“It is better to live without illusions than to live by them.”
~Christopher Hitchens
The Gospels Are Fiction — And History Proves It
For centuries, believers have been told that the Gospels are sacred eyewitness accounts — literal records of divine events that changed the world. But peel back the layers of church tradition, and a very different story emerges. The evidence reveals not divine revelation, but deliberate invention.
Anonymous Authors and Borrowed Texts
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were never signed by those names. They were anonymous works, written decades after the supposed events. Only in the second century did the early church attach apostolic names to lend them authority.
Mark, the earliest gospel (around 70 CE), became the blueprint. Matthew and Luke copied much of it — sometimes word for word — inserting their own revisions to align with their theology. John came even later, rewriting Jesus as a cosmic figure delivering long, philosophical speeches utterly unlike the terse sayings of the earlier texts. This isn’t divine dictation. It’s literary cut-and-paste.
Contradictions and Conflicts
The birth stories don’t agree: in one gospel Jesus is born in Bethlehem, in another Nazareth; in one he flees to Egypt, in another he doesn’t. Even the genealogies contradict each other — one traces through Solomon, another through Nathan.
The resurrection narratives diverge even more dramatically. Mark ends abruptly with terrified women fleeing the tomb. Matthew relocates the encounters to Galilee; Luke confines them to Jerusalem; John adds new appearances and skeptical disciples. Four incompatible stories cannot all be true — and divine inspiration should not read like a committee argument.
Myths Recycled from Older Religions
Long before Christianity, the ancient world already had gods born of virgins, performing miracles, dying, and rising again. Mithras, Osiris,and Dionysus all followed that pattern. The “virgin birth” appears only in Matthew and Luke — absent from the earliest Gospel (Mark) and the latest (John). Why? Because it was added later to make Jesus fit a preexisting mythic template of divine conception.
Even his miracles plagiarize earlier pagan tales: water turned to wine, calming the storm, raising the dead — all recycled motifs meant to make the new savior feel familiar.
Fabricated Prophecy and Linguistic Sleight of Hand
To legitimize Jesus as the Jewish messiah, the authors twisted old Hebrew texts. Isaiah’s “young woman” (alma) magically became a “virgin.” Hosea’s line about Israel’s exodus was reinterpreted as Jesus returning from Egypt. Jeremiah’s lament about war victims became Herod’s “massacre of the innocents” which never took place. The Gospels were not fulfilling prophecy — they were manufacturing it.
The Silence of History
If Jesus truly performed public miracles and rose from the dead, contemporary historians certainly would have noticed! Yet no Roman or Jewish chronicler — not Tacitus, Josephus, Pliny, or Philo — recorded any such events. The few “mentions” of Jesus in later manuscripts are widely regarded by scholars as Christian interpolations and forgeries. History’s silence is thunderous.
The Missing Originals and Tampered Copies
Not a single original gospel manuscript exists. What survive are later, much later copies — riddled with insertions, omissions, and contradictions. The “long ending” of Mark and the story of the adulterous woman in John were added centuries after the fact. If a divine hand guided these writings, why would scribes feel compelled to “improve” them?
The Politics of Scripture
By the fourth century, dozens of gospels circulated. Councils of bishops— not divine revelation — decided which ones to keep and which to destroy. The four we have today were chosen because they reinforced institutional control. Truth does not require a vote. Power does.
Archaeology and the Absent Evidence
Archaeology fails to confirm the Gospel world. No empire-wide census sent families back to ancestral towns. No record of Herod’s baby massacre exists. Nazareth appears to have been uninhabited in the early first century. And even the timeline of the crucifixion conflicts between the gospels — one says Jesus died after Passover, another before. Both assertions cannot be true!
How Many Gospels Existed?
By the time Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea in 325CE, there were dozens of gospel texts circulating — as many as 20 to 50 known or referenced in early Christian communities. Yet only four — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — eventually became official. Others such as the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Peter, and Gospel of Philip were suppressed or destroyed.
Despite popular myth, the Council of Nicaea did not decide the biblical canon; it focused instead on defining Jesus’s divinity in relation to God the Father. The final New Testament list was not fully fixed until the Councils of Hippo (393 CE) and Carthage (397 CE) — long after Nicaea.
The Inevitable Conclusion
Piece together the contradictions, mythic borrowings, anonymous authorship, political editing, and archaeological silence, and one pattern emerges unmistakably: the Gospels are human creations — nothing more than truly imaginative literature shaped by theology and power.
Did a historical preacher once live? Maybe. But the miracle-working, death-defying, cosmic savior described in the Gospels is a myth. And if the foundation is myth, what happens to the faith built on it?
Liberation Through Truth
For centuries, churches suppressed inquiry, banned translations, and punished heresy by torture and death — not because truth needed protection, but because fiction cannot withstand scrutiny. Once you see how fragile these texts are, the fear dissolves.
You no longer need threats of hell to behave morally, or ancient myths to find meaning. Reason replaces fear. Curiosity replaces obedience. Truth replaces faith in fabrication.
When you take the time to read the Bible critically, you can’t help but realize that the Gospels are not history but human storytelling. In doing so, you reclaim something profound — your freedom to think, to question, and, like me, to live in reality without illusion.
See also my essay "Are the Gospels Historical?"