Christianity: Contradictions and Dark Sides

Excerpt

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Approximately 90% of this book is composed of quotes, in other words, the book consists of 90% from the other authors texts that I used in this book. To make clear which text is from the author (me) and which text is adopted, I have decided not only to distinguish the text by font type but also by color. My text is in red, while the cited text is in black. The source of the cited text is provided at the end of each chapter and after each explanation. A summary of the cited sources is also provided at the end of the book.

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1. A prophet is not without honor except in his own country and in his own house

There is no archaeological evidence to support the existence of Jesus Christ. However, almost no one from the current scientific community, either exploring biblical texts and dealing with the person of Jesus Christ or, alternatively, with the history of the Jews at the turn of the modern era, questions the actual existence of a person named Jesus Christ.

Lawrence Mykytiuk, an associate professor of library science at Purdue University and author of a 2015 Biblical Archaeology Review article on the extra-biblical evidence of Jesus, notes that there was no debate about the issue in ancient times either. “Jewish rabbis who did not like Jesus or his followers accused him of being a magician and leading people astray,” he says, “but they never said he didn’t exist.”

There is no definitive physical or archaeological evidence of the existence of Jesus. “There’s nothing conclusive, nor would I expect there to be,” Mykytiuk says. “Peasants don’t normally leave an archaeological trail.”

Source: https://www.history.com/news/was-jesus-real-historical-evidence

“The reality is that we don’t have archaeological records for virtually anyone who lived in Jesus’s time and place,” says University of North Carolina religious studies professor Bart D. Ehrman, author of Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. “The lack of evidence does not mean a person at the time didn’t exist. It means that she or he, like 99.99% of the rest of the world at the time, made no impact on the archaeological record.”

Source: https://www.history.com/news/was-jesus-real-historical-evidence

In contrast to the archaeological evidence, the historical documents and records sing a different tune. During the few decades of his life, Jesus was mentioned by Jewish and Roman historians alike in documents that corroborate certain parts of the New Testament, which describe the life and death of Jesus¹⁾. However, many historians agree that only two actual historically verifiable events of his life are documented: Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptist and death, the crucifixion on the cross.

The first comprehensive written records that dealt with the life of Jesus Christ in a large extent were created many years after his death, they were the writings that form the New Testament, namely, the four Gospels - Gospel of Matthew (probably written anytime between 80–90 CE), Gospel of Mark (65-73 CE), Gospel of Luke (80-90 CE) and Gospel of John (90-110 CE). The other records are Acts of the Apostles (80-90 CE), the 13 letters of Paul (respectively 14 of them in broader sense, 48-100 CE) and the seven so-called Catholic Letters (54-110 CE). The final book of the New Testament is Book of the Apocalypse or the Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse of John (c. 95 CE).

Source: https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nový zákon, voľne parafrázované, roky vzniku zdroj: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible

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¹⁾ The crucifixion and death of Jesus occurred in 1st-century Judea, most likely in AD 30 or AD 33.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_of_Jesus

“These are all Christian and are obviously and understandably biased in what they report and have to be evaluated very critically indeed to establish any historically reliable information,” Ehrman says. “But their central claims about Jesus as a historical figure—a Jew, with followers, executed on orders of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius—are borne out by later sources with a completely different set of biases.”

Historian Flavius Josephus wrote one of the earliest non-biblical accounts of Jesus. The first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who according to Ehrman “is far and away our best source of information about first-century Palestine,” twice mentions Jesus in Jewish Antiquities, his massive 20-volume history of the Jewish people that was written around 93 A.D.

Thought to have been born a few years after the crucifixion of Jesus around 37 A.D., Josephus was a well-connected aristocrat and military leader in Palestine who served as a commander in Galilee during the first Jewish Revolt against Rome between 66 and 70 A.D. Although Josephus was not a follower of Jesus, “he was around when the early church was getting started, so he knew people who had seen and heard Jesus,” Mykytiuk says.

Source: www.history.com/news/was-jesus-real-historical-evidence

 

In one passage of Jewish Antiquities that recounts an unlawful execution, Josephus identifies the victim, James, as the “brother of Jesus-who-is-called-Messiah.” While few scholars doubt the short account’s authenticity, says Mykytiuk, more debate surrounds Josephus’s lengthier passage about Jesus, known as the “Testimonium Flavianum,” which describes a man “who did surprising deeds” and was condemned to be crucified by Pilate. Mykytiuk agrees with most scholars that Christian scribes modified portions of the passage but did not insert it wholesale into the text.

Another account of Jesus appears in Annals of Imperial Rome, a first-century history of the Roman Empire written around 116 A.D. by the Roman senator and historian Tacitus. In chronicling the burning of Rome in 64 A.D., Tacitus mentions that Emperor Nero falsely blamed “the persons commonly called Christians, who were hated for their enormities. Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius.”

As a Roman historian, Tacitus did not have any Christian biases in his discussion of the persecution of Christians by Nero, says Ehrman. “Just about everything he says coincides—from a completely different point of view, by a Roman author disdainful of Christians and their superstition—with what the New Testament itself says: Jesus was executed by the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, for crimes against the state, and a religious movement of his followers sprang up in his wake.”

“When Tacitus wrote history, if he considered the information not entirely reliable, he normally wrote some indication of that for his readers,” Mykytiuk says in vouching for the historical value of the passage. “There is no such indication of potential error in the passage that mentions Christus.”

Source: www.history.com/news/was-jesus-real-historical-evidence

Shortly before Tacitus penned his account of Jesus, Roman governor Pliny the Younger wrote to Emperor Trajan that early Christians would “sing hymns to Christ as to a god.” Some scholars also believe Roman historian Suetonius references Jesus in noting that Emperor Claudius had expelled Jews from Rome who “were making constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus.”

Ehrman says this collection of snippets from non-Christian sources may not impart much information about the life of Jesus, “but it is useful for realizing that Jesus was known by historians who had reason to look into the matter. No one thought he was made up.”

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/was-jesus-real-historical-evidence

Sources For The Life Of Jesus

There are a few references to Jesus in 1st-century Roman and Jewish sources. Documents indicate that within a few years of Jesus’ death, Romans were aware that someone named Chrestus (a slight misspelling of Christus) had been responsible for disturbances in the Jewish community in Rome (Suetonius, The Life of the Deified Claudius 25.4). Twenty years later, according to Tacitus, Christians in Rome were prominent enough to be persecuted by Nero, and it was known that they were devoted to Christus, whom Pilate had executed (Annals 15.44). This knowledge of Jesus, however, was dependent on familiarity with early Christianity and does not provide independent evidence about Jesus. Josephus wrote a paragraph about Jesus (The Antiquities of the Jews 18.63ff.)—as he did about Theudas, the Egyptian, and other charismatic leaders (History of the Jewish War 2.258–263; The Antiquities of the Jews 20.97–99, 167–172)—but it has been heavily revised by Christian scribes, and Josephus’s original remarks cannot be discerned.

Further, not all the sayings and deeds in the Synoptic Gospels are reports of things that Jesus actually said and did. Believing that Jesus still lived in heaven, the early Christians spoke to him in prayer and sometimes he answered (2 Corinthians 12:8–9; cf. 1 Corinthians 2:13). Those early Christians did not distinguish between “the historical Jesus” and “the heavenly Lord” as firmly as most modern people do, and some sayings heard in prayer almost certainly ended up in the Gospels as sayings uttered by Jesus during his lifetime.

Since both the original context of Jesus’ sayings and deeds and those passages in the Gospels that go back to the historical Jesus are unknown, there are substantial difficulties in attempting to reconstruct the Jesus of history. Of these two difficulties, the lack of immediate context is the more serious. It must be admitted that, on many points, precision and nuance in describing the teaching and ministry of Jesus cannot be achieved.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jesus/The-context-of-Jesus-career

So, to summarize the above, Jesus Christ as a real person clearly existed, although we cannot omit the fact that for the first 116 years of our era, he was ignored by the records, meaning those made by historians, chroniclers, and influencers of that time. Records concerning Jesus are very marginal and considering relatively long time of more than 80 years (period between his crucifixion until the year 116), they are also very scarce. His followers, of course, gave him significantly more attention. From today’s point of view, we would call them his believers, respectively the early Christians. Why is that so? Why was no contemporary written record preserved? How could a man who performed such unbelievable acts, even miracles, remain unnoticed by historians of the first and second centuries? How is it possible that a person who turned water into wine, walked on the surface of a lake, multiplied fish and bread, and fed thousands of hungry travellers, someone who healed the sick and even raised the dead, remained completely outside of official historical records and nobody trustworthy, reputable, or credible took note of these acts? If a person (let’s say Joseph Smith) appeared now, in the present day, for instance  on a pilgrimage in Atlanta, and there in front of a crowd of 5,000 people multiplied five loaves of bread and two fish, feeding the whole crowd, and later filled five full baskets with the crumbs of bread that were left over, I cannot imagine that no one would record this event for another 30 years. Yes, I am aware that today, in the era of advanced information technologies phones, and media, it would be in the news the same evening.

However, Jesus did not perform just this one miracle, even though I personally think that even if only this one really occurred, it would be enough for it to eventually appear in a chronicle or some other historical record. The thing driving my confidence in this matter is the claim that there was a massive gathering of up to 5,000 people at this “bread and fish get-together,” according to the evangelist Matthew. Each of them must have been shaken to their core by this miracle, and everyone surely told other people they met about this occurrence. This kind of news travels at lightning-fast speed. I am confident that if this miracle occurred, news of it would reach the ears of at least one chronicler or historian, and he would record it. Let us theoretically admit that the news didn’t reach any contemporary chroniclers, and if it did, they dismissed it straight away and, therefore, didn’t record it. Let’s assume that Jesus and his apostles were considered mere vagrants by the higher circles of that time. But Jesus did not perform just one miracle; he performed several of them, including the most unbelievable ones, such as walking on water and, most importantly, raising the dead! And he did not perform these miracles for a week or a month; he did so for approximately three years! Is it truly possible that none of his chronicler contemporaries noticed or mentioned this, either in a positive or in a negative way? It is unbelievable that considering these sensational deeds performed for some time by Jesus, not a single chronicler or historian of that era can be found who wrote records of these deeds, even if it would be in a negative version, for example: “A group of vagrants is wandering about, led by a certain Jesus of Nazareth. People say that he performs miracles. Allegedly, he turned water into wine, walks on water, and allegedly even heals incurable diseases and raises the dead.”

Let’s consider this possibility as well: For three years, none of Jesus’ miracles reached the ears of any contemporary chronicler or historian, and even if they did, these reports were simply ignored. How can we then explain that if not a chronicler or historian, why didn’t any ordinary person from the public record such incredible events? Can we believe that these miracles, witnessed by thousands of people in person, were not recorded by anyone? Surely, it must have been an incredible, almost supernatural experience for many, one that influenced them for a lifetime, and yet not a single contemporary said: “My God, I am experiencing something that humanity has never experienced before and will never experience again, I must write it down, if not for the future generations, then at least for my descendants”? There is a counterargument that literacy at that time was extremely low; only around 5% of people could read and write. There are two immediate counterarguments to this: First, humans are fundamentally vain, and for sure it wasn’t any different 2,000 years ago. Not a one man among those 5% literate would tell himself: “I must record this; who else but me? Who else has the duty to write down these historical events, since I am one of the few who can write?”

And secondly, it is  at least strange that when Jesus lived and performed his miracles, not a single person wrote about them and on the other hand,  a whole  bunch of writers of Jesus’ deeds suddenly emerged 30 to 170 years after Christ’s crucifixion, starting with many evangelists (the Church decided in the fourth century that only four gospels²⁾,  would be published in the New Testament), Paul´s letters (14 letters in total), Acts of the Apostles (unknown Christian authors), seven other letters (again unknown Christian authors), and many other anonymous writers but whose works did not become part of the New Testament. How is it possible that none of Jesus’ followers of that time wrote even a single line about him, but after a few decades, so many writers and preachers of Christ’s teaching suddenly emerged? Did literacy dramatically increase? No, the literacy rate of 5% did not increase significantly in those few decades, and therefore, neither did the chance of a larger number of writers. So, what’s the deal then? The answer is very prosaic: Some aspects of Jesus’ life that in fact did not happen, simply suddenly appeared 30 years later, namely attractive parts of his life story, miracles and supernatural abilities. Over time, his life story expanded and enhanced. Put simply, it was embellished and exaggerated to such an extent that it became interesting for people and worthy of being written down. This phenomenon is not unusual even today, but the conditions for it were optimal in those times. The entire life story of Jesus Christ was passed down from generation to generation exclusively verbally, so it is only natural that entirely new stories emerged over the years, literally legends completely detached from Jesus’ real life but   more attractive to listeners. Since there was no possibility of verifying the truth of such a story against a reliable historical record, there was a greater probability of believing the new story.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gospels
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#Canonical_gospels: Matthew,_Mark,_Luke_and_John
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synod_of_Hippo
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Councils_of_Carthage#Synod_of_397

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²⁾ The four canonical gospels were probably written between AD 66 and 110. All four were anonymous (with the modern names added in the 2nd century), almost certainly none were by eyewitnesses, and all are the end-products of long oral and written transmission. Mark was the first to be written, using a variety of sources. The authors of Matthew and Luke both independently used Mark for their narrative of Jesus's career, supplementing it with a collection of sayings called the Q source³⁾ and additional material unique to each. There is near-consensus that John had its origins as the hypothetical Signs Gospel thought to have been circulated within a Johannine community⁴⁾. The contradictions and discrepancies between the first three and John make it impossible to accept both traditions as equally reliable.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel

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³⁾ The Q source (also called Q document(s), Q Gospel, or Q; from German: Quelle, meaning "source") is a hypothetical written collection of primarily Jesus' sayings (λόγια : logia). Q is part of the common material found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke but not in the Gospel of Mark. According to this hypothesis, this material was drawn from the early Church's oral gospel traditions.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source

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⁴⁾ The term Johannine community refers to an ancient Christian community which placed great emphasis on the teachings of Jesus and his apostle John.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannine_community

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However, Jesus Christ’s real life was much simpler and much less unique. The most famous biographers of Jesus are four evangelists, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, who wrote their gospels between the years 65 and 110, approximately 32 to 77 years after the death of Jesus. These evangelists recorded all those unbelievable deeds just as they heard them passed down verbally years after the event, a story that paints a picture of a man sent to Earth by God through the Holy Spirit and the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary who performed various miracles, was crucified, and ascended into heaven.

How do chroniclers and historians describe the place and time Jesus lived in? They say that at the time of Jesus’s birth, Judea was under Roman rule, there was great poverty, and the land was split into several hostile territories and was on the brink of collapse. Many preachers and so-called prophets roamed about the country, and they attracted a lot of attention. A Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, governed the country. 

As a 30-year-old, Jesus joined one such roaming group. However, soon enough, he started preaching and attracting his own followers. Evangelists called them disciples and stated that there were twelve of them. I mean the four official evangelists approved by the Church. The unofficial evangelist Philip states that there were more disciples and there were women among them, such as Mary Magdalene. In the poverty reigning in Judea, under the rule of hated Rome, the conditions were perfect for rebels. It’s easy to imagine that such self-proclaimed preachers were very popular among the common people, especially if they hinted even the slightest hostility towards Rome and its representatives in Judea. The entire Jewish nation expected a leader to appear, one that would overthrow hated Pilate and Roman rule over Judea, unite the divided Jewish territories, and create a Jewish kingdom. I think this was one of the main reasons wandering preachers were so popular. They were local, spoke a language that everyone understood, Hebrew, not the despised Latin, and above all else, they brought hope that some new potential leader of Judea would appear among these pseudo-prophets. I assume that Jesus was tempted to fulfil this social demand. If what the author of the Gospel according to Matthew says is true, that as many as 5,000 people listened to Jesus during one of his sermons, a huge number for that time, then such success undoubtedly boosted his confidence, maybe even to such an extent that he hoped to unify and lead the Jewish nation, because besides the socio-political circumstances, there was also a strong religious effect. Namely: Jews were awaiting the Messiah according to their faith (and still are), their saviour, someone who was supposed to descend to Earth and save the Jewish nation. Maybe Jesus really hoped that the masses would rally behind him and that he would lead a Jewish, anti-Roman revolt. I know this is mere speculation, but whether he thought that way or not, the fact remains that the Jews themselves did not accept him, which is very strange. When we apply the example of Jesus Christ to the present day, it is almost unbelievable. It is simply a fact that every nation is proud of its unique people. Take successful scientists, doctors, artists, or athletes as an example. The last two fields, arts and sports, are prime examples. An entire nation rejoices when one of its representatives becomes successful in some sport. Everyone is proud oh him/her; people use the name of a successful athlete on foreign trips as their business card, as an introduction of the nation which they come from, and suddenly even a sports discipline, which, if I may exaggerate a bit, some didn’t even know existed, is of the utmost interest to the citizens of that country. The best example from a Christian perspective is the pope John Paul II. The pride of the Polish people had (and still has) no boundaries. So how is it possible that the Jews didn’t accept Jesus Christ, their compatriot? They must have known him best, after all. Isn´t the answer hidden right in this sentence? The Gospels were written 30-plus years after the crucifixion of Christ. It is quite possible that when they began to spread, the citizens of Judea simply didn’t know him. It seems very probable if a son asked his mother about Jesus Christ at that time in Judea that she would reply, “Son, I don’t know. I really haven’t heard of him, I even asked my father, who remembers a lot, but he doesn’t know anything about him either.” Eventually I can also easily imagine the reaction of an older citizen of Nazareth or Bethlehem: “Yes, I’ve heard of him. He was one of those wandering preachers, but performing miracles? I really have not heard of that.”

Another example: If Joseph Smith was on a pilgrimage in Atlanta in front of a mass of 5,000 people today, and he would multiply five loaves of bread and two fish and fed the whole crowd, do you think Christians wouldn´t accept him as the son of God? And if he would perform other miracles regularly for the next three years? I am convinced that most of the population would, even though the Christian faith does not expect another Messiah. So why didn’t the Jews, who, on top of that, were desperately hoping for a Messiah during the time of poverty and Roman oppression. The coming of the Messiah into this world is one of the core prophecies of the Torah (the Hebrew Bible). And how would Joseph Smith end up if he started proclaiming himself to be the son of God without ever performing a single miracle, only wandering the country with a gang of vagrants? Luckily for him, in today’s age, there would be no threat of stoning or crucifixion. 

Little side note:

After nine days he reached the summit and there pitched camp. He waited a couple of days to allow his surviving troops to recover and to gather up those who had fallen behind. During this time many of the horses that had panicked and broken loose caught up with them, somewhat unexpectedly, together with a large number of baggage animals, which had thrown off their packs, but had followed the army’s tracks and reached the camp.

Winter was now approaching and the early snows were now settling on the mountaintops. Hannibal realised that his men were demoralised as a result of both the hardships they had already endured and the prospect of yet more to come.

So he called them all together and tried to boost their morale. He had only one source of encouragement, and that was the sight of Italy, clearly spread out below. It lies so close up under these mountains that anyone gazing on both together would imagine that the Alps towered above Italy like an acropolis above its city. He pointed out to them the plains along the river Po, and reminded them of the general goodwill felt towards them by the Gauls who lived there, and at the same time he pointed out the direction where Rome lay in relation to their present position. In this way he did manage to some extent to cheer them up.

Next day he harnessed his wagon train, broke camp, and started his descent. The track was narrow and the descent precipitous; the snow made it impossible for anyone to see where he was treading; if anyone strayed from the path or lost his footing, he fell from the heights to certain death. Nevertheless, the men endured these trials stoically, since by now they were well used to such ordeals.

But then they reached a place which was so narrow that it was impossible for the elephants or the baggage animals to move forward at all. There had been a landslide some time previously across nearly one and half stades  (Greek ´nearly three hemi-stadia´) of the mountainside, and this had been made worse by a second and more recent landslip. Confronted with this, the army now became thoroughly disheartened and demoralised once more. At first Hannibal was minded to work his way round the obstacle by a detour, but then a fresh fall of snow made movement impossible and he abandoned the idea.

The situation was now highly unusual, if not almost unique. The fresh fall of this year’s snow had settled on top of that from the previous year, which had remained frozen since last winter. As luck would have it, the surface crust was readily broken, because it was freshly fallen and very soft, though as yet it lacked any depth. So when the soldiers set foot on it, they quickly broke through the surface to the long-standing frozen snow beneath. This was now solid ice, and so they no longer broke through, but instead slid further and further down, one foot after another, just as happens to someone on land who tries to walk across a muddy surface.

As a result, Hannibal gave up all hope of making progress and set up camp along the ridge, scraping away all the snow from the site. After that he ordered the soldiers to rebuild the foundations of the track along the slope, which they did with a great deal of painful effort. Nevertheless in one day they had created an adequate pathway for the horses and pack-animals, so he immediately led them across and set up another camp in an area free of snow and put them out to grass. He then ordered the Numidians to work in relays to build up the path, so that after three days of agonising labour he got the elephants across as well, though starvation had reduced them to a sorry state.  

Hannibal now gathered his whole army together and continued his descent. Three days after leaving the precipitous area just described he reached the plains.

His loss of soldiers as a result of enemy action, river-crossings, and the whole expedition generally, had been very serious; the loss in men from the savage terrain involved in crossing the high passes had been no less costly, while that of his horses and pack-animals had been even more severe. In the end the whole journey from New Carthage (in Spain) had taken five months, the crossing of the Alps fifteen days. And now he had come boldly down into the plains of the Po valley and the tribal lands of the Insubres.

His surviving forces numbered 12,000 African and 8,000 Spanish foot soldiers, together with a maximum of about 6,000 cavalry. He himself has confirmed this on the column at Lacinium, which is inscribed with the statistics of his armed forces.

Source: https://www.johndclare.net/AncientHistory/Hannibal_Sources3.html

The passage mentioned above describing Hannibal’s army crossing the Alps in 218 BC originates from the pen of the historian Polybius (approximately 200 BC–118 BC). It is a passage from his book number 3. This comprehensive work dealing with Roman history is called Histories, and it contains several books, of which books 1 to 5 have been fully preserved, and book 6 has been mostly preserved. Only fragments have remained from the rest of his books. Polybius also wrote a biography of the Greek politician Philopoemen and an extensive treatise called Tactics, in which he deals with Roman and Greek military tactics in detail. I mention Polybius here as a parallel to Josephus or any other historian who was active during Jesus Christ’s life or shortly after his death. I mention Polybius as the prove that historiography itself already existed not just in the times of Jesus Christ, in fact it existed even 200 years before. By the way, these 2,000-year-old historical records fascinate me, taking in account the fact that to us, Slavs, was the first alphabet given in the ninth century by Cyril and Methodius.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius, voľne parafrázovanél

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2. Shortcomings of Oral Tradition – The Snowball

“Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart performed in this home in 1762 at the age of six,” claims a plaque on a building on Ventúrska Street in the historical centre of Bratislava, Slovakia.

Tourists stop in front of it and take photos; guides explain how young Mozart once came to play in Pressburg (as Bratislava was then known). The marble plaque on the original Palffy Palace, which foundations dates back to the Middle Ages, has been drawing tourists for decades. It was even declared a cultural monument during the communist period.

“However, we have no evidence that Mozart ever played in Pressburg, let alone that he did so in this house,” explains historian Stefan Holčík from the Bratislava City Museum. 

It is only a legend, and legends work just as well in Bratislava as in any other city where travel agencies and guides want to impress clients. They don’t care that their stories are based on fabricated arguments.

It might be that also you have a photo at home in which you stand under a famous balcony, by a door, by a house, or by a tombstone that is one hundred percent authentic – except for that it isn’t.

There was no mention of Mozart’s supposed concert in Pressburg in the past. It was only after the Second World War that a Czech musicologist and normalization communist politician, Zdenko Novacek, came up with it. He worked in Bratislava and, based on unsubstantiated data, he convinced his comrades of the installation of the commemorative plaque. The prodigy child allegedly played here in 1792. 

Mozart’s father in fact was in Pressburg at that   time, but according to the historian, it is not likely that his son performed a concert the week before Christmas during the Advent season.

“Mozart’s father mentions visiting Pressburg in a letter. He bought a carriage and a horse here and he had to wait to cross the frozen Morava River to reach Vienna, a 12-hour journey in the freezing cold. If a young child were to undergo this journey, then there would be very big risk of causing pneumonia to him and hardly any parent would risk this,” explains Stefan Holčík.

“Above all, there is no historical document or any record in the archives of noble families that a concert took place here with young Mozart playing. Furthermore, the building on Ventúrska Street was not the only Palffy Palace in the city by any means; on the contrary, several members of this noble family lived in Bratislava, each having their own residence, and we don’t have any evidence why Mozart should play just in Palffy family Palace.  The information on the plaque is clearly false.”

This above is literal excerpt from Peter Getting’s August 2019 article in the Slovak daily newspaper SME titled “There is No Such Thing as a Balcony of Love or Robinson of Pressburg.” It has the characteristic subtitle “What Kind of Tourists Can You Make the Most Money on? The Ones That Love Fabricated Attractions.” Loosely paraphrased, this title perfectly applies to this book. Of course, the tourism aspect needs to be modified to religion or, more generally, to humanity as such. I present it as an example of how legends are born. 

Another example from an article by Peter Getting:

The so-called Robinson of Pressburg is a similar example. Also, here any evidence that he is a historical fact and not a fiction is missing.

You can find the magnificent tombstone of Karol Jetting at the Ondrejský Cemetery. It depicts a sailboat, symbolizing the life of an adventurer who supposedly sailed on many seas, was shipwrecked, and finally wrote exciting memoirs.

The issue is right in the fact that his tombstone was set here long after Jetting’s supposed death in a very symbolic place in the middle of the 19th century. That means no adventurer lies beneath it and most probably he even didn’t exist. Surname Jetting cannot be found in any of the city registries; nobody with that name was born or died here, and according to Holčík, the name didn’t appear in Pressburg at all.

There are also a few suspicious things in his travel book, which contains several factual errors. Robinsonades, or stories of sailors and shipwrecks, were as fashionable then as today’s Nordic crime novels. As today, the guarantee of success only requires signing a detective novel with a pseudonym that sounds Swedish, back then, several imitations of English writer Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” emerged. Romantic pathos was the phenomenon behind the creation of a legend with no support in historical documents.

Another similar case is the visit of Russian Tsar Peter the Great to Pressburg at the end of the 17th century. In honour of this event, the Russian Minister of Culture placed a commemorative plaque on the Slovak National Museum, and the invitation to the ceremony stated that Peter the Great’s visit to Pressburg was for the purpose of “familiarizing himself with the river transport on the Danube and the skill of Slovak builders of riverboats.” The flaw in this is, as the historian Holčík points out, that there were no Slovak shipbuilders in Pressburg at that time. The so-called Danube fleet consisted of cheap riverboats and rafts that could only float downstream and were dismantled for wood at the end of the journey. It should be noted that the monument commission of the capital city recommended that the plaque should not be installed.

Source: https://plus.sme.sk/c/22200771/nie-je-ziaden-balkon-lasky-ani-presporsky-robinson-len-naivni-turisti-ktori-platia.html

Another example is from the US. Let me refer to a quote from the daily SME again, specifically to Soňa Jánošová’s July 2020 article, “She was owned by four slave owners. She escaped from the last one and became a famous speaker.”

It was May of 1851, and in the city of Akron, Ohio, the Congress of the Women’s Rights Convention was taking place. Sojourner Truth, a tall black woman, went on stage and delivered sharp sentences with a deep voice.

“I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”

Source: https://zena.sme.sk/c/22446628/vlastnili-ju-styria-otrokari-poslednemu-utiekla-a-stala-sa-slavnou-recnickou.html

What was the snowball effect in this case, and could it be that to create snowball lasted just 12 years? Because the Sojourner Truth´s speech was published only twelve years later by the human rights activist Frances Dana Barker Gage.

The inconsistencies:

1. Gage published a “transcript” of the speech in a strong Southern dialect, even though Truth was born and raised in the state of New York and only spoke Dutch until she was nine years old. 
2. It is provable that she only had five children.
3. Not all of them ended up in slavery.
4. The speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” which she delivered at the Women’s Rights Convention in Ohio originally had no title. The phrase “Ain’t I a Woman?” relates to another common phrase at the time, “Am I not a man and a brother?” which was used by antiracist and anti-slavery activists to emphasize equality among all of humanity. It’s interesting, however, that this recurring formula is not found in the original version published in the newspapers immediately after the convention. It only appeared in a more explosive version published in 1863, and that version became the historical standard that still speaks to people today.

Source: https://zena.sme.sk/c/22446628/vlastnili-ju-styria-otrokari-poslednemu-utiekla-a-stala-sa-slavnou-recnickou.html

Na to, aby sa snehová guľa nabalila o štyri uvedené nezrovnalosti stačilo dvanásť rokov a teraz nie je podstatné kto sa na nich akým spôsobom podieľal. Nezáleží na tom, čo nabalila Barker Gage, čo pôvodná novinová verzia uverejnená ihneď po jej prejave a čo pridala už priamo do svojho prejavu samotná Truthová. Samozrejme, historikom na tom určite záleží, ale z dôvodu, pre ktorý uvádzam tento príklad ja, je to úplne jedno. Mne ide o názornú praktickú ukážku snehovej gule, ktorá sa reálne stala a ktorá je v dnešnej dobe pomerne ľahko vystopovateľná a overiteľná. Som si istý, že podobných prípadov nabaľovania sa sú plné ľudské dejiny, takých prípadov určite nie sú desiatky a ani stovky, ale sa rátajú na tisíce. Historici by vedeli rozprávať. Potom si je ľahké predstaviť, že pred takmer 2000 rokmi sa na život a skutky Ježiša Krista za viac ako 30 rokov od jeho smrti, nabalilo množstvo neoverených, neoveriteľných a neuveriteľných príbehov, ktoré vychádzali výlučne z ústneho podania, pričom vtedy neexistovala absolútne žiadna možnosť ich vierohodného overenia porovnaním s historickými záznamami.

It only took twelve years for the snowball to get bigger due to the above mentioned four inconsistencies, and now it doesn’t matter who contributed to them and in what way. It doesn’t matter what added Barker Gage, what added the original newspaper version published immediately after her speech or what added Truth herself right into her speech. Of course, historians care about this, but for the reason why I present this example it is irrelevant.  What I want to present is a practical demonstration of the snowball effect that really happened and is relatively easily traceable and verifiable today. I’m sure many similar cases of snowball effect have occurred throughout human history, not dozens or hundreds, but thousands of times. Historians would certainly confirm it. Then it’s easy to imagine that nearly 2,000 years ago, in the period over 30 years from the death of Jesus Christ, a multitude of unverified, unbelievable, and incredible stories were added to his life and his deeds and all of them have been based on verbal interpretation alone because, at that time, there was absolutely no possibility to verify them by comparison with reliable historical records. 

In addition, in the case of the oral tradition very important factor is the subject, the intermediary person that delivers an information. Considering this, I dare to say that in the end of the over generations orally transmitted information is one hundred percent distorted story. It simply comes from human nature, from the speaker’s desire to win attention, to impress and convince the listener about the concrete information (the specific event) that speaker believes in. Any speaker t in effort to make the information believable, supports the story with credible and convincing “facts.” We encounter this daily, and I am sure that human nature has never been different in this regard. Numerous studies have been published on the subject “how many times a day we lie.” For example, in April 2022 in a cafe in Bratislava, I overheard two gentlemen conversation about the war in Ukraine. During their discussion, the man who was talking for the better part of the conversation said: “I talked to an expert on coups who told me that Putin...” Did the phrase “expert on coups” catch your attention as well? Of course, such a position, at least in Slovakia, does not exist, but the speaker simply wanted to give his information as much credibility as possible.

I Want to Believe

Furthermore, there is the “I want to believe” effect, which is probably the most fundamental. The modern Internet age has taught us that, in general, people tend to look for information they are inclined to believe in, information that will strengthen their opinion they already possess. Even if they do stumble upon a different opinion that contradicts their expectations, in most cases, they quickly abandon it and get back to searching for data that supports their preferred opinion, what “they want to believe.” Humanity has always had a strong inclination for (here I must apologize for using this expression) sensationalism, an inclination to believe, and if not to believe, then at least to care about exceptional and abnormal situations, phenomena, stories, events…. The more sensational and fantastic, the more attractive. When the “I want to believe” phenomenon works in combination with a specific event, “miracles” happen. Example: On August 21, 1968, five armies of the Warsaw Pact countries occupied Czechoslovakia. Czech journalist and writer Petr Chudožilov was abroad in Jerusalem at that time. This is how he describes the messages he received from Czechoslovakia:

“We received blow after blow in Jerusalem during a bus ride on August 21. The radio was broadcasting about Russians executing students in the town square of Pilsen as a warning. Later, we heard that writer Bohumil Hrabal committed suicide in protest against the occupation. He was joined by President Svoboda a while after that. Someone was hoping that the member of the castle guard would climb down from the board he was standing on at constant attention and he would open fire to the occupants. In short, the real news was being distorted by noisy data. Many people were crying then, and not just girls. I cried too.”

Source: article “Investigative journalism half a century ago: Petr Chudozilov was uncovering the first scandal of the Prague Spring,”  author: Vladimir Snidl, December 2020. , https://dennikn.sk/2131537/investigativna-zurnalistika-pred-polstorocim-petr-chudozilov-odkryval-prvu-kauzu-prazskej-jari-rozhovor/?ref=tit

Of course, none of it was true. However, it is an example of how the phenomenon “I want to believe” works practically instantly. As shown by this example, in tense, desperate, life changing situations, years, months, days, or hours are not needed.  In such cases, the “I want to believe” effect works almost immediately, in real-time.

Luke the evangelist, respectively the author who wrote the Gospel of Luke, begins his gospel like this:

Dear Friend,
A lot of people have been trying to write about the things that have been happening here. They wrote down what people had seen Jesus do. They wrote down what Jesus had said. They told the message of Jesus. I have carefully studied these things. I thought I should write them down for you. I want you to know the full truth about what you have been told about Jesus. 
Luke 1:1-4 (Gospel of Luke was written in the years 80-90 CE).

What does the author mean by: “I want you to know the full truth about what you have been told about Jesus”? From the context of the introductory text, we can assume that he is not satisfied with what many others before him wrote, and he is trying to record the “whole truth.” Does this mean that Luke, or the author of the Gospel of Luke, had new, additional information, stories, or quotes that were missing from the texts written before then? In all likelihood, yes.

The way how Jesus’ story was likely created over time and what were the motivations to create such stories for the authors of the new gospels, indicates the below excerpt from the TV documentary “Judea and Rome: The Fatal Conflict” from Viasat History.

„The gospel of Matthew mentions the massacre of the innocents. When Herod hears that there´s a new king been born in Bethlehem, he orders the killing of all the male babies in the area.“ (professor Helen Bond, the University of Edinburgh, in the TV document Viasat History „Judea and Rome: The Fatal Conflict“). 

„I think, it was a natural thing for the gospel writer Matthew to tribute this massacre of the innocents to Herod because he was such a likely candidate so concerned about his own position killing rivals, that sort of thing, it´s just that Josephus says nothing about it.“ (professor Steve Mason, the University of Groningen, in the TV document Viasat History „Judea and Rome: The Fatal Conflict“)

„And that is quite significant, because Josephus gives very full account of the end of Herod´s reign and he is very keen to tell us any stories of Herod´s atrocities, so what seems to be happening in the story of Matthew is that the author wants a villain, Matthew wants to set Jesus up as the sort of second Moses, so in the same way that the first Moses was threatened by the evil faro, for Matthew Herod plays the same role, he is the evil archetypal villain. And, of course, people would believe that Herod, it was the kind of thing that he might have done.“ (professor Helen Bond, the University of Edinburgh, in the TV document Viasat History „Judea and Rome: The Fatal Conflict“) 

I think that people were not different one hundred, two hundred, a thousand, or even two thousand years ago. The story passed down verbally for decades between thousands of people was certainly different at the end than at the beginning. Taking in account the above-mentioned examples, even if the nine storytellers of Jesus’ story were absolute pragmatists and perfectionists, strictly sticking to the facts, then with the story that had passed through thousands of mouths and ears it´s for sure enough that just one out of ten people adds something to the story, and in the end, you will get a totally different final product. 

To conclude this chapter, I will add that in 2020, a non-governmental organization Globsec, published a survey, according to which 56% of Slovakians they approached were susceptible to believing in a claim that contains a conspiracy or lies.

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3. Bart Ehrman: Jesus And The Hidden Contradictions Of The Gospels

March 12, 201012:00 PM ET

Bart Ehrman is the author of more than a dozen books, including Misquoting Jesus and God's Problem.
HarperOne

JESUS, INTERRUPTED: REVEALING THE HIDDEN CONTRADICTIONS IN THE BIBLE (AND WHY WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT THEM)
BY BART D. EHRMAN

Read An Excerpt
Bible scholar Bart Ehrman began his studies at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Originally an evangelical Christian, Ehrman believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. But later, as a student at Princeton Theological Seminary, Ehrman started reading the Bible with a more historical approach and analyzing contradictions in the Gospels.

Ehrman, the author of Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them), tells Terry Gross that he discourages readers from "smash[ing] the four Gospels into one big Gospel and think[ing] that [they] get the true understanding."
"When Matthew was writing, he didn't intend for somebody ... to interpret his Gospel in light of what some other author said. He had his own message," Ehrman says.

To illustrate the differences between the Gospels, Ehrman offers opposing depictions of Jesus talking about himself. In the book of John, Jesus talks about himself and proclaims who he is, saying "I am the bread of life." Whereas in Mark, Jesus teaches principally about the coming kingdom and hardly ever mentions himself directly. These differences offer clues into the perspectives of the authors, and the eras in which they wrote their respective Gospels, according to Ehrman.

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"In Mark's Gospel, Jesus is not interested in teaching about himself. But when you read John's Gospel, that's virtually the only thing Jesus talks about is who he is, what his identity is, where he came from," Ehrman says. "This is completely unlike anything that you find in Mark or in Matthew and Luke. And historically it creates all sorts of problems, because if the historical Jesus actually went around saying that he was God, it's very hard to believe that Matthew, Mark and Luke left out that part — you know, as if that part wasn't important to mention. But in fact, they don't mention it. And so this view of the divinity of Jesus on his own lips is found only in our latest Gospel, the Gospel of John."

Ehrman teaches religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible, is now out in paperback.
This interview was originally broadcast on March 4, 2009
Excerpt: 'Jesus, Interrupted'

JESUS, INTERRUPTED: REVEALING THE HIDDEN CONTRADICTIONS IN THE BIBLE (AND WHY WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT THEM)
BY BART D. EHRMAN

Chapter Four
Students taking a college-level Bible course for the first time often find it surprising that we don't know who wrote most of the books of the New Testament. How could that be? Don't these books all have the authors' names attached to them? Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the letters of Paul, 1 and 2 Peter, and 1, 2 and 3 John? How could the wrong names be attached to books of Scripture? Isn't this the Word of God? If someone wrote a book claiming to be Paul while knowing full well that he wasn't Paul — isn't that lying? Can Scripture contain lies?

When I arrived at seminary I was fully armed and ready for the onslaught on my faith by liberal biblical scholars who were going to insist on such crazy ideas. Having been trained in conservative circles, I knew that these views were standard fare at places like Princeton Theological Seminary. But what did they know? Bunch of liberals.
What came as a shock to me over time was just how little actual evidence there is for the traditional ascriptions of authorship that I had always taken for granted, and how much real evidence there was that many of these ascriptions are wrong. It turned out the liberals actually had something to say and had evidence to back it up; they weren't simply involved in destructive wishful thinking. There were some books, such as the Gospels, that had been written anonymously, only later to be ascribed to certain authors who probably did not write them (apostles and friends of the apostles). Other books were written by authors who flat out claimed to be someone they weren't.

In this chapter I'd like to explain what that evidence is.

Who Wrote The Gospels?
Though it is evidently not the sort of thing pastors normally tell their congregations, for over a century there has been a broad consensus among scholars that many of the books of the New Testament were not written by the people whose names are attached to them. So if that is the case, who did write them?
Preliminary Observations: The Gospels as Eyewitness Accounts
As we have just seen, the Gospels are filled with discrepancies large and small. Why are there so many differences among the four Gospels? These books are called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because they were traditionally thought to have been written by Matthew, a disciple who was a tax collector; John, the "Beloved Disciple" mentioned in the Fourth Gospel; Mark, the secretary of the disciple Peter; and Luke, the traveling companion of Paul. These traditions can be traced back to about a century after the books were written.

But if Matthew and John were both written by earthly disciples of Jesus, why are they so very different, on all sorts of levels? Why do they contain so many contradictions? Why do they have such fundamentally different views of who Jesus was? In Matthew, Jesus comes into being when he is conceived, or born, of a virgin; in John, Jesus is the incarnate Word of God who was with God in the beginning and through whom the universe was made. In Matthew, there is not a word about Jesus being God; in John, that's precisely who he is. In Matthew, Jesus teaches about the coming kingdom of God and almost never about himself (and never that he is divine); in John, Jesus teaches almost exclusively about himself, especially his divinity. In Matthew, Jesus refuses to perform miracles in order to prove his identity; in John, that is practically the only reason he does miracles.

Did two of the earthly followers of Jesus really have such radically different understandings of who he was? It is possible. Two people who served in the administration of George W. Bush may well have radically different views about him (although I doubt anyone would call him divine). This raises an important methodological point that I want to stress before discussing the evidence for the authorship of the Gospels.

Why did the tradition eventually arise that these books were written by apostles and companions of the apostles? In part it was in order to assure readers that they were written by eyewitnesses and companions of eyewitnesses. An eyewitness could be trusted to relate the truth of what actually happened in Jesus' life. But the reality is that eyewitnesses cannot be trusted to give historically accurate accounts. They never could be trusted and can't be trusted still. If eyewitnesses always gave historically accurate accounts, we would have no need for law courts. If we needed to find out what actually happened when a crime was committed, we could just ask someone. Real-life legal cases require multiple eyewitnesses, because eyewitnesses' testimonies differ. If two eyewitnesses in a court of law were to differ as much as Matthew and John, imagine how hard it would be to reach a judgment.

A further reality is that all the Gospels were written anonymously, and none of the writers claims to be an eyewitness. Names are attached to the titles of the Gospels ("the Gospel according to Matthew"), but these titles are later additions to the Gospels, provided by editors and scribes to inform readers who the editors thought were the authorities behind the different versions. That the titles are not original to the Gospels themselves should be clear upon some simple reflection. Whoever wrote Matthew did not call it "The Gospel according to Matthew." The persons who gave it that title are telling you who, in their opinion, wrote it. Authors never title their books "according to."

Moreover, Matthew's Gospel is written completely in the third person, about what "they" — Jesus and the disciples — were doing, never about what "we" — Jesus and the rest of us — were doing. Even when this Gospel narrates the event of Matthew being called to become a disciple, it talks about "him," not about "me." Read the account for yourself (Matthew 9:9). There's not a thing in it that would make you suspect the author is talking about himself.

With John it is even more clear. At the end of the Gospel the author says of the "Beloved Disciple": "This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true" (John 21:24). Note how the author differentiates between his source of information, "the disciple who testifies," and himself: "we know that his testimony is true." He/we: this author is not the disciple. He claims to have gotten some of his information from the disciple.
As for the other Gospels, Mark was said to be not a disciple but a companion of Peter, and Luke was a companion of Paul, who also was not a disciple. Even if they had been disciples, it would not guarantee the objectivity or truthfulness of their stories. But in fact none of the writers was an eyewitness, and none of them claims to be.

Who, then, wrote these books?

Excerpted from Jesus, Interrupted by Bart D. Ehrman. Copyright 2009 by Bart D. Ehrman. Excerpted by permission of HarperOne, a member of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124572693, the 12th of March 2010