How Paul Invented Christianity

Paul made the Jewish leader, Jesus, who expected God’s visitation to save the Jews from foreign oppression, into the saviour of an Hellenistic mystery cult. Paul was the cult leader. He transferred the divine title of God to the messiah, and substituted effort of will by faith. Faith is a cop out. It is empty without works, as James wrote, even in the New Testament. Modern Christians prefer faith because works means doing something—doing God’s will, actually measuring up to the law, or measuring up to the criterion of loving your enemy. Paul’s rejection of will undercut Jesus, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, because it is the effort involved in trying to do God’s will that is salvific. Trying to fulfil the law, and trying to love others is what takes people closer to God, not any self-indulgent faith. Paul distorted the value of the law, and he taught in opposition to Jesus. Jews stepped away and ignored him. The Christianity of Christ himself was destroyed. More at:

http://www.askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0582PaulChristianity.php

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Jesus Illigitimate and taken in by the Essenes

What this boils down to is that the early evidence of Jesus’s birth is that he was illigitimate. It is special pleading to say this conclusion is uncharitable because Mary claimed it was a miracle. It ought not to need saying that no Christian father would accept the same excuse for his daughter’s pregnancy, so there is nothing uncharitable about it. In those days, Greeks thought it possible for human women to be impregnated by gods, and it was used as an excuse in that culture, but no traditional Jewish culture was likely to accept it. The Christians who wrote the gospels were not traditional Jews. If they were Jews at all, they were writing for people in the Hellenized world outside Palestine where divine births were acceptable. The two birth narratives were quite plainly stuck on to the bios of Christ, and no scholar considers them to be anything other than myth. It leaves the notion of illigitimacy as the only explanation for Jesus being called the son of Mary. The question then is:

clipped from benwitherington.blogspot.com Did the people in Nazareth know there was something unusual about Jesus’ origins, and it disconnected him from Joseph? Yes they did, which is why they were angry and did not think Jesus had any right to teach them. He was probably viewed as a mamzer, as Dr. Bruce Chilton has argued—an illegitimate child. And this is precisely what James Tabor argues in his Jesus Dynasty book, claiming he was the son of a Roman soldier named Pantera. But of course now, he has reversed himself to support the Jesus Family Tomb theory. You can’t have it both ways, and in fact neither are correct. Jesus was not the physical descendent of Joseph, was known not to be by his hometown folks. The uncharitable suggested he was illegitimate but Mary claimed his conception was a miracle. Those are the two opposing explanations we have from the first century about Jesus’ origins.

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Mary Magdalene

Ben Witherington makes these statements in his blog about the Jesus Family Tomb book. He is a professional Christian and is complaining about the facts offered by the authors, Charles Pellegrino and Simcha Jacobivici, a pair of ancient history sensationalists out to make money. Yet this tiny part of the professional Christian response is just as mendacious. How does he know all the early Christians in Jerusalem spoke only Aramaic, and had no Greek? Since this country had been in the Greek sphere of influence for over three centuries, it seems most unlikely. If they did speak only Aramaic, it was a deliberate choice, not because they had no Greek. As for Mary Magdalene growing up in a Jewish fishing village called Migdal, this is pure invention. No one knows what “Magdalene” means, and so it is pure conjecture that it refers to any town. If it refers to Migdal at all, it could be translated as “Mary the Tower”, implying her fortitude, or even her towering stature.

clipped from benwitherington.blogspot.com The earliest Jewish Christians in Jerusalem, including the members of Jesus’ family and Mary Magdalene, did not speak Greek. They spoke Aramaic. We have absolutely no historical evidence to suggest Mary Magdalene would have been called by a Greek name before A.D. 70. She grew up in a Jewish fishing village called Migdal, not a Greek city at all.

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The Sexuality of Jesus

Jesus’s sexuality is utterly ignored by Christians. Why are Christians—like those represented by the Christian Coalition International Canada Inc—so upset to think that their incarnated God, Jesus, might have been homosexual? Though the gospel image of Jesus is that of a tolerant pacifist, a large proportion of Christians do not recognize this as Jesus, certainly in the way they think and behave themselves. Of course, the gospel image of Jesus is most likely concocted by the early Christians, but literal biblicists are supposed to believe in the bible literally read, and the bible literally read is ambiguous about the sexuality of Jesus. Indeed, the impression given of Jesus is that he had no interest in sex at all, and if that were so then he must have been a god, because no normal man could possibly not be sexually inclined.

Of course, one can eschew sexual activity in practice, but one cannot suppress it completely, mentally. The obvious explanation of Jesus not being sexually active is that he was a member of the order of Essenes, one branch of which did not indulge in sexual activity because it was considered to be symptomatic of humanity and not the angels, who were not sexual creatures, being immortal. The Essenes aspired to be angels, and so gave up sex. Thus they believed they were purer, more perfect and more adjusted to the heavenly life.

Now, it is possible that even this concept of sexual purity did not prevent the Essene monks from indulging in homosexuality. The reason is that they could have justified homosexuality as being non-procreative, and the angels were asexual because they had no need of procreation. Humans needed sex to procreate the human race because immortality had been denied them by God as a consequence of primeval sin, probably seen as sexual activity anyway. Let the punishment fit the crime, was God’s principle in this reasoning. The human race were condemned to being sexual so that they could propagate themselves. A forbidden pleasure, stolen contrary to God’s wishes, had led to sex being a necessity with all the anguish it produced. Homosexuality was not a necessity however. It was not part of the punishment because it was not for procreation.

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