Read Jesus Lied - He Was Only Human: Debunking the New Testament Online
Authors: CJ Werleman
Jesus Lied - He Was Only Human: Debunking the New Testament (5 page)
“
This sense of mission set Christians apart from other religious groups, including Jews, in the early Roman Empire. The notion that it is desirable for existing enthusiasts to encourage outsiders to worship the god to whom they are devoted was not obvious in the ancient world. Adherents of particular cults did not generally judge the power of divinity by the number of congregants prepared to bring offerings or attend festivals. On the contrary, it was common for pagans to take pride in the local nature of their religious lives, establishing a special relationship between themselves and the god of a family or place, without wishing, let alone expecting, others to join in worshipping the same god. Christians in the first generation were different, espousing a proselytizing mission which was a shocking novelty in the ancient world.”
Further to the above, the fledgling religion’s claims of miracles elicited great ridicule from the intellectual communities of Athens, and Rome, and we have evidence of this. Evidence that confirms the tenets of the Christian faith seemed preposterously absurd to anyone with a triple figure IQ, even way back then.
One such source comes from a book titled
The True Word
published in the late second century by a man named Celsus. The author argued that Christianity was a foolish and dangerous religion reserved for ignorant lower-class people. While we don’t have a copy of
The True Word
itself, we do have, interestingly, a retort to the charges made by Celsus from one of the Church’s founding fathers, Origen. Comically, to me at least, is that Origen doesn’t deny the allegation that Christianity is a religion reserved for dimwits. In his book titled
Against Celsus
:
“
The Christians’ injunctions are like this. “
Let no one educated
, no one wise, no one sensible draw near.
For these abilities are thought by us to be evil
s. But as for anyone ignorant, anyone stupid, anyone uneducated, anyone who is a child, let him come boldly.”
“
In private houses also we see wool-workers, cobblers, laundry-workers, and the most illiterate and bucolic yokels, who would not dare to say anything at all in front of their elders and more intelligent masters. But whenever they get hold of children in private and some
stupid women
with them, they let out some astonishing statements, as, for example, that they must not pay any attention to their father and school teachers; they say that these talk nonsense and have no understanding. But if they like, they should leave father and their schoolmasters, and go along with the women and little children who are their playfellows to the wooldressers’ shop, or to the cobbler’s or the washerwoman’s shop, that they learn perfection. And by saying this they persuade them.”
By the very early stages of the fourth century, Christianity was still somewhat of an underworld religion, spoken about in small gatherings in the back of various sympathizers’ homes scattered throughout the Mediterranean. Its followers treated like criminals at worst, or social lepers at best, and Justin Bieber fans somewhere in the middle. A vast majority of the early Christians were former pagan multi-god worshippers, such as God of the Moon, God of the Sun, and so forth. Effectively, anything to do with agriculture had a god. These Greeks, Macedonian, and Roman farmers would hear stories of this guy called Jesus, long after he had died. And I will use Bart D Ehrmans’, author of
Jesus Interrupted,
words to illustrate the amazing phenomenon that was the beginning of Christianity:
“
I am a coppersmith who lives in Ephesus, in Asia Minor. A stranger comes to my town and begins to preach about the miraculous life and death of Jesus. I hear all the stories he has to tell, and decide to give up my devotion to the local pagan divinity, Athena, and become a follower of the Jewish God and Jesus his son. I then convert my wife, based on the stories that I repeat. She tells the next-door neighbor, and she converts. This neighbor tells the stories to her husband, a merchant, and he converts. He goes on a business trip to the city of Smyrna and he tells his business associate the stories. He converts, and then tells his wife, who also converts.
This woman who has now converted has heard all sorts of stories about Jesus. And from whom? One of the apostles? No, from her husband. Well, whom did he hear it from? His next door neighbor, the merchant of Ephesus. Where did he hear them? His wife. And she? My wife. And she? From me. And where did I hear it from? An eyewitness? No, I heard it from the stranger who came to town. This is how Christianity spread, year after year, decade after decade, until eventually someone wrote down the stories. What do you suppose happened to the stories over the years, as they were told and retold, not as disinterested news stories reported by eyewitnesses but as propaganda meant to convert people to faith.”
Ehrman succinctly describes the method for conversion and recruitment of early Christians. The method accounted for little more than the spreading of hearsay and anecdotes. And for a point of reference let us not forget that hearsay is inadmissible as evidence in a Court of Law today. This really does give one a sense of how and why the new religion struggled for relevancy for the first few hundred years after the death of its star, Jesus. Now, there is a natural tendency to dismiss three or four hundred years as a day or two when reflecting on ancient history, due, in part, to the fact that we often speak of thousands of years. To put into some modern day context, however, if Jesus’ death took place during the War of American Independence - we would still, today, be unaware of anyone by his name. Humble beginnings indeed!
Christianity’s big break, however, came in the fourth century. In the midst of Christians still being thrown to live animals as a form of sport, one man’s conversion changed everything, and I do mean everything. His conversion, the reason there is a Church in every freaking neighborhood, a Bible in your house, and ‘In God We Trust’ emblazoned on the hard earned dollars in your pocket. His name – the Roman Emperor Constantine.
The Roman Empire, by the fourth century, was beginning to collapse in on itself; the cracks in the wallpaper were evident to the elite and plainly obvious to Constantine. He needed a device that could bring unity to his crumbling Empire. An empire that stretched to the most northern parts of Europe, to the edge of Asia, and down into the African continent.
With so many varying societies and cultures under his direct control, and with their respective myriad religions and gods, Constantine, under advisement from societal elite, believed a one-god religion could bring stability and uniformity to his empire. However, in the shopping aisles for a one-god (monotheistic) religion, there were only Judaism or Christianity to choose from. The Romans thought the Jewish religion to be far too strict and in many instances barbaric, thus Constantine knew the people would too quickly reject this offer. Christianity, on the other hand, required little interruption in the personal lives of its followers.
You weren’t required to circumcise yourself, slaughter animals as offerings, or even attend a Temple for group worship. Constantine had a read through some of Saint Paul’s letters and thought to himself, “this is a religion one can follow from the comfort of one’s own bathhouse.” This partly explains its popularity in the United States, a religion you can follow without so much as changing the television channel… let alone following any of the central principles.
His decision to convert had begun. But first he needed a convincing story to tell his minnows. No Roman worth his linen toga was going to commence praising the memory of a dead Jew in any great hurry without a sensational marketing campaign to provide a little ‘credibility’. Constantine, after careful strategizing, hatched his plan, and he sold it heroically.
The Emperor was leading his troops into war at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 AD In the heat of battle, with the Romans looking anything but assured of victory, it is said that Constantine had his epiphany. As swords struck flesh and metal all around him, the Emperor averted his eyes skyward and at that very moment he saw a cross of light above the sun with the Greek words ‘
Εν Τουτω Νικα
”. Translated into English, this means ‘by this, conquer!’
Later that night, as his troops rested in preparation for the next day’s fighting he told his generals of what he had seen, and he commanded his entire army to adorn their shields with the Christian symbol, the cross. You don’t need to be a scriptwriter to guess what happened next. That’s right, the Romans gave the opposition a royal ass whipping with good ole Jesus on their side, riding shotgun. Now, before you say Jesus was a divine friend of the Romans lest we forget that the Roman Empire collapsed completely, not long after. Some celestial friend, huh? I can’t help but wonder how things may have turned out differently had the Romans stuck with Jupiter (the Roman version of Zeus) as their god.
Constantine’s conversion was made official by way of a public baptism, and the following year he endorsed the Edict of Milan, which declared religious freedom for Christians, putting an end to their illegitimacy. The crucifix was no longer a symbol of organized crime. They were no longer the ugly, unwanted bastard children of religious faith. Christians could now teach and preach the story of Jesus without the fear of imprisonment or death.
With carte blanche to recruit and convert, and with the Emperor’s sponsorship, mass conversions throughout Europe and Asia-Minor began. Conversions were not effected with miraculous signs or answered prayers. Rather, pagans were converted either by evangelic stories or promises, or did so for political gain. More often than not, staring down the tip of a sword.
Competing religions, including paganism and Judaism were not proselytizing faiths. Typically, you were either born a Jew or you weren’t. Your parents worshipped the planetary gods, or you didn’t. This was not the case for Christianity, however:
“
Judaism spread primarily through migration and procreation. Proselytizing mission was, on the other hand, crucial to the spread of Christianity. The early Christians, moreover, did not have a central cultic, economic and political institution comparable to the Temple in Jerusalem, which attracted outsiders.” [Esler, Modelling Early Christianity (Routledge):129]
Christianity shortly thereafter became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the rest they say is history.
The next step, however, in institutionalizing the fledgling religion would be just as problematic. They now had to develop a Holy Book, set apart from, but complimentary to the Hebrew Bible. Constantine commissioned a meeting of church figureheads and theologians, the Nicaea Council, to pull together as many as possible of the hundreds or thousands of manuscripts that were floating about which told of Jesus or his teachings.
There were dozens of Paul’s letters to the early Christians in the first century that needed to be vetted; many of his Epistles were excluded. There were biographical accounts of Jesus from unknown sources such as the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There were also the Book of Judith, the Book of Baruch, the Epistle of Jeremy, the History of Susanna, the First and Second Gospels of Infancy of Jesus Christ, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Gospel according to the Egyptians, the Apocalypse of Peter, Acts of Paul, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Infancy Gospels of Thomas, the Gnostic Gospels and a galactic shitload more – to all be considered for a place in history… in the Bible.
What was the central objective of the council? Simply, to select texts that were the most complimentary to the Jesus story, which they felt would best support their view of how to take the religion forward. In other words, writings that made him appear most divine, and were the least contradictory in nature, which in the end they didn’t do all that well, despite much deliberation.
One of the first to be binned was the Infancy Gospels of Thomas, for example. This was mainly due to the illustrations of a child Jesus who messed around with his kick-ass magical powers in much the same way a young Harry Potter may have. One such story includes a young Jesus transforming his playmates into goats, or making real life sparrows from mud. Another story from Thomas was Jesus bringing his playmate back to life, after he had fallen off the roof they were playing on, in order to clear the child Jesus from killing his young friend… that’s right, he only brought his friend back to absolve himself of a murder charge… some guy, that Jesus, some guy!
Other Gospels omitted included that of Barnabas, Mary, and Judas amongst others. But in went Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And the Bible was created; a collection of books sanctioned by a bunch of old white men with questionable motives. This often comes as another surprise to Christians who believe that the Bible descended from Heaven the day after Jesus died. It really is a very human book written by humans, and deliberated upon by later humans.
Now, don’t be thinking the Council of Nicaea had just a session or two to deliberate on the inclusion and exclusion of what should and shouldn’t be included in the New Testament. These debates waged on for centuries, before consensus was reached amongst the founding fathers of the church.
There were bitter arguments over the issue of Jesus’ divinity, to name just one such example. You had one side arguing for Jesus being merely a human that preached a new-age version of God’s law. You had another side argue that Jesus was God himself. Further, many regarded Matthew and Luke’s claim of a virgin birth and resurrection to be ludicrous. Imagine that? The idea of spontaneous pregnancy in an otherwise virgin teen and the ascension into a mythical afterlife post crucifixion was regarded as ludicrous? Wow, what a surprise!