http://freethoughtblogs.com/wwjtd/2012/ ... -stand-up/
Will The Real Jesus Please Stand Up?
January 19, 2012 at 12:00 pm JT Eberhard
David Fitzgerald, author of Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All, has sent in a phenomenal guest post. Dave is an all-around great guy and a hell of a speaker. He’s always a crowd favorite at Skepticon.
Enjoy.
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Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?
Is the “Jesus of History” any more real than the “Jesus of Faith”?
(From the upcoming book, Jesus: Mything in Action, by David Fitzgerald)
Christianity had a good, long run. But we are long past the point where it’s reasonable to be agnostic about the so-called “Jesus of Faith.” It’s ridiculous to pretend the lack of historical corroboration of the spectacular Gospel events, let alone the New Testament’s own fundamental contradictions, aren’t a fatal problem for Jesus the divine Son of God.
For example:
Why does Philo of Alexandria discuss the contemporary state of first century Jewish sects in several of his writings, but not a word on the multitudes who followed the miracle-worker and bold, radical new teacher Jesus throughout the Galilee and Judea – or of all the long-dead Jewish saints who emerged from their freshly opened graves and wandered the streets of Jerusalem, appearing to many?
If Jesus was really found guilty of blasphemy by the Sanhedrin, why was he not simply stoned to death, as Jewish law required (Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:4 h & i)? Why is the original trial account of Jesus so full of other unhistorical details and just plain mistakes that could never have actually happen as portrayed? How can each successive gospel continue to overload the original story with their own additional layers of details that are mutually incompatible with the others?
Why does Seneca the Younger record all kinds of unusual natural phenomena in the seven books of his Quaestiones Naturales, including eclipses and earthquakes, but not mention the Star of Bethlehem, the pair of Judean earthquakes that were strong enough to split stones, or the hours of supernatural darkness that covered “all the land” – an event he would have witnessed firsthand?
Why can’t the Gospels agree on so many fundamental facts about Jesus’ life and ministry, such as what his relationship to John the Baptist was – and why was John the Baptist’s cult a rival to Christianity until at least the early second century?
Who were Jesus’ disciples, and why is it no Gospels agree on who they were? Why do the disciples disappear so quickly in the New Testament after the Gospels, only to pop up again centuries later when churches start spinning rival legends that they were busy founding Christian communities all along? If any were martyred for their faith, as Christians frequently insist, why don’t we have any details of any of the disciples’s deaths in the bible?
When his skeptical Roman opponent Celsus asks the early church father Origen what miracles Jesus performed, why can Origen only respond lamely that Jesus’ life was indeed full of striking and miraculous events, “but from what other source can we can furnish an answer than from the Gospel narratives?” (Contra Celsum, 2.33)
Why can’t the Gospels agree on so many fundamental facts about Jesus’ life and ministry? For instance, if he was born during the reign of Herod the Great, or over a decade later, during Quirinius’ tenure? Or why he was arrested? Or on which day he died? Or whether he appeared alive again for just a single day, or for more about a week, or for forty days? Or where and when he appeared alive again, and to whom?
Why are there so many anachronisms and basic mistakes and misunderstandings about first century Judean Judaism? Why are the Gospels all written in Greek, not Aramaic? Why do Christians insist that they are eyewitness accounts when none claim to be, or even read as if they were, or if all contain indications that they were written generations later?
Why is Paul – and every other Christian writer from the first generation of Christianity – so silent on any details of Jesus’ life? Why do they display so much ignorance of Jesus’ teachings and miracles?
Despite the frequent boasts in the New Testament of Christianity spreading like wildfire, attracting new converts by the thousands with every new miracle or inspired sermon, why does Christianity remain a struggling, obscure cult of feuding house churches on the fringe of Roman society for more than three centuries?
Why is there not a single historical reference to Jesus in the entire first century; a pair of obviously interpolated snippets in the works of Flavius Josephus notwithstanding?
We could pose similar thorny questions all day and never run out of them. It’s embarrassing to have to dignify any of the obvious mythological elements of the Gospels, and yet the better part of 2.1 billion people seem unaware of how ludicrous any of them are. We don’t even have to rule out whether or not miracles even can occur, or point out that stories, delusions and lies are common while verified miracles are few if any – we merely have to ask: if they did happen, why didn’t anyone else notice them? Christians are perfectly free to put their faith in whichever messiah they please, though it will take more than blind faith and selective hearing to convince the rest of us that their Christ is anything more than a Jesus of their own making. But what about the real Jesus?
Apologists love to parrot the old lie that “no serious historians reject the historicity of Christ,” but fail to realize (or deliberately neglect to mention) that the “Historical Jesus” that the majority of historians do accept is at best no more than just another first century wandering preacher and founder of a fringe cult that eventually became Christianity – in other words, a Jesus that completely debunks their own.
For your average atheist activist, all this should be more than enough to settle the matter. But the truth is, the issue isn’t even that cut and dry. What about this “Historical Jesus” at the core of all this legendary accretion? Can we actually know what the real Jesus of Nazareth really said and did?
Over a decade ago, after reading Ken Smith’s hilarious and brilliant Ken’s Guide to the Bible, I became curious to know the answers to questions like these. (Very) long story (very) short: I began researching the historical evidence for Jesus, a process of pulling a thread that, for me, unraveled the whole sweater. The result is my book Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All. And I really mean it; I’m convinced there couldn’t even have been an ordinary guy behind our familiar Jesus of Nazareth. No, really.
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for good measure (which is actually quite laughable). You are novelizing this entire matter right before our eyes. 
