The redemption of a street preacher - From Blind-Faith to Reason
The internet changes lives. It reaches parts that other forms of enlightenment fail to reach. In time, the web will surely prove as erosive of religious faith as the printing press in an earlier age. And here is an instructive example of the “battle of ideas” and one man’s journey back to rationality.
A devotee of Jesus regains his senses
In early April 2013 I received an email from a former Christian who sports the memorable name of Genesis McKenzie.
Genesis, like many unfortunate Americans, was indoctrinated from a young age in the dogmas of the Christian faith. In Jesus-land, the equivalent of Janet and John books includes such delights as Kids Praise 4 and Superbook (“transporting kids back to the time of Jesus”). Abandoned by his (Jesus-loving?) father at the age of 7, young Genesis had at least the Lord to sustain him. He grew up with all the ferocious convictions of a blind fanatic and became one of those obnoxious and rather ludicrous street preachers.
Genesis now writes of his former self,
“I was a very motivated creationist, a religious leader and one of those crazy people preaching on the NYC subway trains and handing out tracts. I also sang on those trains.”
Yuck!
All of this began to change when Genesis took up private study of chemistry and biology. Science rapidly eroded his creationist follies but he was still saddled with wild-eyed notions of “Jesus fulfilling prophecies”. Then, during January and February 2013, Genesis found JesusNeverExisted.com and TruthBeKnown.com.
He writes:
“If there is any encouragement or consolation, because of you, I, Genesis McKenzie, am now longer in the chains of faith! On February 6th, 2013 I prayed my last prayer and said goodbye to my sky-daddy, the only father I thought I knew.
“It is quite a humorous thing that I lost my earthly daddy, and later on, I lost my sky daddy who never really was there. I noticed another interesting thing: That I am more peaceful with humanity and appreciate life more now. My life, however, is pretty much the same, only now I am fanatical about utterly destroying what almost destroyed my life; namely, Christianity.”
I invited this recovering casualty of faith to write of his experience for the guidance and instruction of others for posting on this website. This he has done: From Blind-Faith to Reason.
For those interested, here it is:
From Blind-Faith to Reason: Detailing the Process of My De-Conversion from Christianity
Genesis H. McKenzie
Introduction
“When the LORD saw that Moses was coming closer, he called to him from the middle of the bush and said, “Moses! Moses!” He answered, “Yes, here I am.” ” – Exodus 3:1-4, GNT.
There may be lights and signs that individuals base their choices in life upon because they think they are reasonable things to follow. It is sometimes hard to clarify to others what we can see within our own rationale and perceptions, that we may feel and experience, and this can make it difficult to get along with humanity when our views and perceptions collide with others’ around us. Many times, it is those things passed down to us from an early age that needs to be re-examined in the light of an open mind and heart.
“A faith that requires you to close your mind in order to believe is not much of a faith at all.” – Rev. Patricia Templeton.
My name is Genesis, and I was one of those crazy people preaching the Gospel of Jesus on the NYC subway trains and every possible place where I could travel. I preached in buses, handed out tracts, went into dangerous neighborhoods late at night, preached in the library, at restaurants, on the streets, in school, in Church, house-to-house and neighbor-by-neighbor. As I preached, I would also use my talent of singing hymns on those trains, buses and everywhere in public. I was a church leader, having the gift of pastor-teacher; a Bible Translating and missionary preacher! I went to one of the humblest countries in the world and slept among the most economically meek people, sharing the message about Jesus.
Most of the people do not consider it right calling myself crazy, but I really was. I had a kamikaze faith. I travelled all over the world, even in the trenches of the poorest neighborhoods in the world, where there are no bathrooms or showers, but there I was with the Bible in my hand, with a message and a mission; to guide humanity and give them happiness, and to tell them the story about Jesus. I followed the words of God, “… to die is gain.” So, “take up your cross and follow Me” (Matthew 16:24).
From the age of 12 and up, I started studying Christian apologetics, theology, and spending a lot of money buying materials from the Christian Apologetics Press ministries, Watchman Fellowship, CRI, AIG, Logos Bible Software, Hank Hanagraff’s ministries. Also, I studied Greek at the age of 15 and I was knowledgeable about the tenets of the Christian faith, then later became a church officer at Allen Methodist Episcopal Church in NYC on Merrick Boulevard where I started a small house Cult-Awareness Ministry to prevent people from joining dangerous cult groups (Later, I also was a part of the Plymouth Brethren, a conservative, evangelical Christian movement).Then, I became the co-president of the Christian Club in Fiorello LaGuardia High School.
I once was a very motivated young-Earth creationist that rejected mainstream science, a religious leader, church officer, and I even published a book about the Bible. I made people follow me and always believed that it was an invisible and miraculous force doing it, but then something changed my whole life. The same reasons that got me to believe the Bible and Jesus in the first place were the same reasons that got me out. After devoting 26 years of my life to Christianity and Jesus, in February 2013, I quit my faith and my religion; I am officially not a Christian anymore, and said my last solemn prayer to a heavenly father who was never there. It was like saying goodbye to an imaginary friend. So, I am writing this because I just became an infidel, an apostate! Now, all my “Christian” friends just say, “Something must be wrong” or “You must be hurt.” Some have hate mail, some deleted me as their friend just like that. So, I have to write something about it. To understand my story we would have to go back to the very beginning.
My Journey to Christianity: My Father and My Belief in God/Jesus
I still remember my age of three when we lived in an army base in Germany, traveling on the German autobahn with my father, the memory of my mother washing me in a sink, and the Little Drummer Boy song (the “Pa Rumpa Pum Pum” song), at my first Christmas in Maryland. I still remember my age of four when my father divorced my mother but I did not know what was happening. All I remember is that, one day when I was sleeping, I heard loud voices. I walked into the hallway and found my elder sister standing there facing her bedroom. My younger brother crawled behind and stood up next to me on my right. My father was pushing my mother down on the bed over and over. “Call the police!” a woman’s voice yelled. The next thing I remembered is riding in a car at night and watching the brownish white brick walls pass by. Then, sitting on a bench with my brother to my left, an Army police officer asked me, “So, which one do you want to live with?” “My daddy,” I said, and my brother followed my words. And then my brother and I were with my daddy, but my mother and sister disappeared.
From the time that I was age four to the time I was age eight, my father instilled in me the thoughts and words from the Bible by showing me Bible cartoons and Bible music videos, like Psalty: Kids Praise 4 and Super Book. One of my favorite songs that struck my heart over and over, was the song called Make Me A Servant. It goes like…
From the time that I was age four to the time I was age eight, my father instilled in me the thoughts and words from the Bible by showing me Bible cartoons and Bible music videos, like Psalty: Kids Praise 4 and Super Book. One of my favorite songs that struck my heart over and over, was the song called Make Me A Servant. It goes like…
My daddy continued to teach me, and taught me to look into the Bible to find “a father in the sky” that penned down the very words of the Bible. I believed him because I trusted him; he was my “father on this Earth”. My earth-daddy said, “He is everywhere! He is in your ears, in your nose, in your mouth, in your legs, in your feet, in your hands, in your fingers, in your arms, in your underarms,” as he tickled me. “ … and he is inside your head,” he said. My whole world at that point was that my father loved me, and believing that the Bible is the reliable perfect Word of God that has no errors, cannot be wrong and contains no lies; a spoken and written word by a father in the skies. In my “Kamikaze” faith, I did not just love Jesus, I was in love with Jesus. In that world, I believed that I had personal intimacy with Jesus; personal fellowship with God. My words were, “Here I am to serve come what may, no matter may befall me: bad luck, failure, strife, desertion, or good fortune, homelessness, worldwide calamities, you name it! Call me up and make me a servant today!”
The Turning Point
If there was something that I have always believed then it was this:
“I realized another thing, that in this world fast runners do not always win the races, and the brave do not always win the battles. The wise do not always earn a living, intelligent people do not always get rich, and capable people do not always rise to high positions. Bad luck happens to everyone. You never know when your time is coming. Like birds suddenly caught in a trap, like fish caught in a net, we are trapped at some evil moment when we least expect it.” – Ecclesiastes 9:11-12, GNT.
I learnt this verbally, and I learnt this physically. My father taught me the discipline of Kung-Fu and martial arts. The Kung-fu he taught my brother and I was called “Old Testament Martial Arts”. My fighting style was called “Zodak’s Fighting Fist.” He used some of the quotes and principles from the Bible while teaching me life principles and martial arts.
One day, I was in a kung-fu tournament. It was my turn and I was up! My opponent was another kung-fu fighter, and a girl; an Asian girl! I got in the ring, and the next thing you know, I was on my back. My Zodak’s Fighting Fist was defeated.
Then, my world turned upside down. One day in 1988, my dad said to my brother and I, “Hey, I have a surprise for you.” “Really?!” “Yeah, you will never find it.” “Yes, we will.” “No, you won’t,” he said again. Then, we looked for it inside my grandmother’s house. I don’t remember how long it took, but the next thing you know, I realized that my dad was gone. I looked outside…and he was gone. My father did not tell us that he was leaving, but before he left, he said these words that I will always remember during the summer of July 1988: “Do not you ever, ever, ever…. use your kung-fu against anyone” and “Don’t believe in something just because someone tells you that it is true.” I used to sit in Ms. Bristol’s 2nd grade elementary school class and look up at the ceiling, seeing stars up there in my imagination, lightly humming in class to the Muffet Babies song, “Guiding Star,” looking for my dad and imagining that my daddy would return to pick me up.
“Test the Spirits”: Moving Towards Reason
I was very passionate about my religious beliefs and Christianity to the point that it seemed impossible to me for a real Christian to turn away and not have faith, and those who did turn away were faking in the first place. But, if someone could show that the Bible is not the perfect Word of God, and they are right that it is not perfect, then nothing else would matter to me to try to prove that it is the Word of God. Even a so-called “personal experience” with God stands or falls on whether or not the Bible is the Word of God, and nothing else matters, as 1 John 4:1 tells us to “test the spirits, whether they are of God”. Those “personal experiences” would be classified as anecdotes, and suspect to personal interpretations of mental stimulation, or delusions or hallucinations that prove nothing.
I found out that many people professing faith were merely religious and did not understand whom Jesus was as described in the Bible. Their faith was not planted on “the Good Soil,” but among thorns and thistles, among feeble pebbles, and on a heavily trafficked road, not on the Word of God. My morality never mattered because, according to my Christian beliefs, there is no morality without God. “Man is a piece of sin,” and “in human nature, there is not one good thing.” If God, the father in the sky, said something against what I thought was moral, I would follow God, not my own morality. I would “deny myself and take up my post” and cancel out own moral compass because there is nothing moral about the human nature, but a malfunction of sin; man is just a malfunction stemming from the mistake of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Deep in faith, I also became deeply interested in science and inventing. I participated in the school’s Invention Convention and won Grand Prize for inventing the Handy-Dandy Glove. Later on, I invented and patented the “Code Card.” At the age of 12, I began studying Christian Apologetics and Theology. I also purchased Chick Publication magazines and tracts. One of the comic books that stuck in my head was called “Primal Man?” which talked about how evolution was false, that carbon dating is wrong, and those who believe in them are evil. One Christian friend very close to me simply told me that the dinosaurs never existed, but were artificially created by scientists. That is where I draw the line! I think that being dishonest and denying the facts supplied by credible and reliable sources is not being truthful to yourself.
Some people point to dinosaur paintings on caves, like the Havasupai “Dinosaur” paintings to attempt to prove that man and dinosaurs co-existed. I learnt about how in 1979, there was a evangelical Christian film with a picture of the Havasupai “Dinosaur” called “The Great Dinosaur Mystery,” and that made it famous, and is still used today by many evangelicals and the Creation Museums and Creationist websites. But since that time it has been discovered by experts, such as Palaeontologia Electronica, and reported by Discovery News and Fox News that this is not the case: “it is a stylized biped just like in the artistic conventions of the culture that produced the cave art.” (Senter, pg 5-7). Other paintings are just “mud stains.” Bottom line: Those paintings are not dinosaur paintings.
In high school, I became the co-president of the Christian Seekers Club in F.H La Guardia of Music and Art. Being president of the Christian club made my grades suffer more, just as the previous president. My Earth Science teacher and biology teacher taught about how old the Earth is, and their answers made a lot of sense, and challenged my wit. My Earth science teacher mentioned that there is no evidence of a Global Flood in tree ring records and showed a video that showed how a Global Flood never happened. Not every culture around the world has a Global Flood story. China is one of the world’s oldest known continuous civilizations. They never reported a Global Flood and their history is a continuous history going back before 5000 BC. The Chinese Peiligang culture is 9,000 years old, and they had musical instruments and a writing system (Liu, Li. The Chinese Neolithic: Trajectories to Early States, Table 1.1, pg 4).
There was only small floods during Emperor Yao’s time that did not kill anybody around 3000 BC. After Yao resigned in failure to stop the floods, the Emperor Da-Yu successfully solved the small local flood problems by digging a trail in the ground to lead the flood out to the rivers and seas. The local flood happened because of natural causes, but this was not a global flood. Also, for the Chinese, it had nothing to do with a punishment from a god for disobedience; a wrath from God was not in their vocabulary so to speak. It was by natural causes. Now, there are 56 ethnic minority cultures in China. All 56 cultures still exist to this day.
Emperor Yao’s flood is how the tiny and small Miao ethnic group developed their children’s song-myth since they were affected the most in the southwest regions of China. Remember, the Maio are just one of the 56 minority cultures in China. No Global Flood myth is recorded in all the cultures in China, just a children’s song from one small and tiny ethnic group called the Miao. The Chinese peoples and cultures never died out and goes back beyond 9,000 years to Neolithic times and continued on to 5000 BC to 4000 BC to 3000 BC to 2000 BC to 1000 BC until 2013, always existed continuously.
Now, the Bible says that right before the Noah’s Global Flood, the animals went into the ark “the self-same day” (Genesis 7:11-15). There are over 1,000,000 species of animals in the world, not including oceanic creatures. For them to all go into the ark the “self-same day” would mean that 40 animals per second would have to pass through the door into the ark before a 24-hour day was over. The story goes on to say that God had a “No Animal Left Behind Policy” and that Noah must “Bring into the boat with you one male and one female of every kind of animal and bird, as well as a male and a female of every reptile. I don’t want them to be destroyed” (Genesis 6:19-20; 7:8-9, CEV). Noah’s god told him that every living creature outside the ark will not survive and would be wiped off of the planet (Genesis 7:4). For those creatures left behind , “not a bird, animal, reptile, or human was left alive anywhere on earth. The LORD destroyed everything that breathed. Nothing was left alive except Noah and the others in the boat.”(CEV). Even if aquatic animals were not a part of the “No Animal Left Behind policy,” still all of the species in the world could not all fit into the ark, given its dimensions. There are many different species of dogs, bats, birds, turtles, cats, bugs and dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, indeed, would not be able to fit inside. The boat was 450 ft x 75 ft x 45 ft = 1,518,750 cubic feet of space. It is a mathematical catastrophe to fit over 1,000,000 species in that (Moore, 1983).
After class, my teacher approached me and invited me to study spiders in the Museum of Natural History in New York, which offer I happily accepted! Going to that museum showed me what dinosaurs looked like. The museum showed how old the Earth is. When I went into the evolution section, I saw human-ape like bones and creatures in the museum. If the Bible is perfect and infallible, then nothing it says can be wrong nor have errors, and if I think there are errors then maybe my interpretation was wrong. I was discouraged, and in despair. So, I put the Noah’s Ark story on my tentatively unexplainable list. It wasn’t anything doctrinally crucial like the creation of the Earth and mankind.
I wanted answers, so I challenged my science teachers. It was very frustrating because what I was learning in science class seemed to make sense, like how gravity works, and it shook the foundations of my world. One question I asked my Earth science teacher was, “How did life form on Earth? I mean, a rock is non-living matter. How did the living things spring from the non-living stuff?” He said, “Star dust!” At that, I was perplexed. He didn’t give me enough details to help me understand at that time. Then there was a school mate (co-president of the Christian club with me) that showed me Christian books that taught that black holes didn’t exist and that the Big Bang never happened. This just fueled the fire. The next thing you know, I brought that classmate with me to the dean of the science department to answer my pressing concern of why they are not teaching creationism in science class, which turned into a debate, and she sufficiently answered my questions.
Later, as we were walking, I told Alan that I wanted to be a scientist and a doctor, but that I was discouraged because, for me, if the Bible was not literally true, then it is allegorical, and if it is allegorical, then it is not a perfect word from God. Then, my classmate took me to a Christian Bookstore near 42nd Street in Manhattan. He introduced me to Creation science and Intelligent Design. From there, I consumed the books of Answers In Genesis’ ministries and Henry Morris. Others books were by Michael Behe or Duane Gish. I also saw the old Chick Publication magazines that I use to read when I was younger.
I was researching the young Earth creationist position for a long time until about 2002 or 2003. I also continued to study theology, from Lightfoot, to J.H. Darby to studying and using The Companion Bible made by E.W. Bullinger and some of Charles Welch’s writings. I began to see holes in the Young Earth creationist position, seeing problems internally from the Bible and from observing nature. After 2006, I began to see holes in all modern theological positions: from Fundamentalism to every type of Dispensational Theology. Then, I started to explore the possibility of other Genesis ideas and interpretations: including the Genesis 1-2 Gap idea and the long Day-Age idea, where it is said that the days in Genesis 1-2 are not 24-hour days, but long ages; and in these long day-ages God is said to have supposedly used evolution, and Genesis is said to be in agreement with the modern scientific record of that evolution. The Young Earth creationist position is the literal 6000-year-old Christian worldview of the Bible that is held by most evangelicals and fundamental Christianity (This is based on the literal number crunching of the genealogical chronology from Adam to Jesus, which gives you a total of just over 4000 years. It is now 2013 AD. This equates to a total of just over 6,000 years).
From 2008 – 2010, I started to see severe holes in the Genesis 1-2 day-age hypothesis. No matter how you view it, it is at odds with the scientific evidence. In addition, if the days in Genesis 1-2 were millions of years, and it evolved in that order, then there would be no life on Earth. Everything would die of starvation and lack of rain and water. Morever, if the 4th day was a long age, God could not have naturally used evolution because the stars are immediately visible in the Earth’s sky since God “set them in the Earth” and they were all immediately there. And stars billions of light years away would have taken millions of years to reach the Earth, not less than 24-hours. Finally, the order of the stars’ appearing is in the wrong order scientifically. So, the 4th day in Genesis 1:14-16 could not have been a long day-age that God naturally used to evolve the stars, the moon and sun.
By the end of 2012, I finally returned to the Literal Interpretation of Genesis and looked into its structure from the context and the setting of its background culture. This is when I saw it for what it truly is, and finally accepting Modern Science; not Pseudo-Creation science.
The Bible’s Literal Cosmology of the Ancient World
“I went outside to see the trees, the sun, the moon, the stars, the sea; And when I gazed I found to see the ancient world revealed to me.” (Genesis McKenzie) Have we imposed our modern understanding of cosmology onto the ancient cosmology of Genesis 1-2?
Here is a better understanding: What if we take Genesis 1:17 literally and throw away our modern understanding of the cosmology of universe and see how the ancients envisioned in their cosmologies? Genesis chapter 1 says that on the 4th Day of creation “God placed [the celestial bodies] in the dome of the skies to shine on the earth” (Genesis 1:17). Here, “the FIRM-ament of Heavens” is “Dome of the skies,” but I will use “skies” and “dome” from here on to make it clear. So, it was the “heaven-dome” or “Earth’s dome of the heavens.”
If taken literally, then here in Genesis, when the 4th day began, the celestial bodies of the Sun, Moon and Stars are “placed in” or “set inside” or “embedded in” the sky-dome of the Earth. This may sound weird to modern day people, but if we look back to our ancestors and see what they understood, then this makes perfect sense. Let us throw away our modern perspectives and imagine for a moment the world as the ancient world saw the universe!
Ancient Chinese Perception for the Creation of World
While living in China, and later on marrying a native-born Chinese a few months ago, I came to know the ancient Chinese creation story. The ancient Chinese believed that the world was created by a man sleeping in a egg. He opened it up and split it into two pieces, and used his legs and arms to become invisible pillars to hold the two pieces of the egg separately from each other. The top half of the egg was a sky-dome, the lower half became the Earth with a flat top. He used his hair to make stars. The stars and sky were “set in” or “place in” the top half of the egg-shaped sky. The rest of his body parts were used to make the bottom half of the egg, forming the Earth.
To the Chinese, heavens are the skies. The sky was a FIRM-ament; a firm and solid dome that covered the earth, like placing two cereal bowls together. Celestial bodies like the moon and stars of constellations were “smaller than a mountain” and did not float somewhere out there in outer space, billions of light-years away, but it was right here in the Earth “placed in” beneath a physically solid dome with soft fluffy skies. In other ancient cosmologies, before the Earth and sky existed or was shaped, the whole universe was an oceanic watery abyss of nothingness. It was just natural for everyone living around the world to think these things.
Cosmology of Ancient Civilizations
The common cosmology of many ancient civilizations was that the entire universe was completely full of water. For them all, the Earth and its sky-dome above (or firmament) did not exist before; that is, only a great watery abyss of darkness existed. It wasn’t an airy space, but a watery place; a large oceanic heaven. An opening in the watery universe was formed, and then afterwards the Earth and its skies were created. Almost every civilization, including the Hebrews thought that the sky was a solid dome, physically. The sky and earth met together like two cereal bowls or egg shells facing each other. So, the Earth was circlular and flat at the same time: The top half of it is the sky and it was a solid sky. The bottom half was the Earth and it was flat. The sun, moon and stars were really tiny objects in the skies – smaller than a mountain. They were so small they could fit inside the Earth’s sky. To the ancient world, the reason why the sky-dome and the Earth are always created first, and the celestial bodies are created afterwards, and the reason why the sun and stars were smaller than a mountain is because they had a geocentric view of the universe; everything revolved around their Earth. To the ancient world, the sky-dome (or firmament) was, physically, a solid object at the top and fluffy below because above the universe is a complete oceanic abyss above the sky-dome. Their gigantic sky-canopy kept the oceanic universe outside. They believed that if all the stars and constellations of the sky-dome fell to the Earth, like fruits shaken from a tree, then it will not kill people because those celestial objects were “smaller than a mountain.” We know that today, however, that stars are bigger than the moon and cannot fall from the sky to the Earth. If they all stars and constellations could fall to Earth, we would all die.
Are the Concepts in the Bible Perfect and Infallible: Why I Don’t Believe Anymore
“When God began to create the skies and the earth in the beginning, the earth happened to be not yet formed, and unshaped. Darkness covered the surface of the deep! Then, breath of God moved upon the face of the waters…..”
(1) The first book of the Bible opens up and introduces the claimed that God created the earth and the earth’s skies.
(2) It claims that the Earth and it’s solid sky-dome did not yet exist in Genesis 1:1 because it “had yet become” formed or shaped.
(3) The universal brine or oceanic abyss was already present before any creation of earth and its solid sky-dome.
Later on, in day 2 and day 3 of the creation in Genesis, the Earth and it’s Skies are formed and shaped. An opening in the watery universe was formed and the sky-dome is created. Then, earth was formed. Before, nothing was there except a watery darkness in its place; nothing was there, but an empty space; before this the Earth and its sky-dome were formless, unshaped, and had not yet existed.
The seas and plant-life are also made the 2nd and 3rd day. As I read on to day 4 (or stage 4) in Genesis 1:14-17, I began to see what the ancients saw in their cosmology of celestial bodies. On the 4th day of creation, the Bible also depicts the sun, the stars of constellations, and other celestial bodies as relatively small objects, created after the skies and earth were made: “God placed them in the dome of the skies to shine on the earth…” (Genesis 1:17)
The celestial bodies of the sun, moon and the stars to the writer in Genesis and all the rest of the ancient world were thought to be literally “placed in” or “set in” the Earth’s Sky-Dome. These celestial bodies did not float somewhere out there in outer space billions of light-years away, but were right here in the Earth beneath the fluffy and solid dome of the sky.
Throughout the Hebrew Bible until the end of the New Testament, whether we interpret it literally or not, in the book of the “Revelation from Jesus,” where Jesus reveals the tribulation and the end of the ages to John, we can see still that the stars, the moon and the sun were thought to be “smaller than a mountain,” so much that if the Earth is shaken, those stars (which were thought to be inside the sky-dome) can fall from the sky to the Earth, like ripe figs from a tree, and no one gets hurt.
First, look at what Joel and Isaish say, “…Before them the earth shakes, the sky trembles, the sun and moon are darkened, and the stars no longer shine.” (Joel 2:10, KJV) and “For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not flash forth their light; the sun will keep back when it comes out, and the moon will not cause its light to shine.” (Isaiah 13:10, LEB). Now, here is what the Book of the Revelation from Jesus to John says, “…and there was a great earth-shock; and the sun became black as haircloth, and the moon became as blood; And all the stars of heaven were falling to the earth, like green fruit from a tree before the force of a great wind.” (Revelation 6:12-13, BBE).
In Matthew 24:29, Jesus, himself, repeats the words of Joel again as his did in Revelation 6:12-13 that “The sun will become darkened, and the moon will cease its light. The stars from the sky will fall [to the earth]: yes, the powers in the skies will be shaken” (GrNT). Ancient people thought that the stars and their starry constellations were special powers, smaller than a mountain, that can all fall from the sky to the Earth and not hurt people. Jesus, who is claimed to be omniscient, said that!
Jesus and God say that all the stars will no longer shine because they will all fall to the Earth, and these are not just comets, but “stars and constellations.”
The smallest star ever found is called OGLE-TR-122b, it is the size of Jupiter, which is the largest planet of solar system. Approximately 1,321 Earths can fit inside Jupiter. The volume of Jupiter is 1.43019679×10^15 km^3 power bigger than Earth. This proves that if a star falls on earth, it would destroy the Earth.
The problem with the Bible’s creation story is that “GOD says” and “God thinks” that the celestial bodies are placed inside the dome of the Earth’s skies! “God thinks” that the moon, sun and stars are “smaller than a mountain;” and are so physically small, that they can fit right inside the Earth’s sky-dome, that solid firmament of the ancient world (hard at the top and fluffy underneath). Jesus and Yahweh both say and think that the stars and their starry constellations will no longer shine because they will all fall to the Earth (Joel 2:10; Isaiah 13:10; Revelation 6:12-13, Matthew 24:29). God, the father, and Jesus, the omnipotent Lord, didn’t know that the smallest star ever known is as big as Jupiter, and that if stars don’t shine by falling to the Earth, then all humanity will die.
Literal or not, John in the book of Revelation says that Jesus told him that the dimensions of the city from God are a 1500 x 1500 x 1500 mile perfect cube. Our Earth is 8,000 miles across. It is impossible for a cube that is 1,500 miles across the surface of land to be on a spherical planet! Moreover, since it is Jesus giving him the vision, then God and Jesus think that a 1500 x 1500 x 1500 mile perfect cube can fit on our spherical Earth! But, if the Earth is a flat-shaped bowl, as the ancients saw it, then there is no escape because to John, Jesus and God, all think that our present Earth now and later is a flat-shaped bowl with a sky-dome on top (hard at its top and fluffy underneath it), that only can be opened and rolled back by God and angels to let rain inside. These are the acclaimed words of “a father in the sky” that penned down the very words of the Bible. The writers claim that it is what God says and thinks. Is he omniscient?
Maybe it doesn’t matter if he is all-knowing or not? Christians say that the Bible is perfect, infallible, cannot be wrong and does not contain errors.
Language and Origin of the Genesis Saga
Although, one of the Earth’s oldest alcoholic beverage, the oldest cultivated rice and the oldest musical instruments that are still playable (bone flutes) are approximately 9000 years old, dating to the Neolithic period, and although the oldest human form of writing discovered has been traced as far back to 8600 B.C.E. (just over 10,000 years old) on tortoise shells and pottery in the form of Chinese “petroglyphs” in Damaidi cliff carvings in China, it was right after the end of the 4th millennium B.C.E., 5200 years ago, that the Sumerians developed one of the earliest known writing systems in the Mesopotamian region called Cuneiform script (Woods, 2010).
The Sumerians of Mesopotamia evolved into the Assyrians and Babylonias, which became one large culture, speaking one language. From the Sumerians originated the 6-Stage Creation story in an old Chaldean Genesis Epic called the Enuma Elish, and the 6 Days of Creation in Genesis chapter 1 is a copy and modification of it. The Enuma Elish is the oldest creation epic ever known, and is as old as the second millennium B.C. This epic was used in New Year festivals and annual celebrations in Sumeria at least by the 17th century B.C. (Armstrong, 2011). Sumeria is also one of the oldest developed civilizations on Earth, dating back approximately to 5,000 BC. Now, 4000 years later, after being seizd and influenced by the Mesopotamians, the Jewish people copycatted the Sumerian stories and created their epics and stories, like the Exodus story “during the 7th century B.C. for political, religious and ideological reasons” (Cline, 2010, p. 87-88).
Genesis 1 and the older creation epic, Enuma Elish, both define seven stages of development in the creation of the skies and the earth. The key to understanding how they both relate to each other is understanding that the number of the god-types that develop in the stages of creation in the Enuma Elish and the number of days of Genesis are, exactly, identical in number and identical in theme; and the expressions are similar. The reason why they differ is that they both serve a different political and religious agenda. 1st STAGE: The Enuma Elish starts off with the eternal past and the gods Taimat and Apsu, the universal and primordial ocean gods. The wind of the god Marduk rises and moves upon the face of the chaotic, raging and watery ocean of Taimat to fight her. Then there was a flaming light radiating from the belly of the god Marduk: “Go, and cut off the life of Taimat, and let the wind carry her blood into secret places … He set the lightning in front of him; with burning flame he filled his body…He sent forth the winds which he created, the seven of them; to disturb the inward parts of Taimat.” (King, 2004).
On Day 1 in the book of Genesis in the Bible, it has the same themes and motifs as the 1st stage characteristics in the Enuma Elish creation epic: “Darkness covered the surface of the deep! Then, the breath of God moved upon the face of the waters and God says, ‘Let there come light!’ and there came light.” (Genesis 1:2-3). 2nd STAGE: The god, Marduk, defeats the god, Taimat, who is the primordial and oceanic chaos. Then the god Marduk “split her up like a flat fish into two halves.” A half of Taimat was used to make the firmament with “a [hard] roof for the sky” with a doorkeeper assign to watch it to prevent the whole oceanic universe from falling inside (King, 2004). The lower half is used to make the seas. On Day 2 in Genesis’ creation epic in the Bible it has the same characteristic as the Enuma Elish: The waters are split up and divided into two, the upper half is the sky-dome; the lower half is the sea. Genesis copied this theme on the 3rd Day of its creation story.
3rd STAGE: Earth’s land is made in the Enuma Elish (King, 2004). The earth’s land is made in the book of Genesis on the 3rd day. 4th STAGE: In the Enuma Elish, the god of sky forms celestial bodies that are called the sun-god, moon-god and the stars. They are placed in the skies and the sun-god and moon-god begin to revolve around the Earth (King, 2004). It is a geocentric universe because the sun-god, moon-god and stars are created after the Earth and its skies are made. In Day 4, the creation story in the book of Genesis copied this theme and tells of the sun, moon and stars being placed inside the Earth’s skies by God (Elohim) after the Earth was created. 5th STAGE: Animals in the Enuma Elish (King, 2004). In Day 5, Genesis copied this god-type theme and writes that animals came forth. 6th Stage: Humans are created in the image of a god by dust and divine blood here in the Enuma Elish and the epic of Atrahasis (“Marduk created humanity. He seized Kingu (the oafish consort of Tiamat, created by her after the defeat of Apsu), slew him and shaped the first man by mixing the divine blood with the dust.” (Armstrong, 2011, p.9).
Divine blood represents the divine image inherited in humankind. The god Marduk, speaks to his father, the god, Ea, who had evolved into an earthen lord, and Marduk uses his own divine blood and bone to “create man who shall inhabit the earth” (King, 2004). In the 6th day, the book of Genesis in the Bible copycats this: Man is created, is made in the image of God, using the “dust of the earth” (Genesis 1:27; Malachi 2:15) 7th STAGE: In the Enuma Elish, the gods rest in this 7th stage of creation, and celebrate the time the Earth and its skies were created, and are “wholly at ease” (King, 2004). The book of Genesis copied this by making their God to rest in celebration, commemorating the 7th day after the Earth and its skies. There are differences in the Genesis creation account in the Bible in contrast with the older Mesopotamian myths surrounding and neighboring them, but there are also many striking similarities, patterns and motifs that are identical in number and identical in theme in the stages of creation. One reason for the differences is that the biblical Genesis is a modification of the Mesopotamian myths of Eridu Genesis, Eluma Elish and other Sumerian, Babylonian and Ugarit myths to serve the Jehovah/Yahweh cult where the writer(s) modify the older works to portray one god as a creator. Its purpose was to promote the superiority of the Jehovah/Yahweh cult over the other deities in Israel. This sowed the seed of doubt.
These are the beginnings of my distrust in the Bible as the Word of God, the words of a father in the skies. Since it was a modification, redaction and twist of history to deny the past and forge a new identity. Later, I began to see other things I could not see before because of my “state of innocence” and blind belief. The Evolution of the Language and Original Israelites I used to think that Hebrew culture contained a sacred language from God and that Adam spoke it. When I began to study other languages at the age of 15, I wondered why there was an earlier form of Hebrew called paleo-Hebrew and proto-Hebrew (the language of polytheistic people called Canaanites), which came from yet another earlier language of polytheistic people 1000s of years before it evolved into Hebrew after 1200 BC, and then from polytheistic Hebrews into a strict Jewish monotheism around 600 B.C. This is not a divine language; perfect languages don’t evolve. “Several detailed studies of the grammars of various letters have shed light on the prehistory of biblical Hebrew, itself a [polytheistic] Canaanite dialect that developed directly out of the [Canaanite] language reflected in many of these texts” (Coogan, 2001, p.65).
The Book of Joshua: the Epic of Joshua’s Conquests
The Israelite people did not live in a vacuum all by themselves with a religious textbook and a thumb in their mouth, but surrounded by regional neighbors that kept historical records and libraries. For example, Ugarit (modern day Ras Shamra) in northern Syria was an ancient city that was one of the most earliest known fortified urban centers and inhabited from 6000 BCE to around 1200 BCE. It had “a palace library, a temple library, two private libraries” that was discovered in the 20th century. One private library belonging to “a diplomat named Rapanu contained legal, economic, diplomatic, administrative, literary, and religious texts.” (www.newworldencyclopedia/ Ugarit).
Ammurapi was the last king and ruler of the city of Ugarit, reigning from 1215 BCE -1185 BCE. The king, Ammurapi, in a letter of reply to king Alasiya’s plea for assistance, wrote about the crisis he was facing while the Sea Peoples invaded and attacked his Ugarit city. Ugarit was destroyed by the Sea Peoples and burned to the ground after the death of the pharaoh, Merneptah, and by the eighth year of the reign of Ramesses III in 1178 BCE.
In the Book of Joshua, Joshua makes a prayer so that he can defeat and destroy his enemies. He says, “Oh, [Yahweh], make the sun stop in the sky over Gibeon and the moon stand still … So the sun and the moon stopped and stood still …” – Joshua 10:12-13, CEV.
The Book of Joshua goes on to tell a story about how Joshua destroyed the cities of Jericho, Ai and Hazori and Lachish in a matter of days to weeks. These are mentioned here, consecutively: Joshua 6:1-27; Joshua 7-8; Joshua 11; Joshua 10:31-32; 12:11. This is not true! These did not really happen the way it is told in the good ol’ Bible, the words from a father in the sky. The Israelites did not invade Jericho, Ai, Hazori and Lachish.
“It is commonly accepted today that the majority of the conquest stories in the Book of Joshua are devoid of historical reality.” (Cline, 2012, p.120).
The early Islamic and Israelite monarchies are alike; they are both societies based on religious foundations. These stories in Joshua were created later on after the 9th Century BCE not for historical purposes, but for sociological purposes to support the religious foundation and “to present cultural values that must be passed on to younger generations,” which in turn would result in a centralized authority (Coogan, 2001, p. 36 & 150).
Any sane and reasonable person would believe that archaeology and historical evidence is more authoritative than someone’s interpretation of Bible chronology, but there are some people who are not so sane, who hide behind superstitious ignorance and put their religious bigotry above what is historically, archaeologically and scientifically tested and true. One of those people was Bryant Woods. He considered that his Chronological interpretation of the Bible is infallible, divine and from God. He says that we must make archeology “fit” his Authoritarian interpretation of Bible Chronology dating, and if it doesn’t “fit” his “divinely revealed” Bible Chronology dating of 1400 BC (Late Bronze Age), then the archeological dating is wrong, because his interpretation of the Bible cannot be wrong or have error with the dates.
In his quackery, Bryant Wood says that there is a discrepancy between archeology and the Bible because “Kenyon’s dating is wrong.” To Bryant Wood’s, if Kathleen Kenyon’s dating is right, then the Bible is wrong. Later on, Bryant Wood admitted his own defeat by saying, “… there’s really no debate. Nowadays, everyone accepts Kenyon’s dating.” It is true, all encyclopedias, peer-reviewed and mainstream scholars, archeologists and university textbooks have made it clear to anyone with a rational brain that the Middle Bronze Age (2100-1550 BCE) dating is the time Jericho was destroyed, and not a Late Bronze Age dating of 1440 BC that he, Bryant Wood, bases solely on his cultic interpretation of Bible Chronology that he claims to be a revelation from God.
In any case, the city of Jericho was not attacked by any invaders from the outside. The city of Jericho was slowly dismembered over a century from a culture in decline, and then a rebellion from within itself! Again, this was a slow destruction that spanned over 100 years, ultimately ending by 1550 BC. Futhermore, the problem does not end just with the city of Jericho. The Book of Joshua mentions four cities; namely, the cities of Ai, Jericho, Hazori and Lachish.
Here is the time when these cities sprouted up and when they vanished: The city of Ai was unoccupied from 2200 BC-1200BC; the city of Jericho was gradually destroyed over a period of 100 years and was uninhabited before 1550 BC in the Middle Bronze Age; the city of Hazori was gone by 1250 BC in the Late Bronze Age; and Lachish was destroyed at site VI in 1150 BC and at site VII in the late 13th century (The Oxford History of the Biblical World, Table 3.1, pg 132).
This is a huge one thousand year gap! They were all not destroyed in one day to a few weeks as mentioned in the Book of Joshua. The unavoidable truth is that the Early Israelites evolved from a collapsed Canaanite culture and people. Israelites were actually disenfranchised Canaanites who joined in a revolt to overthrow the elites, out of these people who overthrew the ruling class, a culture of Israelites emerged (www.pbs.org). The Israelite community evolved from the Canaanite peoples around them peacefully and not by war. Original Israelites were polytheists, which evolved into monolatry-polytheism and them to Monotheism.
Passover: The Exodus Epic
“The king [Pharaoh] got his war chariot and army ready… to start after the Israelites…. The water came and covered the chariots, the cavalry, and the whole Egyptian army that had followed the Israelites into the sea. Not one of them was left alive.”(Exodus 14:6-7, 28, CEV).
Every Passover the Jewish faithful and some Christian adherents of Jewish origins quote the words, “Once we were slaves in Egypt, and now we are free!” (Deut. 6:21). Can we doubt that Passover ever happened? That the Israelites were slaves and that the angel of Yahweh came in the night and killed the firstborn son of the Pharaoh and all the Egyptians? The Bible mentions Pharaoh, and makes much ado and praise about Pharaoh drowning in the sea: “Not one of them was left alive.” (Exodus 14:28; 15:19; Psalm 106:11; 136:13,15). Many Christians attribute Pharaoh to Ramses II (1279 BCE – 1213 BCE), Mernptah (1213 BCE- 1203 BCE) or Amenhotep II (1425 BCE-1400 BCE). They were all discovered and examined (www.newworldencyclopedia/Pharaoh).
Now, the word “pharaoh” originates from the Egyptian word “pr-aA” used in Egypt before 2000 BCE to refer to the court or palaces (www.egyptvoyager.com). The kings of Egypt, themselves, were not addressed nor called “Pharaoh” until the middle of the eighteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt. The first time the word pharaoh was specifically used as a title for any Egyptian king was in the reign of Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) from around 1367 B.C.E. to 1350. B.C.E. (www.newworldencyclopedia/Pharaoh ; www.etymonline.com). In 1000 BCE – 800 BCE, the original Egyptian word “pr-aA
” evolved to be pronounced “par-ʕoʔ”, then this pronunciation was later used by the Greeks and Hebrews (φαραώ (pharao) and ni desu retal ,neht ,(ylevitcepser ,(horaP) כי אשתך Latin (“Pharaonem”, then “pharaō”), which came into the English language as “Pharon”, and then “Pharaoh”. (www.egyptvoyager.com; New World Encyclopedia, Pharaoh).
So, could it have been Amenhotep II, who reigned in Egypt as “pharaoh” in 1425-1400 BCE, which was the Exodus Pharaoh? No! He wouldn’t have been called “pharaoh”! It could not have been Merneptah either. Merneptah was already in his early 70s when he became Pharaoh. His “aorta was in an extreme stage of calcareous degeneration” and he died an old man “of great age [that] is shown by his baldness, the whiteness of the little hair left, the complete ossification of the thyroid cartilage and especially the ossification of the cartilage of the first rib (not its sheath only)…..[He] was a somewhat corpulent old man” (The Royal Mummies, Cairo (1912), Grafton Elliot Smith, pp. 65, 67, 69).
This leaves us with the pharaoh, Ramses II (1279 BCE – 1213 BCE), also known as Ramesses the Great, who many Christians and Jews say enslaved the Israelites and built the supply cities of Ramses and Pithom (Exodus 1:11-14). The body of Ramses II was found and it is a well-preserved mummy. It was examined extensively, and it shows that Ramses II died at a ripe old age of 92, suffering from arthritis, tooth cavities, and poor circulation. More importantly, “the mummy of Ramses II shows no indication that he drowned in the Red Sea, evidence one might look for in corroborating the Exodus account” (Cline, 2012, p.72). Summary of Historical and Archaeological Facts that contradict the Exodus Story: – Ramses II was not drowned in the Red Sea. – The Jews were not enslaved in Egypt! The Egyptians who built Ramses and Pithom were paid workers and were given a proper burial. -There is no historical nor archaeological evidence that has confirmed the plagues of Egypt. -The neighbors of the Egyptians did not ever record any plagues of Egypt.
The population of Egypt at the time of Ramses II was 3 million. The Bible says that 600,000 Israelites males with weapons (Approximately 2.5 million Israelites who were women and children), escaped Egypt, and then crossed through the Red Sea on foot in less than 24 hours. For them to do that, they all would have to be running at the speed of 30 miles per hour, because walking would take up to 9 days to move heavy traffic like that. It says that they wandered through the desert for 40 years at Kadesh Barnea.
Now, you would imagine that 2.5 million people living in the same location for about 40 years with domesticated animals would leave some remains behind dead animal bones, pieces of broken pottery, feces and other organic material, torn pieces of cloth, spilled beans, etc. For decades, this area has been excavated, looking for some traces of evidence left behind. Not a shred of evidence has turned up! According to Eric H. Cline, “As an archaeologist, I again must point out that there is no archaeological evidence yet available to prove that the Exodus, as described in the Hebrew Bible, took place. As I stated in the National Geographic Channel television show Exodus Revealed, ‘We do not have a single shred of evidence to date. There is nothing [available] archaeologically to attest to anything from the biblical story. No plagues, no parting of the Rea Sea, no manna from heaven, no wandering for 40 years.’” (Cline, 2012, p.90).
No matter what date that has been proposed for the birth of Moses reflect historical errors and contradictions within the Bible. For example, the King of Egypt was not called Pharaoh until the middle of the eighteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt of the reign of Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) from around 1367 B.C.E. to 1350. B.C.E. If Moses was born in 1592 (according to St. Jerome) or 1619 (according to Bishop Ussher), then this is evidence that Moses did not write the Torah, since the kings of Egypt were not called “pharaoh” until the reign of Amenhotep IV. And since Jericho was uninhabited no later than 1562 BCE (to be more precise), then Moses and Joshua could not have conquered Jericho, since the city of Jericho would not have been there.
Nevertheless, if Moses lived from 1391–1271 BCE, according to Rabbinical Judaism, then there is another problem. Jericho was uninhabited by as late as 1550 BCE, and could not have been conquered by Joshua, Moses’ back-up man, if Moses was supposedly born in 1391 BCE. The undeniable truth is that Exodus is a myth!
It’s totally imaginary and so, cannot be disproved unless it makes a falsifiable claim. Surely, the Christians has made claims that the Bible is perfect without error. The purpose of the Exodus myth was to support a religious foundation of the emerging Yahweh cult to pass on sociological and cultural values to children, and ultimately would support the validity of the growing monarchy to centralize power for its political ends. In fact, today major historians, archaeologist, encyclopedias and major universities make it available to anyone open-minded about the fact that “the emergence of early Israel was an outcome of the collapse of the [polytheistic] Canaanite culture, not its cause. And most of the Israelites did not come from outside Canaan – they emerged from within it. There was no mass Exodus from Egypt. There was no violent conquest of Canaan. Most of the people who formed early Israel were local people – the same people whom we see in the highlands throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. The early Israelites were – irony of ironies – themselves originally [polytheistic] Canaanites!” (Finkelstein, I. & Silberman, N. A. The Bible Unearthed. The Free Press: New York, 2001, p. 118.).
What does this all have to do with Jesus? Think about it. The Passover, the Exodus story, the Genesis story, the story of Joshua (whom New Testament writers prefigure it as a type of Jesus Christ) are the foundation of the stories of Jesus. And if they were just an epic or allegory, then the Jesus story is just a great epic and an allegory because they did not really happen. Those Hebrew stories are not just stories for you to read, but also stories to be believed as facts. The Passover lamb in the Exodus story is the Jesus story of the New Testament. Jesus is called the Passover lamb, and Jesus said to tell others that he was raised from the dead and to believe that he died for them.
Proof or Dare: Kamikaze Faith!
So, how am I as a street preacher on the trains, singing my head off with beautiful tunes, out of love to save humanity from the coming death of all deaths; how am I to tell other people about the message of Jesus and then give proof and validate that the claims that I am making are true about an old resurrection story that happened 2000 years ago and that Jesus is living today? How are we to validate our words are true without saying, “Just believe it!” like all the other 3000 religions out there, competing with each other and asking you to do the same thing, and asking you to pray to their gods? Have you tried praying to all of them? Well, Jesus has a solution. He tells us preachers and believers to give proof and to present it as evidence for the validity of his story. Here is the proof Jesus is talking about: “Tell the Gospel to everyone…Where believers go they will be able to do these things as proof: …If they pick up snakes in their hands or drink any poison, they will be unharmed.”(Mark 16:17-18, GrNT) “Take up your cross and follow Me” (Matt 16:24). “I can guarantee this truth: Those who believe in me will do the things that I am doing. They will do even greater things …”(John 14.12, GWT), “…to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21).
Problems with the Resurrection Story
“They have taken the lord out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have put him!” – Mary Magdalene in John 20:2.
There are various problems with the resurrection story. Firstly, the ancients of the Greco-Roman world made up miracles to give their own stories and lives social meaning. They believed that divine powers and miraculous signs are an everyday monotonous event; and that is how they wrote down their histories. The New Testament is a product of this environment.
Secondly, these things ares seen right in the story of the resurrection. It is an anachronism to harmonize the account of Jesus, and when one really studies the Synoptic Gospels one can see that Mark was written first, then Luke was written to strengthen Mark’s abrupt ending, and then Matthew was written later to strengthen and harmonize the shortcomings found both in Mark and Luke.
But first we must ask three important questions. As I wrote this story about my life, I surveyed several Christians with these three “Yes or No” questions that you need to answer yourself:
1st Question: Did the disciples of Jesus expect that Jesus was going to die?
2nd Question: Did the disciples of Jesus expect that Jesus was going to rise?
3rd Question: Did the enemies of Jesus and the devil expect that Jesus was going to rise?
My answer is the same as most Christians. The answers are all a resounding NO! No one knew. Surely, Jesus while told his 12 disciples about how “the son of humanity will be betrayed… condemned to death… be executed. On the third day he will be raised to life.” (Matt. 20:17), but it wasn’t until the end that they understood what he was talking about.
Jesus had to “open their minds so they could understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:45). No one understood, not even the betrayer, Judas, calls Jesus just “an innocent man,” (Matt. 27:4), then hanged himself. He didn’t understand or expect that he was the one to rise, else the little Satan wouldn’t have killed him and crush his own plans in his head (Genesis 3:15; Luke 22:3).
Let’s observe the anachronism right into the pages of the Book of Books itself. An anachronism means “something out of place.” An example of an anachronism is reading about people riding jet planes in America in the 10th Century AD. Another example is “The Flintstones” cartoon using modern appliances and automobiles in a prehistoric setting. We all agree that these things are just “out of place.” So by the same token, the same thing happens when we read the written work of the scribes who wrote the Gospel of Matthew concerning the resurrection of Jesus in order to strengthen the scribes of Luke’s account who make an extension to the story of Mark’s earlier account.
Now, Jesus’ enemies and even his disciples did not know and understand that Jesus was supposed to rise from the dead. Even when Jesus hinted at it talking about the “Jonah sign” or saying, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it again,” as a miraculous sign of proof of his authority (John 2:18-19), no one knew nor understood that he was talking about his resurrection, not even the disciples closest to him. They all thought he was talking about the Jewish Temple (John 2:20-21).
It was only until after Jesus was raised from the dead and appeared to the disciples that, in hindsight, “his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.” (John 2:22, GNT). After Jesus’ resurrection, Jesus had to open their minds to understand the resurrection Scriptures (Luke 24:44-45). Before they were “behind locked doors, because they were afraid of the Jewish authorities,” (John 20:19, GNT) still not understanding “from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead” (John 20:9).
With Mary Magdalene crying out, “They have taken the lord out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have put him” (John 20:2, GNT). So, not even the enemies of Jesus understood or knew that Jesus was going to rise. Even the devil of the Bible was completely oblivious to the idea and/or expectation that Jesus believed or taught that he was suppose to rise from the dead victoriously, or else they would not have killed him. Yet, it is right in the Gospel of Matthew that a great sign occurs (where the scribes in editing that Gospel account tried to strengthen the shortcomings of the abrupt ending of Mark and Luke’s critical additions to Jesus’ resurrection story).
This great sign in the Gospel of Matthew is not a miraculous sign; no, but the signs and marks of an anachronism within its own text. Jesus’ body was placed in a tomb (Matthew 27:59:60), and suddenly the strict Ten Commandment following Jewish “chief priests and the Pharisees met with Pilate and said, ‘Sir, we remember that while that liar was still alive he said, “I will be raised to life three days later.”’” (Matthew 27:63, GNT.) Anachronism #1: Notice that the “devil-filled” enemies of Jesus say “we remember…” it does not say “a disciples of Jesus told us.” As though it was spoken a while back, not a day in advance. So, at the end of the story in Matthew, the scribes added an anachronism to the story so that the enemies of Jesus knew and expected that Jesus would rise from the dead, when we all know that the enemies of Jesus never knew it.
Anachronism #2:
On top of that, the writers of the Gospel of Matthew details the secret and privileged conversations that the Jewish chief priests had with Pontius Pilate and the guards in order to secure the tomb of Jesus by posting guards there and sealing it shut, so that the disciples of Jesus cannot steal his body from the tomb (Matthew 27:63-66), and this was done one day after one of Jesus’ disciples buried Jesus and rolled a big stone to cover the entrance to Jesus’ tomb (Matthew 27:59:60). Now, this is a conversation that no Christian or disciple of Jesus would have known about.
There are other inconsistencies to the resurrection story that Christian apologists over time have tried to defend by proposing varies Timelines or Harmonies of the Resurrection account to make it seem as though there is no problem, but the more Timelines they propose the worst the holes open up.
There are two ways to look at the Resurrection account:
Position A: Mary Magdelene always together with the female disciples.
Position B: Mary separating and leaving the women diciples.
Most Christian apologists today no longer take Position A anymore, but take Position B, because they realize that if they take Position A and say that Mary was together with the women when they looked inside the tomb, everything falls apart and the Resurrection story destroys itself. So, they take Position B because they think that it is safer to make it seems as though Mary Magdalene separated from the the group of women all alone by herself; however, they fail to realize that they have created an even greater problem and a worse hole than position A.
Position A is a better, position B is unforgivable. I’ll show you why: Here is the general Timeline of Events\ propsed by Position B: 1) An angel rolls away stone from tomb before sunrise (Matt. 28:2-4) and The guards are seized with fear.
2) Women disciples visit the tomb and discover Christ missing (Matt. 28:1; Mark 16:1-4; Luke 24:1-3; John 20:1).
3) Mary Magdalene separates from the group of female disciples before looking into the tomb, and leaves to tell Peter and John (John 20:1-2).
4) Other women remain at tomb; they see two angels who tell them of Christ’s resurrection (Matt. 28:5-7); (Mark 16:5-7; Luke 24:4-8).
5) Peter and John run to the tomb and then leave (Luke 24:12; John 20:3-10).
6) Jesus’ First Appearance: Mary Magdalene returns to the tomb; Christ appears to her (Mark 16:9-11; John 20:11-18).
7) Jesus’ Second Appearance: Jesus appears to the other women (Mary, mother of James, Salome, and Joanna) (Matt. 28:8-10).
The problem with this timeline of events it glosses over important details, and if we take Position B, then it fails to realize that #5 of Luke 24:12 and John 20:2-7 would be two separate events, having Peter and Mary Magdalene running back to the tomb before they ran to the tomb. It also fails to realize that the first appearance of Jesus could not have been to Mary Magdalene at the tomb, despite what Mark 16:9-11 says. In fact, the first appearance of Jesus wasn’t at the tomb at all. This is where it all falls apart. The first appearance of Jesus was not to Mary Magdalene.
Another problem when the Christian apologist takes Position B is that he gets busy counting the number of angels and separating Mary Magdalene from the other female desciples that they forget to record the the Timing of the Events and Apparations of both Angels and Jesus to the women and Mary Magdalene.
Let’s keep in mind the following three things. (1) Who told the Mary and the women to “go tell the Peter and the disciples to go to Galilee. Jesus rose” and how many time did they do it?
(2) What was the Timing of the Events of the apparations of angels and Jesus (Please ignore the number of angels. Counting the number of angels will thrown you off.).
(3) When did the other women leave the tomb?
(4) When was the first appearance of Jesus.
(5) Did Mary Magdelene only tell the disciples and the other women did not?
(6) Was Mary Magdelene the only one not afraid to speak up?
(7) Did Peter run to the tomb once, twice or thrice?
Here is Position B: (1) An angel rolls away stone from tomb before sunrise (Matt. 28:2-4). The guards faint in fear. (2) Luke 24:1-2, Mark 16:1-4, John 20:1; Mt 28:1. Mary Magdelene with the women “while it is still dark.” All the female disciples take spices to visit the tomb and wonder “who will open the tomb for us;” however, to their surprise, they discover that the stone is rolled away from covering the tomb!
(Now, lets assume that before the women looked inside the tomb and saw anything and before Mary Magdalene saw anything and actually went inside the tomb and looked, Mary Magdalene ran away (because if Mary Magdelene did go inside the tomb and looked, the story falls apart).
(3) Meanwhile in Jn 20:2, Mary Magdalene, knowing nothing, separates from the group of female disciples before looking into the tomb, and runs to Peter and the disciples, and her message was, ““They have taken the lord out of the tomb and WE don’t know where they have put him!” (How did she know, she didn’t look, if she did, the story of Position B is destroyed; if she did, then Mary Magdalene is ridiculous and not too smart). (4) Meanwhile in Luke 24:3 and Mark 16:5-, with Mary Magdalene gone, the when the women looked into the tomb “and entered they did not find the body of the lord Jesus.” (5) FIRST APPARATION: First Appearance of Angels. Luke 24:4; Mark 16:5; The women looking inside the tomb see angels.
(6) FIRST ANGELIC CHARGE: Luke 24:5-8; Mt 28:5-7; Mk 16:6-7. The angels tell the frightened women, “Go to Peter and the disciples and tell them to go to Galillee. Jesus rose. He is not here but will met you in Galillee!” (7) The women all flee. Mark 16:8 says that they were so scared they “said nothing to anyone” and Matthew strengthens Mark by confirming that they were frightened, but adds that they had enough strength, so that they “hurried away from the tomb, in fright yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples.” (Mt. 28:8; Mark 16:8).
(8) SECOND APPARITION: First Appearance of Jesus. Right in the middle of when the women were on their way, running from the empty tomb toward the place of Peter and the disciples, Jesus first appears to the women (not to Mary Magdalene alone in a garden, according to Position B!). While running, “Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings.” (9) FIRST JESUS CHARGE: Jesus tells the frightened women, “Go to Peter and the disciples and tell them to go to Galillee. They will see me there.” So, they women know about the resurrection of Jesus and Matthew gives these frightened women more of a reason to go to the disciples without just fear because not only an angel appeared to them, but Jesus himself (10) Meanwhile, Jn 20:3, 8, 10: Peter, Mary Magdalene and the disciples, after hearing Mary Magdalene say, “They have taken the lord out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have put him,” they all left their home-base and start running in the direction towards the tomb. But, at the same time, the women who saw the angels and Jesus are running from the tomb towards the direction of Peter, Mary Magdalene and the disciples’ home-base in order to tell them, “Go to Galilee. Jesus rose.”
(11) Miraculously, Peter, Mary Magdalene and the disciples do not meet the group of women running toward in their direction to the home-base, while Peter and Mary are running to the tomb in their direction (But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they didn’t use the shortest distance, but used two different routes).
(12) Peter, Mary Magdalene, and disciples arrive at the tomb in John 20:6-7, 9 and Peter “went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there…” They see nothing. “They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” (13) Peter and the disciples all go home defeated, leaving Mary Magdalene at the tomb all alone (John 20:10). Mary Magdelane is still separate from the other women. (14) In Luke 24:9-10, meanwhile, while Peter and the disciples are walking home and Mary Magdalene left alone at the tomb, the other women, who had all seen Jesus and angels, arrive at the home-base of Peter and the disciples after running “from the tomb.” It says that the women had told what they had seen to Peter and the disciples and gave gave them the message that Jesus and the angel told them: “Go tell the disciples to go to Galilee. Jesus rose.” The women there that told this story are “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles.” So, Mary Magdalene is in two places at once, because she is still in the garden alone crying and left behind with no angels appearing to her at all, and here at the home of the disciples appearing at the same time. And Peter and the disciples miraculously appeared at their home-base before the women came there telling them that Jesus spoke to them and is waiting for them at Galilee.
(15) Peter gets up and instead of going to Galilee, he “ran to the tomb. ..saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.” (In Luke 24:12). So, Peter runs to the tomb two times and does the same thing twice? Both times, “not understanding what happened” (If it is the same event in John 20:1-10, there is a major contradiction). And Peter doesn’t see Mary Magdalene running to his home or at the tomb, so she must have been transported to his home so that he won’t meet her along the way (unless we assume again that they took two different routes).
(16) Meanwhile, Mary Magdalene, alone at the tomb, John 20:10-11. (17) There are NO ANGELIC APPARITIONS for Mary Magdalene telling her to “go and tell Peter and the disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee. Jesus rose.” Instead she “stood outside the tomb sobbing.” (John 20:11). (18) SECOND APPARITION: Second Appearance of Jesus. Mary Magdalene, doesn’t know what happened, like everyone else, saying, “They have taken my lord away, and I don’t know where they have put him.” She turns around and sees Jesus (Jn 20:11-15). (19) SECOND JESUS CHARGE: Jesus tells the sobbing Mary Magdalene to go and tell Peter and the disciples. “And she told them he had said these things to her” (Jn 20:16-18). (20) THIRD APPARITION: The Emmaus Recap! So, after all the women are out the scene, Luke 24 reviews the resurrection account through the men at Emmaus says that the women had “seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive” (Luke 24:22-24).
So, now the women only see angels, but no Jesus is mentioned, but we all know that Jesus appeared to the women. Worst of all, Jesus and the angels told the women to “go the the disciples and tell them to meet Jesus at Galilee. He arose., but instead, we see here that the disciples “went to the tomb and….[Jesus] they did not see.”(Luke 24:24). Why would they run to the tomb when Jesus appeared to them outside the tomb while along the way rushing toward the house of Peter and the disciples? And Peter and the disciples already ran to the tomb before the women arrived at the disciples’ house because after Mary Magdalene ran away from the group of women before she looked inside the tomb, only seeing the rock moved away, she ran to Peter and the disciples and said, “They have taken the lord out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have put him!” (John 20:2)
This is a “Divine Logistic Chaos;” with angels and Jesus appearing all over the place, forgetting that they just told the women already to “Go to Peter and the disciples that Jesus is waiting at Galillee. He arose.” Also, with Mary Magdalene appearing at two places at one, and Peter, Mary Magdalene and the disciples running to the tomb twice and never meeting the women running toward them, and then magically outrunning the women going back home or appearing in the house before the women got there to tell them the good news. This is all what happens if you take Position B.
Let’s incorporate the Jewish priests and guards into the resurrection story, combining both Position A and B together: It was on the third day, Saturday-sunset after 6:00 pm (Sunday in Jewish time), that the disciple girls come to the tomb, and, at once, all the guards at the tomb witness a miraculous sign. The guards all saw an angel fly down and roll the big stone away from the tomb and sit on it. Then, the superstitious guards all fell unconscious. So unconscious that the guards did not feel the girl disciples stepping over them. The guards woke up after the the women left the tomb and “where on their way” (Matthew 24:11).
(And the scribes of John do not mention any angelic apparitions to Mary Magdalene and the women visiting the empty tomb with a command to “go to the disciples and tell them to go to Galilee. Jesus arose” like in the rest of the synoptic Gospels, but instead the Gospel of John has the Mary Magdalene, separating from the women behind at the tomb (Position B), fleeing the tomb and running to Peter and the disciples saying, “They have taken the lord out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have put him!” (John 20:2).
Actually, the earlier scribes of Mark ends the story abruptly at 16:8 with an apparition of angels alone (and no Jesus apparition), and the angels alone tell the girls to “go and tell the disciples and tell them to go to Galilee. Jesus arose,” but instead the girls all fled the tomb and the women said nothing to anyone “because they were scared;” leaving you, the reader, to figure out how the disciples came to know about the resurrection of Jesus (Mark 16:9-20 was added later by Position A scribes after the mid- 2nd Century to try to fix the problems of no apparition from Jesus to the women, borrowing from Luke and Matthew; however, if apologists take Position B, then “[Jesus] appeared first to Mary Magdalene ” who was alone and separate from the rest of the group of women, and she is the one who told the disciples (Mark 16:9-10). This contradicts John 20:2 where Mary runs to the disciples and says , “They have taken the lord out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have put him!”
Position A scribes adding Mark 16:9-11 after the 2nd Century don’t have this contradiction, they have other contradictions.). The scribes of the Gospel of Luke and Matthew, writing later, extend the resurrection story of the scribes of the Gospel of Mark in order to focus on telling the story of how the females disciples came to tell the male disciples that Jesus rose up. Again confirming Mark that just only angels tell the women to go and tell the disciples, but now the scribes of Luke and Matthew add something new to the story: that despite their fear they came to speak up about it to the disciples, telling them the message that “Jesua and the angels said to go to Galilee to meet Jesus. He is risen.”
Meanwhile, the superstitious guards are laying there unconscious. So unconscious that the superstitious guards not only did not feel the girl disciples stepping over them, but did not hear the angel speaking to all the women there, since the guards woke up after the the women left the tomb and “where on their way” (Matthew 24:11). But, if the guards (who saw the miraculous rock-rolling angel fly down, move the big stone away and sit on it), if the guards quickly woke up and left before the women arrived, then they didn’t notice the angel sitting there and waiting for the women to arrive there shortly. Then, the scribes of Matthew tell another secret conversation that no disciples or Christian could have known about (because its purpose is to strengthen Luke and Mark).
The scribes write that the guards go to the strict Torah-following Jewish leaders who did not condemn nor deny the miraculous sign of the rock-rolling and tomb-opening angel story that the guards saw and reported to them, but instead the scribes of Matthew demonize the Jewish chief priests by saying that they broke the 9th Commandment (“You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor” Exodus 20:16), and say that the Jewish leaders mysteriously bribe the superstitious guards to spread out a different and false testimony that endangers the life of the guards and makes the guards look more foolish and idiotic than their first story.
The guard’s testimony was to be that: “The disciples came and stole the body of Jesus while we were sleeping on the job as guards” (Matthew 28:11-13). The scribes and editors of the Gospel of Matthew write that the superstitious guards, who saw the miraculous angel fly down and open the tomb, all took the money and spread out the testimony to all the Jews and to everybody that “the disciples came and stole the body of Jesus while we were sleeping on the job as guards.” (Matthew 28:14). Meanwhile in other Gospel accounts, and back at the Disciple-cave home, Peter, not believing the women’s “nonsense” visits the tomb and “wonders to himself what happened” (Luke 24:12) for the disciples “did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead” (John 20:9).
BUT, the scribes of Matthew, further extend the story and add that not only angels appear to the women to tell them to “go to the disciples and tell them to go to Galilee; Jesus arose,” but adds that moments right after the angel appeared to the women and the women fled away scared, Jesus appeared to the women along the road they were fleeing on toward Peter and the disciples (if Mary wasn’t there (Position B) and separate from the women, then it just makes it worse). So, the Matthew account attempts to give strength to the Luke explanation in how those scared women told the resurrection story to the boys by saying that not only an angel said it, but, moments later while they were running, that Jesus additionally appears and tells the women and Mary Magdalene something like this: “go and tell Peter and the disciples and tell them to go to Galilee; I am risen.” (Matthew 28:10). Now, they had not ONE, but TWO apparitions. When we get to the Gospel of John, writing in a gnostic-like style, there are NO angels appearing at the resurrection scene giving commandments or charges! Instead Mary Magdalene is left alone (Position B), but if we take Position A, then all the women visit the tomb with Mary Magdalene, and see it empty, then they flee to Peter and the disciples with no angel and no Jesus appearing to them at all on the way.
Continuing in Position A, instead, the women say, “They have taken the lord out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have put him!” (John 20:2) So, Peter gets up and visits the tomb and has no idea about what happened. The Gospel of John goes on to say that all “the disciples went back home to their homes” (John 20:10), only Mary Magdalene was left there standing at the tomb. In a gnostic and cryptic-like style, the scribes of the Gospel of John write that as the disciples walked away in defeat, including Peter, it was only “the other disciple” ([Insert Your Name Here]) that knew the mystery that Jesus rose up, but the rest of the disciples, including Peter, were oblivious to the idea of a resurrection in the Jewish Scriptures (Because you, the reader, are “the disciple whom Jesus loves,” (Jn 20:2). You, the reader, are the one who reclines on Jesus’ breast at the Last Passover meal in the cryptic pages of John 13:23 and at the resurrection seen. And you are the disciple that follows right behind Peter and Jesus in John 21:20). Then, in a twist of fact, (taking Position A), Jesus tells Mary Magdalene alone to “go tell the disciples” before she fled from the tomb; however, if we take Position B, and say that Mary Magdalene was separate from the women, then Mary Magdalene is in two places at once: At the disciple’s home and at the tomb at the same time, telling the disciples “with Joanna, Mary and the mother of James and the others with them” about the angels and Jesus telling the disciples, “Jesus and the angels told us to tell you to go to Galilee to meet Jesus, he is risen”. To summarize the resurrection scene at Gospel of Matthew: a) The guards are recorded to have seen a rock-rolling angel miraculously fly down and open the tomb, then it sat on it, then all the guards fainted. Then, the body in the tomb disappears, and then they reported this to the Jewish leaders who in turn mysteriously bribe the soldiers to tell a different story that endangers themselves and makes the guards look like fools; and they are soldiers who were superstitious and witnessed the intimate moments of the resurrection scene with their own eyes! b) The resurrection account records privileged and private conversations between (1) priests and Pilate, (2) secret conversations between priests and guards that no other person or disciple of Jesus could have known about. (3) It records events that happened at the tomb that only the guards could have known about, and no priest, Jew, nor disciple! c) How can the enemies of Jesus know that Jesus would rise from the dead when they did not know it nor the disciples of Jesus? d) How can the enemies of Jesus know that Jesus would rise from the dead when they thought that Jesus was talking about the destroying the Jewish temple and not his body? e) Jesus never directly tells anyone that he would be raised to life, and surely, his enemies and disciples all thought that Jesus was referring to the temple being destroyed and rebuilt in 3 days (John 2 and Matthew 27)! So, the anachronism stands! If you take Position B, the resurrection story falls apart. If you take Position A, the resurrection story falls apart. If you want proof that the Holy Scritures are the defication from the mouth and pen of scribes, then I tell you the truth: these are suspicious hallmarks of fiction; namely, narrating events that could not have been known by the author; it is a made up miracle; a myth!
The composers of the account of Matthew are lying! The resurrection tale of Jesus destroys its own testimony. Whether or not why the story of Jesus was written; it does not matter if it was for sociological purposes to support a religious establishment, or demonize the Jews, or unify the Roman empire, it is clear that the resurrection story of Jesus is a an colossal myth. There is nothing historical about Jesus and there is nothing archaeological available to corroborate the fact that the preaching of the Gospel message of Jesus’ resurrection and his existence is neither any truer than the existence of Big Foot and flying pigs. In the end, we are left with a resurrection tale of Jesus that destroys its own testimony internally; a Jesus who is neither God, nor a man. In the end, we are left with the tell-tell signs of an anachronism in the New Testament and a self-destructive message (and story) of a Jesus that never rose from the dead and that has no evidence for his existed at all. Christians need not only speak the gospel or walk it, but also prove their claim is valid by picking up snakes and drinking poison, and present themselves alive to medical doctors for evaluation. They need to prove their claim and go to the hospitals and heal leg amputees to grow new legs and cure aids, it will be on CNN and BBC and Fox News and CCTV that Christians save the world from AIDS and HIV. If this proof can be tested and repeated indisputably, then it will become a fact instead of an imaginary dream. Surely then, the world will believe and celebrate the cure for AIDs, cancer and leg amputees growing their legs back! I am pretty sure of it! If Christianity really is the truth, why don’t Christians do as Jesus promised and “do greater works” than he did (John 14.12)? Building hospitals, stripping passages from texts and preaching the gospel are not greater works, anyone can do that! But curing AIDs with their hands, making limbs grow back and “handle poisonous snakes and drink any deadly thing without harm” (Mark 16.18) is the proof and evidence Jesus says that you should give. Unless it is totally imaginary, but if it is totally imaginary, then that is the reason it cannot be cannot be disproven; since it doesn’t exist. “The best evidence is Josephus, the rest are trivial.” Therefore, Gospel accounts are not so perfect, but it does not mean that Jesus did not rise from the dead.
Carl Sagan once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” but the evidence given for the reliability of the legend of Jesus’ existence and resurrection are not so extraordinary. The Gospel of Luke 24:18 makes the claim that everyone, historically, in Jerusalem knew that the Jewish “chief priests and rulers…crucified [Jesus]”. So, this should be confirmed by evidence outside the Bible. Aren’t there plenty of accounts during and after Jesus’ life outside the New Testament that corroborates the fact the Jesus, himself, existed? The best evidence is Josephus, the rest are trivial. There are some Christian dispensationalists who believe that signs and miracles have passed and will come back again in the Last Days before Jesus returns. So, if we do not have proof that Jesus’ message is truthful and valid, then how can people have a basis to believe? The only way is to look for proof outside the Bible. So, Christians point to Josephus’ Testimonium Flavianum. Titus “Flavius” Josephus, son of Matthew, was an orthodox Jew, a defender of Judaism and an historian that lived in the first century from around 37-100 AD. He calls himself “an ethnic Hebrew, a priest from Jerusalem” (Jewish War I.3). Before he was a military resistance leader, but after losing in the Jewish-Roman war, he added “Flavius” to his name and he closely collaborated with the emperor of Rome, called Titus “Flavius” Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, from 66 CE until his death. He did his best to protect Jews and bring a sense of tolerance in the Roman world (New World Encyclopedia, Josephus). Josephus’s writings were widely quoted and used by the early Christian fathers. After the 4th century, Josephus’ “Testimonium Flavianum” started to appear in Josephus’ books. This is Josephus’ “Testimonium Flavianum”: “Now, there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of astonishing deeds,–a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the leading [Jewish] men among US, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.” (Antiquities of the Jews – Book XVIII, Chapter 3) This is the best proof that Christian apologists cited for Jesus’ existence and resurrection from the dead . The rest are frivolous forgeries by Christian scribes. It calls Jesus, (1) a great wise man who is a divine being (“if it be lawful to call him a man”). (2) Says that Jesus did astonishing deeds, (3) taught the Truth, (4) many of the Jews and and many of the Gentiles are followed him, (5) Calls him the Jewish Messiah or the Christ, (6) Accuses his own leading Jewish priests to be Christ-killers. (7) It says that Jesus rose from the dead after three days. (8) Says he fulfilled 10,000 prophecies. (9) Says that Jesus had a whole tribe people of named after him. (10) Christians still living in those days.
When we open the Encyclopedia Britannica it calls the Testimonium Flavianum’s “famous references to Jesus Christ” a great forgery! Both Book XVIII and Book XX in the Antiquities of the Jews written by Josephus, an Orthodox Jew, contain the forgeries. The Jewish Encyclopedia also says that the whole passage of the Testimonium Flavianum did not originate with Josephus, an orthodox Jew. Personally, as a Christian before, I have always been skeptical of the Testimonium Flavianum because Josephus was an Orthodox Jew and such a small blurb for such a significant person is appalling, if ever Josephus thought him worth mentioning one bit. Problems with Josephus: “Testimonium Flavianum” I find obvious problems with the so-called “Jesus Paragraph” called the “Testimonium Flavianum” in Josephus’ writings. I will summarize them in eight points, which summarizes some expressions found on the JesusNeverExisted.com website. (1) All the Church fathers before the 4th century quoted Josephus extensively. This Josephus paragraph about Jesus does not appear until the beginning of the 4th century AD, at the time of Constantine. (2) Bishop Eusebius in the middle 4th Century is the first to ever quote this paragraph about Jesus. (3) Josephus was an Orthodox Jew, who did not believe Jesus was “the Messiah”, “Christ,” a god, nor more than a man. Yet, we see it written “if indeed it be lawful that one should call him [Jesus] a man” forged right into Josephus’ writings. In Josephus’ autobiography there is no indication of belief in or knowledge about Jesus! And in some Table of Contexts, the great ‘ol “Testimonion Flavianum” is missing. (4) Josephus, an Orthodox Jew, is made to say that “Leading [Jewish] men among US” were the culprits, condemners and so, killed the Messiah and are the Christ-killers!
Josephus, an orthodox Jew, would never accuse his own people to be the killers of the Messiah! (5) Josephus, an Orthodox Jew, would never have called Jesus the “Messiah” or “the Christ”. BUT that is what is forged in the “Jesus Passage” of the “Testimonium Flavianum” in Josephus’ written works. (6) When Josephus mentions “[great] wise men” or intriguing people he writes pages of information about their life, not a small sentence or two. Josephus would not have spoken so lightly of Jesus being the Messiah if he really believe that he was a “wise man”, who is a divine being, and the Messiah, and the Christ, who taught the Truth, rose from the dead, fulfilled 10,000 prophesies and has a whole “tribe named after him, called Christians, that has not died out to this very day.” Yet, only one brief paragraph is written about that great and wise “god-man” Jesus. (7) After a tiny blurb about Jesus, Josephus talks about Paulina. Josephus, “an ethnic Hebrew, a priest from Jerusalem,” uses over 600 words to write about a beautiful and rich pagan girl named Paulina, but less than 90 words about “Jesus… [called] the Christ,” “a doer of astonishing deeds” who “the divine prophets had foretold ten thousand other wonderful things about.” (Antiquities of the Jews – Book XVIII, Chapter 3) (8) Josephus lived within the apostolic era chronicled in the book of the Acts of the Apostles attributed to Luke. Josephus, however, never mentions a iota about the apostles who continued the truth of the Messiah, such as the apostles Peter and Paul. He never mentions any great works they did. Not one iota about their astonishing deeds. Nothing! Nothing is mentioned about the most intriguing group and tribe of people in history named after a great wise man. And they were to do greater works that Jesus!
It just shows you that the Gospel stories in the Bible mention some historical places and people while at the same time throwing at you creative and fictional stories wrapped around a fictional miracle worker with anachronisms and heavy editing. These are the obvious problems with the passage that screams out to any logical person, “Christian forgery! Christian forgery!” Especially, the messiah/Christ-killer part! Can you see that? Open your eyes and look! Embrace reason! The Christian scribes used forgery to try to give credibility to their death movement; their message of love is death and demonization to all humanity who doesn’t follow and obey it; a message of hate and division in disguise. A match has been lit in the darkness of where the sacred holy Scriptures hide, and its dark past has come to life, and a bomb has blown up; a huge bomb; and it smells worse than a dead rat! These are the true words of that father in the skies; a father whom I thought was always there: an imaginary affliction.
Has God/Jesus made Himself Real in Your Life? Has God made Himself, real in your life? Well, what do you think? Has Thor made himself real in your life? The answer is that Jesus is incapable and powerless to make himself real in anyone’s life or my life; for that which I thought spoke to me wasn’t what I thought spoke to me, but what I thought had spoken to me was truly what I wanted to believe, but was not really true: It was just me, a pathetic echo of my brain. Jesus is your imaginary friend to the end that created in your mind an imaginary world, a shapeless vision for life and an empty solution to humanity’s future challenges and strife. To be more frank, the one whom I thought to be my father in the skies was a delusion that temporarily gave my life a delusional meaning and a synthetic morality. It prevents you and me from cultivating the real -innate- morality that humans are naturally born with; and from seeing the beauty of life the way it is naturally. A Moral Law Requires a Divine Moral Law Giver
If there is one myth that affects you the most as a human being, then it is this myth from the imaginary father in the skies who wrote:
“In [–Insert Your Name Here–] dwells no good thing!” (Romans 7:18).
A Psalm writer wrote in the Bible, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they have done vile deeds; not one of them does good.” (Ps.14:1, GNT).
So, from this passage and others, a FOOL is a morally bankrupt human, and this person is identified if they say or believe, “there is no god.” It also teaches humans that if a person thinks that the existence of a god is currently unknown or just simply don’t belief in the existence of a deity or YHWH, then they are (1) corrupt, (2) have vile deeds (3) and are not good.
I traveled to the other side of the planet and during my stay, living there for a couple of years I read and heard of these true stories in the newspaper. They are the few of the many:
(1) Shao, a retired Chinese old man and an atheist. He lived a modest life, working for a college in China. He spent 500,000 RMB to grant students money to help them. He gave away 600,000 RMB to help poor students. Then, he died. After he was dead, he only had 24.1 RMB in his pocket. He also requested that his body be donated to help other people.
(2) A poor woman in China provided for six homeless children: Food, shelter, and worked hard to support their tuition in school. Other people in China heard about the story and they donated money.
(3) When there was an earthquake in Sichuan Province, in 2010 in China (an atheist country with just only 4% of people who are altogether a mix of Bhuddist, Muslim or Christian), these atheist people from everywhere in all of China donated money, clothes, food and water to help the victims out. They do not need God to tell them to help people.
Why I Care I used to think, “How can humans not be morally depraved without a Divine Moral Lawgiver. If none, then they have no basis for morality. Morals only can come from our God.” So, that is such a good question: why care? Why be good (since we are just going to die)? In February 2013, I bought a Time magazine for $12.99 called, “Time: 100 New Scientific Discoveries.” And I got the answer to my question, “The free rats immediately liberated their trapped partners once they figured out how to open the restraint (even while risking the lose their food).” The free rats could have just run away and get the food, but they chose to risk losing the food and save others.
I care because I am just like those rats who freed their own species. I love humans, and I want my own species to be free too, and live their life the best they can as a real human, not in a “blind-faith” cage!
If a snake is eating a baby mouse, you would not really care; that is its lunch. If a snake were eating a baby human, then you would care because it is your own species, and you wouldn’t want to be its lunch either! All animals do this same thing for their own species with respect to their diverse cultures. Having prosocial and having empathy-driven behavior is part of our biological inheritance and is a natural part of the animal kingdom. That rat experiment shows that morality is not coming from God; it is coming from the heart, whether animal or human. I care because I only have one precious life to live and enjoy, not two. If two, then I would care less about this life. My motto is not “…to die is gain” and “take up your cross and follow Me” because “your life is nothing”! No! This life is something and the only thing we’ve got. So, because of that, I care about other people who are my species. They are my people. I love my species! How can I hate what I am? Putting Blind-Faith in the Jesus cult and its book can never fill real human needs nor give real people genuine love, care, compassion and intelligence; only a trivial reality of a religion that is self-absorbed and teaches its followers to despise themselves. It is a narcissistic tactic to exploit your world and embellish their authority over your mind; using fairytales to blind you from seeing the delusion they want to keep you in.
Religion and the Christian Faith tries to sell you something, except this quack doctor is a religious quack doctor. This quack doctor preaches to you proclaimimg, “I am selling you a “[magical hole-filler]” in your life to fill the “[magical missing] hole” in your life. It is BETTER than life itself. And it will meet all your desires and make all your wishes come true.” The quack doctor then says, “Hey, my “magical water” will align the mystical imbalances in your body. Those imbalances in your body are caused by a lack of “Invisible Pixie Dust” in your life.” Then the quack doctor says to you , “Friend, you need this “magical water” and must keep buying my products until you see the results after you die. You will know that what I have said is true after you die.” This “[magical missing hole = Insert Religion Here]” that is being sold to you that real people in real life can never know is true in their lifetime, but until after they are dead; yes, this unreachable claim of offering immaterial and non-measurable solutions which are suppose to be better than what you can find in real life itself until after you are dead to see it; this “magical Jesus” solution being sold does not meet the real needs of humans; rather, it gives them a delusion! The book you think you love exploits the natural essence of who you are. Religions or Faiths exploit the core of your natural and material desires by offering you something that does not exist, a delusion that can never really make you love anybody. It gives you a false love for your fellow human species, a false morality and a false security, and a false comfort; a fake man to talk to and imagine that he is helping you from the monotonous and coincidental things in life using your imagination; a Jesus who is neither God nor man, the one who never existed.
Who Are the Real Fools of Psalm 14:1? I tell you the truth! The Christian faith in Jesus gently coaxes their followers into believing that there can be no morality without a higher being. “If you want morality; look up!” I use to say, because “In me dwells no good thing!” (Romans 7:18).
A word to the wise from a dear friend of mine, Hadil Adnan, who has said: “Humanity has no religion or homeland.” Religions, like Christianity, gives you a synthetic morality. But if “humanity has no religion or homeland”, then humans have a natural morality and a natural moral compass, and are innately prosocial. A synthetic morality that religion imposes on humanity is a pathological delusion coming from without, instead of an innate substance coming from within.
Since Christianity teaches that “in me dwells no good thing” and I cannot trust my own moral compass, but needs to be replaced by only Jesus’ moral compass or the God of the Bible, then all morals outside the “faithful follower” themselves are imposed onto them; and there is no innate substance within themselves to be good; no rational thought inside for ‘good’ deeds nor inner support for ‘good’ actions; instead, irrationality is the basis for their ethics. So, in religion/faith there is no inner-personal morality for its faithful followers. Because without it and if taken away, there will be chaos. As one Christian exclaims, “If there be no God, there be monstrosity!” In the end, religion, especially the Christian faith, just gives you am imposed morality, not a developed sense of your own worth.
Indeed, this god delusion, imposing morality from without, arrested my inner rationality and had taught me that only a fool (defective human) can say, “There is no god;” that there is no natural morality without god; that, literally, “in me there dwells no good thing.” In reality, the real fool was I, since I had irrationality as a basis for ethics, and believed no innate substance within myself to be good, and no rational thought of my own for ‘good’ actions or deed.
If there is no basis or innate reason to be ‘good’, then the irrational delusion of religion seemed good. Without it I would be ‘evil.’ So, truly, I have been a pathologically dangerous and evil lunatic for believing in the god delusion of Jesus.
Thus, who has become the real fool? They have become the real and pathologically dangerous fools themselves! They are morally barren with a powerless faith. The writer is the fool, himeself, who writes, “In me dwelleth no good thing” and it is the incredibly foolish Psalmist who wrote, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’”. They are the real fools, and they have turned you against who you are inside.!
One Life-One Chance
After the delusion of Christianity was gone, I looked back and saw where my delusion lead me. And I could see that I truly was in a dungeon of faith in a Jesus who was neither God nor human, but Jesus who never existed himself.
Now, I have more of a reason to care about your fellow man because the human species has ONE life.
And since I know today, that today, I have only ONE life to live; and not two (where I can care less about my days on this Earth and inherit something better later in a second life.), it is today I care about people!
If I do not love my fellow human, then our species will be destroyed. I CARE about the SCAM of Jesus that seeks to delude you and destroy the human species from advancing society. Humans do not need to believe in a Land of the blessed fairies or in gods and pixies in order to be ‘good’. The ‘goodness’ of humanity is a natural by-product of pro-social behavior, biologically inherited at birth, not given from without.
Conclusion
I know Christians who have said, “If God is not real, then I will kill you” or “I will blow up a bank.” Also, a cartoon Christian Chick tract had it when I read it when I was little. This is because the religion and/or faith of the Jesus cult has emptied out their innate sense of morality they had from birth! They do empty themselves out to have their own hearts and consciousness seared with a hot iron because Jesus cult commands it as they to blindly follow. In Yahweh’s or in Jesus’ name, when the faithful followers killed it was not considered murder, no, but they are regarded as holy saints; just like in Islam:
Just as Peter who murders two people in the name of Jesus in Acts 5, just for lying and not giving him their money; just as Paul declares that infidels and gays Should Die (Leviticus 20:13; Romans 1:24-32); just as Jesus sanctions child abuse and abandoning your family (Matthew 19:29); just as Jesus sanctions the murder of babies and genocide (Deuteronomy 7:1-2; 20:16) and murdering the followers of other religions (Deut. 13:7-12); just as Jesus thinks that male babies are cleaner female babies (Lev. 12:1-5-); yet in the name of their religion they are made holy saints or gods.
Now, they are just a bunch of pathologically dangerous and evil lunatics disguised and coated with a faith that controls them, ready to kill unbelievers if their god or religious leader says, “Kill all non-believers!” They are all the real fools! And all of the authors of the Bible were editing fools! Indeed, “Humanity has no religion or homeland,” for we all originally came out of Africa. This statement alone will bring more real peace, real healing and real hope to the world. Religion and belief in Yahweh, Jesus, Thor, Zeus, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and other gods just simply divides humanity and creates more chaos.
That is how I converted from faith in Jesus, who never existed, to faith in reason!
Genesis McKenzie
References:
- Universum – C. Flammarion, Holzschnitt, Paris 1888, Kolorit : Heikenwaelder Hugo, Wien; By Heikenwaelder Hugo, Austria,
- Palaeontologia Electronica: (“More ‘dinosaur’ and ‘pterosaur’ rock art that isn’t” by Phil Senter, Article number: 15.2.22A, Copyright Palaeontological Association, July 2012″ pg 5-7 or http://palaeo-electronica.org/content/2012-issue-2-articles/275-rock-art-dinosaurs )
- ‘Proof of Creation’ Dino Drawing Just a Mud Stain:
- http://news.discovery.com/animals/dinosaurs/creationism-dinosaur-drawing-cave-110325.htm Antiquities of the Jews – Book XVIII, Chapter 3 http://penelope.uchicago.edu/josephus/ant-18.html
- Armstrong, K. (2011). A History of God. Random House. P. 9. http://books.google.com/books?id=7J_vp4X28JAC&dq= History+of+God&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PZ56UfSSBcyWrgeKwICoBQ&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA
- Catalogue General Antiquites Egyptiennes du Musee du Caire: The Royal Mummies, Grafton Elliot Smith, Cairo (1912). p. 65, 67, 69. http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/eos/eos_page.pl?DPI=100&callnum=DT57.C2_vol59&object=76
- Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt from MobileReference, Pharoah
- Cline, E.H. (2012). From Eden to Exile: Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible. National Geographic Society, p. 87-88. http://books.google.com/books?id=bJW-zhffwk4C&dq=Eden+to+Exile:+Unraveling+Mysteries+of+the+Bible&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KJ96UaSHDdHLrQej3ICoCQ&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA
- Liu, Li. The Chinese Neolithic: Trajectories to Early States, Table 1.1, pg 4 http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Neolithic-Trajectories-Studies-Archaeology/dp/0521010640#_
- Coogan, M. D. (2001).The Oxford history of the biblical world. Oxford University Press, p.65 http://books.google.com/books?id=zFhvECwNQD0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Oxford+History+of+the+Biblical+World&hl= en&sa=X&ei=IL96Udi0FYS4rAfCioDoBg&redir_esc=y
- Egyptvoyager. Understanding The Royal Titulary. http://www.egyptvoyager.com/hieroglyph_lesson6.htm
- Etymology.com http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pharaoh&allowed_in_frame=0
- Heidegger,M. (1988). The basic problems of phenomenology. Volume 478 of A Midland book.
- Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy Series. Indiana University Press, http://books.google.com/books?id=VmatHCLJ4Q4C&pg=
- PA333&dq=being+heidegger+dasein&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vT56UcvoMZDLrQeu_oH4AQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=being%20heidegger%20dasein&f=false
- King, L. W. (2004). The Seven Tablets Of Creation: The Babylonian And Assyrian Legends Concerning The Creation Of The World And Of Mankind. Kessinger Publishing, http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/stc/stc07.htm
- Moore, R.A.( 1983). “The Impossible Voyage of Noah’s Ark”, Creation Evolution Journal. National Center for Science Education.vol.4. p.5,
- http://ncse.com/cej/4/1/impossible-voyage-noahs-ark)
- Pharaoh. New World Encyclopaedia. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Pharaoh&oldid=902903
- The Bible’s Buried Secrets. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/faq.html
- Ugarit. New World Encyclopaedia. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ugarit
- Woods,C. E. ed.(2010). Visible Language: Inventions on Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond. ORIENTAL INST Press, p. 13-33.
Related Articles:
“I travelled all over the world, even in the trenches of the poorest neighborhoods … there I was with the Bible in my hand, with a message and a mission; to guide humanity and give them happiness, and to tell them the story about Jesus.”
“I made people follow me and always believed that it was an invisible and miraculous force doing it …”
He who has ears Let him hear!
Not one but two bogus genealogies!
5-minute enlightenment
for those in a hurry
