An entirely new interpretation of historical evidence,
exercising rational skepticism
that denies neither atheism nor the Nicene creed
as possible truths.

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Contents

- Preface

• Who am I, what do I believe, and why's it special?
• What is 'proof'?

(1) Of 'Historical Evidence'

• How much are historical documents reliable?
• How much is oral history reliable?
• What about Judaic history?
• Why are there parallel accounts?
• What other documents are there?

(2) Of Rational Explanation of Scientifically Impossible Events

• Did Jesus learned Egyptian medical knowledge?
• Are there rational explanations of miracles and the resurrection?

(3) Of Hermeneutic Corroboration

• Did Romans and Greeks feel guilt?
• Does the hermeneutic change corroborate the New Testament?

(4) Of the Theist vs. Anti-Theist Debate

• What of believers?[
• What of unbelievers?
• What of St. Thomas' Resolution?

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Preface

Who am I, what do I believe, and why's it special? After learning Latin and Ancient Greek from age 10, I studied Philosophy and Psychology at Oxford University, where I was trained in rational skepticism and the philosophy of science. Now I am 60 and retired in Chico (CA).

Regarding belief, it evolved while researching this project. I eventually found myself considering the disciple St. Thomas, because like me, he was a rational skeptic, asking to put his fingers in Jesus' wounds to know the truth. Jesus did not say 'get thee hence' or 'shame on thee for doubt.' Instead he said 'go ahead,' afterwards saying 'Ὅτι ἑώρακάς με, πεπίστευκας; μακάριοι οἱ μὴ ἰδόντες kai πιστεύσαντες" ("Because you've perceived me, you believe; blessed are those who haven't and yet believe," John 20:29). From the perspective of science, Thomas made a request for validation of sufficient hypotheses to corroborate a theory as being undeniably true.

I thus extrapolate an apparently new theological position based on empirical skepticism: I cannot know whether there is an afterlife, without direct experience of it--but if there is an afterlife, then nothing could ever please me more than meeting Jesus! An all-knowing God must know I am sorry for what I've done wrong. After I pass away, I can only ask if I really must make God's beautiful son suffer for my stupid sins. More ardent believers indicate I don't get the blessing they do for believing beforehand, but no worries, my education makes up for it.

What is 'proof'? Upon shared a little homily, ‘Christ’s Passion, the Shit Sponge, and Beyond’ on Facebook, almost all of the ~100 replies within 3 days scorned, with absolute and unequivocal certainty, that all four gospels are entirely made up from beginning to end, because there is no 'proof.' Well, as of the current day, there are mathematical proofs, in the form of tautologies; yet according to the philosophy of science, a hypothesis can never be proven, only corroborated. Those many demanding 'proof' need to adjust their expectations about what actually can be known about events 2,000 years ago, instead considering what might've actually happened with a neutral and open mind.

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(1) Of 'Historical Evidence'

How much are historical documents reliable? Now, perhaps it seems too obvious to me that up to the time when the Church Fathers selected the books for the New Testament, ALL historical accounts were written from oral reports, frequently handed down over spans of 300 years (and even longer in the case of Homer). Thucydides (460~400 BC) is widely purported to be one of the best historians ever, but he entirely made up speeches he never heard, and which even might not have been given at all, simply by imagining what he thought could have been said over the vast expanse of the three Peloponnese wars he described. Unless one is a wildly enthusiastic fan of 'Game of Thrones,' realistically, it remains difficult even to imagine Generals, standing in battlefields, conducting long rhetorical debates with various inhabitants of besieged cities, too frightened to open the gates for parlay. Moreover, when gathering oral accounts, Thucydides decided himself which were most accurate and conflated all his sources into one storyline, without stating ANY differences in accounts he heard, setting an awful precedent for thousands of years of equally questionable reportage. It wasn't until the last century, when structuralists examined the speech patterns and dialects across different Greek city states, that anyone even questioned whether the speeches in Thucydides were accurate at all. But he is lauded as one of the best historians ever.

Much the same is true for all the greatest pieces of 'historical evidence'' we now have about the ancient world, even in Plutarch's 'Parallel Lives,' which is continually presented as genuinely unquestionable fact. Plutarch's history goes back to Alexander the Great, over 500 years earlier, in 356 BC. It was written somewhere in around 200 AD, and the earliest existent copy is from 800 years later. No one thinks to say it is all invention, despite the far lower degree of authenticity, not only of the textual and verbal traditions he passed on, but also in the far later age of the oldest manuscript we have. On Alexander the Great, Plutarch's is one of the few 2nd- or 3rd-generation reports we have, assembled from a few lost sources and oral traditions, again conflating all sources into one storyline. No one says Alexander the Great obviously didn't exist, instead pointing to cities named after him that could equally have been named for a God; or frescoes and statues of him as 'proof,' rather oblivious that the earliest ones were still made centuries after Alexander's death.

How much are oral traditions reliable? Another ignored fact is how oral traditions worked at the time. As described in my separate essay 'on Oral Traditions,' they were not simple ramblings as people tend to thing of storytelling now. There were separate groups telling the story in different places, and in each group, one of the younger adults would be asked to tell the story for the children. The older adults listened, providing corrections and embellishments from their own memory. Of course, there were different opinions on how the story should be told, and different memories of the original events too; but overall the unity of each group in preserving a story would certainly compare quite favorably to the different stories one now hears, for example, about Trump, derived from MSNBC, Fox TV, etc.

What about Judaic history? The time during the first Roman emperors was very turbulent in Judea. Quite a large number of different people attempted to dominate the region and/or usurp the Romans. One effort notably terminated in a huge siege of a mountaintop fortress called Masada. The Romans spent almost a year breaking the fortress, forcing an army of slaves to build an earthen ramp, 375 feet high and thousands of feet long, to reach the citadel. On this we have "The Jewish War" by Josephus (75 AD). The original Hebrew, Aramaic versions, and later Greek translations are mostly lost. The earliest entire version is Slavonic from 1463 AD. It states an ironclad siege tower containing a battering ram was hoisted up the ramp and placed into position to strike against the rebels’ casemate wall. However, archaeological remains indicated the mound never reached the citadel itself. Instead, it appears catapults and basilica also bombarded the citadel's inner buildings so much that even a giant cistern, partly subterranean, was broken open, leaving the besieged with barely no water. It's also believed all the besieged solders and families committed suicide before the siege end. So it appears Josephus is not very reliable in reporting history. But there are accounts of an individual that could have been Jesus, mentioned in passing, in some earlier remnants of Josephus' writing from 75 AD, but not others.

The lack of historical accounts about Jesus outside Josephus is often construed as counter-evidence of his existence. On the other hand, Judaic and Roman historians had no reason even to acknowledge his existence at all in their own history, because they totally denied his significance. If anything they would have denied his existence, because they were losing converts to Christianity. But they didn't deny his existence either. They simply said nothing, because he wasn't really important to them at the time.

Why are there parallel accounts? In marked difference from historical conventions practiced throughout the era elsewhere, the historians working for the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, (272-337 AD) did something entirely unique, making the recorded account of the oral tradition, overall, about an order of magnitude MORE reliable than other sources. Perhaps most importantly, when the four gospels were selected to be reliably preserved, with continual efforts to make every syllable as genuine as possible for millennia, they DID NOT conflate the four accounts into one storyline like everyone else did, but meticulously kept all of them as different as they were, so that future readers could decide themselves how to resolve discrepancies across the separate descriptions.

The differences between the gospels are frequently stated as proof they are wrong. But the historians felt it important to make the record as genuine as possible. Thus they not only preserved the four different accounts as they had been handed down separately in different provinces of Rome, but also, moreover, traced direct lineage of each account through individual people who had been remembering and repeating them since the disciples first starting sharing their 'good news' (the literal meaning of 'gospel'), in order to choose four, not one but four, out of hundreds of documents, as the ones which would be painstakingly transcribed by hand and handed down through the centuries until the first printing press in 1440 AD. Even before then, more copies of the bible were handwritten and carefully translated into multiple languages than any other book in the world.

We know that the historians went thought at least a hundred documents, with at least a thousand prior copies that had been made before, to choose and make these four separate accounts as the best, authentic ones. There is NO OTHER historical evidence from that time that has anywhere near that much 'evidence.' Nothing. The current biblical canon remains as it was formally defined and widely circulated ca. 350 AD, by which time there were copies of multiple collections of documents, including gospels and letters, which were not old at all for that era, dating back only 150 years or so to 150~200 AD (or perhaps earlier, but earlier versions have not survived).

What other documents are there? In later time, those with more interest in saving souls than historical evidence tried to destroy all the other documents completely. And they formed 'a single message' that everyone could agree on, allowing the doctrines to survive terrible persecutions and, even more importantly, the majority's massive ignorance and inability even to read or write. About a dozen texts not in the bible were preserved by the church including The Acts of Thomas (see the Gnostic Society Library). Scattered remnants of surviving texts include the Dead Sea Scrolls. More recently, in 1945, a large cache of comparatively well preserved and totally lost documents were found in Egypt.



As a collection of some of the earliest bound books we now have, this 'Nag Hammadi library' is comparatively well preserved. Books are far more compact than scrolls, and they contain yet more accounts and letters that in total corroborate the history stated in the gospels. Unless one chooses to twist the translation of words such as 'spirit' to such devious ends, none of the other scriptures outside the bible describe Jesus as deceitful evil or demonic, such as one frequently might now hear about both Trump.

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(2) Of Rational Explanation for Scientifically Impossible Events

Any rational inquirer could justifiably claim the documented evidence belies no more than ridiculous supernatural beliefs. A very small number of people have before suggested that there exists more rational explanations, and they've been very popular. For example Lloyd Douglas' book "The Robe (1942) was a bestseller for more than a year. Few now alive read the book, instead watching the movie, which does not mention Douglas' rational explanations.

In the spirit of rational empiricism, I extend Douglas' hypothesis to explain all events described in the New Testament canon, such that they all can be explained by the laws of science we now know.
Immediately I am obliged to add, this is not a denial of the possibility that there were supernatural events, either in total or part. Rather, I present it as an alternate hypothesis that could explain one or more, or even all the miracles, and even the resurrection too, if one is not inclined to accept the scientifically impossible deeds of Christ as recounted in the gospels. In the past I speculated that Jesus obtained such extraordinary knowledge for the time by divine inspiration, but now I have a feasible rational explanation for that too.

Did Jesus learn Egyptian medical knowledge? It is not an unreasonalbe hypothesis that Christ could had learned otherwise unknown medical techniques from scrolls that had been plundered from the library of Alexandria, after its first major fire in 145 BC.

According to canonical texts, Joseph took his family to Egypt immediately after the census, escaping Herod's massacre of the innocents (Matthew:2:13-15), although many historians now think this massacre was 'only' of Herod's own sons. Joseph brought his family back to Nazareth after the death of Herod in 4 BC (Luke 2:4). Jesus was an avid learner and could read at least Hebrew (Luke 4:16-20). So at least one opportunity existed for Joseph to purchase scrolls for Jesus according to canonical history, or Jesus could even have obtained them himself. There is a gap in historical accounts of Jesus' life before adulthood of about 10 years. Jesus and/or Joseph could have been in Egypt then, only returning for the annual passover feast (Luke 2:41). Others have speculated Jesus was studying in Alexandria during this time, particularly because after Jesus' death, St. Mark lived and died in Alexandria (est. 61~68 AD). Others who knew Jesus may well have lived in Alexandria, due to the size and power of the early church there. Moreover, there would have been both religious and political objections to mentioning Jesus' 10-year stay there, because Israel was created from slaves who rebelled from Egypt.

We also know that the Egyptians possessed extraordinary and lost medical knowledge. For example, the Egyptians at ;least knew how to perform surgery, demonstrated by a mummy from 400 BC in the Rosicrucian museum, San Jose, CA (BYU Professor Finds Evidence of Advanced Surgery in Ancient Mummy, Brigham Young University, 2015).



Carbon dating has verified the remains to be genuine, but debate does continue whether the surgery was performed before or after death. X-rays have shown the pin to have a spiral shape, resembling almost exactly that used for attachment of prostheses now. Also, sampling the cement revealed it to contain organic resin, similar to modern bone cement (Medical Mystery of Usermontu: Why the Discovery of 2,600-Year-Old Knee Screw Left Experts Dumbfounded, Ancient Origins, 2015). Here I speculate that the pin was inserted after death in this case to reattach the leg, but prosthetic attachment had already been long practiced, with only this example of the technique surviving.



Are there rational explanations of miracles and the resurrection? So maybe Joseph found and brought tracts, otherwise unpreserved and now lost, from Egypt when he yearly traveled up to Jerusalem, to see Mary and Jesus for Passover. As well as perhaps including some translations of Buddhist texts on āryāṣṭāṅgamārga from three centuries previously, maybe the tracts described lost secrets such as:

• How to perform artificial respiration (resurrection of Lazarus)
• How to stitch a man's ear back on with needle and thread after it had been cut off (Peter at Gethsemane),
• How to clean a cruddy infection out of an eye with sand and water (John 3:5).
• Perhaps other kinds of knowledge, such as how to make a delicious rosé by putting heated water in porous jars that previously held thick wine (and many other such miracles in Luke's gospel). Similarly, when Jesus handing out little pieces of bread and fish (whether once or many times, depending on how one treats the Gospel differences), there were thousands of people there who had traveled great distances to reach the grassy hilltop whence he spoke. So they probably had brought some food and wine for themselves for refreshment before their return. Upon hearing his lessons on giving to others, they could have shared their repasts all around, together enjoying an enormous picnic that otherwise would not have happened (again, an unprecedented event within all history that we know). Now some would say that is not a miracle. To me, it is.
• And finally here, possibly, how to induce a coma by sucking a shit sponge the roman soldiers carried to wipe their arses (crucifixion). It's discussed a little later here, but for more on that, please see my separate homily, 'The Passion, the Shit Sponge, and Beyond.'

There it is. A rational explanation, now, for the miracles and resurrection, if you prefer rational explanation. It only surprises me no one has ever proposed it before.

I could provide many more rational explanations. After several decades of thinking about it, the last event to defy reasonable interpretation was Christ's ascension into sky after death. Cynics have said it was merely a convenient theological addition, to rid themselves of the problem of what happens to a resurrected body. But now it seems most likely to me that he chose to climb the heavenly Mount Sinai, as did his ancestors Abraham and Moses, and passed away there alone.

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(3) Of Hermeneutic Corroboration

Hermeneutic: (from Hermes, messenger and soul guide of the Greek Gods): wisdom in interpretation. Hermeneutic theory is "a member of the social subjectivist paradigm where meaning is inter-subjectively created, in contrast to the empirical universe of assumed scientific realism (Berthon et al. 2002). Other approaches within this paradigm are social phenomenology and ethnography. As part of the interpretative research family, hermeneutics focuses on the significance that an aspect of reality takes on for the people under study" (University of Colorado).

Did Romans and Greeks feel guilt? In 2015, I speculated where there was any case in Pre-Christ Roman texts where people felt guilty about something they'd done wrong. There is valor, humor, and desires to improve civilization in Stoic manners, but no guilt as we understand it today. I asked some friends and family knowledgeable in the field, including two with PhDs who had specialized in history and archaeology. They were surprised they had never heard the question before, but almost instantaneously agreed I was right, to such an extent no further discussion ever took place.

So what of the pre-Christian Greeks? They were very adept at shaming others, but even of those shamed, there is no clear indication that they ever took personal responsibility for what they had done wrong. Instead, they blame the Gods and other people for inflicting fates upon them that they could not escape, from Helen of troy's 'abduction,' all the way to Oedipus blinding himself because he did not know he had killed his father and married his mother. So I asked my friends again. They paused longer, but said they couldn't think of any example of Greek guilt either. A year later, someone at Oxford I don't know gave a lecture on it (reprinted in Armand D'angour, Shame and Guilt in Ancient Greece, New Imago Forum, to psychoanalysts and academics, 2016). The author avoids committing to any absolute statement as to whether the Greeks ever took personal responsibility for what they did wrong, but it contains no concrete example that they did.

Emotional guilt was instead known commonly to the Israelites, who were the first society to attempt a system of rational law based on divine justice (compare to, for example, Draco's tabulation of totally random rules in Athens (620 BC); and the far more common systems of punishment based solely on opinions of the rulers at the time, without any clear statement at all as to what crimes actually were). Prior to that, there is some idea of guilt in the Egyptian judgment in the afterlife. But it was a very different idea than it is now, based on terror of Gods, whether living or beyond life. When we look back to those eras, we tend to assume everyone had much the same judgments and emotions we have now, but we are looking at an extremely savage time, and the social mechanisms to enable such judgments and emotions to blossom in civilization had not fully evolved.

Does hermeneutic change corroborate the New Testament? According to the texts, Jesus introduced astounding teachings on love, hope and forgiveness that were totally alien to the cultures of the time. I speculate that the hermeneutic change was far more significant than merely proving he was alive. The novelty of his lessons could have been no more than amusing, and simply disappeared, but somehow thew grew with significant alacrity. It remains unclear how his teachings gained so much traction at all, amidst the far louder rhetoric and more powerful means of rich and well-entrenched opponents.

His new ideas resulted in spiritual growth of compassion, and love, together with the positive nature of the afterlife, looked to with hope rather than fear (unlike any other tradition of the time ever). Cultural response of the opponents included Nero's feeding early Christians to lions, because they didn't mind dieing, and the Roman crowds just adored watching it, without any guilt at all. This icon from 320 AD shows 40 Christians who were fed to lions all at once. One Christian, on the left, changed his mind at the last minute and was permitted to leave.



It is impossible to imagine at all how so many people professing faith in Christ would join together in such an apparently defeatist effort, and let themselves be so persecuted. Not only does it beg the question of whether there is no empirical evidence for the Holy Spirit working in the world, but also, regardless that, there must have been some genuine historical antecedence (as perpetuated by the Nicaean council, however one regards the creed they defined). But here, I put aside how much corroboration should be necessary to consider belief in the Holy Spirit as rational too.

New teachings by themselves would not be enough to convince people that another way of life might be better. Even now, people are extremely resistant to changing their mind about virtually anything at all, only scoffing at others being wrong. So it seems to me Jesus'' medical knowledge, described by people of the time as miracles, was totally necessary to affect the change for the better he sought. Some would scorn that as fraudulent, but amidst the ignorance and savagery of the time, I personally do not find it in myself to be so condemnatory.

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(4) Of the Theist vs. Anti-Theist Debate

There are many extreme reactions to the rational perspective presented here, from both sides of the religious divide.

What of believers? Virtually all believers find it impossible even to accept that there might be a rational explanation for gospel events that fits within the scientific laws of our universe. On the side of believers, I can imagine, for example, that there was a Creator. With His mighty hammer he struck on an anvil of heat, aiming to send a spinning arc of flame, that is our sun, through time and space. Over the last centuries, many have strongly criticized viewing our planet as the center of creation, because our planet is not at the geometric center of Euclidean space. Nonetheless, its orchestration of complexity, down to the DNA strands evolving in us, is the ‘entropic’ center of the Universe. There is more complexity here than anywhere, most especially within ourselves. almost 7 billion strong, each of us with more neural synapses than stars in all the known galaxies. One cannot deny the possibility of divine intention in some manner or other.

But the Nicaean creed, which is the foundation of virtually all churches today, requires belief in the scientifically impossible. The resulting spiritual and physically violent conflict is immense, not only between theists and antitheists; not only between Christians and Jews and Islam; not only between different branches of Christian churches themselves; but also in inescapable doubts of each and every believer. But why is this even necessary? Would it not be even more extraordinary that Christ could indeed have done all that he did WITHIN the laws of the universe that His father created?

What of unbelievers? On the side of atheists, I can say there are reasons to doubt many specifics of the accounts handed down. That is another topic for far more extensive contemplation. Nonetheless, the overwhelming corroboration of evidence, from the historical to the hermeneutic, makes it rather unreasonable indeed to insist that Christ never existed at all, whether rational science can explain the supernatural events or not.

Maybe the accounts or miracles and death, or coma, are fraudulent, the intentional extent of which would never be more than opinion, even in any heavens and hells of the afterlife. Nonetheless, however fraudulent the account may be, there is still a massive amount of corroboration of his existence, to a level unlike that for any other event of the epoch. That makes it extremely unlikely indeed that Christ’s existence was only a myth.

If one does not believe Jesus to be a divine incarnation, then he cannot be blamed, in person, for deeds which his followers have only committed in delusion. Instead, he remains a beautiful and extraordinary doctor of the human spirit, advocating in parables that even the most uneducated could understand, entirely new ideas of love and forgiveness, without which our race might well have destroyed itself already.

What of St. Thomas' resolution? This homily started by indicating how to extrapolate logically from the skepticism of St. Thomas. He did not accept that Jesus actually had been on the cross without feeling the holes in his limbs. This is exactly how the scientific method works: he wanted experiential corroboration before he could believe the claim true. St. Thomas could very much speak for the reasoning person of science today. Unfortunately, references to St. Thomas in the canonical gospels are few. But there is the 'Acts of Thomas' of his later life preserved by the church itself, indicating its significance. Then in 1945, a gospel by St. Thomas himself was found in the Nag Hammadi library, hidden during the long dark ages, all the way through the emergence from the enlightenment, to the current era of scientific skepticism. With excitement I worked on my own translation in early days of research, only to find, to my complete astonishment, that it contains virtually no statements of historical events in Jesus' life at all. The text instead simply describes enough to set the stage for a fantastic set of Jesus' replies to questions. In the answers, Jesus often emphasizes how to find the Kingdom of Heaven--not necessarily only in whatever afterlife there is, but also, possibly, here on Earth as well. Those familiar with St. Thomas' work usually feel St. Thomas just didn't consider further historical events important.

The first chapter of St. Thomas' gospel, in my own translation, is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/long-lost-gospel-st-thomas-ernest-meyer/

So now, as discussed already, we have no necessary proof that that there is an afterlife. In accordance with rational empiricism. We can only wait to genuinely know of it, after our own passing. Yet it is fairly truthful to say, like St. Thomas, we still can turn to the marvelous lessons of Jesus to find joy here on Earth, right now, with all people joined together by the spirit of hope, love, and forgiveness, every day. All churches today may say I have no faith. In one respect, they would be correct. The scientific method frowns upon belief without empirical ratification. But in another respect, I still believe in the lessons of Jesus.

Whatever faith I may be felt to possess, this homily has shown that the textual evidence for the existence of Christ is an order of magnitude greater than for any other person of the era. It can only remain a matter of opinion whether or how much the gospel accounts of miracles, and inconsistencies between the gospels are fraudulent, intentionally or not. St. Thomas puts the quibbles of inconsistent historical details aside. Indeed, instead of recounting historical events at all, he focuses on his memories of Christ's lessons. For Jesus still leads us to a kingdom of perfect joy, eternal beyond time.