Letters to a Young Atheologist

Letter 1: The Issue of the Historicity of Jesus

Dear Mr. Kappus,

You probably figured that I forgot about your last e-mail to me, in which you asked me for some advise on how to answer your Christian acquaintance's counterpoints. It appears from your correspondence that Mr. Dogmass does not want to let you have your own mind, but insists that you simply believe what he tells you. In his efforts to indoctrinate you, he resorts to standard 'arguments' which are aimed at undermining your certainties, which should be based on reason, not faith. Thus, the need for Objectivism is readily visible at the outset.

"Now again he's arguing that the Bible is valid and that there is more evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ than there is for any other single event in history."

My, what silly garbage people will wallpaper their minds with! This guy actually says that there is "more evidence for the resurrection... than there is for any other single event in history"? That's quite odd!! So, does he have stock video footage of the event in question, just as we have for, say, Adolf Hitler? There are skinhead groups today who do the same thing this guy's doing only in reverse: This guy thinks he can invent "evidence" to validate his mind-game, while skinheads think they can wish away real evidence in order to perpetuate theirs. (In case you were not aware, many advocates of Hitlerism today actually deny that the holocaust ever took place). To put it simply, Mr. Dogmass is lying to you; he knows it, and you should call him on it every time he makes an attempt to propagandize you. Scholars cannot even put one date to any single event in the New Testament with any certainty at all. They have clues which roughly indicate within several-year ranges, but not one date can be fixed. Not one! And this guy pipes up that there's "more evidence" for the resurrection than there is for anything else in history? If he really believes this, he's hallucinating and is unaware of some very important facts.

For instance, when it is attempted to take the claims in the gospels and piece them together in the proper historic relationship of Christ's birth, many problems arise. C. Dennis McKinsey brings out some of these problems quite clearly on page 343 of his book, The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy (Amherst, NY, Prometheus Books, 1995):

1. History says nothing about a taxing (census) ever being taken of the whole Roman world. The KJV says, "All the world should be taxed"; yet no such decree was issued by Augustus. He not only never issued a general decree but never attempted a uniform assessment. Taxes were done province by province.
2. When Jesus was born, the governor of Syria was not Cyrenius. Cyrenius did not become governor of Syria until nearly ten years after the death of Herod and Matthew 2:1 says Jesus was born during the reign of Herod: "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king..."
3. If Jesus was born during the reign of Herod as Matthew says, Joseph [the husband of Jesus' mother], whether a resident of Judea or of Galilee, could not have been taxed by Augustus in any event, since neither province was then a part of Roman Syria. Both provinces belonged to Herod's kingdom and Herod's subjects were not taxed by the Romans.
4. Cyrenius made a census in Palestine but this occurred ten years after the death of Herod, during whose reign Jesus [is alleged to have been] born. On pages 87 and 88 in Bible Difficulties [Christian apologist W.] Arndt makes the following admission,

With insuperable problems like these (and there are others like this in the NT, to be sure), it is difficult to see how your acquaintance thinks he can maintain the claim that "there is more evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ than there is for any other single event in history." If anything, there is plenty of evidence that the authors of the gospels were unclear on recent history in their own lands!

"Now, Mr. Dogmass says that many many documents other than the Bible document Christ's resurrection. And that the Bible is true because it's verified by other documents from different times and in different places. He hasn't told me what these documents are except for a mentioning of the Dead Sea Scrolls."

Okay, here's a suggestion. He says there is "evidence." Ask Mr. Dogmass a few questions regarding the epistemology he's assuming here. Ask him to provide you with a definition of 'evidence' as he believes the term applies in this matter. Then ask him what specifically - and I mean specifically - serves as this supposed evidence, and why it should be considered evidence. Tell him that a party-line, agenda-driven parchment (such as a scroll containing bits and pieces of some 'gospel' account) does not necessarily serve as evidence for the events which they attempt to document; rather, they serve as evidence that people believed these things and circulated these ideas at the time. Big difference here! Very big difference, and this is what apologists do all the time: they constantly equivocate the whole meaning of what 'evidence' refers to in their own desperate arguments. But a claim as such does not constitute as evidence. A claim requires evidence in support of it in order to be verified. The apologists cannot produce any evidence whatsoever for what is claimed in the New Testament. None! All their doing is shifting the burden of proof to their forebears as if to say, "Well, they claimed it, so it must be true." But this conclusion does not follow. They prove nothing by this maneuver other than the fact that there were people back in the first century CE who were just as deluded as the people who call themselves Christians today. A claim is not evidence for what is claimed.

I could claim that I saw a cow jump over the moon. You would laugh at me, and rightly so. But I protest and say, "Hey, I've got it documented here by an eye-witness to the event! Look here, Joe Schmoe was there, too, and he writes of it here. Look!" and I pull out some wad of paper containing Joe Schmoe's 'testimony' and signature (we don't even have signatures of the people who wrote these 'gospels'! Blank out!!) and say, "See, I have evidence that this occurred!" But this does not work since all that is produced so far is just more duplication of the claim itself. Duplicating a claim does not serve as a proof of what is claimed. We must examine the merits of the claim before we can even accept this into the realm of possibility to begin with, and then we will have to examine if there is any other kind of evidence to support it. So far, the claim that a cow jumped over the moon - I don't care if an entire town comes out and claims it happened - is a contradiction of the entities in question. Period. The only proper thing to do is dismiss it.

Ask him if he can produce a physician's report documenting Jesus' actual death. You know, just as in our hospitals, if a patient should expire, a doctor will confirm the patient's death and document it. We have no such documentation for Jesus' death, only hearsay from people who were writing about it decades after the alleged fact, and every bit of writing taken as serving as 'evidence' is written by people who were part of the Christian party agenda - i.e., they had a stake in convincing the already hysterically superstitious people around them that they had 'witnessed' these events. Yet we have no evidence that a person named Jesus Christ actually existed! Not ONE BIT of hard evidence, only "documents" - cheaply written and agenda-driven. In other words, consider the source!

There are even some theories that New Testament authors like Paul did not believe that Jesus actually existed in the flesh, but believed that he was some kind of apparition. Scholars have found dozens of clues indicating this in many of the New Testament epistles, many of which pre-dated the authorship of the gospels. For one thing, Paul's writing exhibits little if any of the teachings and events of Jesus' life as portrayed in the gospel accounts. Paul shows no awareness of Jesus' tendency to teach in confused parables, for instance. Many of the principles which Jesus taught are nowhere to be found in Paul's writings. But if Paul was the first Christian author - which is likely to be the case (Paul's letters were written before any of the gospels were written - this is very important to keep in mind), why was he not teaching the churches under his ministry the teachings we find attributed to Jesus in the gospels? If Paul were the pioneering minister of Christianity (e.g., the first major advocate of Christian theism after Jesus' alleged life and ministry), we should expect to find in Paul's writings at least some awareness of Jesus' parables and folk wisdom teaching. But we do not!

Furthermore, when Paul does write about Jesus' life, the words he uses (in the original Greek) are ambiguous, and suggest that Paul did not think that he was writing about a personality that occupied a fleshly body at any point, but was a 'spirit' in all his manifestations to the Palestinian people at the time. Paul nowhere mentions the virgin birth, for example. Paul mentions the word 'virgin' only once - I Corinthians 7:25 - and this one mention has only to do with his opinions on how young people in the Corinthian church preparing for marriage should conduct themselves. No mention at all about Jesus being 'born of a virgin' (and when this is mentioned in the gospels, tremendous problems for advocates of Christianity arise; more on that another time). Many other details found in the gospel accounts are nowhere confirmed in Paul's writings, which pre-date the gospels. So what's up with this??

Scholars draw from these clues - the omission of gospel account details from the earliest Christian writings and Paul's ambiguous treatment of Jesus as an apparition or spirit never actually existing in the flesh - that the gospel accounts, when they do appear, represent a kind of 'second stage' of development, an evolution, if you will, of Christian theism. Most likely, some of Paul's letters were in circulation, and a few people decided to elaborate their apotheosis of the spirit-character Jesus, drawing on a wealth of outside sources for inspiration, including Mithraism as well as contemporary Greek philosophy and religion, to put together a tradition of what they considered to be Jesus' life and ministry on earth. However, these gospels could very well be, for the reasons given above, fabrications based on misunderstandings of Paul's ambiguous treatment of the character Jesus!

Of course, your acquaintance will not learn of any of these facts in his Sunday school classes for they certainly go against the indoctrination program.

You may also want to ask your acquaintance about the identity of the people that the gospel of Matthew records rising from their graves (Matt. 27:52-53). Who were these people? Why does only Matthew record this? Where are the written testimonies that these resurrected people most likely should have recorded during their period of re-animation? Is it unreasonable to expect that some of these zombies, had this event actually taken place as Matthew records it, would have made their testimony known? Matthew 27:53 says that they "came out of their graves... and appeared unto many." If the zombies themselves did not leave any written record about their mass resurrection, supposedly at the hand of God, what about those to whom Matthew records them appearing?

Think about it. If you saw a squad of zombies marching into a city from the open graves of a cemetery, wouldn't you make sure this sight were documented and covered in whatever mode equivalent to our local press may have existed at the time? I certainly would! Who were these people? What were their names? Why do we not have even ONE MORE source outside Matthew that testifies of this alleged event, an event which surely would have caught the interest of Flavius Josephus and any other active historian at the time? Why do we not find this event recorded in EVEN ONE of the other three gospels? Why did Paul not mention it? Why did not Peter, who was allegedly present and an eyewitness to all these things, not mention this extraordinary event in one of his epistles? Or James, the alleged brother to Jesus? Why do we not have Jesus' mother Mary's record? Or that of Mary's husband Joseph? Or Elizabeth's? Or Mary Magdalene's? Or Joseph of Arimathaea, why do we not have his written testimony? Certainly, the silence of many who allegedly witnessed many of these miraculous events speaks loudly in its own right. Where are the testimonies of the 120 mentioned in Acts 1:15 who attended the Day of Pentecost? What about the 5,000 who shared in the miraculous bounty of bread and fish that each of the gospels mentions (Matt. 14:21; Mark 6:44; 8:19; Luke 9:14; John 6:10)? Who were any of these people? What were their names? Where are their testimonies documenting these claims? Blank out!

"Now, Mr. Dogmass argues that if I reject the bible's validity, that I must also reject any other historical document because any other historical document would consist of only assertions (as I accused the bible of merely being). so I don't know what to say to that. he'd ask me if I believe that Julius Caesar existed. if I say yes, he'd ask me to back it up, and I'd point to history books. and he'd say, "but those are all assertions (reflecting my previous accusation that the bible was just assertions)! you have no proof that Caesar existed!" So I don't know how to respond to that."

(Eventually I will be posting up an article that goes into great detail on this matter; there are apologists who do not accept the fact that it is impossible for a cow to jump over a moon as they believe that the standards dictating what one should accept as 'possible' should be nothing more than what one can imagine. So, assuming this 'standard,' if I can imagine a cow jumping over a moon, I should accept the notion into the realm of possibilities. Objectivism rejects this acontextual assessment of reality as irrational.)

If the claim attempts to assert that an entity behaves or behaved in contradiction to its nature (such as a cow jumping over a moon or a man who's been dead for two or three days rising from the dead and re-appearing before a crowd), then the claim can properly be dismissed as contrary to reality. If we reject any standards by which we can measure claims and discriminate between the rational and the arbitrary and allow such claims into the realm of knowledge about reality, then we would have to allow every claim, regardless of how ridiculous or absurd, into our consideration, and thus no certainty at all would ever be possible. Under such an elastic view of claims and reality, once one arrives at a point where he is confident that he has reached certainty, an alternative contradicting that point of certainty could always be imagined, thus dethroning it completely. One can always imagine something, but the facts do not follow our imagination, and only facts should factor in one's consideration of what is legitimately possible.

This having been said, we can proceed to dealing with the implied challenge posed to you by your acquaintance, namely, on what basis should you accept historical claims. The case of Julius Caesar's existence and role in history provides an excellent case for consideration. First of all, let's examine what is claimed. While I do not know what particular claim arose in context of your dispute with your acquaintance, let's assume it resembles the following:

Claim: An individual in history named Julius Caesar was Emperor of the Roman Empire during the First Century BCE (before current era).

(There are many legends about Julius Caesar which circulated written histories for centuries after his reign; as you will note, none of those legendary claims are included in the one under consideration here.)

Is anything in our model claim about Julius Caesar extraordinary on the face of it? No, not at all. We have mountains of evidence that Rome existed as an Empire in pre-Christian days. This empire continued well into the first millennium CE (current era). The history of this empire, including the history of its leaders such as Julius Caesar, is documented by a bewildering mass of historic texts, written by hundreds of well-learned historians of the time. There was no cultic loyalty binding these historians together in an effort to persuade their readers into believing incredibly fantastic tales of miracles and god-belief claims. The historians as a group did not have a personal stake in conforming their testimony with those of others, as was the case of those authoring the gospels. In fact, it is likely that many historians wrote their histories as polemical responses to other historians. We do not have the benefit of such cross-examination among the authors of the New Testament.

Also, we can examine the claim inductively, and consider each component of the claim in piecemeal fashion. First, does the claim contradict any known facts or sound reasoning when it asserts that an individual human being lived in the first century BCE? Obviously not. We have plenty of hard evidence that individuals lived many thousands of years before this. This part of the claim is neither incredible nor extraordinary.

Does the claim contradict any known facts or sound reasoning when it asserts that the individual it posits as living during the first century BCE was named Julius? Not at all. If an individual lived during this period, a period of relative civilized advancement (people had been giving themselves names for millennia prior to this point in civilized parts of the world), it is only expected that he would have a name. This part of the claim is neither incredible nor extraordinary.

Does the claim contradict any known facts or sound reasoning by asserting that this individual was the leader of the Roman Empire at some point during his lifetime? Not at all. We know that the Roman Empire existed at this time of history, that the Roman Empire was populated by men, that those men had names and identities, and that many of those men were leaders and achievers in context of that society's history. After all, something had to happen. The question is: Is the claim realistic or not? I the case of the above claim about Julius Caesar, sure, this is believable. In the case of Jesus walking on water, turning water into wine and raising dead men from their graves to live again, no, these things are not believable. Anyone pressuring you to accept such claims as knowledge should answer why it is so important to him that you sacrifice the rational use of your mind as well.

Questions like these should be asked in regard to any claim. The claim should be tested by such questions to see if it can hold up. Can the claims in the New Testament hold up under such interrogation? No, they cannot.

Let's throw a hook into things, to put things in the proper perspective regarding the significance of these alleged historic events to our lives at this point of history. Suppose all the claims about the life, events and achievements of Julius Caesar were found to be in error and refuted as falsehoods. What would this mean in the context of your life or mine? I should say, So what? Do I base the moral decisions and path of my life on the supposed truth of the claim that a man named Julius Caesar existed at one point in history and was emperor of a nation called Rome? Of course not. Is there any moral implication or impact on my life and my approach to reality whether or not it can be verified that someone named Julius Caesar existed 2000 years ago and was ruler of a nation that existed at that time halfway around the globe? Certainly not. What if Julius Caesar did actually exist and I never knew squat about it? Would this imperil my life somehow? Would this make my life "empty" as many Christians claim about those who "do not know" Christ? Again, certainly not.

The reason I ask these questions is to put these competing claims, that pertaining to the validity of Julius Caesar as opposed to that pertaining to the validity of Jesus, in their proper perspective, in order to see the pure disingenuousness of the argument that "because one rejects the validity of the Bible, one must reject all historical claims..."

I do not have people approaching me on the street or knocking on my door trying to convince me of the historicity of Julius Caesar's life and to "give my life" over to a code of god-belief based on this historicity. The probability of the factuality of Julius Caesar's life and accomplishments carries no weight at all in my approach to reality. Furthermore, acceptance of the historicity of Julius Caesar's life and the application of a rational philosophy in the conduct of my life are not incompatible.

Such a ruse as the one attempted by your acquaintance only serves to expose the apologist's intention to have his cake and to eat it, too. The presumptuous attempt to draw a principle of comparability by feigning the benignity of New Testament claims is as dishonest as the gift of the Trojan Horse. It is an attempt to enter New Testament claims into the realm of serious consideration by riding on the assumption that historical claims that prove to be authentic can be admitted into the realm of knowledge. However, once this entrance is achieved, for the apologist, the similarity feigned between New Testament claims and otherwise benign historic claims (such as those pertaining to Julius Caesar, for example) is jettisoned and replaced with an insistence on party-line recruitment. On the one hand, no one arguing for the authenticity of the history of Julius Caesar is going to attempt to induct others convinced of that authenticity into a religious program. On the other hand, those attempting to establish the authenticity of New Testament claims, are. To try to put such disparate claims on the same level of debate is indeed dishonest.

The inequity between the various claims under consideration here - one being that a man named Julius Caesar lived in the first century BCE and was ruler of the Roman Empire, the other being that a man named Jesus lived in the first century CE and was the "son of god" - affords us the opportunity to bring into sharp focus the religionist's elastic treatment of the concept 'truth'. According to Objectivism, 'truth' is the recognition of reality; that which we identify as 'true' is correspondent to reality. For the Objectivist, there is only one reality - the realm of existence, and therefore only one standard of truth - reason. As Ayn Rand put it, "Reality is the final court of appeal." There is no fact of reality that is "more true" than another fact. A fact is a fact, and something that is true is something that is true.

But when one posits two competing realities, a natural reality and a supernatural reality, then one's view of truth will consequentially suffer an epistemological division. For the religionist, just as the supernatural realm is "more real" than the natural realm, some truths are "more true" than others. The correspondence of the two horns of this arbitrary division apply respectively to the two realms posited by the religionist.

For instance, the religionist may agree that identity in physical reality is indeed finite (A is A, A is not non-A, etc.). But since his view of reality is built on the premise that physical reality is contingent on a supernatural realm, he must posit a separate standard to apply to that supernatural realm, which he calls 'necessary.' (You should now see how the 'necessary-contingent' dichotomy comes into play here.) When pressed on the matter of the finite nature of identity, the religionist will assert that there are two kinds of existence: 'finite existence' and 'infinite existence.' But these are arbitrary designations and have no truth value whatsoever. The religionist attempts to 'reverse-package' the concept 'existence' as if it could apply to a realm contradicting this one.

The fallacy of reverse-packaging also operates in the religionist's treatment of truth. There are, for purposes of my explanation here, low or base 'mundane truths' which are truths that both believers and non-believers can discern in reality. The 'mundane truths' include such facts as "the earth is an oblique spheroid," "the sun is the center of our solar system," "apples fall from trees because the gravity of the earth pulls them toward the ground," "I am 6'2" tall," "I work in an office" or "Indianapolis is the capitol of Indiana," etc., etc. Such truths are incidental and are cause for concern only in the immediate context of the believer's transient habitation in the flesh (i.e., in context of the believer's life on earth).

'Mundane truths' are subordinate to the higher 'truths', which we shall call 'spiritual truths,' which are truths beyond one's comprehension, truths that are not of this world or existence, but issued from heaven by the ruling consciousness. Such 'truths' are not to be questioned, analyzed or pressed for explanation. Such 'truths' are to be accepted as a matter of moral duty as they are said to proceed from the mouth of the ruling consciousness. Any perceived contradiction between 'mundane truths' and 'spiritual truths' is only apparent, and any attempt to resolve the apparent contradiction can only be satisfied by yielding in favor of the 'spiritual truths' at the expense of the 'mundane truths'.

'Spiritual truths' need not be arrived at by any process of reasoning. Since they are not of this world, they cannot be arrived at in a worldly fashion. Since 'spiritual truths' are said to be of a 'different substance' than truths of this world, they are not subject to logical principle or perceptual verification, as such tools are only sufficient for the 'substance' of 'mundane truths'. Thus, the rejection of the hierarchical nature of knowledge is justified as 'spiritual truths' need not trace their roots to anything man can discover from 'this reality' (as opposed to the 'supernatural reality').

For modern theologians, the fallacy of reverse packaging and its resulting fallout is concealed under extremely sophisticated terminology and arbitrary codes of over-burdened doctrine and high-caliber rhetoric. In their attempts to hijack rationality from its objective roots, modern theologians do not hold that reasoning is man's process of identifying and integrating the material provided by his senses (as the material provided by man's senses is of the 'wrong substance' and can only cloud the mind of the spiritually endowed believer), instead, reasoning is a process by which the 'creature' (i.e., man) thinks thoughts 'analogous' to those of the 'creator' (i.e., God).

Similarly, the concept 'knowledge' also falls victim to the fallacy of reverse packaging. As such, knowledge of this world and of 'this reality' is contrasted against 'spiritual knowledge,' which is not the product of reasoning in the legitimate, objective sense, but a product of 'divine revelation' and 'inspiration.' Thus, 'knowledge' in this sense is not a mental grasp of the facts of (this) reality, but a set of signals beamed into this reality from the mind of the ruling consciousness. There is no need to concern oneself with the correspondence between the content of one's mind and the facts of reality, since those facts are 'contingent' anyhow, and subject to change at any given moment pending the ruling consciousness' mood swings and 'cosmic purpose.' Again, this 'knowledge' is not to be questioned or analyzed as man's mind is deemed impotent and therefore incapable of such endeavors. Besides, it is argued, if God's ways are the standards by which the believer should judge everything (in those rare cases when he is allowed to use his mind), what possible standard could there be in measuring God's standards?

Once the fallacy of reverse packaging has achieved momentum in the mind of the believer, there is little one can do to reverse its destructive grip on its victim.

Some articles on the web which you may want to read in connection to the historicity of Jesus include:

I hope these thoughts help. Please let me know if you need any clarification.

I wish you the best,

Anton