A deeper look at the story of Jesus

I was surfing the Huffington Post one day until I clicked on this article. It was a video of Bill Maher on The View talking to Sherri Shepherd about religion.

...but the god who was born of a virgin, died, was resurrected three days later, died for everybody's sins -- that was an old story going around the Mediterranean for a thousand years. Horus is an Egyptian god, exact same story. He raised somebody named Lazarus from the dead. Mithra, a Persian god. Krishna the Indian god.

I was stunned. But I didn't really look into it until today, Christmas. What better day to research whether Jesus really existed than on the day of his "birth"? Of course, I'm only going to go to objective sites for information.

One site I found is called ReligiousTolerance.org. It's different than most other religious websites in that it doesn't try to proselytize the reader. They are a multi-faith group whose staff includes Christians, Buddhists, Wiccans, and Atheists. They try to be as unbiased and objective as possible and even have a page which they use to record the errors they make for the 4,500 essays and menus they've written. Here are the indisputable FACTS about Jesus from one of these articles:

- There are ZERO documents written during 7 BC to 33 AD about Jesus.
- The Gospel of Q is a collection of moral stories and anecdotes that had been transmitted orally and believed to have been first written down around 50 AD. However, it doesn't include dates for Jesus' life. If Jesus was crucified 33 AD "then many who saw and heard him preach would still have been alive and could have verified that the gospel was accurate." But it also might have been gathered together in the first or second centuries AD.
- Gnostic Christians, Jewish Christians, and Pauline Christians comprised the early Christian movement. They rejected the notion that God could ever present Himself in human form and some didn't believe in Jesus' existence.
- Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian born in the year 37 AD, wrote in his book Antiquities of the Jews that Jesus was a wise man crucified by Pilate. "Most historians believe that the paragraph in which he describes Jesus is partly or completely a forgery that was inserted into the text by an unknown Christian. The passage 'appears out of context, thereby breaking the flow of the narrative.'" A second passage which mentions Jesus' brother James being stoned to death has no consensus.
- Cornelius Tacitus was a Roman historian who wrote Annals (112 AD), a book which states Jesus' existence in the first century AD. But it also might have been based on Christian writings and sayings in the early second century.
- Suetonius wrote The Lives of the Caesars around 120 AD. In it he says "since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, [Emperor Claudius in 49 CE] expelled them from Rome." This is used to support Jesus' existence but Chrestus was also a common Greek name at the time. "It is likely that the reference is to a Jewish agitator in Rome by that name."
- None of the roughly 40 ancient Roman historians who wrote during the first two centuries, with the exception of Suetonius, mentioned that Jesus existed in the first century.
- The Talmud states that Jesus lived in the second century BC but the passage itself dates from that time period. The authors may have based it on the Christian material at the time.

Tomorrow I'll investigate the parallels, or perhaps lack of parallels, between the life of Jesus and the lives of other deities.

Merry Christmas.