We've been throwing out some old junk and we set aside religious books, Bibles, biblical stories for children, etc. We decide if to put them anonymously into the local church, or scrap them. I'm in favor of scrapping. (so I don't have to carry them, avoid detection or answer awkward questions if I get caught putting 'em here) But there is a small brochure by Josh McDowell: More Than a Carpenter.

I took a pen and wrote in some criticism and debunking of the arguments and claims. It was fairly easy, except I needed one last thing. This, from the website above:

The Gospels are assumed to be eyewitness accounts of Jesus life and death. At least this is the way they are interpreted by Christians. However; there is absolutely no way this can be true. Two Gospels (Matthew and Luke) each detail stories about Jesus birth. No disciples were present at these or any of the subsequent events. There was no such thing as a disciple in the year Jesus was purported to be born. Hypothetically Mary or even Joseph could have recanted the stories at some later date but even they would have no knowledge of any secret meeting between Herod and the magi. Furthermore, the only possible legitimate witness to Jesus as the son of God, Mary, is particularly ridiculous. At one point in the Gospel of Mark Mary believed Jesus had lost his mind. Did Mary forget that Jesus was implanted in her miraculously by God? Why would Mary have even been surprised when Jesus was conversing with rabbis at the age of 12? This was, after all, the son of God and she would have been the only person on the planet to know this as a fact.

You see how diffcult is to use the common sense sometimes. 

Now, where do I dump that last little brochure? 

It wouldn't matter to me at all if the tomb of Jesus and his bones were found tomorrow and we got DNA evidence to prove it. All it would mean is a MAN existed. It still would not make magic babies real or surviving rigor mortis real.

But the evidence is that the Jesus character is a mix of motifs. "Jesus" as a name was quite common back then like Jones or Smith. And every culture back then had claims of "kristos" or "anointed one", which as a word eventually became the "Christ".

There was a group of people who started the religion of Christianity, otherwise it would not exist. But it is no more divine or handed down by a god than any other myth that humans start. That early group simply was inspired by legends and maybe even the illusions perpetrated by con artists, much like a phone psychic cons the caller out of their money. And when you read both the OT and NT it is clear that the writers of both clearly expected their super hero to swoop down and save them during their lifetime.

If you want to believe something badly enough the believer will. The writers may have truly believed in what they were writing, or may have been competing to be the new pioneers of the new upstart cult. But on every page of the bible, from the OT to the last page, the book is full of scientific absurdities, cruelty and immorality, and morally bankrupt.

The god character itself to me, would be like going to a Superman movie where Superman finds a women being raped in an ally and doesn't stop it claiming he couldn't interfere with the rapists "free will".

So while I agree that there IS NO contemporary evidence supporting the existence of a man named Jesus, the bigger picture to me is that the concept of the bible itself EVEN if a man was proven to exist, still would not make the bible a scientific textbook, much less a moral code to live by.

The bible is merely a book of myth. Peppering any book with real people or real places still would not make magic real or invisible friends real.

Or if you were writing plays or street performances you would not describe the looks of any character so anyone could play the part. None of the people in gospels are described. This focus on Jesus distracts from seeing the big picture.

Or look at the oldest images and notice he is clean shaven like Alexander and cocks one ear towards the viewer just like Alexander is described as doing for the damaged hearing in one ear.

But the original character is a UNIQUE individual yet NO ONE ever saw or was even a contemporary of Jesus! This is despite the richest collection of historical records anywhere on earth! 

You can have different people play JFK, Lincoln, or George Washington in a play but the original person they are playing was a unique individual.  Unlike most other historical figures there is no corroboration of Jesus' existence!

By the same token no one saw any of the other characters either.

So what we might have is a collection of short street performance morality plays not originally intended to be a complete narrative but simply put together in some rough chronological order. They are episodic without continuity save for the occassional, they went down to. That is, nothing happens on the road. Additionally there are not enough different episodes to fill even the one year of Matthew much less the three years of the others. One can reasonably ask, This is all? and These were the most important things?

While of interest to look at specific problems with the gospels it is not wise to focus on any particular one as offering unique insight. There are so many things odd about them a radically different view of them is required. The narrator has an omniscient viewpoint reporting no one person could have witnessed and reports things he says no one witnessed like the temptation and prayer in Gethsemane. But if it were a single storyteller he is inconsistent with his own story.

There is no credible way to retreat from stories created by Apostles to something lesser. We have to start over from the ground up to figure out what they were supposed to be.

It's safe to say that the Jesus of the bible never existed, but I haven't ruled out the possibility that there was some minor person called Jesus who lived then and had layers of myth added to his story.

Evaluating the sources of myths is a tricky business and it is something I hope to look further into if I find time.