This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Monday? Well, then – guess I might as well post another Monday School. After all, it’s STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!” Who am I to deprive the world of that?

Today’s Lesson: Did Jesus Really Exist?

This question was the subject of a debate I attended back in 2003. It was appropriately entitled “Did The Biblical Jesus Ever Actually Exist?” and pitted American Atheist editor, author, and scientist Frank Zindler against Dr. Carolyn Thomas, a Catholic professor at the Pontifical College Josephinum and the author of several books herself.

As I’ve mentioned before – and as Zindler pointed out in his opening remarks – we actually have very little information about Jesus. If he existed, he doesn’t seem to have written anything. If he existed, nobody seems to have bothered to note what he looked like, let alone draw his picture. If he existed and did any of the things the Bible credits him with, nobody at the time seems to have cared enough or been impressed enough to write about it. It’s a very odd situation, to say the least.

The oldest reports concerning Jesus seem to be the letters of Paul. These letters seem to have been written years after Jesus had died by a man who never met him in the flesh. Paul is alleged to have had a vision or hallucination of Jesus, but it’s hard to accept that as proof that Jesus actually once existed even if that vision did unfold as the Bible reports. The same Bible tells us that those who allegedly had known Jesus in the flesh didn’t much care for Paul and at times angrily disputed his interpretation of Jesus’s message, which does little to bolster Paul’s credibility or authority. Some of the letters attributed to Paul and have made their way into the Bible are now recognized as forgeries written by people claiming to speak for him. Dr. Thomas herself granted this, claiming that it was a common and acceptable thing to do back then. She went on to claim that these unknown forgers nonetheless accurately conveyed Paul’s beliefs – a claim that begs for lots of supporting evidence. Alas, she gave none.

Virtually everything else people claim to know about Jesus comes from the four Gospels. As virtually everyone seems to agree, these Gospels weren’t written as objective reports of events but are the passionate attempts of Christians to sway others to their point of view. They are, to put it simply, theological propaganda written by unknown authors decades after the events they claim to describe. That’s at least three huge strikes against the Gospels right there, and here are three more: These Gospels disagree on many key points; they’ve clearly been tampered with by later, unknown people with their own agendas; and there’s virtually no independent collaboration for anything important that they have to say (other than for such trite things as yes, there was a Rome, and yes, there was a Jerusalem). For example, the Gospel of Matthew claims the Temple curtain was rent the day Jesus died, and a three-hour darkness fell over all the land, and an earthquake occurred, and saints rose from their graves and wandered Jerusalem. Not even the other Gospel writers noted these things, let alone the Romans. Dr. Thomas didn’t even attempt to defend what Matthew says as being historically accurate – she merely said one had to read it as symbol and poetry. If that’s the way we’re supposed to read the Bible, however, it’s hard to understand why we ought to believe Jesus actually existed anymore than we ought to believe the gods mentioned by Homer really existed.

Christians like to point to the fact that Christians and their Christ were mentioned by the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius and then claim that this proves Jesus really did exist. They gloss over the fact that Tacitus was born some 25 years after Jesus allegedly died, and Suetonius some 35 years after. As the Encyclopedia Britannica quickly and succinctly points out, their knowledge of Jesus “was dependent on familiarity with early Christianity and does not provide independent evidence about Jesus.” Prof. Thomas seems not to have even mentioned them as she attempted to justify her belief that Jesus actually existed.

A good deal of the debate centered on Flavius Josephus instead. Josephus was a Jewish historian who seems to make reference in his works at least twice to Christ, if not Jesus. Alas, Josephus, too, seems not to have been born until after Jesus had allegedly died, so whatever information he gives us about Jesus is secondhand, at best. That information’s reliability seems completely undermined by the fact that it’s been tampered with. As the Britannica summarizes, what was written “has been heavily revised by Christian scribes, and Josephus’s original remarks cannot be discerned.” According to Zindler, Josephus’s comments about Jesus violate the flow of his writing the way a meteorite violates a bowl of soup. In the works that Josephus wrote which specifically address the time and place Jesus allegedly lived, no mention of him is to be found. Jospehus does mention Herod, and his dislike for the man apparently caused him to catalog his many sins and faults; unfortunately for Bible-believers, however, he makes no mention of the Slaughter of the Innocents which Matthew quite famously ascribes to him. In the end, not only are we left with no independent corroborating evidence for what the Gospels say, we end up with good reasons to doubt their claims.

As Zindler pointed out at the start of his talk, it is not up to us to prove Jesus didn’t exist – it is up to those who claim that he did to prove it. Dr. Thomas barely even tried. At one point she lamely resorted to saying “People have believed in Jesus for almost two thousand years now, and no atheist is going to change that fact.” She may as well have said people have believed in astrology, or Hinduism, or the inferiority of women for even longer, and no amount of fact and logic will ever convince people to reject those things. Such comments about what people are likely to do are utterly irrelevant to the question of what they ought to do.

It’s possible that some of Dr. Thomas’s colleagues might have been able to offer a better defense of the claim that people ought to believe Jesus really existed, but a local newspaper tells me that they declined to enter the fray at all. “It would be hard for me to take the position [that Jesus didn’t exist] seriously,” one is quoted as saying. “I might have come out a little too strong.” A bit later, he’s quoted as saying “Our positions are diametrically opposed…. I wouldn’t know how to do it.” Do what? Debate someone who disagrees with you?? Why is it that Christians so often refuse to talk to those who disagree? Exactly what are they afraid of? Cooties?

Dr. Thomas did manage to fill her time with words, even if those words weren’t a very good defense of her beliefs. Here is some of what she had to say:

—– The Bible should be read as literature, not as non-fiction. Literature is a valid way for God to communicate His message.

—– Does anyone really doubt the existence of Solomon or David? No. Yet we only know about them from the Bible, too. If the Bible is good enough reason to believe in their existence, why isn’t it good enough to believe in Jesus’s?

—– Josephus doesn’t feel the need to explain who Jesus was. He explains who James was in terms of Jesus. This shows that his readers knew Jesus better than James. What Josephus says about Jesus DOES fit into the flow of his writing. Later Christian interjections are obvious and can easily be removed without hurting what he says.

—– Many great minds have concluded Jesus existed. Faith in Jesus grows everyday.

—– Jesus is never called a magician in the early documents we have. Other alleged messiahs are. If Jesus had been dismissed as a mere magician, we’d know of it. The fact that he wasn’t proves that people took his miracles seriously.

Mr. Zindler used his rebuttal time to make the following points:

—– None of the early Church fathers were familiar with what Josephus allegedly wrote about Jesus. They would have LOVED to have gotten their hands on that evidence. They couldn’t because it hadn’t been forged yet.

—– Not only is there no evidence that Jesus existed, there’s also no evidence that his 12 disciples/apostles existed, either. Why?? How could these guys have been wandering the countryside, getting people in an uproar, and nobody make a note of it?

—– There have been several attempts in recent years to link ancient inscriptions to Solomon and David. I’ve studied those inscriptions at length. They simply do not fit or apply.

Dr. Thomas shot back with these comments:

—– My colleagues thought it would be useless to debate. I don’t debate.

—– Early Christian communities were formed by eyewitnesses.

—– You said that the Gospels form a “foundation myth.” Well, one meaning of myth is “A truth too profound to put into human words.” I believe in the nugget of truth beneath all the inaccuracies.

—– The Gospel writers were trying to make their message meaningful to their audience. They were trying to be inspiring, not historically accurate. [So give them a break, I guess.]

Questions from the audience followed. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

“Frank, if you were to write a Bible, do you think you could do a better job?”

—– Yes. I’d include useful knowledge. No ugly taboos. No silly myths. Instead, what we have here is layer piled atop invented layer, with everyone writing for their own reasons. Paul, the first writer, says “I have visions of Jesus! Listen to me!” Someone else comes along and says “I knew someone who had direct contact with the living Jesus! Believe me instead!” Then someone else comes along and says, “Well, I’m a blood relative of Jesus! Listen to ME!” And then someone else injects those passages in which Jesus sasses his mother and blows off his family – not because he really did so, but to discredit the position of those who claim a blood relationship.

“Dr. Thomas, I can’t believe people refuse to believe in the virgin birth. After all, Buddha, Dionysus, Attis, Krishna, Zoroaster, and many others are said to have been born of virgins, too. Mithra was born of a virgin on December 25th, murdered, and his resurrection celebrated at Easter some 600 years before Jesus. Given all this, how can anyone doubt the story the Bible tells us?” [Yes, the questioner was being sarcastic.]

—– You need faith. I admit it. If you don’t have faith, you’re not going to believe Jesus was born of a virgin. What can I say? Faith is a gift from God.

“Frank, what’s wrong with faith? If it helps people get up in the morning and be happy, what in the world is wrong with that?”

—– I find that to be an incredible question after 9/11. The men on those planes had far more faith than anyone in this room. Faith allows us to be exploited. It allows people to launch Crusades. It allows people to be manipulated into fighting unjust wars. Belief must be based on adequate evidence. When we relax that requirement – when we start believing whatever we want to believe on the basis of inadequate information and faith – we’ve set ourselves on the road to disaster.

Much more of Frank Zindler’s point of view can be found in his recently published book The Jesus the Jews Never Knew: Sepher Toldoth Yeshu and the Quest of the Historical Jesus in Jewish Sources (American Atheist Press: 2003).