JESUS THE CONJURER
Index
HIS MOTHER AND FAMILY WERE SCEPTICAL
MCGRATH ON THE MIRACLES OF JESUS
INTRODUCTION
This book considers the evidence that Jesus, if he existed, was nothing
more than a stage-magician minus the stage of course. It shows the absurdity of trusting in his
miracles. Why should we trust in his
resurrection when he had such dodgy miracles behind him? My book, Non-Miraculous Witnesses,
demonstrates that the Church discerned many miracles in the New Testament that
were not miracles at all and which were not clearly presented as such by these
scriptures.
JESUS THE CONJURER
It is nonsense to run through all the miracles of Jesus – if that is what
they were - to show how they could have been performed. There are enough books on magic and enough
shows on television that tell us how to do the impossible with magic
tricks. The miracles are nearly all
mundane suggesting that if they were made up everything else probably was as
well.
A magician works by distracting
the audience, by doing actions which seem unnecessary if one has magical powers
but which are needed to do the trick – like always pulling a rabbit out of a
hat that is resting on a table – and by not telling the whole truth. Jesus can be proven to have told lies. And he depended on prophecies that anybody
could fulfil and used them as credentials.
If Jesus claimed to have
magically cured people who could have been cured by psychological means then he
would have been willing to use trickery.
Most of his healings could be explained that way. He would not have known much about psychology
but he would have noticed that sometimes cures took place that seemed to have a
link with the brightening of spirits and having a positive outlook.
Jesus’ doctrine is wrong so God
would not have given him miracle powers and the Devil would have used him to
propound smarter doctrines so if Jesus claimed supernatural powers they were
tricks.
Jesus said that John the
Baptist was the greatest man ever and he named him as his precursor so John
must have known him like nobody else did.
Jesus said that John was from God and the best prophet. This implies that John knew him the
best. And the Baptist was not convinced
by Jesus who even had to send messengers to tell him that he did holy signs to
prove that he was the messenger of God (Matthew 11). When John was sceptical what does that say
about Jesus? The fact that John needed
to be told was enough to prove that John was sceptical for had he been a believer
he would have followed Jesus’ activities with a close interest.
Whole villages that Jesus
visited were sceptical about his miracles (Matthew 11). This was while they were supposedly the talk
of the land so they would have known if he could alter nature.
The miracle of the loaves and
fishes could have been done in the dark which makes trickery easier. In Luke 9 we read that the five thousand were
fed in a desert or waste area and significantly near the city of
The Matthew and Luke gospels say
that the Devil took Jesus to the pinnacle of the
Perhaps Satan helped Jesus do
miracles through trickery. Many have
testified in the past that Satan rather than changing nature like magic
manipulates it so that a miracle seems to have happened. For example, he could make a ghost seem to
appear to you by making you mistake a ray of moonlight coming in your window
for the shape of a person causing you to imagine that you saw a person who
spoke to you. The gospels make no effort
to eliminate this hypothesis for the miracles of Jesus. They just give us dubious evidence which is
faulty precisely because we are not told enough. The gospels certainly do magic tricks with
facts, that is what conjurers do, they don’t tell all but use
misdirection.
SUSPICIOUS MIRACLES
Here are the details about the miracles that give grounds for suspicion
of trickery.
Jesus raised Lazarus from the
“dead”? Jesus even said that he would
only do this if his friends believed in him first meaning that it was not a miraculous
sign. A God would only do miracles and change
the way he set nature up for a good reason.
That reason would have to be because miracles are pointers to his power
and love and the truth.
So Jesus told his friends that he
would only be able to raise Lazarus if they believed that he could do it (John
11:40). But belief should not
matter. Belief was required in occult
operations so we are as good as being told that Jesus was into occultism with
its magical pretences. It was like God
killing Lazarus by mistake and then putting things right. Jesus once said that the writings of Moses
were proof enough that he was the Son of God (John 5:46) which was a totally
insane thing to say and shows that the author of John did not know the Old
Testament well and was not related to the apostles in any way at all. But it proves that Jesus had no intention of
raising men from the dead supernaturally at least.
What was Jesus going to do if
they didn’t believe? He would probably
have still pretended to raise Lazarus. He
wanted people to believe he would raise him before it happened so that their
perception would be fine-tuned to put all scepticism aside. It was all psychological manipulation. Magicians
need to instil faith in their audience so that they will be less likely to
catch them out in their trickery. The secret
is to get people to believe what they want to believe.
Lazarus would have been wrapped
up in bandages so how was he able to walk out of the tomb in the robes when
Jesus called him forth? This suggests
that it was all a trick. He was prepared
for the resurrection hoax.
The Jews were so sure that the blind man
Jesus cured was never really blind in the first place that they got together
and interviewed the man’s parents (John 9).
The parents said he was but the gospel indicates that they were habitual
liars. They told the Jews that they did
not know who cured the blindness but they must have known. They told the Jews to ask their son so they
knew he knew. They were not scared of
telling on Jesus for it would have been no secret anyway. After all the Jews knew something was
supposed to have happened and knew it was Jesus. When the Jews behaved this way it proves that
they were sure that Jesus’ previous miracles were fake for they would not have
wanted to find out that any more were real miracles and end up with egg on
their faces. It could have been that the
parents were honest and did not want to say that Jesus cured their boy for he
was never blind so they told the smallest lie they felt they could tell and
should tell. The incident shows that the
Jews were honest investigators and were sceptical meaning that Jesus was a
fraud.
Jesus realised the dead daughter of Jairus
was still alive and he wanted to revive her which was why he put all the people
in the house out so that he would be credited with a miracle if he
succeeded. Jesus said she was not dead
but sleeping. But still he may have let people think he raised her from the
dead!
Jesus was said to have revived the dead son
of the widow of Naim. When the pallbearers
stopped he touched the bier which shows that there was something going on. There was something odd about the miracle
when only Luke dares to record it. Luke
has Paul raising a man from the dead despite Paul admitting that the man was
not dead! Not a reliable reporter! When people have been mistaken for dead today
how much more could this have happened in the days of Jesus and Paul? Page 61, A Christian Faith for Today, W
Montgomery Watt, Routledge,
When Jesus stopped the storm it could not
have been hard to stop for it was not much of a storm when he slept through the
whole thing.
The fig tree is a suspicious miracle for
Jesus cursed it one day in front of people and it was found withered the next
day. The tree could have been dug out
and replaced by a bad one. This would be
an appalling sign if it is a miracle. It
would show the kind of standard the gospellers had.
Jesus fulfilled prophecies that were not
prophecies at all and ones which anybody could fulfil and the rest of them are
left unfulfilled and we are told they will be sorted out by him later. Jesus failed all the tests for being a true
prophet. He was a fake.
When one miracle is or could be a magical
trick that means we have to refrain from making up our minds about any of the
rest of them and be agnostic.
HIS MOTHER AND FAMILY WERE
SCEPTICAL
Mary, Jesus’ own
mother, did not believe in Jesus’ magic power even after he turned the water
into wine at the
The people who knew him best,
his own brothers did not believe in him (John 7:5; Mark 3:21). Their testimony is stronger than anybody
else’s. Christians say they did not
believe in his message but they would have understood it and believed it for it
was only an ethical thing at that stage.
Their problem was with the claim to be the Son of Man and Son of God and
to have the power to use God’s power.
What supports the sceptical family even more
is the fact that there were other reasons why they would have been right. One of these is that Jesus said that no sign
would be granted to his generation but the sign of Jonah which would be the
resurrection of the Son of Man (Matthew
Some say the other miracles were
private ones and only the person who experienced them could understand them as
miracles. But the resurrection was to be
a general miracle for all. If this
interpretation is right then it follows that Jesus did not expect his own
resurrection but that of the whole human race who had died. His own resurrection was still too
private. What is the difference between
twelve people seeing a vision at once and giving no details to prove that it
was the same vision they all saw and twelve people being cured at different
times? None. Perhaps the Church schemed to make it seem
that Jesus only meant that he would rise and not that all would rise when it
became evident that all would not rise.
There is no point in private miracles – though the gospels claim that Jesus
certainly did some of these. No sensible
God would expect us to believe in an extraordinary claim just because somebody
claimed it happened. Extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence.
Jesus made the
equivalent of nine hundred bottles of good wine at Cana when the guests were
already drunk (page 6, A Christian Faith for Today, W Montgomery Watt,
Routledge, London, 2002). The good wine
that Jesus created from water was served at the end of the feast when usually
the bad wine was given out at that point for the guests didn’t know any
different having had too much. This is reported in the gospel of John. The gospel says it was remarked by people how
strange it was to be giving out good wine so late on at the wedding. This is a miracle blessing the sin of drunkenness. It sounds more like a hoax – the Devil will
not help him with such a sin.
THE WITNESSES TO THE TRICKS
The Bible says
that Jesus and his followers were held guilty of fraud and wickedness by the
Jews. If so then there were far better
grounds for disbelieving the Bible tale of a Jesus with magical gifts than
there are for accepting it for there are hundreds of testimonies for the former
and only five from the believers. These
are the gospels and the Book of Acts.
And only the gospel of John claims to be the work of an eyewitness which
makes it worse. And things are worsened
still when that gospels has a different Jesus from that of the other three
gospels.
It is naïve to argue that the miracles were
genuine because nobody criticised them as tricks in the early days. It stands to reason that they were even if we
have no record of it. Doesn’t the
Matthew Gospel tell us that the Jews believed that there would be a fake
resurrection to top off all the deceptions that Jesus had been into? It does not even say that the Jews really
believed the soldiers who may have told them that there had been angels at the
tomb. It does not even say if the body
vanished miraculously or what happened to it.
We just read that the soldiers were told to accuse the disciples of
raiding the tomb. No responsible answer
is given to the accusations of trickery which shows that the author himself
knew or believed that the Jews were right.
The gospels indicate that everyone was a
sceptic where Jesus was concerned when he supposedly died. If the
sceptical Jews told the sceptical Romans to make the tomb of Jesus secure in
case there would be a fake resurrection which would be the zenith of Jesus’
conjuring tricks as Matthew says then this is valuable. When sceptics say such things among
themselves it proves that they are sure they are right. They did not say, “Let us act so as to
discredit the resurrection of this man if he rises from the dead”, which is
what one would expect. When a
supernatural story surfaces it is wiser and more logical to believe the persons
who say nothing magical took place. The
gospels lead one to think that they were so sure that Jesus was an incompetent
miracle-man that the only miracle they envisaged taking place at the tomb would
be a fake one. Instead of openly having
the body removed and hiding the body in a secret place so that nobody would be
impressed if it went missing, they let him be in his tomb and even had guards posted. That shows you they were totally sure no real
resurrection would take place. They were
even sure that no trick or Devil was going to help Jesus now. It speaks of their certainty that the man didn’t
have enough magical power to move a feather.
Jesus would not have been
crucified had he possessed abilities not of this world. The Jews would have preferred to kill him
without anybody knowing in case he would rise if they were going to kill him at
all. He spent enough time on his own
praying for the opportunity to arise.
And they would have tried exiling him or jailing him before they would
have tried killing him. We have the
testimony of the actions of the Jews and not just their words that Jesus could
do no miracles. And they did it though
the people wanted no Jew however bad handed over to the Romans and crucified
and though Jesus was supposed to be popular.
What stronger testimony against Jesus could there be? The apostles would have known soon after
getting involved with Jesus if they could get away with following him and
deceiving for him so their testimony is weaker and we do not know why they died
decades later or how many of these deaths were not natural. But what use is a handful against the
educated Jews who had everything to lose by making a mistake and did it because
they were sure it was not a mistake?
There is too much of an effort made in the gospels to show the Jews in a
bad light. That trick, attacking the
person so that nobody will believe the person though the person is telling the
truth, is as old as
Christians will reply that
after Pentecost many Jews converted to Christianity showing that the disbelief
of the leaders was just a refusal to admit the fact that Jesus did have magic
power. But the records never state that
it was the words and works of Jesus that persuaded them but the message of
salvation. And besides where is it said
that they were very theologically competent Jews?
The Jews accused Jesus of doing
miracles by the power of Satan (Matthew 27:64).
They might have thought that Jesus was just doing tricks and Satan was
manipulating the witnesses through nature to see them as miracles just like he
manipulates people to steal or murder and to see these sins as good (in actual
fact, you need to be insane in the first place to even listen to the Devil so
the Devil tempting you to sin is an absurdity for you can only tempt yourself
for when you are insane to start you don’t need a Devil to make you insane).
There had to be witnesses who
were bribed to give a natural explanation if Jesus did miracles. The Jews had plenty of money and power to get
them and train and coach them to boot.
But we will never know if these witnesses were telling the truth or not. Witnesses appeared at Jesus’ trial to give
evidence that he was a fake and a false prophet who failed to predict the
future and taught absurdities. We read
that the Jews were desperate to have Jesus found guilty and put to death so
they would have chosen better false witnesses.
This suggests that they were real witnesses and due to nerves and fear
of the fans of Jesus they messed it all up.
Or did they? The gospels simply
say their testimony couldn’t agree but the gospels were not in any position to judge
that. No evidence is given only hearsay
that their testimony was useless. They were
probably witnesses who knew that Jesus was a fraud.
The apostles were not forced by
the hostile Jews to be silent on Jesus’ works according to the Book of
Acts. This suggests that the miracles
were too well known as natural, too well known as tricks or never
happened. Any one of these could be the
reason they did not bother silencing them.
Nobody takes cranks seriously.
The gospellers never give
enough detail for us to be sure that magic trickery was impossible and that the
supernatural was the only explanation.
Perhaps they did not know themselves how much trickery Jesus pulled
off. It is more reasonable to hold that
the accusation of trickery is the truth than to claim that Jesus did have
miracle powers and especially when the gospels admit that the Jewish leaders
who knew Jesus rejected his powers. When
in a bit of doubt you have to deny that a miracle happened otherwise you will
find yourself believing anything. It is
more reasonable to believe that the anti-miracle witnesses were right for they
were not answered than to believe that he did miracles. The gospels merely report and do not
refute. They do not attack the testimony
of persons who made allegations against Christ or show that they are
untrustworthy. They only say they were
worth watching but what use is saying for we have no evidence that they knew
what they were talking about?
The Jewish debunkers of Jesus
were more educated than Jesus or his entourage so their word comes first. Christians will reply that we listen to the
testimony of uneducated people and it is as good as that of the
intelligent. We do listen but the
smarter a person is the more reliable they can be and the more acceptable the
testimony is. The smarter people will
see through miracles better than the stupid ones provided they are smart the
right way which the Jewish debunkers were for they had to be theologically
competent in handling religious cranks.
It will not do to accuse the Jews of lying for what evidence do we have
that they were? The leaders were
habitually slandered by the gospellers to stop anybody taking them seriously.
HEALED LIED FOR JESUS
Some of the people the gospels say were cured by Jesus lied for him.
Every healer has his fans who
are willing to fake illness or exaggerate it to make people believe that he
cured them. The fact that these were not
explicitly mentioned in the gospels suggests that they were only interested in
making Jesus look good and not in the truth.
You cannot write a book to defend a miracle-worker when you do not
discredit the frauds who brought disrepute on him. You do not do it.
When Jesus “cured” the bleeding
woman why did he not turn around and see her when he felt the power leaving him
at her touch. He pushed through the
crowd to find her which proves she couldn’t have got away if she had really
been near enough to touch him. In that
charged electric atmosphere many people would have felt cured though they were
not. Jesus just sought out the person
who gave out the signal that she was cured or felt cured and pretended it was
her he meant. The woman was scared and
that could explain why she felt cured.
Strong emotion can simulate a cure and make you feel cured. The failure of the gospels to tell us if the
cure was permanent shows that the writers were incompetent as religious
reporters and were unduly biased.
The woman was dishonest when
she did not want to say that Jesus cured her and was frightened to do so though
when she saw him push through the crowd she must have known Jesus wanted it out
in the open.
The blind man of
Jesus, the synoptics say,
performed miracles that he wished to be kept secret. The recipients of the wonders promised to be
discreet and then they went and gossiped all over the place. When we are asked to believe people like that
that Jesus cured then we are asked to swallow it all on blind faith. If they told lies it is more likely that that
they lied about being cured.
Jesus himself occasionally said
that they were liars or hysterical for he said their faith healed them when
they started shrieking about a miracle.
Don’t object that the disciples
saw them or that Jesus told the world what he had done later. There is no evidence and so it is most likely
that the recipients did the telling. We
have to stick to what is indicated for speculation is no use.
NO AFFIDAVITS FOR MIRACLES
There are no affidavits or sworn testimonies to verify the gospel stories
about Jesus.
You cannot ask anybody to
believe in a miracle or seeming miracle unless you name the witnesses and
evaluate their testimony. A single
testimony about them alone is worthless and if its is second hand and third
hand and so on this will make it worse.
If you think it will do you then you have to believe all you are
told. The gospellers never named the
witnesses or said that they put their memory and honesty to the test.
Christians respond that we
would not believe no matter how strong the evidence was. But that does not mean that it should be as
unprofessional and weak as it is. They
are saying that we can resist believing but we could do that even if the
evidence for a miracle is as strong as the evidence for the existence of the
moon. And evidence causes belief. The unnecessary weakness of the evidence
proves that it is more reasonable to disbelieve for a supernatural power can’t
be involved. And how do they or God know
we would not believe even if the evidence came up and bit our noses off?
We don’t know if anybody could
corroborate the story that Jesus put demons into swine (Matthew 8), gradually
cured the blind man (Mark 8), if anybody who knew if the hand of the man who
had a shrivelled hand was really restored or never shrivelled in the first place
(Matthew 12) or if anybody knew if the Canaanite woman’s daughter was really
possessed and really cured (Mark 7). The
gospels were written to provide evidence for Jesus’ claims and only fools just
say a miracle happened and no more like they have done. Serious reasons for belief in a miracle are
needed.
One miracle that is proven as
far as possible is better than a hundred that are not. This proves that the gospels had no divine
protection against error.
The gospellers don’t so much as
say that they are very sure or how sure they are that their stories are
right.
Luke says he collected the
testimonies so that Theophilus could be sure of what he was told but anybody
can collect testimonies and gossip and not check them out right and take too
much for granted.
Few are the miracles that the
apostles who Jesus designated as his witnesses and testators seen. They verified hardly any of them for us. When the apostles have the job of providing
the evidence and it is not done what is the point of considering
Christianity?
Any writer with a magical story
who expects people to believe because he says so could only be credulous or a
deceiver himself.
MCGRATH ON THE MIRACLES OF JESUS
The apostles said that Jesus’ miracles demonstrated the truth of his
claims. Jesus himself never treated his
miracles apologetically except in so far as they were to be signs of the coming
I want to use PJ Mc Grath’s
study of the miracles of Jesus in his excellent, Believing in God. He said that the four gospel writers have to
assumed to have been sincere because being a Christian had no benefits in those
days – this is illogical when the authors were anonymous. Joseph Smith was perfectly sane and got only
persecution and abuse and every crime he had committed paraded through the
papers and no money and books and a Church of only six members for publishing
the Book of Mormon. And he was still a
fraud. We have greater grounds for
suspecting the gospellers because they were anonymous. The earlier writers never mentioned who these
books were written by and Luke and Matthew depended on Mark for nearly all
their miracle stories suggesting that there was nothing better they could do
and were not eyewitnesses.
Mark says that Jesus came from Tyre and
travelled through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee and into the Decapolis area which
is silly for that is too long a route and there was no road from Sidon to
Galilee in the first century (page 158) and there did not need to be for one
could go back to Galilee through Tyre. The
Case for Christ says that it was not too long for
Mark located Gersanes on the
And Mark was confused about the
towns near
It could not have been good for
Matthew and Luke when they depended on what was not even an eyewitness
testimony to create their own gospels.
The author of Luke and Acts
liked to claim that the prophets all said that Jesus would die and rise again
so that anybody who believes in him will be forgiven. This could be a lie to make quick converts or
it could be that the author was not a Christian for Christianity was based on
the Old Testament so he would have known that this was untrue if he had been a
real Christian. The gospel was kept
secret so the latter is the most probable option and I can only conclude that
the gospel was pure invention at least where it has different material from
Mark and Matthew.
McGrath asserts what when they
cannot be trusted with ordinary things about Jesus they should be trusted less
with their miracles (page 130, Believing in God). The person who makes loads of mistakes cannot
be trusted in more serious matters.
Let me give an example of my own of the
dishonesty of the gospel in the mundane things.
When Jesus told the Jews they blasphemed and sinned when they said he
was using Satan to cast out Devils we do not read that they answered back, “But
your argument fails for the Devil would cast out demons to get disciples for
his sorcerer – you - and they could go to harass somebody else.” They would have said that for they would have
been ready for him for it was not the first time they locked horns with Jesus. This shows the extreme bias of the
gospels. They only care about the one
side: theirs’. They were prepared to
slander the Jews to defend it. Jesus
knew all about the Devil’s strange ways like every Christian does so his
brushing off the objection without proof suggests that he did not care who or
what was doing the miracles. Whoever
would traffic with the Devil is trafficking with the Devil. John was written long after the other three gospels
for the latest of them, Luke, and its sequel Acts says that the Church was very
much tied to Judaism. But John has them
completely separate which implies a much later date. John refers to the excommunication of
Christians from the synagogue which happened in 85 AD (page 161). It might have been written earlier than that
but when it could have been late that is enough to warn us not to pay much
attention to its miracles. You only
believe in miracles when the sources are immaculate and near the event or as a
last resort. It also belies the alleged
divine inspiration of the gospel. It is
the fake word of God.
WAS JESUS DEBUNKED?
Of course as atheists we know that the New Testament miracles, especially
the resurrection of Jesus, have been made up and that the real Jesus was a
fraud if he claimed supernatural powers.
The miracles are mostly not that marvellous and great so if they have
been invented the same may be true of the more mundane stories about
Jesus. Once a liar does not mean always
a liar so we would have to be agnostic about anything else they say.
Christians deny that Jesus’
life, as it is in the gospels, and his miracle works were refuted by those who
would have known.
ARGUMENT 1. If miracles were made up the New Testament
would have been rapidly discredited by those who knew the real story and nobody
would be believing them now.
REPLY. All religions use similar arguments, “If X
never happened our religion would not exist now”. They are naïve and simplistic and
deceptive.
And the miracles of Jesus would
have been contradicted by false records and equally false witnesses if need
be. These efforts are lost to us which
shows both that the Jews lost a great deal of historical material and books in
the disasters that befell their land after Jesus died and that the Church may
have successfully got rid of the damaging information. We know that the Church did weed out anything
that cast doubt on its version of events.
The Jews accused Jesus of black
magic and of deception (Matthew 27:64) and did it among themselves though the
gospels portray them as liars. Why would
they lie among themselves? And also,
they accused Jesus of black magic especially when he cast demons out and he did
not give a good reply to their allegation.
He just whimpered that Satan can’t cast out Satan. That was weak for Satan could do that to do
more harm somewhere else or Satan can pretend to cast out Satan. And who is to say that Satan really has
complete control over his demons? There could
be stupid demons that possess people that he would only be too happy to cast
out.
Jesus’ failure to close them up
shows that they had a point! And black
magic is the form of occultism that has the most power simply because it scares
people something stupid so that they cannot see through the crudest trickery. A totally fake black magician will be the
best occultist and charlatan of all.
Perhaps the Jews were bad
debunkers. They should have been saying
that the lad wasn’t possessed at all but sick and that Satan can heal the
sick. Christians today claim that Satan
can heal the sick to get their devotion or for some dark purpose.
In the First Apology of
Justin Martyr we read that there was a Simon from Gitto who was a Samaritan
and he did mighty miracles in
ARGUMENT 2. When you believe in the supernatural and you
see the supernatural deeds of a holy man and want to debunk them you have to
say they were black magic for it will not do to say they are tricks when they
can’t be. So Jesus did miracles. You can still accuse even the greatest
wonder-worker today of deception and still get some to believe you so the supernatural
nature of Jesus’ wonders must have been irrefutable beyond belief.
REPLY.
But then why do the gospels not support their alleged utter convincing
nature? Why did the Jews and Romans not
use force to prevent Jesus making an impression on the people? Was it because they were sure he was a crank
and that anybody could see it? It had to
be. If Jesus was scaringly convincing
then why did the Jews not use theology more against him to make his wonders out
to be of diabolical origin? That would
not have been difficult.
It is possible that when the Jews said that
Jesus was casting demons out by demonic power and doing miracles that they
meant the demons only engage in tricks. To
say Jesus was doing magic could have meant that he was using trickery and demons
were using their influence on people to believe in his crude tricks.
Witnesses to the miracles would
have been afraid to come forward for they would have been smeared and
persecuted. The Christians were free to
tell all the lies they wanted.
ARGUMENT 3. There would have been too many who knew the
truth for themselves so the truth about Jesus and that he had miracle powers
would have been safe.
REPLY. When the Jews and Romans started persecuting
Christians and killing them for their faith (Acts 8) one would expect them to
go straight for anybody who said that Jesus did miracles which would bring
converts to him. The Bible says that all
except the apostles were driven out of the land and many were murdered and cast
into prison. If anybody had a magical
story about Jesus they were out of the way enabling Christians in safe places
and who hid their real identities like the gospellers did to exaggerate their
stories or come up with new ones like the multiplication of the loaves and
fishes and the raising of Lazarus.
We conclude that refutation and
the truth would not have stopped the miraculous tales of Christianity from
taking off. We find no evidence against
the view that Jesus was genuinely a fraud.
ARGUMENT 4.
The rabbinic
stories about Jesus record that he learned magic in
As you will see in Jesus the
Magician, nothing in the stories about Jesus from outside the New Testament
indicate that his marvels were stupendous or inexplicable. They could have been tricks while demons did
the work of making people want to believe in them so that they were
accepted. The miracles could have been
quite crude and clumsy at times. There
is no unbiased account that Jesus had preternatural powers.
The dreadful Evidence that Demands
a Verdict, Volume 1, has no right to dare to say that the Jewish writings
after the time of Jesus support his miracles (page 124-125). This drivel has been refuted for centuries
and fundamentalist Christians won’t stop resurrecting it.
Conclusion
There are indications in the gospels
that if Jesus was a miracle worker then he was using deception and trickery to
perform his “wonders”. If Jesus existed,
tehn he was a fraud for he did miracles to promote error and religious superstition.
Books Consulted
Believing in God, PJ McGrath,
Jesus: The Evidence, Ian Wilson, Pan Books,
Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Volume 1, Josh McDowell, Alpha,
Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1995
He Walked Among Us, Josh McDowell and Bill Wilson,
The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel, HarperCollins and
Jesus the Magician, Morton Smith, Harper & Row, San Francisco,
1978
Friday, 28 December
2007