The Jesus Hoax Quotes

“It does no good to say, “Well, God is mysterious.”  This is another religious cop-out.  It’s a meaningless statement that can be used to cover over any inconvenient problem.  It’s another sign of surrender.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“Additionally, even if we want to place an emphasis on belief, we still need to have a reason to believe.  If our beliefs aren’t rational, we are liable to believe absolutely anything:  pixies, magic dragons, unicorns, you name it.  We might start burning people as witches, or try casting out demons, or rely strictly on prayer to heal serious diseases.  A society ruled by non-rational beliefs is a very dangerous one, and not something that anyone would truly want to live in.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“Christianity relies on faith, not reason.  Therefore, rational arguments against it, or against Jesus, have no effect.  We simply believe the Christian story, and that’s good enough.”  This is a very convenient ‘get out of jail free’ card that religious people like to play.  But it doesn’t work.  It’s worth noting that all of Western civilization is based on the idea of rationality and reason, from its very inception in ancient Greece around 600 BC.  Reason is older than Christianity, and is the foundation of everything that we have achieved.  It’s not that faith has no place, but if we allow faith to override reason in our ideological thinking, we surrender the very basis of our own culture.  It’s self-defeating and self-destructive.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“Jesus saves.  I truly believe this.  Jesus—the real Jesus, and his real story—will someday save us from a two-thousand-year-old nightmare.   As he himself said, “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:31).  Then he really will deserve his title as the most famous man in history.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“Christians would blame the Jews for killing Christ, not realizing that the whole tale was a Jewish construction in the first place.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“And where is that famed ‘message of love’ so endemic to Christianity?  Love comes later; now it’s time to fight.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“Here he lays out the essence of the plan.  The Romans are the powerful, the noble, the wise and learned; but God did not choose them.  He chose you, the weak and ignorant masses.  He explicitly chose “the foolish,” “the low and despised,” he even chose things that are not—in order to bring down the “things that are,” namely, the Roman Empire.  All in all, a remarkable passage.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“Without a resurrection, all of Paul’s grand plans “are in vain.”  No one will be convinced of Jesus’ divinity, and thus they won’t follow him.  Again, even the life and sayings of Jesus were irrelevant for Paul.  The divine resurrection was everything.  Nietzsche, as usual, was to the point:  [Paul] invented his own history of earliest Christianity. …  The Savior type, the doctrine, the practice, the death, the meaning of death, even what came after death—nothing remained untouched, nothing remained even similar to the reality.  Paul simply transposed the center of gravity of the whole existence after this existence—in the lie of the ‘resurrected’ Jesus.  At bottom, he had no use at all for the life of the Savior—he needed the death on the cross and a little more.[63] And that’s the core of the hoax.  Everything else follows naturally.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“The point bears repeating.  During Jesus’ entire lifetime, from, say 3 BC to 30 AD, not one person—not a Christian, not a Jew, not a Roman, not a Greek—wrote anything about the miracles, what Jesus said, or what his followers did.  No one wrote anything.  It’s as if nothing extraordinary happened at all.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary justification.  At a minimum, they require some justification.  At a bare minimum, they require any justification.  In the case of Jesus, unfortunately, we have no justification.  In other words, we have no evidence for anything like these miracles occurring at all, let alone by a Jesus of Nazareth.  In fact we have no evidence that an historical Jesus even existed, until decades after his death.  We have no bodies, no tombs, no physical remains, no letters, no engravings—nothing that counts as evidence.  We have no evidence.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“Returning specifically to Christianity, I must note a central fact of the entire religion:  The Bible is an entirely Jewish document.  Front to back, cover to cover, A to Z, Old Testament and New—the Bible is an entirely Jewish document.  The morality, the theology, the social attitudes, the worldview…all thoroughly Jewish.  The Old Testament obviously so; it was written by Jews, about Jews, and for Jews.  The same holds with the New Testament, although with a slight twist:  it was written by Jews, about Jews, but for non-Jews.  This twist is crucial to the whole Jesus story.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“Someone, somewhere in the past, constructed a gigantic lie and then passed it around the ancient world as a cosmic truth.  The guilty parties need to be exposed.  Only then can we truly understand this ancient religion, and begin to move forward.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“Suffice it to say that there is no rational answer to this question.  It seems that God either does not really care about our suffering—in which case he’s not all good—or he’s not really able to do anything about it—in which case he’s not all powerful.  In other words, God is either not a moral being, or he’s not all-powerful.  He clearly can’t be both at the same time.  And yet that’s exactly what Christianity, and many other religions, want us to believe.  It’s an unsolvable dilemma.  The Problem of Evil has no answer.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“The biggest problem of all comes when we believe that God is a moral being:  someone who is good, kind, benevolent, just, etc.  This notion is central to Christianity but it leads directly to what we call the Problem of Evil.[1]  In short, the problem is this:  The world is plagued by all varieties of evils, including murder, rape, war, violence, illness, disease, accidents, famine, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes.  These cause massive human suffering and death, every day.  But the world is allegedly overseen by a benevolent and loving God who wishes well for us humans, who are, after all, created in his image.  This moral God, furthermore, is all-powerful; he can instantly do whatever he wishes.  How is it, then, that humans suffer such vast and unending evils?  God has the power to halt or prevent every conceivable evil.  And yet he does not.  Why?”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“can it really be beneficial to accept a myth as truth?  Can one really live a happy, successful, and meaningful life dedicated to a false story, or to a lie?  Take the case of Santa Claus.  This story may be useful to keep naughty little children in line, but it ‘works’ only because of their ignorance and naiveté.  Even if we could keep up the charade for years, would it be ethical to do so?  Surely not; ultimately it would lead to terrible outcomes.  And if there were a whole society of Santa-believers, can we envision them leading a truly good life?  Of course not.  It should be self-evident that a life based on self-deception or falsehood can never turn out well.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary justification.  At a minimum, they require some justification.  At a bare minimum, they require any justification.  In the case of Jesus, unfortunately, we have no justification.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

“Theophrastus.  He had a concern about one of their customs:  “the Syrians, of whom the Jews (Ioudaioi) constitute a part, also now sacrifice live victims…  They were the first to institute sacrifices both of other living beings and of themselves”.[40]  The Greeks, he added, would have “recoiled from the entire business.”  The victims—animal and human—were not eaten, but burnt as “whole offerings” to their God, and were “quickly destroyed.”  The philosopher was clearly repelled by this Jewish tradition.”
― David Skrbina, The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years