it. Paul is said to have written a sententious "Epistle to the Romans," and to have written two or three Epistles from Rome, where Peter is supposed to have been, enthroned as divine Vicar of God and Head of the Church Universal; and yet never a word of this tremendous fact; Paul did not know it, or ignores it. The "Epistles of Paul," fourteen of them, and the "Acts," are replete with defiances of Paul to Peter,—"I withstood him to his face"; and in all the disputes between them, over matters of the faith and the fortunes of the new "Church," not a single one of the Apostles rises in his place and suggests that Peter is Prince and Primate, and that Peter's view of the matters was ex cathedra the voice of God, and he, having spoken, the matter was settled. Paul, in all his Epistles, never gives a suspicion that he had ever heard, even from Peter, of the latter's superior authority.
Thus, the admitted principal, if not only "proof' which the Church urges for its Divine and "Petrine" foundation is found to be—like every other Church muniment and credential, a clerical forgery, a priestly imposture.
Punning in Aramaic or Greek?
Not all readers of Matthew's gospel realize that the Thou-artPeter passage involves a pun in the Greek language. The Greek word for rock is petros. Petros is also the Greek proper name Peter. So Jesus is made to say—as though Greek were the language he spoke—''You are a rock, and on this rock I shall build my church." In colloquial English, Jesus might have said, "Rocky, you're the stone with which I'll build my church."
Probably even fewer readers realize that this Greek pun in Matthew is related to an Aramaic non-pun in "John's" gospel:
John 1:42 And he brought him to Jesus. And when Jesus beheld him, he said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone.
Significantly, in the Johanine version there is no expansion of the word-play into a full-blown pun commemorating the founding of a church. Also, in John, the Cephas anecdote comes at the very beginning of Jesus' public ministry, when he is still collecting a retinue of disciples. In the synoptic gospels, however, the pericope about "Who do men say that I am?" is placed quite far along in his career. Of course, Jesus might have nicknamed Simon "Rocky" twice: in Aramaic early in his career and in Greek later on!
In Mark, Simon receives the nickname Peter at the time the disciples are collected, but the opportunity to pun on the name and establish him Prince of Disciples/Apostles is ignored. In Luke, Peter receives his nickname at the time of commissioning of the apostles, but he is already referred to without comment as Simon Peter a chapter earlier. Surely, the occasion of commissioning his apostles would have been an excellent occasion upon which to make a pun about rocks for building churches. But no: only silence.
The presence of what amounts to "Thou art Cephas" in the Gospel of John—but the absence of a following "and upon this rock I will build my church"—again constitutes a moderately strong argument from silence. Since tradition holds that this gospel was written by "The Beloved Disciple who leaned on Jesus' breast," believers must accept that "John" would have known of Peter's pre-eminence and would have been reminded of Jesus' pun (in Aramaic, of course!) when recounting the story of Jesus surnaming Simon as Cephas. Of course, "John" may have harbored a jealous grudge against Peter and carried this grudge over into his "inspired" writing by not revealing to his readers what his lord and master had revealed to him!
Silent words—not just silent letters
The silence of the rest of the Bible and all early Church Fathers regarding the Thou-art-Peter story is amplified—if amplification of silence can be imagined—by the fact that a key word in the passage is an anachronism ... something that cannot be found to exist at the time required.
While not quite as fraudulently anachronistic as old photographs of the vaccination scars on the arms of Adam and Eve, Jesus' alleged use of the word "church" is just as clearly anachronistic and just as certainly fraudulent. Peter would have understood "build a church" about as well as "grill a hotdog." Ex hypothesi, no churches existed at the time of the Thou-art-Peter event. Worse yet, the very idea of an ecclesiastical organization being founded would have conflicted with everything Peter had been taught--viz., the present age was drawing to a close and the Apocalypse was nigh. Certainly, that would be no time for chartering corporations and setting up off-shore bank accounts!
Just as the narrative context leaves no room for the Thou-art-Peter passage, so too the historical context leaves no room for it. If it be admitted by everyone—as is the case—that churches did not exist at the time in question, how can it be maintained that the absence of the word for church from all the literature of the time is an invalid argument from silence? Is this not evidence of absence of the word from Jesus' vocabulary, rather than absence of evidence concerning his vocabulary?
The Greek word for “church” used in this disputed passage is ecclesia--the same word used today in the Roman Catholic mass to denote the multinational corporation headquartered in Rome. Joseph Wheless explains [p. 180] the absence of the meaning "church" for the term ecclesiaat the time Jesus is alleged to have been speaking:
"There was nothing like ecclesia known to the Jews; it was a technical Greek term designating the free political assemblies of the Greek republics. This is illustrated by one sentence from the Greek Father Origen, about 245 AD, when the Church had taken over the Greek political term ecclesia to denote its own religious organization. Says Origen, using the word in both its old meaning and in its new Christian adaptation: "For the Church (ecclesia) of God, e.g., which is at Athens; ... Whereas the assembly (ecclesia) of the Athenians,' etc. (Origen, Contra Celsum, iii, 20). The Greek Fathers who, a century later, founded the Church among the pagan Greek-speaking Gentiles, adopted the Greek word ecclesia for their organizations because the word was familiar for popular assemblies, and because the translators of the Septuagint had used ecclesia as the nearest Greek term for the translation of the two Hebrew words qahal and edah used in the Old Testament for the "congregation" or "assembly" of all Israel at the tent of meeting.
“These Hebrew words (qahal, edah) had also a more general use, as signifying any sort of gathering or crowd, religious or secular. ... Thus no established and permanent organization of disciples of the Christ is implied by the term ecclesia, even if Jesus could have used the Aramaic equivalent of that Greek term; at most it would have only meant the small group of Jews which might adopt the "Kingdom of heaven" watchword and watchfully wait until the speedy end of the world and the expected quick consummation of the proclaimed Kingdom,—not yet come to be, these 2000 years.”
It is quite clear that the Greek word ecclesia was put into the mouth of Jesus by a partisan of the Roman Church—a church which claimed descent from Saint Peter to justify its apostolic legitimacy and now was seeking to justify its political supremacy over the rival churches of Africa and Asia. By elevating Peter vis-à-vis the rest of the apostles, the interpolator elevated the Roman Church at the same time.
The interlocking arguments from silence which we have examined thus make it certain beyond question that Jesus never founded the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, the converse would seem to be the case. As someone writing in The Truth Seeker once said [23 November 1926]: "Jesus Christ did not found the church—he is its Foundling. His parent, the Jewish church, abandoned the child; the Roman church took it in, adopted it, and gave his mother a certificate of good character."
Forged Inspirations: The Endings of the Gospel of Mark
The King James Version of the Gospel of Mark contains sixteen chapters—the last one of which contains twenty verses. The last twelve of these are the verses so beloved of snake-handling Holy-Rollers and all-so-proper Christian Scientists alike. These are the verses that promise that true-believers can handle snakes and drink poison with impunity. Here we find the verse guaranteeing that "laying on of hands" will heal the sick—the foundation for the faith-healing industry from Boston to Biloxi.
It is a well-known fact that both snake-handlers and Christian Scientists often die despite their faith in the last twelve verses of Mark. Unfortunately for them, the word has not gotten around sufficiently to make them understand that the verses in question are proven forgeries. Like so many religionists, they have died in vain.
Proof that the ending of Mark is a forgery is obtained from powerful, interlocking arguments from silence. Most convincing is the manuscript evidence—which not even the most die-hard critic of arguments from silence would call "absence of evidence." There are, you see, ancient manuscripts of the gospels in which Mark's gospel ends with verse 8 and is followed immediately by Luke. They are silent concerning these important verses. They do not contain them. These are not just any old manuscripts, you understand. These are some of the very oldest in existence—the famous Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, the Sinaitic Syriac Codex, and Codex Bobiensis--all from the fourth century.
What further evidence might one ask for?
Amazingly, there is more silent evidence available. It so happens that these verses are absent also from the most important of the ancient translations of Mark—the fifth and sixth century Armenian, Georgian, and Ethiopic versions. If the ending of Mark were authentic, it should have been in the Greek manuscripts from which these versions were translated. If it had been in their Greek sources, the wholly holy motivated translators would have included it in their translations. Old-World Georgians would be handling snakes right along with their New World namesakes.
In the entire literature that survives from before the middle of the fourth century, there are only two possible allusions to this ending, and both Eusebius (d. 340 CE) and Jerome (d. 420 CE) indicated that the ending was absent from almost all the Greek manuscripts known to them.
At this point, the argument from silence becomes complicated by the presence of manuscripts which contain material different from the traditional KJV ending. I am not certain I can sort out what part of the following is argumentation from silence and what is argumentation of the ordinary bass-voiced, declarative sort. Readers will have to sort it out for themselves.
For a variety of reasons—including the curious grammatical structure of the Greek text of Mark 16:8—already in fairly early times people seem to have felt that the Gospel of Mark was incomplete. There were, after all, no post-resurrection appearances of Jesus as were to be found in other gospels. And so, a number of individuals forged their own endings to Mark—tacking them on after verse 8 without even leaving their initials to warn future readers that what followed was not by "Mark."
One of these endings [see Sidebar 2 at end below] was much shorter than the snakes-and-poison ending ultimately certified as inspired by the Roman Catholic Church and most of its less imperial competitors. Although no patristic source is known that quotes it, it apparently obtained rather wide dispersal—ultimately coming into contact with persons owning manuscripts containing the longer ending. Not unexpectedly, this led to the production of manuscripts such as the eighth-century Codex Regius and Codex Laurensis which contain both endings—printing the short ending immediately after what we know as verse 8 and following it with the longer, standard ending.
But it gets better. The fifth-century Codex Washingtonensis contains our longer ending but inserts the so-called Freer Logion [see Sidebar 2] in between verses 14 and 15!
The clear-cut demonstration much of it involving argumentation from silence—that an inordinate amount of forgery was going on at the end of the gospel of Mark should make us suspicious of the other end of the gospel as well. It should make us suspicious, I would assert, of every book in the Bible.
The Three Heavenly Witnesses:
Unholy forgery of the Holy Trinity
Almost all surviving sects of Christianity are Trinitarian attempting to conceive of a single god existing as "three persons": Father, Son (or Word), and Holy Breath (Spirit). This goofy idea was not known to the early Christian authors who produced the so-called Pauline Epistles and the early versions of the gospels, but Trinities were known to the ancient Egyptians and Hindus. Nevertheless, Trinitarian interpolations found their way into several books of the New Testament. [Another forged Trinitarian passage is found among the last five verses added to Matthew: Matt. 28:19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Wheless demonstrates their fraudulence in his Forgery In Christianity, pp. 183-
186.]
In the so-called First Epistle of John, for example the KJV reads:
1John 5:7For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.
1John 5:8And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.
The modern New English Bible translation, however, has no Trinitarian wording:
1John 5:7-8 For there are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are in agreement.
What ever happened to the Trinity?
The answer is simple: the Trinity didn't get into Greek manuscripts of 1 John until the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries CE! When Erasmus made his first edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516, he couldn't find a single Greek manuscript that contained the Trinitarian verse 5:7. Although Latin versions in his day included the verse, he left it out of his first edition because it was unattested in Greek. Of course, this caused a storm of protest, and someone duly produced a Greek manuscript containing it. Although strongly suspecting it to be a forgery, Erasmus included the passage in later editions of his Greek New Testament. From there it passed into the KJV.
To this day, absolutely no Greek manuscript of 1 John older than the fifteenth century has ever been found to contain the disputed passage. Absence of evidence, or evidence of absence?
Given such a convincing argument from silence, it hardly is necessary to adduce further evidence. Nevertheless, there is a lot of corroboration. For example, absolutely no ancient Christian author mentions it or comments on it—including authors writing about the doctrine of the Trinity who are known to have been familiar with the first letter of "John." Surely, had the passage existed at the time, they would have cited it to bolster their arguments. Clement, Bishop of Alexandria, writing around 200 CE, actually cites the letter and gives us a quote:
John says: "For there are three that bear witness, the spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three are one." [Clem. Alex., Fragment from Cassiodorus, ch. iii, ANF. iii, p. 576]
Even more significant, however, is the fact that Jerome—the translator of the Latin Vulgate, did not know the passage and did not put it into his translation. Only centuries later did the passage find its way into the official Vulgate Latin text—where it was duly approved and certified as being part of the inspired Catholic Bible by the Council of Trent (1545-63). For good measure, The Congregation of the Index, on 13 January 1897, with the approval of Pope Leo XIII, forbade anyone to question the authenticity of the text. Thus, in the Catholic Church at least, the doctrine of the Trinity is an inspired forgery. The silence of ancient manuscripts and the silence of ancient authors make the conclusion ineluctable.
Back to Immanuel and the Fossil Record
It might be a good idea to return to the two arguments from silence with which I began this discussion—arguments I left unresolved as I proceeded to discuss principles to be understood when arguing from silence. These were the assertion that Jesus never was called Immanuel by his mother or family and the assertion that there are no modern species of organisms found in the most ancient sedimentary rocks—as would be required if creationism were true.
Implicit in my initial discussion of the Immanuel question is the fact that nowhere in the entire New Testament except in Matt. 1:23 does the word Immanuel (or its Greek spelling starting with E) occur. The false citation from Isaiah is the only New Testament occurrence of the name. Perforce, there is no mention of anyone ever calling Jesus Immanuel. But how do we know that "Matthew" simply didn't record the "fact" that Jesus was called Immanuel by his family and others of his time?
The Gospel of Matthew is almost as conclusive for this question as was a Kalamazoo phone book for the proposition concerning the existence of the car-repair shop. (Of course, phone books are of far greater general utility than gospels are.) For you see, its author was obsessed with finding fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies in the supposed life of Jesus. Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason, Part III, showed how far "Matthew" had to stretch to find such prophecies and how much he had to stretch the prophecies once he found them. [My annotated edition of Paine's work is available from American Atheist Press.]
In the case before us, "Matthew" has an angel tell Joseph (in a dream, no less!) that his wife has been impregnated by a ghost and that (verse 1:21) "you shall give him the name Jesus (Savior), for he will save his people from their sins." In the very next verse we read: "All this happened in order to fulfil what the Lord declared through the prophet." This is followed by the mistranslation of the Isaiah passage ending with "and he shall be called Emmanuel, a name which means 'God is with us'."Within the space of three verses, we have the non sequitur that the Christ child was named Jesus because Isaiah allegedly had predicted he would be called Emmanuel! Had there been one shred of tradition that anyone was calling Jesus Emmanuel instead of Jesus, is it conceivable that this prophecy-fulfillment monomaniac would not have recorded it? The real wonder is that he didn't make up a fulfillment of this part of the prophecy!
Returning to the silence of the early rock recordwith regard to "everything from fish to Gish," let us see more clearly how that record is truly evidence of absence rather than absence of evidence, as creationists sometimes claim. It might be argued that almost all of the Precambrian sedimentary rocks are of marine origin and one could not reasonably expect to find human remains in such deposits. Fair enough, we can concede this point. We won't expect Gish-like remains in marine sediments. But why no fish? From the Devonian period onward, fish fossils are abundant in marine sediments. Why shouldn't they be in the Precambrian sediments as well? And why is it that there are no modern fish to be found among the abundant fish fossils of the Devonian period? Isn't there something fishy about this? Of the thousands of species of modern fish, why isn't even one found in the Devonian—let alone in the Precambrian? Why is it that the absence of modern fish types becomes less marked as later and later rock layers are studied? Why is it that the absence of modern forms changes systematically as one goes from recent sediments to progressively older ones? Why do modern species disappear before the genera to which they belong disappear? Why, as we travel backward in time through the superposed strata, do genera disappear before the families in which they are classified? Families disappear before their orders, orders before their classes, and classes before their phyla.
Finally, proceeding to the group of modern organisms Noah didn't know he had to preserve in his ark—the flowering plants—we observe that pollen from wind-pollinated species of flowering plants (and gymnosperms as well) is dispersed almost everywhere today. It is simply unbelievable that if flowering plants existed during the Precambrian Era at least a few pollen grains would be found in rock strata from that time. Pollen is the closest thing to an indestructible object nature has produced. Despite the claims of a certain creationist whose laboratory technique was as sloppy as his thinking, no pine pollen—or any kind of pollen—has ever been found in a Precambrian stratum. The absence in these rocks of indestructible, ubiquitously distributed material such as pollen is a very convincing argument from silence that flowering plants have not always existed since Day Three of earth history and that they are not older than the sun and moon as creationist scripture maintains.
Thus, the rock record cries out ¡Evoluci6n, si! ¡Creacionismo, No!
SIDEBAR 1
*****
Synoptic Gospel Context of the Thou-Art-Peter Interpolation
"MARK" (a major source of "Luke" and "Matthew")
Mark 8:27 And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am? 8:28 And they answered, John the Baptist: but some say, Elias; and others, One of the prophets. 8:29 And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ. 8:30 And he charged them that they should tell no man of him. 8:31 And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 8:32 And he spake that saying openly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him. 8:33 But when he had turned about and looked on his disciples, he rebuked Peter, saying, Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men. 8:34 And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. 8:35 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. 8:36 For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? 8:37 Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
"LUKE" (Storyline Derived from "Mark")
Luke 9:18 And it came to pass, as he was alone praying, his disciples were with him: and he asked them, saying, Whom say the people that I am? 9:19 They answering said, John the Baptist; but some say, Elias; and others say, that one of the old prophets is risen again. 9:20 He said unto them, But whom say ye that I am? Peter answering said, The Christ of God. 9:21 And he straitly charged them, and commanded them to tell no man that thing; 9:22 Saying, The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be slain, and be raised the third day. 9:23 And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. 9:24 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. 9:25 For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?
"MATTHEW" (Storyline Derived from "Mark")
Matt. 16:13 When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am? 16:14 And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets. 16:15 He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? 16:16 And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
Matt. 16:17 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. 16:18 And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 16:19 And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
This conflicts with Matt. 18:18 (Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven) where binding and loosing powers are conferred on ALL the apostles.
Matt. 16:20 Then charged he his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ. 16:21 From that time forth began Jesus to show unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. 16:22 Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying. Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee. 16:23 But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offense unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. 16:24 Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.16:25 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. 16:26 For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
*****
SIDEBAR 2
The Last Chapter of Mark
With Three Forged Endings
1. The core first eight verses
Mark 16:1 And when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.16:2 And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulcher at the rising of the sun. 16:3And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulcher? 16:4And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great. 16:5And entering into the sepulcher, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. 16:6And he saith unto them. Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified;: he is risen: he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. 16:7But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, he said unto you. 16:8And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulcher; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.
2. The Longer Forged Ending
Still Considered “Inspired”
By Most Churches Yet Today
Mark 16:9 Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. 16:10And she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept. 16:11And they, when they had heard that he was a lie, and had been seen of her, believed not. 16:12After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country. 16:13And they went and told it unto the residue: neither believed they them. 16:14Afterward he appeared unto the eleven*as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen. 16:15And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. 16:16He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. 16:17 And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils: they shall speak with new tongues; 16:18 they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover: 16:19So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God: 16:20And they went forth and preached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following. Amen
*Although “Mark” tells of Judas’ “betrayal,” there is not mention of Judas dying either by suicide or explosion. The tell-tale use of “the eleven” shows the hand of an interpolator familiar with the later tales in Matt 27:3-10 and Acts 1:16-19.
3. The Shorter Forged Ending
No Longer Believed Inspired
By Anyone
And all that they had been commanded they told briefly to those around Peter. Afterward, Jesus himself appeared to them, and from east to west sent through them the sacred and imperishable Proclamation of everlasting salvation.
[Translation from C.S. Mann. Mark: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Bible,Doubleday & Co., Garden City, 1986, pp 677-678.]
4. THE FREER LOGION
Known Only from a Single Greek Manuscript
And a Latin Translation by Jerome
They replied, saying, “This age of lawlessness and unbelief is under [or from] Satan, who by means of unclean spirits does not allow the true power of God to be taken hold of. Therefore, show your righteousness now.” They were speaking to Christ, and Christ replied to them, “The extent of the years of the authority of Satan has been fulfilled, but other terrible things approach, even for the sinners for whom I was delivered up to death, that they might turn to the truth and sin no more, in order that they may inherit the spiritual and imperishable glory of righteousness which is in heaven.
*****
When debating creationists, I often like to point out that gaps in the fossil record disprove the biblical creation myths. Since it is a favorite creationist argument against evolution to claim that gaps in the fossil record disprove the idea of one species changing into another over time, using this argument against creationism never fails to get attention. "If all living things were created within five days (as the first creation story in Genesis has it)," I like to point out, "or even all on a single day (as the second version says), then we should find the remains of all modern forms in the oldest rock layers, as well as in all the layers above them. We should be able to find everything from fish to Gish [referring to Duane T. Gish, the superstar creationist debater from the Institute for Creation Research, in Santee, California] in Precambrian as well as recent rocks. But we don't. That's because there were no people when those rocks were formed. Humans are among the latest animal forms to appear on our planet."
Of course, it is impossible to flummox a religious apologist. Sometimes I will be told the geologic column is an evolutionist's illusion, and that there are Gish-like remains in the most primitive rock layers: one simply has to know how to date the rocks correctly! But usually, I will be told I just haven't been looking hard enough or in the right places. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," I will be reminded. People in the audience—who typically know even less logic than science—usually think this is some sort of logical axiom, and it is usually better to go on to some other argument than to waste precious debating time trying to show that absence of Precambrian mammals and flowering plants is not "absence of evidence."
There is another species of this argument that one may encounter when trying to reason with a religious apologist. Recently, I had occasion to argue against the notion that Isaiah had the virgin birth of Jesus in mind when he told (Hebrew version) King Ahaz "Behold, the young woman—not virgin as the KJV (King James Version of the Bible, the favorite "inspired version" of Christian fundamentalists until their recent discovery that King James was gay) has it. The Hebrew text says the young woman“is pregnant”—not KJV will conceive—and will bear a son. The Hebrew further disagrees with the “infallible KJV” by explaining that SHE [or possibly you but not KJV they] “will call his name Immanuel." I pointed out the mistranslations and distortions of the KJV and noted further that Jesus never was called Immanuel. "That is simply an argument from silence," I was told. Just because we have no records of the Virgin Mary, Joseph, or even his mother-in-law (don't forget, Jewish rabbis had to be married in those days!) ever calling Jesus Immanuel doesn't mean they didn't do it. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. So there!
Well, what about "arguments from silence"? Do they always involve logical fallacy? Or do they simply suffer from the same limitations as all arguments involving scientific induction--viz., their inability to produce absolute proofs of the type that is common in deductive reasoning? If we grant the premises that "All men are mortal," and "Socrates is a man," we can with absolute certainty conclude that "Socrates is mortal." But no matter how much empirical evidence we may amass, we can never be absolutely certain that dawn will break tomorrow. Nevertheless, it is worth reminding ourselves that it is entirely reasonable—indeed, we can't avoid it—to stake our very lives on propositions for which absolute certainty is unattainable.
An argument from silence is entirely proper, for example, when it can be shown that if assertion Xwere a fact, written source Ywould have been compelled to mention it. The strength of the argument for proposition X varies directly in proportion to the strength of the argument that Ywould have been compelled to mention it. Thus, to assert that ''Auto-Repair Shop Q has never cheated a customer" is proved by the fact that the telephone book makes no mention of customer complaints against it is weak beyond description. On the other hand, to assert that ''Auto-Repair Shop Q did not exist in Kalamazoo during 1950-1951" is proved by the fact that there are no listings for it in Kalamazoo phone books for either year is a very strong argument. Legally, it would probably establish truth ''beyond a reasonable doubt."
Well-crafted arguments from silence can often redound to proclamations of considerable loudness—hence the title of this essay. Joseph Wheless, a Judge and Associate Editor of the American Bar Association Journal, made many devastatingly loud arguments from silence in his 1930 classic of freethought, Forgery in Christianity: A Documented Record of the Foundations of the Christian Religion. It will be instructive for our purposes to retail a few of his demonstrations.
Upon this Rock ...
The Founding of Mendacianity
Were it not for lies and forgeries, there would be no Christian religion. Infact, falsehood is so fundamental to this faith that it might better have been called Mendacianity. It should not be too surprising therefore—unless one is a Roman Catholic Christian—to learn that the biblical passage purported to record the founding of the Roman Catholic Church is a forgery. Even if he once existed as a historical figure, Jesus most certainly never uttered the words attributed to him in Matt. 16:18-19: "And I say unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." That these verses are an interpolation—an insertion forged by someone after the composition of the main text of the gospel that came to be attributed to an uncertain "Matthew"—can be demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt. (Quotation marks are placed around the names of the alleged evangelists because in truth no one knows who wrote any of the books of the New Testament. Almost all of the books are composite works resulting from the activity of several or more authors and editors. The four "canonical gospels" were not attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John until the middle or latter part of the second century CE.)
Much of the demonstration involves argumentation from silence that is very convincing.
First we have the silence of the entire remainder of the New Testament.Nowhere else—not even in the epistles traditionally attributed to Peter himself—do we find notice of Peter being the foundation of the Christian Church and the keeper of the keys of the gates of heaven. Secondly, we have the silence of the oldest church fathers. Not until around the year 211, in his tract "The Scorpion's Sting," do we have Tertullian, a Father of the Latin Church, alluding to the "fact" that "the Lord left to Peter and through him to the Church, the keys of it [heaven]." [The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume III. Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian. Reprinted by Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1980. "Scorpiace" X, p. 643.] The earlier church fathers know nothing of this fundamental doctrine. Certainly, if this passage had existed in their bibles, the earlier fathers would have made use of it for their political gain.
Let us look more closely into the testimony of silence to be found in the gospels. InMatthew, the Thou-art-Peter passage intrudes into the story copied from Mark about Jesus asking his disciples "Whom do men say that I am?"
(SeeSidebar 1below, comparing the texts of the so-called "Synoptic Gospels," the three genetically related New Testament books.)
It is generally agreed by scholars free of dogmatic bias that "Mark" is the source from which "Luke" and "Matthew" derived the Greek text for the core of their narratives—minus, of course, the stuff about the birth of Jesus and his supposed post-resurrection carryings on. "Mark" knows nothing of the Thou-art-Peter business.
The silence of "Mark" is especially noisy when one considers the church tradition that holds that Mark was Peter's assistant—the man who wrote down Peter's reminiscences!Is it conceivable that Peter would not have told his secretary of so important an honor? Is it conceivable that "Mark" could have forgotten such important information if Peter did tell him about it?
The muteness of Mark becomes downright raucous when one notices that the culmination of his story about reincarnation speculation deals not with the bestowal of an honor upon Peter, but with the execration of him: "Get thee behind me, Satan!" Not only is there no Thou-art-Peterto be found in Matthew's model and source, there is no room for such a thing.
The fact that there is no contextual room for the Thou-art-Peter verse raises an interesting question: how could this be considered "absence of evidence"? Does this not make the "argument from silence" compelling?
When we find an element in Matthew's tale that is in conflict with its context and then discover that the source from which “Matthew” obtained his story is structurally harmonious and lacks the jarring element, is that not a positive confirmation that the element in question is an interpolation? The only stronger evidence we can imagine would be the discovery of an ancient manuscript of Matthew itself in which the passage is missing. Of course, that too, would be an argument from silence—but a very loud one.
In a very fundamental way, the raison d'etre of all scriptures is to provide a means for priests to get what they need. Alleged to convey the commands of the gods to the common folk, the scriptures created by the priests are always found to look after the needs of the priests. Thus, the Torah (the first five books of the so-called Old Testament) sees to it that the parasitic priest caste will be well fed and cared for by the faithful.
To return to “Matthew,” no author would be so schizophrenic as to compose a single passage with such total contradiction as "Thou art Peter" followed in two breaths by "Thou art Satan." But an interpolator would not be as conscious of such a thing. His only concern would be to get what he needs put into the sacred text. He also would not be likely to remove much of what he finds in a sacred text—although examples of that can be found. (The deletion of Mark's "Get thee behind me, Satan" in Luke's parallel passage is not really a counterexample, since Luke is not also interpolating something into the text; he simply leaves out an embarrassing passage.) Thus, after the interpolation of gospel, the gospel became the schizophrenic document the Thou-art-Peter passage into Matthew's we know and puzzle over today. Matt. 16:23 still has Mark's "Get thee behind me, Satan"! It is almost a rule of biblical criticism that when one finds contradictions in a text, multiple authors or interpolators are to be inferred.
Turning to "Luke's version," we find that he too, like Mark his model, has no knowledge of the Thou-art-Peter episode. We have already noted that Luke dropped out the Satanic passage found in his source. Clearly, this omission is evidence of a pro-Peter bias. Is it plausible that an author so positively disposed toward Peter would have passed up the opportunity further to improve the latter's image—if even a shred of evidence existed for him to use? As reported in Matthew, the Thou-art-Peter episode took place in the presence of all the disciples and has the character of a mandate that all of them should obey. If the declaration had in fact been made, from that time on all the other disciples or apostles would perforce have known and honored the special place of Peter in the scheme of Christian proto-history. But no one—absolutelyno one - other than the clerical interpolator of Matthew has ever heard of this Petrine honor. Positively disposed to Peter as Luke was, he could not have omitted mention of the honor if he had ever heard of it. Clearly he never heard of it. His never having heard of it could be due either to his incompetence and unreliability as an evangelist or to the fact that the episode is fictional. Bible-believers can decide which option to choose.
Wheless (p. 182) sums up the argument from silence in a moderately amusing fashion:
"Luke" was not present when this monumental pronouncement of the "Rock and Keys" was allegedly made; Peter may have forgotten to tell him of it, or "Luke" may have forgotten that Peter told him. And Peter may have forgotten to tell of it and of his peerless "primacy" to his own "companion" and "interpreter" Mark, or Mark may have forgotten that Peter told him, and thus have failed to record so momentous an event. But John, the "Beloved discipIe" was right there, with Matthew, himself, one of the speakers and hearers in the historic colloquy,—and John totally ignores it. The silence of all three discredits and repudiates it. Moreover, and most significantly, Peter himself, in his two alleged Epistles, has not a word of his tremendous dignity and importance conferred on him by his Master; never once does he describe himself in the pride of priestly humility, "Peter, Servant of the servants of God," or "Prince of Apostles" or even "Bishop of the church which sojourns at Rome," or any such to distinguish himself from the common herd of peasant apostles. Peter must have been very modest, even more so than his "Successors. "
Furthermore, the official "Acts of the Apostles" never once notes this divinely commissioned "primacy" of Peter; and every other book of the New Testament utterly ignores it. Paul is said to have written a sententious "Epistle to the Romans," and to have written two or three Epistles from Rome, where Peter is supposed to have been, enthroned as divine Vicar of God and Head of the Church Universal; and yet never a word of this tremendous fact; Paul did not know it, or ignores it. The "Epistles of Paul," fourteen of them, and the "Acts," are replete with defiances of Paul to Peter,—"I withstood him to his face"; and in all the disputes between them, over matters of the faith and the fortunes of the new "Church," not a single one of the Apostles rises in his place and suggests that Peter is Prince and Primate, and that Peter's view of the matters was ex cathedra the voice of God, and he, having spoken, the matter was settled. Paul, in all his Epistles, never gives a suspicion that he had ever heard, even from Peter, of the latter's superior authority.
Thus, the admitted principal, if not only "proof' which the Church urges for its Divine and "Petrine" foundation is found to be—like every other Church muniment and credential, a clerical forgery, a priestly imposture.
Punning in Aramaic or Greek?
Not all readers of Matthew's gospel realize that the Thou-artPeter passage involves a pun in the Greek language. The Greek word for rock is petros. Petros is also the Greek proper name Peter. So Jesus is made to say—as though Greek were the language he spoke—''You are a rock, and on this rock I shall build my church." In colloquial English, Jesus might have said, "Rocky, you're the stone with which I'll build my church."
Probably even fewer readers realize that this Greek pun in Matthew is related to an Aramaic non-pun in "John's" gospel:
John 1:42 And he brought him to Jesus. And when Jesus beheld him, he said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone.
Significantly, in the Johanine version there is no expansion of the word-play into a full-blown pun commemorating the founding of a church. Also, in John, the Cephas anecdote comes at the very beginning of Jesus' public ministry, when he is still collecting a retinue of disciples. In the synoptic gospels, however, the pericope about "Who do men say that I am?" is placed quite far along in his career. Of course, Jesus might have nicknamed Simon "Rocky" twice: in Aramaic early in his career and in Greek later on!
In Mark, Simon receives the nickname Peter at the time the disciples are collected, but the opportunity to pun on the name and establish him Prince of Disciples/Apostles is ignored. In Luke, Peter receives his nickname at the time of commissioning of the apostles, but he is already referred to without comment as Simon Peter a chapter earlier. Surely, the occasion of commissioning his apostles would have been an excellent occasion upon which to make a pun about rocks for building churches. But no: only silence.
The presence of what amounts to "Thou art Cephas" in the Gospel of John—but the absence of a following "and upon this rock I will build my church"—again constitutes a moderately strong argument from silence. Since tradition holds that this gospel was written by "The Beloved Disciple who leaned on Jesus' breast," believers must accept that "John" would have known of Peter's pre-eminence and would have been reminded of Jesus' pun (in Aramaic, of course!) when recounting the story of Jesus surnaming Simon as Cephas. Of course, "John" may have harbored a jealous grudge against Peter and carried this grudge over into his "inspired" writing by not revealing to his readers what his lord and master had revealed to him!
Silent words—not just silent letters
The silence of the rest of the Bible and all early Church Fathers regarding the Thou-art-Peter story is amplified—if amplification of silence can be imagined—by the fact that a key word in the passage is an anachronism ... something that cannot be found to exist at the time required.
While not quite as fraudulently anachronistic as old photographs of the vaccination scars on the arms of Adam and Eve, Jesus' alleged use of the word "church" is just as clearly anachronistic and just as certainly fraudulent. Peter would have understood "build a church" about as well as "grill a hotdog." Ex hypothesi, no churches existed at the time of the Thou-art-Peter event. Worse yet, the very idea of an ecclesiastical organization being founded would have conflicted with everything Peter had been taught--viz., the present age was drawing to a close and the Apocalypse was nigh. Certainly, that would be no time for chartering corporations and setting up off-shore bank accounts!
Just as the narrative context leaves no room for the Thou-art-Peter passage, so too the historical context leaves no room for it. If it be admitted by everyone—as is the case—that churches did not exist at the time in question, how can it be maintained that the absence of the word for church from all the literature of the time is an invalid argument from silence? Is this not evidence of absence of the word from Jesus' vocabulary, rather than absence of evidence concerning his vocabulary?
The Greek word for “church” used in this disputed passage is ecclesia--the same word used today in the Roman Catholic mass to denote the multinational corporation headquartered in Rome. Joseph Wheless explains [p. 180] the absence of the meaning "church" for the term ecclesiaat the time Jesus is alleged to have been speaking:
"There was nothing like ecclesia known to the Jews; it was a technical Greek term designating the free political assemblies of the Greek republics. This is illustrated by one sentence from the Greek Father Origen, about 245 AD, when the Church had taken over the Greek political term ecclesia to denote its own religious organization. Says Origen, using the word in both its old meaning and in its new Christian adaptation: "For the Church (ecclesia) of God, e.g., which is at Athens; ... Whereas the assembly (ecclesia) of the Athenians,' etc. (Origen, Contra Celsum, iii, 20). The Greek Fathers who, a century later, founded the Church among the pagan Greek-speaking Gentiles, adopted the Greek word ecclesia for their organizations because the word was familiar for popular assemblies, and because the translators of the Septuagint had used ecclesia as the nearest Greek term for the translation of the two Hebrew words qahal and edah used in the Old Testament for the "congregation" or "assembly" of all Israel at the tent of meeting.
“These Hebrew words (qahal, edah) had also a more general use, as signifying any sort of gathering or crowd, religious or secular. ... Thus no established and permanent organization of disciples of the Christ is implied by the term ecclesia, even if Jesus could have used the Aramaic equivalent of that Greek term; at most it would have only meant the small group of Jews which might adopt the "Kingdom of heaven" watchword and watchfully wait until the speedy end of the world and the expected quick consummation of the proclaimed Kingdom,—not yet come to be, these 2000 years.”
It is quite clear that the Greek word ecclesia was put into the mouth of Jesus by a partisan of the Roman Church—a church which claimed descent from Saint Peter to justify its apostolic legitimacy and now was seeking to justify its political supremacy over the rival churches of Africa and Asia. By elevating Peter vis-à-vis the rest of the apostles, the interpolator elevated the Roman Church at the same time.
The interlocking arguments from silence which we have examined thus make it certain beyond question that Jesus never founded the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, the converse would seem to be the case. As someone writing in The Truth Seeker once said [23 November 1926]: "Jesus Christ did not found the church—he is its Foundling. His parent, the Jewish church, abandoned the child; the Roman church took it in, adopted it, and gave his mother a certificate of good character."
Forged Inspirations: The Endings of the Gospel of Mark
The King James Version of the Gospel of Mark contains sixteen chapters—the last one of which contains twenty verses. The last twelve of these are the verses so beloved of snake-handling Holy-Rollers and all-so-proper Christian Scientists alike. These are the verses that promise that true-believers can handle snakes and drink poison with impunity. Here we find the verse guaranteeing that "laying on of hands" will heal the sick—the foundation for the faith-healing industry from Boston to Biloxi.
It is a well-known fact that both snake-handlers and Christian Scientists often die despite their faith in the last twelve verses of Mark. Unfortunately for them, the word has not gotten around sufficiently to make them understand that the verses in question are proven forgeries. Like so many religionists, they have died in vain.
Proof that the ending of Mark is a forgery is obtained from powerful, interlocking arguments from silence. Most convincing is the manuscript evidence—which not even the most die-hard critic of arguments from silence would call "absence of evidence." There are, you see, ancient manuscripts of the gospels in which Mark's gospel ends with verse 8 and is followed immediately by Luke. They are silent concerning these important verses. They do not contain them. These are not just any old manuscripts, you understand. These are some of the very oldest in existence—the famous Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, the Sinaitic Syriac Codex, and Codex Bobiensis--all from the fourth century.
What further evidence might one ask for?
Amazingly, there is more silent evidence available. It so happens that these verses are absent also from the most important of the ancient translations of Mark—the fifth and sixth century Armenian, Georgian, and Ethiopic versions. If the ending of Mark were authentic, it should have been in the Greek manuscripts from which these versions were translated. If it had been in their Greek sources, the wholly holy motivated translators would have included it in their translations. Old-World Georgians would be handling snakes right along with their New World namesakes.
In the entire literature that survives from before the middle of the fourth century, there are only two possible allusions to this ending, and both Eusebius (d. 340 CE) and Jerome (d. 420 CE) indicated that the ending was absent from almost all the Greek manuscripts known to them.
At this point, the argument from silence becomes complicated by the presence of manuscripts which contain material different from the traditional KJV ending. I am not certain I can sort out what part of the following is argumentation from silence and what is argumentation of the ordinary bass-voiced, declarative sort. Readers will have to sort it out for themselves.
For a variety of reasons—including the curious grammatical structure of the Greek text of Mark 16:8—already in fairly early times people seem to have felt that the Gospel of Mark was incomplete. There were, after all, no post-resurrection appearances of Jesus as were to be found in other gospels. And so, a number of individuals forged their own endings to Mark—tacking them on after verse 8 without even leaving their initials to warn future readers that what followed was not by "Mark."
One of these endings [see Sidebar 2 at end below] was much shorter than the snakes-and-poison ending ultimately certified as inspired by the Roman Catholic Church and most of its less imperial competitors. Although no patristic source is known that quotes it, it apparently obtained rather wide dispersal—ultimately coming into contact with persons owning manuscripts containing the longer ending. Not unexpectedly, this led to the production of manuscripts such as the eighth-century Codex Regius and Codex Laurensis which contain both endings—printing the short ending immediately after what we know as verse 8 and following it with the longer, standard ending.
But it gets better. The fifth-century Codex Washingtonensis contains our longer ending but inserts the so-called Freer Logion [see Sidebar 2] in between verses 14 and 15!
The clear-cut demonstration much of it involving argumentation from silence—that an inordinate amount of forgery was going on at the end of the gospel of Mark should make us suspicious of the other end of the gospel as well. It should make us suspicious, I would assert, of every book in the Bible.
The Three Heavenly Witnesses:
Unholy forgery of the Holy Trinity
Almost all surviving sects of Christianity are Trinitarian attempting to conceive of a single god existing as "three persons": Father, Son (or Word), and Holy Breath (Spirit). This goofy idea was not known to the early Christian authors who produced the so-called Pauline Epistles and the early versions of the gospels, but Trinities were known to the ancient Egyptians and Hindus. Nevertheless, Trinitarian interpolations found their way into several books of the New Testament. [Another forged Trinitarian passage is found among the last five verses added to Matthew: Matt. 28:19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Wheless demonstrates their fraudulence in his Forgery In Christianity, pp. 183-
186.]
In the so-called First Epistle of John, for example the KJV reads:
1John 5:7For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.
1John 5:8And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.
The modern New English Bible translation, however, has no Trinitarian wording:
1John 5:7-8 For there are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are in agreement.
What ever happened to the Trinity?
The answer is simple: the Trinity didn't get into Greek manuscripts of 1 John until the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries CE! When Erasmus made his first edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516, he couldn't find a single Greek manuscript that contained the Trinitarian verse 5:7. Although Latin versions in his day included the verse, he left it out of his first edition because it was unattested in Greek. Of course, this caused a storm of protest, and someone duly produced a Greek manuscript containing it. Although strongly suspecting it to be a forgery, Erasmus included the passage in later editions of his Greek New Testament. From there it passed into the KJV.
To this day, absolutely no Greek manuscript of 1 John older than the fifteenth century has ever been found to contain the disputed passage. Absence of evidence, or evidence of absence?
Given such a convincing argument from silence, it hardly is necessary to adduce further evidence. Nevertheless, there is a lot of corroboration. For example, absolutely no ancient Christian author mentions it or comments on it—including authors writing about the doctrine of the Trinity who are known to have been familiar with the first letter of "John." Surely, had the passage existed at the time, they would have cited it to bolster their arguments. Clement, Bishop of Alexandria, writing around 200 CE, actually cites the letter and gives us a quote:
John says: "For there are three that bear witness, the spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three are one." [Clem. Alex., Fragment from Cassiodorus, ch. iii, ANF. iii, p. 576]
Even more significant, however, is the fact that Jerome—the translator of the Latin Vulgate, did not know the passage and did not put it into his translation. Only centuries later did the passage find its way into the official Vulgate Latin text—where it was duly approved and certified as being part of the inspired Catholic Bible by the Council of Trent (1545-63). For good measure, The Congregation of the Index, on 13 January 1897, with the approval of Pope Leo XIII, forbade anyone to question the authenticity of the text. Thus, in the Catholic Church at least, the doctrine of the Trinity is an inspired forgery. The silence of ancient manuscripts and the silence of ancient authors make the conclusion ineluctable.
Back to Immanuel and the Fossil Record
It might be a good idea to return to the two arguments from silence with which I began this discussion—arguments I left unresolved as I proceeded to discuss principles to be understood when arguing from silence. These were the assertion that Jesus never was called Immanuel by his mother or family and the assertion that there are no modern species of organisms found in the most ancient sedimentary rocks—as would be required if creationism were true.
Implicit in my initial discussion of the Immanuel question is the fact that nowhere in the entire New Testament except in Matt. 1:23 does the word Immanuel (or its Greek spelling starting with E) occur. The false citation from Isaiah is the only New Testament occurrence of the name. Perforce, there is no mention of anyone ever calling Jesus Immanuel. But how do we know that "Matthew" simply didn't record the "fact" that Jesus was called Immanuel by his family and others of his time?
The Gospel of Matthew is almost as conclusive for this question as was a Kalamazoo phone book for the proposition concerning the existence of the car-repair shop. (Of course, phone books are of far greater general utility than gospels are.) For you see, its author was obsessed with finding fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies in the supposed life of Jesus. Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason, Part III, showed how far "Matthew" had to stretch to find such prophecies and how much he had to stretch the prophecies once he found them. [My annotated edition of Paine's work is available from American Atheist Press.]
In the case before us, "Matthew" has an angel tell Joseph (in a dream, no less!) that his wife has been impregnated by a ghost and that (verse 1:21) "you shall give him the name Jesus (Savior), for he will save his people from their sins." In the very next verse we read: "All this happened in order to fulfil what the Lord declared through the prophet." This is followed by the mistranslation of the Isaiah passage ending with "and he shall be called Emmanuel, a name which means 'God is with us'."Within the space of three verses, we have the non sequitur that the Christ child was named Jesus because Isaiah allegedly had predicted he would be called Emmanuel! Had there been one shred of tradition that anyone was calling Jesus Emmanuel instead of Jesus, is it conceivable that this prophecy-fulfillment monomaniac would not have recorded it? The real wonder is that he didn't make up a fulfillment of this part of the prophecy!
Returning to the silence of the early rock recordwith regard to "everything from fish to Gish," let us see more clearly how that record is truly evidence of absence rather than absence of evidence, as creationists sometimes claim. It might be argued that almost all of the Precambrian sedimentary rocks are of marine origin and one could not reasonably expect to find human remains in such deposits. Fair enough, we can concede this point. We won't expect Gish-like remains in marine sediments. But why no fish? From the Devonian period onward, fish fossils are abundant in marine sediments. Why shouldn't they be in the Precambrian sediments as well? And why is it that there are no modern fish to be found among the abundant fish fossils of the Devonian period? Isn't there something fishy about this? Of the thousands of species of modern fish, why isn't even one found in the Devonian—let alone in the Precambrian? Why is it that the absence of modern fish types becomes less marked as later and later rock layers are studied? Why is it that the absence of modern forms changes systematically as one goes from recent sediments to progressively older ones? Why do modern species disappear before the genera to which they belong disappear? Why, as we travel backward in time through the superposed strata, do genera disappear before the families in which they are classified? Families disappear before their orders, orders before their classes, and classes before their phyla.
Finally, proceeding to the group of modern organisms Noah didn't know he had to preserve in his ark—the flowering plants—we observe that pollen from wind-pollinated species of flowering plants (and gymnosperms as well) is dispersed almost everywhere today. It is simply unbelievable that if flowering plants existed during the Precambrian Era at least a few pollen grains would be found in rock strata from that time. Pollen is the closest thing to an indestructible object nature has produced. Despite the claims of a certain creationist whose laboratory technique was as sloppy as his thinking, no pine pollen—or any kind of pollen—has ever been found in a Precambrian stratum. The absence in these rocks of indestructible, ubiquitously distributed material such as pollen is a very convincing argument from silence that flowering plants have not always existed since Day Three of earth history and that they are not older than the sun and moon as creationist scripture maintains.
Thus, the rock record cries out ¡Evoluci6n, si! ¡Creacionismo, No!
SIDEBAR 1
*****
Synoptic Gospel Context of the Thou-Art-Peter Interpolation
"MARK" (a major source of "Luke" and "Matthew")
Mark 8:27 And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am? 8:28 And they answered, John the Baptist: but some say, Elias; and others, One of the prophets. 8:29 And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ. 8:30 And he charged them that they should tell no man of him. 8:31 And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 8:32 And he spake that saying openly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him. 8:33 But when he had turned about and looked on his disciples, he rebuked Peter, saying, Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men. 8:34 And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. 8:35 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. 8:36 For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? 8:37 Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
"LUKE" (Storyline Derived from "Mark")
Luke 9:18 And it came to pass, as he was alone praying, his disciples were with him: and he asked them, saying, Whom say the people that I am? 9:19 They answering said, John the Baptist; but some say, Elias; and others say, that one of the old prophets is risen again. 9:20 He said unto them, But whom say ye that I am? Peter answering said, The Christ of God. 9:21 And he straitly charged them, and commanded them to tell no man that thing; 9:22 Saying, The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be slain, and be raised the third day. 9:23 And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. 9:24 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. 9:25 For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?
"MATTHEW" (Storyline Derived from "Mark")
Matt. 16:13 When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am? 16:14 And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets. 16:15 He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? 16:16 And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
Matt. 16:17 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. 16:18 And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 16:19 And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
This conflicts with Matt. 18:18 (Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven) where binding and loosing powers are conferred on ALL the apostles.
Matt. 16:20 Then charged he his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ. 16:21 From that time forth began Jesus to show unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. 16:22 Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying. Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee. 16:23 But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offense unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. 16:24 Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.16:25 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. 16:26 For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
*****
SIDEBAR 2
The Last Chapter of Mark
With Three Forged Endings
1. The core first eight verses
Mark 16:1 And when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.16:2 And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulcher at the rising of the sun. 16:3And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulcher? 16:4And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great. 16:5And entering into the sepulcher, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. 16:6And he saith unto them. Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified;: he is risen: he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. 16:7But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, he said unto you. 16:8And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulcher; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.
2. The Longer Forged Ending
Still Considered “Inspired”
By Most Churches Yet Today
Mark 16:9 Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. 16:10And she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept. 16:11And they, when they had heard that he was a lie, and had been seen of her, believed not. 16:12After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country. 16:13And they went and told it unto the residue: neither believed they them. 16:14Afterward he appeared unto the eleven*as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen. 16:15And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. 16:16He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. 16:17 And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils: they shall speak with new tongues; 16:18 they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover: 16:19So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God: 16:20And they went forth and preached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following. Amen
*Although “Mark” tells of Judas’ “betrayal,” there is not mention of Judas dying either by suicide or explosion. The tell-tale use of “the eleven” shows the hand of an interpolator familiar with the later tales in Matt 27:3-10 and Acts 1:16-19.
3. The Shorter Forged Ending
No Longer Believed Inspired
By Anyone
And all that they had been commanded they told briefly to those around Peter. Afterward, Jesus himself appeared to them, and from east to west sent through them the sacred and imperishable Proclamation of everlasting salvation.
[Translation from C.S. Mann. Mark: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Bible,Doubleday & Co., Garden City, 1986, pp 677-678.]
4. THE FREER LOGION
Known Only from a Single Greek Manuscript
And a Latin Translation by Jerome
They replied, saying, “This age of lawlessness and unbelief is under [or from] Satan, who by means of unclean spirits does not allow the true power of God to be taken hold of. Therefore, show your righteousness now.” They were speaking to Christ, and Christ replied to them, “The extent of the years of the authority of Satan has been fulfilled, but other terrible things approach, even for the sinners for whom I was delivered up to death, that they might turn to the truth and sin no more, in order that they may inherit the spiritual and imperishable glory of righteousness which is in heaven.
*****
The REAL Bible—Who's Got It?
Prologue On The Street
Evangelist: Brother, you're in trouble if you put your faith in science. Science can never give you absolute truth. Science is always having to correct its mistakes. Science can't save!
Heathen: You're probably right that science cannot give us absolute knowledge. But as long as it gives us information which is solid enough to stake our lives on, what more do we need? Anyhow, there doesn't seem to be any other source of information that's any more reliable—and lots that are much less reliable than science. As for saving, penicillin's record isn't too bad.
Evangelist: Friend, there is something more certain than science. There is a source of absolute, unfailing truth. You don't have to go with the guesses of science any more. You can go directly to the source of all knowledge.
Heathen: Really? What is it?
Evangelist: The Holy Bible, Brother, the Book of Books!
Heathen: Which bible is the Holy Bible? I mean, there are lots of different bibles floating around. There's the Koran ...
Evangelist: Sinner, I'm talking about the Christian Bible, not the false bibles of the superstitious heathens.
Heathen: Well, even if I admit that Christian bibles are better than Muslim or Mormon bibles, how do you know which Christian bible is the correct one? The Catholic bibles contain 73 books, the Protestant bibles have only 66.
Evangelist: The Catholics are in thrall to the devil, brother! They have some false books along with the true ones. The true bible is the King James Version—translated without error from the original tongues into God's own English. You don't think God would let the transmission of his own word to us fall into error, do you? The King James Version has been preserved inerrant to bring the message of salvation to sinners like us.
Heathen: No kidding? How do you account for the fact that some of 'us’ are Catholics? Why has god allowed the transmission of his word to Catholics to become corrupted? Why did god allow Protestants to be sold the first editions of the King James Version, which still contained all the 73 books found in the Catholic bible?
Three Problems
True believers who wish to put all their faith in the Bible are faced with three problems: (1) How can one know which books are 'inspired’ and should be part of the scriptural canon? (2) How can one know which one —if any—of the existing contradictory manuscripts (MSS) of a given book preserves the 'true' wording? (3) Assuming that one has the correct manuscript (MS) of a given book. how can one know what the particular Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic words mean?
As we shall see, there is no way these questions can be answered with absolute certainty. At best, believers must trust to the probabilities—not certainties—that arise from a scientific investigation of the facts surrounding the biblical texts and traditions. Believers will have to face the fact that there is no way at all to know which bible to believe—let alone what to believe in it. Believers still have to put their 'faith' in other human beings.
Which Books?
As just mentioned, the first problem believers have to face is the problem of which books belong in the Bible, which ones don't, and how to decide. Actually, it is extremely rare for individuals to decide these questions on their own. Usually, they inherit a set of 'holy books' from the families they are born into. Catholic children inherit a somewhat ampler number than do Protestant children, and Jewish children get still fewer—thirty-four less than the Catholic kids do. Shortest-changed of all are Samaritan kids: they get only Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and—if they’re good and eat their lentil—Joshua. If, to be 'saved,' one needs to have information found, say, in Revelation, 2nd Paralipomenon, or Baruch, isn't it odd of a savior god to let so many people be born into environments deficient in books needed for salvation?
How comes it, then, that there is such diversity of opinion as to which books are 'canonical,' i.e., should be part of the official collection of 'inspired' scripture? What divine principle has left the Samaritans with bibles containing only five or six books, the Jews with thirty-nine, the Protestants with sixty-six, and the Catholics with seventy-three? Why did ancient Christians have even more books in their bibles? (Catholic apologists, it would seem, could justly accuse Protestants and Jews of not playing with a full deck!)
In the case of the Samaritans, the small number of books in their bible reflects nothing more significant than the fact that the Samaritans, living in the northern part of Palestine, became split off from the main center of Jewish cultural evolution—the southern kingdom of Judah—before the prophets and other writings had come to be considered scripture by anyone.
To this day, the pitiful remnant of believers calling themselves Samaritans claims all books outside the Pentateuch (the first five books of the bible, the so-called Five Books of Moses) are uninspired and, therefore, uncanonical. A possible exception is the sixth biblical book, the Book of Joshua, which seems to be given quasi-scriptural status. Not only are the later books of the Jewish canon 'unscriptural,' in the Samaritan view even the Hebrew version of the Pentateuch (the Masoretic Text, the so-called Textus Receptus or 'received text' from which our King James Version (KJV) and later bibles have been translated) is no good either: it differs from the Samaritan text in more than 6000 variant readings. But alas for the beliefs of the Samaritans and the Jews: the small size of the Samaritan bible and the 6000 variant readings of the Masoretic Text are due to no discernibly divine principle of selection. They are merely accidents of political history—and warfare.
Throughout Jewish history up to the Council of Jamnia (held near the present-day city of Joppa, near the end of the first century CE), the list of books thought to 'defile the hands' (i.e., were inspired) differed as a function of geography and political affiliation. By the time the Christian Church was formed, Greek-speaking Jews had accumulated quite a few more hand-defiling books than had their stay-at-home, Aramaic- or Hebrew-speaking cousins. When the Christians adopted the Greek 'Old Testament' for their own (including the new-fangled books that went with it), Palestinian Jews had to circle their wagons. At the Council of Jamnia, the Jews threw out such books as Baruch, Ecclesiasticus, and both Books of Maccabees. By a slender vote, they narrowly avoided throwing out Ezekiel, Proverbs, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. In the case of the Book of Daniel, the Jews threw out the last two chapters, settling for an even dozen chapters. (The Catholic Book of Daniel still contains fourteen chapters.)
Just as the list of holy books differed from Jewish community to Jewish community, so too the list of books considered holy among the early Christians differed from church to church, although Christians generally preferred the larger Greek Old Testament to the smaller Hebrew one. In addition to the Jewish scriptures, each Christian community developed its own 'New Testament' scriptures, creating more than a dozen different gospels and an uncertain number of epistles and apocalypses. Many of them even adopted pagan productions such as the Sibylline Oracles!
It is instructive to see which books were included in actual bible MSS that have survived from antiquity. It is unlikely that books would be included in a bible if they were not considered to be authoritative.
The 3rd-4th-century Codex Sinaiticus--arguably the most famous of all biblical MSS--includes the books of Tobit, Judith, 1 & 4 Maccabees, Wisdom, and Sirach, as well as the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. The 4th-century Codex Vaticanus, includes Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, Baruch, and the Letter of Jeremiah. The Codex Alexandrinus (5th century) includes Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, Tobit, Judith, 1-4 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, and arguably the Psalms of Solomon.
Although no actual bibles authorized by the Gnostic Marcion of Sinope(ca. 85–ca. 160) have survived from antiquity—they all perished in the long sequence of book-burnings with which the orthodox Christians celebrated their triumph over heresy—we do know to a high probability what it contained and what it was like from Tertullian's polemic Against Marcion. Marcion's bible contained not a single book from the Jewish collection. (Quite reasonable, Marcion recognized the god of the so-called Old Testament as a malevolent, evil force incompatible with his Christian 'Gospel'.) What modern Christians call the New Testament constituted his entire bible. In fact, only part of the so-called New Testament made up his bible, for his bible contained only one 'Apostle' and one 'Gospel'.
The only true Apostle for Marcion was Paul, and the only genuine Gospel was what is now known as the Gospel of Luke. (Apparently, Marcion did not attribute the writing to Luke, simply calling it "the Gospel.") According to ancient witnesses, Marcion's Luke lacked the birth legends concerning both Jesus and John the Baptist, and it doubtless reflected a much earlier stage in the evolution of that evangel. This is quite significant when one realizes that the first draft of that gospel was cobbled together about the time that Marcion was born and that Marcion almost certainly had a more 'authentic' version than did his critics half a century later.
Marcion's collection of Pauline letters also was smaller than the standard issue. It contained just ten of the letters usually attributed to Paul—omitting 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, and of course Hebrews. Here again, Marcion was better than his critics, as modern scholars have shown quite conclusively that these four 'epistles' could not have been written by the same hand that wrote Corinthians, Romans, etc. [American Atheist Press has published an e-book English translation of Marcion’s gospel that can be found in The Creation of Christ: An Outline of the Beginnings of Christianity, Vol. 2, by P.L. Couchoud.]
It comes as no surprise to learn, then, that no 'Church Father' is known who drew the line of canonicity in the same way as does the Fire-Baptized Full-Gospel Pentecostal Holiness Church of God in Christ of today.
The illustrious Irenaeus (b. ca. 130 CE), for example, considered the Shepherd of Hermas to be inspired, but rejected Hebrews, Jude, James, 2nd Peter, and 3rd John. (Irenaeus also is notable for having argued that Jesus lived to be over fifty years old!) Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–ca. 213 CE) included the Apocalypse of Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas in his bible. Tertullian (b. ca. 160 CE)—best remembered for his dictum, certum est, quia impossibile est ("I believe it because it's impossible")--threw out all the New Testament books except the four gospels, Acts, 13 'Pauline' epistles, Revelation, and 1st John.
As certain churches (such as those at Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople) gained in political power, each made strenuous efforts to stamp out 'heresy' (any views that might impede the flow of money into their treasuries or undermine the power of their potentates), and church councils were convened (even by the Roman Emperor, rather than by Popes or Patriarchs) to vote on which books were canonica—and to anathematize those who could not buy enough votes to be on the winning side.
The history of these councils is both bewildering and abominable. The Council of Laodicea (363 CE) included Baruch in the Old Testament but barred Revelation from the New. The Council of Carthage (ca. 397 CE) included Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, Tobit, Judith, and First and Second Maccabees. The most recent infallible enumeration of the Catholic canon took place at the Council of Trent (1563 CE), in the midst of the German Reformation. The Greek Orthodox Church closed its canon sometime in the tenth century, when it finally admitted the Book of Revelation (although it still does not use quotations from this book in its lectionaries). The Syrian Orthodox Church grudgingly adopted Revelation a century later still.
Although most church councils did not debate which books belonged to the Bible, it is nevertheless true that issues decided by earlier councils helped to shape the decisions of later councils that defined the canons. Contrary to the naïve opinion that the deliberations of church councils were infused by the power of divine guidance, most of the councils—and their aftermaths—were pretty ghastly affairs.
The Council of Nicaea, for example, was convened in 325 CE by the Roman emperor Constantine—the first Christian emperor. After being converted to Christianity, Constantine put to death his wife, his son, a nephew and his wife, and had Licinius (his co-emperor) and his son strangled after promising them their lives. These chores out of the way, he convened the bishops and patriarchs of the realm to define the nature of the trinity and decide which of the squabbling factions of believers should be given the imperial patent for orthodoxy.
Interestingly, Constantine made a great speech to the assembly in which he appealed to the Sibylline Oracles as scripture on par with the Jewish and Christian books—and no one objected. In particular, he quoted the famous ICHTHUS double acrostic. (This is the Greek word we often see in the astrological fish symbols displayed on the hind-ends of motor vehicles co-piloted by Jesus.) The word ICHTHUS is an acrostic for the Greek words 'Jesus Christ God's Son, Savior,' and is the Greek word for 'fish.' Originally of astrological meaning and signifying the movement of the vernal equinox into the sign of Pisces (The Fishes), it became the symbol of the new-age religion now called Christianity. It is amusing, I think, to see people who believe the Bible contains everything one needs to know nevertheless sporting a symbol that derives from a pagan, extrabiblical source—the Sibylline Oracles.
The burning question of the Council of Nicaea was the argument between Arius and Bishop Alexander of Alexandria. Arius claimed Jesus was essentially distinct from the Father, having been created ex nihilo by the latter. Alexander, however, claimed "as God is eternal, so is his Son,—when the Father, then the Son—the Son is present in God without birth, ever begotten, an unbegotten-begotten." By a packed vote, Arius was condemned as a heretic, excommunicated, and exiled. Three years later, however, Constantine went soft on heresy (or changed his mind as to who were the heretics) and recalled Arius to Constantinople. On the very day on which Arius was to reenter the Cathedral in triumph, however, his bowels suddenly burst out in a privy, obviating any need to redefine orthodoxy. The orthodox considered it a miracle, the Arians knew it was murder.
Poison, however, was not the only way to decide questions of theology. At the 'Ecumenical' Council of Ephesus, (431 CE) St. Cyril, the Pope of Alexandria, bribed enough bishops to be able to convene the Council before the arrival of the Patriarch of Antioch, whose opposition he feared. Without opposition from the delegation from Antioch, it was a simple matter to condemn one Nestorius as a heretic and to proclaim the Virgin Mary to be theotokos, or "Mother of God."
At the Second Synod of Ephesus (449 CE), Dioscoros, the Pope of Alexandria (Cyril's successor) condemned Flavian, the Pope of Constantinople, then kicked his rival in Christ so severely that he died three days later. Summoning a mob of monks and soldiers wielding staves, swords, and chains, Dioscoros convinced the bishops who had planned to vote for Flavian to vote 'correctly.'
Such were the means by which truth was determined in the orthodox Catholic Church. Among the Protestants it was every sinner for himself when it came to deciding which books belonged in the bible.
Among the Protestant 'reformers,' opinions differing greatly from those held by Protestants today were common. Martin Luther didn't think Esther belonged in the Bible, but he thought highly of 1st Maccabees and Sirach. He had a low opinion of Hebrews; and Revelation he thought to be of little value, being neither apostolic nor prophetic. The Epistle of James he termed "an epistle of straw."
The Swiss reformer Zwingli pronounced Revelation to be unbiblical. John Calvin denounced that book of ravings as being unintelligible, and he forbade the pastors of Geneva to attempt to interpret it.
Study of the history of bibles shows that their content and composition have been determined not by any spiritual or supernatural guiding principles, but rather they are the products of the same theopolitical and economic forces that motivate the popes, preachers, and politicians of the modern world.
Which Manuscripts?
Even if we pretended that we could somehow know for certain that the Gospel of Matthew—even though like Luke it plagiarizes the Greek text of Mark and copies quotations from a long-lost book called Q—is truly inspired and, thus, a legitimate book to be included in the canon, how could we tell if anyone of the many extant MSS of Matthew contains the correct, inspired wording? Most true believers know nothing at all about this problem, because it is a well-kept secret among bible scholars that no two MSS of Matthew—or any other biblical book—are exactly alike. Worse yet, for each book there exist different families of MS types, often of approximately equal antiquity but differing from each other in characteristic ways. To try to keep track of all the different wordings in Matthew and other books of the bible, scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament contain a so-called apparatus criticus, a complicated system of footnotes and symbols indicating the major variant readings for each passage in the 'preferred text' [see Figs. 1 and 3].
Concerning the preferred text of the Greek Bible, readers may wonder just who decides—and how—what the preferred readings should be? Space does not permit a discussion of the scientific (and sometimes very un-scientific) principles involved. We can only observe that it is both laughable and sad to see the more intelligent fundamentalists diligently learning Greek in order to "read God's word in the original tongue." Little do they suspect, while staring at the nearly footnote-free pages of their Westcott-Hort Greek testaments, the thousands of scientific and not-so-scientific decisions underlying what they see—or don't see—on each page. Still less do they realize that not one Greek MS in the whole world has the exact same wording as the printed Greek bibles from which their English bibles are translated!
Bible apologists try to wave away the hundreds of thousands of variant readings in the extant MSS by saying that the differences are trivial and do not affect passages essential for Christian doctrine. "Merely spelling differences," they say. The falseness of this assertion can be seen not only in the examples given in Figs. 1–3(variations affecting the doctrine of the virgin birth as well as the doctrine that true disciples can drink poison and caress cobras), but also in passages striking at the heart of the doctrine of the trinity.
Figure 1. A page from E Kaine Diatheke, a Greek New Testament published by The British and Foreign Bible Society (©1958), showing the preferred text and critical apparatus for Matthew 1:11,16, 18.
A. The traditional text of verse 16 reads: "And Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, the [one] called Christ."
B. The beginning of the variant readings for verse 16, with symbols for the various manuscripts followed by their different readings.
C. The symbol for the Syriac (sy) Sinaiticus (s) manuscript, a 3rd-4th-century document reflecting the state of the biblical text in the second century, before believers in the virgin birth myth had succeeded in altering all the gospel texts. [See Fig. 2]
D. The greatly abbreviated Greek reads: "And Joseph begat Jesus, the one called Christ."
Figure 2. No virgin birth here! Part of the genealogy of Jesus in the Syriacus Sinaiticus manuscript referred to in Fig. I-C. (Printed text © 1894 by Agnes Smith Lewis, The Four Gospels in Syriac, Transcribed from the Sinaitic Palimpsest, Cambridge University Press).
Syriac reads from right to left. Asterisks mark the Syriac word 'wld, 'begat.' Underlines show names repeating in the formula: A begat B, B begat C, C begat D, etc. Verses 15-16 read: Eliud begat Eleazar, Eleazar begat Matthan, Matthan begat Jacob, Jacob begat Joseph; Joseph, to whom was betrothed a young woman, Mary, begat Jesus [(l)yshw' the last name underlined] who is called Messiah."
Figure 3. The end of the Gospel of Mark, from the Greek bible used in Fig. 1, showing the state of total confusion in which the Gospel ends.
A. Latin text of a 4th–5th century African Old Latin version manuscript, the Codex Bobbiensis [k] which adds to verse 3 of Mk. 16: “Suddenly at the third hour of the day there was darkness over the whole earth, and angels descended from heaven and stood up with the living god, [and] ascended [to heaven] along with him, and immediately there was light. Then they [women] approached the tomb.”
B. Note saying that verse 8, as well as verses 9–20 are omitted by an early Egyptian Fayyumic [fa] manuscript.
C. Note saying that verse 8 is the concluding verse of the oldest and best manuscripts, including the famous Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, and the Syriacus Sinaiticus shown in Fig. 2. This means that all the post-resurrection tales of the traditional ‘long ending’ are absent, along with Mk. 16:18—the passage so beloved of snake-handling, poison-drinking, true believers in the South. The oldest manuscripts end their story with the women fleeing from the sepulcher, “for they were afraid.”
Actually, the footnotes relating to the end of Mark continue for two more pages after the one shown. One of the later notes tells us that some manuscripts contain an alternative ‘short’ ending to Mk 16:9–20 which reads:
“But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him all that they had been told. And after this, Jesus himself sent out by means of them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.”
Another footnote tells us that there are several manuscripts that include both endings!
When Erasmus of Rotterdam published Europe's first Greek New Testament in 1516, he omitted the Trinitarian proof-text, I John 5:7:
For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.
Needless to say, Erasmus was stoutly criticized for the omission. He defended himself by declaring that he would have included the verse (well-known in the Latin Bible) had he been able to find a single Greek MS that contained it. Soon thereafter, Erasmus was presented a Greek Bible containing the verse.
Suspecting a fraud, but being unable to prove it, Erasmus added the verse to later editions of his bible, the book destined to become the Textus Receptus--the book from which the King James translators would derive the 'authorized' English version of 1611. Tough luck for the trinity, Erasmus' intuition was correct. To this day, no Greek MS older than the 15th-16th century has ever been found to contain the passage. It is now known that the verse was a 4th-century Spanish invention, finally appearing in manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate (the official bible of the Roman Catholic Church) around the year 800.
The discovery that the oldest bibles omit I John 5:7 leaves Christians without biblical proof of the trinity. While there are still other verses which are compatible with Trinitarian doctrine, none is proof of it. Unless Christian apologists consider the Trinity trivial, they must admit that the differences in MSS are important!
The magnitude of the differences between different MSS of the same book can be astonishing. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Jeremiah scroll 4QJer-b, is one-eighth shorter than the Masoretic text of Jeremiah! Even in ancient times wild differences in MSS of individual books existed. The Church Father Irenaeus tells us that the MSS of Matthew's gospel used ca. 185 CE by the Ebionites (the original Jewish Christians of Jerusalem) lacked the first two chapters—the chapters containing the imaginary genealogy of Jesus, the virgin birth story, the wise men, and Herod's slaughter of the innocents. Small wonder that the earliest Christians did not believe the story about Mary and the angel!
We may note one other oddity concerning the 'received text' used to produce the KJV bible. Because the Book of Revelation was never popular in the Greek Orthodox Church, it was hard for Erasmus to find Greek manuscripts of the book. Indeed, he could not find a single manuscript that contained the last six verses. Consequently, he had to make up his own Greek—translating the last six verses into Greek from the Latin Vulgate. To this day, no Greek text has ever been found that reproduces Erasmus' version of the last six verses of the bible, yet it is the source of the KJV rendering.
While we are discussing the Book of Revelation—the book beloved of President Reagan and the gematriasts (biblical numerologists and bible-coders: the word rhymes with pederasts) who advise him—we should note that "the number of the name of the beast" [Rev. 13:18] may not be 666after all. In some very ancient sources the number is 616. Doubtless to the dismay of the gematriasts who seek to guide American nuclear foreign policy on the basis of biblical clues, neither singly nor in combination do the names Madalyn, Murray, or O'Hair total to 616 or 666 when written in the Greek alphabet. At 651, Murray comes closest to 666: close, but no cigar!
An extremely candid discussion of the difficulties involved when bible scholars have to produce (by voting!) an agreed-upon standard text from which to translate vernacular versions of the Bible is presented by the conservative New Testament scholar Bruce M. Metzger. In his A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament [United Bible Societies, 1971], a companion volume to the third edition of United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament, he discusses the extraordinary problems involved in trying to establish an authentic Greek text for the Acts of the Apostles. It seems that the Book of Acts circulated in the early church in two very different text-forms, the so-called Alexandrian and Western texts. According to Metzger,
The two forms of text differ in character as well as length. The Western text is nearly one-tenth longer than the Alexandrian text, and is generally more picturesque and circumstantial, whereas the shorter text is generally more colorless and in places more obscure ... [emphasis added]
Metzger then goes on to explain that an Alexandrian text of Acts published by Westcott and Hort contains 18,401 words, whereas a Western-type text published by A. C. Clark has 19,983 words—a difference of about 8.5 percent! He then makes some truly revealing comments:
... there are variants ... peculiar to the Western text of Acts. These include many additions, long and short, of a substantive nature that reveal the hand of a reviser. Working upon a copy of the "Western" text in the first sense, the reviser, who was obviously a meticulous and well-informed scholar [but was he inspired?], eliminated seams and gaps and added historical, biographical, and geographical details. Apparently the reviser did his work at an early date, before the text of Acts had come to be generally regarded as a sacred text that must be preserved inviolate.
So that's how bibles are written!
Since Acts is supposed to have been written by the author of the Gospel of Luke, Metzger of necessity has to refer to problems in that gospel while considering the Book of Acts. It turns out that one of the differences between Western and Alexandrian forms of Luke calls into question the ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven after his resurrection!
Several ancient MSS of Luke 24:51(a Western text known as 'D' and the Old Latin version) omit the ascension, reading simply "and in the act of blessing he parted from them" [NEB], whereas the KJV has "And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven." As can be seen, this important omission was adopted by the committee that produced the Greek text for the New English Bible.
A parallel omission of the ascension is found in the Old Latin Codex Gigas (also a Western type) text of Acts 1:1-2. The KJV has "The former treatise have I made, 0 Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach, 2 Until the day in which he was taken up, after that he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen ... " Some prominent scholars have reconstructed a Greek text of Acts which omits the ascension from the preface of Acts as well! Since Luke is the only evangelist who documents the ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven, if the MSS that omit this important information are correct, Jesus may never have left the earth. He may still be alive—perhaps hiding in Argentina. Clearly, only inspired readers can be certain of exactly what this inspired author wrote!
What Did They Mean?
We shall end this discussion of variant manuscripts by considering the problem of translated versions of the bible. The problem of knowing what meanings to give to words in foreign languages will be considered in the next section of this essay. What concerns us here is a problem of even greater concern to those who want to know what the 'original text' of the bible once said.
Between the third century BCE and the first century CE, Greek-speaking Jewish scholars in Alexandria and elsewhere translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, producing a series of editions of the Greek Old Testament known collectively as theSeptuagint (abbreviated LXX). A comparison of the LXX with the Hebrew Masoretic Text shows fundamental differences in content—differences which cannot be waived away as translation errors, but rather can be seen as evidence that the Hebrew text used by the translators differed profoundly from the Hebrew text known today. Among the many differences between the LXX and the Masoretic Text are the numerical discrepancies. Thus, Enoch was 65 years old when he begot Methuselah in Hebrew, but he was 165 when he did the deed in Greek. After the birth of Lamech, Methuselah lived 782 years in Hebrew, but 802 in Greek. Not only are there numerical differences between the Greek and Hebrew texts, verses and paragraphs are added or deleted and, in the case of Jeremiah, the individual prophesies are scattered around so differently in the two versions that it is very difficult to compare the two at all.
The problem for true believers is this: the Greek version reflects a Hebrew text more than a thousand years older than that of the Hebrew manuscripts used as the standard for the KJV. Shouldn't we follow the Greek—even if it is a translation—instead of the Hebrew? It should be noted that the authors of the New Testament, when citing the Old Testament, cited it in Greek resembling the LXX far more often than the Masoretic Textus Receptus.If the LXX was good enough for Jesus. shouldn't it be good enough for Presbyterians?
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has confused the problem further. These Hebrew and Aramaic scrolls date to a time almost as old as the time at which the LXX translating began, and temporally overlap the period in which translation was completed. Do these scrolls settle the issue of which is better, LXX or Masoretic Text? Not on your life!
Some of the scrolls, such as the Great Isaiah Scroll, are extremely close to the Masoretic Text. This is why fundamentalists never seem to tire of telling us about this scroll and how it vindicates their bible (they won't tell you about the Short Jeremiah Scroll, mentioned above, which resembles the LXX). In the case of Jeremiah, scrolls similar to both the LXX and Masoretic texts have been found. MSS of Exodus have been found which resemble not only LXX, but the Samaritan version also. Just for good measure, some scrolls reflect still other, hitherto unknown textual traditions.
Which is the correct MS? The question itself has become meaningless at this stage in the scientific understanding of the biblical texts. Different oral traditions gradually were reduced to writing, at different times and in different places. Differing from each other at the moment they were committed to writing, the various written forms of a given story continued to diverge further, as the individual texts were copied and recopied, and errors and 'corrections' were made by the scribes. Periodically, scribes discovered contradictory MSS dealing with the same story. Then the process of harmonization came into play—the scribe combining the contradictory texts into one 'harmonious' narrative.
One extreme example of such harmonization is seen in certain late manuscripts of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, where the two genealogies of Jesus—which in the Textus Receptus differ from each other almost totally—have been 'harmonized' into one-hundred percent identity! Another extreme example is the well-known case of the 2nd-century Syrian Tatian who was converted to Christianity by Justin Martyr at Rome. Tatian 'harmonized' all four canonical gospels into a single, contradiction-free gospel known as the Diatessaron ('Out of Four') in Greek. In its Syriac form it was used for centuries by certain Syrian churches in place of the mutually contradictory Big Four.
After all their study, bible scholars have come to a simple conclusion: trying to find the 'correct reading' of most biblical manuscripts is as hopeless—and as meaningless—as trying to find the 'average voter'!
Which Dictionary to Use?
One of the most perplexing problems facing a believer is one almost never recognized even to exist: how can one know what a given word in an ancient manuscript means? It is not enough to have a good Greek or Hebrew dictionary. The most brilliant of dictionary writers cannot be certain of the meaning of every word as it is used in every culture and subculture, at every period in history. If we find the Hebrew word zabach, 'sacrifice,' for example, in an ancient sentence reading "King Ishkibibbel sacrificed much and Jahweh protected him and his chamber pots," does it mean the same thing as it does in a modern Jerusalem newspaper sentence reading, "Shmuel sacrificed a lot and got his kids through college"?
One need not go to ancient texts to see the magnitude of this problem. The plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) date from almost modern times—and they are in English. Yet it is often quite impossible to know for certain what Shakespeare intended certain lines to mean. In the third act of Hamlet, just after the famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, Hamlet says to Ophelia, "Get thee to a nunnery."
What could be simpler to understand?
It was quite a shock, fifty years ago, when I learned that the Elizabethan slang term for 'brothel' was 'nunnery'. In all the years since, I have been unable to decide whether Hamlet wanted Ophelia to go to a convent or to a bordello. Either meaning fits the context. Hamlet could be worried that Ophelia was likely to become "a breeder of sinners," and should remove herself from the temptations of the world by withdrawing into religion. Or—considering the presence of words such as harlot and bawd in the immediate context, and considering that Hamlet decries Ophelia's "wantonness"—it is plausible that Hamlet, in disgust, was telling Ophelia to join the world's oldest profession.
While the ambiguity of this passage is merely amusing or annoying, depending on how much one wishes to understand Shakespeare, the situation would be deadly serious if Hamlet were a book of scripture instead of a work of art. What if a true believer tried to imitate 'St. Ophelia' and went to the wrong place? She could spend eternity in 'the wrong place,' indeed, if she went to a convent, say, instead of a cathouse!
Although it is often difficult to discern the meaning of words in Shakespeare's English writings, it can be quite literally impossible to know the meaning of certain words in ancient biblical manuscripts. In the New English Bible (NEB), a modern translation produced by an all-star panel of Oxford-Cambridge scholars, it is not at all rare to find pages with footnotes saying "Probable reading" or "Hebrew unintelligible," or with passages wildly different from those of the KJV. For example, in the KJV translation of Job 39:13-14, we read:
Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks? Or wings and feathers unto the ostrich? Which leaveth her eggs in the earth and warmeth them in dust ...
In the NEB, however, we read:
The wings of the ostrich are stunted;*
her pinions and plumage are so scanty**
that she abandons her eggs to the ground,
letting them be kept warm by the sand.
The two associated footnotes read:
*are stunted: probable reading; Hebrew unintelligible.
** Probable reading; Hebrew [means] godly or stork.
Although neither Oxford nor Cambridge was up to the problem of Job 39:13-14, the New International Version (NIV),a fundamentalist production, somehow decided to render our verse:
The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully,
but they cannot compare with the pinions
and feathers of the stork ...
While the lack of footnotes might lead us to suppose that the fundamentalists are never in doubt as to what 'the word of god' means, in the introduction to the NIV we find the admission,
As in other ancient documents, the precise meaning of the biblical texts is sometimes uncertain. This is more often the case with the Hebrew and Aramaic texts than with the Greek text. Although archaeological and linguistic discoveries in this century aid in understanding difficult passages, some uncertainties remain ... [Oxford New International Version Scofield Study Bible, E. Schuyler English, Chairman, Editorial Revision Committee, Oxford Univ. Press, 1984, p. xix]
How can this be?
Part of the problem derives from the fact that Hebrew and Aramaic are written with a defective alphabet, i.e., an alphabet in which most vowels are not written. It was only very late in the history of Hebrew bible-making (late 5th to 9th centuries) that vowel points (the so-called 'jots and tittles') came to be added to the consonantal texts. Unfortunately, there is no way to know that the correct vowels were supplied. As a matter of fact, during the 9th and 10th centuries, there was a long-lasting feud between two families of Jewish scholars, the ben Ashers and the ben Naphtalis, over the vocalization of the scriptures. Unfortunately, the ben Ashers beat out the ben Naphtalis so completely that almost all history of them has been expunged, and we are left with a false sense of security concerning the apparent uniformity of vowel points in the Hebrew text today.
It is easy to see what a mess we would have in English if we did not indicate vowels in writing. If we came across the two-letter word by, for example, how would we know if the word intended was by, bay, boy, buoy, buy, or obey? Of course the context—if there were one—would help in figuring out vocalizations and meanings. But what if, in the case of by, the real word intended were a rare word such as bey?
The difficulties caused by the lack of vowel letters in Hebrew are compounded by the unbelievable number of hapax legomena, words that occur only once in the entire Bible. A quick sampling of the Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary of the Old Testament reveals that there are more than 1500 words (approximately twenty percent of the entire Old Testament vocabulary!) used only once. These include the word dibyonim, rendered as "dove's dung" in the KJV, but which Young's Analytical Concordance to the Bible assures us means "roasted chick pea"—even though the NEB translates it as locust-beans, and the NIV renders it as seed pods.
Imagine the perplexity of a bible scholar—to say nothing of a true believer—coming across a sentence such as "Unless thou puttest the shnurq upon the altar before thou givest up the shew-bread, thou shalt surely die." Assuming that the word shnurq appears in no other context, we can conclude only that a shnurq is probably something smaller than a hippopotamus. The frightful uncertainty resulting from not knowing what to put on the altar could force a true believer to give up giving up shew-bread altogether!
Why Bother?
Although we have only been able to discuss a few of the problems faced by persons wanting to believe in the bible, it should be obvious that the problems are insurmountable. When the ballots were cast at the great ecclesiastical councils which settled the canon, what assurance do we have that the chief god of the universe wasn't off somewhere counting fallen sparrows instead of counting ballots before they were cast—and seeing to it that the right bishops got the poison? What assurance do we have that the forger who slipped the Trinity into Erasmus' third edition did his forging under the inspiration of a triune contradiction in arithmetic? What assurance do we have that the people who write the dictionaries of biblical Greek and Hebrew know what definitions to put into them? How will we know if we are reading about chick-peas or dove's dung?
So, how confident can Fundamentalists be that their English language bible versions of the New Testament, say, have been translated from an authentic Greek text? Bruce Metzger whom we quoted earlier while discussing the Book of Acts, explains [p. 271] that
Since no hypothesis thus far proposed to explain the relation of the Western and the Alexandrian texts of Acts has gained anything like general assent, in its work on that book the Bible Societies' Committee proceeded in an eclectic fashion, holding that neither the Alexandrian nor the Western group of witnesses always preserves the original text, but that in order to attain the earliest text one must compare the divergent traditions point by point and in each case select the reading which commends itself in the light of transcriptions and intrinsic probabilities.
In reviewing the work of the Committee on the book of Acts as a whole, one observes that more often than not the shorter, Alexandrian text was preferred. At the same time the Committee judged that some of the information incorporated in certain Western expansions may well be factually accurate, though not deriving from the original author of Acts.
So there you have it! True Believers have to put their faith more upon pointy-headed classical scholars than upon the inspired authors of the Holy Bible! The scholars, trying to employ scientific and probabilistic arguments, have to decide what is to be believed. Inspiration is not an option.
Clearly, it is futile to try to find the Bible in which to believe, and from which to obtain truth. So why bother to try? The quest for absolute truth is childish, a hold-over from a prescientific period of cultural evolution. Although the 'truths' of science are not absolute, they do nicely in a pinch. And as for salvation, the track-record of penicillin isn't too bad—even if it can cause hives!