FOUNDATIONAL ERRORS IMPLY THERE WAS NO JESUS

There are four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They purport to inform us about the life of Jesus Christ. Have we any evidence that these men were more interested in what they wanted us to believe than in what the evidence said?
 
If the idols and alleged mentors of the four evangelists, the apostles were deranged with credulity or incapable of religious honesty then so were they.

A foundational error is an indication in the story that undermines a large part of the story. If the foundation is faulty the whole structure built on it falls as well. For example, if we find a clue in the gospels that the trial of Jesus never happened that is a foundational error and means that a large part of the gospels is make-believe or cannot be believed even if it is not. If we find a clue that the apostles did not go about with Jesus that means that the gospels are entirely false for the gospels supposedly comprise their testimony.
 
We find foundational errors for everything in the gospels.
 
One indication of the value of foundational errors is to be seen in the following example. We read in the gospels that Jesus condemned divorce. Now what is supposed to have started Jesus saying divorce was always adultery and wrong was the Pharisees coming up to test him asking, “Does the law allow a man to divorce his wife?” That makes it very very likely that if they did not do this, that somebody made up the diatribe against divorce. If the thing that started Jesus off never happened and this can be shown then we can safely dismiss the rest of the story as fiction. The start is the foundation of the story and no story that lies on a bad foundation should be accepted. We might be wrong yes but if we keep the rule about foundational errors rejecting the whole account is all we can do. It keeps things simple and we must always go after the simplest suggestion which is to reject the whole story when a foundational error is the rock the story is built on.
 
Some will object that maybe the account of what Jesus said was true but the gospel erred in assuming that the Pharisees started the discussion off. That is possible. It might be right. But we cannot accept it. The rules of evidence require that we focus on what the records say and leave speculation out. What is written and what is seen matters more than what we think. We have no evidence that the objectors are right. So it is undeniable, if the gospel says the Pharisees started the ball rolling and is wrong then we have to hold that the discourse Jesus made against divorce was never uttered.
 
Incidentally, the Pharisees would not have come up to Jesus and asked him that for they knew that he knew the law well enough to know that it did allow divorce and they knew he claimed he did not contradict the law and was careful with his words. The gospel says they were trying to test him to see if he would reiterate the teaching of the law which is simply not plausible. 
 
The Gospels say that the Jewish leaders and the Romans were desperate to kill Jesus but then say that they let him go about. The Jewish leaders were subjected to terrible abuse by Jesus who once called them vipers to their faces (Matthew 23). This would have turned the people against Jesus if it really happened because at the end of the day the crowds who followed him were devoted Jews and only went after Jesus because he taught them their religion. For Jesus to attack the leadership would have meant a total loss of popularity. To attack the scribes and the Pharisees and the Jewish priesthood was to attack Judaism. Also if you take the gospels literally when they say the Jews said Jesus was illegitimate or born of adultery then they wouldn’t have followed him either for according to their faith a bastard wasn’t fit to go near the Temple and had to be banned according to the commands of God in the Law of Moses never mind being a prophet or the son of God. For Jesus to claim to be a prophet or the Son of God would have been extremely offensive to the Jews if he had been born of parents who were or were thought to be not married to each other.

To say the Jewish leaders and Romans wanted to kill Jesus above all things while giving him his freedom to teach for three years is a foundational error for they wouldn’t have tolerated him five minutes never mind three years. If the gospels are wrong about Jesus’ freedom then everything they say about him is untrue. He could not have worked and preached if he would have been dragged away to the dungeon the moment he opened his mouth.

Another foundational error is the assertion that the Jews had to scheme to arrest and dispose of Jesus quietly for there would be a revolt while it is also said that the public knew what happened to him. If Jesus was destroyed quietly then the story of the passion is fictitious for nobody would have known what happened and he would have been taken without the apostles being about.

The gospels say that Jesus was popular with the people and it was hoped and suspected by most that he would be the Christ, an illegal claim that guaranteed the death penalty from the ruthless Roman rulers. If he had been he would have been crucified a lot lot sooner
 
Another foundational error is that Jesus was allowed into Jerusalem on a donkey acting like a messianic king. John says the apostles never realised that this fulfilled an Old Testament prophecy until after Jesus had risen (12:16). But they would have found out from the crowd many of whom would have known what Jesus was trying to get across by his behaviour. The apostles had to have known that the Messiah was to do what Jesus did for there was tremendous stress on the Messiah in those days. The gospel is just trying to rationalise why the entry into Jerusalem was not mentioned at the start. The real reason was that it never happened.

Another foundational error is the claim of the gospels that the apostles were the foundation of faith in Jesus and his witnesses even though they had abandoned him. It would take a lot of credulity to forsake a miracle-working prophet who knew the future and who could raise the dead like the gospels say. They were not reliable so how could they be the foundation? The Church believes the apostles when they allegedly accepted the testimony of the women and their friends when they said they saw the risen Jesus – we have no evidence but a gospel assertion that they did say that – but it does not believe the apostles were right the time they did not believe these people (Mark 16:14).
 
Suppose somebody believes in something under threat of persecution, and later disbelieves it under pain of Hell.  Suppose I am expected to believe in something just because somebody could have suffered for believing it. Suppose I accept the deranged logic of Christianity that the apostles told the truth about the resurrection because they suffered for it. Then clearly I should believe the somebody that disbelieved under pain of Hell. The apostles did that. Paedophiles suffer for their faith that child-molestation isn’t wrong. Christians are praising them by saying the apostles suffering for faith means anything.
 
Besides somebody believing something and suffering and dying for it doesn’t obligate anybody else to believe what they believe and Christianity dares to say that we are obligated to believe in what the apostles believed or rot in Hell. Their logic is fully of sugary bigotry.

Matthew 15:29-39 has Jesus going up a hill to avoid the crowds presumably. But anyway they find him indicating that far from being the Son of God he was below average intelligence and so dense that he could not make away though he knew they were coming. They brought their sick a long way and up the hill over him. This story cannot be true for if Jesus had been a healer he would not have caused them all this bother. Christians say he probably came down the hill to save the sick from the burden of being carried up but the story does not say that and in fact says he sat down up the hill when the crowds came along. Jesus worrying about what others would think if he did not pay the tax (Matthew 17:27) is too unbelievable to be true. He was the last person that could be accused of being like that.

Another foundational error is the fact that the Gospels claim to have been constructed out of a huge body of data about Jesus. But where is this data? Nobody has tried to preserve it which is extraordinary considering that the Church was persecuted and needed to write down all it could. Why did Paul not care? Was it because there was no data? It had to be. The Gnostics alone cared about the traditions that were not in the gospels but the Church scorned them as heretical humbug. And it was certainly right to do so for the traditions were often nonsensical. But when the Gnostics were able to keep traditions however bad they were why could the orthodox not have done the same? The whole thing suggests that the gospels were made up.

Another foundational error is the assertion that the Jews and Romans were obsessed with destroying Jesus’ work and let the apostles preach in public and let his brothers by blood live though they carried royal blood in their veins.

The gospel story that false witnesses spoke against Jesus at his trial (eg. Mark 14) shows that the gospellers were untrustworthy when it came to giving little mundane details meaning that they cannot be relied upon in more serious matters. There were no false witnesses for none were needed, Jesus had committed the sacrilege of claiming to be the man closest to God while preaching what was considered to be heresy – a crime. The High Priest tore his robes when Jesus made the claim before him though Jesus had made it before. The purpose of the trial was to set Jesus up and if the false witnesses did not exist the trial didn’t happen so there was no trial and no crucifixion for the trial prepared the way for the cross. Get it? No crucifixion, no Jesus.

John’s author mentioned that he wrote the gospel so that we might believe. If he expects us to believe on the strength of his word alone then his standards for what is to be considered credible is low, much too low. He made his Jesus say that he did not accept human testimony such as the Baptist’s. This is a hint that his book was tongue-in-cheek for it was just a human testimony. It shares a very small number of things with the other gospels so it is saying that they are religious novels too.

The Final Response page on the Internet by Steven Carr shows how much of the life of Jesus was stolen from the Old Testament. The Christians regarded the Old Testament as a prophecy of Jesus and so they felt justified in doing things like making out that when Elisha multiplied food to feed a crowd that Jesus must have done the same though they never heard of it. We also see that it is odd that Jairus, the man whose daughter Jesus raised from the dead, has a name meaning he awakens. This suggests that somebody made up the story first and the name of the man later because the story was about a resurrection.

The gospel books claimed to be for backing up the faith and yet one gospel has one woman seeing the risen Jesus and another one has more. You need to mention all the witnesses you can if you want to be credible.

Had the synoptic gospellers been interested in verification they would not have used the same stories so much. Many of the accounts are nearly word for word identical. They would have found different ones if they did any investigating. If they wanted to say that the other stories were true all they had to do was to outline them and say so. You never tell what is already reputed or known about an important person unless there is nothing else to tell or to add which would mean that the person is a myth.

The gospels claim they are for instructing the world. Therefore, they thought that Jesus’ errors were not errors. And his errors are as prominent as sore thumbs. For example, he said that when God said that he was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob it proved that there is a resurrection! They closed their minds to believe lies. The lies must have been made up pretty late and were not doing the rounds as tradition first for they would have been corrected and improved. They are further evidence for Jesus possibly being non-historical. We have no reason to believe that he was a real man when liars wrote his gospels for him.

We know that Mark was inventing his gospel for he never said there were guards watching the tomb of Jesus which Christians would have had to say even if it were not true for their resurrection story had no credibility without that claim. Matthew was the inventor of the guards story. What else did he invent?

The resurrection narratives are completely lacking even in basic routine scientific verification. For example, no effort was said to have been made to ensure that it was really Jesus who died on the cross – we are not told if anybody who knew Jesus had a good view of his face which was disfigured anyway. We read of a testimony that Jesus was pierced in the side on the cross but no proof is given that in his highly strung state at the cross that the alleged witness only thought he saw that. Maybe Jesus was just hit with a bloody lance and it looked like he was wounded in the side. Jesus would have been sweaty so that explains the blood and the water the witness saw.
 
The lack of verification indicates that the stories were made up by the gospellers for if something had really happened all objections would have been carefully refuted and they would have invented stories to remove all doubts. There is no evidence that the very early Church let the public read the gospels and plenty of indications that they did not. Another problem is the fact that Luke and Matthew report different things regarding the birth of Jesus and thereabouts. All four gospels differ on the events surrounding the resurrection. Yet they and Jesus believed that before anything could be accepted as reliable there had to be at least two level-headed and honest witnesses as the God of the Law of Moses commanded. The gospels then defied the law and showed themselves to be capable of religious fraud. Luke reported that Jesus once said that having the Law of Moses and the Prophets was more important than listening to anybody who managed to return from the dead which shows that those gospel-mongers who stressed the importance of Jesus himself were frauds. The supposedly most reliable account of Jesus’ life is his passion and crucifixion. But these stories are full of things that should have been said to silence critics but which were not showing that the stories were invented. Stories should get more convincing as critics are responded to.

The absurd notion that it is easier to believe in a miracle resurrection than to believe that Jesus was accidentally buried alive and escaped from the tomb despite the stone and the soldiers is one of the many rationalisations for the veracity of the gospels that Christians come up with. So if your wallet disappears and you are sure that nobody that was in the house that day to your knowledge did it that means it is a miracle. It is easier to believe it was a miracle than that somebody got into the house without being seen. This is not rational thinking. It is brainwashed thinking. The natural explanation no matter how complicated should be considered true as long as it avoids belief in a miracle. Christians are exposed to conditioning.

The authors of the gospels were perfectly capable of believing or claiming that Jesus existed, worked miracles or rose, against the facts.

If the gospels commit foundational errors then their idol may have not existed. As a rule, the more foundational errors we find the less likely it is that their Jesus was a historical entity. We will see that hardly anything in the gospels is free from such error. The gospels are fairy-tales. Their realistic look is a fabrication, an illusion. Jesus did not exist.
 
When all the big things in the Jesus story are fiction it follows that the lesser stories cannot be trusted at all either.
 
The gospels give us no reason to believe in the existence of Jesus. Even if they did we could safely ignore them for we have proof that even the apostles taught that they never knew of a man called Jesus when he was alive before his crucifixion.