espite the fact that The Ohio State University considers itself to be a major university and center of learning, it is an embarrassing fact that it also harbors a flourishing Faculty Christian Fellowship. It would appear that the raison d’être  of the fellowship is to neutralize the knowledge gained by the rest of the faculty and make the university safe for superstition.  How the Christian program of endarkenment is carried out in individual classrooms I do not know. But once or twice a year – especially around the time of non-Orthodox Easter – the benighted brotherhood goes public in its effort to undo the learning of the ages. 

Several years ago, during the week before Roman Easter, the fellowship took out an ad in the Ohio State Lantern. The ad contained what almost certainly was a picture of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. The caption beneath the arrow-studded holy man read: “Would you lie if the truth hurt this much?” The seductive ad then went on to say, “A painful death often awaited those who first believed that Jesus rose from the dead. But theirs wasn’t a blind faith. No, they kept their eyes open everywhere they told the resurrection story, knowing their next word could be their last. Would so many risk their lives for something that wasn’t true? Would you die for a lie?” The ad then invited innocent and hopefully gullible students to send for a leaflet entitled Beyond Blind Faith. 

How could I pass up the invitation? Without delay, I equipped myself with the pitiful piece of propaganda that presumably reflected the intellectual level of Christian faculty at OSU.

It is clear that readers of the student newspaper were expected to think that the pierced body of St. Sebastian represented the remains of one of “those who first believed that Jesus rose from the dead.” Unfortunately, St. Sebastian (if he ever lived at all is in question) is believed to have met his end during the persecution of Diocletian – a consequence of his rejection of the homosexual advances of the emperor. When was that? The year 303 ce, probably extending into 304. Certainly, Sebastian, if indeed he was a martyr, was not “one of those who first believed”! If he was real, he died for his god belief just as did the kamikaze pilots of World War II who died for the emperor they believed to be a god. Did the kamikazes die for a lie? Did the Iranian children who rolled themselves in blankets across Iraqi mine-fields die for a lie – their belief in the gospel of Ayatollah Khomeini? Certainly, they died for a delusion, just as did the Christian martyrs. Whether it was a lie as well is perhaps a matter of definition. 

Did the Christian faculty know that their picture of St. Sebastian was a deception? Were they deliberately lying to their students? Or were they simply ignorant? If they were deliberately lying, should they continue to be members of the faculty? If they were ignorant, should they continue to be members of the faculty? 

Apart from the St. Sebastian deception, readers may still have wondered about the really early martyrs – the apostles and people such as St. Stephen. Did they die for a lie? First of all, we know of these gentlemen only through the text of the New Testament. There is no evidence that they actually existed, let alone were martyred. In fact, I think I can prove they are as fictional as Christ himself. The stories about them were written well after the time they are alleged to have lived. Certainly the stories about them could contain lies, even if the persons themselves were honest dupes. Even so, the only “martyr” the New Testament tells us about is Stephen. It knows nothing of the supposed martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, or any other disciples. Their supposed martyrdoms were cooked up after the gospels. And even the martyrdom of Stephen can be shown to be a literary invention, having no basis in historical fact.

No matter, that St. Sebastian – the martyr supposedly among “those who first believed” – was nothing of the kind but lived several centuries after the supposed time of Jesus. No matter, that he could indeed have “died for a lie.” The faculty argument basically was that if the ancient stories about Christ’s resurrection were lies, no one would have died to propagate them. But the ancients were martyrs. Therefore, the stories about Jesus are true. 

Apart from the deceptive use of a picture of someone who couldn’t possibly have known what the truth was and had not been an eye-witness, what’s wrong with this argument? Apart, of course, from the fact that the advertisers simply assumed that the New Testament is a reliable account of history?  

What’s wrong is this: a later understanding of the term martyr has been retrojected into the biblical texts and other early Christian writings. For you see, the term martyr ( martus in Greek) originally simply meant witness. It had nothing to do with dying for the faith. Only later on, in the second century, did the term come to mean blood witness, someone who suffered death because of his witness. 

Who, then, were the early witnesses, and to what were they witnessing? It appears that in addition to offices such as deacon, bishop, presbyter, prophet, Brother of the Lord, and interpreter, there was an actual office or rank of “martyr” in the early church. Martyrs seem to have been persons who had had hallucinations of the risen Jesus and testified or witnessed to his reality and reported any oracles delivered by the spectral vision. Later, when church structures changed, martyrs became persons who witnessed for any reason on behalf of the increasingly obnoxious religion. Finally, it came about that many of these noisy nuisances were put to death for their disturbance of the peace, and the term martyr assumed its modern meaning. Then, when it was seen in ancient records that so-and-so had been a “martyr,” it was assumed that he or she had been put to death – even when there is no reason to suppose that had actually happened. 

The only case in the New Testament of a martyr being put to death is the case of St. Stephen, supposedly the first blood witness. But even in this story, in the Book of Acts, Stephen is a martyr because he is a witness, not because he dies. Significantly, Stephen’s witnessing is what leads to his being stoned. To what is he supposedly witnessing?  

In Acts 7:55-56 we read:  “But he [Stephen], full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, ‘Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God’.”   His hallucination is used as evidence for his witness. As I have hinted already, Stephen was not a real character. Luke’s accounts of the deaths of both Jesus and Stephen are reminiscent of certain writings of the Stoic philosopher and dramatist Seneca, in particular his tragedy Hercules Śtæus. (Hercules – like Christ, also a solar divinity – in many ways is a precursor of the savior Jesus.) Moreover, “Luke” (the unknown author of Acts)¹ reworks material in his Stephen story material used by “Mark” and “Matthew” for their Jesus stories (e.g., Mark 14:53-57) and then concocts elaborate sermon speeches to be put into the mouth of his martyr creation. 

As in the case of the St. Sebastian deception, we must wonder if the Christian faculty placing the ad in The Lantern knew that the term martyr was being misused in the argument of the ad. If they did, we must ask once again: should they be teaching at OSU? If they did not know what virtually every bible scholar knows concerning the evolution in meaning of the term, should they be teaching above the primary school level?

The leaflet advertised by the fundamentalist faculty was written by a fellow named Paul E. Little and bore the title “Beyond blind faith.” Essentially, the leaflet was intended to confuse students into believing that someone called Jesus really was resurrected from the dead two thousand years ago and that, therefore, a god exists. I must say, however, that the effort was much clumsier and more amateurish than the Josh McDowell leaflet pushed by the Fellowship the previous year at Easter time. But despite Little’s ineptness in argumentation, he apparently had been able to convince the credulous Christian inculcators to bet their poker chips on Jeezus. 

We have already noted that the newspaper ad was deceptive in that it passed off St. Sebastian as though he had been a martyred eye-witness of Jesus, rather than someone who, if he was real at all, lived several centuries after the so-called apostolic era. Little’s leaflet too contained a breath-taking deception. In trying to refute the so-called “swoon theory” advanced by some liberals to explain the empty tomb, Little wrote: 

Even the German critic David Strauss, who by no means believes in the Resurrection [note the present tense], rejected this idea as incredible. He said: “It is impossible that One who had just come forth from the grave half dead, who crept about weak and ill, who stood in the need of medical treatment, of bandaging, strengthening, and tender care, and who at last succumbed to suffering, could ever have given the disciples the impression that He was a conqueror over death and the grave; that He was the Prince of Life.”

Surprising to say, the leaflet began with a statement I could agree with. Little wrote, “It is impossible for us to know conclusively whether God exists and what He is like unless He takes the initiative and reveals Himself.” The way I always phrase the argument is this: Unless god gets involved with the universe, he/she/it is not different from the undetectable gremlins posited to live on the rings of Saturn. If you cannot even imagine a way to test their existence, statements about them are meaningless. They can’t even be false. Only statements that are meaningful, that is, testable at least in principle, can be true or false. Since undetectable gremlins by definition cannot affect the outcome of any test imaginable, propositions concerning their existence or nonexistence are neither true nor false: they are simply meaningless. Similarly, if the gods of the Christians do not interact with the world of physics and chemistry they are just as meaningless as the undetectable gremlins. Jesus, Jehovah, the Virgin Mary, the devil, the archangel Michael – all are undetectable gremlins and are meaningless. They don’t even have enough going for them to be false! 

Little, however, proceeded to assert, in effect, that god is a detectable gremlin, or at least is a gremlin who did in fact allow himself to be detected once upon a time. “We must scan the horizon of history to see if there is any clue to God’s revelation,” he wrote. “There is one clear clue… In an obscure village in Palestine, almost 2,000 years ago, a Child was born in a stable. Today the entire world is still celebrating the birth of Jesus.” 

Did you catch where he slipped the extra ace into his deck of cards? He simply assumed that the New Testament story is a valid history of what happened two thousand years ago. He simply assumed that Jesus actually existed, and that all the miracles attributed to him actually occurred – thousands of drowning pigs and all. Of course, before he could get us to believe in gods, he would have to do something to get us to believe in the bible.  

Although there are a few places where he sort of tried to bring in evidence to support the bible, for the most part he simply accepted it as true. Then he tried to draw inferences from the novel known as the New Testament. We, of course, can’t buy this. We have too much evidence showing the New Testament to be an unreliable source of historical data to make us accept his assumptions. Since almost all his argumentation is based on his unproved assumption that the bible stories are true, we could discontinue this analysis right now. But that would take all the fun out of it. So we will proceed to examine Little’s little tricks of logic – or rather, illogic.

I have noted that the propagandist Paul E. Little claimed in effect that god is a detectable gremlin and that it is meaningful to talk about his existence because once upon a time he did get involved with the working of the world: he revealed himself to some illiterate fishermen, prostitutes, and tax collectors in a country-bumpkin part of the world. Unfortunately, Little did little to provide solid evidence for this claim. We can only infer that he got his information from the bible, and we are supposed to believe with essentially no evidence that the bible is a completely true and valid mirror of history. We’re going to need faith. 

Little must have assumed his readers were very unsophisticated and gullible. Why else would he have written the following right at the beginning of his tract: “We must scan the horizon of history to see if there is any clue to God’s revelation. There is one clear clue. In an obscure village in Palestine, almost 2,000 years ago, a Child [that’s child with a capital C] was born in a stable. Today the entire world is still celebrating the birth of Jesus.”  

Now just how is it that we are to scan the horizon of history? Can we find archaeological artifacts inscribed “JC was here”? Can we find the diaries written by the person born in the stable? Can we consult ancient historians who give eye-witness reports of this prodigy? Can we find any evidence at all believably contemporary with the supposed life of Christ? Of course we can’t. All we have is the New Testament and the later partisan literature of the church fathers. And even the New Testament – apart from its generally abysmal value as a source of historical facts – contradicts itself on almost every detail of the supposed life of Christ. 

For example, Little tossed off the supposed fact that Jesus was born in a stable, following the tale in the gospel of Luke. But if he had consulted the gospel of Matthew, he would have discovered that Jesus was born in the home of Joseph, who lived in Bethlehem. Matt. 2 verse 11 plainly states, “Entering the house, they saw the little Child with His mother, Mary...” Nothing about a stable, and it is clear from the context of the previous and following verses that Joseph is at home in Bethlehem. No Nazareth in sight. Only after a prophetically necessary flight into Egypt does the holy family return to Palestine and settle in Nazareth – a city we now know from archaeology was not in existence during the first century! 

Little claimed that all this happened “almost 2,000 years ago,” but doesn’t tell us exactly when. That’s because nobody knows when Jesus was born – or even if he was born! He could have hatched for all we know. There’s no historical evidence to the contrary. Perhaps Little thought Jesus was born in the year 1 AD (there is no year zero, remember, although that might be more appropriate for the birth date of someone who never existed). Unfortunately, the AD/BC system of reckoning time didn’t begin with the birth of Christ and continue uninterruptedly to the present. No, the system of dating AD/BC was cooked up by a monk named Dionysius Exiguus [‘Dennis the Short’] who lived in the sixth century. Unfortunately, Denny made some mistakes in chronology quite apart from anything relating to the historical Jesus, and everyone knowledgeable agrees we can’t go by the AD/BC dividing line. Nor can we tell from the New Testament. Luke would have us believe that Jesus was born when Herod was King, at the time of the first census under Quirinius. Unfortunately again for Little, Herod died in the year 4 BC, and the census was in the year 6 AD. Maybe JC was a bornagainer – born in 4 BC, then again in 6 AD! 

In his attempt to get students hooked on the opiate of the masses, Mr. Little made considerable to-do over the alleged fact that Jesus said that he was the Son of God and “clearly claimed attributes which only God has.” Of course, every mental hospital in the country has at least one inmate who claims the same or more. Usually, such individuals are under heavy sedation or restraint. Why Little didn’t take them more seriously is a puzzle. After all, there is no question that they exist, whereas the individual whose hearsay claims of divinity he credits left no earthly trace at all – unless the relic foreskins treasured in the reliquaries of Europe really are surviving snippets of the only god ever to undergo corrective surgery eight days after being born. 

What evidence did Little have that Jesus claimed to be a god? Nothing more than the New Testament, and hardly anything more than the gospel of John at that. Most of Little’s citations misrepresented or took out of context that which he quoted. For example, he cited John 5:18, which reads: “The Jews tried all the harder to kill Him; not only was He breaking the Sabbath, but He was even calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.” Of course, the alleged equating of Jesus with god was being done by the Jews, not by Jesus. Moreover, the very next verse makes it quite clear that Jesus is inferior to his father, not equal. It reads: “To this charge Jesus replied, ‘In truth, in very truth I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he does only what he sees the Father doing...’” A little later Jesus is made to say “To deny honour to the Son is to deny it to the Father who sent him.” Not only does this make it clear that Jesus is inferior – after all, he is being sent, not doing the sending himself – it is clearly modeled after the world of diplomacy. An ambassador is not the king of his country, but he is to be accorded the courtesy and honor of the king he represents. This is all there is to it. 

Without citing a reference, Little asserted that “On another occasion he said, ‘I and My Father are One.’” and went on to say that the religious leaders thereafter accused Jesus of blasphemy, observing “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Since Little did not tell his readers just where this was in the Bible, his readers probably didn’t look up John 10:30ff to be able to see Jesus’ supposed answer to this charge: “Jesus answered, ‘Is it not written in your own Law, “I said: You are gods”? Those are called gods to whom the word of God was delivered – and scripture cannot be set aside. Then why do you charge me with blasphemy because I, consecrated and sent into the world by the Father, said, “I am God’s son”? So even the gospel of John, when you study it, hardly places Jesus above, say, the Archangel Michael. But of course, all we have is hearsay of hearsay, several hundred degrees removed. Who can believe it? Without Amanita muscaria mushrooms, that is?

In his assault on reason, Little asserted that there are only four possibilities with regard to Jesus Christ:  

• One, is the possibility that Jesus lied when he said he was god. 
• A second is that he was sincere but self-deceived, a lunatic. 
• Third is the possibility that all of the talk of his claiming to be god is a legend. 
• Fourth is the possibility that he spoke the truth and was god with a capital G.

But the important point here is that Little left out the most obvious interpretation of the idea that Jesus’ claims were legendary: the idea that Jesus himself is a legend, a fictional creation of first-century literature. Little ridiculed the legend idea as being “as fantastic as for someone in our own time to write a biography of the late John E. Kennedy and in it say he claimed to be God, to forgive people’s sins, and to have risen from the dead. Such a story is so wild it would never get off the ground because there are still too many people around who knew Kennedy. The legend theory does not hold water in the light of the early date of the Gospel manuscripts.”² 

Now even if Jesus had been historical, this analogy is inappropriate, since millions of people witnessed Kennedy when alive and would be aware of the false report of him. In the case of Jesus, however, even the gospels themselves indicate that Jesus was largely unknown and swore people to secrecy about his works. Without the printing press, a fable written about him in a foreign city could circulate a long time without encountering anyone who could give it the lie. Worse yet, given the known book-burning history of the church, countertestimonies would have gotten no farther than the countertestimonies against Joseph Smith or Mary Baker Eddy. Finally, if Jesus never existed, no matter how early the gospels were written, there never would have been any eyewitnesses to contradict them. In fact, the lack of contrary witnesses is more reasonable as evidence that JC is legendary than as evidence of the correctness of the tales about him. 

It is instructive to see how Little dealt with the other options, what logical errors he committed, and what  slights-of-hand he performed.

“One possibility,” according to Little, “is that Jesus lied when He said He was God – that He knew He was not God, but deliberately deceived his hearers to lend authority to His teaching. Few, if any, seriously hold this position. Even those who deny His deity affirm that He was a great moral teacher. They fail to realize those two statements are a contradiction. Jesus could hardly be a great moral teacher if, on the most crucial point of His teaching – his identity – He was a deliberate liar.”  

While this may or may not confound those who think Jesus was a great moral teacher, it does nothing to refute the position of those who simply think he was a liar. Keep in mind, we have only the New Testament accounts of what Jesus is supposed to have said, and we have more than ample evidence to prove that the New Testament is not a trustworthy source of information. But if we look at some of the things Jesus is alleged to have said, he seems little different from any of the cult leaders of modern times such as David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard, or Jim Jones. Consider his supposed claim in Luke 14:26: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” The Reverend Moon could not have said it better! Certainly, if Jesus ever really said such a thing, it is not going to cause cognitive dissonance to suppose that he was capable of lying about his real intentions and would have been willing to hood-wink people into serving him. When we think of all the harm and agony that have resulted from believers trying to collect on Jesus’ supposed promise in Matt. 19:29, we surely have to think of the most evil of cult leaders known. That verse, in case you have forgotten it, reads: “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for My name’s sake, shall receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life.” Now that is not exactly family values as preached by the Republican Righteous, but it does show that even Newton Gingerich is better than the god he worships 

It is an amusing fact that people who do think the New Testament is a trustworthy source of information are precisely the ones who must conclude Jesus to have been a liar – for the simple reason that the gospels portray him as having lied on at least two occasions.  

In his hearing before the high priest (John 18:20) Jesus is made to assert, “I have spoken openly to all the world; I have always taught in synagogue and in the temple, where all Jews congregate; I have said nothing in secret” (New English Bible). This contradicts, of course, the stories of his teaching in parables – specifically for the purpose of keeping things secret – and the stories of his teaching on a mountain top, on a plain, and on a boat. As far as I am aware, floating temples and out-board synagogues did not exist at the time he is supposed to have lived. 

Another lie ascribed to Jesus relates to his invitation to go to the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem. According to John 7:8, Jesus told his “brothers,” “Go to the festival yourselves. I am not³ going up to this festival because the right time for me has not yet come” (NEB). But then, verse 10 relates how “Later, when his brothers had gone to the festival, he went up himself, not publicly, but almost in secret.” Can the word liar have a better illustration? 

And so, when we reflect that we can have no credible knowledge of the character of Jesus and can only pick and choose among the mutually contradictory impressions given by the New Testament, we have to conclude that if Jesus did in fact once upon a time walk the earth – even if not upon the water – he could just as well have been a liar as a lunatic. The argument in the faculty propaganda leaflet is extremely weak indeed.

We come next to an argument that is so silly that it almost seems beneath our dignity to criticize it. Asking “What were Jesus’ Credentials?” – intending to prove that Jesus not only existed but was a god – Little asserted as though it were a demonstrable fact the claim “First, His moral character coincided with His claims.” (That’s capital “His-es” of course.) Getting sillier, he went on: “Many asylum inmates claim to be celebrities or deities. But their claims are belied by their characters. Not so with Christ.... Jesus Christ was sinless... He was able to challenge His enemies with the question, “Can any of you prove me guilty of sin?” ...He was met by silence, even though He addressed those who would have liked to point out a flaw in His character. We read of the temptations of Jesus, but we never hear of a confession of sin on His part... This lack of any sense of moral failure on Jesus’ part is astonishing in view of the fact that it is completely contrary to the experience of the saints and mystics in all ages.”⁴ 

It is not, of course, contrary to the observations of most Jesus Christs being housed at public expense in state mental hospitals. Few of them think they are sinners for the simple reason they think they’re gods! 

What evidence did Paul Little have for these claims? Why the New Testament, of course! Certainly the people making up the story of Jeezus weren’t going to have him confess any sins nor were they about to have his supposed opponents come up with any charges that would stick. Little even quoted from the so-called First Epistle of Peter to try to prove that Peter vouched for the sinlessness of Jesus: “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in His mouth” 1 Peter 2:22. Alas, scholars know that the two epistles of Peter in the New Testament are forgeries using Peter’s name to gain force and authority. Simple church politics were the motivation for their fabrication.  

I am about to publish an English translation of a German book, written early in this century by a philosopher named Arthur Drews, which shows that Peter – just as Jesus – was a mythical character and thus could not have written either of the two letters bearing his name in the New Testament.⁵ But apart from the evidence of that book, we see that the Greek of I Peter is much too good to have been written by an unlettered fisherman from Galilee. The allegation that the letter was written via a scribe named Sylvanus is simply an attempt to gain the authority of the name of the scribe who supposedly penned First and Second Thessalonians – as well as to cover up the obvious literary incongruity of an uneducated man writing some of the best Greek in the Bible. Furthermore, the letter is clearly a composite, one part of it indicating that Christians can be punished by the state simply for bearing the name “Christian.” But we know from the letter of Pliny, the Roman governor of Bithynia and Pontus (both mentioned in I Peter 1:1) to the emperor Trajan that punishment for the name did not come about until some time after Pliny’s letter – written in the year ce 112. Too late for “Rocky” Simon – and too late to be a trustworthy witness to the supposed sinlessness of Jesus. Someone writing a century after the supposed life-time of a fictional character can say anything he wants to without fear of contradiction – at least contradiction in his lifetime.

It would seem there is no end to the things I have found wrong with “Beyond Blind Faith.” The tract clearly was promulgated by Ohio State University faculty true believers for the exact purpose of instilling blind faith. It is almost frightening to realize that there is a sizeable number of people teaching at that University who are so limited intellectually that they found this propaganda piece logical and convincing. Apparently, they even swallowed the leaflet’s claim that “Christ demonstrated a power over natural forces which could belong only to God, the Author of these forces.”  

Now as we have seen repeatedly, the only “evidence” for preposterous claims such as this has been gathered from the tales found in the New Testament, a book simply assumed to be trustworthy by the author of the tract. Little claimed that Jesus turned water into wine, but neglected to mention the fact that such magical production of wine was originally associated with Dionysus or Bacchus, and that there is evidence that many priests were skilled in faking this trick in the Mediterranean world in which Christianity emerged. The ties between Dionysus and Christ are vividly revealed in the tombs beneath the Vatican high altar, tombs in which Dionysiac imagery is intimately intermingled with the earliest known Christian artwork.  

Jesus is supposed to have stilled a raging storm of wind and waves on the Sea of Galilee, but Mr. Little doesn’t tell us that any of the other nature gods such as Poseidon and Æolus were supposed to be able to do the same thing. And of course, he couldn’t be expected to know that Mark’s gospel cobbed these nature miracles from Homer’s Odyssey. Dennis R. MacDonald, a member of the Jesus Seminar whose biography can be found several chapters before mine in Edward Babinski’s book Leaving the Fold, has demonstrated quite convincingly that Mark, the anonymous author of the Gospel of Mark, quite consciously patterned his Jesus after Homer’s Odysseus – at least with regard to the stories relating to watery miracles of nature. 

Just as Odysseus has adventures upon a thalassa, or sea, Jesus too is described by Mark as adventuring upon the Thalassa of Galilee, although no author before him thought to call this little lake a sea. Just as Mark has Jesus walk upon the sea, Homer long before had Hermes “ride upon the multitudinous waves” (5:44-54). Just like Odysseus, for whom the Phæacians “spread a rug and a linen sheet on the deck of the hollow ship at the stern, that he might sleep soundly; and he too went aboard and laid him down in silence” (13:73-76), so too Jesus is asleep at the stern on a cushion when a storm comes up for him to rebuke (Mk 4:35-41). Jesus stills the storm, just as do Zeus, Poseidon, and Athena in The Odyssey. Significantly, Mark tells us that when Jesus went to sea, “Other boats were with him,” even though these other boats have no part in the story. But then, Odysseus sailed with a fleet also. Afterwards, both Jesus and Odysseus disembark on the shore and both encounter a wild man living in a cave or in tombs. Both are accompanied by twelve comrades. In both cases the wild man possesses immense strength. Just as Jesus uses a miracle to drown two thousand pigs in the sea, so too Odysseus’ companions, whom Circe had turned into pigs, eventually drowned in the sea also. Well, there are lots and lots more parallels, but we must bring this part of our critique to a close. After learning of the Homeric connection, I’m sure readers are very impressed by Jesus’ stilling of the storm. On second thought, perhaps only Christian readers who teach at the Ohio State University will still be impressed after learning this. Such is the miracle of religious plagiarism. 

In Part II, Paul Little’s claims pertaining to the supposed resurrection of Jesus will be examined, along with the rest of the tall tales that form the Easter narrative of the New Testament. 

Footnotes: 

¹ The actual authors of the four canonical gospels are in fact unknown. Moreover, each of the gospels is clearly the work of more than one author. The names of the four gospels are here used to represent the writer – whoever he was – who brought each gospel more or less to its final form.   

² With Albright’s claim that the gospels were written at an early date still in his readers’ minds, little here slips from early dates of composition to early manuscripts. Manuscripts dating before 70 CE would be most impressive, but no first-century manuscripts of the four gospels have ever been found.  

³ Some Greek manuscripts, in an obvious attempt to clean up the Jesus image, substitute the word  (‘not yet’) for the  (‘not’) of the better texts.  

⁴ Little overlooked (or ignored) a crucial bible verse that completely contradicts his assertion. Matt. 19:17 has Jesus say “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.” Either this means Jesus was disclaiming both godhood and goodness, or he was guilty of false modesty – sometimes charming in mere mortals, but a character flaw in immortals.  

⁵ The Legend of Saint Peter, by Arthur Drews. American Atheist Press, December 1997, $12.00.  

 
Formerly a professor of biology and geology, Frank R. Zindler is now a science writer. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New York Academy of Science, The Society of Biblical Literature, and the American Schools of Oriental Research. He is the editor of American Atheist.