Nailed: 10 Christian myths that show Jesus never existed

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Post Reply
User avatar
Kapyong
Posts: 547
Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 4:51 pm
Contact:

Nailed: 10 Christian myths that show Jesus never existed

Post by Kapyong »

Greetings all,

A recent short book summarises the Jesus Myth theory by listing 10 myths about Christianity that turn out not to be true. That book is :

"Nailed - 10 Christian Myths that show Jesus never existed at all."
by David Fitzgerald.

Earl Doherty says of this book :
"Fitzgerald's is possible the best 'capsule summary' of the mythicist case I've ever encountered ... with an interesting and accessible approach."
Robert M. Price says :
"Fitzgerald summarises a great number of key arguments concisely and with new power and original spin. I really learned something from him. Recalls classical skeptics and biblical crictics. A surprising amount of new material."
Richard C. Carrier says :
"Say what you will about the overall conclusion that Jesus never existed, but you can't deny that when it comes to the 10 modern myths about Jesus dissected here, Fitzgerald has hit the nail on the head. All 10 points are succinct and correct. A nice readable introduction to the top ten problems typically swept under the rugby anyone insisting it's crazy to even suspect Jesus might not have existed."
The ten myths are :
  • Myth 1 - The idea that Jesus was a myth is ridiculous
  • Myth 2 - Jesus was wildly famous - but ...
  • Myth 3 - Ancient Historian Josephus wrote about Jesus
  • Myth 4 - Eye-witnesses wrote the Gospels
  • Myth 5 - The Gospels give a consistent picture of Jesus
  • Myth 6 - History confirms the Gospels
  • Myth 7 - Archeology confirms the Gospels
  • Myth 8 - Paul and the epistles corroborate the Gospels
  • Myth 9 - Christianity began with Jesus and his apostles
  • Myth 10 - Christianity was totally new and different
I will probably follow this later with summaries of some of these points, depending on which points readers draw attention to.

Kapyong
User avatar
stephan happy huller
Posts: 1480
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 3:06 pm
Contact:

Re: Nailed: 10 Christian myths that show Jesus never existed

Post by stephan happy huller »

I don't think it is so easy either way. Take 8. Paul and the epistles corroborate the Gospels. The Marcionites and other heretics said that Paul wrote the original gospel. So you have the Catholics arguing against the idea essentially that Paul wrote or knew about the contents of the gospel (in their tradition Luke) but why would the heretics have argued otherwise? The idea would have to be - assuming Marcionite primacy - that the Catholics removed references to the gospel or allusions to the contents of the ur-text of the Apostolikon. Why would they have done that? Because it proved Jesus 'existed'? No, I imagine this had nothing to do with it. The Marcionites understood Jesus to be a heavenly being who descended into the world in a specific year in history (which was erased and undoubtedly changed to the 15th year of Tiberius). I think mythicists are wasting their time with these arguments because the truth is that you have a supernatural Jesus attached to a specific year with the knowledge of Paul at the earliest period and this understanding was changed. I don't think that the gospel story was ever fully understood to be a 'myth.' The story was understood to be absolutely historical and Jesus wasn't a man (he passed through objects, flew etc). Does that help anyone? I doubt it. I think mythicists rape the evidence to score points annoying religious people with half-truths - i.e. that 'the gospel was a myth.' Not true.

Sort of like the birther understanding of Obama's Kenyan alleged birth. Obama exists. He really was born in Hawaii but some said before the last election that this was a myth or hoax and that he was really born in Kenya. Historians from two thousand years in the future can't use the birthers arguments to argue for the 'mythical existence' of Obama or that he never existed. But that's what I think you do with this stuff you don't fully understand and don't want to understand fully because it gets in the way of your polemic against Christianity.
Everyone loves the happy times
User avatar
Kapyong
Posts: 547
Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 4:51 pm
Contact:

Re: Nailed: 10 Christian myths that show Jesus never existed

Post by Kapyong »

Greetings Stephan,

Thanks for your insightful response :-)
I am not a full bottle on the Marcionites, so pardon me if I ask some basic questions.
stephan happy huller wrote:I don't think it is so easy either way. Take 8. Paul and the epistles corroborate the Gospels. The Marcionites and other heretics said that Paul wrote the original gospel.
Hmmm ... did they mean 1) the gospel being 'Paul's good news' or did they mean 2) a written Gospel like G.Luke?
stephan happy huller wrote:So you have the Catholics arguing against the idea essentially that Paul wrote or knew about the contents of the gospel (in their tradition Luke) but why would the heretics have argued otherwise? The idea would have to be - assuming Marcionite primacy - that the Catholics removed references to the gospel or allusions to the contents of the ur-text of the Apostolikon. Why would they have done that? Because it proved Jesus 'existed'? No, I imagine this had nothing to do with it.
Are we sure about Marcionite primacy?
Otherwise it could be like so :
Paul's writes his epistles, no knowledge of a written Gospel
Catholics point out Paul knew no Gospel
Marcionites argue Paul DID know a Gospel, for whatever reason
stephan happy huller wrote:The Marcionites understood Jesus to be a heavenly being who descended into the world in a specific year in history (which was erased and undoubtedly changed to the 15th year of Tiberius).
This could have been a belief that grew later than Paul. Paul never places Jesus in history.
stephan happy huller wrote:I think mythicists are wasting their time with these arguments because the truth is that you have a supernatural Jesus attached to a specific year with the knowledge of Paul at the earliest period
Where is the clear evidence that Paul had that knowledge?
How are you so sure it happened at 'the earliest period'?
Doesn't it depend on your 'assuming Marcionite primacy' ?
stephan happy huller wrote:and this understanding was changed.
Why do you think that is important?
Different groups could easily have different reasons for placing Jesus at different times - but all later than Paul

stephan happy huller wrote:I don't think that the gospel story was ever fully understood to be a 'myth.' The story was understood to be absolutely historical and Jesus wasn't a man (he passed through objects, flew etc). Does that help anyone? I doubt it. I think mythicists rape the evidence to score points annoying religious people with half-truths - i.e. that 'the gospel was a myth.' Not true.
I suspect G.Mark was written as allegory, then later Gospels were historicised as the history Jesus became dogma.

stephan happy huller wrote:But that's what I think you do with this stuff you don't fully understand and don't want to understand fully because it gets in the way of your polemic against Christianity.
There's a lot I don't understand Stephan, and I hope you and others here can help me understand more :-)
I have read many many Jesus theories over the years, and the Jesus Myth theory seems, in my opinion, to best fit the facts.

Kapyong
User avatar
Kapyong
Posts: 547
Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 4:51 pm
Contact:

Re: Nailed: 10 Christian myths that show Jesus never existed

Post by Kapyong »

Gday again,

A comment on Myth 1 -
Comparing Jesus resurrection to Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon - a popular internet meme lately - Fitzgerald says :

First, we have Caesar's own account (not directly we don't - Caesar's account does not specifically refer to the Rubicon - but at one stage in his account he is north of it, later he is south of it.) But we have nothing from Jesus's own hand, and we do not really know who wrote any of the Gospels.

Second, many of Caesar's enemies reported the crossing of the Rubicon, but we have no hostile or even neutral mentions of the resurrection until over a 100 years after the alleged event, when Christian beliefs were well known.

Third, there are numerous inscriptions, coins, mentions of battles, conscriptions and judgements, which form an alsmost continuous chain of evidence of Caesar's march. But there is no physical evidence of any kind for Jesus.

Fourth, almost every historian of the period mentions the crossing, often naming and quoting their sources and known to be reliable. But for Jesus we have no historians mentioning the resurrection till centuries later - and they are Christian historians.

Finally, the civil war could not have proceeded as it did if Caesar had not crossed the Rubicon with his army and captured Rome. By contrast the only thing necessary for Christianity is a belief.

Carrier says :
"In fact, when we compare all five points, we see that in four of the five proofs of an event's historicity, the resurrection has no evidence at all, and in the one proof that it does have, it has not the best, but the very worst kind of evidence - a handful of biased, uncritical, unscholarly, unknown, second-hand witnesses. Indeed you really have to look hard to find another event that is in a worse condition than [the resurrection] as far as evidence goes."
Kapyong
User avatar
Peter Kirby
Site Admin
Posts: 8015
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 2:13 pm
Location: Santa Clara
Contact:

Re: Nailed: 10 Christian myths that show Jesus never existed

Post by Peter Kirby »

I'd like to see a dissertation-level presentation. Another popular-level presentation is just more of the same.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
Bernard Muller
Posts: 3964
Joined: Tue Oct 15, 2013 6:02 pm
Contact:

Re: Nailed: 10 Christian myths that show Jesus never existed

Post by Bernard Muller »

The ten myths are :
Myth 1 - The idea that Jesus was a myth is ridiculous
Myth 2 - Jesus was wildly famous - but ...
Myth 3 - Ancient Historian Josephus wrote about Jesus
Myth 4 - Eye-witnesses wrote the Gospels
Myth 5 - The Gospels give a consistent picture of Jesus
Myth 6 - History confirms the Gospels
Myth 7 - Archeology confirms the Gospels
Myth 8 - Paul and the epistles corroborate the Gospels
Myth 9 - Christianity began with Jesus and his apostles
Myth 10 - Christianity was totally new and different
Myth 1: I agree.

Myth 2: He was not ... That's obvious even if many Christians believe otherwise.

Myth 3: I think the mention of "the brother of Jesus, him called christ, whose name is James" in Josephus Ant. is authentic. Mythicists' attempts to explain it away do not make sense.
http://historical-jesus.sosblogs.com/Hi ... b1-p21.htm
http://historical-jesus.sosblogs.com/Hi ... b1-p71.htm

Myth 4: Yes, but that does not prevent a gospel writer to have heard about an eyewitness, but because the eyewitnesses were dead when the gospel was written, that allowed this writer to embellish, distort, fill up holes and add up fiction to satisfy his agenda. I think that's the case of "Mark" and some "Q" writers. As for the others, they made up all other stuff about Jesus.

Myth 5: No, they don't.

Myth 6: Ditto

Myth 7: Archeology cannot confirm the gospels, just a tiny bit of them.

Myth 8: Paul & his epistles do corroborate small parts of gMark, through bits and pieces:
When eyewitnesses were still alive, Paul wrote about a minimal Jesus (but also, for Paul, pre/post-existent as a heavenly deity) who, from "Israelites, ... whose [are] the fathers, and of whom [is] the Christ, according to the flesh ..." (Ro9:4-5 YLT) and "come of a woman, come under law" (Gal4:4 YLT) (as a descendant of (allegedly) Abraham (Gal3:16), Jesse (Ro15:12) & David (Ro1:3)), "found in appearance as a man" (Php2:8) "in the likeness of sinful flesh" (Ro8:3), "the one man, Jesus Christ" (Ro5:15) (who had brothers (1Co9:5), one of them called "James", whom Paul met (Gal1:19)), "humbled himself" (Php2:8) in "poverty" (2Co8:9) as "servant of the Jews" (Ro15:8) and, after "the night in which he was delivered up" (1Co11:23 Darby), "was crucified in weakness" (2Co13:4) in "Zion" (Ro9:31-33 & Ro11:26-27).

Myth 9: NOT true

Myth 10: Ditto

Even so, that did not prevent the Jesus' episode to trigger the beginning of Christian beliefs:
By a simple act (remaining seated in a bus, then arrested), Rosa Parks (a humble seamstress then) provided the spark which gave birth to the momentous modern Civil Rights Movement, led by others from the start. Decades later, she was considered its "Mother" and revered as an icon, despite the fact she withdrew from it early on.
Then, considering the above, can we assurely answer "no" to this question:
Could Jesus have existed as just a lowly Jew, but through circumstances leading to (& about) his execution, triggered the later development, by others, of a (religious) movement and cultic beliefs?

All what was needed is that:
http://historical-jesus.sosblogs.com/Hi ... b1-p50.htm

Cordially, Bernard
Last edited by Bernard Muller on Mon Dec 02, 2013 12:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I believe freedom of expression should not be curtailed
User avatar
stephan happy huller
Posts: 1480
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 3:06 pm
Contact:

Re: Nailed: 10 Christian myths that show Jesus never existed

Post by stephan happy huller »

Either the Marcionites were first or second. If they were first then all that I said above. If they were second then you have a gospel narrative dated to the fifteenth of Tiberius involving a man named Jesus with a mother named Mary who was nailed to a cross and whose body was touched by his disciples. The arguments of Price and others assume knowledge of the Marcionites. Without the Marcionites you have a stronger - not weaker - case for historicity. It is the concept of Marcionite primacy which lends credibility to the 'supernatural understanding' of Jesus. It's like you're switching tracks and taking some from here and some from there all with the specific purpose of 'disproving' Christianity.

Just relax and look at the evidence without prejudice. You can argue that Jesus wasn't a human being. This is supported by the ancient witnesses. But I don't see how you get around the argument that the appearance of Jesus happened in a specific year in 'real time.' Thus the gospel narrative always had strong 'unmythical' characteristics. I don't know of many myths that were set in a particular year and set against another impending year (i.e. the destruction of the temple in 70 CE). Everything points to a supernatural appearance in a real historical year and in fact a real historical era. One which had great significance for the Jews.

As such it is difficult to make a convincing case for the gospel narrative being a 'myth' in the classical sense of the term or that it doesn't attempt to describe - in however poetic terms - an actual historical crucifixion (which may or may not have involved a historical man named Jesus). Remember the ancient tradition that Christ wasn't crucified on the cross, someone else was.
Everyone loves the happy times
User avatar
stephan happy huller
Posts: 1480
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 3:06 pm
Contact:

Re: Nailed: 10 Christian myths that show Jesus never existed

Post by stephan happy huller »

Someone hostile to Christianity recorded Jesus's crucifixion occurred in 21 CE not 29 or 30 CE. This is perhaps the most difficult piece of evidence for the mythicist position - the narrative being taken as historical (at least to some degree) by the opponents of Christianity as early as the end of the third century. I think this goes back to a much earlier tradition (to the second century at least) where Jesus's appearance and crucifixion occurred in the 49th and Jubilee before the destruction of the temple (echoes of a Jewish/Samaritan dating of the temple destruction occurring in a sabbatical cycle.
Everyone loves the happy times
User avatar
Peter Kirby
Site Admin
Posts: 8015
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 2:13 pm
Location: Santa Clara
Contact:

Re: Nailed: 10 Christian myths that show Jesus never existed

Post by Peter Kirby »

Bernard Muller wrote:Myth 3: I think the mention of "the brother of Jesus, him called christ, whose name is James" in Josephus Ant. is authentic. Mythicists' attempts to explain it away do not make sense.
Such explanations "do not make sense"? What kind of moron do you take your reader for?

Even those who argue for the authenticity of the reference must concede that a hypothesis of interpolation meets the minimum standard of making sense. Good grief.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
andrewcriddle
Posts: 2817
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 12:36 am

Re: Nailed: 10 Christian myths that show Jesus never existed

Post by andrewcriddle »

Kapyong wrote:Gday again,

A comment on Myth 1 -
Comparing Jesus resurrection to Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon - a popular internet meme lately - Fitzgerald says :

First, we have Caesar's own account (not directly we don't - Caesar's account does not specifically refer to the Rubicon - but at one stage in his account he is north of it, later he is south of it.) But we have nothing from Jesus's own hand, and we do not really know who wrote any of the Gospels.

Second, many of Caesar's enemies reported the crossing of the Rubicon, but we have no hostile or even neutral mentions of the resurrection until over a 100 years after the alleged event, when Christian beliefs were well known.

Third, there are numerous inscriptions, coins, mentions of battles, conscriptions and judgements, which form an alsmost continuous chain of evidence of Caesar's march. But there is no physical evidence of any kind for Jesus.

Fourth, almost every historian of the period mentions the crossing, often naming and quoting their sources and known to be reliable. But for Jesus we have no historians mentioning the resurrection till centuries later - and they are Christian historians.

Finally, the civil war could not have proceeded as it did if Caesar had not crossed the Rubicon with his army and captured Rome. By contrast the only thing necessary for Christianity is a belief.
The issue surely is not whether Caesar and his army physically crossed the Rubicon.

The interesting issue is whether the traditional account of the crossing, (i.e. that Caesar openly acknowledged at the time of the crossing that to cross the river was to pass the point of no return), is historically based.

It probably is based on history, (it must have been obvious that to cross the Rubicon was a significant step towards cicil war), but our earliest source, (Plutarch's parallel life), dates from c 100 CE. It is quite possible that later writers with the advantage of hindsight made the crossing much more significant than it appeared to be at the time.

Andrew Criddle
Post Reply