Category Archives: Jesus disappoints

Replacement Post

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This is not the scheduled post. I’ve shelved that for the time being for fear of nasty repercussions. I don’t believe it was inflammatory; in fact, it was well researched and perfectly reasonable. However, as all theistic religions are barbaric at heart, with followers and supporters prepared to take radical action in defence of their particular man-made deity, I’m not prepared to take that risk just yet.

We live in turbulent times and religion is in the midst of it all, maniacally stirring the pot. It may well turn out to be the death of us all. Let us wait and see.

Jesus the Great Revolutionary

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According to Matthew and Luke’s gospels, Jesus was a revolutionary. He wanted to see the world turned around, the very meaning of the word revolution. He preached that the world as it was would be destroyed and remade, this time with the social order reversed. Those who had been first in the old order – the rich, the powerful, the cruel – would be made to be the last, while those who were formerly last – the poor, the downtrodden, the lowly, the compassionate – would find themselves in first place. They’d be best in show, the new top dogs and, in ways that really mattered, rich. Meanwhile, those who had really committed themselves to him, his closest followers, would become the rulers with him of the renewed revolutionised order that he envisaged: his Kingdom of God.

How would all this happen? Jesus’ Father in Heaven would soon be sending the Son of Man to set the revolution in motion. This powerful being, who perhaps Jesus envisaged as being none other than himself, would ensure all the unimaginable but necessary changes would be achieved. There would be some violence of course, because you can’t have a revolution without at least a little violence:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. (The Prince of Peace himself in Matthew 10:34)

Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. (Matthew 3:10)

Once the old is done away with and the new order established, there would be something of a socialist utopia on Earth. Everyone would share what they had; each would have his or her needs met by everyone else. Even those who came late to the party would enjoy all the rewards the new Kingdom had to offer (Matthew 20:1-16). There’d have to be some slaughter too of course: the one who advocated loving one’s enemies looked forward to exacting bloody revenge on his:

“But as for these enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and slaughter them in my presence.” (Luke 19:27. See also Revelation)

Except of course, none of this happened. The Son of Man did not emerge from the clouds when Jesus expected him to. He himself did not become the Son of Man, ready to kick-start the great social revolution. Instead, the rich, the powerful and the cruel put an end to Jesus’ revolutionary ideas; they were gaining too much traction among the poor and downtrodden and needed to be quashed. An uprising couldn’t be ruled out, specially as Jesus recognised the need for force:

From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has been coming violently and the violent take it by force. (Matthew 11.12)

He predicted too that blood would be spilt, going so far as to recommended his followers arm themselves:

He said to them… ‘the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, “And he was counted among the lawless”; and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.’ They said, ‘Lord, look, here are two swords.’ He replied, ‘It is enough.’ (Luke 22:36-38)

According to the gospels, the Jewish religious leaders persuaded the Roman authorities to do away with this dangerous revolutionary and insurrectionist. Once they were made aware of him, the Romans were more than happy to oblige. They mocked Jesus’ aspirations as King of the Jews and crucified him alongside other ‘rebels’ (Matthew 27:38).

His followers however were not yet ready to let go of him or his revolutionary ideas. Perhaps they saw the possibility of their ruling the world slipping from them. They continued to preach that he would appear again, possibly as the Son of Man, to bring about the revolution he had foreseen.

This is, as I say, Matthew and Luke’s version of events. The writers of the fourth gospel would jettison the failed New-World-Order narrative, building their own Superman-Jesus and dispensing entirely with the great social revolution. In their story, the Kingdom of God is ‘not of this world’ (John 18:36) but only in people’s heads.

The four gospels are, of course, make-believe; allegories of the hoped for Messiah. The Kingdom of God, the revolutionary leader, the reversal of the social order are what some of the earliest cultists wished for, looked for, hoped for. It is their aspirations that are reflected and embodied in the earliest gospels. Like the hopes and dreams of every cultist before and since, they came to nothing.

Many of today’s Christians would not, in any case, have cared for the Kingdom of God that Matthew and Luke’s Jesus is made to promote; far too much socialism and the wrong sort of people in charge. Jesus’ new Kings of the World would, in any case, have made a mess of things in much the same way as all those who took control in the revolutions the world did actually experience. Power, as Lord Acton put it, corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Better for Jesus that he became a personal saviour, confined to the minds of those who think he really existed, a mere revolutionary in the head.

The Real Jesus

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Dear Christian,

When you became a Christian, did you meet the man who wandered around Galilee 2,000 years and who, according to ancient stories, died on a Roman cross? Was it an actual human being you met at the moment you ‘saw the light’ (the clue’s in the term)? Or was it something – an emotional experience perhaps – that you interpreted as the presence of a heavenly, supernatural being? If you’re honest you’ll acknowledge you didn’t meet a real person but felt something that you took to be one.

When you pray to Jesus, exactly who are you praying to? Is it the man who drifted around Galilee 2,000 years ago? Are your thoughts magically transported back in time so he hears you, somehow or other, in his head? No? So do you pray to a supernatural, celestial Jesus who for the past 2,000 years has been sitting at the right hand of God in a mythical never, never land? I’m guessing you’ll say this is the Jesus you commune with (while disputing my calling heaven never, never land).

When you worship Jesus are your honeyed words whisked back 2,000 years to sustain a man who meandered around Galilee spouting profundities before getting himself killed? Or do you envisage your prayers reaching a supernatural figure living out there in space or maybe in another dimension? (C’mon, you know it’s the latter.)

When you say Jesus was present at the creation of the world as described at the start of Genesis, do you mean the man who, billions of years later, would roam around Galilee? Or do you mean a celestial  Jesus who was a part of the Godhead in some mysterious, inexplicable way? (I’m guessing, again, it’s this latter.)

When you say Jesus will judge the living and the dead at the End of the Age, do you refer to the man who lived 2,000 years ago, trudging around Galilee? Or do you mean some mystical manifestation of this character who’s eager to separate the sheep from the goats while hovering in the sky prior to massacring the goats? (It’s this version, isn’t it.)

In the Bible, did Paul meet the flesh-and-blood man who had slogged around Galilee a few years earlier? Or did he hallucinate a celestial being as a flash of light? (It was the latter, wasn’t it.)

When you speak of the Jesus who died on the cross to save you from your sins, do you quote the individual who supposedly drifted round Galilee 2,000 years ago? Or do you more often reference Paul, who never met him and knows nothing of his supposed earthly life? (You know which.)

Yet despite your belief in mystical, spiritual versions of Jesus, you are adamant he was not a mythical being. Not at the start of time, not at the end, nor in Paul’s writings; not in your own conversion, not in your prayers or worship and especially not in your own inner experience of him. No, he was, according to you, a very real person.

Yet there are no signs you believe in this historical Jesus, the man who allegedly roamed around Galilee two millennia ago. You ignore him and his teaching if favour of a celestial superman. How do we know you ignore him? All the examples above for a start, but there’s also the way you don’t do what he says. You don’t love your neighbour and enemies alike, you don’t sell all you have to give to the poor, you don’t give to everyone who asks, you don’t despise riches, you don’t refrain from judging others. You rarely turn the other cheek or go the extra mile and you are not prepared to forgive endlessly. You don’t accept that this man believed the End of Age was coming in his own time (or at least that his script-writers did) nor that he was disastrously wrong. It’s the cosmic super-being you go for every time.

How very strange. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful phenomenon, don’t you think?

The Day After The Rapture

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Are you still there?

Either the rapture didn’t happen or there aren’t many True Christians round where I live. I watched all day for them jetting into the sky to meet Jesus but didn’t see a single one.

What went wrong? That South African preacher Joshua Mhlakela who saw Jesus surely can’t have been mistaken. Jesus told him clearly that yesterday, or maybe today, would be when he’d be back to collect his Chosen and judge the great multitude of sinners. I even turned on the TV last night to see if it had happened elsewhere. I thought the Final Judgement was underway with some dude ticking off the UN. Turned out just to be some big orange guy, not Jesus in disguise.

So what now? I think I can guess. Jesus’ message to Joshua Mhlakela will be reinterpreted: it wasn’t that the Rapture was going to happen yesterday, or today. It’s the events leading up to the rapture that he promised would kick off this week. That’ll be it. The Rapture itself is still some time off, as it always is.

Mhlakela’s vision of Jesus was no different from the ones the earliest Christian believers had: those character with fake names like Peter and Paul. Dismiss the good pastor’s vision of the Lord and what JC purportedly said and you have to dismiss the visions of those early fanatics who operated under aliases. Visions, dreams and hallucinations have no bearing on reality, as Mhlakela and the thousands who believed him have demonstrated yet again. Christianity and many other faiths are founded on such imaginings. As Luke puts it in Acts 2:17 during ‘the Last Days’ of 2,000 years ago:

And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams (misquoting Joel 2: 28-29)

This is the basis of the Christian delusion, and every other.

But Some Doubted

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We know that all the accounts of the resurrection appearances are inconsistent, incompatible with each other and read like visions or hallucinations. If that’s not enough there are two aspects of the stories that are delivered almost as asides that give the game away.

Matthew 28:17 records that

…the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.

Meanwhile, in a completely different set of resurrection appearances, Acts 1:3 claims that

After his suffering, (Jesus) presented himself to (his chosen apostles) and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.

These verses from Matthew and Acts are almost always overlooked by true believers. In the Matthew passage we have a number of the eleven remaining disciples doubting that what they were experiencing was the resurrected Jesus. That’s the same disciples whom the gospel tells us trailed round the countryside with him listening to him as he regularly predicted his death and resurrection. Yet when the resurrection happened (spoiler: it didn’t really) they doubted that what they were seeing was Jesus.

How can this be? Did he not look himself, as in the other tall-tales of his reappearance? Was he so changed he was unrecognisable? If so, how did anybody recognise him? That’s the trouble with visions and apparitions: they’re just not clear or convincing.

Luke, meanwhile, extends the time that Jesus spends with his followers from a day or so in his gospel to 40 days in Acts. This is when Jesus offers the ’many convincing proofs’ that he is the Messiah and has survived death. This really makes no sense at all. As I asked in a previous post (slightly edited here) –

By ‘many convincing proofs’: what does this mean? That he had to prove he’d come back to life? Couldn’t his old chums see that for themselves? Couldn’t they recognise the man with whom they’d spent the last three years (allegedly)? Or if they could, weren’t they convinced he’d returned from the dead so that he felt the need to prove it? And how did he prove it? With a death certificate? By letting them poke his holes? And this took forty days?

Isn’t it more likely they were subject to group hysteria and some sort of hallucination (they’d had hallucinations before – see Matthew 17:1-9) and they then had to convince each other that what they’d experienced was really Jesus?

This is what was really going on: it took those who’d hallucinated seeing the heavenly Messiah a significant amount of time (what ‘40 days’ actually means) to concoct what they thought proved their visions were real. Like Paul (perhaps copying him), they found this ‘proof’ in the ‘prophecies’ of Jewish scripture.

This is the ‘many convincing proofs’ Luke refers to. No resurrected god-man spent 40 days offering evidence from scripture that he was really back from the dead. The visionaries themselves came up with it. Unfortunately for them, relying on shaky exegesis and misapplied passages from ancient texts is no proof at all.

Try telling that to Paul and the gospel writers though. All of Christianity rests on the visions of a few and the ‘many convincing proofs’ from scripture that persuaded them that what they’d experienced was really the Messiah, manifested in all his glory.

We’re talking a faith built on sand indeed. No wonder those sensible early disciples doubted every part of it.

Spiritual Forces of Evil in the Heavenly Realms

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Original AI image from Night Cafe

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 6:12)

…you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. (Ephesians 2:2)

…the prince of this world now stands condemned. (John 16:11)

The first-century worldview of early Christian cultists was that somewhere above the Earth a battle raged between God and Satan. The powers of darkness – the devil and his demons – had in ages past launched an attack on the Lord and his angels. This war in the spiritual realm continued unabated up to the time when a cultist wrote Ephesians, pretending to be Paul. Paul himself had already alluded to Satan as the god of this age (2 Corinthians 4:4), while the authors of the fourth gospel would later refer to him as the archon – ruler and prince – of this world (John 12:31; 14:30).

Which just goes to show how the Almighty God they believed in was nothing of the sort. He had tussled with his arch-enemy for eons without quashing his rebellion and putting an end to his persistent attacks. The stand-off had gone on for millennia, and, according to today’s Christians, is still happening. A puny god it is who cannot get the better of one of his far less powerful creations.

And what are God and Satan fighting over? Us, apparently. The devil wants control of human beings.

Why? Who knows. In fact, according to Paul, Satan already has control over us. He enslaves us to sin, which in turn leads to death (Romans 5:12, 6:23). 

Not to worry though, Paul, fake Paul and the fourth gospel writers assure us that their enfeebled God has a cunning plan! He’ll allow a being who is precious to him – like a son, in fact – to be sacrificed so that anyone who believes in him will no longer be enslaved to Satan and sin and will be granted eternal life. How’s that for special magic!

Who shouted out from the back that that sounds like a cop-out? It’s a fantasy bordering on the insane. Like it or not, we are somehow embroiled in heavenly warfare, specially if we’re of the number who’ve bought into this malarkey.

While we’re at it, have you noticed how so many of the wars and skirmishes currently afflicting the world have religion at their heart? YHWH is scrapping with Allah, Allah is up against the Great Satan while Jesus – no stranger to war-mongering himself – presides over it all, leading the world to Armageddon and his own ultimate ‘return’.

Here’s my suggestion. All the gods and demons need to get their act together. They should agree to an ultimate slug-fest, a final battle in the spiritual realm to decide who’s really the Supreme God – the last deity standing – and leave us humans out of it entirely. Surely, being gods, they’re up for finding out who can piss furthest up the wall.

A preposterous idea? Of course it is. None of these fantasy beings exist. There’s no YHWH, Allah, Heavenly Father, Jesus, Krishna, angels, archons, Satan or ‘spiritual forces of evil’ to duke it out. There’s no ‘heavenly plane’ where they can get to it. Everyone of these despotic characters is a human creation, as are the wars, disputes and skirmishes they underpin. It follows that none of them can be the supreme god and certainly none of them are worth fighting over. It’s time we grew up and put away all of our childish imaginary tyrants.

Seek and Ye Shall Find

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Thanks to all the Christians who responded to my questions last week. Here’s the answers (in red) they helped me reach.

I asked –

1. What happens to you, as a Christian, when you die:

a) You go immediately to heaven (The Bible says this precisely nowhere)

b) You go into suspended animation until Christ’s coming and the final judgement (Paul implies this is the case in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. You have to ask yourself how he knew this)

c) You cease to exist (Yup, this is it. So, as Dolly says, better get to livin’)

2. According to the first three gospels, how long was Jesus in the grave?

a) About 36 hours (Friday tea-time till just before sunrise on Sunday. You do the Math)

b) 3 whole days (see above. Despite saying in Matthew 12:40 that this is how long he’d be dead, he fell way short. The fourth gospel, on the other hand, alters the timeline to make things fit)

c) He wasn’t: he went down to hell (according to 1 Peter 4:6 and the so-called Apostles’ Creed this is exactly what he did. Some people are daft enough to believe it)

3. Which of the following does Paul refer to in his letters?

a) Jesus’ miraculous birth (he mentions this zero times)

b) Jesus’ parables, teaching and miracles (likewise; not a single mention)

c) The Empty Tomb (nor this. Don’t you think that’s strange?)

4. How often did Paul refer to Jesus’ second coming?

a) In all of his letters (Nope)

b) 2 or 3 times (Nope)

c) Never (That’s it: not once. Paul looks forward to Jesus coming soon, as if it’ll be his first visit: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 again. Don’t you think that’s significant?)

5. How often did Jesus refer to his second coming?

a) Once or twice (No)

b) Frequently (Again, no)

c) Never (Yes, never. The fictional Jesus of the gospels says someone called ‘the Son of Man’ would be arriving real soon: Mark 14:62. Occasionally Jesus’ creators suggest he and the Son of Man are one and the same, which they are in that both are fictional)

6. When did Paul say the Messiah would be coming to the Earth?

a) Thousands of years in the future (To hear modern Christians talk you’d think this was it, but no: Paul never said this.)

b) While he himself was still alive (He says clearly that he expected he’d still be alive when Jesus came down from heaven: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. How many more times?)

c) He didn’t say (course he did: see above)

8. According to the gospels, when did Jesus say the Son of Man would be coming to the Earth?

a) He didn’t (he did)

b) Thousands of years in the future (Nope)

c) While those he was talking to were still alive (Yes: in Mark 9:1; 13:26 and 14:62)

8. What, according to the Bible, is the Word of God?

a) The Bible itself (‘Fraid not)

b) The Church (No)

c) Jesus (Yes, but not as often as you might think: only in John 1:1-3)

9. Which was written first?

a) Mark’s gospel (made up about 70CE)

b) Paul’s letters (the earliest, in the 50s)

c) Acts of Apostles (invented circa 80-90CE)

10. When the New Testament mentions ‘the Scriptures’, what is it referring to?

a) Ancient Jewish writings (exclusively so)

b) The whole of the Bible as we now know it (the Bible as such probably didn’t exist until the 4th century)

c) The New Testament (there was no New Testament when the writers who would later be included in it were writing. So, no)

11. How did the New Testament writers ‘prove’ Jesus was the Messiah?

a) By claiming the scriptures predicted he would be (Exclusively so)

b) By pointing to his miracles (Never)

c) By quoting things he said (Never)

Now isn’t that odd.

12. According to the Bible, how did Jesus want his followers to spend their time?

a) By witnessing to atheists on the internet (You think?)

b) By worshipping him (Never)

c) By feeding the hungry, healing the sick and helping the weak (This. See Matthew 25:31-46. So why you spending your days and nights harassing non-believers on the Net?)

Actually, no Christian helped out with this. The answers are those that scholars (and I, in my own humble little way) have arrived by actually reading the friggin’ Bible. 

Where are those stories?

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Those opposed to the idea that Jesus was only ever a mythical figure are generally dismissive of those who point to the evidence of the New Testament that this is precisely how the earliest Christians saw him. These critics lambast as ‘amateurs’, ‘pseudo-historians’ and ‘fringe’ enthusiasts those who don’t see any evidence for an historical Jesus. But such ad hominems are not arguments and they’re certainly not evidence that a human Jesus existed. When the books of the New Testament are arranged in chronological order, the very earliest writing about Jesus – Paul in the 50s and the creed of 1 Corinthians 15 – appear to view him only as a scripture-fulfilling spiritual manifestation.

So, was Jesus actually an itinerant preacher who traipsed the Earth in the 30s before rapidly evolving into Paul’s mythical Christ or was he a mythical being to begin with, only later to be cast as an historical figure?

It has to be one or the other. 

Within twenty years of his supposed death, Paul and others had experienced dreams, visions and hallucinations (Acts 2:17) that convinced them Jesus was a supernatural being in heaven. This doesn’t of course rule out that a human Jesus had actually existed, but it makes it unnecessary for him to have done so. Paul and almost all the creators of the New Testament books treat his earthly existence as irrelevant. Even when ‘proving’ their celestial Superman is the promised Messiah, they refer not to his activities on Earth, but appeal exclusively to what they believed Jewish scripture revealed about the Messiah.

According to these men, this is how they knew the Jesus of their dreams was truly the Saviour: the ancient scriptures. Not a single one of them says, ‘I refer you to Jesus’ miraculous birth in Bethlehem; I remind you that he changed water into wine, controlled the elements and miraculously multiplied food.’ Not one of them references his many healings, exorcisms and raising of people from the dead. Not one mentions the historical details surrounding his crucifixion, the empty tomb or the women who first saw him alive again. Not one relates a single resurrection appearance (beyond their own visions) nor do they mention the ascension or a looked for ‘second’ coming. Why not? Surely these would be the definitive indicators that Jesus was the Messiah, instead of, or at least alongside, the so-called prophecies of ancient scriptures.

The ‘why not?’ is because these stories – the birth, the miracles, the healings, the empty tomb, the bodily resurrection, the ascension and the rest – had, at the time Paul was writing, not yet been created. Consequently, they couldn’t be passed on to Paul when he met Cephas and James. There was no much-vaunted ‘oral tradition’ for him to call upon to fill in the gaps in his knowledge about an Earthly Jesus. There was no oral tradition because there was no Earthly Jesus to relate stories about when Paul was active in the 50s. This version of Jesus, created from Jewish scripture, Paul’s teaching and cult rules, didn’t appear until the early 70s. Even after Mark’s gospel and its copycat sequels, most of the writers of later New Testament continued to believe in and refer only to a heavenly saviour verified by ancient Jewish scripture.

But, apologists say today, no-one at the time would be taken in by talk of a Messiah who existed only in the heavenly realm. And that’s true; despite the Bible’s claims to the contrary, very few people were persuaded. But some bought into it, just as others at the time bought into Mithras. Mithraism was, for a while, more successful than the fledgling Christian cult. Yet its adherents knew Mithras himself manifested only in the heavenly plane. This didn’t stop multitudes of military men from joining the cult to worship him. It was the same for the other deities of the day. They too didn’t exist even if stories about their adventures on the Earth were widely circulated and, in all probability, believed by the gullible.

If, however, Jesus’ life on Earth had happened in the early part of the first century, how was it that 20 years after his death he had already become an angelic being without a past? Why had Paul, the writer of Hebrews, the pseudo-Pauls, James and John of Patmos never heard any of the stories about him, or didn’t care about them or felt they weren’t really evidence of Jesus’ Messiahship? Where are those stories? Outside the later gospels they don’t exist. It’s as if, when Elvis Presley died, no one cared any more about all the hit records he’d made and were instead only interested in his post-mortem sightings in laundromats and shopping malls. The process just doesn’t happen this way round.

No, it is far more likely that Jesus went from being a celestial saviour to having stories written about him, stories that are based on prophecies in Jewish scripture and Paul’s ‘revelations’. They are allegorical and metaphorical, wholly made up as the writer of Mark 4:11-12 tells us with the equivalent of a Clark Kent wink:

The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’

 

Later ‘evidence’

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The Didache is an early Christian manual discussing ethical behaviour and outlining liturgical practice. Scholars disagree about when it was created, most opting for a date around 100CE. Despite referring to itself as ‘The Teaching of the Lord Through the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles’ in the only extant complete copy, the Didache doesn’t mention Jesus by name nor refer to any of the historical details of the kind provided in the gospels. Instead, it refers to ‘the Lord’ or ‘the Messiah’, the same terms Paul uses for his angelic Christ, and makes use of ‘teaching’ similar to that in the (invented) gospels, from which it almost certainly draws.

We’re now heading into a period when the gospels were in wider circulation and any reference to Jesus cannot be regarded as independent from them. We need, consequently, to be suspicious of any ‘evidence’ that appears to affirm his historical existence. Documents that appear after the gospels is unlikely to be from independent sources (not that they always reference their sources) but are merely relying on gospel data as filtered through contemporary Christian believers. Hence the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote in his Annals circa 115CE:

Nero fastened the guilt (for the fire in Rome in 64CE) and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Chrestians by the populace. Chrestus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.

Chrestians? Chrestus?

Pilate as procurator instead of prefect? Christianity as a ‘mischievous superstition’?

Actually, this last I can see. The other peculiarities are a problem for those who claim this is evidence for an historical Jesus. Written some 85 years after Jesus was supposedly active, this first extra-biblical reference to something approaching an historical figure is simply too late. Likewise everything after it.

We’ve exhausted the paltry references to ‘the Christ’ or ‘the Lord’ that exist prior to and just after the gospels. An historical Jesus there is not, in any of them. What does this all mean? 

The New New Testament: part 3

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Following the fourth gospel is the epistle of Jude, written at the end of the first century. It is certainly not by a brother of Jesus, despite this traditional attribution. Rather, it addresses false teaching in the Christian community of its day. It makes its points with reference to characters in Jewish scriptures and even mentions the apostles (those who had visions of Jesus) but knows nothing about an earthly Jesus. Parts of Jude are lifted wholesale into the later forgery of 2 Peter.

And then… another made up Jesus! This time the avenging angel of Revelation. I’ve written about Revelation recently so won’t repeat it all here. Suffice to say, this revealing is completely within a disturbed cultist’s head. He wants to see those who oppose the cult to suffer at the hands of his the Messiah who sweeps down from heaven determined to wipe out unbelievers and set the chosen few up as rulers of a reformed Earth. This Jesus seems to have forgotten he once told people to love their neighbours, pray for those who persecuted them, humble themselves, give all they had to the poor etc etc. Revelation Jesus has no time for this sorta shit! Of course, he’s no more real than any of the gospel Jesuses. He’s simply another made-up version, ‘revealed’, or so his creator would have us think, from Heaven. Revelation is chockful of symbolism – The Whore of Babylon, the Number of the Beast, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb etc – all of it applicable to the time when it was written. It has no bearing on anything after that time and doesn’t, despite sloppy interpretations, feature ‘the Anti-Christ’.

The letters of John were all probably written by the same person. This is not the John credited with creating the fourth gospel nor Revelation’s nut-job. This John, or whatever he was really called, is concerned with divisions within his community, chiefly those caused by a group who denied that Jesus was the Christ (1 John 2:22). They were literally anti-Christ. This is where the term occurs in the New Testament and it doesn’t refer to a future madman who will crush Christians in his attempt to rule the world. It seems likely that John’s anti-Christs believed Jesus did not visit Earth as a flesh and blood human being. They were perhaps the last remnants of those Christians who, like Paul and most of the preceding New Testament letter writers, held that Jesus was a divine being, active only in Heaven. With these epistles then, written around CE 100, we turn a corner. Belief in the symbolic Jesus depicted in the gospels as a real man, has become the orthodoxy. It took some time to get here.

And chronologically, that’s about it. There are four forged books left, making the properly ordered New Testament end, not with a bang but a whimper. While 1 & 2 Timothy and 2 Peter claim to be written by Paul and Peter respectively their late date rules this out. 1 Timothy provides the infamous line that women should remain silent in church and obey their husbands at all times. 2 Peter has all the nonsense about a day being the same as a thousand years in God’s eyes. Its duplicitous author argues that God is delaying bringing punishment to the world so that more people might be saved. Evidently he lacks any mathematical understanding. You would think at this point the cultists would have realised that the cultists of the previous century, so certain of the Lord’s imminent arrival had got it disastrously wrong. But no. They reinterpreted their ‘revelations’ and prophecies so that instead of his arrival being ‘at hand’ it was now set to happen at any time in the future, even thousands of years ahead.

Christianity was all but dead at this point. It simply refused to admit it.