Debunking The Christ Myth?

Argument from Glenn Kimball against
The Christ Conspiracy
(which he hasn't read)

This thinking is a new fade [sic] whose time for debunking is at hand.

Reply by Acharya S, author of
The Christ Conspiracy

"This thinking," i.e, that Jesus Christ is a mythical character, is not at all a "new fad." It has been around since the very beginning, because the intelligentsia of the ancient world knew that what the early Church fathers were palming off was mummified mythology. As Rev. Robert Taylor says:

And from the apostolic age downwards, in a never interrupted succession, but never so strongly and emphatically as in the most primitive times, was the existence of Christ as a man most strenously denied.

Indeed, the first and second epistles of John were written principally to combat such deniers of the historical Christ. (1 Jn. 4:2-3; 2 Jn. 7) The denial of "Christ come in the flesh" is an early "heresy" called "Docetism," whose proponents not only abounded during the first centuries of the Christian era but were the original "Christians," i.e., Gnostics.

The text is borrowed in two places from that of the Gospel, which of itself is sufficient to disprove the authenticity of the letter. Moreover, the quotations are made not from the Gospels proper, but from the famous concordance of Tatian, compiled in the second century, and known as the "Diatessaron," thus fixing the date of the legend as approximately the middle of the third century.

The Catholic Encyclopedia also says of this "letter":

Its legendary environment and the fact that the Church at large did not hand down the pretended epistle from Our Lord as a sacred document is conclusive against it.

As Wells says in The Historical Evidence for Jesus:

About 1200, Constantinople was so crammed with relics that one may speak of a veritable industry with its own factories. Blinzler (a Catholic New Testament scholar) lists, as examples, letters in Jesus' own hand, the gold brought to the baby Jesus by the wise men, the twelve baskets of bread collected after the miraculous feeding of the 5000, the throne of David, the trumpets of Jericho, the axe with which Noah made the Ark, and so on . . .

And Wheless says in Forgery in Christianity:

[T]hat "very dishonest writer," Bishop Eusebius, in the fourth century...forged the Letters between Abgar and Jesus, falsely declaring that he had found the original documents in the official archives, whence he had copied and translated them into his Ecclesiastical History... If the Gospel tales were true, why should God need pious lies to give them credit? Lies and forgeries are only needed to bolster up falsehood: "Nothing stands in need of lying but a lie." But Jesus Christ must needs be propagated by lies upon lies; and what better proof of his actuality than to exhibit letters written by him in his own handwriting? The "Little Liars of the Lord" were equal to the forgery of the signature of their God - false letters in his name, as above cited from that exhaustive mine of clerical falsities, the Catholic Encyclopedia.

No, a myth doesn't write letters. Forgers do.

We have financial records of the family. A myth didn't have money.

"Financial records" of his family? What's next, Mary's gynecological exam results?

The narrative is not worthy of belief, still it is probable that Tertullian knew a document that professed to be a report of Pilate.

"Professed" being a key word here. Kimball is again referring to FORGED texts regarding Procla, etc., one of the many such spurious texts found in The Lost Books of the Bible, which is one of Kimball's "sources." The reason why these texts were "hidden" is because they are known forgeries.

In reality, according to GA Wells, the Roman historian Tacitus reported that UNDER TIBERIUS (42 BCE-37 CE) THERE WERE NO DISTURBANCES IN PALESTINE. If Tiberius had actually spoken about the god "Jesus," he would have been referring to the ubiquitous pre-Christian non-historical, non-carnalized "savior" of the (Gnostic) salvation cultists and would thus represent one of the first conspirators.

How is it that the early Church fathers and all the other Christian fanatics overlooked all of these "archives" and "records" when they were pressed to provide proof of their fables?

Regarding the old spear motif, here's an excerpt from The Christ Conspiracy:

The Spear of Longinus

Longinus was the name of the Roman soldier who stuck Jesus in the side with a spear. Legend held that Longinus was blind and was subsequently cured by Jesus's blood. Again, this is not a historical event but part of the mythos and sacred king ritual, as Walker relates:

The true prototype of the legend seems to have been the blind god Hod, who slew the Norse savior Balder with the thrust of a spear of mistletoe.... March 15, the "Ides of March" when most pagan saviors died, was the day devoted to Hod by the heathens, and later Christianized as the feast day of the Blessed Longinus.

Walker also states:

Up to Hadrians time, victims offered to Zeus at Salamis were anointed with sacred ointmentsthus becoming "Anointed Ones" or "Christs" then hung up and stabbed through the side with a spear.

In addition, the Scandinavian god Odin, and the god Marsyas of Mindanao in the Philippines were hung on a "fatal tree" and stabbed with a spear. The Hindu god Vishnu (Bal-ii) was crucified with a spear in his side, bearing the epithet "side-wounded." The gods Wittoba and Adonis were also crucified and "side-wounded" saviors.

Although a myth, many "authentic" "spears of Longinus" have been "found" in the Christian world. Indeed, Hitler purportedly spent a great deal of time, money and energy to track down the "true" spear, believing that it, like so many other "sacred" objects, held occultic powers.

The side-wounding in the mythos is due to the position of the sun near Sagittarius, the archer, also a centaur or centurion..

These "letters" are KNOWN FORGERIES, which is why they are apocryphal. Much mythmaking surrounded Pilate. The Catholic Encyclopedia relates the troubles Pilate had with the Samaritans and states:

That is the last we know of Pilate from authentic sources, but legend has been busy with his name. He is said by Eusebius (H.E., ii, 7), on the authority of earlier writers, whom he does not name, to have fallen into great misfortunes under Caligula, and eventually to have committed suicide. Other details come from less respectable sources. His body, says the "Mors Pilati," was thrown into the Tiber, but the waters were so disturbed by evil spirits that the body was taken to Vienne and sunk in the Rhone, where a monument, called Pilate's tomb, is still to be seen. As the same thing occurred there, it was again removed and sunk in the lake at Lausanne. Its final disposition was in a deep and lonely mountain tarn, which, according to later tradition, was on a mountain, still called Pilatus, close to Lucerne. The real origin of this name is, however, to be sought in the cap of cloud which often covers the mountain, and serves as a barometer to the inhabitants of Lucerne. There are many other legends about Pilate in the folklore of Germany, but none of them have the slightest authority.

Kimball is also evidently referring to the "letter purporting to have been sent by Pontius Pilate to the Emperor Claudius" embodied in the apocryphal (BOGUS) "Acts of Peter and Paul," of which the Catholic Encyclopedia states, "This composition is clearly apocryphal though unexpectedly brief and restrained."

Kimball claims that these various "childhood" texts were written by those authors purported, i.e., the apostles such as Matthew and James. They were not. They are pseudepigraphical forgeries. As concerns such apocryphal texts, which were all the rage during the centuries preceding and succeeding the Christian era, the Catholic Encylopedia acknowledges:

Pseudographic composition was in vogue among the Jews in the two centuries before Christ and for some time later. The attribution of a great name of the distant past to a book by its real author, who thus effaced his own personality, was, in some cases at least, a mere literary fiction which deceived no one except the ignorant. This holds good for the so-called "Wisdom of Solomon," written in Greek and belonging to the Church's sacred canon. In other cases, where the assumed name did not stand as a symbol of a type of a certain kind of literature, the intention was not without a degree of at least objective literary dishonesty.

One of the texts Kimball uses, the Infancy Gospel of James, also known as the Protoevangelium Jacobi, is well known to be an apocryphal or pseudepigraphical forgery. As the Catholic Encyclopedia says:

It purports to have been written by "James the brother of the Lord," i.e. the Apostle James the Less. It is based on the canonical Gospels which it expands with legendary and imaginative elements, which are sometimes puerile or fantastic. The birth, education, and marriage of the Blessed Virgin are described in the first eleven chapters and these are the source of various traditions current among the faithful.... Critics find that the "Protoevangelium" is a composite into which two or three documents enter. It was known to Origen under the name of the "Book of James". There are signs in St. Justin's works that he was acquainted with it, or at least with a parallel tradition. The work, therefore, has been ascribed to the second century.

Of the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, evidently also promoted by Kimball, CE says: "It is a tasteless and bombastic effort, and seems to date from about the fourth century."

Kimball is also evidently referring to the "Acts of Pilate" or the "Gospel of Nicodemus," an obviously fictitious forgery of the fourth century that is so ridiculous it even presumes to record the actual conversations of the astonished faithful and prophets of old, such as David and Enoch, who have been resurrected from the dead after Jesus's own resurrection and ascension! This text was considered so evidently fictitious that it was nixed and buried, because it would so readily cast doubt upon the "veracity" of the gospel tale as well. Only the credulous and uncritical do not realize the fictitious nature of this text. These are, in short, fairytales, not historical accounts. As the Catholic Encyclopedia says of the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus, "The writers (for the work we have is a composite) could not have expected their production to be seriously accepted by unbelievers."

As concerns these various apocryphal gospels, the Catholic Encyclopedia says:

When, therefore, enterprising spirits responded to this natural craving by pretended Gospels full of romantic fables and fantastic and striking details, their fabrications were eagerly read and largely accepted as true by common folk who were devoid of any critical faculty and who were predisposed to believe what so luxuriously fed their pious curiosity. Both Catholics and Gnostics were concerned in writing these fictions. The former had no other motive than that of a pious fraud.... But the heretical apocryphists, while gratifying curiosity, composed spurious Gospels in order to trace backward their beliefs and peculiarities to Christ Himself. The Church and the Fathers were hostile even towards the narratives of orthodox authorship. It was not until the Middle Ages, when their true origin was forgotten even by most of the learned, that these apocryphal stories began to enter largely into sacred legends, such as the "Aurea Sacra," into miracle plays, Christian art, and poetry. A comparison of the least extravagant of these productions with the real [sic] Gospels reveals the chasm separating them. Though worthless historically, the apocryphal Gospels help us to better understand the religious conditions of the second and third centuries, and they are also of no little value as early witnesses of the canonicity of the writings of the four Evangelists.

Of yet another forged "letter," that of "Lentulus," CE says:

A brief letter professing to be from Lentulus, or Publius Lentulus, as in some manuscripts, "President of the People of Jerusalem", addressed to "the Roman Senate and People", describes Our Lord's personal appearance. It is evidently spurious, both the office and name of the president of Jerusalem being grossly unhistorical. No ancient writer alludes to this production, which is found only in Latin manuscripts. It has been conjectured that it may have been composed in order to authenticate a pretended portrait of Jesus, during the Middle Ages.

The list of spurious "documents" goes on and on, and it is from these that Kimball gets his "new history" of the mythical Jesus. For more information, please see the Catholic Encyclopedia entry for Apocrypha.

And for those who have problems with the truthful statements from the Catholic Encyclopedia regarding fraudulent compositions from its own Church hierarchy, we have plenty of Protestant scholars also attesting to the fact of Christian forgery.

The Protestant Encyclopedia Biblica states, "Almost every one of the Apostles had a Gospel fathered upon him by one early sect or another."

Another Protestant authority, Dr. Conyers Middleton said:

There never was any period of time in all ecclesiastical history, in which so many rank heresies were publicly professed, nor in which so many spurious books were forged and published by the Christians, under the names of Christ, and the Apostles, and the Apostolic writers, as in those primitive ages. Several of forged books are frequently cited and applied to the defense of Christianity, by the most eminent fathers of the same ages, as true and genuine pieces.

Many people have had near-death experiences. They prove nothing but the conditioning of the individual's mind. The followers of Osiris, Isis, Buddha, Krishna and many others ALSO saw them in NDEs, visions and hallucinations. Hindus see the elephant-headed god Ganesha. If such serve as "proof" of their reality, then these gods are also real. I personally have had visions of Krishna, Buddha, Jesus and Mickey Mouse.

Glenn Kimball

While the rest of this maudlin mush may evoke sympathy for an apparently pained existence, it does not serve as a demonstration of anything other than the mental state of its author.

Regarding the statement that it is "a thousand times easier to critique than to advocate" - HARDLY a truism in the case of Christianity, the proponents of which have tortured and slaughtered some 200 million or more unbelievers over the centuries. Considering how even today critical scholars and scientists are shouted down by emotional believers, it is MUCH more difficult to point out that there is NO historical or archaeological record for this fable having taking place in history. It takes an enormous amount of courage, in fact.

No matter what these guys come up with, the fact will remain that virtually the entire gospel story is found around the globe for centuries and millennia prior to the Christian era and represents the personification of the sun.

Acharya S

Update: Not content with hawking spurious Christian comic books, Kimball is now pretending to have found King Arthur's legendary sword, Excalibur, as was well as the stone it was stuck into!