A Letter To TIME
Richard Stengel
Managing Editor
Time Inc.
Time and Life Building
Rockefeller Center
New York, NY 10020-1393 04/09/08
Dear Sir,
I note that two of your last issues of Time have had cover articles about the Pope and his pending visit to the United States. In the past you have had several articles about Christianity, particularly Catholicism, and CNN, with which you are allied, screened a piece on the Historic Jesus a few weeks ago.
It is with some confusion that I write to ask why, unless the policy of your magazine is based on the dogma of the Catholic Church and homage to the Popes, you use so much space, repetitively, to push this church’s position, specifically, and their Christian views in particular?
There are many of us who do not find the Christian faith enticing or even believable. Benedict comes from a long line of Popes whose tenure is less than exemplary - he, himself, while in South America recently, said that the indigenous peoples who were massacred or assimilated by the Spanish, longed for Christ. Surely this is twisted reasoning and a crude attempt to pardon the atrocities committed in the name of the Catholic Church in South America. But this is just one attempt to excuse the church from past sins against people.
“As John Paul leaves the stage, the extraordinary achievements that ensure his role as one of our greatest popes must be weighed against the human suffering wrought by internal corruption on his watch.” (From: “Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II.” by Jason Berry and Gerald Renner.)
See, also, the canonization of Edith Stein or Sister Theresa Benadicta de Cruce by Pope Paul II in “Papal Sins - Structures of Deceit” by Gary Wills (Chapter III, page 47ff). In John Paul’s “apology” to Jews (“We Remember”) for Catholic association with Hitler, he maintained that Catholics were also persecuted by the Nazis for their religious beliefs, thus suggesting two things: first that there is some kind of kindred spirit between Catholics and Jews in their persecution by Nazis, and second, that Catholics had to comply with Hitler’s demands to save Catholic lives.
Your magazine never covers the “other side” of the story of Christians or any other religion. The question raises its ugly head again; (for it suggests that, as journalists, you are making news rather than reporting it without bias,) why do you keep covering the Catholic point-of-view and lauding the Popes. Are you doing it because of a management decision at Time, or are you afraid of what the Catholic Church might do if you balance your coverage by doing an article on the other side of the story? Or does your religion editor make policy?
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Here is an example of the other side of the story:
There is no evidence that Jesus, the human being, also known as the “historic Jesus”, ever existed (see, for example: http://www.bidstrup.com/bible.htm under “The Christian Era and the Last Great Revision of Judaism, 30 C.E. to approx. 73 C.E.”: “For all his influence on the world, there's better evidence that he never even existed than that he did. We have absolutely no reliable evidence, from secular sources, that Jesus ever lived, or that any of the events surrounding his life as described in the four Gospels ever happened. Indeed, when scholars apply the Negative Evidence Principle, it begins to look like the Jesus we know from the New Testament is the result of late first-century myth making.”
The “evidence” used by Christian churches comes, mainly, from four sources: the prophesies of the Old Testament, the Gospels of the New Testament, the Epistles of the New Testament, and the writings of non-Christians of the period. All of these sources are tainted by inconsistencies, forgery, fraud and lies by Christians who knew there was scant evidence for the historic Jesus and who, therefore, attempted to create such “evidence” (see, “Forgery In Christianity” by Joseph Wheless, “The Jesus Puzzle,” by Earl Doherty, “God Is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything,” by Christopher Hitchins, “The Impossibility of God,” Ed. by Machael Martin & Ricki Monnier, & “The Case Against Christianity,” by Michael Martin.)
The prophesies can be discounted immediately because they are made in the context of Jewish lore and relate to the awaited Jewish Messiah who was not Jesus, according to most Jews. When the New Testament was in production, there are indications that they were altered in an attempt to align them with the prophesies, but this attempt was crude and was not successful. But this is clearly one of the most obvious of the biblical, New Testament manipulations.
The Gospels need a little more attention.
The production of the New Testament, as we know it, was developed by about 350 AD. Under the control of Christian Bishops from Rome, Jerusalem and other places in Asia Minor, the extant and discovered writings of Christian sects were put together for examination (a prominent figure in this “collection” is Iraneus, one of the Bishops). This production was stimulated by a meeting of Bishops of all Christian sects ordered by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the First Nicaean Council in 325 AD. Constantine’s purpose was to stop Christian sects bickering and fighting across his domain. To this end, he eventually ordered all Christian sects with the exception of the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church, to be disbanded or assimilated under threat of banishment, imprisonment, torture and death. One of the most controversial problems at the Council, and one of the most important, remembering that this was three hundred years after “Christ’s death”, was the “Arian Controversy”. One of the Bishops and his followers maintained that Jesus was a prophet, and not the son of God or a deity at all. This emphasizes that, before Constantine’s intervention, even at this time, not all religious groups believed and taught that Jesus was God. The later Councils were responsible for choosing Rome as the western religion’s headquarters and for crushing the Gnostics by finally crucifying most of them.
This began a purge which lasted about a century, after which the two selected sects reigned supreme. Unfortunately, it also forced some groups to either hide their writings or to destroy them - an example of this issome of the Gnostic texts which were hidden for centuries and only discovered in the 1940s - it is thought that most of the sectarian writings are now gone. The First Nicaean Council lasted several months and two further things were accomplished: the Nicaean Creed was adopted, articulating exactly what Christians believed (must believe), and the Bible compilation was begun (by order of Constantine and headed by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea). This copy of the Bible was accepted by the Eastern (orthodox) church. The Catholic Bibles’ text, produced after the Orthodox Bible, was chosen by Jerome, Bishop of Dalmatia. The Bible has had several revisions, including translations from Latin into Greek, and Latin into English and many other languages. All of these changes took place between 340 BC and and about 1600 BC. Two modern translations from the United States’ Baptists were completed in 1976 and 1996. Most modern biblical texts come from the translation of two original texts: the Hebrew Masoretic Text (Old Testament) and the Greek Textus Receptus (New Testament). This produces yet another problem: the translations of these texts have been difficult align with the meaning and intent of the original Hebrew and Greek which, again, makes them unreliable.
The compilation of the New Testament was made with one target in mind. Those pieces that were selected were ruled “the word of God”. There is no description of how this selection was made or how these Bishops knew that the selected pieces were “the word of God”, but many pieces such as the Gospel of St. Thomas, the Q Gospel, and a number of epistles, were excluded. The chosen Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were written by unknown authors - the names attached to them are arbitrary and for identification purposes only. In fact, the Gospels were written by many people over the 325 years since Jesus’ “death” and served as advertisements of the religion by various Christian sects. Evidence of this is found in computer-based writing analyses of the Gospels.
The Gospels, themselves, are not reliable evidence of the historic Jesus. They are contradictory and factually limited. Matthew, Luke and John have copied much of Mark as their foundation. The Gospels were written between 70 and 150 years after Jesus’ “death” and are, therefore, not the production of eye witnesses, but are the compilation of many stories passed down by word-of-mouth, and many of their assertions are wrong, historically and factually. If scientific method and the rules of evidence are to be applied equally to social customs such as legal systems, scientific research, historic analysis, and the Gospels then the Gospels cannot be accepted as evidence of anything.
The Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles provide no further evidence of Jesus the man. Each of them refers to a mystical (spiritual) Jesus, even the Pauline Epistles. There is also evidence that both of these sources were tampered with. For example, not all the Pauline Epistles were written by Paul and we know from details of his travels and his decisions that Paul was not an honest man. He tended to select sides of an issue which suited him according to the people who were hosting him. For example, he was for the inclusion of non-Jews (gentiles) into the growing Christian church at times, and at times he was against it, according to whom he was with. These attributes and exclusions, once again, make the epistles unreliable as evidence. Paul did not know Jesus and so his provided information is all hearsay anyway.
Outside the Christian churches, another source of so-called evidence is found in various writings such as Flavius Josephus’ (see: writingshttp://members.aol.com/fljosephus/testhist. htm - Josephus was a Jew captured by the Romans in the Roman/Jewish war when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed. He lived in Rome, pandering to the Romans by writing informational material about the Jews that could be used to identify them and to analyze their threat to Rome. In Josephus’ writing there is one paragraph that refers to Jesus. This paragraph clashes with the text before it and after it. If it is excluded then the meanings of these before and after texts accord precisely. The style of the paragraph is also different from the rest of the book. It is, therefore, considered a fraudulent inclusion put in the middle of the book as “evidence” by a Christian or Christians. In fact this is the case with all of the non-Christian references which include both Jewish and Roman texts: forgery of the pieces referring to Jesus is predominant and, once again, therefore, they cannot be used as evidence of an historic Jesus.
Some reference to Jesus’ life as described in the Gospels is important. The virgin birth is a copy of the birth of Horus to Isis, Gods of both the Egyptians and the Romans (and others) long before Christ was born. One of the Gospels also describes Mary and Joseph journeying to their home of birth because a census was about to start - there is no evidence of a census at this time at all, and since taxation and a number of other important management decisions are based on the census, the Romans took very careful notes when they occurred - another “fact” that shows a lack of reliability in the Gospels.
The information of Jesus as a child is scanty, and then about fifteen years of his life are ignored. It seems strange that the Son of God should not have as much of his life on earth as possible well documented, but this is not so. This suggests that Jesus’ life before he chose the Apostles, was considered unimportant - again, a strange position for Christians to take, especially considering the detail of some of the later pieces. When we meet him again he is trying to preach to the rich of Galilee, but is forcefully evicted by them. He then turns to the poor and from them he selects his Apostles. Both Jesus and his Apostles were illiterate and spoke a language, Aramaic, which was not widely used. Few publications at this time were in Aramaic, but most of them are in Latin, Greek and Hebrew (although some later limited writings in Aramaic were discovered) .
The recording of Jesus’ life, therefore, was not directly from his followers unless by word of mouth - and it is well known how inaccurate this is. Jesus meets John the Baptist who selects him to carry on his work after baptizing him - again, a strange thing to do since Jesus was the Son of God, and would not need, it seems, to be baptized. Also, baptism is a Christian sacrament, and the Christian religion was not yet formed. John would have applied a Jewish rite of cleansing or tsadeq, not called baptism, which was created several centuries later by the Christian church. Another strange thing that is supposed to have happened here, is that God tells Jesus that he is proud of him. Strange, because if Jesus was God, then he was congratulating himself. These items show that many of the stories about Jesus’ are not clearly thought out and provide peculiarly twisted views of him and actions around him.
Jesus goes to Jerusalem to join in the Passover celebrations. He is described in the Gospels as riding on a donkey with adoring crowds laying palm fronds in front of the donkey’s feet as he progressed towards one of the main gates to the city. This is nonsense. First, his following was comprized of between 15 and 20 people. also, during Passover each year thousands of pilgrims came to Jerusalem to pray in the Temple and participate in the festivities. The palm fronds were laid to keep down the dust from all the feet walking on the roads into Jerusalem. To say that they were laid down for Jesus again twists the facts. If Jesus had a following of thousands and was recognized as a real threat to both Judaism and Roman occupation across Judea, the Roman administration (which documented all such threats in mesages to Rome) would have written about it. There are no such records.
The story of Jesus being betrayed by Judas is another piece of nonsense - Jesus had told his Apostles at the Passover seder that he was going to die. He could have done one of two things when the soldiers came to arrest him - given himself up without the help of Judas, going to his death as predicted, or slip away without getting caught as did most of his Apostles. If the place where, it is alleged, he was caught is examined, the ease of escape is simple to see, but Jesus made no effort to escape - in fact, as it is described and knowing he was going to his death, he committed suicide. Not a good thing for a God to do. The descriptions here are dreamlike and are outlined as if in a revelation, not as a real account at all.
The execution of Jesus was said to be done by crucifixion on a cross. However, the Romans did not use crosses for crucifixion at this time. They used a single stake, sharpened at one end. The hands were stretched out above the head and nailed through the wrists or bound together to the stake, as were the feet. The pointed end of the stake was placed in the ground. The sharpened stake was also used in different ways - to be hammered up a victim’s anus, to be hammered through a victims body, or to be hammered down a victim’s throat. Nasty, but effective as a combination of torture and execution. The cross did not become a symbol of Christianity until around 400 AD when it was first depicted on a coin. Several churches have questioned the use of the cross as a Christian symbol, given its doubtful origin. The Anglican Church has questioned its use and suggested other symbols.
To summarize; there are so many fraudulent pieces of writing, so many inaccuracies, and so many forgeries that it is impossible to accept that an historic Jesus actually existed. From his birth to his death (without those elusive fifteen years), from the descriptions of his teachings to his entrance to Jerusalem on Passover, from his execution to his rising from the dead and his ascent into heaven, every act and every process is questionable. The Gospels cannot be trusted as evidence of anything except multiple advertisements for Christian sects who exaggerated and lied to get their flocks to grow. The Epistles do not describe a human Jesus, and the non-Christian writings about Jesus are all forgeries. The manipulation of the New Testament by the exclusion of many pieces of writing, and the statement that the selected pieces are the word of God indicate the same thing - fraud to maintain Christian growth among the ignorant or manipulated by threats of violence and hell in the afterlife.
Given the lack of reliable evidence, therefore, we must agree that Jesus never lived on earth, never was a human being, and that all the stories about him are myths. This means that the entire corpus on which Christianity is based is false and the actions which define Christianity by the historic Jesus (particularly the resurrection, and the ascent into heaven) are figments of many imaginations. Accurate and truthful descriptions of Jesus the man (the historic Jesus) and, therefore, the basis for Christianity, do not exist.
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I would comment on three other things that both your magazine and TV productions about Christianity do: as there is no pictorial evidence of Jesus’ existence at the time of his “life” (pottery shards with pictures on them, paintings on the walls of temples, drawings on parchment with the writings of the gospels,) Time and its affiliates such as CNN, use a continuum of pictures of paintings done at least a thousand years after Jesus is supposed to have existed, without references or disclaimers, as if they show the true life and appearance of Jesus and his associates.
Secondly, you (and most Christians) choose to accept Jesus’ existence as fact, and you start from there - scientifically, starting with an unproved “fact” as a foundation for further theoretical (and/or “factual”) developments, is a serious error which invalidates everything that follows it. In order for your assertions about Jesus’ life, and for these assertions to be even somewhat true, the “fact” of Jesus’ existence must first be proved.
The third thing that you do is to use Christian “experts”, usually theologians or faculty from theology departments, to do your analysis. Again there is a presupposition by these “experts” that Christianity is based on “facts” without elucidation. Their analyses and expertise must be, therefore, considered tainted. It is remarkable and apt that when Jefferson was creating his University of Virginia, he demanded that there be no department of theology: “A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution [the University of Virginia]. - from a letter to Thomas Cooper, October 7, 1814.
The decline of Catholicism in Europe, the U.S., Africa and South America is also worth investigating. This includes the current difficulty of the church to find young men to become priests. This is emptying their seminaries, lowering the size of the congregations across the world and the concomitant closing of churches, the closing of Catholic schools around the world and an increase in secular staff in the remaining schools, and the decrease in fiscal support. The continued decrease of church members across Christian sects, Protestant and Catholic, is balanced by the growth of fundamentalism as an hysterical response. This is similar to the growing Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle and Far East where force has become the answer to what is considered a Muslim slide into Western materialism (much like the response of the early Catholic Church to Gnosticism). Part of this was covered in a recent CNN program; “God’s Warriors”, as narrated by Christian Amanpour. But much more analysis and research is needed to show why the movement of religions is, once again, towards global violence to save themselves (although many of us believe that religious violence has never stopped.)
Don’t you think that the opinions of other experts should be included in your analyses - especially those whose research uncovers details of opposite opinions. I know I am naive, but it has always been my personal illusion that journalists, especially analytical journalists, give the many sides of a story rather than just one of them (unless they are biased like those on Fox news!).
I don’t expect an answer to this letter. Priests, lay Christians, and others who are avowed members of the churches rarely answer such letters, hiding in their own mythology and superstitious world. It would certainly be refreshing if Time decided to give the other sides of the religious stories. But I know you must sell your magazine and the Christian threat of boycott is real; a pity if your management is sufficiently cowardly to succumb to their threats. Remember, belief is not fact and faith is not reason.
Sincerely,
Chris Morton
Today
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