Today’s major religions — Christianity and Islam — make absolutely contradictory and irreconcilable claims. Each faith believes its holy book is the literal “word of God,” accepted on faith that everything in it is historical fact infallibly written by scribes inspired by God.
Christianity says Jesus is a god; Islam states Jesus is not a god. This means that one of them is dead wrong. Worst of all is the claim by both Islam and Christianity that those who believe in the wrong god will be condemned to hell. Such idiocy.
The Christian tale has always been difficult to swallow by other religions, just as the dogmas of other religions can’t be accepted by Christians. So let’s look at Christianity critically from the perspective of other faiths and see if their skepticism is justified.
Paul’s writings
The earliest writings known in the New Testament are letters believed by Christian scholars to have been written by the apostle Paul between about 50 and 70 CE (Common Era), which is a few decades after Jesus’ alleged death around 30 CE. Paul traveled extensively between Jerusalem and Rome from 5-67 CE, and authored the “Pauline Letters,” or epistles — seven books in the New Testament.
What is absolutely remarkable about them is they do not portray Jesus as a historical person. All of Paul’s sources are divine — no human sources whatsoever. Paul only mentions his source of knowledge of Jesus as God or God’s revelation, or indirectly from the Old Testament.
In the more than 300 references to Jesus in Paul’s seven authentic letters, Paul does not mention even one single fact that “connects Jesus with an earthly life.” We hear nothing about his virgin birth, the date he was born or died, whether he was married or single. Nothing about Mary, Joseph, Bethlehem, his sermons, his miracles or anything about his personal appearance. Paul’s silence on Jesus’ history and earthly accomplishments is unthinkable. The simplest explanation is that there never was a historical Jesus.
Historical Jesus
The heart and soul of Christianity is the belief in a supernatural and historical Jesus. The New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — believed to have been written anonymously between about 70 and 110 CE — all insist that Jesus was well-known throughout Jerusalem and the Mediterranean world. And his unprecedented miracles were allegedly “witnessed by multitudes.” The entire city of Jerusalem reportedly went wild acclaiming him as he entered triumphantly. He was dramatically arrested and placed on trial before the whole city of Jerusalem. His death and resurrection were supposedly accompanied by spectacular supernatural events: angelic appearances, earthquakes and a supernatural darkness that covered an entire region for hours.
Christians have always claimed that the events in Jesus’ life were the best-attested events in human history. And, additionally, the first century is known as one of the best-documented historical periods. Yet we have no texts of anyone who says anything whatsoever about the “incredibly famous events” declared in the gospels.
Eyewitnesses to Jesus
Jesus supposedly lived from about 4 BCE (Before the Common Era) to 30 CE. Yet there is not a single mention of him by his contemporaries — not by Romans or Jews — during his entire lifetime.
For instance, Seneca the Younger, in his book On Superstition (where he criticizes every known cult and religion) makes no mention whatsoever of Jesus or Christianity. And Gallio, Seneca’s older brother, also never heard of Jesus or Christians. Yet this makes no sense, since he was the magistrate who heard Paul’s case (Acts 18:12-17). And there is the Jewish historian Justus of Tiberias, who lived in Galilee not far from Jesus’ hometown and wrote a history of the kingdom of Judah, covering the entire time when supposedly Jesus lived. But there was not one mention of Jesus.
And, finally there was Philo-Judaeus, one of the most prolific writers in the ancient world, most of whose works were preserved. He lived before, during and after the alleged time of Christ, and was in or near Jerusalem when Christ reportedly made his triumphal entry and when the crucifixion and resurrection occurred, and during the alleged earthquakes and supernatural darkness. It is astonishing he never once mentioned Jesus, the crucifixion, resurrection or the miraculous events associated with him.
This pervasive silence of Jesus occurred in spite of the fact that the Christian church doggedly preserved every scrap of documentation that mentioned him or Christianity. Many ancient Christian scholars, such as Origen and Eusebius, were near fanatical in referencing or quoting authors who attested to Jesus or Christianity. Any mention of Jesus in first- or second-century literature would therefore have had the highest probability of preservation.
Thus, we can be certain that Philo or any other first- or early second-century author never spoke of him. Yet the same writers had much to say about other less interesting messiahs — but nothing about Jesus.
It is inconceivable that all tens of thousands of Romans and Jews living in Judea during the first century could have missed everything about Jesus’ life and his miracles. And if you assume Jesus was the son of God and therefore “the most important historical person to walk the Earth,” the complete omission by all his contemporary writers is deafening. We simply have no eyewitness record of Jesus ever existing.
Non-biblical mentions
Aside from having no proven eyewitness of Jesus, there is absolutely nothing written outside of the bible to confirm Jesus’ life, death and return from the dead during the first century and most of the second century. From Jesus’ death until at least 112 CE, not a single word of Jesus is mentioned in any non-biblical source. He is never discussed, challenged or talked about in any surviving Roman or Greek source of the period.
Not until 112 CE, when the author Pliny the Younger, governor of a Roman province, in a letter to his emperor, asked how to handle secret meetings of a group called “Christians.” And in 115 CE, Tacitus, in writing his history of Rome, mentions a “Christus” who was executed at the hands of Pontius Pilate. However, the word “Christians” in Pliny’s letter is believed to have originally been “Essenes,” and later changed by Christian forgers. And the passage by Tacitus is also believed by Christian scholars to be a forgery and is not quoted by ancient historians until the 15th century. Everything else referring to Jesus outside of the bible dates later than 120 CE, long after any eyewitness would have died.
Biblical fraud
Literary fraud was rampant in the early years of the Old and New Testaments. After about 120 CE, the quantity of bogus literature about Jesus and early Christianity exploded to an immense scale, making the task of sorting truth from fiction almost impossible. And, beginning about the second century and continuing for hundreds of years, almost any literature that disputed the existence of Jesus or Christianity was methodically destroyed or deleted from references by church officials.
One of the greatest crimes in human history was the total destruction of the library at Alexandria in 391 CE, perpetrated by Christian fanatics. They destroyed absolutely priceless scrolls and documents that hid the truth about the pagan origin of their religion and its alleged founder. As many as 700,000 hand-written manuscripts were lost, and it is believed to have set back civilization at least 1,000 years.
Presenting myth as fact became popular under the Roman Empire. Thus, a large part of faith literature is fabricated, yet passed off as true. Letters were similarly forged. This was the norm, not the exception. In fact, based on all of the references cited, most Christian faith literature in its first three centuries is fabricated. The phrase “pious fraud” was coined to describe what Christian fathers deemed a pious act to employ deception and fraud. Tom Harpur, an ordained priest and professor of New Testament studies, said, “The great world religion actually rests on a foundation of falsehood and forgery.”
Josephus’ Jesus reference
Embarrassingly for Christians, the closest historical support for the bible in all of the first century is an outright forgery. In the year 93 CE, Flavius Josephus, a respected Jewish historian from Judea, published his Antiquities of the Jews.
Josephus lived in the same area where Jesus allegedly lived and taught. Antiquities contains a disputed paragraph many Christians believe as historical evidence for Jesus. The short passage, three sentences long, presents a glowing summary of Jesus’ miraculous career. This paragraph is obviously a Christian fabrication inserted into the text where it is totally out of context, and is so blatantly counterfeit that no historian today can deny it as a later Christian forgery.
The major giveaway is that the Jesus passage does not appear in Josephus’ works until the fourth century. There was absolutely no reference to the Jesus passage anywhere for the first 200 years of Josephus’ works, in spite of the fact that Josephus’ histories were immensely popular by ancient scholars and their writings are filled with references to him. The passage could not be referenced, obviously, as it did not exist.
The Jesus passage is first quoted repeatedly by the notorious Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea — known to have been responsible for many revisions and blatant forgeries. The bishop was an advocate of what he called “holy lying.” Over two dozen complaints from his contemporaries still survive. Eusebius apparently altered and doctored the facts constantly, and is believed by many Christian scholars today to have inserted the entire Jesus passage.
Mythical, invented Jesus
The earliest writings in the New Testament by Paul portray a celestial, mythical Jesus rather than a real and historic one. The only reason people believe that Jesus really existed as a historical person lies in the contents of the New Testament that were written decades after Paul, when Christian apologists had time to embellish his story with earthly characteristics. There were no eyewitnesses and no other source, document or otherwise, that independently corroborates the historical reality of Jesus.
So we are left with two choices: Either much or all of the New Testament was fabricated to grossly exaggerate Jesus’ fame and accomplishments — which went completely unnoticed by society — or he was an outright mythical character that the gospels clearly succeeded in inventing.
We can now more easily understand why billions of people in other religions believe Jesus was mythical, and, with it, the foundation of Christianity.
FFRF member Paul Davis is an engineering geologist in southern California, specializing in earthquake fault and landslide investigations.
