Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that show Jesus never existed

[dafydd]

If these people weren't Christians, why did later Christians claim they were?

Because they were Christians? Just a wild stab in the dark.

 

[dejudge]

ETA: The Jesusneverexisted site, which is just about as skeptical as you can get about everything with regard to early Christianity had this to say about Clement:
It sounds like, he at least, thinks there is pretty good reason to believe that Christians were in Rome before 100 CE. I wonder how good the evidence for Clement is. I'm sure he's mentioned in the Liber Pontificalis but that is pretty sketchy as a source for the earliest popes.

Well, I just visited the Jesusneverexisted site and I did not see what you claimed.

Clement appears to be regarded as questionable.

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/beginnings.html

Nothing is known of the life or death of "Saint" Clement (often grandly, if anachronistically, styled either first, second, third or fourth 'pope'!).

5th century fantasy invented a colourful martyrdom for the guy, involving drowning in the Black Sea with an anchor round his neck and a sub-marine shrine built by angels.

The fable probably owed much to a confusion with his namesake, Titus Flavius Clemens, a consul executed by Emperor Domitian. The confusion is further compounded by the common assumption that Clement's reference to the "recent misfortunes" of the Roman Church relates to a supposed persecution instigated by Domitian. But this "persecution" is bogus and Clement actually makes no mention of martyrdom even when it refers to the deaths of Peter and Paul.

 

[Brainache]

Well, I just visited the Jesusneverexisted site and I did not see what you claimed.

Clement appears to be regarded as questionable.

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/beginnings.html

Completely unbiased source there...

 

[dejudge]

If these people weren't Christians, why did later Christians claim they were?

Perhaps for the same reason it is claimed Jesus was born of a Holy Ghost and a Virgin, the Logos, God Creator who walked on the sea, transfigured, resurrected, ate food after he was raised from the dead, then commissioned his disciples after which he ascended.

If the story of Jesus was not true why did later Christians claim they were?

In gJohn, Jesus, God Creator, told his disciples he was the Truth and the Life.

Christians were taught the Truth by God Creator, the Logos..

 

[davefoc]

Because they were Christians? Just a wild stab in the dark.

Do you think this is an argument? Do you think Christians don't lie? Do you think that the controversy about the degree to which the early church was persecuted is unfounded and of course all those people were martyred because Christians said they were? Do you notice any correspondence between a religion whose central character is martyred and the fact that martyrdom plays such a big role in early Church stories? Do you think it is impossible that somebody might have noticed the traction that stories of martyrdom had and just made them up?

Did you have any thoughts as to why Tacitus makes no further mention of Christians in his works available today? The paragraph in question claims that the Christian presence in Rome in 64 CE was significant enough that it was in Nero's interest to make a scape goat out of them. Why isn't anybody else but Tacitus writing about these mid to late first century Roman Christians?

 

[davefoc]

Well, I just visited the Jesusneverexisted site and I did not see what you claimed.

...

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/peter.htm

The part that I quoted was from this section:
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Emergence of a Bishop at Rome

[/FONT][/FONT]
My point wasn't that because the author of this site claimed that Clement existed he necessarily did. My point was that given the author's overall view it adds credibility to his claim that there was pretty good reason to believe Clement existed. I realize that in other areas of his site he makes the point that his claims of Clement's existence are based on sketchy information as you noted in your post.

I notice in one of your recent posts you seem to accept the existence of Marcion. Marcion's excommunication is generally set in about 144 CE. How does this square with your theories about nothing much happening in Christianity before 180 CE including the letters of Paul.

One theory is that Marcion wrote the letters of Paul. Do you reject this theory because you know the letters weren't known before 180 CE. The standard theory is that Marcion put some of the letters of Paul together with what is supposed to have been a version of Luke into the canon that he is generally credited with creating. Do you reject all this because you know Paul's letters weren't existent until after 180 CE?

 

[dejudge]

My point wasn't that because the author of this site claimed that Clement existed he necessarily did. My point was that given the author's overall view it adds credibility to his claim that there was pretty good reason to believe Clement existed. I realize that in other areas of his site he makes the point that his claims of Clement's existence are based on sketchy information as you noted in your post.

I did find the reference anyhow it is quite contradictory. We do not even know who wrote the so-called Clement letter and all other writings under the name of Clement are considered forgeries.

In fact, there are at least six apologetic sources that contradict the authors claim that Clement was bishop 81-97 CE but from around 69 CE.

The so-called Clement letter is far worse than the Gospels.

I notice in one of your recent posts you seem to accept the existence of Marcion. Marcion's excommunication is generally set in about 144 CE. How does this square with your theories about nothing much happening in Christianity before 180 CE including the letters of Paul.

You have not read or cannot remember my posts. I never ever claimed "nothing much happening in Christianity before 180 CE".

By the way, I do not accept the claim that Marcion was excommunicated. Justin Martyr was a contemporary of Marcion and wrote nothing of such an excommunication.

One theory is that Marcion wrote the letters of Paul. Do you reject this theory because you know the letters weren't known before 180 CE. The standard theory is that Marcion put some of the letters of Paul together with what is supposed to have been a version of Luke into the canon that he is generally credited with creating. Do you reject all this because you know Paul's letters weren't existent until after 180 CE?

Why would Marcion write letters about events that supposedly happened about100 years earlier and which contains teachings that contradicts his own?

Marcion's Son of God had no earthly mother or father and came directly from heaven.

The Pauline writers claimed the Son of God was made of a woman.

Marcion used the writings of Empedocles--Not Paul--according to Hippolytus.

Ephraem the Syrian wrote Against Marcion and in the existing copies there is hardly anything or nothing about the Pauline letters.

Effectively, the Pauline letters were unknown to Marcion.

 

[Brainache]

Do you think this is an argument? Do you think Christians don't lie? Do you think that the controversy about the degree to which the early church was persecuted is unfounded and of course all those people were martyred because Christians said they were? Do you notice any correspondence between a religion whose central character is martyred and the fact that martyrdom plays such a big role in early Church stories? Do you think it is impossible that somebody might have noticed the traction that stories of martyrdom had and just made them up?

Did you have any thoughts as to why Tacitus makes no further mention of Christians in his works available today? The paragraph in question claims that the Christian presence in Rome in 64 CE was significant enough that it was in Nero's interest to make a scape goat out of them. Why isn't anybody else but Tacitus writing about these mid to late first century Roman Christians?

You can't seriously be saying that the later Christians were unrelated to the ones described in Tacitus, can you?

What happened to the first group?

Why do we hear no dispute over who they were in later texts?

 

[David Mo]

David - in much of the above you really do not seem to be stating much disagreement with me. The only substantial point of dispute is that you seem still to be claiming that events such as Thermopylae are indeed believed true by historians only upon the same sort of entirely anonymous hearsay writing as we have for Jesus in the gospels, and with absolutely no other external independent support of any kind (which is the case with the gospels).

Of course, we have many points in common.

Not only Thermopylae but a lot of events and historical individuals of Antiquity depend of one or two hearsay (not first hand) sources. You can go over the list of ancient philosophers, for example. The Kadesh battle is a good example too. For a long time the unique testimony was the Pharaonic account. It was a mythical account plenty of incredible deeds. But historians believed the Kadesh battle was an historical event. Why not? More recently an independent account was found. It is the Hittite reverse of the story. As it was to be expected,, it doesn’t match the Pharaonic account. But it confirm the original belief of historians.

This kind of confirmation is very difficult if not impossible with less public individuals for obvious reasons. Kings, battles and so leave more evident traces than philosophers, prophets or poets. Historians have wider criteria in these cases.

The only other thing which you now seem to be complaining about is that I have referred to academics like Randel Helms to show that what was written in the gospels was being taken from the OT prophecies of a messiah. Where you seem to be saying we cannot trust Helms because he is a professor of English Language studies and not a bible studies scholar like Dominic Crossan or Bart Ehrman.

No, my God! I have said for me is indifferent if Helms or Crossan or Ehrman are historian teachers or naval engineers. I intend discuss only their arguments.

[But how many times do you need reminding that bible scholars like Ehrman and Crossan are so hopelessly unreliable and unobjective as to keep claiming that the evidence which makes Jesus in their claim a "certainty”, is that Paul met “the Lords brother" (because it says so in the bible!), and in Crossan’s case saying (from memory) “the crucifixion of Jesus is just about the best attested event in all of ancient history” (again, because it says so in the bible!). With expert scholars like that, it’s a darned good job none of those people are working in any remotely serious academic field, or else they would have screwed up half the planet by now with their inability to tell fact from fiction.

Just that. I disagree with Ehrman and Crossan in this case, because I find their evidences not conclusive. They are weak indications, at most. You know my argument is another one.

[What you are calling a “mythicist alternative” which you say is far less convincing than the belief of certainty expressed by bible scholars like Ehrman, Crossan and all the many thousands who Ehrman obviously includes when he says “every properly trained scholar on the planet”, that so-called “mythicist alternative” which you apparently think that I am offering to you, is only an alternative which says that the claimed evidence from the bible is not good enough to reliably conclude that Jesus probably existed … if you think that is a mythicist claim then you have misunderstood the claim entirely - the claim is that the biblical evidence is nowhere near reliable enough, and in most of what it says not remotely credible either in the 21st century.

You mix different things again.

My belief of historical existence (and no more!) of Jesus doesn’t depend of Ehrman or “many thousand” of scholars. It is only based on my own criterion and some texts of Gonzalo Puente Ojea that convinced me. Mr. Puente is a well known (in Spain) and militant atheist.

A very different point is the reliability of the Bible. On this point I agree with the mythicist side. The Bible is a mythical story and we ought to analyze critically its passages one by one before we accept one of them as historical fact. And my experience says me that only a few of them will pass the proof. Perhaps we agree on this.

 

[Craig B]

I Why would Marcion write letters about events that supposedly happened about100 years earlier and which contains teachings that contradicts his own? ...
Effectively, the Pauline letters were unknown to Marcion.

Nevertheless, the jesusneverexisted site has this to say

Miraculously, it was Marcion himself who had first "found" the epistles of Paul, letters that it seems had remained curiously forgotten for a century. Marcion, the heretic, assembled a canon even earlier than the Muratori, with ten epistles attributed to Paul and a simple Jesus tale that had a kinship to Luke's gospel.

Does your statement simply mean that Marcion forged this material? Even so, that would place the forgery before your favoured date of c180 AD.

 

[eight bits]

Brainache

If these people weren't Christians, why did later Christians claim they were?

You're kidding, right?

One of the annoying things about being dead is forced conscription into the schemes and quarrels of the living.

In other threads, lots of folks, maybe not you, have some fun with Egyptian Jewish hermits whom various ancient Christian authors, relying on one another and ultimately misreading Philo, falsely tagged with the Christian label.

What happened to the first group?

The same thing that happened to the Shakers, I would imagine, but without the museums.

Why do we hear no dispute over who they were in later texts?

Maybe we do. Epiphanius disputed all sorts of folks who seem to leave little or no other trace. He even has an unnamed and uncounted "group," knowledge of which he attributes to a Jewish convert, of public Jews who transmit the Christian "truth" privately to other Jews.

 

[dafydd]

Your point seems to be that it has been proven that there were Christians in Rome in 64 CE. There might have been.

My point was that he seems to be unable to admit to any mistake.

 

[dafydd]

Do you think this is an argument? Do you think Christians don't lie? Do you think that the controversy about the degree to which the early church was persecuted is unfounded and of course all those people were martyred because Christians said they were? Do you notice any correspondence between a religion whose central character is martyred and the fact that martyrdom plays such a big role in early Church stories? Do you think it is impossible that somebody might have noticed the traction that stories of martyrdom had and just made them up?

Did you have any thoughts as to why Tacitus makes no further mention of Christians in his works available today? The paragraph in question claims that the Christian presence in Rome in 64 CE was significant enough that it was in Nero's interest to make a scape goat out of them. Why isn't anybody else but Tacitus writing about these mid to late first century Roman Christians?

No.

 

[pakeha]

...One of the annoying things about being dead is forced conscription into the schemes and quarrels of the living. ...

To sig or not to sig, that is the question.

 

[Brainache]

Brainache


You're kidding, right?

One of the annoying things about being dead is forced conscription into the schemes and quarrels of the living.

In other threads, lots of folks, maybe not you, have some fun with Egyptian Jewish hermits whom various ancient Christian authors, relying on one another and ultimately misreading Philo, falsely tagged with the Christian label.


The same thing that happened to the Shakers, I would imagine, but without the museums.


Maybe we do. Epiphanius disputed all sorts of folks who seem to leave little or no other trace. He even has an unnamed and uncounted "group," knowledge of which he attributes to a Jewish convert, of public Jews who transmit the Christian "truth" privately to other Jews.

I'd like to see a plausible scenario whereby Tacitus' Christians who worshipped a "Christ who suffered the ultimate punishment under Pilate" were unrelated to the Christians that we all know and love today...

 

[eight bits]

pakeha


Brainache

I'd like to see a plausible scenario whereby Tacitus' Christians who worshipped a "Christ who suffered the ultimate punishment under Pilate" were unrelated to the Christians that we all know and love today...

Why would you need to see another scenario, when you've already read posts here about misreadings of Philo and his tales of (Jewish) "Anchorites?" Ancient writers knew about Christians in their own day, defined by reference to a Pilate-related Christ. They then read about another group who supposedly behaved similarly sometime between Pilate's term (+/-) and the writers' present. They thought the second group was an early part the first, and wrote accordingly.

It happened. That's what plausibility looks like.

 

[IanS]

Of course, we have many points in common.

Not only Thermopylae but a lot of events and historical individuals of Antiquity depend of one or two hearsay (not first hand) sources. You can go over the list of ancient philosophers, for example. The Kadesh battle is a good example too. For a long time the unique testimony was the Pharaonic account. It was a mythical account plenty of incredible deeds. But historians believed the Kadesh battle was an historical event. Why not? More recently an independent account was found. It is the Hittite reverse of the story. As it was to be expected,, it doesn’t match the Pharaonic account. But it confirm the original belief of historians.
This kind of confirmation is very difficult if not impossible with less public individuals for obvious reasons. Kings, battles and so leave more evident traces than philosophers, prophets or poets. Historians have wider criteria in these cases.



No, my God! I have said for me is indifferent if Helms or Crossan or Ehrman are historian teachers or naval engineers. I intend discuss only their arguments.



Just that. I disagree with Ehrman and Crossan in this case, because I find their evidences not conclusive. They are weak indications, at most. You know my argument is another one.



You mix different things again.

My belief of historical existence (and no more!) of Jesus doesn’t depend of Ehrman or “many thousand” of scholars. It is only based on my own criterion and some texts of Gonzalo Puente Ojea that convinced me. Mr. Puente is a well known (in Spain) and militant atheist.

A very different point is the reliability of the Bible. On this point I agree with the mythicist side. The Bible is a mythical story and we ought to analyze critically its passages one by one before we accept one of them as historical fact. And my experience says me that only a few of them will pass the proof. Perhaps we agree on this.

David - it really just comes down to the highlighted passage above (as I said before). But you are not citing situations that are comparable to that of the hearsay in the case of gospel accounts of Jesus.

I do not accept that real academic historians (not bible scholars) claim that historical events are true merely upon the same sort of entirely anonymous hearsay that we have for Jesus in the gospels.

If that is all that historians had for events such as Thermopylae then the best they could objectively say is that the event might have occurred but that we have zero reliable evidence for it.

And that is precisely what I have said here about Jesus at least 50 times now! He might have existed, but there is actually no good, reliable or credible evidence of his existence as a human person.

However since you keep insisting that historians definitely do believe that Thermopylae is true only upon the same sort of entirely anonymous hearsay that the gospels present for Jesus, and with no other external independent contemporary confirmation of any kind, then you had better now produce the evidence to support what you claim - cite the historians that claim to believe Thermopylae whilst agreeing that they believe it on no better evidence that mere anonymous unknown hearsay alone and with no other independent external support whatsoever.

And by the way, whilst you are looking for quotes from those historians to confirm what you say about their claims, note that as I have explained here numerous times before, the fact that the gospels are only presenting anonymous hearsay which I say is unsafe for anyone here to accept as even remotely reliable for the same reasons that such anonymous hearsay is always ruled out in legal jury trials, that is only 5% of what is fatally wrong with the Jesus case.

So if you are able to show real historians declaring events true on no better than anonymous hearsay alone, then we will still have to deal with the other 95% of fatal issues (all of which I have explained before) which make the particular type of gospel hearsay so completely untrustworthy in the case of Jesus, and which make the Jesus case not at all comparable with non-religious claims in history such as Thermopylae.

 

[Belz...]

To sig or not to sig, that is the question.

I don't know about sigging this but it's definitely a keeper in my "best quotes of the JREF" file.

 

[Belz...]

Why would you need to see another scenario, when you've already read posts here about misreadings of Philo and his tales of (Jewish) "Anchorites?" Ancient writers knew about Christians in their own day, defined by reference to a Pilate-related Christ. They then read about another group who supposedly behaved similarly sometime between Pilate's term (+/-) and the writers' present. They thought the second group was an early part the first, and wrote accordingly.

It happened. That's what plausibility looks like.

Hell of a coincidence, though. And to echo Ian and Dejudge, what's our evidence ? Forgive me if I've missed it, but there's much chaff to wade through in this thread.

 

[dejudge]

I'd like to see a plausible scenario whereby Tacitus' Christians who worshipped a "Christ who suffered the ultimate punishment under Pilate" were unrelated to the Christians that we all know and love today...

First of all HJ was a nobody, an obscure preacher.

According to HJers their HJ was not the Christ so it is absurd, highly illogical, to suggest the WELL KNOWN Christus is obscure HJ. It is not even known when the well known Christus died, how the well known Christus was killed or how old he was.

Many many person suffered the ultimate penalty under Pilate. In fact, it is claimed that Pilate was called to Rome to answer charges of Genocide.

Obscure HJ is unrelated to the well known Christus in Tacitus.

The Bible itself also tell us how Christus and his followers were unrelated to the Jesus Christ cult.

Mark 13:6 KJV ----For many shall come in my name, saying , I am Christ; and shall deceive many.

Matthew 24:5 KJV----For many shall come in my name, saying , I am Christ; and shall deceive many

Luke 21:8 KJV----And he said , Take heed that ye be not deceived : for many shall come in my name, saying , I am Christ; and the time draweth near : go ye not therefore after them.

And now, in gMark and gLuke before the Jesus character is dead there is ALREADY another person found using the name of Christ.


Mark 9:38 KJV --And John answered him, saying , Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us.

Luke 9:49 KJV--- And John answered and said , Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name; and we forbad him, because he followeth not with us.