Question: "Did Jesus really exist? Is there any historical evidence of Jesus Christ?"

Question: "Did Jesus really exist? Is there any historical evidence of Jesus Christ?"

Answer: Typically when this question is asked, the person asking qualifies the question with "outside of the Bible." We do not grant this idea that the Bible cannot be considered a source of evidence for the existence of Jesus. The New Testament contains hundreds of references to Jesus Christ. There are those who date the writing of the Gospels in the second century A.D., 100+ years after Jesus' death. Even if this were the case (which we strongly dispute), in terms of ancient evidences, writings less than 200 years after events took place are considered very reliable evidences. Further, the vast majority of scholars (Christian and non-Christian) will grant that the Epistles of Paul (at least some of them) were in fact written by Paul in the middle of the first century A.D., less than 40 years after Jesus' death. In terms of ancient manuscript evidence, this is extraordinarily strong proof of the existence of a man named Jesus in Israel in the early first century A.D.

It is also important to recognize that in 70 A.D., the Romans invaded and destroyed Jerusalem and most of Israel, slaughtering its inhabitants. Entire cities were literally burned to the ground! We should not be surprised, then, if much evidence of Jesus' existence was destroyed. Many of the eye-witnesses of Jesus would have been killed. These facts likely limited the amount of surviving eyewitness testimony of Jesus.

Considering the fact that Jesus' ministry was largely confined to a relatively unimportant backwater area in a small corner of the Roman Empire, a surprising amount of information about Jesus can be drawn from secular historical sources. Some of the more important historical evidences of Jesus include the following:

The first-century Roman Tacitus, who is considered one of the more accurate historians of the ancient world, mentioned superstitious "Christians " ("named after Christus" which is Latin for Christ), who suffered under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. Suetonius, chief secretary to Emperor Hadrian, wrote that there was a man named Chrestus (or Christ) who lived during the first century (Annals 15.44 ).

Flavius Josephus is the most famous Jewish historian. In his Antiquities he refers to James, “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ.” There is a controversial verse (18:3) that says, "Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats. . . . He was [the] Christ . . . he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him." One version reads, "At this time there was a wise man named Jesus. His conduct was good and [he] was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But those who became his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive; accordingly he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders."

Julius Africanus quotes the historian Thallus in a discussion of the darkness which followed the crucifixion of Christ (Extant Writings, 18).

Pliny the Younger, in Letters 10:96, recorded early Christian worship practices including the fact that Christians worshiped Jesus as God and were very ethical, and includes a reference to the love feast and Lord’s Supper.

The Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 43a) confirms Jesus' crucifixion on the eve of Passover, and the accusations against Christ of practicing sorcery and encouraging Jewish apostasy.

Lucian of Samosata was a second-century Greek writer who admits that Jesus was worshiped by Christians, introduced new teachings, and was crucified for them. He said that Jesus' teachings included the brotherhood of believers, the importance of conversion, and the importance of denying other gods. Christians lived according to Jesus’ laws, believed themselves immortal, and were characterized by contempt for death, voluntary self-devotion, and renunciation of material goods.

Mara Bar-Serapion confirms that Jesus was thought to be a wise and virtuous man, was considered by many to be the king of Israel, was put to death by the Jews, and lived on in the teachings of his followers.

Then we have all the Gnostic writings (The Gospel of Truth, The Apocryphon of John, The Gospel of Thomas, The Treatise on Resurrection, etc.) that all mention Jesus.

In fact, we can almost reconstruct the gospel just from early non-Christian sources: Jesus was called the Christ (Josephus), did “magic,” led Israel into new teachings, and was hanged on Passover for them (Babylonian Talmud) in Judea (Tacitus), but claimed to be God and would return (Eliezar), which his followers believed - worshipping Him as God (Pliny the Younger).

In conclusion, there is overwhelming evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ, both in secular and Biblical history. Perhaps the greatest evidence that Jesus did exist is the fact that literally thousands of Christians in the first century A.D., including the 12 apostles, were willing to give their lives as martyrs for Jesus Christ. People will die for what they believe to be true, but no one will die for what they know to be a lie.

Recommended Resource: Case for Faith / Case for Christ by Lee Strobel.

Existência Histórica de Cristo

LEITOR QUESTIONA ARTIGO QUE NEGA A EXISTÊNCIA HISTÓRICA DE CRISTO

Por Carlos Martins Nabeto

- Envio-lhes um email que recebi e gostaria de receber ou ter acesso a posição católica sobre o assunto. Grato. Do Irmão em Cristo. Enner Jefferson.

Prezado Enner,

Pax Christi!

Antes de mais nada, gostaríamos de agradecer pelo encaminhamento desse artigo que "põe em dúvida" a historicidade de Jesus, a quem nós cristãos consideramos como "o Cristo" e "Filho de Deus".

Mais ainda, damos graças ao nosso Bom Senhor por tal artigo ter sido encaminhado por você, um cristão protestante que, certamente com toda a boa fé, "gostaria de receber ou ter acesso a posição católica sobre o assunto", confiando, assim, em nossa humilde resposta.

Que o Pai todo-poderoso, com a sua graça, possa nos ajudar a empreender essa tarefa, para que você também, assim como nós, possa render-Lhe um "cântico novo", por ter sido tão bom e amoroso para conosco, pobres pecadores.

Para facilitar a compreensão e não deixar NADA sem resposta, faremos uso do nosso costumeiro método de abordagem da matéria, considerando cada parágrafo ou idéia do artigo original.

*****

Iniciemos... O conteúdo original do artigo é indicado em azul. Nossas respostas seguem em preto:

"Antes de iniciar o aspecto da inexistência do homem chamado Jesus, é necessário dissociar o conceito Jesus do de Cristo".

É evidente que o CONCEITO entre Jesus (uma Pessoa) se diferencia do de Cristo (o Salvador Ungido). Porém, isto não significa que JESUS DE NAZARÉ - E APENAS ELE - SEJA O CRISTO! Há, pois, total compatibilidade entre Pessoa e Função.

Nada obstante, verifica-se claramente que o articulista pretende demonstrar a inexistência histórica do "homem chamado Jesus" (se esquecendo ainda que os cristãos não consideram Jesus apenas como mero homem, mas verdadeiramente como "homem E Deus"); logo, mais exato seria ele pretender provar a impossibilidade da Encarnação do Verbo (o que - reconheçamos - não conseguiria mesmo fazer, pois "para Deus, tudo é possível" [Mateus 19,26]). Então, como não pode provar a premissa maior, tenta a menor...

"Cristo vem do crestus essênio e significa peixe, literalmente, mas o sentido é de ungido, entre outras palavras, referindo-se ao estado transpessoal do ser humano".

Sabemos muito bem que os primeiros cristãos atribuíam, sim, a figura do peixe a Jesus Cristo, Senhor Nosso. As catacumbas de Roma possuem inúmeras pinturas do Peixe nas lápides que encerram ou encerraram corpos de cristãos falecidos e martirizados.

Porém, Cristo não significa "peixe", mas "Ungido"; e tal fato nada tem à ver com "o estado transpessoal do ser humano" - como quer fazer crer o articulista - se relacionando, ao contrário, ao fato de que o Pai consagrou o Filho para uma missão de salvação (esclarecendo, assim, o Novo Testamento, o motivo prefigurado pelo qual os reis e sacerdotes de Israel eram ungidos com um caráter sagrado: eram a "sombra" de Cristo Jesus, o Messias! O único que seria DE FATO simultaneamente rei e sacerdote!).

Por seu turno, o hábito de os cristãos apontarem Cristo pela imagem do Peixe também nada tem a ver com o tal "crestus essênio", pois o óleo da unção dos reis e sacerdotes encontra-se detalhamente descrito em Êxodo 30,22, o qual foi redigido centenas de anos antes da própria existência dessa seita judaica.

Na verdade, a figura do Peixe foi sabiamente escolhida pelos primeiros cristãos (que passaram a ser perseguidos logo no início de sua formação, quer por judeus, quer por pagãos) porque encontrava fundamento bíblico nas palavras de Jesus: "Eu vos farei pescadores de homens" (Marcos 1,17) e também porque a palavra "peixe" em grego (escrita em caracteres latinos "ichtus") representava abreviadamente a expressão "Jesus [I] Cristo [CH], de Deus [TH] Filho [U], Salvador [S]".

Cristo, como se vê, é representado pelos caracteres latinos CH que, por sua vez, correspondem aos caracteres gregos P (chi) e X (rô). Prova disto é que também são encontrados inúmeros símbolos "PX" nas catacumbas e túmulos cristãos, tendo se convertido no monograma clássico de Cristo (que, mais tarde, em latim, passaria a significar também "Christus Rex", ou seja, "Cristo Rei").

Qualquer cristão que visitasse as catacumbas mais antigas (onde eram enterrados não apenas cristãos mas também e principalmente pagãos) conseguia rapidamente identificar um túmulo cristão através desses símbolos ou outros, como a âncora, o pelicano, o pavão e o pastor.

Percebemos, assim, que o articulista, desconhecendo ou desprezando completamente a primitiva iconografia cristã, as Sagradas Escrituras e a Sagrada Tradição da Igreja, inventa estórias (sem "H" mesmo!) e faz uma tremenda salada, que se revela indigesta para os incautos.

"Autores de peso, como Sêneca, Marcial, Juvenal, Plínio o Velho, Apuleio, Fílon de Alexandria e muitos outros, viveram no transcorrer do século I e nunca o mencionaram, apesar de serem imensamente interessados nas questões religiosas da sociedade em que viviam. Os autores gregos, hindus, árabes e judeus também nunca ouviram falar na existência de Jesus".

Primeiramente, vamos ver quem era cada um desses homens: Sêneca (+65), Apuléio (+164) e Fílon (+50) eram FILÓSOFOS e não historiadores, possuindo crenças pagãs próprias; Marcial (+102) e Juvenal (+50?) eram POETAS e não historiadores; Plínio o Velho (+79) era NATURALISTA e não historiador.

Em suma: NENHUM deles tinha compromisso com a tarefa de apontar e narrar FATOS HISTÓRICOS, pois se dedicavam principalmente às matérias ESPECULATIVAS. Com efeito, não nos surpreende em absolutamente nada que TALVEZ nada tenham abordado sobre a figura histórica de Jesus.

E usamos aqui um "talvez" porque, sabendo do penoso processo de redação, publicação e transmissão dos textos na época antiga, é bem possível que diversas obras desses escritores nem mesmo tenham sido copiadas e transmitidas...

Ironia do "destino" é que as obras literárias desses homens, que conseguiram chegar até os nossos dias, só foram salvas GRAÇAS aos monges católicos medievais que as copiaram e as difundiram em manuscritos, ainda que não fizessem referências a Jesus Cristo ou à religião cristã, o que redunda em prol da própria Igreja Católica em dois pontos:

1º) Por salvar a literatura "clássica" e antiga;

2º) Por demonstrar que os monges copistas reproduziam, com boa fé e fidelidade, tais textos de origem pagã. E se tomavam tal cuidado com essas obras, quanto mais tomariam com as Sagradas Escrituras e outras obras de autores cristãos!!!

Seja como for, o articulista OMITE que outras personalidades antigas NÃO ESQUECERAM de falar de Cristo! Inclusive historiadores, compromissados com fatos históricos...

Tácito (+115), historiador e jurista romano, aponta: "Este nome (cristãos) lhes vem de Cristo, que no tempo de Tibério tinha sido entregue ao suplício pelo procurador Pôncio Pilatos" ("Anais" XV,44).

Ou o também historiador e sociólogo romano Suetônio (+141), que observava que durante o reinado do imperador Cláudio (41-54), "expulsou de Roma os judeus, que, sob o impulso de Chrestós, se haviam tornado causa frequente de tumultos" ("Vita Claudii" XXV). Observe-se que "Chréstos" é uma forma grega equivalente a Christós e a informação condiz perfeitamente com o relato de Atos 18,2: "Cláudio decretou que todos os judeus saíssem de Roma" .

Ou o historiador judeu Flávio Josefo (+98), que afirma: "Por esse tempo apareceu Jesus, um homem sábio, que praticou boas obras e cujas virtudes eram reconhecidas. Muitos judeus e pessoas de outras nações tornaram-se seus discípulos. Pilatos o condenou a ser crucificado e morto. Porém, aqueles que se tornaram seus discípulos pregaram sua doutrina. Eles afirmam que Jesus apareceu a eles três dias após a sua crucificação e que está vivo." (Josefo, "Antiguidades Judaicas" XVIII,3,2).

Ou, ainda, com o antiquíssimo Talmud Babilônico, relatando a seu jeito, para favorecer os judeus: " Na véspera da Páscoa suspenderam a uma haste Jesus de Nazaré. Durante quarenta dias um arauto, à frente dele, clamava: 'Merece ser lapidado, porque exerceu a magia, seduziu Israel e o levou à rebelião. Quem tiver algo para o justificar venha proferí-lo!' Nada, porém se encontrou que o justificasse; então suspenderam-no à haste na véspera da Páscoa" (Tratado Sanhedrin 43a do Talmud da Babilônia). Note-se que este relato judaico não põe em dúvida a existência histórica de Jesus, muito pelo contrário...

Como se vê, todos eles falam da PESSOA de Cristo (não simplesmente da existência de cristãos). Logo, não há como se afirmar que "escritores antigos" nunca ouviram ou falaram acerca de Jesus Cristo. Afirmar o contrário é querer passar uma "borracha" injustificadamente sobre a História, deliberadamente para satisfazer seus próprios interesses e desejos pessoais.

"Nada consta no Sinédrio de Jerusalém, nem nos anais de Pôncio Pilatos, nem nos do Imperador Tibério, malgrado a ameaça de um novo rei, ainda que do 'outro mundo' merecesse toda a atenção do Império Romano. O silêncio é gritante!".

Jerusalém foi destruída pelos romanos, no ano 70 d.C., em razão dos constantes tumultos e levantes judaicos; no ano 135, após nova e violenta revolta, os romanos tornaram a invadir e, desta vez, a destruir por completo toda Jerusalém... Praticamente nada sobrou e o Templo foi arrasado. Quereria o articulista ainda esperar encontrar algum documento do Sinédrio e, mais especificamente, sobre Cristo? Quanta pretensão!

No que diz respeito aos registros públicos romanos, também não seria necessário lembrar que Roma foi invadida, pilhada e destruída algumas vezes pelos bárbaros, outras vezes pelos próprios governantes romanos em guerras que travavam entre si. Portanto, poderiam muito bem ter sido destruídos em algum desses eventos ou o articulista pode provar, com ALGUM registro histórico, o contrário?

Ademais, se Jesus de fato nunca tivesse existido, tal "mentira cristã" não teria durado muito, até porque contava com a total repressão dos judeus? Como poderia um "mito sem pé nem cabeça" conquistar todo o vasto e poderosíssimo Império romano, sofrendo duríssima perseguição, quer de judeus, quer de pagãos, em apenas três séculos?

Como quer que seja, pelo que apreciamos até aqui, a evidência histórica fala muito mais favoravelmente à existência de Jesus...

"Segundo La Sagesse, 'As bibliotecas e museus guardam escritos e documentos de autores que teriam sido contemporâneos de Jesus os quais não fazem qualquer referência ao mesmo. Por outro lado, a ciência histórica tem-se recusado a dar crédito aos documentos oferecidos pela Igreja, com intenção de provar-lhe a existência física. Ocorre que tais documentos, originariamente não mencionavam sequer o nome de Jesus, todavia foram falsificados, rasurados e adulterados visando suprir a ausência de documentação verdadeira. Por outro lado, muito do que foi escrito para provar a inexistência de Jesus Cristo foi destruído pela Igreja, defensivamente. Assim é que por falta de documentos verdadeiros e indiscutíveis, a existência de Jesus tem sido posta em dúvida desde os primeiros séculos desta era, apesar de ter a Igreja tentado destruir a tudo e a todos os que tiveram coragem e ousaram contestar os seus pontos de vista e os seus dogmas'".

Com a apreciação que fizemos anteriormente, percebemos como são vãs e ridículas as palavras de La Sagesse... Até porque vimos que foi graças aos monges copistas da Igreja Católica que nos chegaram até mesmo as obras de escritores pagãos...

Se fôssemos levar à sério as palavras de La Sagesse, deveríamos começar a duvidar também da existência de muitíssimos (não só de alguns!) personagens antigos e anteriores a Cristo, inclusive Sócrates e Platão, que só nos chegaram graças a esses monges...

Ou teríamos ainda que concluir - ABSURDAMENTE - que a Terra e todo o universo não existem verdadeiramente porque faltam registros históricos confiáveis e documentados que sigam a "ciência séria e pessoal" de cada um destes críticos do Cristianismo e da Igreja Católica.

Com efeito: se os documentos que fazem menção à existência histórica de Cristo que citamos acima foram corrompidos, que nos apresentem - segundo a mesma ciência EXATA que nos pedem - QUAIS são os manuscritos mais antigos, dos MESMOS escritores, que contradizem a existência histórica de Jesus e os relatos acima transcritos.

Que não façam, pois, acusações LEVIANAS E GRATUITAS, mas que demonstrem com dados cientificos CONFIÁVEIS E IRREFUTÁVEIS. O articulista, portanto, faz uma alegação pura e simples, mas não apresenta PROVA em contrário e nem se dá ao luxo de pelo menos fazer uma referência, segundo o critério científico, de onde tirou as suas "conclusões racionais".

"Paralelamente, Alberto Cousté diz que 'A única exceção estaria em um parágrafo das Antigüidades Judaicas, de Flávio Josefo (37-95), mas Hainchelin demonstra, pela crítica comparada que faz de outras passagens, que se trata de uma grosseira e tardia interpolação. Voltaire já o havia intuído no artigo 'Cristianismo' do Dicionário Filosófico: 'Como teria esse judeu obstinado afirmado que Jesus era o Cristo? Que absurdo colocar na boca de Josefo palavras de um cristão!'. É muito importante se indagar qual o porquê desta interpolação forjada por Eusébio. Qual motivo haveria senão encobrir a inexistência de Jesus?"

O autor cita a passagem interpolada de Flávio Josefo, mas esquece de dizer que existe uma outra, mais antiga, que não possui tal interpolação e que não nega a existência de Jesus (apenas não afirma que ele era o Cristo, como realmente seria de se esperar de um historiador que professa o Judaísmo!). Tal passagem é justamente aquela que apontamos mais acima e que novamente reproduzimos aqui, para relembrar:

"Por esse tempo apareceu Jesus, um homem sábio, que praticou boas obras e cujas virtudes eram reconhecidas. Muitos judeus e pessoas de outras nações tornaram-se seus discípulos. Pilatos o condenou a ser crucificado e morto. Porém, aqueles que se tornaram seus discípulos pregaram sua doutrina. Eles afirmam que Jesus apareceu a eles três dias após a sua crucificação e que está vivo. [Talvez ele fosse o Messias previsto pelos maravilhosos prognósticos dos profetas]" (Josefo, "Antiguidades Judaicas" XVIII,3,2)." (Josefo, "Antiguidades Judaicas" XVIII,3,2).

Mas ainda que se considerasse a interpolação (indicada acima entre colchetes), o fato é que ela também não diz respeito à historicidade de Jesus, mas parece apontar uma "dúvida" de Josefo de TALVEZ ser Jesus o Messias prometido ao Povo de Israel (e nada mais que isso!).

Cai por terra, assim, e de uma só vez, todos os argumentos de Cousté e de Voltaire... Novamente notamos que a História tende para a existência de Jesus de Nazaré!

Mais interessante, porém, é saber - ah, como a História nos faz bem!! - que Voltaire morreu buscando a sua reconciliação com a Igreja Católica, tendo sido assistido por sacerdotes católicos, que ali estavam a seu pedido (ou seja, será que não acreditava mesmo na existência histórica de Jesus Cristo?)!!!

"Os maçons do mais alto grau sabem (ou desconfiam) que as palavras postas na boca do mito de Jesus eram na realidade de João, o Essênio, também conhecido como o Batista. Marcelo Mota, em Carta a Um Maçon, denuncia esse fato, explicando que João teria nascido antes do século I e o seu pensamento teve grande impacto sobre a época em que viveu, afirmando que 'o homem era o templo do deus vivo'. Assim, os primeiros patriarcas não puderam deixar de incluí-lo, sob pena de levantar suspeita. O quarto Evangelho diz que 'Havia um homem enviado por Deus, cujo nome era João'. Iguala, pois, João a Jesus".

A fé e a doutrina da Igreja Católica é TOTALMENTE incompatível com as crenças e as afirmações maçônicas.

Ademais, nunca é tarde para lembrar que a Igreja Católica continua DECLARANDO não ser possível a ninguém querer ser católico e, ao mesmo tempo, maçon. Se alguém afirmar ser maçon, CERTAMENTE não poderá afirmar ser "cristão católico", dada a condenação existente.

Logo, o que os maçons acham ou deixam de achar sobre Jesus NÃO NOS QUER SIGNIFICAR ABSOLUTAMENTE NADA! Se eles acham que Jesus e João Batista eram iguais, PROBLEMA deles. Responderão por sua posição no Dia do Juízo.

Porém, para sermos um pouco mais práticos: onde e como o tal Marcelo Mota PROVOU que Jesus não existiu? Apenas por ter dado a entender que Ele usou ensinamentos de João Batista? Mas João Batista era judeu, assim como o próprio Jesus!!! Logo, os pensamentos de João Batista e de Jesus, EVIDENTEMENTE, não se opunham às verdades contidas no Antigo Testamento e poderiam ser realmente bem semelhantes!!! Ora, em que isto contradiz a existência fática de Jesus? Em nada!

"Em relação aos supostos milagres do mito do nazareno, a cópia descarada foi, agora, de Apolônio de Tiana, que teria revivido os mistérios de Dionísio. Vejamos alguns desses milagres, de acordo com Alberto Cousté: a) Apolônio teria nascido também de mãe virgem; b) Diversos reis enviaram presentes e cartas à parturiente; c) Ainda criança, ele discutiu com os doutores do templo de Esculápio e os derrotou; d) Os cisnes cantaram no seu nascimento e um raio caiu do céu (adoração dos pastores e a estrela de Belém); e) Os anjos transportavam-no pelo ar (segunda tentação de Jesus); f) Ressuscitava mortos, curava cegos e aparecia na frente de amigos distantes; g) Entendia a linguagem dos pássaros; h) Convocava o demônio, que lhe aparecia sob a forma de um olmo; i) Tinha poder sobre os demônios inferiores que atormentavam os possuídos, expulsando-os ao capricho dos seus desejos. Basta dar uma consultada em A Vida de Apolônio, escrita por Filóstrato. Não é só. Os ritos solares baseados na fórmula do deus sacrificado, copiaram-se uns aos outros. Seria cansativo repeti-los todos aqui, mas, veja-se, por exemplo, em relação ao mito de Horus, há milhares de anos antes do conto de Jesus e, depois, leitor, julgue você mesmo a espantosa semelhança: a) Horus nasceu de uma virgem em 25 de dezembro; b) Horus teve 12 discípulos, que representavam os doze signos zodiacais; c) Horus foi enterrado em um túmulo e ressuscitado; d) Horus era também a Verdade, a Luz, o Messias, o Pastor Bom etc.; e) Horus também realizava milagres; f) Horus ressuscitou um homem chamado El-Azar-Us, que, é óbvio, traduziram como Lázaro, o leproso. O copista nem se deu ao trabalho de mudar o nome, já que a grande massa era ignara e não sabia latim; g) O epíteto de Horus era "Iusa" (Jesus), "o Filho sempre tornando-se" de "Ptah", o "Pai"; h) Horus também era chamado o "KRST" (Cristo) ou "Ungido". Se perscrutar outros ritos, como o de Mitra, Adônis, Krishna, Osíris etc., fica patente novas e inúmeras cópias, vários plágios de textos religiosos, com pouca alteração. Indico aqui ao leitor que quiser se aprofundar no assunto a obra Ísis Sem Véu, de Madame Blavatsky."

Como o articulista - NA VERDADE - não possui NENHUM ARGUMENTO SÓLIDO (principalmente histórico) para fundamentar a sua pretensão de negar a existência de Jesus, parte para um plano B, que seria dizer que o Cristianismo (em especial o Catolicismo) é resultado de um Paganismo misturado com crenças judaicas. Em outras palavras, os cristãos teriam criado o "mito" Jesus fazendo uso de uma série de crenças pagãs.

TAL ARGUMENTO É PRA LÁ DE VELHO... E ANTI-HISTÓRICO!! O argumento, aliás, costuma a ser explorado pelos protestantes (Hislop, White etc.), sem convencer dada a precariedade das "provas" suscitadas.

A propósito, há alguns anos, um Pastor protestante, pr. Ralph Woodrow, publicou um livro, baseado sobretudo nas teses de Hislop, rotulando as crenças católicas como "pagãs"; passados alguns anos, humildemente reconheceu que fôra injusto e se retratou publicamente, tirando o seu livro de circulação e publicando um outro em que restabelecia a verdade que descubrira em suas pesquisas mais honestas (veja aqui, nas suas próprias palavras: http://www.ralphwoodrow.org/books/pages/babylon-mystery.html). Obviamente que, além de desagradar os ateístas de plantão, acabou por desagradar muitos protestantes que enxergavam no seu livro anterior uma arma hábil contra os católicos... ;)

Ora, nós, cristãos em geral (católicos, ortodoxos e protestantes) oramos a Deus. Os pagãos faziam (e fazem o mesmo). Então porque oramos, somos pagãos? Nós cremos em Deus, os pagãos também; então somos pagãos? Nós cremos que Deus tem o poder de fazer milagres, os pagãos também pensam o mesmo de seus inúmeros deuses; então nosso Deus teve origem pagã? Uma mentalidade bem simplista... e curta...

E as ORIGENS de certos detalhes seriam exatamente as mesmas e expressariam também os MESMOS SIGNIFICADOS? O Natal dos cristãos expressaria a recordação da Encarnação do Verbo ou A adoração de um deus pagão chamado Mitra?

É ÓBVIO que a origem do Natal encontra-se na Encarnação de Jesus, Deus feito homem, e sua celebração NADA TEM a ver com o Mitraísmo... A idéia é ridícula e sem sentido algum; TOTALMENTE FORA DA REALIDADE, demonstrando apenas a FANTASIA de certas pessoas que, para negarem alguma coisa que não lhe agrada, misturam alhos com bugalhos e só podem confundir mesmo aqueles que NÃO EDIFICARAM A SUA FÉ SOBRE A PEDRA (Mateus 16,18), mas sobre a areia.

Pois muito bem, se tais coisas REALMENTE são pagãs, então que nos PROVE não apenas alegando gratuitamente, mas apresentando fontes confiáveis e, acima de tudo, PRECISAS! Na verdade, o autor do artigo incorpora aqui o famoso "espírito de papagaio", repetindo coisas afirmadas por outros, que por sua vez ouviram de outros e assim vai, sem se atentar para uma análise mais cuidadosa e... histórica!

Os 12 Apóstolos correspondem aos 12 signos do zodíaco? Em que fonte ESCRITA foi relatado isso ORIGINALMENTE? Em que livro, em que capítulo e em que ano foi escrito PRECISAMENTE? ... E que o articulista faça o mesmo para cada "plágio cristão" que encontrar, vez que o ônus de provar é sempre de quem afirma...

Estaremos aqui, SENTADOS, esperando as PROVAS...

"Além disso, os textos pagãos, essênios e gnósticos foram descaradamente copiados para compor o atual Novo Testamento, junto com o expurgo dos apócrifos, no Concílio de Nicéia, em 325, onde provavelmente foi criado o mito de Jesus para dar cumprimento à profecia judaica sobre o advento de um messias. O anônimo autor de Supernatural Religion demonstra o caráter espúrio dos quatro Evangelhos, perpetrada por Irineu e seus lacaios".

Desta vez o autor "viajou na maionese"...

Primeiro: se os textos gnósticos foram COPIADOS para compor o Novo Testamento então porque Santo Ireneu (+202) escreveu justamente sua obra "Contra as Heresias" especificamente contra os gnósticos e citando inúmeras vezes trechos do Novo Testamento?

E isto basta também para demonstrar que o tal "anônimo autor de Supernatural Religion" caiu também em total contradição ao afirmar que os Evangelhos foram "perpetrados por Irineu e seus lacaios"... Ora, se Ireneu é antignóstico, como poderia usar os textos gnósticos para compor o NT?

Segundo, a ciência já PROVOU DEFINITIVAMENTE que o Novo Testamento é muito anterior ao Concílio de Nicéia. Diversos fragmentos de papiros do NT são datados - segundo as modernas técnicas e metodologias das ciência - como ANTERIORES ao séc. IV (vários deles, inclusive, do mesmo séc. I d.C.!).

Ademais, existem muitos autores cristãos anteriores ao referido Concílio e a Ireneu (Clemente de Roma, Inácio de Antioquia, Policarpo de Esmirna, Hermas de Roma, Pápias de Hierápolis, Aristides de Atenas, Taciano da Síria, Atenágoras de Atenas, Teófilo de Antioquia, entre vários outros) que citam LITERALMENTE passagens e seções inteiras do Novo Testamento tal como sempre conhecemos em nossas leituras...

Percebe-se que o articulista, no seu afã de pregar contra a existência de Cristo, CAI EM TOTAL CONTRADIÇÃO, pois ao querer fazer uso favorável dos apócrifos gnósticos para retirar a autoridade do Novo Testamento canônico, SE ESQUECEU QUE OS ESCRITOS GNÓSTICOS APÓIAM E CONCORDAM QUE JESUS REALMENTE EXISTIU!!!!

E assim, o próprio o Autor deste artigo contra Jesus perde TOTALMENTE a sua autoridade (se é que ainda lhe restava alguma...).

"É óbvio que esta fraude em nada influenciou os judeus, que sabiam da história toda, razão por que eles têm sido perseguidos nestes dois milênios pelo Vaticano".

E eis que novamente o articulista cai em contradição... Afirma ele agora que a "fraude do NT não influenciou os judeus" e que eles "sabiam da história toda" (isto é, de que Jesus não teria existido!)...

Ora! Se isto fosse verdade, ou seja, se soubessem MESMO que Jesus nunca teria existido, não teriam preferido afirmar isso CLARA E ABERTAMENTE ao invés de se reunirem em Jâmnia, por volta do ano 90 DEPOIS DE CRISTO, para estabelecerem o cânon da Bíblia judaica - "retirando" (como se pudessem fazê-lo após a vinda do Cristo Salvador!) a autoridade das escrituras aceitas naturalmente pelos judeus alexandrinos (que adotavam a Septuaginta, com os livros que chamamos hoje de "deuterocanônicos") e que agora vinha sendo usado pelos cristãos para suportar todo o ensino cristão (inclusive da própria existência de Cristo)?

E (relembrando mais uma vez a afirmação do autor feita no parágrafo anterior), porque esses judeus, que "sabiam de tudo" não agregaram à sua Bíblia oficial, de Jâmnia, os livros gnósticos se estes tinham verdadeiramente alguma autoridade? Mais: por que não teriam feito o mesmo no seu Talmud, ao invés de - ao contrário - confirmarem a existência histórica de Cristo? Ora, leiamos novamente o que o Talmud afirma CATEGORICAMENTE:

"NA VÉSPERA DA PÁSCOA suspenderam a uma haste JESUS DE NAZARÉ. Durante quarenta dias um arauto, à frente dele, clamava: 'Merece ser lapidado, porque exerceu a magia, seduziu Israel e o levou à rebelião. Quem tiver algo para o justificar venha proferí-lo!' Nada, porém se encontrou que o justificasse; ENTÃO suspenderam-no à haste na véspera da Páscoa." (Tratado Sanhedrin 43a do Talmud da Babilônia).

Com efeito, se o autor assume que os judeus "sabiam de tudo", DEVERÁ RECONHECER QUE JESUS CRISTO REALMENTE EXISTIU NO TEMPO E NO ESPAÇO TERRESTRE, pois os judeus reconheceram isso!!!!!

CHEQUE-MATE!!!

Quanto à acusação de que o Vaticano persegue os judeus, eles mesmos já reconheceram HISTORICAMENTE que foi graças ao Vaticano que muitos deles se salvaram durante a II Guerra Mundial. E, além disto, o papa João Paulo II emitiu um pedido de perdão aos judeus pelos crimes praticados pelos FILHOS DA IGREJA. Portanto, o articulista está tratando, no mínimo, de coisas que desconhece; ou pretende - inutilmente! - ressuscitar uma culpa que já foi sepultada pela própria História.

"Havia quase setenta seitas, no século IV, de acordo com uma enumeração de Epifânio, que compartilhavam sobre a maldade intrínseca da criação e viam em Jeová um demiurgo imperfeito e rancoroso, que se deixava enganar por sua própria criação. Uma dessas seitas, de opinião diversa, sofrera enormemente a influência do culto mitral, trazida pelos soldados de Pompeu, pouco antes do início da era cristã, deslumbrados pelo dualismo persa. Estando o Império Romano fragilizado, esta seita aliou-se a Constantino. O benefício seria mútuo. Por um lado, ajudaria a fortalecer o império, por outro destruiria as outras seitas, firmando-se por absoluto. Esta seita se transformou no que conhecemos hoje como a Igreja Católica".

Esse argumento já foi inúmeras vezes refutado aqui, no site do Veritatis Splendor.

Por essa razão, além de observar que o articulista faz novamente uma afirmação gratuita, sem apontar fontes em que possa fundamentar seu o "raciocínio", preferiremos indicar os artigos em que as teses mais absurdas sobre um "possível" relacionamento entre Catolicismo e Paganismo foram abordadas:

- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/575
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/3001
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/468
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/3958
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/4044

Esses são apenas alguns textos; mas é possível encontrar MUITOS outros usando a ferramenta de busca existente do site Veritatis Splendor, digitando-se no campo de pesquisa (no topo superior direito) palavras-chave como "Paganismo", "Babilônia", "Pagã" etc. Para aí remetemos o leitor interessado em mais detalhes.

"Portanto, o Cristianismo só poderia se assentar através da pena (fé cega) e pela espada (perseguição religiosa). E, invocando a própria Igreja Católica, está na frase histórica, proferida pelo papa Leão X: Quantum nobis prodeste haec fabula Christi! - 'Quanto nos ajuda esta fábula de Cristo!'".

O desfecho CERTAMENTE não poderia ser o pior e mais desastrado possível...

Inconformado pelo "cheque-mate" dado anteriormente, parte o autor para jogar no ar uma "lenda urbana", citada por muitos protestantes anticatólicos (na base do já mencionado "espírito de papagaio"), mas NUNCA PROVADA...

Pois muito bem, CHEQUE-MATE 2: Aponte-nos em qual documento da Igreja o Santo Padre o Papa Leão X (1513-1521) escreveu tal coisa!!!

EIS AÍ O NOSSO DESAFIO, já que a Verdade é única!!!

Se achar, aliás, mande-nos uma cópia para que possamos disponibilizá-la na Área de Documentos da Igreja, que mantemos aqui no Veritatis Splendor. E não se importe se não encontrar tal documento em português, mas só em qualquer outra língua, pois teremos IMENSO PRAZER em traduzí-lo.

Aliás, achamos que isso seria o mínimo que o articulista deveria fazer... Pelo menos assim, talvéz pudéssemos rever este nosso segundo "cheque-mate" e então ficaríamos empatados, já que ele NUNCA conseguirá derrubar o nosso primeiro "cheque-mate"... ;)

Em outras palavras... O ARTICULISTA NUNCA PROVARÁ QUE JESUS DE NAZARÉ NÃO EXISTIU!!! E NÓS TEMOS A CERTEZA DE QUE TAMBÉM NUNCA CONSEGUIRÁ DEMONSTRAR QUE O PAPA PIO X TENHA PRONUNCIADO TAL DESATINO!

Bom. Se antes esperávamos sentados, cremos agora FIRMEMENTE que poderemos deitar e dormir pra lá de despreocupados ;)

CONCLUSÃO: A HISTÓRIA E A RAZÃO DEMONSTRAM QUE JESUS CRISTO EXISTIU. A ESTÓRIA [DA CAROCHINHA] E A FALTA DE RAZÃO DEMONSTRAM O INVERSO!

-----

Em complemento a esta resposta que oferecemos, sugerimos ainda a leitura dos seguintes artigos do Veritatis Splendor:

A Igreja e o Paganismo
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/3958/
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/4073/
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/3001/
etc.

Historicidade de Cristo
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/569/
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/570/
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/4041/
etc.

Vaticano e Judaísmo
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/3339/
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/3729/
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/3123/
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/57
- http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/1832
etc.

(Use a ferramenta de busca existente do site Veritatis Splendor, para obter outros resultados e artigos interessantes!).

---

Para citar este artigo:

NABETO, Carlos Martins. Apostolado Veritatis Splendor: LEITOR QUESTIONA ARTIGO QUE NEGA A EXISTÊNCIA HISTÓRICA DE CRISTO. Disponível em http://www.veritatis.com.br/article/4697. Desde 5/16/2008.

Tony Snow - Cancer's Unexpected Blessings

CT Classic

Cancer's Unexpected Blessings

When you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change.

Tony Snow | posted 7/20/2007 02:30PM

Commentator and broadcaster Tony Snow announced that he had colon cancer in 2005. Following surgery and chemo-therapy, Snow joined the Bush administration in April 2006 as press secretary. Unfortunately, on March 23 Snow, 51, a husband and father of three, announced that the cancer had recurred, with tumors found in his abdomen—leading to surgery in April, followed by more chemotherapy. Snow went back to work in the White House Briefing Room on May 30, but resigned August 31. CT asked Snow what spiritual lessons he has been learning through the ordeal.

Blessings arrive in unexpected packages—in my case, cancer.

Those of us with potentially fatal diseases—and there are millions in America today—find ourselves in the odd position of coping with our mortality while trying to fathom God's will. Although it would be the height of presumption to declare with confidence What It All Means, Scripture provides powerful hints and consolations.

The first is that we shouldn't spend too much time trying to answer the why questions: Why me? Why must people suffer? Why can't someone else get sick? We can't answer such things, and the questions themselves often are designed more to express our anguish than to solicit an answer.

I don't know why I have cancer, and I don't much care. It is what it is—a plain and indisputable fact. Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths begin to take shape. Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out.

But despite this—because of it—God offers the possibility of salvation and grace. We don't know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face-to-face.

Second, we need to get past the anxiety. The mere thought of dying can send adrenaline flooding through your system. A dizzy, unfocused panic seizes you. Your heart thumps; your head swims. You think of nothingness and swoon. You fear partings; you worry about the impact on family and friends. You fidget and get nowhere.

To regain footing, remember that we were born not into death, but into life—and that the journey continues after we have finished our days on this earth. We accept this on faith, but that faith is nourished by a conviction that stirs even within many nonbelieving hearts—an intuition that the gift of life, once given, cannot be taken away. Those who have been stricken enjoy the special privilege of being able to fight with their might, main, and faith to live—fully, richly, exuberantly—no matter how their days may be numbered.

Third, we can open our eyes and hearts. God relishes surprise. We want lives of simple, predictable ease—smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see—but God likes to go off-road. He provokes us with twists and turns. He places us in predicaments that seem to defy our endurance and comprehension—and yet don't. By his love and grace, we persevere. The challenges that make our hearts leap and stomachs churn invariably strengthen our faith and grant measures of wisdom and joy we would not experience otherwise.

'You Have Been Called'

Picture yourself in a hospital bed. The fog of anesthesia has begun to wear away. A doctor stands at your feet; a loved one holds your hand at the side. "It's cancer," the healer announces.

The natural reaction is to turn to God and ask him to serve as a cosmic Santa. "Dear God, make it all go away. Make everything simpler." But another voice whispers: "You have been called." Your quandary has drawn you closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to the issues that matter—and has dragged into insignificance the banal concerns that occupy our "normal time."

There's another kind of response, although usually short-lived—an inexplicable shudder of excitement, as if a clarifying moment of calamity has swept away everything trivial and tinny, and placed before us the challenge of important questions.

The moment you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change. You discover that Christianity is not something doughy, passive, pious, and soft. Faith may be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But it also draws you into a world shorn of fearful caution. The life of belief teems with thrills, boldness, danger, shocks, reversals, triumphs, and epiphanies. Think of Paul, traipsing though the known world and contemplating trips to what must have seemed the antipodes (Spain), shaking the dust from his sandals, worrying not about the morrow, but only about the moment.

There's nothing wilder than a life of humble virtue—for it is through selflessness and service that God wrings from our bodies and spirits the most we ever could give, the most we ever could offer, and the most we ever could do.

Finally, we can let love change everything. When Jesus was faced with the prospect of crucifixion, he grieved not for himself, but for us. He cried for Jerusalem before entering the holy city. From the Cross, he took on the cumulative burden of human sin and weakness, and begged for forgiveness on our behalf.

We get repeated chances to learn that life is not about us—that we acquire purpose and satisfaction by sharing in God's love for others. Sickness gets us partway there. It reminds us of our limitations and dependence. But it also gives us a chance to serve the healthy. A minister friend of mine observes that people suffering grave afflictions often acquire the faith of two people, while loved ones accept the burden of two people's worries and fears.

Learning How to Live

Most of us have watched friends as they drifted toward God's arms not with resignation, but with peace and hope. In so doing, they have taught us not how to die, but how to live. They have emulated Christ by transmitting the power and authority of love.

I sat by my best friend's bedside a few years ago as a wasting cancer took him away. He kept at his table a worn Bible and a 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. A shattering grief disabled his family, many of his old friends, and at least one priest. Here was a humble and very good guy, someone who apologized when he winced with pain because he thought it made his guest uncomfortable. He retained his equanimity and good humor literally until his last conscious moment. "I'm going to try to beat [this cancer]," he told me several months before he died. "But if I don't, I'll see you on the other side."

His gift was to remind everyone around him that even though God doesn't promise us tomorrow, he does promise us eternity—filled with life and love we cannot comprehend—and that one can in the throes of sickness point the rest of us toward timeless truths that will help us weather future storms.

Through such trials, God bids us to choose: Do we believe, or do we not? Will we be bold enough to love, daring enough to serve, humble enough to submit, and strong enough to acknowledge our limitations? Can we surrender our concern in things that don't matter so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?

When our faith flags, he throws reminders in our way. Think of the prayer warriors in our midst. They change things, and those of us who have been on the receiving end of their petitions and intercessions know it.

It is hard to describe, but there are times when suddenly the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and you feel a surge of the Spirit. Somehow you just know: Others have chosen, when talking to the Author of all creation, to lift us up—to speak of us!

This is love of a very special order. But so is the ability to sit back and appreciate the wonder of every created thing. The mere thought of death somehow makes every blessing vivid, every happiness more luminous and intense. We may not know how our contest with sickness will end, but we have felt the ineluctable touch of God.

What is man that Thou art mindful of him? We don't know much, but we know this: No matter where we are, no matter what we do, no matter how bleak or frightening our prospects, each and every one of us, each and every day, lies in the same safe and impregnable place—in the hollow of God's hand.

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

SLAVERY TODAY AND THE BATTLE OVER HISTORY

SLAVERY TODAY AND THE BATTLE OVER HISTORY

When I was invited to lecture on: “Slavery – The Rest of the Story” at three university campuses in Minnesota, I expected that it would engender some opposition. What I could not have foreseen was the intensity of hostility and emotion that would be whipped up by some radical students against myself and those who had invited me.

Karl Marx declared: “The first battlefield is the rewriting of history.” Evidently, many of Marx’s disciples have been very busy on the university campuses rewriting history, rearranging reality and brainwashing students.

The University of Minnesota has 37,000 students, including over 2,900 international students from more than 130 countries, including China, India, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and many others.

I have been invited to lecture at the university campus before, on the persecution of Christians in Sudan. Those presentations received some opposition, but nothing like what we received on this occasion.

Muslim students from Somalia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia expressed great hostility, anger and emotion in opposition to my presentations on Slavery – The Rest of the Story . At one of the lunch time presentations in a university auditorium, the questions and answers and discussion went on for over 3-and-a-half hours after the end of the presentation. One Somalian stood up and made a long and vitriolic speech against “President Bush’s war of aggression against the people of Iraq,” and attacked me for not dealing with this. In response I pointed out that I was not an American citizen, that I had never worked in Iraq, that I am an African, and the subject that I had been invited to speak on was: “Slavery – The Rest of the Story.” I had spoken on what I had personally witnessed and researched in Sudan, but I could not speak with any authority on Iraq, as I had never even visited that country.

However, I did point out that I was not aware that America was waging “a war of aggression against the Iraqi people.” It was my impression that the Allied forces had freed the people of Iraq from one of the most brutal dictatorships in the Middle East. In fact, I asked, didn’t Iraq now have the first elected government in its history? So, perhaps it would be more accurate to refer to the conflict in Iraq as a civil war where the US forces are assisting the first elected government in Iraq’s history against local insurgents?

A woman, who identified herself as coming from Saudi Arabia, was most agitated. She declared that it was false to give the impression that women were oppressed in Islam. Women were “completely free and equal.” It was wrong to suggest that Muhammad had owned slaves, she claimed, he never mistreated anybody, and Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion of brotherhood.

I had to remind this lady that both the Quran and the Hadith confirm that Muhammad was a slave owner and a slave trader. Muhammad gave detailed instructions concerning the treatment of slaves, including that Muslim slave masters could lawfully “enjoy” their female slaves sexually or even hire them out as prostitutes. “How many women can a Muslim man marry?” I asked. “Four” she replied. “And how many men can a Muslim woman marry?” “What’s that got to do with it?” She responded angrily. I pointed out that this indicates that there is no equality for women in Islam.

“Are you, as a Muslim woman, allowed to vote in Saudi Arabia?” “Of course not!” she responded angrily. “Can you, as a Muslim woman, drive a car in Saudi Arabia?”“No, but Saudi Arabia is the land of Muhammad!”“But you can drive a car here in America? Why is it that you have so many more rights and freedoms in America than you would have in your home country of Saudi Arabia?” In response, this woman expressed very hostile views of America and its government, prompting me to ask why she had come to study in such a horrible country, under such terrible conditions, when she could be enjoying such perfect freedom back in Saudi Arabia?

One student, apparently from Pakistan, declared that I did not deserve to live, and I should not be allowed to remain on this planet! When I asked where he would suggest I go, he exploded: “To hell!” In response to this I said: “I’m sorry, but the Lord Jesus has already dealt with that, so I will not be able to join you.”

One of the most surprising aspects of my visit to the university campuses in Minnesota was the hostility of many university lecturers against Christianity and America. As a missionary who has spent almost 25 years ministering to restricted access areas in Africa, I expect opposition from Muslims and Marxists. However, as experienced during these campus outreaches in Minnesota, some of the most fervent opposition we received came from nominal Christians who seem either infatuated with, or in fear of, Islam. They seemed most antagonistic towards Biblical Christianity and even hostile to the Christian civilisation, which they benefit from.

One university professor stood up during the question and answer time and declared that he was most disappointed with my presentation. It was “the most bigoted, narrow-minded lecture” he had ever heard in his life. He had brought his students from his history class to hear me, expecting that I would speak about the American involvement in the slave trade. He didn’t understand why I would have dealt with such “hurtful” and “offensive” material as the Muslim involvement in the slave trade. Why hadn’t I given more time and attention to America’s involvement?

To this I had to respond that surely the advertised title of my presentations: Slavery – The Rest of the Story should have made it abundantly clear that it was not my purpose to come to America to repeat again what most Americans are so familiar with, and what ended over 150 yeas ago. As an African missionary, who had witnessed the ongoing slave trade in Sudan today, I had undertaken a research project into the history of slavery in Africa and the result was the book: Slavery, Terrorism and Islam – The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat – on which these lectures had been based.

The American involvement in the slave trade lasted for less than 3 centuries; however, the Muslim involvement in the slave trade has continued for 14 centuries and is still continuing to this day. Considering that 95% of the African slaves who were transported across the Atlantic went to South and Central America, mainly to Portuguese, Spanish and French possessions, and that less than 5% of the slaves who crossed the Atlantic went to the United States, it was remarkable that the vast majority of academic research, films, books and articles concerning the slave trade concentrated only on the American involvement, as though slavery was a uniquely American aberration. The vastly great involvement of Portugal, Spain and France seems to be largely ignored. Even more so the far greater and longer running Islamic slave trade into the Middle East has been so ignored as to make it one of history’s best-kept secrets.

Now, I pointed out, if I had concentrated on the American slave trade, that would have been ignorant, bigoted and prejudiced.

Numerous Sudanese university students stood up to confirm the truth of my presentations, that there was indeed slavery continuing in Sudan today. “It is a fact! No one can deny it! The facts and the documentation are there, for anyone to see. We ourselves have seen and experienced it. The Americans are very honest and admit their involvement in slavery over 150 years ago. Why can’t you Muslims be honest and admit what is going on in your own countries, and deal with it?” challenged one student from Sudan.

Another man from Mexico spoke up: “My ancestors were the Aztecs. We were the biggest slave traders, and the slaves were used for human sacrifice - to make the sun rise each day! Our Aztec priests ripped out the beating hearts from living slaves who were sacrificed in our temples. Men were enslaved and sacrificed like that. I don’t like it. I am not proud of it, but it is a fact. It is part of our history. We have to face up to it. And the slavery and human sacrifice in Mexico only stopped when Christianity came and brought it to an end. That is the fact of history. When are the Arabs going to face up to the facts of their own history, and to what is going on in many Muslim countries today? When are they going to rise up like the Christians to bring this slavery in their own countries to an end?”

The atmosphere in the university auditorium was electric, as various students and some lecturers took part in the very vigorous question and answer time, and debating, arguing and discussing these volatile topics.

At one of the university campus meetings, I was still surrounded by about 10 students, including some from Somalia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, 4 and a half hours after the beginning of the presentation. Suddenly I realised that all the discussion had stopped and everyone was silent. They were all listening to me. After hours of shouting and argument, it was an eerie experience as I related the parables of Christ, particularly of the two men who went up to the Temple to pray: the one was a religious leader, a Pharisee; and the other was a tax collector – a sinner. I related the contrast between these two men. The one self-righteous, convinced of his own goodness and moral superiority, and the other man humbled and repentant only crying out: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!” Then I asked them which of these two men were justified in God’s sight? Whose prayer did the Lord find acceptable? The Muslim students remained silent as one of the Christians responded: “The tax collector, because he was repentant.” This seemed to shock the Muslims as they would have thought that the religious leader, with his fasting, was the righteous one.

I also had the opportunity to share the Gospel in the story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son and how God Himself provided the lamb. I pointed them to Jesus, who is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29). He died in our place, the Just for the unjust.

After all the heated emotions, anger and shouting, it was an extraordinary experience to be able to communicate calmly and clearly the Gospel presentation to these Muslims who had been so emotive and hostile for so many hours.

My respect was greatly increased for the campus ministries that have to work in such volatile and hostile environments on a daily basis. Campus ministries, such as Maranatha, are laying a foundation for righteousness for future generations. On a daily basis they are seeking to evangelise in dorm rooms, class rooms and offices throughout the university community. With guest speakers like myself, and through men’s and women’s Bible studies, prayer meetings, contact tables and outreaches, they are challenging the present politically correct propaganda of Humanism and the New Age Movement with the life changing power of the Gospel of Salvation and Jesus Christ alone.

My host, Rev. Bruce Harpel, who founded Maranatha Christian Fellowship over 25 years ago, explains: “In the classroom, students are indoctrinated to think that truth is relative, that there are no absolutes, and what is right and wrong are determined by the individual and society.”

“Drinking, drugs, sexual immorality, and lack of accountability lead some students to self destruction. The student usually exits college much more wounded and addicted to sin than when he/she entered. Many times students who were raised in Christian homes abandon their beliefs as they are challenged by opposing worldviews. When these students return to their respective towns, cities, and countries, this bondage to sin is transfused into the bloodstream of society. We see more white-collar crime, violence, sexually transmitted diseases, abortions, suicide, divorce, depression and despair in society than ever before. The University is truly a mission field and that is why we are here. To ignore campus ministry is to surrender the culture to the enemy .”

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” 2 Corinthians 3:17

Dr. Peter Hammond

The Itch: Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies.

Annals of Medicine

The Itch

Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies.

by Atul Gawande June 30, 2008

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Scientists once saw itching as a form of pain. They now believe it to be a different order of sensation. Photograph by Gerald Slota.

Keywords

Itching;

Scratching;

Oaklander, Anne Louise (Dr.);

Neurology;

Brain;

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders (O.C.D.);

Perception

It was still shocking to M. how much a few wrong turns could change your life. She had graduated from Boston College with a degree in psychology, married at twenty-five, and had two children, a son and a daughter. She and her family settled in a town on Massachusetts’ southern shore. She worked for thirteen years in health care, becoming the director of a residence program for men who’d suffered severe head injuries. But she and her husband began fighting. There were betrayals. By the time she was thirty-two, her marriage had disintegrated. In the divorce, she lost possession of their home, and, amid her financial and psychological struggles, she saw that she was losing her children, too. Within a few years, she was drinking. She began dating someone, and they drank together. After a while, he brought some drugs home, and she tried them. The drugs got harder. Eventually, they were doing heroin, which turned out to be readily available from a street dealer a block away from her apartment.

One day, she went to see a doctor because she wasn’t feeling well, and learned that she had contracted H.I.V. from a contaminated needle. She had to leave her job. She lost visiting rights with her children. And she developed complications from the H.I.V., including shingles, which caused painful, blistering sores across her scalp and forehead. With treatment, though, her H.I.V. was brought under control. At thirty-six, she entered rehab, dropped the boyfriend, and kicked the drugs. She had two good, quiet years in which she began rebuilding her life. Then she got the itch.

It was right after a shingles episode. The blisters and the pain responded, as they usually did, to acyclovir, an antiviral medication. But this time the area of the scalp that was involved became numb, and the pain was replaced by a constant, relentless itch. She felt it mainly on the right side of her head. It crawled along her scalp, and no matter how much she scratched it would not go away. “I felt like my inner self, like my brain itself, was itching,” she says. And it took over her life just as she was starting to get it back.

Her internist didn’t know what to make of the problem. Itching is an extraordinarily common symptom. All kinds of dermatological conditions can cause it: allergic reactions, bacterial or fungal infections, skin cancer, psoriasis, dandruff, scabies, lice, poison ivy, sun damage, or just dry skin. Creams and makeup can cause itch, too. But M. used ordinary shampoo and soap, no creams. And when the doctor examined M.’s scalp she discovered nothing abnormal—no rash, no redness, no scaling, no thickening, no fungus, no parasites. All she saw was scratch marks.

The internist prescribed a medicated cream, but it didn’t help. The urge to scratch was unceasing and irresistible. “I would try to control it during the day, when I was aware of the itch, but it was really hard,” M. said. “At night, it was the worst. I guess I would scratch when I was asleep, because in the morning there would be blood on my pillowcase.” She began to lose her hair over the itchy area. She returned to her internist again and again. “I just kept haunting her and calling her,” M. said. But nothing the internist tried worked, and she began to suspect that the itch had nothing to do with M.’s skin.

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Plenty of non-skin conditions can cause itching. Dr. Jeffrey Bernhard, a dermatologist with the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is among the few doctors to study itching systematically (he published the definitive textbook on the subject), and he told me of cases caused by hyperthyroidism, iron deficiency, liver disease, and cancers like Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Sometimes the syndrome is very specific. Persistent outer-arm itching that worsens in sunlight is known as brachioradial pruritus, and it’s caused by a crimped nerve in the neck. Aquagenic pruritus is recurrent, intense, diffuse itching upon getting out of a bath or shower, and although no one knows the mechanism, it’s a symptom of polycythemia vera, a rare condition in which the body produces too many red blood cells.

But M.’s itch was confined to the right side of her scalp. Her viral count showed that the H.I.V. was quiescent. Additional blood tests and X-rays were normal. So the internist concluded that M.’s problem was probably psychiatric. All sorts of psychiatric conditions can cause itching. Patients with psychosis can have cutaneous delusions—a belief that their skin is infested with, say, parasites, or crawling ants, or laced with tiny bits of fibreglass. Severe stress and other emotional experiences can also give rise to a physical symptom like itching—whether from the body’s release of endorphins (natural opioids, which, like morphine, can cause itching), increased skin temperature, nervous scratching, or increased sweating. In M.’s case, the internist suspected tricho-tillomania, an obsessive-compulsive disorder in which patients have an irresistible urge to pull out their hair.

M. was willing to consider such possibilities. Her life had been a mess, after all. But the antidepressant medications often prescribed for O.C.D. made no difference. And she didn’t actually feel a compulsion to pull out her hair. She simply felt itchy, on the area of her scalp that was left numb from the shingles. Although she could sometimes distract herself from it—by watching television or talking with a friend—the itch did not fluctuate with her mood or level of stress. The only thing that came close to offering relief was to scratch.

“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any,” Montaigne wrote. “But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.” For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.

Itching is a most peculiar and diabolical sensation. The definition offered by the German physician Samuel Hafenreffer in 1660 has yet to be improved upon: An unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch. Itch has been ranked, by scientific and artistic observers alike, among the most distressing physical sensations one can experience. In Dante’s Inferno, falsifiers were punished by “the burning rage / of fierce itching that nothing could relieve”:

The way their nails scraped down upon the
scabs
Was like a knife scraping off scales from
carp. . . .
“O you there tearing at your mail of
scabs
And even turning your fingers into
pincers,”
My guide began addressing one of them,

“Tell us are there Italians among the
souls
Down in this hole and I’ll pray that your
nails
Will last you in this task eternally.”

Though scratching can provide momentary relief, it often makes the itching worse. Dermatologists call this the itch-scratch cycle. Scientists believe that itch, and the accompanying scratch reflex, evolved in order to protect us from insects and clinging plant toxins—from such dangers as malaria, yellow fever, and dengue, transmitted by mosquitoes; from tularemia, river blindness, and sleeping sickness, transmitted by flies; from typhus-bearing lice, plague-bearing fleas, and poisonous spiders. The theory goes a long way toward explaining why itch is so exquisitely tuned. You can spend all day without noticing the feel of your shirt collar on your neck, and yet a single stray thread poking out, or a louse’s fine legs brushing by, can set you scratching furiously.

But how, exactly, itch works has been a puzzle. For most of medical history, scientists thought that itching was merely a weak form of pain. Then, in 1987, the German researcher H. O. Handwerker and his colleagues used mild electric pulses to drive histamine, an itch-producing substance that the body releases during allergic reactions, into the skin of volunteers. As the researchers increased the dose of histamine, they found that they were able to increase the intensity of itch the volunteers reported, from the barely appreciable to the “maximum imaginable.” Yet the volunteers never felt an increase in pain. The scientists concluded that itch and pain are entirely separate sensations, transmitted along different pathways.

Despite centuries spent mapping the body’s nervous circuitry, scientists had never noticed a nerve specific for itch. But now the hunt was on, and a group of Swedish and German researchers embarked upon a series of tricky experiments. They inserted ultra-thin metal electrodes into the skin of paid volunteers, and wiggled them around until they picked up electrical signals from a single nerve fibre. Computers subtracted the noise from other nerve fibres crossing through the region. The researchers would then spend hours—as long as the volunteer could tolerate it—testing different stimuli on the skin in the area (a heated probe, for example, or a fine paintbrush) to see what would get the nerve to fire, and what the person experienced when it did.

They worked their way through fifty-three volunteers. Mostly, they encountered well-known types of nerve fibres that respond to temperature or light touch or mechanical pressure. “That feels warm,” a volunteer might say, or “That feels soft,” or “Ouch! Hey!” Several times, the scientists came across a nerve fibre that didn’t respond to any of these stimuli. When they introduced a tiny dose of histamine into the skin, however, they observed a sharp electrical response in some of these nerve fibres, and the volunteer would experience an itch. They announced their discovery in a 1997 paper: they’d found a type of nerve that was specific for itch.

Unlike, say, the nerve fibres for pain, each of which covers a millimetre-size territory, a single itch fibre can pick up an itchy sensation more than three inches away. The fibres also turned out to have extraordinarily low conduction speeds, which explained why itchiness is so slow to build and so slow to subside.

Other researchers traced these fibres to the spinal cord and all the way to the brain. Examining functional PET-scan studies in healthy human subjects who had been given mosquito-bite-like histamine injections, they found a distinct signature of itch activity. Several specific areas of the brain light up: the part of the cortex that tells you where on your body the sensation occurs; the region that governs your emotional responses, reflecting the disagreeable nature of itch; and the limbic and motor areas that process irresistible urges (such as the urge to use drugs, among the addicted, or to overeat, among the obese), reflecting the ferocious impulse to scratch.

Now various phenomena became clear. Itch, it turns out, is indeed inseparable from the desire to scratch. It can be triggered chemically (by the saliva injected when a mosquito bites, say) or mechanically (from the mosquito’s legs, even before it bites). The itch-scratch reflex activates higher levels of your brain than the spinal-cord-level reflex that makes you pull your hand away from a flame. Brain scans also show that scratching diminishes activity in brain areas associated with unpleasant sensations.

But some basic features of itch remained unexplained—features that make itch a uniquely revealing case study. On the one hand, our bodies are studded with receptors for itch, as they are with receptors for touch, pain, and other sensations; this provides an alarm system for harm and allows us to safely navigate the world. But why does a feather brushed across the skin sometimes itch and at other times tickle? (Tickling has a social component: you can make yourself itch, but only another person can tickle you.) And, even more puzzling, how is it that you can make yourself itchy just by thinking about it?

Contemplating what it’s like to hold your finger in a flame won’t make your finger hurt. But simply writing about a tick crawling up the nape of one’s neck is enough to start my neck itching. Then my scalp. And then this one little spot along my flank where I’m beginning to wonder whether I should check to see if there might be something there. In one study, a German professor of psychosomatics gave a lecture that included, in the first half, a series of what might be called itchy slides, showing fleas, lice, people scratching, and the like, and, in the second half, more benign slides, with pictures of soft down, baby skin, bathers. Video cameras recorded the audience. Sure enough, the frequency of scratching among people in the audience increased markedly during the first half and decreased during the second. Thoughts made them itch.

We now have the nerve map for itching, as we do for other sensations. But a deeper puzzle remains: how much of our sensations and experiences do nerves really explain?

In the operating room, a neurosurgeon washed out and debrided M.’s wound, which had become infected. Later, a plastic surgeon covered it with a graft of skin from her thigh. Though her head was wrapped in layers of gauze and she did all she could to resist the still furious itchiness, she awoke one morning to find that she had rubbed the graft away. The doctors returned her to the operating room for a second skin graft, and this time they wrapped her hands as well. She rubbed it away again anyway.

“They kept telling me I had O.C.D.,” M. said. A psychiatric team was sent in to see her each day, and the resident would ask her, “As a child, when you walked down the street did you count the lines? Did you do anything repetitive? Did you have to count everything you saw?” She kept telling him no, but he seemed skeptical. He tracked down her family and asked them, but they said no, too. Psychology tests likewise ruled out obsessive-compulsive disorder. They showed depression, though, and, of course, there was the history of addiction. So the doctors still thought her scratching was from a psychiatric disorder. They gave her drugs that made her feel logy and sleep a lot. But the itching was as bad as ever, and she still woke up scratching at that terrible wound.

One morning, she found, as she put it, “this very bright and happy-looking woman standing by my bed. She said, ‘I’m Dr. Oaklander,’ ” M. recalled. “I thought, Oh great. Here we go again. But she explained that she was a neurologist, and she said, ‘The first thing I want to say to you is that I don’t think you’re crazy. I don’t think you have O.C.D.’ At that moment, I really saw her grow wings and a halo,” M. told me. “I said, ‘Are you sure?’ And she said, ‘Yes. I have heard of this before.’ ”

Anne Louise Oaklander was about the same age as M. Her mother is a prominent neurologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York, and she’d followed her into the field. Oaklander had specialized in disorders of peripheral nerve sensation—disorders like shingles. Although pain is the most common symptom of shingles, Oaklander had noticed during her training that some patients also had itching, occasionally severe, and seeing M. reminded her of one of her shingles patients. “I remember standing in a hallway talking to her, and what she complained about—her major concern—was that she was tormented by this terrible itch over the eye where she had had shingles,” she told me. When Oaklander looked at her, she thought that something wasn’t right. It took a moment to realize why. “The itch was so severe, she had scratched off her eyebrow.”

Oaklander tested the skin near M.’s wound. It was numb to temperature, touch, and pinprick. Nonetheless, it was itchy, and when it was scratched or rubbed M. felt the itchiness temporarily subside. Oaklander injected a few drops of local anesthetic into the skin. To M.’s surprise, the itching stopped—instantly and almost entirely. This was the first real relief she’d had in more than a year.

It was an imperfect treatment, though. The itch came back when the anesthetic wore off, and, although Oaklander tried having M. wear an anesthetic patch over the wound, the effect diminished over time. Oaklander did not have an explanation for any of this. When she took a biopsy of the itchy skin, it showed that ninety-six per cent of the nerve fibres were gone. So why was the itch so intense?

Oaklander came up with two theories. The first was that those few remaining nerve fibres were itch fibres and, with no other fibres around to offer competing signals, they had become constantly active. The second theory was the opposite. The nerves were dead, but perhaps the itch system in M.’s brain had gone haywire, running on a loop all its own.

The second theory seemed less likely. If the nerves to her scalp were dead, how would you explain the relief she got from scratching, or from the local anesthetic? Indeed, how could you explain the itch in the first place? An itch without nerve endings didn’t make sense. The neurosurgeons stuck with the first theory; they offered to cut the main sensory nerve to the front of M.’s scalp and abolish the itching permanently. Oaklander, however, thought that the second theory was the right one—that this was a brain problem, not a nerve problem—and that cutting the nerve would do more harm than good. She argued with the neurosurgeons, and she advised M. not to let them do any cutting.

“But I was desperate,” M. told me. She let them operate on her, slicing the supraorbital nerve above the right eye. When she woke up, a whole section of her forehead was numb—and the itching was gone. A few weeks later, however, it came back, in an even wider expanse than before. The doctors tried pain medications, more psychiatric medications, more local anesthetic. But the only thing that kept M. from tearing her skin and skull open again, the doctors found, was to put a foam football helmet on her head and bind her wrists to the bedrails at night.

She spent the next two years committed to a locked medical ward in a rehabilitation hospital—because, although she was not mentally ill, she was considered a danger to herself. Eventually, the staff worked out a solution that did not require binding her to the bedrails. Along with the football helmet, she had to wear white mitts that were secured around her wrists by surgical tape. “Every bedtime, it looked like they were dressing me up for Halloween—me and the guy next to me,” she told me.

“The guy next to you?” I asked. He had had shingles on his neck, she explained, and also developed a persistent itch. “Every night, they would wrap up his hands and wrap up mine.” She spoke more softly now. “But I heard he ended up dying from it, because he scratched into his carotid artery.”

I met M. seven years after she’d been discharged from the rehabilitation hospital. She is forty-eight now. She lives in a three-room apartment, with a crucifix and a bust of Jesus on the wall and the low yellow light of table lamps strung with beads over their shades. Stacked in a wicker basket next to her coffee table were Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life,” People, and the latest issue of Neurology Now, a magazine for patients. Together, they summed up her struggles, for she is still fighting the meaninglessness, the isolation, and the physiology of her predicament.

She met me at the door in a wheelchair; the injury to her brain had left her partially paralyzed on the left side of her body. She remains estranged from her children. She has not, however, relapsed into drinking or drugs. Her H.I.V. remains under control. Although the itch on her scalp and forehead persists, she has gradually learned to protect herself. She trims her nails short. She finds ways to distract herself. If she must scratch, she tries to rub gently instead. And, if that isn’t enough, she uses a soft toothbrush or a rolled-up terry cloth. “I don’t use anything sharp,” she said. The two years that she spent bound up in the hospital seemed to have broken the nighttime scratching. At home, she found that she didn’t need to wear the helmet and gloves anymore.

Still, the itching remains a daily torment. “I don’t normally tell people this,” she said, “but I have a fantasy of shaving off my eyebrow and taking a metal-wire grill brush and scratching away.”

Some of her doctors have not been willing to let go of the idea that this has been a nerve problem all along. A local neurosurgeon told her that the original operation to cut the sensory nerve to her scalp must not have gone deep enough. “He wants to go in again,” she told me.

A new scientific understanding of perception has emerged in the past few decades, and it has overturned classical, centuries-long beliefs about how our brains work—though it has apparently not penetrated the medical world yet. The old understanding of perception is what neuroscientists call “the naïve view,” and it is the view that most people, in or out of medicine, still have. We’re inclined to think that people normally perceive things in the world directly. We believe that the hardness of a rock, the coldness of an ice cube, the itchiness of a sweater are picked up by our nerve endings, transmitted through the spinal cord like a message through a wire, and decoded by the brain.

In a 1710 “Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,” the Irish philosopher George Berkeley objected to this view. We do not know the world of objects, he argued; we know only our mental ideas of objects. “Light and colours, heat and cold, extension and figures—in a word, the things we see and feel—what are they but so many sensations, notions, ideas?” Indeed, he concluded, the objects of the world are likely just inventions of the mind, put in there by God. To which Samuel Johnson famously responded by kicking a large stone and declaring, “I refute it thus!”

Still, Berkeley had recognized some serious flaws in the direct-perception theory—in the notion that when we see, hear, or feel we are just taking in the sights, sounds, and textures of the world. For one thing, it cannot explain how we experience things that seem physically real but aren’t: sensations of itching that arise from nothing more than itchy thoughts; dreams that can seem indistinguishable from reality; phantom sensations that amputees have in their missing limbs. And, the more we examine the actual nerve transmissions we receive from the world outside, the more inadequate they seem.

Our assumption had been that the sensory data we receive from our eyes, ears, nose, fingers, and so on contain all the information that we need for perception, and that perception must work something like a radio. It’s hard to conceive that a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert is in a radio wave. But it is. So you might think that it’s the same with the signals we receive—that if you hooked up someone’s nerves to a monitor you could watch what the person is experiencing as if it were a television show.

Yet, as scientists set about analyzing the signals, they found them to be radically impoverished. Suppose someone is viewing a tree in a clearing. Given simply the transmissions along the optic nerve from the light entering the eye, one would not be able to reconstruct the three-dimensionality, or the distance, or the detail of the bark—attributes that we perceive instantly.

Or consider what neuroscientists call “the binding problem.” Tracking a dog as it runs behind a picket fence, all that your eyes receive is separated vertical images of the dog, with large slices missing. Yet somehow you perceive the mutt to be whole, an intact entity travelling through space. Put two dogs together behind the fence and you don’t think they’ve morphed into one. Your mind now configures the slices as two independent creatures.

The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals. When Oaklander theorized that M.’s itch was endogenous, rather than generated by peripheral nerve signals, she was onto something important.

The fallacy of reducing perception to reception is especially clear when it comes to phantom limbs. Doctors have often explained such sensations as a matter of inflamed or frayed nerve endings in the stump sending aberrant signals to the brain. But this explanation should long ago have been suspect. Efforts by surgeons to cut back on the nerve typically produce the same results that M. had when they cut the sensory nerve to her forehead: a brief period of relief followed by a return of the sensation.

Moreover, the feelings people experience in their phantom limbs are far too varied and rich to be explained by the random firings of a bruised nerve. People report not just pain but also sensations of sweatiness, heat, texture, and movement in a missing limb. There is no experience people have with real limbs that they do not experience with phantom limbs. They feel their phantom leg swinging, water trickling down a phantom arm, a phantom ring becoming too tight for a phantom digit. Children have used phantom fingers to count and solve arithmetic problems. V. S. Ramachandran, an eminent neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, has written up the case of a woman who was born with only stumps at her shoulders, and yet, as far back as she could remember, felt herself to have arms and hands; she even feels herself gesticulating when she speaks. And phantoms do not occur just in limbs. Around half of women who have undergone a mastectomy experience a phantom breast, with the nipple being the most vivid part. You’ve likely had an experience of phantom sensation yourself. When the dentist gives you a local anesthetic, and your lip goes numb, the nerves go dead. Yet you don’t feel your lip disappear. Quite the opposite: it feels larger and plumper than normal, even though you can see in a mirror that the size hasn’t changed.

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

The theory—and a theory is all it is right now—has begun to make sense of some bewildering phenomena. Among them is an experiment that Ramachandran performed with volunteers who had phantom pain in an amputated arm. They put their surviving arm through a hole in the side of a box with a mirror inside, so that, peering through the open top, they would see their arm and its mirror image, as if they had two arms. Ramachandran then asked them to move both their intact arm and, in their mind, their phantom arm—to pretend that they were conducting an orchestra, say. The patients had the sense that they had two arms again. Even though they knew it was an illusion, it provided immediate relief. People who for years had been unable to unclench their phantom fist suddenly felt their hand open; phantom arms in painfully contorted positions could relax. With daily use of the mirror box over weeks, patients sensed their phantom limbs actually shrink into their stumps and, in several instances, completely vanish. Researchers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center recently published the results of a randomized trial of mirror therapy for soldiers with phantom-limb pain, showing dramatic success.

A lot about this phenomenon remains murky, but here’s what the new theory suggests is going on: when your arm is amputated, nerve transmissions are shut off, and the brain’s best guess often seems to be that the arm is still there, but paralyzed, or clenched, or beginning to cramp up. Things can stay like this for years. The mirror box, however, provides the brain with new visual input—however illusory—suggesting motion in the absent arm. The brain has to incorporate the new information into its sensory map of what’s happening. Therefore, it guesses again, and the pain goes away.

The new theory may also explain what was going on with M.’s itch. The shingles destroyed most of the nerves in her scalp. And, for whatever reason, her brain surmised from what little input it had that something horribly itchy was going on—that perhaps a whole army of ants were crawling back and forth over just that patch of skin. There wasn’t any such thing, of course. But M.’s brain has received no contrary signals that would shift its assumptions. So she itches.

Not long ago, I met a man who made me wonder whether such phantom sensations are more common than we realize. H. was forty-eight, in good health, an officer at a Boston financial-services company living with his wife in a western suburb, when he made passing mention of an odd pain to his internist. For at least twenty years, he said, he’d had a mild tingling running along his left arm and down the left side of his body, and, if he tilted his neck forward at a particular angle, it became a pronounced, electrical jolt. The internist recognized this as Lhermitte’s sign, a classic symptom that can indicate multiple sclerosis, Vitamin B12 deficiency, or spinal-cord compression from a tumor or a herniated disk. An MRI revealed a cavernous hemangioma, a pea-size mass of dilated blood vessels, pressing into the spinal cord in his neck. A week later, while the doctors were still contemplating what to do, it ruptured.

“I was raking leaves out in the yard and, all of a sudden, there was an explosion of pain and my left arm wasn’t responding to my brain,” H. said when I visited him at home. Once the swelling subsided, a neurosurgeon performed a tricky operation to remove the tumor from the spinal cord. The operation was successful, but afterward H. began experiencing a constellation of strange sensations. His left hand felt cartoonishly large—at least twice its actual size. He developed a constant burning pain along an inch-wide ribbon extending from the left side of his neck all the way down his arm. And an itch crept up and down along the same band, which no amount of scratching would relieve.

H. has not accepted that these sensations are here to stay—the prospect is too depressing—but they’ve persisted for eleven years now. Although the burning is often tolerable during the day, the slightest thing can trigger an excruciating flareup—a cool breeze across the skin, the brush of a shirtsleeve or a bedsheet. “Sometimes I feel that my skin has been flayed and my flesh is exposed, and any touch is just very painful,” he told me. “Sometimes I feel that there’s an ice pick or a wasp sting. Sometimes I feel that I’ve been splattered with hot cooking oil.”

For all that, the itch has been harder to endure. H. has developed calluses from the incessant scratching. “I find I am choosing itch relief over the pain that I am provoking by satisfying the itch,” he said.

He has tried all sorts of treatments—medications, acupuncture, herbal remedies, lidocaine injections, electrical-stimulation therapy. But nothing really worked, and the condition forced him to retire in 2001. He now avoids leaving the house. He gives himself projects. Last year, he built a three-foot stone wall around his yard, slowly placing the stones by hand. But he spends much of his day, after his wife has left for work, alone in the house with their three cats, his shirt off and the heat turned up, trying to prevent a flareup.

His neurologist introduced him to me, with his permission, as an example of someone with severe itching from a central rather than a peripheral cause. So one morning we sat in his living room trying to puzzle out what was going on. The sun streamed in through a big bay window. One of his cats, a scraggly brown tabby, curled up beside me on the couch. H. sat in an armchair in a baggy purple T-shirt he’d put on for my visit. He told me that he thought his problem was basically a “bad switch” in his neck where the tumor had been, a kind of loose wire sending false signals to his brain. But I told him about the increasing evidence that our sensory experiences are not sent to the brain but originate in it. When I got to the example of phantom-limb sensations, he perked up. The experiences of phantom-limb patients sounded familiar to him. When I mentioned that he might want to try the mirror-box treatment, he agreed. “I have a mirror upstairs,” he said.

He brought a cheval glass down to the living room, and I had him stand with his chest against the side of it, so that his troublesome left arm was behind it and his normal right arm was in front. He tipped his head so that when he looked into the mirror the image of his right arm seemed to occupy the same position as his left arm. Then I had him wave his arms, his actual arms, as if he were conducting an orchestra.

The first thing he expressed was disappointment. “It isn’t quite like looking at my left hand,” he said. But then suddenly it was.

“Wow!” he said. “Now, this is odd.”

After a moment or two, I noticed that he had stopped moving his left arm. Yet he reported that he still felt as if it were moving. What’s more, the sensations in it had changed dramatically. For the first time in eleven years, he felt his left hand “snap” back to normal size. He felt the burning pain in his arm diminish. And the itch, too, was dulled.

“This is positively bizarre,” he said.

He still felt the pain and the itch in his neck and shoulder, where the image in the mirror cut off. And, when he came away from the mirror, the aberrant sensations in his left arm returned. He began using the mirror a few times a day, for fifteen minutes or so at a stretch, and I checked in with him periodically.

“What’s most dramatic is the change in the size of my hand,” he says. After a couple of weeks, his hand returned to feeling normal in size all day long.

The mirror also provided the first effective treatment he has had for the flares of itch and pain that sporadically seize him. Where once he could do nothing but sit and wait for the torment to subside—it sometimes took an hour or more—he now just pulls out the mirror. “I’ve never had anything like this before,” he said. “It’s my magic mirror.”

There have been other, isolated successes with mirror treatment. In Bath, England, several patients suffering from what is called complex regional pain syndrome—severe, disabling limb sensations of unknown cause—were reported to have experienced complete resolution after six weeks of mirror therapy. In California, mirror therapy helped stroke patients recover from a condition known as hemineglect, which produces something like the opposite of a phantom limb—these patients have a part of the body they no longer realize is theirs.

Such findings open up a fascinating prospect: perhaps many patients whom doctors treat as having a nerve injury or a disease have, instead, what might be called sensor syndromes. When your car’s dashboard warning light keeps telling you that there is an engine failure, but the mechanics can’t find anything wrong, the sensor itself may be the problem. This is no less true for human beings. Our sensations of pain, itch, nausea, and fatigue are normally protective. Unmoored from physical reality, however, they can become a nightmare: M., with her intractable itching, and H., with his constellation of strange symptoms—but perhaps also the hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone who suffer from conditions like chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain, tinnitus, temporomandibular joint disorder, or repetitive strain injury, where, typically, no amount of imaging, nerve testing, or surgery manages to uncover an anatomical explanation. Doctors have persisted in treating these conditions as nerve or tissue problems—engine failures, as it were. We get under the hood and remove this, replace that, snip some wires. Yet still the sensor keeps going off.

So we get frustrated. “There’s nothing wrong,” we’ll insist. And, the next thing you know, we’re treating the driver instead of the problem. We prescribe tranquillizers, antidepressants, escalating doses of narcotics. And the drugs often do make it easier for people to ignore the sensors, even if they are wired right into the brain. The mirror treatment, by contrast, targets the deranged sensor system itself. It essentially takes a misfiring sensor—a warning system functioning under an illusion that something is terribly wrong out in the world it monitors—and feeds it an alternate set of signals that calm it down. The new signals may even reset the sensor.

This may help explain, for example, the success of the advice that back specialists now commonly give. Work through the pain, they tell many of their patients, and, surprisingly often, the pain goes away. It had been a mystifying phenomenon. But the picture now seems clearer. Most chronic back pain starts as an acute back pain—say, after a fall. Usually, the pain subsides as the injury heals. But in some cases the pain sensors continue to light up long after the tissue damage is gone. In such instances, working through the pain may offer the brain contradictory feedback—a signal that ordinary activity does not, in fact, cause physical harm. And so the sensor resets.

This understanding of sensation points to an entire new array of potential treatments—based not on drugs or surgery but, instead, on the careful manipulation of our perceptions. Researchers at the University of Manchester, in England, have gone a step beyond mirrors and fashioned an immersive virtual-reality system for treating patients with phantom-limb pain. Detectors transpose movement of real limbs into a virtual world where patients feel they are actually moving, stretching, even playing a ballgame. So far, five patients have tried the system, and they have all experienced a reduction in pain. Whether those results will last has yet to be established. But the approach raises the possibility of designing similar systems to help patients with other sensor syndromes. How, one wonders, would someone with chronic back pain fare in a virtual world? The Manchester study suggests that there may be many ways to fight our phantoms.

I called Ramachandran to ask him about M.’s terrible itch. The sensation may be a phantom, but it’s on her scalp, not in a limb, so it seemed unlikely that his mirror approach could do anything for her. He told me about an experiment in which he put ice-cold water in people’s ears. This confuses the brain’s position sensors, tricking subjects into thinking that their heads are moving, and in certain phantom-limb and stroke patients the illusion corrected their misperceptions, at least temporarily. Maybe this would help M., he said. He had another idea. If you take two mirrors and put them at right angles to each other, you will get a non-reversed mirror image. Looking in, the right half of your face appears on the left and the left half appears on the right. But unless you move, he said, your brain may not realize that the image is flipped.

“Now, suppose she looks in this mirror and scratches the left side of her head. No, wait—I’m thinking out loud here—suppose she looks and you have someone else touch the left side of her head. It’ll look—maybe it’ll feel—like you’re touching the right side of her head.” He let out an impish giggle. “Maybe this would make her itchy right scalp feel more normal.” Maybe it would encourage her brain to make a different perceptual inference; maybe it would press reset. “Who knows?” he said.

It seemed worth a try. ♦