Jesus Christ: An Artifice for Aggression by Sita Ram Goel

110 Pages·2004·1.18 MB·English

by  Sita Ram Goel

Jesus Christ
An Artifice for Aggression
A 6th century mosaic of Jesus at Church San Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy
Sita Ram Goel
Jesus Christ

An Artifice for Aggression

Sita Ram Goel

VOICE OF INDIA

NEW DELHI
ISBN 81-85990-16-6
© Sita Ram Goel
First Published: 1994
First Reprint: 2001
Published by Voice of India, 2/18, Ansari Road, New Delhi - 110 002
and printed at Rajkamal Electric Press, New Delhi -110 033
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Preface

The first glimpse of the Jesus of the gospels came to me in
1956. My Jesuist friend who had tried to convert me, had failed
in the attempt. When we were back at the mission headquarters
in Patna, the following dialogue took place between us.
“You believe that Jesus was an avatar,” he asked.
“Yes, I do,” I replied.
“Can an avatar tell a lie?”
“He is not supposed to.”
“What if Jesus says he is the only God?”
“He can't say that.”
My friend picked up a copy of the New Testament and read
out several passages from the gospels. Jesus did say in so many
words not only that he was the only God but also that those who
did not accept his claim would burn for ever in the infernal pit.
I realized with painful surprise that Jesus was not all Sermon on
the Mount as I had been led to believe by his Hindu votaries.
Years passed, and I had no time to spare for Jesus. I turned
to him again in the eighties when Ram Swarup made me wise
about the character of monotheistic creeds. It was then that I
turned to the gospels. I was horrified. Now I could see why the
history of Christianity had been what it had been. The source of
the poison was in the Jesus of the gospels. The rest of my studies
followed.
A few years ago I was discussing the menace of Christian
missions with a Gandhian friend. He agreed with me that there
was something sinister about them. I told him that we shall have
to tell our people the truth about Jesus if we wanted to tackle the
missions. He was visibly shaken, and said to me in a voice
choked with emotion, “Sitabhai. Jesus ko kucch mat kahiye
(Brother Sita, do not touch Jesus)!”
“Have you read the gospels,” I asked him.
He was annoyed, and shot back, “That is a personal ques-
tion.”
I had to drop the subject. Every time I have asked opinion-
ated people about the source of their opinion on a particular
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vi / JESUS CHRIST
question, I have been accused of being personal. I am thinking
of writing an essay — Advantages of Being An Ass.
And now I have defied the ban. I do not know how my
Gandhian friend will take it.
I have wondered over the years why we Hindus have re-
mained preoccupied with the behaviour patterns of Muslims and
Christians and not with the belief systems which create those
behaviour patterns. We object to Christian missions, but refuse
to discuss Christianity and its God, Jesus. We object to Islamic
terrorism, but refuse to have a look at Islam and its prophet,
Muhammad. I see no sense or logic in this Hindu habit.
In fact, we go a step further. We appeal to the Christian
missionaries in the name of Jesus, and ask them not to do what
they have been doing. We appeal to the Muslims in the name of
Muhammad, and ask them to stop doing what they have been
doing. In the process, we have invented a “real” Jesus and a
“true” Christianity. We have also invented a “real” Muhammad
and a “true” Islam. The missionary and the mullah smiles at our
inventions but goes ahead and makes good use of our soft-
headedness. That is why we have failed to solve the “communal
problem” all these years. We have never tried to find out why
our own people, which both Christians and Muslims are, should
become alienated from us when they pass under the spell of
Christianity and Islam.
Flattering the bully may become necessary when the bully is
powerful and there remains no other way of softening him except
by extolling his heroes or his cult. Hindus have experienced such
emergencies vis-a-vis both Islam and Christianity. But there is
no reason for their continuing with the same psychology. Hindus
should not convert an apaddharma into Sanatana Dharma.
New Delhi SITA RAM GOEL
15 April 1994
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Contents

Preface v
1. Jesus of History 1
1.1. Quest of the Jesus of History 2
1.2. The Jewish Evidence 3
1.3. The Pagan Evidence 4
1.4. Evidence of the Gospels 6
1.5. Summing Up 31
2. Jesus of Fiction 35
2.1. The “real” Jesus Stories 36
2.2. Jesus as Synthetic Product 52
3. Jesus of Faith 60
3.1. Jesus of the Gospels 66
3.2. The Gospels are the First Nazi Manifesto 70
3.3. Christ of Kerygma 71
3.4. Christianity is a Big Lie 76
4. Christianity Crumbles in the West 80
4.1. The Scene in India 82
4.2. Jesus is Junk 85
Appendices
1. Of Pagan Gods and Heresies 86
2. The Church as a Tool of Imperialism 90
3. Spiritual Shift 94
4. Hindus vis-a-vis Jesus 97
Bibliography 107
Index 109
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Chapter 1
Jesus of History
Christian missionary propaganda in general and the theologies of
Fulfillment, Indigenisation (or Acculturation), and Liberation in
particular leave the impression as if Jesus Christ was a mighty figure
who took the world by storm as soon as he appeared on the scene.
Evidential Theology which tells us of miracles which are supposed to
have accompanied his birth and death as well as of those reported to
have been performed by him in the course of his ministry, has been one
of the main weapons in the armoury of Christian missions. I remember
very vividly the words of my friend, the Jesuit missionary, who tried to
convert me in 1956. “Let me tell you at the very outset,” he had said,
“that Jesus is no mythological mumbo-jumbo like your Rama and
Krishna, and even Buddha. On the contrary, he is a solid historical figure
whose miracles were witnessed and vouchsafed by many contemporary
people.”
The historicity of Jesus Christ as described in the gospels has been
for a long time one of the principal dogmas of all Christian
denominations. In India where the history of the search for the Jesus of
history remains unknown even to the so-called educated elite, the
missionaries continue to hawk this dogma without fear of contradiction.
The scene in the modern West, however, has undergone a great change.
What we witness over there is that this “solid historical figure” has
evaporated into thin air as a result of painstaking Biblical and
Christological research undertaken over the last more than two hundred
years, mostly by theologians belonging to the Protestant churches.
We need not bother about the miracles which are supposed
to have accompanied the birth and death of Jesus or to have been
performed by him. The subject was dealt with very aptly by
Edward Gibbon who wrote towards the end of the eighteenth
century. “But how shall we excuse,” he had asked, “the supine
inattention of the Pagan and philosophic world to those evidences
which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence not to their
reason but to their senses? During the age of Christ, of his
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JESUS OF HISTORY / 3
Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), Professor of Oriental Languages at the
University of Hamburg in Germany, subjected the Bible to higher criticism
and wrote in secret some 4,000 pages. His work was published in seven
fragments by his friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, several years after
his death. The last fragment, The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples,
published in 1778, presented Jesus as a failed Jewish revolutionary
whose dead body was stolen from his tomb by his disciples in order to
spread the story of his resurrection. A storm of agonised protest blew
over the Christian world. But that did not stop the theologians from
pressing forward on the path blazed by Reimarus. Today the shelves
in libraries all over the Western world are laden with Lives of Jesus. There
is hardly a year when some scholar or the other does not come up with a
new Life of Jesus. In fact, by now the Jesus of history has become a
veritable industry. All available evidence, Christian and non-Christian,
has been and is being examined and presented from all sorts of angles.
The Jewish Evidence
Christian tradition tells us that Jesus was a Jew who lived in Palestine
during the first 30 or 33 years of the era which is supposed to have
commenced from the date of his birth. It is, however, strange that Jewish
historians who lived and wrote during the same period or a little
later, fail to notice him as well as the religion supposed to have been
founded by him. Philo (20 BC-54 AD), who wrote a history of the
Jews, knows no Jesus Christ and no Christians. So also another historian
of the same period, Justus of Tiberius.
The most remarkable case is that of Flavius Josephus who lived
from AD 36 or 37 to 99 or 100. He completed two monumental works —
The Jewish War in 77 AD and the Antiquities of the Jews fifteen years
later. The histories mention no Jesus Christ. His first work relates to
AD 66-74 when the Romans put down a widespread Jewish rebellion in
Palestine, and by which time the Christian church at Jerusalem is supposed
to have functioned for 35 years. The work has not a word about Jesus or
his followers. Christian apologists point to two passages, one long
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4 / JESUS CHRIST
and the other very short, which mention Jesus as a wise man and also as
Christ. But scholars have proved quite convincingly that both of them are
either clumsy Christian interpolations or have been tempered with by
Christian scribes.2 It has to be remembered that none of the manuscripts
of Josephus’ Antiquities is older than the eleventh century, so that
Christian scribes have had ample opportunities for tempering with
the text.
The vast rabbinical literature of the Jews, composed during the first
two and a quarter centuries of the Christian era, contains only five authentic
references to Jesus. But they “do not conclusively establish his historicity,
as none of them is sufficiently early”. Moreover, “they are so vague
in their chronology that they differ by as much as 200 years in the
dates they assign to him”. None of the five Jesuses fits the Christian
scheme of Jesus Christ’s birth or life or death. The Talmud betrays no
knowledge of Jesus independent of the Christian tradition, and it is conceded
by most Christian scholars that it “is useless as a source of information
about Jesus”.3
The Pagan Evidence
The Greeks and Romans have left to posterity a vast historical and
philosophical literature written in or referring to the time-bracket when
Jesus is supposed to have lived. But it is unaware of him. 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.
2 William Benjamin Smith, Ecce Deus: Studies of Primitive Christianity, London,
1912, pp. 230-37; Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Part III, Caesar And Christ,
Fourth Printing, New York, 1944, p. 552; Paul JohnsoAn H, istory of Christianity, Penguin
Books, London, 1978, p. 21; Ian Wilson, Jesus: The Evidence, Pan Books, 1985, pp.
51-54; Michael Arnheim,I s Christianity True?, London, 1984, p. 4; G.A. WellsD, id Jesus
Exist?, London, 1986, pp. 10-11. Many more critical studies on the subject can be
cited.
3 G.A. Wells, op. cit, p. 12 with reference to J. Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, London,
1925, and M. Goldstein, Jesus in the Jewish Tradition, New York, 1950.
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