Deconstructing Jesus Book

The creation of the Jesus cult and the myth that surrounds it reveals itself when one strips away the special pleading and magically assuming that the New Testament (NT) was creatio ex nihilo and was not a product of its time period. When the New Testament is considered as part of reality and its superstitious origins are removed the Jesus cult has even less validity than I had previously thought.

This book mercifully saves the reader from too many Biblical citations with their all too familiar contradictions and incoherencies. This book does provide insights that show how the Gospels are mostly fictional extrapolations from other fictional extrapolations. All of the post-prediction proofs in the NT have always irritated me. It is easier to believe that humans were being human and fooling the gullible than it is to believe in magic, fortune tellers or non-repeatable experiences. Fictional stories are easily made to fit any narrative one wants. Even today, over 500 people (the number of witnesses mentioned in Acts) believe in the return of Elvis and that UFOs are real. The author made the point that modern day believers in UFOs just as the early Jesus cult myth believers are looking for something bigger than just the phenomena itself. For a somewhat obscure and recent book on the intersection between UFOs and religious myth believers check out the book 'American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology' by Diana Walsh Pasulka.

Even if one were to believe the NT and that every matter of fact that was presented in it was true, it still doesn't lead to the conclusion 'that Jesus died for your sins [scapegoat theory, discussed at length within this book] and that He was the Son of God' and so on. My least favorite lines in the NT and cited in this book is 'Truly He must be the Son of God' because he knew everything about the woman at the well, or because how he died on the cross. Is that really the best explanation you can come up with to explain the facts that you think you know?

What do you call someone who murders people because he didn't like their beliefs and then goes on zealously propagating that same set of beliefs? Christians call him Paul, I call him a psychotic. Yes, a psychotic really and truly could have heard a spirit say 'Paul, Paul, why do you persecute me', but at face value I'll just call him a psychotic and not take what he has to say with any more credence than it deserves and even if he wasn't a psychotic isn't a better explanation was that the voice Paul heard was an alien from outer space, an undigested piece of meat, or the first ventriloquist practicing her act?

The author deconstructs the Jesus myth while constructing what most likely happened instead. There was no uniformed agreed upon template for what was developing into the canonical Jesus myth. As the world and the word of the Jesus myth was revealing itself, there were very many crops in the field trying to take hold and from time to time they were getting meshed together while other schools of thought were getting plucked from the field as if they were weeds and the strongest myth was the one that incorporated the others while making their own myth all the stronger.

The author makes a strong case that the historical Jesus is mostly fictional and perhaps even completely fictional. The strongest believers of the Jesus Myth cult and those who appeal to special pleading and think the New Testament was created out of whole cloth (creatio ex nihilo) through a direct mystical Godly inspiration are today most likely to be Evangelical Christians and when they are white are 80% likely to support Donald Trump. Myths and myth makers need context free fake news with relational free alternative facts in order to reconcile their inherent contradictions or in other words they need special pleading and creatio ex nihilo.