Dear Rev. Know-It-All,

I just saw a movie on U-tube that proves Jesus never existed and that religion is just a myth that some people invented just to control other people. So what are you planning on doing for a living now?

Yours Truly,

click below to see
I heard Jesus wasn't real! --- Answer Part 1

Dear Dee Pazapuddle 

Jesus really lived. He isn’t a myth no matter what you’ve heard or seen in the movie, “Zapquest,” or whatever it’s called. We have a whole lot more reason to believe that Jesus existed than that Socrates existed. 

Socrates, the Greek philosopher was mentioned by only four sources contemporary to him, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle and Aristophanes. The first three were his committed disciples and the fourth thought Socrates was a fraud. The greatest Greek historian of the age, Thucydides, doesn’t even mention him, so maybe he was just invented by his friends, or maybe they exaggerated about him.

Nonsense! 

No one ever questions the existence of Socrates, and yet we have a lot more evidence for Jesus than we do for Socrates.

We have a lot of evidence written by His friends. Remember that the Bible is not one book. It is a collection of books, many of which mention Jesus and  were written by contemporaries. We have Matthew, Peter, James Jude and John who were His disciples. They were contemporary witnesses who knew Him well. We have Luke and Mark who were His contemporaries and probably had seen Him, especially Mark. It may be that Jesus’ Last Supper in Jerusalem was held at the home owned by Mark’s mother.

We have contemporary witnesses who were not His disciples. Jesus is mentioned in two places by Flavius Josephus, who was born in 37 AD, shortly after Jesus’ death and resurrection. He was a prominent Jewish leader who, in a discussion of the martyrdom of St. James in book 20 of the Jewish Antiquities refers to Jesus as the “so called Messiah.” This particular reference is accepted as authentic by almost all scholars of the text. There is another passage in Book 3 that is much more controversial. Though the version we have in Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History is thought by most to be a fabrication, it is possibly an exaggeration of an authentic text by Josephus. No matter! 

Josephus describes the existence of Jesus and his acceptance as messiah by some contemporary Jews. Though Flavius Josephus was not personally a witness to Jesus, he certainly knew a lot about Jesus’ followers and was in a position as a government official to know if Jesus was just a myth invented by some fishermen who wanted to find an easier way to make a living.

Jesus also seems to be mentioned in the Mishnah, the core of the Talmud. 

The Talmud was censored in 1631 to remove references to Jesus. One theory is that they were not very complimentary to Jesus and were simply causing too much trouble for the Jews of Europe.

The Mishnah contains old stories and legends that may well date to the time of Jesus and though they seem rather garbled, it is pretty clear that they refer to the miraculous nature of His ministry. One much later rehashing of ancient sources, the “Toledoth Yeshu” refutes the Resurrection. 

Why refute the resurrection of someone who never existed? In particular they seem to refute His birth from a virgin. Again, why would the Mishnaic sages, who were essentially contemporary with Jesus and the first generations of Jewish Christians bother to critique something that no one believes about someone who never existed? 

To the degree that these works come from ancient sources, they are evidence that some Jewish people contemporary to Jesus believed not only in the existence of Jesus but in His virgin birth and resurrection.

More unlikely, there may actually still exist references to the text of a brief correspondence between Jesus and the ruler of a small principality in the Middle East. Eusebius of Caesarea claims that Abgar V of Edessa  asked Jesus to come and heal him. Jesus sent word back that He could not, but later would send His disciples. The whole thing is very doubtful, but not impossible.

In a certain sense there are certainly three physical place remains that bear witness to the life of Jesus, two in the Holy Land and one in Rome.

FIRST:

Early Christian pilgrims talked of visiting the house of St. Peter in Capernaum, in Galilee, the house where Jesus stayed at times with Peter and his family, and which had been made into a church.

In modern times, the church and the house on which it had been built have been excavated. In the first century house there is a special room or courtyard that has been a pilgrimage site since the middle of the first century (50-60 AD). There is graffiti that mentions “Jesus” and “Lord.” That house and its special association with Jesus from a few years after His leaving this earth would seem to indicate that people in Capernaum and Galilee knew Him and had no doubts about His existence or His importance.

SECOND:

There is, in Jerusalem, a Latin graffito of a ship and a paraphrase of a verse from the Psalms, “Domine, Ivivmus.”  “Lord we have come.” It is near the traditional site of the tomb of Jesus. Some scholars date it to around the year 310, but others date it to about 135 AD. 

Melito the Bishop of Sardis, who died in 180 AD mentions the spot where Jesus had been crucified as being in the “middle of the street.” By the time Melito wrote, the tomb of Christ had been buried under the pavement of a new city built by the Romans over the ruins of Jerusalem and called Aelia Capitolina. (Built 131 AD). This seems to indicate along with the graffito that the place of Jesus death and resurrection had never been forgotten by the first Christians of the Holy Land. We have good indications as to the exact places where Jesus lived and died. 

This would lead one to think that He existed. It also makes me think that He rose from the dead.

THIRD:

Pope Anacletus, who became the third Pope in 79 AD is said to have built a shrine over the grave of St. Peter. Peter was martyred in about 64 AD, so Anacletus was building a monumental tomb for St. Peter just 15 years after his death. Anacletus knew Peter. He knew who he was and where he was buried. You can still see the remains of this shrine beneath the main altar in St. Peter’s basilica in Rome. 

You may hear about an ossuary in Jerusalem inscribed with Simon bar Jona. That’s literally Simon Johnson. There were lots of Simon Johnsons at the time of Jesus and St. Peter. Anacletus knew the one in question and built a monument over his grave that was venerated by the first Christians and is venerated until today. 

What has this to do with Jesus? Very simple: If there was no Jesus, there was no Peter! Why would Anacletus go to the trouble to build a monument for the follower of someone who never existed?

AND...

There is one other possible physical remain worth mentioning: the Shroud. 

Don’t start laughing. 

The Shroud was proven to be a medieval forgery by carbon dating in 1988. Perhaps you saw the banner headlines, “SHROUD; A MEDIEVAL FORGERY.” Did you see the headlines in August of 2005 saying that the carbon 14 tests of 1988 were proven irrelevant by Robert Villareal and eight other scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory? 

No. Of course you didn’t. 

There were no headlines because the story was universally ignored by  brain damaged cretins who pose as journalists.  The story is pretty simple. 

In 1988 a small piece of cloth was taken form a corner of the shroud and divided into three pieces which were sent to three different laboratories. All three labs carbon dated the cloth they had received to somewhere  around 1250 AD. 

Case Closed. A Fake! 

Not so fast. 

The problem was that the piece of cloth was taken from a patch that had been woven into the original cloth. The shroud is linen, the patch was cotton. It photographed differently, It had a different chemical composition. It had been dyed to match the original cloth. It had vanillin in it.

(This is important. Vanillin is a type of natural plant sugar that decays at a steady rate. If a cloth is older than 1,300 years, there is no vanillin in it. There is no vanillin in the shroud. There is plenty of vanillin in the patch, indicating that the patch is much younger than the cloth.)

It is one of the single most studied archeological objects on planet earth. It is a cloth of ancient middle eastern origin, about 14 feet long. There is a faint image, front and back of the corpse of a naked man who died a horrible death by torture. He seems to have been scourged with a Roman whip of which there are surviving examples. He was crowned with a bonnet of thorns and crucified. There are blood stains that indicate the same. 

In 1980, Dr. Adler proved that the blood stains were real blood and went so far as to say that the blood type is AB, common among ancient middle easterners. 

I dare you to do a google search on the shroud. It will amaze you. 

The skeptics seem more like true believers than do the true believers! As evidence mounts, they come up with more far fetched proof that the shroud is a fake; conspiracy theories, Leonardo DaVinci, and on and on! If they are confronted with the possibility that the shroud is not a fake their reasoning goes something like this: “Even if the shroud is ancient and bears the image of a crucified Jew, how do we know it’s Jesus? It is not proof of anything.”

Whatever the shroud is, it is an amazing historical artifact. 

My point is not that it is or isn’t what it seems to be. 

I am simply trying to say that those who deny the claims of Christ will go to any lengths, no matter how absurd to deny even the possibility of His resurrection and even His existence. That’s why you didn’t see any headlines about the case for the shroud’s possible authenticity being reopened! 

Why is the world so afraid of the possibility that there is a God and that He visited His own creation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth? 

You tell me.

Rev. Know-It-All

(To be continued next week - - -> Click Here To Go To - Part 3)