The New Testament Itself Sabotages Belief in the Jesus Resurrection

We don’t have to ask science to explain why it didn’t happen

It is so hard for Christians to grasp that—a very long time ago—their religion fell down a deep rabbit hole of superstition and magical thinking. It doesn’t require very much study and critical thinking to figure this out. The clergy, across the wide range of Christian brands that don’t agree, have developed considerable show business skills in the structuring of worship events. That is, they have mastered razzle-dazzle—with the use of music, ritual, costuming, art, and architecture—to disguise and deflect attention from beliefs that are deeply superstitious and dependent on magic. Televangelism comes to mind especially; the phony clergy who run these events know how to put on spectacular displays. And the Catholic church, for centuries, has built impressive cathedrals to function as sets for their rituals—and it wins the competition for outrageous costumes! All this helps boost confidence among the laity that the proclaimed theologies must be true.


The Context of Christian Origins

But if Christians truly want to grasp what their religion is all about, they should ask this simple question: What is the context of their Jesus faith?  The most obvious answer is Judaism, and its scripture, what Christians call the Old Testament. Their theologians have insisted that Jesus was predicted by this ancient document. There’s a huge problem with this claim, however: there is not a single text in the Old Testament that mentions Jesus by name. Why didn’t the old-time prophets or authors—under divine inspiration—write something like, “Many centuries from now, the messiah, the son of our god, will appear. He will be a preacher named Jesus, from Nazareth.” 

Lacking that, the New Testament authors searched for texts they felt could be applied to Jesus. And sometimes we are amazed by the shallow, even goofy, results. Matthew sought to lend credibility to his virgin birth tale by quoting Isaiah 7:14, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son…” But Matthew used the Septuagint version of the text, which mistranslated “young woman” as “virgin,” hence Matthew 1:23 reads, “Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son…” It seems that Matthew was also determined to put Hosea 11:1 to good use. He invented to farfetched story of Joseph taking Mary and the infant Jesus to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath—so that he could quote this verse, “…out of Egypt I called my son…” The author of Luke’s gospel had no use at all for this story, and his birth narrative ignores it entirely; in fact, the flight to Egypt doesn’t fit anywhere in his birth narrative. 

I urge the devout to carefully read both Isaiah 7 and Hosea 11, to see how flagrantly Matthew ignored the context of these verses. There no hint, even remotely, that they have anything to do with the story of Jesus. The defenders of Christianity are fond of accusing atheists of taking Bible verses “out of context” when we quote texts that are embarrassing to their faith. But it’s not hard to see that the New Testament authors hunted in the Old Testament for verses that they argued applied to Jesus, interpreting them totally out of context. Yes, of course, the Jesus sect emerged from Judaism—that is important for understanding Christianity’s origins. But not too many Jews thought that the claims of the new Jesus sect made sense, and it was rejected. 

But what about the much wider context of ancient religions? Here the “deep rabbit hole” that Christianity fell into becomes obvious. Crucial homework here is Richard Carrier’s 2018 high-impact essay, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. Here he describes nine other gods who were believed to have died and risen again, with full benefits for those who believed. The authors of the New Testament jumped on this band-wagon, recreating the image of Jesus to fit the pattern. Carrier points out that the stories of these other nine god vary enormously, but the basic underlying idea was retained. 

The Confusion of Four Gospel Accounts of that First Easter Morning 

Theologians, apologists, and clergy have been trying forever to explain away the contradictions and flaws, but the four gospel authors had their own theological agendas. Functioning as novelists, they created their resurrection stories as they imagined what had happened. They last thing they anticipated was that their four accounts would one day be published together, that is, The Grand Opening on the New Testament. If only the devout were devoutly obsessed with reading these four documents, committed to comparing them carefully.
Robert Conner, in his book, Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story, has noted that the gospel writers seem to have been influenced by ghost folklore. The author of Luke included the Emmaus Road story—found only in his gospel—in which the risen Jesus appears to two disciples as they are walking toward the village of Emmaus. But they don’t recognize him. Later, when he blessed bread at a meal, he suddenly vanished. So, was Jesus a resurrected body—or a ghost? 

And there’s too much in the resurrection stories that doesn’t make sense. Robert Conner wrote on this blog in 2021: 

“There weren’t any witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection. None. At. All. Despite Jesus foretelling that he would rise on the third day after his death, not one of his disciples showed up to witness it. Not. A. One. And when the women visited the tomb, expecting it to contain a corpse, and reported back to the Eleven Amigos, here’s their response: ‘But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense’” (Luke 24:11). 

Say what? Did the disciples assume that Jesus had been preaching/promising nonsense? 

But full stop here. There is no contemporaneous documentation by which to verify what the disciples said; nor is there any to verify anything that Jesus supposedly said as “reported” by the gospel authors, who wrote decades later. They were theologians, not historians. They were determined to promote the Jesus cult. And it is clear that they had no idea that their documents would one day—far in the future—be analyzed carefully, critically, skeptically.  

What to do with a resurrected body?

In the gospel of John we find the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. This was voice-activated resurrection: Jesus    “…cried with a loud voice, ‘’Lazarus, come out!”  (John 11:43) How does this differ from a magic spell? This story was constructed to allow Jesus to proclaim, “I am the resurrection and the life.” (John 11:25) We are never told how Lazarus died again. In Matthew’s gospel we read that, at the moment Jesus died on the cross,

“The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.” (Matthew 27:52-53) Again, it is Matthew alone who “reports” this, and we wonder what happened to all these folks. Did they just wander back to their tombs and die again? 

Of course the gospel authors couldn’t allow their readers to wonder what happened to Jesus. Hence we read in Acts, chapter 1 that Jesus ascended to heaven, disappeared beyond the clouds, witnessed by the disciples. Since we are 100 per cent certain this cannot have happened (given what we know about the earth’s location in space), the body of the supposedly risen Jesus did not leave planet earth.  

So we don’t have the real ending of the story. We are not told what really happened to him. The gospel authors made up the ascension to heaven to keep their cult followers in awe. The Acts 1 episode is pure fantasy. Either Jesus is still—somehow, somewhere—walking around, or like Lazarus and the many folks who came alive in their tombs and toured Jerusalem on Easter morning, he died again. But the gospel authors skipped this detail. They had to protect belief in their own dying-and-rising savior god. 

These days we would call it a cover-up.

The apostle Paul provides no help either. He brags in Galatians 1:11-12: “For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin, for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” In his letters he makes scant mention of Jesus’ life, preaching, and miracles. He says nothing about an empty tomb on Easter morning. Based on a careful reading of chapter 13:1-5 of his Letter to the Romans, it would seem he wasn’t even aware that Jesus had been executed by Roman officials. Paul’s knowledge of Jesus came through his hallucinations, which theologians—no matter what religion, by the way—consider authentic visions. 

The New Testament provides no help whatever in finding out what happened to Jesus in the end. In fact, this revered document provides far too many reasons for not taking the resurrection seriously at all. 

David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes:
·      Guessing About God (2023),
·      Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also available. 
·      Everything You Need to Know About Prayer But May Not Want to Admit (2025)
 
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
 
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.