(The Fable of Christ: The Book of Accusation, Luigi Cascioli (samizdat); et.al.)
The late Luigi Casoli entered the public spotlight when he sued the Catholic Church for religious abuse in 2002. Kasholi's book The Tale of Christ can be ordered through his website and, apart from the obviously numerous bad assumptions and erratic interpretations, it is a really lively experience, another in a series of titles about the theory of the mythical Christ, which I doubt will shake the foundations of the Vatican, but surely contribute to the spread of this concept as old, after all, as the so-called Christ himself.
Kasholi's position is that with this book he provides "irrefutable evidence" that Jesus Christ never existed, however, firstly, the rhetorical way in which he delivers his thesis will lead even the most ardent reader to accept it with a slight grain of salt, precisely because of the vitriol with which his sentence is loaded.
It begins with "Genesis" precisely because the author, as soon as he saw that the figure of Jesus Christ was a typical consequence of the religious evolution of the Jews, from the very beginning began to search for the cause in the book that talks about those people, in the Bible. "My independent and rational analysis of the facts," he says in the first chapter, "has led me to conclusions which I feel I can positively defend against any criticism." Despite all this, Kasholi clearly permutates that the Hasmoneans are direct descendants of the dynasty of King David, even though they were members of the Israelite tribe of Levi. But that's just a small thing.
Robert M. Price (The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, 2003), one of the scholars of the New Testament and probably the biggest supporter of the mythic Jesus theory, notes many more inconsistencies in Kasholi (e.g. some of Kasholi's data on Marcion are so obviously wrong that they could be checked in any mediocre history of ancient Palestine). Price especially dwells on Kasholi's final theory about the Zealot John of Gamla who allegedly served the Essenes as a model for Jesus Christ, using the generally pacifist writings from the Dead Sea, in order to explain that the Essenes only wanted to give the impression that they were a peaceful tribe. , and in fact they were almost revolutionaries.
Finally, the like-minded Price, who does not see any "irrefutable evidence" for anything in that primary theory of Kasholi's (I guess precisely because it is just the mere unprovable speculation of a man who often finds evidence in conjectures), concludes Kasholi's self-giving with these words: "Kasholi offers numerous interesting ideas, assumptions and new interpretations of well-known verses and passages. This book is certainly worth reading, although it is, all in all, an interesting failure."
The theory of a mythical Jesus has been alive since the first pagan philosophers who used natural arguments to undermine Christian theories about an alien God made of flesh and blood who walks on water and heals people from the unpleasant virus of death. As interpolations in the Bible by the early Catholic Church are already well-known today, this theory gained a kind of momentum in the so-called to the new atheism, where it was probably natural to talk about holy books and church teaching with open distrust.
Recently, for example, it has been suggested that Zeus was the supreme god among the Greeks and that monotheism more or less reigned in Greece. Like the Jewish god Yahweh, he destroyed cities and unleashed floods; Hesiod in Theogony says that without Zeus, people would be just beasts, and the same is written in the Old Testament. So it turns out that all the other Greek gods were lower gods, as today in the Christian church we have, allegedly, more than 10.000 saints. What are all these saints but people who have been given something "divine" by others, so aren't they our lower gods? Judaism, and especially Christianity and Islam, are simply the recycling of old religions.
In his second study, Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?, Macdonald points to four extensive passages in the "Acts of the Apostles" as obvious examples that could easily have been taken from Homer's Iliad. MacDonald writes: It is one thing to generally recognize the importance of mimesis in ancient narratives, while it is quite another to recognize them as imitation in a specific text. Scholars usually learn to hide their addiction to avoid accusations of nitpicking or plagiarism, but mimesis is most difficult to recognize even when authors present their work as mere imitation.
Nevertheless, a person whose name is rarely mentioned and who won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for his biographical book about God - God: A Biography! In 1996, Jack Miles did the same with the literary figure of Jesus Christ a few years later (Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, 2001). The first quote by Oscar Wilde in the book about God says it all: "If nothing is serious, then nothing is funny." In both remarkably serious books, Miles examines the evolution of God through man's literary achievements in works of theological literature such as the Tanakh, the Bible, and the NT.
In accordance with the beliefs of most Christians that the Bible was literally written by God the Father, Miles deviates and rejects the patristic teaching of the above all instructive allegorical and metaphorical interpretations of the holy scriptures, especially testing his faith within that context. At the same time, Miles ascertains God through general rigorism where He is taken for granted and accepted among people as a real person.
Miles proves that questioning the symptoms of multiple personality in the ontology of God can be a valid process in approaching theological scholarship, so it does not seem silly that Miles visualizes God in both his masterpieces in the same way that Edmund Wilson would treat Melville's notary Bartleby in his essays or Hawthorne's notorious Judge Pynchon of the House with Seven Gables.
Simply put, our Creator changes with the flow of time. However, what today's believer must not turn his head to is the huge list of human characteristics in the fluctuating personality of the Old Testament God, that is, something that is literally impossible to know in the most relevant editions of the modern historiographical establishment, which are more reminiscent of metaphysical discussions anesthetized by unshakable faith than valid ones. and judicious scientific explanations of contradictions.
Contemporary theology literally even today uses Origen's discourse technique during the anti-Christian accusations of the Greek philosopher Kelso; do not ask questions, but simply believe - the meaning of Origen's formulations is the greatest. It is no secret that our God often forgets; he is still irritable and vain, he lies and blackmails, gets angry, learns, changes, punishes, while in most cases he is simply frustrated, jealous, depressed and desperate. And the context in which it should be seen is given in the original text itself.
According to what the Bible stubbornly shows, only one relatively certain theory can be stated, and that is that man created God in his own image, and not the other way around. We would certainly be an insult to his power of creation, and who can think otherwise - that's clearly not the case for all boards.
As far as that is concerned, Ehrman primarily points to the lack of even the most superficial self-criticism in the mainstream of Christian science stemming from respected biblical institutions where the emphasis of learning is placed precisely on the critical reading of the Holy Scriptures. And it was precisely this objective form of learning - as much as it was possible through the study of Bultmann and Schweitzer - that helped Ehrman eventually find his true path, but never, even after his conversion into a relative non-believer, to lose touch with what he and further sees it as a positive dogma of Christianity.
The outstanding German Lutheran theologian, Rudolf Bultmann, for example, asserted a total fence between history and faith, writing that the very fact that the imaginary Christ died on the cross is very important for the Christian faith. After 30 years of studying the NT, he came to the conclusion that Jewish guilt over Jesus' death was inserted into the Passion strictly for polemical reasons; "one can only emphasize the uncertainty of our comprehensive knowledge related to the life and work of the historical Jesus, and thus to the entire origin of Christianity."
Schweitzer, another respected German theologian and philosopher, notes that the existence of Jesus Christ has not yet been confirmed and cannot be confirmed by any standard conventional evidence.
For many, however, the most irritating theory about the mythical Christ was presented by one of the first humanities professors who worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls, J.M. Allegro, then from Oxford. In the phenomenal book The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, he expresses the thesis that Judaism and Christianity arose as a consequence of the primitive fertility cults of the ancient Sumerians (worship of the sun), and thus because of the excessive use of the psilocybe cubensis mushroom, better known in the Bible as the mysterious manna that grows from the earth ("food from God"), while in some places in the books of "Moses" it is ignorantly translated as "bread".
At the primordial level, Jesus, according to Allegro, was a sacred mushroom; After all, Allegro's primary claim is that the image and work of Christ/Messiah is based on the conservative spiritual leader of the Essene Teacher of Righteousness, whose teaching - similar to that of Jesus from the NT - was recorded almost verbatim in the found Qumran papyri, with the fact that the early Christians adapted it for a somewhat more universal background and a more open social order, which, after all, can be seen from reading the NT. (Another brilliant study of the acceleration of human evolution and the rise of religion due to overuse of hallucinogenic drugs is Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna.)
I will add to all this the closing words of the prominent American folklorist and anthropologist, Alan Dundis, from his small but detailed book Holy Writ as Oral Lit: "...Multiple versions of almost every episode of the Old and New Testaments - the creation of woman, the flood, the woman who becomes a sister (from 'Genesis'), the Ten Commandments, the names of the 12 tribes of Israel, the names of the 12 apostles, the Sermon on the Mount, the Jewish prayer to the Lord (Shema), the Christian prayer to the Lord, the words written on the cross, as and the last words of Jesus, among other examples—testify to the extraordinary folklorism of the Bible.There is no fixed, fixed text, but many texts that show extraordinary variety in numbers, names, and sequences.
The Bible can be the 'greatest book in the world' as well as the 'most important book in the world', but it is mainly folklore and I think the time has come for it to finally be recognized as such."
Schweitzer, another respected German theologian and philosopher, notes that the existence of Jesus Christ has not yet been confirmed and cannot be confirmed by any standard conventional evidence.
Plagiarism of the myth of Osiris
In fact, most Christians still fail to understand that the entire short biography of Jesus Christ is completely taken or compiled from the mythical sources of the Egyptian-Greek cult of Osiris-Dionysius.
The similarities are so striking that they become impossible to believe unless we first confirm them without much trouble, however, many scholars have decided not to engage in similar diacritical experiments, because then they may end up siding with the devil and their theology/history will become too extreme (or too simplistic !) that it will never be accepted in official scientific circles. A good part of today's science considers even Freud, precisely because he is above all obvious, to be a disreputable scientist with overly simplistic conclusions.
Richard Dawkins wrote in Delusion about God that he believes in the possibility that a person with the name Jesus Christ existed, but that he does not see any agreement in the debates of renowned scholars regarding the interpretation of the history presented in the New Testament, which is at best - excessively arbitrary.
He is joined by another revalued skeptic, perhaps the best scholar of the New Testament today, Bart Ehrman, but in his first book, in which he is supposed to present evidence of the existence of that common man, but also to point out the contradictions related to Jesus in the NT - Jesus, Interrupted (2009) – he only repeats what already in the 18th century German rational theology began to devalue with new interpretations.
On the other hand, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens, and Bill Marr (the author of the documentary Religulous), have no problem with the claims about Jesus as an imaginary person whose existence is simply impossible to prove, and similar topics are still covered by documentaries such as are The God Who Wasn't There (2005) and Zeitgeist (2007).
However, in a book such as The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, Denis R. MacDonald proves that the authors, or the author, of the "Gospel of Mark" made extensive use of Homer's Odyssey as a primary literary model in the creation of chapters 1-14, while used the Iliad for chapters 15 and 16, especially in the part about Hector's death and the abduction of his corpse.
Bonus video:
