The Jesus Con

"Wicca is a form of Neopaganism and modern Witchcraft. Wicca is a religion. Wicca is a spiritual path. Wicca is a way of life... and Wicca has the potential to be the most relevant and important new spiritual development of the 21st Century and supplant the irrational and superstitious religions prevalent in the past 2,000 years - as long as we can learn to keep it progressive and guard against its commercial exploitation and trivilisation." - Kevin Saunders, 2009

Last updated: 8 March, 2010

THE JESUS CON

This is the text of a talk given by Kevin Saunders to the International Witchfest in London, November 2008.

It really is a tremendous pleasure and honour to be invited here to talk to you today. I hope you will forgive my reading from notes… I never used to, but my condition doesn’t allow my brain to remember a talk of this length these days, especially one relatively technical.

I’d like to start… by quoting a few words written some years ago now, by a gentleman known as Israel Regardie, who I’m sure many of you are familiar with. The quote is taken from a book about the Tree of Life and is written during the vast economic problems faced in the 1930s, but I feel that it is as pertinent today as ever it was, and in many ways, with our knowledge of the environmental damage the human race has already caused, much more so:

“The structure of national organisation would appear to be veering from economic ruin to that final crazy lurch which may see it disappear over the gaping precipice to complete destruction… Once the viewpoint of the personal ego, the outcome of ages of evolution, has been transcended, man may see the iron fetters of ignorance roll away to reveal an untrammelled vision of supreme beauty, the world as a living thing and a joy forever. Is there not for all to see the beauty of the Sun and the Moon, the pageantry of the changing seasons in the year, the sweet music of rain falling through the leaves of trees towering to the gates of heaven, and the dew in early morning creeping over the grass, tipping it with spear-points of silver?”

My talk today, however, is not about Israel Regardie or the Tree of Life, but it IS about ignorance in our modern world. It is a about a much better known book that, in my arrogant opinion, has done more to shape the popular world-view today, done more to maintain ignorance, held back development of a spirituality that respects our planet, and enables a faulty claim of morality to be applied to some of the most immoral acts of war and environmental destruction in our time… the (so-called) Holy Bible.

Now I do appreciate that it is common amongst us Pagans to respect people’s right to choose one’s religion, as I do. It is common amongst us to respect people who follow those other religions… but I would challenge the idea that we, as Pagans, respect those religious institutions and belief systems in themselves. Get a group of Wiccans together anywhere, and I can guarantee it won’t be long before we begin to have a laugh at the ridiculous nature and numerous contradictions prevalent in Christianity. I don’t, however, intend to have a laugh, but to take a real serious look at the values of the Christian Bible and, perhaps more controversially, attempt to show that it’s central character – Jesus Christ – was NOT the son of a god and more, someone who didn’t even exist as a man in any way shape or form, good or otherwise.

The Bible is a book of two halves, so, being a rational person I shall start at the beginning… but don’t worry… I don’t intend to spend the whole weekend deconstructing the entire book, I just want to remind us all of the nature of the god on which Christianity is based.

The Old Testament is not a collection of works about morality, but more a primitive creation myth onto which is attached a history of the tribe of Jews who came out of Egypt to find a home of their own.

This highly primitive story is actually drawn from much older myths put together at some point from being an amalgamation of stories that appear to have their origins in the Egyptian and Sumerian traditions. It is hard to believe that this element of the story, for what it is worth, was ever meant to be anything but allegorical. However, the Catholic Church, many Christian evangelists, and the Judaic authorities insist that the Bible is literally the ‘word of god’ and that every word should literally be taken as the gospel truth. The Puritan Archbishop Ussher of Armagh, the Primate of the whole of Ireland and Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin, writing in the 17th Century carefully and quite astoundingly worked out, working with the hierarchy as detailed in the Bible, that the date of creation was Sunday, 23rd October 4004 BCE! It’s possible, however, that Archbishop Ussher plagiarised his work from a John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in 1644 who managed to go one step further and determine that the holy trinity, having created heaven and earth and everything in it in the days previously, created ‘man’ at 9am on that very morning!

Is this sounding a little silly yet? Well… I must admit, as my birthday is the 23rd October, it does have some attractions, sharing my birth with the whole of creation!

Well, perhaps we can forgive the ignorance of 17th Century academics writing before the more recent period of rational enlightenment. But please don’t forget, there are millions of people around the world who STILL accept the Church’s insistence on the literal truth of the Bible and not just those from poorly educated backgrounds. Just this week we saw a Creationist standing for Vice-President of the USA who, despite her position, really does believe that this is something that cannot be challenged. All of the scientific evidence that the physical Universe is actually tens of millions of years old, the evidence left behind in fossils, the bones of dinosaurs, etc, were amazingly put there simply to test the faith of those true Christian believers who believe that their god, who created ‘man’ in his own form, from his hiding place on some great cloud in the sky, is nothing more than a divine test, or the work of Satan.

We could have had a woman in the second most powerful political position in the world who is so dumb that she can seriously stand up and say she believes this to be true. I don’t feel that we should be too relieved that Sarah Palin wasn’t successful, because what we ended up with, in the form of Barack Obama, is a product of American neo-Zionism that may not turn out to be a great deal better, but time will tell!

It is in these first few pages of the Old Testament, that Christians come to two very damaging assumptions… First, that their god is in the same form as humans, and therefore pigeon-holes the human species as something far more important than the rest of nature; and secondly, adding weight to the first, that god gives ‘man’ domination over all of nature – as if humans aren’t a product of nature.

Let’s move forward a little, by-passing the story of Noah, to a character who is equally important to the Jews, Christians and Muslims… Abraham.
Abraham, according to the Bible, and therefore absolutely true, was asked to sacrifice his own son by ‘god’ and yet was stopped at the last moment, with Abraham’s knife at his son’s throat, by this god who explained that he felt the need to test Abraham’s faith and obedience. Here, maybe, we have one of this god’s dubious attributes – paranoia – not an attribute one would expect to see in the great all-seeing, all-knowing, omnificent creator. But it get’s far worse!

OK… let’s move forward a little more, out of Genesis to the story of Moses and the Ten Commandments. There are actually several versions of these ‘commandments’ that have appeared over the years through various translations, some, incidentally, even have far more than ten. In one of these commandments god states that nobody should worship any other god than ‘me’… which I find interesting as it appears to accept that there ARE other gods… but the fifth book of Moses - Deuteronomy (chapter 5, verse 9 if you are interested) goes one step further and states: ‘Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me…’. Well that certainly makes things clearer! There are other gods, but one must not worship them because the god suffers from such dreadful human failings as jealousy and will punish those and their families for several generations, so he is vindictive as well!

We are also told (in the King James version on which the modern American Bible is based) that: “Thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”. Again, the King James version goes on to qualify this with fear invoking threats for those who disobey. Why would a god want, or feel the need, to invoke fear in order to gain such respect? Personally I don’t take kindly to threats so he can stuff that for a start!!

If we move now to the end of Deuteronomy, we come to the book of Joshua, at the beginning of which we find that Moses is dead and his god talks to Joshua (interestingly the Greek word for ‘Jesus’).

Joshua is described as Moses’ minister and he takes up the leadership of the Hebrews as their god shows yet another strange attribute – that of land agent. It is here that god decides to ‘give’ Palestine to the Jews, despite it being occupied by other tribes. It is this that was used by the Christian and Jewish Zionists in the 1920s to argue for the Jewish state to be set up, eventually happening in 1948, after many years of largely European Jewish foreigners moving into the area, and to the exclusion of the Arabs who rightly lived there. It is this act, that had the full support and brutal assistance from us British and the American neo-Zionists, that has guaranteed a thorn in the side of any hope of peace in the Middle East for decades to come… all because it says in the Bible that their god gave this land to the Israelites. So this god not only favours humans above all other species, but we are now supposed to believe that he favours one ancient tribe of humans above all others! American support for Israel is used to give historical credit to the idea that the Americans, still heavily influenced by the Puritan extremists, who started the genocide of American natives and moved there to set up the new Zion – or the ‘New World Order’ as it says on their bank notes underneath the symbol used by the Illuminati – it all serves to give credit to the idea that the American Government is continuing ‘god’s will’… a claim regularly made by George W Bush in his campaign against Islam in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people have already died.

The book of Joshua is a particularly violent book on the part of the Israelites, although violence is far from being confined to this book. Under the orders of their god they commit practically every sinful act possible including genocide, infanticide, regicide, rape, theft and the mindless destruction of entire cities. With their god not just turning a blind eye to these dreadful acts, but ordering and condoning them, it is not entirely surprising that modern Christian leaders as well as the modern Israelites, once again occupying Palestine, feel able to justify the most appalling horrors and injustices upon fellow human beings.

We now turn forward several hundred pages further into the Christian Old Testament… hundreds of pages that say so very little of importance that it is amazing anyone other than historians are actually interested (in fact pages that I doubt many Christians themselves have ever bothered to read)… to the book of Isaiah. It is known that Isaiah was written around 200 years before the supposed birth of Jesus, and it is one of the harder books to read in the Bible having obviously been chopped around so much over the years that it is difficult to gain much sense from large parts of it. I bring it up here, though, because it is a book that the New Testament’s Paul refers to on a number of occasions.

Isaiah offers a lot of criticism of the Jews stating that Jerusalem is like a vineyard whose grapes have gone wild and bad, with weeds, thorns and briars filling the city. It indicates that god now feels that the Jews have lost their way and abused their faith. It is here that the virgin birth is predicted… and it is in this book that a peculiar character appears – a servant of god who suffers in silence, although this long-suffering servant is never actually named, but who does bear many resemblances to the humble virtues attributed to Jesus, as well as providing a list of signs to watch out for that will confirm the coming of a messiah. It also talks of a new branch will grow out of Judaism as in chapter 12, verse 10:

Jesse, incidentally, was the father of King David and therefore a key ancestor of the so-called Jesus, hence the name.

So far we have looked at a few snippets from the Old Testament. So far, except for the rather infantile myths near its beginning, it consists of a relatively linear history of a violent and ancient Middle Eastern tribe led by a warrior god who appears to have little in the way of love or care for any other people. The point is, that it is a reasonable LINEAR history. When we come to the New Testament, it is therefore reasonable to assume that this is also a linear history in a similar vein, but IT IS NOT!

The oldest books in the New Testament are actually those epistles written by Paul. The letters that theologians and academics universally accept were genuinely written by Paul, NEVER refer to Jesus in a physical time or place, they do not refer to the virgin birth (or any birth for that matter), nor his parents, nor to his trial before the Romans, nor to his death. It is simply not credible that a Christian writing so close to the time of the supposed Jesus would have omitted all of these important so-called facts. Considering that Paul's letters take up a whole quarter of the new Testament, how is it possible that he could not have mentioned any of these incredible earth-shattering feats nor even mentioned any of the many miracles ascribed to Jesus? The reason is, that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John had yet to be invented and written down. It's as simple as that! Only four out of the thirteen letters attributed to Paul in the new Testament are universally accepted as genuine. But even if one is generous and excepts the eight possibles out of the thirteen, there is STILL no mention of Jesus as a living human being. Paul was a highly respected church leader who lived at a time contemporary with the supposed real-life Jesus, these omissions, in themselves, are incontrovertible proof to anyone capable of thinking rationally, that the Jesus of the gospels did not exist in real life. This logic still stands just as firmly even if the gospels had been written before Paul's letters (an idea that no serious theologian would today accept in any case, even though the four gospels appear in the Bible before Paul's letters); Jesus only ever existed as a mythical concept extrapolated from the Old Testament teachings and other contemporary works such as the Wisdom of Solomon.

Paul's letters, as they appear in the New Testament, are a turgid and clumsily edited collection that are nearly impossible to relate to in a modern context, even though they do occasionally share some ethical insights into Paul's ideas of spirituality. (Incidentally, Paul, before his conversion to Christianity, was guilty of condemning people to death by stoning for breaking Jewish law and who had a seriously bad experience in marriage leaving him an embittered misogynist, an attitude which in my mind added weight to the suppression of women over the last few thousand years).

SO, where did the four gospels come from and who wrote them? The impression is given that these were written by the disciples of Jesus, but they were not. They were written decades after his supposed death, some possibly more than a hundred years after, and after Jerusalem was utterly destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE which itself gives convenient (albeit retrospective) credence to the idea of the Jews being punished for killing the messiah.

Throughout the Bible there are numerous mentions of various characters "talking with spirit" or "having the Holy Ghost with them" while they talk. or words to that effect. “Talking with spirit” is basically channelling information whilst in trance-like state. It would appear from descriptions in the Bible that this channelling of spirit or channelling the Holy Ghost, was done within group meetings of relatively small numbers of Jewish people. The best of these were written down by scribes and distributed through the community. These stories were most likely told and retold and no doubt changed, as in the game of Chinese whispers, ever so subtly, from each telling to the next. I believe the popular stories told around a central theme of Jesus (a mythical descendant of Jesse) who initially was a character drawn out of the Old Testament, hundreds of years before, but gradually becoming believed as true by having these stories told and retold about him, and eventually the stories from any particular province within which a certain church was working were gathered together as a collection and written down for posterity. As these words were jealously guarded as words "directly from spirit" – the spirit of Jesus Christ, there would be a tendency to protect them once they'd been written down in order to maintain their "integrity". Each church would no doubt jealously guard the texts from their own particular Providence and even ascribe them with a name, and no doubt a name derived from the biblical texts themselves and the older myths would help to give then a further sense of authors authentication. This is why there are four ‘gospels’ that are so (unnecessarily) similar.

These little stories, told by relatively primitive groups of Christian Jews who started ‘channelling’ words of this mythical figure are now, in the 21st Century, applied as dogma… even though there is almost nothing of any real spiritual value in the whole collection!

The book of Mark appears to be the oldest written Gospel and seems to be the foundation stone on which the others were laid, which explains why large sections are not only similar, but identical, from one gospel to the next. It is likely that Mark itself was a collection of channelled stories from spirit taken from a slightly earlier time, but certainly after the times of Paul (because they introduced a distinct and fundamental change in Christian doctrine by putting words in the mouth of the mythical Jesus Christ). These stories gradually moved around each of the regions gradually gathering snippets of other newly formed channelled information and ending up as a collection of their own held sacred by various churches.

In other places, the editor of each of the Gospels has then proceeded to intersperse bits of information that make up an individual version of the local theology. Amongst other things, this explains why the Bible passages appear to be a patchwork of bits of information stuck together, sections where there are enormous contradictions even within the same Gospel, and why there are places where there are very obvious continuity problems. In a game of Chinese whispers by the end of the telling of the story the whole thing has become completely mixed up and illogical; it seems that the editors, whoever they may have been, have done their best to unravel these mysteries and re-present them with their own regional variations of the doctrine edited in, but failed to iron out all of the wrinkles and make them comprehensively understandable to an intelligent thinker.

Paul's mission became one in which he would devise his own doctrine that faith in Jesus was all that was required to convert to Christianity and build a following around this concept. Following the Jewish wars with Rome it would have been politically expedient to distance the Jewish Christians from the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem. In order to be acceptable to non-Jews, and make conversion attractive, it would obviously be much easier if it were to drop Jewish law and therefore not require the, no doubt, unpopular Jewish law that required circumcision and the abstinence from certain foods. This seems to be the reason why Paul was such a controversial figure and why there were signs of strong disagreement between Paul and other Jewish Christians such as Peter who felt that Judaism should be restricted to those born Jewish. Taking this version of Judaism to the masses represents a break with Judaism and would clearly have served to prove to the Roman authorities that Christians did not deserve to be persecuted on the same basis that Jews were.

By the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine, in the 4th Century, there were obviously a great many of these hand-written scrolls, some of which sort of made sense and some that were clearly dubious. In fact there were hundreds of them.

Constantine initially adopted Christ, just as any other Pagan of his time, as a bolt on extra to a range of personal deities that he followed having been persuaded to include him before his successful take-over of Rome itself. It wasn’t until he was on his death bed that he actually allowed himself to be baptised, and therefore conveniently absolved of his sins, that included murdering close members of his own family… Constantine was a vicious dictator who turned up at the Council of Nicaea dressed as a Sun god and, as Roman Emperor, saw himself as divine and put himself between human and god, which is why the Catholic Church is led by a Pope… What better way to try and solidify a failing Empire and (more importantly its Emperor) than to force everyone to adopt a religion that only has one god and insisting the Emperor is his earthly manifestation… so much for the founder of the modern Church!

We could, perhaps, wonder why so many obvious contradictions were left in the New Testament. Well… Constantine’s editor in chief was a chap called Eusebius who had the job of determining which of these hundreds of scrolls would be included in the official Roman Catholic Bible that everyone would be forced to adopt and follow, even of they couldn’t read it. But why the contradictions? OK… well, if we take a quick look at one of the scrolls that DIDN’T make it into the Bible we can see that the contradictions that remained were relatively minor compared to what COULD have been included… This is taken from a book known as “Thomas’s Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ”:

Not quite the Jesus of love and forgiveness we are expected to believe in, but it is certainly more in line with a son of the sort of god depicted in the Old Testament! Is it any wonder that such works didn’t QUITE make it??

From the days of Constantine onwards, Christianity became a political tool for controlling the population. Only through worshipping Jesus and his god, through the Emperor, could people make it into Heaven and be absolved of whatever sins they may have committed in life. This political control has continued right up to the present day with many, many wars being fought in their names.

Ladies and Gentlemen… we live in a world that has placed humans ABOVE nature, rather than an interdependent part OF nature. Humans have been, through religious doctrine, been encouraged to ‘go forth and multiply’ in order to win domination for this religion to the point where we would need to replicate Mother Earth, our Goddess, something like 8 times over if the world’s population were to have enough resources to maintain itself at what we consider today to be a reasonable level of materialism.

On the bright side, we live in a country where little more than 1% of the population now attend Churches run by the Church of England, but I don’t feel we can afford to be complacent and assume Christianity will die out and a more appropriate form of spirituality developed and put in its place… not without tremendous help at least… The Christian Church in our own country is fighting back and targeting the MOST vulnerable in order to win back numbers, despite the irrationality of their arguments. In the area where I live, in deepest, darkest Somerset, out of the 10 infant schools to which my partner and I could send our 6 year-old son to, 9 of them are run by the Church of England, and the other is non-conformist Christian school… there is NO other choice but to send him to a school where many days throughout the year are dedicated to teaching him about Christianity… and even though we try and avoid this by taking him out of school regularly, there is tremendous pressure on him to conform and be like the others whose parents are less interested then we are in him receiving an education that isn’t centred around the Church.

I recently read that in Norfolk there is even a group that is offering special services to promote Christianity to special needs children who are obviously particularly vulnerable! The Church is aiming to get our children and indoctrinate them while still young in order to reverse their fortunes.

We might live in a country that has largely turned its back on the Church, but one whose people DO still consider themselves to be Christian because they believe in ‘something good out there’. They just don’t realise that there ARE alternatives, and in some ways I DO feel we, as Pagans, are not presenting ourselves in a fashion yet, that is going to make the majority listen.

We live in a country that doesn’t support the Church, and yet the Church HAS managed to continue its dominance of our most important institutions. Our current Prime Minister is a Presbyterian… our former Prime Minister recently declared himself to be a Catholic, despite the blood on his hands.

AND… perhaps worst of ALL, we ally ourselves with a nation that is one of the most materialistic on our beautiful planet… a nation that despite having separated Church and State in its fine constitution, is dominated by Christian fundamentalists who really DO believe in the literal truth of the Bible – every word of it – despite the irrationality of it, and many who even believe that its new preacher President has been sent to them by divine inspiration and who will inevitably continue the lurch towards all-out nuclear war with our Islamic neighbours.

In the names of the Goddess and God, the Sun the Moon and the Earth, the elements and the spirits of our ancestors I feel it is time for us to stand up and be counted and do something about it. NOW!!!

This talk is a brief summary of a much more detailed critique of Christianity that will appear in my next book when I find a publisher brave enough to print and promote it.

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