Did Jesus Exist?

After being a Christian for 30 years, I finally grew strong enough to ask and research the question of whether Jesus was real or not. My research is documented in my book Jesus Demigod, but I felt that I needed to summarize my conclusions here. As this is a summary, I want to keep this page short and to the point, but just realize that I have mountains of evidence in my book. The standard Christian response to this question is the response that Dr. Bart Ehrman has propagated onto the world. The consensus scholarship position is that there was certainly a Jewish man who died under the authority of Pontus Pilate in the 30’s, but it is highly debatable as to whether the miraculous claims associated with this person were true or fictional. I wanted to know WHY the scholars came to this conclusion. What evidence did they have that Jesus was a real person? When I say real person, I do not mean the son of God who healed everyone of all their sicknesses, who turned water into wine, who walked on water, raised people from the dead, and who was himself resurrected from the dead after his public execution. Even if Jesus was a real man, but not the great miracle worker, the conclusion still remains that Christianity is built on lies. The only way Christianity can be true is if Jesus literally performed all the miracles attributed to him, and honestly we should be able to perform miracles in the name of Jesus today to demonstrate it’s truth, but we can’t. I had come to the conclusion that God did not perform miracles for believers in Jesus today, so I wanted to find out why the miracles stopped, or if they ever really happened in the first place. 

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As for the miraculous claims of the Bible, there is exactly zero evidence that any of them ever happened. If you are unwilling to consider the possibility that the Bible is making miraculous claims for the purpose of deception, then you are unwilling to be a rational person. Do you believe that cowboys really die when they get shot on television Westerns? Do you believe Spiderman can really shoot webs out of his wrists and swing between buildings in New York? Do you believe that a radiation accident can turn a normal man into the Incredible Hulk when he gets angry? Do you believe Zeus is really throwing lightning bolts from the clouds? All throughout history, people have been writing mythology, and all throughout history people have believed some myths were true. Just because someone believes something is true, does not mean it is true, and just because someone says they believe something doesn’t really mean they believe it either. If you are searching for the truth, then you must consider that everything is a lie, until the evidence proves otherwise. I wanted to know if the Bible New Testament was a reliable record of history, or if it was just more mythology. The only thing we have to support the miracles of Jesus, are the unsupported claims from the Christian writings. When you look at historical records (outside the Bible), we can verify the existence of the Roman Caesars, Pontus Pilate, Herod, and even John the Baptist, but we cannot verify the existence of Jesus, Paul, Peter, or any of the twelve Apostles. There is a key difference between the characters that appear in history and those that only appear in the New Testament. The normal humans are verified in history, but the miracle working humans only appear in the New Testament. It should be obvious that supernatural claims that are not verified by independent sources are much less likely to be true. If you can find a motive for why a fictional story was created with supernatural claims, then the scale bottoms out on the side of skepticism. My main purpose for this page is not to even talk about the supernatural Jesus (who is much less likely to exist), but to look more closely at the possibility of a natural Jew who was crucified under the authority of Pontus Pilate. 

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If Jesus was really a normal human Jew who was crucified under Pontus Pilate, but later deified by his followers, and falsely attributed with all these miracles that didn’t really happen, then does that appear in history and what would be the motive for this action? The fact is that everything ever written about Jesus was written about a supernatural figure, by people who were not alive to witness the supernatural Jesus. Scholars come to their consensus opinion for the primary purpose of appeasing Christians. The Scholars base their conclusion on the assumption that behind every myth is a grain of truth. I would agree that there is a MOTIVE behind every myth, but not that every mythical character was based on a real life character. Some myths certainly could have developed from a real life character, but there would need to be some evidence for the real life character before drawing this conclusion. For example, Julius Caesar and Caesar Vespasian left behind a lot of evidence, both written and physical. Both of these Caesar’s have stories written about them where they performed miracles. The most likely conclusion is that these Caesar’s were real, but the miraculous claims associated with them are mythical. There is a logical motive behind attaching supernatural claims to Caesar’s. Caesar’s wanted to be worshipped as God’s and not just normal rulers, so especially after they died, people would attach some supernatural claims to their lives. On the other hand, what would be the motive to attach supernatural claims to a poor carpenters son who didn’t accomplish anything other than being killed by the Romans? Who would have the motivation and authority to Deify Jesus after he was dead? If Jesus died in 33 CE, whey didn’t Josephus, who was born in Jerusalem to a prominent Jewish family talk about Jesus in his writings? The “Testimonium Flavianum” was not written by Josephus. It is an obvious Christian forgery, even though many scholars want to pretend that is was only manipulated by Christians, rather than completely forged. I elaborate on this in my book and in other places. Once you realize that Christians had to manipulate the writings of Josephus to support Jesus, then you can recognize that Christians are not depending on reliable evidence, but they had to manufacture evidence to support their Jesus. And who were these Christians who were manipulating historical records? They were all Greek speakers in the Roman Empire, who had to have authority from the Roman Empire to manipulate texts. The Romans had absolute control over the Roman Empire for many centuries during the development of Christianity. 

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The Romans were actively engaged in multiple wars with the Jews in the first and second centuries. The Romans defeated the Jews in every Jewish Rebellion. The Jews were dying for their faith and expecting their God to intervene on their behalf, but he never did. The Jews expected a Jewish Messiah to lead their victorious rebellion against Rome, but every Jewish Messiah that stepped up, was also killed. When the Romans found out the motivation for the Jews to die for their faith was their expectation of their God to send a Messiah, all the Romans had to do was create their own version of a Jewish Messiah, to change the Jewish expectations. The Romans created Jesus by combining Greek philosophy with the Jewish Scriptures to create a Jewish Messiah who just came to die on a cross to pay for their sins. The Roman version of the Jewish Messiah would not motivate future rebellions, but would change the Jewish hope of an earthly Kingdom to a spiritual Kingdom after death. Since every Christian church father lived in the Roman Empire and was educated in the Greek language and culture, we can be very confident that Christianity was a Roman invention, rather than a movement based on a humble Jewish failure who accomplished nothing. 

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The evidence is overwhelming that Jesus, in reality, was neither the Biblical Superhero, nor a natural Jewish man who made the Jews so mad, they demanded that the Romans kill him. The Romans were actively killing Jews in the first and second centuries. The Jews could never demand that the Romans do anything. That is the most ridiculous idea on this whole page. Share your comments below.

[The above article is used with permission of the original author and originally appeared at the author’s website https://linktr.ee/biblejeff. Note that not all of the opinions in this article are in total agreement with the opinions of the site owner and one should expect some conflicting or contradictory information when reading different authors of this site.]