David Fitzgerald Skepticon 3 "Examining the Existence of a Historical Jesus"

is the action coordinator for San Francisco atheists he's also a board member of the CFI and he's done tons of other things but most importantly he knows how to fence and it's super awesome because we did a photoshoot yesterday for next year's calendar he would had this sword he was just like it was amazing I am in awe it was awesome alright without further ado David it's June all right Wow there are a lot of you out here aren't there hello skeptic on so here's the thing 10 years ago it never even crossed my mind that there might not be a historical Jesus because I mean let's face it he's got to be the most famous person in all of human history the most influential person and even if he wasn't the Divine Son of God you know which none of us think that at least you know there had to at least been a guy named Jesus or even maybe a couple different guys in first century Judea who are Jesus but at any rate there's good evidence for we have lots of eyewitnesses for him we have his very words there's just good solid rational reasons to believe that there was a Jesus or so I used to think then one day I got curious see you know I wonder what is the evidence for Jesus and that's where this talk comes from this talk is brought to you this talk is brought to you by the book nails if you really hate this talk you're really really going to hate the book now since its I've got my watch it's just past half 12:00 now this there's so many arguments to bring out in this issue that we're not going to get out of them now so this is just the quick and dirty version and since we're going from this straight into lunch it's going to be even quicker and dirtier so bear with me and let's just run with it so to get started first thing we have to do is find out well just what does history say about Jesus now even though he's supposedly the most influential person in all of human history as soon as you actually try to pin down history the first thing you get from apologists is oh well you know what the funny thing is there's really no reason for contemporary historians of his time to have taken notice of Jesus but is that right it seems like there's a few biblical incidents that might have made history at the time first of all we've got Caesar taxing the world now Luke's Gospel says that Jesus was born the year Caesar Augustus declared attacks on all the world this creates all kinds of problems not least of which because Matthew says that Jesus was born during King Herod's reign which ended in 4 BC and the only Roman census at that time was it 6 ad which is a gap of 10 years there have been many many many famous attempts to try to rectify this and none up hold up we also have Herod slaughter of all the baby boys in Bethlehem try to get Jesus we have Jesus's triumphant entry in Jerusalem he entered in Jerusalem and the entire town welcomes him as their king and yet somehow the Romans don't seem to notice that either Jesus casting out the money changers now as we all know Jesus is said to come in and cast out all the greedy money changers from the temple but as but Robert price points out the temple area covered 34 3 5 acres the equivalent of 34 football fields so it would have contained thousands of pilgrims innumerable livestock stalls money changing booths and it was crawling with armed guards to prevent just this sort of thing in the first place so we've got to possib either Jesus was this one man kung-fu army of death who did all this on his own which is possible it is Jesus or some scholars have said perhaps what it was is that he led a small force of zealots to take over the temple and cast out all the money changers and that's certainly reasonable except that's all the more reason that the Romans would have taken notice of it and then of course we have the events surrounding Jesus's death all kinds of weird supernatural comes down after Jesus is crucified there's an earthquake in fact there's two earthquakes there's a supernatural darkness that covers at least the whole region if not the whole world depending on which gospel you're asking in the form the sacred temple curtain in the Holy of Holies tears from top to bottom and there's the resurrection of many holy people who appeared in Jerusalem according to Matthew somehow Mark Luke and John missed that along with every other historian in history and then of course after his death a day or possibly eight days or possibly 40 days after that depending on which gospel you ask Jesus comes back remains on earth and then goes back up to heaven in front of many witnesses we'll come back to that later so these are just a few of the more conspicuous incidents that we see in the gospel that we have no corroborating evidence for at all but if you ask anybody and even most atheists they'll show you oh yeah there's a whole battery of contemporary eyewitnesses who attested Jesus so let's bring these guys out this doesn't a half or so are the ones who are most often cited as witnesses for Jesus and we don't really have time to go into all of them so I'm just going to spring ahead and go into the ones who are the most credible let's put them on the timeline here is our eyewitness timeline here's the first century now here's Jesus now if you look the points on that are extremely pointy and well-defined you've got four BC thirty-three seee but in fact it should be a lot fuzzier because we don't really know when he was born as it says it could have been as early as four BC it could have been as late as six AD and we really don't know what year he died in fact it could have been 31 C II it could have been 33 C II if Matthew Mark and Luke right or it could not have been 33 ad or 31 ad if John is right because he has them dying on a different day altogether than the other Gospels let's see where the rest of witnesses pop in would you look at that as you can see absolutely none of these guys are in a position to give any contemporary eyewitnesses a time Jesus lived not a single one of them and to be honest with you I won't even hold that against them if their testimonies had anything relevant to say but most of their testimonies are discussing Christians and nobody disputes that there were Christians in the second century of the first century and again in the book I go into what they actually do say in fact all the eyewitnesses the only one that could even be considered a near contemporary to Jesus is a Jewish historian Flavius Josephus and even he was born after Jesus's alleged death and wrote sixty years after that we'll come back to him later now this isn't to say that there weren't people who were there to notice and that no early servants survived from the first century now despite the apart of the fervent wishes of apologist the 1st century is not this total black hole of history it's one of the best historical documented periods that we know in history and there are several historians and other writers who did live at the right time and the right place to see the beginnings of Christianity and what's more these writers had plenty of good reasons to be interested in it enough to say something about it and there are plenty more Roman and Greek and Jewish writers who didn't do all those things but didn't have reason there to write but we have plenty that did here's a couple of those just touching on the real fast Epictetus was a major greek philosopher who espoused the brotherhood of man that was remarkably similar to christ but he makes no mention of Jesus or Christianity whatsoever that's okay Marshall and Juvenal were observant social satirist they these to poke fun at all aspects of first century Roman society but they have nothing to say about Christians and again maybe that's okay maybe Christian just wasn't on the radar yet or maybe they just didn't think Christianity was funny though strangely enough later Roman satirists like Lucien found Christianity very funny Lucius Marcus Ania Seneca Seneca the elder who is widely regarded as the greatest Roman writer on ethics so it's certainly odd that a writer on Roman ethics would have nothing to say about what's arguably the greatest ethical shake-up at this time but that's exactly the case Pliny the Elder was a scientist who wrote volumes not just unnatural and astronomical phenomenon like say earthquakes and supernatural darkness but also on legends and cultic beliefs now here's a guy who would have been really interested in everything it happens around Jesus and Christianity but he has nothing to say about either and this should raise a huge red flag for us and there's two others that aren't on this older slide but they are in the book and that's Seneca the younger who like Pliny also wrote about nature and strange phenomenon and he wrote a book called on superstition the superstition which was lambasted all the major religions of his time and yet nothing to say about Christianity his brother galio is actually in the Bible he is the judge in the book of Acts at Paul's a trial he not only has nothing to say about Jesus he has nothing to say about Paul either which is very strange but those are all Romans let's see what we can get from the Jews what too far justice of Tiberius is a Jewish historian now just as if Tiberius lived in the first century he was a native of Galilee lived just a few miles up the road from Jesus's hometown to make the whole thing just perfect he wrote a huge history covering the entire time when Jesus lived and in fact the only reason we even know about justice is because of what he had to say about Jesus he doesn't have a goddamn thing to say about Jesus at all which completely outraged the Byzantine church fathers in the ninth century because he's a Jew so naturally he's not going to mention Jesus is what they'd say Philo of Alexandria a Jewish philosopher and writer who was alive before during and after the time of Christ when Christ had his triumphant procession when he drove the money changers out of Temple when the birth earthquake and when he's crucified all the people zambian through jerusalem he was alive for all that in fact he we know he had strong ties to jerusalem and he was even in jerusalem close to the time of these events he may have been literally on site for these events but he doesn't know about any of this or seem to know anybody in Jerusalem who knows in yet abyss now mind you he wrote entire books on other sects at this time such as the Essenes and the therapeutic but nothing on Jesus nothing on Christianity and this is particularly weird when we realize it was Philo who developed so many ideas that influenced Christianity such as the idea of the logos the word as in the word came flesh and dwelt among us and in the beginning was the word there's also Nicholas of Damascus who was Herod's personal friend also his advisor and his court historian and there are many many many others and also there's not just these witnesses but there's also suspicious gaps in writers that we do have records of and there's completely lost critiques that are mentioned by early Christian writers but lost critiques of Christianity that are completely gone were never saved so there's a whole wealth of writings that we have of missing and opportunities for them to write that we have on that to go unwritten now some people claim that the Talmud writers knew about Jesus so let's take a look at their Jesus actually let's look at both of their Jesus's one of this is GC ben pandera who was reportedly a miracle worker and the bastard of a Roman soldier named Pantera he was said to been stoned to death and then hung on a tree on the eve of Passover in Jerusalem which sounds good and T realized this happened during the reign of Alexander geneious about 80 years before Jesus was supposed to been born the other Jesus been stata was a evil magician that it was also said to been stoned and hanged on the eve of a Passover but this is it litter 30 miles from Jerusalem and this is in the second century about 80 years after Jesus was supposed to died and there is a Jesus bin Nasser II who is mentioned in later Talmud in the Middle Ages but it's clearly a satirical one and it was clearly written around the 4th or 5th century so it's plaint the rabbi's in the early on had no ideas apart from what they read in the Gospels so let's go back to a Jew who does have something to say out Jesus this is the only person on the apologist list who could even be considered the close contemporary this guy trying hard to look like Julius Caesar is Flavius Josephus he was born Joseph bin matin Yahoo in Jerusalem and 37 seee he was a reluctant Jewish commander on the side of Jerusalem during their war with Rome in the late 60s and the 70s but he later went on over to the Roman side which by Irish standards makes him a filthy little traitor but since he wrote all these great historians we can cut him a little slack and spend some time with him he spends many pages describing a variety of different miracle workers and messiahs in the first centuries but does he talk about Jesus well this time it looks like we do have somebody says something about Jesus in volume 18 chapter 3 of his book the antiquities of the Jews Josephus describes all these various misfortunes that fell under the Jews under Pilate at one point he's pushing graven images of Caesar on them another there's a massacre there's another sad calamity here they all get booted out Rome they're all very very gloomy stuff but right in the middle of all these depressing little tales of woe there's this now there was about this time Jesus a wise man if it be lawful to call him a man for he was a doer of wonderful works a teacher of such men has received the truth with pleasure he drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles he was the Christ and when Pilate at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us had condemned him to the cross those that loved him at the first did not forsake him for he appeared to them alive again the third day as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him and the tribe of Christians so named from him are not extinct at this day now funny thing about this this whole thing sticks out like a Britney Spears video in the middle of a funeral let's just take a quick look at the highlights of these and you tell me if you think this was written by a first century Orthodox Jewish historian or by a forgery a Christian forgery later look what he says he calls him the Christ he says the ten thousand wonderful things concerning him and he appeared to them alive again so it's hard to believe that an Orthodox Jew let alone a historian wrote any of these things calling a criminal that was condemned by his fellow Orthodox Jews the Christ a Greek word for the Messiah and gushing over the rules of wonderful things he did like a schoolgirl and casually mentioned that oh yes he returned from the dead now as the Orthodox Jew of course I don't believe he was not a saya but clearly you know he was and the tribe of Christians so named from him is not extinct at this day well of course they were never a tribe of Christians and as doubtful of Josephus would have made such a mistake but the term Christian wasn't even used until the second century and Christian I didn't even get tribes eyes until well into the second century he was just scattered and organized unorganized communities at that time and he says as the divine prophets had foretold but normally careful historian Josephus doesn't mention who these prophets are or what they said which is very unlike him another subtle indication of forgery that's not imperative es is the mistaken use of the word Gentile it just so happens that Josephus who was writing for a Roman audience never uses the word Gentile and India's writings for instance throughout antiquities of Jews in the Jewish war he'll refer to non-jews as Greeks or Syrians regardless of their actual death Missa tee and incidentally I had a Christian friend of mine who called me on this and said no Dave in my edition of Josephus he always calls Gentiles I said really you're kidding me what Edition do you have the penguin with some magician I said that's the exact same edition I have and you'll have to show me where that was he never could so Josephus would have been extremely interested in Jesus casting out the money changers from the temple but he makes no mention of that that's just a kind of story he'd like because he spins pages and pages documenting the antics of other lesser loser messiahs and miracle workers in great detail not to call him a loser but John the Baptist Judas of Galilee Theotis the magician a Jewish Messiah called the Egyptian all of whom here as deceivers and imposters and he has nothing good to say about any of them in fact pointing out uppity Jewish would-be messiahs is kind of a special focus of his but this lone little snippet is all he has to say about the guy who's the real deal he spends longer time describing the tawdry little sex scandal in the next paragraph than he does in any of this describing who he think is the actual messiah and in fact the reason that Josephus didn't like any of these miracle-working messiahs is that he spent his whole career declaring that his patron the Emperor Vespasian with the actual Messiah and lastly the very next paragraph after this suspicious little passage starts by saying at this time there was another sad calamity sad calamity we just saw a commercial for Jesus what sad calamity okay stopping beating the dead horse here in light of all this really no historian argues that it's not a forgery anymore the only argument left anymore is how much of a forgery it is and Christians try to insist that well it's only a half forgery that Josephus really wrote something and some monk in the Middle Ages tried to fix it up well if that's true how come the next paragraph ends that way but here's the real kicker the passage itself doesn't even appear until the fourth century earlier Christian Church Fathers and apologists like the church father origin like clement of alexandria we're constantly using Josephus in their ammo against pagan debates they would given their mothers for a nice base in the hole like this but they never do but somehow in the fourth century it starts getting quoted by this man Eusebius bishop of caesarea let's just take a second to get to know him because i'm convinced most people have never heard of him and yet he is responsible in a large part for the christianity we have today and i'm i think christian ii was a huge debt to this largely unsung tireless illustrious lying son of a bitch the father of ecclesiastical history Edward Gibbon the author of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire said Eusebius himself directly indirectly confesses that he is related whatever may rebound to the glory and suppress all that contend to the disgrace of his religion and Eusebius himself has a chapter entitled it will be necessary sometimes to use falsehood as a remedy for the benefit of those who require such a mode of treatment and we have example after example of catching him in a lie or changing the facts to suit himself he drastically rewrote his official church history at least five times that we know of to keep up with changing church politics but how do we know that it was Eusebius who did the forgery well one strong clue is that he inherited his library and therefore his copy of Josephus from origin who is one of those Church Fathers that not only knows nothing about the passage but criticized Josephus for never mentioning Jesus he made other contributions and we'll skip over these real fast because we're trying to make it quick and dirty today but one important thing he did do was Constantine's vision of the cross now how many of you have heard the story about Constantine seeing the sign of the Cross in heaven and that converted him well the interesting thing that this life-changing event doesn't appear in any biographies that they wrote while he was alive in that earlier biography you see this tells a completely different story complete opposite he wins his battles because he is a lifelong Christian and totally pious it's not until he dies that we eat that that a wonderful story and the funny thing about Eusebius is most of the examples of his lying comes from his best defenders who are usually 19th century English clergyman trying to to restore his reputation so just backing up a little bit this blatant forgery in Josephus and actually there's another reference in Josephus later on that's not a forgery but is simply talking about another Jesus altogether and later Christians thought it was talking about Jesus to recap this forgery means that if we look at the entire first century we are left with a grand total of zero historical references for a hundred years so what do we have we have the Gospels so everything we know about Gospels from these four books now you guys already know this because atheist have already matched up as being the top Reverend religion no notice it's all skipped through this Old Testament New Testament New Testaments made of the Gospels which along with the book of Acts purports to the biographies of Jesus Christ and accounts of the early church there's four of them Matthew Mark Luke and John the epistles are the writings of Apostle Paul and other Christian missionaries and the Book of Revelations is the source of innumerable bad Christian sci-fi movies and books about the rapture now I think I also don't have to tell you guys that there's some discrepancies in the Bible I'm sorry just a few these are in the conflicting accounts of Jesus's genealogy and his Nativity and now what else we had and his childhood and his baptism now what we have when we talk about his genealogy ins and his child his baptism is pot ministries and his apostles and his miracles his teachings his personality and a very cornucopia of other contradictions about who and what and where he did everything and we're not talking about simple divergences in eyewitness testimony or bad translations of it we're not talking about well Matthew said he wore a blue toga and Luke said it was a red toga we're saying more like Matthew said this happened in Egypt and Luke said it happened in Jerusalem and John said that never happened and so let's look at some of these and please keep in mind that there are many many more discrepancies in just these accounts but it would take an insight in Tyre encyclopedia to list them all and there are several encyclopedias that list them all here we go and by the way I have Dan Barker to thank for all these Dan Barker here yet or is he here tomorrow these are all from his book godless who went to the tomb well if we asked Matthew Mary Magdalene and the other Mary James's mother come to see the tomb it's closed by the heavy stone mark says Mary Magdalene James mother and Salome having already seen the tomb come to anoint Jesus body wandering among themselves who will roll away the stone but luckily they arrived to find the stone already rolled away Luke says Mary Magdalene Joanna Mary the mother James and other women having already seen the tune come to anoint Jesus body with no thought of how they're going to roll away the stone John says that since Jesus body had already been anointed slowly shortly after his death Mary comes alone and finds the stone rolled away what is Mary fine well according to Mark it was a young man sitting inside the tomb on the right Luke says it was two men sitting standing inside John says it was two angels sitting on each end of the bed and Matthew says a great earthquake occurred then Angeles descended blazing like a lightning paralyzed the Roman guards with terror rolled away the stone and sat on it and again I feel compelled to point out once more that these aren't even all the discrepancy in the resurrection accounts the Gospels are packed with contradictions like these from before Jesus's birth - after his death and everywhere in between and you could sometimes hear Christian scholars admit well yes it's contradictory but that's to be expected no one sees the same thing and these are our eyewitness accounts blah-blah-blah-blah-blah and my favorite of all time is well the contradictions show that it's true so let's do this let's just say that's not and for argument's sake that we accept that all these people were real people and that furthermore that all the Gospel writers really did interview them who are these eyewitnesses that know so much when they're talking to one evangelist and snow little when they're talking to other I'll show you what I mean now of course in a court of law this will all be thrown out in the first place for being mere hearsay but let's say Mary herself is a real person and we have her on the witness stand sure maybe she's not going to remember what time of morning it was exactly or who was with her what God said but honestly are we supposed to think that when she talked to mark you say said yeah there was a guy and he was sitting on the inside side of the tomb and that's what I saw and then when she talks to Matthew says oh yeah then when there there's the mighty earthquake angel Lord came down blazing like lightning Terrell Stone terrorized the armed guards from sheer terror now is he risen above the dead and of course yeah lots of other dead holy people came back to life from the tomb and start walking around Jerusalem really really so how can these Gospel accounts be so contradictory well first of all let's take a look at who these authors were alleged to be first up we've got Matthew Matthew Levi tax collector one of Jesus Twelve Apostles we have mark John mark who is supposed to be the interpreter of the pasal Peter we have Luke said to be Paul's personal physician he's also said to have written the book of Acts and John who's usually insisted to be the Apostle John son of Zebedee but the text only says it was the disciple who Jesus loved and has been a lot of guesswork determined it was John but there's been other candidates as well including Lazarus now it's interesting to see that Luke made the cut at all since his connection is through Paul and Paul wasn't an eyewitness either an apologist compensate this difficulty by declaring that Luke is an excellent historian and what do they base it on well Luke says right in the beginning of his book he is an excellent historian well all right then that's right and I cannot tell you how many blog posts I've seen where the comments are all caps Luke is the best historian he's excellent careful historian except that he's not that's the problem and there have been countless examples of why this is including the fact that our excellent and careful historian friend has ripped off almost all his historical details from our old friend flavia's Josephus and even then not always accurately which is how we know that he's stealing from Flavius Josephus and not the other way around what's more Wald appears he's very familiar with Roman sites and taverns which he casually rattles off without explanation not only does he not know Aramaic the language of first century Judea he has very little knowledge of Judea itself since he makes several mistakes that no GD and Jew would ever make now I say Luke but I suspect you already know that they four official Gospels were not written by anybody named Matthew Mark Luke or John and even the conservative scholars have accepted that and we can even question if these guys were real but that's a whole other can of worms in fact all the Gospels are anonymous and titles like according to Matthew or according to Mark were not added until late in the second century and in fact no one seems to even heard of our Gospels until well into the second century one reference around the Year 120 is from Pappas the Bishop of Harappa 'less he quotes from Matthew and Mark but the only thing is his quotes don't match anything we have in our Matthew or mark so we don't know what he's quoting from or they were still under construction in the year 120 just ten years after Pappas Justin Martyr knows none of the four gospel authors he calls them the memoirs of the Apostles so we have no way of knowing of who or how many people really wrote the Gospels and only guesses as to where or when or how many times they've been edited or re-edited in fact it's only until the Year 180 which is a full hundred and fifty years after the supposed death of Jesus that we even learned what the four canonical Gospels are and discover why they're exactly four no more no less does anybody know why there's just four and no more God says so that's a good question yeah that he is dead right it's because there's four quarters of the earth and four Universal wins science people science another church father says since the world sits upright upon four and supported by four pillars it's only natural that the gospel is supported by four pillars mark the oldest gospel alludes to the Jewish war with Rome and the destruction of the temple in 70 AD so it was obvious that it was written after that in fact some people think it was written it directly in response to that and there are other reasons I think it was written after the destruction of Jerusalem Matthew Luke for their part they rework mark so we know that they came later still and as I mentioned our excellent historian friend Luke rips off ladies Joseph is quite a bit from a book that was written in 94 AD so that is the earliest even humanly possible date for Luke and it's probably much later because it doesn't get quoted in too well in the second century that's true of all the Gospels by the way it's also clear that the Gospels of Mark Matthew and Luke could not possibly have been written by anyone remotely close to Jesus and not just because they would have been long dead for one thing all the Gospels are written in Greek not Aramaic and plus both writers plagiarize largely word-for-word up to 90% of the Gospel of Mark and simply add their own twists on it sayings of Jesus and supposed historical details this is not some crazy atheist heretical notion this has been the majority opinion of scholars all biblical scholars for almost 200 years this is what they call the synoptic problem and yeah it's a problem let's ignore the fact that Matthew and Luke contradict each other in things like the genealogy of Jesus and his Nativity story completely and thus both of them can't be right one of them has to be wrong at least but let's ask this instead why would a supposed witness like math you have to plagiarize the writings of some guy who wasn't an eyewitness and just tweak his story a little bit and weirder still the guy he's stealing from mark supposedly got his gospel from his good buddy Peter so why is it that the other Gospels all have more anecdotes about Peter including the example of Jesus saying to him Peter you are the rock upon which I shall build my church I think Peter would remember that and told that to mark actually I think Peter would have said Jesus what's a church since churches hadn't been invented when he supposedly said that and it gets worse first of all I'm getting ahead of myself the author of Mark shows no understanding of the social situation in the Holy Land he makes numerous errors that no Jew or anyone in living in Judea in the first century could ever have made when you compare Matthew and Mark's Gospel you'll find that the author or authors of Matthew are constantly correcting his blunders about all aspects of Jewish society the religion the calendar holidays customs attitudes and yes even Jesus requited repeatedly miss quoting scripture but one last nail in this coffin is that whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark shows a George Bush like lack of familiarity with Palestinian geography no one who actually lived in Palestine could have made the mistakes that the author of mark did for instance mark 31 says then Jesus returned from the region of Tyre and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee in the region of the Decapolis so let's look on the map so the route from tyre went down the coast to the port city of Akko and then down south to the Sea of Galilee to the Decapolis region south and east so where is Sidon on a map oh there it is it's 22 miles to the north and 50 miles out of his way that he'd be walking on foot to get there so to use a - I Missouri metaphor this is like going from Saint Paul to sarah st. Louis to Springfield by way of Milwaukee and this is one of several blunders that mark makes and geography a graphical blunders in fact the mistakes in mark are so blatant that a church father origin gave up completely on trying to make sense of his geography and said it has to be interpreted symbolically and mystically so these are the three so-called synoptic Gospels which is Greek for seen together I don't know what the Greek word for ripped off from one another is do you know it's alright okay now but unlike these three clones the Gospel of John is very very different in fact it was rejected early on as being a heretic or gospel by some Christian groups and Church Fathers but it proved to be so popular that it couldn't be repressed despite the fact that it has virtually nothing in common with the teachings or the theology or the style or even the content of the other Gospels as I said earlier he even has Jesus being crucified on a completely different day and John's Jesus has a completely different personality much more badass and in charge innocent optics Jesus is a secret society never gives his secret identity he teaches his disciples mostly in private he's constantly hiding his miracles he's telling lepers now don't tell anyone where I touched you it'll just be our little secret I know so bad so bad but not John's Jesus oh no baby John's Jesus knows he's God and he doesn't care who knows it let's he'll tell you in fact that's about all he talks about you might as well have a big t-shirt saying I am God written over because that is what he strode through Jerusalem saying all the damn time now in the Synoptics Jesus drives out the money changers at the very end of his career gets in hot water and gets crucified for it John's Jesus no babies he kicks off his career three years before that by going into there and smashing some heads this badass mofos Jesus hardly ever seems to feel any doubt at all he doesn't cry like some little sissy boy in the Garden of Gethsemane he doesn't tell any fruity parables there's no Sermon on the Mount no blessed are the meek know love thy neighbor there is certainly no liberal turn-the-other-cheek crap no sir there is none of that in John this is a Republican Jesus he does however call the Jews the spawn of the devil which is a little odd seeing as he's won in fact John spends his entire gospel bagging on not the scribes and the Pharisees but the Jews as they were as if they were this big ad morphus blob of evil which is odd because our anti-semitic gospel writer John is also supposed to be a Jew but in one place John's Jesus says something uncharacteristically humble he says the father is greater than I and that's just one place of several in the Gospels that contradict the idea of the Trinity and in fact the idea the Trinity appears nowhere in the Bible at all and isn't it a little weird anyway that the Old Testament God would never once even mention the fact that he's actually this three-in-one super god of the Father the Son and some bird-like spirit creature of some sort and in fact if you went to Moses and said anything remotely like that what would happen you were gotten stoned to Jeff and stoned to death and about two minutes flat but as different different is all this is from the Synoptics once we get to the passion narrative yes John starts creeping from Mark to now he tweets the story to put his own spin on it but it's very clear he's working off another copy of mark and sadly there's even Eddins that the unique parts of John are plagiarized from still earlier writings such as the Greek Greek philosopher Pythagoras there's also some obvious giveaways that it just like the other Gospels it's been edited and added to here's one oh there's the Trinity hello Trinity in chapter 2 Jesus performs his first miracle then down in verse 23 perform some more miracles and then after that in chapter 4 he does his second miracle so it's clear that somebody's been padding the books and I should mention that these are just the four official Gospels that made it the cut and there are many many other Gospels that did not get enough support to get into the Bible does anyone guess how many Gospels there were 1327 couple hundred are we up to like 65 or so it's in the 40s at least yeah one Christian website said that there was over 4,000 or some said there were 270 and they're all voted on at the Council of Nicaea and that's just not true the fact is it was far far Messier than that they're never actually was a one-time vote taken on which his gospel in which is Scripture it was a much more haphazard practice process that took over centuries there are over 29 Scrolls found in early catches like the non-homogeneous today's of early historians that we've never found and these are probably just a few of many who knows how many Gospels there were that have just been totally lost a time mark was just the first gospel written if everybody had been happy with it we wouldn't have four Gospels in our Bible Matthew wasn't setting out to write some new gospel zone he was just improving on the only gospel he knew and adding to it and cleaning up its mistakes Luke wrote on the other hand when there are tons and scads of Gospels floating around and he tried to make it sound like his is the only one on the market that's the real deal even including Matthew and marks who he steals from John came along even later still and he doesn't even pretend to try to be going along with the details of anybody else's gospel so that's the state of our four biblical Gospels four out of many many more contradictory reworked writing set down decades after his oppose in advance by anonymous author or authors who were later falsely represented as eyewitnesses but the Gospels are only half our source of information about Jesus we also have the letter Z the Apostle Paul and the epistles or do we so what about Paul and the other New Testament writers well who is Paul first of all according to the official story after Jesus's crucifixion Paul became the greatest Christian missionary he traveled throughout the ancient world setting up churches and wrote several letters though many if not the majority of biblical scholars now say that he only wrote seven of the 13 letters attributed to him who was Paul's Christ let's take a gander at how he describes his Christ Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God the firstborn of all creation the brightness of God's glory and Express image of God he upholds all things by the word of his power in him dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily is the mediator of the New Covenant the great Shepherd of the Sheep the great High Priest who's passed through the heavens he's disarmed and subjugated the supernatural principalities and powers the angels and authorities he's the Lord of both the living and the dead he descended into the lower pits of the earth into the round of the Dead preached to the spirits in prison there and brought the souls of the captives out he led captivity captive he ascended on high far above all the heavens he gave gifts to mankind he will deliver his followers from the wrath to come he's a righteous advocate with the father he's able to subdue all things to himself all things in heaven and earth were created by him through him and for him and he is before all things and in him all things consist now that is an awesome awesome resume but do you notice anything missing in that there's nothing when Christian writers in Paul's generation speak of their Christ Jesus that sounds like they're describing a guy who's lived on earth in Galilee just a few years before they sound instead like they're describing a mythological figure in the book of Acts when people come on the scene and start preaching about Jesus they go straight to the man Jesus talk about all the wonderful things he did and then they go into the fantastic wonderful things he did in heaven in the first generations this is exactly the opposite we get all mythological Jesus and almost nothing that can be tied to a here and now in fact nothing at all he only never talks about Jesus's death the Lord's Supper or any events of Christ's life as though they actually happened to a real live person so how is it that Paul and other apostles like himself know Christ is it through what Jesus did in his lifetime did the other apostles tell him no Paul V intently denies this again in that he's received his knowledge from any man he says he has learned about the Sun through Revelation and scripture God chose to reveal his son through me he says in Galatians 1:16 the writer of Ephesians says the mystery of Christ which in former generations was not revealed to men is now now disclosed to dedicated apostles and prophets speaking through the spirit Paul always points to scripture as the source of his gospel everything he says that Jesus did is always according to the scripture Jesus did this according to the scripture above all if God through the spirit who supplied this gospel God who's appointed apostles like Paul to carry the message it's important to recognize that Paul had been dead for decades before the Gospels were even written Paul and the other epistles came first the gospel and Acts came much later the only Scriptures they knew were the Jewish Scriptures to Paul the existence of the Saviour up to this point has been unknown he's been a secret a mystery hidden away in heaven for eons by God but now he's revealed along with the promise of salvation this is what Paul and every other epistle writer is constantly telling us they don't refer back to any sort of human Jesus and indeed in many places there's no room for such a figure in their theology they treat the Spirit of God and the Son of God as though it's exactly the same thing did Paul even know there was supposed to be a real guy named Jesus if you look for any biographical info on the late Jesus of Nazareth from Paul or from any non gospel writer in the entire first century you are out of luck because no one has anything to say about Jesus the human being the words Bethlehem Nazareth Galilee never appear in the New Testament letters the word Jerusalem is never used in connection with Jesus there's not a hint of any sacred sites let alone pilgrimages holy relics the clothes the things he uses daily life the things he touched there's absolutely nothing of that until the fourth century when pieces of the true cross start showing up and Jesus's tomb is discovered both of them and the first rind on the supposed mount of Jesus death is set up and the pilgrim business gets kicked off so why the absence the standard rationalization you get from Christian apologists is that Paul was interested in the earthly life of Jesus which is truly one of the lamest rationalizations to ever come out of Christianity it's not the very lamest but it's right up there act says that after his conversion Paul went immediately to the elders in Jerusalem and reported for duty but according to Paul's own account in his letters he waited three years following his conversion before making a short visit to Jerusalem for 15 days to get to know Peter and James and incidentally he never tells us he was waylaid on the road to Jerusalem by a divine Jesus nothing like that ever occurs in his letters and once he went to Jerusalem he didn't make it back there for another 14 years so did Paul learn all the facts of Jesus's life on that one occasion and if so what was he doing for those three years before he went to Jerusalem and if he visited any of these things can I think he would have not at least shared his experiences at some point at least at some point in his letters it's often they tried to claim that example for the explanation for Paul's glaring silence about Jesus's life is simply that Paul and I guess everybody else in the first 50 years or so of Christianity just never had occasion for mentioning things like all this mention missing info about Jesus and their letters but of course they constantly have occasion and they miss it over and over and over again the New Testament writers never cite Jesus's teachings or examples in all these squabbles in the early church that was tearing apart early Christians issues like circumcision salvation is it by grace or by works can we take supper with unbelievers Jesus ruled on all these things but instead they keep going back to the old Jewish Scriptures here's one example Jesus teaches that all foods are clean and yet they are still arguing about it with Paul and the Jerusalem leaders and in fact it's so bad that the writer of Acts has to fake a vision that Peter has to explain why it's okay for them to eat all foods but if Jesus had already pronounced on the question why are they jumping through all these back robotic hoops to do it if everyone remembered it why was there any dispute at all why is it that sometimes Paul disagrees with Jesus all these guys only had to quote Jesus's own teachings and that would have settled the case issue over so why isn't he ever ever wouldn't you think that when Paul sets off on his missionary journeys people will be asking questions about this guy from Palestine who was a son of God and the savior of the entire world if not questions about his life at least things that they taught but instead there's a total absence of these things there's a gaping hole of silence that lasts for over a century and this silence alone is one of the strongest arguments that the entire gospel account of Jesus's life is nothing but a work of inspired fiction now here's another weird thing we find early Christianity if it was started by a single person or a group of followers it's a wildly wildly schizophrenic movement we know that least a dozen early rival Christian movements scattered throughout the empire including two main ones to rival Christianity's Peter's Jewish leaning community in Jerusalem that valued Mosaic law and works and Paul's Gentile based ministry that stressed faith overall and broke with the Jewish law and there are many others as well that often had little in common with each other and often he had different scriptures and one other early reveled Christianity was John the Baptist his cult by the way yet another early branch of Christianity was the Gnostics now the named Gnostics is a blanket term for a wide range of different diverse groups and scholars have tried long and hard to come up with one simple explanation that explains who they were and what their relationship was to each other and to the relation the religion that became Orthodox Christianity but the term Gnostic is proving to be about as useful as the term mammal for trying to pin these guys down because their dogmas were completely and constantly mutating by whim one feature that most of them shared in common was that the creation of the world was a huge mistake and that pieces of God were trapped in bits of matter called human beings and that by acquiring secret knowledge and practicing them their rituals Gnostics hope to learn how to rejoin with God in heaven Bible scholars for the longest time just assumed that Gnostics were some later mutant form of Christianity but over the years after this finding things like the NAG Hammadi it's become very clear that this is not the case and several Gnostic groups predate Christianity and in major portions of the Empire Christianity mint Gnostic groups who replaced decades and sometimes even centuries before Orthodox sects arrived in these many many diverse forms of Gnosticism there are many many diverse forms of Jesus sometimes he was a mythical part of the heavenly plural the Godhead sometimes he was something like John's mouth a Jesus sometimes he had strange titles like dirty kiyose or the third illuminator and some gnostic jesus' had an identical twin some Jesus's had sex one Jesus might have had sex with a male apostle some Gnostics held that Jesus was totally divine and only appeared to die others held that he was out instantly a mere human man and many other Gnostic groups were violently opposed to the idea that he could have appeared in the flesh at all now it's impossible to know how many other forms of Jesus there were because as I said there were dozens of Gospels alone let alone Gnostic groups let alone other groups that we think of Moors Christianity Christians don't really know what to do with things like the Gnostics because they're so different and they're so bizarre from what we thinking of is Christianity but when we're talking about the early church we're talking about these weird beard fleeting cult le'ts in 1st century Judea like the Gnostics this was Christianity even though we'd never recognized them today and they would been gladly burned at the stake they know hundreds of years later Paul in his letter it's constantly harps on all the divergent groups and other apostles that preach another Jesus one that's so different from his own that he lays curses on them and accuses them of being agents of Satan it's a big problem there's lots and lots of false Christ's floating around in those days so what's going on here how could there possibly be all these so many different and competing Jesus movements was it like this it christianity immediately branched off into these wildly diverse sects letting some kind of Cambrian explosion well here's how most scholars try to explain the situation they say that different communities latched on to different fragments of Jesus aspects of teachings or things they remembered about him preserving certain traditions and forgetting everything else so does that make any sense at all we've got this explosion of wildly different groups occurring pretty much right after Jesus's death certainly by 20 years after his death what happened to all those people who actually were related to Jesus and remembered Jesus and walked around with him what happened how could they all disagree so violently about even the most basic facts of his life like did he exist at all well let's consider another possibility maybe it didn't happen like this maybe it happened like this perhaps all these diverse religious movements were already in place and in the mid to late 1st century their Christ's and Lords became coalesced into the figure of Jesus Christ is that possible well let's take a look but before we do that I want to ask you something if you had to pick one person most responsible for giving us Christianity who would you say Paul Paul anybody else Eusebius Constantine aren't that these are all good guesses but I'm going to vote for this guy that's right it's Alexander the Great a Greek bisexual imperialist pagan who lived 300 years before I'm getting the hook sign so we're going to wrap this up extremely fast but here's the in a nutshell in the Greek Hellenistic world all these savior gods and goddesses from all these different parts of the Empire from Greeks to Persians and even Jewish influences became coalesced into Savior gods by the 1st century that was the sexy idea in religions all the old the old Pantheon's were tired and the new idea was the mystery faced these new Savior God's personal saviors how much how much time do we have JT 10 minutes our damn so much so my alright let's cut right to the chase then right to the chase what is Jesus made of Jesus was made of Midrash he was an allegorical figure created by the gossler author of the Gospel of Mark to serve an allegorical picture purpose just like many other Savior gods at the time did and he fully expected his audience to know this the educated members Minds know this Christian I did not start out as some with a single man or a single God it started out in a thousand places all over the world over hundreds of years out of this rich melting pot and created this ever-growing variety of forms and doctrines it all in all you could not picture a better example of Darwinian evolution in action and it is far from over yet so who knows what Jesus is the future has in store for us thanks very much thanks very much thank you thank you because we don't have time for questions got one for you will you come back next year I would love to come back next year excellent I love to come back this year and we're gonna take kind of a shorter lunch break if everyone could be back here at 1:45 that's when we'll start again so the book it up front by it yes by his book if you miss the end of the talk you can find it in the

Channel: HamboneProductions

Views: 245,793

Rating: 4.757576 out of 5

Keywords: Skepticon, david, fitzgerald, hambone, productions, atheism, atheist, fsm, Did, historical, jesus, exist, bible, evidence, proof, flying, spaghetti, monster, lecture, science, philosophy, debate

Id: MvleOBYTrDE

Length: 54min 38sec (3278 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 30 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/Fogge]

Excellent. Too bad he was cut short.

[u/AtheismResource]

Read more from David here: http://www.atheismresource.com/2010/jesus-never-existed-at-all Also, at the bottom of his article, you can see a ton of other sources that support this premise as well as other books on the subject. His book is packed full of references and evidence... AWESOME read!

[u/CowboyProgrammer]

This is one of those subjects that even a lot of my atheist friends shy away from. They still seem to think that there was some sort of historical figure that set things in motion.

[u/[deleted]]

Yes, he is.

Historical Jesus is one of the most interesting concept to debate on Reddit, unlike YEC and other craziness, some people actually will debate that subject.

Not that none of them can do anything else than cast some doubt on his inexistance, not actually convince anyone, and even less reconcile that Historical Jesus with Super Human Jesus.

[u/bennjammin]

From listening to Bart Ehrman lectures I think that Jesus probably existed, but his reputation just got really out of hand.

[u/crazylilting]

That was just to short!!! I could attend a full day seminar with this guy and still want to know more. Thanks for the link!!!

[u/sillybluestarr]

Anyone read his book? His lecture was really interesting.

[u/canadianpastafarian]

"Stood out like a Britney Spears video at a funeral" - hilarious line.

[u/Waterrat]

I'd have been quite pleased if this had gone on for at least an hour longer. Excellent talk. What a shame the people who really need to hear this never will. If only it were taught in school. sigh