“Even atheists,” a Christian told me recently, “will admit that Jesus existed.” It’s a common fact, right? Christians will usually concede that all the spectacular and impossible miracles he was behind is “debatable,” but they so adamantly assert that even atheists like myself admit that he “existed at some point in history.”
Any smart atheist would disagree and counter that not only did the greatest mythological figure of all-time never create any miracles, he simply didn’t exist.
When I was growing up, before completely embracing my atheism, even I contributed to this common misconception. I would often say with no problem that I didn’t believe in God, but of course Jesus existed, even if he may not have been the miracle-producing savior he is worshipped as. I mean historians say so, so it must be true!
This was before I actually looked at the “evidence” used to support this claim that there was a man named Jesus Christ who healed the sick and turned water into wine. After doing some simple research, however, it is easy to see that the stories are nothing more than glorified tall tales.
Several ancient authors are often cited for having “witnessed” Jesus and all of his glory, among them being Titus Flavius Josephus and Publius Cornelius Tacitus. Despite the fact that all of their accounts are secondhand and therefore impossible to prove whether they are truly authentic, there is one damning truth that nobody ever seems to mention. Josephus was born in 37 A.D., Tacitus was born in 56 A.D., and other ancient authors who supposedly prove Jesus’ existence were born even later.
How does this prove Jesus existed when the alleged crucifixion took place before the oldest of these ancient authors, Josephus, was even born?!
For centuries, historians, mathematicians, astronomers and other people of influence have attempted to pinpoint Jesus’ alleged death date, but what they all agree on is that it happened sometime between 30 and 36 A.D., which would make it one to seven years before Josephus was born. So there are no eyewitness accounts, no texts written by anyone who claimed to be there, and no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that Jesus ever walked the Earth.
I admit that I can’t prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that he never existed. This is because the statement is that of a categorical proposition which contains a universal negative, and one cannot (logically, at least) prove a universal negative.
However, based on the evidence presented, and as pointed out by Frank Zindler, former head of American Atheists, we can apply the concept of lex parsimoniae, colloquially known as “Occam’s Razor.”
What “Occam’s Razor” states is that when considering hypotheses, the one that makes the fewest new assumptions is usually the correct one. It also contends that until there is a theory that allows us to sacrifice simplicity by offering something more in the way of explanatory power, we should gravitate towards the most likely theory.
Therefore, based on the fact that there are no eyewitness accounts and that Jesus was allegedly crucified before some of the most oft-cited pagan historians claiming his existence were born, it is safe to assume that Jesus never even existed.
In fact, according to Zindler, in a piece he wrote entitled “How Jesus Got A Life,” which in part deals with this exact question, these “pagan authors can be taken only as being witnesses of the state to which Christian traditions had evolved in their times, not as witnesses of an historical Jesus of Nazareth.”
Jesus Christ is nothing more than a myth akin to the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. However, in the case of this little fairy tale, adults actually believe it.
Gerry Wachovsky is a graduate student and columnist for the Daily 49er.
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