Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
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Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
Cpt Kaos Mon Feb 01, 2010 5:19 am
by Frank R. Zindler
The American Atheist, Summer 1998.
Updated from The Probing Mind series, January 1987
I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against people who try from time to time to deny it. It would be easier, frankly, to believe that Tiberius Caesar, Jesus' contemporary, was a figment of the imagination than to believe that there never was such a person as Jesus.
- N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress, 1996)
For most of my life, I had taken it for granted that Jesus, although certainly not a god, was nevertheless an historical personage - perhaps a magician skilled in hypnosis. To be sure, I knew that some of the world's greatest scholars had denied his existence. Nevertheless, I had always more or less supposed that it was improbable that so many stories could have sprung up about someone who had never existed. Even in the case of other deities, such as Zeus, Thor, Isis, and Osiris, I had always taken it for granted that they were merely deified human heroes: men and women who lived in the later stages of prehistory - persons whose reputations got better and better the longer the time elapsed after their deaths. Gods, like fine wines, I supposed, improved with age.
About a decade ago, however, I began to reexamine the evidence for the historicity of Jesus. I was astounded at what I didn't find. In this article, I would like to show how shaky the evidence is regarding the alleged existence of a would-be messiah named Jesus. I now feel it is more reasonable to suppose he never existed. It is easier to account for the facts of early Christian history if Jesus were a fiction than if he once were real.
Burden of Proof
Although what follows may fairly be interpreted to be a proof of the non-historicity of Jesus, it must be realized that the burden of proof does not rest upon the skeptic in this matter. As always is the case, the burden of proof weighs upon those who assert that some thing or some process exists. If someone claims that he never has to shave because every morning before he can get to the bathroom he is assaulted by a six-foot rabbit with extremely sharp teeth who trims his whiskers better than a razor - if someone makes such a claim, no skeptic need worry about constructing a disproof. Unless evidence for the claim is produced, the skeptic can treat the claim as false. This is nothing more than sane, every-day practice.
Unlike N. T. Wright, quoted at the beginning of this article, a small number of scholars have tried over the centuries to prove that Jesus was in fact historical. It is instructive, when examining their "evidence," to compare it to the sort of evidence we have, say, for the existence of Tiberius Cæsar - to take up the challenge made by Wright.
It may be conceded that it is not surprising that there are no coins surviving from the first century with the image of Jesus on them. Unlike Tiberius Cæsar and Augustus Cæsar who adopted him, Jesus is not thought to have had control over any mints. Even so, we must point out that we do have coins dating from the early first century that bear images of Tiberius that change with the age of their subject. We even have coins minted by his predecessor, Augustus Cæsar, that show Augustus on one side and his adopted son on the other. 1 Would Mr. Wright have us believe that these coins are figments of the imagination? Can we be dealing with fig-mints?
Statues that can be dated archaeologically survive to show Tiberius as a youth, as a young man assuming the toga, as Cæsar, etc. 2 Engravings and gems show him with his entire family. 3 Biographers who were his contemporaries or nearly so quote from his letters and decrees and recount the details of his life in minute detail. 4 There are contemporary inscriptions all over the former empire that record his deeds. 5 There is an ossuary of at least one member of his family, and the Greek text of a speech made by his son Germanicus has been found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. 6 And then there are the remains of his villa on Capri. Nor should we forget that Augustus Cæsar, in his Res Gestæ ("Things Accomplished"), which survives both in Greek and Latin on the so-calledMonumentum Ancyranum, lists Tiberius as his son and co-ruler. 7
Is there anything advocates of an historical Jesus can produce that could be as compelling as this evidence for Tiberius? I think not, and I thank N. T. Wright for making a challenge that brings this disparity so clearly to light.
There is really only one area where evidence for Jesus is even claimed to be of a sort similar to that adduced for Tiberius - the area of biographies written by contemporaries or near contemporaries. a It is sometimes claimed that the Christian Bible contains such evidence. Sometimes it is claimed that there is extrabiblical evidence as well. Let us then examine this would-be evidence.
The Old Testament "Evidence"
Let us consider the so-called biblical evidence first. Despite the claims of Christian apologists, there is absolutely nothing in the Old Testament (OT) that is of relevance to our question, apart from the possible fact that some prophets may have thought that an "anointed one" (a rescuer king or priest) would once again assume the leadership of the Jewish world. All of the many examples of OT "predictions" of Jesus are so silly that one need only look them up to see their irrelevance. Thomas Paine, the great heretic of the American Revolution, did just that, and he demonstrated their irrelevance in his book An Examination of the Prophecies, which he intended to be Part III of The Age of Reason. b
The New Testament "Evidence"
The elimination of the OT leaves only the New Testament (NT) "evidence" and extrabiblical material to be considered. Essentially, the NT is composed of two types of documents: letters and would-be biographies (the so-called gospels). A third category of writing, apocalyptic, c of which the Book of Revelation is an example, also exists, but it gives no support for the historicity of Jesus. In fact, it would appear to be an intellectual fossil of the thought-world from which Christianity sprang - a Jewish apocalypse that was reworked for Christian use. 8 The main character of the book (referred to 28 times) would seem to be "the Lamb," an astral being seen in visions (no claims to historicity here!), and the book overall is redolent of ancient astrology. 9
The name Jesus occurs only seven times in the entire book, Christ only four times, and Jesus Christ only twice! While Revelation may very well derive from a very early period (contrary to the views of most biblical scholars, who deal with the book only in its final form), the Jesus of which it whispers obviously is not a man. He is a supernatural being. He has not yet acquired the physiological and metabolic properties of which we read in the gospels. The Jesus of Revelation is a god who would later be made into a man - not a man who would later become a god, as liberal religious scholars would have it.
The Gospels
The notion that the four "gospels that made the cut" to be included in the official New Testament were written by men named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John does not go back to early Christian times. The titles "According to Matthew," etc., were not added until late in the second century. Thus, although Papias ca. 140 CE ('Common Era') knows all the gospels but has only heard of Matthew and Mark, Justin Martyr (ca. 150 CE) knows of none of the four supposed authors. It is only in 180 CE, with Irenæus of Lyons, that we learn who wrote the four "canonical" gospels and discover that there are exactly four of them because there are four quarters of the earth and four universal winds. Thus, unless one supposes the argument of Irenæus to be other than ridiculous, we come to the conclusion that the gospels are of unknown origin and authorship, and there is no good reason to suppose they are eye-witness accounts of a man named Jesus of Nazareth. At a minimum, this forces us to examine the gospels to see if their contents are even compatible with the notion that they were written by eye-witnesses. We cannot even assume that each of the gospels had but one author or redactor.
It is clear that the gospels of Matthew and Luke could not possibly have been written by an eye-witness of the tales they tell. Both writers plagiarize d (largely word-for-word) up to 90% of the gospel of Mark, to which they add sayings of Jesus e and would-be historical details. Ignoring the fact that Matthew and Luke contradict each other in such critical details as the genealogy of Jesus - and thus cannot both be correct - we must ask why real eye-witnesses would have to plagiarize the entire ham-hocks-and-potatoes of the story, contenting themselves with adding merely a little gravy, salt, and pepper. A real eye-witness would have begun with a verse reading, "Now, boys and girls, I'm gonna tell you the story of Jesus the Messiah the way it really happened..." The story would be a unique creation. It is significant that it is only these two gospels that purport to tell anything of Jesus' birth, childhood, or ancestry. Both can be dismissed as unreliable without further cause. We can know nothing of Jesus' childhood or origin!
Mark
But what about the gospel of Mark, the oldest surviving gospel? Attaining essentially its final form probably as late as 90 CE but containing core material dating possibly as early as 70 CE, it omits, as we have seen, almost the entire traditional biography of Jesus, beginning the story with John the Baptist giving Jesus a bath, and ending - in the oldest manuscripts - with women running frightened from the empty tomb. (The alleged postresurrection appearances reported in the last twelve verses of Mark are not found in the earliest manuscripts, even though they are still printed in most modern bibles as though they were an "authentic" part of Mark's gospel.) Moreover, "Mark" being a non-Palestinian non-disciple, even the skimpy historical detail he provides is untrustworthy.
To say that Mark's account is "skimpy" is to understate the case. There really isn't much to the gospel of Mark, the birth legends, genealogies, and childhood wonders all being absent. Whereas the gospel of Luke takes up 43 pages in the New English Bible, the gospel of Mark occupies only 25 pages - a mere 58% as much material! Stories do indeed grow with the retelling.
I have claimed that the unknown author of Mark was a non-Palestinian non-disciple, which would make his story mere hearsay. What evidence do we have for this assertion? First of all, Mark shows no first-hand understanding of the social situation in Palestine. He is clearly a foreigner, removed both in space and time from the events he alleges. For example, in Mark 10:12, he has Jesus say that if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. As G. A. Wells, the author of The Historical Evidence for Jesus 10 puts it,
Such an utterance would have been meaningless in Palestine, where only men could obtain divorce. It is a ruling for the Gentile Christian readers... which the evangelist put into Jesus' mouth in order to give it authority. This tendency to anchor later customs and institutions to Jesus' supposed lifetime played a considerable role in the building up of his biography.
One further evidence of the inauthenticity of Mark is the fact that in chapter 7, where Jesus is arguing with the Pharisees, Jesus is made to quote the Greek Septuagint version of Isaiah in order to score his debate point. Unfortunately, the Hebrew version says something different from the Greek. Isaiah 29:13, in the Hebrew reads "their fear of me is a commandment of men learned by rote," whereas the Greek version - and the gospel of Mark - reads "in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men" [Revised Standard Version). Wells observes dryly [p. 13], "That a Palestinian Jesus should floor Orthodox Jews with an argument based on a mistranslation of their scriptures is very unlikely." Indeed!
Another powerful argument against the idea that Mark could have been an eye-witness of the existence of Jesus is based upon the observation that the author of Mark displays a profound lack of familiarity with Palestinian geography. If he had actually lived in Palestine, he would not have made the blunders to be found in his gospel. If he never lived in Palestine, he could not have been an eye-witness of Jesus. You get the point.
The most absurd geographical error Mark commits is when he tells the tall tale about Jesus crossing over the Sea of Galilee and casting demons out of a man (two men in Matthew's revised version) and making them go into about 2,000 pigs which, as the King James version puts it, "ran violently down a steep place into the sea... and they were choked in the sea."
Apart from the cruelty to animals displayed by the lovable, gentle Jesus, and his disregard for the property of others, what's wrong with this story? If your only source of information is the King James Bible, you might not ever know. The King James says this marvel occurred in the land of the Gadarenes, whereas the oldest Greek manuscripts say this miracle took place in the land of the Gerasenes. Luke, who also knew no Palestinian geography, also passes on this bit of absurdity. But Matthew, who had some knowledge of Palestine, changed the name to Gadarene in his new, improved version; but this is further improved to Gergesenes in the King James version.
By now the reader must be dizzy with all the distinctions between Gerasenes, Gadarenes, and Gergesenes. What difference does it make? A lot of difference, as we shall see.
Gerasa, the place mentioned in the oldest manuscripts of Mark, is located about 31 miles from the shore of the Sea of Galilee! Those poor pigs had to run a course five miles longer than a marathon in order to find a place to drown! Not even lemmings have to go that far. Moreover, if one considers a "steep" slope to be at least 45 degrees, that would make the elevation of Gerasa at least six times higher than Mt. Everest!
When the author of Matthew read Mark's version, he saw the impossibility of Jesus and the gang disembarking at Gerasa (which, by the way, was also in a different country, the so-called Decapolis). Since the only town in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee that he knew of that started with G was Gadara, he changed Gerasa to Gadara. But even Gadara was five miles from the shore - and in a different country. Later copyists of the Greek manuscripts of all three pig-drowning gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) improved Gadara further to Gergesa, a region now thought to have actually formed part of the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. So much for the trustworthiness of the biblical tradition.
Another example of Mark's abysmal ignorance of Palestinian geography is found in the story he made up about Jesus traveling from Tyre on the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, 30 miles inland. According to Mark 7:31, Jesus and the boys went by way of Sidon, 20 miles north of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast! Since to Sidon and back would be 40 miles, this means that the wisest of all men walked 70 miles when he could have walked only 30. Of course, one would never know all this from the King James version which - apparently completely ignoring a perfectly clear Greek text - says "Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the Sea of Galilee..." Apparently the translators of the King James version also knew their geography. At least they knew more than did the author of Mark!
John
The unreliability of the gospels is underscored when we learn that, with the possible exception of John, the first three gospels bear no internal indication of who wrote them. Can we glean anything of significance from the fourth and latest gospel, the gospel of John? Not likely! It is so unworldly, it can scarcely be cited for historical evidence. In this account, Jesus is hardly a man of flesh and blood at all - except for the purposes of divine cannibalism as required by the celebration of the rite of "holy communion."
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god," the gospel begins. No Star of Bethlehem, no embarrassment of pregnant virgins, no hint that Jesus ever wore diapers: pure spirit from the beginning. Moreover, in its present form, the gospel of John is the latest of all the official gospels. f
The gospel of John was compiled around the year 110 CE. If its author had been 10 years old at the time of Jesus' crucifiction in the year 30 CE, he would have been 80 years old at the time of writing. Not only is it improbable that he would have lived so long, it is dangerous to pay much attention to the colorful "memories" recounted by a man in his "anecdotage." Many of us who are far younger than this have had the unpleasant experience of discovering incontrovertible proof that what we thought were clear memories of some event were wildly incorrect. We also might wonder why an eye-witness of all the wonders claimed in a gospel would wait so long to write about them!
More importantly, there is evidence that the Gospel of John, like Matthew and Luke, also is a composite document, incorporating an earlier "Signs Gospel" of uncertain antiquity. Again, we ask, if "John" had been an eye-witness to Jesus, why would he need to plagiarize a list of miracles made up by someone else? Nor is there anything in the Signs Gospel that would lead one to suppose that it was an eye-witness account. It could just as easily have been referring to the wonders of Dionysus turning water into wine, or to the healings of Asclepius.
The inauthenticity of the Gospel of John would seem to be established beyond cavil by the discovery that the very chapter that asserts the author of the book to have been "the disciple whom Jesus loved" [John 21:20] was a late addition to the gospel. Scholars have shown that the gospel originally ended at verses 30-31 of Chapter 20. Chapter 21 - in which verse 24 asserts that "This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true" - is not the work of an eye-witness. Like so many other things in the Bible, it is a fraud. The testimony is not true.
Saint Saul And His Letters
Having eliminated the OT and the gospels from the list of possible biblical "evidences" of the existence of Jesus, we are left with the so-called epistles.
At first blush, we might think that these epistles - some of which are by far the oldest parts of the NT, having been composed at least 30 years before the oldest gospel - would provide us with the most reliable information on Jesus. Well, so much for blushes. The oldest letters are the letters of St. Saul - the man who, after losing his mind, changed his name to Paul. Before going into details, we must point out right away, before we forget, that St. Saul's testimony can be ignored quite safely, if what he tells us is true, namely, that he never met Jesus "in the flesh," but rather saw him only in a vision he had during what appears to have been an epileptic seizure. No court of law would accept visions as evidence, and neither should we.
The reader might object that even if Saul only had hearsay evidence, some of it might be true. Some of it might tell us some facts about Jesus. Well, allright. Let's look at the evidence.
According to tradition, 13 of the letters in the NT are the work of St. Saul. Unfortunately, Bible scholars and computer experts have gone to work on these letters, and it turns out that only four can be shown to be substantially by the same author, putatively Saul. g These are the letters known as Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians. To these probably we may add the brief note to Philemon, a slave-owner, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians. The rest of the so-called Pauline epistles can be shown to have been written by other and later authors, so we can throw them out right now and not worry about them.
Saul tells us in 2 Corinthians 11:32 that King Aretas of the Nabateans tried to have him arrested because of his Christian agitation. Since Aretas is known to have died in the year 40 CE, this means that Saul became a Christian before that date. So what do we find out about Jesus from a man who had become a Christian less than ten years after the alleged crucifixion? Precious little!
Once again, G.A. Wells, in his book The Historical Evidence for Jesus[pp. 22-23], sums things up so succinctly, that I quote him verbatim:
The...Pauline letters...are so completely silent concerning the events that were later recorded in the gospels as to suggest that these events were not known to Paul, who, however, could not have been ignorant of them if they had really occurred.
These letters have no allusion to the parents of Jesus, let alone to the virgin birth. They never refer to a place of birth (for example, by calling him 'of Nazareth'). They give no indication of the time or place of his earthly existence. They do not refer to his trial before a Roman official, nor to Jerusalem as the place of execution. They mention neither John the Baptist, nor Judas, nor Peter's denial of his master. (They do, of course, mention Peter, but do not imply that he, any more than Paul himself, had known Jesus while he had been alive.)
These letters also fail to mention any miracles Jesus is supposed to have worked, a particularly striking omission, since, according to the gospels, he worked so many...
Another striking feature of Paul's letters is that one could never gather from them that Jesus had been an ethical teacher... on only one occasion does he appeal to the authority of Jesus to support an ethical teaching which the gospels also represent Jesus as having delivered.
It turns out that Saul's appeal to the authority of Jesus involves precisely the same error we found in the gospel of Mark. In 1 Cor. 7:10, Saul says that "not I but the Lord, [say] that the wife should not separate from the husband." That is, a wife should not seek divorce. If Jesus had actually said what Saul implies, and what Mark 10:12 claims he said, his audience would have thought he was nuts - as the Bhagwan says - or perhaps had suffered a blow to the head. So much for the testimony of Saul. His Jesus is nothing more than the thinnest hearsay, a legendary creature which was crucified as a sacrifice, a creature almost totally lacking a biography.
Extrabiblical "Evidence"
So far we have examined all the biblical evidences alleged to prove the existence of Jesus as an historical figure. We have found that they have no legitimacy as evidence. Now we must examine the last line of would-be evidence, the notion that Jewish and pagan historians recorded his existence.
Jewish Sources
It is sometimes claimed that Jewish writings hostile to Christianity prove that the ancient Jews knew of Jesus and that such writings prove the historicity of the man Jesus. But in fact, Jewish writings prove no such thing, as L. Gordon Rylands' book Did Jesus Ever Live? pointed out nearly seventy years ago:
…all the knowledge which the Rabbis had of Jesus was obtained by them from the Gospels. Seeing that Jews, even in the present more critical age, take it for granted that the figure of a real man stands behind the Gospel narrative, one need not be surprised if, in the second century, Jews did not think of questioning that assumption. It is certain, however, that some did question it. For Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho, represents the Jew Trypho as saying, "ye follow an empty rumour and make a Christ for yourselves." "If he was born and lived somewhere he is entirely unknown."
That the writers of the Talmud [4th-5th centuries CE, FRZ] had no independent knowledge of Jesus is proved by the fact that they confounded him with two different men neither of whom can have been he. Evidently no other Jesus with whom they could identify the Gospel Jesus was known to them. One of these, Jesus ben Pandira, reputed a wonder-worker, is said to have been stoned to death and then hung on a tree on the eve of a Passover in the reign of Alexander Jannæus (106-79 BC) at Jerusalem. The other, Jesus ben Stada, whose date is uncertain, but who may have lived in the first third of the second century CE, is also said to have been stoned and hanged on the eve of a Passover, but at Lydda. There may be some confusion here; but it is plain that the Rabbis had no knowledge of Jesus apart from what they had read in the Gospels. 11
Although Christian apologists have listed a number of ancient historians who allegedly were witnesses to the existence of Jesus, the only two that consistently are cited are Josephus, a Pharisee, and Tacitus, a pagan. Since Josephus was born in the year 37 CE, and Tacitus was born in 55, neither could have been an eye-witness of Jesus, who supposedly was crucified in 30 CE. So we could really end our article here. But someone might claim that these historians nevertheless had access to reliable sources, now lost, which recorded the existence and execution of our friend JC. So it is desirable that we take a look at these two supposed witnesses.
In the case of Josephus, whose Antiquities of the Jews was written in 93 CE, about the same time as the gospels, we find him saying some things quite impossible for a good Pharisee to have said:
About this time, there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. 12
Now no loyal Pharisee would say Jesus had been the Messiah. That Josephus could report that Jesus had been restored to life "on the third day" and not be convinced by this astonishing bit of information is beyond belief. Worse yet is the fact that the story of Jesus is intrusive in Josephus' narrative and can be seen to be an interpolation even in an English translation of the Greek text. Right after the wondrous passage quoted above, Josephus goes on to say, "About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder..." Josephus had previously been talking about awful things Pilate had done to the Jews in general, and one can easily understand why an interpolator would have chosen this particular spot. But his ineptitude in not changing the wording of the bordering text left a "literary seam" (what rhetoricians might term aporia) that sticks out like a pimpled nose.
The fact that Josephus was not convinced by this or any other Christian claim is clear from the statement of the church father Origen (ca. 185-ca. 154 CE) - who dealt extensively with Josephus - that Josephus did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah, i.e., as "the Christ." Moreover, the disputed passage was never cited by early Christian apologists such as Clement of Alexandria (ca.150-ca. 215 CE), who certainly would have made use of such ammunition had he had it!
The first person to make mention of this obviously forged interpolation into the text of Josephus' history was the church father Eusebius, in 324 CE. It is quite likely that Eusebius himself did some of the forging. As late as 891, Photius in his Bibliotheca, which devoted three "Codices" to the works of Josephus, shows no awareness of the passage whatsoever even though he reviews the sections of theAntiquities in which one would expect the disputed passage to be found. Clearly, the testimonial was absent from his copy of Antiquities of the Jews. 13 The question can probably be laid to rest by noting that as late as the sixteenth century, according to Rylands, 14 a scholar named Vossius had a manuscript of Josephus from which the passage was wanting.
Apologists, as they grasp for ever more slender straws with which to support their historical Jesus, point out that the passage quoted above is not the only mention of Jesus made by Josephus. In Bk. 20, Ch. 9, §1 of Antiquities of the Jews one also finds the following statement in surviving manuscripts:
Ananus… convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned.
It must be admitted that this passage does not intrude into the text as does the one previously quoted. In fact, it is very well integrated into Josephus' story. That it has been modified from whatever Josephus' source may have said (remember, here too, Josephus could not have been an eye-witness) is nevertheless extremely probable. The crucial word in this passage is the name James (Jacob in Greek and Hebrew). It is very possible that this very common name was in Josephus' source material. It might even have been a reference to James the Just, a first-century character we have good reason to believe indeed existed. Because he appears to have born the title Brother of the Lord, h it would have been natural to relate him to the Jesus character. It is quite possible that Josephus actually referred to a James "the Brother of the Lord," and this was changed by Christian copyists (remember that although Josephus was a Jew, his text was preserved only by Christians!) to "Brother of Jesus" - adding then for good measure "who was called Christ."
According to William Benjamin Smith's skeptical classic Ecce Deus, 15 there are still some manuscripts of Josephus which contain the quoted passages, but the passages are absent in other manuscripts - showing that such interpolation had already been taking place before the time of Origen but did not ever succeed in supplanting the original text universally.
Pagan Authors Before considering the alleged witness of Pagan authors, it is worth noting some of the things that we should find recorded in their histories if the biblical stories are in fact true. One passage from Matthew should suffice to point out the significance of the silence of secular writers:
Matt. 27:45. Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour... Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. 51. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; 52 And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, 53 And came out of the graves after his resurrection [exposed for 3 days?], and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.
Wouldn't the Greeks and Romans have noticed - and recorded - such darkness occurring at a time of the month when a solar eclipse was impossible? Wouldn't someone have remembered - and recorded - the name of at least one of those "saints" who climbed out of the grave and went wandering downtown in the mall? If Jesus did anything of significance at all, wouldn't someone have noticed? If he didn't do anything significant, how could he have stimulated the formation of a new religion?
Considering now the supposed evidence of Tacitus, we find that this Roman historian is alleged in 120 CE to have written a passage in hisAnnals (Bk 15, Ch 44, containing the wild tale of Nero's persecution of Christians) saying "Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus..." G.A. Wells [p. 16] says of this passage:
[Tacitus wrote] at a time when Christians themselves had come to believe that Jesus had suffered under Pilate. There are three reasons for holding that Tacitus is here simply repeating what Christians had told him. First, he gives Pilate a title, procurator [without saying procurator of what! FRZ], which was current only from the second half of the first century. Had he consulted archives which recorded earlier events, he would surely have found Pilate there designated by his correct title, prefect. Second, Tacitus does not name the executed man Jesus, but uses the title Christ (Messiah) as if it were a proper name. But he could hardly have found in archives a statement such as "the Messiah was executed this morning." Third, hostile to Christianity as he was, he was surely glad to accept from Christians their own view that Christianity was of recent origin, since the Roman authorities were prepared to tolerate only ancient cults. (The Historical Evidence for Jesus; p.16).
There are further problems with the Tacitus story. Tacitus himself never again alludes to the Neronian persecution of Christians in any of his voluminous writings, and no other Pagan authors know anything of the outrage either. Most significant, however, is that ancient Christian apologists made no use of the story in their propaganda - an unthinkable omission by motivated partisans who were well-read in the works of Tacitus. Clement of Alexandria, who made a profession of collecting just such types of quotations, is ignorant of any Neronian persecution, and even Tertullian, who quotes a great deal from Tacitus, knows nothing of the story. According to Robert Taylor, the author of another freethought classic, the Diegesis (1834), the passage was not known before the fifteenth century, when Tacitus was first published at Venice by Johannes de Spire. Taylor believed de Spire himself to have been the forger. i
So much for the evidence purporting to prove that Jesus was an historical figure. We have not, of course, proved that Jesus did not exist. We have only showed that all evidence alleged to support such a claim is without substance. But of course, that is all we need to show. The burden of proof is always on the one who claims that something exists or that something once happened. We have no obligation to try to prove a universal negative. j
It will be argued by die-hard believers that all my arguments "from silence" prove nothing and they will quote the aphorism, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But is the negative evidence I have referred to the same as absence of evidence? It might be instructive to consider how a hypothetical but similar problem might be dealt with in the physical sciences.
Imagine that someone has claimed that the USA had carried out atomic weapons tests on a particular Caribbean island in 1943. Would the lack of reports of mushroom-cloud sightings at the time be evidence of absence, or absence of evidence? (Remember, the Caribbean during the war years was under intense surveillance by many different factions.) Would it be necessary to go to the island today to scan its surface for the radioactive contamination that would have to be there if nuclear explosions had taken place there? If indeed, we went there with our Geiger-counters and found no trace of radioactive contamination, would that be evidence of absence, or absence of evidence? In this case, what superficially looks like absence of evidence is really negative evidence, and thus legitimately could be construed as evidence of absence. Can the negative evidence adduced above concerning Jesus be very much less compelling?
It would be intellectually satisfying to learn just how it was that the Jesus character condensed out of the religious atmosphere of the first century. But scholars are at work on the problem. The publication of many examples of so-called wisdom literature, along with the materials from the Essene community at Qumran by the Dead Sea and the Gnostic literature from the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt, has given us a much more detailed picture of the communal psychopathologies which infested the Eastern Mediterranean world at the turn of the era. It is not unrealistic to expect that we will be able, before long, to reconstruct in reasonable detail the stages by which Jesus came to have a biography.
They Should Have Noticed
John E. Remsburg, in his classic book The Christ: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Evidence of His Existence (The Truth Seeker Company, NY, no date, pp. 24-25), lists the following writers who lived during the time, or within a century after the time, that Jesus is supposed to have lived:
Josephus
Philo-Judæus
Seneca
Pliny Elder
Arrian
Petronius
Dion Pruseus
Paterculus
Suetonius
Juvenal
Martial
Persius
Plutarch
Pliny Younger
Tacitus
Justus of Tiberius
Apollonius
Quintilian
Lucanus
Epictetus
Hermogones Silius Italicus
Statius
Ptolemy
Appian
Phlegon
Phædrus
Valerius Maximus
Lucian
Pausanias
Florus Lucius
Quintius Curtius
Aulus Gellius
Dio Chrysostom
Columella
Valerius Flaccus
Damis
Favorinus
Lysias
Pomponius Mela
Appion of Alexandria
Theon of Smyrna
According to Remsburg, "Enough of the writings of the authors named in the foregoing list remains to form a library. Yet in this mass of Jewish and Pagan literature, aside from two forged passages in the works of a Jewish author, and two disputed passages in the works of Roman writers, there is to be found no mention of Jesus Christ." Nor, we may add, do any of these authors make note of the Disciples or Apostles - increasing the embarrassment from the silence of history concerning the foundation of Christianity.
NOTES:
a It is sometimes claimed that the "miraculous" spread of Christianity in the early Roman Empire is evidence of an historical Jesus - that such a movement could not have gone so far so fast had there not been a real person at its inception. A similar argument could be made, however, in the case of the earlier rapid spread of Mithraism. I am unaware of any Christian apologists who would argue that this supports the idea of an historical Mithra!
b A profusely annotated paperback edition of Paine's book is available from American Atheist Press for twelve dollars. (Order No. 5575, click here)
c An apocalypse is a pseudonymous piece of writing characterized by exaggerated symbolic imagery, usually dealing with the expectation of an imminent cosmic cataclysm wherein the deity destroys the wicked and rewards the righteous. Apocalyptic writing abounds in hidden meanings and numerological puzzles. Parts of a number of Judæo-Christian apocalypses other than Revelation have been preserved, but only the latter (if one does not consider the Book of Daniel to be entirely apocalyptic) was accepted into the Christian canon - and it almost didn't make it, having been rejected by several early Church Fathers and Church Councils.
d The opposite theory, often referred to as "Griesbach's hypothesis," that the author of Mark had "epitomized" the two longer gospels, keeping only the "essential" details, is today almost entirely rejected by bible scholars. While the arguments to support this nearly universal rejection are too involved to even summarize here, it may be noted that shortening of miracle stories is completely out of keeping with the principles of religious development seen everywhere today. Stories invariably get "better" (i.e., longer) with the retelling, never shorter!
e There is compelling evidence indicating that these alleged sayings of Jesus were taken from another early document known as Q (German, for Quelle, 'source'). Like the so-called Gospel of Thomas found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, Q appears to have been a list of wisdom sayings that at some point became attributed to Jesus. We know that at least one of these sayings ("We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced…" Matt. 17:11; Luke 7:32) derives from Æsop's Fables, not from a sage of Galilee!
f I say "official gospels" because there are, in fact, many other gospels known. Once people started making them up, they sort of got stuck in over-drive. Only later on in Christian history did the number get pared back to four.
g Even the letters supposed to contain authentic writings of Saul/Paul have been shown by a number of scholars to be as composite as the gospels (e.g., L. Gordon Rylands, A Critical Analysis of the Four Chief Pauline Epistles: Romans, First and Second Corinthians, and Galatians, Watts & Co., London, 1929). According to such analyses, the core Pauline material in these letters is what might be termed a pre-Christian Gnostic product. This material is surrounded by often contradictory material added by proto-Catholic interpolators and redactors who succeeded thus in claiming a popular proto-Gnostic authority for the Church of Rome. In any case, the Greek text of these letters is heavy with terms such as Archon, Æon, etc. - jargon terms popular in the more astrologically conscious forms of Gnosticism. It would appear that the Christ of Paul is as astral a being as the Lamb of Revelation. Like the god of Revelation, the god of Paul communicates via visions, not physically, face-to-face.
h Originally, this would have been the title born by a member of a religious fraternity associated with the worship of Yahweh, who in Greek was always referred to as kurios ('Lord'). This was carried over into primitive Christianity, where we know from I Cor. 9:5 that there existed a governing class coordinate with apostles that was called "Brothers of the Lord." Misunderstanding of the original meaning of the title led to the belief that Jesus had siblings - an error that can be found already in the earliest of the canonical gospels.
Interestingly, the embarrassing passages in the gospels where Jesus is rude to his mother and brethren would seem to derive from a period where a political struggle had developed between apostolically governed sects and those governed by "Brethren of the Lord," who claimed authority now by virtue of an alleged blood relationship to Jesus - who had by then supplanted Yahweh as "Lord." The apostolic politics of the gospel writers could not resist putting down the Brethren Party by having Jesus disregard his own family. If Jesus didn't pay serious attention to his own family, the argument would go, why should anyone pay attention to their descendants? This is the only plausible explanation for the presence of such passages as John 2:4 ("Woman, what have I to do with thee?") or Mark 3:33 ("Who is my mother, or my brethren?).
Latinists often dispute the possibility of the passage being a forgery on the grounds that Tacitus' distinctive Latin style so perfectly permeates the entire passage. But it should be noted that the more distinctive a style might be, the easier it can be imitated. Then too, there is a lapse from normal Tacitean usage elsewhere in the disputed passage. In describing the early Christians as being haters "of the human race" (humani generis), the passage reverses the word order of normal Tacitean usage. In all other cases, Tacitus has generis humani.
j Curiously, in the present case, it would seem that such proof is in fact possible. Since Jesus is frequently referred to as "Jesus of Nazareth," it is interesting to learn that the town now called Nazareth did not exist in the first centuries BCE and CE. Exhaustive archaeological studies have been done by Franciscans to prove the cave they possess was once the home of Jesus' family. But actually they have shown the site to have been a necropolis - a city of the dead - during the first century CE. (Naturally, the Franciscans cannot agree!) With no Nazareth other than a cemetery existing at the time, how could there have been a Jesus of Nazareth? Without an Oz, could there have been a Wizard of Oz?
REFERENCES
1. Illustrated in Robin Seager, Tiberius, Eyre Methuen, London, 1972. For more detailed numismatic documentation of Tiberius, see also C. H. V. Sutherland, Roman History and Coinage 44 BC-AD 69, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987; by the same author, Coinage in Roman Imperial Policy 31 B.C.-A.D. 68, Sanford J. Durst Numismatic Publications, NY, 1978.2. Illustrated in Seager, op. cit.
3. Illustrated in Seager, op. cit.
4. Examined in Sutherland, 1987, op. cit. See also Victor Ehrenberg and A. H. M. Jones, Documents Illustrating the Reigns of Augustus & Tiberius, 2nd Edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955.
5. See Inscriptiones Latinæ Selectæ, edidit Hermannus Dessau, reprinted in 4 vols. by Ares Publishers Inc., Chicago, 1979.
6. Illustrated in Seager, op. cit.
7. See Acta Divi Augusti, Regia Academia Italica, Rome, 1945.
8. In her Anchor Bible Volume 38, Revelation (Doubleday, Garden City, NJ, 1975), J. Massyngberde Ford proposed that the core of Revelation was material written by Jewish followers of John the Baptist. Even if the Baptist had been an historical figure (which is extremely doubtful), this still would make Revelation in essence a pre-Christian, Jewish apocalypse.
9. For more astrological aspects of Revelation, see Bruce J. Malina, On The Genre And Message Of Revelation: Star Visions and Sky Journeys, Hendrickson, Peabody, MA, 1995.
10. George A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1982, p. 13.
11. L. Gordon Rylands, Did Jesus Ever Live?, Watts & Co., London, 1929, p. 20.
12. This so-called Testimonium Flavianum appears in Bk 18 Ch 3 §3 of Josephus: Jewish Antiquities Books XVIII-XIX, IX, translated by L. H. Feldman, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981, pp. 48-51.
13. J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Græca, Tomus CIII. Photius Constantinopolitanus Patriarcha, Garnier Fratres, Paris, 1900, Cod. 47, 76, and 238.
14. Rylands, op. cit., p. 14.
15. William Benjamin Smith, Ecce Deus: Studies Of Primitive Christianity, Watts & Co., London, 1912, p. 235.
The American Atheist, Summer 1998.
Updated from The Probing Mind series, January 1987
I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against people who try from time to time to deny it. It would be easier, frankly, to believe that Tiberius Caesar, Jesus' contemporary, was a figment of the imagination than to believe that there never was such a person as Jesus.
- N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress, 1996)
For most of my life, I had taken it for granted that Jesus, although certainly not a god, was nevertheless an historical personage - perhaps a magician skilled in hypnosis. To be sure, I knew that some of the world's greatest scholars had denied his existence. Nevertheless, I had always more or less supposed that it was improbable that so many stories could have sprung up about someone who had never existed. Even in the case of other deities, such as Zeus, Thor, Isis, and Osiris, I had always taken it for granted that they were merely deified human heroes: men and women who lived in the later stages of prehistory - persons whose reputations got better and better the longer the time elapsed after their deaths. Gods, like fine wines, I supposed, improved with age.
About a decade ago, however, I began to reexamine the evidence for the historicity of Jesus. I was astounded at what I didn't find. In this article, I would like to show how shaky the evidence is regarding the alleged existence of a would-be messiah named Jesus. I now feel it is more reasonable to suppose he never existed. It is easier to account for the facts of early Christian history if Jesus were a fiction than if he once were real.
Burden of Proof
Although what follows may fairly be interpreted to be a proof of the non-historicity of Jesus, it must be realized that the burden of proof does not rest upon the skeptic in this matter. As always is the case, the burden of proof weighs upon those who assert that some thing or some process exists. If someone claims that he never has to shave because every morning before he can get to the bathroom he is assaulted by a six-foot rabbit with extremely sharp teeth who trims his whiskers better than a razor - if someone makes such a claim, no skeptic need worry about constructing a disproof. Unless evidence for the claim is produced, the skeptic can treat the claim as false. This is nothing more than sane, every-day practice.
Unlike N. T. Wright, quoted at the beginning of this article, a small number of scholars have tried over the centuries to prove that Jesus was in fact historical. It is instructive, when examining their "evidence," to compare it to the sort of evidence we have, say, for the existence of Tiberius Cæsar - to take up the challenge made by Wright.
It may be conceded that it is not surprising that there are no coins surviving from the first century with the image of Jesus on them. Unlike Tiberius Cæsar and Augustus Cæsar who adopted him, Jesus is not thought to have had control over any mints. Even so, we must point out that we do have coins dating from the early first century that bear images of Tiberius that change with the age of their subject. We even have coins minted by his predecessor, Augustus Cæsar, that show Augustus on one side and his adopted son on the other. 1 Would Mr. Wright have us believe that these coins are figments of the imagination? Can we be dealing with fig-mints?
Statues that can be dated archaeologically survive to show Tiberius as a youth, as a young man assuming the toga, as Cæsar, etc. 2 Engravings and gems show him with his entire family. 3 Biographers who were his contemporaries or nearly so quote from his letters and decrees and recount the details of his life in minute detail. 4 There are contemporary inscriptions all over the former empire that record his deeds. 5 There is an ossuary of at least one member of his family, and the Greek text of a speech made by his son Germanicus has been found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. 6 And then there are the remains of his villa on Capri. Nor should we forget that Augustus Cæsar, in his Res Gestæ ("Things Accomplished"), which survives both in Greek and Latin on the so-calledMonumentum Ancyranum, lists Tiberius as his son and co-ruler. 7
Is there anything advocates of an historical Jesus can produce that could be as compelling as this evidence for Tiberius? I think not, and I thank N. T. Wright for making a challenge that brings this disparity so clearly to light.
There is really only one area where evidence for Jesus is even claimed to be of a sort similar to that adduced for Tiberius - the area of biographies written by contemporaries or near contemporaries. a It is sometimes claimed that the Christian Bible contains such evidence. Sometimes it is claimed that there is extrabiblical evidence as well. Let us then examine this would-be evidence.
The Old Testament "Evidence"
Let us consider the so-called biblical evidence first. Despite the claims of Christian apologists, there is absolutely nothing in the Old Testament (OT) that is of relevance to our question, apart from the possible fact that some prophets may have thought that an "anointed one" (a rescuer king or priest) would once again assume the leadership of the Jewish world. All of the many examples of OT "predictions" of Jesus are so silly that one need only look them up to see their irrelevance. Thomas Paine, the great heretic of the American Revolution, did just that, and he demonstrated their irrelevance in his book An Examination of the Prophecies, which he intended to be Part III of The Age of Reason. b
The New Testament "Evidence"
The elimination of the OT leaves only the New Testament (NT) "evidence" and extrabiblical material to be considered. Essentially, the NT is composed of two types of documents: letters and would-be biographies (the so-called gospels). A third category of writing, apocalyptic, c of which the Book of Revelation is an example, also exists, but it gives no support for the historicity of Jesus. In fact, it would appear to be an intellectual fossil of the thought-world from which Christianity sprang - a Jewish apocalypse that was reworked for Christian use. 8 The main character of the book (referred to 28 times) would seem to be "the Lamb," an astral being seen in visions (no claims to historicity here!), and the book overall is redolent of ancient astrology. 9
The name Jesus occurs only seven times in the entire book, Christ only four times, and Jesus Christ only twice! While Revelation may very well derive from a very early period (contrary to the views of most biblical scholars, who deal with the book only in its final form), the Jesus of which it whispers obviously is not a man. He is a supernatural being. He has not yet acquired the physiological and metabolic properties of which we read in the gospels. The Jesus of Revelation is a god who would later be made into a man - not a man who would later become a god, as liberal religious scholars would have it.
The Gospels
The notion that the four "gospels that made the cut" to be included in the official New Testament were written by men named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John does not go back to early Christian times. The titles "According to Matthew," etc., were not added until late in the second century. Thus, although Papias ca. 140 CE ('Common Era') knows all the gospels but has only heard of Matthew and Mark, Justin Martyr (ca. 150 CE) knows of none of the four supposed authors. It is only in 180 CE, with Irenæus of Lyons, that we learn who wrote the four "canonical" gospels and discover that there are exactly four of them because there are four quarters of the earth and four universal winds. Thus, unless one supposes the argument of Irenæus to be other than ridiculous, we come to the conclusion that the gospels are of unknown origin and authorship, and there is no good reason to suppose they are eye-witness accounts of a man named Jesus of Nazareth. At a minimum, this forces us to examine the gospels to see if their contents are even compatible with the notion that they were written by eye-witnesses. We cannot even assume that each of the gospels had but one author or redactor.
It is clear that the gospels of Matthew and Luke could not possibly have been written by an eye-witness of the tales they tell. Both writers plagiarize d (largely word-for-word) up to 90% of the gospel of Mark, to which they add sayings of Jesus e and would-be historical details. Ignoring the fact that Matthew and Luke contradict each other in such critical details as the genealogy of Jesus - and thus cannot both be correct - we must ask why real eye-witnesses would have to plagiarize the entire ham-hocks-and-potatoes of the story, contenting themselves with adding merely a little gravy, salt, and pepper. A real eye-witness would have begun with a verse reading, "Now, boys and girls, I'm gonna tell you the story of Jesus the Messiah the way it really happened..." The story would be a unique creation. It is significant that it is only these two gospels that purport to tell anything of Jesus' birth, childhood, or ancestry. Both can be dismissed as unreliable without further cause. We can know nothing of Jesus' childhood or origin!
Mark
But what about the gospel of Mark, the oldest surviving gospel? Attaining essentially its final form probably as late as 90 CE but containing core material dating possibly as early as 70 CE, it omits, as we have seen, almost the entire traditional biography of Jesus, beginning the story with John the Baptist giving Jesus a bath, and ending - in the oldest manuscripts - with women running frightened from the empty tomb. (The alleged postresurrection appearances reported in the last twelve verses of Mark are not found in the earliest manuscripts, even though they are still printed in most modern bibles as though they were an "authentic" part of Mark's gospel.) Moreover, "Mark" being a non-Palestinian non-disciple, even the skimpy historical detail he provides is untrustworthy.
To say that Mark's account is "skimpy" is to understate the case. There really isn't much to the gospel of Mark, the birth legends, genealogies, and childhood wonders all being absent. Whereas the gospel of Luke takes up 43 pages in the New English Bible, the gospel of Mark occupies only 25 pages - a mere 58% as much material! Stories do indeed grow with the retelling.
I have claimed that the unknown author of Mark was a non-Palestinian non-disciple, which would make his story mere hearsay. What evidence do we have for this assertion? First of all, Mark shows no first-hand understanding of the social situation in Palestine. He is clearly a foreigner, removed both in space and time from the events he alleges. For example, in Mark 10:12, he has Jesus say that if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. As G. A. Wells, the author of The Historical Evidence for Jesus 10 puts it,
Such an utterance would have been meaningless in Palestine, where only men could obtain divorce. It is a ruling for the Gentile Christian readers... which the evangelist put into Jesus' mouth in order to give it authority. This tendency to anchor later customs and institutions to Jesus' supposed lifetime played a considerable role in the building up of his biography.
One further evidence of the inauthenticity of Mark is the fact that in chapter 7, where Jesus is arguing with the Pharisees, Jesus is made to quote the Greek Septuagint version of Isaiah in order to score his debate point. Unfortunately, the Hebrew version says something different from the Greek. Isaiah 29:13, in the Hebrew reads "their fear of me is a commandment of men learned by rote," whereas the Greek version - and the gospel of Mark - reads "in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men" [Revised Standard Version). Wells observes dryly [p. 13], "That a Palestinian Jesus should floor Orthodox Jews with an argument based on a mistranslation of their scriptures is very unlikely." Indeed!
Another powerful argument against the idea that Mark could have been an eye-witness of the existence of Jesus is based upon the observation that the author of Mark displays a profound lack of familiarity with Palestinian geography. If he had actually lived in Palestine, he would not have made the blunders to be found in his gospel. If he never lived in Palestine, he could not have been an eye-witness of Jesus. You get the point.
The most absurd geographical error Mark commits is when he tells the tall tale about Jesus crossing over the Sea of Galilee and casting demons out of a man (two men in Matthew's revised version) and making them go into about 2,000 pigs which, as the King James version puts it, "ran violently down a steep place into the sea... and they were choked in the sea."
Apart from the cruelty to animals displayed by the lovable, gentle Jesus, and his disregard for the property of others, what's wrong with this story? If your only source of information is the King James Bible, you might not ever know. The King James says this marvel occurred in the land of the Gadarenes, whereas the oldest Greek manuscripts say this miracle took place in the land of the Gerasenes. Luke, who also knew no Palestinian geography, also passes on this bit of absurdity. But Matthew, who had some knowledge of Palestine, changed the name to Gadarene in his new, improved version; but this is further improved to Gergesenes in the King James version.
By now the reader must be dizzy with all the distinctions between Gerasenes, Gadarenes, and Gergesenes. What difference does it make? A lot of difference, as we shall see.
Gerasa, the place mentioned in the oldest manuscripts of Mark, is located about 31 miles from the shore of the Sea of Galilee! Those poor pigs had to run a course five miles longer than a marathon in order to find a place to drown! Not even lemmings have to go that far. Moreover, if one considers a "steep" slope to be at least 45 degrees, that would make the elevation of Gerasa at least six times higher than Mt. Everest!
When the author of Matthew read Mark's version, he saw the impossibility of Jesus and the gang disembarking at Gerasa (which, by the way, was also in a different country, the so-called Decapolis). Since the only town in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee that he knew of that started with G was Gadara, he changed Gerasa to Gadara. But even Gadara was five miles from the shore - and in a different country. Later copyists of the Greek manuscripts of all three pig-drowning gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) improved Gadara further to Gergesa, a region now thought to have actually formed part of the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. So much for the trustworthiness of the biblical tradition.
Another example of Mark's abysmal ignorance of Palestinian geography is found in the story he made up about Jesus traveling from Tyre on the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, 30 miles inland. According to Mark 7:31, Jesus and the boys went by way of Sidon, 20 miles north of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast! Since to Sidon and back would be 40 miles, this means that the wisest of all men walked 70 miles when he could have walked only 30. Of course, one would never know all this from the King James version which - apparently completely ignoring a perfectly clear Greek text - says "Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the Sea of Galilee..." Apparently the translators of the King James version also knew their geography. At least they knew more than did the author of Mark!
John
The unreliability of the gospels is underscored when we learn that, with the possible exception of John, the first three gospels bear no internal indication of who wrote them. Can we glean anything of significance from the fourth and latest gospel, the gospel of John? Not likely! It is so unworldly, it can scarcely be cited for historical evidence. In this account, Jesus is hardly a man of flesh and blood at all - except for the purposes of divine cannibalism as required by the celebration of the rite of "holy communion."
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god," the gospel begins. No Star of Bethlehem, no embarrassment of pregnant virgins, no hint that Jesus ever wore diapers: pure spirit from the beginning. Moreover, in its present form, the gospel of John is the latest of all the official gospels. f
The gospel of John was compiled around the year 110 CE. If its author had been 10 years old at the time of Jesus' crucifiction in the year 30 CE, he would have been 80 years old at the time of writing. Not only is it improbable that he would have lived so long, it is dangerous to pay much attention to the colorful "memories" recounted by a man in his "anecdotage." Many of us who are far younger than this have had the unpleasant experience of discovering incontrovertible proof that what we thought were clear memories of some event were wildly incorrect. We also might wonder why an eye-witness of all the wonders claimed in a gospel would wait so long to write about them!
More importantly, there is evidence that the Gospel of John, like Matthew and Luke, also is a composite document, incorporating an earlier "Signs Gospel" of uncertain antiquity. Again, we ask, if "John" had been an eye-witness to Jesus, why would he need to plagiarize a list of miracles made up by someone else? Nor is there anything in the Signs Gospel that would lead one to suppose that it was an eye-witness account. It could just as easily have been referring to the wonders of Dionysus turning water into wine, or to the healings of Asclepius.
The inauthenticity of the Gospel of John would seem to be established beyond cavil by the discovery that the very chapter that asserts the author of the book to have been "the disciple whom Jesus loved" [John 21:20] was a late addition to the gospel. Scholars have shown that the gospel originally ended at verses 30-31 of Chapter 20. Chapter 21 - in which verse 24 asserts that "This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true" - is not the work of an eye-witness. Like so many other things in the Bible, it is a fraud. The testimony is not true.
Saint Saul And His Letters
Having eliminated the OT and the gospels from the list of possible biblical "evidences" of the existence of Jesus, we are left with the so-called epistles.
At first blush, we might think that these epistles - some of which are by far the oldest parts of the NT, having been composed at least 30 years before the oldest gospel - would provide us with the most reliable information on Jesus. Well, so much for blushes. The oldest letters are the letters of St. Saul - the man who, after losing his mind, changed his name to Paul. Before going into details, we must point out right away, before we forget, that St. Saul's testimony can be ignored quite safely, if what he tells us is true, namely, that he never met Jesus "in the flesh," but rather saw him only in a vision he had during what appears to have been an epileptic seizure. No court of law would accept visions as evidence, and neither should we.
The reader might object that even if Saul only had hearsay evidence, some of it might be true. Some of it might tell us some facts about Jesus. Well, allright. Let's look at the evidence.
According to tradition, 13 of the letters in the NT are the work of St. Saul. Unfortunately, Bible scholars and computer experts have gone to work on these letters, and it turns out that only four can be shown to be substantially by the same author, putatively Saul. g These are the letters known as Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians. To these probably we may add the brief note to Philemon, a slave-owner, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians. The rest of the so-called Pauline epistles can be shown to have been written by other and later authors, so we can throw them out right now and not worry about them.
Saul tells us in 2 Corinthians 11:32 that King Aretas of the Nabateans tried to have him arrested because of his Christian agitation. Since Aretas is known to have died in the year 40 CE, this means that Saul became a Christian before that date. So what do we find out about Jesus from a man who had become a Christian less than ten years after the alleged crucifixion? Precious little!
Once again, G.A. Wells, in his book The Historical Evidence for Jesus[pp. 22-23], sums things up so succinctly, that I quote him verbatim:
The...Pauline letters...are so completely silent concerning the events that were later recorded in the gospels as to suggest that these events were not known to Paul, who, however, could not have been ignorant of them if they had really occurred.
These letters have no allusion to the parents of Jesus, let alone to the virgin birth. They never refer to a place of birth (for example, by calling him 'of Nazareth'). They give no indication of the time or place of his earthly existence. They do not refer to his trial before a Roman official, nor to Jerusalem as the place of execution. They mention neither John the Baptist, nor Judas, nor Peter's denial of his master. (They do, of course, mention Peter, but do not imply that he, any more than Paul himself, had known Jesus while he had been alive.)
These letters also fail to mention any miracles Jesus is supposed to have worked, a particularly striking omission, since, according to the gospels, he worked so many...
Another striking feature of Paul's letters is that one could never gather from them that Jesus had been an ethical teacher... on only one occasion does he appeal to the authority of Jesus to support an ethical teaching which the gospels also represent Jesus as having delivered.
It turns out that Saul's appeal to the authority of Jesus involves precisely the same error we found in the gospel of Mark. In 1 Cor. 7:10, Saul says that "not I but the Lord, [say] that the wife should not separate from the husband." That is, a wife should not seek divorce. If Jesus had actually said what Saul implies, and what Mark 10:12 claims he said, his audience would have thought he was nuts - as the Bhagwan says - or perhaps had suffered a blow to the head. So much for the testimony of Saul. His Jesus is nothing more than the thinnest hearsay, a legendary creature which was crucified as a sacrifice, a creature almost totally lacking a biography.
Extrabiblical "Evidence"
So far we have examined all the biblical evidences alleged to prove the existence of Jesus as an historical figure. We have found that they have no legitimacy as evidence. Now we must examine the last line of would-be evidence, the notion that Jewish and pagan historians recorded his existence.
Jewish Sources
It is sometimes claimed that Jewish writings hostile to Christianity prove that the ancient Jews knew of Jesus and that such writings prove the historicity of the man Jesus. But in fact, Jewish writings prove no such thing, as L. Gordon Rylands' book Did Jesus Ever Live? pointed out nearly seventy years ago:
…all the knowledge which the Rabbis had of Jesus was obtained by them from the Gospels. Seeing that Jews, even in the present more critical age, take it for granted that the figure of a real man stands behind the Gospel narrative, one need not be surprised if, in the second century, Jews did not think of questioning that assumption. It is certain, however, that some did question it. For Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho, represents the Jew Trypho as saying, "ye follow an empty rumour and make a Christ for yourselves." "If he was born and lived somewhere he is entirely unknown."
That the writers of the Talmud [4th-5th centuries CE, FRZ] had no independent knowledge of Jesus is proved by the fact that they confounded him with two different men neither of whom can have been he. Evidently no other Jesus with whom they could identify the Gospel Jesus was known to them. One of these, Jesus ben Pandira, reputed a wonder-worker, is said to have been stoned to death and then hung on a tree on the eve of a Passover in the reign of Alexander Jannæus (106-79 BC) at Jerusalem. The other, Jesus ben Stada, whose date is uncertain, but who may have lived in the first third of the second century CE, is also said to have been stoned and hanged on the eve of a Passover, but at Lydda. There may be some confusion here; but it is plain that the Rabbis had no knowledge of Jesus apart from what they had read in the Gospels. 11
Although Christian apologists have listed a number of ancient historians who allegedly were witnesses to the existence of Jesus, the only two that consistently are cited are Josephus, a Pharisee, and Tacitus, a pagan. Since Josephus was born in the year 37 CE, and Tacitus was born in 55, neither could have been an eye-witness of Jesus, who supposedly was crucified in 30 CE. So we could really end our article here. But someone might claim that these historians nevertheless had access to reliable sources, now lost, which recorded the existence and execution of our friend JC. So it is desirable that we take a look at these two supposed witnesses.
In the case of Josephus, whose Antiquities of the Jews was written in 93 CE, about the same time as the gospels, we find him saying some things quite impossible for a good Pharisee to have said:
About this time, there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. 12
Now no loyal Pharisee would say Jesus had been the Messiah. That Josephus could report that Jesus had been restored to life "on the third day" and not be convinced by this astonishing bit of information is beyond belief. Worse yet is the fact that the story of Jesus is intrusive in Josephus' narrative and can be seen to be an interpolation even in an English translation of the Greek text. Right after the wondrous passage quoted above, Josephus goes on to say, "About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder..." Josephus had previously been talking about awful things Pilate had done to the Jews in general, and one can easily understand why an interpolator would have chosen this particular spot. But his ineptitude in not changing the wording of the bordering text left a "literary seam" (what rhetoricians might term aporia) that sticks out like a pimpled nose.
The fact that Josephus was not convinced by this or any other Christian claim is clear from the statement of the church father Origen (ca. 185-ca. 154 CE) - who dealt extensively with Josephus - that Josephus did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah, i.e., as "the Christ." Moreover, the disputed passage was never cited by early Christian apologists such as Clement of Alexandria (ca.150-ca. 215 CE), who certainly would have made use of such ammunition had he had it!
The first person to make mention of this obviously forged interpolation into the text of Josephus' history was the church father Eusebius, in 324 CE. It is quite likely that Eusebius himself did some of the forging. As late as 891, Photius in his Bibliotheca, which devoted three "Codices" to the works of Josephus, shows no awareness of the passage whatsoever even though he reviews the sections of theAntiquities in which one would expect the disputed passage to be found. Clearly, the testimonial was absent from his copy of Antiquities of the Jews. 13 The question can probably be laid to rest by noting that as late as the sixteenth century, according to Rylands, 14 a scholar named Vossius had a manuscript of Josephus from which the passage was wanting.
Apologists, as they grasp for ever more slender straws with which to support their historical Jesus, point out that the passage quoted above is not the only mention of Jesus made by Josephus. In Bk. 20, Ch. 9, §1 of Antiquities of the Jews one also finds the following statement in surviving manuscripts:
Ananus… convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned.
It must be admitted that this passage does not intrude into the text as does the one previously quoted. In fact, it is very well integrated into Josephus' story. That it has been modified from whatever Josephus' source may have said (remember, here too, Josephus could not have been an eye-witness) is nevertheless extremely probable. The crucial word in this passage is the name James (Jacob in Greek and Hebrew). It is very possible that this very common name was in Josephus' source material. It might even have been a reference to James the Just, a first-century character we have good reason to believe indeed existed. Because he appears to have born the title Brother of the Lord, h it would have been natural to relate him to the Jesus character. It is quite possible that Josephus actually referred to a James "the Brother of the Lord," and this was changed by Christian copyists (remember that although Josephus was a Jew, his text was preserved only by Christians!) to "Brother of Jesus" - adding then for good measure "who was called Christ."
According to William Benjamin Smith's skeptical classic Ecce Deus, 15 there are still some manuscripts of Josephus which contain the quoted passages, but the passages are absent in other manuscripts - showing that such interpolation had already been taking place before the time of Origen but did not ever succeed in supplanting the original text universally.
Pagan Authors Before considering the alleged witness of Pagan authors, it is worth noting some of the things that we should find recorded in their histories if the biblical stories are in fact true. One passage from Matthew should suffice to point out the significance of the silence of secular writers:
Matt. 27:45. Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour... Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. 51. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; 52 And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, 53 And came out of the graves after his resurrection [exposed for 3 days?], and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.
Wouldn't the Greeks and Romans have noticed - and recorded - such darkness occurring at a time of the month when a solar eclipse was impossible? Wouldn't someone have remembered - and recorded - the name of at least one of those "saints" who climbed out of the grave and went wandering downtown in the mall? If Jesus did anything of significance at all, wouldn't someone have noticed? If he didn't do anything significant, how could he have stimulated the formation of a new religion?
Considering now the supposed evidence of Tacitus, we find that this Roman historian is alleged in 120 CE to have written a passage in hisAnnals (Bk 15, Ch 44, containing the wild tale of Nero's persecution of Christians) saying "Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus..." G.A. Wells [p. 16] says of this passage:
[Tacitus wrote] at a time when Christians themselves had come to believe that Jesus had suffered under Pilate. There are three reasons for holding that Tacitus is here simply repeating what Christians had told him. First, he gives Pilate a title, procurator [without saying procurator of what! FRZ], which was current only from the second half of the first century. Had he consulted archives which recorded earlier events, he would surely have found Pilate there designated by his correct title, prefect. Second, Tacitus does not name the executed man Jesus, but uses the title Christ (Messiah) as if it were a proper name. But he could hardly have found in archives a statement such as "the Messiah was executed this morning." Third, hostile to Christianity as he was, he was surely glad to accept from Christians their own view that Christianity was of recent origin, since the Roman authorities were prepared to tolerate only ancient cults. (The Historical Evidence for Jesus; p.16).
There are further problems with the Tacitus story. Tacitus himself never again alludes to the Neronian persecution of Christians in any of his voluminous writings, and no other Pagan authors know anything of the outrage either. Most significant, however, is that ancient Christian apologists made no use of the story in their propaganda - an unthinkable omission by motivated partisans who were well-read in the works of Tacitus. Clement of Alexandria, who made a profession of collecting just such types of quotations, is ignorant of any Neronian persecution, and even Tertullian, who quotes a great deal from Tacitus, knows nothing of the story. According to Robert Taylor, the author of another freethought classic, the Diegesis (1834), the passage was not known before the fifteenth century, when Tacitus was first published at Venice by Johannes de Spire. Taylor believed de Spire himself to have been the forger. i
So much for the evidence purporting to prove that Jesus was an historical figure. We have not, of course, proved that Jesus did not exist. We have only showed that all evidence alleged to support such a claim is without substance. But of course, that is all we need to show. The burden of proof is always on the one who claims that something exists or that something once happened. We have no obligation to try to prove a universal negative. j
It will be argued by die-hard believers that all my arguments "from silence" prove nothing and they will quote the aphorism, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But is the negative evidence I have referred to the same as absence of evidence? It might be instructive to consider how a hypothetical but similar problem might be dealt with in the physical sciences.
Imagine that someone has claimed that the USA had carried out atomic weapons tests on a particular Caribbean island in 1943. Would the lack of reports of mushroom-cloud sightings at the time be evidence of absence, or absence of evidence? (Remember, the Caribbean during the war years was under intense surveillance by many different factions.) Would it be necessary to go to the island today to scan its surface for the radioactive contamination that would have to be there if nuclear explosions had taken place there? If indeed, we went there with our Geiger-counters and found no trace of radioactive contamination, would that be evidence of absence, or absence of evidence? In this case, what superficially looks like absence of evidence is really negative evidence, and thus legitimately could be construed as evidence of absence. Can the negative evidence adduced above concerning Jesus be very much less compelling?
It would be intellectually satisfying to learn just how it was that the Jesus character condensed out of the religious atmosphere of the first century. But scholars are at work on the problem. The publication of many examples of so-called wisdom literature, along with the materials from the Essene community at Qumran by the Dead Sea and the Gnostic literature from the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt, has given us a much more detailed picture of the communal psychopathologies which infested the Eastern Mediterranean world at the turn of the era. It is not unrealistic to expect that we will be able, before long, to reconstruct in reasonable detail the stages by which Jesus came to have a biography.
They Should Have Noticed
John E. Remsburg, in his classic book The Christ: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Evidence of His Existence (The Truth Seeker Company, NY, no date, pp. 24-25), lists the following writers who lived during the time, or within a century after the time, that Jesus is supposed to have lived:
Josephus
Philo-Judæus
Seneca
Pliny Elder
Arrian
Petronius
Dion Pruseus
Paterculus
Suetonius
Juvenal
Martial
Persius
Plutarch
Pliny Younger
Tacitus
Justus of Tiberius
Apollonius
Quintilian
Lucanus
Epictetus
Hermogones Silius Italicus
Statius
Ptolemy
Appian
Phlegon
Phædrus
Valerius Maximus
Lucian
Pausanias
Florus Lucius
Quintius Curtius
Aulus Gellius
Dio Chrysostom
Columella
Valerius Flaccus
Damis
Favorinus
Lysias
Pomponius Mela
Appion of Alexandria
Theon of Smyrna
According to Remsburg, "Enough of the writings of the authors named in the foregoing list remains to form a library. Yet in this mass of Jewish and Pagan literature, aside from two forged passages in the works of a Jewish author, and two disputed passages in the works of Roman writers, there is to be found no mention of Jesus Christ." Nor, we may add, do any of these authors make note of the Disciples or Apostles - increasing the embarrassment from the silence of history concerning the foundation of Christianity.
NOTES:
a It is sometimes claimed that the "miraculous" spread of Christianity in the early Roman Empire is evidence of an historical Jesus - that such a movement could not have gone so far so fast had there not been a real person at its inception. A similar argument could be made, however, in the case of the earlier rapid spread of Mithraism. I am unaware of any Christian apologists who would argue that this supports the idea of an historical Mithra!
b A profusely annotated paperback edition of Paine's book is available from American Atheist Press for twelve dollars. (Order No. 5575, click here)
c An apocalypse is a pseudonymous piece of writing characterized by exaggerated symbolic imagery, usually dealing with the expectation of an imminent cosmic cataclysm wherein the deity destroys the wicked and rewards the righteous. Apocalyptic writing abounds in hidden meanings and numerological puzzles. Parts of a number of Judæo-Christian apocalypses other than Revelation have been preserved, but only the latter (if one does not consider the Book of Daniel to be entirely apocalyptic) was accepted into the Christian canon - and it almost didn't make it, having been rejected by several early Church Fathers and Church Councils.
d The opposite theory, often referred to as "Griesbach's hypothesis," that the author of Mark had "epitomized" the two longer gospels, keeping only the "essential" details, is today almost entirely rejected by bible scholars. While the arguments to support this nearly universal rejection are too involved to even summarize here, it may be noted that shortening of miracle stories is completely out of keeping with the principles of religious development seen everywhere today. Stories invariably get "better" (i.e., longer) with the retelling, never shorter!
e There is compelling evidence indicating that these alleged sayings of Jesus were taken from another early document known as Q (German, for Quelle, 'source'). Like the so-called Gospel of Thomas found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, Q appears to have been a list of wisdom sayings that at some point became attributed to Jesus. We know that at least one of these sayings ("We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced…" Matt. 17:11; Luke 7:32) derives from Æsop's Fables, not from a sage of Galilee!
f I say "official gospels" because there are, in fact, many other gospels known. Once people started making them up, they sort of got stuck in over-drive. Only later on in Christian history did the number get pared back to four.
g Even the letters supposed to contain authentic writings of Saul/Paul have been shown by a number of scholars to be as composite as the gospels (e.g., L. Gordon Rylands, A Critical Analysis of the Four Chief Pauline Epistles: Romans, First and Second Corinthians, and Galatians, Watts & Co., London, 1929). According to such analyses, the core Pauline material in these letters is what might be termed a pre-Christian Gnostic product. This material is surrounded by often contradictory material added by proto-Catholic interpolators and redactors who succeeded thus in claiming a popular proto-Gnostic authority for the Church of Rome. In any case, the Greek text of these letters is heavy with terms such as Archon, Æon, etc. - jargon terms popular in the more astrologically conscious forms of Gnosticism. It would appear that the Christ of Paul is as astral a being as the Lamb of Revelation. Like the god of Revelation, the god of Paul communicates via visions, not physically, face-to-face.
h Originally, this would have been the title born by a member of a religious fraternity associated with the worship of Yahweh, who in Greek was always referred to as kurios ('Lord'). This was carried over into primitive Christianity, where we know from I Cor. 9:5 that there existed a governing class coordinate with apostles that was called "Brothers of the Lord." Misunderstanding of the original meaning of the title led to the belief that Jesus had siblings - an error that can be found already in the earliest of the canonical gospels.
Interestingly, the embarrassing passages in the gospels where Jesus is rude to his mother and brethren would seem to derive from a period where a political struggle had developed between apostolically governed sects and those governed by "Brethren of the Lord," who claimed authority now by virtue of an alleged blood relationship to Jesus - who had by then supplanted Yahweh as "Lord." The apostolic politics of the gospel writers could not resist putting down the Brethren Party by having Jesus disregard his own family. If Jesus didn't pay serious attention to his own family, the argument would go, why should anyone pay attention to their descendants? This is the only plausible explanation for the presence of such passages as John 2:4 ("Woman, what have I to do with thee?") or Mark 3:33 ("Who is my mother, or my brethren?).
Latinists often dispute the possibility of the passage being a forgery on the grounds that Tacitus' distinctive Latin style so perfectly permeates the entire passage. But it should be noted that the more distinctive a style might be, the easier it can be imitated. Then too, there is a lapse from normal Tacitean usage elsewhere in the disputed passage. In describing the early Christians as being haters "of the human race" (humani generis), the passage reverses the word order of normal Tacitean usage. In all other cases, Tacitus has generis humani.
j Curiously, in the present case, it would seem that such proof is in fact possible. Since Jesus is frequently referred to as "Jesus of Nazareth," it is interesting to learn that the town now called Nazareth did not exist in the first centuries BCE and CE. Exhaustive archaeological studies have been done by Franciscans to prove the cave they possess was once the home of Jesus' family. But actually they have shown the site to have been a necropolis - a city of the dead - during the first century CE. (Naturally, the Franciscans cannot agree!) With no Nazareth other than a cemetery existing at the time, how could there have been a Jesus of Nazareth? Without an Oz, could there have been a Wizard of Oz?
REFERENCES
1. Illustrated in Robin Seager, Tiberius, Eyre Methuen, London, 1972. For more detailed numismatic documentation of Tiberius, see also C. H. V. Sutherland, Roman History and Coinage 44 BC-AD 69, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987; by the same author, Coinage in Roman Imperial Policy 31 B.C.-A.D. 68, Sanford J. Durst Numismatic Publications, NY, 1978.2. Illustrated in Seager, op. cit.
3. Illustrated in Seager, op. cit.
4. Examined in Sutherland, 1987, op. cit. See also Victor Ehrenberg and A. H. M. Jones, Documents Illustrating the Reigns of Augustus & Tiberius, 2nd Edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955.
5. See Inscriptiones Latinæ Selectæ, edidit Hermannus Dessau, reprinted in 4 vols. by Ares Publishers Inc., Chicago, 1979.
6. Illustrated in Seager, op. cit.
7. See Acta Divi Augusti, Regia Academia Italica, Rome, 1945.
8. In her Anchor Bible Volume 38, Revelation (Doubleday, Garden City, NJ, 1975), J. Massyngberde Ford proposed that the core of Revelation was material written by Jewish followers of John the Baptist. Even if the Baptist had been an historical figure (which is extremely doubtful), this still would make Revelation in essence a pre-Christian, Jewish apocalypse.
9. For more astrological aspects of Revelation, see Bruce J. Malina, On The Genre And Message Of Revelation: Star Visions and Sky Journeys, Hendrickson, Peabody, MA, 1995.
10. George A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1982, p. 13.
11. L. Gordon Rylands, Did Jesus Ever Live?, Watts & Co., London, 1929, p. 20.
12. This so-called Testimonium Flavianum appears in Bk 18 Ch 3 §3 of Josephus: Jewish Antiquities Books XVIII-XIX, IX, translated by L. H. Feldman, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981, pp. 48-51.
13. J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Græca, Tomus CIII. Photius Constantinopolitanus Patriarcha, Garnier Fratres, Paris, 1900, Cod. 47, 76, and 238.
14. Rylands, op. cit., p. 14.
15. William Benjamin Smith, Ecce Deus: Studies Of Primitive Christianity, Watts & Co., London, 1912, p. 235.
Cpt Kaos- Posts : 40
Join date : 2010-01-29
Re: Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
Cpt Kaos Mon Feb 01, 2010 5:20 am
Figure 1. As the earth's axis slowly shifts its orientation in space, it traces out the surface of a double cone in space. Because of the axial wandering, the points where the celestial equator (the projection of the earth's equator onto the celestial sphere) intersects the ecliptic (the apparent path made by the sun against the background of "fixed stars") move also, shifting clockwise around the ecliptic as seen by the northern hemisphere. It takes 25,800 years for the points of the intersection to move all the way around the ecliptic.
How Jesus Got a Life
The Probing Mind
by Frank R. Zindler
March 1992, Revised October, 1999
NAPOLEON: Monsieur Laplace! I have read with great interest your Traité de mécanique céleste - all five volumes - but nowhere have I found any mention of the Good Lord.
LAPLACE: Sire, I have had no need of that hypothesis.
Our world is an unstable place. Nations rise, and governments topple. Unbalanced people the world around torture and kill each other for the sake of religion or other groundless causes. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and wars periodically scourge our globe. Continents drift about and collide with each other, and oceans form and disappear. Even planet Earth itself has the wobblies. As it spins on its axis, the earth is not stable. Like the center peg of a toy top, the axis of the spinning earth slowly wobbles in a circle, tracing out the surface of a double cone in space [see Figure 1, above].
This motion of the earth's axis is called precession, and it is, I believe, a major component of the causes long ago that led to the creation of Christianity. The character now known as Christ, or Jesus, was not born of a virgin; rather, it was the product of an unstably rotating earth. If the earth's axis did not precess, the Christ character would never have been invented. Christianity as we know it would not exist.
In my forthcoming book, Inventing Jesus, I hope to demonstrate exhaustively the extraordinary chain of causes and effects which led from a wobbling earth to a divine biography - the so-called "Life of Christ." In this brief article, of course, I can do little more than state and explain the major points of this thesis and give a sampling of the evidence I have found to support it.
I. "Jesus Christ" never existed as an historical figure.
It is a curious fact that the oldest components of the so-called New Testament, the letters believed to have been written by one Saul/Paul, know almost nothing of any Jesus biography. Neither Bethlehem nor Nazareth are mentioned in these charter documents of the Christian religion. Only in the much later Book of Acts is it claimed that Saul (Paul) had an interview with "Jesus of Nazareth." [1] The later the document, the greater the detail of the Jesus story presented.
There is no convincing evidence to make one suppose that any of the surviving "gospels" were written by eyewitnesses. Indeed, study of the gospels shows quite conclusively that they were not. For example, the authors of the gospels of Matthew and Luke incorporate nearly the entire Greek text of the gospel of Mark, adding sayings taken from yet another document (the so-called "Q-Document"), and generally make the miracles recounted by Mark even more miraculous. Had Matthew and Luke been eyewitnesses, they would have written their own accounts, without recourse to plagiarism.
Mark's gospel, the oldest of the official set of four, contains errors of geography [2] and custom [3] that would not have been made by an eyewitness. John's gospel, the latest of the set, is both too late and too ethereal to be taken as a biographical account at all - eyewitness or otherwise. There is nothing about the gospels to make one take them seriously from a biographic point of view: there is no good reason to think them other than ancient examples of the art of fiction.
If the historicity of Jesus cannot be supported by the New Testament writings, what about extrabiblical sources? Did any Greek or Roman or Jewish historians observe his career and write about it? Not one.
Although Josephus, [4] Tacitus, [5] Suetonius, [6] and other ancient authors are often cited as evidence for an historical Jesus, it is clear that their accounts (even if they could be proven authentic) are derivative, not original. Josephus, the oldest of these historians, was born at least five years after the date of the alleged crucifixion! There are no eyewitnesses. Moreover, the ancient non-Christian accounts of Jesus all were written at a time when Christianity already was a thriving delirium, and our pagan authors can be taken only as being witnesses of the state to which Christian traditions had evolved in their times, not as witnesses of an historical Jesus of Nazareth.
There is no credible evidence indicating Jesus ever lived. This fact is, of course, inadequate to prove he did not live. Even so, although it is logically impossible to prove a universal negative, it is possible to show that there is no need to hypothesize any historical Jesus. The Christ biography can be accounted for on purely literary, astrological, and comparative mythological grounds. The logical principle known as Occam's Razor tells us that basic assumptions should not be multiplied beyond necessity. For practical purposes, showing that an historical Jesus is an unnecessary assumption is just as good as proving that he never existed.
II. Christianity began as a mystery religion.
While modern Christianity trumpets its message openly and to all, with little regard for those uninterested in hearing its "good news," it was not so in the beginning. A careful reading of the Pauline epistles and the gospels (supplemented by modern documentary discoveries) shows that Christianity began as a mystery cult, replete with initiations, secrets, and multiple levels of indoctrination.
The word mystery (Greek, : 'what is known only to the initiated') occurs twenty-seven times in the official New Testament, and almost all of these occurrences demonstrate the existence of a secret infrastructure in the nascent cult.
And the disciples came, and said unto him, "Why speakest thou unto them in parables?' He answered and said unto them, 'Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given." [Matt. 13:10-11]
The dangling verses now customarily printed at the end of the Epistle to the Romans (but placed elsewhere in various ancient manuscripts) tell of "that divine secret () kept in silence for long ages but now disclosed…" [New English Bible]
Paul the mystagogue is very evident in passages such as I Cor. 2:6ff:
Now we are speaking a wisdom among those who are mature [i.e., ready to be initiated], that is, a wisdom which does not belong to this age, nor the rulers of this age [7] who are about to pass away; but we are speaking God's wisdom in a mystery, wisdom which has been hidden and which God predetermined before the ages to contribute to our glory. None of this world's rulers knew this wisdom… But as it has been written, Things that no eye has seen and no ear heard and that have not occurred to human mind, things that God has prepared for those who love him- God indeed revealed them to us through the Spirit… [8]
I Cor. 4:1 speaks of "stewards of the mysteries of God."
Paul the would-be initiator of inductees into the mysteries peeks out at us also from the third chapter of I Corinthians. "I could not speak to you as I should speak to people who have the Spirit," he tells his not-fully-pliant initiates. "I had to deal with you on the merely natural plane, as infants in Christ. And so I gave you milk to drink, instead of solid food, for which you were not yet ready. Indeed, you are still not ready for it, for you are still on the merely natural plane." [9] Paul's Corinthians were still being fed the superficial story; they were not yet ready to be told the hidden meanings of things, perhaps the full truth concerning the symbolic, not physical, nature of "Christ."
That there was indeed a secret gospel and an initiation into the mysteries of the religion now known as Christianity is dramatically attested by the "Secret Gospel of Mark," found in a manuscript discovered by Morton Smith in 1958, in the Monastery of Mar Saba southeast of Jerusalem. The Greek text found by Smith appears originally to have been composed at the end of the second century by Clement of Alexandria. [10] Clement is replying to one Theodore who has been upset by claims that there was a secret gospel of Mark which differed from the canonic (official) version. Clement tells him that indeed there is a secret gospel used by the Alexandrian church for initiation into the Christian mysteries. He gives several examples of material present in the secret gospel but absent in the canonic one. One of the more interesting "secrets" revealed by Clement tells us:
…Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. [11]
III. Christianity was derived as much from Mithraism as from Judaism. Understanding the origin of Mithraism is crucial to understanding the origin of Christianity.
The mystery religion to which early Christianity seems most closely related is Mithraism. Mithra (also spelled Mithras), a Graeco-Persian invention, was born of a virgin on the winter solstice - frequently December 25th in the Julian calendar. Being a solar deity, Mithra was worshipped on Sundays; after Mithra had become amalgamated with Helios, he was depicted with a halo, nimbus, or glory around his head. In some cases it has been difficult to tell if ancient images were intended as depictions of Mithra or Jesus. The leader of the cult was called a pope (papa) and he ruled from a "mithraeum" on the Vatican Hill in Rome. A prominent iconographic feature in Mithraism was a large key, needed to unlock the celestial gates through which souls of the deceased were believed to pass. It would appear that the "keys of the Kingdom" held by the popes as successors to "St. Peter" derive from Mithra, not from a Palestinian messiah. The Mithraic priests wore miters, special headdresses from which the Christian bishop's hat was derived. (The Latin name for this Phrygian/Persian hat was mitra - which also was an acceptable Latin spelling for Mithra!) The Mithraists consumed a sacred meal (Myazda) which was completely analogous to the Catholic Eucharistic service (Missa, or Mass). Like the Christians, they celebrated the atoning death of a savior who was resurrected on a Sunday. A major center of Mithraic philosophy was at Tarsus - St. Paul's hometown - in what now is Southeast Turkey.
IV. Mithraism and Christianity have their origins in astrology and astronomy.
In 128 B.C.E. the Greek astronomer Hipparchus of Rhodes discovered the precession of the equinoxes [see Figure 2]. Because the earth's axis is tilted approximately 23.5 degrees away from a line perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun, the sun appears from the northern hemisphere to follow a path in the sky (the ecliptic) which for six months of the year is above the celestial equator and below it for six months. (The celestial equator marks the points on the "celestial sphere" which are directly overhead as seen by a person living on the earth's equator.) Twice a year, as the sun appears to move along its ecliptic path, it crosses the celestial equator. When the sun is at these points - the so-called vernal (spring) and autumnal equinoxes - the durations of day and night are equal.
Figure 2. Views from the earth, the universe of stars seemed to the ancients to be attached to the great "celestial sphere" which had the eart as its center. The "celestial equator" is the projection of the earth's equator upon the inside of the sphere. The circle of the ecliptic is the path which the sun appears to follow against the background of "fixed stars." The zodiac is a belt of sky, extending 9o above and below the ecliptic, which can be divided into twelve zones of equal size, each characterized by the presence of a particularly prominent constellation. The moon and visible planets all eppear to move within the confines of the zodiacal belt. The equinoctial points are two places where the equator intersects the ecliptic, at an angle of approximately 23.5o. Around 128 B.C.E., Hipparchus of Rhodes discovered that the position of the equinoxes was not constant. He determined that the vernal (spring) equinox had once been in the constellation Taurus but had, by his day, moved ("precessed") almost all the way through the constellation of Aries. At the beginning of the Christian era, the vernal equinox moved into Pisces.
Because the earth wobbles as it spins on its axis, the north and south poles of its axis do not always point to the same spots on the celestial sphere. As a consequence, the equinoctial points become displaced with respect to the so-called fixed stars - including the stars forming the twelve zodiacal constellations. When Hipparchus discovered that the vernal equinox had been displaced from Taurus into Aries, he or some of his disciples felt that they had detected the labor of a hitherto unknown god. (Many Greeks felt that each natural phenomenon or physical force was actually the working of a particular god.) For astrological reasons, this new god was identified with the ancient Persian god Mithra. The mystery religion known as Mithraism thus was born. [12] Mithra was installed as a Time-Lord or chronocrat, the god who would rule over the Age or Aeon of Aries.
By the time Hipparchus and his Stoic colleagues understood that the vernal equinox had moved from Taurus into Aries, the equinox was almost out of Aries as well. Very soon it would move into Pisces, and a new Time-Lord would be needed. Just as movement of the equinox out of Taurus had been symbolized as the sacrifice of a bull [13], so too, the movement out of Aries would come to be symbolized by the sacrifice of a lamb. The first symbol of the new-age religion, the religion reigning in the age of Pisces, significantly, would be the fish. [14] (The cross, apparently, was originally the Greek letter chi (c), which reminds us of the intersection of the celestial equator with the ecliptic at an acute angle.) It is not surprising that in the oldest epitaphs and inscriptions it is actually two fish that were used to symbolize the New-Age cult - making the symbol of Christianity identical to the astrological symbol for Pisces, in obedience to the fact that Pisces is plural: the fishes.
V. The Magi mentioned in the second chapter of Matthew's gospel were Mithraic astrologer-priests, probably scouts looking for the new Time-Lord who was to rule the "new age" of Pisces.
The Mithraic clergy involved actively in the astrology of the cult were known as Magi (Greek magoi), and are depicted as wearing Phrygian (pseudo-Persian) caps such as Mithra is supposed to have worn. It is my thesis that some of these Magi, realizing that the age of Mithra was drawing to a close (the equinox would move into Pisces some time during the first century C.E.), would have left their cult centers in Phrygia and Cilicia, in what is now East and Southeast Turkey, from cities such as Tarsus to go to Palestine to see if they could locate not just the King of the Jews, but the new Time-Lord, the ruler of the new age of Pisces. (Pisces was considered to have especial connections with the Jews.) It is significant, I believe, that early depictions of the Magi's visitation of the Christ Child (including one in a church at Bethlehem) showed them wearing Phrygian (Mithraic) caps.
While it is clear that the story of the Magian visitation found at the beginning of the second chapter of Matthew's gospel is more fairy tale than history (how does one follow a star?), it seems there is a kernel of historicity in it. I believe, however, that the Greek text has been misunderstood with regard to the point of origin of the Magi and just where they were when they saw the star that triggered their trip. The King James Version tells us of "wise men from the east," who "have seen his star in the east." Modern translations tend to have the wise men see "his star at its rising." The Greek word for 'east' used in these two passages is , and it can indeed refer to the east or to the rising of a heavenly body. But it can also be the name of a place - Anatolia. Anatolia could signify either the entire peninsula of Asia Minor (i.e., the area now called Turkey), or a particular province of Phrygia. It thus appears that Matt. 2:1-2 should actually read:
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came Magi from Anatolia to Jerusalem,
Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for in Anatolia we have seen his star, and are come to worship him.
This Palestinian visit from the Magi could have been the catalyst that triggered various Jewish groups - and perhaps some non-Jewish groups - into thinking that the messiah whom they had been awaiting had already come and had not been noticed. Lest this seem too far-fetched, it should be noted that even in our own sophisticated age notices of Christ's "second coming" are of regular occurrence. It is not irrational to suppose that somewhere right now there is a small cult which believes that Jesus is back on earth. [15]
It is clear that the people who wrote the New Testament believed in reincarnation and "redivivus appearances" of such characters as Elijah. This would have made it fairly easy for a Magian visit to convince people that their messiah had already appeared. A particularly illustrative example is found in Matthew's gospel: [16]
Jesus... asked his disciples, saying: "Who do men say that the Son of Man is?"
And they said, "Some say John the Baptist; some, Elijah; and others, Jeremiah, or one of the Seers."
He says to them: "But who do you say that I am?"
And Simon Peter, answering, said: "Thou art the Anointed, the Son of the Living God!"
And his disciples put a question to him, saying: "Why then do the scribes say 'Elijah must come first'?"
Now, Jesus answered and said to them: "Elijah indeed comes first, and will restore all things. Now, I say to you, Elijah has come already, and they did not recognize him, but have done him as many injuries as they could. Thus also the Son of Man is destined to suffer by them."
Then his disciples understood that he said this to them about John the Baptist.
Similar cases of "events" of cosmic significance occurring unnoticed are found in the gospels of Thomas [17] and Luke:
Gos. Thom. 51. His disciples said to him, "When will the repose of the dead come about, and when will the new world come?" He said to them, "What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it."
Gos. Thom. 52. His disciples said to him, "Twenty-four prophets spoke in Israel, and all of them spoke of you." He said to them, "You have omitted the one living in your presence, and have spoken only of the dead.
Lk. 17:20-21. Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, he answered them, "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, 'Lo, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you."
VI. The Jews were ready for the Magi when they came to visit.
The Jews during the last two centuries B.C.E. were awaiting a messiah, and were making checklists of passages from the OT which they fancied described the who, where, why, and how of the person who would be their messiah. The actual texts from the OT were often taken completely out of context, distorted, and misquoted, and there was little respect for the tenses of verbs. (A particularly egregious example of such scripture-twisting methodology can be seen in the gospel of Matthew.)
No written works of Mithraism are known, since like other mystery cults, it centered around a secret known only to persons initiated into its rits. Most of our knowledge about it is derived from the iconography of its temples. A Central element in them was the depiction of Mithra sacrificing a wild bull (Taurus).
The messianic check-lists that different groups had been keeping would have been reinterpreted after the visit of the Magi: instead of telling what the messiah would do, they came to be interpreted as a record of what he had done. News that the messiah had already come would spread rapidly. The fact that no one had noticed the first coming was the reason the myth of the second coming had to be invented. Nothing actually had been accomplished by the first coming - except on paper!
An example of such a checklist has been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scrolls scholar Theodor Gaster tells us about
…a catena of five Scriptural passages attesting the advent of the Future Prophet and the Anointed King and the final discomfiture of the impious. The first four are taken from the Pentateuch, and include an excerpt from the oracles of Balaam. The fifth is an interpretation of a verse from the Book of Joshua. An interesting feature of this document… is that precisely the same passages of the Pentateuch are used by the Samaritans as the stock testimonial to the coming of the Taheb, or future 'Restorer.' They evidently constituted a standard set of such quotations, of the type that scholars have long supposed to have been in the hands of New Testament writers when they cited passages of the Hebrew Bible supposedly confirmed by incidents in the life and career of Jesus. [18]
VII. Gnosticism helped to reinterpret the checklists, and other pre-Christian literary creations, as documents pertaining to the life of the unnoticed messiah.
Before the so-called New Testament was completed, the leaders of the primitive Christian Church had to do battle with a "heresy" called gnosticism. The Gnostics were persons who believed in gnosis, a type of introspective knowledge. According to Kurt Rudolph, a leading authority on Gnosticism, gnosis is "knowledge given by revelation, which has been made available only to the elect who are capable of receiving it, and therefore has an esoteric character." [19] It is now known that gnosticism is older than Christianity, and an argument can be made that Christianity is a Gnostic heresy, rather than the other way around as traditionally taught.
Through "revelation" Gnostics and others could decide not only that checklists should be reinterpreted, but even that materials completely unrelated to Christianity were actually filled with hidden knowledge of Christian significance. This is extremely important from a psychiatric point of view, for it allowed the authors of the messianic biographies to feel guiltless of fraud, despite the fact that there was little if any truth in their products. All that was needed was for some person, perhaps one who had fasted too long, to have a very strong feeling - possibly the result of a dream, autosuggestion, or even hallucination - that knowledge was being communicated to him from another world. Thereafter, even a list of gardening tools could be transmogrified into a religious document of great profundity.
Two early symbols of Christianity were the lamb and the tropos cross, as seen on this sixth-century sarcophagus.
The Gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt provides some examples of how non-Christian materials could have been appropriated for Christian purposes. The so-called "Apocalypse of Adam," a non-Christian phantasy composed of Jewish elements, follows the same general outline and contains many of the same components as does the birth narrative found in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. It is clear that both stories are derived from a common mythological source - a source that Gnostic principles allowed to be adapted for Christian use by "St. John the Revelator."
The "smoking gun" of revelation-in-the-making also has been found at Nag Hammadi, and it is most instructive for anyone wishing to understand how non-Christian materials could have been transmuted into the documents now found in the New Testament. James M. Robinson, the editor of the Nag Hammadi materials published in English, tells us that
The Nag Hammadi library even presents one instance of the Christianizing process taking place almost before one's eyes. The non-Christian philosophic treatise Eugnostos the Blessed is cut up somewhat arbitrarily into separate speeches, which are then put on Jesus' tongue, in answer to questions (which sometimes do not quite fit the answers) that the disciples address to him during a resurrection appearance. The result is a separate tractate entitled The Sophia of Jesus Christ. Both forms of the text occur side by side in Codex III. [20]
VIII. Jesus had to get his names before he could get his lives.
Before Jesus could be given a biography, he had to receive a name. Actually, he received several names and, as we shall see, all of his names were really titles. Thus, the name Jesus of Nazareth originally was not a name at all, but rather a title meaning (The) Savior, (The) Branch. In Hebrew this would have been Yeshua‘ Netser. The word Yeshua‘ means 'savior,' and Netser means 'sprout,' 'shoot,' or 'branch' - a reference to Isaiah 11:1, which was thought to predict a messiah (lit., 'anointed one') of the line of Jesse (King David's father): "And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots…"
While this reference to a branch from Jesse will doubtless seem obscure to modern readers, it would not have been obscure to ancient Jews such as those who composed the Dead Sea Scrolls (and wrote a commentary on Isaiah 11:1); nor would it have been obscure to the early Christians. According to the church father Epiphanius, who was born on Cyprus in 367 C.E. and wrote a treatise against "heretics," the Christians originally were called Jessaeans, precisely because of the messianic tie to Jesse. [21]
Although for speakers of Hebrew and its close cousin Aramaic the meaning and prophetic significance of the title The Savior, The Branch would have been clear, after it had been wrestled into Greek as or , its titular significance must soon have been forgotten. The part came to be a simple name ( in Latin) of the Tom, Dick, or Harry sort. The part, however, was misperceived as being derived from the name of a place - the imaginary village of Nazareth - much as the word Parisian can be derived from Paris.
And so, Yeshua‘ Netser came to be Jesus of Nazareth - a name of the Jimmy-the-Greek sort, a name thought to contain information on a person's place of origin. (There may have been an intermediate Wizard-of-Oz period, combining a title with a place name: The Savior of Nazareth.)
At the turn of the era, there was no place called Nazareth, and it is not entirely certain that the place now called by that name was inhabited during the period in question. The name appears neither in the Old Testament nor in the large "intertestamental" literature. Nor is it found in Josephus, despite the fact that he names several dozen towns in Galilee - a place where he conducted military maneuvers. As far as I can tell, the place presently called Nazareth received its name from an imaginative Jessaean some time at the end of the second century or early third century - most likely after Hadrian expelled the Jews from Jerusalem in 135 CE. At the turn of the era, however, Nazareth was as mythical as the Mary, Joseph, and Jesus family that was supposed to have lived there. [21B]
It is interesting to note that archaeological excavations of the oldest Jewish-Christian churches in that town have revealed branches as a prominent decorative motif (shades of netser!) as well as zodiacs - some even surrounding the chi-rho symbol [22] of Christ, exactly as zodiacs have been found surrounding images of Mithra. Further, the ruins of the baptistries bear evidence that initiation rites in early Christianity were every bit as interesting as those in Mormonism before the recent bowdlerization.
Like Jesus of Nazareth, the "name" Jesus Christ also began as two titles. As we have seen, the Jesus part of the name really is the title Savior. But what of Christ? The Greek word christos means 'anointed,' and is the equivalent of the Hebrew word meshiah. Thus, Christ and Messiah are equivalent terms, both referring to the peculiar Israelite practice of anointing their kings and high priests with oil. (The Greeks oiled their athletes instead.)
IX. Jesus got his lives from other people and other literatures.
There are at least five different Jesuses described in the New Testament: the one which the Apostle Paul "met" during an epileptic seizure on the road to Damascus, and the four palpably different messiahs chronicled in the canonic gospels. The biographic dimensions of the Pauline messiah are so meager that little need be said about him. But what of the tales told by the four evangelists?
Two fish (symbolic of the Age of Pisces) with an anchor shaped like a cross are seen in detail from an early fourth-century tombstone. Early in the history of Christianity, the fish also was connected with baptism and served as a Greek acrostic for the phrase "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior."
Much of the biographic material found in the New Testament is merely a reworking of material taken from the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint. A considerable part of the narrative structure of the gospel of Matthew (and also of Mark, his source) can be thought of as a fleshing out and adaptation of a messianic checklist such as I have hypothesized would have formed the nucleus for a messianic biography. Over and over again, events and circumstances both trivial and important are recounted by Matthew and followed by the refrain, "…that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets…" While this refrain does not appear in Mark's narrative, it seems clear that the story skeleton used by Mark had been constructed from a checklist of Old Testament "prophecies" that would have to be fulfilled by the messiah.
The many "sayings of Jesus" (logia) recounted in the gospels would, if they could convincingly be derived from a single personality or source, be strong evidence that an historical Jesus once existed. But such is not the case. A group of prominent Bible scholars, styling themselves "The Jesus Seminar" and sponsored by the Westar Institute in Sonoma, California, recently completed its six-year analysis of all the logia and reported that at least eighty percent of the sayings were not authentic! That is to say, they were able to find explanations for their composition which did not require an historical Jesus. [23] And what of the other twenty percent? All we can say is that their true origins are unknown. It has not been proven that they come from a man called Jesus.
To trace all the elements of the Jesus biographies to their sources will require a very large book. Here we can give only a few examples of how some material became incorporated into the braid of literature that has come to be known as "The Life of Christ."
The healing miracles probably derive from the testimonies given by persons who thought themselves to have been cured by the Greek god Asklepios (Asclepius in Latin). The great venom with which the early church fathers attacked the cult of this pagan god indicates a close rivalry between the two cults and a certain embarrassment among Christians repeatedly being told that Asklepios had already done all of Jesus' tricks and had done them better.
Early in the development of the biographies, "Jesus" became identified with the "Son of Man" character who figures so importantly in late Old Testament books and apocryphal writings, such as the Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch. This allowed for large-scale accretion of literary material. It is interesting to note that the Son-of-Man literature underwent considerable evolution from its beginning up to its amalgamation with the Christ character. Originally, in Hebrew and Aramaic, the phrase son of man simply signified a human being - i.e., not some other species of animal. Later, it came to symbolize Israel the nation. Much prophetic literature referring to the Son of Man is actually referring to Israel the nation. (Israel was, after all, a nation of human beings; the goyim or 'nations' - gentiles - were not considered fully human.) Then, the term was individualized once again and identified with the awaited messiah. Finally, it was grafted - with all its accumulated literature and associations - onto the Jesus vita.
Some of the Jesus biography was derived from pre-Christian gnosticism, and some material was incorporated from Hellenic-Jewish wisdom literature. Some items, such as the doctrine of the logos ("the Word") came from the Stoic philosophers. The saying "To give is more blessed than to receive" [Acts 20:35] is actually an ancient Greek aphorism. [24] The saying in Matt. 11:17, "We have piped unto you and ye have not danced," derives from one of Aesop's fables! [25] The saying that "wheresoever the carcass is, there the eagles will be gathered together" [Matt. 24:28 = Luke 17:37] is attested by a number of Greek (Lucian [26], Aelianus [27]) and Latin (Seneca [28], Martial [29], and Lucan [30]) antecedents. [31]
As a final illustration of how easy it was to put words into Jesus' mouth, we may consider a passage in Saul/Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. In the ninth verse of the second chapter, he quotes a yet unidentified "scripture":
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him."
In the gospel of Thomas (actually a collection of sayings or logia, resembling the Q-Document from which Matthew and Luke drew supposed sayings of Jesus), this is reworked as logion number 17 and attributed to Jesus himself:
"I shall give you what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard, and what no hand has touched, and what has never occurred to the human mind." [32]
The same saying was adapted by the author of the Q-Document and found its way into the official New Testament as Matt. 13:16-7 and Luke 10:23-4:
"Blessed are the eyes that see what you see and the ears that hear what you hear… many prophets and righteous men have desired to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it." [Material in italics found only in Matthew's version] [33]
It yet remains to go through the entire New Testament to extract all the materials supposedly containing information of the life of Christ and to trace them to their sources. It remains also to sort out which of the characters in that book are historical and which are fictional. The twelve disciples, for example, appear to be zodiacal figures, but John the Baptist may have been real. St. Paul almost certainly was real, but St. Peter probably was not. The Virgin Mary and Joseph were invented for their roles, but Pontius Pilate was not.
Much work remains to be done to put the chroniclers of Christ out of business, although a surprising amount of it was done already a century or more ago, but now is lost or difficult to retrieve. This fact has prompted the popular writers Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln to comment:
Each contribution in the field of biblical research is like a footprint in sand. Each is covered almost immediately and, so far as the general public is concerned, left virtually without trace. Each must constantly be made anew, only to be covered again. [34]
It is time now for the vacuum that is Christ, not the footprints of scholars, to be filled in with sand. It is past the time when mythical beings should be taken seriously. The time has arrived for biblical scholars to stand upon the same solid foundation on which the Marquis de Laplace stood when questioned by the Emperor of France. When questioned about the historical Jesus, all should be able to reply: "I have had no need of that hypothesis."
NOTES:
[1] This is in Acts 22: 7ff, which alleges to be a first-person account of Saul's conversion: "Then I heard a voice saying to me, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' I answered, 'Tell me, Lord, who you are.' 'I am Jesus of Nazareth,' he said, 'whom you are persecuting.' My companions saw the light, but did not hear the voice that spoke to me…" [New English Bible]
A contradictory, third-person account of Saul's conversion can be found in Acts 9: 4ff: "He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' "Tell me, Lord,' he said, 'who you are.' The voice answered, 'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting… Meanwhile the men who were travelling with him stood speechless; they heard the voice but could see no one…" [New English Bible]
It would appear that the version in Chapter 9 was taken from a document older than that from which the Chapter 22 account was derived. The Nazareth tradition had not yet been invented when the Chapter 9 story was put in writing.
[2] An example of Mark's ignorance of Palestinian geography is found in the story he recounts about Jesus traveling from Tyre on the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, thirty miles inland. According to Mark 7:31, Jesus and his gang went by way of Sidon, twenty miles north of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast! Since to Sidon and back would be forty miles, this means that Mark's messiah walked seventy miles when he could have walked only thirty. Although Mark seems unaware of this problem, the translators of the King James Version seem to have understood it quite well - adroitly obfuscating their translation accordingly: "Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon…"
[3] Mark 10:12 tells us that a wife, if she divorces her husband and marries another, is guilty of adultery. While this was possible in some pagan societies, it was not an option open to Israelite women.
[4] Josephus ben Matthias (ca. C.E. 37 - ca. 100), Jewish Historian and general.
[5] Cornelius Tacitus (ca. C.E. 56 - ca. 120), Roman orator, historian and politician.
[6] Gaius Suetonius Tranquilus (ca. C.E. 69 - ca. 122), Roman biographer and historian.
[7] It is difficult not to see this as a reference to the end of the 2150-year-long astrological Age of Aries, over which Mithra had reigned as 'Time-Lord' or chronocrat. Paul was writing almost exactly at the time the Age of Pisces was beginning, with Jesus as the new Time-Lord. The Greek for 'the rulers of this age' is . This fairly reverberates with both astrological and Gnostic mysteries. In gnosticism, the archons clearly are rulers of astrological derivation, and the æons are both rulers and periods of time. It is suggestive also, that the church father Origen, in commenting on this passage in Corinthians alludes to "the astrology of the Chaldeans and Indians" and "Magi" - Mithraic or Zoroastrian astrologers [Origen De Principiis, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. IV, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI, 1982, pp. 335-6.]
[8] William F. Orr, and James Arthur Walther, The Anchor Bible: I Corinthians, Doubleday & Co., Inc., Garden City, NY, 1976, pp. 153-4.
[9] I Cor. 3:1-3, New English Bible.
[10] Titus Flavius Clemens (ca. C.E. 150 - ca. 211), Prominent early church father.
[11] Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1973, p. 447.
[12] For this modern understanding of the late and astrological origin of the Mithraic religion, I am heavily dependent upon the writing of David Ulansey, especially his little book The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World, Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford 1989.
[13] A glance at Figure 2 will show that the constellation Perseus is located above the constellation Taurus. Mythologically, Perseus became amalgamated with Mithra, and the physical ascendance of Perseus over Taurus suggested that Mithra-Perseus had killed the bull.
[14] Very early in the history of Christianity, the fish symbol received a non-astrological interpretation by means of a clever acrostic. The Greek word for fish, ICHTHUS, can be formed from the first letters of each word in the motto - 'Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior.'
[15] On August 6, 1991, the supermarket tabloid National Examiner carried a front-page notice: "Vatican Report. Jesus may be back on earth." The article itself, on page nine, reported that "Stunned scientists and religious leaders believe Jesus Christ has returned to Earth!" There was some uncertainty, however, if the second coming had come about in a biblical manner or whether Christ had been cloned scientifically from blood spots in the Shroud of Turin. Considering the large numbers of people who read this paper, it is all but certain that there are some people who will believe its extraordinary tales.
[16] Matt. 16:13-16; 17:10-13. My translation.
[17] Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development, Trinity Press International, Philadelphia, 1990, pp. 124-5.
[18] Theodor H. Gaster, The Dead Sea Scriptures, Third Revised and Enlarged Edition, Anchor Books/Doubleday , Garden City, New York, 1976, p. 393.
[19] Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1985, p. 55.
[20] James M. Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library, Third, Completely Revised Edition, Harper, San Francisco, 1988, pp. 8-9.
[21] J.-P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, etc., Series Graeca Prior, Patrologiae Graecae Tomus XLI, S. Epiphanius Constantiensis in Cypro Episcopus, Adversus Haereses, Paris, 1863, columns 389-390.
[21B] Despite the excavations of the Franciscan B. Bagatti [Excavations in Nazareth, translated by F. Hoade, Franciscan Printing Press, Jerusalem, 1969] no remains of any building datable to the first centuries BCE or CE have ever been found at present-day Nazareth, and the artifacts dated by Bagatti to "the Roman Period" are probably all later than first century CE. Moreover, most if not all of the artifacts appear to be funerary goods used in burials of residents of Japha (Japhia), a town a mile or so away which was known to Josephus.
The first inscriptional mention of the place-name Nazareth is thought to be on a fragment of marble found at the site of ancient Caesarea in 1962. ["A List of Priestly Courses from Caesarea," M. Avi-Yonah, Israel Exploration Journal, 12:137-9] The synagogue in which the marble fragment was found appears to date from the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century CE [The Archeology of the New Testament, Jack Finegan, Princeton Univ. Press, 1992, p. 46], thus ruling out the inscription as a witness to any first-century place called Nazareth.
It is doubtful, however, that the inscription really mentions Nazareth. The several related fragments of the inscription were interpreted by means of Hebrew liturgical poems dating from the sixth to seventh centuries - when present-day Nazareth was already a thriving tourist site and the name was well-known. The letters n-ts-r-t are bounded by broken edges of the stone (in fact, the n is only partially present), and it is not certain what letter may have preceded the n. In my opinion, the damaged n probably was preceded by a g (a narrow letter in Hebrew, easily fitting into the space hypothesized by the discoverers of the inscription) and read Gennesaret, not Nazareth. Gennesaret was founded in Hellenistic times and was well known.
[22] The letters chi () and rho () are the first two letters of the Greek word Christos, and have been superimposed upon each other to form a sort of cross, a symbol still prominently employed by the Roman Catholic Church.
[23] The rules of evidence employed by this team of scholars, along with their reasons for accepting or rejecting a particular logion can be found in The Gospel of Mark Red Letter Edition, by Robert W. Funk and Mahlon H. Smith, Polebridge Press, Sonoma, California, 1991.
[24] Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 63.
[25] Arnold Ehrhardt, The Framework of the New Testament Stories, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964, p. 51-3.
[26] Lucian (ca. C.E. 120 - 180), Greek Satirist and rhetorician.
[27] Claudius Aelianus (ca. C.E. 170 - ca. 235), Roman rhetorician.
[28] Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ca. 4 B.C.E. 1- ca. 65), Roman statesman and philosopher.
[29] Marcus Valerius Martialis (ca. C.E. 40 - ca. 103), Roman Poet.
[30] Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (C.E. 39-65), Roman Poet.
[31] Ehrhardt, Framework, p. 53-8
[32] Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 58.
[33] Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 59.
[34] Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln., The Messianic Legacy, Henry Holt, New York, 1986, p. 9. [Manuscript received November 19, 1991.
Copyright
2008 American Atheists, Inc. All right
How Jesus Got a Life
The Probing Mind
by Frank R. Zindler
March 1992, Revised October, 1999
NAPOLEON: Monsieur Laplace! I have read with great interest your Traité de mécanique céleste - all five volumes - but nowhere have I found any mention of the Good Lord.
LAPLACE: Sire, I have had no need of that hypothesis.
Our world is an unstable place. Nations rise, and governments topple. Unbalanced people the world around torture and kill each other for the sake of religion or other groundless causes. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and wars periodically scourge our globe. Continents drift about and collide with each other, and oceans form and disappear. Even planet Earth itself has the wobblies. As it spins on its axis, the earth is not stable. Like the center peg of a toy top, the axis of the spinning earth slowly wobbles in a circle, tracing out the surface of a double cone in space [see Figure 1, above].
This motion of the earth's axis is called precession, and it is, I believe, a major component of the causes long ago that led to the creation of Christianity. The character now known as Christ, or Jesus, was not born of a virgin; rather, it was the product of an unstably rotating earth. If the earth's axis did not precess, the Christ character would never have been invented. Christianity as we know it would not exist.
In my forthcoming book, Inventing Jesus, I hope to demonstrate exhaustively the extraordinary chain of causes and effects which led from a wobbling earth to a divine biography - the so-called "Life of Christ." In this brief article, of course, I can do little more than state and explain the major points of this thesis and give a sampling of the evidence I have found to support it.
I. "Jesus Christ" never existed as an historical figure.
It is a curious fact that the oldest components of the so-called New Testament, the letters believed to have been written by one Saul/Paul, know almost nothing of any Jesus biography. Neither Bethlehem nor Nazareth are mentioned in these charter documents of the Christian religion. Only in the much later Book of Acts is it claimed that Saul (Paul) had an interview with "Jesus of Nazareth." [1] The later the document, the greater the detail of the Jesus story presented.
There is no convincing evidence to make one suppose that any of the surviving "gospels" were written by eyewitnesses. Indeed, study of the gospels shows quite conclusively that they were not. For example, the authors of the gospels of Matthew and Luke incorporate nearly the entire Greek text of the gospel of Mark, adding sayings taken from yet another document (the so-called "Q-Document"), and generally make the miracles recounted by Mark even more miraculous. Had Matthew and Luke been eyewitnesses, they would have written their own accounts, without recourse to plagiarism.
Mark's gospel, the oldest of the official set of four, contains errors of geography [2] and custom [3] that would not have been made by an eyewitness. John's gospel, the latest of the set, is both too late and too ethereal to be taken as a biographical account at all - eyewitness or otherwise. There is nothing about the gospels to make one take them seriously from a biographic point of view: there is no good reason to think them other than ancient examples of the art of fiction.
If the historicity of Jesus cannot be supported by the New Testament writings, what about extrabiblical sources? Did any Greek or Roman or Jewish historians observe his career and write about it? Not one.
Although Josephus, [4] Tacitus, [5] Suetonius, [6] and other ancient authors are often cited as evidence for an historical Jesus, it is clear that their accounts (even if they could be proven authentic) are derivative, not original. Josephus, the oldest of these historians, was born at least five years after the date of the alleged crucifixion! There are no eyewitnesses. Moreover, the ancient non-Christian accounts of Jesus all were written at a time when Christianity already was a thriving delirium, and our pagan authors can be taken only as being witnesses of the state to which Christian traditions had evolved in their times, not as witnesses of an historical Jesus of Nazareth.
There is no credible evidence indicating Jesus ever lived. This fact is, of course, inadequate to prove he did not live. Even so, although it is logically impossible to prove a universal negative, it is possible to show that there is no need to hypothesize any historical Jesus. The Christ biography can be accounted for on purely literary, astrological, and comparative mythological grounds. The logical principle known as Occam's Razor tells us that basic assumptions should not be multiplied beyond necessity. For practical purposes, showing that an historical Jesus is an unnecessary assumption is just as good as proving that he never existed.
II. Christianity began as a mystery religion.
While modern Christianity trumpets its message openly and to all, with little regard for those uninterested in hearing its "good news," it was not so in the beginning. A careful reading of the Pauline epistles and the gospels (supplemented by modern documentary discoveries) shows that Christianity began as a mystery cult, replete with initiations, secrets, and multiple levels of indoctrination.
The word mystery (Greek, : 'what is known only to the initiated') occurs twenty-seven times in the official New Testament, and almost all of these occurrences demonstrate the existence of a secret infrastructure in the nascent cult.
And the disciples came, and said unto him, "Why speakest thou unto them in parables?' He answered and said unto them, 'Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given." [Matt. 13:10-11]
The dangling verses now customarily printed at the end of the Epistle to the Romans (but placed elsewhere in various ancient manuscripts) tell of "that divine secret () kept in silence for long ages but now disclosed…" [New English Bible]
Paul the mystagogue is very evident in passages such as I Cor. 2:6ff:
Now we are speaking a wisdom among those who are mature [i.e., ready to be initiated], that is, a wisdom which does not belong to this age, nor the rulers of this age [7] who are about to pass away; but we are speaking God's wisdom in a mystery, wisdom which has been hidden and which God predetermined before the ages to contribute to our glory. None of this world's rulers knew this wisdom… But as it has been written, Things that no eye has seen and no ear heard and that have not occurred to human mind, things that God has prepared for those who love him- God indeed revealed them to us through the Spirit… [8]
I Cor. 4:1 speaks of "stewards of the mysteries of God."
Paul the would-be initiator of inductees into the mysteries peeks out at us also from the third chapter of I Corinthians. "I could not speak to you as I should speak to people who have the Spirit," he tells his not-fully-pliant initiates. "I had to deal with you on the merely natural plane, as infants in Christ. And so I gave you milk to drink, instead of solid food, for which you were not yet ready. Indeed, you are still not ready for it, for you are still on the merely natural plane." [9] Paul's Corinthians were still being fed the superficial story; they were not yet ready to be told the hidden meanings of things, perhaps the full truth concerning the symbolic, not physical, nature of "Christ."
That there was indeed a secret gospel and an initiation into the mysteries of the religion now known as Christianity is dramatically attested by the "Secret Gospel of Mark," found in a manuscript discovered by Morton Smith in 1958, in the Monastery of Mar Saba southeast of Jerusalem. The Greek text found by Smith appears originally to have been composed at the end of the second century by Clement of Alexandria. [10] Clement is replying to one Theodore who has been upset by claims that there was a secret gospel of Mark which differed from the canonic (official) version. Clement tells him that indeed there is a secret gospel used by the Alexandrian church for initiation into the Christian mysteries. He gives several examples of material present in the secret gospel but absent in the canonic one. One of the more interesting "secrets" revealed by Clement tells us:
…Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. [11]
III. Christianity was derived as much from Mithraism as from Judaism. Understanding the origin of Mithraism is crucial to understanding the origin of Christianity.
The mystery religion to which early Christianity seems most closely related is Mithraism. Mithra (also spelled Mithras), a Graeco-Persian invention, was born of a virgin on the winter solstice - frequently December 25th in the Julian calendar. Being a solar deity, Mithra was worshipped on Sundays; after Mithra had become amalgamated with Helios, he was depicted with a halo, nimbus, or glory around his head. In some cases it has been difficult to tell if ancient images were intended as depictions of Mithra or Jesus. The leader of the cult was called a pope (papa) and he ruled from a "mithraeum" on the Vatican Hill in Rome. A prominent iconographic feature in Mithraism was a large key, needed to unlock the celestial gates through which souls of the deceased were believed to pass. It would appear that the "keys of the Kingdom" held by the popes as successors to "St. Peter" derive from Mithra, not from a Palestinian messiah. The Mithraic priests wore miters, special headdresses from which the Christian bishop's hat was derived. (The Latin name for this Phrygian/Persian hat was mitra - which also was an acceptable Latin spelling for Mithra!) The Mithraists consumed a sacred meal (Myazda) which was completely analogous to the Catholic Eucharistic service (Missa, or Mass). Like the Christians, they celebrated the atoning death of a savior who was resurrected on a Sunday. A major center of Mithraic philosophy was at Tarsus - St. Paul's hometown - in what now is Southeast Turkey.
IV. Mithraism and Christianity have their origins in astrology and astronomy.
In 128 B.C.E. the Greek astronomer Hipparchus of Rhodes discovered the precession of the equinoxes [see Figure 2]. Because the earth's axis is tilted approximately 23.5 degrees away from a line perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun, the sun appears from the northern hemisphere to follow a path in the sky (the ecliptic) which for six months of the year is above the celestial equator and below it for six months. (The celestial equator marks the points on the "celestial sphere" which are directly overhead as seen by a person living on the earth's equator.) Twice a year, as the sun appears to move along its ecliptic path, it crosses the celestial equator. When the sun is at these points - the so-called vernal (spring) and autumnal equinoxes - the durations of day and night are equal.
Figure 2. Views from the earth, the universe of stars seemed to the ancients to be attached to the great "celestial sphere" which had the eart as its center. The "celestial equator" is the projection of the earth's equator upon the inside of the sphere. The circle of the ecliptic is the path which the sun appears to follow against the background of "fixed stars." The zodiac is a belt of sky, extending 9o above and below the ecliptic, which can be divided into twelve zones of equal size, each characterized by the presence of a particularly prominent constellation. The moon and visible planets all eppear to move within the confines of the zodiacal belt. The equinoctial points are two places where the equator intersects the ecliptic, at an angle of approximately 23.5o. Around 128 B.C.E., Hipparchus of Rhodes discovered that the position of the equinoxes was not constant. He determined that the vernal (spring) equinox had once been in the constellation Taurus but had, by his day, moved ("precessed") almost all the way through the constellation of Aries. At the beginning of the Christian era, the vernal equinox moved into Pisces.
Because the earth wobbles as it spins on its axis, the north and south poles of its axis do not always point to the same spots on the celestial sphere. As a consequence, the equinoctial points become displaced with respect to the so-called fixed stars - including the stars forming the twelve zodiacal constellations. When Hipparchus discovered that the vernal equinox had been displaced from Taurus into Aries, he or some of his disciples felt that they had detected the labor of a hitherto unknown god. (Many Greeks felt that each natural phenomenon or physical force was actually the working of a particular god.) For astrological reasons, this new god was identified with the ancient Persian god Mithra. The mystery religion known as Mithraism thus was born. [12] Mithra was installed as a Time-Lord or chronocrat, the god who would rule over the Age or Aeon of Aries.
By the time Hipparchus and his Stoic colleagues understood that the vernal equinox had moved from Taurus into Aries, the equinox was almost out of Aries as well. Very soon it would move into Pisces, and a new Time-Lord would be needed. Just as movement of the equinox out of Taurus had been symbolized as the sacrifice of a bull [13], so too, the movement out of Aries would come to be symbolized by the sacrifice of a lamb. The first symbol of the new-age religion, the religion reigning in the age of Pisces, significantly, would be the fish. [14] (The cross, apparently, was originally the Greek letter chi (c), which reminds us of the intersection of the celestial equator with the ecliptic at an acute angle.) It is not surprising that in the oldest epitaphs and inscriptions it is actually two fish that were used to symbolize the New-Age cult - making the symbol of Christianity identical to the astrological symbol for Pisces, in obedience to the fact that Pisces is plural: the fishes.
V. The Magi mentioned in the second chapter of Matthew's gospel were Mithraic astrologer-priests, probably scouts looking for the new Time-Lord who was to rule the "new age" of Pisces.
The Mithraic clergy involved actively in the astrology of the cult were known as Magi (Greek magoi), and are depicted as wearing Phrygian (pseudo-Persian) caps such as Mithra is supposed to have worn. It is my thesis that some of these Magi, realizing that the age of Mithra was drawing to a close (the equinox would move into Pisces some time during the first century C.E.), would have left their cult centers in Phrygia and Cilicia, in what is now East and Southeast Turkey, from cities such as Tarsus to go to Palestine to see if they could locate not just the King of the Jews, but the new Time-Lord, the ruler of the new age of Pisces. (Pisces was considered to have especial connections with the Jews.) It is significant, I believe, that early depictions of the Magi's visitation of the Christ Child (including one in a church at Bethlehem) showed them wearing Phrygian (Mithraic) caps.
While it is clear that the story of the Magian visitation found at the beginning of the second chapter of Matthew's gospel is more fairy tale than history (how does one follow a star?), it seems there is a kernel of historicity in it. I believe, however, that the Greek text has been misunderstood with regard to the point of origin of the Magi and just where they were when they saw the star that triggered their trip. The King James Version tells us of "wise men from the east," who "have seen his star in the east." Modern translations tend to have the wise men see "his star at its rising." The Greek word for 'east' used in these two passages is , and it can indeed refer to the east or to the rising of a heavenly body. But it can also be the name of a place - Anatolia. Anatolia could signify either the entire peninsula of Asia Minor (i.e., the area now called Turkey), or a particular province of Phrygia. It thus appears that Matt. 2:1-2 should actually read:
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came Magi from Anatolia to Jerusalem,
Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for in Anatolia we have seen his star, and are come to worship him.
This Palestinian visit from the Magi could have been the catalyst that triggered various Jewish groups - and perhaps some non-Jewish groups - into thinking that the messiah whom they had been awaiting had already come and had not been noticed. Lest this seem too far-fetched, it should be noted that even in our own sophisticated age notices of Christ's "second coming" are of regular occurrence. It is not irrational to suppose that somewhere right now there is a small cult which believes that Jesus is back on earth. [15]
It is clear that the people who wrote the New Testament believed in reincarnation and "redivivus appearances" of such characters as Elijah. This would have made it fairly easy for a Magian visit to convince people that their messiah had already appeared. A particularly illustrative example is found in Matthew's gospel: [16]
Jesus... asked his disciples, saying: "Who do men say that the Son of Man is?"
And they said, "Some say John the Baptist; some, Elijah; and others, Jeremiah, or one of the Seers."
He says to them: "But who do you say that I am?"
And Simon Peter, answering, said: "Thou art the Anointed, the Son of the Living God!"
And his disciples put a question to him, saying: "Why then do the scribes say 'Elijah must come first'?"
Now, Jesus answered and said to them: "Elijah indeed comes first, and will restore all things. Now, I say to you, Elijah has come already, and they did not recognize him, but have done him as many injuries as they could. Thus also the Son of Man is destined to suffer by them."
Then his disciples understood that he said this to them about John the Baptist.
Similar cases of "events" of cosmic significance occurring unnoticed are found in the gospels of Thomas [17] and Luke:
Gos. Thom. 51. His disciples said to him, "When will the repose of the dead come about, and when will the new world come?" He said to them, "What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it."
Gos. Thom. 52. His disciples said to him, "Twenty-four prophets spoke in Israel, and all of them spoke of you." He said to them, "You have omitted the one living in your presence, and have spoken only of the dead.
Lk. 17:20-21. Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, he answered them, "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, 'Lo, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you."
VI. The Jews were ready for the Magi when they came to visit.
The Jews during the last two centuries B.C.E. were awaiting a messiah, and were making checklists of passages from the OT which they fancied described the who, where, why, and how of the person who would be their messiah. The actual texts from the OT were often taken completely out of context, distorted, and misquoted, and there was little respect for the tenses of verbs. (A particularly egregious example of such scripture-twisting methodology can be seen in the gospel of Matthew.)
No written works of Mithraism are known, since like other mystery cults, it centered around a secret known only to persons initiated into its rits. Most of our knowledge about it is derived from the iconography of its temples. A Central element in them was the depiction of Mithra sacrificing a wild bull (Taurus).
The messianic check-lists that different groups had been keeping would have been reinterpreted after the visit of the Magi: instead of telling what the messiah would do, they came to be interpreted as a record of what he had done. News that the messiah had already come would spread rapidly. The fact that no one had noticed the first coming was the reason the myth of the second coming had to be invented. Nothing actually had been accomplished by the first coming - except on paper!
An example of such a checklist has been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scrolls scholar Theodor Gaster tells us about
…a catena of five Scriptural passages attesting the advent of the Future Prophet and the Anointed King and the final discomfiture of the impious. The first four are taken from the Pentateuch, and include an excerpt from the oracles of Balaam. The fifth is an interpretation of a verse from the Book of Joshua. An interesting feature of this document… is that precisely the same passages of the Pentateuch are used by the Samaritans as the stock testimonial to the coming of the Taheb, or future 'Restorer.' They evidently constituted a standard set of such quotations, of the type that scholars have long supposed to have been in the hands of New Testament writers when they cited passages of the Hebrew Bible supposedly confirmed by incidents in the life and career of Jesus. [18]
VII. Gnosticism helped to reinterpret the checklists, and other pre-Christian literary creations, as documents pertaining to the life of the unnoticed messiah.
Before the so-called New Testament was completed, the leaders of the primitive Christian Church had to do battle with a "heresy" called gnosticism. The Gnostics were persons who believed in gnosis, a type of introspective knowledge. According to Kurt Rudolph, a leading authority on Gnosticism, gnosis is "knowledge given by revelation, which has been made available only to the elect who are capable of receiving it, and therefore has an esoteric character." [19] It is now known that gnosticism is older than Christianity, and an argument can be made that Christianity is a Gnostic heresy, rather than the other way around as traditionally taught.
Through "revelation" Gnostics and others could decide not only that checklists should be reinterpreted, but even that materials completely unrelated to Christianity were actually filled with hidden knowledge of Christian significance. This is extremely important from a psychiatric point of view, for it allowed the authors of the messianic biographies to feel guiltless of fraud, despite the fact that there was little if any truth in their products. All that was needed was for some person, perhaps one who had fasted too long, to have a very strong feeling - possibly the result of a dream, autosuggestion, or even hallucination - that knowledge was being communicated to him from another world. Thereafter, even a list of gardening tools could be transmogrified into a religious document of great profundity.
Two early symbols of Christianity were the lamb and the tropos cross, as seen on this sixth-century sarcophagus.
The Gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt provides some examples of how non-Christian materials could have been appropriated for Christian purposes. The so-called "Apocalypse of Adam," a non-Christian phantasy composed of Jewish elements, follows the same general outline and contains many of the same components as does the birth narrative found in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. It is clear that both stories are derived from a common mythological source - a source that Gnostic principles allowed to be adapted for Christian use by "St. John the Revelator."
The "smoking gun" of revelation-in-the-making also has been found at Nag Hammadi, and it is most instructive for anyone wishing to understand how non-Christian materials could have been transmuted into the documents now found in the New Testament. James M. Robinson, the editor of the Nag Hammadi materials published in English, tells us that
The Nag Hammadi library even presents one instance of the Christianizing process taking place almost before one's eyes. The non-Christian philosophic treatise Eugnostos the Blessed is cut up somewhat arbitrarily into separate speeches, which are then put on Jesus' tongue, in answer to questions (which sometimes do not quite fit the answers) that the disciples address to him during a resurrection appearance. The result is a separate tractate entitled The Sophia of Jesus Christ. Both forms of the text occur side by side in Codex III. [20]
VIII. Jesus had to get his names before he could get his lives.
Before Jesus could be given a biography, he had to receive a name. Actually, he received several names and, as we shall see, all of his names were really titles. Thus, the name Jesus of Nazareth originally was not a name at all, but rather a title meaning (The) Savior, (The) Branch. In Hebrew this would have been Yeshua‘ Netser. The word Yeshua‘ means 'savior,' and Netser means 'sprout,' 'shoot,' or 'branch' - a reference to Isaiah 11:1, which was thought to predict a messiah (lit., 'anointed one') of the line of Jesse (King David's father): "And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots…"
While this reference to a branch from Jesse will doubtless seem obscure to modern readers, it would not have been obscure to ancient Jews such as those who composed the Dead Sea Scrolls (and wrote a commentary on Isaiah 11:1); nor would it have been obscure to the early Christians. According to the church father Epiphanius, who was born on Cyprus in 367 C.E. and wrote a treatise against "heretics," the Christians originally were called Jessaeans, precisely because of the messianic tie to Jesse. [21]
Although for speakers of Hebrew and its close cousin Aramaic the meaning and prophetic significance of the title The Savior, The Branch would have been clear, after it had been wrestled into Greek as or , its titular significance must soon have been forgotten. The part came to be a simple name ( in Latin) of the Tom, Dick, or Harry sort. The part, however, was misperceived as being derived from the name of a place - the imaginary village of Nazareth - much as the word Parisian can be derived from Paris.
And so, Yeshua‘ Netser came to be Jesus of Nazareth - a name of the Jimmy-the-Greek sort, a name thought to contain information on a person's place of origin. (There may have been an intermediate Wizard-of-Oz period, combining a title with a place name: The Savior of Nazareth.)
At the turn of the era, there was no place called Nazareth, and it is not entirely certain that the place now called by that name was inhabited during the period in question. The name appears neither in the Old Testament nor in the large "intertestamental" literature. Nor is it found in Josephus, despite the fact that he names several dozen towns in Galilee - a place where he conducted military maneuvers. As far as I can tell, the place presently called Nazareth received its name from an imaginative Jessaean some time at the end of the second century or early third century - most likely after Hadrian expelled the Jews from Jerusalem in 135 CE. At the turn of the era, however, Nazareth was as mythical as the Mary, Joseph, and Jesus family that was supposed to have lived there. [21B]
It is interesting to note that archaeological excavations of the oldest Jewish-Christian churches in that town have revealed branches as a prominent decorative motif (shades of netser!) as well as zodiacs - some even surrounding the chi-rho symbol [22] of Christ, exactly as zodiacs have been found surrounding images of Mithra. Further, the ruins of the baptistries bear evidence that initiation rites in early Christianity were every bit as interesting as those in Mormonism before the recent bowdlerization.
Like Jesus of Nazareth, the "name" Jesus Christ also began as two titles. As we have seen, the Jesus part of the name really is the title Savior. But what of Christ? The Greek word christos means 'anointed,' and is the equivalent of the Hebrew word meshiah. Thus, Christ and Messiah are equivalent terms, both referring to the peculiar Israelite practice of anointing their kings and high priests with oil. (The Greeks oiled their athletes instead.)
IX. Jesus got his lives from other people and other literatures.
There are at least five different Jesuses described in the New Testament: the one which the Apostle Paul "met" during an epileptic seizure on the road to Damascus, and the four palpably different messiahs chronicled in the canonic gospels. The biographic dimensions of the Pauline messiah are so meager that little need be said about him. But what of the tales told by the four evangelists?
Two fish (symbolic of the Age of Pisces) with an anchor shaped like a cross are seen in detail from an early fourth-century tombstone. Early in the history of Christianity, the fish also was connected with baptism and served as a Greek acrostic for the phrase "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior."
Much of the biographic material found in the New Testament is merely a reworking of material taken from the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint. A considerable part of the narrative structure of the gospel of Matthew (and also of Mark, his source) can be thought of as a fleshing out and adaptation of a messianic checklist such as I have hypothesized would have formed the nucleus for a messianic biography. Over and over again, events and circumstances both trivial and important are recounted by Matthew and followed by the refrain, "…that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets…" While this refrain does not appear in Mark's narrative, it seems clear that the story skeleton used by Mark had been constructed from a checklist of Old Testament "prophecies" that would have to be fulfilled by the messiah.
The many "sayings of Jesus" (logia) recounted in the gospels would, if they could convincingly be derived from a single personality or source, be strong evidence that an historical Jesus once existed. But such is not the case. A group of prominent Bible scholars, styling themselves "The Jesus Seminar" and sponsored by the Westar Institute in Sonoma, California, recently completed its six-year analysis of all the logia and reported that at least eighty percent of the sayings were not authentic! That is to say, they were able to find explanations for their composition which did not require an historical Jesus. [23] And what of the other twenty percent? All we can say is that their true origins are unknown. It has not been proven that they come from a man called Jesus.
To trace all the elements of the Jesus biographies to their sources will require a very large book. Here we can give only a few examples of how some material became incorporated into the braid of literature that has come to be known as "The Life of Christ."
The healing miracles probably derive from the testimonies given by persons who thought themselves to have been cured by the Greek god Asklepios (Asclepius in Latin). The great venom with which the early church fathers attacked the cult of this pagan god indicates a close rivalry between the two cults and a certain embarrassment among Christians repeatedly being told that Asklepios had already done all of Jesus' tricks and had done them better.
Early in the development of the biographies, "Jesus" became identified with the "Son of Man" character who figures so importantly in late Old Testament books and apocryphal writings, such as the Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch. This allowed for large-scale accretion of literary material. It is interesting to note that the Son-of-Man literature underwent considerable evolution from its beginning up to its amalgamation with the Christ character. Originally, in Hebrew and Aramaic, the phrase son of man simply signified a human being - i.e., not some other species of animal. Later, it came to symbolize Israel the nation. Much prophetic literature referring to the Son of Man is actually referring to Israel the nation. (Israel was, after all, a nation of human beings; the goyim or 'nations' - gentiles - were not considered fully human.) Then, the term was individualized once again and identified with the awaited messiah. Finally, it was grafted - with all its accumulated literature and associations - onto the Jesus vita.
Some of the Jesus biography was derived from pre-Christian gnosticism, and some material was incorporated from Hellenic-Jewish wisdom literature. Some items, such as the doctrine of the logos ("the Word") came from the Stoic philosophers. The saying "To give is more blessed than to receive" [Acts 20:35] is actually an ancient Greek aphorism. [24] The saying in Matt. 11:17, "We have piped unto you and ye have not danced," derives from one of Aesop's fables! [25] The saying that "wheresoever the carcass is, there the eagles will be gathered together" [Matt. 24:28 = Luke 17:37] is attested by a number of Greek (Lucian [26], Aelianus [27]) and Latin (Seneca [28], Martial [29], and Lucan [30]) antecedents. [31]
As a final illustration of how easy it was to put words into Jesus' mouth, we may consider a passage in Saul/Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. In the ninth verse of the second chapter, he quotes a yet unidentified "scripture":
"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him."
In the gospel of Thomas (actually a collection of sayings or logia, resembling the Q-Document from which Matthew and Luke drew supposed sayings of Jesus), this is reworked as logion number 17 and attributed to Jesus himself:
"I shall give you what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard, and what no hand has touched, and what has never occurred to the human mind." [32]
The same saying was adapted by the author of the Q-Document and found its way into the official New Testament as Matt. 13:16-7 and Luke 10:23-4:
"Blessed are the eyes that see what you see and the ears that hear what you hear… many prophets and righteous men have desired to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it." [Material in italics found only in Matthew's version] [33]
It yet remains to go through the entire New Testament to extract all the materials supposedly containing information of the life of Christ and to trace them to their sources. It remains also to sort out which of the characters in that book are historical and which are fictional. The twelve disciples, for example, appear to be zodiacal figures, but John the Baptist may have been real. St. Paul almost certainly was real, but St. Peter probably was not. The Virgin Mary and Joseph were invented for their roles, but Pontius Pilate was not.
Much work remains to be done to put the chroniclers of Christ out of business, although a surprising amount of it was done already a century or more ago, but now is lost or difficult to retrieve. This fact has prompted the popular writers Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln to comment:
Each contribution in the field of biblical research is like a footprint in sand. Each is covered almost immediately and, so far as the general public is concerned, left virtually without trace. Each must constantly be made anew, only to be covered again. [34]
It is time now for the vacuum that is Christ, not the footprints of scholars, to be filled in with sand. It is past the time when mythical beings should be taken seriously. The time has arrived for biblical scholars to stand upon the same solid foundation on which the Marquis de Laplace stood when questioned by the Emperor of France. When questioned about the historical Jesus, all should be able to reply: "I have had no need of that hypothesis."
NOTES:
[1] This is in Acts 22: 7ff, which alleges to be a first-person account of Saul's conversion: "Then I heard a voice saying to me, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' I answered, 'Tell me, Lord, who you are.' 'I am Jesus of Nazareth,' he said, 'whom you are persecuting.' My companions saw the light, but did not hear the voice that spoke to me…" [New English Bible]
A contradictory, third-person account of Saul's conversion can be found in Acts 9: 4ff: "He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' "Tell me, Lord,' he said, 'who you are.' The voice answered, 'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting… Meanwhile the men who were travelling with him stood speechless; they heard the voice but could see no one…" [New English Bible]
It would appear that the version in Chapter 9 was taken from a document older than that from which the Chapter 22 account was derived. The Nazareth tradition had not yet been invented when the Chapter 9 story was put in writing.
[2] An example of Mark's ignorance of Palestinian geography is found in the story he recounts about Jesus traveling from Tyre on the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, thirty miles inland. According to Mark 7:31, Jesus and his gang went by way of Sidon, twenty miles north of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast! Since to Sidon and back would be forty miles, this means that Mark's messiah walked seventy miles when he could have walked only thirty. Although Mark seems unaware of this problem, the translators of the King James Version seem to have understood it quite well - adroitly obfuscating their translation accordingly: "Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon…"
[3] Mark 10:12 tells us that a wife, if she divorces her husband and marries another, is guilty of adultery. While this was possible in some pagan societies, it was not an option open to Israelite women.
[4] Josephus ben Matthias (ca. C.E. 37 - ca. 100), Jewish Historian and general.
[5] Cornelius Tacitus (ca. C.E. 56 - ca. 120), Roman orator, historian and politician.
[6] Gaius Suetonius Tranquilus (ca. C.E. 69 - ca. 122), Roman biographer and historian.
[7] It is difficult not to see this as a reference to the end of the 2150-year-long astrological Age of Aries, over which Mithra had reigned as 'Time-Lord' or chronocrat. Paul was writing almost exactly at the time the Age of Pisces was beginning, with Jesus as the new Time-Lord. The Greek for 'the rulers of this age' is . This fairly reverberates with both astrological and Gnostic mysteries. In gnosticism, the archons clearly are rulers of astrological derivation, and the æons are both rulers and periods of time. It is suggestive also, that the church father Origen, in commenting on this passage in Corinthians alludes to "the astrology of the Chaldeans and Indians" and "Magi" - Mithraic or Zoroastrian astrologers [Origen De Principiis, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. IV, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI, 1982, pp. 335-6.]
[8] William F. Orr, and James Arthur Walther, The Anchor Bible: I Corinthians, Doubleday & Co., Inc., Garden City, NY, 1976, pp. 153-4.
[9] I Cor. 3:1-3, New English Bible.
[10] Titus Flavius Clemens (ca. C.E. 150 - ca. 211), Prominent early church father.
[11] Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1973, p. 447.
[12] For this modern understanding of the late and astrological origin of the Mithraic religion, I am heavily dependent upon the writing of David Ulansey, especially his little book The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World, Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford 1989.
[13] A glance at Figure 2 will show that the constellation Perseus is located above the constellation Taurus. Mythologically, Perseus became amalgamated with Mithra, and the physical ascendance of Perseus over Taurus suggested that Mithra-Perseus had killed the bull.
[14] Very early in the history of Christianity, the fish symbol received a non-astrological interpretation by means of a clever acrostic. The Greek word for fish, ICHTHUS, can be formed from the first letters of each word in the motto - 'Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior.'
[15] On August 6, 1991, the supermarket tabloid National Examiner carried a front-page notice: "Vatican Report. Jesus may be back on earth." The article itself, on page nine, reported that "Stunned scientists and religious leaders believe Jesus Christ has returned to Earth!" There was some uncertainty, however, if the second coming had come about in a biblical manner or whether Christ had been cloned scientifically from blood spots in the Shroud of Turin. Considering the large numbers of people who read this paper, it is all but certain that there are some people who will believe its extraordinary tales.
[16] Matt. 16:13-16; 17:10-13. My translation.
[17] Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development, Trinity Press International, Philadelphia, 1990, pp. 124-5.
[18] Theodor H. Gaster, The Dead Sea Scriptures, Third Revised and Enlarged Edition, Anchor Books/Doubleday , Garden City, New York, 1976, p. 393.
[19] Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1985, p. 55.
[20] James M. Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library, Third, Completely Revised Edition, Harper, San Francisco, 1988, pp. 8-9.
[21] J.-P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, etc., Series Graeca Prior, Patrologiae Graecae Tomus XLI, S. Epiphanius Constantiensis in Cypro Episcopus, Adversus Haereses, Paris, 1863, columns 389-390.
[21B] Despite the excavations of the Franciscan B. Bagatti [Excavations in Nazareth, translated by F. Hoade, Franciscan Printing Press, Jerusalem, 1969] no remains of any building datable to the first centuries BCE or CE have ever been found at present-day Nazareth, and the artifacts dated by Bagatti to "the Roman Period" are probably all later than first century CE. Moreover, most if not all of the artifacts appear to be funerary goods used in burials of residents of Japha (Japhia), a town a mile or so away which was known to Josephus.
The first inscriptional mention of the place-name Nazareth is thought to be on a fragment of marble found at the site of ancient Caesarea in 1962. ["A List of Priestly Courses from Caesarea," M. Avi-Yonah, Israel Exploration Journal, 12:137-9] The synagogue in which the marble fragment was found appears to date from the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century CE [The Archeology of the New Testament, Jack Finegan, Princeton Univ. Press, 1992, p. 46], thus ruling out the inscription as a witness to any first-century place called Nazareth.
It is doubtful, however, that the inscription really mentions Nazareth. The several related fragments of the inscription were interpreted by means of Hebrew liturgical poems dating from the sixth to seventh centuries - when present-day Nazareth was already a thriving tourist site and the name was well-known. The letters n-ts-r-t are bounded by broken edges of the stone (in fact, the n is only partially present), and it is not certain what letter may have preceded the n. In my opinion, the damaged n probably was preceded by a g (a narrow letter in Hebrew, easily fitting into the space hypothesized by the discoverers of the inscription) and read Gennesaret, not Nazareth. Gennesaret was founded in Hellenistic times and was well known.
[22] The letters chi () and rho () are the first two letters of the Greek word Christos, and have been superimposed upon each other to form a sort of cross, a symbol still prominently employed by the Roman Catholic Church.
[23] The rules of evidence employed by this team of scholars, along with their reasons for accepting or rejecting a particular logion can be found in The Gospel of Mark Red Letter Edition, by Robert W. Funk and Mahlon H. Smith, Polebridge Press, Sonoma, California, 1991.
[24] Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 63.
[25] Arnold Ehrhardt, The Framework of the New Testament Stories, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964, p. 51-3.
[26] Lucian (ca. C.E. 120 - 180), Greek Satirist and rhetorician.
[27] Claudius Aelianus (ca. C.E. 170 - ca. 235), Roman rhetorician.
[28] Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ca. 4 B.C.E. 1- ca. 65), Roman statesman and philosopher.
[29] Marcus Valerius Martialis (ca. C.E. 40 - ca. 103), Roman Poet.
[30] Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (C.E. 39-65), Roman Poet.
[31] Ehrhardt, Framework, p. 53-8
[32] Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 58.
[33] Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 59.
[34] Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln., The Messianic Legacy, Henry Holt, New York, 1986, p. 9. [Manuscript received November 19, 1991.
Copyright
2008 American Atheists, Inc. All right
Cpt Kaos- Posts : 40
Join date : 2010-01-29
Re: Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
Cpt Kaos Mon Feb 01, 2010 6:10 am
Kritiese – en nare – blik op Skrif, kerk
2010-02-01 03:07
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A New History of Early Christianity deur
Charles Freeman, Yale University Press, Londen.
Hierdie boek is die eerste nuwe geskiedenis van die vroeë Christendom sedert Henry Chadwick se The Early Church van die 1960’s.
Dié historikus, ’n Brit, praat met gesag oor die eerste net meer as vyf eeue; krities, maar met
respek.
Hy ondersoek sy storie uit die Skrif, kerklike en ander skryfsels, oud en nuut, en sê wanneer hy deur ’n gebrek aan bronne gestrem word. In die 2?000 jaar agtertoe is kosbare inligting verwoes – baie hiervan sedert die 4de eeu in die kerk se vervolging van mede-Christene en nie-Christene.
Die Christen se geweldstryd na buite en binne, met of sonder staatsgesag, krul soos ’n geroeste doringdraad dwarsdeur sy geskiedenis.
Freeman soek na Jesus in die Nuwe Testament en bely ten slotte dat, hoe diep, perfek en opreg jou studie ook al is, dit onmoontlik is om die historiese Jesus te herskep of presies te sê wie Hy was en hoe Hy aanbid moet word.
Die 19de-eeuse teoloog George Tyrrell het gesê as jy in ’n put afkyk op soek na die historiese Jesus, dit gewoonlik jou gesig is wat na jou opstaar.
Wat dikwels vergeet word, is dat Jesus ’n Jood was, met die Judaïsme ’n vrugbare saailand vir sy boodskap – ’n besef wat tot versoening kan lei.
’n Probleem van die vroeë Christene was om ’n plek vir Jesus te kry langs of gelyk aan God. Petrus sien Jesus as mens (Engelse Bybel, Handelinge 2:22), Markus en Lukas stel hom laer as God en in Mattheus sê Jesus sy dissipels moet bekeerdes doop in die naam van die Vader, Seun en Gees – sonder klaarheid of die drie figure gelyk is of ’n
hiërargie vorm.
Vir Johannes van die evangelie is Jesus laer as die Vader; maar hy haal Jesus aan: “Ek en die Vader is een” (10:30) en later: “Glo in my omdat Ek in die Vader is en die Vader in My” (14:11). Dié verse speel in die jaar 325 ’n groot rol in die besluit by Nicea oor die Drie-eenheid, maar vir Freeman is daar te veel teenstellings in die evangelies en is die res van die Nuwe Testament ewe onhelder om die verwantskap tussen Jesus en God te bepaal.
Die totstandkoming van die Drie-eenheidsbegrip word nie in dié resensie beklemtoon nie. Dis mensgemaak en vol politiek, soos Belhar; en die onliefde waarmee generasies keisers en biskoppe Jesus tot die Godheid verhef, lees nie soos ’n Jesusverhaal nie.
Ook dié boek laat jou nie juig en spring en dans nie, want die storie van die kerk is anders as van die kansel af. Wie loop voor: die Jesus-beweging met sy Joodse aanhang of die Paulus-beweging met sy fokus op nie-Jode?
Tussenin kom ander groepe, elk ook met sy eie leerstuk(ke) – en wie het die waarheid? Dit raak ’n oop kompetisie wat in ’n magspel eindig en gewen word deur dié wat hulle van 313 af aan die kant van keiser Konstantyn bevind – hy bepaal die uitslag van die Drie-eenheidstemming in 325.
Die wenners word tot die “ortodoksie” gedoop wat die “ou waarhede” verskans; en almal binne Christelike kringe wat van hulle verskil, is “ketters” – wat vervolg word.
Só word die vervolgdes van die ou bewind die vervolgers van die nuwe; en eintlik beteken “ketter” net aan watter kant van die draad jy staan – Freeman sê dit nie, maar dis soos “vryheidsvegter” en “terroris”.
Die kerk word ’n sosiale en ekonomiese mag wat in sy jag op ketters en nie-Christene tempels en monumente in besit neem of vermaal en biblioteke afbrand. Dit, tesame met die val van die Romeinse ryk in die 5de eeu, wis byna die kennis van die tyd uit en vertraag die intellektuele ontwikkeling van die Christenwêreld tot met die Renaissance.
Dis een van die groot redes vir die vreugdeloosheid van hierdie boek; en ’n ander is die nare kyk van die “vaders” op die vrou en seks, met die erfsonde wat later hierby aansluit.
Paulus, onbepaald omstrede en raaiselagtig, voed tot vandag met sy kommer oor seksualiteit ’n paranoia oor die verlokking van die vrou en die euwels van gayskap. Kommer oor seksuele onthouding loop diep in die vroeë kerk, met Tertullianus wat die vrou noem “die duiwel se toegangspoort”.
Dan is daar Augustinus, een van die grootste geeste van die laat 4de en vroeë 5de eeu, wat die mens per skrif ewig vasknoop aan die erfsonde wat van Eva af seksueel van generasie na generasie oorgedra word. Die monnik Pelagius staan hom teë en sê, as dit waar is, wat is dan die sin van Jesus se leringe? Maar hy verloor.
Desondanks is die kerk ’n bolwerk teen armoede en lewer hy ’n enorme sosiale diens, benewens die geestelike anker wat hy bied.
Die boek pak sake aan waaroor geestelikes liefs swyg. Dalk wil hulle kritiek doodswyg, wat nie kan nie. Dalk is hulle bang vir hul eie antwoorde. Hoe ook al, hulle moet hier lees om by te bly.
* Die boek kan bestel word by sales@yaleup.co.uk.
* Van Wyk is ’n historikus.
2010-02-01 03:07
* Artikel opsies
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* Deel
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At van Wyk
A New History of Early Christianity deur
Charles Freeman, Yale University Press, Londen.
Hierdie boek is die eerste nuwe geskiedenis van die vroeë Christendom sedert Henry Chadwick se The Early Church van die 1960’s.
Dié historikus, ’n Brit, praat met gesag oor die eerste net meer as vyf eeue; krities, maar met
respek.
Hy ondersoek sy storie uit die Skrif, kerklike en ander skryfsels, oud en nuut, en sê wanneer hy deur ’n gebrek aan bronne gestrem word. In die 2?000 jaar agtertoe is kosbare inligting verwoes – baie hiervan sedert die 4de eeu in die kerk se vervolging van mede-Christene en nie-Christene.
Die Christen se geweldstryd na buite en binne, met of sonder staatsgesag, krul soos ’n geroeste doringdraad dwarsdeur sy geskiedenis.
Freeman soek na Jesus in die Nuwe Testament en bely ten slotte dat, hoe diep, perfek en opreg jou studie ook al is, dit onmoontlik is om die historiese Jesus te herskep of presies te sê wie Hy was en hoe Hy aanbid moet word.
Die 19de-eeuse teoloog George Tyrrell het gesê as jy in ’n put afkyk op soek na die historiese Jesus, dit gewoonlik jou gesig is wat na jou opstaar.
Wat dikwels vergeet word, is dat Jesus ’n Jood was, met die Judaïsme ’n vrugbare saailand vir sy boodskap – ’n besef wat tot versoening kan lei.
’n Probleem van die vroeë Christene was om ’n plek vir Jesus te kry langs of gelyk aan God. Petrus sien Jesus as mens (Engelse Bybel, Handelinge 2:22), Markus en Lukas stel hom laer as God en in Mattheus sê Jesus sy dissipels moet bekeerdes doop in die naam van die Vader, Seun en Gees – sonder klaarheid of die drie figure gelyk is of ’n
hiërargie vorm.
Vir Johannes van die evangelie is Jesus laer as die Vader; maar hy haal Jesus aan: “Ek en die Vader is een” (10:30) en later: “Glo in my omdat Ek in die Vader is en die Vader in My” (14:11). Dié verse speel in die jaar 325 ’n groot rol in die besluit by Nicea oor die Drie-eenheid, maar vir Freeman is daar te veel teenstellings in die evangelies en is die res van die Nuwe Testament ewe onhelder om die verwantskap tussen Jesus en God te bepaal.
Die totstandkoming van die Drie-eenheidsbegrip word nie in dié resensie beklemtoon nie. Dis mensgemaak en vol politiek, soos Belhar; en die onliefde waarmee generasies keisers en biskoppe Jesus tot die Godheid verhef, lees nie soos ’n Jesusverhaal nie.
Ook dié boek laat jou nie juig en spring en dans nie, want die storie van die kerk is anders as van die kansel af. Wie loop voor: die Jesus-beweging met sy Joodse aanhang of die Paulus-beweging met sy fokus op nie-Jode?
Tussenin kom ander groepe, elk ook met sy eie leerstuk(ke) – en wie het die waarheid? Dit raak ’n oop kompetisie wat in ’n magspel eindig en gewen word deur dié wat hulle van 313 af aan die kant van keiser Konstantyn bevind – hy bepaal die uitslag van die Drie-eenheidstemming in 325.
Die wenners word tot die “ortodoksie” gedoop wat die “ou waarhede” verskans; en almal binne Christelike kringe wat van hulle verskil, is “ketters” – wat vervolg word.
Só word die vervolgdes van die ou bewind die vervolgers van die nuwe; en eintlik beteken “ketter” net aan watter kant van die draad jy staan – Freeman sê dit nie, maar dis soos “vryheidsvegter” en “terroris”.
Die kerk word ’n sosiale en ekonomiese mag wat in sy jag op ketters en nie-Christene tempels en monumente in besit neem of vermaal en biblioteke afbrand. Dit, tesame met die val van die Romeinse ryk in die 5de eeu, wis byna die kennis van die tyd uit en vertraag die intellektuele ontwikkeling van die Christenwêreld tot met die Renaissance.
Dis een van die groot redes vir die vreugdeloosheid van hierdie boek; en ’n ander is die nare kyk van die “vaders” op die vrou en seks, met die erfsonde wat later hierby aansluit.
Paulus, onbepaald omstrede en raaiselagtig, voed tot vandag met sy kommer oor seksualiteit ’n paranoia oor die verlokking van die vrou en die euwels van gayskap. Kommer oor seksuele onthouding loop diep in die vroeë kerk, met Tertullianus wat die vrou noem “die duiwel se toegangspoort”.
Dan is daar Augustinus, een van die grootste geeste van die laat 4de en vroeë 5de eeu, wat die mens per skrif ewig vasknoop aan die erfsonde wat van Eva af seksueel van generasie na generasie oorgedra word. Die monnik Pelagius staan hom teë en sê, as dit waar is, wat is dan die sin van Jesus se leringe? Maar hy verloor.
Desondanks is die kerk ’n bolwerk teen armoede en lewer hy ’n enorme sosiale diens, benewens die geestelike anker wat hy bied.
Die boek pak sake aan waaroor geestelikes liefs swyg. Dalk wil hulle kritiek doodswyg, wat nie kan nie. Dalk is hulle bang vir hul eie antwoorde. Hoe ook al, hulle moet hier lees om by te bly.
* Die boek kan bestel word by sales@yaleup.co.uk.
* Van Wyk is ’n historikus.
Cpt Kaos- Posts : 40
Join date : 2010-01-29
Re: Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
Captain Planet Wed Feb 03, 2010 6:15 am
ek het nog nie als gelees nie maar hier doen hy presies dit waarteen hy preek:
He is clearly a foreigner, removed both in space and time from the events he alleges. For example, in Mark 10:12, he has Jesus say that if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. As G. A. Wells, the author of The Historical Evidence for Jesus 10 puts it,
Such an utterance would have been meaningless in Palestine, where only men could obtain divorce.
wat is sy bewys hy se dit so nou moet dit so wees? not likely as hy nie die woord van ander aanvaar nei hoekom moet sy woord net geglo word? hy moet dan bewyse kan lewer as hy so eng op die bybel is moet hy sy eie werk in dieselfde raamwerk beoordeel maar conveniently doen hy dit nie, so ja sover impress die ou my nie veel nie, maar ek moet nog alles lees ek noem maar net solank.
He is clearly a foreigner, removed both in space and time from the events he alleges. For example, in Mark 10:12, he has Jesus say that if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. As G. A. Wells, the author of The Historical Evidence for Jesus 10 puts it,
Such an utterance would have been meaningless in Palestine, where only men could obtain divorce.
wat is sy bewys hy se dit so nou moet dit so wees? not likely as hy nie die woord van ander aanvaar nei hoekom moet sy woord net geglo word? hy moet dan bewyse kan lewer as hy so eng op die bybel is moet hy sy eie werk in dieselfde raamwerk beoordeel maar conveniently doen hy dit nie, so ja sover impress die ou my nie veel nie, maar ek moet nog alles lees ek noem maar net solank.
Captain Planet- Posts : 17
Join date : 2010-01-29
Re: Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
Captain Planet Wed Feb 03, 2010 6:20 am
hier is nog voorbeeld, ek moet se hierdie ou is besig om my al hoe minder te impress hoe meer ek lees, dis asof hy net eenvoudig aanvaar wat hy dink is reg sonder om bewyse te lewer.
Another example of Mark's abysmal ignorance of Palestinian geography is found in the story he made up about Jesus traveling from Tyre on the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, 30 miles inland. According to Mark 7:31, Jesus and the boys went by way of Sidon, 20 miles north of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast! Since to Sidon and back would be 40 miles, this means that the wisest of all men walked 70 miles when he could have walked only 30. Of course, one would never know all this from the King James version which - apparently completely ignoring a perfectly clear Greek text - says "Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the Sea of Galilee..." Apparently the translators of the King James version also knew their geography. At least they knew more than did the author of Mark!
eerstens se hy net storie is opgemaak hoekom? wat is sy bewys dis opgemaak omdat die Here en sy groep langpad geloop het en nie kortpad nie? hoekom moet hy kortpad stap hoe langer die pad hoe meer mense kon hy bereik of dalk was daar n ander rede daar kan vele wees hoekom daardie pad gevolg is. maar alles wat hy se word nie gestaaf nie so dis dieselfde as die bybel. so hoekom moet mens hom glo ek sien nogsteeds geen bewyse van soliede argument hier nie. maar ek lees nog
Another example of Mark's abysmal ignorance of Palestinian geography is found in the story he made up about Jesus traveling from Tyre on the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, 30 miles inland. According to Mark 7:31, Jesus and the boys went by way of Sidon, 20 miles north of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast! Since to Sidon and back would be 40 miles, this means that the wisest of all men walked 70 miles when he could have walked only 30. Of course, one would never know all this from the King James version which - apparently completely ignoring a perfectly clear Greek text - says "Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the Sea of Galilee..." Apparently the translators of the King James version also knew their geography. At least they knew more than did the author of Mark!
eerstens se hy net storie is opgemaak hoekom? wat is sy bewys dis opgemaak omdat die Here en sy groep langpad geloop het en nie kortpad nie? hoekom moet hy kortpad stap hoe langer die pad hoe meer mense kon hy bereik of dalk was daar n ander rede daar kan vele wees hoekom daardie pad gevolg is. maar alles wat hy se word nie gestaaf nie so dis dieselfde as die bybel. so hoekom moet mens hom glo ek sien nogsteeds geen bewyse van soliede argument hier nie. maar ek lees nog
Captain Planet- Posts : 17
Join date : 2010-01-29
Re: Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
Captain Planet Wed Feb 03, 2010 6:23 am
The unreliability of the gospels is underscored when we learn that, with the possible exception of John, the first three gospels bear no internal indication of who wrote them. Can we glean anything of significance from the fourth and latest gospel, the gospel of John? Not likely! It is so unworldly, it can scarcely be cited for historical evidence. In this account, Jesus is hardly a man of flesh and blood at all - except for the purposes of divine cannibalism as required by the celebration of the rite of "holy communion."
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god," the gospel begins. No Star of Bethlehem, no embarrassment of pregnant virgins, no hint that Jesus ever wore diapers: pure spirit from the beginning. Moreover, in its present form, the gospel of John is the latest of all the official gospels.
waar kom hy nou aan die twak? John praat van God en die was voor die Here op aarde gebore is alhoewel een al toe. so hy ken net plain nie die tema wat hy probeer weg argumenteer nie so weereens teleurstellend. nee wat die ou suck en ek het nog so baie om te lees.
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god," the gospel begins. No Star of Bethlehem, no embarrassment of pregnant virgins, no hint that Jesus ever wore diapers: pure spirit from the beginning. Moreover, in its present form, the gospel of John is the latest of all the official gospels.
waar kom hy nou aan die twak? John praat van God en die was voor die Here op aarde gebore is alhoewel een al toe. so hy ken net plain nie die tema wat hy probeer weg argumenteer nie so weereens teleurstellend. nee wat die ou suck en ek het nog so baie om te lees.
Captain Planet- Posts : 17
Join date : 2010-01-29
Re: Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
Cpt Kaos Thu Feb 04, 2010 12:31 am
Jis,
Ek dink dit behoort redelik goed gestaaf te wees dat gedurende daardie periode vroue nie mag divorce het nie - veral in die Joodse samelewing wat baie patriagaal was.
Hy het darem redelik baie bronne in sy notes maar ek sal toegee ek dink nie hy is 'n akademikus nie maar dalk net 'n baie passievolle student van die akkuraadheid van die Bybel.
Johannes het niks van die stories van die ander Gospels nie en begin met waar Jesus gedoop word.
Ek persoonlik dink nie noodwendig daar het nie 'n historiese Jesus bestaan nie maar ek dink die Gospels en Nuwe Testament is baie aangepas om te pas baie spesifieke naratiewe en godsdienstige/politieke agendas van vroeer Christen kerkvaders en gemeenskappe.
Meeste bybelkundiges (nie teoloee nie) meen dat die gospels aangepas is om aan sekere narratiewe en gehore te "appeal" - byvoorbeeld die virgin birth vir ander romeinse sektes en godsdienste wat dit ingehad het. Meeste stem ook saam dat baie van die gospels so oorvertaal en verander is (ouer griekse weegawes verskille van nuwer latynse weergawes) dat dit onwaarskynlik is dat dit deur een persoon geskryf is en dan baie skrywers stukke vertaal en bygevoeg het soos vereis - m.a.w. selfs al is die Bybel inspireer deur God moes hy klomp ouens inspireer het en sommige om sy oorspronlikike inspirasie (woorde) te verander.
Ek sal bietjie vir jou meer neutrale links stuur - van bybelkundiges en akademisie.
Ek dink dit behoort redelik goed gestaaf te wees dat gedurende daardie periode vroue nie mag divorce het nie - veral in die Joodse samelewing wat baie patriagaal was.
Hy het darem redelik baie bronne in sy notes maar ek sal toegee ek dink nie hy is 'n akademikus nie maar dalk net 'n baie passievolle student van die akkuraadheid van die Bybel.
Johannes het niks van die stories van die ander Gospels nie en begin met waar Jesus gedoop word.
Ek persoonlik dink nie noodwendig daar het nie 'n historiese Jesus bestaan nie maar ek dink die Gospels en Nuwe Testament is baie aangepas om te pas baie spesifieke naratiewe en godsdienstige/politieke agendas van vroeer Christen kerkvaders en gemeenskappe.
Meeste bybelkundiges (nie teoloee nie) meen dat die gospels aangepas is om aan sekere narratiewe en gehore te "appeal" - byvoorbeeld die virgin birth vir ander romeinse sektes en godsdienste wat dit ingehad het. Meeste stem ook saam dat baie van die gospels so oorvertaal en verander is (ouer griekse weegawes verskille van nuwer latynse weergawes) dat dit onwaarskynlik is dat dit deur een persoon geskryf is en dan baie skrywers stukke vertaal en bygevoeg het soos vereis - m.a.w. selfs al is die Bybel inspireer deur God moes hy klomp ouens inspireer het en sommige om sy oorspronlikike inspirasie (woorde) te verander.
Ek sal bietjie vir jou meer neutrale links stuur - van bybelkundiges en akademisie.
Cpt Kaos- Posts : 40
Join date : 2010-01-29
Re: Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
Cpt Kaos Thu Feb 04, 2010 12:51 am
Gaan check bietjie die "Nuwe Hervormers" website uit. Ek het respek vir die ouens. Hulle kom almal uit die NG tradisie maar is ook godsdienskundiges en bybelkundiges - hulle glo dus nie alles in die Bybel nie maar wel die spirtuele boodskap:
Link oor opsomming van boek oor historiese Jesus deur Sakkie Spanneberg:
http://www.nuwe-hervorming.org.za/?q=wiki/jesus-nasaret-enkele-perspektiewe
Review van Hitchens' "God in not Great" :
http://www.nuwe-hervorming.org.za/?q=wiki/god-not-great-how-religion-poisons-everything
'n Bespreking van die Jesus-seminaar (die grootste en mees credible poging om Jesus te bestudeer):
http://www.nuwe-hervorming.org.za/?q=wiki/nuwe-hervorming-jesus-seminar
Ek post hierna drie artikels van die Nuwe Hervorming sodat jy nie na die links hoef te gaan nie:
Link oor opsomming van boek oor historiese Jesus deur Sakkie Spanneberg:
http://www.nuwe-hervorming.org.za/?q=wiki/jesus-nasaret-enkele-perspektiewe
Review van Hitchens' "God in not Great" :
http://www.nuwe-hervorming.org.za/?q=wiki/god-not-great-how-religion-poisons-everything
'n Bespreking van die Jesus-seminaar (die grootste en mees credible poging om Jesus te bestudeer):
http://www.nuwe-hervorming.org.za/?q=wiki/nuwe-hervorming-jesus-seminar
Ek post hierna drie artikels van die Nuwe Hervorming sodat jy nie na die links hoef te gaan nie:
Cpt Kaos- Posts : 40
Join date : 2010-01-29
Re: Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
Cpt Kaos Thu Feb 04, 2010 12:52 am
Die geboorteverhaal van die historiese Jesus
deur Sakkie Spangenberg
Die wyse waarop baie van ons die Bybel lees en verstaan, verskil aansienlik van vroeëre geslagte se lees en verstaan daarvan. Ons is beïnvloed deur ten minste drie groot omwentelings in die geestesgeskiedenis van die Westerse wêreld. Gedurende die vyftiende tot sewentiende eeu het daar 'n omwenteling voorgekom in Westerlinge se begrip van die waarheid. Gedurende die sewentiende tot negentiende eeu het daar 'n omwenteling plaasgevind in hulle verstaan van die geskiedenis. Gedurende die twintigste eeu het daar 'n omwenteling plaasgevind in hulle omgang met literatuur.
Die viering van Kersfees bied na my mening 'n goeie aanknopingspunt om 'n keer die effek van hierdie omwentelinge en die belangrikheid van die historiese Jesusnavorsing te illustreer.
Christene wat tot die Westerse tradisie van die Christendom behoort, vier Jesus se geboorte op 25 Desember. Christene wat tot die Oosterse tradisie behoort, vier sy geboorte op 6 Januarie. Twee tradisies en twee verskillende datums! Wie is reg? Is Jesus op 25 Desember of op 6 Januarie gebore?
Uit navorsing het dit duidelik geword dat nié één van hierdie datums korrek is nié. Jesus van Nasaret (of dan die historiese Jesus) is nie op 25 Desember óf 6 Januarie gebore nie. Ons het hier te doen met 'n tradisie wat sy oorsprong in die vierde eeu nC het.
Hoe het dit gekom dat 25 Desember gekies is? Die datum hou verband met 'n fees wat in Europa gevier is om die terugkeer van die son na die lang Europese winter, te herdenk. Die Noordelike wintersonstilstand vind jaarliks op 21/22 Desember plaas. Die fees was bekend as die fees van die onoorwinlike Son. Omdat die Christelike godsdiens die amptelike godsdiens van die Romeinse ryk geword het, is hierdie fees verchristelik.
Dis egter nie net oor Jesus se geboortedag wat daar verskillende tradisies bestaan nie, maar ook oor sy geboortejaar. Is Jesus van Nasaret 2002 jaar gelede gebore? Anders gestel: Is Jesus in die jaar 1 nC gebore? Volgens Matteus en Lukas is Hy gebore tydens die bewind van Herodus die Grote (Matt. 2:1, Luk. 1:5). Uit buite-bybelse bronne weet ons dat Herodus in die jaar 4 vC oorlede is. As ons die twee evangelies se gegewens aanvaar, moes Jesus dus vóór 4vC gebore gewees het. Lukas gee egter addisionele inligting. Volgens hom was Sirenius goewerneur van Sirië toe 'n volkstelling gehou en Jesus gebore is (Luk. 2:1-7). Maar Sirenius het eers gedurende die winter van 6-7 nC aan bewind gekom. Lukas se twee datums rym dus nie mooi nie. Jesus kon nie vóór 4vC én ná 6 nC gebore gewees het nie! Êrens het Lukas se inligting hom in die steek gelaat.
'n Derde saak waaroor daar verskillende tradisies bestaan, is Jesus se geboorteplek. Volgens Matteus het Josef en Maria in 'n huis in Betlehem gewoon en het die ster die wyse manne daarheen gelei (Matt. 2:9-11). Volgens Lukas het die gesin in Nasaret gewoon (Luk. 2:1-7) en is Josef en Maria deur keiser Augustus se sensusopname gedwing om na Betlehem te gaan. Hier in Betlehem is Jesus toe in 'n stal gebore waar die skaapwagters Hom gevind het. 'Hier is nie sprake van 'n teenstrydigheid nie', sal sommige lesers sê. Maar was Jesus in 'n huis gebore (soos Matteus beweer), of is Hy buite die herberg in 'n stal gebore (soos Lukas beweer)? Was daar wyse manne of skaapwagters? Ons kan die vraag nog indringender vra: Was Jesus wél in Betlehem gebore (soos Matteus en Lukas beweer), of is Hy in Nasaret gebore (soos Markus en Johannes veronderstel)? Nêrens in Markus of Johannes word na Hom verwys as 'Jesus van Betlehem' nie, maar altyd as 'Jesus van Nasaret' (vgl Mark. 1:9, 24; 10:47; 14:67; 16:6; Joh. 1:45; 18:5, 7).
Gerd Theissen ('n Duitse Nuwe-Testametikus) skryf die volgende hieroor: 'My gevolgtrekking is dat Jesus van Nasaret kom. Die verskuiwing van sy geboorteplek na Betlehem is die resultaat van godsdienstige legende en kreatiwiteit. Volgens die destydse verwagting moes die messias in Betlehem gebore word, daarom verplaas Matteus en Lukas Jesus se geboorte daarheen.'
Die historiese Jesus was dus nooit in Betlehem gebore nie, ook nie in die jaar 1 nC nie en allermins op 25 Desember. Wat het Christene en die wêreld dan op 25 Desember gevier? Na my mening 'n roereier-geboorteverhaal. Dis 'n verhaal wat nêrens só in die Bybel opgeteken staan nie, maar oor eeue uit Bybelse en buite-bybelse materiaal geskep is - natuurlik met verskeie oogmerke. Tans is dié verhaal 'n handige instrument om kapitalisme te dryf.
Ons het op 25 Desember eintlik die geboorte van die 'global capitalistic and sentimental Jesus' gevier. Kersfees het 'n kapitalistiese fees geword. In die VSA (wat 70% van die wêreld se hulpbronne jaarliks verorber) word 40% van die land se handel tydens die veertien dae tussen 'Thanksgiving day' en Kersdag gedryf. Ek wonder hoe ons land se Desemberhandelsyfers gaan lyk en twyfel of dit die koninkryk is waarvoor die historiese Jesus Hom beywer het.
deur Sakkie Spangenberg
Die wyse waarop baie van ons die Bybel lees en verstaan, verskil aansienlik van vroeëre geslagte se lees en verstaan daarvan. Ons is beïnvloed deur ten minste drie groot omwentelings in die geestesgeskiedenis van die Westerse wêreld. Gedurende die vyftiende tot sewentiende eeu het daar 'n omwenteling voorgekom in Westerlinge se begrip van die waarheid. Gedurende die sewentiende tot negentiende eeu het daar 'n omwenteling plaasgevind in hulle verstaan van die geskiedenis. Gedurende die twintigste eeu het daar 'n omwenteling plaasgevind in hulle omgang met literatuur.
Die viering van Kersfees bied na my mening 'n goeie aanknopingspunt om 'n keer die effek van hierdie omwentelinge en die belangrikheid van die historiese Jesusnavorsing te illustreer.
Christene wat tot die Westerse tradisie van die Christendom behoort, vier Jesus se geboorte op 25 Desember. Christene wat tot die Oosterse tradisie behoort, vier sy geboorte op 6 Januarie. Twee tradisies en twee verskillende datums! Wie is reg? Is Jesus op 25 Desember of op 6 Januarie gebore?
Uit navorsing het dit duidelik geword dat nié één van hierdie datums korrek is nié. Jesus van Nasaret (of dan die historiese Jesus) is nie op 25 Desember óf 6 Januarie gebore nie. Ons het hier te doen met 'n tradisie wat sy oorsprong in die vierde eeu nC het.
Hoe het dit gekom dat 25 Desember gekies is? Die datum hou verband met 'n fees wat in Europa gevier is om die terugkeer van die son na die lang Europese winter, te herdenk. Die Noordelike wintersonstilstand vind jaarliks op 21/22 Desember plaas. Die fees was bekend as die fees van die onoorwinlike Son. Omdat die Christelike godsdiens die amptelike godsdiens van die Romeinse ryk geword het, is hierdie fees verchristelik.
Dis egter nie net oor Jesus se geboortedag wat daar verskillende tradisies bestaan nie, maar ook oor sy geboortejaar. Is Jesus van Nasaret 2002 jaar gelede gebore? Anders gestel: Is Jesus in die jaar 1 nC gebore? Volgens Matteus en Lukas is Hy gebore tydens die bewind van Herodus die Grote (Matt. 2:1, Luk. 1:5). Uit buite-bybelse bronne weet ons dat Herodus in die jaar 4 vC oorlede is. As ons die twee evangelies se gegewens aanvaar, moes Jesus dus vóór 4vC gebore gewees het. Lukas gee egter addisionele inligting. Volgens hom was Sirenius goewerneur van Sirië toe 'n volkstelling gehou en Jesus gebore is (Luk. 2:1-7). Maar Sirenius het eers gedurende die winter van 6-7 nC aan bewind gekom. Lukas se twee datums rym dus nie mooi nie. Jesus kon nie vóór 4vC én ná 6 nC gebore gewees het nie! Êrens het Lukas se inligting hom in die steek gelaat.
'n Derde saak waaroor daar verskillende tradisies bestaan, is Jesus se geboorteplek. Volgens Matteus het Josef en Maria in 'n huis in Betlehem gewoon en het die ster die wyse manne daarheen gelei (Matt. 2:9-11). Volgens Lukas het die gesin in Nasaret gewoon (Luk. 2:1-7) en is Josef en Maria deur keiser Augustus se sensusopname gedwing om na Betlehem te gaan. Hier in Betlehem is Jesus toe in 'n stal gebore waar die skaapwagters Hom gevind het. 'Hier is nie sprake van 'n teenstrydigheid nie', sal sommige lesers sê. Maar was Jesus in 'n huis gebore (soos Matteus beweer), of is Hy buite die herberg in 'n stal gebore (soos Lukas beweer)? Was daar wyse manne of skaapwagters? Ons kan die vraag nog indringender vra: Was Jesus wél in Betlehem gebore (soos Matteus en Lukas beweer), of is Hy in Nasaret gebore (soos Markus en Johannes veronderstel)? Nêrens in Markus of Johannes word na Hom verwys as 'Jesus van Betlehem' nie, maar altyd as 'Jesus van Nasaret' (vgl Mark. 1:9, 24; 10:47; 14:67; 16:6; Joh. 1:45; 18:5, 7).
Gerd Theissen ('n Duitse Nuwe-Testametikus) skryf die volgende hieroor: 'My gevolgtrekking is dat Jesus van Nasaret kom. Die verskuiwing van sy geboorteplek na Betlehem is die resultaat van godsdienstige legende en kreatiwiteit. Volgens die destydse verwagting moes die messias in Betlehem gebore word, daarom verplaas Matteus en Lukas Jesus se geboorte daarheen.'
Die historiese Jesus was dus nooit in Betlehem gebore nie, ook nie in die jaar 1 nC nie en allermins op 25 Desember. Wat het Christene en die wêreld dan op 25 Desember gevier? Na my mening 'n roereier-geboorteverhaal. Dis 'n verhaal wat nêrens só in die Bybel opgeteken staan nie, maar oor eeue uit Bybelse en buite-bybelse materiaal geskep is - natuurlik met verskeie oogmerke. Tans is dié verhaal 'n handige instrument om kapitalisme te dryf.
Ons het op 25 Desember eintlik die geboorte van die 'global capitalistic and sentimental Jesus' gevier. Kersfees het 'n kapitalistiese fees geword. In die VSA (wat 70% van die wêreld se hulpbronne jaarliks verorber) word 40% van die land se handel tydens die veertien dae tussen 'Thanksgiving day' en Kersdag gedryf. Ek wonder hoe ons land se Desemberhandelsyfers gaan lyk en twyfel of dit die koninkryk is waarvoor die historiese Jesus Hom beywer het.
Cpt Kaos- Posts : 40
Join date : 2010-01-29
Re: Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
Cpt Kaos Thu Feb 04, 2010 12:55 am
Gebore uit die maagd, Maria..."
Hansie Wolmarans
Samevatting
Jesaja 7:13-14 is nie 'n profesie van 'n maagdelike geboorte nie. Die kind wat Immanuel ("God-is-aan-ons-kant") genoem word, is een van Jesaja se eie seuns. Matteus 1:18-25 lê Jesaja uit om in te pas by 'n Grieks-Hellenisties mitologiese raamwerk. Jesus was Maria se buite-egtelike kind, moontlik by 'n Romeinse soldaat, Panthera. Die leerstuk van die maagdelike geboorte berus op 'n foutiewe en negatiewe siening van die vrou se rol in biologiese voortplanting. Dit funksioneer as 'n meestersimbool vir uitgediende patriargale waardes. Jesus word nêrens direk in die Ou Testament voorspel nie. Die teologiese raamwerk van 'n heilsgeskiedenis, berus op 'n onaanvaarbare teologiese determinisme. Die nadele van hierdie visie is dat dit die status quo onkrities legitimeer, of 'n passiewe fatalisme by mense tot gevolg het. Die Nuwe Hervorming wil 'n teologie van verantwoordelikheid vestig om mense betrokke te kry in die kreatiewe dans van die lewe. Daar is iets bevrydends daarin dat 'n buite-egtelike seun van 2000 jaar gelede nog steeds 'n positiewe invloed op mense lewens kan hê.
* Inleiding: Determinisme
Een van die take van die Nuwe Hervorming, is die ontrafeling van 'n web, 'n patroon van denke, wat oor eeue heen gespin is. Deel hiervan, is die dogma dat God 'n bloudruk het vir hierdie wêreld. Die geskiedenis is besig om volgens hierdie plan uit te speel. Die teologiese woord hiervoor is heilsgeskiedenis , terwyl die filosowe van determinisme— 'n geloof dat God selfs die onheil en teenspoed in my lewe tot my eie beswil oor my laat kom. Die leerstuk van die maagedelike geboorte van Jesus, is deel van die groter leerstuk van die heilsgeskiedenis . Hiervolgens word Jesus in die Ou Testament voorspel, en hierdie voorspellings word in die Nuwe Testament vervul. Daar is nie 'n enkele teks in die Ou Testament wat 'n direkte voorspelling van Jesus is nie.
Vir my as individu het die determinasie perspektief die implikasie dat ek soos 'n klein stukkie van 'n groot legkaart inpas in 'n groter prentjie. Rick Warren se boek, Living a Purpose Driven Life eksploiteer hierdie visie. Ons taak is bloot om God se plan vir ons lewens te ontdek en daarby in te val. Ek sal aantoon dat daar nie só 'n meesterplan is nie. Ons is geroepe om self op 'n positiewe manier aan ons lewens sin te gee.
Hierdie siening dat die geskiedenis vooraf deur God gedetermineer is, kom uit die Bybel self. Ek lees eers Jesaja 7:13-14, en daarna ook Matteus 1:18-25. Eers sal ek gesels oor die geskiedkundige agtergrond van elke teks, kyk na maagdelike geboortes in die kultuur toé, en ten slotte vra wat dit vir ons beteken.
* Die geboorte van 'n kind
Ongeveer 700 jaar voor Jesus se geboorte, hoor ons (Jes 7:13 -14):
Toe sê Jesaja: "Luister, geslag van Dawid! Is dit nie vir julle genoeg om mense te vermoei nie, dat julle ook my God moet vermoei? Die Here sal daarom self vir julle 'n teken gee: 'n Jong vrou sal swanger word en 'n seun in die wêreld bring en sy sal hom Immanuel noem."
So ongeveer 90 jaar ná Jesus se geboorte, skryf Matteus 'n stukkie geskiedenis neer (Mt 1:18 -25):
18 Hier volg nou die geskiedenis van die geboorte van Jesus Christus. Toe sy moeder Maria aan Josef verloof was, nog voordat hullegetroud was, het dit geblyk dat sy swanger was. Die swangerskap het van die Heilige Gees gekom.
19 Haar verloofde, Josef, wat aan die wet van Moses getrou was maar haar tog nie in die openbaar tot skande wou maak nie, het hom voorgeneem om die verlowing stilweg te verbreek.
20 Terwyl hy dit in gedagte gehad het, het daar 'n engel van die Here in 'n droom aan hom verskyn en gesê: "Josef, seun van Dawid, moenie bang wees om met Maria te trou nie, want wat in haar verwek is, kom van die Heilige Gees.
21 Sy sal 'n Seun in die wêreld bring, en jy moet Hom Jesus noem, want dit is Hy wat sy volg van hulle sondes sal verlos."
22 Dit het alles gebeur sodat die woord wat die Here deur sy profeet gesê het, vervul sou word:
23 "Die maagd sal swanger word en 'n Seun in die wêreld bring, en hulle sal Hom Immanuel noem." Die naam beteken God by ons.
24 Toe Josef uit die slaap wakker word, het hy gemaak soos die engel van die Here hom beveel het en met haar getrou.
25 Hy het egter nie met haar omgang gehad voordat sy haar Seun in die wêreld gebring het nie. En Josef het Hom Jesus genoem.
* Uitleg van Jesaja
Om hierdie twee stukkies letterkunde te verstaan, moet ons dit in konteks probeer plaas. Koning Agas van Juda is in die moeilikheid: twee ander konings wil hom aanval (7:1). Jesaja troos hom en sê dit sal nie gebeur nie (7:7). Hy gee hom ook 'n teken ( my parafrase) : "'n Jong vrou is [by haar man] swanger, en gaan binnekort 'n seun in die wêreld bring. Sy moet hom God-is-Aan-Ons-Kant noem" ( 7:14 ). Jesaja beloof verder dat, vóór hierdie seuntjie verstand kry, die twee konings se lande verwoes sal lê ( 7:15 ). Hy praat dus glad nie oor iets wat 700 jaar later gaan gebeur nie, maar binnekort.
Wie is hierdie jong vrou en haar seun? In 7:3 wys Jesaja sy seun, Sear-Jesub ("'n-Bietjie-sal-Terugkeer") vir Agas, as 'n teken dat dinge goed sal afloop—daar sal 'n klompie Jode uit die ballingskap terugkom. In 8:3 gee Jesaja 'n ander seun van hom die naam "Plunder-en-Roof-is-Naby." Dit is 'n teken dat Agas se vyande geplunder gaan word. In die volgende hoofstuk, 8:18 , sê Jesaja dat hy en sy kinders "lewende getuies" is dat die Here hulle gaan help. Heelwaarskynlik praat Jesaja dus van een van sy eie kinders wat "Immanuel" of "God-is-Aan-Ons-Kant" genoem is. Daar is ook geleerdes wat dink koning Agas se vrou swanger was. Jesaja moedig hom dan aan om sy kind die naam "Immanuel" te gee, "God-is-aan-ons-kant."
Die historiese perspektief van ons profeet is dié van determinisme. God in die kosmos se boonste verdieping, is besig om die geskiedenis soos 'n stuk materiaal op 'n weefmasjien uit te weef. Jesaja, as profeet, het insig in wat gaan gebeur; hy het 'n telefoonlyn boontoe. Wanneer die oorlogswolke saampak, gee Jesaja vir hulle hoop. Sy eie of dalk die koning se kind kry 'n simboliese naam: God baklei aan hulle kant.
* Uitleg van Matteus
Matteus skryf, soos Jesaja, teen die agtergrond van 'n kosmos met drie verdiepings. Wat hier op aarde gebeur, is die resultaat van dinge wat deur God gedetermineer is. Nou is dit 'n engel in 'n droom wat Josef se internetkonneksie boontoe is. Matteus vertel dat Josef "verloof" was. Dit is natuurlik nie korrek vertaal nie. In dié tyd was daar nie 'n onderskeid tussen "verloof" en "trou" nie. 'n Dogter, sodra sy begin menstrueer, is aan 'n man gegee as sy vrou. Die verhouding het dan ontwikkel totdat hulle uiteindelik sou seks hê. Hier staan bloot dat hulle getroud was, maar nog nie seks gehad het nie. Dit blyk toe dat Maria swanger was. Vir Matteus is hierdie swangerskap van die Heilige Gees afkomstig. Hy verander aan die Jesaja teks om hier uit te kom. 'n Jong vrou wat swanger is (teenwoordige tyd), is nou 'n maagd wat sal swanger word (toekomstige tyd). Die naam Immanuel het nou te doen met verlossing van sonde, en nie met aan wie se kant God is in die oorlog nie. Skraap ons hierdie mitologiese raamwerk, kan mens tot geen ander gevolgtrekking kom as dat Jesus buite die eg gebore is nie.
Die tradisie dat Jesus 'n buite-egtelike kind was, is baie oud. Om die waarheid te sê, dit kom in die Bybel self voor. Die oudste Evangelie, Markus, wat so ongeveer 85 n.C. geskryf is, het glad nie die verhaal van die maagdelike geboorte nie. Markus 6 vertel dat Jesus eenkeer na sy geboortedorp teruggekeer het. Op die sabbat het hy in die sinagoge gepreek. Toe sê die mense (6:3): "Is hy dan nie die timmerman, 'N SEUN VAN MARIA en die broer van Jakobus, Joses, Judas en Simon nie? En is dit dan nie sy susters wat hier by ons woon nie?"
Hierdie versie spreek boekdele. 'n Kind se afkoms is altyd van vaderskant aangedui, behalwe waar die kind buite-egtelik was; dan is dit van moederskant af gedoen. Volgens buitebybelse tradisies het Maria 'n verhouding met 'n Romeinse soldaat gehad. In ongeveer 178 n.C. skryf Celsus (sy geskrifte is verbrand; ons ken hom net uit Contra Celsum , Origines se verweer), dat Jesus se pa 'n Romeinse soldaat, Panthera, was. In die Joodse Talmud word daar na "Jesus, die seun van Panthera" verwys. Palestina is deur Romeinse soldate beset rondom ons Christelike jaartelling. In die Rynland, Duitsland, is 'n grafskrif gevind waar 'n Romeinse soldaat en boogskutter, Panthera, begrawe is, nadat hy in Palestina diens gedoen het en toe in 9 n.C. oorgeplaas is. Dit is moontlik dat hy die biologiese pa van Jesus wat gebore is kort nadat Maria begin menstrueer het, waarskynlik op 12/13-jarige ouderdom. Oor die aard van die verhouding tussen Panthera en Maria sou mens net kon spekuleer—verkragting is nie uitgesluit nie.
Andries van Aarde het 'n boek geskryf, Fatherless in Galilee waarin hy aantoon hoe Jesus se hele siening van God as vader ontwikkel het, omdat hy deur sy gemeenskap 'n aardse vader ontsê is; dit was Jesus se meganisme om sy omstandighede te hanteer.
* Maagdelike Geboortes in die Ou Tyd
Ons moet verstaan dat maagdelike geboortes nie onbekend was in daardie tyd nie. Per definisie was 'n held, soos byvoorbeeld Herakles, se pa 'n god, en sy ma 'n aardse maagd. Spore hiervan is in die Ou Testament. Genesis 6:1-4 vertel:
"Toe die mense baie begin word het op die aarde en daar vir hulle dogters gebore is, 2 het die hemelwesens [=gode] gesien die dogters van die mense is mooi en het hulle getrou [eufemisme] met die dogters van hulle keuse. … 4 In daardie tyd was daar reuse op die aarde, en ook daarna wanneer die hemelwesens [=gode] na die dogters van die mense toe gekom en kinders by hulle gehad het. Hulle was die sterk mense van die ou tyd, die manne van naam."
Oor talle belangrike mense is die verhaal versprei dat hulle pa 'n god was, byvoorbeeld die filosoof Plato en Alexander die Grote. Hierdie siening, om iemand se belang ná die tyd terug te verklaar as dit dit op goddelike genetiese materiaal berus, het ontstaan omdat mense nie mooi verstaan het hoe voortplanting werk nie. Die vrou se funksie is gesien as dié van 'n blompot. Die enigste bydrae van die vrou in die proses is om 'n houer of 'n veld te verskaf waarin die manlike saad kan groei (Aristoteles Generatio Animalium 1.728a). Die digter, Aeschylus skryf in sy werk, die Eumenides dat die ma slegs die saadjie wat geplant is, voed. Die ware ouer is die een wat die saadjie plant.
Hierdie siening het 'n invloed op sedes gehad. Mans kon maar rondloop om hulle genetiese materiaal te versprei. Vroue moes kuis bly, sodat haar kinders die man se genetiese samestelling kon voortdra. Die huweliksmoraliteit het ontwikkel rondom sake soos erfreg en die konsentrasie en behoud van produksiemiddele binne 'n familie.
Gevolglik berus die maagdelike geboorte storie op 'n uiters negatiewe siening van die vrou. Dit is onmoontlik om 'n storie voor te stel dat 'n aardse man 'n hemelse godin bevrug om 'n heldin in die wêreld te bring. Maria is passief in Matteus se verhaal — die storie is niks anders as 'n verkragting deur 'n bo-natuurlike manlike krag nie. Alle inligting in die storie word aan Josef gekommunikeer. God tree hier op soos 'n feudale landheer wat die ius primae noctis , die reg van die eerste nag, uitoefen. Die landheer het die reg gehad om, wanneer een van sy onderdane trou, die eerste kind by haar te verwek. Hier eis die kosmiese landheer hierdie reg op, en, soos reglose bywoners, moet Josef en Maria dankbaar daarby inval. Om hierdie verhaal in verband te bring met kloning en dat 'n maagdelike geboorte in hierdie konteks verstaan moet word, is om die hele aangeleentheid verkeerd te verstaan. Daar is gevolglik geen plek meer in 'n moderne teologie vir die leerstuk van Jesus se maagedelike geboorte nie.
* Slot: 'n Teologie van Verantwoordelikheid
Daar is vir my talle nadele daaraan om die geskiedenis in 'n raamwerk van determinisme te beleef:
* Dit gee die wat mag het 'n rede om nie te verander nie. In die ou Suid-Afrika is Romeine 13 ("…en die owerhede wat daar is, is daar deur die beskikking van God.") gebruik om die apartheidsregime te stut. Gekoppel met die mite dat God Afrikaanse mense in Suid-Afrika geplant het om 'n nasie te wees en tot aan die einde blank en dominant te bly, en die lig van die evangelie te versprei, het oneindige leed en ellende tot gevolg gehad. Die opvatting dat daar 'n "skeppingsorde" is wat die rolmodellering van mans en vroue in die huwelik bepaal, kinders se plekke vaslê in blindelingse onderdanigheid, is gif vir ons samelewing. Dit is een van die vernaamste oorsake van geweld teenoor vroue en kinders in ons land. Dit bring ons by die tweede nadeel:
* Johnny Steinberg skryf in Business Day van 15 November 2004 :
"But what a strange journey white supremacism has travelled. It has no voice in public discourse. It has no political party and no newspaper. Instead, it has migrated, fully intact and unscathed, deep into private life. Robbed of a public platform, it has not died, but mutated into a new attitude one of resignation, fatalism, depression. It has become, above all, an ideology of dispiritedness."
'n Deterministiese siening van die geskiedenis maak mense fatilisties en passief om dinge maar net gelate te aanvaar as komende uit Gods hand. Ons behoort dinge soos moraliteit, reg en geregtigheid, in berekening te bring wanneer ons praat oor sake soos regstellende aksie en misdaad. Ek dink dat hierdie opvatting die rede is waarom Afrikaanse mense oor die algemeen apaties geword het in die nuwe Suid-Afrika; ons raak nie betrokke by dinge soos die Gemeenskaps Polisiërings Forum of partypolitiek nie. Een van die belangrike take van die Nuwe Hervorming Netwerk is om 'n teologie van menslike verantwoordelikheid te ontwikkel. Ons reglement verklaar: " Ons visualiseer 'n nuwe era waar inligting vrylik kan vloei sonder vrees vir verkettering, marginalisering, of vervolging. Elke mens, man, vrou of kind, behoort in staat te wees om in nuwe verhoudings tot hulleself, hulle omgewing en God te kan leef om die beste te kan wees waartoe hulle in staat is."
As ons immanent, dit wil sê, sonder verwysing na 'n derde kosmiese verdieping, kyk na oorsake en gevolge, kan dit bevrydende effekte hê. Ons kan verstaan hoe oorerwing en omgewing ons gedrag bepaal. Maar ons kan ook ons uniekheid en eiewaarde besef. Ons hoef nie dinge gelate te aanvaar nie; ons kan 'n verskil maak.
Daar is vir my iets bevrydends en positief daarin dat 'n buite-egtelike seun van 2000 jaar gelede, Jesus van Nasaret, my rolmodel is. Dit is soos ons huishulp wie se matriekdogter 'n ruk terug deur 'n bende van tien verkrag is. Nog steeds kry die kinders in haar familie name soos Hope , Grace , Beauty , en Freedom— 'n naamgewende verwagting dat ons en ons kinders dinge kan verander; ons is nie uitgelewer aan magte waaroor ons geen beheer het nie.
Ek lees eenkeer van 'n man wat een oggend vroeg op die strand gestap het. Langs die see het duisende seesterre gelê wat deur die gety uitgespoel is. In die opkomende son sien hy 'n silhoette van 'n dansende figuur. Soos hy nader stap, sien hy dis 'n man wat die seesterre optel en een vir een in die see teruggooi. Toe hy naby kom, vra hy die ou wat hy doen. "Ek gee hierdie seesterre 'n tweede kans . Hulle kan nie hier in die son oorleef nie." "Maar daar is duisende op die strand! Hoe kan jy 'n verskil maak?" "Wel" sê hy, terwyl hy optel en een teruggooi, "ek het 'n verskil vir hierdie een gemaak." Die ou het gebuk en saam met die man seesterre begin teruggooi.
'n Nuwe Hervorming perspektief op Kersfees is dat ons betrokke sal raak by die kreatiewe dans van die lewe. Ons is nie langer passiewe toeskouers nie, maar akteurs.
Hansie Wolmarans
Samevatting
Jesaja 7:13-14 is nie 'n profesie van 'n maagdelike geboorte nie. Die kind wat Immanuel ("God-is-aan-ons-kant") genoem word, is een van Jesaja se eie seuns. Matteus 1:18-25 lê Jesaja uit om in te pas by 'n Grieks-Hellenisties mitologiese raamwerk. Jesus was Maria se buite-egtelike kind, moontlik by 'n Romeinse soldaat, Panthera. Die leerstuk van die maagdelike geboorte berus op 'n foutiewe en negatiewe siening van die vrou se rol in biologiese voortplanting. Dit funksioneer as 'n meestersimbool vir uitgediende patriargale waardes. Jesus word nêrens direk in die Ou Testament voorspel nie. Die teologiese raamwerk van 'n heilsgeskiedenis, berus op 'n onaanvaarbare teologiese determinisme. Die nadele van hierdie visie is dat dit die status quo onkrities legitimeer, of 'n passiewe fatalisme by mense tot gevolg het. Die Nuwe Hervorming wil 'n teologie van verantwoordelikheid vestig om mense betrokke te kry in die kreatiewe dans van die lewe. Daar is iets bevrydends daarin dat 'n buite-egtelike seun van 2000 jaar gelede nog steeds 'n positiewe invloed op mense lewens kan hê.
* Inleiding: Determinisme
Een van die take van die Nuwe Hervorming, is die ontrafeling van 'n web, 'n patroon van denke, wat oor eeue heen gespin is. Deel hiervan, is die dogma dat God 'n bloudruk het vir hierdie wêreld. Die geskiedenis is besig om volgens hierdie plan uit te speel. Die teologiese woord hiervoor is heilsgeskiedenis , terwyl die filosowe van determinisme— 'n geloof dat God selfs die onheil en teenspoed in my lewe tot my eie beswil oor my laat kom. Die leerstuk van die maagedelike geboorte van Jesus, is deel van die groter leerstuk van die heilsgeskiedenis . Hiervolgens word Jesus in die Ou Testament voorspel, en hierdie voorspellings word in die Nuwe Testament vervul. Daar is nie 'n enkele teks in die Ou Testament wat 'n direkte voorspelling van Jesus is nie.
Vir my as individu het die determinasie perspektief die implikasie dat ek soos 'n klein stukkie van 'n groot legkaart inpas in 'n groter prentjie. Rick Warren se boek, Living a Purpose Driven Life eksploiteer hierdie visie. Ons taak is bloot om God se plan vir ons lewens te ontdek en daarby in te val. Ek sal aantoon dat daar nie só 'n meesterplan is nie. Ons is geroepe om self op 'n positiewe manier aan ons lewens sin te gee.
Hierdie siening dat die geskiedenis vooraf deur God gedetermineer is, kom uit die Bybel self. Ek lees eers Jesaja 7:13-14, en daarna ook Matteus 1:18-25. Eers sal ek gesels oor die geskiedkundige agtergrond van elke teks, kyk na maagdelike geboortes in die kultuur toé, en ten slotte vra wat dit vir ons beteken.
* Die geboorte van 'n kind
Ongeveer 700 jaar voor Jesus se geboorte, hoor ons (Jes 7:13 -14):
Toe sê Jesaja: "Luister, geslag van Dawid! Is dit nie vir julle genoeg om mense te vermoei nie, dat julle ook my God moet vermoei? Die Here sal daarom self vir julle 'n teken gee: 'n Jong vrou sal swanger word en 'n seun in die wêreld bring en sy sal hom Immanuel noem."
So ongeveer 90 jaar ná Jesus se geboorte, skryf Matteus 'n stukkie geskiedenis neer (Mt 1:18 -25):
18 Hier volg nou die geskiedenis van die geboorte van Jesus Christus. Toe sy moeder Maria aan Josef verloof was, nog voordat hullegetroud was, het dit geblyk dat sy swanger was. Die swangerskap het van die Heilige Gees gekom.
19 Haar verloofde, Josef, wat aan die wet van Moses getrou was maar haar tog nie in die openbaar tot skande wou maak nie, het hom voorgeneem om die verlowing stilweg te verbreek.
20 Terwyl hy dit in gedagte gehad het, het daar 'n engel van die Here in 'n droom aan hom verskyn en gesê: "Josef, seun van Dawid, moenie bang wees om met Maria te trou nie, want wat in haar verwek is, kom van die Heilige Gees.
21 Sy sal 'n Seun in die wêreld bring, en jy moet Hom Jesus noem, want dit is Hy wat sy volg van hulle sondes sal verlos."
22 Dit het alles gebeur sodat die woord wat die Here deur sy profeet gesê het, vervul sou word:
23 "Die maagd sal swanger word en 'n Seun in die wêreld bring, en hulle sal Hom Immanuel noem." Die naam beteken God by ons.
24 Toe Josef uit die slaap wakker word, het hy gemaak soos die engel van die Here hom beveel het en met haar getrou.
25 Hy het egter nie met haar omgang gehad voordat sy haar Seun in die wêreld gebring het nie. En Josef het Hom Jesus genoem.
* Uitleg van Jesaja
Om hierdie twee stukkies letterkunde te verstaan, moet ons dit in konteks probeer plaas. Koning Agas van Juda is in die moeilikheid: twee ander konings wil hom aanval (7:1). Jesaja troos hom en sê dit sal nie gebeur nie (7:7). Hy gee hom ook 'n teken ( my parafrase) : "'n Jong vrou is [by haar man] swanger, en gaan binnekort 'n seun in die wêreld bring. Sy moet hom God-is-Aan-Ons-Kant noem" ( 7:14 ). Jesaja beloof verder dat, vóór hierdie seuntjie verstand kry, die twee konings se lande verwoes sal lê ( 7:15 ). Hy praat dus glad nie oor iets wat 700 jaar later gaan gebeur nie, maar binnekort.
Wie is hierdie jong vrou en haar seun? In 7:3 wys Jesaja sy seun, Sear-Jesub ("'n-Bietjie-sal-Terugkeer") vir Agas, as 'n teken dat dinge goed sal afloop—daar sal 'n klompie Jode uit die ballingskap terugkom. In 8:3 gee Jesaja 'n ander seun van hom die naam "Plunder-en-Roof-is-Naby." Dit is 'n teken dat Agas se vyande geplunder gaan word. In die volgende hoofstuk, 8:18 , sê Jesaja dat hy en sy kinders "lewende getuies" is dat die Here hulle gaan help. Heelwaarskynlik praat Jesaja dus van een van sy eie kinders wat "Immanuel" of "God-is-Aan-Ons-Kant" genoem is. Daar is ook geleerdes wat dink koning Agas se vrou swanger was. Jesaja moedig hom dan aan om sy kind die naam "Immanuel" te gee, "God-is-aan-ons-kant."
Die historiese perspektief van ons profeet is dié van determinisme. God in die kosmos se boonste verdieping, is besig om die geskiedenis soos 'n stuk materiaal op 'n weefmasjien uit te weef. Jesaja, as profeet, het insig in wat gaan gebeur; hy het 'n telefoonlyn boontoe. Wanneer die oorlogswolke saampak, gee Jesaja vir hulle hoop. Sy eie of dalk die koning se kind kry 'n simboliese naam: God baklei aan hulle kant.
* Uitleg van Matteus
Matteus skryf, soos Jesaja, teen die agtergrond van 'n kosmos met drie verdiepings. Wat hier op aarde gebeur, is die resultaat van dinge wat deur God gedetermineer is. Nou is dit 'n engel in 'n droom wat Josef se internetkonneksie boontoe is. Matteus vertel dat Josef "verloof" was. Dit is natuurlik nie korrek vertaal nie. In dié tyd was daar nie 'n onderskeid tussen "verloof" en "trou" nie. 'n Dogter, sodra sy begin menstrueer, is aan 'n man gegee as sy vrou. Die verhouding het dan ontwikkel totdat hulle uiteindelik sou seks hê. Hier staan bloot dat hulle getroud was, maar nog nie seks gehad het nie. Dit blyk toe dat Maria swanger was. Vir Matteus is hierdie swangerskap van die Heilige Gees afkomstig. Hy verander aan die Jesaja teks om hier uit te kom. 'n Jong vrou wat swanger is (teenwoordige tyd), is nou 'n maagd wat sal swanger word (toekomstige tyd). Die naam Immanuel het nou te doen met verlossing van sonde, en nie met aan wie se kant God is in die oorlog nie. Skraap ons hierdie mitologiese raamwerk, kan mens tot geen ander gevolgtrekking kom as dat Jesus buite die eg gebore is nie.
Die tradisie dat Jesus 'n buite-egtelike kind was, is baie oud. Om die waarheid te sê, dit kom in die Bybel self voor. Die oudste Evangelie, Markus, wat so ongeveer 85 n.C. geskryf is, het glad nie die verhaal van die maagdelike geboorte nie. Markus 6 vertel dat Jesus eenkeer na sy geboortedorp teruggekeer het. Op die sabbat het hy in die sinagoge gepreek. Toe sê die mense (6:3): "Is hy dan nie die timmerman, 'N SEUN VAN MARIA en die broer van Jakobus, Joses, Judas en Simon nie? En is dit dan nie sy susters wat hier by ons woon nie?"
Hierdie versie spreek boekdele. 'n Kind se afkoms is altyd van vaderskant aangedui, behalwe waar die kind buite-egtelik was; dan is dit van moederskant af gedoen. Volgens buitebybelse tradisies het Maria 'n verhouding met 'n Romeinse soldaat gehad. In ongeveer 178 n.C. skryf Celsus (sy geskrifte is verbrand; ons ken hom net uit Contra Celsum , Origines se verweer), dat Jesus se pa 'n Romeinse soldaat, Panthera, was. In die Joodse Talmud word daar na "Jesus, die seun van Panthera" verwys. Palestina is deur Romeinse soldate beset rondom ons Christelike jaartelling. In die Rynland, Duitsland, is 'n grafskrif gevind waar 'n Romeinse soldaat en boogskutter, Panthera, begrawe is, nadat hy in Palestina diens gedoen het en toe in 9 n.C. oorgeplaas is. Dit is moontlik dat hy die biologiese pa van Jesus wat gebore is kort nadat Maria begin menstrueer het, waarskynlik op 12/13-jarige ouderdom. Oor die aard van die verhouding tussen Panthera en Maria sou mens net kon spekuleer—verkragting is nie uitgesluit nie.
Andries van Aarde het 'n boek geskryf, Fatherless in Galilee waarin hy aantoon hoe Jesus se hele siening van God as vader ontwikkel het, omdat hy deur sy gemeenskap 'n aardse vader ontsê is; dit was Jesus se meganisme om sy omstandighede te hanteer.
* Maagdelike Geboortes in die Ou Tyd
Ons moet verstaan dat maagdelike geboortes nie onbekend was in daardie tyd nie. Per definisie was 'n held, soos byvoorbeeld Herakles, se pa 'n god, en sy ma 'n aardse maagd. Spore hiervan is in die Ou Testament. Genesis 6:1-4 vertel:
"Toe die mense baie begin word het op die aarde en daar vir hulle dogters gebore is, 2 het die hemelwesens [=gode] gesien die dogters van die mense is mooi en het hulle getrou [eufemisme] met die dogters van hulle keuse. … 4 In daardie tyd was daar reuse op die aarde, en ook daarna wanneer die hemelwesens [=gode] na die dogters van die mense toe gekom en kinders by hulle gehad het. Hulle was die sterk mense van die ou tyd, die manne van naam."
Oor talle belangrike mense is die verhaal versprei dat hulle pa 'n god was, byvoorbeeld die filosoof Plato en Alexander die Grote. Hierdie siening, om iemand se belang ná die tyd terug te verklaar as dit dit op goddelike genetiese materiaal berus, het ontstaan omdat mense nie mooi verstaan het hoe voortplanting werk nie. Die vrou se funksie is gesien as dié van 'n blompot. Die enigste bydrae van die vrou in die proses is om 'n houer of 'n veld te verskaf waarin die manlike saad kan groei (Aristoteles Generatio Animalium 1.728a). Die digter, Aeschylus skryf in sy werk, die Eumenides dat die ma slegs die saadjie wat geplant is, voed. Die ware ouer is die een wat die saadjie plant.
Hierdie siening het 'n invloed op sedes gehad. Mans kon maar rondloop om hulle genetiese materiaal te versprei. Vroue moes kuis bly, sodat haar kinders die man se genetiese samestelling kon voortdra. Die huweliksmoraliteit het ontwikkel rondom sake soos erfreg en die konsentrasie en behoud van produksiemiddele binne 'n familie.
Gevolglik berus die maagdelike geboorte storie op 'n uiters negatiewe siening van die vrou. Dit is onmoontlik om 'n storie voor te stel dat 'n aardse man 'n hemelse godin bevrug om 'n heldin in die wêreld te bring. Maria is passief in Matteus se verhaal — die storie is niks anders as 'n verkragting deur 'n bo-natuurlike manlike krag nie. Alle inligting in die storie word aan Josef gekommunikeer. God tree hier op soos 'n feudale landheer wat die ius primae noctis , die reg van die eerste nag, uitoefen. Die landheer het die reg gehad om, wanneer een van sy onderdane trou, die eerste kind by haar te verwek. Hier eis die kosmiese landheer hierdie reg op, en, soos reglose bywoners, moet Josef en Maria dankbaar daarby inval. Om hierdie verhaal in verband te bring met kloning en dat 'n maagdelike geboorte in hierdie konteks verstaan moet word, is om die hele aangeleentheid verkeerd te verstaan. Daar is gevolglik geen plek meer in 'n moderne teologie vir die leerstuk van Jesus se maagedelike geboorte nie.
* Slot: 'n Teologie van Verantwoordelikheid
Daar is vir my talle nadele daaraan om die geskiedenis in 'n raamwerk van determinisme te beleef:
* Dit gee die wat mag het 'n rede om nie te verander nie. In die ou Suid-Afrika is Romeine 13 ("…en die owerhede wat daar is, is daar deur die beskikking van God.") gebruik om die apartheidsregime te stut. Gekoppel met die mite dat God Afrikaanse mense in Suid-Afrika geplant het om 'n nasie te wees en tot aan die einde blank en dominant te bly, en die lig van die evangelie te versprei, het oneindige leed en ellende tot gevolg gehad. Die opvatting dat daar 'n "skeppingsorde" is wat die rolmodellering van mans en vroue in die huwelik bepaal, kinders se plekke vaslê in blindelingse onderdanigheid, is gif vir ons samelewing. Dit is een van die vernaamste oorsake van geweld teenoor vroue en kinders in ons land. Dit bring ons by die tweede nadeel:
* Johnny Steinberg skryf in Business Day van 15 November 2004 :
"But what a strange journey white supremacism has travelled. It has no voice in public discourse. It has no political party and no newspaper. Instead, it has migrated, fully intact and unscathed, deep into private life. Robbed of a public platform, it has not died, but mutated into a new attitude one of resignation, fatalism, depression. It has become, above all, an ideology of dispiritedness."
'n Deterministiese siening van die geskiedenis maak mense fatilisties en passief om dinge maar net gelate te aanvaar as komende uit Gods hand. Ons behoort dinge soos moraliteit, reg en geregtigheid, in berekening te bring wanneer ons praat oor sake soos regstellende aksie en misdaad. Ek dink dat hierdie opvatting die rede is waarom Afrikaanse mense oor die algemeen apaties geword het in die nuwe Suid-Afrika; ons raak nie betrokke by dinge soos die Gemeenskaps Polisiërings Forum of partypolitiek nie. Een van die belangrike take van die Nuwe Hervorming Netwerk is om 'n teologie van menslike verantwoordelikheid te ontwikkel. Ons reglement verklaar: " Ons visualiseer 'n nuwe era waar inligting vrylik kan vloei sonder vrees vir verkettering, marginalisering, of vervolging. Elke mens, man, vrou of kind, behoort in staat te wees om in nuwe verhoudings tot hulleself, hulle omgewing en God te kan leef om die beste te kan wees waartoe hulle in staat is."
As ons immanent, dit wil sê, sonder verwysing na 'n derde kosmiese verdieping, kyk na oorsake en gevolge, kan dit bevrydende effekte hê. Ons kan verstaan hoe oorerwing en omgewing ons gedrag bepaal. Maar ons kan ook ons uniekheid en eiewaarde besef. Ons hoef nie dinge gelate te aanvaar nie; ons kan 'n verskil maak.
Daar is vir my iets bevrydends en positief daarin dat 'n buite-egtelike seun van 2000 jaar gelede, Jesus van Nasaret, my rolmodel is. Dit is soos ons huishulp wie se matriekdogter 'n ruk terug deur 'n bende van tien verkrag is. Nog steeds kry die kinders in haar familie name soos Hope , Grace , Beauty , en Freedom— 'n naamgewende verwagting dat ons en ons kinders dinge kan verander; ons is nie uitgelewer aan magte waaroor ons geen beheer het nie.
Ek lees eenkeer van 'n man wat een oggend vroeg op die strand gestap het. Langs die see het duisende seesterre gelê wat deur die gety uitgespoel is. In die opkomende son sien hy 'n silhoette van 'n dansende figuur. Soos hy nader stap, sien hy dis 'n man wat die seesterre optel en een vir een in die see teruggooi. Toe hy naby kom, vra hy die ou wat hy doen. "Ek gee hierdie seesterre 'n tweede kans . Hulle kan nie hier in die son oorleef nie." "Maar daar is duisende op die strand! Hoe kan jy 'n verskil maak?" "Wel" sê hy, terwyl hy optel en een teruggooi, "ek het 'n verskil vir hierdie een gemaak." Die ou het gebuk en saam met die man seesterre begin teruggooi.
'n Nuwe Hervorming perspektief op Kersfees is dat ons betrokke sal raak by die kreatiewe dans van die lewe. Ons is nie langer passiewe toeskouers nie, maar akteurs.
Cpt Kaos- Posts : 40
Join date : 2010-01-29
Re: Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
Cpt Kaos Thu Feb 04, 2010 12:56 am
Die dogma van die Erfsonde
Die godsdiensdebatte die afgelope twee tot drie jaar toon duidelik dat twee groepe teenoor mekaar staan. Die een groep beklemtoon die tradisionele Christelike dogmas. Die ander groep beklemtoon die nuwere feite wat drie eeue se intensiewe Bybelnavorsing en wetenskaplike kennis aan die lig gebring het.
Kom ek illustreer die verskille aan die hand van die leerstuk oor die sonde. In die tradisionele sondeleer speel die volgende Bybeltekste 'n belangrike rol: Genesis 2–3; Psalm 51:7; Romeine 5:12, 18–19. Die kerkvader Augustinus (354–430) is grootliks vir hierdie leerstuk verantwoordelik. Volgens hom was daar 'n oer-egpaar: Adam en Eva. Hulle was die heel eerste mense en is ongeveer 6 000 jaar gelede geskep. Hulle was perfek en sondeloos. Die tuin waarin hulle gewoon het, was onoortreflik. Daar was nie winde wat huise kon omwaai en reën wat landerye kon verspoel nie. Hulle het nie sonsteek geken nie, ook nie mangel- of blindedermontsteking nie. Hulle wêreld was 'n perfekte een.
Hierdie perfekte wêreld het egter op 'n dag in duie gestort. Eva het haar nie gesteur aan God se gebod dat hulle nie van die boom van kennis van goed en kwaad mag eet nie. Die slang het haar met slingse redenasies oorreed om van die vrugte van daardie boom te eet. Sy het geëet en ook vir Adam daarvan gegee. Toe God hiervan te hore kom, het Hy hulle uit die tuin verban en beide swaar strawwe opgelê. Adam sou van toe af hard moes werk en Eva sou swaar aan kinders geboorte skenk. Ook die slang is gestraf. Van toe af moes hy op sy pens seil en hy en die mens was permanente vyande.
Die oersonde het tragiese gevolge gehad — alles en almal was nou stukkend. Niks en niemand was meer heel nie. Oor hierdie pynlike toestand skryf Dawid in Psalm 51:7: ‘Kyk, in ongeregtigheid is ek gebore, en in sonde het my moeder my ontvang.' Eva en Adam se ongehoorsaamheid het soos 'n virus die totale mensdom besmet.
Paulus redeneer egter in Romeine 5 dat alhoewel Adam se ongehoorsaamheid sonde, ellende en dood in die wêreld ingebring het, het Jesus hierdie dinge omgekeer. In die plek van sonde staan vergifnis en vryspraak. In die plek van ellende is vreugde en voorspoed. En in die plek van die dood, opstanding en ewige lewe.
Dis kortliks die tradisionele Christelike leer oor die sonde.
Bybelwetenskaplikes het egter oor die afgelope driehonderd jaar Genesis, Psalms, Romeine en al die ander Bybelboeke intensief bestudeer. Hierdie studies het uitgewys dat die tradisionele leerstuk oor die sonde op interpretasies berus wat nie steek hou nie.
Ek noem slegs enkele voorbeelde.
Daar is twee skeppingsverhale (Gen 1 en Gen 2–3). Nie een van hierdie verhale kan as geskiedenis geklassifiseer word nie. Daar was dus nie 'n regtige Adam en Eva nie. Hulle is slegs verhaalkarakters. Genesis 2–3 vertel nie die verhaal van hoe sonde in die wêreld ingekom het nie, maar hoe die mens die kans om vir ewig te kan lewe, verbeur het. Daar was immers 'n tweede boom in die middel van die tuin — die boom van (die ewige) lewe! Die slang het Eva van daardie boom weggelok en haar vrugte van die boom van kennis aangebied. Die slang is nie die Satan nie. Latere vertellings en dogmatiese leerstellings het hom met die Satan gelyk gestel. Maar volgens híérdie verhaal is hy dit nie. Die slang is ook 'n verhaalkarakter en soos ander dierekarakters kan hy praat.
In Psalm 51 is 'n gedig wat kennelik nie deur Dawid geskryf is nie (vgl Ps 51:20), maar deur 'n onbekende persoon ná die Babiloniese ballingskap (587–539 vC). Die opskrif ‘'n Psalm van Dawid' is 'n latere toevoeging. Dit geld ook van die woorde ‘toe die profeet Natan na hom gekom het, nadat hy by Batseba ingegaan het.' Al die psalms was aanvanklik sonder op- en byskrifte geskryf. Die woorde: ‘Kyk, in ongeregtigheid is ek gebore, en in sonde het my moeder my ontvang' (Ps 51:7) het niks met erfsonde te doen nie. Ons het hier met hiperbool (oordrywing) te doen. Die digter betreur sy eie geneigdheid om verkeerd te doen.
In Romeine 5 speel die Wet 'n oorheersende rol en stel Paulus die tweede Adam (Jesus) teenoor die eerste Adam. Wat opval is dat Paulus Eva nie vermeld nie. Waarom? Eva kan nie die teenhanger van die manlike Jesus wees nie. Vroue is halfwas mense. Mans is die eintlike mense. Paulus se beheptheid met die Wet hou verband met die feit dat hy vroeër 'n Fariseër was. Die Wet het vroeër sy geloof gedefinieer en sy lewe gerig. Volgens Paulus is daardie tyd vir goed verby. Jesus se kruisdood en opstanding definieer nou sy geloof en rig sy lewe. Volgens Paulus het die Wet geen rol meer te vervul nie. Dit verdien geen plek meer in mense se verhouding met God nie.
Misken toegewyde Bybelwetenskaplikes sonde? Allermins. Hulle sê: ‘Lees die Bybel weer — mense is nie sondaars omdat hulle só gebore word nie, maar omdat hulle verkeerd kies en handel . Ons ís nie sondaars vanweë die misstap van 'n oervoorouer nie, maar ons kan daagliks sondaars word.'
Hier is 'n aantal aanhalings uit onlangse publikasies as bewys dat ander geleerdes die oortuiging deel dat die Bybel (en spesifiek Genesis 2–3) nie gewag maak van erfsonde nie. Die gedeelte voer ook nie aan dat die dood deur Adam en Eva se toedoen in die wêreld gekom het nie. Luister hoe stel Alastair G Hunter ('n Skotse Ou-Testamentikus) dit:
We were not ( pace Augustine) created evil; our birth is not inevitably contaminated by the genetic inheritance of a mythic fall from grace. It has always puzzled me that intelligent people, who are well aware of the nature of genetic processes and evolutionary biology, can still propound the inexpressible nonsense that, because some legendary forefather and mother committed wrongdoing, bad blood has somehow entered the human race.
James Barr ('n ander bekende Skotse Ou-Testamentikus) skryf soos volg hieroor:
The thought that all death, at all times and in all circumstances, is due to a primeval fault is difficult to take seriously, and all the more so when we perceive that Old Testament scripture by no means supports this idea. Similarly, the belief that God really, on the ground of a fault committed by two humans in the beginning of the world, ordained death as a destiny for all later humanity, throughout history, has truly staggering effects on the idea of God.
Now modern Old Testament scholarship has, I think, been agreed that the auline use of the story (we should call it a use rather than an interpretation) does not fit the actualities of the text. In that sense, even if Brunner may have brushed aside Köhler's judgement in 1926, competent scholarship has continued to conclude that, at least on the negative side, Köhler was right. The story of Adam and Eve was not the story of the ‘Fall of Man' in the traditional sense. At the end of a survey of mainstream modern scholarship, Sibley Towner (1984:81) pronounced it as ‘univocal in all the literature of the main stream' that:
There is no Fall in scripture, if by Fall one means the doctrine of the shattering of the divine image in humankind, the loss of immortality at an early moment in human history, and the inexorable transmission of the original sin through human genes ever after. There is no account of the origin of evil and no primeval encounter with Satan.
En hier is 'n paar sinne uit die pen van Anne Primavesi ('n vroulike teoloog):
Since the time of Augustine, mainstream Christianity has held that without Adam's sin, there would be no death. But because Adam sinned and left us prey to the power of death, we need a saviour. The ‘anthropo-logic' implies, indeed states, that we human beings were distinguished from all others by being created by God to live forever. Our salvation by Christ means that God's purpose stands, and that we alone, out of all species, are to be exempt from death.
Die leer oor die erfsonde en die leer van die dood as ewige straf op sonde is uitgediende leerstukke wat in 'n argief hoort. Augustinus se kennis van Hebreeus was gering en hy het op grond van die Griekse en Latynse vertalings hierdie rare leerstelling geformuleer. Sy siening berus nie op goeie eksegese nie, maar op filosofiese aannames wat ons nie meer kan onderskryf nie. Evolusionêre biologie en die studie van menslike gene maak dit ook vir ons onmoontlik om aan hierdie leerstelling te bly vasklou.
Die godsdiensdebatte die afgelope twee tot drie jaar toon duidelik dat twee groepe teenoor mekaar staan. Die een groep beklemtoon die tradisionele Christelike dogmas. Die ander groep beklemtoon die nuwere feite wat drie eeue se intensiewe Bybelnavorsing en wetenskaplike kennis aan die lig gebring het.
Kom ek illustreer die verskille aan die hand van die leerstuk oor die sonde. In die tradisionele sondeleer speel die volgende Bybeltekste 'n belangrike rol: Genesis 2–3; Psalm 51:7; Romeine 5:12, 18–19. Die kerkvader Augustinus (354–430) is grootliks vir hierdie leerstuk verantwoordelik. Volgens hom was daar 'n oer-egpaar: Adam en Eva. Hulle was die heel eerste mense en is ongeveer 6 000 jaar gelede geskep. Hulle was perfek en sondeloos. Die tuin waarin hulle gewoon het, was onoortreflik. Daar was nie winde wat huise kon omwaai en reën wat landerye kon verspoel nie. Hulle het nie sonsteek geken nie, ook nie mangel- of blindedermontsteking nie. Hulle wêreld was 'n perfekte een.
Hierdie perfekte wêreld het egter op 'n dag in duie gestort. Eva het haar nie gesteur aan God se gebod dat hulle nie van die boom van kennis van goed en kwaad mag eet nie. Die slang het haar met slingse redenasies oorreed om van die vrugte van daardie boom te eet. Sy het geëet en ook vir Adam daarvan gegee. Toe God hiervan te hore kom, het Hy hulle uit die tuin verban en beide swaar strawwe opgelê. Adam sou van toe af hard moes werk en Eva sou swaar aan kinders geboorte skenk. Ook die slang is gestraf. Van toe af moes hy op sy pens seil en hy en die mens was permanente vyande.
Die oersonde het tragiese gevolge gehad — alles en almal was nou stukkend. Niks en niemand was meer heel nie. Oor hierdie pynlike toestand skryf Dawid in Psalm 51:7: ‘Kyk, in ongeregtigheid is ek gebore, en in sonde het my moeder my ontvang.' Eva en Adam se ongehoorsaamheid het soos 'n virus die totale mensdom besmet.
Paulus redeneer egter in Romeine 5 dat alhoewel Adam se ongehoorsaamheid sonde, ellende en dood in die wêreld ingebring het, het Jesus hierdie dinge omgekeer. In die plek van sonde staan vergifnis en vryspraak. In die plek van ellende is vreugde en voorspoed. En in die plek van die dood, opstanding en ewige lewe.
Dis kortliks die tradisionele Christelike leer oor die sonde.
Bybelwetenskaplikes het egter oor die afgelope driehonderd jaar Genesis, Psalms, Romeine en al die ander Bybelboeke intensief bestudeer. Hierdie studies het uitgewys dat die tradisionele leerstuk oor die sonde op interpretasies berus wat nie steek hou nie.
Ek noem slegs enkele voorbeelde.
Daar is twee skeppingsverhale (Gen 1 en Gen 2–3). Nie een van hierdie verhale kan as geskiedenis geklassifiseer word nie. Daar was dus nie 'n regtige Adam en Eva nie. Hulle is slegs verhaalkarakters. Genesis 2–3 vertel nie die verhaal van hoe sonde in die wêreld ingekom het nie, maar hoe die mens die kans om vir ewig te kan lewe, verbeur het. Daar was immers 'n tweede boom in die middel van die tuin — die boom van (die ewige) lewe! Die slang het Eva van daardie boom weggelok en haar vrugte van die boom van kennis aangebied. Die slang is nie die Satan nie. Latere vertellings en dogmatiese leerstellings het hom met die Satan gelyk gestel. Maar volgens híérdie verhaal is hy dit nie. Die slang is ook 'n verhaalkarakter en soos ander dierekarakters kan hy praat.
In Psalm 51 is 'n gedig wat kennelik nie deur Dawid geskryf is nie (vgl Ps 51:20), maar deur 'n onbekende persoon ná die Babiloniese ballingskap (587–539 vC). Die opskrif ‘'n Psalm van Dawid' is 'n latere toevoeging. Dit geld ook van die woorde ‘toe die profeet Natan na hom gekom het, nadat hy by Batseba ingegaan het.' Al die psalms was aanvanklik sonder op- en byskrifte geskryf. Die woorde: ‘Kyk, in ongeregtigheid is ek gebore, en in sonde het my moeder my ontvang' (Ps 51:7) het niks met erfsonde te doen nie. Ons het hier met hiperbool (oordrywing) te doen. Die digter betreur sy eie geneigdheid om verkeerd te doen.
In Romeine 5 speel die Wet 'n oorheersende rol en stel Paulus die tweede Adam (Jesus) teenoor die eerste Adam. Wat opval is dat Paulus Eva nie vermeld nie. Waarom? Eva kan nie die teenhanger van die manlike Jesus wees nie. Vroue is halfwas mense. Mans is die eintlike mense. Paulus se beheptheid met die Wet hou verband met die feit dat hy vroeër 'n Fariseër was. Die Wet het vroeër sy geloof gedefinieer en sy lewe gerig. Volgens Paulus is daardie tyd vir goed verby. Jesus se kruisdood en opstanding definieer nou sy geloof en rig sy lewe. Volgens Paulus het die Wet geen rol meer te vervul nie. Dit verdien geen plek meer in mense se verhouding met God nie.
Misken toegewyde Bybelwetenskaplikes sonde? Allermins. Hulle sê: ‘Lees die Bybel weer — mense is nie sondaars omdat hulle só gebore word nie, maar omdat hulle verkeerd kies en handel . Ons ís nie sondaars vanweë die misstap van 'n oervoorouer nie, maar ons kan daagliks sondaars word.'
Hier is 'n aantal aanhalings uit onlangse publikasies as bewys dat ander geleerdes die oortuiging deel dat die Bybel (en spesifiek Genesis 2–3) nie gewag maak van erfsonde nie. Die gedeelte voer ook nie aan dat die dood deur Adam en Eva se toedoen in die wêreld gekom het nie. Luister hoe stel Alastair G Hunter ('n Skotse Ou-Testamentikus) dit:
We were not ( pace Augustine) created evil; our birth is not inevitably contaminated by the genetic inheritance of a mythic fall from grace. It has always puzzled me that intelligent people, who are well aware of the nature of genetic processes and evolutionary biology, can still propound the inexpressible nonsense that, because some legendary forefather and mother committed wrongdoing, bad blood has somehow entered the human race.
James Barr ('n ander bekende Skotse Ou-Testamentikus) skryf soos volg hieroor:
The thought that all death, at all times and in all circumstances, is due to a primeval fault is difficult to take seriously, and all the more so when we perceive that Old Testament scripture by no means supports this idea. Similarly, the belief that God really, on the ground of a fault committed by two humans in the beginning of the world, ordained death as a destiny for all later humanity, throughout history, has truly staggering effects on the idea of God.
Now modern Old Testament scholarship has, I think, been agreed that the auline use of the story (we should call it a use rather than an interpretation) does not fit the actualities of the text. In that sense, even if Brunner may have brushed aside Köhler's judgement in 1926, competent scholarship has continued to conclude that, at least on the negative side, Köhler was right. The story of Adam and Eve was not the story of the ‘Fall of Man' in the traditional sense. At the end of a survey of mainstream modern scholarship, Sibley Towner (1984:81) pronounced it as ‘univocal in all the literature of the main stream' that:
There is no Fall in scripture, if by Fall one means the doctrine of the shattering of the divine image in humankind, the loss of immortality at an early moment in human history, and the inexorable transmission of the original sin through human genes ever after. There is no account of the origin of evil and no primeval encounter with Satan.
En hier is 'n paar sinne uit die pen van Anne Primavesi ('n vroulike teoloog):
Since the time of Augustine, mainstream Christianity has held that without Adam's sin, there would be no death. But because Adam sinned and left us prey to the power of death, we need a saviour. The ‘anthropo-logic' implies, indeed states, that we human beings were distinguished from all others by being created by God to live forever. Our salvation by Christ means that God's purpose stands, and that we alone, out of all species, are to be exempt from death.
Die leer oor die erfsonde en die leer van die dood as ewige straf op sonde is uitgediende leerstukke wat in 'n argief hoort. Augustinus se kennis van Hebreeus was gering en hy het op grond van die Griekse en Latynse vertalings hierdie rare leerstelling geformuleer. Sy siening berus nie op goeie eksegese nie, maar op filosofiese aannames wat ons nie meer kan onderskryf nie. Evolusionêre biologie en die studie van menslike gene maak dit ook vir ons onmoontlik om aan hierdie leerstelling te bly vasklou.
Cpt Kaos- Posts : 40
Join date : 2010-01-29
Re: Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
Captain Planet Thu Feb 04, 2010 1:12 am
damn dude daar gee jy my nog 7jr se leefstof!!
ja ek dink ook die ou is n baie passievolle student ek dink net hy moet versigtig wees dat hy nie self doen wat hy ander van beskuldig nie maar ek sien waar hy vandaan kom en ek wil dit nog als gaan klaar lees.
maar dit als is vir my interessant, veral omdat ek onomwonde glo daar is n God en dat sy Seun gestuur is om vir ons sondes te sterf, ek weet jy mag dalk dink ek is gebrainwash as n kind maar dit werk vir my en so is dit, maar dit gese beteken nie ek wil nie weet van kritiek gelewer teen die geloofstelsel nie want ek voel dinge is so verskriklik deur mense verdraai vir eie voordeel dat om die presiese waarheid te kry amper nou onmoontlik sal wees. ek sal graag wil he Stephan moet weer bietjie hier kommentaar lewer hy sal def meer kennis ens as ek he.
maar ek like goeie debat en ek hou van feit dat mens nou hier kan debatteer ons het elk ons eie opininies en geloof oortuigings en tog kan ons die redeneer sonder om persoonlik te word of om ons tot oorlog te wend
ek wens soms ek het meer opgelet in die filosofie klasse in stellenbosch was so interessant en natuurlik die oorweging van argumente en hoe om dit te konstrueer ens. maar ja so is dit
ja ek dink ook die ou is n baie passievolle student ek dink net hy moet versigtig wees dat hy nie self doen wat hy ander van beskuldig nie maar ek sien waar hy vandaan kom en ek wil dit nog als gaan klaar lees.
maar dit als is vir my interessant, veral omdat ek onomwonde glo daar is n God en dat sy Seun gestuur is om vir ons sondes te sterf, ek weet jy mag dalk dink ek is gebrainwash as n kind maar dit werk vir my en so is dit, maar dit gese beteken nie ek wil nie weet van kritiek gelewer teen die geloofstelsel nie want ek voel dinge is so verskriklik deur mense verdraai vir eie voordeel dat om die presiese waarheid te kry amper nou onmoontlik sal wees. ek sal graag wil he Stephan moet weer bietjie hier kommentaar lewer hy sal def meer kennis ens as ek he.
maar ek like goeie debat en ek hou van feit dat mens nou hier kan debatteer ons het elk ons eie opininies en geloof oortuigings en tog kan ons die redeneer sonder om persoonlik te word of om ons tot oorlog te wend
ek wens soms ek het meer opgelet in die filosofie klasse in stellenbosch was so interessant en natuurlik die oorweging van argumente en hoe om dit te konstrueer ens. maar ja so is dit
Captain Planet- Posts : 17
Join date : 2010-01-29
Re: Het die Historiese Jesus bestaan en hoekom is dit opgemaak?
Cpt Kaos Thu Feb 04, 2010 1:13 am
DIE MAAGDELIKE GEBOORTE
Sakkie Spangenberg
Jesus se maagdelike ontvangenis speel 'n baie belangrike rol in die totale pakket van dogmas van die Westerse Christendom. Sonder die maagdelike ontvangenis, sou Jesus in die erfsonde gedeel het en sou hy dus nie die ware verlosser kon wees nie.
Die belydenis dat Jesus uit ‘n maagd gebore is, berus op 'n hele klompie aannames waarna ons eers moet kyk. Hierdie belydenis gryp terug na die vertellings van Matteus en Lukas. Ek fokus op Matteus se verhaal omdat die verteller na 'n teks uit Jesaja verwys ter bevestiging van sy eie verhaal: ‘Die maagd sal swanger word en 'n seun in die wêreld bring ...' (Jesaja 7:14). Kontroleer 'n mens die gegewens in die Hebreeuse teks van Jesaja, blyk dit Jesaja nie voorspel het dat ‘n maagd goddelik bevrug gaan word nie. Die verteller wou slegs maar vertel dat die profeet Jesaja 'n keer vir koning Agas en die hele volk ‘n hoopvolle teken gegee het. (Dit kan egter ook as 'n dreigteken verstaan word.) Agas se vrou sal binnekort swanger raak en geboorte gee aan 'n seun. Vóór hierdie seun sy kinderskoene ontgroei het, sal die Aramese bedreiging iets van die verlede wees. (Hansie verskil 'n ietwat van my oor wie dan nou die pa van hierdie kind sal wees, die profeet Jesaja of koning Agas.)
Jesaja het geensins voorspel dat Maria deur die Heilige Gees bevrug sal word nie. Die skrywer van die Matteusevangelie is egter lief om telkens na Ou-Testamentiese verhale terug te gryp om daardeur te bevestig dat God se verhaal met Israel nie afgesluit is nie. Vertellers van Bybelverhale gryp altyd terug en bou altyd voort op vroeëre vertellings.
Vra 'n mens hoekom Matteus hierdie soort vertelling geskep het, duik daar interessante perspektiewe op. Let wel, dis die verteller wat die verhaal skep en laat ontwikkel. Hy beskik oor sy karakters en kan met hulle doen net wat hy wil. Hy kan ter wille van die doel wat hy nastreef, Jesus 'n eksodus laat beleef (Matteus 2:13–15) en selfs op die hoogste punt van die tempeldak laat staan (Matteus 4:5)!
Wanneer ons Bybelverhale (tewens enige verhaal) lees, is dit belangrik om te snap dat daar 'n verskil is tussen verhaalwaarheid en historiese waarheid . Die probleem is dat baie Bybellesers nie die verskil snap nie. Volgens hulle is alles in die Bybel historiese en wetenskaplike waarheid. Volgens hulle is daar nie iets soos verhaalwaarheid in die Bybel nie.
Kom ons keer terug na die geboorteverhaal van Matteus en vra onsself af: Wat wou Matteus met die verhaal van 'n buitengewone geboorte kommunikeer? Dit antwoord hierop is: Presies dit wat ander vertellers van sulke verhale in die antieke tyd wou kommunikeer: ‘Besonderse mense het besonderse geboorteverhale.' Moses het 'n besonderse geboorteverhaal (meer korrek kindheidsverhaal) gehad en Matteus modelleer sy Jesuskarakter op die patroon van die Moseskarakter. Eintlik probeer hy kommunikeer dat Jesus 'n tweede Moses is. Hy het 'n besonderse geboorteverhaal (Matt 1 & 2). Sy lewe word net soos Moses s'n deur ‘n koning bedreig (Matt 2). Hy beleef 'n eksodus soos Moses (Matt 2) en dwaal veertig dae en veertig nagte in die woestyn rond waar hy versoek word soos die Israeliete tydens die uittog (Matt 4). Jesus gaan (soos Moses) die berg op en preek die nuwe wet van die koninkryk (Matt 5–7). Die hele Matteusevangelie kan in vyf groot redevoerings verdeel word. Onthou die Pentateug (die eerste vyf boeke van die Ou Testament)! Wie nie snap dat Matteus se Jesuskarakter byna die ewebeeld van Moses is nie, mis 'n belangrike punt van die vertelling.
Uit die voorafgaande is dit duidelik dat ons die vertelling oor maagdelike verwekking nie as 'n soort historiese verhaal moet lees nie. Groot kerkteoloë uit die verlede het hierdie verhaal wat slegs verhaalwaarheid kommunikeer, gelees asof dit historiese waarheid kommunikeer en belydenisse daaroor opgestel en mense wat ander standpunte as hulle huldig, verketter.
Hierdie teoloë het op grond van die Griekse vertaling van hierdie teks en die aanhaling daarvan in die evangelie van Matteus (Matt 1:23) 'n dogma oor die maagdelike geboorte gaan bou waarvan die pilare wankelrig is. Weinig Ou-Testamentici sal vandag hulle Joodse vakgenote verwyt dat Jode die Ou Testament (of die Tenak , soos dit onder die Jode bekend staan) verkeerd interpreteer. Jesus is nie die voorspelde Messias nie, maar die geïnterpreteerde Messias . In die woorde van Günther Weber (1998:112):
Did the prophet Isaiah, enlightened by God, prophesy that a virgin would bear a child more than seven hundred years later? No he did not. Centuries later the evangelist Matthew tore this passage from its original context and applied it to Jesus in order to depict him as the promised Messiah. It is an interpretation, not a fact.
Die vroeë Christene het op grond van die Griekse vertaling (die Septuagint) daartoe gekom om hierdie tekste as profesieë te lees. Deur die eeue het Christene Jode verwyt dat hulle die tekste nie reg lees en uitlê nie. Tans sien baie Ou-Testamentici die saak anders. Dit was die vroeë Christene wat op grond van die Septuagint hierdie afleidings gemaak het. Ons kan hulle egter nie verwyt nie. Hulle was kinders van hulle tyd en die metodes van uitleg wat hulle gebruik het, was algemeen gangbaar in daardie tyd. Die ontdekking van die Dooie Seerolle in 1947–1956 en die bestudering daarvan oor die afgelope vyftig jaar, het dit bevestig. Ons het hier met pesjer -uitleg te doen en daardie soort uitleg het nie ag geslaan op die historiese konteks waarin bepaalde woorde geskryf is nie.
Maar ons moet ook kennis neem van daardie mense se beskouing van die vrou en hulle kennis van haar fisiologiese ‘klokwerk'. Hier help biskop biskop John Selby Spong (2002:118) ons:
But as devastating as these bits of knowledge are to the cause of traditional orthodoxy, the deepest problem that the virgin-birth story faces is that it reflects a premodern understanding of the human birth process — an understanding that, because of our expanded knowledge of genetics, biology, and reproduction, educated people today could not possibly believe without closing their minds to vast amounts of data. The early Christians simply did not understand the woman's role in reproduction. They reasoned not from scientific knowledge but from an analogy drawn from their common life. The knew that a farmer planted his seed in the soil of the earth and that Mother Earth nurtured the seed into maturity. This was the analogy that shaped the way the ancient Jews understood human reproduction. The life of any new born baby was believed to dwell in the seed of the male. The woman's contribution, like that of Mother Earth, was only to provide a nurturing womb. She did not add to the substance of the new life.
As gevolg van hierdie siening van die vrou het manlike teoloë later jare hulle koppe gebreek oor die vraag of Jesus dan nou 'n God, 'n mens of 'n God-mens was. As die Gees die embrio gegee het (Maria was bloot 'n vat) kon Jesus mos nie werklik 'n mens gewees het nie? Die hele dosetiese stryd in die kerkgeskiedenis het voortgevloei uit daardie manlike teoloë se gebrekkige kennis van die vrou se rol in die verwekking van kinders.
Ons kan vandag die saak anders beredeneer omdat ons meer van die vrou se rol in die voortplantingsproses weet, maar as ons ons kennis in dáárdie verhale inlees, lees ons die verhale anachronisties.
Aanvaar ek die geboorteverhaal as historiese werklikheid en bely ek die dogma as historiese waarheid? My antwoord hier op is “nee”. Ek onderskryf die volgende woorde van die Nuwe-Testamentikus Clayton Sullivan (2002:40):
Was Jesus a virgin's son? The answer, I suggest, is no . The pagan virgin belief, historians now recognize, was one of the first steps taken by the early church in the simultaneous de-Judaizing of and hellenizing of the Christian message as it spread into the Greco-Roman world.
Die verhaal van die maagdelike ontvangenis wil slegs kommunikeer dat Jesus 'n besonderse persoon was en dit aanvaar ek van harte.
Bronne waarna in die artikel verwys word:
Spong, J S 2002. A new Christianity for a new world: Why traditional faith is dying and how a new faith is being born . New York:HarperCollins.
Sullivan, C 2002. Rescuing Jesus from the Christians . Harrisburg: Trinity Press.
Weber, G 1998. I believe. I doubt. Notes on Christian experience. London: SCM.
Sakkie Spangenberg
Jesus se maagdelike ontvangenis speel 'n baie belangrike rol in die totale pakket van dogmas van die Westerse Christendom. Sonder die maagdelike ontvangenis, sou Jesus in die erfsonde gedeel het en sou hy dus nie die ware verlosser kon wees nie.
Die belydenis dat Jesus uit ‘n maagd gebore is, berus op 'n hele klompie aannames waarna ons eers moet kyk. Hierdie belydenis gryp terug na die vertellings van Matteus en Lukas. Ek fokus op Matteus se verhaal omdat die verteller na 'n teks uit Jesaja verwys ter bevestiging van sy eie verhaal: ‘Die maagd sal swanger word en 'n seun in die wêreld bring ...' (Jesaja 7:14). Kontroleer 'n mens die gegewens in die Hebreeuse teks van Jesaja, blyk dit Jesaja nie voorspel het dat ‘n maagd goddelik bevrug gaan word nie. Die verteller wou slegs maar vertel dat die profeet Jesaja 'n keer vir koning Agas en die hele volk ‘n hoopvolle teken gegee het. (Dit kan egter ook as 'n dreigteken verstaan word.) Agas se vrou sal binnekort swanger raak en geboorte gee aan 'n seun. Vóór hierdie seun sy kinderskoene ontgroei het, sal die Aramese bedreiging iets van die verlede wees. (Hansie verskil 'n ietwat van my oor wie dan nou die pa van hierdie kind sal wees, die profeet Jesaja of koning Agas.)
Jesaja het geensins voorspel dat Maria deur die Heilige Gees bevrug sal word nie. Die skrywer van die Matteusevangelie is egter lief om telkens na Ou-Testamentiese verhale terug te gryp om daardeur te bevestig dat God se verhaal met Israel nie afgesluit is nie. Vertellers van Bybelverhale gryp altyd terug en bou altyd voort op vroeëre vertellings.
Vra 'n mens hoekom Matteus hierdie soort vertelling geskep het, duik daar interessante perspektiewe op. Let wel, dis die verteller wat die verhaal skep en laat ontwikkel. Hy beskik oor sy karakters en kan met hulle doen net wat hy wil. Hy kan ter wille van die doel wat hy nastreef, Jesus 'n eksodus laat beleef (Matteus 2:13–15) en selfs op die hoogste punt van die tempeldak laat staan (Matteus 4:5)!
Wanneer ons Bybelverhale (tewens enige verhaal) lees, is dit belangrik om te snap dat daar 'n verskil is tussen verhaalwaarheid en historiese waarheid . Die probleem is dat baie Bybellesers nie die verskil snap nie. Volgens hulle is alles in die Bybel historiese en wetenskaplike waarheid. Volgens hulle is daar nie iets soos verhaalwaarheid in die Bybel nie.
Kom ons keer terug na die geboorteverhaal van Matteus en vra onsself af: Wat wou Matteus met die verhaal van 'n buitengewone geboorte kommunikeer? Dit antwoord hierop is: Presies dit wat ander vertellers van sulke verhale in die antieke tyd wou kommunikeer: ‘Besonderse mense het besonderse geboorteverhale.' Moses het 'n besonderse geboorteverhaal (meer korrek kindheidsverhaal) gehad en Matteus modelleer sy Jesuskarakter op die patroon van die Moseskarakter. Eintlik probeer hy kommunikeer dat Jesus 'n tweede Moses is. Hy het 'n besonderse geboorteverhaal (Matt 1 & 2). Sy lewe word net soos Moses s'n deur ‘n koning bedreig (Matt 2). Hy beleef 'n eksodus soos Moses (Matt 2) en dwaal veertig dae en veertig nagte in die woestyn rond waar hy versoek word soos die Israeliete tydens die uittog (Matt 4). Jesus gaan (soos Moses) die berg op en preek die nuwe wet van die koninkryk (Matt 5–7). Die hele Matteusevangelie kan in vyf groot redevoerings verdeel word. Onthou die Pentateug (die eerste vyf boeke van die Ou Testament)! Wie nie snap dat Matteus se Jesuskarakter byna die ewebeeld van Moses is nie, mis 'n belangrike punt van die vertelling.
Uit die voorafgaande is dit duidelik dat ons die vertelling oor maagdelike verwekking nie as 'n soort historiese verhaal moet lees nie. Groot kerkteoloë uit die verlede het hierdie verhaal wat slegs verhaalwaarheid kommunikeer, gelees asof dit historiese waarheid kommunikeer en belydenisse daaroor opgestel en mense wat ander standpunte as hulle huldig, verketter.
Hierdie teoloë het op grond van die Griekse vertaling van hierdie teks en die aanhaling daarvan in die evangelie van Matteus (Matt 1:23) 'n dogma oor die maagdelike geboorte gaan bou waarvan die pilare wankelrig is. Weinig Ou-Testamentici sal vandag hulle Joodse vakgenote verwyt dat Jode die Ou Testament (of die Tenak , soos dit onder die Jode bekend staan) verkeerd interpreteer. Jesus is nie die voorspelde Messias nie, maar die geïnterpreteerde Messias . In die woorde van Günther Weber (1998:112):
Did the prophet Isaiah, enlightened by God, prophesy that a virgin would bear a child more than seven hundred years later? No he did not. Centuries later the evangelist Matthew tore this passage from its original context and applied it to Jesus in order to depict him as the promised Messiah. It is an interpretation, not a fact.
Die vroeë Christene het op grond van die Griekse vertaling (die Septuagint) daartoe gekom om hierdie tekste as profesieë te lees. Deur die eeue het Christene Jode verwyt dat hulle die tekste nie reg lees en uitlê nie. Tans sien baie Ou-Testamentici die saak anders. Dit was die vroeë Christene wat op grond van die Septuagint hierdie afleidings gemaak het. Ons kan hulle egter nie verwyt nie. Hulle was kinders van hulle tyd en die metodes van uitleg wat hulle gebruik het, was algemeen gangbaar in daardie tyd. Die ontdekking van die Dooie Seerolle in 1947–1956 en die bestudering daarvan oor die afgelope vyftig jaar, het dit bevestig. Ons het hier met pesjer -uitleg te doen en daardie soort uitleg het nie ag geslaan op die historiese konteks waarin bepaalde woorde geskryf is nie.
Maar ons moet ook kennis neem van daardie mense se beskouing van die vrou en hulle kennis van haar fisiologiese ‘klokwerk'. Hier help biskop biskop John Selby Spong (2002:118) ons:
But as devastating as these bits of knowledge are to the cause of traditional orthodoxy, the deepest problem that the virgin-birth story faces is that it reflects a premodern understanding of the human birth process — an understanding that, because of our expanded knowledge of genetics, biology, and reproduction, educated people today could not possibly believe without closing their minds to vast amounts of data. The early Christians simply did not understand the woman's role in reproduction. They reasoned not from scientific knowledge but from an analogy drawn from their common life. The knew that a farmer planted his seed in the soil of the earth and that Mother Earth nurtured the seed into maturity. This was the analogy that shaped the way the ancient Jews understood human reproduction. The life of any new born baby was believed to dwell in the seed of the male. The woman's contribution, like that of Mother Earth, was only to provide a nurturing womb. She did not add to the substance of the new life.
As gevolg van hierdie siening van die vrou het manlike teoloë later jare hulle koppe gebreek oor die vraag of Jesus dan nou 'n God, 'n mens of 'n God-mens was. As die Gees die embrio gegee het (Maria was bloot 'n vat) kon Jesus mos nie werklik 'n mens gewees het nie? Die hele dosetiese stryd in die kerkgeskiedenis het voortgevloei uit daardie manlike teoloë se gebrekkige kennis van die vrou se rol in die verwekking van kinders.
Ons kan vandag die saak anders beredeneer omdat ons meer van die vrou se rol in die voortplantingsproses weet, maar as ons ons kennis in dáárdie verhale inlees, lees ons die verhale anachronisties.
Aanvaar ek die geboorteverhaal as historiese werklikheid en bely ek die dogma as historiese waarheid? My antwoord hier op is “nee”. Ek onderskryf die volgende woorde van die Nuwe-Testamentikus Clayton Sullivan (2002:40):
Was Jesus a virgin's son? The answer, I suggest, is no . The pagan virgin belief, historians now recognize, was one of the first steps taken by the early church in the simultaneous de-Judaizing of and hellenizing of the Christian message as it spread into the Greco-Roman world.
Die verhaal van die maagdelike ontvangenis wil slegs kommunikeer dat Jesus 'n besonderse persoon was en dit aanvaar ek van harte.
Bronne waarna in die artikel verwys word:
Spong, J S 2002. A new Christianity for a new world: Why traditional faith is dying and how a new faith is being born . New York:HarperCollins.
Sullivan, C 2002. Rescuing Jesus from the Christians . Harrisburg: Trinity Press.
Weber, G 1998. I believe. I doubt. Notes on Christian experience. London: SCM.
Cpt Kaos- Posts : 40
Join date : 2010-01-29
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