Did Jesus Even Exist?

Frank R. Zindler I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against people who try from time to time to deny it. It would be easier, frankly, to believe that Tiberius Caesar, Jesus' contemporary, was a figment of the imagination than to believe that there never was such a person as Jesus. - N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress, 1996) --------------------------------------------------For most of my life, I had taken it for granted that Jesus, although certainly not a god, was nevertheless an historical personage - perhaps a magician skilled in hypnosis. To be sure, I knew that some of the world's greatest scholars had denied his existence. Nevertheless, I had always more or less supposed that it was improbable that so many stories could have sprung up about someone who had never existed. Even in the case of other deities, such as Zeus, Thor, Isis, and Osiris, I had always taken it for granted that they were merely deified human heroes: men and women who lived in the later stages of prehistory - persons whose reputations got better and better the longer the time elapsed after their deaths. Gods, like fine wines, I supposed, improved with age. About a decade ago, however, I began to reexamine the evidence for the historicity of Jesus. I was astounded at what I didn't find. In this article, I would like to show how shaky the evidence is regarding the alleged existence of a would-be messiah named Jesus. I now feel it is more reasonable to suppose he never existed. It is easier to account for the facts of early Christian history if Jesus were a fiction than if he once were real. Burden of Proof Although what follows may fairly be interpreted to be a proof of the non-historicity of Jesus, it must be realized that the burden of proof does not rest upon the skeptic in this matter. As always is the case, the burden of proof weighs upon those who assert that something or some process exists. If someone claims that he never has to shave because every morning before he can get to the bathroom he is assaulted by a six-foot rabbit with extremely sharp teeth who trims his whiskers better than a razor - if someone makes such a claim, no skeptic need worry about constructing a disproof. Unless evidence for the claim is produced, the skeptic can treat the claim as false. This is nothing more than sane, every-day practice. Unlike N. T. Wright, quoted at the beginning of this article, a small number of scholars have tried over the centuries to prove that Jesus was in fact historical. It is instructive, when examining their "evidence," to compare it to the sort of evidence we have, say, for the existence of Tiberius Csar - to take up the challenge made by Wright. It may be conceded that it is not surprising that there are no coins surviving from the first century with the image of Jesus on them. Unlike Tiberius Csar and Augustus Csar who adopted him, Jesus is not thought to have had control over any mints. Even so, we must point out that we do have coins dating from the early first century that bear images of Tiberius that change with the age of their subject. We even have coins minted by his predecessor, Augustus Csar, that show Augustus on one side and his adopted son on the other. 1 Would Mr. Wright have us believe that these coins are figments of the imagination? Can we be dealing with fig-mints? Statues that can be dated archaeologically survive to show Tiberius as a youth, as a young man assuming the toga, as Csar, etc. 2 Engravings and gems show him with his entire family. 3 Biographers who were his contemporaries or nearly so quote from his letters and decrees and recount the details of his life in minute detail. 4 There are contemporary inscriptions all over the former empire that record his deeds. 5 There is an ossuary of at least one member of his family, and the Greek text of a speech made by his son Germanicus has been found at Oxyrhynchus in

Egypt. 6 And then there are the remains of his villa on Capri. Nor should we forget that Augustus Csar, in his Res Gest ("Things Accomplished"), which survives both in Greek and Latin on the so-called Monumentum Ancyranum, lists Tiberius as his son and co-ruler. 7 Is there anything advocates of an historical Jesus can produce that could be as compelling as this evidence for Tiberius? I think not, and I thank N. T. Wright for making a challenge that brings this disparity so clearly to light. There is really only one area where evidence for Jesus is even claimed to be of a sort similar to that adduced for Tiberius - the area of biographies written by contemporaries or near contemporaries. a It is sometimes claimed that the Christian Bible contains such evidence. Sometimes it is claimed that there is extrabiblical evidence as well. Let us then examine this would-be evidence. The Old Testament "Evidence" Let us consider the so-called biblical evidence first. Despite the claims of Christian apologists, there is absolutely nothing in the Old Testament (OT) that is of relevance to our question, apart from the possible fact that some prophets may have thought that an "anointed one" (a rescuer king or priest) would once again assume the leadership of the Jewish world. All of the many examples of OT "predictions" of Jesus are so silly that one need only look them up to see their irrelevance. Thomas Paine, the great heretic of the American Revolution, did just that, and he demonstrated their irrelevance in his book An Examination of the Prophecies, which he intended to be Part III of The Age of Reason. b The New Testament "Evidence" The elimination of the OT leaves only the New Testament (NT) "evidence" and extrabiblical material to be considered. Essentially, the NT is composed of two types of documents: letters and would-be biographies (the so-called gospels). A third category of writing, apocalyptic, c of which the Book of Revelation is an example, also exists, but it gives no support for the historicity of Jesus. In fact, it would appear to be an intellectual fossil of the thought-world from which Christianity sprang - a Jewish apocalypse that was reworked for Christian use. 8 The main character of the book (referred to 28 times) would seem to be "the Lamb," an astral being seen in visions (no claims to historicity here!), and the book overall is redolent of ancient astrology. 9 The name Jesus occurs only seven times in the entire book, Christ only four times, and Jesus Christ only twice! While Revelation may very well derive from a very early period (contrary to the views of most biblical scholars, who deal with the book only in its final form), the Jesus of which it whispers obviously is not a man. He is a supernatural being. He has not yet acquired the physiological and metabolic properties of which we read in the gospels. The Jesus of Revelation is a god who would later be made into a man - not a man who would later become a god, as liberal religious scholars would have it. The Gospels The notion that the four "gospels that made the cut" to be included in the official New Testament were written by men named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John does not go back to early Christian times. The titles "According to Matthew," etc., were not added until late in the second century. Thus, although Papias ca. 140 CE ('Common Era') knows all the gospels but has only heard of Matthew and Mark, Justin Martyr (ca. 150 CE) knows of none of the four supposed authors. It is only in 180 CE, with Irenus of Lyons, that we learn who wrote the four "canonical" gospels and discover that there are exactly four of them because there are four quarters of the earth and four universal winds. Thus, unless one supposes the argument of Irenus to be other than ridiculous, we come to the conclusion that the gospels are of unknown origin and authorship, and there is no good reason to suppose they are eye-witness accounts of a man named Jesus of Nazareth. At a minimum, this forces us to examine the gospels to see if their contents are even compatible with the notion that they were written by eye-witnesses. We cannot even assume that

each of the gospels had but one author or redactor. It is clear that the gospels of Matthew and Luke could not possibly have been written by an eye-witness of the tales they tell. Both writers plagiarize d (largely word-for-word) up to 90% of the gospel of Mark, to which they add sayings of Jesus e and would-be historical details. Ignoring the fact that Matthew and Luke contradict each other in such critical details as the genealogy of Jesus - and thus cannot both be correct - we must ask why real eye-witnesses would have to plagiarize the entire ham-hocks-and-potatoes of the story, contenting themselves with adding merely a little gravy, salt, and pepper. A real eye-witness would have begun with a verse reading, "Now, boys and girls, I'm gonna tell you the story of Jesus the Messiah the way it really happened..." The story would be a unique creation. It is significant that it is only these two gospels that purport to tell anything of Jesus' birth, childhood, or ancestry. Both can be dismissed as unreliable without further cause. We can know nothing of Jesus' childhood or origin! Mark But what about the gospel of Mark, the oldest surviving gospel? Attaining essentially its final form probably as late as 90 CE but containing core material dating possibly as early as 70 CE, it omits, as we have seen, almost the entire traditional biography of Jesus, beginning the story with John the Baptist giving Jesus a bath, and ending - in the oldest manuscripts - with women running frightened from the empty tomb. (The alleged postresurrection appearances reported in the last twelve verses of Mark are not found in the earliest manuscripts, even though they are still printed in most modern bibles as though they were an "authentic" part of Mark's gospel.) Moreover, "Mark" being a non-Palestinian non-disciple, even the skimpy historical detail he provides is untrustworthy. To say that Mark's account is "skimpy" is to understate the case. There really isn't much to the gospel of Mark, the birth legends, genealogies, and childhood wonders all being absent. Whereas the gospel of Luke takes up 43 pages in the New English Bible, the gospel of Mark occupies only 25 pages - a mere 58% as much material! Stories do indeed grow with the retelling. I have claimed that the unknown author of Mark was a non-Palestinian non-disciple, which would make his story mere hearsay. What evidence do we have for this assertion? First of all, Mark shows no first-hand understanding of the social situation in Palestine. He is clearly a foreigner, removed both in space and time from the events he alleges. For example, in Mark 10:12, he has Jesus say that if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. As G. A. Wells, the author of The Historical Evidence for Jesus 10 puts it, Such an utterance would have been meaningless in Palestine, where only men could obtain divorce. It is a ruling for the Gentile Christian readers... which the evangelist put into Jesus' mouth in order to give it authority. This tendency to anchor later customs and institutions to Jesus' supposed lifetime played a considerable role in the building up of his biography. One further evidence of the inauthenticity of Mark is the fact that in chapter 7, where Jesus is arguing with the Pharisees, Jesus is made to quote the Greek Septuagint version of Isaiah in order to score his debate point. Unfortunately, the Hebrew version says something different from the Greek. Isaiah 29:13, in the Hebrew reads "their fear of me is a commandment of men learned by rote," whereas the Greek version - and the gospel of Mark - reads "in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men" [Revised Standard Version). Wells observes dryly [p. 13], "That a Palestinian Jesus should floor Orthodox Jews with an argument based on a mistranslation of their scriptures is very unlikely." Indeed! Another powerful argument against the idea that Mark could have been an eye-witness of the existence of Jesus is based upon the observation that the author of Mark displays a profound lack of familiarity with Palestinian geography. If he had actually lived in Palestine, he would not have made the blunders to be found in his gospel. If he never lived in Palestine, he could not have been an eye-witness of Jesus. You get the point.

The most absurd geographical error Mark commits is when he tells the tall tale about Jesus crossing over the Sea of Galilee and casting demons out of a man (two men in Matthew's revised version) and making them go into about 2,000 pigs which, as the King James version puts it, "ran violently down a steep place into the sea... and they were choked in the sea." Apart from the cruelty to animals displayed by the lovable, gentle Jesus, and his disregard for the property of others, what's wrong with this story? If your only source of information is the King James Bible, you might not ever know. The King James says this marvel occurred in the land of the Gadarenes, whereas the oldest Greek manuscripts say this miracle took place in the land of the Gerasenes. Luke, who also knew no Palestinian geography, also passes on this bit of absurdity. But Matthew, who had some knowledge of Palestine, changed the name to Gadarene in his new, improved version; but this is further improved to Gergesenes in the King James version. By now the reader must be dizzy with all the distinctions between Gerasenes, Gadarenes, and Gergesenes. What difference does it make? A lot of difference, as we shall see. Gerasa, the place mentioned in the oldest manuscripts of Mark, is located about 31 miles from the shore of the Sea of Galilee! Those poor pigs had to run a course five miles longer than a marathon in order to find a place to drown! Not even lemmings have to go that far. Moreover, if one considers a "steep" slope to be at least 45 degrees, that would make the elevation of Gerasa at least six times higher than Mt. Everest! When the author of Matthew read Mark's version, he saw the impossibility of Jesus and the gang disembarking at Gerasa (which, by the way, was also in a different country, the so-called Decapolis). Since the only town in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee that he knew of that started with G was Gadara, he changed Gerasa to Gadara. But even Gadara was five miles from the shore - and in a different country. Later copyists of the Greek manuscripts of all three pig-drowning gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) improved Gadara further to Gergesa, a region now thought to have actually formed part of the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. So much for the trustworthiness of the biblical tradition. Another example of Mark's abysmal ignorance of Palestinian geography is found in the story he made up about Jesus traveling from Tyre on the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, 30 miles inland. According to Mark 7:31, Jesus and the boys went by way of Sidon, 20 miles north of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast! Since to Sidon and back would be 40 miles, this means that the wisest of all men walked 70 miles when he could have walked only 30. Of course, one would never know all this from the King James version which - apparently completely ignoring a perfectly clear Greek text - says "Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the Sea of Galilee..." Apparently the translators of the King James version also knew their geography. At least they knew more than did the author of Mark! John The unreliability of the gospels is underscored when we learn that, with the possible exception of John, the first three gospels bear no internal indication of who wrote them. Can we glean anything of significance from the fourth and latest gospel, the gospel of John? Not likely! It is so unworldly, it can scarcely be cited for historical evidence. In this account, Jesus is hardly a man of flesh and blood at all - except for the purposes of divine cannibalism as required by the celebration of the rite of "holy communion." "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god," the gospel begins. No Star of Bethlehem, no embarrassment of pregnant virgins, no hint that Jesus ever wore diapers: pure spirit from the beginning. Moreover, in its present form, the gospel of John is the latest of all the official gospels. f The gospel of John was compiled around the year 110 CE. If its author had been 10 years old at the time of Jesus' crucifiction in the year 30 CE, he would have been 80 years old at the time of writing. Not only is it improbable that he would have lived so long, it is dangerous to pay much

attention to the colorful "memories" recounted by a man in his "anecdotage." Many of us who are far younger than this have had the unpleasant experience of discovering incontrovertible proof that what we thought were clear memories of some event were wildly incorrect. We also might wonder why an eye-witness of all the wonders claimed in a gospel would wait so long to write about them! More importantly, there is evidence that the Gospel of John, like Matthew and Luke, also is a composite document, incorporating an earlier "Signs Gospel" of uncertain antiquity. Again, we ask, if "John" had been an eye-witness to Jesus, why would he need to plagiarize a list of miracles made up by someone else? Nor is there anything in the Signs Gospel that would lead one to suppose that it was an eye-witness account. It could just as easily have been referring to the wonders of Dionysus turning water into wine, or to the healings of Asclepius. The inauthenticity of the Gospel of John would seem to be established beyond cavil by the discovery that the very chapter that asserts the author of the book to have been "the disciple whom Jesus loved" [John 21:20] was a late addition to the gospel. Scholars have shown that the gospel originally ended at verses 30-31 of Chapter 20. Chapter 21 - in which verse 24 asserts that "This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true" - is not the work of an eye-witness. Like so many other things in the Bible, it is a fraud. The testimony is not true. Saint Saul and His Letters Having eliminated the OT and the gospels from the list of possible biblical "evidences" of the existence of Jesus, we are left with the so-called epistles. At first blush, we might think that these epistles - some of which are by far the oldest parts of the NT, having been composed at least 30 years before the oldest gospel - would provide us with the most reliable information on Jesus. Well, so much for blushes. The oldest letters are the letters of St. Saul - the man who, after losing his mind, changed his name to Paul. Before going into details, we must point out right away, before we forget, that St. Saul's testimony can be ignored quite safely, if what he tells us is true, namely, that he never met Jesus "in the flesh," but rather saw him only in a vision he had during what appears to have been an epileptic seizure. No court of law would accept visions as evidence, and neither should we. The reader might object that even if Saul only had hearsay evidence, some of it might be true. Some of it might tell us some facts about Jesus. Well, allright. Let's look at the evidence. According to tradition, 13 of the letters in the NT are the work of St. Saul. Unfortunately, Bible scholars and computer experts have gone to work on these letters, and it turns out that only four can be shown to be substantially by the same author, putatively Saul. g These are the letters known as Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians. To these probably we may add the brief note to Philemon, a slave-owner, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians. The rest of the so-called Pauline epistles can be shown to have been written by other and later authors, so we can throw them out right now and not worry about them. Saul tells us in 2 Corinthians 11:32 that King Aretas of the Nabateans tried to have him arrested because of his Christian agitation. Since Aretas is known to have died in the year 40 CE, this means that Saul became a Christian before that date. So what do we find out about Jesus from a man who had become a Christian less than ten years after the alleged crucifixion? Precious little! Once again, G.A. Wells, in his book The Historical Evidence for Jesus [pp. 22-23], sums things up so succinctly, that I quote him verbatim: The...Pauline letters...are so completely silent concerning the events that were later recorded in the gospels as to suggest that these events were not known to Paul, who, however, could not have been ignorant of them if they had really occurred. These letters have no allusion to the parents of Jesus, let alone to the virgin birth. They never refer to a place of birth (for example, by calling him 'of Nazareth'). They give no indication of the time or place of his earthly existence. They do not refer to his trial before a Roman official, nor to

Jerusalem as the place of execution. They mention neither John the Baptist, nor Judas, nor Peter's denial of his master. (They do, of course, mention Peter, but do not imply that he, any more than Paul himself, had known Jesus while he had been alive.) These letters also fail to mention any miracles Jesus is supposed to have worked, a particularly striking omission, since, according to the gospels, he worked so many... Another striking feature of Paul's letters is that one could never gather from them that Jesus had been an ethical teacher... on only one occasion does he appeal to the authority of Jesus to support an ethical teaching which the gospels also represent Jesus as having delivered. It turns out that Saul's appeal to the authority of Jesus involves precisely the same error we found in the gospel of Mark. In 1 Cor. 7:10, Saul says that "not I but the Lord, [say] that the wife should not separate from the husband." That is, a wife should not seek divorce. If Jesus had actually said what Saul implies, and what Mark 10:12 claims he said, his audience would have thought he was nuts - as the Bhagwan says - or perhaps had suffered a blow to the head. So much for the testimony of Saul. His Jesus is nothing more than the thinnest hearsay, a legendary creature which was crucified as a sacrifice, a creature almost totally lacking a biography. Extrabiblical "Evidence" So far we have examined all the biblical evidences alleged to prove the existence of Jesus as an historical figure. We have found that they have no legitimacy as evidence. Now we must examine the last line of would-be evidence, the notion that Jewish and pagan historians recorded his existence. Jewish Sources It is sometimes claimed that Jewish writings hostile to Christianity prove that the ancient Jews knew of Jesus and that such writings prove the historicity of the man Jesus. But in fact, Jewish writings prove no such thing, as L. Gordon Rylands' book Did Jesus Ever Live? pointed out nearly seventy years ago: all the knowledge which the Rabbis had of Jesus was obtained by them from the Gospels. Seeing that Jews, even in the present more critical age, take it for granted that the figure of a real man stands behind the Gospel narrative, one need not be surprised if, in the second century, Jews did not think of questioning that assumption. It is certain, however, that some did question it. For Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho, represents the Jew Trypho as saying, "ye follow an empty rumour and make a Christ for yourselves." "If he was born and lived somewhere he is entirely unknown." That the writers of the Talmud [4th-5th centuries CE, FRZ] had no independent knowledge of Jesus is proved by the fact that they confounded him with two different men neither of whom can have been he. Evidently no other Jesus with whom they could identify the Gospel Jesus was known to them. One of these, Jesus ben Pandira, reputed a wonder-worker, is said to have been stoned to death and then hung on a tree on the eve of a Passover in the reign of Alexander Jannus (106-79 BC) at Jerusalem. The other, Jesus ben Stada, whose date is uncertain, but who may have lived in the first third of the second century CE, is also said to have been stoned and hanged on the eve of a Passover, but at Lydda. There may be some confusion here; but it is plain that the Rabbis had no knowledge of Jesus apart from what they had read in the Gospels. 11 Although Christian apologists have listed a number of ancient historians who allegedly were witnesses to the existence of Jesus, the only two that consistently are cited are Josephus, a Pharisee, and Tacitus, a pagan. Since Josephus was born in the year 37 CE, and Tacitus was born in 55, neither could have been an eye-witness of Jesus, who supposedly was crucified in 30 CE. So we could really end our article here. But someone might claim that these historians nevertheless had access to reliable sources, now lost, which recorded the existence and execution of our friend JC. So it is desirable that we take a look at these two supposed witnesses. In the case of Josephus, whose Antiquities of the Jews was written in 93 CE, about the same

time as the gospels, we find him saying some things quite impossible for a good Pharisee to have said: About this time, there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. 12 Now no loyal Pharisee would say Jesus had been the Messiah. That Josephus could report that Jesus had been restored to life "on the third day" and not be convinced by this astonishing bit of information is beyond belief. Worse yet is the fact that the story of Jesus is intrusive in Josephus' narrative and can be seen to be an interpolation even in an English translation of the Greek text. Right after the wondrous passage quoted above, Josephus goes on to say, "About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder..." Josephus had previously been talking about awful things Pilate had done to the Jews in general, and one can easily understand why an interpolator would have chosen this particular spot. But his ineptitude in not changing the wording of the bordering text left a "literary seam" (what rhetoricians might term aporia) that sticks out like a pimpled nose. The fact that Josephus was not convinced by this or any other Christian claim is clear from the statement of the church father Origen (ca. 185-ca. 154 CE) - who dealt extensively with Josephus that Josephus did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah, i.e., as "the Christ." Moreover, the disputed passage was never cited by early Christian apologists such as Clement of Alexandria (ca.150-ca. 215 CE), who certainly would have made use of such ammunition had he had it! The first person to make mention of this obviously forged interpolation into the text of Josephus' history was the church father Eusebius, in 324 CE. It is quite likely that Eusebius himself did some of the forging. As late as 891, Photius in his Bibliotheca, which devoted three "Codices" to the works of Josephus, shows no awareness of the passage whatsoever even though he reviews the sections of theAntiquities in which one would expect the disputed passage to be found. Clearly, the testimonial was absent from his copy of Antiquities of the Jews. 13 The question can probably be laid to rest by noting that as late as the sixteenth century, according to Rylands, 14 a scholar named Vossius had a manuscript of Josephus from which the passage was wanting. Apologists, as they grasp for ever more slender straws with which to support their historical Jesus, point out that the passage quoted above is not the only mention of Jesus made by Josephus. In Bk. 20, Ch. 9, 1 of Antiquities of the Jews one also finds the following statement in surviving manuscripts: Ananus convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned. It must be admitted that this passage does not intrude into the text as does the one previously quoted. In fact, it is very well integrated into Josephus' story. That it has been modified from whatever Josephus' source may have said (remember, here too, Josephus could not have been an eye-witness) is nevertheless extremely probable. The crucial word in this passage is the name James (Jacob in Greek and Hebrew). It is very possible that this very common name was in Josephus' source material. It might even have been a reference to James the Just, a first-century character we have good reason to believe indeed existed. Because he appears to have born the title Brother of the Lord, h it would have been natural to relate him to the Jesus character. It is quite possible that Josephus actually referred to a James "the Brother of the Lord," and this was changed

by Christian copyists (remember that although Josephus was a Jew, his text was preserved only by Christians!) to "Brother of Jesus" - adding then for good measure "who was called Christ." According to William Benjamin Smith's skeptical classic Ecce Deus, 15 there are still some manuscripts of Josephus which contain the quoted passages, but the passages are absent in other manuscripts - showing that such interpolation had already been taking place before the time of Origen but did not ever succeed in supplanting the original text universally. Pagan Authors Before considering the alleged witness of Pagan authors, it is worth noting some of the things that we should find recorded in their histories if the biblical stories are in fact true. One passage from Matthew should suffice to point out the significance of the silence of secular writers: Matt. 27:45. Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour... Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. 51. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; 52 And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, 53 And came out of the graves after his resurrection [exposed for 3 days?], and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many. Wouldn't the Greeks and Romans have noticed - and recorded - such darkness occurring at a time of the month when a solar eclipse was impossible? Wouldn't someone have remembered - and recorded - the name of at least one of those "saints" who climbed out of the grave and went wandering downtown in the mall? If Jesus did anything of significance at all, wouldn't someone have noticed? If he didn't do anything significant, how could he have stimulated the formation of a new religion? Considering now the supposed evidence of Tacitus, we find that this Roman historian is alleged in 120 CE to have written a passage in his Annals (Bk 15, Ch 44, containing the wild tale of Nero's persecution of Christians) saying "Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus..." G.A. Wells [p. 16] says of this passage: [Tacitus wrote] at a time when Christians themselves had come to believe that Jesus had suffered under Pilate. There are three reasons for holding that Tacitus is here simply repeating what Christians had told him. First, he gives Pilate a title, procurator [without saying procurator of what! FRZ], which was current only from the second half of the first century. Had he consulted archives which recorded earlier events, he would surely have found Pilate there designated by his correct title, prefect. Second, Tacitus does not name the executed man Jesus, but uses the title Christ (Messiah) as if it were a proper name. But he could hardly have found in archives a statement such as "the Messiah was executed this morning." Third, hostile to Christianity as he was, he was surely glad to accept from Christians their own view that Christianity was of recent origin, since the Roman authorities were prepared to tolerate only ancient cults. (The Historical Evidence for Jesus; p.16) There are further problems with the Tacitus story. Tacitus himself never again alludes to the Neronian persecution of Christians in any of his voluminous writings, and no other Pagan authors know anything of the outrage either. Most significant, however, is that ancient Christian apologists made no use of the story in their propaganda - an unthinkable omission by motivated partisans who were well-read in the works of Tacitus. Clement of Alexandria, who made a profession of collecting just such types of quotations, is ignorant of any Neronian persecution, and even Tertullian, who quotes a great deal from Tacitus, knows nothing of the story. According to Robert Taylor, the author of another freethought classic, the Diegesis (1834), the passage was not known before the fifteenth century, when Tacitus was first published at Venice by Johannes de Spire. Taylor believed de Spire himself to have been the forger. i

So much for the evidence purporting to prove that Jesus was an historical figure. We have not, of course, proved that Jesus did not exist. We have only showed that all evidence alleged to support such a claim is without substance. But of course, that is all we need to show. The burden of proof is always on the one who claims that something exists or that something once happened. We have no obligation to try to prove a universal negative. j It will be argued by die-hard believers that all my arguments "from silence" prove nothing and they will quote the aphorism, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But is the negative evidence I have referred to the same as absence of evidence? It might be instructive to consider how a hypothetical but similar problem might be dealt with in the physical sciences. Imagine that someone has claimed that the USA had carried out atomic weapons tests on a particular Caribbean island in 1943. Would the lack of reports of mushroom-cloud sightings at the time be evidence of absence, or absence of evidence? (Remember, the Caribbean during the war years was under intense surveillance by many different factions.) Would it be necessary to go to the island today to scan its surface for the radioactive contamination that would have to be there if nuclear explosions had taken place there? If indeed, we went there with our Geiger-counters and found no trace of radioactive contamination, would that be evidence of absence, or absence of evidence? In this case, what superficially looks like absence of evidence is really negative evidence, and thus legitimately could be construed as evidence of absence. Can the negative evidence adduced above concerning Jesus be very much less compelling? It would be intellectually satisfying to learn just how it was that the Jesus character condensed out of the religious atmosphere of the first century. But scholars are at work on the problem. The publication of many examples of so-called wisdom literature, along with the materials from the Essene community at Qumran by the Dead Sea and the Gnostic literature from the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt, has given us a much more detailed picture of the communal psychopathologies which infested the Eastern Mediterranean world at the turn of the era. It is not unrealistic to expect that we will be able, before long, to reconstruct in reasonable detail the stages by which Jesus came to have a biography. NOTES: It is sometimes claimed that the "miraculous" spread of Christianity in the early Roman Empire is evidence of an historical Jesus - that such a movement could not have gone so far so fast had there not been a real person at its inception. A similar argument could be made, however, in the case of the earlier rapid spread of Mithraism. I am unaware of any Christian apologists who would argue that this supports the idea of an historical Mithra! A profusely annotated paperback edition of Paine's book is available from American Atheist Press for twelve dollars. (Order No. 5575, click here) An apocalypse is a pseudonymous piece of writing characterized by exaggerated symbolic imagery, usually dealing with the expectation of an imminent cosmic cataclysm wherein the deity destroys the wicked and rewards the righteous. Apocalyptic writing abounds in hidden meanings and numerological puzzles. Parts of a number of Judo-Christian apocalypses other than Revelation have been preserved, but only the latter (if one does not consider the Book of Daniel to be entirely apocalyptic) was accepted into the Christian canon - and it almost didn't make it, having been rejected by several early Church Fathers and Church Councils. The opposite theory, often referred to as "Griesbach's hypothesis," that the author of Mark had "epitomized" the two longer gospels, keeping only the "essential" details, is today almost entirely rejected by bible scholars. While the arguments to support this nearly universal rejection are too involved to even summarize here, it may be noted that shortening of miracle stories is completely out of keeping with the principles of religious development seen everywhere today. Stories invariably get "better" (i.e., longer) with the retelling, never shorter!
e d c b a

There is compelling evidence indicating that these alleged sayings of Jesus were taken from

another early document known as Q (German, for Quelle, 'source'). Like the so-called Gospel of Thomas found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, Q appears to have been a list of wisdom sayings that at some point became attributed to Jesus. We know that at least one of these sayings ("We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced" Matt. 17:11; Luke 7:32) derives from sop's Fables, not from a sage of Galilee! I say "official gospels" because there are, in fact, many other gospels known. Once people started making them up, they sort of got stuck in over-drive. Only later on in Christian history did the number get pared back to four. Even the letters supposed to contain authentic writings of Saul/Paul have been shown by a number of scholars to be as composite as the gospels (e.g., L. Gordon Rylands, A Critical Analysis of the Four Chief Pauline Epistles: Romans, First and Second Corinthians, and Galatians, Watts & Co., London, 1929). According to such analyses, the core Pauline material in these letters is what might be termed a pre-Christian Gnostic product. This material is surrounded by often contradictory material added by proto-Catholic interpolators and redactors who succeeded thus in claiming a popular proto-Gnostic authority for the Church of Rome. In any case, the Greek text of these letters is heavy with terms such as Archon, on, etc. - jargon terms popular in the more astrologically conscious forms of Gnosticism. It would appear that the Christ of Paul is as astral a being as the Lamb of Revelation. Like the god of Revelation, the god of Paul communicates via visions, not physically, face-to-face. Originally, this would have been the title born by a member of a religious fraternity associated with the worship of Yahweh, who in Greek was always referred to as kurios ('Lord'). This was carried over into primitive Christianity, where we know from I Cor. 9:5 that there existed a governing class coordinate with apostles that was called "Brothers of the Lord." Misunderstanding of the original meaning of the title led to the belief that Jesus had siblings - an error that can be found already in the earliest of the canonical gospels. Interestingly, the embarrassing passages in the gospels where Jesus is rude to his mother and brethren would seem to derive from a period where a political struggle had developed between apostolically governed sects and those governed by "Brethren of the Lord," who claimed authority now by virtue of an alleged blood relationship to Jesus - who had by then supplanted Yahweh as "Lord." The apostolic politics of the gospel writers could not resist putting down the Brethren Party by having Jesus disregard his own family. If Jesus didn't pay serious attention to his own family, the argument would go, why should anyone pay attention to their descendants? This is the only plausible explanation for the presence of such passages as John 2:4 ("Woman, what have I to do with thee?") or Mark 3:33 ("Who is my mother, or my brethren?). Latinists often dispute the possibility of the passage being a forgery on the grounds that Tacitus' distinctive Latin style so perfectly permeates the entire passage. But it should be noted that the more distinctive a style might be, the easier it can be imitated. Then too, there is a lapse from normal Tacitean usage elsewhere in the disputed passage. In describing the early Christians as being haters "of the human race" (humani generis), the passage reverses the word order of normal Tacitean usage. In all other cases, Tacitus has generis humani. Curiously, in the present case, it would seem that such proof is in fact possible. Since Jesus is frequently referred to as "Jesus of Nazareth," it is interesting to learn that the town now called Nazareth did not exist in the first centuries BCE and CE. Exhaustive archaeological studies have been done by Franciscans to prove the cave they possess was once the home of Jesus' family. But actually they have shown the site to have been a necropolis - a city of the dead - during the first century CE. (Naturally, the Franciscans cannot agree!) With no Nazareth other than a cemetery existing at the time, how could there have been a Jesus of Nazareth? Without an Oz, could there have been a Wizard of Oz? REFERENCES
1. j h g f

Illustrated in Robin Seager, Tiberius, Eyre Methuen, London, 1972. For more detailed

numismatic documentation of Tiberius, see also C. H. V. Sutherland, Roman History and Coinage 44 BC-AD 69, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987; by the same author, Coinage in Roman Imperial Policy 31 B.C.-A.D. 68, Sanford J. Durst Numismatic Publications, NY, 1978.2. Illustrated in Seager, op. cit
3. 4.

Illustrated in Seager, op. cit.

Examined in Sutherland, 1987, op. cit. See also Victor Ehrenberg and A. H. M. Jones, Documents Illustrating the Reigns of Augustus & Tiberius, 2nd Edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955. See Inscriptiones Latin Select, edidit Hermannus Dessau, reprinted in 4 vols. by Ares Publishers Inc., Chicago, 1979.
6. 7. 8. 5.

Illustrated in Seager, op. cit. See Acta Divi Augusti, Regia Academia Italica, Rome, 1945.

In her Anchor Bible Volume 38, Revelation (Doubleday, Garden City, NJ, 1975), J. Massyngberde Ford proposed that the core of Revelation was material written by Jewish followers of John the Baptist. Even if the Baptist had been an historical figure (which is extremely doubtful), this still would make Revelation in essence a pre-Christian, Jewish apocalypse For more astrological aspects of Revelation, see Bruce J. Malina, On the Genre and Message of Revelation: Star Visions and Sky Journeys, Hendrickson, Peabody, MA, 1995.
10. 9.

George A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1982, L. Gordon Rylands, Did Jesus Ever Live?, Watts & Co., London, 1929, p. 20.

p. 13.
11. 12.

This so-called Testimonium Flavianum appears in Bk 18 Ch 3 3 of Josephus: Jewish Antiquities Books XVIII-XIX, IX, translated by L. H. Feldman, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981, pp. 48-51. J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Grca, Tomus CIII. Photius Constantinopolitanus Patriarcha, Garnier Fratres, Paris, 1900, Cod. 47, 76, and 238
14. 15. 13.

Rylands, op. cit., p. 14.

William Benjamin Smith, Ecce Deus: Studies of Primitive Christianity, Watts & Co., London, 1912, p. 235. BART EHRMAN AND THE CHESHIRE CAT OF NAZARETH Frank R. Zindler http://thejesusmysteriesforum.blogspot.in/2012/08/frank-r-zindlers-bart-ehrman-and.html When all that is left of a Cheshire cat is its grin, how can we be sure it is in fact the grin of a cat? To be sure, if we have watched a grinning cat disappear progressively until all we see is its grin, we can have some confidence that the aerial grin we perceive to remain is in fact that of a cat. As the grin further dissolves into the fog and mist of a perplexing day, however, it becomes harder and harder to determine if the motes that float before our eyes are still the remnants of the grin or just the random rubbish of polluted air. At some point, however, we will have to admit that the cat is gonecompletely gone. This all seems obvious enough and uncontroversial. But what if someone else were to walk by as you were standing at the wayside peering into the low branches of a tree and fixing your gaze on the fading remnants of the grin? What are you staring at? the stranger might inquire. The grin of a Cheshire cata cat that used to live in Cheshire in England, you reply.

Really? he might ask. Where exactly is it? You might point to a branch where the faint pattern of glowing dust still hovered in the air. Right there, youd explain. A moment ago, the whole cat was on that branch, but hes faded away to just the grin you see up there now. What?! the passerby might challenge you. Thats no cat! Thats just a will-o-thewisp! Well, you affirm, I know its a cat that grew up in Cheshire even though its gone now and not even a trace remains. Who would believe you? Who ought to believe you? Just as with Alice wandering around in Wonderland, a walk through the field of New Testament studies comes again and again to faint, ethereal traces that one is told are remnants of the scowl, or grin, or grimace, or smirk, or leer, or glare, or smiley-face, or amorous glance, or winsome wink of another character of Western literature: Jesus of Nazareth. Unlike the case of Alice and the Cheshire cat, no one now alive was around two thousand years ago to witness Jesus of Nazareth in his physical entirety before he started to fade into the blurry image of the past we now possess. Moreover, it certainly doesnt help when we learn that many of the earliest Christians didnt believe that Jesus ever had a physical entirety! There is a further problem. Unlike Alice witnessing the fading of the Cheshire cat from the beginning and so being able not only to attest to the identity of the pattern glowing amidst the darkling leaves but even to confirm the physical reality of a feline philosopher of known provenience, no one today can even attest with certainty to the identity of the character they think they see in the Rorschach records of the past. Still less can they vouchsafe the reality of his physical existence. No two persons see the same Jesus, let alone the Jesus that Bart Ehrman describes in Did Jesus Exist? One thing now seems certain to all scholars who are theologically free to follow the trail of evidence whithersoever it might lead: the original character whose jigsaw-puzzle image has fragmented and been scattered to the point where only a few pieces of the face remain in the puzzle-box of history could not possibly have been any of the Jesuses of the canonical New Testament. From the time of the Enlightenment it has been understood that whoever Jesus of Nazareth might have been in real life, he could not have been the miracle-worker of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That is to say, he could not have performed actual miracles that violated the laws of science. The Rationalists, however, held on to the stories as being history of a sort, but history that misunderstood what was really going on. Jesus wasnt really dead in the tomb; he had merely swooned. Jesus wasnt really walking on the water; the stones just below the surface werent visible in the fog. And so on. The Rationalists rescued the various gospel Jesuses from deconstructive demise for a time. But then in 1900 L. Frank Baums wonderful The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published, and the adventitious nature of Rationalist salvage efforts could eventually come to be seen as no more credible than arguments trying to prove that Emerald City isnt green because it is made of emeralds; rather, it is green due to paint pigments that exhibit high reflectance at wavelengths around 555 nanometers. And so began the inexorable disintegration and disappearance of the Cheshire Jesus of Nazaretha god long believed to have been a man but now known to have been no more real a man than was the Cheshire cat a real cat. After we briefly retrace the dissolution of The Historical Jesus a bit later, we shall see that insoluble epistemological problems now rule out any possibility that Bart Ehrmanstill less believing Christian apologistscan save the Savior long piously believed to have come from a place called Nazareth in the Galilee. Problems Facing Historicists

The greatest problem faced by modern questers of the Historical Jesusthe problem of lack of physical evidenceactually existed already close to the time their quarry is imagined to have lived. Practically from the beginning of the literary record still at our disposal, there were Christiansheretics, according to the victorious Orthodox Party who denied that Jesus or Christ (not necessarily equivalent characters) had had any physical reality at all. This problem was made extremely embarrassing by the apparent fact that no physical remains at all existed that could attest to the historicity of any Jesus at all, let alone to the physicality of a Jesus of an unknown place called Nazareth. It is not surprising, therefore, to discover that a thriving industry developed for manufacture and sale of holy relicsphysical objects that could in some way be made to attest to the reality of Jesus, his Twelve Disciples, his parents, his step-siblings, his miracles, as well as the very geographical stage itself on which the drama of the ages was thereby certified to have been acted out. Several foreskins of Jesus were produced for sacred edification of the faithful. Splinters of the True Cross, bones of the Apostles, and a mind-boggling array of artifacts soon filled the reliquaries of the churches of the Mediterranean world. All the relics were used to prove the unprovableto bear false witness in support of a man whose existence had never been witnessed by mortal man or woman. What was necessary even in ancient times has become even more necessary in modern times. Forgeries such as the Shroud of Turin, the James Ossuary, and the bones of Saint Peter at the Vatican1 continue to be needed props if modern Christians are to maintain contact with the historical Jesus. Although there were no unbroken traditions of habitation to tie present-day sites such as Nazareth, Capernaum, Bethany, Bethphage, etc., to the New Testament venues of Jesus supposed ministry, by the time of Constantines mother Helena tour guides seem to have been doing a handsome business leading the faithful to the place where Baby Jesus was born, where Gabriel spoke to Mary, where Jesus was crucified, buried, and did everything else men do except Well, Jesus apparently did those things too, but there probably would have been no tourism potential in memorializing the places where the Savior of the World did that sort of thing. Before the tour guides could show credulous Christians the holy places of the gospels, of course, names of places to venerate had to be created by the reverend evangelists themselves. One of the places, Aenon,2 was an unintentional invention resulting from dyslexia on the part of one of the authors of the Gospel of John trying to parse the sentences of a Codex Bezae-like manuscript of the Gospel of Luke. Nazareth was created to provide Jesus with a hometown in order to thwart the claims of the Docetists. Others, like Capernaum,3 Bethany, Bethphage,4 Bethabara, etc., were created for symbolic purposes. Most of the holy places of the gospels were unknown to ancient geographers and other writers. As shocking as these claims may seem, there is an even greater problem with which historicists must contend. In my The Jesus the Jews Never Knew5 I have shown that there is no evidence in all of Jewish literature surviving from antiquity to show that the ancient Jews had ever heard of Jesus of Nazareth, due to the simple fact that they had never heard of Nazareth! In recent times, Ren Salm6 demonstrated that the city now called Nazareth was not inhabited between the end of the Bronze Age or beginning of the Iron Age and Late Roman times, and that the sites venerated by Roman Catholic Christians were the remains of an ancient necropolisa cemetery, not the kitchen of the Virgin Mary or of anyone at all. The historicist cause was not helped at all by the Israeli archaeologist

Aviram Oshri,7 who showed that Bethlehem in Judea also was not inhabited at the required time, even though a Bethlehem in Galilee was a going concern at the time in which the gospel stories are set. Since no ancient writers had noticed the birthing and ministry of the Son of Man, a.k.a., the Son of God, it early on became necessary to forge witnesses by interpolating the texts of writers such as Josephus. Entire compositions such as The Correspondence of Paul and Seneca were needed to show that the Stoics had borrowed from Paul and not the other way around as it so strongly appears. Perhaps most embarrassing of all, the historical Jesus never wrote anythingat least not during his lifetime. By the time of Eusebius [ca. 263339 CE], however, Jesus had gotten around to dictating a letter in response to a letter sent to him by King Abgar of Edessa. The King, it became known, had written a letter to Jesus (now found in the Doctrina Addaeithe Doctrine of Thaddaeus)8 asking him to come and heal his ills and find asylum from the Jews. Jesus letter basically was a dust-off, explaining that he was too busy at the moment (I ascend again to my Father who sent me) but that he would have one of his secretaries attend to it. It has become obvious at this point that there is nothing outside the canonical New Testament and the New Testament Apocrypha that can serve as a database from which to construct an image even of Jesus of Anyplace-At-All. Is that sufficient to create even the image of a disembodied grin? Let us see what historicists have to work with in the New Testament. In the Pauline Epistles, there is no biographical material at all apart from creedal claims that the savior of the world was born of woman according to the flesh passages that quite likely were put there to confute the Docetists.9 There is nothing in the other epistles or the Apocalypse10 from which one might infer the agenda of a coffee break, let alone important biographical details. That leaves only the Book of Acts and the Four Gospels in their disenchanted, demystified, skeletal forms. Is that enough to satisfy the ontological needs of historicists? Enter The Jesus Seminar, a group of biblical scholars led by Robert W. Funk and John Dominic Crossan. Convened in 1985, the group met several times a year to evaluate the more than 1,500 sayings that have been attributed to the historical Jesus. The makeup of The Jesus Seminar slowly changed over time, and even I was able to take part in the debates for a number of years. Then, in 1993, the scholarly equivalent of detonating a nuclear warhead at a fireworks display occurred: publication of The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus.11 Even though the scholars had included the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas in their database, a majority of them could only defend about twenty percent of the alleged Sayings of Jesus as likely to be authentic. (Of course, I argued that none of them were authentic, but being a mere geologist and neurophysiologist I repeatedly was voted down.) To this day, Fundamentalist Christians are trying to see if The Jesus Seminar can be identified with the number of the name of the beast of the Apocalypse666. The Five Gospels were followed in 1998 by The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus.12 The findings this time were fairly predictable. Jesus did not rise bodily from the dead, the empty tomb is a fiction, Jesus did not walk on water, etc. Just as predictably, a majority felt that Jesus had been born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem,

at the time of Herod the Great. His mothers name was Mary, his fathers name might not have been Joseph, and so on. While The Jesus Seminar did not succeed in what I had expected would be a complete dismantling and deconstruction of the gospel Jesuses, it was the beginning of the end of the historical Jesus. One of the more important scholars who had taken part in the deliberations was Dennis Ronald MacDonald. He had discovered copious evidence that there had been a considerable amount of imitation of Homers Odyssey in the Gospel of Mark and other early Christian literature such as The Acts of Andrew. This means that at the same time that The Jesus Seminar was showing that the great majority of the sayings attributed to Jesus were not authentic, MacDonald13 was showing that a substantial amount of the Jesus storyline was not authentic either. While MacDonald was busy identifying Homeric imitations in the Second Gospel (Augustus Caesars was the first), I was focusing on the so-called Q-Document, the hypothetical sayings gospel from which most of the sayings of Jesus had been derived in the construction of the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Whereas Ehrman argues that Q is an independent witness of Jesus, I, would argue that although it came to include material about John the Baptist and rudimentary narrative, it began merely as a list of wise sayings or proverbs. Perhaps it was used in some ancient school or other and then became attributed to Jesus fairly early in the manufacturing of gospels. How can I say this? My answer will probably seem even more shocking than my claim. If Q was a true listing of the wise sayings of Jesus, then Ehrman could probably argue that Jesus had been well educated in Greek literatureincluding Aesops Fables! In fact, Jesus had had such a good Hellenisic education that he even quoted Aesop in one of his sayings that is reported in Q and adapted as Matthew 11:17 and Luke 7:32. Luke 7:32: They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept. Mat 11:17And saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented. This passage incorporates a phrase from the Fables of Aesop, the fable of the Fisherman Piping to the Fish (Babrius 9 = Perry 11).14, 15 In the fable, the fisherman plays his flute to attract fish, but it doesnt work. So, he throws his net into the water and brings up many dancing fish: When I piped you would not dance, but now you do so

merrily. As suggestive as the Aesop evidence might be to indicate that the Q sayings collection originally had nothing to do with Jesus of NazarethQ material then being unavailable for Ehrmans useevidence from the Nag Hammadi Library shows how originally non-Christian sayings actually came to be attributed to Jesus. James M. Robinson, the editor of the Nag Hammadi materials published in English, tells us that The Nag Hammadi library even presents one instance of the Christianizing process taking place almost before ones eyes. The non-Christian philosophic treatise Eugnostos the Blessed is cut up somewhat arbitrarily into separate speeches, which are then put on Jesus tongue, in answer to questions (which sometimes do not quite fit the answers) that the disciples address to him during a resurrection appearance. The result is a separate tractate entitled The Sophia of Jesus Christ. Both forms of the text occur side by side in Codex III.16 With so much of the Historical Jesus now having been pared away we may imagine his total dissolution. For nearly two centuries, one scholar after another has claimed that this or that feature of the Life of Christ was borrowed from some Pagan source, adapted from the Hebrew scriptures or Septuagint, modeled after Homer, other divinities, etc. A large part of Jesus can be seen to be The New Moses or New Elijah, and it is easy to see how all the Old Testament predictions of Jesus were actually the seeds that sprouted and turned into the various Jesuses of the various gospels. Certainly, it is not possible to prove such a thesis in an essay such as this. Nevertheless, a fair number of scholars are busily at work adducing evidence to show that practically every detail of the Jesus biography is either borrowed and adapted from nonChristian sources, modeled after them, or was the creative fallout from ancient theopolitical equivalents of nuclear wars of attrition. What if these scholars succeed? What will historicists such as Bart Ehrman do if it can be clearly demonstrated that eighty or ninety percent of the biography of Jesus is bogus in the sense that it was created ad hoc to create a terrestrial itinerary for a heavenly being sojourning on our sublunary sphere? Some years ago I sent a questionnaire polling fellow members of The Jesus Project in which one question read something like If it could be clearly demonstrated that the entirety of the gospel Jesus biography was inauthentic, would you still believe in the Historical Jesus? If 90%? If 80%? To my astonishment, more than one of those hard-headed, secular scholars indicated

that they would continue to believe in the Historical Jesus even if his entire biography were proven to be a fiction! What Historicists Must Try To Do Having no authority more credible than the fabled witness of the disembodied grin of a Cheshire cat, historicists must look to see if there are any dots or spots or splotches in the blurred and broken image of the past that they can connect in such a way that it can produce a convincing and unambiguous picture of even a character they might call Jesus of Nazareth. Then, the picture must be sharp enough to convince not just themselves but skeptics as well that the character was an actual mannot just a description of a character in a work of fiction. And most importantly: they must take care to insure that the picture at which they gaze is not their own image in a mirror. Throughout the ages, millions of men and women have been able to convince themselves and others not only of the identity of a pattern (actually, patterns) of traces that they identify as the spoor of Jesus of Nazareth, but also of his physical reality in Palestine around the turn of the era. Bart Ehrman is but one of millions of Alices who have affirmed an antecedent physical reality behind the grins they have strained to see. He must find his virtual quarry not amongst the leaves of trees, of course, but rather amidst the leaves of codices and papyrus rolls. The James Ossuary and the Shroud of Turin can no longer be called as witness to the physical entirety of Jesus of Nazareth. The image historicists in desperation try to see is made more difficult to descry by the fact that the miracles ascribed to Jesus of Nazarethwhat for Christian critics are the most illuminating features of the imagemust be masked or eclipsed in the image at the outset. As a secular scholar who must always submit himself to the rule of reason, Ehrman knows that if he accepts the stories of Jesus of Nazareth raising the dead, healing the sick at a distance, walking on the water, etc., he must then admit not only the possibility but the probability that all the miracles attributed to Asclepius, Dionysus, Isis, Buddha, Allah, and thousands of other divinities who have been worshipped and talked about since the Stone Age are just as credible. He probably also knows that he must not fall into the old Rationalist error of trying to find rational explanations for the miracles lodged in narrative frameworks that to all appearances are fairy-tale fictions. Once all the wonders and marvels have been removed from the canonical gospels, what remains for historicists to use to demonstrate the historicity of a Jesus of AnywhereAt-

All? What must they do? Let us remember, as bearer of the historicist banner, Ehrman has to stake everything on the gospels and other documents of the canonical New Testament because there are no eyewitnesses or contemporary writers who could vouch for the existence of Jesus or any of his twelve disciples/apostles.17 Moreover, despite the thousands of fake relics ranging from body parts of Jesus and John the Baptist to splinters of the True Cross, no genuine physical materials are reliably traceable to Jesus of Anywhere-At-All. And then there is a further problema somewhat amusing one. No one in early times ever described his physical appearanceeven though according to 1 Corinthians 15:6 Jesus appeared to five hundred people at the same time. How did everyone know it was Jesus of Nazareth they were gawking at? How did they recognize him? Perhaps he announced himself in the words of Bart Ehrman18I am Jesus from a one-dog town called Nazareth? Surely, if all five hundred had seen Jesus when he had been alive, someone would have left a record of what he looked like. But then, even if none of the witnesses had ever known Jesus when he was alive, wouldnt some of them have left a record of what his virtual image had looked like? But then again, Saint Paul himselfapparently on face-to-virtual-image speaking terms with Jesusis curiously silent concerning the visual details of his visions. Only rather late in the story did Christians begin to imagine just exactly what Jesus looked like. Is it unreasonable to ask historicists if he was tall or short? Slim or stocky? Black-haired or blonde as in portraits painted by German Lutherans? Was his hair long and curly, or short and kinky? The gospels are the historicists last hope. For, in spite of the existence of many Jewish, Greek, and Roman authors living and writing at the turn of the era and having reason to take notice of Jesus, none of them mentioned either Jesus or Nazareth. Even more inexplicable: if the Twelve Disciples/Apostles had done anything at all to evangelize the world, they would have been noticed even if their master had spent most of his life in the cave in which he is imagined to have been born. Surely, if Jesus of Nazareth had been real, Philo of Alexandria [20 BCE50 CE] would have known about him and his disciples. Philo was a major developer of the Logos theory of Platonism, Stoicism, and Christianity. He had intimate ties to the goings on in Jerusalem, as his nephew Marcus Julius Alexander was the husband of the Herodian Princess Berenice who is mentioned in the twenty-fifth chapter of Acts. His other nephew Tiberius Julius Alexander became procurator of Judea [ca. 46-48] under Claudius. Unless what Jesus and the Apostles were doing had no religious significance, Philo should have noticed them. Historicists must try to find an answer to this problem that is more compelling than the answers one might get from a Josh McDowell or a Lee Strobel.

Justus of Tiberias [second half of first century], the great rival of Josephus living just fifteen miles from Nazareth as the angel flies, could not have been ignorant of Jesuine traditions in Galilee had there been any. Moreover, the evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke should have mentioned the controversial new city of Tiberias19 had they ever been in the Galilee themselves and if Jesus had ever done anything there as claimed by the evangelist John. Although the works of Justus of Tiberias were not preserved, Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople [ca. 810-893] published a great volume of book reviews called the Bibliotheca in which he commented on one of the writings of Justus, The Chronicles of the Kings of the Jews. Obviously disappointed by the work, he sadly recorded that of the advent of Christ, of the things that befell him one way or another, or of the miracles that he performed, [Justus] makes absolutely no mention (Codex 33, my translation].20 Historicists must try to make up for the fact that no biographical material at all is found in the Pauline Epistles except for the disputed Brother of the Lord21 of Galatians 1:19. Even if Ehrman is correct about Brother of the Lord meaning Brother of Jesus,22 however, we must wonder why that would be significant. After all, in the Gnostic traditions Jesus had a twin brother named Thomas! If James be accepted on flimsy evidence to be a brother of Jesus, what reason might we give for rejecting Thomas as his twin brother? Of course, some historicists might accept both James and Thomas, provided that Thomas be a fraternal twin, not an identical twin. It seems, however, that all historicists are faced with a dilemma. They must decide if the Catholics are correct that Jesus had no full siblings at allor that a Gnostic-cum-Protestant position must be defended: Jesus had brothers and sisters and a twin! Although historicists need solid evidence to prove their Jesus, we must not fail to keep in mind that they are limited to the New Testament as a source of information concerning Jesus of Nazareth. To make matters worse, most of the data contained in the canonical New Testament are not of any use at all. So, to return to the Epistles: No Jesuine biography can be found in the non-Pauline epistlesincluding the one supposed by some to have been written by James the disputed brother of Jesus. Although The General Epistle of James is often supposed to have been written by a certain James the physical brother of Jesus, its author curiously does not even hint at any such privileged position. He does not begin his letter with anything at all resembling James, a servant of God relaying to the twelve tribes the directives of his

big brother Jesus the Messiah. Instead, the letter begins James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad, greeting. Then follows what can only be described as an essay in Stoic philosophy.23 (We may note that this is the infamous Epistle of straw against which Martin Luther railed.) An interesting feature of this letter is the complete absence of any reference to Jesus as a man or as the Messiah of the Jews. We have merely the formulaic Lord Jesus Christ. Whatever the title Christ may have meant to this author, it seems impossible to read any messianic reference into it. To be sure, there is an apocalyptic purpose to this piece, but it looks very much like an adaptation of Stoic eschatology to Christian use. The database available to historicists is shrunken further if, as we must, we eliminate the pseudopauline Epistle to the Hebrews. The first chapter does not even mention Jesus by name, but rather speaks of The Son who is the effulgence of Gods splendour and the stamp of Gods very being, and sustains the universe by his word of power. [Heb 1:3, NEB]. In this verse it is rather difficult to make out the image of a fellow who just a few decades earlier had been living in a one-dog-town that no one had ever heard of.24 Can this Son be Jesus of Nazareth? Can this Son have been the physical Christ (Messiah) of the Jews? That Christ has to be anointed with real oil. But we learn in verse 9 that this Sonassumed by historicists to be equivalent to Christ who in turn is equivalent to Jesushas been anointed (echrisen) in heaven, not on earth. Moreover, the annointment is not with olive oil and essences; rather, the oil is the oil of gladness (elaion agalliaseos). Can this Son be the carpenters son? As noted previously, no biographical data can be extracted from the astrotheological nativity brainstorm of the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse or Revelation of John. That leaves the Gospels and Acts, and I will argue that this limitation will prove lethal to the historicist cause. In trying to prove the quondam existence of any kind of gospel Jesus, it will be seen, historicists come face to face with the greatest problem of all: a problem in epistemology and philosophy of science. The Epistemological Jesus The historicists problem in epistemology is straight-forward. It is even theoretically impossible for Ehrmanor anyoneprove the existence of Jesus of Nazareth on the

basis of the evidence available to us this late in history without falling into a scientifically meaningless argument. Before we go any further, I must explain what I mean by scientifically meaningless argument. Let us consider by way of illustration two propositions: (1) The moon is made of green cheese; (2) Undetectable gremlins inhabit the rings of Saturn. Although a non-scientist would be likely to say that both propositions are false, a scientist would claim that only one of these claims is falsethe green-cheese proposition. The Saturnian gremlin claim, a scientist would explain, is neither true nor false; it is scientifically meaningless. True and false can apply only to meaningful sentences. Well, then, how does one tell if a proposition is meaningless or meaningful? To be meaningful a claim must in principle be falsifiable. That is, one must be able at least to imagine a test that could be performed that conceivably could show the proposition to be false. The green-cheese proposition can easily be tested today. But even before our astronauts went to the moon and discovered that moon dust is no good in salad dressing, it was easy to imagine what one could do to see if the moon were, in fact, cheese. But the gremlin sentence, by contrast, cannot be tested even in the imagination. Were we to send a rocket to Saturn that was carrying the finest gremlinometers that the creation scientists at NASA were able to build, ex definitio they would not be able to detect undetectable gremlins. Undetectable gremlins are forever undetectable and thus unverifiable. The gremlin proposition is thus meaningless and is neither true nor false. Thus, the sentence Jesus of Nazareth once lived in Nazareth is a meaningful sentence. It can be tested and it has proven to be false. The sentence The Jesus of the gospels once lived somewhere or other, however, is meaningless. There is no conceivable way to falsify it. Even if every square inch of Israel/Palestine were excavated and no genuine Jesuine artifacts were discovered, one could always be told You didnt search thoroughly enough, or All traces disappeared long ago, or He was too obscure to leave an identifying trace. The Jesus of Somewhere-or-Other, thus, is just another undetectable gremlin. Returning to Bart Ehrman and his book Did Jesus Exist?, we must look to see if his theses not only are correct or incorrect, but also we must see if any of them are neither true nor falsescientifically meaningless.

Let us consider the problem of Nazareth. Ren Salm and I have argued that Nazareth was not inhabited at the turn of the era. Ehrman rejects our evidence, siding with Franciscan archaeological apologists (who have destroyed most of the archeological stratigraphy at the venerated sites they control and made further truly scientific excavations impossible) and some recent archaeologists who have made claims of habitation at Nazareth at the turn of the era but never have shown their data for critics to evaluate. (It would, after all, be devastating to Christian tourism in Israel if it became certain that the present city called Nazareth was not the one-dog-town of Jesus that Ehrman claims it to have been.25 Just to be safe, however, Ehrman claims that it doesnt really matter if Nazareth of today isnt the Nazareth of Jesus or if Jesus didnt actually come from there. He would still be Jesus, merely Jesus of Someplace-Else! One supposedly legendary feature of the Gospels relates closely to what I have just argued and is in fact one of the more common claims found in the writings of the mythicists. It is that the alleged hometown of Jesus, Nazareth, in fact did not exist but is itself a myth (using the term as the mythicists do). The logic of this argument, which is sometimes advanced with considerable vehemence and force, appears to be that if Christians made up Jesuss hometown, they probably made him up as well. I could dispose of this argument fairly easily by pointing out that it is irrelevant. If Jesus existed, as the evidence suggests, but Nazareth did not, as this assertion claims, then he merely came from somewhere else.26 It is not clear in the above passage whether Ehrman has simply misunderstood the argument that I and other mythicists have advanced or if he misunderstands the logic of science. The former possibility seems likely from the fact that even though on the page cited he discusses my article Where Jesus Never Walked,27 he incorrectly summarizes the mythicist argument by the statement The logic of this argument appears to be that if Christians made up Jesuss hometown, they probably made him up as well. Whether such a claim would in fact be irrelevant could be debated, but it is not the argument I would make and it is not the usual argument I have found other scholars to use. Rather, the argument I have made is simply the fundamentally scientifically relevant argument that if Nazareth did not exist when Jesus and the Holy Family should have been living there, then of logical necessity Jesus of Nazareth could not have existed. By extension, that would mean of course that the Jesus of Matthew and Luke also could not have existed.28 Why is this argument not only relevant, but relevant in a way that is sine qua non? Let us see.

The difference between Jesus of Nazareth and practically all the other gods and goddesses whose existence has ever been claimed is this. By being a character who was defined as being physically associated with a specific town at a specific place at a specific time, his existence could in principle be tested. Claims of his existence would thus be meaningful in the scientific sense. Exhaustive archaeological surveying of the site claimed to be Nazareth could in principle determine the existence claim to be false if the site showed no evidence of habitation at the requisite periods. On the other hand, it could only add a tiny bit of weight to the truth side of the claim if the archaeological evidence of habitation at the turn of the era were positive. Claims of the existence of a Jesus of Someplace-Else, however, like claims of the existence of Zeus, or Thor, or Yahweh would be scientifically meaningless since in principle they could not be tested or falsified.29 They are scientifically meaningless. It is unfortunate that so many biblical scholars have not had adequate training in the philosophy and logic of science. If Ehrman had read more of the first, second, and fourth volumes of my recent Through Atheist Eyes: Scenes From a World That Wont Reason, he could have avoided blunders such as the Jesus of Someplace-Else. Nevertheless, Ehrman is still able to assert he could identify some Jesus, even if not Jesus of Nazareth. But just exactly which Jesus would that be? The Face of Ehrmans Jesus The image that Ehrman thinks he sees and describes in great and enhanced detail in the last part of his book Did Jesus Exist? most certainly is not the Yeshu of Jewish writings of late antiquity that can be interpreted to mean that Jesus was born a bastard at the time of Alexander Jannaeus [r. 10376 BCE]. According to one version of the Sepher Toldoth Yeshu,30 the scurrilous antigospel some have claimed was cited by the Greek philosopher Celsus around the year 177 CE, In the year 671 of the fourth millenary (of the world), in the days of Jannaeus the king, a great misfortune happened to the enemies of Israel. There was a certain idle and worthless debauchee named Joseph Pandera, of the fallen tribe of Judah According to this version of the Toldoth, Miriam gave birth to Yeshu/Jesus at the time of Alexander Jannaeusaround a hundred years Before Christ! Of course, historicists routinely dismiss this source as fanciful anti-Christian Jewish polemicsas though the canonical sources are measurably less fanciful. Nevertheless, Gibbon somewhere speaks of the anachronism of the Jews, who place the birth of Christ

near a century sooner. It is amusing to note that according to the Jewish calendar, which was not standardized until the fourth century CE,31 the Julian year 1 CE corresponds to Hebrew year 3762, so that the year 3671 of the Toldoth would place the birth of Yeshu around the year 90 BCE. Obviously, Ehrmans picture of Jesus of not-Nazareth does not look at all like the old photographs of Yeshu ben Pandera. Still lessheres no surprisethe Ehrman image exhibits no similarities at all to that of the early Jewish Christians discussed by Shlomo Pines in his famous paper The Jewish Christians of the Early Centuries of Christianity According to a New Source.32 According to Pines, those early Christians placed the ministry of their Jesus approximately five hundred years before the Council of Nicaea, which was held in the year 325 CE! Doing the easy subtraction, we find that Jesus lived around 175 BCE. Even I can agree with Ehrman that that Jesus could not have existed. After all, archaeological evidence33 shows that Nazareth was not inhabited in 175 BCE. Ehrmans Jesus also does not match up with that of the unknown author of The Letter of Pilate to Claudius34 who thought that Jesus was done in during the reign of Claudius instead of Tiberius as everyone knows. More importantly, he disagrees with Irenaeus, the Church Father [120202] who also thought that Jesus lived into his late 40s, and thus into the reign of Claudius [r. 41-54]! It is regrettable that Ehrman did not read the copy I sent to him of my The Jesus the Jews Never Knew: Sepher Toldoth Yeshu and the Quest of the Historical Jesus in Jewish Sources.35 In that book I discuss the twenty-second chapter of Against Heresies by Irenaeus of Lyons [120202 CE] who argued against the heretics who taught that Jesus was in his thirties when he died! Arguing from the text of John 8:56-57,36 he explained now such language is fittingly applied to one who has already passed the age of forty, without having as yet reached his fiftieth year, yet is not far from this latter period. As if this all does not create enough confusion concerning the position Jesus of Nazareth may have occupied in Roman chronology, there is another oddity of history that seems somehow to relate to the Historical Jesus and should have been investigated by Ehrman. This is the peculiar fact that Iberia for a long time used a calendrical system for which the commencement year corresponded to 38 BCE. According to an article in the on-line edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia,37 Spain, with Portugal and Southern France, observed an era of its own long after the rest of Christendom had adopted that of Dionysius [Exiguus]. This era of Spain or of the Csars, commenced with 1 January, 38 B.C., and remained in force in the Kingdom of Castile and Leon till

A.D. 1383, when a royal edict commanded the substitution of the Christian Era. In Portugal the change was not made till 1422. No satisfactory explanation has been found of the date from which this era started. Wouldnt it be reasonable to conclude that the Iberians and their neighbors on the north began their era on a date they took to be the year of Jesus birth? Remember, these were very Christian nations. Why would they so long resist the general Christian Era of the rest of Europe unless they had reason to believe they had better information than did Dionysius Exiguus when he set the starting point for his Christian Era at what so long has been reckoned as the year AD 1? It certainly looks as though an important part of Christendom believed that Jesus had been born 38 years Before Christ!38 Despite these problems in natal chronology, Ehrman seems quite certain that the dots and spots and splotches he has connected into the image of a man are traces of an actual man who was born and lived at the time the Gospel of Matthew says he lived, before the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE. Or, maybe, at the time the Gospel of Luke says during the Augustan census of Quirinius in 6 CE. Or, at any rate, sometime around the turn of the era. Yes, he lived somewhere sometime around the turn of the era. But there is a far more interesting and historically important Jesus whom Ehrman has not called to sit to have his portrait sketched: the Jesus of the Docetists and Gnostics. Although he gives no reasons for his manifest preference, Ehrman doesnt think the true Jesus of Christian origins was the Jesus of the Docetists or Gnosticstraces of whose Jesus or Christ (sorting out the two is a difficult and daunting task) form a large chunk of the picture we might be able to reconstruct of any Jesus. Removal of the Docetic and Gnostic evidence from the data-set with which we might seek to test the historicity of the Jesus of some place and some time around the turn of the era makes that testing more difficultand probably less meaningful. (By ruling out evidence that could disconfirm his hypothesis of historicity, Ehrman comes dangerously close to making his thesis scientifically meaningless by making it less open to testing and falsification.) How comes it then that an expert in the apocryphal literature would ignore his own scholarship when trying to reconstruct his Jesus of Not-Nazareth? I am guessing that Ehrman ignored the Jesus of the Docetists and Gnostics because he realized their writings would be of no use whatever in reconstructing a historical Jesus or Christ. Given his powerful historicist bias and the relative narrowness of his education, it probably never occurred to him to weigh the significance of those documents as evidence against historicity. Had he read my essay What does it mean to be scientific?39 he would have realized the need to think like a scientist in order better to understand the relevance of his

own research. Ehrman has shown in his magisterial The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture40 that a large number of passages in the New Testament were altered to refute the Docetists and Gnostics. How shall we evaluate this? If my thesis that both the genealogies and birth narratives in the New Testament were made up to thwart the Docetists and Gnostics, the veracity of a large amount of textual evidence is involved and so these passages now become unavailable for constructing an image of Jesus. We cannot know a priori who was correctthe proto-Orthodox or the Docetists and Gnostics.41 Ehrman is also the author of a New York Times Best Seller titled simply Forged, with the more expansive subtitle Writing in the Name of GodWhy the Bibles Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. Although I am not certain he would agree with me that the genealogies and birth legends were invented to confute the Docetists and Gnostics, nevertheless he agrees that that material is not suitable for use in any residue of data points to be used in connecting the dots of the Jesus picture: With regard to the stories of Jesuss birth, one does not need to wait for the later Gospels, mentioned above, to begin seeing the fabricated accounts; they are already there in the familiar versions of Matthew and Luke. There never was a census under Caesar Augustus that compelled Joseph and Mary to go to Bethlehem just before Jesus was born; there never was a star that mysteriously guided wise men from the East to Jesus; Herod the Great never did slaughter all the baby boys in Bethlehem; Jesus and his family never did spend several years in Egypt. These may sound like bold and provocative statements, but scholars have known the reasons and evidence behind them for many years. It is almost impossible to say whether the people who made up and passed along these stories were comparable to forgers, who knew full well that they were engaged in a kind of deception, or whether they, instead, were like those who falsely attributed anonymous books to known authors without knowing they were wrong. They may not have meant to deceive others (or they may have!), but they certainly did deceive others. In fact, they deceived others spectacularly well. For many, many centuries it was simply assumed that the narratives about Jesus and the apostlesnarratives both within and outside the New Testament described events that actually happened. 42 It is unlikely that Ehrman realized what he had admitted here when later he composed Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Evidence for Jesus of Nazareth. We must emphasize the sub-title of the book here. For it is precisely in the birth narratives that we find all but two references to Nazareth43 in the entire canonical New Testament! When we eliminate the birth legends from our database we no longer have any compelling support for the existence of Jesus purported hometown, and without Nazareth, Jesus becomes inevitably the Jesus of Someplace-Elsewho, as we shall see, is a meaningless and identity-less character. It is hard to estimate how much of the Jesus of (Not)-

Nazareth database is left now for Ehrman to use in reconstructing the face. Fifty percent? Forty percent? Even less? It cannot be stressed too strongly: the more data Ehrman has to exclude from his database, the less likely it is that he can produce a meaningful hypothesis concerning a historical Jesus. By excluding all data that might argue against or falsify his thesis, his thesis is in danger of becoming worse than wrong; it risks becoming meaningless. The Jesus of Nowhere-At-All? The more Jesus becomes an ordinary component of the anonymous population inferred to have existed in first-century Palestine, the fewer falsifiable statements concerning him become possible. If Ehrman had understood this simple principle of science, he would not have written that It is also true, as the mythicists have been quick to point out, that no Greek or Roman author from the first century mentions Jesus. It would be very convenient for us if they did, but alas, they do not. At the same time, the fact is again a bit irrelevant since these same sources do not mention many millions of people who actually did live. Jesus stands here with the vast majority of living, breathing, human beings of earlier ages. 44 The fallacious nature of this comparison is obvious to anyone educated in the sciences. By placing Jesus in the class of beings who could not be mentioned by ancient writers because nothing was known about themnot even how many of them there were, when they existed, where they existedhe is putting Jesus into the category of beings about whom nothing specific can be said. From our point in time, nothing can meaningfully be specifically said about any particular one of those millions of people we infer to have lived at the time in question. We can only make meaningful claims about the entire population and then, if we are lucky, we may make general, probabilistic claims about hypothetical individual members of the population. It might be possible to say, for example, that a person selected at random from that population was 56% likely to be a woman over the age of 30, 92% likely to speak Aramaic, and so on. But we could not make any specific claim about a person who is completely and totally unidentified and unidentifiable. The nameless millions of whom Ehrman writes are an inference, not an observation. If Jesus is one of those unnamed millions, we can know nothing of him and can make no specific claims about him. Carl Sagans aphorism Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence was never more apt than in the case of the historical Jesuseven without his miracles. What test could we do to learn if any claim regarding any one of the unknown millions of the past is true or false if he evaded the notice of all the writers of the time and left no physical remains that could yield clues to his identity? Could the Jesus of Nowhere-Specific be detected if we had a time machine? How would we recognize him if none of the gospels identifying features were left for which to search and we couldnt know for sure that we had parked the Tardis at the right place and time? We have come now to a point where the Historical Jesus is not yet completely gone, even though Ehrman himself has helped to cause the disappearance of his arms and legs and most of his torso. Nevertheless, soon all that will be left will not be the face of the Historical Jesus; it will be the grin of a cat that cant be traced to Cheshire. Like Alice in Wonderland, the reader of this essay has just witnessed the progressive dismantling and dissolution of a fascinating creation of the human mind. Like the Cheshire cat, Jesus of Nazareth was never a real, living organism. Like the Cheshire cat, who could not be beheaded because he had already lost his body, Jesus of Nazareth could not be beheaded by the loss of his Nazareth identity. New Testament critics including Bart Ehrman had already hacked away most of his body by the time that empty excavations at Nazareth had erased the testimony of the empty tomb at Jerusalem. All that now remains is the fictive face on the Shroud of Turinthe laser display-like death mask of the Cheshire cat of Nazareth. Sometime soon, everyone including Bart Ehrman will have to admit that the cat is gonecompletely gone.

*Posted with the permission of Frank R. Zindler, August 1, 2012. ------------------------1 The bones now venerated in the basement of the Vatican are actually the bones of two men, an old woman, chickens, pigs, and a mouse, as I have shown in my essay Of Bones and Boners: Saint Peter at the Vatican, THROUGH ATHEIST EYES. Volume One: Religions & Scriptures (Cranford, NJ, American Atheist Press, 2011, pp. 99122) 2 Details of how this came about can be found in my essay Where Jesus Never Walked, ibid, pp. 4950. 3 An account of the outrageous archaeological research that has been done at the present-day site of Tel.um as well as proof that Josephus did not in fact know of a town called Capernaum can be found in ibid., pp. 3844, and in my technical paper CapernaumA Literary Invention, Journal of Higher Criticism, Volume 12, No. 2, Fall 2006, pp. 127. 4 Could there be a more appropriate place to curse a fig tree than BethphageHouse of Figs in Hebrew? 5 Frank R. Zindler, The Jesus the Jews Never Knew: Sepher Toldoth Yeshu and the Quest of the Historical Jesus in Jewish Sources, Cranford, NJ, American Atheist Press, 2003. It appears that Ehrman did not read the copy of this book that I sent to him. 6 Ren Salm, The Myth Of Nazareth: The Invented Town Of Jesus, Cranford, NJ, American Atheist Press, 2008. 7 Aviram Oshri, Where Was Jesus Born? Archaeology, Vol. 58, No. 6, NovemberDecember, 2005 8 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, I, xiii, ca. 325 CE 9 See my essay Bart Ehrman and the Body of Jesus of Nazareth. 10 Although an astral account of the nativity of Christ or Jesus is to be found in the twelfth chapter of Revelation, it is so symbolic and allegorical that nothing resembling biography can be gleaned therein. It is, however, the sort of nativity narrative one might expect for a divine figure. 11 Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, NY, Macmillan Pub. Co., 1993 12 Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus, San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1998. 13 Dennis Ronald MacDonald, Christianizing Homer: The Odyssey, Plato, and The Acts of Andrew, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994; Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000. 14 Ben Edwin Perry, Aesopica: A Series of Texts Relating to Aesop or Ascribed to Him or Closely Connected with the Literary Tradition That Bears His Name, Vol. One: Greek and Latin Texts, Urbana, Univ. Illinois Press, 1952, p. 326 15 I was surprised to discover that John S. Kloppenborg, the famous Q authority, was unaware of this Aesop borrowing. Neither his Q Parallels (Sonoma, Polebridge Press, 1988) nor The Critical Edition of Q with James M. Robinson and Paul Hoffmann (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2000) notes the Aesopic origin of Q 7:32b. 16 James M. Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library, 3rd rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper, 1988), pp. 8-9. 17 The absence of historical evidence of the Twelve is even more significant than the lack of evidence for Jesus. After all, what exactly would have been reported of Jesus if he didnt do any of the miracles? The apostles, however, had as their main function attracting the attention of the Roman world. My essay The Twelve: Further Fictions from the New Testament [Through

Atheist Eyes, Vol. I, pp. 81-98] examines this problem in some detail. I dont know if Ehrman simply did not read this essay in his obviously hasty preparation for Did Jesus Exist? or if he was unable to answer my argument and so avoided mentioning it. 18 Nazareth was a little one-horse town (not even that; it was more like a one-dog town) that no one had ever heard of, so far as we can tell, before Christianity. Did Jesus Exist?, page 189. 19 When Herod Antipas founded Tiberias as a Roman city sometime around 20 CE, he violated Jewish ritual law by building it on the top of graves. At the time Jesus should have been traveling in the area, there would have been great and noisy tumult concerning the propriety of Jews living in the new city. Curiously, there is no record of anyone asking Jesus for his opinion about the city, which is mentioned only in the Gospel of John. In John 6:1 the Sea of Tiberias is mentioned simply as another name for the Sea of Galilee. In John 6:23, the city of Tiberias is mentioned simply as a departure point for boats needed in the narrative. The Sea of Tiberias is mentioned once more in the anti-Docetic appendix added later to the Gospel, in the first verse of chapter 21. Nowhere is there any hint that the authors of this gospel had any real knowledge of the city and the religious controversy engulfing it at the time Jesus should have been in the neighborhood. 20 Photius of Constantinople. Myriobiblon Sive Bibliotheca. In Vol. 103, cols. 65-66 of Patrologia Graeca. Edited by J.-P. Migne (Paris, 18571886). 21 I have argued [The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, pp. 7588] that Brother of the Lord being understood as signifying Brother of Jesus is an anachronism dating from a later period when Lord had become an epithet or title of Jesus alone not just of Christ or Christ-Jesus. In the LXXthe Old Testament for most early Christians it would appearthe word Kyrios (Lord) was used as a pronounceable substitute for the unpronounceable power-name Yahweh. In the Hebrew Bible, the name is written as a so-called Tetragrammatonthe four unpronounceable letters YHWH usually being written in Paleohebrew script. When the Hebrew text had to be read aloud, under pain of death [Leviticus 24:16] YHWH must never be pronounced correctly (Yahway or Yahweh). Instead, the Hebrew word Adonai (my Lords) was spoken in its place. When YHWH had to be transcribed into Greek, however, the magical, secret name of God could not be spelled out with all its vowels showing. So the substitute word Adonai was translated into Greek as Kyrios. I have argued that Brother of the Lord probably referred to a brotherhood of monk-like ascetics in special service to Yahweh. How this brotherhood became associated with early Christianity is unclear. 22 Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, p. 120 et al. 23 A masterful analysis of the Stoic dimensions of the Epistle of James is to be found in Logos and Law in the Letter of James: The Law of Nature, the Law of Moses, and the Law of Freedom, by Matt A. Jackson-McCabe (Supplements To Novum Testamentum 100, Atlanta, Society of Biblical Literature, 2001). Although the author accepts the historicity of James the Brother of Jesus and the priority of Jewish Christianity, he nevertheless demonstrates the pseudonymity of the letter. He concludes his analysis on page 253 with the observation that Jamess interaction with Pauline ideas provides a secure basis for locating it [the letter] within early Christianity. More specifically, the Letter of James was produced in some circle of Christians for whom the Torah remained the central expression of love of God, and thus a critical criterion for inheriting the promised kingdom that would be given to the twelve tribes at the Parousia of the messiah, Jesus. Its precise date and provenance, however, remain elusive. Clearly it was not written prior to Pauls activity; and if it does assume some collection of Pauls letters, this

would likely place it well after Pauls death, and thus after the death of James the brother of Jesus ca. 62 CE. In fact, while the letters emphasis on the Torah seems consistent with our evidence for Jesuss brother, its enlisting, to this end, of the Stoic view of law seems more consistent with later developments in the Christian debates about the Torah. All things considered, it seems most plausible to view James as a pseudonymous work, written in the late first or early second century, perhaps in Syria or Palestine. In any case, the Letter of James provides important, if all too rare evidence for a form of the Christian movement where soteriology centered not on rebirth through the Gospel, but on observance of the Torah. If Jackson-McCabe is correct, this eliminates the Epistle of James from the database available for reconstructing the Historical Jesus. Interestingly, by placing the Jewish Christian author after the collecting of Pauls letters, he provides us with another example of Jewish Christianity being later than what has come to be viewed as proto-Orthodox Christianity. A variety of views on the nature and significance of this epistle can be found in the symposium volume Matthew, James, and Didache: Three Related Documents in Their Jewish and Christian Settings, edited by Huub van de Sandt and Jrgen K. Zangenberg, Symposium Series No. 45, Atlanta, Society of Biblical Literature (2008). 24 Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, page 189. 25 Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, page 189. 26 Ibid, p. 191. It must not be thought that Ehrman is being facetious or alone in his judgment here. Some years ago I polled my fellow members of The Jesus Project, asking them the question: If it could be shown conclusively that present-day Nazareth was not inhabited at the time of Jesus, would you continue to believe in his historical reality? A large fraction answered yes to the question.27 Through Atheist Eyes, Volume One, Cranford, NJ, American Atheist Press (2011) pp. 2756. 28Were it the case that Mark 1:9Jesus came from Nazareth in Galileewas (contrary to my opinion) not an interpolation, then the Jesus of Mark also could not have existed. 29 Because they are not defined with respect to specific times, places, and physical properties, one is perpetually on a wild-goose chase trying to find them. No matter where we might look, we are told that we simply didnt look in the right place or at the right time. All such gods are the equivalents of undetectable gremlins. In the case of Jesus of Nazareth, however, an exhaustive search is possible in principle, and Ren Salm has done an exhaustive analysis of the Roman Catholic venerated sites owned and operated by the Franciscans and has found no compelling evidence of habitation at the turn of the era. Desperate claims are now being made that the right spots havent been examined, and other parts of the Nazareth hill are being claimed to show proof of habitation at the proper time. Alas, by admitting that the venerated sites are not the correct locations for the holy homes of the Jesus family, it must now be admitted that the Roman Catholic Church was wrong in its profitable claim to the property deeds for Marys home and Josephs workshop. Perhaps an Evangelical Protestant-run theme park such as The Nazareth Village Farm Project will be able to stake a more durable claim. It is worth noting, moreover, that the Gospel of Luke makes the claim that the Nazareth of Jesus had a synagogue at the top of the hill at the edge of a cliff. [Luke 4:2830] These details absolutely rule out present-day Nazareth as the town of Jesus. Are there any hills in Galilee with first-century synagogue remains atop them bordering a cliff? I dont think so, but tour guides carrying out archaeological research might be able to find one. Or create one. 30 Two thoroughly annotated versions of this anti-gospel have been reprinted as appendices A and B of my book The Jesus the Jews Never Knew: Sepher Toldoth Yeshu and the Quest of the Historical Jesus in Jewish Sources (Cranford, NJ, American Atheist Press, 2003) 31 The Book of Calendars, Frank Parise, Editor. Facts On File, Inc., New York, NY, (1982), pp. 1243.

32 Shlomo Pines, The Jewish Christians of the Early Centuries of Christianity According to a New Source, Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 2 (1966): 237-310. 33 See the extended arguments and evidence of Ren Salm in his The Myth Of Nazareth, The Invented Town Of Jesus (Cranford, NJ, American Atheist Press, 2008) 34 Not having taken the time to read my explanation of the tradition of Jesus living into his forties or even fifties [The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, pp. 12729], Ehrman writes in his introduction to The Letter of Pilate to Claudius [The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (with Zlatko Plee, Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 511], It is not clear what to make of the anachronistic reference to Claudius as the emperor at the time of Jesus death (rather than Tiberius; Claudius would not assume the throne for another decade). The author of this letter, living so long after the fact, may simply not have known the facts of Roman imperial history. Actually there appear to have been many attempts post hoc to locate Jesus in the frame of human history. This is hard to understand only if he had actually lived. 35 The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, pp. 127129. 36 John 8:56. Your father Abraham was overjoyed to see my day; he saw it and was glad. 57. The Jews protested, You are not yet fifty years old. How can you have seen Abraham? This is followed by the apparently Docetic verses 58-59: Jesus said, In very truth I tell you, before Abraham was born, I am. They picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus was not to be seen; and he left the temple. 37 The Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03738a.htm), article Chronology, General, section Beginning of the year. 38 The Egyptologist Margaret Morris (personal communication) has informed me that 38 BCE corresponds to the year in which worship of Octavian (Augustus Caesar) began in the Iberian Peninsula. 39 Frank R. Zindler, What does it mean to be scientific? Through Atheist Eyes: Scenes from a World That Wont Reason, Volume Two: Science & Pseudoscience, (Cranford, NJ, American Atheist press, 2011) pp. 110-126. 40 Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption Of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament, New York, NY, Oxford University Press (1993). 41 We are debating the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth merely because the Orthodox won the war. If any one of the non-Jewish heresies had won out, the notion that Jesus of Nazareth had ever been born would then be the heresy. We have no reason to believe the Orthodox more than we believe the Docetists or Gnostics. There is danger in believing any of them. Caveat creditor! 42 Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of GodWhy the Bibles Authors Are Not Whe We Think They Are, New York, NY (2011) HarperOne, pp. 140-41. 43 The first passage is Mark 1:9, that says that Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized in the Jordan by John. For important technical reasons presented in my chapter Bart Ehrman and Marks Jesus of Nazareth, I have argued that this passage is an interpolation, but Ehrman considers it authentic. The other passage is in Acts 10:38, where the Lucan author has made up a speech in which Peter says You know about Jesus of Nazareth how God anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with power. (Readers may be warned that in reading the KJV books of Mark and Acts many more occurrences of the word Nazareth are to be found, but they are mistranslations from the Greek text which uses titles that should be rendered Nazarene or Nazorean. Interestingly, Ehrman has also made such a mistake at least once. In his translation of The Letter of Tiberius to Pilate [The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations, Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Plee, Oxford U. Press, 2011, pp. 532-33] he mentions Jesus of Nazareth. This, however, is a KJV-type mistranslation of Iesou ton [sic] Nazoraiouof Jesus the Nazorean.

44 Did Jesus Exist?, page 43.