The Most Potent Lie of the Last 75 Years

There is one lie that has done more damage to more people during my lifetime than any other lie I can think of. It is the lie that Jesus of Nazareth is unknowable through history. Instead of accepting the New Testament for what it is – a collection of the primary historical sources on the life of Jesus – this lie says that these 27 texts are historically unreliable. The unreliability is attributed one more of the following false accusations:

We don’t know who wrote them.
We don’t know when they were written.
They’ve been doctored over time.
We don’t even know what the 27 original texts actually said.

The point of all these fallacious claims is to blot out Jesus from the pages of history. This lie has been so persuasive with so many people that the knowledge of Jesus has been effectively denied to billions of people. Believing this lie even kept me from reading the New Testament for far too long. Once I finally read it for myself, the lie lost its power. It could not stand up to the truth.

This lie is told by many people in many ways. I will give you just one example of it, and I’m sure you’ll recognize the outline of the argument because I’m sure you’ve heard it multiple times in your life. The video is of Charlie Rose (of PBS at the time) interviewing highly-acclaimed literary critic Harold Bloom on the publication of Bloom’s book Jesus and Yahweh in 2005. Bloom and Rose take less than two minutes to completely dismiss Jesus as a subject worthy of historical study. They do it so blithely, so condescendingly. But that’s because this lie has been repeated by so many people for so many years that anyone who seeks social approval is afraid to even challenge it. The video is cued to start at the 2:23 mark and you can stop at 4:04. Or you can just read the transcript below.

Bloom: There is a more or less historical personage, Jesus of Nazareth. I say “more or less historical” because we have no verifiable facts about him.

Rose: But there was at some point in the history of the world a person who walked in Bethlehem named Jesus of Nazareth?

Bloom: All quests for the historical Jesus have always failed, but evidently there was such a person, but we have nothing verifiable about him. There is a theological or hellenistic mystery dying-and-reviving god named Jesus Christ, and there is the non-theological God, the human, all-too-human original God of the Tanakh (or Hebrew Old Testament), Yahweh.

Rose: Yahweh.

Bloom: Yahweh. And He is not theological at all. And the fundamental argument of the book is that it is not possible to make a coherent statement which links these three highly-diverse figures. And if indeed that argument is right, then the religious history of the last 2,000 years is a disaster.

Rose: Okay, let’s just stay with two of those – forget Yahweh for a second. And he’s supposed to be the son of Yahweh. Jesus is the son of Yahweh.

Bloom: Yes.

Rose: What’s wrong with the historical… Why can’t we believe that the historical Jesus and the Jesus…of Christ is not the same person?

Bloom: We have seven different versions of Jesus in the canonical Greek New Testament. They cannot be reconciled.

Rose: Because they wrote years later, so they made a lot of mistakes.

Bloom: They are, they are written at different times. They are all written after the death of Jesus, whoever he was and whenever that was. Not one of them, I believe, is written by someone who could ever have heard him, seen him, encountered him in any way. They, all of them, are conversionary documents. I cannot put any credence in them whatsoever and I’ve been reading them in the Greek original almost my whole lifetime now.

The point of the lie is to deny Jesus’ right to historical existence. And it works. If Jesus doesn’t exist historically, no one can make a decision about him. This effectively keeps Jesus under wraps – where no one can believe him or even disbelieve him. He’s erased from history, and, as a result, erased from consciousness. He might as well have never lived.

Not everyone is as condescending as Bloom, nor is every interviewer as fawning as Rose, but exchanges like this have been commonplace in American society for the last 75 years. They take place in every strata of society at every pocket of culture. Without even trying, I’d heard this point of view often enough by the time I was in my mid-20’s that I accepted it as true – without question. It was just the way that intelligent and educated people thought. It was logic that seemed utterly intuitive – until I read the New Testament for myself.

There is nothing logical about the point of view Bloom expressed. He didn’t remain consistent with it for even a second. The point of the interview was his book about Jesus and Yahweh, but if “we have nothing verifiable about him,” how in the world could you write half a book about him? In the very next seconds after what’s transcribed above, Bloom makes forceful claims about what Jesus said and didn’t say, what Jesus did and didn’t do. Absurdly, Bloom is making historical claims about someone for whom Bloom insists there is no reliable history. All the while, Rose reacts as if this incoherence is erudite and worthy of public attention. As I said above, these two men are not unique at all. Many, many people have thought in this self-contradictory and foolish way – me included. It’s about time we all woke up!

The truth about the historical record for Jesus is that it is as strong or stronger than practically any other person in antiquity. There is no good reason to doubt the identity of the eight authors of the 27 New Testament texts, just as there is no good reason to doubt that these men were contemporaries of Jesus. The New Testament is as historical as history gets. Stop believing the lie. Read it for yourself. As has been rightly said, “History is too important to be left to the professionals.”

9/27/25