Why Jesus Almost Certainly Wasn't Real

You knew it was coming. If you know me personally, you know I’m an agnostic atheist. Agnostic because I would believe in God if evidence of his/her/its existence was obvious, and atheist because I don’t believe that evidence for the existence of a god/gods exists. However, even in atheist camps, there is a popular belief that a historical Jesus exists.

Before I present my arguments for why a historical Jesus almost certainly wasn’t real, I might as well give my reasoning for why the Biblical Jesus definitely wasn’t real. All of the traits attributed to Jesus are applicable to most messianic figures of folklore going back all the way to Ancient Egypt. Let me give you a list of traits and see if you can tell whether it is Jesus or Horus.

1. Born in December 25th to a virgin mother.
2. His birth was predicted by three kings and indicates by a “star in the east.”
3. He was a prodigious child teacher of religion at the age of 12.
4. Baptized at age 30 and preached to those in his community with 12 disciples.
5. While preaching, he performed miracles such as walking on water, raising the dead, and healing the sick.
6. After being betrayed by one of his disciples, he was crucified.
7. He was dead for three days, but was resurrected after those days and ascended to Heaven.

Many of these traits are present is other mythological figures, such as Zoroaster, Mithra, Adonis, Attis, and Krishna.The reason these traits are all present is because these stories are an astrological allegory. In fact, most myths since Horus are astrological allegories. I could explain each of these aspects individually, but there are many sources that reinforce this, such as the 18th and 19th Century works of Constantin-Francois Volney, Criticism of the Gospel History of the Synoptics, Criticism of the Pauline Epistles, A Critique of the Gospels and a History of their Origin, and Christ and the Caesars by Bruno Bauer, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves, and Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World by Gerald Massey. Many 20th and 21st Century sources are more comprehensive and factually accurate, specifically The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion by James George Frazer, Did Jesus Exist? and the other books on the subject written by George Albert Wells, Jesus: Neither God nor Man-The Case for a Mythical Jesus by Earl Doherty, and On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt by Richard Carrier, who famously asserted that the probability of a historical Jesus’ existence was anywhere from ⅓ as a liberal estimate to 1/12,000 as a conservative estimate.

A few arguments for the mythical Jesus’ existence are available, but many of them are derived from Josephus’ Testimonium Flavianum, which has been demonstrated to likely be a forgery. Other than this, other documents supposedly proving Jesus’ historicity are written many years after his supposed death, and really only prove the cult of Christ-worship existed before the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. This, in my eyes, shows that a historical Jesus was unlikely and a Biblical Jesus is impossible. If a man rose from the dead during the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, it would be in all of their records, and Christianity would have been established as the state religion of the Roman empire centuries before it was actually established.

I think that it's certainly possible that a carpenter’s son named Yeshua bin Yosef claimed that he was divine and presented the Palestinian Jews a unique interpretation of the Jewish religion based on Buddhist philosophy, but I don't find it feasible in any way. Jesus, especially as he's typically visualized or interpreted by society, is a myth. That being said, most religious figures are myths and I don’t have an extreme dislike for Jesus in particular, I just feel that religion doesn’t deserve to exist and we shouldn’t believe something without a shred of evidence. Sorry for not posting in a while, but make sure you check out the next piece on Jacob Mitchell: Iconoclast.