Was Jesus Really Born? - May Be /may Not B Controversial

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Was Jesus really born?

“Let me tell you at the outset that Jesus is no mythological mumbo-jumbo like your Rama and Krishna, and even Buddha. On the contrary, he was a solid historical figure whose miracles were witnessed and vouchsafed by many contemporary people,” said a Jesuit missionary to Sita Ram Goel. Let us have a closer look at this ‘solid historical figure’.


“Missionary propaganda would leave the impression that Jesus was a mighty figure who took the world by storm as soon as he appeared on the scene. However, the ‘solid historical figure’ melts into thin air at the first brush with modern historical research. Biblical and Christological research undertaken in the West during the last two and a half centuries has cast doubt on the historicity of every aspect of the life of Jesus, including his existence as a historical person.” 

Historicity of Jesus as described in Gospels has been one of the principal dogmas of all Christian denominations. Now, as Ram Swarup used to say, historicity by itself does not mean much. You and I are historical persons, but that fact by itself does not confer greatness or any other virtue on us. However, when historicity of the founder is touted as a point of superiority, we are inclined to examine it a little more closely.

Albert Schweitzer, the world famous theologian and missionary, admitted that, “There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the Life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of the God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth and died to give his work final consecration, never had any existence. This image has not been destroyed from without. It has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by concrete historical problems which came to surface one after the other and … refused to be palmed down to fit the design on which Jesus of the theology has been constructed…”

Silence of the Pagans
The history of ancient Rome has been recorded in great detail. There is a vast body of historical and philosophical literature written in or referring to the time-frame when Jesus is supposed to have walked the earth. But that literature is oblivious of the mighty figure called Jesus Christ. Seneca (2 BC-66 AD), Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD), Martial (40-102 AD), Plutarch (45-125 AD), Juvenal (55-140 AD), Apuleius (d. 170 AD), Pausanius (d. 185 AD) and Dio Casius (155-240 AD) do not mention any Jesus or Christ. Epictetus (50-100 AD) refers to Galileans starting with Judas the Galilean who led the Jewish revolt against Rome in the first decade of the First Century, but not to Jesus of Nazareth who is supposed to have come from Galilee shortly afterwards. There is no reference to any Jesus in any pagan work of the time.


Critical scrutiny has shown that all these references either do not relate to Jesus of Nazareth, or are influenced by Christian tradition, or are clever Christian fabrications. Ian Wilson concludes that “in  all this there is scarcely a crumb of information to compel a belief in Jesus’ existence”Paul Johnson comments that fabrications “occur throughout the history of Christianity up to Renaissance and even beyond”Sita Ram Goel has pointed out that word “Christian” does not appear in the Christian literature itself before 140 AD. On the other hand, anti-Christian polemics which appears for the first time around 160 AD, starts by questioning the existence of a character called Jesus Christ


Non  evidence of Jewish historians
As per Christian tradition, Jesus was a Jew who lived in Palestine during the first 30 or 33 years of the era which is supposed to have begun from the year of his birth. One would expect him to get a pride of place in the writings of Jewish historians who lived and wrote during the same period or a little later. It is, therefore, strange that they are silent on Jesus or the religion he is said to have founded. Philo (20 BC-54 AD), who wrote a history of the Jews, knows no Jesus Christ and no Christians. Nor does another historian of the same period, Justus of Tiberius.

Biblical scholars have compiled them with great diligence. The findings and conclusions of their research are available to anyone with relatively small effort. Among others, for example, Arun Shourie has documented them in great detail in his Harvesting Our Souls: Missionaries, Their Design, their claims (ASA Publications, New Delhi, 2000). Small wonder that no responsible theologian or historian is now prepared to construct the life-story of Jesus from material provided by the gospels.
“But that is the whole point. You are nit-picking, going on and on about the discrepancies among the accounts of an event in different gospels. The details of Gospels are not what is important. What matters is the figure of faith that they weave,” the missionaries would say.
Although this is a somersault from tall claims about a solid figure of history as opposed to mythological mumbo-jumbo, we would let it pass. There is no doubt that millions of Christians through the ages have derived solace and guidance from the Gospels.
 

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