Ali Ataie – Jesus was not crucified the evidence
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AI: Transcript ©
Hello, everyone, and welcome to blogging theology.
Today, I'm very happy to welcome back doctor
Ali Atay from Zaytuna College. Assalamu alaykum, sir.
How are you?
Very well. Very good to see you again.
For those
who don't know, doctor Ali Athaai is a
scholar of biblical hermeneutics
specializing
in sacred languages,
comparative theology, and comparative literature at Zaytuna College
in California.
Just what happened to Jesus of Nazareth
at the end of his earthly life 2000
years ago is a point of dispute
between Christians and Muslims.
The Christian gospels,
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, tell the story
about the death of Jesus
at the hands of the Romans by crucifixion,
yet the Quran
disputes these accounts.
Today, doctor Ali Atay will look to establish
the historical plausibility
of an uncrucified
Jesus
of Nazareth.
So over to you, sir.
Thank you so much.
Yeah. So about a year ago,
as you may remember, doctor,
Luis Atoury appeared on Blogging Theology
and did a wonderful presentation,
on this topic. And I highly recommend
that people watch that podcast if they haven't
already,
or to watch it again.
But I've been thinking about this topic now
for a while.
And when I saw doctor Fatouhi's presentation, it
just sort of further motivated me to contribute
something similar to the public discourse.
So maybe this will be,
something of a supplement or a sequel,
to what he presented. I'm going to cover
some of the same ground,
but also look at a few additional things,
Insha'Allah.
My presentation is a bit,
long winded,
so I
apologize in advance. No. No. We we like
you like long winded presentations of blogging theology?
Because we like content detail, quality stuff, so
I wish you produce in abundance. So don't
apologize for that, sir.
That's
so I do have a slideshow. So let's,
Yep. Let's go to the title slide here.
It's up there.
Great. So I've titled this presentation They Did
Not Kill Him Nor Crucify Him,
Establishing the Historical Plausibility
of an Uncrucified
Jesus of Nazareth, peace be upon him.
Okay? So,
okay, how do modern secular, quote, unquote, scientific
historians
establish history?
Well, it's all a game of plausibility.
Plausibility is everything. So historians like Bart Ehrman,
for example, determine what happened in the past
by asking a very simple question.
In light of the evidence,
what most probably happened? Right? So this is
how modern history is done. Did Barack Obama
win the presidential election
in 2012?
Well, the answer is yes, because that is
most probable. It is highly, highly unlikely,
highly implausible,
that there was some sort of elaborate global
conspiracy, and that we were all fooled.
But let's go back in time a bit.
Was Lee Harvey Oswald the lone wolf in
the JFK assassination?
Well, now here, it used to be very,
very probable that he was. But in light
of new evidence over the years, it is
now at least plausible
that he did not act alone. In fact,
the House Select Committee on, on Assassinations,
concluded in 1979,
16 years later,
that there was probably more than 1 gunman.
So the past did not change. Only our
perception of it has.
Well, let's go back even further. Did Constantine
convert to Christianity,
before or after the Council of Nicaea
8 25 of the Common Era.
Now things get a bit more hazy. Right?
The farther back we go, the hazier things
get.
Were Muslims in the Americas
first, or were Christians here first? Now here
it actually depends on whose history
we're reading.
Are you reading Catholic historians or Muslim historians?
Eastern or Western?
If you ask an American historian,
who was the first man to fly an
airplane?
He'll probably say, Orville and Wilbur Wright, of
course.
The Wright brothers.
If you ask a Brazilian historian,
he'll probably say, Alberto Santos Dumont.
So whose history are we reading?
So there are 4 main criteria
of modern historiography. Okay? So historians, they look
at 4 main things. So number 1, multiple
independent attestation of sources,
and number 2, early sources,
number 3, criterion of embarrassment,
And number 4,
social coherence.
So in the case of Jesus of Nazareth,
peace be upon him,
most,
modern historians
point out that we have 4 gospels and
several epistles written by 1st century Christians that
mention that Jesus was put to death via
crucifixion.
So apparently,
multiple independent and early sources, the first two
criteria.
Jesus was believed to have been the messiah
by his early followers, so they certainly wouldn't
make up a crucified messiah. That's embarrassing.
Therefore, he was likely
crucified, criterion of embarrassment.
Also, the Romans crucified thousands of Jews in
Palestine. So what's another Jew? Why should he
be so exceptional? So, you know, Occam's razor.
In other words, it is socially and contextually
coherent that Jesus was crucified.
In addition to this, it is very clear
that the life of the historical Jesus of
Nazareth, peace be upon him,
ended abruptly
around 31, 32, or 33,
of the common era, and that James became
the leader of the Nazarenes until his death
around 62 of the common
era. This was probably because Jesus was killed
and buried somewhere.
So in light of this, historians have concluded
that Jesus was most probably crucified. This is
how secular history is done. What most probably
happened? And I'll return to these four criteria
at the end of my presentation
to re examine, inshallah.
So for historians, the most compelling evidence here
is that a lot of Christians in the
1st century said Jesus was crucified. Yes, I
agree.
But a crucial question here is which Christians,
whose Christian history are we reading? And I'll
go back to this point,
as well,
But let's pretend that there's a man standing,
on the top of a tall building,
and I tell you that he got there
one of 3 ways. So either he flew
up there
like Superman,
or he took the elevator.
I guess you would call that the lift.
Right?
Or he took the stairs. I think most
people would say he probably took the elevator.
Now is it true
without any reasonable doubt that he took the
elevator? No. He could have taken the stairs.
That is plausible. It's just not very common.
Flying, however, is a miracle.
Okay. Now a miracle by definition is the
least plausible occurrence,
a breach of natural law, a breach of
customary occurrence or physics.
Both Muslims and Christians
believe that Jesus' birth and end of his
earthly life were miraculous
in some fashion. In other words, both groups
believe in the virgin birth of Jesus and
the ascension of Jesus from this world.
Both groups also believe in many of the
same miracles that Jesus was able to perform
during his life by the permission of God.
From the standpoint of modern secular history,
these things are considered non historical.
Why? Because modern historians do not presuppose
God's existence. They have no access to God.
They don't even consider the supernatural.
They are naturalists. This is how modern historians
like airmen operate. This doesn't mean that they
necessarily deny the supernatural.
They simply don't consider it in their method,
And this is a bit different than how
the father of history in the west, Herodotus,
approached history.
So Herodotus openly acknowledged the supernatural and that
some event could have a double explanation, one
natural and one supernatural. In other words,
the what and the why.
So so modern secular historians
are are essentially explanatory monists. Like, everything will
be explained naturalistically.
So in agreement with modern historians, Herodotus used
aikos,
which is a Greek Greek term meaning reasoning.
For example, Herodotus, interestingly enough,
did not believe that the Greeks attacked Troy
because the Trojans were holding Helen.
He finds that implausible.
He thinks that the Greeks attacked Troy simply
because they wanted to conquer Troy
for their glory, and Herodotus was a Greek.
Helen was just a pretext for war. Helen
was a way to garner
public support for an invasion.
So he thought it was much more likely
that Helen was in Egypt, not Troy, in
Asia Minor.
So so they they so I didn't drop
that. The the this Brad Pitt film then,
whatever it's called, we know Brad Pitt and
the others, is all wrong then because it
was all about Helen and Troy in the
Hollywood movie, isn't it? So we gotta look
again and perhaps question that as as a
true account.
Yeah. Yeah. It seems like it was political
propaganda. You know, the face that launched a
1,000 ships? Not really. Right?
But Herodotus, you know, he never discounted the
supernatural. He considered
supernatural as well, and he's the father of
western history.
So it's ironic when a Christian,
polemicist
says to the Muslim that the night journey
of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,
to Jerusalem
in one night and his ascension into the
heavens is unhistorical,
so Muslims should stop believing in these things.
Yes. According to modern secular historians who never
consider miracles, the night journey and ascension are
highly implausible,
but then again, so is the resurrection of
Jesus.
Are Christians going to stop believing in that?
And Christians need to admit this about the
resurrection. Right? They need to stop claiming
that the resurrection is historical according to the
paradigm of modern historiography.
And I would make a distinction
between the terms non historical and unhistorical.
So yes, from the standpoint of secular history,
the night journey of the prophet, peace be
upon him, as described in Muslim sources, is
non historical, because it is a miracle, and
miracles are not considered by modern historians.
They're only looking for naturalistic
explanations.
The supernatural is just on an area that
they concern themselves with.
But I would argue that the night journey
is not unhistorical,
because apart from its supernatural element, which modern
historians could explain away
as being the prophet's dream,
the historical
circumstances
that surround the event of the night journey
are plausible.
Now let me cite one example for clarification.
In the book of, Acts. Right? So Luke
quotes Paul,
who gives the, account of his conversion at
his trial. Right? The Damascus Road conversion, as
it's called. So according to Luke, Paul explained
that he had a vision of the resurrected
Jesus. So this is a nonhistorical
event. Why? Because it is a miracle, a
supernatural
event. From a modern historical standpoint,
did it happen exactly as Paul through Luke
told us? Probably not. Now, a Christian may
still believe in this
because he trusts Paul or Luke, or he
trusts the scripture,
or he has other good reasons for believing,
be they theological, metaphysical, personal, or otherwise,
and he can make those arguments.
However, the reason why this story seems to
be unhistorical
is because of the non supernatural
circumstances
of the story.
This story encroaches into the area, the domain,
the field
of the secular
historian.
How?
Well, according to the story,
the high priest in Jerusalem commissioned Paul to
bring Christians from Damascus
to stand trial in Jerusalem.
This is highly implausible historically.
Why? Number 1, the term Christian is 2nd
century,
so there's an anachronism.
Number 2, the high priest did not have
jurisdiction
over anyone in Damascus.
As Paula Fredriksen points out, the high priest
didn't even have authority
over the Essenes who lived in his own
backyard.
So to just sorry. Paula Fredriksen
obviously is a very distinguished American New Testament
scholar,
a professor,
and an expert in this particular field. Just
so I clarify who she is. Yeah. Yes.
Thank you. Yeah.
So so so Paul's conversion story
is not only nonhistorical
due to the presence of a miracle, due
to the presence of a miracle. It is
plausibly unhistorical as well because of its non
supernatural claims.
Hadith
of the Hadith about the night journey, about
the prophet.
It would be equivalent
to the Hadith saying something like the prophet
prayed at the Dome of the Rock,
Masjid Qubat al Sahra, when he arrived in
Jerusalem. So here, a secular historian would say,
well, wait a minute. That mosque was not
built until 70 years later by the Umayyads.
Clearly, this is a later tradition. Of course,
the Hadith
does not say that.
Now, Aramin believes
that after Jesus's death, he was seen by
some of his disciples.
He believes that, but he also says that
any explanation
is more plausible than a man rising from
the dead. The the disciples experienced a group
hallucination,
much more plausible than a man rising from
the dead. So if Christians want to believe
that Jesus did rise from the dead,
then that is their faith conviction. It is
based primarily
upon theological evidence and the credibility of those
who made the claim, but it cannot be
historical in the modern secular sense,
and that's okay. I mean, we have faith
commitments as well as Muslims. I
believe the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,
when he said that he journeyed to Jerusalem
in one night. I believe him because there
was convincing evidence to me that he was
a truthful man with unimpeachable integrity.
The Arabs before Islam would refer to him
as a Sadiq al Anin,
the truthful and trustworthy one. So it's not
blind faith, it's reasonable faith. Right? So,
if he said it, then it's true. And
I have good reasons for believing him despite
the night journey being non historical and implausible
according to modern naturalistic
historians.
So so Muslims and Christians, at some point,
will both
butt heads
with the likes of Bart Ehrman. Both groups
make non historical claims according to the standards
of modern secular
historiography.
I agree with secular historians,
as do the Christians, that Jesus dropped out
of history around 31 of the common era,
but not because he was buried in some
unmarked mass grave,
but because he ascended into heaven. And this
is a miracle. So a secular historian would
say that my view was not historical, and
I'm fine with that. I believe that because
my prophet said that Jesus ascended, and I
have multiple reasons why I believe that the
prophet was truthful.
The focus of my presentation today is not
on the
miraculous birth of Jesus,
nor is it on his miracles of
curing the blind and the lepers and raising
the dead by God's leave, nor is it
on his ascension
at the very end.
Today, I want to talk specifically
about the historicity
of the crucifixion and its immediate aftermath
from a secular standpoint
within a modern secular paradigm.
Is it plausible,
just plausible,
from a standpoint of modern history to conclude
that Jesus was never crucified?
If so, then the Quran's claim about the
crucifixion is historically valid according to the method
of modern historiography.
Okay.
So
Interesting. It is no secret
that the Quran categorically denies
that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified.
And we'll look at the verse.
So so the the prominent criticism of the
Quran,
right, is that the Quran is denying a
non supernatural
historical event
that is accepted
by consensus of modern historians.
Therefore, the Quran's position regarding the crucifixion
is unhistorical.
So this is the sort
of prominent criticism.
Now to this,
a Muslim might say, so what? I don't
care what some modern historians say. I believe
the Quran because I'm convinced
that the Quran is the word of God
and that the author of the Quran
has direct access to history, as as doctor
Faturi said. I trust Allah and his messenger.
I have I have many reasons why I
trust Allah and his messenger. So just as
I believe that Moses split the Red Sea
by God's leave, despite what modern
historians say about that event, I also believe
that Jesus was not crucified, despite what modern
historians say about that event. I have confidence
in my text. I have confidence in Allah
and His messenger.
If the greatest monotheist of all time, the
most influential man who ever lived, the prophet
Muhammad, peace be upon him, a man whose
name literally means
the praised one who is constantly praised by
human beings in every country around the world.
If that man said that Jesus wasn't crucified,
then I believe him, and I don't care
what Bart Ehrman or Dale Martin or Dale
Allison,
whatever they say, I hear and I affirm.
The prophet is a man whose fruits demand
are serious
consideration. So if a Muslim were to say
all those things, that's fine.
I understand.
And and Paul, you mentioned in the past
that the Quran's claim about the crucifixion is
unfalsifiable.
In other words, a modern historian can say
to a Muslim that he's denying history as
he sees it, but he cannot say that
he knows with certainty that Jesus was crucified
without a shadow of doubt.
No one can prove that Jesus was crucified
through the modern scientific method. To do this,
you either have to go back in time
and actually witness the event, which is impossible,
or reproduce the event, which is impossible.
So as doctor Fatouhi pointed out, the past
is ghayb. It's unseen.
So even the atheist has iman bil ghayb,
belief in the unseen, a belief or a
confidence
or faith in what may have been
in what in what may have happened in
the past,
based upon
available evidence. Now, doctor Fatouh also made another
excellent point,
I'm paraphrasing.
He said that, he said that the Quran
explicitly says that prophets were murdered by their
communities
in the past.
Martyr'd or murdered prophets are not incompatible with
the Quran's prophetology.
Now, if prophet Muhammad is the real author
of the Quran, which is the claim of
Jews, Christians, and atheists,
and he desperately
wanted to convert Jews and Christians to Islam
and to become his followers, then why in
the world did he deny the crucifixion of
Jesus
when both Jews and Christians maintained that Jesus
was crucified? Why would he invent an uncrucified
Jesus?
Why would he create an unnecessary
roadblock
to conversion?
The answer seems to be that the Quran
is stating
an actual fact since it has direct access
to history as a divine revelation, it is
simply a fact that Jesus of Nazareth,
the son of Mary, peace be upon them,
was not crucified.
In addition to this, I might add that
the Quran consistently revises,
biblical stories,
in a way which makes them more plausible
historically.
The author of the Quran consistently avoids the
historical pitfalls
of the biblical narratives. I'm not necessarily talking
about the miracles. I'm talking about the events
that historians concern themselves with. So we see
this concerning the stories of the flood, the
story of Joseph,
the Exodus from Egypt, and with the Quran's
sort of overall Christology that Jesus was a
human being, a prophet, a teacher, and a
healer. For example, just one example, the Quran
does not say that basically
2,000,000 people 2,200,000
Israelites
made exodus from Egypt
as the Torah does. This is highly, highly
implausible historically.
The the Quran says it was a small
remnant.
So now when the Quran denies the crucifixion,
this denial
should not be immediately dismissed as unhistorical.
Rather, it should be it should deserve our
serious consideration.
But here's my contention today.
Okay?
So I'm not contending that it is necessarily
more historically likely
that Jesus was not crucified.
It is my contention, however, that the historicity
of the crucifixion
is highly overemphasized
by secular historians.
And as a tradition of secular history,
historians continue to endorse the crucifixion.
But when we look at the actual evidence,
the historical case for the crucifixion is not
nearly as strong as we have been led
to believe.
When we actually examine the evidence,
we will come away with the historical plausibility
of an uncrucified
Jesus. And if it is plausible, just plausible,
that Jesus wasn't crucified, then no one can
say that the Quran contains a historical error
or that it is unhistorical.
If there is a reasonable doubt
that Jesus was crucified, then secular historians must
admit
that the Quran's position is at least plausible.
Can can I sorry. Can I just pause
there just for a second just to add,
the way that many Westerners have difficulty,
with,
the idea of a non, uncrucified Jesus is
to do with our culture in the last
2000 years? We we we see crucifixes
in churches.
We see in war memorials, the first, second
world war, you know, all over France and
in Britain too, of crucifixes. Yeah. Big stone
statue crucifixes.
It's part of our cultural
experience
to see a crucified Jesus.
And this is not an historical point about
1st century, of course. It's about for us
as axiomatic
as westerners that it happened because it's all
over the place, in in our churches, in
our memorials, all over the world. And so
it has a a certain kind of axiomatic
quality to it. But you're saying if we
go back to the, the actual evidence in
the 1st century, then there is reasonable,
doubt that this was crucified, as you say.
To reexamine the evidence. I mean, think about
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. So if I
said that a Moroccan immigrant
shot Lincoln,
is that a historical error? The answer is
yes. Why? There is zero evidence to support
its plausibility. So I'm not asking if it's
possible,
rather plausible.
There's there's a difference. Is there a reasonable
degree of certainty that a Moroccan immigrant shot
Lincoln? No.
But now think about the JFK assassination.
You know, if I said that there was
a second gunman, is that a historical error?
Not necessarily.
Why? Because there was some evidence to establish
its plausibility.
It is plausible that there was a second
gunman. So my claim is that I can
come up with a theory of the crucifixion
that is both in agreement with the Quran,
as well as historically plausible.
In other words, we do not need to
postulate the historically implausible
to in order to explain how Jesus was
not crucified and how he was seen after
some crucifixion
event.
Okay. K. So all of that was sort
of just
introduction. Let's move on here.
Okay. Now on a previous podcast,
I explained,
both the swoon and divine rapture theories.
Okay. So just to very quickly review and
then assess,
The swoon theory is this idea
that Jesus was placed on a cross, but
he didn't die. Right? He survived the crucifixion.
The divine rapture theory is this idea that
Jesus was placed on a cross,
but before he could die from his injuries,
afflicted upon him by his enemies,
God directly intervened and seized Jesus' soul.
Both theories give the impression to his enemies
that they killed him. Hence, they did not
kill him nor crucify him, but it was
made to appear so unto them, as the
Quran says. Under the swoon theory,
Jesus was able to recover from his injuries,
and then he was seen by his disciples
and maybe others alive, right, still alive.
Under divine rapture, God returned Jesus' soul to
his body after seizing it,
and then he was seen alive,
once again alive.
But here's the question. Are these theories convincing
both Quranically and historically?
So this is our project today, to postulate
a theory of the crucifixion
that is both in agreement with the Quran,
as well as historically
plausible within the paradigm
of modern historiography.
So it seems to me that a potential
problem with the swoon theory from a Qur'anic
standpoint
is that it cannot be easily reconciled with
the broader Qur'anic discourse.
For example, we're told in the Quran,
excuse me, that that God will say to
Jesus on the day of judgment,
Behold, I restrained
the Israelites from harming you. Right?
And the verb katha in this verse,
is used
7 other
times in the Quran, and in every case,
it means to restrain or avert from physical
harm.
So if Jesus was fastened to a cross
with ropes or or nails or both,
after having been probably flogged and beaten, it
seems doubtful that this would constitute being restrained
from harm, right, even if he never died.
So it seems to me that the swoon
theory doesn't quite work when we look at
the Quran more comprehensively.
And by the way, Psalm 20 Psalm 20
verse 6
says that God will save his messiah. Right?
It
says. God will save his messiah.
None of the Tanafi passages that Christians
claim are messianic
explicitly mentioned the word messiah,
but Psalm 20 verse 6 does, and it
says, God will save his messiah.
And the verb is yasha in biblical Hebrew,
which means to save from physical harm, just
as in Quran Arabic does. Interesting. Divine divine
rapture from the cross also,
suffers,
pun intended, from this same problem. A a
flogged, beaten, bleeding Jesus is very difficult
to to reconcile with these broader Quranic statements
concerning
him. Divine rapture would also necessitate,
that some type of resurrection
must have occurred if Jesus made post crucifixion
appearances to his disciples. Either the soul of
Jesus was returned to his corpse by God
who reanimated Jesus' body, or the disciples had
individual and or shared visions of a phantasmic
Jesus
who had left his body behind in his
grave. The former is the position of the
gospels,
while the latter seems to be the kind
of resurrection
that Paul described in the same as passage
in 1st Corinthians
15.
Although neither Paul nor the gospel writers maintained
that Jesus' soul was raptured
by God, at at least not in the
sense that I'm describing what it means to
be raptured.
In other words, both Paul and the gospel
writers
say that Jesus was killed by human agents
on the cross, but they differ on the
nature of the resurrection. The Pauline resurrection of
Jesus is where the body stayed buried
and appearances were in the form of visions.
Paul never spoke of an empty tomb. That
is a later development. I'll return to the
empty tomb later inshallah.
That's a good point. So, Paul, this has
been noticed by biblical scholars that Paul doesn't
mention the empty tomb,
the at all. And this is a it
only appears in the much later, gospels written
after AD 70, Mark being the earliest, of
course. So it's actually not there in the,
1st part of the 1st century. This idea
is unknown.
It's not there yet. And we'll we'll talk
about Mark and the empty tomb narrative.
Now
in addition to the,
scriptural, that is, Quranic problems with the swoon
theory,
the swoon theory is also historically
a bit thorny.
So,
Muslims would have to grant, at least in
a general sense,
the claim of the gospels
that Jesus's body was promptly removed from the
cross at the request of 1 or more
of Jesus's followers. So this is by itself
highly unlikely,
although although not entirely
unheard of. So in his autobiography
entitled the life of Flavius Josephus,
the Jewish historian that Josephus, who died around
a 100 of the common era, he actually
mentioned how he successfully requested Titus
to remove from their crosses 3 crucified victims
whom Josephus had recognized as being his old
friends.
Yep. All three men were still alive when
removed from their crosses, but only one managed
to survive.
So this event, if it's true, probably took
place around 70 of the common era, right
around the time Mark wrote this gospel. Interestingly,
in Mark, a man named Joseph or Joseph
of Arimathea,
which sounds a lot like Josephus' name, Joseph
Bar Matathia, maybe it's a coincidence.
In any case, Joseph requested the body of
Jesus from Pontius Pilate,
and Pilate marveled that Jesus had died already.
Perhaps Josephus' claim was floating around orally, and
Mark heard it and decided to model Joseph
after Josephus,
but made it a point to emphasize that
Jesus was in fact dead. I'll come back
to Joseph of Arimathea.
Historically speaking, however,
the truth is according to airmen, that most
of the time, crucified victims were left on
their crosses
long after they had expired,
precisely to deny them the dignity of proper
burials.
Right? Leaving bodies on crosses to rot or
to be eaten by animals was also an
extremely effective way
of deterring others from committing similar crimes against
the state.
Furthermore, if Jesus swooned on the cross, this
would mean that the Roman centurions in charge
of Jesus' crucifixion
utterly failed at their job, and such negligence
would have put their own lives in imminent
danger. So in my opinion, the swoon theory
is is problematic,
both scripturally,
and historically.
When it comes to
divine rapture from the cross,
as I said earlier, secular history is a
game of plausibility.
Right? While it is certainly possible that God
intervened and seized Jesus' soul before his natural
death,
we can't say that it's plausible simply because
secular history does not have access to God
and cannot verify his actions,
this would be a nonhistorical
claim.
For example, if if some absolutely
conclusive archaeological
evidence
of an Israelite exodus from ancient Egypt,
during the 18th or 19th Dynasties were to
be found,
a historian, at least in the secular sense,
would not conclude that they left because God
ordered them to do so. This is simply
unknowable from their perspective. Likewise, if Jesus died
unnaturally fast, which is what Mark actually suggests,
there's no way that a historian could verify
that God miraculously
hastened the process of death. Maybe God did,
but it's not plausible for secular historians. So
when it comes to the event of the
crucifixion,
our goal today is to steer clear
of both scriptural and historical implausibility.
Again, we seek a theory of the crucifixion
that is both in agreement with the Quran
as well as historically plausible.
Now what about the substitution theory? So this
is, in fact,
the most prevalent theory found among Muslim exegetes.
Right? And there are a few versions of
this theory, but they all include some sort
of supernatural identity transference. In other words,
according to substitution theorists,
somebody else, either Judas Iscariot or Simon of
Cyrene or Barabbas or some unnamed Jew,
was magically transfigured into the likeness of Jesus,
and then crucified by the Romans by instigation
of the Jewish leaders.
From a standpoint of Quranic scripture, this theory
works. Most exegetes,
they take the phrase, they did not kill
him nor crucify
him, to mean that Jesus was
never anywhere near a cross. Right? He did
not swoon nor was he raptured. This this
also works with the verse, that states that
that God, restrained the Israelites
from harming Jesus, peace be upon him. So
scripturally, this seems to check off.
Historically, however, this would constitute a miracle,
and miracles are the least plausible occurrences.
In addition to this, I have my doubts
as to whether
Judas Iscariot and Simon of Cyrene were actual
historical persons.
Perhaps some of these figures were the literary
creations of the gospel writers
for the purposes
of advancing their respective Christologies, and I'll get
into that later.
Maybe Jesus was indeed somehow substituted.
The problem is that the substitution theory does
not help us
achieve our stated goal of offering a crucifixion
theory that is both historically plausible and scripturally
sound.
Let's go to the next one here.
Now, I wanna say something
about historians before we continue.
So a common trope we hear from some
atheists,
is that secular historians are objective
and unbiased
and inductive.
Right? They go where the evidence leads them
while religious people are are impeded by their
respective faith commitments.
So this is just false. We are all
biased to a certain degree, and anyone who
denies this is just delusional.
All of us bring our various degrees of
knowledge and limited experiences
and emotions to bear upon every aspect of
our lives. If secular historians were perfectly objective
and unbiased, then
they should arrive at absolute consensus
on all matters of history. Obviously, they do
not. I think it was,
John Dominic Crossan who said, and I'm paraphrasing,
we all make Jesus in our own image.
You know? So was Jesus a protozelic, an
a scene, a Pharisee, a Sadducee,
an apocalyptic
prophet, a cynic philosopher,
or a slick talking,
public faith healing con man?
It depends on what historian you read.
In fact, there have been seasoned historians,
such as Bruno Bauer and GA Wells, who
didn't even affirm a minimalist history of Jesus.
In other words,
they thought that it was more plausible that
Jesus never existed.
And there are now at least 2 peer
reviewed books written by highly trained
modern secular historians
that deny that Jesus even ever existed.
These historians are called mythicists. Now, personally, I
don't find their historical arguments
very convincing,
but their conclusions just demonstrate,
the point that in modern historiographical,
studies,
even the entire concept of plausibility
is a bit nebulous
and ultimately subjective
to a certain significant degree.
For mythicists,
such as, you know, Richard Carrier and David
Fitzgerald,
Tom Harper
and Robert Price, their sheer contention that Jesus
never existed
has a probability
greater than 50%, that is nonexistence of Jesus,
is more plausible
than any minimalist
historical
existence.
According to Carrier, for example, his book is
called On the Historicity of Jesus,
Jesus started out as an angel in the
Pauline epistles
who made a revelatory appearances to certain men
after he was crucified
by demons in the celestial realm, not on
earth.
This angelic Jesus was later euhemerized
by the gospel writers who wanted him to
be a man
in in actual human history, a literary
incarnation,
if you will. The same thing happened to
Zeus and Uranus, who started off as gods
but were then made into human kings by
Euhemeris,
who was this Greek writer in the 3rd
century before the common era.
Therefore, the mythic the mythicist concludes
that the gospels are nothing more than historical
fiction,
I. E. Myth
masquerading as true history,
giving the appearance of history verisimilitude.
And this is what Celsius said in the
2nd century about the gospels.
I mention this because it is important to
note
that mythicists arrived at their conclusions
by employing
essentially
the same historical method and looking at the
same historical evidence
as mainstream historians, such as Ehrman and Martin
and Allison and Littwe and Frederiksen, who vehemently
defend
the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth.
For example, you know, if you watch the
debate between Robert Price and Bart Ehrman, 2
atheist historians,
they are quoting the same text and looking
at the same evidence,
yet arriving at vastly different conclusions.
Right? I mean, Ehrman would say to Price,
you're not being inductive.
You're not going where the evidence is leading
you. But then doctor Dennis McDonald would say
to airmen, you're not being inductive.
You're not going where the evidence is leaving
you. And McDonald,
like Ehrman, is a historicist.
Yeah. James Taber, who just retired from UNC,
you've had him on blogging theology Yep.
Is a brilliant historian
and has always been a brilliant historian.
Taber believes that the Talpiot tomb,
discovered in 1980,
was plausibly the tomb of Jesus and his
family. Now I know that Ehrman disagrees with
Taber, but would Ehrman say that Tabor's position
is absolutely crazy and devoid of any reason?
I doubt it. I mean, would he say
that that Tabor is is blinded
by his fundamentalist
Christian faith? Tabor is not a fundamentalist.
I think if I mean, so just put
you make a extremely good point there, actually.
I I'm
it it's good to sometimes biblical scholars, professional
historians
into,
the 1st century, particularly
Jewish history and historical Jesus,
sometimes they're honest about this. Professor, Dale Allison,
for example, from Princeton, who I've, had on
Blumley thought a couple of times in in
in a recent work,
admitted
that the, the the the standard tools for
historical criticism,
of this period have failed
to produce consensus amongst historians.
And he's very critical, you know, form criticism,
redaction criticism, and so on. You mentioned the
criterion
of of dissimilarity and so on. He said
there's actually been a the whole project has
failed.
And and this this show, you you initially,
when you spoke or at the very beginning
about the, the so called, you know, the
scientific historical method.
But it shows that really it's not really
scientific because we don't say that about physics
when it looks at the laws of physics.
We don't say it was just failed
completely because physicists just disagree whether or not
there are all laws of physics. It simply
doesn't happen. So it, the project, according to
Dale Allison, has actually not produced the goods
that its entire,
scholarly apparatus
was set out to deliver.
And this is a damning indictment by one
of of of America's leading,
New Testament scholars, at Princeton. So I think
your point is well made. That's what I'm
trying to say. Yeah. I mean I mean,
would would Ehrman say that it is not
the least plausible
that the Talpiot family tomb once housed the
ossuaries of of Jesus and some of his
family members? If he does say that, then
this just confirms my point that quote unquote
objective
faith bracketing historians
looking at the same evidence can come to
vastly different conclusions. I saw it. I saw
it. Yeah. Secular historians that's the whole point.
Secular historians can be very much at odds,
and they also tend to change their minds.
Now I'm certainly not a Jesus a Jesus
mythicist. Right? But I do believe
that myth and legend has probably so permeated
the gospel accounts of Jesus' passion narratives
that it is not at all beyond reason
to dismiss them completely as historical
fiction, the passion narratives, and I will demonstrate
this. We'll get there, inshallah.
Now now Muslims in the past
have had good theological reasons for believing the
words of the Quran, and those reasons continue
to hold true nowadays.
As I said, we have ample evidence for
trusting Allah and His Messenger. But historically speaking,
and by historical here, I mean the modern
secular Western paradigm,
historically speaking, does it make sense to entertain
the claim of the Quran on this matter?
I would argue it does
if the Quran's claim can be supported by
historical evidence. So people tend to dismiss the
Quran because it came so many years after
Jesus. You know, what does the Quran know
about Jesus? They say. But if something is
true, then it's true. So let me offer
the following analogy.
Suppose an American black man in the year
1900,
claimed to be a descendant of Thomas Jefferson.
Right? And he believed this with all of
his heart, along with his family and friends,
and he was known by all who met
him to be a good, upright, and truthful
man throughout his entire life. In his day,
mainstream historians
would have rejected his claim and ridiculed him
if not outright persecuted him.
Now a 100 years later,
his descendants allowed authorities to exhume his body,
and lo and behold, his claim was verified
by DNA analysis.
Now, you know, doing history is not like
examining DNA. It's not nearly as conclusive. In
fact, history is probably the most imprecise of
all the sciences.
There's always going to be a degree of
interpretation,
and, of course, the past cannot be reproduced.
In the science of history, all we must
do is demonstrate
that something is plausible,
not simply possible.
If Muslims can show that it is plausible
that Jesus of Nazareth
was not crucified by examining the sources and
evidence,
then critics cannot say that the Quran's position
is unhistorical.
After that, mainstream historians must admit
that they may not have gotten things right.
And as you said, there are some, like
Gail Allison, who are starting to come around.
If they refuse, then they are guilty
of the same type of dogmatism
and deduction
that they frequently accuse people of religion
as having. Now Bart Ehrman is an a
very interesting example.
He has said many times in public debates
that he does not consider the the canonical
gospels
to be very valuable as as historical documents.
And he rightly points out
the inconsistencies,
historical improbabilities,
and outright contradictions
in the passion narratives
and mentions that if the gospel writers got
the minor things wrong,
then how do we know that they didn't
get the major things wrong? In other words,
if the details are wrong historically,
why do we assume that the big picture
is right?
He says this all the time. You know,
here's a quote from him. Quote, they are,
meaning the gospels
sorry. Are they,
the gospels, the kind of sources that historians
would want to establish
what probably happened in the past?
I think the answer to that question is
no,
end quote.
Yet, when he is confronted with the Quranic
position regarding the crucifixion,
it seems like he suddenly turns Christian apologist
and has fights tooth and nail
to defend his opinion that the crucifixion of
Jesus is one of the most, quote, solid
facts of history
and even mocks those who say otherwise. And
yet among his,
among his primary pieces of evidence for the
crucifixion
are the gospels, the same gospels that he
has made a career of tearing limb from
limb.
So his logic seems to be that despite
the problems in the gospels,
they are still before the Quran. Right? So
he's an atheist historian, so before and after
are very significant for him, and I'll address
that in a minute. But what gets me,
is when Christians use this before after argument.
Right?
They say, why do Muslims believe a text,
you know, I in the Quran,
that came 600 years after the New Testament?
Why would you believe a man, the prophet
Muhammad, peace be upon him, who said something
that contradicts the New Testament
600 years later?
So I have a question for the Christians.
Why would you believe in the New Testament
Jesus,
who committed blasphemy
by claiming to be divine
over 1400 years after Moses said, God is
not a man, that He should lie. Why
would you believe a man, the New Testament
Jesus,
who said something that contradicts the Torah 1400
years later?
So my response to the Christian, who also
believes in revelation and prophecy,
is very simple. God revealed the truth about
Jesus 600 years later.
In other words, the Christian narrative is wrong.
You know, this is not difficult, and I
will get into that. But how will they
answer my question? Will they say, no. No.
No. Jesus did not commit blasphemy.
They won't say that. They can't say that
because then Jesus didn't claim to be God.
You know, if they say that the passage
in the Torah that says God is not
a man
is not authentic, then they're admitting that the
Bible is corrupt.
If they say something ridiculous like, yeah, it
says God is not a man, but it
doesn't say that He won't become a man,
then Jesus didn't commit blasphemy, so they are
stuck at an impasse.
Now with respect to the Quran's position regarding
the crucifixion,
let me offer a useful analogy.
So I'm going to read something,
and then I will comment.
So on November 22, 1963, president John f
Kennedy was assassinated
while riding in his presidential motorcade in Dallas,
Texas.
Almost immediately, the authorities had a suspect in
custody. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald, a
former US Marine.
Oswald was the perfect person for the American
public to hate. He defected to the Soviet
Union a few years earlier and was apparently
a dedicated communist.
This was during a time when the average
American citizen had very little knowledge of the
dark workings of his government.
This was well before we had heard of
the Gulf of Tonkin
or Operation Northwoods
or Nayirah Asaba or Building 7 and WMDs.
2 days after his arrest, Oswald, who claimed
that he was, quote, just a patsy,
was shot and killed by a nightclub owner
named Jack Ruby who may have had ties
to the FBI and organized crime syndicates.
Ruby conveniently died in prison of an apparent
blood clot in 1967.
In September 1964,
the Warren Commission
conducted,
sorry, concluded that Oswald assassinated the president and
that he acted alone. We were told definitively
that Oswald fired 3 bullets
from his position on the 6th floor of
the Texas School Book Depository.
One missed wildly, while 2 others found their
mark with deadly precision.
This was exactly what freedom loving American masses
wanted to hear.
1 man, a lone wolf, a traitor, and
he's dead.
Any talk of conspiracy at this point was
just ridiculous,
unpatriotic,
and even dangerous.
At the very scene of the assassination, however,
there were several eyewitnesses who said that they
heard gunshots coming
from a hilly area several hundreds of feet
in front
of the President's motorcade.
This area was called the Grassy Knoll.
A young married couple, William and Gail Newman,
were standing on Elm Street in Dealey Plaza
along with their 2 sons when the President
headed directly toward them.
The Newmans were situated exactly in between the
Grassy Knoll
and the president's motorcade.
William stated in an affidavit
that he thought the first two shots sounded
like distant firecrackers
that seemed to startle the president.
The 3rd shot, however, was believed by William
to have been fired
from directly behind him and his family from
the grassy knoll.
This was unmistakably
a gunshot, and both William and Gail remembered
the president's head exploding with blood and brain
matter just a few feet in front of
them.
At this point, William and Gail instinctively hit
the deck and covered their sons' bodies
in fear that they were caught in the
middle of a deadly crossfire.
William said that he was close enough at
one point to hear Jackie Kennedy's horrified cries
coming from the presidential motorcade.
Both William and his older son also stated
that they remembered seeing armed men running toward
the hill behind them.
Despite their eyewitness testimony in proximity to the
assassination,
the Newmans were inexplicably
not interviewed by the Warren Commission.
Wow. Throughout the 1960s early 70s, historians were
confident that the Warren Commission had gotten things
right,
but then on March 6, 1975,
a short film shot by an eyewitness to
the assassination
named Abraham Zapruder
was aired on network television.
The Zapruder
film vividly captured the gruesome damage caused by
the final bullet as it struck the president.
The president's head flew back into the left,
causing grain matter to explode out onto the
trunk of the presidential limo.
The footage corroborated the statements of the Newmans,
who stated that the final shot originated from
in front of the president's motor cave
and behind them from the grassy knoll.
The importance of the Zapruder film cannot be
overstated.
Although nothing is absolutely conclusive,
the film provided compelling evidence of a possible,
nay plausible,
second gunman,
and that, by definition, is a conspiracy.
Today, however, people are split on the matter.
Interestingly, only the youngest Newman's son, who is
now in his early sixties and who does
not remember the assassination,
believes in the standard narrative of the lone
gunman.
Okay.
So let's put this into
proper perspective.
Historians are still trying to figure out
what exactly happened
in broad daylight
in Dealey Plaza on the early afternoon of
November 22, 1963,
less than 60 years ago,
and this is with access to multiple eyewitnesses
and video cameras.
Yet Bart Ehrman and Christian polemicists
want want us to accept
that the Quran contains a, quote, historical error,
because it denies that the solitary execution of
a specific man
took place
2000 years ago in Palestine,
an execution that may have lasted no more
than a few hours,
and about which a single writing or statement
from an eyewitness
is not extant.
In addition to this, anyone who believes
this event as constituting
anything short of historical bedrock
must be blinded by his religious zealotry
and is thus deserving of mockery.
So this is not a perfect analogy,
I must admit, but I think it's adequate
enough to get my point across.
Verse
157 of surah number 4 of the Quran
is analogous to the Zapruder film.
The Zapruder film was broadcast over a dozen
years after the assassination,
but originated with someone who had firsthand experience
of the event.
The Quranid verse, 4157,
was revealed to the prophet Muhammad in the
year
626,
627,
by one who has direct knowledge of history.
For a secular historian, however,
my claim of the Quran's revelatory status
is not nearly good enough. The crucial question
is,
is,
is if 4157
can be substantiated
by examining the evidence. In other words, can
the claim of this verse that they did
not kill Jesus
be historically
plausible?
Okay? The verse declares,
they did not kill him, I. E. Jesus,
nor crucify him,
but it was made to appear so unto
them. But then to qualify this statement, the
Quran says,
and those who differed about it,
the crucifixion,
were in doubt concerning it. They did not
have certain knowledge,
except that they followed conjecture.
Wow. There are 4 key words used in
the second half of this verse. Okay? The
Quran is essentially making a claim here that
it wants us to investigate.
So first, we are told that the early
peoples, Ikh Talafu, about the crucifixion,
They had ikhtilaf.
Ichtilaf means different opinion,
that the crucifixion was a point of contention.
Then we're told
that there was shek. Shek means doubt about
the crucifixion,
and shek is like 5050, like 2 positions
that are basically equal in probability. It can
go either way.
Then we're told that they did not have
knowledge about the crucifixion,
meaning
that it was just information. It did not
come from a reliable source.
Lastly, we were told that they ended up
following
fun,
conjecture,
hearsay,
where one position was given preponderance
over another.
However, than in Arabic
suggests that the contrary
may also be the case.
In other words, the contrary is still plausible.
This is what the Quran is claiming. If
we do the research,
we will come to this conclusion.
The Christians and Jews ended up following
hearsay reports
about some crucifixion event
from non eyewitnesses
when there was a difference of opinion
with multiple scenarios being plausible
historically.
So is this accurate?
Can I before sorry? Before we continue, I
just wanted to ask you, about that verse,
just a it's a small question. When you
say it was made to appear to them
that it was so, who is the implied
actor there?
Who who made it appear to them that
it was so? Is this referencing God or
is it or or some other
who is implied in that, if you see
what I mean?
The conceptual sort of
active,
the the the doer of the verb. Most
of the exegetes say that God God,
engineered this event.
God made it appear so unto them. There
may be some difference of opinion about this,
and I have, something else to say about
this Okay. Later in the presentation. Alright. Thank
you. Yeah. We'll we'll get there. It's fine.
Yeah. Yeah. No. It's okay. So so according
to the
so according to the second part of this
verse, we are essentially
told, okay, that
none of the evidence that Jews and Christians
marshaled to support Jesus' crucifixion
was written by an eyewitness
to this alleged historical event. Every epistle, gospel,
and historical record
in Christian, Jewish, and Roman sources, without exception,
came much later and were authored by people
who were not there.
These sources are conjectural. They are thanni, as
the Quran said. Today, we know that this
is true,
But back when the prophet first uttered these
words, Christians believed in the following, and many
of them still do.
Paul took his teachings from the original disciples
with whom he had a congenial relationship.
Mark, a student of Peter,
a disciple, wrote the gospel of Mark, which
states that Jesus was crucified.
Matthew, a disciple of Jesus, wrote the gospel
of Matthew,
which states that Jesus was crucified.
Luke, a pupil and traveling companion of Paul,
who was taught by the disciples,
wrote the gospel of Luke and Acts, which
state that Jesus was crucified.
John, the disciple whom Jesus loved,
wrote the Gospel of John, which states that
Jesus was crucified.
Peter, a disciple of Jesus, wrote 1st and
second Peter,
which states that Christ suffered for our sins,
presumably by crucifixion.
All of these attributions
turned out to be false.
All of them. This is standard historical criticism.
These gospels and epistles are later writings
that were either anonymously
written,
or they are brazen forgeries,
where their authors are pretending to be apostles
of Jesus
and pretending to be eyewitnesses.
In other words, the Quran is correct.
The Quran made a statement 600 years after
Jesus that turned out to be true
according to the dominant view of modern historical
critics. It took historians a few centuries.
Can
I just sorry? Just to intro
just agreeing with what you say, but I
just want to emphasize that when you say
this is a standard historical critical view,
in my to my knowledge, most historians
in this field are actually Christians
in the United States, in Germany, in France,
and Britain. It's overwhelmingly Christian dominated. It's about
people like Bart Urban are exceptions. These are
he started off, of course, as a biblical
scholar who was an evangelical. So he moved
into atheism later in his career. The reason
I mentioned that is what you've said is
actually accepted
by most scholars, who are Christians to be
the case. So we're not dealing here with
hardened skeptics who hate Christianity.
We're dealing here with Christian committed Christians themselves.
I mean, I've mentioned a whole raft of
names, some some Jimmy Dunne onwards, who do
believe in the trinity, but nevertheless acknowledge the
historical evidence is so compelling to them,
to to come to the conclusion, say, the
gospels, for example, are not written by eyewitnesses.
And the problem is most ordinary lay Christians,
shall we say, who are not familiar with
what their own scholars have been saying for
a couple of centuries now,
unaware of this and continue to believe that
Matthew, the apostle Matthew, wrote Matthew, the apostle
John wrote John, etcetera, etcetera. So this huge
gulf, this schism, which is well understood,
that but Erman has references,
other people,
that most Christians are not educated, unfortunately,
in basic historiography, which is practiced by their
own scholars.
So this is a real problem in terms
of the,
the scholarship for,
the Bible, actually. But anyway. Right. You know,
Neil, you're right. This is the standard historical
criticism among non confessional and confessional scholars. I
mean, Dale Dale Martin is a Trinitarian. He
believes in the trinity. Absolutely.
Raymond Brown. Right? So Yes. From, this is
across the board.
Yes. That's true. The Quran also says
The Quran says their forgeries have deceived them
about their religion. So this is true. Now
compare this to the New Testament Jesus who
made confirmed false prophecies,
Not the so the New Testament Jesus, not
the real Jesus.
So here's my question to the to the
Christian.
If the New Testament Jesus made false prophecies,
why believe him when he claimed to be
divine? And in fact, most historians do not
believe
that Jesus claimed divinity. Most historians agree with
the Quran here, not the New Testament.
And by the way, any man, and we
mentioned this in the past in almost every
podcast,
any man,
Jew or Gentile, priest or rabbi,
carpenter or blacksmith, any man who claims to
be divine is a liar according to the
Torah and the Quran.
Okay. Now, years ago, I debated a Christian
apologist named Mike Lacona,
and he would go on to write a
700 page tome called the resurrection of Jesus.
Right?
Mister
Dockter now, Lacona, used the analogy
of the Titanic. Right? So he said that
everyone agrees that the Titanic sank. The differences
are in the peripherals,
the details.
When did it sink? Exactly when did it
sink?
You know, when did it break in half?
Did the band really keep playing, etcetera?
So his point is Jesus was crucified. Everyone
agrees. The differences are in the details.
So my response is 2 fold to this.
Number 1, I do not grant the premise
that, quote, everyone agreed that Jesus was crucified.
I think there's evidence to suggest that Christians
prior to and concurrent with Paul,
including the disciples,
plausibly denied the crucifixion, and I'll get into
that.
Number 2,
in addition to eyewitness testimony,
there is forensic physical evidence
that the Titanic sank.
This is why everyone agrees that it sank.
You can see pictures or film of the
Titanic today
sitting at the bottom of the Atlantic.
Right?
Is there physical, forensic, or material evidence of
Jesus' alleged crucifixion?
Is there any material evidence of any Jew
who was ever crucified
by the Romans in ancient Palestine? Apparently, tens
of thousands of Jews were crucified,
and all archaeologists
have ever found
was a single heel bone of a man
with a nail driven through it. They call
him Yohanan. I don't know how they know
his name, but that's what they call him.
I think they just made it up.
Tens of 1,000 apparently
crucified,
1 heel, 1 nail. That's it. So either
the numbers are greatly exaggerated,
or the vast majority of the time,
victims were tied to their crosses. And by
the way, only the gospel of John says
that Jesus was nailed to the cross, and
it's an implicit reference.
Now a Christian apologist
might say at this point, but there is
physical evidence
of Jesus' crucifixion.
What about all of these holy relics
sprawled across the Christian world that provide
material evidence of Jesus' crucifixion.
What about the crown of thorns,
the pieces of the true cross, the Shroud
of Turin?
Okay. So let's deal with these briefly,
because this is, you know, easy. So the
so called crown of thorns
displayed at Notre Dame Cathedral in France,
this only popped up in the 5th century
before the of the common era, 5th century
CE.
It is impossible to trace it back
to 1st century Palestine,
let alone back to Jesus of Nazareth. Right?
If Christians want to believe it's authentic
because of a spiritual hunch or some feeling
or insight,
fine, but but don't tell me it's valid
historically.
When it comes to the various pieces and
splinters of the, quote,
true cross,
church leaders have been very hesitant
to submit fragments for scientific testing since testing
is not only expensive, it also damages the
relic.
Perhaps more importantly, however, is the church's desire
to preserve its reputation,
especially
since,
what happened in 2016.
So a supposed fragment
of the so called true cross,
you know, venerated for a 1000 years at
Waterford Cathedral in Ireland,
was radiocarbon dated by researchers,
at Oxford
in 2016,
and the results were less than thrilling for
the church.
The fragment was dated to the 11th century
of the common era. Wow.
The most famous Christian relic by far is
called the,
the Sacros Undon or the Shroud of Turin.
So the Shroud
first emerged in France in the middle of
14th century
and was almost immediately immediately denounced as a
fraud by the Bishop of Troyes.
Nonetheless,
the popularity and
sort of the mystique of the shroud grew
exponentially, especially when it was moved to Turin
in Italy in 15/78.
It was radiocarbon dated by scientists
at 3 different institutions in 1988,
and all three tests determined a range between
1260 and 1390
CE
with a 95%
confidence.
Today, the official position of the Catholic church
a lot of people don't know this, but
the official position of the Catholic church
is that the Shroud of Turin is a
representation
of Christ.
Emphasis on the prefix
re,
representation.
In other words, it's not an icon.
Sorry. In other words, it is an icon,
not a relic.
That's the official position. It's not a relic.
Okay? And and by the way, there are
2 scholars, Andrea Nicoletti
and,
a man named,
I think, Andrew Casper,
who have done fantastic work on this topic.
Conclusively,
the Shroud of Turin has nothing to do
with the historical Jesus of Nazareth.
The truth is that the manufacture of relics
in the middle ages proved to be very
profitable.
You'd have these hoodwinked masses,
right, in hopes of attaining blessings.
They would flock to various pilgrimage sites just
to catch a glimpse
of these counterfeits,
and relics were often sold to unsuspecting and
well meaning buyers
for incredible prices. I mean, it was basically
big business, right? And what what One of
the most
sad but, famous relics is the, if I
could put it this way, the fore skin
of Jesus. And, apparently, there are 1,000 of
fore skins of Jesus as sacred relics around,
which, obviously, all can't be real,
just obviously.
Exactly. Yeah.
And also also, you, church authorities realized that
there were several death shrouds,
you know, and over and over 30 crucifixion
nails.
Wow. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, that was and and over 100
thorns from the crown, and these are all
floating across the Christian world. It all hailed
as being authentic. So what the church actually
did is they conjured up this idea that
most of these objects were contact relics.
Right? In other words, these were objects that
came into contact
with the genuine articles and were thus also
genuine
in some sense. That's, you know, some hardcore
damage control. The bottom line is that there
is no direct evidence,
no direct
material evidence
of Jesus' death by crucifixion.
So who said Jesus was crucified? Well,
the authors of the 4 gospels traditionally believed
to be 2 disciples of Jesus and 2
disciples of the disciples, all stated clearly that
Jesus was crucified
by the Romans at the instigation of the
Jewish leaders and that he died on the
cross. But here's the problem. According to a
near consensus of new testament scholars, both confessional
and non confessional, as we mentioned, the gospels
of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were anonymously
written books that were later attributed to their
supposed eponymous
authors.
These books were actually written between the years
70 100
CE,
or plausibly later, by highly educated 3rd or
4th generation,
Greek speaking Pauline Christians,
not by the Aramaic speaking disciples of Jesus,
nor even the disciples of the disciples.
In fact, it is very likely
that the authors of the gospels had no
connection whatsoever with the original disciples.
Furthermore, none of the gospel authors
claimed to be disciples or eyewitnesses to the
events that they described.
If the disciple Matthew wrote the gospel of
Matthew,
it doesn't stand to reason that he would
copy
substantial portions of Mark's gospel verbatim,
especially since Mark never met Jesus. With respect
to the book of Acts,
I think it can be convincingly argued that
it was mostly a work of historical fiction,
as it plainly contradicts material found in the
earlier Pauline corpus. And and I mentioned in
the previous podcast,
the author of Acts
clearly intended to present an idealized picture
of the early church. It's revisionist history. It's
written in the 2nd century
that severely sanitizes
the conflict
between what we call camp on
one side and camp, James slash Peter on
the other. Yeah. I mean, Acts reads very
much like an ancient novel. I mean, this
doesn't mean that it's totally fictitious,
but Luke did write according to his genre,
and Luke never claimed to be an inspired
writer. How did an ancient historian write history?
Well, the answer is by simply making up
a lot of things.
Luke imitated the literary style and method
of his perennial teachers,
Herodotus and Thucydides,
who made up the dialogue according to what
they thought was appropriate. I mean, Thucydides admitted
that he was the real author
of Pericles' famous funeral oration.
You know? This is why Peter and Paul
sound like the same person in Acts.
They are the same person.
In reality, Luke.
Right?
These are very uncomfortable facts. When I first
came across them myself, when I was studying
studies were very, very disturbing. As as you
say, Thucydides, you know, one of the founders
of history, historiography,
you know, a a respected historian. But he
said, look. I wasn't there at this battle,
at this war. And this this is what
my this is what I think the generals
there would have said on the occasion Yep.
Because that would have been the appropriate thing
to for them to say. So he created
speeches and put them into their mouths. So
the the idea of ancient, historiography
was actually to invent speeches, not out of
some kind of malicious, oh, I'm creating forgeries
here, but simply because there was no record
of the speeches, and so they put them
into their mouths. And what you've just said
is actually the standard view when it comes
to acts, the book of acts by Luke,
that Luke wasn't there. The speeches attributed to
Paul and and Peter and others were put
on the lips of of Peter and Paul
and others. And that this is the standard
view now because that's how they did history
in the 1st century.
And to say to read back, we wouldn't
do that today. Well, no. Of course, we
wouldn't because we have a different methodology, different
criteria. You don't invent speeches just like that.
But at that time, you could and you
did, and it was respectable to do so.
And Luke, as a man of his time,
would have done exactly the same. So we
don't really have the words of Paul and
Peter in Acts at all, I'm for. I
wish we did. But, unfortunately,
that it's very, very implausible
to suggest that these are the actual words
of these two people, unfortunately. Right. Yeah.
This the author would say, this is what
I think they said. This is what's plausible
to me. And and historians, they they generally
they generally like Thucydides
better than Herodotus because Thucydides is actually considered
to be this sort of father of scientific
history,
because he he doesn't entertain this idea. It's
like sometimes Herodotus will say, well, there was
an earth
earthquake in a certain place,
and maybe this was Poseidon, you know, doing
something in the ocean. Right? Whereas Thucydides, he
sort of, you know, sticks to the facts
as it were from a more secular standpoint.
But, yeah, he admits this is this is
what I think. And and we look at
1st and second Peter, you know, I mean,
these are these are brazen forgeries written by
someone, I think to be Peter at the
end of 1st century or early 2nd century.
So this really leaves us with Paul, the
earliest author of the New Testament. Right? And
as we know, Paul was not a disciple
of the historical Jesus,
nor had he known the historical Jesus.
Now obviously then, he was not present at
Jesus' alleged crucifixion,
not an eyewitness.
According to the Synoptic gospels, no disciple was
present at the crucifixion. There are 13 epistles
in the New Testament that explicitly claim Pauline
authorship.
Okay? Yet scholars are almost unanimous that Paul
only really wrote 7 of them. So first
Thessalonians,
1 and second Corinthians,
Romans, Galatians,
Philippians,
and and Philemon or Philemon,
however you want to say that. The other
6 are forgeries in his name. In fact,
according to mainstream textual critics, at least 11
of the 27 books that made it into
the New Testament canon
are forgeries.
To say it another way, over 40% of
the books in the New Testament that many
Christians consider to be the words of God
were written by impostors
who, according to Ehrman, may have intended to
deceive their audiences
and and got away with it.
This is according to mainstream historians. So why
is Paul so important for us right now?
Well, the answer is
Paul of Tarsus was the first person in
recorded
history to claim that Jesus was crucified,
and no one other than Paul, Christian or
otherwise, explicitly mentions
that Jesus was crucified and any other document
we know of
until we get to Mark in 70 of
the common era, and of course, the evangelist
Mark was highly influenced by Pauline Christology.
In fact,
Paul is by far and away
the main character in the book of Acts.
I mean, he should really be called the
Acts of Paul.
Christian apologists insist
that surely the disciples believed that Jesus had
been crucified. I mean, this is a nice
claim, but there's no there's simply no compelling
evidence for it, nor is there any compelling
historical evidence that tells us what happened to
the original disciples.
All we have are later legends.
The so called epistles of Peter and James
are later forgeries
intended to smooth over Pauline
and Jamesonian hostilities. They were not written by
Peter and James, and we already mentioned that
the gospels of of of Matthew and John
are anonymous.
According to historians,
James the just,
right,
Ya'aqwuf had Siddiq,
was the leader of the apostles
after Jesus' departure
for 30 years, and yet we have no
record whatsoever
that James ever wrote anything. Are we really
to believe
that during the first 80 years of Christian
history, Paul was the only Christian in the
world who was writing letters
to various believing congregations.
Where on earth are the authentic
letters of James, Peter, Thomas, etcetera? Why do
we only have one side of the story?
James as head of the Jerusalem Nazarenes wrote
nothing,
really, for 30 years? Peter wrote nothing? Thomas
wrote nothing?
Doctor Steve Mason, he he said it like
this. He said it's like he said it's
like hearing one side of a telephone conversation.
Right? What's the other person saying?
We don't know. I mean, we can make
educated speculations,
but we don't know for certain. Where are
the books and gospels and epistles and histories
of the Jamesonian Jewish Christians of the 1st
century?
Why was the 1st 80 years of Christianity
scrubbed with a paw line sponge?
I mean, is not the Quran correct when
it says that the Christians disregarded
a significant portion of what was given to
them
by God? The
Quran is correct again.
Here's a quote from
former New Testament professor of Christian origins,
Burton Mack. Okay? He says,
quote, for almost 2000 years,
the Christian imagination
of Christian origins has echoed the gospel stories
contained in the New Testament.
Testament. That is not surprising.
The gospel accounts erased
the pre gospel histories.
Their inclusion within the church's New Testament consigned
other accounts
to oblivion,
end quote. Burton Mac on redescribing Christian origins.
You know, Josephus mentions
21 different Jesuses,
21 different Yeshuas,
according to Steve
Mason. The only undisputed mention of Yeshua Hanusri,
Jesus of Nazareth,
is when Josephus speaks of James
and the death of James in antiquities 20.
Many, many historians consider the testimony in Flavium
in book 18 to be a total fabrication.
Therefore, it is plausible that Josephus did not
even mention the death of Jesus by crucifixion.
James was much more important to Josephus
than Jesus.
And this actually makes sense from the perspective
of a non Christian, non confessional historian,
because James was the head of the Nazarenes
for almost 30 years. Jesus was a public
preacher for probably only 1 year.
Now a Christian apologist at this point will
say, what about the creed of 1 Corinthians
15? Right? The creed, the creed. This is
their sort of bread and butter. Right?
Paul said that he received it,
and then delivered it to the Corinthians.
He received it from the original disciples. This
is the claim.
Okay? First of all, what does the so
called creed say?
It says Christ died for our sins according
to the scriptures, and that he was buried,
and that he rose
again the 3rd day according to the scriptures.
Which scriptures? It's hard to tell. It continues.
And that and that he was seen by
Cephas, who's probably Peter.
The Aramaic name of Peter was Kephas,
It continues. Then of the 12, says Paul,
a bit strange, right? According to the gospels,
Peter was one of the 12, and Judas
is already dead.
Also in the gospels, women were the first
witnesses. I'll get to that later.
The creed continues.
After that, he was seen by more than
500 brethren at once, of whom the greater
part remain unto this day, but some are
fallen asleep.
After that, he was seen of James
and all of the apostles,
And last of all, he was seen of
me also.
Okay. So the point that Christian apologists want
to make here
is that Paul, quote unquote, received this ancient
creed directly from the disciples,
that the disciples taught him that Christ died
for our sins.
Okay? Etcetera.
At first glance, this seems like a good
argument. It seems like this is what Paul
was saying. However,
such an interpretation ignores
the broader context
of Paul's claims. Paul is extremely adamant
in his letter
to the Galatians that the gospel he is
preaching
is ukestincata
anthropon,
is not of human origin.
And he clarifies this in the next verse.
For I neither received it
of man, nor was I taught it,
but by the revelation,
apokolusaius,
of Jesus Christ. Elsewhere, after Paul claimed that
he met with apostles
in Jerusalem,
he wrote, as for those who were held
in high esteem, they added nothing to my
message.
Wow. So there you have it. Paul received,
quote, unquote, his gospel
from what he claimed was a was a
revelation of Christ, not from the disciples,
nor any human witnesses.
Notice that Paul used the same exact
verb,
paraleban,
in both 1 Corinthians 15:3, in the creed,
and in Galatians 12.
It was a so called revelation of Christ
that told Paul
that Christ died for our sins, etcetera.
He is not claiming that he received this
from the disciples.
In other words, the is not, the chain
of transmission,
of Christ died for our sins, etcetera, the
is not of the of the creed of
Christianity
begins with Paul historically.
Now I'm not saying that Paul invented the
crucifixion.
I do believe that there was a crucifixion
event
where probably multiple Jews were crucified
and that certain other Jews from the very
beginning
were under the impression that this
one crucified preblemaker was the same man who
instigated
a disturbance at the temple a few days
earlier, and I'll go step by step through
my plausible historical narrative
toward the end of my presentation, inshallah.
But for now, let me say this. I
think that rumors of Jesus' alleged crucifixion
trickled down from certain Jewish authorities in Jerusalem
into the general population
until it reached the ears of Saul of
Tarsus, aka
Paul, who was somewhere outside of Jerusalem.
Rumors also spread
of this man, Jesus, appearing to his disciples
after his apparent death on the cross. So
my contention is that while Paul wasn't the
1st Jew
to say that Jesus was crucified, he was,
however, the 1st professed,
quote, Christian
to maintain that Jesus was crucified,
and his main motivation
was Christology.
Okay?
Now Paul accepted
hearsay reports that had come out of Jerusalem
stating that Jesus had been put to death
on a cross, but could not explain how
it was also reported
that many people saw Jesus after his reported
death. You know, the simplest explanation, the most
historical explanation is what? That Jesus was never
killed, that he was never crucified,
not that he was killed, buried, and then
his disciples had mass hallucinations,
nor that he was killed and raised from
the dead. So Paul believed a false report.
You know, this happens.
You know, it was fake news, as they
say.
On the day of Uhud,
okay, there was a false report that the
prophet Muhammad was killed,
and we actually know what happened.
A companion named Mus'a'id ibn Umer, who resembled
the Prophet,
and who was the standard bearer on the
day on that day was killed by an
idolater
named Ibn Khamiya. Ibn Khamiya shouted, Khattel to
Muhammad.
I've killed Muhammad. And this rumor spread like
a wildfire.
And some of the companions actually retreated back
to Medina
to defend the city, and many residents of
Medina heard this false report as well. It
happens. So so Paul was able to reconcile
these reports
after having an epiphany,
what he calls an apocalypses,
a revelation that eventually led to a religion
called Christianity.
Now,
I encourage the viewers
to go back and watch the podcast that
we did on Paul versus James,
for more clarity. But here's what I'll say
about Paul for now.
And I'm not going to mince words, and
I apologize in advance. If some Christians
find this offensive. Probably this entire podcast
is a bit offensive to them.
But I think it's important to speak honestly,
and with clarity about these things. So I'm
gonna tell you what I really think. Okay?
So Paul of Tarsus was an ethnically
Jewish Roman citizen.
Okay? He was a traveling tent maker, an
amateur Hellenistic philosopher.
I think that Paul wanted to make it
big in philosophy.
Okay? He was a marginal religious Jew
who had also studied some stoicism,
middle platonism, epicureanism,
and he was familiar with the beliefs of
some of the popular mystery cults.
In fact, Tarsus, in the days of Paul,
was one of the major centers of Greco
Roman philosophy in the ancient world.
I believe that Paul was a very tormented
man. I mentioned this before. He admitted that
a messenger of Satan abused him.
He said that he had some sort of
thorn in his flesh.
And I agree with the opinion of scholars
who say that the thorn was some sore
some source
of continual annoyance or trouble.
You know, imagine running a marathon with a
rock in your shoe. Right?
It's a continual source of annoyance. It keeps
poking you. I think that Paul's thorn
was people constantly
denouncing him as a fraud.
Jews, pagans, and Christians.
This was continuous
throughout his entire life.
I do not believe Paul when he says
that he was a Pharisee,
and I certainly don't believe Luke, who claimed
that Paul was a student of Gamaliel.
After years of contemplating this issue, I have
come to lean towards the position that Paul
was basically a charlatan.
Paul was a self aggrandizing,
mean spirited deceiver, a con man, basically, a
snake oil salesman
who would say just about anything to get
fame and wealth. He wanted desperately to make
a name for himself. He was a prototype
of the televangelist
swindlers
who deceived their gullible audiences
for fame and money. I mean, just from
the subtext of 1 Corinthians,
I think it's I think it's very clear
that the Corinthians were seriously questioning
his apostolic
pedigree, legitimacy.
He says, am I not an apostle?
Have I not seen our Lord?
This is my defense to those who would
question my authority. I think there are several
reasons why people suspect
suspected Paul. For one thing, Paul deliberately misquoted
the Torah
to advance his theology. Right?
In 1 Corinthians, he quoted Deuteronomy 25:4
accurately,
but then makes this very bizarre midrash.
You know? He says he says, it is
written, you shall not muzzle an ox
while it is treading out the grain.
So what he means by this is that
you should all pay me money
for what I have done for you.
He says, in 1 Corinthians 911,
if we have sown spiritual seed among you,
is it too much if we reap a
material harvest from you? I mean, just watch
these popular preachers and televangelists.
The new testament Jesus actually said it was
easier for a camel
to pass through the eye of a needle
than for a rich man to enter paradise.
But if you listen to these preachers, they
say, you know, sow that seed and reap
that harvest,
paraphrasing Paul, all the time. In other words,
pay me, pay me money.
So I think that the so called Ebionites,
who were really the early Jamesonian Nazarenes, and
Ebionites is a pejorative term, I think that
they were onto something about Paul. He was
a deceiver and an apostate.
In first Corinthians 9,
Paul tells the Corinthians, you know, collect the
money, and when I get there, I'll give
it to the poor saints in Jerusalem.
You know? Okay.
In Romans 3, Paul refers to my lie,
as he puts it. My lie. Now there
are different ways that Christian apologists try to
explain what Paul may have meant here,
everything from
Paul was speaking pathetically
to Paul was quoting
an imaginary interlocutor,
but it seems to me that Paul was
caught in some lie. We don't exactly know
what,
and so he essentially says, if my if
a lie of mine
ended up glorifying God,
is it really still a sin?
This seems to be his argument.
This doesn't mean that Paul did not believe
in anything he was saying. I think he
did believe
that he was living in the end times.
I think he was sort of a half
believer, half deceiver
who would justify his deception in some way
to himself,
probably like most televangelists. You know, whatever made
these guys, you know, sleep at night,
that's what made Paul sleep at night.
I I also don't believe Paul when he
claimed to have met James
or his claim about withstanding Peter to his
face. I doubt that Paul ever personally knew
the disciples of Jesus,
but he knew of them. And I think
that James in Jerusalem was aware of Paul's
false claims
and would send missionaries to cities
that Paul had evangelized
to correct Paul's false gospel.
Paul claimed to have met these men, James
and Peter, because it gave him clout. It
bolstered his credibility
in the eyes of his followers, who were
being told to denounce him by the Nazarene
missionaries
sent by James.
So so so Paul saw an opportunity
to marry Judaism with Greco Roman religion,
and thus become the founder of a new
religious and philosophical
movement,
and he would make his teachings, I. E.
His gospel, as he puts it, the intersection
of 2 traditions,
Judaism and Hellenism.
According to Paul, the Jewish Messiah
was the latest iteration of a dying and
rising savior, man God, who vicariously atoned for
our sins. Now naturally, Paul knew next to
nothing about the historical
Jesus. He never met him, and frankly, did
not care much about his actual
ministry and teachings.
All he knew was that some Jewish authorities
were claiming
to have killed Jesus of Nazareth,
a man who allegedly claimed to be some
sort of messiah,
and yet many claimed that they saw him
alive after his alleged crucifixion. This was all
Paul needed to get his project off the
ground.
His entire gospel was formulated
around these two rumors, essentially,
that Jesus was killed by crucifixion
and that he was seen alive
thereafter.
So just to be clear again,
Paul was not the first person to suggest
that Jesus was crucified. This is not my
contention.
My contention is that Paul was the first
so called believer in Jesus as messiah
to insist that Jesus was crucified,
and he did this primarily for theological
reasons. We do not know whether the disciples
of Jesus believed that he was crucified,
and I think that there are good reasons
for maintaining
that they did not believe he was crucified.
Okay? The gospel writers who were not disciples
were Pauline Christians. They believed in these sort
of broad strokes of Paul's gospel, that Jesus
was killed by crucifixion for our sins
and was then resurrected in some sense. This
is the bare bones of Pauline Christology.
The gospel writers were also very much aware
of much dissent as to whether Jesus was
actually crucified,
and there's evidence of this in their gospels.
The gospels are essentially
extended passion narratives
that support the central Pauline message that Jesus
was the divine son of God who died
on the cross for our sins
then rose from the dead in some sense.
The evangelists presented their specific passion narratives
as being events that took place in history.
However, the primary goal of the gospel writers
was to impart theology,
not to give us accurate history. They wrote
history through the lens of their theology.
So these are polemical tractates.
The author of John admitted this in John
2031.
These things have been written in order to
convince you that Jesus is the Son of
God. And a close examination
of the passion narratives
leaves little doubt that the series of events
that they described
are highly implausible
from a historical standpoint,
and we'll go over these events in a
few minutes, inshallah. I'll show you what I
mean.
But let's first answer an important question
posed by doctor Bart Ehrman.
Okay?
This question has actually stumped many Muslim du'at,
callers to Islam.
His question is, who would make up a
crucified messiah?
Right? In other words, Jesus must have been
crucified because no
Jew would make up a crucified messiah. Crucified
messiah or killed messiah is an oxymoron.
What Jew would ever cook up such a
thing?
Well, in my mind, the answer is simple.
The answer is Paul of Tarsus.
So Paul was a highly Hellenized Jew
who said a lot of things
that the majority of Jews found offensive.
I think F. C. Bauer and Walter Bauer
got it right. Paul was a corrupter of
the gospel. I think Thomas Jefferson also held
this position
as an educated layman.
But even with that said,
Paul likely believed,
as did several Jews in the 1st century,
that the prophecies
of Daniel 9 were about to be fulfilled.
Right?
I believe that Paul was an apocalypticist.
He genuinely believed that the world as we
know it was about to end.
And in my opinion, Daniel 9 has has
nothing to do with the 1st century CE,
but many Jews in the 1st century did
believe that Daniel 9 was referring to their
time,
including most likely Paul. And in Daniel 9,
we are told that a messiah will be
cut off,
iqareth mashiach.
That is a messiah will be killed.
A messiah. There's no definite article in the
Hebrew. The term messiah, as you know, is
a very loose term in the Tanakh.
It could refer to a priest, a prophet,
or some military leader.
Now doctor Richard Carrier, who's an atheist and
a mythicist, although I think a very interesting
thinker and historian, he makes a good point
here. He says that the reason why Josephus
mentioned so many Jesuses,
that is so many Joshuas,
because Jesus' name,
Yeshua,
is essentially Joshua.
Right? A shortened form like Josh.
The reason why there were so many Jesuses
during Jesus' time
was because Jewish parents were naming their sons
after Israel's greatest warrior,
Joshua,
in hopes of him becoming
being martyred while fighting the Roman Interesting.
Due to this passage in Daniel 9. They
wanted to self fulfill this prophecy.
They wanted their sons to be this messiah.
So to answer Ehrman,
the idea of a dying or killed messiah
giving his life as a martyr
for the sake of saving his nation, as
it were, was not unheard of among Jews
in the pre Christian 1st century. Now Paul,
being an intensely ambitious amateur philosopher
and desperate to make a name for himself,
seized the opportunity
to marry this trendy Jewish idea of a
murdered messiah with the popular pagan notion
of a dying and rising savior man god.
But for Paul, Jesus wasn't simply a messiah.
He was the Davidic King Messiah, who whose
supposed resurrection
inaugurated
the coming kingdom of God, which was imminent.
Paul believed that it would manifest
in his lifetime,
and he was wrong.
So for Paul, the Danielic idea of a
martyred messiah
was significantly
and radically modified
theologically. Paul's messiah was the messiah
who saved people by literally dying for their
sins. So who would make up a crucified
messiah?
An ethnically Jewish,
apocalypticist,
and syncretistic
Hellenistic philosopher
named Paul of Tarsus. That's who.
I'll have to I'll have to remember that
string of adjectives. It's very good in in
my next next time I mentioned who Paulus
Tarsus was.
Yes.
And and
now,
so let's let's look let's look briefly at
a couple of passages in Paul's letters.
Okay? 1 to the Galatians and 1 to
the Corinthians. So this Galatians 3 and first
Corinthians 1. Okay. The the alleged crucifixion
was definitely a point of major contention
among the congregations that Paul had founded.
This is just a fact,
and this is what the Quran says. The
Quran says that there was ikhtilaf
among the early Christians about the supposed crucifixion.
Again, that's 4 157, chapter 4 verse 157
of the Quran. The Quran is correct. There
was a plurality of Christianities
even in Paul's day.
The Quran is correct about this. I personally
believe that Paul wrote his letter to the
Galatians
because he was being exposed as a fraud.
You know, apostles sent by James from Jerusalem
traveled to Galatia to correct Paul's deviant teachings.
Paul had to do some major damage control.
So just some quick background information. So Paul
had a big problem
on his hands when writing his letter to
the Galatians. So number 1, he needed to
convince his congregation that his gospel message
was consistent with that of James, because James
was universally
recognized as the head of the Nazarenes
after Jesus.
And number 2,
he had to simultaneously
explain why the Jamesonian
apostles,
who must have appealed to James when they
visited Galatia in Paul's wake,
were, in Paul's words, false brethren, hypocrites, and
teachers of a different gospel. I mean, we
can only imagine the confusing scene in Galatia.
The Galatians must have been scratching their heads
and wondering
why their seemingly trustworthy teacher, Paul, had taught
them doctrines
that did not agree with Jesus'
successor
brother and recognized head of the entire messianic
movement, James the Just. So in chapter 1
of of Galatians,
Paul tried to mitigate this tension
by insisting that despite receiving his gospel from
no man,
he did nonetheless
eventually go to Jerusalem
to meet with Peter and James. And Paul
mentioned this while swearing before God that he
was not lying. I'm not lying. I'm not
lying. This is probably because the apostles were
calling him a liar. Paul's desperate oath to
the Galatians reveals an interesting potential
subtext.
It is likely that the Jamesonian apostles
accused Paul of being an unauthorized
teacher of the gospel
and a false apostle of Jesus. It is
also likely that the apostles asked the Galatians,
as they had asked the Corinthians,
to demand Paul to produce a letter of
recommendation
from James and ijazah, a teaching license
from James. Only James authorized apostles.
Everyone answered to James. Interestingly,
interestingly,
Marcion
was the early
Christian
heretic.
He had an early version of Galatians that
he quoted
in his book, the Apostolicon.
He died around 160 of the common era.
And in Marcion's
version of Galatians,
verses
18 to 24 of chapter 1,
were not even there. In other words, Paul's
claim
of visiting Jerusalem and meeting James and Peter
is not there. Wow. Naturally,
Tertullian
and other early church fathers
accused Marcion of truncating and falsifying the text.
However, many scholars maintain that Marcion's
version
may have
represented, in many respects, an earlier form of
Galatians
that was subsequently
interpolated by the proto orthodox
to bolster the teachings and claims of Paul.
The
oldest extant manuscript of Galatians is called P
46.
Okay? It's dated to 200 of the common
era,
perhaps as early as 175.
But even if we take the permanence postquette,
like the early date of 175, that's a
120 years after Paul wrote the original.
Nonetheless,
in chapter 2, Paul seems to have doubled
down on his claims. He boldly asserted that
14 years after his initial meeting with James,
he returned to Jerusalem to preach the gospel
there as well.
It was then, claims Paul, that James, Cephas,
and John, who seemed to be pillars, in
Paul's words, so called pillars, after having recognized
the, quote, grace that was given to Paul,
bestowed upon him, as well as Barnabas, the
right hands of fellowship. And just as a
side note, Bart Ehrman is inclined to the
position that Paul claimed to be the apostle
to the nations of Isaiah 42.
And we know from the previous podcast
that the servant of Isaiah 42 is clearly
the prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alaihi sallam.
Right? In in Galatians,
Paul claimed that he went to Arabia
for 3 years.
Why?
Because the servant of Isaiah 42 will convert
the Kedarites
and the Nabataeans, the Arabs.
Isaiah 42 is very clear about this. Of
course, Paul failed in Arabia
if, and it's a big if, if he
was even telling the truth that he did
in fact go to Arabia, but I doubt
he actually went to Arabia. I don't think
Paul can be trusted.
So Paul claimed that the pillars authorized him,
right, as a fellow apostle,
Although even these verses are contested as well.
After that point, Paul felt it was necessary,
to score points with the Galatians at Peter's
expense.
So he briefly recounted an incident that supposedly
took place in Antioch,
during which Peter revealed his own, quote, hypocrisy
by refusing to continue to eat with gentiles
when Peter saw that certain men from James
had arrived.
Paul then claimed that Peter and other Jews
who committed
hypocrisy with him
were not following the, quote, truth of the
gospel.
So Paul justified his claim by stating that
since Peter had already
discarded the Jewish laws and was living like
a gentile,
why did Peter now require gentiles
to follow Jewish laws?
Paul wrote that he confronted Peter to his
face
in front of all the people, because Peter
was worthy of condemnation. This is what Paul
is saying to the Galatians about some supposed
event that happened in Antioch.
The subtext here, I think, is very subtle.
So Paul must have meant that the men
from James
were the real distorters and hypocrites. It was
their presence that caused Peter to deviate
from the gospel according to Paul. You see,
Paul cannot explicitly condemn James.
James was too big of a figure
in the early messianic movement. However, Paul implies
that the men that James sent to Antioch
must have falsely represented James
and that this misrepresentation
must have happened yet again in Galatia
when they condemned Paul.
The Jamesonian
apostles were the enemies, and not necessarily
James himself. I think This is what Paul
is trying to say. Therefore, in one fell
swoop, Paul was able to do 3 things.
Number 1, denounce
the Jamesonian messengers who denounced him. Number 2,
demonstrate his own superiority over Peter, who buckled
under the pressure of the notorious false apostles,
and number 3,
express an ambivalence towards James.
I mean, it would have been nice if
Peter had responded
with a with a letter of his own
to the Galatians in response to Paul's
grievous claims of him being a hypocrite,
a coward, a deviator,
and a closet antinomian.
Unfortunately, there's nothing that can be authentically dated
to that time. Again, with Paul, we only
have one side of the conversation.
For me, Paul's story of his showdown with
Peter in Antioch reeks of fabrication.
I mean, if Peter cannot get the gospel
right
in in in the 1 to 3 years
that he spent with the actual historical Jesus,
what makes us think that Paul got it
right after having a one minute conversation with
a vision that he claimed was Jesus? If
Paul's understanding of the gospel based upon his
vision caused him to be in direct opposition
to the understandings of Jesus' actual disciples,
such as Peter and James, then what does
it say about Paul's vision? If Jesus could
just reveal the truth of the gospel, as
Paul puts it, to Paul in an instant,
why did Jesus bother
to hand select and teach and train
a bunch of disciples who are ultimately going
to get it wrong anyway
and then forsake Jesus in his most dire
time of need?
You know, a Christian once told me,
Paul was right.
Peter was known for misunderstanding Jesus. In fact,
Jesus himself called Peter,
Satan at one point
due to Peter's failure
to grasp his message. Peter also denied knowing
Jesus three times because he was a coward.
This is what the gospels say.
Now, yes, this is true, but but the
Christian often forgets that the gospels were written
after
all of Paul's genuine letters were composed
and widely circulated,
and that the positions of Paul, I would
say the lies of Paul,
most likely created
many of the narratives
in the gospel accounts. In other words, Paul
is the indirect author of the gospels.
In fact, James was completely written out of
the gospels,
even though independent historical sources
such as Josephus tell
us that he was the leader of the
messianic movement after Jesus.
And if it were if if it were
not for the, the the tiny
epistle of James
tucked in somewhere in the back of the
Christian canon,
the leader of the early Nazarenes for 30
years,
would have been basically written out of the
entire New Testament.
Even in Acts, James is mentioned
about 4 times. I mean, Paul is mentioned
a 127
times.
If James was an unbeliever
during Jesus' entire ministry,
as most Christians claim, why would he be
selected as the leader of the apostles
if his knowledge of the gospel and experiences
with Jesus
drastically paled in comparison
to any other disciple, including Judas, whom I
doubt ever existed, by the way. I'll get
to that later.
Clearly, the author of Acts had an anti
Jamesonian bias.
He mentioned the leader of the entire Jesus
movement
4 times, but Paul, his hero, 127
times. Again, is this Acts of the Apostles
or the Acts of Paul?
Why did the early Pauline Christians,
including the gospel writers, claim that James was
an unbeliever
during the life of Jesus? Well, the claims
of Paul in his epistles were highly influential.
In his famous, quote, creed, Paul said that
he he said that the resurrected Jesus
appeared to Cephas, right,
then the 12, I. E. The disciples,
then 500, then James, and then to me.
Paul knows that he himself is a,
what do you call them? Johnny come lately.
Right? That he wasn't a disciple.
But notice where Paul places James, at the
end just before himself.
It doesn't seem to me that Paul is
giving deference to James. It seems to me
that Paul is putting himself on par with
James.
But then he goes even further, and he
says, but by the grace of God, I
am what I am, and his grace toward
me has not been in vain. On the
contrary, I worked harder
than any of them. Uh-huh. 1st Corinthians 1510.
Paul claimed to be better
But but Paul is Paul is sorry. Just
a would would highlight the obvious here. But
Paul is great at boasting, boasting about his
ministry, boasting about his gospel, boasting about his
career,
you know, which sits sits very ill with
a kind of humble kind of follower of
Jesus that we would expect, I think. Right.
Yeah. So let's examine what Paul wrote to
the Galatians at the beginning of chapter 3
of his epistle.
This is key for a present discussion. Paul
severely reprimanded the Galatians for allowing themselves to
be swayed
or bewitched, according to Paul,
by the Jerusalem apostles sent from James, I.
E. Nazarenes,
into believing a different gospel than his own.
So Paul wrote, oh, foolish Galatians, who has
bewitched you that you should not obey the
truth?
Before your very eyes,
Jesus
Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.
So this verse is usually overlooked
or interpreted in a very basic sense without
really analyzing
its potentially
explosive significance.
The standard meaning is that the Galatians were
convinced by Paul's opponents
that the crucifixion of Jesus did not free
them from the obligations
of the Jewish law. However, the wording of
the verse, as well as its overall context,
may suggest
that Paul's opponents who arrived in Galatia
after Paul's initial visit
not only advocated adherence to Jewish law, but
also disagreed with Paul's very portrayal
of Jesus being crucified,
that they repudiated the cross altogether,
and that Paul himself was a source
of the crucified Jesus Christ. It was as
if Paul was saying, why do you now
maintain
that Jesus was not crucified? Didn't I convince
you that He was? Didn't I portray
in Greek? Didn't I portray Him
as crucified?
It appears that Paul's apostolic opponents
also visited Corinth in his wake. Right? In
his second letter to the Corinthians,
he cautioned his congregation
to not let their minds be corrupted by
accepting alam Iesun, another Jesus.
Then Paul went on to reveal that his
opponents,
whom he mockingly referred to as super apostles,
were of Jewish descent. Right? So he's a
and he says, are they Hebrews? So am
I. Are they Israelites?
So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham?
So am I. Are they ministers of Christ?
And then he says, I sound like a
fool, but I served him more.
Paul then provided a laundry list of his
alleged sufferings
for the sake of Christ, which included being
beaten, stone flogged,
shipwrecked, as well as
a daring escape from the grip of the
governor of Damascus by being lowered in a
basket through a window. I mean, this was
supposed to convince his audience that he was
truly sincere and more worthy of respect
than his opponents who had actual teaching authority
from James.
So
it is very plausible that the subtext of
the book of Galatians
is that apostles from James who went to
Galatia
repudiated the cross altogether
and condemned Paul for teaching a false gospel,
where are the writings of James and Peter
teaching that Jesus was crucified and resurrected?
Where? Elsewhere in Galatians,
Paul told us that he noticed that during
his first trip to to Jerusalem,
he says there were many churches in Christ
sprawled across Judea. Where are the writings of
these churches that speak of Jesus' crucifixion and
resurrection? Where?
Perhaps there were writings, but the crucifixion was
nowhere.
Why is it that the first believer
in Jesus'
messiahship
to claim that Jesus was
crucified
in recorded history was Paul, a man who
admittedly persecuted
Jesus' disciples before his Damascus road conversion
and slandered and ridiculed them after.
Now, before we get to the gospels,
let me take a quick look at 1st
Corinthians 1.
So Paul wrote this letter
because he was informed about massive internal
quarreling,
what he calls Eris. Okay? Eris,
which was also the name of the Greek
god of strife.
Eris in Arabic is Ikhtilaf.
Paul wrote, this is in 1st Corinthians 112,
some of you say, I am of Paul,
I e follow Paul.
Others say, I am of Apollos,
or I am of Kepha, Peter,
or I am of Christ.
So this verse is very strange.
This is,
did I quote this? Yeah. 1st Corinthian so
this is 1st Corinthians 112. It's very strange
and has been notoriously difficult to make sense
of it throughout the centuries.
So it seems that Paul was told by
certain
Paul, sorry. It seems that Paul was told
that certain competing
factions
had arisen in Corinth
and that each faction championed its own teacher
as authentically teaching the gospel.
Right? Thus, the followers of Peter disagreed with
those of Paul, and both both disagreed
with those of Apollos.
But what was the nature of their ikhtila
fat, of their disagreements?
And what are we to make of those
who disagreed with Paul, Apollos,
and Peter
and preferred to follow Christ?
Now Paul goes on to say, in essence,
that we should all follow Christ. Right? He
says, is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified?
But what Paul really meant was that the
Corinthians
should follow Christ
by following him, Paul. And this is what
he says later explicitly.
Follow me because I follow Christ.
In in Philippians 3 17, he says, brothers
and sisters, join in following me. He tells
the Corinthians, if you are not married, follow
me. Just be celibate.
Right? The world's about to end anyway.
What we do know is that Paul reprimanded
the Corinthians that when he first came to
them,
he did not try to speak with impressive
speech or wise arguments, he says, but only
to present
Jesus Christ
and Him crucified.
So Paul is saying
that he could have sort of philosophically
elaborated upon his teachings, but at the bare
minimum, the Corinthians must believe that Jesus,
the Messiah, was crucified. If you don't believe
that, you don't believe in my gospel.
Right? So in 1 Corinthians 1, it is
very likely
that the crucifixion of Jesus was the main
cause
of the dissension,
the heiress among the different factions,
with some even rejecting Christ altogether because of
it. Perhaps some of the Corinthians were influenced
by the prevalent Jewish understanding,
and some by a philosophical Greek understanding, because
Paul stated, but we preach Christ crucified
and impenitent unto the Jews
and an absurdity unto the Greeks.
That is, for the Jews, the idea of
the sort of long awaited Davidic King Messiah
being crucified
was an oxymoronic
scandal, skandalon.
While for the Greek wise men, I. E.
Philosophers,
the notion of a literal God dying for
our sins
was morian, nonsense. Only uneducated fools believed in
the literalness of such mythology
as Celsus once
pointed out.
So so so Paul did not know the
exact extent of the quarreling among the Corinthian
factions,
but only that it had something to do
with the original his original pronouncement to them
that Christ was crucified and that Peter's name
was thrown into the mix.
Okay? Paul wanted his congregation to rest assured
that he and Peter, and James, for that
matter, were on the same wavelength about the
crucifixion
despite what they may have heard to the
contrary.
It is possible
that when Paul stated that the crucifixion of
Christ
was an impediment or stumbling block
to the Jews,
by Jew, he meant both non Christian Jews
as well as Jewish Christians. This is possible
because he refers to Peter as a Jew
in Galatians.
Maybe the faction of Peter in Corinth
denied
Jesus' crucifixion.
Again, Paul is the indirect author of the
gospels.
This is a really important point that Paul
is the indirect author
of the gospels.
In Mark,
why does the mark in Jesus really the
Pauline Jesus, that's really who it is, why
does the mark in Jesus
refer to Peter as Satan?
Well, Jesus in quotes
says that he will suffer, be rejected, and
be killed.
When Peter heard this, he took Jesus aside
and started rebuking him. So then the mark
in Jesus shouted, get behind me, Satan,
for you are setting your mind not on
divine things,
but on earthly things. Now what does Paul
say about his opponents in Philippians 3? He
calls them dogs who mutilate the flesh. So
these are Jewish Christians who practice circumcision.
Then he's then he calls them enemies of
the cross
who, quote, set their minds on earthly
things.
What did, quote, Jesus say to Peter in
Mark 833?
He said that he was setting his mind
on earthly things. The Markan,
aka Paul line Jesus, calls Peter Satan
for objecting to Jesus being killed
and says his mind is set on earthly
things. Paul calls his opponents in Philippians
enemies of the cross
and says their minds are set on earthly
things. It is plausible that they were followers
of Peter in Paul's day who opposed
Paul's notion that Jesus was killed.
I think Mark is well aware during his
time that there were Jewish Christians who claimed
Sanad. They claimed a link to Peter and
denied the crucifixion. This is why the Mark
and Jesus called Peter
Satan, because Paul called the followers of Peter
enemies of the cross
20 years earlier for plausibly denying that Jesus
was killed. Now whatever the disputes actually entailed,
we will sadly never know for certain. We
do know, however, that eventually Jewish Christian apostles
with letters of authorization from James, visited Corinth
and preached another Jesus unto the Corinthians
that diametrically
opposed Paul's teachings.
So to me, it seems that James was
informed that Paul was throwing his good name
around to bolster the authority of his own
deviant gospel.
By the end of Paul's second letter to
the Corinthians, he warns the Corinthians
that if they continue seeking proof
that Christ genuinely
speaks through him
in other words, if they keep questioning
Paul's authority and legitimacy,
Paul will confront them harshly,
and they will be punished by Christ. He
tells them to not be deceived
by a seemingly weak Christ
hanging
on the cross.
Christ will demonstrate His power when He judges
them. So
it is historically plausible that there were factions
of Christians
living in Galatia
and Corinth
and Philippi who repudiated the crucifixion altogether. Yes,
it is also plausible that these Christians
were persuaded by Jewish Christians
who were teaching another gospel and another Jesus
compared to what Paul was teaching.
They were teaching uncrucified
Jesus. This is totally plausible.
Now let's move on to the Gospels.
Most historians believe
in the existence of q, right, Bart Ehrman
certainly does. Q, also known as the sayings
gospel,
was a written source of Jesus' sayings that
Matthew and Luke used when writing their gospels.
I've spoken of q in the past, so
I'll keep it brief.
In addition to the subtext of Paul's letters,
q is absolutely key for understanding
what non Pauline Christians believed about Jesus.
How? Well, q was most likely written in
the fifties independent
of Paul.
Now q probably had different strata of authorship
over several years.
But even despite this, let me quote what
John Dominic Crossan said about Q. This is
a direct quote from JD Crossan. There is
nothing, nothing, nothing
in the gospel according to Q about the
crucifixion of Jesus
or the resurrection of Jesus.
Wow. There is nothing, nothing, nothing in the
gospel according to Q about the crucifixion of
Jesus or the resurrection of Jesus, JD Cross.
In other words, the passion narratives of Matthew
and Luke,
right, either come from Mark,
really a redaction of Mark, or they are
unique to their own gospel accounts, what textual
critics
call special m and l material, special Methian
and Lucian material. And of course Sorry.
I I didn't mean to interrupt your flow.
But do do you do you have the
source of John Dominic Crossan?
Which book he said that in? Nothing. Nothing.
Nothing. This was in a podcast, and I
I can, I'll I'll
send it to you inshallah. Alright. I didn't
realize. Okay. Thank you. Sorry I didn't drop.
It was in a recent podcast. Oh, really?
Gosh. Oh, yeah.
I'll send that to you, inshallah. So so
let me say that again. According to historians,
the earliest known source of the gospels
said nothing about the crucifixion and resurrection of
Jesus.
In addition to this, the traditions found in
q are plausibly representative
of Jamesonian Christianity,
pre Pauline Nazarene Christianity, Jewish Christianity.
Is it plausible that the community that authored
q
did not believe in the crucifixion of Jesus?
Yes. It is plausible.
Doctor Dennis McDonald,
reconstructed the contents of q,
which he calls the first gospel,
first gospel compared to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John. Q is the first gospel. He says
that q was not written by a Christian,
but by a Jew. He means a messianic
Jew, a Jew who believes in Jesus but
not in the Pauline sense. He says in
q, there is no salvation by Jesus because
of his crucifixion,
end quote. And in fact, there is no
crucifixion. According to McDonald,
Jesus is making the Jewish law more compatible
and more compassionate for people who are sort
of on the margins of society, and this
is why Jesus
has these arguments with the Pharisees.
He says that when you demythologize
Jesus, you get a Jewish reformer,
you get a prophet
and teacher of a more relaxed form
of the law of Moses. This is very
close to what the Quran says.
Jesus is quoted in the Quran, I have
come to confirm the Torah before me and
to make lawful for you
some of what was unlawful. So fear God
and obey me. God is my lord and
your lord. Worship him. This is a straight
path. Now as I said earlier,
the four gospels are the main, quote, historical
sources
of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.
And here's something else about the gospels. Just
as the,
divine status of Jesus increases
as we move chronologically
through the gospels, you know, this evolution
of Christology from Mark to John that James
Dunn and Bart Ehrman talk about, Likewise, the
evangelists want to increasingly
convince
their readers that Jesus was crucified,
And one way in which they do this
is by exaggerating
the events surrounding the crucifixion.
So in Mark, darkness came over the whole
land,
and the curtain of the temple was torn
in 2. Okay? In Matthew, there's darkness. The
curtain tears, but there's also an earthquake
and a zombie apocalypse.
Many Jewish saints were resurrected,
and they walked around Jerusalem,
appearing to many, according to Matthew.
Some contemporary evangelical scholars
have admitted that this is most likely a
legend,
and these include doctor Mike Lacona, who debated
me several years
ago, and back then defended the absolute historicity
of the crucifixion and resurrection accounts in the
New Testament. It seems maybe he's changed some
of his views in more recent years. In
his book, he referred to the resurrection of
the saints
as poetical
and an embellishment and
special effects.
Right? So Lacona's new position
has invited upon himself
the wrath of many Christian apologists,
including the notorious Norman Giesler
of answering Islam fame. Let me quote you
Norman Gisler.
He said he, meaning Lacona, claims that Matthew
is using a Greco Roman literary genre,
which is a flexible genre
in which, and now he's quoting from Lacona
from his book, The Resurrection of Jesus, page
34,
in which it is often difficult
to determine where history ends and legend begins.
Wow. Lacona also this is now Giesler again.
Lacona also believes that other New Testament texts
may be legends, such as the mob falling
backward at Jesus' claim, I am he, in
John 18, and the presence of angels at
the tomb recorded in all 4 gospels.
So this is very interesting. Lacona admits that
this event in Matthew sounds a lot like
Plutarch's death of Romulus.
It's probably
a legend.
Now Luke does not mention the rising of
the saints from the dead.
The author of John does something amazing. John,
I'll just call him John for convenience.
John has the advantage of hindsight. So in
light of new developments
among the Christian community, John can correct and
revise elements
in the synoptic passion narratives. Right?
John moves the day of the crucifixion up
one day
to the day of the Passover preparation
when the lambs were being slaughtered. John is
making a theological
point here. Again, this is history made subordinate
to theology.
Either John is right or the Synoptics are
right,
but both cannot be right, and Jesus was
not crucified twice.
But both can also be wrong.
John eliminates Simon of Cyrene bearing Jesus' cross,
saying that Jesus bore his own cross.
John has Jesus impaled on the cross,
and he has Jesus' body anointed
before his burial,
all contradicting
the Synoptics
and all made to demonstrate
that Jesus was not substituted, he did not
swoon,
he was dead on the cross and buried
in the tomb. Now, the so called gospel
of Peter was written after John,
And by the time we get to that
gospel,
the church father said, okay, enough is enough.
In the gospel of Peter, the cross comes
out of the tomb
and starts speaking to people.
The the early father said, we can deal
with saints rising from the dead, but not
with a talking cross.
So we go from Mark, where Pilate marveled,
is he dead already? And no one sees
a resurrected Jesus, all the way to a
talking cross in Peter, so called gospel of
Peter. Matthew, Luke, John, and Peter increasingly
trying to convince their readers
that Jesus was crucified. Now
why was there an why was there an
increased
insistence
upon the divinity of Jesus
from Mark to John, according to historians?
The answer is because the evangelists
were responding to Christians
who differed about
the divinity of Jesus.
I would argue that this is the same
reason why we also see
an increased insistence
upon the crucifixion of Jesus.
The evangelists were responding to Christians who differed
about his crucifixion. This makes total sense.
So, okay,
let's let's examine the
let's examine the passion narratives of the gospels.
Okay? And you will see that event after
event
in these passion narratives
is either historically
implausible,
okay, or most likely myth,
allegory, or legend. That is to say, the
author is making a theological point, not relating
a natural event in history. Yet these gospels
are the main sources
that establish the quote, most solid fact of
history
that Jesus was crucified.
My contention is that it is very plausible
that every event,
including the so called crucifixion of Jesus in
these gospels,
is legend.
Cue, the earliest historical source of the gospels,
written independently of Paul, did not have a
passion narrative.
In Q, Jesus did not say, my God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me? He
did not say, father, into your hands I
commend my spirit. He did not say, it
is finished. He did not say, father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do.
He did not speak to his crossmates.
He did not promise one of them paradise.
He did not speak to Mary and the
beloved disciple from the cross.
The author of Q recorded none of these
things. Why? Because he probably never heard them.
Why? Because Jesus was probably never crucified.
And here I have to recommend a scholar,
an underrated scholar, doctor. Dennis McDonald. So he's
a former fundamentalist Baptist
pastor and the son of a fundamentalist Baptist
pastor, and he ended up getting a PhD
from Harvard, and he's been professor of New
Testament
and Christian origins at Claremont Graduate University. So
his book is called Mythologizing
Jesus, From Jewish Teacher
to Epic Hero,
and also a book called The Gospels in
Homer. So Doctor. Macdonald, he highlights a major
blind spot
in New Testament historical scholarship, a major blind
spot,
and that is Hellenistic
literary mimesis,
or more specifically,
Homeric
literary
mimesis.
So doctor McDonald is not a mythicist. Okay?
So he affirms the historical Jesus.
What is Homeric literary mimesis or mimesis criticism?
So it is this notion that the gospel
writers are borrowing stories and events
from the lives of Homeric Greek heroes like
Odysseus,
revising these stories to fit their narratives
and replacing those heroes with Jesus.
In other words, these events are not historical.
The highly educated gospel writers knew fully well
that many of these events never happened,
and their educated Greek audiences knew that these
events probably never happened. This is the flexible
genre that Laconia was talking about. Don't forget
that Mark, for for instance,
was a highly educated Greek convert who definitely
studied Homer, Hesiod, and Herodotus. This was the
standard Greek curriculum
at his time.
The passion narratives in the gospels
were written as literary works of art.
They were written to make theological and philosophical
points.
Okay? For Mark, historical accuracy
was very much in the background,
and when he does present history, he does
it through the lens of his Christology. And
of course, Matthew and Luke heavily depended upon
Mark. This is also why the gospel writers
constantly tell us that Jesus was walking and
teaching,
walking and teaching, walking. What is the significance
of emphasizing that Jesus was a walking teacher?
Well, the Greek verb for walking is peripateo.
The peripatetics
were a recent 1000000 philosophers. Aristotle
was famous for walking around the Lyceum
and teaching his students.
The gospel writers want to present Jesus
as the new great teacher, the new Aristotle
for the Greco Roman audiences.
It was only when huge masses of uneducated
Greek speeding
Greek speaking Christians
began hearing these gospels that all of these
events mentioned in these texts
began to be seen as true and literal,
that they forgot the genre of literature. So
let's start with the anointing of Jesus
by a certain woman. Okay? So we can
call this,
event number 1,
and I'll go in chronological order more or
less. Okay? So in all four gospels,
we're told that some woman takes oil and
anoints Jesus prior to the passion narrative.
In Mark and Matthew, this happens in Bethany
in the house of Simon the leper. This
woman is not named, and she anoints Jesus'
head. In Luke, this happens in a Pharisee's
house, and the woman anoints Jesus' feet with
oil and with her tears.
In John,
the woman is identified explicitly as Mary Magdalene,
and she anoints his feet as well.
Now, in book
in in Odyssey book 19,
after a long journey,
Odysseus returns home to Ithaca dressed as a
beggar.
His wife Penelope
tells his old wet nurse and maid Eurycleia
to wash his feet
and later anoint him with oil.
While she washes his feet, she notices his
childhood scar,
and Odysseus says to her, don't tell anyone,
or else I'll be killed.
So we have this theme of secrecy, and
this is very prevalent in Mark. Right? William
Reid, he calls this the Mark in messianic
secret. Macdonald calls this a Homeric borrowing.
Now Eurycleia
then dropped Odysseus's foot in the vessel after
recognizing him.
She is the only one who recognizes him.
In Mark 14, the woman in Bethany
who anoints Jesus does this because she is
the only one who recognizes that Jesus will
die.
Now what was the name of this woman
in the Odyssey?
Eurycleia.
Eurycleia means renown
far and wide.
What does the New Testament Jesus say about
the woman who washed his feet? He says,
wherever the good news is preached about the
world,
this woman's deed will be remembered and discussed.
In other words,
this woman's deed will be uracleia,
known and renowned
far and wide.
Now, of course, there are differences between these
two accounts,
but the literary points of contact just seem
too many
to be coincidental.
It seems that Mark based his story about
Jesus
upon Odysseus.
Furthermore, it is totally haram, it is totally
forbidden,
for a woman to touch a man whom
she is not related to according to Jewish
law. So if this story is true, then
the New Testament Jesus is a sinner according
to
his own law. Now,
I'm not saying that this story
definitely never happened.
Nothing is definitive.
You know, a Christian might say here that
this is a coincidence
or that God engineered this event
in this way in order to facilitate
the conversion of the pagans, and maybe some
people find these arguments persuasive.
What I am saying is that from within
the paradigm
of modern secular history,
this story is highly implausible.
Therefore, while Mark believed that Jesus existed,
it is reasonable to conclude that this specific
event never happened to Jesus. Mark is deliberately
appealing to his Greco Roman audience. This is
deliberate.
Mark wants Jesus to be the new Odysseus,
the new hero.
This is Homeric literary mimesis,
so probably not historical.
Now doctor McDonald says that Bart Ehrman is
resistant to this methodology,
and yet Ehrman offers no alternative explanation. He
just refuses
to recognize these parallels,
and this is because the dominant way to
deal with inconvenient truths
is to deny or ignore them. And McDonald
also said that Ehrman,
he would have to rewrite
half of his famous
intro to the New Testament
if he were to omit Homeric
mimesis of of of the New Testament.
Of course, he doesn't wanna do that. You
know? So much for induction.
Event number 2, the last supper.
So the gospels tell us that a Jewish
rabbi and messianic claimant
celebrated a Passover meal by ordering his disciples
to drink his blood and eat his flesh.
For a Jew, this would be totally and
absolutely revolting,
but in various forms of paganism,
theophagy, or eating one's god, was a common
ritual. So this is highly questionable historically.
It is socially and theologically out of whack
in its supposed context.
I think that Mark created
the Last Supper narrative because of something in
Paul. Again, Paul is the indirect author of
the gospels. Paul says, on the night he
was delivered, he took bread.
Paul also calls Jesus, quote, our Passover lamb
in 1 Corinthians 5:7. It seems to me
that Mark used these statements to create his
last supper narrative and made the Last Supper
a Passover meal. The Last Supper is most
likely not historical.
Event number 3, the garden scene.
In book 12 of the Odyssey,
Odysseus and his men face a great temptation
on the island of Thrinacia.
Wherever Whatever they do, they cannot harm the
sacred cattle of the sun god Helios.
Odysseus goes into the interior of the island
alone to pray
and falls asleep while his men in the
boats
remain awake.
Eventually, his men revolt and slaughter the sacred
cattle.
This is reversed by the gospels. Jesus goes
alone into the interior of the Garden of
Gethsemane to pray, and is tempted to not
go through with his suicide mission,
and he stays awake while his disciples sleep.
Eventually, his disciples
forsake him and flee.
So McDonald says that this does not seem
like a coincidence.
This is Homeric
literary mimesis.
This whole garden scene
is plausibly
not historical.
Event number 4, the naked young man.
In Mark, and only in Mark, we are
told that a crowd that when the crowd
arrived to arrest Jesus in the garden,
a young man, a nianistas,
who had followed Jesus there was wearing nothing
but a linen cloth, a sindon.
This is Mark 14.
When the men grabbed
this young man, he managed to slip out
of his linen cloth and run away naked.
The identity of this man has baffled scholars
for centuries.
Two chapters later, when the women go to
the empty tomb,
they see the same young man,
Nielanychas,
dressed in a white robe sitting in the
tomb,
and he tells him to go to Galilee.
This is not an angel in Mark.
This is not an angel.
So we have a young companion of Jesus,
who was naked and is now clothed. According
to Mimesis' critics,
this young man is Mark's variation
of Homer's El Penor.
El Panor was the youngest companion of Odysseus,
who died an untimely death in Odyssey Book
10. In Book 11, the soul of El
Panor comes out of the netherworld
and greets Odysseus
and asks Odysseus to bury him. In popular
pre
Christian art, Elpenor was depicted in this scene
as naked
to symbolize his soul,
so then Odysseus goes back and buries Elpenor
in a tomb by shrouding his body.
A young companion of Odysseus was naked and
is now clothed.
Again, maybe this really happened. Maybe this is
a coincidence, but it is highly unlikely.
Event number 5,
the person of Judas Iscariot.
I think this also resonates with something Paul
said,
but was interpreted with much license by Mark.
So again, in 1st Corinthians 11/23, Paul says,
on the night he was handed over or
delivered,
not betrayed.
So pro didomy in Koine Greek, in New
Testament Greek,
means to betray, but Paul didn't say that.
Paul said that Jesus was paradidomi,
handed over, handed over presumably by God to
be sacrificed. This is most likely what Paul
meant.
In fact, Paul used the same verb to
mean exactly this
earlier in the very same verse.
He said, for I received from the Lord
that which I also delivered,
to you.
The lord Jesus, on the night he was
delivered, took bread.
I don't think Paul had knowledge of Judas,
so I think that Mark
misinterpreted this to mean betrayed, or more likely,
Mark decided, for the purposes of telling a
good dramatic story,
that he was going to interpret parodidomiae
as betrayed.
It's good storytelling.
It adds to the pathos of the story.
You know, Paul did say, however, that the
Jews are unpleasing to God and contrary to
all men. So Mark invented a betrayer
whose name was,
drum roll, please,
a Jew from the cities,
Yehuda Ish Karioth,
Judas Iscariot.
Who betrayed Jesus and his country bumpkin disciples?
A wily,
deceitful,
thieving,
city slicking
Jew.
This is a mark in anti Jewish trope.
Gosh. This Jewish character is so evil,
he even identifies
Jesus to the temple guards
by kissing him. What is Mark really saying
here? Even if a Jew appears friendly and
loving, he's not to be trusted?
Paul famously said
that the resurrected Christ appeared to the 12.
This is just further evidence that Paul did
not have any knowledge of any disciple betraying
him. The 12.
The longer ending in Mark, however, whoever wrote
that, not the original Mark, he didn't have
a choice but to state that Jesus appeared
to the
11, because Judas was dead. So Judas Iscariot,
plausibly
not historical.
Event number 6, the midnight trial.
Jewish trials in the Sanhedrin
were only conducted during the day. Everybody knows
this.
Also, trials were never held in the houses
of high priests.
Also, there was a 24 hour waiting period
before one could be sentenced.
The gospels ignore all of these. All of
these rules are mentioned in the Mishnah Sanhedrin.
Here, the Christian apologist will say, well, it's
still possible
that it was a midnight trial in the
house of the high priest
and that Jesus was condemned and beaten and
spat upon on the spot.
Yeah, it's possible. Maybe that's what happened, but
it is not plausible.
You see, Mark wants to get his story
going. A secret midnight trial is just more
exciting. It keeps the story moving.
So the midnight trial, likely not historical.
Event number 7,
Mark knows the transcript.
How did Mark get a transcript of Jesus'
trial in the house of the high priest?
Who told Mark exactly what they were saying
to each other? Not Peter.
Mark says that Peter was in the lower
courtyard
of the palace warming himself by fire, so
he was outside.
The answer is Mark, like Luke, imitated
the literary style and method of his perennial
Greek teachers who made up the dialogue. This
was a standard practice of the Greek writers
and novelists, including Mark. If a Christian says
that the holy spirit revealed it to Mark,
fine. Believe that if you want, but that
is a non historical claim, and Mark never
claims this for himself.
Event number 8,
Pilate's reluctance.
We are told in all 4 gospels and
Acts
over and over again, that Pontius Pilate was
reluctant
to condemn Jesus, that Pilate was sympathetic to
Jesus.
But that bloodthirsty mob of Jews outside
essentially forced him to crucify Jesus. No friend
of Caesar are you, they said to Pilate.
This is highly historically implausible.
Unlike, Paul, who never mentions Pilate in his
genuine letters,
Mark knew that Pilate was a governor of
Judea
at Jesus' time and that he was known
for crucifying many Jews. So Mark assumed that
he must have been involved at some level
in the crucifixion of Jesus. Mark's brilliant storytelling
was once again on display. I mean, he's
a brilliant storyteller.
By mentioning Pilate,
Mark historicized
Jesus for his Greco Roman audience.
But by exonerating Pilate of all culpability
in the execution of Jesus,
Mark carefully avoided criticizing
the Roman authorities.
For Mark,
Pilate, like Jesus, was innocent. Both were victims
of the same bloodthirsty
Jewish mob. This, in Mark's mind, created a
type of
fraternal kinship between the Christian community in Rome,
where Mark was living, and the Roman government.
The problem, however, is that Mark's depiction of
Pilate
as a torn man who was essentially manhandled
by a shouting rabble of Jews is simply
historically
implausible.
Pilate described,
sorry, Philo described Pilate as, quote, a man
of inflexible,
stubborn, and cruel disposition.
Josephus said Pilate was willing to slaughter
a multitude of innocent Jews
who peacefully protested the erection of standards
that is statues of Zeus in Jerusalem.
Yet in Matthew, we have Pilate
washing his hands. I am free of the
blood of this innocent man. Let his blood
be upon us and our children. In John,
Pilate says, shall I crucify your king? So
in John, Pilate affirms
that Jesus is the king of the Jews.
The Abyssinian church,
canonized Pilate and his wife, Anya. He saint
Pontius Pilate.
In John, Pilate turns to Jesus and says,
tell me what to do. Really?
The historical Pilate would not have
an Adam's weight
of compunction
about killing a Jew. Okay?
So, look, a Christian might say here, well,
Jesus just had this incredible effect on people,
and I agree with that. I completely understand
that. Jesus was a blessed man, peace be
upon him, a prophet who changed the hearts
of those he interacted with. Fine,
but don't tell me that this is a,
don't tell me this is historical
according to the method and paradigm of modern
historians.
Event number 9,
sent Hedren to Pilate to Herod and back
again.
This is only described in Luke, the author
who claimed to have a perfect understanding of
the life of Jesus. So apparently, Herod, the
puppet tetrarch
of Galilee and Perea, who was not exactly
known for being a pious Jew,
made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover.
He was in Jerusalem. Amazing.
Not only that. Herod was apparently not too
busy to interrogate Jesus.
So,
you know, this is how a play or
a movie works. Right? Fast moving scenes
all during the day.
Jesus before the Sanhedrin,
then before Pilate,
then before Herod,
then back before Pilate,
then he's condemned,
then he walks to the place of crucifixion,
and then he is crucified,
and all before brunch.
All of this happened before the 6th hour,
according to Luke. That's 12 noon.
This is a play. This is fiction. This
is not how real life works.
Event number 10, the Pascal pardon.
So in his continued efforts to present Pilate
as a benign,
dare I say, magnanimous Roman governor,
Mark claimed that Pilate, presumably due to the
kindness of his heart,
wanted to release a Jewish prisoner in celebration
of the impending Passover holiday.
Therefore, he gave the crowd a choice between
Jesus and a criminal named Barabbas.
The crowd chose Barabbas, who was released, while
Jesus was reluctantly
delivered up to be crucified.
Now, given what Philo and Josephus
said about the character of Pontius Pilate, it
is highly historically implausible, to say the least,
that Pilate would even offer such a Pascal
pardon,
let alone assent,
to release a dangerous
murdering
insurrectionist
against Rome.
And of course, there is no historical record
of Pilate ever doing such a thing. In
addition to presenting a more flattering depiction of
Roman authorities,
I think there's a much more substantive theological
reason
why Mark invented probably invented this story.
Remember that Paul called Jesus our Passover
lamb.
Right? And Mark loved that. But how did
he tell a good story? Well, in Leviticus,
in the Torah,
we read the following. It says he, Aaron,
shall take 2 goats and set them before
the lord at the entrance of the tent
of meeting, and Aaron shall cast lots on
the 2 goats, one lot for the lord
and the other for Azazel.
Aaron shall present the goat in which the
lot fell for the lord and offer it
as a sin offering, but the goat on
which the lot fell for Azazel
shall be presented alive before the lord to
make atonement over it that it may be
sent away into the wilderness to Azazel.
So in Mark's symbolism, the 2 goats represented
2 versions
of the Davidic king messiah.
So you have Jesus,
who was a selfless, nonviolent,
itinerant preacher,
and you have Barabbas, the son of the
father, who was a violent political zealot and
assassin.
The Jews cheered more loudly for Barabbas because
he was the type of messiah that they
wanted. However, the type of messiah that the
Lord wanted
was one that would willingly give his life
as a divine savior.
On the surface,
Pilate was basically bullied by the crowd to
execute Jesus.
But at a deeper, symbolical level, Pilate was
an Aaron figure
who sacrificed the lord's goat for our sins.
The other goat, Barabbas,
was sent back to the demon Azazel, I
e, the Jews. That's who they wanted, so
that's who they got. Thus, for Mark, as
well as for the evangelists who followed him,
the incident of Pascal Pardin of Barabbas
served a key theological
and political function
in their overarching Christological
agendas.
This is not historical.
Event number 11,
Simon of Cyrene. So in the Synoptics, we're
told that for no apparent reason,
the Romans compelled a man named Simon of
Cyrene to carry the cross of Jesus
while Jesus walked in front.
Was this usual?
Would the Romans force innocent men,
to, carry the crosses of the condemned?
Christians claim that Jesus was so battered and
beaten that he simply could not carry his
cross. And this is a nice theory, but
the gospels don't say this. This is ad
hoc apologetics.
Luke, who, again, claimed to have a perfect
understanding
of Jesus'
life, does not mention that Jesus was scourged.
Luke intended his gospel to be the gospel,
right, not to supplement 3 other gospels. He
intended to write the definitive gospel, and he
did not mention that Jesus was flogged.
Yet Simon carries Jesus' cross. What's going on
here? Well, believe it or not, this whole
episode is yet again a Pauline inspired anti
Petrine trope. This is not history. It's polemics.
The Synoptic Jesus says, whoever wants to be
my disciple
must deny him and take up his cross
and follow me.
You see, Peter, whose real name was Simon,
denied Jesus three times and abandoned Jesus.
He did not take up his cross and
follow Jesus,
but this other Simon does.
Right? Now Mark says that Simon of Cyrene
was the father of Alexander and Rufus,
two Greek names, and Cyrene was a Greek
port city,
it seems to me that Mark created this
person,
Simon of Cyrene, an ethnically Greek convert to
Judaism,
who is willing to follow Jesus, while Shimon
Bar Yona,
the ethnically Jewish disciple of Jesus, was not
willing to follow Jesus. So Simon of Cyrene
is a symbol of the Gentiles
replacing the Jews
who refused to follow Jesus.
So Simon of Cyrene, probably not historical.
Maybe there was a Simon of Cyrene, but
he never carried some cross.
Event number 12,
a father sacrificing his son. So in Genesis
22, we're told that Abraham, the father of
nations,
put wood on the back of his son,
Isaac,
and made him march up a hill in
order to sacrifice him. In the gospels, the
quote, unquote father put wood on his, quote,
son's back and made him march up a
hill to sacrifice it. This is mimetic of
Abraham and Isaac.
In the Tanakh, God stops Abraham.
In the Tanakh, the height of evil is
parents sacrificing their children.
But in the gospels, a father sacrificing
his son is the height of love and
glory.
Okay?
That's number 13.
Being sold for shekels of silver and 3
condemned men.
So, in Genesis,
Joseph is sold by his brothers for 20
shekels of silver.
Joseph is eventually imprisoned,
although he is innocent,
And he has 2 cellmates,
a cup bearer of wine
and a baker of bread.
3 condemned men in total. 1 of them
will be crucified.
In the New Testament, Jesus initiates a new
covenant by passing around wine and bread. 1
of his, quote, brothers, Judas, betrays him for
30 shekels of silver.
Jesus is imprisoned, although he is innocent. Eventually,
he's crucified. Again, there are differences. Of course,
there are. This is how literary mimesis is
none.
But it is clear
that Jesus is the new Joseph.
Mark modeled his passion narrative upon a Josephine
archetype.
This is reason enough to have reasonable doubt
about its historicity.
Event number 14,
Jesus' quick death.
In the synoptics, especially Mark, as I said,
Jesus dies unexpectedly quick.
Here again, the Christian apologists say, of course,
Jesus was bleeding out since the night before.
And so eventually, the blood loss caused his
body to go into shock
after, just a few hours on the cross.
Again, this is their wishful thinking.
If Jesus was in such a bad condition
before his alleged crucifixion,
then why did Mark tell us that Pilate
marveled
that he had died so quickly? Why was
Pilate,
who was a master, a crucifier of Jews,
so shocked that Pilates had already died? Sorry,
that Jesus had already died? You see, a
long drawn out death,
which was normal for crucified victims, did not
lend itself to good storytelling.
Mark wants this thing to end quickly. He
wants the story to keep moving.
This is not history. It's a passion play.
It's artistic storytelling.
Event number 15.
The earthquake, darkness,
the curtain tearing, and dead saints rising from
the graves. Look. Maybe these things happened.
I believe in miracles, but you cannot say
these things are historical
according to modern
historiography.
If the curtain of the temple tore
from top to bottom, the curtain that built
the Holy of Holies, this would have been
a huge deal for the Jews.
Why why did no one mention this? Maybe
they conspired
to conceal this? Probably not. What happened to
these saints? Did they die again? Are they
still alive?
Did did they appear to anyone we know
of?
Event number 16, the centurion's confession. I'll talk
about that. Event number 17,
Jesus's body taken by secret disciples
after asking Pilate. I already talked about this.
Highly implausible.
Event number 18,
women coming to the tomb to anoint the
body.
So this is really strange.
Okay?
Now here's a question.
Why did Jews anoint dead bodies with oils
and spices?
Okay.
So the answer is that bodies would start
to smell shortly after death.
The anointing was meant to mask the smell
until,
the body was finally buried or entombed.
John tells us that Jesus' body was anointed
before his burial
by his secret disciples, Nicodemus
and Joseph of Arimathea.
So if that is true, why would Jesus'
body need to be anointed again by the
women?
Maybe the women didn't know that he was
anointed,
the apologists will say.
But even if that were true, Jesus is
already buried.
Why would they anoint a body that is
already buried?
It makes zero sense. Interesting question. Did Jews
anoint bodies that were already buried?
The other thing is, it's totally unlawful
for women to anoint men's bodies,
and men to anoint women's bodies,
according to Jewish law.
Besides, how were the women planning on getting
access
to Jesus' body?
Anyway of course, I had thought they were
expecting Jesus to be risen from the dead
anyway according to Christian apologetics. So why were
they even bothering? And they just they should
have been, you know, waiting for it to
happen, but, obviously, they did they didn't believe.
Yeah. They were coming to an we're told
explicitly, they're coming to anoint the body. How
are they planning on rolling the stone away?
So here's what's really happening, I think. Mark
needed some plot device.
He needed to give someone a reason to
go to the tomb and find it empty.
This whole episode of the women coming to
the tomb
to anoint Jesus' body, which is already entombed,
and then finding the tomb empty is highly,
highly implausible.
Event number 19, women were the first witnesses
to the resurrection. I'll talk about that
later. Let's move to Okay.
Let me finish this section with this, going
back to this idea of Homeric literary mimesis.
Okay?
Just something to think about here. Hector,
the son of Priam,
was the prince of Troy, the son of
the king, Hector. What happened to him in
books 21 and 22 of the Iliad? Well,
Hector was essentially abandoned by all of his
fellow Trojans.
They all retreated into the city. They forsook
him and fled.
Sounds familiar.
Hector was the only Trojan left
outside Troy.
Hector refused to retreat,
thus demonstrating his willingness to suffer and die
for his cause.
Sounds familiar?
At first, however, Hector tries to negotiate with
Achilles
and then tries to run from him.
Jesus in the garden tries to get out
of his so called mission.
Remove this cup away from me. Get not
as I will, but as thou will.
Now Hector then realizes
that the gods had forsaken him.
The Markan and Methane Jesus cried out, my
God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me? Same exact verb in the
Greek.
Now, a Christian apologist might say, oh, wait
a minute. This is Psalm 221.
So how can this have anything to do
with Homer?
Well, McDonald calls this memetic hybridity.
You see, a skilled storyteller like Mark
can seamlessly thread 2 traditions together.
It's master storytelling.
Achilles stabs Hector in the throat.
Jesus is apparently nailed to the cross. In
John, he's stabbed in his side. Achilles then
allows the dogs and birds
to maul Hector's body.
The dogs have encircled me. They divided up
my garments. Psalm 22 again.
Other Greeks come and stab Hector's corpse.
The New Testament Jesus is mocked on the
cross.
Hector's mother and wife,
witnessing the spectacle,
weep and wail with grief.
In the New Testament, Jesus' mother and wife
figure witnessed the spectacle and weep and wail
in grief.
Hector's little brother, Paris, witnesses his brother's gruesome
death, and John, the beloved disciple whom Jesus
makes his brother, woman, behold your son, witnesses
his brother's gruesome death.
In book 24,
Priam
begs for his son's body,
and Achilles, now full of regret, agrees.
In the New Testament, a man named Joseph,
a man who has the same name
as Jesus' adopted father,
asked Pilate for Jesus' body. McDonnell says that
this was no accident. Joseph is the pream
of the gospels.
In book 2 of Virgil's Aeneid,
the slain Hector appears to Aeneas
and tells him to flee the city of
Troy.
In the gospels, the slain Jesus appears to
the women and tells them, tell my brothers
to go to Galilee.
There they will see me. In other words,
flee the city of Jerusalem.
Now
there's a famous Jewish tractate called Sefer Tore
Doth Yeshu,
the book of the history of Jesus. This
is the sort of first polemical
Jewish response to the New Testament Jesus.
Okay? First polemical Jewish response. And there are
different versions of this, but in the Aramaic
version,
the oldest, the rabbi said that Jesus was
executed for sorcery
by stoning and then crucified.
His body was then removed from the cross
and dragged through the streets by the Jewish
leaders,
exactly like what happened to Hector in the
Iliad.
The Romans had nothing to do with Jesus
in the toledoth Yeshul,
just like the Romans had nothing to do
with Jesus and Paul's letters, by the way.
Paul never mentions Romans or Pilate in his
authentic letters and says explicitly that the Jews
killed Jesus. So the toledav Yeshu is a
polemical counternarrative
to the gospels that probably goes as far
back as the late second century. My hunch
is that the Jewish writers of these things
knew that they were making things up.
One could argue that the rabbis were mocking
the New Testament passion narratives and exposing them
as false. It is as if the rabbis
were saying, we know that the passion narratives
in the gospels are fiction and based upon
these ancient myths. So here's another myth for
you, also from the Iliad. You want Hector?
We'll give you Hector.
So in the 2nd century in the 2nd
century,
there were Jews, pagans, and maybe other Christians
attacking the New Testament gospels
and calling them mythology.
The author of 2nd Peter, who is a
charlatan, a forger pretending to be Peter, writing
in the 2nd century,
says something very telling. He says, for we
did not follow cleverly contrived
myths
when we made known to you
the power and coming of our lord Jesus
Christ. We were eyewitnesses
of his majesty, 2nd Peter 116. I mean,
look at the subtext. The author of 2nd
Peter, who falsely claimed
to be an eyewitness to Jesus,
was responding to critics,
critics of the Gospels, who accused the gospel
writers and early Pauline Christians
of making up entertaining stories,
cleverly contrived myths.
Now a Christian polemicist might say,
well, the idolaters
in Mecca said something about the Quran, that
it was Asatir al Awalin,
tales from the ancients.
The difference is that the Quran presents itself
as a corrective of these previous stories,
be they biblical or ancient
Near Eastern tradition. The Quran acknowledges that it
is revising,
correcting, and rejecting
these accounts.
For example, in the Quran, Allah Subhanahu Wa
Ta'ala, He says to the Prophet, peace be
upon him,
We relate to you some of the story
of Moses and pharaoh
in truth
for believing people. In other words, this is
what really happened. The gospel writers, on the
other hand,
took Jewish and Greek stories
about other people, tweak them a bit, and
then replace the protagonist with Jesus.
That is a very different that's very different
than what the Quran is doing. The Quran
tells us what it's doing. The Quran is
transparent.
The gospel writers were writing according to a
well known
flexible genre of Greco Roman literature
where mimesis and legend were standard.
The Quran, on the other hand, is a
sui generis. It's a one of a kind
text that does not conform to any classification
of antecedent Arabic prose.
It is not Asatir. It is not Shira.
It is not Sajah. It is not Mursal.
It is not Quihanna. It is not Miq.
It is not poetry. It is not rhymed
prose. It is not straight prose. It is
not soothsaying.
The Quran is unclassifiable.
And the Quran says explicitly in the hada,
These are the true accounts.
So last one before we move on.
We're coming down towards the end of the
presentation,
Inshallah.
So check this one out. So Plutarch
wrote a book of biographies called Parallel Lives.
Okay?
48 biographies of famous Greeks and Romans.
And one of these men was Cleomenes the
3rd,
who was a Spartan king and radical political
reformer.
Okay? So, he died around 2 20 BCE.
Cleomenes escaped to Alexandria where he was eventually
killed. He was stabbed in his side, and
then his body was crucified.
While he hanged on the cross, a snake
coiled itself
around his head, preventing the ravening
birds from mutilating his face.
There was also a group of women who
were watching this and weeping.
Plutarch said that when the king of Alexandria,
one of the colonies,
when he saw this, he was suddenly seized
with fear.
Maybe this was a righteous man
who was beloved to the gods.
Wow. So he gave the women permission to
perform the rites of purification.
Plutarch then says that the Alexandrians started to
worship Cleomenes
and would come to the spot of his
crucifixion
and address Cleomenes as a hero
and son of the gods.
Remember the Roman centurion in Mark. Truly, this
man was the son of God. Or in
Luke, truly this man was righteous.
A historian might say, okay, fine,
but Jesus was still crucified. Only the details
were lifted from these stories. Maybe, maybe not.
It is plausible that none of these things
happened to Jesus. It seems to me that
an honest person must concede this. Now before
I get to my plausible story,
sort of
finish here, let's briefly go back to something
I said earlier.
Okay? If the details of the passion narratives
are wrong,
okay, why do we assume
that the big picture is right? If the
smaller events are implausible,
if the smaller events are all implausible,
why do we assume the bigger picture is
historical?
Here's another quote from Ehrman.
He says, these are not reliable historical accounts,
meaning the gospels. The accounts are based on
oral accounts in circulation for decades. You know,
he says this all the time. The authors
are not eyewitnesses.
There are Greek speaking Christians living 35 to
65 years after the events they narrate. There
was no one there at the time take,
there was no one there at the time
of Jesus' death taking
notes. Many stories were invented.
Most were changed.
Now, let me give you one example of
modern historians changing their minds about the big
picture.
Okay?
And there are more controversial examples I can
give here, but I'll keep it tame.
Perhaps people heard the story of Nero
playing his fiddle Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As Rome
is burning. Right? The fire that he himself
apparently started.
There are 3 ancient historians who wrote about
Nero, Suetonius, Tacitus, and Cassiodio.
Now first thing to consider, everything we know
about Nero comes from his political opponents. They're
highly biased. Now I remember Mike Placono arguing
that we can't trust that the followers
of Apollonius of Tyanna
saw him after his death because the sources
are late, anonymous, and biased. Well,
it's exactly what historians say about the gospels.
They are late, anonymous, and biased. So Suetonius,
who wrote about 60 years after Nero,
said Nero was responsible for the fire
and that he watched it blaze
from the tower of Macinas
while playing an instrument
and singing about the destruction of Troy.
Others, however, said that this was just a
rumor.
Okay? So we have ikhtilaf, difference of opinion.
Another thing is that the fiddle didn't exist
in the 1st century. Okay? So he was
probably playing a harp or a lyre.
But wait a minute. According to Tacitus,
who is actually later than Suetonius,
Nero wasn't even in Rome
when the fire started.
He was 30 miles away in a city
called Antium.
Finally,
no one actually saw Nero playing his harp
in Rome
while the city burned. There were no eyewitnesses.
This is conjecture.
Somebody might say, well, still Nero was known
for his outlandish behavior.
He was a cross dresser who loved to
perform in drag. He was a singing drag
queen.
Well, he had he had a flair for
the dramatic.
You heard it first on blocking theology. Nero
was a cross dressing drag queen. Okay.
Yeah. So maybe, you know, it sort of
fits his care. This sounds like the argument,
well, a lot of Jews were crucified by
the Romans, so Jesus was too.
In light of all of this, many historians
today maintain that it is implausible
that Nero was playing his instrument in Rome
up on a tower while Rome was burning.
This was an unsubstantiated
rumor
based on biased reports,
meant to slander a political opponent.
When none of the details support the main
event, perhaps the main event is false.
Now here's a quote from
the Atlantic Monthly. It says December 1996. It's
an article called
The Search for a No Frills Jesus by
Charlotte Allen. So Allen interviewed Burton Mack, the
famous New Testament scholar, scholar of q.
And so this is what she wrote in
this, article in the Atlantic Monthly, December 1996.
She says, course of a recent interview,
he, Mack,
revealed his next project, putting together a scholarly
consortium
that would redescribe Christian origins
in some way other than through the gospel
narratives
and their quote, crucifixion
drama,
as he calls it.
Because Q contains no passion narrative,
Mack believes that no one really knows how
Jesus died
and that the gospel accounts,
sorry, died, and that the gospel stories of
his passion,
like most of the other gospel stories,
are pure fiction,
end quote. Now I don't totally agree with
Mack on every point, obviously,
but he makes a compelling point here about
the passion narratives. According to Burton Mack, and
I agree with this, Jesus existed.
The first gospel,
a k a q, records some of his
actual teachings.
But we don't know what happened to Jesus
historically,
because the passion narratives are pure
fiction.
And I would add, and Paul of Tarsus
could not be trusted.
Just throw that in. Okay. Okay. So here
it is. Okay. A plausible story
part 1.
So I'm just going to read this verbatim
as I wrote it, and then I'll take
It'll take a few minutes.
Okay. So in the year 31, 32, or
33 CE,
a young rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth traveled
from the Galilee to Jerusalem to observe the
fasts of the Passover week. The gospels tell
us that he traveled with 12 male disciples
and possibly a few women, but the number
12 is clearly symbolical for the 12 tribes
of Israel. The gospel abiders were envisioning Jesus
and his disciples as replacing Jacob and the
tribes. Whatever their exact number, it makes sense
that those who followed Jesus down into Judea
were a small group of pilgrims.
At some point during his time in the
holy city, Jesus cleansed the temple in some
way. In Mark, the earliest gospel, we are
told that Jesus threw out people who were
engaged in buying and selling in the temple
area and overturned the tables of the money
changers.
Matthew and Luke basically echoed Mark, while John
added that Jesus made a scourge of small
cords and drove out the animals as well.
The cleansing of the temple is mentioned in
all 4 gospels twice in John and adequately
explains why Jesus immediately made enemies in Jerusalem.
It makes historical sense that something like this
probably happened. The incident angered the the corrupt
temple establishment
who felt that their status and source of
revenue was under attack by Jesus.
In response, they began a propaganda campaign
depicting
Jesus and his group as potentially dangerous revolutionaries.
Judean Jews probably looked down their noses at
their Galilean brethren,
considering them to be simple minded peasants or
hot headed troublemakers.
Of course, the Galileans were known for basically
two things,
fishing and zealotry.
The latter was due in large part to
the slain Jewish freedom fighter, Judas of Galilee,
who died 6 of the common era, whom
Josephus considered the founder of the 4th Jewish
sect known as the Zealots.
Judas' sons, Jacob and Simon, were still active
in the Galilee at the time of Jesus,
and both would eventually be crucified by Tiberias
Julius Alexander
around 46 of the common era.
Galilean pilgrims were also easily discernible
from other pilgrims due to certain cultural
idiosyncrasies,
such as their distinctive
backwater Aramaic accents.
My theory is that not long after the
incident at the temple, some of the temple
leaders reported to the Roman authorities what Jesus
of Galilee and his band of would be
zealots had done.
However, neither Jesus nor his disciples had any
intention whatsoever
for political insurrection.
Personally, I think Jesus cleansed the temple as
a prophetic act of symbolism.
He believed that if the Temple leadership did
not clean up their act, so to speak,
then God's wrath would descend upon them in
the form of the Temple's destruction.
Over the next few days, as Jesus was
teaching at various places in Jerusalem,
his disciples caught wind of rumors that they
were suspected as being zealots.
Afraid, intimidated, and grossly outnumbered,
the disciples either fled back to Galilee after
taking leave of Jesus or went into hiding
in the holy city with Jesus.
The ruthless Roman governor of Judea, Pontus Pilate,
already had several Jewish insurrectionists in custody
that he wished to publicly crucify during the
holy week. He wanted to send a strong
message to any and all Jewish freedom fighters.
Toward the end of the holy week, perhaps
even on the day of Passover,
Pilate ordered the men flogged and crucified.
Starting with Mark, the gospels tell us that
3 men were crucified with one of them
named Jesus.
One could make the argument, however, that the
evangelists were employing literary mimesis mimesis here. Jesus
was the antitype of Joseph rejected by his
brothers and went to suffer with 2 other
convicts.
Literary mimesis, as we saw, is very common
in the gospel passion narratives.
Thus, the evangelist number 3 was likely symbolical.
It was used to cast Jesus as the
new Joseph. The Romans would crucify men in
bunches,
so it is not inconceivable that Pilate crucified
15 or 20 men on this day. Nonetheless,
I will grant that 3 men were crucified
and that one of them was named Jesus.
The name Jesus, Yeshua, was the 5th or
6th most common name of Jewish males in
1st century Palestine,
and given the fact that it was an
abbreviated form of Joshua,
Yehoshua,
Israel's greatest military champion,
it was likely even more popular among the
hot blooded Galileans.
For every 10 Galileans crucified by the Romans,
it is very plausible that at least one
of them was named Jesus.
All 4 evangelists relate that one of the
3 men that was to be crucified,
along with 2 unidentified
laestas,
was known as Barabbas.
While
many biblical translators render the word laestes in
the singular as robber or thief, Josephus, writing
around the time of the evangelists,
always used this word to refer to dangerous
revolutionaries.
Barabbas was also called a laistes,
as well as an insurrectionist,
stasiasstes.
Mark tells us that Barabbas was bound to
his fellow rebels who had committed murder in
the insurrection,
ente
stasse.
It must be noted that in the original
Greek,
the verb to commit or do, poieo,
is in the pluperfect
plural here,
poieiksan.
Barabbas and his men had committed murder in
the insurrection,
not just Barabbas.
Therefore, it is likely that the duo lestes,
I. E. The crossmates,
whatever their true number, were loyal followers of
Barabbas.
What
what is the insurrection?
Mark did not tell us, but it seems
that he expected his readers to know about
it. It was a historical event still fresh
in the minds of Mark's readers. We can
surmise that Barabbas and his small men of
terrorists or freedom fighters, depending on your perspective,
had attempted some act of stasis against the
Romans against the Romans in Jerusalem
sometime before the arrival of Jesus from Galilee.
Pilate had kept Barabbas and his men chained
and imprisoned,
waiting for the perfect time to execute them,
Passover week.
Pilate's callousness was on full display. As the
Jews collectively celebrated God's power by his striking
the Egyptians with death, Pilate demonstrated his own
power by putting Jews to death on their
holiday.
This is consistent historically with what we know
about Pilate's character from sources outside of the
gospels, such as Philo of Alexandria and Josephus.
Interestingly, the Arabic name Barabbas is actually a
patronymic title meaning son of the father,
Bar Abba.
This appears to be a messianic title. Perhaps
Ravas claimed to be the conquering king messiah
or or was at least touted by his
followers as being a messianic figure.
But even more interesting than Barabbas' title was
his first name.
According to early some early Greek manuscripts of
the gospel of Matthew,
it was Jesus.
Origen noticed this as early as the 3rd
century CE, and note, we don't have a
complete copy of Matthew's gospel until the 4th
century of the common era.
It is unlikely that Christians would invent the
first name Jesus for Barabbas, a man who
opposed Jesus' teachings at every turn.
Barabbas' first name was removed from later manuscripts,
no doubt for pietistic reasons.
So here we have them, the 3 crucified
laestas.
One of them called Jesus, the son of
the father, I. E. The messiah,
the so called king of the Jews, along
with at least 2 of his disciples.
You may be chomping at the bit right
now wondering, but wasn't Barabbas
released by Pilate and Jesus of Nazareth crucified
in his place? As stated earlier, while the
existence of Barabbas is historically plausible,
the notion of some Pascal pardon, practiced by
Pontius Pilate no less, screams of pure legend.
The evangelists wanted to historicize
key statements made by Paul, such as Jesus
being our Passover lamb or Jesus' betrayal by
night, although the evangelists also disagreed with Paul
in at least one key area, the nature
of Jesus' resurrection.
The evangelists were Greco Roman authors, and Greco
Roman authors embellished, exaggerated,
and often created their narratives.
This was a standard practice.
In no place did Marr claim to be
a divinely inspired writer, yet he presented himself
as an omniscient storyteller who knew what people
were thinking. He knew what the centurion had
said at the cross. He knew the exact
dialogue between Jesus and the high priest at
the former's trial.
Sincere Christians just assume that Mark knew these
things because he must have been inspired by
the Holy Spirit,
But Mark, along with the rest of the
evangelists,
were simply imitating the literary style of the
perennial teachers Herodotus and Thucydides, who made up
the dialogue according to what they thought was
appropriate.
My contention is that despite the evangelists' inclusion
of real historical persons
in their passion narratives, such as Jesus of
Nazareth, Pontius Pilate, Jesus Barabbas, and Herod Antipas,
these passion narratives are most likely not historical.
The evangelists attempted to historicize the passion of
their savior, and the mention of several real
figures gave their stories a strong sense of
verisimilitude.
The evangelists, in essence, created a simulacrum
or substitute Jesus of Nazareth,
which they subsequently tortured and killed with their
pens,
the Jesus of Christian faith.
Countless succeeding generations of Jews, Christians and pagans,
were made to believe that Jesus of Nazareth
was crucified
due to these writings.
This gives new insight into the Quran statement,
which can be translated as, but he, Jesus,
was made to appear so crucified,
that is, made to appear so by the
evangelist.
It was precisely their passion narratives,
motivated and underpinned by Pauline Christology,
written in the standard Greco Roman style, replete
with literary mimesis
from both the Tanakh and Homeric epics
and abounding with historical implausibility
that gave the world the impression that Jesus
of Nazareth had been crucified.
Part 2.
When Barabbas and his men were crucified, not
a single follower of Jesus of Nazareth was
present. Why would they be? I agree with
James Taber that the most likely spot at
the crucifixion was the Mount of Olives.
Countless Jews standing in the heart of Jerusalem
would have been able to see the horrific
spectacle on the mountain, albeit from a great
distance.
As he hanged on the cross, Barabbas may
have cried out, my God, my God, why
have you forsaken me? This was a man
who generally felt like he was fighting the
good fight for the sake of god, but
now felt utterly abandoned.
To further mock to further mock Yeshua Bar
Abba, the Romans placed a placard above his
head which read, the King of the Jews,
according to Mark, or this is Jesus, the
King of the Jews, according to Matthew,
or this is the King of the Jews,
according to Luke. Interestingly, only in John do
we find the placard reading Jesus of Nazareth,
the King of the Jews.
By the time John wrote his gospel, around
90 to 100 CE, he thought it was
necessary to clarify or perhaps correct the Synoptics.
As stated earlier, John eliminated the episode of
Simon Cyrene carrying the cross. He wrote that
Jesus was impaled on the cross, and he
said that Jesus' body was anointed before it
was placed into the tomb, all contradicting the
Synoptics.
Clearly, John went out of his way to
convince his readers that Jesus of Nazareth was
the one crucified,
not Barabbas, Simon, etcetera, and that he was
totally dead when he was placed in the
tomb. He did not survive.
It is plausible that the Johannine community was
contending with rival Christian groups that denied
the death of Jesus of Nazareth on the
cross.
While the crucified victims were visible at a
distance to the people of the city below,
who may have attended the actual event on
the mountain? We simply do not know. It
makes little sense that any of the close
supporters of either Jesus would have been present
at the scene, since Yeshua Han Nusri was
considered
a persona non grata by the Temple establishment,
and Yeshua Bar Abba was a convicted insurrectionist.
In fact, the synoptic gospels tell us explicitly
that all of Jesus' disciples forsook him and
fled.
John, of course, belied the Synoptics and placed
a disciple at the very foot of the
cross, and despite Mark telling us that passersby
and chief priests were mocking the crucified Jesus,
it is also unlikely that any members of
the Sanhedrin,
temple authorities, or Pharisees were present.
It seems to me that the Jewish leaders
would have preferred to be at home with
their families
observing the Passover rather than exhausting themselves
to attend the execution of 3 criminals by
Roman soldiers on the top of a mountain.
I think the Romans knew that willful Jewish
attendance
to these gruesome scenes tended to be low.
This is precisely why they would crucify their
victims along busy streets and on high places.
These spectacles functioned as both an indelible demonstration
of Roman power, as well as an effective
deterrent to Jewish rebellion.
Christian apologists point out that Mark tells
Mark tells us that several women were looking
on from afar
and that Mark, as a Christian, would not
have made this up,
since it was embarrassing that only Jesus' women
followers were witnesses
to his crucifixion and subsequent resurrection.
In patriarchal Jewish law, a woman's testimony was
next to worthless. Therefore, it must be historical,
they conclude.
The criterion of embarrassment is definitely useful in
determining historical truth, but I think that when
it comes to the prominence of women in
the gospels,
both Ehrman and Macdonald offer more plausible explanations.
According to Ehrman, a signature mark and motif
that was picked up by the later evangelists
was that outsiders
get it, while insiders, such as Jesus' family
members, male disciples, and Jews in general,
consistently
struggle to profess faith in Jesus as the
Son of God and savior,
outsiders such as Roman centurions,
demons, and women
recognized him immediately.
While the male disciples fled like towers when
they felt the heat around the corner, as
it were, the female disciples courageously continued to
follow Jesus even to the cross. In my
view, Mark's motif is really the result of
his underlying anti Jewish sentiments, and although Mark
places Jewish women at the cross, an empty
tomb, it is their status as women, as
outsiders, that trumps their Jewishness.
Part 3.
According to Ehrman, we have, quote, no idea
what Jesus said when he was crucified. The
gospels give us conflicting statements.
If Jesus,
that is Jesus Barabbas, uttered the cry of
dereliction from the cross, as I suggested earlier,
how would we have known it?
How would it have reached us?
If a few Jewish leaders were present at
the crucifixion along with some women, which I
doubt, perhaps they heard Barabbas say these words
and then reported it to others. This would
explain why Mark and Matthew reported the cry
as Jesus' last words
just prior to another loud cry before dying.
If we are being honest, however, this is
not the way a truly righteous man would
die, let alone a prophet or omniscient god.
If Jesus of Nazareth knew that he was
sent by God essentially himself, according to Christian
theology, on a suicide mission to die for
our sins, then what is the meaning of
such final words?
Christian apologists defend the Mark and slash Matthew
and Jesus by pointing out that he was
quoting the first verse of Psalm 22
as a way of signaling to his audience
the fulfillment of prophecy,
that although the psalmist started in despair,
he ended on a much more hopeful note.
This might be true, but it doesn't change
the fact that the Markan slash Matthean Jesus
believed that he had been forsaken by God
by being crucified.
It seems as though Jesus could not have
imagined in a 1000000 years that this was
going to happen to him. But despite God
having forsaken him, perhaps he would be forgiven
in the afterlife, although the psalmist does not
mention anything about death or dying, but rather
that God would save him from his afflictions
in this world.
Whatever the case may be, the content of
Psalm 22 is clearly antithetical
to the to Christian theology, which imagines that
the father and son enter into a metaphysical
covenant before the foundation of the world, stipulating
that in the year 4000 after Adam, the
sun slash logos would enter the human flesh
and die for the sins of humanity in
the greatest act of redemption in all history.
On the contrary, the final words of the
Markan slash Matthean Jesus sound much more like
what Barabas would have said, a theocratic nationalist
who dedicated his life to cleansing the holy
land of occupying pagans,
but who ended up stripped, scourged, beaten, nailed
and crucified
by those very pagans in his own country.
In his utter bewilderment and despair, he cried
out to God and continued to cry out
until he died. A Christian would argue that
perhaps some of the women who heard, quote,
Jesus utter these words eventually told the disciples,
including Matthew and Peter. Matthew then recorded it
in his gospel, and Mark, Peter's student, recorded
it in his gospel. The major problem of
this assertion
is that we now know that it makes
almost no historical sense to ascribe any gospel
to any disciple or disciple of a disciple,
and we will be hard pressed to find
a single critical scholar who takes this position.
But even if we humor the Christian argument
of apostolic authorship, we run into a cascade
of other problems.
Luke, who claimed to have a, quote, perfect
understanding of Jesus' life and times, did not
record the cry of dereliction.
Instead, he recorded Jesus saying, father, into your
hands, I commend my spirit as his final
words. Luke had access to Mark. It was
one of his sources, but he was clearly
bothered by the Mark in Jesus accusing God
of abandoning him.
And John, before being stabbed in his side,
Jesus spoke to his mother and the beloved
disciple and then uttered, it is finished, as
his final words.
This begs several important questions.
Why didn't the women attending the crucifixion tell
Peter or Matthew about these things?
If they did, why didn't Mark or Matthew
record them? Perhaps Peter and Matthew did not
believe the women. Perhaps the women forgot.
If they forgot things as important as Jesus'
final conversation with Mary and his beloved disciple,
Jesus asking God to forgive the Jews from
the cross, Jesus promising paradise to one of
the laestas,
Jesus saying, it is finished, and Jesus being
stabbed by a Roman centurion, then why trust
these women at all?
Why even trust them when they said that
the crucified man was Jesus of Nazareth?
They were watching from afar. They saw a
man heavily bruised, untidy, and disheveled.
Was that really Jesus of Nazareth?
Perhaps they read the placard placed conveniently
above his head, mockingly identifying him as the
king of the Jews or Jesus, the king
of the Jews.
But this could have described Jesus Barabbas.
It is obvious then that when it came
to their crucifixion narratives,
theology was the main motivator
of both Luke and John, not historical truth.
This was also true of Mark and Matthew.
The 2 evangelists believed that Jesus of Nazareth
was crucified,
not because they were told by eyewitnesses or
disciples who encountered eyewitnesses,
but because they were representatives of the Pauline
churches whose founder believed the rumors that Jesus
of Nazareth had been crucified.
Later, this founder claimed that these rumors were
confirmed by special revelation,
which also unveiled the reason for Jesus' death.
God's son made himself a human sacrifice for
sin.
It is very likely that Mark and Matthew
place Psalm 221
upon the lips of the dying Jesus of
Nazareth to make a theological point despite its
bothersome aspects. After all, the Psalm does seem
to describe someone being cornered and mocked by
his enemies.
Thus, none of the purported words of Jesus
from the cross hold up well to historical
scrutiny.
The versions of Mark and Matthew are more
plausible than Luke and John, although generally speaking,
all four accounts are highly implausible.
I want to say something briefly about Psalm
22 before we continue the narrative. As I
stated, the anonymous Greek Christian who wrote the
gospel of Mark believed that Jesus of Nazareth
died for humanity's sins,
Motivated by his hero Paul's assertion that this
was, quote, according to the scriptures, Mark scoured
the Tanakh for something he could utilize
as a proof text. The best he could
find was Psalm 22. However, Psalm 22
was not as unequivocal as some of the
early church leaders wanted it to be.
Thus, verse 16 was distorted
by post New Testament church fathers to make
it a bit clearer for Bible readers
that David predicted the crucifixion of Jesus of
Nazareth,
the messiah.
The verse reads in the King James version,
the dogs have have,
the dogs have
encompassed me.
The assembly of the wicked have enclosed me.
They pierced my hands and my feet.
If this is an accurate translation, one would
think that the evangelists would have jumped at
quoting this verse in their passion narratives.
Strangely, they do not. In fact, on a
single New Testament, New Testament writer quoted, paraphrased,
or even alluded to the latter portion of
this verse, despite apparently its description of someone
being pierced through his hands and feet. How
did they miss that? All 4 gospel authors
mention that the soldiers casted lots for Jesus'
garments while he hanged on the cross. This
was for them the fulfillment of the prophecy
mentioned in verse 18 of the very same
psalm.
Verse 16, however, was enigmatically
ignored by all.
The answer to this riddle is revealed when
we look at the original Hebrew.
The, it literally translates, for dogs have encircled
me, an assembly of the wicked have surrounded
me, like a lion, Ka'ari,
my hands and my feet. Yeah. The Jewish
publication society rendered the last part as, like
a lion, they are at my hands and
my feet. The phrase they are at is
not found in the original Hebrew, but is
implied by the context.
This is Hebrew lyrical poetry, and often, in
such poetry, a rhetorical device known as ellipsis
is employed. In this case, the ellipsis displayed
in this verse reveals that the psalmist was
experiencing an extremely heightened state of agitation
as he described his present situation.
The important thing is that the verse definitely
does not say pierced. So why do Christians
consistently translate ka'ari,
like a lion, as they pierced?
Sometime after the writing of the canonical gospels,
yet before the writings
of anti Jewish apologist Justin Martyr, who died
165,
Christian scribes and or Orthodox fathers deliberately altered
the Greek words of this verse
from like a lion to they pierced.
Thereafter,
the new wording, the new wording of the
Septuagint, the LXX, was they pierced my hands
and my feet.
Justin jumped all over this and was quick
to remind his readers in his first apology
and dialogue
that the statement in verse 16 referred to
the nails that were driven into the hand
and feet of Jesus during crucifixion.
Upon scrutiny, however, the Christian's sleight of hand
becomes exposed.
Somebody noticed that the phrase
sounded a lot like the verb and
thus decided to translate the Greek in accordance
with the latter.
Hence, the verb oruksan from the lexical form,
orosu, was interpolated in the Greek text. I
don't wanna get too technical here. To summarize
to summarize the point, the Greek text that
the gospel writers were working from
certainly did not read, they pierced my hands
and my feet. If it had, they would
have seized upon the opportunity
to point this out to their peers. It
was sometime after the compositions of the gospels
when the Greek of Psalm 22 was altered
based upon a deliberate misreading of the original
Hebrew.
And it was only
and it was only after that point that
Christian apologists
began to claim that the nailing of Jesus
to the cross was predicted in the Psalm.
The early Christian apologists intentionally falsified
the Greek translation. This is exactly what the
Quran tells us that they do, yet again,
the Quran is correct. And just a quick
side note before we get to part 4,
the the rabbis actually point out
that Zachariah
chapter 13
prophesied
the appearance of a false prophet.
A false prophet. Clearly false according to the
context, who would have a very distinctive appearance,
by the way. So Zechariah 13:6, it says
this this false prophet will be asked,
so he says,
so what are these wounds in your hands?
So Zechariah 13 predicts
that a false prophet will appear with wounds
in his hands. So the rabbis say this
is Jesus of Nazareth, but I would argue
that this is the New Testament Jesus.
This is not Jesus of Nazareth, because Jesus
of Nazareth was never crucified.
Now, okay. Part 4, the conclusion of the
story.
Okay. So the crucified victims remained on their
crosses for several days. This was a standard
practice of the Romans. It is highly implausible
that a secret follower of Jesus of Nazareth,
a man supposedly executed by Rome for treason,
will be granted special permission by Pontius Pilate
to remove the body from the cross immediately
after death. Pilate had just ordered multiple crucifixions
on the Passover,
But now are we to believe that he
was suddenly sensitive to ceremonial Jewish laws concerning
the Sabbath?
Rather, Mark wanted to entomb Jesus
as soon as possible for the sake of
his theological narrative. A long, drawn out crucifixion
of Jesus would not flow well for his
overall story.
But who would ask for Jesus' body? It
certainly couldn't be a disciple. According to Mark,
they all left Jesus in the lurch.
Mark needed to create someone of influence,
and that someone was an honorable senator, Sanhedrin
member, named Joseph of Arimathea,
a man with the most common first name
among Jewish men of the 1st century who
hailed from a town that nobody until this
day has ever heard of.
The creation of Joseph also served another crucial
purpose for Mark. Jesus was a Galilean who
had died in Jerusalem.
According to Jewish law, corpses had to be
buried within 24 hours of death, if possible.
Therefore, Jesus needed a place to be buried,
but not in the ground. A ground burial
doesn't work well with a narrative that involves
a physically reconstituted body and a grave that
must be verified as being empty.
Rather, Jesus needed an expensive above ground spacious
rock tomb, and lo and behold, Joseph of
Arimathea happened to own 1, and he gave
it to Jesus.
Mark wants us to believe that a respected
member of the Jewish Sanhedrin in Jerusalem offered
his precious family tomb to an itinerant Galilean
preacher he met a few days ago, who
was crucified by Rome and mocked for being
a false messiah.
But how does Mark explain this? Was it
because Joseph professed that Jesus was the son
of God, like the Roman centurion?
Of course not. Joseph was a learned
Jewish male insider. All we get from Mark
is a vague statement that Joseph was, quote,
also waiting for the kingdom of God.
More plausibly, whatever remained of the crucified men
on the mountain was eventually thrown into a
common grave several days after their deaths.
Naturally, they had become the talk of the
town as they hung on their crosses.
Who were these men? Who was their leader?
Perhaps after the Passover, some curious Jews made
the trek up the mountain, only to find
a bunch of unrecognizable
and unconscious bodies.
Perhaps some of the temple leaders had heard
that someone named Jesus was crucified,
a Jesus who had claimed to be some
sort of messiah
and had led a disturbance in the city.
Perhaps some of them said that this must
have been Jesus Barabbas, while others said Jesus
of Nazareth, the man that they had reported
to the Romans after he caused a riot
at the temple.
Some of the members of the temple cult
exulted that they had killed Jesus of Nazareth
through the Romans, while others doubted. They had
shek or doubt.
And there you have it. An historically plausible
alternative to the dominant position among secular historians
that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. It's quite
simple, really. Some of the Jewish leaders believed
that Jesus Barabbas was Jesus of Nazareth. Both
men share the same first name, title and
reputation
as causers of stasis.
There were probably other commonalities as well, such
as physical appearance and age. Perhaps Barabbas was
a Galilean.
Perhaps he was also a Jesus of Nazareth.
The prophet Jesus neither swooned nor was divinely
raptured from the cross.
No one was supernaturally transfigured, nor did the
Romans crucify the wrong man.
The episodes of the Paschal pardon and Joseph
of Arimathea
taking the body and offering his family tomb
are historically implausible.
This theory also accounts for the disciples seeing
Jesus after the crucifixion.
Some of them simply remained in his company
while he kept a low profile.
Some were in Jerusalem.
Other Jews who were under the impression that
Jesus had been crucified could have seen him
as well. However, I do believe that the
disciples must have also experienced
something supernatural
after the crucifixion event, and that this experience
had a profound effect upon them. They believed
that they had witnessed something miraculous.
Given the circumstances of the Passover crucifixions,
it seems to me that some of the
members of the Temple cult continued to search
for Jesus, believing
that
he
was
ultimately not among the condemned criminals.
At some point, God took Jesus from this
earth. I understand that this cannot be historical
from a standpoint of someone like Bart Ehrman,
and I admit it. This is my faith
conviction. Unlike Christian apologists who insist upon the
historicity of the resurrection,
I concede that the ascension of Jesus was
a miracle,
and therefore,
non historical.
My aim today is only to explain how
Jesus may have plausibly
escaped the cross historically.
The disciples went back to Galilee and believed
that Jesus appeared to them in multiple visions.
These appearances can be explained scientifically.
People across time and culture have claimed that
they experienced visions of their long gone loved
ones. I believe, however, that the disciples' visions
of Jesus were real, not imagined. Chief among
the the disciples were James, Peter, and John,
the 3 pillars.
Sometime later, these 3, along with others, returned
to Jerusalem and founded a sect of Judaism
known as the Nazarenes or the Branchites named
after the hometown
of their master, Jesus of Nazareth.
Under the leadership of Jesus' brother James, the
Nazarenes continued teaching the precepts of the gospel.
They were a politically quietist movement that practiced
a more liberal form of the Jewish law.
They stressed asceticism,
charity, love for the poor and relationship with
God.
Being devout Jews, they did not believe that
Jesus was divine or that He had become
a human sacrifice for sin. And as I
stated earlier, there's no strong evidence that they
even affirmed Jesus had been crucified.
The Jamesonni Nazarenes proved themselves unthreatening to both
the temple cult, as well as the Roman
authorities,
at least for a while. They preached that
Jesus was a prophet messiah who predicted the
future coming of a powerful figure known as
the Son of Man, who set up his
monotheistic kingdom upon the Earth
and vanquished the 4th beast, the Roman Empire.
James, nicknamed the Just, was a highly revered
figure, handpicked by Jesus himself before his departure,
who led the Jerusalem based based Nazarenes until
his eventual assassination
by the temple called in 62, the common
era, almost 30 years after Jesus.
The death of James was documented by Josephus.
Amazingly, despite being the immediate successor of Jesus
and universally recognized head of the Nazarenes for
nearly 3 decades,
James is virtually nonexistent in the gospels, and
we have no record of a single one
of his authentic writings or epistles.
In fact, most average Christians I've spoken to
over the last 20 years
plus,
admitted that they did not even know that
Jesus had a brother, let alone a brother
such as James. There's a good reason for
this, however, and his name Apollo his name
is Paul of Tarsus, who has essentially hijacked
the entire movement.
Okay.
So we're really coming out to the end.
I know oh,
this is taking a while.
But just,
as another side note here,
Paul's conversion story in Acts is also a
mimetic of popular antecedent Greek literature.
Alright? So so this is in addition to
the other historical problems,
with his his first story I mentioned earlier,
such as the term Christian being an anachronism
and the fact that the high priest did
not have jurisdiction over Jews in Damascus. So
in the 1st century,
Jesus and Dionyses
were 2, quote, gods
who were competing for the hearts and minds
of the Greeks.
Okay? Jesus turns water into wine. Of course,
Dionysus was the god of wine
who also had many wine miracles attributed to
him. The Johannine Jesus says, I am the
true vine.
Right? And the subtext seems to indicate,
that he means true as opposed to the
false vine,
Dionysus.
I am the true vine. Right? So now
in the the Bacchae,
right, the Greek playwright Euripides,
who died around 400
BCE,
he mentions that the king of Thebes,
whose name was Pentheus,
was persecuting members of the cult of Dionysus.
Now, Dionysus
was the killed and resurrected
divine son of god. So then Dionysus,
as a persecuted god man, appears to Pentheus,
his his persecutor,
in disguise,
and Pentheus sees a light. And Dionyses says
to him,
quote, I would control my rage and sacrifice
to him, meaning himself, if I were you,
rather than kick against the goads.
Pentheus is then punished and killed by the
members of the Dionysian cult. In Acts, the
persecuted god man,
alright, and killed and resurrected the divine son
of god Jesus appears to Paul, his persecutor.
Paul sees a light. And Jesus says to
him, I am Jesus,
Whom you are persecuting,
it is hard for you to kick against
the goads.
It is the same exact expression.
So Paul is punished by blindness,
but eventually converts. So Luke wants to demonstrate
the superiority of Paul over Penthes, but the
context of the two stories is the same.
We have 2 persecutors of 2 divine sons
of god who are directly confronted by those
divine sons of god
by using the same Greek expression,
and the persecutors are punished in the same
way after seeing a light.
This story is most likely fiction.
Luke seems to have taken it from Euripides'
baccai.
Okay. So I have 2 slides left really
close to the end.
Now
after thinking about this a bit, I came
up with a second historically plausible story, and
this one's much much shorter,
but this story is, this story is premised
upon the plausibility
that the gospel passion narratives are mostly or
completely legendary, and I think I demonstrated that.
Okay. So according to Paul, our earliest new
testament writer, the Jews killed Jesus,
and Paul also says Jesus was crucified, obviously.
Now perhaps what Paul meant was that the
Jews killed him by crucifixion.
But historically and legally, how would the Jews
have executed Jesus?
Right? If he was found guilty of blasphemy
for sorcery, which is actually what the Tal
Adaf Yeshu and and Quran suggest that the
charges were.
Had a serhumubin. This is evident in sorcery.
If that's the case, then they would have
stoned him
and then crucified his body postmortem.
And thus the Quran says,
They did not kill him, I. E. By
stoning nor crucify him
postmortem,
as it were. So and this is also
the Jewish claim in the Talmud that he
was stoned and crucified.
So so allow me to clarify then. Paul
does not mention Roman involvement at all.
Okay? Paul says that the archons of this
age killed Christ.
Right? The rulers or leaders of this age.
The Greek word archon is is very imprecise.
It could refer to a rabbi, a high
priest, a Roman governor, an angel, a demon.
However, in 1st Thessalonians,
right, 2:15,
Paul is explicit. The Jews killed Jesus, and
this verse is authentic. So no Roman involvement,
And this is consistent with Josephus,
at least a stronger opinion that
the testimony of Flavium is a total fabrication.
Okay? This is also consistent with the toled
off Yeshu,
the Talmud, and what Maimonides wrote in the
Mishnah Torah. It says Jesus the Nazarene, who
claimed to be the Messiah, was killed by
the Jewish court, the Beit Din. No Roman
involvement.
This also seems to be consistent with the
Quran when it quotes some of the Jewish
authorities boasting that they had killed Jesus.
Now, if a historian or a Christian apologist
wants to say
that Paul meant that the Jews killed him
using the Romans,
well, Paul doesn't say that.
Yeah. It's possible, but he he doesn't say
that. In fact, in Romans 13, Paul says
that the Roman government does not persecute the
righteous and innocent.
You know? He says, do what is right,
and the authorities will honor you.
Only if you do wrong should you be
afraid. Now would a Christian who believed that
the Romans falsely crucified Jesus say anything like
this? It doesn't seem likely. Wasn't Jesus righteous,
and is it?
Now most historians would say that John the
Baptist and Jesus were very close.
Okay? In fact, Jesus was initially a disciple
of John
and was baptized by John.
Most historians take this position. It seems that
at some point, Jesus took on his own
disciples,
but most likely considered continued to consider John
to be, like, you know, his teacher or
mentor.
Okay. So so here we have 2 teachers,
both with disciples, very close in age,
very similar in their message, possibly related, possibly
cousins,
who may have even looked similar. In fact,
in the gospels,
people confuse Jesus for John.
You know, we're told that Herod
and some others thought that Jesus was John
resurrected.
That makes sense. It's also plausible that John
was confused for Jesus.
Now what happened to John? So according to
Mark, and Matthew and Luke take from Mark,
Herod unlawfully married Herodias,
right, his brother's wife.
Okay? And I'm going to refer to John
the Baptist as the Baptist now to avoid
confusion. So according to the Synoptics, the Baptist
said that it was unlawful for Herod to
marry his brother's wife.
And because of this, Herodias wanted to kill
the Baptist, but she couldn't.
But then she saw an opportunity.
So Herod threw this huge, you know, birthday
party for himself,
and the daughter of Herodias danced for all
of his guests. Now Herod was so grateful,
he said to her, ask me whatever you
want, and I'll give it to you. I'll
even give you half of my kingdom.
And the girl coached by her mother said,
bring me the head of John the Baptist.
So then Herod had no choice. He had
the executioner bring her the Baptist head on
a platter.
Okay. So from a historical standpoint, this story
sounds like a romance
novel. Right? A story of intrigue and drama
and deception. You know, in Hellenistic
in Hellenistic novels, there's this thing where someone
makes an oath to another person, and then
the and then the other person says something
unexpected.
So then the first person is forced to
fulfill his oath. Right?
Also, women in these novels and stories,
cannot directly confront the men. They have to
be passive aggressive.
May maybe this is what happened, but historically,
we're speaking you know, historically,
this sounds like Mark just telling an interesting
story that never really happened.
Now Josephus,
who doesn't have a dog in this fight,
right, as it were, meaning he's not he's
not a Christian,
also mentions the Baptist's death,
but he says something very different than the
New
Testament.
According to Josephus,
Herod Antipas imprisoned the Baptist
because the Baptist was gaining many followers,
and Herod was afraid that the Baptist might
eventually lead a rebellion
against it.
Okay? This is in antiquities 18. Very different
than the New Testament. So this tells us
that John was also a messianic figure of
some sort.
In fact, the Mandiantians to this day believe
John was the messiah, not Jesus.
So Josephus says that,
that Herod imprisoned John at the fortress of
Machares,
which was to the east of the Dead
Sea in present day Jordan, then John was
executed.
Josephus doesn't say how he was executed.
Also, if you look at Josephus's,
it actually puts the death of the Baptist
a little bit later than what the gospels
say, something like 33,
34, even 36.
So so John's death would have been closer
to Jesus' alleged crucifixion.
It is plausible that John the Baptist was
stoned and crucified
or just crucified.
In in the Tal Adath Yeshu,
just an FYI, John the Baptist is is
crucified.
This is plausible because Herod needed to make
a strong statement
to both his Roman overlords
and to the followers of the Baptist. However,
Tabor points out that John was killed at
a fortress far away from his supporters. So
maybe what happened was,
that the Jews living in that area reported
the news to other Jews
in the heart of Palestine,
Jerusalem in particular,
that some Galilean preacher of the coming kingdom
of God with seemingly messianic expectations,
or aspirations
was crucified by Herod Antipas.
And there there might have been Jewish leaders
and members of the temple cult in Jerusalem
who assumed that that was Jesus of Nazareth,
while others said John the Baptist. And these
were, you know, men who,
hated Jesus for cleansing the temple, exposing
their hypocrisy, and teaching a slightly more liberal
version of the Torah. The rumor that
it was Jesus
spread, and then some of those who spread
the rumor also heard that Jesus was seen
alive thereafter.
Some thought he had been resurrected. Others disagreed.
And the rest is history. So just a
misunderstanding.
Totally plausible. None of John's nor Jesus' followers
were present
at this execution, so there was an there
was an echilaf
as to who was actually killed.
Eventually, some of the leaders of the temple
cult realized that Jesus may
still be alive and had never died. They
pursued him, but God caused them to ascend,
thus thwarting their plans.
And finally,
finally,
this is the last slide.
Uh-huh. Let's
revisit the 4 main criteria of modern historiography.
I promise I'd come back to this.
Question number 1, is the crucifixion of Jesus
multiply attested in historical sources? I would say
no.
Paul wrote that Jesus was crucified in multiple
letters, but that is one source. Paul.
Mark, who wrote the first gospel, was a
Pauline Christian. He believed in Paul's gospel,
that Jesus died for our sins as the
divine son of God. Mark depended on Paul.
Matthew and Luke depended on Mark. And John
had knowledge of the synoptics.
That's all conceivably one source, Paul. And remember,
Paul was not an eyewitness.
In fact, none of the gospel writers were
eyewitnesses.
What about M and L? Well, it is
plausible that M and L were created by
Matthew and Luke themselves. So M is material
that's only found in Matthew, and l is
only, is material only found
in Luke. It's plausible that they created that
material themselves. That was part of the genre
of, of the flexible genre we were talking
about earlier. It's common amongst the Greco Roman
novelists.
And that's why they don't agree because they
they made up these details. What about the
unique crucifixion details of the gospel of John?
Well, as I stated earlier, John contradicts the
synoptics
regarding the passion narrative time and again.
He's writing history through the lens of his
high Christology. John is clearly inventing
these details.
Besides, John is Pauline at his core.
Jesus must be crucified.
What about Josephus? Well, the testimony of Flavium
is a fabrication.
Thus, Josephus does not mention the crucifixion of
Jesus.
The earliest known Roman reference to the crucifixion
is in the annals of Tacitus,
who died 120 of the common era.
And there's actually some debate about its authenticity,
but historians generally consider it
authentic, genuine,
and thus an important
independent, I e, non Christian text that confirms
the gospel accounts
of Jesus' crucifixion.
However, Tacitus
wrote the Annals around 116,
85 years after the supposed crucifixion,
and it's not clear whether Tacitus was relating
what was generally known among previous
Roman historians
or whether he was simply acquiescing
to the popular Christian narrative.
Okay? Tacitus did not have a reason
to question whether Pilate may or may not
have executed
some random Jew among 1,000 of others.
Question number 2 is is the crucifixion an
early source as well? It's mentioned by Paul,
which is earlier than the gospels, but Paul
gives us zero narrative.
However, it is not in Q, which was
plausibly earlier than Paul. So, no, the earliest
source about Jesus that we know of does
not mention Jesus' alleged crucifixion.
It is not in q. Remember, there's nothing,
nothing, nothing in the gospel account in the
gospel according to q about the crucifixion
of Jesus.
It also seems likely that from the subtext
of Paul's epistles that there were Christian factions
in various cities around the Mediterranean that denied
the crucifixion, and we looked at that. Question
number 3, was the crucifixion embarrassing?
Well, this depends on the type of quote
unquote Christian
and what text he's looking at. So the
answer is not necessarily. Again, the name Yeshua
was so popular at this time because Jewish
parents wanted their sons
to be the messiah mentioned in Daniel 9,
who is martyred, and martyrdom is not embarrassing.
It is glorious.
Now, Paul was definitely an apocalypticist.
You know, he thought the world was about
to end, so
there's a high probability that he considered Daniel
9 to be happening during his generation,
as did many other Jews. And Daniel 9
speaks of a messiah
who was cut off. So I think what
happened was that Paul heard rumors
that a man named Jesus,
who was claiming messiahship, was crucified,
but that certain people also claimed
to have seen Jesus thereafter.
Paul said to himself, this man is perfect.
He's named Jesus, a perfect name, short for
Joshua, who claimed to be the Messiah, who
was killed, just like Daniel 9 says,
then seen after his death. Ah, so this
is how God
is going to inaugurate these end times, with
Jesus' death as a martyr for our sins,
then his resurrection.
So for Paul, this messiah in Daniel 9
must be the messiah because the end is
so near.
So to answer the question, no, in Paul's
understanding,
insisting that Jesus did die as messiah was
not embarrassing at all.
Finally, number 4, is the crucifixion socially or
contextually coherent? In other words, does the crucifixion
make sense in its context? Yes. A lot
of Jews were crucified. That's the only one
that modern historians get, in my opinion. But
the problem here for the historians and Christians
is that the specific
events surrounding
the alleged crucifixion of Jesus in the gospels
are highly implausible,
which makes one question the historicity
of the entire event. So in conclusion, after
all of this, if someone doesn't admit
that there is a reasonable doubt about the
crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, if they don't
admit that it is at least historically plausible
that he wasn't crucified, then we must question
their intellectual honesty.
And that,
my dear brother Paul,
is mercifully the end.
Fantastic. Well, thank you very much indeed, doctor
Ali Atay, for a magisterial
exposition
of historical
plausibility of an uncrucified
Jesus of Nazareth. And I use the word
magisterial,
like, deliberately,
authoritative,
comprehensive, definitive,
exposition there. So thank you very much indeed,
sir.
Thank you. Okay. Well, we'll leave it there,
and we can all digest the content over
over time, I'm sure. So thank you. Until
next time.