Mark Fulton

There’s another fascinating angle to consider. I think it’s probable that the Roman government at the time instigated Paul’s pagan propaganda. The fact that belief in the divinity of Jesus appears to have arisen in many diverse areas of the empire a number of decades after his death suggests that it came from a central source such as the government. In those times it was easier to promote propaganda than it is today, because the public was less informed and less able to check out the facts. There was good reason to mar the power of messianic Judaism, and particularly … More…

Yeshua and his entourage were easily outmaneuvered. The Romans swooped on them in the garden of Gethsemane while Jewish residents slept. John claimed a cohort of soldiers was consigned to collar him: “Judas the traitor knew the place well, since Jesus had often met his disciples there, and he brought the cohort to this place together with a detachment of guards sent by the chief priests and Pharisees, all with lanterns and torches and weapons” (John 18:3 JB). Judas had betrayed him to the Romans. A cohort was six hundred Roman soldiers, one tenth of a legion. Pilate wouldn’t have … More…

  “Jesus loves me! This I know, For the Bible tells me so” (Traditional, Words by Anna B. Warner) Most Christians assume Jesus had affection for anyone who accepted him; that he had a personal interest in each and every individual. I think they seriously misunderstand their main man. Jesus did not love gentiles (who he referred to as pagans). He told his disciples: “Do not turn your steps to pagan territory, and do not enter any Samaritan town. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel” (Matt. 10:6, NJB). When discussing his own mission, he said: “I was sent … More…

Jesus made plenty of promises. He talked of kingdoms and miracles to come, as well as heaven. He had to insist his flock had faith: “Everything is possible for anyone who has faith” (Mark 9:24, NJB). Everything is possible if one is injected with heroin too, but that is an illusion. One comes back to a cold, harsh world. Faith, like heroin, will never reverse reality. Jesus stated, “I tell you solemnly, unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3, NJB). Children have very active imaginations, which is natural, healthy, … More…

  To examine the Gospels objectively, we need to dig deeper than just reading well-chosen, neatly packaged snippets as typically presented in Christian books and churches. We should assess them in their entirety, who wrote them, what their connections with Yeshua were, when they were written, and why. Massive holes then appear in the traditional tales. We don’t know the original authors’ true identities, yet they had no known close, genuine connection with Yeshua. They wrote many decades after the events they allegedly described. They may have been under the employee of the Roman government, and written spoofs to counter … More…

  There are no chapters on Jesus in most philosophy textbooks. A philosopher has credentials and Yeshua didn’t. He was uneducated and illiterate. Galilean peasant society was insular and primitive, even by the standards of the times. He might’ve been clever and charismatic, yet he knew nothing of the philosophy and science of the Greek and Roman world. Non-Jewish law, ethics, history, art and literature were a mystery to him. Such an uninformed person wasn’t qualified to be a world-class teacher of philosophy. Jesus was a deluded dreamer who made wild promises that didn’t come true. He was judgmental, intolerant, … More…

In 1945 two brothers were looking for fertilizer at the base of cliffs in the Egyptian region of Nag Hammadi. They found a huge earthen jar that contained twelve books bound in gazelle leather. These books are one of the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century. Now known as the Nag Hammadi Library, they contained a complete manuscript of the Gospel of Thomas. It was one of fifty-two manuscripts in twelve books. The text was written in Coptic, the form of the Egyptian language spoken during later Roman imperial times. Scholars have been able to reconstruct the Gospel … More…

The real Jesus was not the preacher of ethics he is portrayed as in the Bible. He was a man whose primary agenda was the establishment of a Jewish Kingdom of God in Palestine. He gave the finger to the gentile world. The stories in the Gospels of him eating with tax collectors, who were working for the Roman government, were designed to make him pro-gentile. On occasions in the Gospels he denigrated aspects of Jewish law, which no true Jew would ever do, so this was fictional too. The benign preacher who claimed he wasn’t a zealot and was … More…

Toward what was to be the end of his campaign, he focused on Jerusalem. It was the political and spiritual center of the Jewish nation, and boasted a large Jewish population that swelled exponentially around Passover. If he was going to begin an insurrection, it had to start here. According to the Gospel of John, he preached by day at the temple and retreated to a safe house at nearby Bethany before nightfall. He was anointed with oil in the weeks before his death. The word “messiah” means an anointed one, as does the name “Christ.” So the name Jesus … More…

  “If Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins. And what is more serious, all who have died in Christ have perished. If our hope for Christ has been for this life only, we are the most unfortunate of all people.” (1 Cor. 15:17–19, NJB). “If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. For that view of the resurrection is not believable, and if that is all there is, then Christianity, which depends upon the truth and authenticity of Jesus’ resurrection, … More…

Jesus said, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!..woe to you, blind guides…You blind fools!…You blind men!…You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?” (Matt. 23:13–34, NJB). “Well then, just as the darnel is gathered up and burnt in the fire, so it will be at the end of time. The Son of Man will send his angels and they will gather out of his kingdom all things that provoke offences and all who do evil, and throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth” … More…

“Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie?  We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.” (Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794) Cults that had existed for hundreds or thousands of years all had miracle performing prodigies. Isis, an Egyptian goddess, healed the sick. Poseidon, the Greek god … More…

Stories of gods born to virgins could be found in many countries thousands of years before Jesus. In Greek mythology, Danae was the virgin mother of the demigod Perseus. The Egyptians had Isis as the virgin mother of Horus, and she was worshipped throughout the Roman Empire in Jesus’ time. Mithras, whose cult outshone Christianity for popularity in the first three centuries, was conceived when God entered a virgin. Augustus, Attis, Adonis, Buddha, Krishna, Osiris, Tammuz, and Zoroaster were all born to virgins. To be a god your mother almost needed to be a virgin! A young female virgin is … More…