Gnostics Gave Evidence that Jesus a Myth
A scholar writes, "The gnostic 'gospels' aren't gospels in the sense Christians use the word. They lack historical narrative, concrete details, historical figures, believable people, and details about social and religious life. The Jesus they describe has hardly any interest in the material realm. After all, the primary goal of Gnosticism, which came to maturation in the second century, was to escape the physical world. The Gnostic Jesus talked endlessly (and often nonsensically), but wouldn't get his hands dirty".
A Jesus being that different from the gospels one amounts to those faiths and believers saying, "The story is not true". That is close to calling that Jesus a myth.
In the early Church, there were many people who believed that Jesus Christ was
not a man but a vision. They believed that the Jesus who we read of in the
gospels was not a man. These people were mystics and were not far from being
psychologists. Their Jesus only existed in the mind like modern witches use
imaginary people to lead them to spiritual awareness. They were called
antichrists who denied the coming of Jesus in the flesh in John’s time. In
Paul’s day, they denied that Jesus had risen from the dead. We know their Jesus
was a mental force and not a vision of a separate entity because the New
Testament just condemns them and never tries to prove to them that Jesus was
real as we would expect if they were saying there was a Jesus but he was only a
ghost.
The mystics called themselves Gnostics - those who know. They wrote scriptures
that indicate the possible non-existence of Jesus Christ. Those that deny
there is evidence in any real sense for Jesus were as good as saying he was not
real.
Gnostic writings mostly had no interest in stories about Jesus as a person. They did not assess any evidence about him as if he were not a historical being. Jesus has no interest in anything material while the New Testament one gets tired, likes food, touches people, uses material things even spit as sacred. He is usually not even anything like a Jew. It has been noticed that he preaches but does nothing to dirty his hands to help anyone. Incredibly the New Testament Jesus never once cleans up an incontinent person or does anything like that. He does miracles to help people but that is cheap help. A good person wants their hands dirty and wants no short cuts that any lazy monster would take.
WERE THERE GNOSTICS IN THE FIRST CENTURY?
Did Gnostic Christianity denying the Jesus story exist in the days of the apostles or did it come after? It hardly matters. Either way something problematic existed with the Jesus story which gave rise to Gnosticism. There is a black hole of data so you never know if Gnosticism was there from the start or not.
Some scholarship says it was a later development.
‘But it is now widely agreed that the quest for a pre-Christian Gnosticism, properly so called, has proved to be a wild goose chase.’, Dunn, ‘The Cambridge Companion to St. Paul’, p. 9 (2003).
‘Even if it could be proven that any of the previously discussed works or, for that matter, any of the NH tractates are non-Christian Gnostic documents, that would not in itself be evidence for pre-Christian Gnosticism.’, Combs, ‘Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism and New Testament Interpretation’, Grace Theological Journal (8.2.207-208), 1987.
‘And even if we are on solid ground in some cases in
arguing the original works represented in the library are much older than extant
copies, we are still unable to postulate plausibly any pre-Christian dates.’,
McRae, ‘Nag Hammadi and the New Testament’, pp. 146–47, in Combs, ‘Nag Hammadi,
Gnosticism and New Testament Interpretation’, Grace Theological Journal
(8.2.208) , (1987).
‘Egypt has yielded early written evidence of Jewish, Christian, and pagan
religion. It has preserved works of Manichaean and other Gnostic sects,
but these are all considerably later than the rise of Christianity.’, Unger,
‘The Role of Archaeology in the Study Of the New Testament’, Bibliotheca Sacra
(116.462.153), 1996.
‘Some modern researchers suggest that several New Testament and related texts evidence
contact with “Gnosticism” in various stages of its development. Texts that
especially stand out are Paul’s Corinthian correspondence, Colossians,
Ephesians, the Pastoral Epistles, Jude, 2 Peter, and the letters of Ignatius of
Antioch (d. ca. 115) and Polycarp of Smyrna (d. ca. 165) among others. But even
here the issues discussed are diverse, demonstrating a complex assortment of
competing new religious movements, but no evidence of “Gnosticism.”’, Freedman,
‘Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible’, p. 509 (2000).
‘Scholarship must in all likelihood abandon the hypothesis that a cohesive Gnostic movement is reflected in Paul’s letters.’, Lüdeman, ‘Primitive Christianity: A Survey of Recent Studies and Some New Proposals’, p. 150 (2003).
‘If in all likelihood, with the possible exception of the Simonians, there was
no such thing as a rival Gnostic movement within or competing with Pauline
Christianity, the question arises whether there ever was a specific Gnostic myth
as an entity of its own.’ , ibid’, p. 151.
‘The full-fledged Gnosticism of later church history did not exist in the first century A.D.21 An incipient form of Gnosticism was present, but Schmithals makes the error of reading later Gnosticism into the first century documents.’, Schreiner, ‘Interpreting the Pauline Epistles’, Southern Baptist Journal of Theology (3.3.10), Fall 1999.
THE GOSPEL OF PHILIP
This Nag Hammadi gospel says Jesus was not conceived by
the Holy Spirit for the Holy Spirit is female and that nobody baked bread until
he came. This is a clear indication that Jesus was considered to be a myth
figure.
THE APOCRYPHON OF JAMES
The Apocryphon of James which was written in the early second century says that
there is a curse on the men who saw Jesus meaning the apostles. This work is
proof that there were mystical Christians who denied the authority of the
apostles. By implication, they were rejecting the authority of the gospels for
the gospels purport to preserve the apostles teaching and take us as near to
seeing Jesus as a man as possible.
The unorthodox Christian scripture the Apocryphon of James or Secret Book of
James seems to have originated before 150 AD (page 30, The Nag Hammadi Library
in English). This work rejects the reliability of the gospels and the New
Testament for it says only Peter and James were given the knowledge. It says
that those who have seen and consorted with the Son of Man or Jesus are cursed
and those who have not seen him are blessed. So we are told not to believe that
Peter and James consorted with Jesus. They never knew him as a man. The reason
people who haven’t known Jesus are blessed is because they can have visions of
him and receive secret knowledge of him. (This knowledge gives salvation so it
is spoken of as life while ignorance is symbolised as death or death and
burial.) So we are told that anybody who claims to know a real flesh and blood
Jesus or him as a man is not to be heeded. The gospels are to be dumped. It says
that we must neglect reason. Probably it simply means that reason will not bring
you to the truth not that reason has no value. So books like the gospels which
try to make it reasonable to believe in Jesus are to be deplored. Jesus says in
this treatise that the head of prophecy was stopped with John the Baptist. Then
he said Peter and James need to understand what this means. So the head of
prophecy is symbol. So earlier when we read that they are to scorn death and
then contradictorily keep remembering the cross and death of Jesus we can only
conclude that we are to scorn literal death and keep remembering the symbolic
cross and death of Jesus. They stand for Jesus becoming saved and reborn through
knowledge so that the old Jesus is symbolically crucified and dead and replaced
by a spiritually alive Jesus.
James asks Jesus to protect him against temptation by the evil one and Jesus
replies that through temptation they can be made equal to Jesus and like Jesus
they will be crucified and buried by the evil one like he was. Since James the
primary recipient of this answer was not crucified the crucifixion is symbolic.
Here Jesus is saying he didn’t really die on the cross but died and was buried
by the evil one. He means that before he was saved himself he was deluded and
was dead in the sense that he wasn’t saved and in that sense he was buried by
Satan. The Apocryphon has no need to say such things about Jesus unless it was
thought to be true. It’s a very intelligent work as well. These Christians
believed that only the being appearing to them to give them saving knowledge
mattered not stories about a historical Christ. They even denied that he was
crucified. When the biggest thing that happened to Jesus was a symbol and not
real then it is hardly likely that Jesus was real either.
Conclusion
The Gnostics knew that Jesus was a myth and the stories about him were not true.
That is why they felt free to make up tales of their own but at least they
admitted they were making up tales in the hope of helping people spiritually.
The WWW
Who is GA Wells? Rev Dr Gregory S. Neal
www.errantskeptics.org/G_A_Wells.htm
The Silent Jesus
www.askwhy.co.uk/awcnotes/cn4/0325SilentJesus.html#Justin
Apollonius the Nazarene, The Historical Apollonius versus the Historical Jesus
www.apollonius.net/bernard1e.html
Why Did the Apostles Die? Dave Matson,
www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1997/4Why97.html
The “Historical” Jesus by Acharya S
www.truthbeknown.com/historicaljc.htm
How Did the Apostles Die?
www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1997/4/4front97.html
History’s Troubling Silence About Jesus, Lee Salisbury
www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=102
Steven Carr discusses the Christian and apostolic martyrs
www.bowness.demon.co.uk/martyrs.htm
www.bowness.demon.co.uk/martyrs2.htm
Challenging the Verdict
A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ
http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsOne.htm
http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsTwo.htm
http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsThree.htm#Twelve
The Martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, Peter Kirby
http://home.earthlink.net/~kirby/
The Martyrdoms: A Response, Peter Kirby
www.bowness.demon.co.uk/martyrs3.htm
A Sacrifice in Heaven,
http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/supp09.htm
The Evolution of Jesus of Nazareth
http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/partthre.htm
The Jesus of History, a Reply to Josh McDowell by Gordon Stein
www.infidels.org/library/modern/gordon_stein/Jesus.html
Josh McDowell’s Evidence for Jesus – Is It Reliable?, by Jeffrey J Lowder
www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/jury/chap5.html
A Reply to JP Holding’s “Shattering” of My Views on Jesus
www.infidels.org/secular_web/new/2000/march.html
Robert M Price, Christ a Fiction
www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/fiction.html
Earliest Christianity G A Wells
www.infidels.org/library/modern/g_a_wells/earliest.html
The Second Century Apologists
http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/century.htm
Existence of Jesus Controversy, Rae West
www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk/littleton/gm1_jesu.htm
Why I Don’t Buy the Resurrection Story by Richard Carrier
www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/index.shtml
Jesus Conference,
www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_sd/jconf_hall.html
Jesus Conference,
www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_sd/jconf_stuckenbruck.html
The Testament of Levi Concerning the Priesthood and Arrogance
www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-08/anf08-07.htm#P378_53868.
Sherlock Holmes Style Search for the Historical Jesus
www.fortunecity.com/greenfield/bp/890/history.html
The Ascension of Isaiah
www.earth-history.com/sacred-ascension-Isaiah.htm
Apollonius of Ty
ana: The Monkey of Christ? The Church Patriarchs, Robertino
Solarion www.apollonius.net/patriarchs.html
What About the Discovery of Q? Brad Bromling
www.ApologeticsPress.org
Wells without Water, Psychological Buffoonry from the Master of the Christ-Myth,
James Patrick Holding
www.tektonics.org/JPH_WW.html
Critique: Scott Bidstrp [sic] on The Case for Christ by James Patrick Holding
www.tektonics.org/bidstrup02.html
GA Wells Replies to Criticism of his Books on Jesus
www.infidels.org/library/modern/g_a_wells/errant.html
The Ossuary Scam: A Critical Analysis of the “James” Ossuary
http://www.atrueword.com/index.php/article/articleprint/15/-1/1/
The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus, Acharya S
www.truthbeknown.com/origins.htm
The Historical Jesus
http://www.geocities.com/b_d_muller/index.html
BIBLE VERSION USED
The Amplified Bible
The King James Version
