BLOGS
THERE WAS NO JESUS
I bet on it
According to the Bible, the Messiah was born in the first century. But was he? His names, Jesus Christ, are titles, the former meaning savior and, in Greek, the latter meaning anointed with oil. Such titles were given to middle eastern local gods like Horus in Egypt, Dionysus and Attis in Greece, Mithras in Rome, and Krishna in India. Jesus was the Anglicized name of Joshua.
Like other gods, Jesus was born by a virgin on December 25th. Horus was conceived the same way by Isis since she failed to recover her husband Osiris’ penis, because Set, his brother, had cut it off and a fish had eaten it. The births of Buddha and Krishina in India were also immaculate. Considering miraculous births like these mythical, Gerald Massey, a twentieth-century Egyptologist, called them astronomical. The apostle Paul said nothing about Jesus’ birth.
What did Jesus look like? The Bible is silent on this. His early portrays showed him with African features, black wooly hair, full lips, and a round nose, similar to the large contingent of people of African descent living in the area in those days.
As with other gods, Jesus’ life story, birth place – Bethlehem or Nazareth, which may not have existed at the time - kept changing. His parables and death circumstances also varied with time. Jesus walked on water, emulating the sun’s journey across the big river in the sky, the Milky Way, in May. Earlier, Osiris and Pythagoras had likewise prevailed over the “waters”. Besides each having twelve disciples, Jesus and Dionysus also turned water into wine at weddings. And Jesus, like Mithras, the Roman soldier’s god, had a last supper. It would seem that all these gods were one and the same.
Jesus did not claim he was God. When asked for the whereabouts of the kingdom of God, he said: “in you.” With time, questions about his nature arose resulting in contentious debates and street fights in Alexandria. Upon seeing that Serapis, a merger of Osiris and the Apis bull by Egypt’s Greek rulers, the Ptolemys, was worshipped as Christus, a presbyter, Arius, argued that Jesus was manmade. To settle the disputes, Emperor Constantine convened a bishops Council in Nicaea in 325 AD. The council ruled that Jesus was divine and was of the same substance as the father.
In the first century AD, Jews yearned for a Messiah, a worrier from the line of King David to liberate them from Roman rule. However, Roman emperors required their subjects to worship them in addition to their local gods. Obstinate Messianic and dagger waving Sicarii Jews refused and worshiped only Yahweh. To win these rebels over, the Romans planned to deceive them and say that the emperor, Vespasian, was a god and his son, Titus, the son of man, as Jesus called himself, was the Messiah. But Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, who wrote about the Roman war against the Jews in Judea and recorded the history of the Israelites never mentioned Jesus. Later, a forgery was inserted into his work 300 years later. Josephus, then, created a new religion based on Joseph in the Old Testament. In it, Jesus’s life mirrored that of Joseph’s as well as Serapis.’ The Jewish philosopher, Philo Judaeus, very likely wrote the doctrine of the Word (Logos) and John’s gospel. The term gospel meant good news from the warfront; it certainly wasn’t coined by the conquered.
Although Jesus could have lived in the first Century, it cannot be verified. Nothing has been found in contemporaneous records about him. Josephus promoted Titus Flavius as the returned Messiah and not Jesus. When visiting Jerusalem with his mother, Constantine randomly selected out a tomb and declared it to be that of Jesus. The tomb still draws lots of pilgrims today.
No archeological artifacts have survived showing Jesus lived. His crucifixion is doubtful, too. Church father Bishop Araneus believed that he was not crucified but died an oldish man. Although crucifixion by the Romans is believed to have been common in the first century, only two bones appearing to be heels have been found, one in Jerusalem and the other in Italy near Venice.
Lacking a shred of evidence for Jesus’ existence, then, as in other religions, his story bears the hallmarks of fiction or a myth.
WAS MOSES MYTH?
Did the Exodus actually take place?
Moses didn’t write the Torah as is reported. God only gave him the Ten Commandments. Deuteronomy 34:1 says, “Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses….” But Moses being the first prophet, he couldn’t have written this, as he had died before the book recorded it. Moses died before the Israelites reached the promised land, so before there were other prophets. He also lived centuries before the time of the Edomite kings listed in Genesis, and they couldn’t have denied him passage through their kingdom during the exodus. Sites like Kadesh Barnea, Heshbon, and Gibeon mentioned in Exodus weren’t even occupied at the time. Also, laws credited to Moses were similar to the seventeenth century BCE Babylonian Code of Hammurabi and others. In turn, the code was likely based on the Egyptian 147 Negative Confessions from the book of the dead.
Moses’ story, too, of floating down the River Nile in a basket is similar to that of Sargon of Akkad, a third millennium BCE Mesopotamian king. Moreover, what happened on Mount Sinai (if you can find it) was a copycat. Laws of the Greek mythological god Bacchus, called “the Lawgiver,” were written on two tablets of stone. And one day as the Persian prophet Zoroaster prayed on a high mountain, the Lord appeared before him and handed him the “Book of Law.” Zoroaster brought the book to the King and people at the foot of the mountain. The Persians could have introduced this story when imposing The Law on the Jews after they returned from their Babylonian exile.
Were Moses, Abraham, and Noah humans like us? One could hardly live 120 years with semblance of a sound mind as Moses did, but Abraham’s sojourn of 175 years is a stretch, and Noah’s 950 years a fantasy. None of the tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets from the archives of the ancient city of Mari specifically refers to Abraham either. Failing to find evidence for these figures, or the Exodus—the Egyptians have no records of it—John Loftus, a former preacher, wrote in Why I Became an Atheist, that Jewish history “…rested on myths, legends, and superstitions.”
Because Bible events tally poorly with history, Joseph’s Egyptian stay, the Exodus, and accounts revolving around figures like Abraham and Jacob, were most likely based on earlier Canaanite traditions and written late, according to archeologist Donald Redford. For instance, when Joshua supposedly conquered the Canaanite cities in 1407 BCE, the area was under constant Egyptian rule. Also, cities like Jericho, unoccupied since 1550 BCE, had no sky-high walls, if any. Moreover, even if there had been walls, Joshua would have torn them down before the time of Moses and the Exodus, dated to the thirteenth century during Ramses II’s reign. The Israelites do not mention the Egyptians, as Israel wasn’t a nation yet. Like resettled Jericho, cities that fell did so to the Sea Peoples. And since Pithom was a fort built by Pharaoh Necho around 608 BCE, and Ramses, a city constructed by Ramses II in the 1,200s BCE on top of Avaris, the main center of the Hyksos until 1,550 BCE, Moses couldn’t have existed before the third century BCE, when the Egyptians invented him and gave him an Egyptian name. Ex 1:11.
The Face of God is available at: https://www.a.co/d/fAQNZi2
