I'm not a Christian. I don't believe Jesus was God. In fact,
I'm not even sure he existed and if he did, the man had to be a fake.
This is part four of The Skeptics Journey, a true story of an atheist multi-year search for truth.
This non-believer wanted to understand this world and how it was made.
He also wanted to dispel the myths about a God who is responsible for all of this.
Our skeptic prefers anonymity so we're using others to portray him, but the words used
throughout this series are his exact words. This is his story... his journey.
Like I said in part 1 of my journey, I couldn't accept the miracle of the
creation account capturing the book of Genesis. It was too much to swallow
without any proof. But, in part 2 I learned that science doesn't currently
have the concrete answers I'm looking for either.
So when in part 3 I delved into the Bible and researched the Old Testament
prophecies about this promised Savior and how the New Testament supposedly
fulfills those prophecies in the life of Jesus.
This was extremely perplexing, because the Old Testament was verifiably written before he was born
and the fact that these hundreds of extremely specific details could be
realized in one person it's just mind-blowing.
I am very confused but I still don't believe it. Jesus had to be a fake! Either his entire life was modeled
to fit the storylines of these ancient prophecies or his life itself is one big lie.
So, I decided to research the life of Jesus and the alleged miracles he
performed but I didn't want to use the Bible as my only resource because I
don't believe the miracles and I certainly don't believe in ancient prophesies fulfilled.
I started by asking the question of whether Jesus even existed.
It would be the simplest explanation if the New Testament was a
made-up story to fulfill the Old Testament prophecies.
The New Testament writers would be free to describe these miraculous events and attribute them to
someone who never even lived. I was curious whether any other major
religions mentioned Jesus and I was surprised to find that Jesus
is mentioned in the Jewish Talmud and the Koran.
Surprisingly, Islam's religious text goes in unexpected detail about the virgin birth, Jesus being sent by God,
and performing miracles. Muslims apparently don't believe Jesus was God, but they do
believe he was a true prophet who performed actual miracles.
While this was surprising, the Quran was written hundreds of years after Jesus' a
time, and probably had to deal with stories about him in some way, because by
then Christianity was already well established.
I decided to disregard this source as "repeating a previously told untrue story". So I wanted to see what the
ancient Greeks Romans and Jews who despised Christians had to say about Jesus.
I decided to limit my research to surviving documents written within the
1st or 2nd centuries, soon enough after Jesus's death to be original and not
rewrites of other fictitious material. I was actually able to find many sources
that fit this requirement, including ancient texts from a Roman Senator,
Tacitus, a Jewish priest and historian, Josephus, and a Greek satirist, Lucian,
as well as several others. These documents refer to them as "Jesus" or "Christ" and
provide numerous other details about his life.
The findings tend to make it impossible to say that Jesus did not exist because there are too many
references about him from sources that were actually against Christianity.
To summarize the information from these non-biblical non-christian sources I had to
conclude that, a man named Jesus existed, who was also called Christ.
Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate, a Roman prefect. Jesus had a brother named James
who was stoned to death for his belief in Jesus.
Jesus had many followers who were killed for their faith in Him. Now, what I find even more troubling is that
some of these texts actually mentioned the miracles Jesus performed.
And as I said before, many of these writers were against Christianity.
Most of them were atheist or members of other religions and yet they still mentioned the miracles.
Josephus went so far as to describe the resurrection of Jesus as though it were fact.
Why would he do that?
I found something in the Bible that really bothers me. In first Corinthians chapter 15,
the Apostle Paul names at least 13 specific people who saw Jesus after his resurrection,
and then says there are 500 more witnesses to the resurrection.
This was written soon enough after Jesus's death that Paul actually challenged his
readers to find these eyewitnesses because many of them are still alive.
You would think that the Roman, Greek, and Jewish authors who despised Christianity
would take up the challenge and debunk the resurrection.
ancient text that denied Jesus' existence or even attempted to debunk the miracles as fake.
I am very confused. I still don't believe in miracles or ancient
prophecies, but I want to know the truth. No one can fool the entire world without
any help, so those closest to him had to have known the truth.
I think for my next area of research I'm going to investigate
those people closest to Jesus.
Do you believe Jesus existed? Do you believe He performed miracles?
No matter where you stand on the spectrum of belief,
I encourage you to continue with us in watching The Skeptic's Journey, a true story.
Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, please let us know.
Click here to subscribe to our channel, and here to continue watching The Skeptic's Journey.
As always you can help us produce more videos like this by making a
tax-deductible donation to our ministry at ChristianityEngaged.org
Thanks, and God bless.