I dislike religious historians. I can’t for the life of me fathom how any of these men and women can take their profession seriously when they have so much invested in their beliefs. Who among them is willing to question the historicity of their own God? Even if they are, can we trust the blinders of faith won’t simply make it impossible for them to be objective?

For an example of what I’m talking about, take this recent finding from Harvard professor Karen L. King: she claims to have found a 4th century note from Coptic (Egyptian) Christians that make mention of Jesus having a wife. There’s yet to be any actual testing on the piece of papyrus, but already King and her team are convinced of its authenticity.

Even if it did originate from that time period, so what? This is yet another example of third, fourth accounts being taken as fact. If you’ve ever spent 5 minutes analyzing human behavior, you quickly realize most of us aren’t really interested in facts or truth. We’re all too busy trying to make the world fit into OUR vision, and that means the inconvenience of reality often means it’s entirely left out of our conversations. I don’t see much scholarly debate over whether or not Amon Ra had a wife, and he too came to Earth to help the poor and oppressed. There’s a trend to all legends, you see, and the fact that people try to inject this Jesus guy into real history only proves how poor their scholarship actually is.

What I find frustrating in all of this is even people skeptical of this new ‘finding’ fail to apply the same level of skepticism to everything else. Take a quote from this Christian who seems entirely confused abut what ‘attested historical figure’ actually means:

Jesus may be one of the best attested figures in the ancient world, but we still know hardly anything about him. And because he is the key figure in the largest religion in the world, we are keen to fill in the blanks…

The truth of the matter is that we don’t know what Jesus looked like. We don’t know where he was or what he was doing when he turned 18. And we don’t know if he was ever married or divorced.

What he looked like or if he had a wife is only the tip of this ignorance iceberg. When was this supposed messiah born? When did people start writing about him? Does it not seem suspicious to these folks that even many early Christians believed he was simply an allegory? The author admits there were plenty of religious frauds all too happy to fabricate evidence. Why is it so difficult to think the same is true for his historicity?

How many more times do we have to read dubious articles about finding Jesus’ tomb or some supposed piece of his actual cross. You might as well claim you found Hercules’ resting place as far as I’m concerned.