Blueprint for the Construction of the Son of God
It was commonly believed in the first century that scripture said that the coming savior would be a descendent of David, and that events in the life of David foreshadowed events which would occur in the life of the savior; events in the life of Moses, Elisha, Elijah, and the Lord, were likewise thought to be foreshadowings. The Old Testament was thus the blueprint which anyone could use for the construction of stories about a fictional savior. There were lots of candidates for “messiah” in those days; one could be found prophesying on practically every street corner, but, if one wanted to be taken seriously as the savior the Old Testament prophesied would come, he had to do all of those things, or, he had to have a good publicist and imaginative writers who could make it seem as if he did them.
Creating the Gospel Stories
About forty years after Jesus was alleged to have been crucified, Mark took Old Testament stories about divine figures and treated them as if they were foreshadowings of events in the life of a coming savior. Mark made sure that the man called "Jesus" fulfilled these prophecies by constructing Jesus stories based on the Old Testament antecedents. He did this either because he sincerely believed that the savior had come to earth in the form of a man named "Jesus," and that he MUST have done the things Mark thought the Old Testament said would be done by the savior, or else he was deliberately manufacturing stories about "Jesus" in order to promote his candidate for the position of son of God. Virtually every story Mark told about Jesus is based on a story he found in the Old Testament.
Luke, and Matthew, writing decades after Mark, essentially copied Mark's stories, and then modified them to suit their particular needs. Matthew, as we have already seen in this forum, did a particularly bad job of finding “prophecies” of his own to have Jesus fulfill "prophecy" (e.g., the triumphal entry fiasco).
Faulty Reasoning
There is zero evidence outside of the Bible that there actually was a "Jesus" described in the Bible; the only evidence for the "prophecies" Jesus allegedly fulfilled is in the Bible. To prove the Bible stories are true, the apologist thinks he's permitted to point to the stories of prophecy fulfillments found in the Bible as proof that the Bible is accurate; that's nonsensical circular reasoning, of course.
If the Gospel Stories Were False
Apologists sometimes claim that if the gospels stories were false, there would have been many who would have said so, and since we have only a few reports of the Jesus stories being false, the apologists claim that this comparative lack of refutation stands as proof that the stories are true. This is nonsense. Mark's gospel, the first one, wasn't written until about 70 AD, and the life span in those days was about 30, so who would be around to refute the stories forty years later? Furthermore, even if there were people still alive who lived in and around the areas where Jesus was alleged to have worked his miracles, how would they forty years later be able to claim that such events never happened? It is virtually impossible to prove that something did not happen, even if it was alleged to have happened recently. Can the apologist prove, for example, that last year in their county dead saints were not raised from their graves by an itinerant miracle worker? If not, then why do they point to the apparent lack of protest about the stories of Jesus’ alleged miracles, stories told forty years after the alleged events, as evidence that they must have happened?
If the Gospel Stories Were True
Now, if the Bible stories were true, then one would expect that there would exist some extrabiblical evidence of these events in poetry, literature, or the reports of historians and journalists. However, there is not the slightest mention of the miraculous feeding of five thousand, then later the four thousand, from just a handful of bread and fish. Nine thousand people! Surely most of them would have told and retold their personal miracle story over and over again, as would have their children, and so on down through the generations. But, not a single peep from anyone is recorded either in written, or oral history.
There is no mention anywhere of the murder by Herod's swordsmen of all of the children under two years of age in Bethlehem and the surrounding suburbs. What a sensational story that would have been, if it had ever happened. The details of the slaughter of these innocents would still be talked about today, if the murders had actually occurred. But, there is not a word of this outside the Bible. How come Matthew is the only one who knows about it?
There’s no mention by anyone that John the Baptist’s head was chopped off at the request of Herodias’ daughter, and brought to a banquet on a platter. What a story! But, not a word from anyone except Mark. How come Josephus, a leading historian of his time, and who wrote about John’s execution, didn’t know about the head on the platter at the banquet? Surely someone besides Mark would have known about it, if it had actually happened.
No one told of the journeys into Jerusalem made by the many saints who rose from their graves following the alleged resurrection. What a memory that would have made for all those folks in Jerusalem: shriveled corpses, decades or longer in their graves, getting up and walking into town and chatting up the people! But, nobody knows about it except the gospel writer.
The list is very long. How come nobody thought these events were important enough to record, if they had really happened? How could these astonishing events not be important?
A list which is even longer is the one with all of the absurdities true believers are willing to accept in order to preserve their delusions. Objective observers who wish to see further evidence that cast doubt on the historicity of Jesus will find more than a dozen articles on this subject on the web page in the signature below; I recommend they start with “The Jesus Puzzle,” by Earl Doherty.
Contrary to what the apologist will claim, most university religious scholars know that most or all of the gospels are fiction, and they seriously question whether the historical Jesus ever existed.
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"