Category Archives: Christian origins

Dying For A Lie, part 94

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Over on Gary Marston’s Escaping Christian Fundamentalism, he has been arguing, along with some of you, about the resurrection with Joel Edmund Anderson, self-professed expert on all things Biblical. Joel – he has a PhD in Biblical Studies, don’t you know – has twice said in the discussion that the disciples would not have died for a lie, meaning they wouldn’t have let themselves be martyred if they hadn’t really seen Jesus alive again in the flesh.

I’ve addressed the assertion that they wouldn’t have died for a lie several times already on this blog: here, here and here for example, though some of my thinking about the Jesus phenomenon has changed since then. Nonetheless, I added my penny’s worth to Gary’s discussion (it’s difficult to get involved in real time because of the time differences between the US and UK):

And there it is again: ‘they wouldn’t suffer death and persecution for what they knew to be a lie.’

While you (Joel) mention the execution of James there is no evidence even in your hallowed text that this was because he believed in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

The later legends of the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul are just that: legends. (And Paul wasn’t even a disciple! Moreover, he is clear in Galatians that his experience of the risen Jesus was ‘in’ his head.) There is no evidence, none at all, for your claim that ‘the disciples’ (all of them?) died or were even persecuted because of their belief in a bodily resurrection.

If some were put to death, it could equally have been because of their abandonment of conventional Jewish beliefs; their provocation of religious authorities (there’s plenty evidence of this in the gospels); their replacement of emperor worship with a deified itinerant preacher or for political reasons. We simply do not know.

That said, there are zealots today prepared to die for lies (think 9/11, Islamist terrorists) so there is no reason to think it didn’t also happen 2,000 years ago.

This line of argument, as ‘proof’ of the resurrection is exceedingly weak, Joel, yet it appears to be all you’ve got.

Joel did not respond. I feel sure he will make the claim again at some point in the future because it’s what he, like many other Christians, want to believe, which is really what ‘faith’ is all about.

And now, the Conclusion

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It’s a game you can play all day.

  • First, choose a story – any story – from the gospels.
  • Look for all the metaphors in the story.
  • Note its allegorical elements.
  • Find either the myth from Jewish scripture and/or the part of Paul’s fantasy that the story is based on.
  • Read the story in light of these insights.

Once you’ve done this a few times – which you can, literally, till Kingdom come – you’ll realise that all the stories in the gospels are literary inventions. Stories that are replete with metaphor, reliant on earlier mythical sources and that read like allegory would be considered, in any other context, to be fiction.

And what will you conclude from this?

That just because the stories are from the gospels doesn’t grant them a free pass. Stories that fulfil all the criteria of fiction, as the gospel stories do, are elsewhere considered to be fiction: think Romulus, the non-canonical gospels, King Arthur, the Book of Mormon, the Chronicles of Narnia. So why not here?

That calling the stories ‘pericopes’, in an attempt to elevate their status, merely disguises the fact they are just stories.

You’d acknowledge that History, as in the recording of past events, is not written as allegory. It doesn’t depend on metaphor and symbolism to reveal hidden meanings. Historians reject or are highly sceptical of any accounts that depend on such literary techniques. They usually conclude these are not history, whatever else they might be.

You could, I suppose, try arguing that history in ancient times wasn’t the discipline it is now and did indeed incorporate elements from fiction. But you’d be wrong. Historical accounts of the first century have survived and do not confuse historical fact, however interpreted, with fiction. Writing that relies on allegory and hidden meanings is not considered to be history. You would then have to concede that the gospel narratives do not qualify as history. You would then be in agreement with the majority of scholars who think this.

Then you’d ask, why? Why, if Jesus was such an incredible guy, did so much have to be made up about him? You could, I guess, argue that an itinerant first-century preacher successfully manipulated events so that he fulfilled ‘prophecy’, complied, at least in Mark, with Paul’s (future) teaching and managed to make himself some sort of living breathing metaphor. Or you could conclude, applying Occam’s razor, that the stories are simply made up. And if you did, you’d be agreeing with Mark when he reveals that ‘everything is in parables’ (Mark 4:11).

You’d then ask yourself: if the miracles, the healings, the profundities, hyperbole, nativity tales, angels, demons, zombies, the transfiguration and much else besides are all fiction, then why not too the resurrection? Is it one of only a few episodes in the gospels – the crucifixion is often cited as another – that isn’t fiction? Is it the one of only a few stories in that’s factual and true? The empty tomb, the angels, the sightings by Mary, the disciples and Thomas, the fish breakfast, the ascension: are these historical when everything else is not? You’d have to ask on what criteria you were salvaging this particular story as historical when all that precedes it patently is not.

Then you’d have to start wondering if there really was a Jesus. The versions of him who appear in the gospels are constructs, characters created from metaphor, Old Testament stories and the teaching of the early Christian cult. If there really was a man who trailed around Palestine with an apocalyptic message, he is long gone. Indeed, he had vanished by the time the stories about him that we know as the gospels came to be written.

Jesus and the Blind Man

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This time we’ll take a closer look at Mark 8:22-26, a story about Jesus healing a blind man:

They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?”

He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”

Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Jesus sent him home, saying, “Don’t even go into the village.”

This parable is doing a lot of metaphorical heavy lifting.

First, it is located in Bethsaida, the home of some of the disciples as well as the place where Jesus does some of his most spectacular miracles, only later to curse the village for its lack of interest in him (Mark 11:21). It is symbolic of those who reject the cult’s message, or are too dim to see that their heavenly Jesus is the Messiah.

Second, the story is sandwiched (no pun intended) between the feeding of the four thousand, in which the hapless disciples fail to recognise Jesus’ miraculous status, and the account of Peter realising that Jesus is in fact the Messiah. The healing of the blind man, neatly placed between the two, is therefore an allegory within allegories about seeing (gettit?) Jesus for who he really is (i.e. what cultists believed him to be.)

Third, the story is a prophecy-fulfilled parable. Isaiah 35:5 says that when the Messiah comes ‘the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped.’ Jesus has to be made to do these things – he performs some ear unstopping too (Mark 7:31-35) – to show he is indeed the prophesied Messiah.

Fourth, physical blindness is a very obvious metaphor for spiritual blindness. The preceding story reminds those who can’t ‘see’ the cult’s truth for themselves: ‘Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?’ (Mark 8:18). This is itself a borrowing of Isaiah 6:9-10. Indeed, the entire story, together with that of the deaf man being cured, is a parable of Isaiah’s ‘prophecy’:

You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall indeed see but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.

Jesus’ healing of blindness then becomes a metaphor for seeing the light, as Peter does in the subsequent story when he finally recognises him, like the cult has done, as the Messiah.

Fifth, Jesus spits on or in the man’s eyes: a very clumsy metaphor for the streams of living water that emanate from God himself in Jeremiah 2:13. Perhaps too there’s a reference to the baptism ritual beloved of the early cult. (Christian bloggers themselves have trouble explaining this gross detail that Mark sees fit to include in his story.)

Sixth, in order to give sight to the blind man, Jesus (or rather the cult) first removes him – the initiate – from the village, from those who don’t even know they are blind. Next, Jesus/the cult shows him how those who are spiritually blind are no better than trees wandering around aimlessly (yes, Mark really does mix his metaphors). Jesus/the cult then opens the initiate’s eyes to the Truth so that finally he sees ‘everything clearly.’ He can now never return to his former state; his ‘home’ is with the cult, not with the spiritually blind outside it.

The story is evidently metaphorical. That Jesus spits in the man’s face is not, as some Christians claim, evidence that it really happened. It is weighed down by so much symbolism and clunky metaphor, and at the same time strategically placed between two other ‘seeing the light’ stories that its literary origins are apparent. Mark and his fellow cultists knew what they were doing when they dressed their beliefs up in stories like these. As they themselves insist, you need only open your eyes to see it.

Jesus and the Leper

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I thought we might share a couple of Bible studies these next couple of weeks. Some of you will remember these from your Christian days, when you’d gather with other eager believers so that a self-appointed expert could tell you what a particular story in the Bible really meant. I’m no expert, just someone who subjected myself to such indoctrination while all the time wondering if what I was being told was really what the passage was about. Doubts, however, were ‘of the devil’ so any such critical thinking needed to be suppressed. Since my eyes were opened to the allegorical nature of much of what is in the Bible and in the gospels in particular, I now see these same passages in a completely different light. I hope you’ll allow me to share my insights with you.

First off, it’s Mark 1:40-45, in which Jesus (seemingly) heals a leper:

 A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” Jesus was indignant. He reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” 

Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cleansed. Jesus sent him away at once with a strong warning: “See that you don’t tell this to anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.” 

Instead he went out and began to talk freely, spreading the news. As a result, Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed outside in lonely places. Yet the people still came to him from everywhere.

The giveaway phrase here is ‘make me clean’. The man does not ask Jesus to heal him which, suffering from a debilitating disease as he was, would have been the most obvious, most pressing request to make. Instead, he asks to be ‘cleansed’ with all its ritual connotations, the word used here, καθαρίζω (katharizo), also meaning ‘purify’. According to Leviticus 4: 11-12, leprosy was a condition that was spiritually unclean. Only by making the prescribed offerings – the usual doves, lambs and ‘crimson stuff’ – could a leper who was already healed become ritually pure.

Who, according to the New Testament, replaces all the sacrificial offerings of the old covenant? Why, it’s Jesus himself of course (1 Corinthians 11:25, Ephesians 5:25-26 etc). Jesus cleanses and purifies the leper in the story, just as he is able to cleanse and purify sinners. This is what the early cult believed: ‘Ask Jesus, the heavenly Christ, to cleanse you of your sins and, just like he does for the leper in this parable, he’ll do it for you. As a penitent believer, you are the leper. Not only are you cleansed of your sin, you are purified.’

This also explains why Jesus is ‘indignant’ when the leper first approaches him. On the surface it makes little sense for him to be indignant with the man, which is why some translations change this verse to say Jesus ‘felt compassion for him.’ Jesus’ metaphorical annoyance is for those who have allowed the man’s spiritual condition to have deteriorated to a state comparable with leprosy. The Jewish priestly system, symbolised anachronistically in Mark as the Scribes and Pharisees, the later arch-enemies of the new cult.

Jesus commands the leper to visit the Jewish priest to demonstrate that he, Jesus, is the new cleanser of sins, replacing the priesthood itself. Instead, the leper goes against Jesus’ and the early cult’s wishes. My God, how could the cult remain secret and exclusive if newly cleansed converts behaved like this!

So there you have it. The leper is a metaphor for the sinner in need of the heavenly Jesus’ cleansing. His leprosy is a metaphor for the sin itself. The healing is a metaphor for the penitent’s spiritual purification. The man’s by-passing of the Jewish law is a metaphor for Jesus replacing the law. The cleansed leper’s shouting about it is a metaphor for the early cult’s desire to keep its rituals and teaching secret. Its parables like this one were designed to enlighten cult members while obfuscating and confusing the unbeliever (Mark 4:11-12).

As a literary creation, an allegory replete with metaphor, this event need never have happened in reality. Given its literary nature, it’s highly unlikely it did.

God and the Domino Effect

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Once free of belief in God, everything that follows collapses.

No God means –

   No divinely inspired scripture, no sin, no salvation, no need of salvation, no repentance or divine forgiveness (and no need of these things either), no grace.

   No supernatural, no heaven or hell, no Satan, angels or demons, no Holy Spirit, no effective prayer, no miracles, no judgement, no eternal life.

  No Son of God, no God Incarnate, no prophecy, no atonement, and, most significantly, no resurrection. 

According to the Bible, God resurrected Jesus (Romans 6:4; Galatians 1:1; Acts 2:22 etc). Therefore, no God = no resurrection.

So, where did all these ideas that, once God ceases to exist, fall like dominoes? Answer: the only place ideas ever come from: the human mind. Everything ever associated with gods, and with YHWH (Old and New versions) is entirely human invention. This is the only logical, rational conclusion.

  Paul’s vision of what he took to be the Risen Christ and his consequent theology: the product of a tortured imagination.

  The resurrection appearances supposedly experienced by Cephas and others: within their own heads (grief-induced hallucinations, dreams, trances, emotional agitation). Or: an emotional response to some natural phenomenon such as bright lights.

  The stories of Jesus that these visions inspired: invented by creative writers imaginatively applying ‘prophecy’ imagined by earlier writers.

  If he existed, Jesus’ Messiah complex: worked up entirely within his own religion-soaked brain.

  His conclusion that the end of the age was nigh and that he would be king of the new order (assuming he really did think this): the result of wishful thinking, all in his imagination.

Subsequent additions to the Christian experience: the Trinity, guesswork about the Messiah’s delayed return, the panoply of saints, heresy, blasphemy, ‘God’s standards’, the inerrancy of scripture, apologetics and, coming full circle, conversion experiences. All creations of the human imagination and emotions.

With no actual God, this is the only viable explanation of the phenomenon that is religion. Human beings did it.

 

Whatever Happened to Yeshua bar Yosef?

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What happened to the real Jesus? The itinerant Jew who trudged around Palestine with a small group of followers, preaching who knows what. How to survive the imminent end of the world perhaps. His name wasn’t really Jesus. That’s a Hellenised version of the Jewish name Yeshua: Ἰησοῦς’ pronounced ‘Yay-soos’, which means (suspiciously) ‘YHWH is salvation’. The bar Yosef part means son of Joseph, not son of God. Whatever he was about, this Yeshua was crucified by the Romans and soon after his death, one or two of his friends convinced themselves they’d seen him alive again. Or so the story goes.

The earliest information we have about Yeshua includes very little of what we now think we know of him. The crucifixion/resurrection are the only parts of the story that interest Paul, and then only because he thinks he too has seen the risen Yeshua inside his own head. But this Yeshua, whom Paul does indeed call Jesus, is no itinerant preacher. Paul seems unaware of any of his story, his parables, aphorisms or miracles. Instead he consistently describes Jesus as a heavenly being who speaks to him through ‘revelation’, explaining in convoluted terms how his death leads to salvation. This Jesus, now with appended ‘Christ’, Greek for Messiah, is an amalgam of elements from mystery religions, resurrection myths and Paul’s own fanciful ideas. He is hard to reconcile with a real man who walked the Earth years earlier.

Verdict: Paul’s celestial Christ isn’t Yeshua bar Yosef. Paul’s Christ never existed.

The accounts of Jesus that appear decades later attempt to ground Paul’s imaginary being historically and geographically. In this, the gospels are superficially successful but even a cursory analysis reveals serious fault lines. The gospels rely heavily on myth, metaphor and the misapplication of ‘prophecy’, rather than historical fact. They are a form of midrash. The first, written anonymously round about 70CE and later attributed to someone called Mark, is, as today’s TV dramas often say, based on an idea by Paul. It is unlikely it reflects an historical Yeshua. Subsequent gospels, also anonymous but known later as Matthew and Luke, are themselves based on Mark’s, importing its flaws and introducing spurious material of their own. In neither is Jesus the son of Joseph; he’s the son of God, born of a virgin

Verdict: the Jesus of the synoptic gospels is not Yeshua bar Yosef. He’s a literary construct, a fantasy figure.

When the fourth gospel appears, sixty to seventy years after Yeshua is supposed to have lived, the Jesus character has evolved yet again. John’s supremely confident, egotistical creation equates himself fully with God: ‘I and the Father are one,’ as he puts it. This Jesus bears little relation to Mark’s central character who keeps his mission and identity secret (as well he might as a literary construct created primarily for cult members in the know.)

Verdict: the fourth gospel’s Jesus is not Yeshua bar Yosef. He’s constructed from the beliefs of later versions of the cult.

By the time of Revelation (95-96CE), Christ has become a Game of Thrones reject, overseeing the destruction of demons, dragons and other non-existent creatures. Any semblance of reality has been left far behind.

Verdict: Revelation’s Christ isn’t Yeshua bar Yosef. He’s as imaginary as Paul’s Christ, another fanatic’s ‘vision’.

Can Yeshua bar Yosef be rescued from all these accretions? Can a historical figure be detected beneath the layers of fantasy constructed around him (or the idea of him at least)? The attempts made in the last 150 years suggest not. He is lost for good underneath layers of myth and magic.

Does it matter? Not really. None of his followers today would be interested even if he could be unearthed and resurrected. They are content with the Jesus of imagination: Paul’s, the gospel writers’, the creators of creeds, ministers who interpret the stories about him and their own emotional need. Today’s Christ is an imaginary being, a heavenly superman as unreal as the sky gods who preceded him; a faith-created myth.

Verdict: the Jesus worshipped by today’s Christians isn’t Yeshua bar Yosef either. That character is lost to us. So early did cultists lose sight of him, he may as well have not existed.

Perhaps he didn’t. 

Whatever Happened to Mary Magdalene?

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(The risen Jesus) appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve (1 Corinthians 15:12)

When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had driven seven demons. (Mark 16:9)

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb… Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshipped him. (Matthew 28: 1 & 9)

Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance… she turned around and saw Jesus standing there. (John 20: 1 & 14)

Whatever happened to Mary Magdalene? I mean, where did she go? She’s everywhere in the gospels: following Jesus and his entourage around the place, funding his layabout lifestyle (Luke 8:1-3) and being first to see him after he returned from the dead. After that, nothing. Luke doesn’t even bring her back for his sequel and no one else in the New Testament so much as mentions her. When, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul lists those who, like him, have had a vision of the risen Christ, she’s conspicuously absent. Mary is the first person to see Jesus resurrected according to three of the four gospels, yet in the far earlier tradition mentioned by Paul, she doesn’t get a look in. Her place is taken by Cephas.

The neglect of Mary Magdalene in early tradition could of course be because she was a woman, and a woman’s testimony, back in those less than enlightened times, was worth far less than a man’s. However, it’s far more likely that whoever created the creed had never heard of her. Why not? Because the gospels didn’t exist when they came up with it. They had no idea that a woman was supposedly the first to see Jesus alive again. As far as they were aware, it was ‘Cephas’ who’d had the first vision of the risen Lord. Yet Peter – assuming he and Cephas are the same person – isn’t the first to see the risen Jesus in any of the gospels.

Mary Magdalene is side-lined like this because when the creed was created, and later still when Paul quotes it in 1 Corinthians 15, the stories about her hadn’t yet been invented. It’s safe to say, she hadn’t been invented.

In fact, Mary Magdalene and most of the rest of the support cast from the (future) gospels aren’t referred to anywhere else in the New Testament. This includes at least eight of the disciples from the slightly differing lists in the gospels, the Virgin Mary, Joseph, the angel Gabriel, the Magi, Nicodemus, Lazarus, Martha & Mary, Judas (apart from Luke’s side-splitting story about him in Acts), Barabbas, Joseph of Arimathea and Doubting Thomas. Likewise, fictionalised versions of historical figures with key roles in the gospel stories aren’t referred to either: Herod, Pilate, Caiaphas and John the Baptist(?) are all absent, even from epistles written and forged after the appearance of the gospels’ ‘cunningly devised fables’ (2 Peter 1:16).

Decades after the early creed of 1 Corinthians 15 and Paul’s letters, Mark invented Mary Magdalene, as well as many other characters who appear in his gospel. His allegory then became the basis for the other three canonical gospels, whose authors added their own imaginary characters.

And just as they invented the earthly Jesus’ companions and adversaries, they created too his miracles, teaching, cryptic parables, bodily resurrection and ascension. Mary Magdalene was but one small aspect of their ingenuity.

 

The Great Resurrection Scam

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Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.  For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 (circa AD 49-51)

Paul said that because Jesus died and rose from the dead others would too. How does this follow?

He also claimed that all a person had to do to be sure of a spiritual resurrection was to believe that Jesus had already risen (1 Corinthians 15:20, AD 53-54), How did he know this? Almost certainly it came to him in one of his visions and his subsequent ‘revelations’ (‘the Lord’s word’ as he puts it in the letter to the Thessalonian sect).

Possibly, though less likely, he learnt it from the Christians he persecuted prior to his conversion. If so, where did they get the idea from? That the cult members in Thessalonica had to ask Paul what would happen to those who had passed away suggests this wasn’t a significant concern prior to this point. Paul and other early believers thought the Messiah/Son of Man was going to appear within their lifetimes (‘we who are still alive’ etc). It was only when cultists started dying off in noticeable numbers, and the Lord remained a no-show, that it started to become an issue. Paul had to make something up. And make it up he did.

How the Bible tells us the Resurrection was nothing more than Visions

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I’ve written about this before, but want to pull together some strands that demonstrate the risen Jesus was a vision or hallucination. He appeared only in the mind of others: the New Testament tells us as much.

Exhibit 1. Paul writes of the appearance of the risen Jesus, whom he sees as a ‘life-giving Spirit’, being ‘in’ him (Galatians 1.16). Paul has more than one such vision, including his trip to heaven recounted in 2 Corinthians 12.2, which he refers to as his ‘revelations’.

Exhibit 2. Paul implies in Corinthians 15.5-8 that others who have experienced the post-mortem Jesus ‘saw’ him in exactly the same way he did. For Paul, there was no difference between his inner-visions and those experienced by the so-called apostles.

Exhibit 3. The author of Acts creates a story out of Paul’s first vision, the famous account of his conversion on the road to Damascus. It’s a fabrication of course, told differently each time it’s referred to Even so, Luke retains the visionary nature of the experience: Jesus is a bright light and a disembodied voice.

Exhibit 4. The other sightings of the risen Jesus in Acts are visions. When, for example, Stephen is about to be stoned (Acts 7:54-56) he sees in his mind’s eye the heavens open and Jesus sitting at the right hand of god. Other New Testament encounters of the resurrected Jesus, such as John’s Revelation, are explicitly said to be visions.

Exhibit 5. Many of the sightings of the risen Jesus in Matthew and Luke are not of a real, physical human being. Those who experience him see him materialising in locked rooms, vanishing at will and floating up into the clouds. None of these events actually happened; they are the gospel writers’ literary realisations of visions experienced decades earlier, and they retain the hallucinatory qualities of those experiences.

Exhibit 6. Remaining with the gospels’ accounts of the risen Jesus, there is the strange phenomenon of those experiencing him failing to recognise him. Mary in the garden thinks he’s the gardener; the disciples on the road to Emmaus don’t know its him until he breaks bread; the disciples mistake him for someone else on the shore until he tells them how to fish properly. Most damning of all, some of the inner circle of disciples doubt it’s Jesus they’re seeing in their collective visions (Matt 28:17-18). Again, these stories preserve the tradition that the earlier visions weren’t always recognised as Jesus. And why wasn’t he? Because he was an hallucination

Exhibit 7. The risen Jesus has to prove who he is. According to Acts 1:1-3, he ‘presents himself’ his followers, some of whom have wandered around aimlessly with him for three years, and has to convince them he is who he appears to be. And, the text suggests, it takes him forty days to do it. This makes no sense. A far better explanation of this story (and it is a story) is that having experienced their visions of something-they-took-to-be-the-resurrected-Jesus (bright lights? Disembodied voices?), his followers set about convincing themselves that what they experienced really was their former Master. This they did by scouring the scriptures to find ‘proof’ that the Messiah would die and rise again. We know this is how their thinking worked. The same process was used to create the gospels and is evident throughout the New Testament.

Exhibit 8. Dead people stay dead. They do not resurrect.. This is not an a priori assumption. No corpse has ever revived after 36 hours or indeed any other period of time. We know this experientially, statistically and scientifically. Only in stories and religious myth do the dead return. This is what we are dealing with here: stories and myth that flesh out the visions and hallucinations of a few religious zealots.

Either All True Or None True

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About 2,500 years ago, a man called Elijah went up to heaven while still alive. He was taken through a whirlwind in a chariot of fire, pulled by horses of fire. This amazing event was witnessed by several other people who were profoundly affected by it. The story of this ascension was possibly relayed orally for many years until finally being written down in what is now 2 Kings 2.

Did any of this really happen?

Of course not. It’s a myth.

Some time in the 4th century BCE, the first king of Rome, Romulus, was taken, while still alive, to the dwelling place of the gods. From that time on he was worshipped as a god – some said he was eternal to begin with – with a temple being built in the very place from where he had ascended. Later he appeared to one of his followers, Julius Proculus who said the resurrected Romulus was larger and more beautiful than ever, armed with weapons shining like fire. Julius Proculus attested to this appearance of the resurrected Romulus, swore an oath to its veracity and relayed it faithfully to others.

Did any of this really happen?

Of course not. It’s a myth.

https://mythologymatters.wordpress.com/2019/04/18/easter-mythology-the-resurrection-as-modeled-on-greco-roman-myths/

It is not known when Mithras was born, if indeed he was. He emerged from a rock in the spiritual realm as a child or youth, ritually slaughtering a bull and sharing a banquet with the god Sol. He guided souls to the after-life, propelled as they were by the bull’s blood and flames. He was worshipped primarily by soldiers who saw him as their salvation from the bitterness of earthly life. There were rituals to be followed to become a true initiate and for Mithraic mysteries to be revealed. How Mithras made himself known to his acolytes is unknown, but in the first three centuries CE, his cult rivalled that of the Christians in popularity.

Did all of this really happen?

Of course not. It’s a fabrication, a myth.

In the 8th century CE, the prophet Muhammad flew from Mecca to Jerusalem on a winged equine. Once in Jerusalem he climbed a ladder to heaven. Once there he travelled through the various levels, having conversations with other lesser prophets, before entering Allah’s domain. His journey was later revealed to two early prophets who had known Muhammed when they were boys. They conveyed the details accurately until they were recorded, briefly at first in the Qur’an and later in more detail in its supplement, the hadith.

Did any of this really happen?

Of course not. It’s a fabrication, a myth.

In the early 19th century, Joseph Smith was visited by Jesus and his Father in a vision. They told him that he should not join any existing church because they were all in error. Later, a hitherto unknown angel named Moroni appeared to Smith and indicated to him where some gold plates were buried. He instructed Smith to dig up and translate the plates. Obediently, Smith did so, using a pair of seer stones for the translation. The resulting Book of Mormon was a revelation of Christ’s activities in North America following his resurrection. Smith wisely had a number of his associates witness, in writing, the existence of the gold plates as well as their supernatural provenance.

Did any of this really happen?

Of course not. It’s a fabrication.

In 1916 the Virgin Mary appeared numerous times to three poor Portuguese children, giving them instruction and prophesying to them. She also promised that she would perform a miracle at Fatima. Accordingly, between 30,000 and 100,000 people, including reporters and photographers, gathered at Fatima where many saw multi-coloured lights before the sun itself ‘danced’. It came closer to the Earth before zig-zagging back to its usual place in the sky. While not all of the attendees testified to the phenomenon of the dancing sun (some saw only the lights, others nothing at all) many did and testified to the effect the miracle had had upon them.

Did all of this really happen?

Of course not. It’s a fabrication based on hallucinations.

Around 30CE, a rabbi known as Jesus, who had been born of a virgin, gathered together 12 followers and went around Galilee preaching absolution from sin and the imminence of the Kingdom of God. He announced he was the Messiah who would rule the Earth when the kingdom arrived. The Jewish authorities took exception to his claims and petitioned the Romans to have him executed. This they did, only for Jesus to come back to life three days later, appearing in visions to his followers. He ascended to heaven, promising that those who believed in him would enjoy eternal life. Some of his disciples spread his message faithfully until it was eventually written down, first by a former Pharisee called Paul and then by four authors who accurately recorded what Jesus had said and done.

Did all of this really happen?

What do you think?