There was no Jesus

[drew hempel]

This is my debate with best-selling fiction author Michael Prescott -- at his blog:
Michael: I recommend you read Bishop Lightfoot's "Essays on Supernatural Religion." I had to go to the U of MN access center to read this "scholarly" work that was the definitive academic dismissal of the 19th C. "suns of god" thesis you claim has been discredited. Bishop Lightfoot's book was recently reissued though so you can order it if you don't frequent a good University.
To my amazement Bishop Lightfoot admits that indeed the "Ancient Texts" were of spurious origin and of great contention, with the canon gospels not composed till after 150 A.D. Not only that but Bishop Lightfoot is very clear that the Roman Church had a political agenda to attack the gnostics.
I have a masters degree so I know how to check my sources! haha You're just relying on vapid, empty "authority" for your own psychological reasons. Good luck!
Posted by: drew hempel | July 31, 2007 at 08:45 PM
On the forging of Tacitus' Annals:
http://www.truthbeknown.com/pliny.htm
Posted by: drew hempel | July 31, 2007 at 10:26 PM

Well for my "thoughts" you can also read my new free blogbook: http://mothershiplanding.blogspot.com. Admittedly it's turgid as hell but hey I live in Minnesota so the point is to burn a whole through the skull which such intense mind power. haha.
Posted by: drew hempel | July 31, 2007 at 11:11 PM
Drew wrote,
>haha You're just relying on vapid, empty "authority" for your own psychological reasons. Good luck!
I'm not much interested in being psychoanalyzed by someone who believes the CIA was behind 9-11. Insult me again and I'm blocking your IP address. I am weary of you.
Posted by: Michael Prescott | August 01, 2007 at 06:22 AM
Michael you already censored my one post where I pondered the afterlife of the 30,000 kids that die a day from nutrition-based disease, like starvation. Luckily you didn't censor my reposting of the link.
As Acharya S. details in her new forum thread, created specifically for Michael's "special needs" the argument that Christianity is Sun Worship is not from the 19th C. nor has it been discredited:
http://forums.truthbeknown.com/viewtopic.php?t=903
Posted by: drew hempel | August 01, 2007 at 02:26 PM
I have not "censored" any of your previous comments, Drew. If one of them disappeared, it was a Typepad glitch.
I asked you not to insult me again. You responded by accusing me of censorship and making a crack about my "special needs."
Sayonara.
Michael bans me and my city's bridge collapse. That's some serious juju.
Posted by: drew hempel | August 02, 2007 at 10:43 AM
Anyway here's my final post since I'm officially banned:
Yep I'm back at the U of MN "cavern" for old book storage, reading Bishop Lightfoot's attack on W.R. Cassel's "Supernatural Religion." Lightfoot readily admits that Eusebius was parsing through the writings "of the Ancients" to decide what was authentic or not. Just based on that simple fact alone the spurious nature of the Gospels is evident. Yet Lightfoot argues:
"Of the Gospels the historian will only record anecdotes concerning them. On the other hand, in the case of the Apocalypse mere references and quotations will be mentioned, because they afford important data for arriving at a decision concerning its Canonical authority." (p. 39)
That seems a back-handed strategy at best and at worse a strange way to treat supposedly sacred works. According to Lightfoot the sources for the 4 Gospels are, as per Eusebius:
"As regards these, he [Eusebius]contents himself with preserving any anecdotes which he may have found illustrating the circumstances under which they were written, e.g. the notices of St. Matthew and St. Mark in Papias, and of the Four Gospels in Irenaeus." (p. 46)
Considering how much Lightfoot questions the authenticity of Ignatius and others, besides the fact the Eusebius openly was questioning his sources as being not authentic, the origin of the Gospels disappears into a cloud of smoke. There is much speculation about Papias and Irenaeus and Polycarp but that the Roman Church was fighting off the ascetic Gnostics is quite clear.

Posted by: drew hempel | August 02, 2007 at 10:52 AM
Drew, if your earlier comments had been as thoughtful as that one, there would have been no need for a ban.
I'll tell you what. I'll lift the ban if you will eschew derogatory personal remarks when someone disagrees with you.
Congratulations. You are unbanned!
Posted by: Michael Prescott | August 02, 2007 at 11:03 AM
For those who are wondering why I was so ticked off at Drew, it might help to know that he posted some unflattering things about me on Acharya S's site.
Here was part of his first comment:
>Anyway let's see if I garnered any response because usually he ignores the "dissident" information I present but sometimes I get under his collar so much that I provoke an ad hominem from him....
>You may want to check out other people posting similar information to this famous apologist! haha. ...
>Ah how ignorance is bliss.
Note that my responses are characterized as ad hominems, and that he says he's just trying to "get under my collar" and "provoke" me. He also calls me a "famous apologist." Of course I'm not an apologist at all. I'm not even a Christian. He also calls me ignorant - but I guess that's not an ad hominem.
In a later comment, Drew wrote,
>Yeah Michael Prescott just threatened to ban me! haha. ...
>He already censored my "threatening" post when I pondered the afterlife of the 30,000 kids that die a day from nutrition-based disease like starvation.
>So I reposted that threatening information! Too bad several other posters were saying the same thing as me about the Christ Conspiracy but I was the only one to claim that Prescott has a psychological hang-up.
>I guess that is an insult. haha.
Here he accuses me of censoring some comment of his (which I didn't - if it disappeared, blame the quirks of Typepad, which has been known to swallow whole posts). He also apparently has trouble understanding that accusing someone of having "a psychological hang-up" is an insult.
Incidentally, in this same thread Acharya S. herself writes,
>There's nothing solid about THE James who supposedly wrote Revelation and the epistle.
You'd think such a careful scholar would know that Revelation is attributed to John, not James. (Rev 1:4)
I freely admit I am no Biblical scholar. But neither is Drew. And neither is Acharya S.
For the work of real scholars, see N.T. Wright, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crosssan, and Bert Ehrman, among many others. They provide a cross-section of well-informed, up-to-date views ranging from broad skepticism (Ehrman) to conservative Christian belief (Wright). And they know the difference between James and John!
Posted by: Michael Prescott | August 02, 2007 at 02:42 PM
Well Michael I posted your response to Acharya S.' above quote to see what she says about your response. Hopefully she will but I do regard her as a bible scholar as I've checked her sources. John Dominic Crossan is not up to snuff at all! I've read a current Yale Professor of Religious Studies book on the early history of the Church and it too was sorely lacking in comparision to Acharya S.' research.
Anyway today my friend Bert was pondering how the WTC could have collapsed, in lieu of the Minneapolis bridge collapse a few blocks from where we sat. Suddenly I pulled out a fact-card from a letter I was going to send to my sister -- it had a photo of WTC Tower 7 as a perfect demolition, noting that no major media has shown the collapse of WTC 7. Immediately, for psychological reaons, Bert said he didn't want to consider this information -- even though it was just a half-sheet, with a list of 11 reasons why 9-11 was an inside job.
But again, as my career is in policy change, I've long encountered how political information, whether it's the Roman Imperial Church formation or the formation of the U.S. Empire, is avoided like the plague.
Posted by: drew hempel | August 02, 2007 at 04:34 PM
Hi Michael -- if you didn't read Acharya S.'s forum, where I posted your comment, she has a reply, and she said she just made a typo that had been corrected. Acharya S. has a whole chapter on Revelations in her book the Christ Conspiracy.
As I've stated her sources have all stood up to attack and her sources go to a deeper analysis of the Bible than I've been able to find by the Roman Imperial Church apologists.
Because my favorite thing is to disprove my own beliefs I will now go to the library and read the authors that Michael Prescott lists as legitimate Bible scholars.
But Michael why have you no evidence for a historical person called Jesus Christ? You have yet to respond to Tacitus' Annals being a fraudulent source. If Tacitus' Annals are not fradulent then what is wrong with the evidence that proves they are?
Please provide any evidence and please read Acharya S' research Michael Prescott! If I find any evidence that disproves her research I will be happy to post it here but I've tried and her work is more detailed.
I could not even find John Dominic Crossan addressing the question as to whether there is evidence that Jesus Christ was a person. All scholars have the same problem. The apologists just assume that Jesus Christ was a person without looking at the validity of the evidence.
Then based on an insecure foundation the whole "bridge" of the Holy Roman Empire and the U.S. comes tumbling down.
Posted by: drew hempel | August 03, 2007 at 10:11 AM
OK So I'm at the Minneapolis Central public library which is the largest public collection so should have the list of scholars Michael has listed. I have Bart Ehrman's book in my lap: After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity.
He states in the introduction:
"Even among church people, it is sacrcely realized that early Christians engaged in heated and often acrimonious debates over fundmental issues, such as...."
But whether Jesus was a historical person is NOT mentioned as one of the issues, even though it blatantly was an issue!
Ehrman then states that Eusebius "was the first Christian author to provide a full sketch of the history of the church, from the days of Jesus down to his own time (his first edition was published in 311 C.E.)." (p. 2)
So there we have it! He gives Eusebius as the main source for the "historical" Jesus yet I just posted quotes from a detailed analysis of Eusebius' writing, Bishop Lightfoot's attack against the book Supernatural Religion by WR Cassels. As my excerpts indicate Eusebius himself was deciding what was fake and what was authentic, based on his own political bias, not on any real evidence.
The real evidence is of belief in Jesus as meaning "savior" in spiritual terms, not in an historical person named Jesus.
Posted by: drew hempel | August 03, 2007 at 10:55 AM
Ok now I have Professor Marcus J. Borg's book:
Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship. (1994)
Again I'm amazed that he does not address the issue of whether Jesus existed historically. This book covers John Dominic Crossan by the way and with that the whole list provided by Michael Prescott.
First of all Borg has the psychic balls to admit that Rudolf Bultmann led the way in proving that there's no evidence for a historical Jesus. Then Borg says that scholars realized that a historical Jesus just wasn't important to theology. Then Borg admits the following:
"For much of its history, the agenda of Jesus scholarship has been set, consciously or unconsciously, by theological questions. This is not surprising, given that Christianity was until recently the dominant cultural consciousness of the West. Thus, the questions brought to the texts, whether for the sake of undermining or supporting Christian convictions, have commonly had those convictions in mind." (p. 6)
At this point Borg asks the question: "Can any of the chrstological 'titles' of Jesus be traced back to Jesus?"
But does he try to answer this question: NO!!
Instead he does a "bait and switch" tactic to comparative religion.
"In the recent past, the framework for formulating the questions brought to the texts [i.e. the questions of whether Jesus was a historical person] has become less specifically Christian....Instead, the questions have become more 'global,' that is, related to the broad sweep of human history and experience. How is the figure of Jesus similar or dissimilar to religous figures in other traditions?" (p. 6)
See BAIT AND SWITCH -- all of a sudden Borg is back to assuming that "the figure of Jesus" existed and now the question is how his life compares to Lao Tzu or Buddha -- yet Borg had ignored the vital question of evidence for whether Jesus was a historical person or not.
Posted by: drew hempel | August 03, 2007 at 11:33 AM

The most thorough rebuttal of Acharya S. that I've found on the Web is this essay.
I concede that this comes from a Christian apologetics site, and I don't agree with all of the author's assertions (for instance, he disputes the generally accepted JEDP theory). But he does note numerous problems with Acharya's claims and research.
Borg, Crossan, et al may not specifically address the question of Jesus' historical reality only because the issue was settled (in academic circles) so long ago. As far as I know, there are only two credentialed academics who maintain that Jesus was (or may have been) a fictional character. They are G.A. Wells and Michael Martin. (Martin, however, is a philosopher, not a New Testament scholar.) I read one of Wells' books, The Jesus Legend; I haven't read anything by Martin. Their views have not attracted a following.
Incidentally, I've also read nonscholarly books asserting Jesus' nonexistence, such as Freke and Gandy's The Jesus Mysteries and their Jesus and the Lost Goddess, and Arthur Weigall's 1928 book The Paganism in Our Christianity. And I've read The Golden Bough, The White Goddess, and similar books. So I'm not entirely unacquainted with this line of argument. In fact, for a while I was persuaded by it, but I now think it is mistaken.
If you're looking specifically for arguments that Jesus existed, one source to consult is The Historical Jesus, by Gary R. Habermas. Habermas is a conservative Chistian scholar; again, I don't endorse all his views, but he has a solid grasp of the evidence. Another book to consider is The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? by F.F. Bruce.
In order to support her claims, Acharya S. must assert that all the ancient documents referring to Jesus and his followers were forged or were written much later than most academics believe. I find this line of argument tendentious, but your mileage may vary.
A discussion of claims that Tacitus' Annals were forged is found here. In 1878 J.W. Ross claimed that the Annals were forged by someone named Poggio in the 1400s. Unfortunately for this thesis, references to Tacitus' Annals are found in much earlier centuries. From the above-linked page:
Mendell also gives an extensive list of witnesses to the text from the 1st century onwards. From this we can see that Tacitus is mentioned or quoted in every century down to and including the Sixth. The Seventh and Eighth centuries are the only ones that have left no trace of knowledge of our author. Without quoting every reference, here are some which I found of interest.
Various citations follow. Read the whole thing for details.
Note that Tacitus is not the only ancient non-Christian writer to discuss Jesus and his movement. Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Josephus, Julius Africanus (citing Thallus and Phlegon), the Emperor Trajan, the Emperor Hadrian, Lucian, Mara Bar-Serapion, and portions of the Talmud all address this subject. It is unlikely, to say the least, that all of these passages were forged.
Anyway, we are unlikely to convince each other, and I don't have time to debate the issue forever, so we will have to agree to disagree. Thanks for the library info. It's good to have you back!
Posted by: Michael Prescott | August 03, 2007 at 12:20 PM
Michael I saw the book "The Historical Jesus" on the shelve and so I immediately opened it to look for its sources. It relies on the same ones you have listed -- Josephus, Pliny, etc. -- sources which are admitted to by unreliable by numerous bible scholars referenced by Acharya S.
As I stated even Professor Marcus Borg notes that Rudolf Bultmann discredited any evidence for a historical Jesus. Here's Borg again:
"Fifteen years after Schweitzer's book, Rudolf Bultmann, this century's single most influential New Testament scholar, published The History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921). His study of how the traditions about Jesus developed during the oral period suggested that very little of the preaching and teaching of Jesus as reported in the gospels can be traced back to Jesus himself. This historical skepticism engendered by Bultmann's form-critical work was reinforced after World War II by redaction criticism, the meticulous study of how the evangelists modified and shaped the traditions they received to adapt them to their own times and convictions." (p. 4)
In your discussion of Tacitus -- there's a difference between his writings and his Annals that supposedly mention Christ yet you have conflated the two.
Again there is much evidence of forgery for political reasons and there is no evidence for a historical person named Jesus. I read Bishop Lightfoot's attempt to find such evidence and his book is a very detailed scholarly attack against the case for forged documents. Bishop Lightfoot notes, as I quoted, that Eusebius himself decided which documents were forged or not, based on his own political views, in support of the Roman Imperial Church.

[SerialExpLain]

Can you debate Michael Heiser, Ph.D next, in a big arena. I'd pay excellent money to see that, and even make book:smirk:

[B4Time]

Thats it Drew chew on him a little bit lol.You might be interested in this torrent from the PB its not allowed here.I was looking for ufo torrents and came across it.The second lecture might be of interest to you Edward T. Martin Jmmanuel {Jesus} In India.Checked it out as much as I could and they do have a beer named after Mary.Also they are both supposed to be buried there Jmmanual{Jesus} and Mary.Search the bay for Talmud Jmmanuel 4 part video.Should be the only one that pops up.I would post the torrent but I can't seem to get it in this post lol.I havent figured it out yet.

[SerialExpLain]

Drew, here is a site you may have fun interpreting.

Quote:Galactic Research Institute

Sounding the Lost Chord, Restoring the Lost Interval?

Harmonics of The Sirius Code Revealed, Part II
The Lost Chord and The Interval of Lost Time
A Special Opportunity for Earth Wizards

http://www.lawoftime.org/GRI/rinri/rinri-sirius2.html

[drew hempel]

SerialExplain -- thanks. The only sentence of worth in that essay is this:

"That is because 7 × 4 is 28 and 13 × 28 = 364 = 7 × 52, the Sirius Beta ratio."

Because mainstream science refuses to see a connection between the 360 degrees used for trigonometry and the zodiac calendar of 12 signs based on the solar calendar.

For example the Egyptians had a solar calendar of 360 plus 5 days as a holiday. But in mesopotamia the Solar Calendar was supposedly not based on 360 and instead the lunar calendar was considered 29.5 x 12 = 354.

But in China and in the Mayan calendar the Lunar Calendar was based on 13 x 28 = 364 which uses ASYMMETRIC MATH -- not an one-to-one "divide and average" lunar figure.

In fact the 29.5 can only be used with a PHONETIC language because, as David E. Duncan points out in his book "Calendar," try subtracting 354 from 365 using ideograms.

This is just like the Freemasonic projection of the Golden Ratio back onto Egypt. The Golden Ratio also uses Symmetric one-to-one "divide and average" math, based on phonetic symbols, just as 29.5 does.

In fact the early Sumerian lunar calendar probably was like the Chinese and Mayan calendar -- using 13 x 28 and since 52 x 7 is based on harmonics -- the ideograms are actually

MANTRAS.

Finally 52 plus 7 (plus one as the starting note) makes 60 for the 360 degree Solar Calendar. In otherwords to finish the overtones of the octave the 52 plus an octave makes 60 and since you're adding an octave then you multiply by 6 and not 7.

6 x 60 = 360 for the Solar Calendar and for the degrees of trigonometry.

The comma of Pythagoras, or the cause of 666 as the irrational number, is the difference between 12 Perfect Fifths (natural resonance as 60) and 7 octaves. Hence the secret of the sentence I quoted.

We can see here how the Chinese did not use a "divide and average" method but instead took the Solar Eclliptic as 360 degrees which sometimes makes a Lunar Leap Month -- showing the direct connection between the Solar Zodiac 12 x 30 and the 360 of trigonometry:

http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/hbcalendar-u.html

But that website for the Mayan Sirius Harmonics is just more of Arguelles-Theosophist-CIA propaganda conflating Scalar Logarithmics with Mayan complimentary opposites. It's easy to fool people with that fake science stuff since science IS fake.

[SerialExpLain]

Drew, I am so sure you are expert on how easy it is to fool people, lol

Did you happen to see that QiGong video where the guy supposedly makes his hand grow? Check in out its on Google-Youtube; I'm sure you've seen it by now though since that is your area of interest.

[drew hempel]

No I haven't seen that but video can be altered. Not that I don't believe it -- Master Chuny Lin always teaches the "finger growing" trick as an intro to his practice. He creates a chi-field to help activate people's fingers as well.

http://springforestqigong.com.