BLOGS
JESUS WAS NOT WHAT WE WERE TOLD
Going by the gospels, Christ, or the Messiah, was born in the first century CE. But was he? His names, Jesus Christ, were mere titles meaning savior and anointed with oil in that order. Such titles were also used for gods like Horus in Egypt, Dionysus and Attis in Greece, Mithras in Rome, and Krishna in India. Jesus was the Anglicized name of Joshua.
Like Horus and others, Jesus had a virgin birth on December 25th. Horus was similarly conceived by Isis since her man, Osiris, lost his penis when his brother, Set, hacked it off and fed it to a fish. In India, the births of Buddha and Krishina were also without sin. Ironically, the apostle Paul, though he espoused Jesus, he did not mention his miraculous birth.
What did Jesus look like? The Bible doesn’t give a description. His early portrayals showed him with African features, black wooly hair, full lips, and a round nose, similar to the large contingent of people of African descent living in the Middle East at the time.
Mark did not mention Jesus’s birth at all, writing that that he was from Nazareth, which did not exist at the time. Bethlehem was introduced later in Mathew and Luke to fulfill a prophecy from Micah 5:2. Jesus's parables and death circumstances also changed with time. The walk on water reflected the sun’s journey across the big river in the sky, the Milky Way, in May. It was an allusion to a prophecy in Isaih 43:2. Also earlier, Osiris and Pythagoras prevailed over the “waters.” Jesus was not the first either to have twelve disciples or to turn water into wine at a wedding. Dionysus also did. And Mithras, the Roman soldier’s god, had a last supper before Jesus did. No wonder, many of these mythological gods were indistinguishable from Jesus.
Apart from John, Jesus did not claim he was a God. When asked where the kingdom of God was, he answered, “in you.” With time, questions about his nature arose resulting in contentious debates and street fights in Alexandria. Seeing that Serapis, a merger of Osiris and the Apis bull by the Ptolemys, was being worshipped as Christus, a presbyter, Arius, claimed that Jesus was manmade. To settle the disputes, Emperor Constantine convened a bishops Council in Nicaea in 325 AD. There, Jesus was stated to be divine, made of the same substance as the father.
Jews yearned for a Messiah, a worrier from the line of King David to liberate them from Roman rule in the first century AD, as was prophesied in the Torah. Nevertheless, Roman emperors expected their subjects to worship them along with their local gods. Obstinate Messianic and dagger concealing Sicarii Jewish assassins refused and only worshiped Yahweh. To win over the rebels, the Romans schemed to fool them. They portrayed emperor Vespasian's son, Titus, as the Messiah. Since the fraud was orchestrated by Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, who wrote about the Roman war against the Jews in Judea, the historian couldn't have acknowledged Jesus Christ, as a forgery inserted in his book, Antiquities of the Jews, indicated. Instead, he wrote about Jesus the son of Ananias in The Jewish War. The lowly Jesus ben Ananias also called a madman prophesied the destruction of the Temple like Jesus Christ also did. Further, Jesus was not mentioned in any contemporaneous records.
Also, no archeological artifacts have been found showing Jesus lived. His tomb was randomly selected by Constantine’s mother when visiting Jerusalem. The crucifixion is doubtful, too. Church father Bishop Araneus believed that he was not crucified but died an oldish man. Although crucifixion by the Romans is believed to have been common in the first century, only two bones appearing to be heels have turned up, one in Jerusalem and the other in Italy near Venice.
Lacking evidence for Jesus’ existence, then, as in other religions, his story bears the hallmarks of fiction or myth. The clincher, though: not in a thousand years can a virgin birth occur in humans. Those who say otherwise, do not know what they are talking about.
The Face of God is available at: https://www.a.co/d/fAQNZi2
MOSES WAS FABRICATED
The Exodus never happened.
Moses didn’t write the Torah. God only gave him the Ten Commandments. Deuteronomy 34:1 saying, “Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses….” does not make sense since by Moses being the first prophet, he couldn’t have known about future successors as he would have passed away by then. Moses also lived centuries before the time of the Edomite kings listed in Genesis, so they couldn’t have denied him passage through their land during the exodus. Sites like Kadesh Barnea, Heshbon, and Gibeon mentioned in Exodus weren’t occupied at the time. Also, laws credited to Moses were similar to the seventeenth century BCE Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. In turn, the code was most likely based on the Egyptian 147 Negative Confessions from the book of the dead.
Also, Moses’ story of him floating down River Nile in a basket mirrors that of Sargon of Akkad, a third millennium BCE Mesopotamian king. Moreover, what happened on Mount Sinai (it has not been found) was borrowed. Laws of the Greek mythological god, Bacchus, called “the Lawgiver,” were written on two tablets of stone. And one day as the Persian prophet Zoroaster prayed on a high mountain, the Lord appeared before him and handed him the “Book of Law.” Zoroaster brought the book to the King and people at the foot of the mountain. The Persians could have introduced this story when imposing The Law on the Jews after returning from their Babylonian exile.
Were Moses, Abraham, and Noah humans like us? One could hardly live 120 years with semblance of a sound mind as Moses did, but Abraham’s sojourn of 175 years is a stretch, and Noah’s 950 years a fantasy. None of the tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets from the archives of the ancient city of Mari specifically refers to Abraham either. Failing to find evidence for these figures, or the Exodus—the Egyptians have no records of it—John Loftus, a former preacher, wrote in Why I Became an Atheist, that Jewish history “…rested on myths, legends, and superstitions.”
Because Bible events tally poorly with history, Joseph’s Egyptian stay, the Exodus, and accounts revolving around figures like Abraham and Jacob, were most likely based on earlier Canaanite traditions and written late, according to archeologist Donald Redford. For instance, when Joshua supposedly conquered the Canaanite cities in 1407 BCE, the area was under constant Egyptian rule. Also, cities like Jericho, unoccupied since 1550 BCE, had no sky-high walls, if any. Moreover, even if there had been walls, Joshua would have torn them down before the time of Moses and the Exodus, dated to the thirteenth century during Ramses II’s reign. The Israelites do not mention the Egyptians, as Israel wasn’t a nation yet. Like resettled Jericho, cities that fell did so to the Sea Peoples around 1200 BCE. And since Pithom was a fort built by Pharaoh Necho around 608 BCE, and Ramses, a city constructed by Ramses II in the 1,200s BCE on top of Avaris, the main center of the Hyksos until 1,550 BCE, Moses couldn’t have existed before the third century BCE, when the Egyptians invented him and gave him his Egyptian name, Exodus 1:11.
The Face of God is available at: https://www.a.co/d/fAQNZi2
