Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists

by Dan Barker

Josephus would not have called Jesus “the Christ” or “the truth.” Whoever wrote these phrases was a believing Christian.

The phrase “to this day” shows that this is a later interpolation. There was no “tribe of Christians” during Josephus’ time.

In all of Josephus’ voluminous works, there is not a single reference to Christianity anywhere outside of this tiny paragraph.

If Jesus truly had been the fulfillment of divine prophecy, as Christians believe (and Josephus was made to say), he would have been the one learned enough to document it.

This sounds more like sectarian propaganda—in other words, more like the New Testament—than objective reporting.

Christians should be careful when they refer to Josephus as historical confirmation for Jesus. If we remove the forged paragraph, as we should, the works of Josephus become evidence against historicity.

If you admit there was a propensity for believers to tamper with evidence, how do you know they kept their grubby hands off the New Testament?

It is only eager believers who jump to the conclusion that this provides evidence for Jesus. Nowhere in any of Suetonius’ writings did he mention Jesus of Nazareth.

In 112 C.E., Pliny (the younger) said that “Christians were singing a hymn to Christ as to a god…” That’s it.

Pliny, at the very most, might be useful in documenting the religion, but not the historic Jesus.

Tacitus claims no first-hand knowledge of Christianity. He is merely repeating the then common ideas about Christians. (A modern parallel would be a 20th century historian reporting that Mormons believe that Joseph Smith was visited by the angel Moroni, which would hardly make it historical proof, even though it is as close as a century away.)

He is merely repeating what Christians believed in the second century. Lucian does not mention Jesus by name.

since Lucian did not consider himself a historian, neither should we.

All of these “confirmations” of Jesus are at best second-hand hearsay of what others were thought to have believed. They would be worthless in a court of law. It would be like a witness to a murder saying, “I did not see the act itself, but I read in a letter from someone who is now dead that they heard from a probably reliable source that s...

There are currently hundreds of millions of copies of the Koran in existence, in many forms and scores of translations. Does the sheer number of copies make it more reliable than, say, a single inscription on an Egyptian sarcophagus?

Matthew reports that Herod slaughtered all the first-born in the land in order to execute Jesus. No historian, contemporary or later, mentions this supposed genocide, an event that should have caught someone’s attention. None of the other biblical writers mention it.

why Joseph’s genealogy is relevant if he was not Jesus’ father: Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost. (I’d like to see the genome of the Holy Ghost’s DNA.)

“Mithra was born on the 25th of December…which was finally taken over by Christians in the 4th century as the birthday of Christ. Some say Mithra sprang from an incestuous union between the sun god and his own mother… Some claimed Mithra’s mother was a mortal virgin. Others said Mithra had no mother, but was miraculously born of a female Rock, the petra genetrix, fertilized by the Heavenly Father’s phallic lightning.

“Like early Christianity, Mithraism was an ascetic, anti-female religion. Its priesthood consisted of celibate men only…

“After extensive contact with Mithraism, Christians also began to describe themselves as soldiers for Christ;… to celebrate their feasts on Sun-day rather than the Jewish sabbath…

If early Christians, who were closer to the events than we are, said the story of Jesus is “nothing different” from paganism, can modern skeptics be faulted for suspecting the same thing?

Prudent history demands that until all natural explanations for the origin of an outrageous tale are completely ruled out, it is irresponsible to hold to the literal, historical truth of what appears to be just another myth.

The Gospel stories are no more historic than the Genesis creation accounts are scientific. They are filled with exaggerations, miracles and admitted propaganda. They were written during a context of time when myths were being born, exchanged, elaborated and corrupted, and they were written to an audience susceptible to such fables.

If history cannot prove a miracle, then certainly secondhand hearsay cannot either.

“Why have you ruled out the supernatural?” is a question believers sometimes ask. I answer that I have not ruled it out: I have simply given it the low probability it deserves along with the other possibilities. I might equally ask them, “Why have you ruled out the natural?”

I say to Christians: Either tell me exactly what happened on Easter Sunday or let’s leave the Jesus myth buried next to Eastre (Ishtar, Astarte), the pagan Goddess of Spring after whom your holiday was named.

“When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.” —Benjamin Franklin

We have suffered enough from the divisive malignancy of belief. Our planet needs a faithectomy.

“Being a mere mortal mammal makes me feel unimportant, so I’m going to believe in God.”

The fact that life is ultimately meaningless does not mean it is not immediately meaningful.

“Isn’t atheism just another religion?” No, it isn’t. Atheism has no creeds, rituals, holy book, absolute moral code, origin myth, sacred spaces or shrines. It has no sin, divine judgment, forbidden words, prayer, worship, prophecy, group privileges or anointed “holy” leaders.

We atheists possess “salvation” not because we are released from a sentence, but because we don’t deserve the punishment in the first place. We have committed no “sin.” Sin is a religious concept, and in some religions salvation is the deliverance from the “wages of sin”—which is death or eternal punishment.

since there is no god, there is no sin, therefore no need of salvation.

How much respect should you have for a doctor who cuts you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage? Only those who consider themselves sinners need this kind of deliverance—it is a religious solution to a religious problem.

If salvation is the cure, then atheism is ...