By Douglas Anele
Over two months ago when a colleague of mine, through a mobile phone
text message, drew my attention to Femi Aribisala’s rejoinder to my
two-part essay in Sunday Vanguard entitled “The Significance of Easter,”
I wanted to reply the following week. But at the last minute I changed
my mind because I am usually unenthusiastic to defend myself against
criticism, especially from religionists who dogmatically believe that a
single“holy”book contains all the important spiritual and moral truths
in the world.
In any case, since Aribisala’s riposte, “Barrack Obama Does Not
Exist,” contains existential fallacies which are the stock-in-trade of
Christians that a 100-level undergraduate logic student can easily
identify and debunk, and since Aribisala himself and like-minded
Christian apologists might believe, falsely, that his rejoinder is a
definitive refutation of my sceptical stance on the historicity of the
biblical Jesus, it is necessary to point out gaping errors in
Aribisala’s reasoning.
To begin with, Aribisala was so eager to parade his “burning bush
experience” that he forgot the main thrust of my argument. I did not say
that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist, simpliciter.
Instead, I argued that,giventhe irreconcilable contradictions in the
Gospels’ narratives about a character named Jesus and the resounding
silence about him by notable historians of the period, which strongly
suggests that the biblical figure is probably a mythologised version of
an obscure insignificant Jewish rabbi who preached unorthodox version of
Judaism in the twilight years of the ancient Roman Empire,the
foundation of Easter celebrationsis mythological as well.
I even stated in my article that “assuming that there was a religious
teacher named Jesus…whose activities were mythologised to create the
fictional character in the gospels and who, as some investigators have
suggested, did not die on the cross… .” ThereforeI did not rule out the
possibility that the Gospels’ accounts are fabricated narratives woven
around an actual person. What my essay ruled out is complete veracity of
what was written about a certain Jesus in the New Testament.
That said, Aribisala’s parody of Obama being a myth, and his
tongue-in-cheek reference to the existence of his wife, are pointless
and totally misplaced. Indeed, those areinappropriateexamples, because
despite the shenanigans of Donald Trump and others who challenged the
American citizenship of Obama, there are authentic verifiable documents
that establish the particulars of his birth beyond reasonable doubt, and
no one has ever claimed that he performed the kind of incredible
superhuman feats credited to Jesus in The Holy Bible.
Moreover, there is no record of Obama resurrecting after death and
ascending into heaven to sit at the right hand of a god. Mutatis
mutandis, the same arguments apply to Karen, Aribisala’s wife, who I am
certain exists because she was my teacher and I see her regularly at the
Faculty of Arts building, University of Lagos. It is trivially correct,
as Aribisala asserts, that there are conflicting reports about all
historical figures.
But the issue is that, even in the case of founders of influential
philosophical-spiritual and religious systems in antiquity, such as
Socrates, Plato, Buddha, Confucius etc., authoritative historians of the
period they lived documented some of their activities. Again, the
actual writings of these personages, or verifiable accounts of their
teachings and activities written by disciples, have come down to us.
Concerning Buddha, Zoroaster,Mohammed, and other paradigmatic figures
around whom legendshave accreted over millennia, there are extant
trustworthy records testifying to theiractual existence, and historians
generally reacha consensusabout what is fact and what is fiction in
available documents about them.But the case of Jesus is on another level
altogether.
Even if we ignore contradictions in the Gospels’ account and the
incontrovertible fact that the New Testament is definitely not a
historical record since the extant copies were written in Greek not
earlier than seventy years after the events they purportedly describe by
believers who lived in foreign countries, it is very odd that
historians of the period did not write about a so-called messiah who
performed momentous miracles.
Meanwhile, there is strong agreement among scholars that a small
passage in the massive, thirty-two volume historical work of the
first-century Jewish priest and historian, Josephus, which mentioned the
name ‘Jesus,’is a Christian fabrication.
Of course, Femi Aribisala is neither interested in the question of
the veridicality of the Gospels’ narratives nor in the findings of
eminent scholars that have painstakingly investigated the historicity of
Jesus: like most Christian apologists he is much more preoccupied with
maintaining a dogma at all cost.
Anyway, his conflation of objective reality with his own
hallucinatory experiences and those of Saul is a typical instantiation
of slipshod reasoning characteristic of religious apologists.
Philosophers such as Gaunilo, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Bertrand
Russell have definitively demonstrated the error of extrapolating from
subjective experiences to objective existence.
The key point here is that, no matter what Aribisala claims to have
done with his “living Jesus”and irrespective of the number of “burning
bush experiences” he had had in the past or will have in the future, all
these are totally irrelevant to the question of establishing the
objective reality of the contents of those encounters.
Aribisala’s illogical leap from phantasmagoria to actuality is
symptomatic of a mind suffused with illusory consolations of religious
dogma and unwilling to entertain the possibility that Christianity is
fundamentally mythological.If a well-educated man like Femi Aribisala is
unwilling to differentiate between mythology and reality just to defend
a dogma, you can imagine the mindset of millions of illiterate and
undereducated Nigerians.
Christian apologists would continue to defend acrobatically the
mythologies in the New Testament precisely because without myths
Christianity would lose its psychological appeal and eventually wither
away, thereby jeopardising the easy privileges enjoyed by the clergy and
the entire Christian establishment. That is why the demythologising
programmeof Rudolf Bultmannwill never be widely accepted by theologians.
If indeed it is true, as Femi Aribisala claimed, that Jesus showed up
to him “in person,” I can only remind him that, for most young children
during Yuletide Father Christmas or Santa Claus shows up “in
person.”Does it then follow that there is an actual Santa Claus?
Vanguard
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