Dear Editor,

By now, most of us, and especially those of us who celebrate Easter at this time of the year, must realise that the Gospel accounts on which these celebrations are based are unreliable.

With unverified claims like the one found in Matthew about many dead people coming back to life, and the contradictory claims about Jesus’s final and permanent burial by Joseph, as opposed to the women who wanted to complete the same burial with the oils making nonsense of the Gospels, other “proofs” are needed.

One such “proof” being offered for the truthfulness of the Easter story is the alleged claim of a famous non-Christian Jewish historian named Josephus — a historian under the patronage of the Emperor and who lived to within a hundred years of Jesus. He is supposed to have written this statement in his famous documents:

“About this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call Him a man. For He was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people that accept the truth gladly. He won over many of the Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. When Pilate, upon hearing Him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned Him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love Him did not give up their affection for Him. On the third day, He appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvellous things about Him. And the tribe of Christians, so called after Him, has still to this day not disappeared.”

Now, even most Christian scholars have conceded that Josephus could not have written such a fantastic claim. For starters, elsewhere in his writings, when describing the fate of Jesus’s brother James, Josephus clearly indicated that he did not believe what Jesus preached was true. Unlike the famous quote, in regards to James, Josephus said that it was the Christians who called Jesus “the Christ” and not him.

As such, he would not be calling him “the Christ” or “a wise man”. It is very likely, as Josephus would have therefore concluded, that as Jesus was not the Christ, he would not have “appeared to them restored to life” according to “prophecy”. He also would not have claimed that the people accepted “the truth” gladly. Also, Josephus could not have said “…if indeed one ought to call him a man” as he rejected what he preached.

However, the entire quote is very suspicious for other reasons. Josephus was talking about the terror of Pilate’s rule. Immediately after this quote, Josephus writes, “About the same time also, another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder…” – the intrusiveness of the pro-Jesus quote is clear.

Finally, to complete the picture, that famous quote is not to be found in all the copies of Josephus’s works. The ninth-century scholar Photius and the 16th-century scholar Vossius both had copies of Josephus’s writings, without the famous quote. This suggests that the inventors of that quote did not succeed in altering all copies of Josephus’s works.

The fact that the early Christian fathers were prepared to invent stories in an attempt to give legitimacy to the divine Jesus story should convince any rational-thinking person that there was no miracle-working messiah named Jesus. I am certainly thoroughly convinced that there existed no such person at all.

Michael A Dingwall

michael_a_dingwall@hotmail.com