Evidence that
Jesus was a Myth
for the
Evidence for his
existence is only imagined
VALENTINUS AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS
THOSE WHO DENIED THE EXISTENCE
MARCION STATED THAT THE EVIDENCE WAS FLIMSY
All of the evidence for Jesus the alleged founder of the Christian Church can be invalidated. At best there is no evidence, at worst the evidence indicates that Jesus never existed. From my other books which you can access through the homepage you will see that the Jesus story was unknown in the early Church, that the New Testament evidence for Jesus can be dismissed as worthless, you will see that the Jesus who the apostles knew was just a post resurrection apparition and you will see New Testament traditions that Jesus didn’t live in the first century but in times long forgotten.
Introduction
Jesus Christ did not exist. If he did there is no acceptable evidence for
it. And if there is acceptable evidence
then it is too flimsy to justify taking Jesus seriously as a person never mind
a god or wizard. To the world, I offer
Was There a Jesus? The truth can be
known and should be. Unfortunately,
defending the existence of Jesus and accepting him as a man and not a myth is
where the money is and where the power lies.
That is the real secret of the strength of the popular belief that he
was a real person. Moses was invented
and was similar to Jesus and had more supporters so why couldn’t Jesus have
been invented as well? Hopefully when the philosophy contained in my The Gospel According
to Atheism grows popular Jesus will be as little known as Henry James Prince,
the nineteenth century Messiah in
The sources we have are the gospels and the rest of the New Testament writings which are regarded as scriptures or God’s word by the Christians. We have a few short writings from the first post-apostolic generation. We will test them all to see if they really assist the case for belief in Jesus as a historical Jesus.
We have some references from secular writings. The trouble is that they are either vague or could have been forged or could have been depending on Christian hearsay. For example, somebody put a piece about Jesus’s existence, miracles, messiahship and resurrection in the unbeliever Josephus’s work.
Tacitus said that Christ was put
to death under Pilate. Unhappily for
Christians, Pilate killed several Christs so there
could be some confusion there. He said
when he died the superstition was checked for a moment but broke out in
Tacitus speaks as if the Church
broke out for the first time in
Tacitus says it happened soon after the death of Christ, a year or so.
These contradictions of the history of the Church show that Tacitus was not in any position to be relied up in what he wrote about Christ. He could have been wrong to think that Pilate executed him.
The contradictions are inexplicable. Was a forger at work again? If so, then the forger needed to fabricate evidence for the existence of Jesus which would be a very telling thing to do!
Thankfully the body of writings is a small one which makes the task not too difficult. We will see that if Jesus did not exist then it was a case of definitely not existing or a case of having no evidence one way or the other which would mean we don’t know if he existed or not. Either is fatal to the Christian faith.
A Catholic Truth Society booklet called, Did Jesus Exist? gives many dubious arguments insisting that he did exist.
It insists that the gospels were written in the first century (4) against the evidence and ignores the possibility that they were confidential if they did exist that early. It says that Mark must be genuine and the work of Mark for if it were not it would have been ascribed to the apostle Peter (5) as if the authority that first made the ascription would necessarily have thought of Peter! There is no evidence for the Marcan ascription before late in the second century. And at best that evidence is merely gossip and hearsay.
Who was believed to have written
it has nothing to do with its being authentic.
What if everybody knew that Peter was against books and we don’t
know? The forger would have decided then
to pretend to be Peter’s associate who was writing the truth without Peter’s
approval. Pages 8 and 9 respond to Wells
(author of Did Jesus Exist? a book that says he did not) who wrote that
if we believe in Lenin and no or hardly any evidence for him exists and nobody
mentioned him we would have a strong argument from silence that he never
existed. They tell us that this would
show that Jesus did exist for we do have documents about him and nobody could
invent a non-existent revolutionary who was spearheading the 1917 Revolution in
Jewish tradition is held to back up the existence of Jesus on page 12 but this Jesus might not have been our Jesus but just somebody who he was based on. A fictitious character can be based on a real one and the character is still fictitious even if both characters bear the same name. If the Christians invented Jesus those who were embarrassed by this might have lied saying: “Oh Jesus was that guy that was hanged on the Eve of the Passover some decades ago. That was him you know.”
If you read the epistle of James you get the impression that the teaching of Jesus was plagiarised from that of James and perhaps events from the life of James were used to make stories up about Jesus.
A forged letter of
Now, the letter also says that the Jews killed the prophets. The Jews were accused of killing prophets by Jesus before he founded the Church. Jews in the context can mean the whole Jewish race past and present. That means the letter does not contradict the view that the Jews killed Jesus centuries before. It doesn’t help show that Jesus lived.
Perhaps it might be reasoned, “Jesus accused the Jews of killing the prophets meaning the Jews as a whole taking the Jews who had killed them in the past long before his generation into consideration. Maybe the Jews are being said to have killed Jesus in the same sense where the letter says they put Jesus to death though we know the Romans did it. The mention of the prophets would indicate that for the prophets mean the writers of the Old Testament and the author would have been specific if his own brand of prophets had been meant.”
Think again. Jesus is mentioned first and the prophets after, implying that Jesus might have died before these prophets. And why would the letter writer abuse the Jews here when it would have been enough and better to say it was an evil few? There were Jews in Thessalonica and he would have desired to convert them and not alienate them. The writer abused the Jews because they killed Jesus ages before and not in the first century for if Pilate had killed him he could have said so. It had to be ages for only centuries before could there have been a possibility that all the Jews had killed Jesus. He must have meant that the Jews killed him directly for we have no evidence that he could have meant indirectly through Pilate. Jesus might have been stoned and then crucified as a display by Jewish dissidents who did not mind that crucifixion was considered an unlawful method of execution for Jews for the writer never said that Jesus died on the cross. Or perhaps they nailed Jesus up as some kind of display knowing he was about to die anyway. It is important to realise that though the apostle Paul says only once that Jesus died on the cross (Philippians 2:8) and he says he bears the crucifixion marks of Jesus on his own body, he does not say that Jesus was nailed to the cross. If Jesus was tied there would still have been marks. Perhaps he was tied to the cross and stoned and these are the marks Paul means for Paul was certainly stoned a few times. These interpretations are probably right and they totally demolish the gospel account of the death of Jesus.
The Jews did not kill Jesus personally if he was crucified unless the Thessalonians author is supporting the Jewish Talmud which says that Jesus was hanged up for stoning on the Eve of the Passover.
The wrath the letter says was visited upon the Jews is probably the disaster of 70 AD which means the letter is a forgery for Paul was dead then. There is no other disaster that could have affected all the Jews at the time and the letter has it in for them all. So even if the letter did say Jesus was slain by Jews in recent times it would still not count as evidence for Jesus for it came from a liar’s quill.
Page 16 says that Paul said that a wife must stay with her husband and this is not from Paul but the Lord (1 Cor. 7) and this may be from oral tradition so Jesus must have existed. It says that this is the most simple and straightforward interpretation. That is a lie for Paul never hinted that he used oral tradition though he did expect others to use the verified tradition he started himself. Paul had a lot of visions so that is where it came from. The visions is the simplest explanation considering he had lots of them. He never asked the people to hold fast to the traditions about Jesus or even mentioned them but he did ask them to hold fast to the apostolic tradition embodied in himself. He did speak of visions, nothing else, so visions it is. The revelation about marriage came from a vision of Jesus.
The author of the booklet would have said if it had occurred to him that Wells was wrong to say that the persons who fleshed out Jesus the myth plotted him in the time of Pilate for that was a time of great suffering. He would say it would be silly to pick Pilate and then exonerate him and not to put Jesus in the time of Herod the Great which saw worse suffering. But the gospellers had to pick a time in which there was not so much excessive suffering but excessive crucifixions. And why not pick Pilate and then make excuses for what he did to please Roman readers? Also, the prophecy of Daniel concerning the seventy weeks seemed to the Church to have required that the Messiah die about the time of Pilate.
The author would be glad to know that Wells has come to believe not that Jesus existed but that he was based on some first century people on account of the Book of Q. Q is the alleged forerunner of Mark’s gospel which was allegedly used to help create the gospel and the other synoptic ones too. Q might only prove that there was some character that the Jesus character was modelled on but since it is so based on teaching that may be an overstatement. No two scholars agree on exactly what material in Mark constituted Q. A growing number hold that Q exists only in the imagination of the scholars for Mark could have invented and plagiarised from Pharisee teachers all the things he says Jesus said in his gospel without using any specific sources – people inventing stuff tend to subconsciously reproduce what they have heard or seen and that is all they need. The book of Q can be explained without a historical Jesus and it never says the son of God will be crucified on earth or gives any concrete statement that he was a real person and every single thing Mark, the first gospel, says happened during the execution of Jesus can be traced back to an Old Testament verse and anything that isn’t is just an elaboration of what was found in the Old Testament suggesting that the whole story was made up from the Jewish Bible (The Evolution of Jesus of Nazareth, http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/partthre.htm). Christians complain that literary dependence of the gospellers on Q needs proof and then they say then that the commonality between the synoptics can be explained by there having been a historical Jesus! (What About the Discovery of Q? by Brad Bromling D.Min). The similarity suggests the contrary, that there was no Jesus and myths and legends or lies had to be used to make up his story because there is too much similarity. Eyewitness reports would have been very difficult to make tally especially in the wording of what Jesus said. The Christians will grasp at any straw no matter how silly it is to get people to agree with them.
THE ELLEGARD BOOK
The book by Professor Alvar Ellegard, Jesus - One Hundred Years before Christ, is a study of how the Jesus story could have been put together if Jesus was a myth. The theory is that Ignatius of Antioch, in the second century, was the first person to turn Jesus into a historical person and the gospels hobbled along later to give him more solidity. Let us put it under the microscope.
The letters of Paul never speak
of Jesus coming again or returning (page 26) which is open to the possibility
that Jesus never lived on earth meaning this future coming would be his first
coming. James is called the brother of
Jesus in Paul’s letters (Galatians
The reason the book gives for a Christ faction in the Greek Church in Paul’s time, is that a pre-Christian Essene form of Jesus worship was in existence (page 23). Perhaps. It would mean Jesus was known and worshipped long before the time the gospels say he lived. The faction must have believed in direct communication with Christ because anything else would involve accepting a man like the way it was with Peter or Paul or Apollos as the emissary of Christ so you wouldn’t say any of them were a Christ faction. The Christ faction were perhaps Gnostic in inclination for they believed that they could not sin so they lived immorally and had supernatural abilities and knowledge. Paul never attacks their rejection of the Jesus story – Gnostics were so radical that they believed that everybody rejecting the Jesus story and inventing their own story was a sign of spiritual insight for truth differed from person to person an attitude that the vast majority of Gnostics have and always have had - so he had no Jesus story. He did not say they must stop telling lies about Jesus on the basis that the evidence says it is lies because he could not.
When answering Marcion’s followers who contended that Paul was the sole witness to Jesus having been resurrected, Irenaeus replied that Paul said that the same God was inspiring him and Peter. Irenaeus should have used the text, 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, which says that Peter and some others saw the Jesus of the resurrection besides Paul. Irenaeus would have used it if it had been in his text of Paul. Irenaeus needed to back up what he said for his mere opinion would not have washed with the Marcionites. Page 19 says it is weak to argue, “Irenaeus would have used the text for it gave him better support”. There is good reason to hold that 1 Corinthians 15 has been tampered with as the followers of Marcion believed. Marcion and his followers had no problem holding that Jesus appeared to the other apostles for they were said to be apostates and liars anyway. The more apparitions the better. When they refused to believe that Jesus did appear to anybody but Paul clearly then they had historical grounds for saying that.
Because there is no evidence of
the buildings called synagogues in
He disagrees with Thiede’s claim that fragments of Mark were found at Qumran dating Mark to 50 AD because the fragments are too small and unclear to be sure that they are from Mark (page 185). Moreover, the Cave 7 where they were found may not have had the same history as the rest and could have been used by Christians for hiding texts in (page 186). I would add that it is possible that somebody put the fragments there in order for them to be “discovered” for the evidence for the lateness of the Gospels is conclusive. It was the location they were found in that led to them being dated so early. Plenty of ancient material for planting is available on the black market and even at some legitimate markets in the East. But in any case, the fragments could be from anything for they are so small and the excuse was made that they are earlier editions of New Testament material to excuse their differences with our current text.
It is possible that the parallels between the Shepherd of Hermas and the Gospels mean that the Shepherd was used to create the gospels (page 46). Or it could be that they have the same source. The wording is not the same. Strong evidence that Hermas helped originate the gospels comes from the fact that it avoids seeing the Son of God as a historical figure who people met and touched and laughed and cried with. The author dates Hermas to the sixties of the first century.
All that is wrong with this is that he does not look to see if Hermas would have used the gospels or the source that the gospels used. Also, when a simple verse gets more complicated wording in a parallel text it is most likely that the harder one is the later version. Things tend to get fancier the longer time goes on and Hermas is the least fancy version of the Christian gospel.
However, Ellegard notes that a gospel parable of Jesus inspired by Isaiah 5 is more complicated than the Hermas version which is closer to Isaiah meaning that Hermas inspired the Gospel version (page 48). When Hermas ignored Paul and his writings (page 48) it is astonishing if he would have plagiarised the gospels or used the source of the gospels. This may be only an indication that the gospels were edited and elements from other books were implanted in the second century.
The book claims that Jesus was
transmuted into a historical person by the lies of St Ignatius of
The textual parallels between Ignatius’s writings and the sayings ascribed to Jesus in the gospels are distinguished by the fact that Ignatius never attributes them to Jesus while the gospels do (page 204). I have argued elsewhere that these parallels could have arisen by chance and tradition and are very few.
Ignatius wrote that the Spirit of God knows where it comes from and goes to. In John this becomes the wind representing the spirit blowing where it goes and nobody knows where it comes from. It gets more complicated and poetic in John so Ignatius seems to have been reworked to create what is in John.
Ignatius said that we must
receive the bishop as the one who sent him and regard him as the Lord. This corresponds with Jesus saying that whoever
receives the person he sends receives him (John
The author is right to argue that since Ignatius said that the Jewish prophets preached the gospel (Philippians 5:2) his reference to the need for gospels does not mean the books of the gospels we have (page 206). Philippians 8:2 has him protesting against people who said they would not believe in the gospels if what the gospels said was not in the ancient prophets. This does not mean books for few would have got the books and since they were so expensive and delicate they were only available to a few. He then said that the records were the cross, death and resurrection proving that he did not mean books. He said that Jesus drank after the resurrection which is not in the gospels (page 210) and shows he did not have them. If he had he would have regurgitated the account of Jesus eating fish in the gospel of Luke which was far more impressive and persuasive. If there had been gospels then the fish story being better known would naturally have been selected.
Some of the parallels in the book can be traced back to coincidence. A doctrine like, “The Son does all the Father wants”, could be mistaken as a parallel text to, “Whatever the Father does the Son does”. Times wording will be similar for the doctrine cannot be stated just in any old words but in much the same wording.
The evidence for the whole structure of Ellegard’s argument is not terribly convincing but it is convincing enough. There are coincidences that give it strength.
About 150 AD, Justin wrote his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew. Some think that Trypho never existed but he did for on one occasion when he and Justin were discussing the interpretation of prophecies about Jesus, Justin wandered from the subject to discuss the alleged removal by the Jews of material supportive of Jesus from the Old Testament. The dialogue then was created from an actual conversation.
Trypho said that nobody from Jesus’ time knew Jesus and that Jesus was invented. Trypho was an informed and worthy opponent when Justin had to write a book to challenge him. Justin, like Irenaeus much later, believed that Jesus lived to be an old man (page 40, St Peter and Rome) which conflicts with the gospels which we know Justin never knew completely for much of the historical part if not all of it was top secret. But there is reason to believe that Justin knew nothing but the bare skeleton of the Jesus story. Justin himself then inadvertently gives support to Trypho for Justin himself clearly knew nothing about Jesus and could not demonstrate that he must have lived. Thus we have a valuable witness to Jesus being a legend. In the Dialogue, Justin was extremely nasty to the Jew. He accused all Jews of being idolaters, spiritually ruined and depraved and incapable of honesty or fair play and said that they were the wickedest people on earth and that they fornicated like harlots (page 161, The Light Shining in Darkness). How could we trust anything – that was not bad – that Justin said about Jesus when he was so keen to win the argument with the Jews even at the cost of heaping vile slander on them? His apologetic was not about real love for Jesus but winning an argument and since the Jews were blamed for Jesus’ death Jesus was a good weapon to use against them to incite hatred. Justin cannot be trusted. That the Church preserved his hate-filled writings and prays to Justin as a saint does not speak well for the Church either.
The Jew, Trypho,
stated that there was no evidence for Jesus for nobody who would have known had
heard of him as a real person in
It is interesting that Trypho voices the unbiblical Jewish belief as fact that the Messiah will not know who he is until Elijah the precursor anoints him and reveals him. If the Jews had been as antichrist as Justin would like to think they would have vanquished the legend. Why? Because the Christians were saying John the Baptist was Elijah and John anointed Jesus with the spirit and revealed him in the River Jordan. It is a bit disturbing if Christian myths were following Jewish legends! It shows the Christians were reading back Jewish legends into the Jesus story as they helped it to incubate.
Trypho
suggests that the New Testament authors created the story of Jesus’ baptism and
anointing by the Spirit with the Baptiser John, Elijah, in the
It is one thing for Jesus to fulfil God’s prophecies but there is something amiss if he manages to fulfil prophecies that God never made! The Old Testament never says that Elijah will come to prepare the way for Jesus though Jesus and his Church imagined it did!
Trypho
was asserting that even if the Jesus of the Christians existed that nobody
claiming to be Elijah declared him to be a Messiah to open his eyes that he was
the Messiah so he rejects the gospels saying that John did tell Jesus in the
waters of the
We are told that the Christ of the Christians did not fit the criterion for being a real Christ but was an invention. However, Trypho does not concentrate on the existence of Jesus. His purpose was to show that the Messiah of the Christians could not have been a real Messiah and that the Christian view of the Messiah was not supported by the Old Testament. The reason he did that was because the Christians believed in the existence of Jesus on the basis of the prophecies.
Justin replies in Chapter 9 that he forgives Trypho for saying those things for Trypho has been misled by false scripture teachers and he promises to prove to Trypho that the stories are not fables. He means by proving the Old Testament prophesied Jesus. Now Justin never ever tries to prove that Jesus did x, y and z according to the scriptures but looks at Jesus through the scriptures. This tells us that Justin could not prove the existence of Jesus for what you have to do is to prove that Jesus did this and that and then that this was foreseen in the Old Testament criteria for a true Messiah.
Chapter XVII brings us Justin accusing the Jews of sending missionaries all over the world just to make trouble for Christians and slander them. This is impossible to believe for the Jews did not care what non-Jews thought. Why did the Jews pick on Christians and not Christ? The passage gives no hint that they went about slandering Jesus and saying the resurrection was a hoax which indicates that the Jews knew Jesus never existed. Justin wants to forget the Jews believed that. He says the Jews still persecute Christ but Christians hold that to persecute Christians is to persecute Christ.
When Justin claimed that the Old Testament had been altered, he lost any right to say that the Bible had no contradictions (Chapter LXV) and that it proved Christ was born and was the saviour. Trypho would certainly have pointed that out to him but Justin left that point out. Trypho would also have objected that had Jesus been the Christ Jesus would have restored the Bible. Justin quoted some allegedly missing scriptures (Chapter LXXII). One from Esdras merely says that there is a saviour and if the people turn away from him they shall be laughed at. Another from Jeremiah says that somebody is like a lamb for the slaughter and the Jews will say they should kill him. Another says the Lord came down to raise his people from the dead. A line about God reigning from the wood has supposedly been cut out of a psalm. Not one of these lost scriptures necessarily proves that God became man or anything about Jesus.
Chapter XXIX says that anybody baptised in the Holy Spirit does not need the other “baptism” of circumcision. Jesus would always have had the Holy Spirit and was still circumcised. Justin is contradicting the gospels that Jesus was circumcised.
Chapter XXXIV denies that a Psalm is about Solomon and says it is about Christ for it is about somebody who is adored by all kings and who rules the world. Quoting this Psalm would have been useless for Trypho would say it proved nothing for Christ did not achieve these things yet. So Justin is saying that all kings adored the man Christ some time in the past and that Christ was emperor of the world meaning that Jesus lived long long before the time period the gospels give. This is a clear contradiction of the New Testament and proves it was censored or not regarded as infallible at the time. Trypho never replied to this for it was so silly and impossible to disprove.
In Chapter XXXIX we read, “Trypho said, ‘prove to us that the man who according to you was crucified and rose into Heaven is the Messiah of God. For you have proved by the scriptures you have recited before that the scriptures say the Christ must suffer and return to rule all nations. Show us that your Christ is the Christ”. Justin replies, “It has been proved sirs. It has been proven to those who hear and who have heard what you have heard and accepted by you. But I return to what I was discussing and will give the other proof later to you in case you say I cannot prove”.
Trypho says that the Christians are SAYING Jesus was nailed to the cross indicating that there was no evidence for it but their word. Justin, in reply, tells the Jews that the prophecies are proof enough. In other words, the prophecies must have been fulfilled so even if there is no evidence for Christ we know from the prophecies that the Christ story is true and can work out the details of the story. In other words, the prophecies are the only real record of Christ. In other words, if the interpretation is wrong then Jesus Christ never existed.
Later in Chapter XLVIII Trypho challenges Justin to prove Christ as he promises and he complained that it was “all very paradoxical and no proof is possible. It is when you say that this Messiah existed as God before the origin of time and then that he agreed to be born and become a man and yet that is not just a man this is more than paradoxical but foolish – that is how I see it”. If you analyse this you see that the traditional claim of the Church that Trypho was disputing the idea of a God waiting for a long time to become man is false for Trypho as a Jew would have known that the same complaint could be made about God being so slow in sending the Messiah be he God or not. There is no absurdity in God waiting for the right time. As a scholar, Trypho would have known that the similar thought that it is too silly to believe that God would have waited so long before making the world was flawed. He is rejecting the idea that the Messiah was born as a man and could be a divine being for a God made man would only be a God pretending to be a vulnerable man. He is implicitly denying that Jesus could do miracles and rise from the dead. Justin replies, “I am unable to prove that he existed before his birth as a son of the creator of all things and that he was God and born man of a virgin. But I have proved that he is the Christ”. Justin means only the Old Testament proves Christ to have been the Messiah and Justin is denying that there are any books or proofs that Jesus was a God and existed before he was born which is a challenge to the traditional interpretation of the gospel of John which appears at first glance to support the traditional theology that there are three persons in God and the second person the Word or Son became man. Justin even says that Christ is the Christ whoever he is. He does not know Jesus at all or anything about him. He has to learn about the mysterious Jesus from Old Testament prophecy.
Justin cannot use the resurrection to prove that Jesus is God even on the basis that if Jesus said he was God and God would prove it by raising him then Jesus was proven to be God by the resurrection. Justin did not have the uncensored gospels. And even without them he should still have been able to formulate an argument for the resurrection by arguing on the basis of history and the integrity of the alleged witnesses to the resurrection.
And Justin was not thinking about proving that Christ was
born of a virgin but that Christ was born for born is the whole point of what
he said. It’s the main point. He meant, “I cannot prove that he was born –
it just happened to be from a virgin”. Trypho's request for proof that Jesus really fulfilled the
prophecies is not given and in chapter XLIX Justin goes back to proving from
prophecy that Elijah in John anointed Jesus but never uses history to prove the
event really happened as prophesied. Trypho answers that the prophecy used to prove this is
ambiguous and Justin argues that there was nobody else but John and Jesus to
fulfil the prophecy. He does not use
facts to prove Jesus fulfilled prophecy but uses prophecy to work out the
alleged facts. The fact that he
indicates that John and Jesus were the only candidates implies that his view
was that the baptism in the Jordan was more than just a dip in the water and
John hearing a voice and seeing a dove light on Jesus. It seems to imply that there was a coronation
and something that nobody else could imitate.
It was some kind of grand public event and was unique for anybody could
go for a dip and say the man who baptised them was Elijah and that the Holy
Spirit came down. Justin rejected and
did not know or accept the story of what happened at the
Chapter LXIX says that the Devil created the legend of Hercules with his divine origin from Jove and his world travels and magic strength, ascension into Heaven to create a counterfeit of the life of Christ so that Hercules seems to imitate Christ. But Jesus did not travel the world or have great physical strength according to the Gospels so Justin is eliminating the gospels whether he knew them or not as reliable records of the life of Jesus. This would be strong evidence that Jesus may not have existed for the gospels are the only things that stand between belief in Jesus as a person and denial of his reality. The reason Justin brings all these parallels between Jesus and the gods up is because he wants to convince Trypho that the Devil and his legions know the prophecies of the Old Testament mean what Justin says they mean. So to ruin things for Jesus, Satan and his minions invent other Jesus’s such as Hercules.
The outrageously ridiculous thesis in Chapter LXX that the mystery religion of Mithras was based on the true interpretation of Daniel and Isaiah but distorted is a sure sign that Justin was extremely embarrassed by the similarity between Christ and Mithras. He wanted to deflect Trypho from going into the charge that Christians used pagan myths when inventing their Jesus. And it worked. Trypho did not use this line of argument. Trypho would have known to a certain extent that Christianity was a copy of paganism but would have found it difficult to answer Justin’s hint that it was independent. The pagans did not esteem Daniel and Isaiah that much and their legends all came from nature myths - for example, the sun setting and rising suggested dying and rising gods.
Justin devoted Chapters CVI and CVII to proving that the end of Psalm 22 and the story of Jonah showed that Jesus would rise again. Neither prove any such thing. Justin wrote in Chapter CVIII that though Jesus had told the Jews that he would perform the sign of Jonah meaning the resurrection they would not believe the resurrection report and maintained that the body had been stolen and the apostles were lying. Justin made no effort to prove that the resurrection happened. His logic was if the Old Testament said the Messiah would rise then Jesus must have risen and it is on this logic that he tries to persuade Trypho. That is why Trypho does not bother answering the objection. The objection could only be answered on the basis that the gospel stories were verifiable and convincing and this was not done so both Justin and Trypho did not regard the gospels as wholly important if they existed. It seems more probable that they did not know the historical parts of the gospels at all. Justin denied the gospel evidence when he said that prophecy proves the resurrection when what he should have been doing was proving the resurrection and then that it was prophesised.
Justin claims to prove that the Old Testament predicted that the Gentiles would be more open to the gospel than the Jews who would mostly turn away. There is something very dodgy going on when the people who would have known Jesus best were so dead set against him. The Jews were a lot less addicted to material pleasures than the Gentiles and had a rigid moralistic religion so psychology tells us that they should have been easier to convert. But the case may be that they knew too much about Justin’s non-existing Jesus to be converted.
Justin showed he did not have the Book of Acts when he
told Trypho that you could not be a Jew and a
Christian at the one time. It wasn’t
likely then that he had Luke’s gospel either for one goes with the other and
the end of Luke says the apostles never left the
In Chapter CXLII, Trypho tells Justin that it was not the intention of his or Justin’s companions to discuss what they discussed. Trypho says he is pleased with the conversation and that more discussions like that would be of service in understanding the Old Testament scriptures. Before they left Justin told them he hoped they would come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah of God. So he had failed to convince them. Evidently, Trypho was impressed only by the ingenuity but not the conclusions of Justin’s Old Testament exegesis.
Justin says the apostles wrote memoirs of the life of Jesus but he never tells us what was in them or if he used them in his research into the life of Jesus. Justin was dishonest because he said that when God said that he gives nobody his glory but keeps it for himself for he is the only God and that when he gave Christ his glory the solution to the contradiction is a mystery (Chapter LXV). When he sees or thinks he sees a contradiction he pretends it is not there. Justin seriously contradicted the gospels when he said this for had Christ been God there would have been no contradiction. But Justin believed that Christ was not God but was another God. This is plain. His attitude shows that the early Church had no scriptures but the Old Testament and anything else was just a book, useful, but just a book that could be right or wrong and had no binding authority on the Church. This shows that early Christianity was not based on evidence but on Old Testament interpretation and opinion.
Justin backed up Trypho’s unbelief in the reality of Christ without meaning to. Justin was the Christian’s first real apologist. This individual is eulogised by Christians and his eccentricities and fanaticism are conveniently papered over.
GOSPEL STORIES INSERTED INTO TRYPHO
Justin
gives some details from the life of Christ that are similar to the Gospel of
Matthew in the Dialogue with Trypho. His version of the visit of the magi says
Jesus was born in a cave and that the magi came from
It
is important that Justin is only close to the gospel story in its most dubious
claims, the nativity, the entry into
Justin did not know of the extremely basic apostolic and New Testament doctrine originated by Jesus that there was no salvation without explicit faith in Christ for he thought that Socrates and Heraclitus, pagan Greek philosophers, were redeemed in the blood of Christ and were in Heaven. Anything he says then is to be taken with a pinch of blessed salt unless it was something he would not have liked to admit.
In chapter 49, of his Dialogue, Justin gets Trypho to agree that the Old Testament says that Elijah will precede the Messiah. But the Old Testament says no such thing which is why the report of Trypho’s agreement is dubious. This means that Justin’s discourse that heavily borrows from the gospel about John being Elijah and Jesus saying so is an insertion. Now why try to get Trypho to believe things about John being Elijah when Trypho would not have believed Elijah had to proclaim a Jesus style Messiah? Was somebody trying to make it look like the gospels were known before they actually were? Evidence for this is Trypho’s rejection of the doctrine that Isaiah saying one would come crying in the wilderness referred to the Baptist preparing the way for Jesus. Trypho would have believed Elijah if he was coming would literally come. It is no use pointing to an obscure prophet like John who wasn’t regarded as being on the level of the other prophets and who produced no scriptures and saying he was Elijah. Anybody could be Elijah at that rate.
The discourse is followed by a report that Trypho learned from it that John is being said to have come with the same Holy Spirit as Elijah and he finds that silly. That is a lie and Justin knows it because the Jews had no problem with God invisibly indwelling more than one prophet at the one time never mind when there was centuries between them. Justin then quoted texts from the Old Testament to show that it was possible. Why did Trypho not ask Justin where he got his information that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies from? Why is he presented as taking for granted what Justin reports to him is right? Why does he listen to Justin saying about what happened to John the Baptist and that it fulfilled a prophecy and then change the subject to object that John and Elijah having the same Holy Spirit is silly? Trypho would have questioned the story he was being told not the theology. The bits that seem to have come from the gospels look so much like insertions made long after Justin died. A forger seems to have been at work.
If Justin had the Matthew or Luke gospel then why did he depend on Isaiah to prove that Jesus was virgin-born in chapter 66 when both he and Trypho knew that it was not good enough as Trypho stated?
The chapter that gives the details about Jesus’ birth and the massacre of the innocents as Matthew has it is dubious for it is offered as proof that Jesus fulfilled prophecy and we are given the impression that Trypho accepted it for that is the end of the dispute. Trypho would not have been that easily convinced. Then it jumps to the declaration by Trypho that Justin’s scripture interpretations are contrivances. His silence about the books that allegedly verify that they are not contrivances shows that somebody has been inserting the Matthew material into the passage.
The early Christians would have thought that kings from the east came to worship Jesus and that Jesus had been baptised by John who was Elijah without the gospels because they created the life story of Jesus out of the Bible prophecies and John was a popular prophet. A lot of the material in Justin can be explained that way.
A
scribe probably inserted the material that is close to the gospels. It was material that could have been left out
and it is impossible to see what Justin wanted it for. And why didn’t he use the story of the entry
into
OTHER
SNIPPETS ABOUT JUSTIN
We have some fragments from Justin’s Work on the Resurrection. This book was written to answer those who rejected the idea that anybody could come back from the dead.
In the first chapter of that work he said that truth is free and is its own authority and should be believed both for its own status as truth and for the sake of trusting the God of truth who sends it. He said that the truth of Christianity is sent with authority and it is not right to ask for proof for it for the proof is greater than the proven and since God is truth nothing not even proof can be better than God.
In other words, you believe in Christianity because God says it is true and not because there is any evidence. So there cannot be any evidence when he has that attitude. When Justin answers objections to the resurrection he never does it by trying to verify that the apostles and the gospels were truthful so he never had any gospels and did not regard the apostles testimony as evidence. Rather than depend on evidence the Christian sees if the gospel might be true and then gets a revelation from God that it is true.
It is certain that Justin did not have the gospels.
Found at Nag Hammadi in
The research material for this work was just thrown together. It shows the marks of the Gnostic system of Valentinus. This means the author had access to the outstanding scholarship of the Valentinians and should be taken seriously.
Because the book is like the format of the catechisms of the second century to the fourth it is dated in the late second century (The Nag Hammadi Library in English, page 141). But the way it is disorganised hints that most of the material in it must go back a lot further. The quotations from the gospels are hurried insertions – whoever put them in had no intention of tampering much. If the gospel in its original form had been all late second century we would expect to see criticisms of the Christian writings in it for it opposes anything that makes people fail to see that the spiritual Jesus saves and there is no physical Jesus. So in its original form and because of its primitive teaching it goes back to the first century or the early part of the second before the gospels appeared. It is sacramentalist and it would use the gospel of John which has been traditionally been thought to have been a major source of sacramental thinking more if it does not. It quotes John once and calls it the word of God. Yet it contradicts it! The author could only get pieces of John’s gospel for he couldn’t get his piece of it right so he wrote before John was made public in the middle of the second century. Despite himself he was proving that John was a liar. This perhaps accidental attack on John’s veracity carries more weight than all the early testaments favouring the apostolic doctrine put together. The Church will say it was just a mistake. But you have to take historical material as it is for if you start assuming that anything you don’t like is a mistake you are on the path to danger. A historical portrait has to stand by what the written sources say for there is no alternative but worthless speculation.
The book is not merely a collection of Gnostic myth that the author believed you could dissent from. The sacramentalism and the emphasis on knowing magical names of Jesus and the catechism format suggest that it was a dogmatic book for a sect. What was in it was in it because it was believed to be as much fact as the rising of the sun every morning.
The quote from John says that whoever does not eat the flesh and drink the blood has no life in him. But the flesh is interpreted as the word of God and the blood as the holy spirit of God. This would be a denial that the gospel version of Jesus existed as a flesh and blood being so he could have been a vision or an illusion or a symbol from Heaven.
It says that Jesus Christ lived before men knew how to
make bread, “Before Christ came there was no bread in the world, just as
Philip says that Mary did not conceive by the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is female. It says that the apostles hated her which shows that its author did not have the New Testament which says that Mary was chummy with the early Church.
The gospel says that Jesus appeared differently to different people suggesting that he was an apparition perhaps one that people induced to appear themselves by hypnotic rites.
It says Christ came to the whole place meaning he had been all over the world. The gospel comes to the brink of stating that Jesus was just a vision. It went on to say that Jesus burdened nobody while on earth which contradicts the gospels that he depended on charity to live and expected the apostles to die for him instead of sending them to safe places to preach. And that then he forbade causing distress to anybody though Jesus abused the Pharisees and caused a lot of misery. The author is disputing the gospel account. And yet he appeals to some word of God or scripture that supports his teaching meaning there was a book that would not be compatible with the gospels.
The gospel is reckoned by Barbara Thiering and her ilk to state that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a romantic relationship. It says that he loved her more than the disciples and kissed her often on the mouth to their disgust. They complained and he said that he loved them like her. So if he loved her most and did not love her the most then love must be in two different senses. The first sense is sexual and the second is platonic.
The gospel says that kissing is a sacrament that gives wisdom, “We also kiss one another. We receive conception from the grace which is in one another”. Kissing is causing you to be conceived as a child of God and passes on grace. So is there no romance in Jesus and Mary’s kisses? There must be some for he kissed her a lot and could have got others who could give the sacrament to do it. The early Christians kissed one another according to the New Testament. This was stopped to scotch unkind rumours. So the sacrament of the kiss points to the earliness of the gospel.
How does this slot in with the idea that Jesus didn’t live in the first century for the gospels say Magdalene did live then? Gnostics had no problem making up stories about religious figures. They thought making myths and inventing faiths was a sign of gnosis and that all schools of mysticism strove for the one truth so the details didn’t matter.
The author thought that Adam was nailed to the cross and
that Adam and Jesus were one and the same.
“When Eve was still in Adam death did not exist. When she was separated from him death came
into being. If he enters again and
attains his former self, death will be no more.
“My God, My God, why O lord, have you forsaken me?” (Mk
The gospel says that there is the son of man which was Jesus’ title and then there was the son of the son of man who is he who creates through the son of man and who can beget. The son of the son is every man so the son of man is Adam. Jesus and Adam were the same person or Adam was the first person to be possessed by the Christ Jesus force which became a part of him so that when he died you could say it died too.
Philip said that Adam came from two virgins which were the spirit and the earth and that therefore Jesus was born of a virgin to put the fall right. Adam’s mothers were not women so Jesus’ wasn’t either. Adam was Jesus and Adam became Jesus by some kind of spiritual rebirth. Jesus’ mother was the spirit. Gnostics saw creation as a fall from God so it is not the fall of Genesis where Adam and Eve were disinherited for disobedience that is meant. Adam was bad for he was earth and spirit and Jesus was good for he was pure spirit. Adam became Jesus when he got rid of what his mother earth had put into him. The therefore shows that Jesus was Adam for he fixed the fall that Adam had. Nobody else was involved. Nobody would argue that a person called Adam was virgin born so another person Jesus had to be for that makes no sense. That is not what the gospel is saying.
The gospel says that Adam became an animal by eating the fruit and that Christ was redeemed himself (page 152) and became sinless.
A story is attributed to the apostle Philip that Joseph the father of Jesus planted a garden of trees and made the cross of Jesus from them. But the gospel interprets this as an allegory for it starts about the tree of life in the middle of the garden and that it is from an olive tree there that we get the chrism and the chrism grants us a resurrection from spiritual death to life in this world. Joseph means increase in Hebrew and could be a symbol for the power that made Jesus or Adam. The cross could be the tree of life in the Garden of Eden that Adam was symbolically nailed to meaning he could not avail of its fruit and wanted to. The olives represent the salvation he won for us. This interpretation requires that Jesus be Adam and in the Garden of Eden. Adam could be the fallen animal man and Jesus the redeemed spiritual man. Though the two are different persons in many ways they are the same person in essence which is why they can be spoken of as if they were separate persons at times. If Joseph made Jesus’ cross and Jesus was crucified in Joseph’s garden then we could have a staged mock crucifixion. It was necessary to fake a resurrection which God used to give mystical knowledge to the world. The author of Philip might be denying the gospels that Joseph was dead during Jesus’ ministry.
“Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images. The world will not receive truth in any other way.” This completely repudiates and contradicts the gospels which are not wrapped up in symbols. So, Jesus must be a symbolic picture which does not rule out him being a true apparition that unveils truth to us. The gospel would not be teaching if Philip meant teaching. Jesus claimed to be the truth and this gospel is taking him literally.
The gospel condemned names because they cloak what is unreal. It said that words like Father, Son and Holy Spirit and resurrection blind one to the truth. It means you put your interpretation on them and they become idols. Words describe facts so the facts about the Son if you take him as somebody that lived on earth are as dangerous. Obviously, the gospel advocates truth so it forbids dependence on this alleged Jesus. He would not have come to earth to block our progress so he was not on earth at all and just speaks from Heaven to those who are in mystical communion with him - and though people differ in the details he gives them the truth that gives them personal transformation in the way that is best for them.
The gospel says that God dyes. But this is symbolism for the fact that God changes a person in water baptism which the text says.
The line, “God is a man-eater. For this reason men are [sacrificed] to him”. The author may only be reiterating the Old Testament demand for killing people who commit certain sins.
We are told that Jesus came to crucify the world. So perhaps this is just another way of expressing what Jesus asked us to do when he told us to sacrifice ourselves and follow him by bearing our crosses.
It is argued that this gospel is worthless on the grounds that it is crazy. But you don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. It is not really crazy.
Philip proves that Jesus was made up. It proves there were early Christians who denied that the gospels had the real Jesus and who treated gospels and legends about Jesus as allegories and myths not as literal truth which is the same as saying there is little or no evidence for the existence of Jesus.
VALENTINUS AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS
The Gnostic heretic of the Second Century, Valentinus, held that the Pastoral Letters of St Paul were forged (page 5, The Gnostic Paul). Interestingly, modern experts have come to the same conclusion so Valentinus knew something we did not. Valentinus rejected these letters not for doctrinal reasons for the other epistles of Paul which he accepted were far more rabidly anti-gnostic but for historical reasons. Valentinus then eliminated the epistle which says that Jesus spoke before Pilate which made it clear that Paul had no historical evidence for his Jesus. In the Valentinian scheme, Paul left no evidence for a historical Jesus. Valentinus didn’t take the gospels seriously as history. This is as important as saying that Jesus didn’t exist. When you say the life of somebody is dubious or not to be taken seriously then you cannot exclude the possibility that the person never lived. I am saying that anybody not taking the New Testament gospels that seriously on the historical level is as good as saying there is no evidence that the gospels are historically true where they speak of Jesus.
Valentinus subscribed to the language of a historical Jesus and to the whole Christian system but the only difference was that he felt that there were two equally valid understandings of this faith. The seemingly literal talk masked esoteric symbolism. For example, they said that the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus, or his historical resurrection if you like, was foolishness and quoted Paul in their defence (page 82, 84). The resurrection of Jesus signifies enlightenment and the achievement of gnosis which resurrects the soul from death to life (page 81).
The Gospel of Philip which has Valentinian influence says that the flesh of Jesus is the logos or word of God and his blood is the Holy Spirit and argues that Jesus said this himself when he stated that anybody who does not eat his body and drink his blood will be lost in death (page 99). That is a challenge to the view that Jesus was a historical personage. They did believe that he existed but only on the spiritual plane. For us, it is enough that they denied his physical sojourn on earth.
The Valentian work Treatise on the Resurrection or as its sometimes called The Epistle to Rheiginos rejects the view that Jesus’ resurrection had anything to do with the body. In fact it was salvation from the body and Jesus rose again spiritually. The letter teaches that the world and what is physical is an illusion but the resurrection alone is real. Thus we see a form of Christianity that didn’t take the Bible too seriously or the New Testament but valued alleged secret teachings and religious experiences. Such an attitude towards the New Testament and the gospels is incompatible with attaching any importance to the Jesus of history.
The Valentinians were able to live like fully orthodox Christians (page 157, The Gnostic Paul). They held that they should teach traditional Christianity to their followers and reserve the secret teaching for a few suitable people among them. The Valentinians held that Paul gave secret tradition to Theudas who gave it to Valentinus (page 5, The Gnostic Paul). Paul indicated that he was keeping teachings back from the Church that only some very trusted people could be allowed to hear (1 Corinthians 3:1-3).
Valentinians sounded exactly like ordinary Christians. It was what they meant by what they preached that was different and they kept much of their teaching secret. But as evidenced by them and other groups, they viewed literal Christianity which took the gospels as history to be false. Christians complain that if Jesus didn’t exist then why aren’t there more statements to the effect from first and second century people that he didn’t exist. Don’t they realise that the fact that most of those who claimed to be Christians in the early Church, including the Valentinians, denied that the gospels should be afforded any historical status. That is the same thing as admitting there was no evidence for the historical gospel Jesus. For a first or second century person to say Jesus didn’t exist wouldn’t be enough to prove that Jesus didn’t exist for the person could be lying out of hatred for Christ. But when people who like Jesus say there is no evidence that is actually better for those of us who doubt the existence of Jesus. It is confessing there is no evidence he lived and if there is no evidence there is no reason to believe in him. If there is no evidence Jesus lived, then he probably never lived at all.
The Christian scholar might reply that the Valentinians for example were heretics not Christians. Makes no difference. They had nothing to gain from denying that there was evidence for Jesus. The only evidence they were interested in was subjective evidence such as having visions of Jesus and feeling that he was with them. But subjective evidence counts for nothing for Hindus claim subjective and experiential evidence of Vishnu and various gods. They weakened their own teaching – and they didn’t care because they honestly knew or believed that there was no evidence for Jesus as a historical personage.
Christian tradition such as we
seen in the first century Epistle of Barnabas and most sources agreed with Valentianianism that stories about God and his deeds were
to be treated as symbolic and not historical.
We read in the excellent pro-Fundamentalist book, Fundamentalism and the Word of God
by J I Packer that during Medieval times, the literal or historical sense of
scripture or the Bible was regarded as of no importance and the whole Church
agreed (page 103, Fundamentalism and the
Word of God) All they cared about
was their fanciful allegorical interpretations.
For example, when
This tells us a number of things.
- The faith of the Church in those days was based on tradition and subjective feelings not on evidence. The heretics such as the Valentinians taught the same thing.
- The Church didn’t trust the Bible so they tried to avoid having to deal with it for looking for evidence for Christ and his doings.
- The Church desperately and fanatically opposed heretics such as the Valentianians and the Gnostics who also refused to take scripture literally or as history for they did it too openly. If the Church had been able to, it would have rejected the allegorical method of interpreting the Bible which can make it mean anything you want to. That way it would have been able to attack the heretics using the Bible. It would be able to argue for instance that historically Christ founded his Church and promised to remain with it forever from the Bible and that the Church that has a direct l