"It is worth pointing out a notable difference between today's militant atheists and today's militant theists. The former are known to write books and angry letters to the editor. The latter are known to shoot abortion doctors, fly aircraft into buildings, lie about the efficacy of condoms in preventing AIDS, inscribe Bible verses on weapons and, oh yes, blame people for the natural disasters that afflict them." ~ Richard Dawkins
Monday, 13 June 2011
Was Jesus a madman?
Trailer for a forthcoming film by Peter Breitbart, President of the Sussex University Secular Society, and contributor to the Brighton-based Freethinker magazine.
Sunday, 12 June 2011
The historicity (not) of Jesus
Christians often throw out names of non-Christian writers who they claim wrote about Jesus like: Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Lucian of Samosata, among others. First, most of those writers didn’t write very much at all about Jesus. Many talk about someone called “Christ.” Christians assume this refers to Jesus, but there have been many people during that time and in other times who claimed to be “the Christ.” But what I find more interesting is that none of those writers were contemporaries to Jesus who was alleged to have been crucified in the year 33 CE:
- Josephus (37 CE – c. 100 CE)
- Tacitus (56 CE – 117 CE)
- Pliny the Younger (61 CE – c. 112 CE)
- Lucian of Samosata (125 CE – after 180 CE)
Here are some historians who would have been contemporaries of Jesus and interestingly enough never mentioned him at all:
- Philo Judaeus (20 BCE - 50 CE)
- Seneca (4? BCE - 65 CE)
- Pliny the Elder (23? CE - 79 CE)
Then there are the Scrolls of Gabriel's Revelation which tell a story remarkably similar to that of Jesus except that the principle character was named Simon. The scrolls pre-date the alleged birth of Jesus. In other words, the Scrolls of Gabriel serve as a rough draft for the Gospel story.
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