Jesus Lied - He Was Only Human: Debunking the New Testament (8 page)
Read Jesus Lied - He Was Only Human: Debunking the New Testament Online
Authors: CJ Werleman
Ask any Christian to narrate the birth of Jesus and they will describe for you the nativity scene we know oh so well at Christmas time. Displayed in churches, homes, shopping malls, and even the White House exhibits an eighteenth century Italian version of the nativity during the Christmas season.
The nativity scene typically portrays three wise men (the magi) led by a star to baby Jesus, who is found in a manger. The magi come bearing gifts for the child prodigy, namely frankincense, gold, and myrrh. Were it me, I would have been really pissed that they didn’t all bring gold. I mean, who the hell wants bloody frankincense? And what the fuck is Myrrh?
With God’s first family gathered around baby Jesus wrapped snuggly in his blankey; the magi, the angels, and the stable animals look upon the messiah in adoration.
Q: What would have happened if it had been Three Wise Women instead of the Three Wise Men?
A: They would have:
• Asked directions
• Arrived on time
• Helped deliver the baby
• Cleaned the stable
• Made a casserole, and
• Brought practical gifts
But then, what would they have said when they left…?
• “Did you see the sandals Mary was wearing with that gown?”
• “That baby didn’t look anything like Joseph.”
• “Can you believe they’d let all those disgusting animals in the house?”
• “I heard Joseph isn’t even working right now.”
• “And that donkey. Huh, it’s seen better days!”
• “Want to bet how long it will take to get your casserole dish back?”
All right, here’s a quick exercise. Grab your copy of the Bible. If it’s the New International Version, please flick through until you come to page 1110, the beginning of Gospel of Mark. Tell me, what does Mark write about the birth of Jesus? I’m waiting. Found it? You can’t find anything can you? You mean to tell me that the first Gospel to write about the life of Jesus, the Gospel that Matthew and Luke copied from, makes absolutely no mention of the miraculous birth of Jesus Christ?
The first recorded biography of Jesus is completely and utterly silent on the birth of a human god? Well, that’s what I thought you’d say. Now, if you’re only gospel was Marks, which many early Christians only had, as he preceded the writings of the other Gospels by at least ten to twenty years, then you’d have no idea that Jesus was born of a virgin. You’d have no clue that his birth was anything but a standard mammal-esq conception and delivery or that he had a Midi-chlorian count in excess of 20,000, far higher than Master Yoda. Therefore, for at least forty years after the death of Jesus – not a single person had heard of the miraculous birth claim.
Now, I ask you this question: What credible biographer would examine all the facts of a man’s biography and think to himself, “oh well, the part about him being born of a virgin is not significant”? It would be like an American History writer including no mention of Native American Indians or the Battle of Little Bighorn in General Custer’s biography. It simply wouldn’t happen. So for 15 to 20 years after Jesus’ death, no one on God’s green earth had ever wrote anything that suggested that natural law was suspended to make way for the conception of Jesus. This prompted Thomas Paine to question humorously:
“
Which do you believe more likely – that natural law was suspended (virgin birth) or that a Jewish minx lied?”
Matthew and Luke are the only Gospels to make the virgin birth claim but they do so for different reasons, and in varying interpretations. Luke writes that Jesus is literally the Son of God. God impregnated Mary, so that her son was also God’s son.
The narrative of Luke has the archangel Gabriel first delivering the news to John the Baptist’s wife, Elisabeth, that she will soon bear child, despite the fact she believed herself to be barren, having tried unsuccessfully for child, for many years. In the sixth month of her pregnancy the angel then appears before Mary, “Greetings, you are highly favored! The Lord is with you”, says Gabriel. This greeting troubled Mary, and the angel returned to comfort her:
“
Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; his kingdom will never end.” (Luke 1:30-33 NIV)
Mary then asks the angel quizzically, “How will this happen if I am a virgin?” The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will over shadow you. So the Holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.”
Hmm, was she consenting? It sounds like angel rape to me!
The above scripture is in stark contrast to Luke’s fellow ideologue, Matthew, who gives his own interpretation on why Jesus was born of a virgin. Matthew, centrally concerned in appealing to a Jewish audience, is the only Gospel to go to extraordinary and nuanced lengths to match every story of Jesus’ life to Old Testament prophecy. He believed that if he could show signs that Jesus was the fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy then the Jews would finally wake up and smell the metaphorical coffee.
Matthew’s poor Hebrew linguistic skills (and we’ll explore this again in later chapters), presumably because he was Greek, gets him caught up in some comical interpretative errors and rookie mistakes. So, why did Matthew write that Jesus was born to a virgin? It was because he found an obscure passage in the book of the prophet Isaiah that read:
“
A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14 NIV)
This was Matthew’s attempt at “Come all see what’s written in the Hebrew Bible, and now look at the birth of Jesus. It must be true, he is the Messiah!” There are a couple of problems that Matthew runs right into. First and foremost, the passage from Isaiah was never intended to be a messianic prophecy; it was a prediction of an event that would occur in Isaiah’s own lifetime. Isaiah wrote this passage to provide King Ahaz, who pre-dated Jesus by more than 800 years, encouragement that he would eventually be given victory over his enemies.
Isaiah documents that the House of David and King Ahaz were waging war against the Northern Kingdom of Israel, led by King Pegah, and the Kingdom of Israel led by King Retsin. The Bible records that Ahaz and Jerusalem were on the brink of defeat and facing destruction. God called for Isaiah to deliver a message to King Ahaz. The memo read, “I will send a deliverer to ensure the two hostile armies will fail in their attempt to capture the nation.”
“
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. He will eat curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right. But before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste.” (Isaiah 7:14-16 NIV)
Isaiah makes it crystal clear that the narrative was a prophecy about the failed siege of Jerusalem by the two attacking armies from the north. The last sentence, in particular, states that the two enemy nations will be defeated before the time that the child (Immanuel) will reach the age of maturity. Furthermore, two other Old Testament passages, namely 2 Kings 15:29-30, and 2 Kings 16:9, confirm that this prophecy was fulfilled with the assassination of the two respective kings. In other words, the fulfillment of this prophecy took place nearly eight centuries before the birth of Jesus, and had nothing to do with a future messianic prediction.
Henceforth, another piece in Matthew’s puzzle to reverse engineer the story of Jesus to the Hebrew Bible.
Secondly, Matthew’s Hebraic to Greek translation skills lets him down badly. The Hebrew word used in Isaiah is ‘alma’, meaning young woman. If read correctly, Isaiah was writing that a young woman shall conceive and bear a son. When Matthew interpreted ‘alma’ to mean virgin he subsequently used the Greek word for virgin, ‘parthenos’. And this 2000-year myth was thus sealed with a typo.
The third major problem Matthew has, is when he quotes the verse from Isaiah into his birth of Jesus’ narrative, going as far as to give the meaning to the name Immanuel – ‘God’s with us’. Immanuel Christ seems kind of odd, don’t you think?
A question that has always bothered me, even beyond the points that I have raised thus far, is why does Jesus never make a single reference to his miraculous conception by his mother? As we will review in later chapters, Mary makes several appearances throughout the New Testament but never makes mention of her discussions with angels, or God, or her virginal conception. Furthermore, everything that Jesus ever says or does during his lifetime seems to come as complete surprise, if not shock, to her. Mary appears to have surprisingly low expectations of the son that she conceived in a game of midnight ‘bury-the-bishop’ with the Holy creator.
Unfortunately for the faithful, the discrepancies do not end here. In Luke’s narrative, the angel Gabriel came to visit her to inform her that she’d soon be pregnant with God’s child. The angel never says anything to Joseph; he is irrelevant in Luke’s account. Whereas Matthew writes that Joseph became consumed with anger because his supposed virgin bride had informed him she was pregnant. Why not, it’s only natural to presume wrongdoing in such a circumstance. But later that night as he considered his options, knowing that Mosaic law demanded he stone her to death on the city outskirts, an angel came to him:
“
Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and you shall name in Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:20-21 NIV)
This may seem like a petty observation on the surface but it illustrates the emergence of a pattern that features many irreconcilable discrepancies, and implausibility’s. If we examine the actual birth (delivery) of Jesus, we read conflicting accounts that demonstrate that Matthew and Luke cannot both be right, given their respective conflicting narratives.
Matthew says that the Wise Men (Magi) are led to Jerusalem by a star from the east. The star hovers above the city momentarily and the men ask some locals where the King of the Jews is to be born. King Herod learns of these star following strangers and enquires who they are and why are they looking for such a newborn. Matthew, reverting to his Hebrew Bible for a clue, gives the reason from prophecy, Micah 5:2:
“
But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.”
To take a side step from this narrative for a moment, the Gospels completely trip over themselves. Matthew in particular, attempts to place Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, the city of David, which again is nothing short of a vain plea to sway Jewish sensibilities. The fabrication of this story telling between Matthew and Luke is utterly soiled in John’s Gospel, as he suggests that Jesus was neither born in Bethlehem nor descended from King David. As we can see once more, it is not possible for all Gospels to be right. At least one of them is telling a lie, but which one, and to what end?
This embellishment stems again from the fact that the Greek speaking Gospels failed to fully comprehend Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament (Torah in the Hebrew/Jewish tradition).
A Hebrew that should know is Hayyim ben Yehoshu, ‘
The Historical Basis of the Jesus Legend’
writes:
“
Since the early Christians believed that Jesus was the Messiah, they automatically believed that he was born in Bethlehem. But why did the Christians believe that he lived in Nazareth? The answer is quite simple. The early Greek speaking Christians did not know what the word “Nazarene” meant. The earliest Greek form of this word is “Nazoraios,” which is derived from “Natzoriya,” the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew “Notzri.” (Recall that “Yeishu ha-Notzri” is the original Hebrew for “Jesus the Nazarene.”) The early Christians conjectured that “Nazarene” meant a person from Nazareth and so it was assumed that Jesus lived in Nazareth. Even today, Christians blithely confuse the Hebrew words “Notzri” (_Nazarene_, _Christian_), “Natzrati” _Nazarethite_) and “nazir” (_nazarite_), all of which have completely different meanings.”
Anyway, the Star fires up its engines once again and points the men to the exact house in Nazareth… shit, Bethlehem where baby Jesus and his parents reside. A house is specified. In other words, there’s no mention of a manger or stable. AN Wilson, in his book ‘
Jesus’
comments:
“
The story of the baby being born in a stable at Bethlehem because there was no room for him at the inn is one of the most powerful myths ever given to the human race. A myth, however, is what it is. Even if we insist on taking every word of the Bible as literally true, we shall still not be able to find there the myth of Jesus being born in a stable. None of the Gospels state that he was born in a stable, and nearly all the details of the nativity scenes which have inspired great artists, and delighted generations of churchgoers on Christmas Eve, stem neither from history nor from Scripture, but from folk-lore. [...] Which is the more powerful figure of our imaginations - the ‘real’, historical Jesus of Nazareth, or the divine being, who in his great humility came down to be born as a poverty-stricken outcast?”
