David Fitzgerald, Rapture Day

so here's the question this comes up to me a lot why don't more historians question Jesus's historicity I seem to be constantly swimming Upstream with this one and I point out it just occurred to me recently this the analogy for that is it's pretty obvious when you think about it consider this you've got all historians now only a small minority of those people are biblical historians so anyone who comes up with a Biblical history question if you ask any historian they'll say I don't know that's really not in my field but most historians say blah blah blah well who are these guys the biblical historians that are saying this well if we look at him overwhelmingly they're theologians their clergy their pastors their priests you name it but they're all basically working for Jesus and an employment Factor so the idea that there was no Jesus that's going to be a non-starter right from the get-go and as uh Robert Price likes to say the mythis case has been rebutted they act as if this thing was all some 18th century crackpot notion that came and went and was uh instantly rebuffed he says well when did that happen the arguments of the mythicist camp have never been refuted they've only been steadfastly ignored in fact what he says and I love it is they've been hared by The Men Who say harumph and I could not say it better myself but to be fair there's a lot of secular biblical Scholars out there Bart ER definitely leaps to mind who have uh no uh truck with the mythis camp what about these guys what kind of Jesus do we get from them well you can see it depends on which uh guy we talk about because it seems like almost every secular biblical scholar has their own take on who Jesus might have been and that's just counting the good ones it's see in the bottom we've got even more crazy crackpot jesuses that are out there as well so who is the real Jesus for secular Scholars and how plausible are any of these reconstructions that they have well as far as any of them go all of them have their strengths none of them are particularly out there they all tend to focus on a certain you know cluster of different traits of Jesus and sort of interpret him in one way and reject all the others as uh inauthentic they all appeal to solid historical analogies for the new take on Jesus so there's nothing you know crazy about any of them but they do suffer from two fatal flaws as Bart Man points out most of them if not all of them don't make any sense of why Jesus died in the first place though to be fair neither do their Source materials the gospels if we look at them the various reconstructions of Jesus cancel each other out and what I mean by that is he simply wears too many hats in the gospels he's an exorcist A Healer a king Prophet Sage Rabbi Demag God etc etc etc the actual historical Jesus if there was one may certainly have been a Messiah King or a progressive Pharisee or a Galan Shaman or a magist or a helenistic sage but he cannot very well have been all of them at the same time so where does this leave us in Jesus I have a book that talks about this very thing 10 Christian myths that show Jesus never existed at all I was so pissed off at the presumption that all these things had been uh Deb you know de uh bunked long ago that that was one of the real main imp impetuses for me to get this book out and I picked on 10 standard things that are just completely wrong with your traditional picture of Jesus and let's just go right into them and see what we've got and number one of course is just the idea that Jesus as a myth is ridiculous um and we've already touched on that a little bit but let's just take a look at some of the evidence for we have for Jesus now this uh analogy like so much of the analogies en nailed it comes to us directly from our own Richard carrier and I have to give a shout out to him because not only is he responsible for this and like like four other things you'll see just in this one alone but if he was not involved with the production of this book there either would have been no book at all or it would have sucked just as much as the Christians say it sucks now and it doesn't suck at all my friends here's an example what I mean We compare evidence for Jesus to evidence for Julius Caesar uh Douglas gavet is an apologist who's very famously said that the evidence for the resurrection is just as good as the resurrection for say Julius Caesar Crossing the Rubicon which is a complete load of crap as we'll see and here we go first of all it we have Caesar's own account of the crossing of the Rubicon but in Jesus we have nothing written by Jesus at all and we don't know anybody who any of the people who actually wrote any of the gospels of Jesus secondly many of Caesar's enemies also reported the crossing of the Rubicon but in the case of Jesus we have no hostile or even neutral reports of the Resurrection until well over a hundred years after the supposed event happened third there's numerous inscriptions coins mentions of battles conscriptions and judgments all of which form an almost continuous chain of solid physical evidence for Caesar's entire campaign we have no physical evidence of any kind for Jesus and I don't have to remind you we have thousands of years of really lame forgeries the the shroud of Turan the St James uary this latest lead codes thing that popped up and and uh I love this came out they said experts see the rust things on these couldn't be duplicated so this must be authentic then they actually read what the lead codes said and this came out just like two months ago they are inscriptions from a uh from tombs uh tombstones that are just kind of yanked out they're not even complete sentences they're they not only are they saying gibberish they're not even complete iish and and they they can recognize oh yeah you got it off the stone here in Jerusalem yeah fourth almost every historian of the period reports the Rubicon Crossing including the most prominent and reliable of the Roman age but not a single historian mentions the resurrection until the third or fourth century and then it's only Christian historians and finally the Roman Civil War simply could not have proceeded as it did if Caesar hadn't actually physically crossed the Rubicon with his army into Italy and actually captured Rome but for Jesus the only thing necessary to explain the rise of Christianity is a lot of people who were told that the resurrection happened and bought it so when we compare Jesus and Julius Caesar's various exploits here we see that in the case of Caesar every single line of evidence is there and in the case for Jesus four out of the five ones are not there at all and the fifth one we have is not the best kind of evidence but the absolute worst so let's take us to myth number two Jesus was wildly famous but there was no reason for contemporary historians to notice them it always never fails to amaze me that this is the most famous guy in history and yet as soon as you start asking for historical details they immediately start backpedaling and saying oh yeah yeah he's the most famous person in all of human history yet there was no reason for us to take notice of him at all and I talked about this in my other talk here's some of the things that he did that were pretty spectacular Julius Caesar supposedly taxing the whole world Herod slaughtering the Innocents in Bethlehem Jesus having his triumphant entry into Jerusalem and accolate by the entire town him casting out the greedy money changers from the temple and all the crazy freaky things surrounding Jesus's death of which only two seem to be appearing here now um and his Ascension into heaven of course so where are these Witnesses for all these amazing amazing spectacular things um just in a nutshell I've got very fine points on this line that says Jesus was born from -4 to neg to 33 uh BC and BCE to uh CE but uh as I said in the other talk we really don't know what year he was born and there's conflicts on that from conflicts from Matthew and Luke and we don't know what year he died because the synoptic gospels don't agree with John's gospel on that so for argument sake we'll just put minus 4 to 33 and see where the Contemporary eyewitnesses that are always touted for him show up and here they are bam they're almost all of them in the 2 Century are later uh the only one that early is that's even close to being born the during the time that Jesus was alive is Josephus so we'll talk about him in a little bit but that's not to say that there weren't tons of people at the time who were in the right place and the right time and more importantly had actual motives to be interested in Jesus uh epicus Marshall and juvenile uh flyy the Elder cica Gallo justice of Tiberius Nicholas of Damascus file of Alexandria I discussed the the more famous ones of these in the book uh Nicholas Damascus in fact was uh the courtier for Herod and the historian for Herod pho's Alexandria uh Not only was it instrumental in uh coming up with um uh writing histories of different sects at the time such as therapeuti and as scenes but his ideas also made it into Christianity he was the one who gave us the idea of the holy spirit for instance now here's another thing that pops up a lot of atheists will say that well maybe it's you know of course he didn't all do all the miraculous yeah yeah we know that but there probably was a guy and I used to be this very person there probably had to be a guy you know who did this and so could there have been a stealth Messiah and the what started changing me from that idea is that I don't think so not only for all the reasons Rick carrier gave in his last talk that we just saw but here we've got all these loser Messiahs and want to Messiah who did lame ass things weren't nearly as successful and nearly interesting and yet they made the historical footprint Jesus didn't and not only that but we have as they said other christs even in Paul's letter and in the gospel were warned about other Jesus christs and other christs and people casting out demons in your name but not one of us um being preached so what about that guy I was just mentioning ancient historian flavus Josephus well we I can spend a lot of time on this and I do spend a lot of time in the other talk for now suffice it to say that this guy flavis Josephus that is best known for a the testimonium flavinium which is a a passage in in his works that it claims to uh be um a witness for Jesus it's not it's a complete fraud and no one denies that in fact we even know who did it this guy a third Century church historian named uus of cesaria in fact he's the father of Christian church history there's another passage that he does that people agree historians agree isn't a forgery and I agree too that it's not a forgery um because when you read the passage it says which Jesus is talking about and it's not our Jesus it's Jesus the son of damus moving right along to myth number four but eyewitnesses wrote the gospels well I hope they did because the gospels are the only thing we have that's has any evidence for Jesus for the first hundred years or more and even when we do get references said Jesus in the second century it's not some guy talking about Jesus did this Jesus did that it's oh yeah Christians there are this weird cult that believes this about this guy da um but let's see what the gospels say all right we've got Matthew Mark Luke and John Mark alludes to the destruction of the temple which happened in uh the year 70 AD so we know it had been written after that Matthew and Luke for their part rework parts of Mark so they had to be leaders still and Luke actually steals from our good friend flavus Josephus in a book that flavus Josephus wrote in 93 or 94 ad so that's the absolute earliest that Luke could have been written and in fact I think the latest figure I heard was around run5 that they think now and what would I mean when I say that they reworked Mark well what I mean is that Luke rips off 55% of Mark verbatim word for word Mark uh Matthew contains 90% of Mark the interesting thing he doesn't just copy Mark he also corrects all the mistakes Mark makes about basic Judaism um there's lots of things we could say more about the gospels but I think the main point to make is that the gospels were not written by anybody named Matthew Mark Luke and John those names were all added sometime in the 2 Century um all of them were originally Anonymous and what do they say about Jesus I often hear oh they're all eyewitnesses and they each give a a different perspective of Jesus well yeah that's right let's see what they say about their Jesus is they say even though a different perspective it's all the same Jesus let's just look at that Mark's Jesus is the biggest No Frills Jesus and he not only fails to do things sometimes and messes up and loses his temper and loses and says mean things to people but he dies in in on the cross you know what's really freaky about Mark's Jesus in this picture that looks exactly like JT everheart exactly Mars Jesus also dies in complete despair Matthew's Jesus is a new and improved Jesus Matthew didn't set out to start write a gospel of his own he was just making Corrections and adding some material that he liked to the only gospel he knew about he's also the most Jewish of the of the four gospels um making as I said correcting Mark's basic mistakes on Judaism and just adding touches that uh especially uh Illusions to scripture that Mark does it Mark also pulls things from from the Old Testament scriptures he just doesn't say that's what he's doing Matthew makes it very evident Luke is interesting because while Matthew will improve uh Mark's Jesus by for instance having him get out of difficulty uh in Nazareth Luke's Jesus just sails through them like a zen master he he foresees everything happening nothing ever uh uh perturbs him in the least least um and the funny thing about Luke is he says that of all the gospels he's the only one giving the real deal because he's done the research which is a complete lie because he's only stealing from Matthew and Luke Matthew and Mark who he includes in that group of of gospels that are false and another interesting there there's only one spot in all of Luke's gospels where he's not the Serene zen master and that's in the Garden of Gethsemane at one point all of a sudden out of nowhere he becomes greatly agitated sorrowful unto death starts B uh sweating blood and Angels come down and attend to him it's only in two verses and Boop that's over and he goes right back into you know easy breezy you know cool as a cucumber Jesus the interesting thing about that is if you look in your Bibles you'll often see those two verses in Brackets and why are they in Brackets it's because they are considered to be um forgeries entered in later interpolations because nobody uh made no appearance until in our our earliest and best manuscripts and then we've got John's Jesus John's Jesus is the boss on the cross he is a bad mofo Jesus now the other Jesus is at the end of their one-year career they go in and kick out the money changers and there's a big hub no not John's Jesus that's the first thing he does in his three-year career is get in there and start smashing heads um he never feels any doubt he never feels any weaknesses he even seems to be making fun of the other girly jesuses when he talks about things like uh am I going to cry about this no this is why I came here let's roll he is in fact a Superman without a Clark Kint but there are a few discrepancies in the four gospels just a few as you can see here and um some questions remain they all have different answers for some kind of very basic things about Jesus's life which are not visible to us at this time here they go like for instance why did the Jews want to kill Jesus why did Judas betray him when was he born and when did he die they give radically different answers for all that if they even mention it at all myth number six history confirms the gospels well let's look at that because we get hear that a lot in fact uh Luke is often sighted as being one of the best historians ever because he's always been found to be correct and it's like well no that's not exactly true at all when we look at Jesus's trial in fact the violations of ancient Jewish law dog pile on each other so much and so ridiculously that it's almost hard to catch up and at least since the 18th century Jewish Scholars have been saying uh okay that couldn't happened that could never happen that could never happen their image of pilate as this dithering little Nancy boy who W you know has to wash his hands of the whole thing because he can't make up his mind what he should do about this Jesus guy is completely ridiculous given everything we know about Jesus even though in the gospels the Jews are you know ordering him around telling him what to do threatening him to get in hot water with Caesar in real life in our reality pilate would never do what the Jews said always did What They begged him not to do and he didn't get in trouble for killing Jews he killed Jews all the time and he didn't really care if they were guilty or innocent one of the the major things we know about is he surrounded a a group of protesters one time with his men descri disguised in uh cloaks and at his signal they went in with daggers and killed everyone in the ring of people that was just one of the fun things pilate liked to do um and is the trial itself even based on anything in reality at all one thing about the gospel of Mark it's the first gospel it's the gospel everyone is based on and yet so many historians have found layer after layer of symbolic things that don't seem to be uh grounded in reality at all but have a symbolic meaning and I'll just point out to one right right here this is barabus in fact in some Syria manuscripts his name is Jesus barabus uh barabus if you uh aren't up on your ancient Aramaic means son of the father so in this case we have two sons of the father a Jesus and a Jes and a barabus one is sacrificed for the the sins of Israel the other one who is is a murderer and a seditionist is released into the Wilderness and Richard K is the one who pointed out uh if he's not the first one to point out that this copies exactly the yam kapor ritual so precisely there's no doubt that that is a uh allegory for the yam kapor ritual when one scapegoat carried with it the sins of Israel Into the Wilderness and the other one was a perfect sacrifice for their sins and it's not just Jesus's trial when we look at Paul's trial Peter's trial uh uh Steven's trial rather um we find that there weird things coming up in the trial that make no damn sense at all for instance uh when uh Peter cures a local in Jerusalem just a few weeks after the crucifixion the Sanhedrin is in a hubub because everyone has heard about Peter curing this and we can't cover it up what's to be done and it's like really that's the miracle you're all in a tizzy about we don't remember Jesus you know Supernatural Darkness uh you know the temple curtain ripping all the dead people in Jerusalem's Cemetery coming out of the graves and walking into that's what you're worried about the guy with the crippled you know so myth number seven calling right along archaeology itself how does that confirm the gospels well it doesn't really um in fact as early as the second century we had uh pagans philosophers pointing out that the Sea of Galilee isn't really a Sea of Galilee it was called Lake chin uh before uh Mark called it the Sea of Galilee in his book and in fact fact and rather than being able to have um 9-hour um ship voyages and um and mighty waves and storms it's a lake filled uh Lake about uh 7 Miles by four miles if I'm not mistaken and as he says it's Inc capacious for waves or storms so it's completely wrong it's funny uh that should say Jesus in Wonderland by the way um we have a third Century Church Father who actually went so far as to say now when you look at the travels in the Deeds of Jesus they make no sense literally but have to be interpreted spiritually and we get a lot of that in the gospels well what about the written evidence we often get told that there's jillions and Jil there's 24,000 manuscripts of the Old Testament and that's great and groovy until you ask well how old are these manuscripts of the Old Testament oh most of them are from the 9th century well that's pretty interesting you got some from the 8th Century what do we have from well the first century second century third Century well from the first Century we don't have anything at all from the second century we get pieces and scraps of manuscripts all the way up until about the year 300 when we get our first complete Bibles we get codc caticus and codex vaticanus but if Christians are going to brag about that's how far early our earliest bibles are we need to remember cotus caticus and cotus vus have different books from each other and both of them have different books from what we have ear in fact is the oldest manuscript that they often bring up it's called p52 as you can see it's not a manuscript of the Book of John it's the manuscript of these 13 words in fact it's partial words because there's only one complete word in the whole thing it's right there in the very bottom it's Kai the Greek word for and so to say that we have anything near complete records of uh of of the gospels is crazy uh Bruce mezar very famous very prominent very esteemed uh biblical scholar who's done a lot of work his own work confounds that very thing he says oh yeah we just within a few go generations we could reproduce the whole gospel well it's you who shows us that's wrong Bruce mezer and that not even taking in account the forgery that is blatant and Bruce man has done Bart Man rather has done incredible work on this in his book Orthodox Corruption of scriptures and um misquoting Jesus and uh Jesus interrupted and his new book uh forged um it for a guy who's not a mythicist all his work sure as hell supports the mythicist theory and one of these days I'm going to have to send him a letter and point that out to him how many manuscripts are there as we said there's jillions and jillians but when you get the age of them there's none in the crucial time when we need them well what about Paul and the Epistles what about the rest of the New Testament they kind of collaborate corroborate the gospels don't they well who was Paul's Christ when he talks about his Christ in fact when every Christian from those first early generations of Christ describes theirs they're describing a mythological figure there's no biographical details no Jerusalem no Nazareth no Jesus Mary Judas nothing like that at all it seems to boil down to two things a last supper and a um and his crucifixion so why does Paul never ask what would Jesus do in fact if Paul doesn't just not quote Jesus's teachings he actually contradicts his teachings in several places and what does he have to say about the Last Supper well one thing he says is that uh when he puts it in into context he never says that this happened in Jerusalem he never said this happened on the night of passover he never puts it in any kind of historical context at all he describes it in very mythical ways exactly like the other Pagan M mystery faiths uh uh Lord suppers in fact Lord's Supper is the term taken directly from the mystery face he never calls it the last supper and in fact he warns his followers that we can only go to our last our Lord's Supper not their Lord's Supper you cannot eat at the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons as well myth number nine well Christianity began with Jesus and his Apostles except when you actually look at it when you look at early Christianity the first thing you start realizing that this started as one single thing it surely was a schiz FRC uh movement because there's lots of differences including two main splits Peter and Paul Peter who was uh stuck in a very Jewish Christian Paul who is breaking away from that and doing a very Gentile based Christianity and the the apostles themselves it's fascinating to see how quickly they vanish from the uh record once you get the gospels and in fact biblical Scholars been scratching the head about this for years uh one of the uh essays that's the most prominent as defending the apostles itself says it's he has no explanation for why they instantly disappear from the record as if they never existed or they were completely fictitious he doesn't say that I'm saying that in fact some people are saying that the reason there's 12 of them and other uh Illusions in the gospels are because these aren't 12 people they're the TW signs of the zodiac and there are a couple different little um uh incidents in the gospels that seem to be analogies an allegory for some astrological things and here's an interesting thing this is from one of the earliest parts of the Bible it's a called a ProLine uh segment element because it's something that Paul came across but they they agreed that he didn't start this this was already in place becom a Christian it's called the kosis himym kosis means emptying out um he emptied himself out of his divine nature and became a person and it says and being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death even death on a cross therefore God also so highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend in Heaven and Earth and under the Earth every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the father now it's not obvious but there's two things that are very interesting about this little hymn the first one was printed uh pointed out by some uh Greek Scholars that this line even death on a cross this is a hymn it's a poem in in Greek that is the only line that sticks out it breaks the meter wasn't part of the original poem which means in one of the earliest earliest fragments this may be the very earliest Christian writing we have somebody had to insert reference that he died on a cross on there and that's not even the craziest thing about this uh Jean is it Jean Philip kuso uh Jean L Kush in the 30s pointed out something he says um theologians cite this as being where Jesus gets his title Lord but he says um that's not what happening at all read it again it says he became obedient to the point of death and for that reason God excite exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name the name of Jesus the God man in this story does not get the name Jesus until after he's crucified and does this very interesting stuff myth number 10 Christianity was a totally new different miraculous overnight success that changed the world World well that's kind of half right I mean it did eventually change the world but not for hundreds hundreds of years of it being just completely Fringe and it just crawled um in fact its growth was so slow if we compare it to a completely weird beard example uh sanism spiritualism in the 18th century got uh let me see if I can get the numbers right I want to say 3 million 30 million uh followers in just 10 years it took Christianity by uh example almost 200 50 years to get anywhere near that close another thing is that they were constantly on the defensive about the parallels to older Pagan religions nowadays um apologists always just sniff away oh mystery face oh Pagan religions no it was no copycat all our evidence comes from later you know they have all these great reasons for why that could not possibly be so so why is it the early Christian fathers didn't use those simple arguments what did they tell us they told us this that Satan must have seen all these uh prophecies in the Old Testament deciphered them figured out what Christianity was going to look like act like and rituals were going to be like way in advance and spread copycats of everything before Christianity ever came into existence the devil has his Christ said Ficus maternus early one and it's really this guy who we have to thank for giving us Christianity and that's the emperor Constantine this nice goodlooking cuddly bear of a guy um it's interesting to note that even though he was the first Christian Emperor he was also the lifelong Pagan Emperor I like to say he was half Christian half Pagan and 100% politician uh it Christianity didn't become the Pagan uh official religion of paganism until he after his death but he certainly uh got the nails going on the coffin um in fact closing down shutting down the Pagan temples as Keith Hopkins has pointed out was a huge financial windfall for the uh the emperor so it was totally win-win to take on this fringy cult that his mother belonged to and um start favoring it so in conclusion can Jesus be saved in the last chapter of my book I have all these examples of how it looks like to me that things would be different if we did have a Jesus and it boils down to this if Jesus had been an actual historical figure we've got a real thorny Paradox either he did these remarkable things a host of amazing revolutionary things taught these amazing things and no one outside his little Fringe cult noticed for over a century or he didn't and yet shortly after his death tiny communities of worshipper that can't agree about the most basic facts of his life spring up scattered all over the Empire not just in Jerusalem but all to the inlands and there's really only one conclusion I can draw from that there simply never could have been a historical Jesus that's all I've [Applause] got

Channel: Desipio

Views: 71,937

Keywords: David, Fitzgerald

Id: 80BeyRYlMSQ

Length: 30min 42sec (1842 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 18 2011