It seems that every piece of evidence we uncover points to the inescapable conclusion that the Jesus of Mark and subsequent gospels is a fictional character. Based in part upon the early Christian idea of a heavenly Son of God, Homer's Odysseus and perhaps the teacher of righteousness, various wandering kingdom preachers of the first century and the ubiquitous motif of the hero, all rolled up into one, Jesus' fictional ministry, was set into a mini-epic, Allah Homer's Odyssey by the inventive hand of Mark, or shall we say, the anonymous author of the Gospel we call Mark. Check out my Jesus Myth series for a fairly in-depth explanation of this idea that Jesus never walked the earth. The desperate attempts by Eusebius, done and countless others at explaining away the completely incongruent fact that Jesus' tomb was completely forgotten for 300 years, quite frankly, speak for themselves. And the tomb of Jesus was not the only one that was discovered in the fourth century. The tomb of Joseph, Jacob's son, was discovered and since that time has been venerated by Jews, Christians, Samaritans and Muslims. And by miraculous coincidence, in that same century, the tomb of Joseph's mother, Rachel, was also discovered on the outskirts of Bethlehem. A small building was erected and since the fourth century, the place has been venerated by countless people. It seems that the fourth century was an excellent year for finding the tombs of biblical characters. And all one really needed to do was to point and yell loudly, this is it. Interestingly, some 800 years later, the tomb of Adam was discovered and believe it or not, right beneath the place that had been labeled sometime in the fourth century as Golgotha. That's right, the first man ever created was buried exactly beneath Jesus' cross. And in fact, a tradition arose claiming that when Jesus was speared, his blood trickled down into the ground and onto Adam's skull, thereby cleansing him and by extension, all humanity from their sin. Under this rock, the skull of the first man lay. The rock was opened above the skull of Adam and the blood and water which flowed from the side of Christ ran through this crack and washed away the sins of men. But the Protestants couldn't be satisfied with the fourth century founding of Golgotha by decree of Constantine the Catholic. So an enterprising British general named Charles Gordon, in 1885, claimed to have discovered the real location of Golgotha, the place of the skull. He found an appropriate location that seemed to fit the perfect ideal, a garden setting with an actual tomb, well, many tombs, and the fainist resemblance to a human skull. Well, if you squint hard enough, and this general Gordon declared loudly was the authentic location of Jesus' death and burial. And so today, you can flip a coin and make your pilgrimage to see the very place Jesus died and was buried, the church of the Holy Sepulchre, or the garden tomb. We can clearly see that ideas spring forth, they are written down and later become history with holes in the earth uncovered and slapped with a label for all those who wish to believe in holy relics. And speaking of anachronisms, I want to take a quick look at a probable anachronism regarding the empty tomb and anachronism that, if true, mark unknowingly created in pinning the first gospel. According to Amos Cloner, archaeologist and professor emeritus in the Martin Seuss department of the Land of Israel Studies at the Bar Ilan University in Ramatgan, Israel, the tombstones used to close off tombs during Jesus' day were not round, but rectangular, Richard Carrier, a PhD in ancient history, Sites Cloner's article. He, that is Cloner, observes that more than 98% of the Jewish tombs from this period called the Second Temple Period, 1st century BCE to 70 CE, were closed with square blocking stones, and only four round stones are known prior to the Jewish war. All of them blocking entrances to elaborate tomb complexes of the extremely rich, such as the tomb complex of Herod the Great and his ancestors and descendants. However, the Second Temple Period ended with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. In later periods, the situation changed and round blocking stones became much more common. Carrier also notes that the stone is moved in the synoptic gospels by rolling it away, which could only be done if the stone was round and not rectangular. Each reference in the synoptics to rolling the stone shows the use of the Greek word Kulein, or Kuleindine, meaning to roll, which is the root word for Kilindros, which is the Greek ancestor of our modern word, Cylinder. Mark, in pinning his gospel, has almost certainly created an anachronism which by the way, doesn't rule out the historicity of a resurrection, but certainly shows that he was either unaware that the tombstones used decades before he pinned his riding were rectangular and not round, or he was aware, but by the end of his gospel, he succumbed to the well-known phenomenon of editorial fatigue. This is where the pretense is breakdown, and the writer forgets he's supposed to be riding about events decades earlier, and makes mental slips, such as referring to contemporary events and situations such as the tombstones in his day, or tombstones of the rich, such as Herod the Great, who would have had a round stone even pre-70 CE. This anachronism is not quite sufficient to establish the terminus post-quim for the composition of Mark's gospel to around 70 CE, because Mark may have had the tombstones of the extremely wealthy, such as Herod the Great, in mind when he wrote his gospel, and in fact, this does make sense when we remember that the tomb in question was supposedly owned by a rich man, but as we learned from Professor Cloner, round tombstones were simply unavailable during Jesus's day except for the very wealthy. So perhaps Mark is projecting the situations he saw in Rome backwards into time, without knowing things were much different across the Mediterranean only a few decades earlier. When we compare the evidence of both archaeology and literature, we find over and over again that the evidence points to a fictional beginning for Christianity. If the gospel story is fictional, and the gospels were not widely known until almost the third century, then we can begin to understand how it would take 300 years before Christians started to become interested in the location of Jesus' tomb. The answer keeps echoing. There simply were no disciples. There were no miracles. There was no Jesus and no tomb. It all hinged upon the circulation of the written story of Mark and his copiers, Matthew, Luke, and John. And only by decree of Constantine in the fourth century, did Jesus' tomb become located and tomb veneration began. An interesting article from which some of my information was drawn can be found at JesusNeverExisted.com slash sepulchur.html. Ken Humphrey's site has a lot of great info and I urge you to check it out. Another article of interest from which I gleaned the tombstone shape, anachronism is Richard Carrier's Craig's empty tomb and Habermass on visions. Found at infidel's.org slash library slash modern slash Richard underscore carrier slash i-n-d-e-f slash 4e.html. In the next video, we'll have a look at perhaps the most flaunted of all passages regarding the historicity of Jesus' resurrection. See you there.