Enter the forgers. Clearly, Christ existed — like Ulysses and Zarathustra, of whom it is hardly important to know whether they were flesh-and-blood people living at a precise time and in an identifiable place. Jesus’s existence has not been historically established. No contemporary documentation of the event, no archaeological proof, nothing certain exists today to attest to the truth of a real presence at this meeting point between two worlds, abolishing one and naming its successor.
No tomb, no shroud, no archives, except for a sepulcher invented in 325 by Saint Helena, mother of Constantine. She must have been a woman of supreme gifts, since we are also indebted to her for the discovery of Golgotha and of the titulus, the wooden fragment bearing the charges brought against Jesus. Then there is that piece of cloth from Turin, which carbon-14 dating has situated in the thirteenth century CE, and which only a miracle could have wrapped around Christ’s corpse more than a thousand years earlier! Finally, there are of course two or three vague references in ancient texts — Flavius Josephus, Suetonius, and Tacitus — but in copies made several centuries after the alleged crucifixion of Jesus and — significantly — after the success of his supporters was assured.
On the other hand, how can we deny Jesus’s conceptual existence? For the same reason as Heraclitus’s Fire, Empedocles’s Friendship, Plato’s Ideas, or Epicurus’s Pleasure, Jesus functions wonderfully as an Idea on which a vision of the world is articulated, a conception of the real, a theory of a sinful past and of future salvation. We must leave it to lovers of impossible debates to decide on the question of Jesus’s existence and address ourselves to the questions that matter. What exactly is this construction named Jesus? What was its purpose? Its aims? To serve whose interests? Who created this fiction? How did the myth take shape? How did this fable evolve in the centuries that followed?
The answers to these questions require a detour via a hysterical thirteenth apostle, Paul of Tarsus (a “bishop of foreign affairs,” as he called himself), the author of a successful coup d’état (the emperor Constantine), and his successors (Justinian, Theodosius, Valentinian) who incited Christians to despoil, torture, and slaughter pagans and burn pagan libraries. From Jesus the invisible ectoplasm to Jesus the absolute master of an empire and then of the world, history evolves alongside the family tree of our civilization. It begins in a historical fog in Palestine, continues in Rome, and then settles into the gold, pomp, and purple of Christian power in Byzantium. It thrives even today in millions of minds formatted by the unbelievable story — built on the wind, on the improbable, on contradictions that the church has invariably dispelled through bouts of political violence.
So we know that most existing documents are skillfully executed forgeries. Burned libraries, repeated orgies of vandalism, accidental fires, Christian persecutions and autos-da-fé, earthquakes, the media revolution that replaced papyrus with parchment and presented the copyists, sectarian zealots of Christ, with a choice between the documents to be saved and those to be cast into outer darkness . . . Then there were the liberties taken by monks who established editions by ancient authors to which they added what they considered (with the hindsight of the conquerors) to be missing. It all added up to a philosophical nightmare.
Nothing of what remains can be trusted. The Christian archives are the result of ideological fabrication. Even the writings of Flavius Josephus, Suetonius, or Tacitus, who mention in a few hundred words the existence of Christ and his faithful in the first century of our era, obey the rules of intellectual forgery. When an anonymous monk recopied the Antiquities of the Jewish historian Josephus (arrested and turned into a double agent, a collaborator with Roman power), when that monk had before him the Annals of Tacitus or Suetonius’s Lives of Twelve Caesars (and was astonished to find no mention of the story he believed in), he added a passage in his own hand and in all good faith, without shame and without a second thought, without wondering whether he was doing wrong or committing a forgery. He could do it the more easily because in those days one did not approach a book with the eye of a modern reader, concerned with the truth and respectful of the authenticity of the text and the author’s rights . . . Even today we read these writers of antiquity in manuscripts copied several centuries after they were written, and contemporaneous with Christian copyists who redeemed their contents by arranging them to swim with the flow of history.
Hysteria crystallized. The ultra-rationalists — from Prosper Alfaric to Raoul Vaneigem — were probably right to deny the historical existence of Jesus. The closed corpus of texts, documents, and information we possess has been pored over for decades without ever producing a definitive conclusion or winning general approval. From Jesus the fiction to Jesus the Son of God the spectrum is broad, and the number of theories advanced offers equal justification to the aggressive atheism of the Rationalist Union and to the beliefs of Opus Dei.
What can be said is that the period in which Jesus supposedly appeared teemed with individuals of his kind, fire-breathing prophets, exalted madmen, hysterics convinced of the rightness of their grotesque truths, heralds of apocalypse. A history of that incandescent century would include countless such examples. The Gnostic philosophers themselves proceeded from the millenarian effervescence and fiery lunacy which marked that period of anguish, fear, and change in a world nobody understood. The old was crumbling, splintering, threatening to collapse. And that threatened collapse generated fears to which certain individuals responded with frankly irrational proposals.
On the banks of the Jordan, a region familiar to Jesus and his apostles, a man named Theudas claimed to be Joshua, the prophet of promised salvation (and also an etymon, or earlier form, of the name Jesus) . . . Arriving from his native Egypt with four hundred followers, all spoiling for a fight, he sought an end to Roman power and claimed the ability to divide a river with his words alone, thus allowing his men to advance and put an end to the colonial power. Roman soldiers beheaded this poor man’s Moses before he could display his hydraulic talents.
On another occasion, in 45, Jacob and Simon, sons of Judas the Galilean — yet another place-name familiar to Jesus — began an uprising that ended as badly as that led by their father in the year 6. The Romans crucified the rebels. Menahem, grandson of a family prolific in freedom fighters, followed in his ancestors’ footsteps and rebelled in 66, triggering the Jewish War that ended in 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem.
In this first half of the first century, prophets, messiahs, and bearers of good tidings abounded. Some invited their supporters to follow them into the desert, there to witness prodigies and manifestations of divinity. A visionary from Egypt with forty thousand followers occupied the Garden of Olives, another area associated with Jesus. He claimed that his voice alone could shatter the walls of Jerusalem and lay the city open to his men. Once again, the Roman soldiery dispersed them. Multitudes of stories describe this Jewish determination to unseat Roman power with the sole help of religious, mystical, millenarian, and prophetic discourse announcing the good tidings predicted in the Old Testament.
Their resistance was legitimate: the wish to eject occupying armies seeking to force their language, laws, and customs on the conquered always justifies resistance, rebellion, refusal, and struggle, even armed struggle. But to believe — spurred only by their belief in the impossible — that they could oppose the world’s most battle-tested troops, hardened in all the major conflicts of the day, trained and professional, possessing impressive equipment and full powers, merely transformed their magnificent struggle into battles lost in advance. Brandished like a battle flag before the Roman legions, God was outmatched.
Jesus thus embodied the period’s hysteria, its belief that with goodwill alone and with action undertaken in the name of God, one could conquer and triumph. Breaking down walls with one’s voice instead of with battering rams and siege artillery, crossing rivers with a word and not in military craft worthy of the name, opposing battle-hardened troops with hymns, prayers, and amulets and not with spears, swords, or cavalry: there was nothing there to trouble the Roman army of occupation. Mere scratches on the Roman hide.
The name of Jesus crystallized the diffuse and disparate energies wasted against the imperial machinery of the day. It furnished the emblematic patronymic of all Jews who (armed only with their will and the belief that their God could miraculously free them from the colonial yoke) refused to accept Roman occupation. But if God’s power and his love of his people were so great, surely he could have spared them from having to endure, even briefly, the occupiers’ unjust laws. Why would he tolerate such injustice before encompassing its abolition?
Thus, whether Jesus really lived or not must be reduced to the status of a mere hypothesis. This Jesus may well have been the son of a carpenter and a virgin. He may well have been born in Nazareth, he may well have given lessons as a child to the doctors of the law and spoken as a grown-up to fishermen, craftsmen, and other humble folk working on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. He may well have had more trouble with Jewish communities than with the Roman authorities, accustomed as they were to these sporadic and unimportant rebellions. But he synthesized, focused, sublimated, and crystallized what roiled the period and the history of the first century of his era. Jesus gave a name to Jewish rejection of Roman domination.
Etymology supports this claim. “Jesus” means “God saves, has saved, will save.” There could be no clearer expression of the name’s symbolic freight: his very name pointed to his destiny. The patronymic heralded a future that was already known, and implied that the adventure ahead was written somewhere in a corner of heaven. Thenceforth, history was content to allow its revelation to unfold day by day. How could one imagine that such a given name did not mandate the fulfillment of these earlier prophecies and potentialities? Or what better way of saying that the construction of Jesus implies a forgery reaching down to the smallest details, itself serving as a pretext and an occasion for this ontological catalyst?
~~Atheist Manifesto- The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -by- Michel Onfray
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