Jesus was guilty as charged. Therefore, he was not the innocent Lamb of God whose death redeemed the world.
His resurrection, on the other hand, is based on pious illusions.
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This is the third book in my trilogy. Here are the titles of my first two books.
1 – The Christian Fable.
2 – Enigmatic Texts in the Gospel and the Constitution.
Two statements are made in the third book.
The first one goes to the heart of the Christian faith, which sees in Jesus the innocent Lamb of God who redeemed the world. This implies that Jesus was innocent, and was condemned unjustly. But I show in my book that, according to the secret revelations that are in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus was guilty as charged.
The second statement concerns the resurrection of Jesus. I show in my book that, although the resurrection experience of the disciples was real, it did not affect the dead body of Jesus. I reach that conclusion by elimination. In order to show that the resurrection affected the dead body of Jesus, the disciples invented two stories, the empty-tomb story and the story of Joseph of Arimathea. It is easy to show that there are two burial stories in the Gospel of John. The first one implies that the Roman soldiers disposed of the body of Jesus with the bodies of the two other men who were crucified with him. This was done after sunset. Mary Magdalene and her female friends had left the crucifixion site before sunset, on account of the Sabbath. They did not know what the soldiers did after they left. In other words, they did not know where Jesus was buried, and they could not have discovered the empty tomb. The second burial story goes back to the Gospel of Mark. It introduces Joseph of Arimathea and how he buried Jesus as Mary Magdalene and her female companions observed what he did. This made it possible for them to go back to the tomb and find it empty. In my book, I show that this second story was derived from the first one, and amounts to forgery.
It is easy to forge a story. But there is always a way of exposing a forgery. In this case, the one who invented the second burial story as it is found in the Gospel of Mark made a mistake that confirms his forgery.
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It is not so easy to show that Jesus was guilty as charged. The disciples and eyewitnesses have systematically lied about this point and about many other things that happened during the life of Jesus. They had to do so; otherwise their faith in Jesus Christ, Son of God, would have become untenable. They were obsessed by this problem. They acknowledged that their hearts were hardened. This is a reference to what God did to Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus. God hardened his heart so he would not listen to Moses. In a similar way, the disciples of Jesus were under the powerful influence of a mysterious force that made them do what they did. They lied about the real reason why Jesus was condemned. This was not for them a free choice. But I must say that they were honest liars. They left traces of their lies, not consciously and knowingly, but unconsciously and unknowingly. The problem is that those traces have remained unrecognized to this day.
Before we can reconstruct what happened during the last phase in Jesus’ life that caused his loss of popularity in Galilee and his crucifixion in Jerusalem, we should reconstruct the mental processes that guided the disciples and eyewitnesses after his death into believing in his resurrection and his eventual deification. Such a reconstruction is beyond the competence of theologians and gospel scholars. It requires a new methodology, that is to say new tools that can help us read the mind of a fisherman like Peter who had become all of a sudden the founder of a new religion that was based on pious illusions, and became believable thanks to a systematic recourse to fake news. Thus, the Christian religion was based on the testimony of someone who was a mental case, and who was honest enough to admit it, not overtly but covertly.
The Gospel of Mark is in substance the gospel of Peter. This is what makes it so valuable. In it Peter recognizes that he and the other disciples had a serious problem. Their hearts were hardened. Consequently the memory they had of Jesus was altered, and they misrepresented Jesus’ message that caused his condemnation.
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