Reddit reviews Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All

Welcome, and thank you for your question! It happens to be about a topic near and dear to my heart!

I've done a blog post on the subject of the Jesus Myth. It mentions the book Nailed which is all about this topic. You can catch the author's summary in this talk.

Richard Carrier, a scholarly historian, points out a hell of a lot of holes in the resurrection story in this talk. It's done to an atheist audience, so it's not quite as polite as you may be used to hearing at Christian meet-ups ;)

I'll just leave this here:

I got my information from reading a book called Nailed: Ten Christain Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All

Here's a video of David Fitzgerald presenting the basic arguments.

Authors and Historians alive during Jesus's Time who had reason to notice him, but did not mention him:

Seneca: Wrote a book On Superstition and discussed every religious sect of his time, pagan, jewish, etc. He makes no mention of Jesus or his cult. St. Agustine attempts to explain this away in City of God

Philo Of Alexandria: Wrote a book about Pilate's Persecution of the jews, but makes no mention of Jesus.

Those are just a few, this is a comment, not a book, so let's move on.

There are claims that Jesus is mentioned in historical documents. Most notably Josephus.
I won't quote the passage, but it is a blatant forgery. After extolling how wonderful and Christy this Jesus fellow was, the next paragraph continues "About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews in disorder". Another sad calamity? It is blatantly obvious this paragraph of Jesus was inserted at a later date.

Watch the link or read the book if you want more evidence.

> What would it take to change your mind, ie; convince you that a god exists ?

Independently verifiable evidence.

> Even if the bible and the gospels were completely internally consistent, completely historically accurate, written by eye witness accounts who were part of the story and heavily documented from multiple sources. Would you believe it and all its miracles and claims to be true ?

If it could be independently verified, then yes.

> Any book recommendations on wether a historical Jesus existed ?

I think Richard Carrier is a good place to start. Fitzgerald is good, too.

1. The Gospels are contradictory and inconsistent.
   
   Matthew 27:52-53 is my favorite example. That's not a minor difference. In fact it's a huge oversight that Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and Peter all never mention. Would this not have been a useful event in trying to convince people of the divinity of Jesus? Did they not mention it because it simply did not happen? If that's the case, why should one believe any of what the authors of these books attributed to these men?
   
   I'm not disputing the idea that eyewitness testimony is unreliable and sometimes contradictory. I'm disputing the idea that saints rising from the dead, wandering around, and appearing to many is an event of minor consideration that could be easily missed or deemed unimportant enough to mention by all but one person.
   
   > Cornelius Tacitus one of the most prominent first century Roman historians stated
   
   
2. Cornelius Tacitus wasn't even born until 56 AD. To try and utilize him as some sort of credible firsthand eyewitness is absolutely spurious. He was reporting what other people were saying, and it shouldn't be allowed to escape the critical eye that he never mentions anything about the resurrection, just the death of this "Christus." Even if a historical Jesus existed (which I'm not thoroughly convinced of), his existence does not mean that every other thing said about him in the bible is de facto true.
   
   
3. I can't believe people are still trying to use Josephus. The Testimonium portion your friend quoted is a forgery by later Christian scribes. David Fitzgerald, author of Nailed, talks about this in a response to a review of his book:
   
   > The following paragraph starts by saying “About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder.” Another sad calamity? But what sad calamity? Josephus has just presented a commercial for Jesus, not a sad calamity! This reference skips over the Testimonium entirely and points to the previous section. That passage, where Pilate sets his soldiers loose to massacre a large crowd of Jews in Jerusalem, certainly fits the bill as a sad calamity, but no versions of the Testimonium do, “reconstructed” or not.
   
   > Many commentators, including Doherty, G. A. Wells and Peter Kirby, have noted that without the Testimonium passage, the continuity between the passages flanking it flows seamlessly into each other. This fact alone is a tremendous indication that the passage is 100% entirely fraudulent.
   
   Watch this video of Fitzgerald speaking at Skepticon. It gives a pretty good background to the historical evidence from a non-Christian perspective. Richard Carrier is another great historian to look into on this topic.
   
   > The Church itself shouldn't exist if Jesus never resurrected. Early Christians wouldn't have died under Nero and other tyrants if they had not had proof that Jesus was resurrected in the first place.
   
   Someone saying this to my face would immediately pay a price in ill-concealed laughter. As if tyrants have never persecuted people simply because they were a threat.
   
   > Is it irrational to believe that there is something beyond the physical world? Something beyond just what the five senses can evaluate?
   
   There are plenty of things we measure that cannot be evaluated by our five biological senses (though we actually have more than five). Magnetism, light outside the visible range, small amounts of ionized radiation, the existence of various elementary particles are some that I can think of off the top of my head. But we have done this through science and we don't call it magic or "the spiritual world."
   
   Let's put it this way: Science is the process of applying skepticism and logic to evidence to explain those observations about the world we inhabit. There is nothing about this definition which would preclude the existence of ghosts, for example, if we could definitively observe that ghosts exist. Science as a skeptical position doesn't start with theories, it starts with data. Without data, all theories are just speculation with no grounding in observable reality. So, to the person claiming that ghosts exist, the scientist says "give me data."
   Now, the position to which people who believe in spiritual realms often retreat is "the spiritual world is beyond the scope of the physical. Evidence is impossible to obtain."
   
   Well, that's just dandy, isn't it? If it's impossible to observe the spiritual world because it is completely separate from the physical world, then how the hell do you know anything about it at all? If we cannot see ghosts because they do not interact with light, cannot touch ghosts because they do not interact with matter, etc. then we're effectively talking about an entity that by definition can have no interaction with our reality and you can have no knowledge about. If they do interact with light or matter, then we can have observable evidence for testing their existence.
   
   To suggest that there's some parallel dimension that can't be investigated whatsoever with any physical method is to say that it can have no effect upon our world.

>further the information we do have from that far back is very spotty

Untrue. "Nailed" by David Fitzgerald has a whole chapter dedicated to the historical evidence we have from 1st century Judea which makes the utter lack of evidence for Jesus that much more anomalous.

So I'm pretty familiar with the modern version of "Jesus mythicism", which is what you're talking about. I'll try to summarize without writing too long of an essay.

(For further reading, look into books or presentations by Richard Carrier, author of the peer-reviewed scholarly work On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt or David Fitzgerald, author of a much more approachable Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All. Here is a 60 minute presentation of the theory laid out in Carrier's book.)

There are two major thrusts of this argument:

1. The purported "evidence" for Jesus' existence, when actually examined in detail, is severely lacking
   
2. There is another plausible explanation for the origins of Christianity and the New Testament books besides Jesus being a real person.
   
   Arguments around 1) have been around for a long time (although there are interesting recent developments), but 2) is where Richard Carrier, specifically, is making some significant contributions. Unfortunately, the publication of his work is very recent, and it is as-yet-unclear whether it will be broadly accepted.
   
   So with regard to the evidence, let's list a few and their problems:
   
   

• The NT gospels are highly mythologized, and can't be accepted as a reliable historical narrative (even the non-miraculous parts)
  
• The NT epistles were written years later, and up to half of Paul's letters are considered to be forgeries
  
• Paul's (authentic) epistles were some of the earliest NT books written, but Paul never even claims to have met a physical Jesus, just had a vision/spiritual encounter. In fact, Carrier claims that a proper interpretation of Paul's writing shows that he viewed Jesus as a celestial being
  
• There is nothing else contemporaneous. Literally nothing, nada, zip. Jewish records about Jesus stirring up trouble? Nope. Roman records about Jesus' trial and crucifixion? Nope.
  
  Aaaaand then we have like a huge gap before other documents start appearing. And most of these other sources are evidence of Christianity or Christians, not evidence of Jesus, per se. For example:
  
  
• Josephus is frequently mentioned, but both references in Josephus have been shown to be interpolations.
  
• Did the astronomer Thallus mention the darkness at Jesus' death? No, he did not.
  
  Getting a little long, so for part 2 (how did we get Christianity, then?), I'll mainly refer you to Carrier's Presentation. In short, Carrier thinks that the original conception of Jesus was of a celestial Jesus in the heavens, and he was later euhemerized (put into stories on earth), and then the latter stories became popular as the gospels, and the original stories/ideas were lost/discarded.
  
  Hope that makes sense.
  
  (Edit: replaced presentation link with a better quality video. Also, fixed links to Carrier's new blog.)

The full book is an expansion of this paper which he wrote previously.

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I've always sided with Christopher Hitchens on this - the fact that they tried so hard to fulfill old testament prophecy by concocting the census and other events in the life of the jesus character leads me to believe that there was a core figure of some sort. Otherwise, why not just make it all up and have him fit perfectly?

However, i've been reading Nailed, which is making the case that he's a complete fabrication. The most important point is the argument from silence. If the jesus character did anything of note (even non-miraculous), he should have been mentioned by contemporary writers. There were dozens of writers in and around Jerusalem that would have noticed if he'd been causing a stir.

The most glaring problem is that even the early church fathers were unaware of any writers mentioning their god. And we know how fervently the believers hung onto the tiny scraps from secular writers - some of which are blatant forgeries. If there had been any mention like "A preacher named Jesus came into Jerusalem in a big parade, and then threw out the money changers... blah blah blah", apologists from the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries would have quoted it and passed it along.

And what of the giant miracles that took place around the time of his death? The sun blotted out for hours or days, the dead rising from their graves, etc. There again we find the silence deafening.

Instead of the church maintaining a set of secular writings to at least suggest that jesus was a real person, we have these curious holes in otherwise well maintained works. Books missing from histories maintained by the church, at just the points where you would want to look for evidence of their godman. The evidence suggests that these books were removed to avoid the embarrassment of jesus not getting a mention.

So what do we know? All of his miracle stories were plagiarized from earlier myths (though not en-masse as Zeitgeist and Acharya S's books would lead you to believe). Most of the numbers in his life, and even some of the places have astrological significance - indicating that the stories were concocted to reel in pagans. We have conflicting stories even in the gospels, indicating that each writer was basically just making things up as he went. There's a huge hole in what should have been recorded by contemporary writers, or even written by jesus himself or any eyewitness. These things make it very difficult to make the case that there was even a core figure, because if there was, he wasn't significant enough to be mentioned by the dozens of historians around his era - many of whom did mention other messiahs of the time.

So which is it? Either he didn't exist at all, or he was so insignificant that he didn't get any attention - contrary to everything the bible says.

A man named Jesus, perhaps, and people who did a few of things accredited to him, but there's no evidence beyond the Gospels (whose credibility is pretty much negligible as a historic source) that Jesus, the prophet of Christianity, actually existed. No contemporaries wrote of him, and the few that are supposed to are likely to be either forgeries or edited transcriptions.

David Fitzgerald does a great job of writing about this: http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333147932&sr=1-1

There is NO contemporary evidence (outside the bible) that this Jesus character even existed. Between the apparent "death" of Jesus until Saul of Tarsus' (aka Paul the apostle) Damascus road vision there is no record of Christianity at all. It was Paul that kicked off Christianity. Here is some recommended reading

http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060859512/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330464426&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408070120&sr=1-1&keywords=Nailed

http://www.amazon.com/How-Jesus-Became-God-Exaltation-ebook/dp/B00DB39V2Q/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1403984728

> tell me all of the reasons why the bible is flawed

That's rather a tall order. There are many perspectives from which it is flawed, and within many of those, a great many problems.

Are you after things like contradictions? Then see this question in the FAQ

Are you after finding out how the New Testament was altered again and again, and why? Then you may want to try to get the book Misquoting Jesus

Are you interested in common mistaken claims about and hidden contradictions in the New Testament? Maybe you'd enjoy Jesus, Interrupted

Are you interested in finding out which parts of the new testament were written by people claiming to be someone else? Then try Forged

Are you interested in whether there's solid evidence Jesus existed at all? Then try Nailed

Are you interested in refuations of many Christian ideas by a bunch of different authors? Then try The Christian Delusion

and so on and so on...

> I also plan on telling my family about my new found Athiesm soon so, any advice in that regards would be greatly appreciated.

Please read the advice in the FAQ. This is not a decision to be taken lightly.

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> why Athiesm is your preferred route

That's atheism (small a, e before i). It's not a choice, any more than I chose not to believe in leprechauns or Santa or flying monkeys. At some point I found I didn't have belief in these propositions. Discovering there weren't any gods I believed in made me without-god-belief. That's literally a-theism.

>The only thing I like about the Bible, New Testament, is that it tells the story of Jesus, and how he came to be and live, how he was, his story

There's actually good reason to think most of that account is fictional, and just a mix of legend and myth.

A good introduction, the book Nailed:
http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911

A talk by Richard Carrier and Skepticon II
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX4LvKvIWJw

>actually

probably*

That's the best we can do, since the evidence is suspiciously lacking and internally contradictory.

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Happy Ēostre, and happy reading!

It's hard to disprove the existence of someone or something 2k years in the past.

However, I'm not sure why many atheists think he most likely existed. I have a number of assumptions, though.

• Yea, so if there was a historical Jesus, that doesn't mean he was the son of god, so it's a question that's not relevant for my atheism. Why argue over it?
  
  
• Someone must have started christianity, so likely it was some "christ" guy.
  
  
• Lots of scholars seem to think there was a historical Jesus, so why doubt it?
  
  Personally, I like what David Fitzgerald had to say about this in "Nailed" but I can understand why even atheists go with one of the arguments above.

Actually, there is absolutely no evidence that Jesus ever existed, even worse, there are more pointers that indicate that he most likely never existed at all.

Eg. the historian David Fitzgerald wrote a well researched book about this;

Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All

(btw this isn't anything new, historians who have claimed this before just have been ignored without addressing their claims)

link to the book:

http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911

I'm pretty sold on the Christ Myth theory. It was a pretty easy sale since I kind of strongly suspected that the Biblical Jesus Christ was the syncretic blend of Jewish messianic cults and a Greek mystery school demigod.

What pushed me firmly into the Christ Myth theory camp was reading Nailed by David Fitzgerald. Nailed takes the top apologetic claims of historical evidence of Jesus Christ and shows you what bullshit they and the apologists that use them are.

You can't base your choices on whatever your boyfriend or brother tell you.

You need to start thinking for yourself. And by thinking, I mean going out and search for stuff. We can only give you pointers to what books we recommend to you.

I can point you to this essay: http://www.nazarethmyth.info/Fitzgerald2010HM.pdf

If you prefer the expanded book, it's here: "Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All" http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911

After that you can go and read other atheist books, like Richard Dawkins' "God delusion" or Christopher Hitchens' "God is not great".

Then you can read whatever christian propaganda you're told.

A great book by David Fitzgerald with actual evidence: 'Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All' http://amzn.com/0557709911

Hrmm. If you've got a library, I've got books:

For New Testament contradictions, you'll want him to read Misquoting Jesus and Jesus, Interrupted by Bart Ehrman, in that order. For a video, this one at least gets the basic point across. Skeptic's Annotated has a good list too.

For the immorality of the Old Testament, Evil Bible or Skeptic's Annotated.

Morality: Andy Thompson's lecture at AAI 2009.

Jesus not existing: Nailed.

Not true. You should read the book Nailed, by David Fitzgerald (you can find it for free on Library Genesis too, but I won't link to that). He makes a compelling case that this "strong evidence" is not so strong after all. It's certainly worth a read.

Nailed by Edmond Fitzgerald
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0557709911/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1417318461&sr=8-1

The historical record indicates for his non-existance. There is zero evidence that any human existed for whom the Bible story might try to describe. Even all the people who absolutely should have written about Jesus apparently chose to ignore him completely. Out side of the Bible there is nothing, and inside it only contradictions, self serving lies, and deliberate forgeries. In other words, its a good read for those who like facts rather than fiction.

I'm just gonna post a link to the amazon review page for his book. You should probably take the time to read some of the negative reviews (some which come from atheists) which claim that he uses very poor historical methods and also fails to mention information that is highly relevant but doesn't support his side. I haven't read his book but I doubt it is a scholarly endeavor

>he's like the greatest humanist that ever never was.

FTFY

David Fitzgerald has studied the historicity of jesus and has published a book called Nailed if you like books but also has some good talks about it on youtube if you prefer videos. Here is a good one.

Sorry, was mobile and didn't have a link handy.

Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All
by David Fitzgerald

http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911

You haven't listened to the talk, have you. There's a book if you prefer to read, as i do myself. Of course, one book doesn't prove the case. In fact there's many books on the subject. The historicity of Jesus isn't a foregone conclusion.

Nailed by David Fitzgerald

This book lays out a mythicist viewpoint as well. An easy read.


https://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911/

Great book I think you would enjoy. And it's loaded with quotes and facts you can use to drive them crazy.

https://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911

There is actually pretty overwhelming evidence that Jesus is a myth. If you assemble the books of the NT in chronological order you can actually follow the development of the myth, from Paul, for whom Jesus was an abstract deity sort of like a Greek god, to Mark, for whom Jesus was a real person full of doubts and uncertainties and who never claimed to be God (indeed, at one point wondered why God had forsaken him), to Matthew and Luke who just copied Mark and a lost source called Q, to John, whose Jesus was a sort of superhero, performing all kinds of miracles that had never been recorded before. Christians will tell you that there are other contemporary references to Jesus written by non-Christians, but this is not true. All of the alleged references are either known forgeries (Josephus) or references to Christians, not Christ. To state the obvious, the existence of Christians is not in dispute.

This is also a good resource:

https://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911

> aka by people heavily invested into and having careers built upon Jesus being non-mythical.

As opposed to the other side? aka people who [sell books on amazon] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Of-Nazareth-Invented/dp/1578840031/ref=pd_sim_b_18?ie=UTF8&refRID=0Q25CVBES7RRJ3E90PYP) about their shit? They don't have careers built upon Jesus being mythical?

I'm going to reply the easy stuff now, and research and reply the harder stuff.

Please bear in mind that early Christianity is an area of casual curiosity to me, that my sources are neither scholarly nor unbiased, and that the main reason I haven't gone digging through the literature in detail is that being precise is not very important to me, and I don't care to read tedious apologetics. I don't need to knock holes in literalism to dismiss Christianity.

I might as well give you a data dump of my sources:

• The book Nailed by David Fitzgerald (it's messily formatted, but informative - for example it's interesting how long the church took to become culturally prominent rather than just one competing thread).
  
  
• http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/jesus_myth_history.htm and its follow-up http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/jesus_myth_followup.htm
  
  
• A documentary I saw, that discussed how the evidence of archaeology doesn't align with a Jewish migration into or out of Egypt, a journey through the desert to Palestine, or a genocide and takeover, or a huge kingdom. On the contrary, the pre-Jewish culture fits into the region, indicating a local origin. Some of the things about the Moses story make zero sense, for example, Egypt ruled the area of Palestine back then. Running for cover thataway would be madness. But it makes a lot of sense as a historical fiction, compounded to back the newly forged monotheist religion of a shaky kingdom around the time of the return from Babylon. Alas, I still kick myself I didn't make note of the title, so it's not much use as a cite.
  
  
• Casual Wikipedia browsing inspired by the above.
  
  As for deism, it can't be ruled out exactly, but neither can anything - you are asking for a probability of p=0 which simply doesn't happen in a universe that has to be understood via evidential refinement of plausibility estimates. What it can be is ruled "pointlessly overcomplicated and thus wildly implausible, beneath notice".
  
  Occam's razor can be formalized as Solomonoff induction. The mathematical fact is that adding one binary bit to the essential complexity of a guess at the laws of the universe halves your likelihood of guessing right. This can be used as a "universal prior" for Bayesian updates - it takes evidence to push your best estimate towards a more complex guess. It would take a mountain of evidence to make a deist theory more plausible than regular physics. And by definition a deist universe is indistinguishable from a godless one, zero evidence. The concept is basically a senseless dodge into la-la land (bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster are hugely more plausible) simply with the goal of saving a useless and unnecessary god.
  
  So it's religion, because religion isn't bound to be sane. But it's not worth actually considering as a theory of reality.
  
  As for dark matter, any appeal to that that is a variation on "we are ignorant, therefore god". Yes, it's inconvenient. No, we don't understand it yet. presumably there is a gap in the theory. That does not constitute enough of a nod-and-wink to invalidate the many tests that have thoroughly confirmed quantum and relativistic theories to extreme precision in the observable universe, both locally and not. (Seek a physicist for better detail on this. I am not sure how much people are still considering the theory that the laws of physics might vary. These things do get disproven, and that disproof doesn't necessarily filter down to the pop sci press.)

David Fitzgerald wrote an entire book about this call Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that Show Jesus Never Existed at All.

Here is a video of a talk he gave about his research for the book.

This book

There is a review of it here. But I will warn that the review is quite long.

The bottom line is, there's no contemporary evidence whatsoever for the existence of Jesus. No one wrote about him while he was alive, there are no works of art that depict him, no pieces of carpentry that he may have constructed. No historians mention him, no Roman records. The gospels were written several decades after his supposed life; Paul, who never met Jesus, his writings are the closest, and there's arguments that Paul mayn't have thought of him as a real person.

This is a good lecture to get you started. His book, Nailed, is awesome.

This book briefly describes Pontius Pilate's role as Roman governor. It's not exactly objective, but the author provides citations for everything.

I'm reading this book right now and it's giving a very convincing argument that no such person even existed.

Strongly agreed on reading Richard Carrier, though his works are of a significant size and you might not have the time to finish them prior to the due date of your paper (though I definitely encourage you to read through them at some point).

A shorter debate between Richard Carrier and Zeba Crook is available on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgmHqjblsPw


And you might also want to check into some of the works of David Fitzgerald:

• David Fitzgerald: Ten Beautiful Lies About Jesus [This is a fairly short PDF that's easy to get into and immediately downloadable.]
  
• David Fitzgerald: Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All

Check this book out. Pretty decent read and it's very well laid out and explains things in great detail.

http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911

Jesus probably never existed.
http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911
http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Neither-God-Case-Mythical/dp/0968925928/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1347399464&sr=1-1&keywords=Earl+Doherty

>>Go sit in on a Sunday school lesson on Noah’s Ark. see if it’s taught as a fable or history. Whether or not the adults in the room themselves believe it. Do they teach the Passover as just a thing or ask questions about whether god’s behavior in that story was horrific? Nothing is presented with any opportunity or suggestion of questioning the truth or morality. That’s indoctrination.

>There's a good chance it will be taught as fable. After all, it's pretty clear that the beginning of genesis is allegorical.

You just go see. You’ll probably be surprised.

I went to an old-earth, evolution-believing, liberal church. Nobody mentioned allegory out loud least of all to the children.

>And no, we don't teach that God's actions were evil, because they weren't.

Why are the people of Egypt guilty because of the actions of the Pharaoh?

You’re Bob living a hundred miles away down the Nile. You wake up one morning and the Holy Spirit has killed your baby because you didn’t kill/smear a goat that you had no idea about because you’re a peasant that does t know shit.

Was that a moral action?

Now you’re Fred, that son of Bob and you’re three days old and you get murdered because fuck knows, you’re three days old. Sucks to be you. Was that a moral action?

>>I mean the efforts to present arguments for the truth of the beliefs are normally only used on new converts. Once your in the club everyone talks to everyone with the constant assumption that the beliefs are valid.

>Nobody converted me either.

Maybe not in person. Or did you read the Bible cover to cover having heard nothing about Christianity and then went “sounds good to me”?! I guess you’re lucky you didn’t read the Quran first!

>And do you not talk as if God doesn't exist with your atheist friends?

It doesn’t really make sense to talk about non-existing stuff at all. Do you about Voldemort’s non-existence, or unicorns? Or the flrargeblargle? You don’t need to continually re affirm your lack of belief in the flrargeblargle until someone presents some new positive evidence. But you would asses new claims. Every story in the Bible is a new claim unless you swallow it wholesale.

It’s only the affect of the belief on the actions of the believers that makes it worth mentioning by atheists at all.



>>Paul never met Jesus. He claimed to have met ghost Jesus on a road. How are we justifying his claims of divine knowledge? IMHO a large part of modern Christianity just comes from Paul’s mind. The Catholics especially.

>Paul lived at the same time as the other apostles my guy.

So? I live at the same time as a lot of people. Doesn’t mean I’m the authority on anything.

>>An honest dating puts them at much longer than a few decades. There are many papers you can read on this. It’s also clear from language analysis that the later gospels were riffing and reinterpreting on Mark which was the first and simplest one. As they get later as in John Jesus gets more sure if his divinity and does more miracles. The myth was getting embellished.

>Do you have a source?

For an easy intro (not written for scholars) try:
Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All https://www.amazon.com/dp/0557709911/
Or the follow up. There are audio books.

>>With shady provenance of the Bible, the length of time and number of hands it has passed through, yes. You should treat every chapter as potentially forged, modified, false, or metaphorical.

>The number of hands it's passed through? What are you talking about?

Oh man. There’s too much to go into here. Look up the history of the Bible and try to pick a non-evangelical source.

You can't cite the non-existence of a source, unless you sit down and read every book that's ever been written.

The most popular "source" that Christians cite for the historicity of Jesus is Josephus. However a number of historians have shown that those passages in Josephus (along with some others) were inserted after the fact.

Ultimately, though, the argument from skeptics and atheists is this: There is no historical evidence to back up the claims made in the Bible about Jesus. Being such extraordinary claims, one would expect these startling events to have been recorded by contemporary historians, but they were not. Therefore, until better evidence comes along, we are forced to conclude that Jesus -- at least, the Jesus of the Bible -- did not exist.

Here's a couple of good skeptical sources on the historicity of Jesus:

• Video: David Fitzgerald: "Ten Beautiful Lies About Jesus"
  
• Video: Richard Carrier: "You're All Gonna Die! How the Jews Kept Failing to Predict Doomsday and Created Christianity Instead"
  
• Video: David Fitzgerald: "Examining the Existence of a Historical Jesus" (Skepticon 3)
  
• Book: David Fitzgerald: "Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All"
  
• Book: Richard Carrier: "Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus"
  
  (Disclaimer: I haven't done much research into the question of the historicity of Jesus because I think the nonexistence of deities is so obvious that the question is pointless. So Fitzgerald and Carrier are the only resources I'm familiar with; Loftus, I think, is also good, but I'm not familiar with him.)

Thanks. Maybe op will post a link.


I'm now trying to dig into a new book by David Fitzgerald called Nailed, but I'm finding it difficult to get a good summary of his 10 points which, he claims, refutes the historicity of jesus.

Perhaps you might find this book interesting: Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All

I saw the author present a talk on the subject at Skepticon 3. It's fascinating stuff.

NAILED is great. you can get it here: http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293828454&sr=1-1

Great book

Shows you that all historical accounts of Jesus were written by people after the fact or that the so called historian never even existed.

Amazon.

Really!? Good. I guess we can burn this book then.

I would recommend Nailed by David Fitzgerald, Proving History by Dr. Richard Carrier, and On the Historicity of Jesus, also by Dr. Carrier

And I’ve perused Nailed, and have read both of the books I recommended by Dr. Carrier

Most biblical historians believe Jesus existed. And most biblical historians work for or get funded by Christian institutions, making them incredibly biased. Don't want to watch a video? Fine, read a book. But you won't, because you are too biased yourself.

Here's some info for you to check out:

• http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/ef6w9/nailed_ten_christian_myths_that_show_jesus_never/
  
  
• The site in question
  
  
• The book in question

I recently read a book that summarizes a lot of it.

http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1303275336&sr=8-1

There is no dispute as to when Josephus lived. From 37 - 100 A.D. Considering this it is impossible for him to be a contemporary or witness of Jesus.

Antiquities of the Jews is the book that Jesus is mentioned in. It was written in 94 A.D. so at best he is retelling what Christians told him or, at worst, it was added later by someone else.


Citation: Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All

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>Some scholars cast doubt on all these passages, suspecting them to be Christian interpolations, on the grounds that Josephus, who was a Pharisee and sympathetic to the Romans, would not have given such a glowing view of Jesus.

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>In The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus (1912) Arthur Drews stated "In the edition of Origen published by the Benedictines it is said that there was no mention of Jesus at all in Josephus before the time of Eusebius (about 300 A.D., Ecclesiast. Hist., 1, 11). Moreover, in the sixteenth century Vossius had a manuscript of the text of Josephus in which there was not a word about Jesus." as proof that both this passage and the Testimonium Flavianum were interpolations

Citation

I also find it strange that Josephus, a law-observant Jew, would refer to Jesus as the Christ.

You should read this http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911. Also, the author, David Fitzgerald, presents an hour lecture hitting some of the more interesting points of his book at Skepticon 3. Thankfully it is on youtube, fair warning, he uses a tiny bit of language. Here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvleOBYTrDE.

Edit: I don't believe Jesus existed in any form, but that is just my opinion.

I chose that source specifically because the author is an atheist making good arguments why atheists should focus less on disproving the existence of Jesus. And Fitzgerald appears to me to be very much advocating a 'purely mythic Jesus' in a book that screams from its title and promotional literature, 'crackpot'.

If you'd like Habernas refuted read David Fitzgerald, Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All

Not necessarily. http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911

I just finished [this book]
(http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911) and found it facinating. There is a video here as well.

I have no real interest in the religious/supernatural aspects of the story but the author makes a pretty good case for the non-existence of Jesus as the historical figure the Bible make out to be.