"It is almost universally accepted that Jesus: This discrepancy is particularly striking when behaviour or teaching ascribed to him in the gospels has obvious relevance to the concerns being persued by the writers of these epistles.

The New Testament scholar Professor Graham Stanton frankly calls it 'baffling' that Paul fails to 'refer more frequently and at greater length to the actions and teaching of Jesus', particularly at points where 'he might well have clinched his argument by doing so'. And Stanton is aware that other epistles present us with 'similar problems' (Gospel Truth? New Light on Jesus and the Gospels, London: Harper Collins, 1995).

Similar remarks have been made by the German New Testament scholar Walter Schmithals, who also notes that one supposed reference by Paul to gospel material that is commonly adduced is based on nothing better than mistranslation of his Greek.
There is, then, a discrepancy between the earliest documents and later Christian ones that should not be brushed aside.

This earliest literature includes, additionally to the genuine Paulines, three post-Paulines ascribed to Paul (2 Thessalonians, Colossians and Ephesians) and also the letter to the Hebrews, the epistle of James, the first epistle of Peter, the three epistles of John and the book of Revelation.
If Paul alone had written as he did of Jesus, one might just possibly be able to attribute this to some personal idiosyncracy;
but a consistent silence by numerous independent authors about matters which, had they known of them, they could not but have regarded as relevant to their purposes, cannot be so explained."

"three arguments that have been invoked repeatedly against the supposition that Luke used Matthew

• Luke is ignorant of Matthew’s modifications to Mark;
• Luke seems unaware of Matthew’s ‘M’ additions to Mark;
• in the double tradition, sometimes Matthew’s formulation and sometimes Luke’s seems the more primitive

...
two positive arguments that have been mounted in favour of Q

• Q displays a distinctive profile and character
• in favour of the 2DH is the fact that it is an effective hypothesis that accounts for much of the data of the Synoptic gospels

"To gain admission to the canon, Gospels were attributed to apostles (Matthew and John) or to those dependent on apostles for their information (Mark and Luke). But today, these persons are not thought to have been the actual authors. None of the texts themselves give the author's name - all four are anonymous.
They were composed in the last thirty years of the first century, half a century after the fact."

"Traditionally, Christ-Myth theorists have argued that one finds a purely mythic conception of Jesus in the epistles
and that the life of Jesus the historical teacher and healer as we read it in the gospels is a later historicization.

This may indeed be so, but it is important to recognize the obvious:
the gospel story of Jesus is itself apparently mythic from first to last.
In the gospels the degree of historicization is actually quite minimal,
mainly consisting of the addition of the layer derived from contemporary messiahs and prophets.

One does not need to repair to the epistles to find a mythic Jesus. The gospel story itself is already pure legend.
What can we say of a supposed historical figure whose life story conforms virtually in every detail to the Mythic Hero Archetype,
with nothing, no "secular" or mundane information, left over?

Alexander the Great, Caesar August, Cyrus, King Arthur, and others have nearly suffered this fate.
What keeps historians from dismissing them as mere myths, like Paul Bunyan, is that there is some residue.
We know at least a bit of mundane information about them, perhaps quite a bit, that does not form part of any legend cycle.
Or they are so intricately woven into the history of the time that it is impossible to make sense of that history without them.

But is this the case with Jesus? I fear it is not.
The apparent links with Roman and Herodian figures is too loose, too doubtful for reasons I have already tried to explain.
Thus it seems to me that Jesus must be categorized with other legendary founder figures including Buddha, Krishna, and Lao-tzu. There may have been a real figure there, but there is simply no longer any way of being sure."

" the life and knowledge thou hast made known to us through thy servant (or child) Jesus"

"... immerse in running water 'In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit'."

"The Didache has a calculatedly ambiguous use of Lord to mean "the Lord God" and/or 'the Lord Jesus'."

"In his view, He simply passed through the wall of Mary's uterus instead of being delivered through the normal birth canal,
so that Mary's hymen was not raptured. Thus, there was a sort of miraculous caesarean section."

"who [R.Brown] dismisses the truckload of comparative religion parallels to the miraculous birth of Jesus:
This one is not strictly speaking a virgin birth, since the god fathered the child on a married woman.
That one involved physical intercourse with the deity, not overshadowing by the Holy Spirit,
and so on.
But, we have to ask, how close does a parallel have to be to count as a parallel?
Does the divine mother have to be named Mary?
Does the divine child have to be named Jesus?
Here is the old 'difference without a distinction' fallacy."

"The Gospels contain the explicit affirmation of a virginal conception of the biological order, brought about by the Holy Spirit.
The Church made this truth her own, beginning with the very first formulations of the faith.
The faith represented in the Gospels is confirmed without interruption in later Tradition.
The formulas of faith of the first Christian writers presuppose the assertion of virginal birth,
a real, historical virginal conception of Jesus...
The solemn definitions of faith by the ecumenical councils and the papal Magisterium,
which follow the first brief formulas of faith, are in perfect harmony with this truth."

"Put dramatically but with not too much exaggeration:
if the miracle tradition from Jesus’ public ministry were to be rejected in toto as unhistorical,
so should every other Gospel tradition about him.
For if the criteria of historicity do not work in the case of the miracle tradition,
where multiple attestation is so massive and coherence so impressive,
there is no reason to expect them to work elsewhere."

" To sum up: the historical fact that Jesus performed extraordinary deeds deemed by himself and others to be miracles
is supported most impressively by the criterion of multiple attestation of sources and forms and the criterion of coherence.
The miracle traditions about Jesus’ public ministry are already so widely attested in various sources and literary forms
by the end of the first Christian generation."

"that total fabrication by the early church is, practically speaking, impossible."

"I propose now that magic is to religion as banditry is to politics. As banditry challenges the ultimate legitimacy of political power, so magic challenges that of spiritual power. Magic and religion can be mutually distinguished, in the ancient world or
in the modern one, by political and prescriptive definitions but not by substantive, descriptive, or neutral descriptions.
Religion is official and approved magic; magic is unofficial and unapproved religion.
More simply: "we" practice religion, "they" practice magic. ....
It is endlessly fascinating to watch Christian theologians describe Jesus as miracle worker rather than magician and then
attempt to define the substantive difference between those two... There is, it would seem from the tendentiousness of such arguments, an ideological need to protect religion and its miracles from magic and its effects."

"Mark 8:11-13 and 1 Cor. 1:22 made it clear that Christian preachers had no miracles to offer to those who sought them as credentials. But we have also seen that a great number of miracle stories (healings, exorcisms, and nature prodigies) were soon attributed to Jesus, many of them rewritten from Old Testament stories or adapted from other Hellenistic heroes and Gods.
Why such a change?..."

"We sit in our homes and offices on balmy spring evenings amid warm breezes, safe and comfortable,
and we talk about and contemplate the experiences which Jesus, according to the Gospels, underwent,
and we react in horror.
Lee Strobel (a famous american apologist) characterized it this way in The Case For Christ:
"a topic of unimaginable brutality: a beating so barbarous that it shocks the conscience,
and a form of capital punishment so depraved that it stands as wretched testimony to man’s inhumanity to man.""

"Throughout the Roman empire, many thousands underwent those barbarous beatings
and that very depraved form of capital punishment.
In other times and places, cruelties of equal barbarism have been practiced.
All of it is indeed a wretched testimony that is terrible to contemplate,
and especially terrible that it applies to ourselves.
But when we apply it in the Gospels and within the context of Christian faith,

• Does it not become infinitely more terrible?
• Is not the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus a testimony to God’s ‘inhumanity’ —if I may borrow the term—
  to his own Son, or to put it another way, to a part of himself?
• How can we think of the God of the universe, a God of love—if such a being exists—operating in this fashion,
  requiring that such a depraved death be inflicted on even a human being, let alone a divine one,
  choosing blood sacrifice as the means of our salvation?
• How can we envision a plan for the redemption of humanity that must entail the performance of such a hideous deed?
• Are we not reinforcing the wretched testimony we all lament?
• Is love and forbearance taught through an act of cruelty and hate?

I suggest that this concept speaks not of eternal truths
but of times and modes of thinking which were on a far more primitive level than our own.
Blood sacrifice goes back into prehistoric times, as a means of placating and entreating the gods,
and to perpetuate the idea that God needs such a thing in order to forgive our sins
is to condemn the concept of Deity to a degree of enlightenment much inferior to the one we have reached ourselves.
To perpetuate it is to condemn our society and our own minds to a continued enslavement to those primitive times and ideas.
There must surely be a better way, and a better philosophy by which to conduct our lives and on which to base our hopes.

Mr. Strobel, I ask you to change your image, your contrast.
I would ask you to envision yourself not in your comfortable home,
but standing in the streets of Jerusalem and on the hillside of Calvary, and watching those horrific events unfold.
And then I would ask you to ask yourself:
are these the workings of a God?"

"The framework stories of the gospels are the most highly mythologized type of material.
They include the narratives of Jesus birth, baptism, transfiguration, crucifixion, resurrection, and post-resurrection appearances.
The transfiguration story is purely mythological, as are the birth narratives, the story of the empty tomb,
and the appearances of the resurrected Jesus to the disciples.
Critical scholars would not say that these derive from reminiscences."

"These books are sacred and canonical because they contain revelation without error,
and because, written by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have God for their author."

"It will never be lawful to restrict inspiration merely to certain parts of the Holy Scripture,
or to grant that the sacred writers could have made a mistake. ...
They render in exact language, with infallible truth, all that God commanded and nothing else;
without that, God would not be the Author of the Scripture in its entirety."

"I just needed one thing, read at last the whole bible.
I set down to read it through, every word, front to back, Old testament and New.
I figured now, with my greater understanding and maturity, I might receive more from it than I did as a child.
I was able to see far worse things in it than I ever did before.
I saw a terrible, sinful God - a jealous, violent short-tempered, vengeful being
whose behavior is nonsensical and overly meddlesome and unenlightening.
Later I was to find that the vast majority of Christians never actually read the Bible,
and have no idea what is really in there.

In all I can say that the Old Testament disgusted me, while the New Testament disappointed me.
In general, no divinely inspired text would be so long and rambling and hard to understand.
Wise men speak clearly, brillantly, their ability at communication is measured by their succes at making themselves readily understood. The Bible spans over a thousand pages of tiny, multi-columned text, and yet says nowhere near as much, certainly nothing as well, as the Tao Te Ching does in a mere eighty-one stanzas.
The Bible is full of the superfluous

• extensive genealogies of no relevance to the meaning of life or the nature of the universe,
• long disgressions on barbaric rituals of bloodletting,
• taboo that have nothing to do with being a good person or advancing society toward greater happiness,
• lengthy diatribes against long-dead nations
• constant harping on a coming and gloom.

I asked myself:
would any wise, compassionate being even allow this book to be attributed to him, much less be its author?
Certainly not.
How could Lao Tzu, a mere mortal, who never claimed any superior powers or status,
write better, more thoroughly, more concisely, about so much more, than the Inspired Prophets of God?

It was not only this that struck me. What was the most pungent was the immorality of the Bible.
Though called a wise father, there is not a single example in the Old Testament of God sitting down and kindly teaching
anyone, and when asked by Job, the best of men, to explain why He went out of His way to hurt a good man by every possible means, including killing Job's loved ones, this 'wise father' spews arrogant rhetorical questions, ultimately implying nothing more than "might makes right" as his only excuse.


I looked in horror at the demonic monster being portrayed here.
He was worthy of universal condemnation, not workship.
He who thinks he can do whatever he wants because he can is as loathsome and untrustworthy as any psychopath.

It was bad enough that this God's idea of the "best" in man is a willingness to murder one's own child in demand.
It is inconceivable that any kind being would ever test Abraham's loyalty that way.
To the contrary, from any compassionate point of view, Abraham failed this test:
he was willing to kill for faith, setting morality aside for God.
A decent being would reward instead the man who responded to such a request with
"Go to hell! Only a demon would ask such a thing, and no compassionate man would do it".
But the Bible message is exactly the opposite. How frightening.

It was no surprise, then, to find that this same cruel god

• orders people to be stoned to death for picking up sticks on Saturday (Numbers 15:32-36)
• and commands those who follow other religions be slaughtered (Deuteronomy 13:6-16)

Indeed, genocide (Deuteronomy 2:31-34, 7:1-2, 20:10-15, and Joshua, e.g. 10:33)
and facism (Deuteronomy 22:23-24, Leviticus 20:13, 24:13-16, Numbers 15:32-6)
were the very law and standard practice of God, right next to the Ten Commandments.
Instead of condemning slavery, God condones it (Leviticus 25:44, cf Deuteronomy 5:13-14, 21:10-13).
And so on. All fairly repugnant.

I could go on at length about the many horrible passages that praise the immoral, the cruel, as the height of righteous
goodness. It does no good to try in desperation to make excuses for it.
A good and wise man's message would not need such excuses.
It follows that the Bible was written neither by the wise nor the good.

And the New Testament was only marginally better, though it too had its inexcusable features:

• from commands to hate (Luke 14:26) to arrogantly sexist teachings about women (1 Timothy 2:12)
• from Jesus saying he "came not to bring peace, but the sword",
• setting even families against each other (Matthew 10:34-36)
• and approving the murder of disobedient children (Mark 7:6-13),
• to making blasphemy the worst possible crime (Matthew 12:31-32), even worse than murder or molesting a child.
• It, too, supported slavery rather than condemning it (Luke 12:47, 1 Timothy 6:1-2).

Worse, its entire message is not "be good and go to heaven", itself a naive and childish concern
(the good are good because they care, not because they want a reward),
but "believe or be damned" (Mark 16:16, Matthew 10:33, Luke 12:9, John 3:18), a fundamentally wicked doctrine.
The good judge others by their character, not their beliefs, and punish deeds, not thoughts, and punish only to teach,
not to torture. But none of this moral truth was in the Bible, and the New Testament had none of the humanistic wisdom of the Tao Te Ching which speak to all ages, but instead drones on about subjection to kings and acceptance of slavery,
while having no knowledge of the needs of a democratic society, the benefits of science, or the proper uses of technology.
It even promotes superstition over science, with all its talk about demonic possession and faith healing
and speaking in tongues, and assertions that believers will be immune to poison (Mark 16:17-18).

The Bible is plagued with a general obscurity and ambiguity, and illogicality,
which I had already noted as a child, and though I did understand more and saw it as less confused than I once had,
the improvement was minimal and not encouraging.
It still taught a morality that is unlivable, and above all contained hardly a hint of humor
or any mature acceptance of sexuality or anything distinctly and naturally human.

When I finished the last page, though alone in my room, I declared aloud:
"Yep, I'm an atheist".
It was the question I had sought to answer by reading this book revered by 85% of the American public as the paragon of religious truth. I had never before been so acquainted with how hundreds of millions of people could be so embarrassingly wrong. This revelation led me on a quest to find out more about this matter.
It seemed inconceivable that I was the only one who noticed what a total pile of baloney the Bible was,
the only who could see that all the evidence, and the simple process of well-thought logic,
led to the conclusion that there was no god, or certainly none around here."

"The Pagans would appear almost to have been good Christians:

• they had their gods, (whom they fondly called Savior and Messiah)
• the death and resurrections of gods;
• devils, angels, and spirits good, bad and indifferent;
• their heavens,hells and purgatories;
• they believed in immortality of the soul, —witness the Pyramids and the tombs of the Kings, as of Tut-ankh-Amen in Egypt, and of the Queen Shub-Ad, just unearthed in Ur of the Chaldees;
• their elaborate sacrifices, animal and human, even of their dear little children to appease their gods, as in Carthage and Canaan, —a chronic Hebrew practice.
• Virgin-births of demigods by the intervention of gods and human maids were common-places of Pagan faith,
• as were Virgin-mothers and god-child: the Christians imported theirs from Egypt— the Madonna statues of Isis and the Child Horus—of universal vogue at the beginning of this era of the Christ— may be seen in almost any first-class Museum, as the Metropolitan in New York and the University in Philadelphia.
  This popular Pagan device,the “Mother of God” and her God-baby-in-arms, was taken over as a Christian sop to the crowds of Pagans who were being enticed and forced into the Church; it was violently opposed by many of the more intelligent Churchmen: “Nestorius [Bishop of Constantinople about 404] had declared against the new and, as he asserted, idolatrous expression ‘Mother of God’ (Theotokos), thereby opposing the sentiments and wishes of the humbler people” (CE. iii, 101); and in protest Nestorius left the Catholic Church and founded one of the most wide-spread and powerful “heresies,” which exists in the East to the present time.
• The Pagans had their holy mysteries and sacraments,
  • baptisms of water and of blood,
  • communions with the gods at their sacred altars,
  • partaking of sacred meals to ingest the divine spirit and become godlike.
• they believed in the resurrection of the dead,
• and in final judgments meting rewards and punishments according to the deeds done in the flesh,
  —the Egyptian Book of the Dead, 3000 years B.C., giving priestly prescriptions for use before the judgment seat of Osiris, is found in almost every tomb of those able to pay for the hieroglyphic papyrus rolls.
• The Pagans had their holy days (from which the Christians plagiarized their Christmas, Easter, Rogation Days, etc.);
• their monks, nuns, religious processions carrying images of idols (like those of saints today);
• incense, holy water, holy oil, chants,hymns, liturgies, confessions of sins to priests, forgiveness of sins by priests,
• revelations by gods to priests, prophecies, sacred writings of “holy bibles,” Pontiffs, Holy Fathers, holy crafty priesthood.

All these sacrosanct things of Christian “Revealed Religion,” were age-old pre-Christian Pagan myths and superstitions.

I puzzle myself to understand how there could be “divine revelations,” to Jews and Christians, of things which for ages had been identically ancient Pagan delusions and the inventions and common holy stock in trade of all Pagan priestcrafts.
Indeed and in truth, there can be no divine revelation of miraculous “facts” and “heavenly dogmas” which for centuries had been, and in the early Christian ages were, the current mythology of credulous Pagandom. This I shall make exceeding clear."

"And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God,

• was produced without sexual union,
• and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven,

we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter."

"For when they tell that Bacchus, son of Jupiter,

• was begotten by [Jupiter’s] intercourse with Semele,
• and that he was the discoverer of the vine;
• and when they relate, that being torn in pieces, and having died, he rose again, and ascended to heaven;
• and when they introduce wine into his mysteries,

do I not perceive that [the devil] has imitated the prophecy announced by the patriarch Jacob, and recorded by Moses?
And when they tell that Hercules was strong,

• and travelled over all the world, and was begotten by Jove of Alcmene,
• and ascended to heaven when he died,

do I not perceive that the Scripture which speaks of Christ, ‘strong as a giant to run his race, has been in like manner imitated?
And when he [the devil] brings forward Æsculapius as the raiser of the dead and healer of all diseases,
may I not say that in this matter likewise he has imitated the prophecies about Christ?"

"Many of the ideas of the Christians have been expressed better- and earlier- by the Greeks.
Behind these views is an ancient doctrine that has existed from the beginning."

"Demolition of the Idolatrous Temples at Alexandria, and the Consequent Conflict between the Pagans and Christians"

"Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over and they change its character to enable them to deny difficulties in face of criticism."

"The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please."

"dismembered the epistles of Paul, removing all that is said by the apostle respecting that God who made the world, to the effect that He is the Father of our Lord Jesrts Christ, and also those passages from the prophetical writings which the apostle quotes,
in order to teach us that they announced beforehand the coming of the Lord."

"When my fellow-Christians invited me to write letters to them I did so. These the devil's apostles have filled with tares, taking away some things and adding others. For them the woe is reserved. Small wonder then if some have dared to tamper even with the word of the Lord himself, when they have conspired to mutilate my own humble efforts."

"So it was that they [apostates] laid hands unblushingly on the Holy Scriptures, claiming to have corrected them..."

"Charges of this kind against "heretics"-that they altered the texts of scripture to make them say what they wanted them to mean-are very common among early Christian writers. What is noteworthy, however, is that recent studies have shown that the evidence of our surviving manuscripts points the finger in the opposite direction.
Scribes who were associated with the orthodox tradition not infrequently changed their texts."

"Almost no one recognized the enormity of the problem of textual variation until the groundbreaking publication in 1707 of one of the classics in the field of New Testament textual criticism, a book that had a cataclysmic effect on the study of the transmission of the Greek New Testament, opening the floodgates that compelled scholars to take the textual situation of our New Testament manuscripts seriously.
This was an edition of the Greek New Testament by John Mill, fellow of Queens College, Oxford.
On the basis of an intensive thirty years effort to accumulate materials, Mill published his text with apparatus,
in which he indicated places of variation among all the surviving materials available to him.
To the shock and dismay of many of his readers, Mill's apparatus isolated some 30,000 places of variation.
The status of the original text was thrown wide open to dispute.
If one did not know which words were original to the Greek New Testament,
how could one use these words in deciding correct Christian doctrine and teaching?"

"Mill's book was in 1707, so what can we say now about the total number of variants known today in the NT?
Scholars differ significantly in their estimates: from 200,000 to 400,000.
There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament!"

"The winning side decided which books were going to count as scripture and which books were going to be excluded, and the books that were excluded, then, of course, are deemed heretical - teaching false beliefs - and aren't included in the canon of scripture. And only the books, the, the 27 books that finally made it into the New Testament are considered canonical."

"Much of what passes for 'historical' interpretation of Paul and for 'objective' analysis of his letters
can be traced to the second century heresiologists.

If the apostle were so unequivocally anti-Gnostic,
How could the Gnostics claim him as their great Pneumatic teacher?

How could they say they are following his example
when they offer secret teaching of wisdom and Gnosis 'to the initiates?'

How could they claim his resurrection theology as the source for their own,
citing his words as decisive evidence against the ecclesiastical doctrine of bodily resurrection?"

"That it is necessary sometimes to use falsehood as a medicine for those who need such an approach:

“And even the lawmaker who is of little use, if even this is not as he considered it, and as just now the application of logic held it, if he dared lie [pseudesthai] to young men for a good reason, then can’t he lie?
For falsehood [pseudos] is something even more useful than the above,
and sometimes even more able to bring it about that everyone willingly keeps to all justice.”

“Truth is beautiful, Stranger, and steadfast. But to persuade people of it is not easy.”

“You would find many things of this sort being used even in the Hebrew scriptures, such as concerning God being jealous or falling asleep or getting angry or being subject to some other human passions, for the benefit of those who need such an approach.

“…So in a book where Eusebius is proving that the pagans got all their good ideas from the Jews, he lists as one of those good ideas Plato’s argument that lying, indeed telling completely false tales, for the benefit of the state is good and even necessary. Eusebius then notes quite casually how the Hebrews did this, telling lies about their God, and he even compares such lies with medicine, a healthy and even necessary thing.”

"It is the sort of thing we may expect from a Tertullian, who, in his Apology for Christianity (c. 21), tells one who doubts the truth of the gospel story that he will find a special report of Pilate to Tiberius in the Roman archives. In the mouth of a modern historian such a statement is frankly ridiculous."

"in addition to the four canonical gospels, we have:

• four complete noncanonicals,
• seven fragmentary,
• four known from quotations
• and two hypothetically recovered

for a total of 21 gospels from the first two centuries, and we know that others existed in the early period."

"There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus.
The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah,
who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth,
and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence.
This image has not been destroyed from without, it has fallen to pieces,
cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to the surface one after another."

"A pile of pieces--sayings, deeds--do not constitute a story,
and without story there cannot be character, and without character, there cannot be meaning.
Once that given by the gospels is abandoned, another must be imported.
All the sifting and sieving of the individual pieces leads nowhere by itself."

"Proverbs enshrine wisdom. They crystallize insights about life that immediately ring true to experience once we hear them,
though chances are we ourselves would never have thought of them.
If their truth resonates deep inside us, they have, as it were, their own empirical verification
and do not rely upon the authority of a great name.
It is only later, once scribes seek extraneous theological legitimation for a collection of sayings, in a theological context,
that the sayings collection comes to be judged and legitimated by analogy to revelations and prophecies."

"The early writers had absolutely no reason to mention:

• where Jesus was born or when,
• what era he lived in,
• the names of his parents,
• where he grew up,
• where he preached,
• that he performed miracles
• or had it out with the Jewish leadership,
• and so on.

It is all superfluous data, out of context for all that the early writers write,
unless one of the three constraints above [that they forgot or argued or needs update] comes into play -
and there is not a scrap of evidence that any of them did!"

"In his efforts to counter those who have in his view misled his Corinthian congregation, Paul fails to make any reference whatever to an earthly Jesus or to any presumed wisdom teachings of his which the opponents have supposedly misused."

"So vivid are these details [ndr: of the Passion of Jesus in Jerusalem], so clear are the pictures they paint, that there remains a general consensus in both church and society that these stories surely were literally created from vivid eyewitness recollections.
The assumption is made, without much internal debate, that what we read here are literal and historic facts.
Indeed, to think otherwise for most church people is almost inconceivable.

Yet that easy leap from familiar data to historic accuracy has been challenged increasingly in the last century, not by critics of the Christian faith who have abandoned organized religion in droves, but rather by the world of New Testament scholarship.
Between the academy in which our clergy are trained and the pews in which our church members sit is a gap in knowledge of enormous proportions. Indeed, that gap might better be described as a void.

To listen to the sermons of many clergy, one would have to conclude either that they did not learn what is readily available in the centers of theological study or that they have decided not to share it.
Perhaps a better explanation might be that this generation of clergy, unable themselves to process what they have learned or unable to correlate it with what they themselves believe, decided simply to ignore or suppress this biblical scholarship for as long as they could. If that is a more accurate explanation, then maybe what we are facing today is that the time limit on that process of ignoring or suppressing biblical scholarship has now finally run its course.

For many claims can be made about the passion story of the gospels, but claims of historical accuracy of literal facts are not among those that will stand."

John Shelby Spong Liberating the Gospels p.235

"I am not sure, as I said earlier, that one can persuade people that Jesus did exist as long as they are ready to explain the entire phenomenon of historical Jesus and earliest Christianity either as an evil trick or a holy parable.
I had a friend in Ireland who did not believe that Americans had landed on the moon but that they had created the entire thing to bolster their cold-war image against the communists. I got nowhere with him. So I am not at all certain that I can prove that the historical Jesus existed against such an hypothesis and probably, to be honest, I am not even interested in trying."

"This is an honest, no-hold-barred exchange involving thousands of scholars, clergy and other individuals who have critical questions about the past, present and future of religion."

"Some of the principles guiding the work of Westar are:"

"It is ironic that Roman Catholic scholars are emerging from the dark ages of theological tyranny just as many Protestant scholars are reentering it as a consequence of the dictatorial tactics of the Southern Baptist Convention and other fundamentalisms."

"What are you to gain from this?
To proove that Jesus doesn't exist.
You feel abandoned, so you believe that your justified to harrass ppl who have something to believe in
and take it away because you, yourself have no belief in God.
You're just insecure.
Who cares if ppl believe in Jesus, it's a belief, why do you find the need to cram it down ppl's throats.
What have they done to you?
Your what's wrong with society, someone who claims to be a "truthseeker."
The only ppl that should be delt with are religous extremists, not regular christians."

"So why don't you have the balls to say that Buddha didn't exist? There's less data for him than Jesus.
Is it just because you're an anti-Christian bigot?
(perhaps you've stopped beating your wife too, but I think you get the point)"

"Time out, gentleman!

Can I just say, Kurgan-10 [ndr: kind of guy who write hundred of long messages with nothing more than 'you didn't answer anything'], how much I admire the patience it must take to so fully address this dickw*d's ramblings.

I have an image of a zoo keeper lovingly sponging down a monkey every time he rolls in his own sh*t. It's almost touching.

I can only hope you have all of those facts in your head and don't have to spend time in actual research for the sake of a thread on a board that's basically (let's face it) a honeytrap for morons and timewasters. I could be the only other person reading it, and I've only skimmed it in half an hour. Would you not be better employed directing your formidable intelligence and learning to some more worthy end?

Seriously, some monkeys will never be clean."

"As a historian I do not know for certain that Jesus really existed,
that he is anything more than the figment of some overactive imaginations....
In my view, there is nothing about Jesus of Nazareth that we can know beyond any possible doubt.

In the mortal life we have there are only probabilities.
And the Jesus that scholars have isolated in the ancient gospels, gospels that are bloated with the will to believe,
may turn out to be only another image that merely reflects our deepest longings".

"The theory that Christianity could have begun without an historical Jesus of Nazareth
has been adamantly resisted by New Testament scholarship since it was first put forward some 200 years ago.
It has generally been held by a small minority of investigators, usually 'outsiders.'

An important factor in this imbalance has been the fact that, traditionally,
the great majority working in the field of New Testament research have been religious apologists, theologians,
scholars who are products of divinity schools and university religion departments, not historians per se.

To suggest that a certain amount of negative bias may be operating among that majority
where the debate over an historical Jesus has been concerned, is simply to state the obvious.
Nor is such a statement to be considered out of order, especially in the face of the common 'argument'
so often put forward against the mythicist position: that the vast majority of New Testament scholars
have always rejected the proposition of a non-existent Jesus, and continue to do so.
In fact, the latter is simply an 'appeal to authority' and cannot by itself be given significant weight."

"It is now endemic in North American Biblical Studies that very few practitioners have studied philosophy or theology at any depth. Such study, indeed, is sometimes regarded with suspicion, as though it might prejudice the pure, objective, neutral reading of the text."

"The Servite major seminary was near Chicago but we students lived in complete isolation from the outside world.
Monastic life meant celibacy and liturgy, work and recreation, silence and study.
The curriculum was designed for safety rather than originality; obedience was the supreme virtue;
discussion and debate were hardly encouraged."

"the historical Jesus research is becoming something of a scholarly bad joke.
it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place
to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography."

"He argues that biblical studies should end, because it is just religious apologetics, not an academic discipline or a branch of scholarship.

In this radical critique of his own academic specialty, biblical scholar Hector Avalos calls for an end to biblical studies as we know them. He outlines two main arguments for this surprising conclusion:

• First, academic biblical scholarship has clearly succeeded in showing that the ancient civilization that produced the Bible held beliefs about the origin, nature, and purpose of the world and humanity that are fundamentally opposed to the views of modern society. The Bible is thus largely irrelevant to the needs and concerns of contemporary human beings.
• Second, Avalos criticizes his colleagues for applying a variety of flawed and specious techniques aimed at maintaining the illusion that the Bible is still relevant in today's world. In effect, he accuses his profession of being more concerned about its self-preservation than about giving an honest account of its own findings to the general public and faith communities.

Dividing his study into two parts, Avalos first examines the principal subdisciplines of biblical studies (textual criticism, archaeology, historical criticism, literary criticism, biblical theology, and translations) in order to show how these fields are still influenced by religiously motivated agendas despite claims to independence from religious premises.

In the second part, he focuses on the infrastructure that supports academic biblical studies to maintain the value of the profession and the Bible. This infrastructure includes academia (public and private universities and colleges), churches, the media-publishing complex, and professional organizations such as the Society of Biblical Literature.

In a controversial conclusion, Avalos argues that our world is best served by leaving the Bible as a relic of an ancient civilization instead of the "living" document most religionist scholars believe it should be. He urges his colleagues to concentrate on educating the broader society to recognize the irrelevance and even violent effects of the Bible in modern life.

What does Professor Avalos hope to accomplish? As he says: "Our purpose is to excise from modern life what little of the Bible is being used and also to eliminate the potential use of any sacred scripture in the modern world." Jews and Christians are quick to find quotations in the Koran that relate to killing of the infidels, but are eager to pass over all those references to slaughter of the innocents that occur in various books of the Bible. Avalos makes the case that the Bible was written by primitive people in a cultural context so foreign to our own that the Bible no longer makes sense.
"What I seek is liberation from the very idea that any sacred text should be an authority for modern human existence."
He refers constantly to the "bibliolatry" that has gotten us into so much trouble historically, and laments that the publishing industry and academia have such a vested interest in keeping such a form of idol worship alive.
"Abolishing human reliance on sacred texts is imperative when those sacred texts imperil the existence of human civilization as it is currently configured. The letter can kill. That is why the only mission of biblical studies should be to end biblical studies as we know it."

"Most biblical studies academics think the bible is worth keeping and studying and most are members of `faith communities'. But Avalos shows that the bible is irrelevant, the product of an ancient and very different culture whose values and beliefs about the origin, nature and purpose of the world are not useful or ethical. Religion is a fifth wheel, superfluous to life, a hindrance to all intellectual and scientific advances. It is an illegitimate claim to extra power for foolish arguments. We should not rely on any authority, especially not on a single ancient text.

He investigates biblical studies" various sub-disciplines. He shows that the translations of the bible are largely bowdlerised. Textual criticism has found no original texts or manuscripts, and Jesus spoke in Aramaic, not Hebrew or Greek, so there can be no original, pristine word of God.

Avalos shows how history and archaeology have disproved `biblical history'. He notes that centuries of Jesus studies have not found a historical Jesus: he has no verifiable words or deeds, and there are no contemporary eye-witness accounts. Literary criticism has not shown that the bible is better literature than other ancient works, and the excessive attention paid to this one text has meant that thousands of ancient Mesopotamian texts have never been translated.

Avalos examines the USA-based Society of Biblical Literature, with its 7,000 self-serving members, and shows how it has nothing useful or original to offer. Theology has found no coherent message about God; instead it is inconsistent and arbitrary, trying to rescue the bible through citing bits of texts. Nice people find the nice bits, nasty people find the nasty bits; both say that theirs are the essential bits.

It is often held against atheists like Richard Dawkins that they do not know theology, but they don't need to because others have done the work, like Walter Kaufmann in his Critique of religion and philosophy and now Avalos in this excellent book."

"Avalos exhibits courage by telling the truth about the state of critical bible study and taking on his colleagues.
I think he is on the mark and will hopefully stir some honest scientific review of the bible and religion in general.
Why do humans still defer to an ancient document that has little historical fact and no real application to modern society?"

"'The End of Bible Studies' is the most fun I've ever had reading such an analytical book.
I can honestly say that I was in a state of perpetual shock as I read page after page of devastating critique
of such a huge and firmly anchored suite of disciplines.
After all, what university in the Western World doesn't have a major workforce of teachers and researchers
devoted to something-or-other relating to THE BIBLE?

According to Avalos, "Bible Study" is a thoroughly worn out field where nothing new has been discovered
or analyzed for decades. Even worse, nothing new can be discovered, short of a major archeological find,
which seems very unlikely. Even worse than this, academics are fully aware of the futility of further study.
Avalos points this out by quoting extensively from academics who are fully devoted to their profession,
but strangely honest about how difficult it is to find anything remotely new to say.

I already knew that the Jewish and Christian bibles were fiction.
I had no idea that the profession was so wildly hypocritical.
Man, this guy is not afraid to get rude!"

"Hector Avalos presents in this book a concise summary of the current state of biblical scholarship.
He shows that biblical scholarship, far from being a neutral and objective enterprise, is motivated even today by theological presuppositions."

"Its methodological principles [of quest for the HJ] are quite clear and coherent, at least in theory,
and they seem the most adequate ones for the type of materials presented in the gospel accounts."