The Historical Jesus

[Pat Mustard]

The issue I have with comparing the Gospels to Moby Dick is that Herman Melvil never even once made the claim that his story was true. Nor is there any significant number of people alive today who think that Captain Ahab was a real person. If you're going to make a comparison I think it should be more Apples to Apples in order for it to be effective. 

Let's imagine that I wanted to create a version of Abraham Lincoln who raised people from the dead and fought vampires. If I tried to spread Lincolnism today, beyond taking advantage of a small handful of lonely and imaginative people, how well would Lincolnism stand up to criticism? Would if my Lincolnites were being persecuted or killed for their faith? How many of them do you think would be willing to die for something that can so easily be proven false? 

In 200 A.D. denying that Jesus performed miracles was almost impossible. There were simply too many eye-witness accounts that had been passed down by parents to their grand children (and on to their grand children as well). The Jews had every reason to want to dis-credit Jesus, but they couldn't assert that the miracles weren't real so they just had to call him a sorcerer and leave it at that.
If Jesus performed no miracles then why did so many people believe in him? And why were so many people convinced that he was able to cast out demons? How did his word spread across Rome, Greece and even Israel when it was being met with so much resistance? Why were so many people willing to die for the idea that their life had been touched by the Holy spirit? 

Why were there so many people willing to face death or imprisonment for their faith? How much more opposition could a believer of any story encounter? How much opposition would prove that, at the very least, their beliefs were sincerely held?

For a guy who was hanged on a cross and bled out in front of thousands of jeering spectators (gods aren't supposed to bleed you know). For a guy whom many believed to be a god the crusifixion would represent the defeat of said god, would Thor allow himself to be sacrificed by his own people? What about Zeus? No one was expecting the son of God to allow something like this to happen. Every rational person was thinking at that time, "If Jesus is more than just a sorcerer, then why wouldn't he come down from that cross? Why not summon an army of angels? Why not use a miracle in front of all these witnesses to prevent yourself from experiencing any more pain, or humiliation?"

  Who among us would be willing to face that amount of pain and humiliation if we had the power to simply snap our fingers and become Superman?

         For the skeptic, the crucifixion would mark the ultimate cap-stone to Jesus legacy. He lived, people say he performed a few miracles, and then he died by the people he was trying to save. In the end he was proven to be a fraud, he was proven not to be the son of God. And so an execution, that would've ended any other cult leader's career; somehow managed to be the most talked about miracle in history; the empty tomb.


Why did the disciples go from being depressed, after Christ's crucifixion, and giving up on spreading the gospel to being willing to risk their lives for Jesus?
What explains Paul's conversion from a man who wanted to kill Christians to a man who was willing to die for the testimony of Christ?

"Would you believe that a christian life was a good life, if there were no christ?"  Well if it were proven that Christ couldn't do miracles then I would probably try to keep the morals but I would retreat to Daoism. I like Lao Tsu's teaching a lot so it's my second favorite religion.

Actually going further with this, in the third century CE there were no eye-witness accounts, there were plenty of accounts purporting to be of eye-witnesses (some of which became the canonical gospels) but none were written earlier than 75CE at best. Most were written significantly later.

The jews didn't need to discredit Yeshua because they knew full well that most of what was written about him was fantasy.

The reason why he was held to cast out demons was because every holy man was held to do so (no matter their religion). Many natural illness processes were not well understood 1,800 years ago and were attributed to demons. An observant person could see that quite a few of these processes had a finite existence with the sufferer coming out ok so they would tailor their flim-flam accordingly if their goal was to deceive others.

What resistance did christianity face, the only well documented resistance to christianity was from other christians. Intra-doctrinal bustups were a frequent event within the early churches, something that has barely diminished to today (albeit with fewer murders).

On the "why would somebody die for a lie?" bit, millions willingly died for fascism and nazism in the second World War, millions more unwillingly. People die for lies the whole time and christians are no exception.

On the crucifiction, we don't even know if it happened. According to the bible, Yeshua died for disobeying Talmudic law. In that case his death would have been caused by stoning or by hanging, the jewish laws didn't prescribe crucifiction as punishment. As to the growth of christianity, many con artists, get rich quick men and eventually those wielding real power got interested enough in the cult to promote and grow and use it to their own ends that it got entrenched within society and became a prerequisite for one's continuing existence in European cultures. It's a classic case of growth by the sword.