In an introductory Chapter titled ‘Jesus Never Existed ---- A crackpot idea?’ Kenneth Humphreys has stated that in a culture based upon Christianity, the denial of Jesus’s existence may appear at first glance absurd or even stupid.
To quote his words in this context: ‘After all, goes the argument, mainstream scholarship accepts that there was an historical Jesus, even if there is no agreement as to actually who he was, precisely when he was, what he did or what he said. Yet for more than 200 years, a minority of courageous scholars have dared to question the existence of Jesus.
Their skepticism and outright denial of the historical figure of Jesus is not the result of perverse obduracy in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Rather, it is a rational response to the dearth of evidence and an honest riposte to more than a suspicion of fabrication.’
Kenneth Humphreys has provided a brilliant rebuttal of what amounts to the fake historicization of the great hero, a saviour who rescues followers from death itself. He has presented his story in a vivid, vital and vibrant manner, drawing his inferences and conclusions based on an acutely cohesive and reasoned exegesis.
Here again, the exact words of Kenneth Humphreys are very relevant. ‘Unpalatable as it may be to some, there is nothing spiritual or miraculous in this exposition. The phantom superhero of the Christian story emerged over time and from a particular social milieu in a culture long attuned to religious synthesis. Beliefs created the man, the man did not create the beliefs.
If collective visual thinking seems too prosaic an explanation for such a grand idea as Jesus Christ, King of Kings, reflect for a moment that the same process, of fashioning a Jesus from within one’s own psyche and projecting him back into an ancient pageant, continues even today. It is how children have been indoctrinated, generation after generation.
The illusion is fragile, it requires faith because it assaults the rational senses and is confounded by every daily experience: the ‘righteous’ suffer misfortune in equal measure as the ungodly. Believers are comforted that their faith is no vain illusion by the assurance that unlike all other Gods of antiquity, theirs alone had an historical presence. Few are aware that how contentious is that supposition’.
Kenneth Humphreys gives documentary evidence with facts, figures and pictures/photographs to prove that ‘Jesus of History’ was long held captive by the Church itself. Beginning from the Age of Enlightenment in the first quarter of the 18th century, less reverential minds like Voltaire, Rousseau and many others gained access to this ‘Divine Prisoner’ and were aghast that only a spectre was to be found.
That realization inaugurated a fierce war between critics and defenders of the faith. Finding itself impotent and powerless against the gradual encroachment and progress of ideas flowing from the advances in science and scholarly enquiry, the Church started regrouping its forces to claim the academic high ground.
The Church established and staffed Seminaries and Colleges of Biblical Study, funded Universities and sponsored Archaeological Research. As a result, most of the New Testament Scholars have been drawn from the ranks of ‘believers’ and they approach their subject with a certain reverence. They often go out of their way not to give offence or disturb the mental peace or pious enthusiasm of Jesus Lovers, even when the evidence is clear, irrefutable and damning.
Kenneth Humphreys argues that such scholars, usually straddle between two worlds. In one world, stands a ‘theological’ Jesus Christ, with whom they may well have ‘a personal relationship’. That Jesus is acknowledged to be a ‘matter of faith’. In the other world perambulates ‘the historical Jesus’.
Their painstaking, meticulous investigation of the history, culture and politics of Palestine in the Second Temple Period has created an historically authoritative background. The veracity of the context is not in question. Roman Judaea in the 1st century AD certainly existed. If is against this graphic background that a wafer thin construct of “Jesus” makes his spectral appearance.
Kenneth Humphreys comes to the brilliant conclusion: “Jesus is intruded into the scene as a consequence of faith not of history, for the so called ‘evidences’ for Jesus or late and part of a forgery mill which has characterized Christianity from the 2nd century down to our own time. It is the historical context ‘itself’ which allows the phantom saviour to “live”, “die” and “resurrect” and thereby cast its false shadow back upon history”.
Kenneth Humphreys gives an interesting description of the manner in which the ‘false fiction’ is presented:
“We are certain that Jerusalem existed, Herod, Pharisees and Romans, why not a Jesus? Cue the Discovery Channel Documentary: ‘these are the Types of sandals Jesus would have worn. This is the Type of tree he would have rested under’.
Most of the historians of Christianity, raised and educated in a Christian culture, are always content to assume that Jesus lived, respectfully deferring to the options of Biblical Specialists who are often men of faith. Given the paucity of irrefuntable evidence, they lace their uncertainty with a “probability”.
Referring to a recent scholarly investigation into the “real Jesus”, by a writer called Geza Vermes in this book ‘Changing Faces of Jesus’, Kenneth Humphreys observes that this writer at no point has considered that the superhero may not actually have existed, beneath all the layers of invention he has so assiduously peeled away. No wonder Geza Vermes closes with a dream of a “returning Christ”—the very dream he had at the beginning of his study!
Likewise, Kenneth Humphreys says that the famous Historian Michael Grant, in his investigation of Jesus, glosses over non-existence in just two paragraphs with the cavalier comment “Jesus was probably born at Nazareth... or perhaps some other small place”. Though obliged state again and again that there is no evidence or only fabricated “evidence” from a later time, he maintains an insistence through out that the shadowy figure “must” be real.
To quote the inimitable words of Kenneth Humphreys again:”... a scholar who announces that he thinks that there was no historical Jesus is likely to face scorn, even ridicule, and will gain little for his candour. It is much safer for academics to aver the ‘possibility of a man behind the legend’ even while arguing that layers of encrusted myth obscure knowing anything about him.
This ‘safe’, and ‘frankly’ gutless option maintains simultaneously the ‘obscurity’ of carpenter in an ancient provincial backwater (“absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”) and an academic detachment from ‘faith issue’ which raised that supposed obscure guru to an iconic status”.
Jesus Never Existed is not a book meant for those who wish to keep their faith in the cool, cloistered bliss of historical ignorance. Jesus Never Existed brings out the scorching truth that the triumph of Christianity was a disaster for humanity — made chillingly ironic by the bogus nature of its central character, superstar and “saviour”. I am only using the words of Kenneth Humphreys.
Reading Kenneth Humphrey’s book, I am reminded of the plot of the fiction novel The Da Vinci Code which graphically presents the discovery of historical evidence, (concealed by the chruch) that Christ and Mary Magdalene were married and began a bloodline that continued through the centuries. It depicts Christianity as the biggest cover-up in history,
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