Biblical Mysteries

by Jim Walker

Amazingly, the question of an actual historical Jesus rarely confronts the religious believer. The power of faith has so forcefully driven the minds of most believers, and even apologetic scholars, that the question of reliable evidence gets obscured by tradition, religious subterfuge, and outrageous claims. The following gives a brief outlook about the claims of a historical Jesus and why the evidence the Christians present us cannot serve as justification for reliable evidence for a historical Jesus.

All claims of Jesus Derive From Hearsay Accounts: No one has the slightest physical evidence to support a historical Jesus; no artifacts, dwelling, works of carpentry, or self-written manuscripts. All claims about Jesus derive from writings of other people. There occurs no contemporary Roman record that shows Pontius Pilate executing a man named Jesus. Devastating to historians, there occurs not a single contemporary writing that mentions Jesus. All documents about Jesus got written well after the life of the alleged Jesus from either: unknown authors, people who had never met an earthly Jesus, or from fraudulent, mythical or allegorical writings. Although one can argue that many of these writings come from fraud or interpolations, I will use the information and dates to show that even if these sources did not come from interpolations, they could still not serve as reliable evidence for a historical Jesus, simply because all sources derive from hearsay accounts. Hearsay means information derived from other people rather than on a witness' own knowledge.Courts of law do not generally allow hearsay as testimony, and nor does honest modern scholarship. Hearsay provides no proof or good evidence, and therefore, we should dismiss it.If you do not understand this, imagine yourself confronted with a charge for a crime which you know you did not commit. You feel confident that no one can prove guilt because you know that there exists no evidence whatsoever for the charge against you. Now imagine that you stand present in a court of law that allows hearsay as evidence....

( Click here to Read Part 1 )

Comparing Jesus to other Historical Figures: Many Christian apologists attempt to extricate themselves from their lack of evidence by claiming that if we cannot rely on the post chronicle exegesis of Jesus, then we cannot establish a historical foundation for other figures such as Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, Napoleon, etc. However, there sits a vast difference between historical figures and Jesus. There occurs either artifacts, writings, or eyewitness accounts for historical people, whereas, for Jesus we have nothing.

Alexander, for example, left a wake of destroyed and created cities behind. We have buildings, libraries and cities, such as Alexandria, left in his name. We have treaties, and even a letter from Alexander to the people of Chios, engraved in stone, dated at 332 B.C.E. For Agustus Caesar, we have the Res gestae divi augusti, the emperor's own account of his works and deeds, a letter to his son (Epistula ad Gaium filium), Virgil's eyewitness accounts, and much more. Napoleon left behind artifacts, eyewitness accounts and letters. We can establish some historicity to these people because we have evidence that occurred during their life times. Yet even with contemporary evidence, historians have become wary of after-the-fact stories of many of these historical people. For example, some of the stories of Alexander's conquests, or Nero starting the fire in Rome always get questioned or doubted because they contain inconsistencies or come from authors who wrote years after the alleged facts. In qualifying the history of Alexander, Pierre Briant writes, "Although more than twenty of his contemporaries chronicled Alexander's life and campaigns, none of these texts survive in original form. Many letters and speeches attributed to Alexander are ancient forgeries or reconstructions inspired by imagination or political motives. The little solid documentation we possess from Alexander's own time is mainly to be found in stone inscriptions from the Greek cities of Europe and Asia." [Briant]...

by: William F. Dankenbring

A stone in a dry creek bed in New Mexico, discovered by early settlers in the region, is one of the most amazing archaeological discoveries in the Western Hemisphere. It contains engraved on its flank the entire Ten Commandments written in ancient Hebrew script! Hebrew scholars, such as Cyrus Gordon of Brandeis University near Boston, have vouched for its authenticity. I visited the site of the huge boulder, near Las Lunas, New Mexico, in 1973 and photographed the Hebrew inscriptions. A local newspaper reporter guided me to the mysterious site, located out in the middle of the New Mexico desert. We watched for rattlesnakes, as we hiked in to the spot where the boulder lies, unmoved and in situ for who knows how many mysterious centuries.

Who put it there? Who wrote the incredible inscription of the TEN COMMANDMENTS in an ancient Hebrew dialect? In December, 1989, it was reported that an American explorer in Peru's highland jungles had found evidence that indicated king Solomon's legendary gold mines may have been in that region. The explorer, Gene Savoy, declared that he had found three stone tablets containing the first writing found from the ancient civilizations of the Andes. The inscriptions, he reported, are similar to Phoenician and Hebrew hieroglyphs! Reports the San Francisco Chronicle: "The hieroglyphs on the tablets are similar to those used in King Solomon's time and include one identical to the symbol that always appeared on the ships he sent to the legendary land of Ophir, which the Bible described as the source of his gold, Savoy said" (December 7, 1989).Savoy is no newcomer to archaeological discoveries. He was the discoverer of the last Inca city of Vilcabamba in 1964. Savoy declared that the three tablets each weigh several tons and measure about 5 by 10 feet. They were found in a cave near Gran Vilaya, the immense ruins of the Chachapoyas Indian civilization which he discovered in 1985. This discovery is not surprising to me. In my book Beyond Star Wars, I suggest strongly that ancient Peru was the site of the mysterious "land of Ophir."

Hebrews in the Americas 1,000 B.C.? In 1973, while traveling to do research for an article I was writing for The Plain Truth magazine, I visited with Dr. Joseph Mahan in Atlanta, Georgia, an expert in ancient Indian ethnology of the southeastern Indians of the United States. He showed me samples of pottery uncovered from the waters around the Bahamas, and told me of Indian legends, including that of the Yuchis, stating they had migrated to the area of Florida and Georgia from the region of the Bahamas. According to their legends, the island sank beneath the sea and they fled for their lives.

Though the Bible does not specifically describe the instrument that Jesus died upon, tradition has it that he was put to death on a cross; consisting of a stake and a crossbeam. The Greek stauros is sometimes used to describe a simple stake, and other times a more complex form such as the cross. To determine what appearance the stauros took in Jesus' death, we need to consider what the Greek language tells us, what history tells us, and most importantly, what the Bible tells us. Furthermore, we must consider the significance of the stauros to the Christian, and whether it is a subject of shame or of great joy.

The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology says this about the Greek stauros: Corresponding to the vb. (stauroo) which was more common, stauros can mean a stake which was sometimes pointed on which an executed criminal was publicly displayed in shame as a further punishment. It could be used for hanging (so probably Diod. Sic., 2, 18, 2), impaling, or strangulation. stauros could also be an instrument of torture, perhaps in the sense of the Lat. patibulum, a crossbeam laid on the shoulders. Finally it could be an instrument of execution in the form of a vertical stake and a crossbeam of the same length forming a cross in the narrower sense of the term. It took the form either of a T (Lat. crux commissa) or of a + (crux immissa). (Vol. 1, page 391) The Greek word xylon can mean "wood, a piece of wood, or anything made of wood," and can refer to a cross as well, as pointed out in Vine's Expository Dictionary, Vol. 4, p. 153. Historical findings have substantiated the traditional cross. One finding is a graffito1 dating to shortly after 200 A.D., taken from the walls of the Roman Palatine. It is a drawing of a crucified ass; a mockery of a Christian prisoner who worships Christ. The Romans were no doubt amused that Christians worshiped this Jesus whom they had crucified on a cross. In June of 1968, bulldozers working north of Jerusalem accidentally laid bare tombs dating from the first century B.C. and the first century A.D. Greek archeologist Vasilius Tzaferis was instructed by the Israeli Department of Antiquities to carefully excavate these tombs...