New Literary Evidence Strongly Suggests That The Gospels Are Not Historical.

New literary evidence strongly suggests that the Gospels are not historical.

It is not a coincidence that the New Testament was written in Greek instead of Hebrew. Jesus did not say 'I am the Aleph and the Tav,' but rather 'I am the Alpha and the Omega, ... the beginning and the end' of the Greek alphabet. Indisputably, Jesus explicitly identifies himself with the language of the Greeks.

Eli of Kittim

Excerpts from "Jesus Was Not a Jew" by Marilyn R. Allen

Christianity is NOT based upon Judaism even slightly, and never has been: this is merely another Jewish canard to be swallowed by the gullible. They are diametrically opposed in their principles. "THE MAN OF GALILEE" (whom they hounded, tortured, and finally achieved his crucifixion—would they have crucified their own?) taught and preached against their hidebound, cruel, enslaving Traditions. HE opposed them at every turn, and said that the "Sabbath was made for man: not man for the Sabbath," as the Jewish Pharisees had it. HE said they "compassed land and sea to make one convert, and having made him, he was twofold more the child of hell than they." HE told the Jews they were "whited sepulchres" which is the best description of their two-faced hypocrisy that I know of. His Disciples were Galileans ... of the Roman province of Galilee, (Galilee was not a Jewish province: Judea was).

Always where the Light is, there is the shadow also. In this connection, I would like to recommend to Evangelist Billy Graham, and other uninformed Christian ministers, that they read the booklet, The Prophet of Galilee (A Portrait of the Christ) by Mr. John Henry Monk, Editor of Grass Roots. In his brochure, The Prophet of Galilee, Mr. Monk calls attention to the fact that "All the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not," (St. Mark 7:3): but Jesus did not wash his hands oft, and "when it came to ceremonial washing, not at all." Mr. Monk then quotes the following sayings of Jesus to prove that HE was not of their faith and race. Jesus was speaking to Jews:

"Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness" (John 6:49) "Moses gave you circumcision" (John 7:22) "Is it not written in your law?" (John 10:14) "It is also written in your law" (John 8:17) "Written in their law" (John 13:25).

Why did His disciples say unto him, "Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee?" (John 11:18). Why did He say to Pilate: "if my sovereignty were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered unto the JEWS?" (John 18:36). And there are other passages which, by their wording, prove that He did not consider Himself one of them.

Christ Was Not a Jew

There is an excellent little book, Christ Was Not a Jew, by Dr. Jacob Eton Connor, A.B., Ph. D. The work was subtitled, "An Epistle to the Gentiles." Quoting St. Matthew 21:11—And the multitude said, This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee. See also St. Matthew 4:15-18. Now to revert to Dr. Connor, "The TRUTH demanding recognition is that Christ, as the Son of Man, was a Galilean, and the Galileans were not Jews ... Josephus, the Jewish historian, describes the Galileans as a people wholly unlike the Jews in temperament and ideals—so different indeed that they could not have been of the same race. There was a taboo against inter-marriage between them as recorded in the Jewish Talmud. In a word, Christ as the Son of Man was a Galilean, and the Galileans were not Jews. This is the verdict of history. (Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Vol. I. p. 206, 'There is, accordingly, as we see, not the slightest foundation for the supposition that Christ's parents were of Jewish descent.'). See also L. A. Waddell, L.L.D., C.B., E.E.I., The Makers of Civilization, 1929 .... "It is begging the question for anyone to assert that Christ was of the Jewish race. The contrast of His character with that of the Jewish background establishes a presumption that differentiates Him utterly, even if only the human aspect is considered ... and we learn from Josephus ... that the Galileans were a different kind of people from those of Judaea—a fact attested by the Jews themselves." To quote from Grass Roots, Oct., 1954, by Mr. John Henry Monk:

"To ignore race," (says C. G. Campbell, in his book on Race and Religion, from which Mr. Monk quotes) "is to disregard the most important influence upon the outcome of human history; for it largely, "Generally speaking, a country takes its name from a racial group which has long inhabited and dominated it .... The temptation is strong to discover in the name Galilee the word-root found in such names as Kelt, Gaul, Galicia, and Galatia, and thus to identify the Galileans as of an early Keltic origin." (Note by Mr. Monk: The proper spelling of the name is Kelt, not 'Celt,' for the Greek alphabet has no C. Thus the Gauls descended from the queen-mother, and the Kelts from her beloved son-king. The Gauls-Kelts were Greeks, for they recorded all their important papers in Greek ....)

Continuing to quote Mr. Campbell:

"... the Israelites (meaning Jews) always referred contemptuously to the Galileans as Gentiles ... the Galileans were uncircumcised ... their religion differed essentially from orthodox Judaism." "... the Romans made a distinction between the Galileans and the Israelites (Jews) by not placing Galilee under the same provincial government as Judea. The Romans placed it under Syria or gave it a government of its own." ... "Galilee presented a background for the rise of Christianity that was Hellenistic rather than Judaic .... The Israelites (Jews) habitually spoke of them as Gentiles, classing them with the goyim of the non-Israelitic (Jewish) world .... Nor is there any indication that orthodox Jews lived in Galilee in any numbers until after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in '70, when Judeans fled into Galilee ... that orthodox Judaism was the prevalent religion among the preponderantly Gentile population of Galilee, is patently absurd .... These Galatians ... were among the earliest of racial groups to embrace the Galilean religion of Jesus .... Although it has been widely assumed, as a matter of course, that Jesus was a Jew, the only support for this assumption is its long reiteration .... The Galileans were always called Gentiles, or aliens, by the Jews, and there is no actual evidence ... that Jesus was other than a Galilean..." (End of quotes from Race and Religion.)

And now to quote Dr. Hermann Guthe, Professor of Theology Emeritus, University of Leipzig, Germany, VII: 36 p. 678, Funk and Wagnall's New Standard Bible Dictionary, 3rd Edition, 1936:

"From II Chronicles 30:10 it may be inferred that about 100 B.C. a number of families felt themselves to be in relationship to Jerusalem. But their position among the heathen was not secure. Consequently, about 163 B.C., Simon the Maccabee was ordered to remove them with their property to Judea."—Note that Dr. Guthe says these families in Galilee "felt" themselves to be related to Judea.

And to quote from I Maccabees 5:14-24: "... Behold there came other messengers from Galilee with their clothes rent, who reported on this wise, and said, they of Ptolemais, and of Tyrus and Sidon, and all Galilee OF THE GENTILES are assembled together to consume us ... "Now unto Simon were given 5,000 men to go into Galilee! ..." Then went Simon into Galilee, where he fought many battles with the heathen (this is the consignation which Jews apply to Christians), so that the heathen were discomfited by him. And he pursued them unto the gate of Ptolemais; and there were slain of the heathen about 3,000 men, whose spoils he took. And those that were in Galilee ... with their wives and their children, and all that they had, took he away with him, and brought them into Judea with great joy."—And thus it was that the last person feeling himself to be related to the Judeans was expatriated from Galilee 165 years Before Christ. The book of I Maccabees is considered to be Holy Writ by the Jews, and all others generally recognize it to be historical. The writer's new Webster's Collegial Dictionary (1949), based on Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, gives the following definition of Galilean: "A native or inhabitant of Galilee. Hence, a Christian;—after the epithet, 'The Galilean' applied to Jesus."

A Monstrous Perversion of Truth

Continuing with quotes from Dr. Connor's Christ Was Not a Jew: "Sure it is a monstrous perversion of the truth—this claim that Christ was a Jew—that is now being used by Jews ... to the incredible damage of Christ's mission to all the world. Says a recent authority, 'Whoever makes the assertion that Christ was a Jew is either ignorant or insincere: ignorant when he confuses race and religion: insincere when he knows the history of Galilee, and partly conceals, partly distorts the very entangled facts in favor of his religious prejudices, or it may be, to curry favor with the Jews. The probability that Christ was no Jew, that He had not a drop of genuinely Jewish blood in His veins, is so great that it is almost equivalent to a certainty.' (From W. D. Morrison's The Jews under Roman Rule, p. 85. 'Among no people of antiquity did race antipathy exercise so potent an influence as among the Jews of Judaea .... Among them, national inclusiveness had become one of the most vital elements of religion.') "Christ's mentality contrasts so vividly with a static-mindedness, a backward-looking type of mind, that this distinction alone divides Him from the Jewish race. It is utterly irrational to assume that He could have been evolved from a race with a hide-bound concept of morality, of ethics, of deity and humanity and their relations to each other ... His mentality was alive and unbounded .... "He went into the synagogues everywhere, as He had a right to do, because these were the 'town halls' of the public. It was thus that He went into the synagogue of His own home town, Nazareth, and when He had announced Himself in the chosen text, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,' they were ready to murder Him .... "Everybody knew Him and His followers as Galileans ... even the servant who detected Peter's Galilean speech .... Christ said, 'I ever taught in the synagogue and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort' (thus naming the Jews objectively). And since HE did not include Himself among them, but throughout the whole farce of his trial He regarded Himself and was regarded by others as a Galilean, and not a Jew, what excuse has anyone for calling Him a Jew? Absolutely none ... Christ lived and died a Galilean Gentile or non-Jew, so far as He was the Son of Man. "It has been said by Ernest Renan (in his Life of Christ), that this makes Him all the more akin to the whole world—the Galileans being a mixed people but non-Jewish, and therefore He was not the scion of any one race or dynasty. He had the Galilean's independent spirit in His disposition, and not once did He show a servile attitude toward His persecutors ... no, not even to the High Priest .... Neither Christ nor any other Galilean, as Josephus describes them, would have apologized for having his face slapped .... How idle it is to think that Christianity, a world religion, could have sprung from the 'chosen people' bigotry! "But this compromise between Christianity and Judaism—for such it was [as the Disciples first taught it, after Christ's death]—could not endure, for the two were unrelated and irreconcilable. The one was broadly Gentile, the other strictly racial and intolerant.

Judaism would not have it so. Having brought about the public assassination of the Head of the new faith they had no idea of permitting His followers to preach His doctrines .... So the first Christian martyrs fell, and thus the blood persecutions began .... Finally, there was a general conference in Jerusalem of the apostles, elders and leaders of the Christians ... and the apostolic position with respect to the independence of Christianity from all Relationship with Judaism and established ... Jerusalem could never have conquered humanity: 'it is the north (Galilee) alone which has made Christianity.' (From Ernest Renan's Life of Christ p. 123) .... The Jews, on the other hand, were unrelenting in their efforts to totally exterminate the Christians." Dr. Connor then quoted excerpts from the three historians, Gibbon, Renan and Lanciani, based on the testimony of Tacitus, Seutonius and Pliny the younger, all of which have been verified, as to the Jewish incitement against the early Christians. Finally, Dr. Connor says: "It is sometimes thoughtlessly said that Christianity is an Oriental religion .... It ignores the fact that Christianity lost little time in escaping the confines of its origin, chiefly through the instrumentality of the Greeks, and thereafter attaining its full growth and its mission as a world religion only in the Occident. The sun rises in the East, but that does not make the sun Oriental: and like the sun, Christianity mounted toward the zenith of its power as it moved westward. No strictly Oriental religions have ever made much headway in the West, and owing to differences in the mentality it is safe to infer that they never will. The fact that Christianity has done so is consistent with its Occidental character—that is to say, its comprehensiveness, its breadth of human interest as opposed to the petty, provincial narrowness and bigotry, the concentrated selfishness of Judaism. Christianity is fundamentally non-Jewish: its earthly origin was among a Gentile people, the Galileans, and the principal means of freeing it from its hostile background was another Gentile people, the Greeks. The Apostolic Council held in Jerusalem to settle the matter, about the year 49 A.D., officially declared the complete independence of Christianity from Judaism."

Biblical Criticism: A Flawed Interpretation of the Gospels

By Award-Winning Author Eli Kittim

The type of Biblical criticism (or the scholarly “study and investigation of biblical writings”) that is taught today in the world’s finest seminaries is geared towards an understanding of the historical Jesus. While the Criteria of historical Authenticity are very important and untainted in and of themselves, the underlying assumption of how they should be applied is fundamentally flawed. The problem in the quest for the historical Jesus is that everything seems to be centered on the Gospels, without many cross-references between the Gospels and the Epistles, not to mention the book of Revelation. This means that these scholars, many of whom are Christ’s followers, begin their biblical investigation with the preconceived assumption that the Gospels are historical, and they therefore entirely miss the point of the Gospels as well as the overall context of the New Testament. And this is done without even the slightest thought that the Gospels might turn out to be theological renderings of future events rather than historiographical accounts!

For instance, in order to corroborate whether or not the Gospel events happened, little attention is given to the rest of the New Testament Scriptures—such as the Epistles (which tell us that Christ will appear “Once in the end of the world” Heb. 9:26), or the book of Revelation (which verifies that “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” 19:10)—but turn instead to “Multiple Attestation” sources of the Gospels that are known as “Mark” (the earliest written Gospel), “Q” (shared verses between Matthew & Luke), “L” (unique material found in Luke), “M” (special material found in Matthew), and “John” (unique material found in John). In other words, the Gospels become the foundation of the subsequent study. Then they add a few more arbitrary criteria—such as “Attestation of Forms” (other genres that Gospel material may appear in, as if this proves the historicity of the Gospels), “Dissimilarity” (If it isn’t Judaic or of the Church it must be unique to Jesus), “Embarrassment” (If the gospels include embarrassing things, they must have happened), and the “Criterion of Rejection” (Events that describe Jesus’ rejection & crucifixion are assumed to be authentic)—as if these inferences are wholly reliable and conclusive. Thus, it is not inappropriate to describe these rules that scholars play by as guessing games!

The tools that scholars use to identify whether or not the Gospel events happened are not only arbitrary and presumptuous, they are also completely out of touch with the rest of the New Testament because they begin with the erroneous assumption that the Gospels are biographies. And this is NOT TRUE! This historical-Gospel inference must be checked against biblical evidence because the Epistles and the book of Revelation give us a very different version of Jesus than the Gospels.

Furthermore, these studies are probabilistic in nature, based entirely on historical reductionism. Thus, these conclusions are not only distorted and partial, but wholly unwarranted.

After a twenty-year Bible study that evolved into a book, “The Little Book of Revelation: The First Coming of Jesus at the End of Days,” my conclusion is that the historical Christ is as real as the Shroud of Turin is authentic!

The Little Book of Revelation: The First Coming of Jesus at the End of Days [Eli of Kittim] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. This book is a fascinating study in search of the real Jesus. The author concludes that scripture is essentially a collection of prophecies

Eli of Kittim - The Mytho-Prophetic Bible The Bible is a collection of mythic prophecies, not a record of past events.