saying that in my book I say that there's no reason at all to believe that the So-Cal Jesus of Nazareth ever existed. But here's what I say about Socrates. The original collision between our reasoning faculties and any form of organized faith, this is my book, though it must have occurred before in the minds of many, is probably exemplified in the trial of Socrates in 399 BC. It does not matter at all to me that we have no absolute certainty that Socrates even existed. The records of his life and his words are secondhand, almost but not quite as much as are the books of the Jewish and Christian Bible and the hadiths of Islam. Philosophy, however, has no need of such demonstrations because it does not deal in revealed wisdom. Now, as it happens, we do have some very good descriptions of the life of Socrates that make his existence to me plausible, but it doesn't matter to me at all whether he was real or not. What matters is that someone advanced his

method of reasoning, his test of evidence against experience, his commitment to a certain kind of dialectical honesty, and that if it hadn't been him, it would have been someone else. That's what's precious to me, and that he never said, You've got to believe in everything I say or go to Hell or Heaven because, and here's why, you've got to agree with me because my mother never went to bed with anybody, and that proves the truth of what I say, or that I, or by the way it looks, I must have looked very dead when they took me down from the cross, but I didn't die, and that proves my point. I'm willing to Grant it all. I'm willing to Grant the Immaculate Conception first, then the Virgin birth, then the resurrection, and the enunciation and the Assumption, and we need to Grant all of it. It doesn't prove the truth of the proposition that you should take no thought for tomorrow, the central doctrine of Jesus of Nazareth, take no thought for

tomorrow no investment, no thrift, no care for your children, that you should abandon your family, not worry about construction, about investment, about anything, just follow me. A ridiculous, an immoral proposition that, as C.S. Lewis so cleverly, and I must say for him very honestly, puts it, means that the man must either have been a maniac, a sick man, an evil man, or he must have believed that the world was coming immediately to an end and that he was commanded to announce this fact to the deluded, bronze-age inhabitants of Palestine. Because if he didn't believe that, and if he didn't believe he was divinely mandated, then his words would not have been inaccurate or false; they would have been wicked. That's what you have to be talking about now. There is, on the historicity point, there are only two reasons, I think, to suppose that there may have been the figure of some kind of deluded rabbi present at that time. The first is the fakery of the story. The fakery itself

proves something. The prophecy says this man must be born in the House of David, of David's line, in David's Town. It means he must be born in Bethlehem. Jesus of Nazareth is well known to have been born in Nazareth. In order to get him to Bethlehem, a huge fabrication has to be undertaken. A census is proposed by Caesar Augustus. No such census ever took place. The people of the region were not required to go back to their Hometown to be registered. That's never happened. Quirinius was not governor of Syria in that year, as the gospels say. None of the story of the Nativity is true in any detail, and not one of the gospels agrees with each other on this fabrication. But the fabrication itself suggests something. If they were simply going to make up the whole thing and there'd never been any such person, then why not just have him born in Bethlehem right there and leave out the Nazarene business? So, the very falsity of it, the very

fanatical attempt to make it come right suggests that yes, there may have been a charismatic, deluded individual wandering around at that time. But which is most impressive to you? The Fantastic Fabrications, the unbelievably inane and inarticulate preachments, or the inconsistencies in the story? You could mention another thing about the resurrection: most of the witnesses to this are women, illiterate, stupid, deluded, hysterical females of the kind who in a Jewish court at that time would have had about as much chance of being listened to as they would in an Islamic court today. What religion that wants its fabrication to be believed is going to say you've got to believe it 'cause we have some illiterate hysterical girls who said they saw this? No, it's impressive to me. It's impressive to me that the evidence is so thin and is so hysterical and is so feeble and is so obviously strenuously cobbled together because it suggested was something was going on. There was some character, and I don't

want to therefore to profane those who think that no, uh, there must have been something and say no, there was nothing. This is not a whole cloth fabrication, but it is a very human and very intelligible and very, um, pitiable, I think, uh, uh, practice of fraud, uh, that may have worked on stupified uh, peasants in the greater Jerusalem area, but should really have no power to influence anyone, um, in this room. Whereas the noble methods and words and systems by which Socrates reasoned, uh, will continue to illuminate our path for as long as we care about the only real gift we have, which is our independent um, intelligence. Now, um, I think that'll do for now, but if you want to ask me, yes, I've run out of time, but if you would care just to look at the chapter I've written about the discovery, the concession, now by every Israeli uh, archaeologist, by the whole school now of Israeli archaeology, that the entire story of The Exodus, the Captivity, the wandering, uh, the conquest of Cana.

the rest is also a complete fabrication. You will see a perfect collision between the two things that do allow us to make progress as scholars and intellectuals: the weighing of evidence against interest and that the great school of Jewish archaeology, given every motive to find the contrary, giving every motive and every chance in the Sinai and in the region to dig up and find what David Ben-Gurion, the founding of the state, called the title deeds of Zionism, to come back empty-handed and say we admit it, this story has no basis of any kind whatever, is, I submit to you, something far more noble, far more worthwhile, far more honest, far more courageous, far more moral, and far more Socratic than any of the nonsense that Dunes just tried to pass off on you. Thanks. [Applause]

Christopher Hitchens on Jesus of Nazareth

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