Origins

Pagan Origins

Fact

Many sayings associated with [the pre-Christian deity] Osiris were taken over into the Bible. This included:

• 23rd Psalm: an appeal to Osiris as the good Shepherd to lead believers through the valley of the shadow of death and to green pastures and still waters
• Lord's Prayer: "O Amen, who art in heaven..."

[Link]

"Love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18) originates from an Akkadian proverb.

I am willing that any man should come before us and say, Jesus taught that you must love your enemies, it is written in the Bible; but, if he will open the old manuscript of Diogenes Laertus, he may there read in texts that have never been disputed, that the Greek philosophers, half a dozen of them, said the same before Jesus was born.
-- Col. Thomas W. Higginson, cited in The Christ by John E. Remsberg

The saying "To give is more blessed than to receive" [Acts 20:35] is actually an ancient Greek aphorism. [Link]

More pre-Christian statements incorporated into Christian scripture

Pre-Judeo-Christian motifs in the Bible

About the Holy Bible, by Robert G. Ingersoll states how the Creation stories in the Bible were "far older than the Pentateuch" and writes that in the Persian story of Creation:

God created the world in six days, a man called Adama, a woman called Evah, and then rested.
The Etruscan, Babylonian, Phoenician, Chaldean and the Egyptian stories are much the same.

The very name "Eden" is also originally a Sumerian name and simply means "plain/flat terrain".
... The story of how man was created from dirt (clay?) and brought to life through a breath of air through the nose as told in Gen 2,7, is a copy of the far older Sumerian creation myth. The Sumerian legend is preserved as a seven-tablet epos, Enuma Elish, "In the beginning". [Link]

The biblical "And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." (Deut 19,21; Ex 21,23.25) is actually from [the laws of] Hammurabi. [Link]

We know that this [Flood] story in Genesis was copied from the Chaldean. There you find all about the rain, the ark, the animals, the dove that was sent out three times, and the mountain on which the ark rested.
-- About the Holy Bible, Robert G. Ingersoll

Pre-Christian Zoroastrian and Buddhist elements in the New Testament

The principal demon (Ahriman) promised Zarathustra earthly power if he would forsake the worship of the supreme God. Ahriman, like Satan when tempting Jesus, failed. [Link]

Paradise (both the word and concept are of Persian origin), the Lake of Fire, Seventh Heaven, Angels and Demons are all from Zoroastrianism.
So is the tale of the Three Kings / Three Wise Men:

...the story of the Magi, who were said to have visited the newborn Jesus, resembles an earlier story of Magi who looked for a star foretelling the birth of a Savior, in this case Mithras. Magi were not kings but Zoroastrian astrologers... [Link]

Buddha (500 BCE):

Buddha and Jesus are both said to have walked over the water (Jatakas 190; Matthew 14)

Buddha feeds 500 people by miraculously multiplying the available food. According to the Gospel writers, Jesus feeds 5000 people in this manner (Jatakas 78; Mark 14).

Other elements in the Gospels which scholars admit were entirely from the pre-Christian religions of Zoroastrianism and Buddhism.

Fact:

In their confusion, early Judeo-Christian sects merged the two totally different concepts of Messiah and Saoshyant together. Christ was neither.

Zoroastrian Saoshyant (saviour):

Zarathustra predicted the imminent arrival of a World Savior (Saoshyant), who would be born of a virgin and who would lead humanity in the final battle against Evil. Jewish Messianism grafted these conceptions onto their pre-existing expectations of a Davidic king who would redeem the Jewish nation from foreign oppression.
-- Zoroastrianism: The Forgotten Source [Link]

According to Persian Mithraism, Mithra, born of Anahita, was the prophesied Saoshyant. Not Jesus, who does not fit the bill.

Jewish Messiah:

Jesus did not fulfill the messianic prophecies; Jesus did not embody the personal qualifications of the Messiah; Biblical verses "referring" to Jesus are mistranslations
-- Summary from: "Why don't Jews believe in Jesus?"

Pre-Christian symbols in Christianity

Facts

- The church did not adopt the cross until about the 6th century (New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 4, p. 475).
- The Sixth Ecumenical Council ratified the use of the crucifix in 680 CE (Canon 82), and decreed that 'the figure of a man fastened to a cross be now adopted'.
- Pope Hadrian I (772-795) confirmed this new logo of the Church.

Greek stauros - a stake - was incorrectly translated as cross, and

Early Christians usually depicted their religion with a fish symbol (ichthus), dove, or bread of the Eucharist, but never Christ on a cross (or on a stick). [Link]

• Images of the crucified Roman deity Bacchus were already common in early centuries
• The fish symbol (Ichthus) to signify Jesus was also of pre-Christian origin

Of course, it is well-known that the Christmas tree is entirely pagan in origin too. See more

Virgin Mary and child

It was the gnostic art that reproduced the Hathor-Meri and Horus of Egypt as the Virgin and child-Christ of Rome....
-- Gerald Massey, Egyptologist

Irenaeus, 2nd century father of the Church,

tells us that the MSS [manuscripts] of Matthew's gospel used ca. A.D. 185 by the Ebionites (the original Jewish Christians of Jerusalem) lacked the first two chapters - the chapters containing the imaginary genealogy of Jesus, the - virgin birth story, the wise men, and Herod's slaughter of the innocents. Small wonder that the earliest Christians did not believe the story about Mary and the angel! [Link]

There was no virgin birth in Mark's gospel, for the simple reason that, according to scholarly consensus, it hadn't been invented yet.
-- Gospel Truth, by Bible scholar Russell Shorto

There was no cult of the Virgin Mariam or Mary in the early centuries of the church
-- Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics

The 5th century Patriarch Nestorius and his followers did not accept the perpetual virginity of Mary. They insisted that Mary was only mother to the human portion of Christ, and denied that God had a mother. The Nestorians insisted she ought not to be worshipped as Mother of God. (-- History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, by John William Draper)
However, St Cyril (bishop of Egypt's Alexandria, where the Goddess Hator-Meri and her saviour son Horus had been worshipped before Christianity) got Nestorianism declared heresy at the Council of Ephesus and proclaimed the Virgin Mary as "mother of god." Since then it's been Church doctrine.

The reverence for Mary as the Virgin Mother of God derives entirely from a pre-Christian practice.

Pre-Christian festivals, holy-days and terms for God

Facts

• On 25 December, the Romans had long celebrated the birth of Roman deity Sol Invictus Mithras. Christians then took over this date:

  4th century Bishop John Chrysostom writes:

  On this day also the Birthday of Christ was lately fixed at Rome [Link]

• Sunday was not made the "official" Sabbath day until around 364 CE, when

  The Church Council of Laodicea ordered that religious observances were to be conducted on Sunday, not Saturday. Sunday became the new Sabbath. [Link]

• More: Easter, New Year's, The Epiphany and the observance of the Three Kings, Lent and St. Valentine's Day all stem from pre-Christian celebrations too, and were appropriated by Christianity in later times.

Pre-Christian terms for God

Chrestos, not Christos, was used by the early Christians. It had been a common designation for pagan deities:

According to Realencyclopaedie, the inscription Chrestos is to be seen on a Mithras relief in the Vatican.
According to Christianity and Mythology, Osiris, the Sun-deity of Egypt, was reverenced as Chrestos. In the Synagogue of the Marcionites [an early Gnostic Christian sect] on Mount Hermon, built in the third century A.D., the Messiah's title is spelled Chrestos.
According to [3rd and 4th century Christians] Tertullian and Lactantius, the common people usually called Christ Chrestos. [Link]

The most ancient dated Christian inscription (Oct. 1, 318 A.D.) runs "The Lord and Saviour Jesus the Good"— Chrestos, not Christos. This was the legend over the door of a Marcionite Church, and the Marcionites were Anti-Jewish Gnostics [Gnostic Christians], and did not confound their Chrestos with the Jewish Christos (Messiah).
-- Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.? by G. R. S. Mead

Early Christian writers almost uniformly spelled the name of Christ, not "Christos" (the Anointed), but "Chrestos." Chrestos was a Pagan name given to the judge of Hades or the lower world.
-- The Christ, by John E. Remsberg

The religious use of the terms Dominus and Natali was also pre-Christian in origin, as was the concept of Logos.

Pre-Christian rituals in Christianity

Baptism and the Eucharist were rituals of several pre-Christian religions. For example:

Baptism, communion, and even confirmation, are rites that were performed in Persia a thousand years before the advent of Christ.
-- The Christ, by John E. Remsberg

The leader of the [Mithraic] cult was called a pope (papa) and he ruled from a "mithraeum" on the Vatican Hill in Rome. [Link]

Many other Mithraic rituals, even the Mithraic dress and gear, were incorporated into Christianity besides.

Pre-Christian saviour Gods and men

The saviour-god Osiris was worshipped as far back as Neolithic times:

Osiris was called "Lord of Lords," "King of Kings" and "the good Shepherd." He was called "the resurrection and the life," the god who made "men and women to be born again." He was the "god man" who suffered, died, rose again and lived eternally in heaven. They thought that by believing in Osiris they would share eternal life with him. Egyptian scripture reads: "As truly as Osiris lives, so truly shall his followers live also."

The coming of Osiris was announced by Three Wise Men. His flesh was eaten in the form of communion cakes of wheat. Only through Osiris could one obtain eternal life, they believed. The much loved 23rd Psalm of the Bible is a modified version of an Egyptian text appealing to Osiris, "the good shepherd," to lead the dead "to green pastures and still waters," "to restore the soul" to the body and to give protection in "the valley of the shadow of death."
-- Easter Pathology, by William Edelen (Presbyterian and Congregational minister)

Other pre-Christian saviour Gods and godmen who had miraculous births (often born of perpetual virgins), performed miracles, died and were resurrected: Dionysus, Mithras, Attis, the man Apollonius of Tyana.

Christian apologetics on pre-Christian saviours

The early apologists for the Church, seeing the similarities between Jesus and these pre-Christian saviour Gods who were being worshipped around them at the time, admitted that the pagan deities came earlier. They blamed the devil for having sent "false saviours" ahead of God's Christ.

Some of today's Christian apologists, unable to implicate the devil in their "scholarship", try to argue that the pre-Christian religions copied their saviours from Christ, aiming to convince any ignorant people. In doing so, they go against all the evidence as well as the eye-witness accounts of the early Church Fathers who had to admit that the pagan saviour religions were pre-Christian.

Read about the flawed Christian apologetics from both the past and the present

More on the pre-Christian origins of:

• words, statements, myths and narratives incorporated into the Bible
• symbolism, festivals and terms for God, now wrongly thought of as Christian
• rituals like Baptism and Eucharist, now considered Christian
• the saviour concept: pre-Christian saviours, and the flawed Christian apologetics related to this

Myth

How much we have profited by the legend of Christ
-- Pope Leo X

Facts

No Nazareth anywhere near the 1st century:

...archaeological excavations at present-day Nazareth -- ...carried out by Franciscan monks and priests... -- have failed to show the remains of a single building credibly datable to the first century B.C.E. or the first century C.E. The oldest buildings found seem to date from the last half of the third century, and there is no information to indicate what the inhabitants of those buildings called their village.
Before the second or third century C.E. -- going back to the Middle Bronze Age -- the site now occupied by Nazareth was a necropolis, a city of the dead. [Link]

Other places mentioned in the New Testament that did not exist at the time Jesus was said to have lived

About the alleged Roman Census during Quirinius in Luke:

Herod died in the year 4 BCE. So Jesus could hardly have been born both in the reign of Herod and at the time of the Census of Quirinius in 6-7 CE [Link]

Quirinius' census was of Judaea, not Galilee, and Herod never ordered a slaughter of infants [Link]

Jesus Acts and Words: mostly fake

The Jesus Seminar has over two hundred specialists and Gospel scholars on board:

For more than ten years, the Jesus Seminar has researched and debated the life and death of the historical Jesus. They have concluded that the Jesus of history is very different from the icon of traditional Christianity: Jesus did not walk on water, feed the multitude, change water into wine, or raise Lazarus from the dead. He was executed as a public nuisance, not for claiming to be the son of God. And in the view of the Seminar, he did not rise bodily from the dead. [Link]

They concluded that only 18% of the total sayings supposedly spoken by Jesus might have been uttered by him and only 16% of the total Acts assigned to Jesus might have occurred. This is to be expected when so much of Christianity is borrowed from Pre-christian sources. But it says little for the reliability of the Gospels and the image of Jesus they create.

No Jesus Christ

Throughout history, people have denied the existence of a historical Jesus. The school of Radikal Kritik also looks into non-historicity and inauthentic writings:

Dutch Radical Criticism is the usual name of a school that in the nineteenth century arose within Dutch New Testament scholarship that contested a) the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth and/or b) the authenticity of the lot of the Pauline Epistles. [Link]

Facts

There were many Messiahs around the time the Christ was supposed to have lived. Some of them were called Jesus. But none of them was the Jesus of the Gospels and Christianity.

There are in fact no eyewitnesses for Jesus Christ:

Tacitus, Suetonius, Plinius, Philo, Iustus Tiberias, and Flavius Iosephus have all been tampered with by church scribes in order to camouflage Christian origins.
-- Jesus Cristo Nunca Existiu ("Jesus Christ Never Existed") by La Sagesse

Learn how the Church forged secular "witnesses" and testimonies for Jesus.

Even early Christians did not speak of a human Christ:

The Gospel story, with its figure of Jesus of Nazareth, cannot be found before the Gospels. In Christian writings earlier than Mark, including almost all of the New Testament epistles, as well as in many writings from the second century, the object of Christian faith is never spoken of as a human man who had recently lived, taught, performed miracles, suffered and died at the hands of human authorities, or rose from a tomb outside Jerusalem.
-- The Jesus Puzzle, by Earl Doherty (Journal of Higher Criticism) [Link]

Further details and more on the non-historicity of Jesus

Early Christianity

The letters of John are not written by John the apostle. All the "Catholic letters" (I Peter, II Peter, I-III John, Jude) are also forgeries. And six of the thirteen letters of St. Paul are not by him. Even his "real" letters were later heavily edited by the Church.
Among the later added parts, not in the original Gospel texts: The sermon on the Mount, The story of Jesus' birth (Luke 2:1-21) and the stories of Jesus' resurrection! [Link]

About the Trinitarian proof-text (verse 1 John 5:7):

It is now known that the verse was a fourth-century Spanish invention, finally appearing in MSS [manuscripts] of the Latin Vulgate (the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church) around the year 800. [Link]

... the second half of the last chapter of Mark, from the ninth to the twentieth verses, does not exist in the oldest manuscripts, while some manuscripts give a different ending altogether.
-- Crimes of Christianity, by G W Foote and J M Wheeler

The 9th to 20th verses which are missing in the oldest manuscripts of Mark (and Mark is the oldest of the four Gospels), concern the alleged post-resurrection appearances of Jesus.

Which books?

Different Church fathers considered different books canonical whilst rejecting others.

The Christian canon was changed during several Councils of the Church.

Among the Protestant "reformers," opinions differing greatly from those held by Protestants today were common. [Link]

And finally, the Roman Catholic Church in the council of Trent, and the Greek Church in the council of Constantinople, decided once for all what the list should be for their adherents; and the Westminster Assembly gave the English-speaking Protestants their catalogue.
-- A Short History of the Bible, by Bronson C. Keeler

Early Christian Bibles, Gospels and other Scriptures

Of the books used in Christian Churches, and mentioned by name in the writings of the Christian Fathers of the Church during the first four centuries, at least seventy have entirely disappeared.
... many other Gospels which were once in common use, but which were subsequently considered to be unorthodox, have disappeared. ... Two epistles and a hymn attributed to Jesus himself have disappeared.
... many other books which once ranked as equal to the books of our New Testament, have also ceased to exist.
-- Shaken Creeds - The Virgin Birth Doctrine, by Jocelyn Rhys

Facts

Other Gospels have a totally different story of Jesus, some have no resurrection for instance.
And in The First Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ:

As a boy, Jesus was playing on a river bank on the Sabbath. Another boy came along and saw young Jesus making fish pools and became righteously indignant over Jesus' breaking of the Sabbath laws. The boy set about destroying the pools, whereupon Jesus struck him dead. In the same chapter, Jesus struck another boy dead for bumping into him while running in the street (I Infancy 19). [Link]

Different early Christian sects had different sets of books in their Bibles.

No saving or resurrected Jesus in the Q Source:

The Synoptic Sayings Source [Q source] was written, and presumably passed around, during the generation or two after Jesus died and before the gospels were written. ... the Synoptics Sayings Source never mentions Jesus' death and resurrection, or Jesus bringing salvation. [Link]

A Short History of the Bible by Bronson C. Keeler states:

Many Gospels, Epistles and Revelations, not now in use, were read in the churches in the early centuries. ... the Fathers [of the Early Church] instituted the theory that certain books were inspired. ... They declared many books to be inspired which we do not think to be; and they ignored and rejected many books which have since been invested with divine honors.

The Bible did not form the beliefs. The beliefs formed the Bible.

Our four Gospels were selected by the Church, which pronounced them the true Word of God. The Church guarantees the books, but who will guarantee the Church?
-- Crimes of Christianity, by G W Foote and J M Wheeler

Early Christian sects and their beliefs

Jesus' earliest followers ...did not know stories about His death and resurrection. [Link]

Jesus' Jewish followers in Jerusalem, the Ebionites, did not believe in Jesus' virgin birth, his divinity, nor in his saving resurrection either. The authentic Ebionites of today still don't believe in these things.

The Gnostic Christians, who developed in the first century, who were the first Christians in Egypt and elsewhere, believed Jesus brought salvation by bringing sacred wisdom, not by dying on the cross.

[Link]

Fact

For hundreds of years everyone assumed that the earliest Christians were orthodox New Testament Roman Christians, and "heretical" Christianities — like Gnosticism and Marcionism — developed later... Then in the 1930s ...Walter Bauer decided to actually look at the evidence:

the "heresies" weren't branches off any trunk, they were the original local Christianities. And they weren't small marginal sects, they were the main local Christianities.

all around the Mediterranean, outside Rome, the orthodox New Testament Roman Christianity was a secondary sect, a sect that became dominant only after the conversion of Constantine gave it the advantage of Roman swords.

[Link]

Gnostic Christianity developed from pre-Christian Gnosticism.
Mandaeism is another pre-Christian religion of the region; Mandeans are followers of John the Baptist.

Details and more on Early Christianity

Canonical Gospels, Acts and the Pauline Epistles

Facts

Acts ... is a tendentious creation of the second century ... Many scholars now admit that much of Acts is sheer fabrication [Link]

All the Gospels derive their basic story of Jesus of Nazareth from a single source: whoever produced the first version of Mark. That Matthew and Luke are reworkings of Mark with extra, mostly teaching, material added is now an almost universal scholarly conclusion, while many also consider that John has drawn his framework for Jesus’ ministry and death from a Synoptic source as well. [Link]

... except for a thing called "P52," a tiny mid-second century fragment maybe from John, there are no gospel manuscript fragments till about 200 AD [Link]

What's more, the Apostolic Fathers ...like Clement, Polycarp and Ignatius were Christians alive in the late first and early second century. ...they do not quote, or even mention, the gospels. In fact, no Christian quotes or mentions our modern gospels until the middle of the second century AD. [Link]

In other words, there is no evidence our modern picked-by-Catholic-priests-in-the-fourth-century gospels existed before 150 AD [Link]

Unnamed Gospel manuscripts

The names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not added to the Gospels

until late in the second century.

Thus, although Papias ca. 140 CE knows all the gospels but has only heard of Matthew and Mark, Justin Martyr (ca. 150 CE) knows of none of the four supposed authors.

It is only in 180 CE, with Irenæus of Lyons, that we learn who wrote the four "canonical" gospels, and why:

"There are four principle winds, four pillars that hold up the sky, and four corners of the universe; therefore, it is only right that there be four gospels."
-- Church father Irenaeus

[Link]

More about Papias:

Papias said that of the four gospelers, only Matthew knew Jesus — yet Matthew copies extensively from Mark, who never met Jesus. [Link]

Papias referred in some letters ... to St. Mark's "Memoirs of Jesus," which Papias stated were derived from St. Peter, and to some "Sayings of Jesus" written by St. Matthew ...
Papias was Bishop of Hierapolis, and none of his writings survive except in the form of alleged quotations made by Eusebius about 150 years later.
-- Shaken Creeds, by Jocelyn Rhys

Suppose Papias is referring to our present Gospel of Mark; what testimony have we to the authenticity of Jesus' words as contained in it? Just this: Eusebius says that Papias said that John the Presbyter said that Mark said that Peter said that Jesus said thus and so. That is the historical lineage of the authenticity of the Gospel of Mark. When the reader has that, he has it all. He knows as much of it as the best theologian does, and is just as competent to decide whether or not it is to be credited.
-- A Short History of the Bible, by Bronson C. Keeler

Eusebius of Caesarea - how trustworthy is he?

He [Eusebius of Caesarea] tells us that his chief business as a writer is to "edify"; which means, to advertise the Church. So modern historians are discreetly reticent about the zealous and courtly bishop. I will, as usual, supply the word which they leave unspoken. Eusebius was a liar.
-- The Story of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe, historian and former Franciscan monk

The Four Gospels: not eye-witness accounts

the gospels of Matthew and Luke could not possibly have been written by an eye-witness of the tales they tell. Both writers plagiarize (largely word-for-word) up to 90% of the gospel of Mark

Mark the oldest surviving Gospel: [Whoever wrote] Mark was a non-Palestinian non-disciple, which would make his story mere hearsay

The alleged postresurrection appearances reported in the last twelve verses of Mark are not found in the earliest manuscripts, even though they are still printed in most modern bibles as though they were an "authentic" part of Mark's gospel.

...there is evidence that the Gospel of John, like Matthew and Luke, also is a composite document, incorporating an earlier "Signs Gospel" of uncertain antiquity.
...the very chapter that asserts the author of the book to have been "the disciple whom Jesus loved" [John 21:20] was a late addition to the gospel.

Matthew and Luke contradict each other in such critical details as the genealogy of Jesus

The most critical need was for a genealogy proving that Jesus was of the lineage of David, since it was widely believed that the Messiah would be a descendent of the lascivious king. So the genealogies were the first additions to be forged and added to the Markan account.

[Link]

The Pauline Epistles

These are the letters attributed to Paul/St Saul

Facts

St. Saul's testimony can be ignored quite safely, if what he tells us is true, namely, that he never met Jesus "in the flesh"

it turns out that only four [of the 13 letters attributed to Paul] can be shown to be substantially by the same author, putatively Saul.

Even the letters supposed to contain authentic writings of Saul/Paul have been shown by a number of scholars to be as composite as the gospels. ... the core Pauline material in these letters is what might be termed a pre-Christian Gnostic product.

The Pauline Epistles do not know the life of Jesus described in the Gospels

[Link]

The Falsified Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight by Hermann Detering (NT scholarship of the Radikal Kritik school):

This book shows that all the Pauline letters are all 2nd-Century fabrications, Catholically redacted from Marcionite gnostic dualist-god original versions.

More on the Canonical Gospels and the Pauline Epistles

The Apostles

The twelve disciples were a late addition to the Christ myth [Link]

Facts

• Even though both Matthew and Luke are known to have copied the narrative framework of Mark’s gospel, it is interesting to note that their lists of disciples (or apostles) do not match Mark’s exactly.
• the Twelve clearly serve a zodiacal function in the gospels, and the sun-god nature of Jesus
• The solarity of Jesus and the zodiacal nature of the Twelve is further underscored by the fact that the latter are related to the mythical Twelve Tribes of Israel
• It has long been known that the tribes are themselves zodiacal symbols, part of the solar development of the Yahweh cult that took place centuries before the turn of the era. The disciples both represent the twelve tribes and judge them.

[Link]

Late martyrdom fictions for fictional Twelve

the Twelve Apostles belong to the realm of mythology, and their alleged martyrdoms are pure inventions. In the significant words of the eminent Dutch theologians, Dr. Kuenen, Dr. Oort and Dr. Hooykaas,

"All the Apostles disappear without a trace."

-- The Christ, by John E. Remsberg

In the time of Tertullian and Clemens of Alexandria [late 2nd - early 3rd centuries] the glory of martyrdom was confined to St Peter, St Paul and St James.
It was gradually bestowed on the rest of the apostles by the more recent Greeks, who prudently selected for the theatre of their preaching and sufferings some remote country beyond the limits of the Roman empire
-- Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon [Link]

the martyrdom of Peter is generally rejected, and is not claimed until about 170 [the year 170 CE]
-- The Story of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

The Legend of Saint Peter by Arthur Drews (first version translated by Frank Zindler, available from American Atheists) shows how since Peter is a myth and:

the stories about him based on mere midrash, myth, dogmatism, and forgery, the alleged historical foundation of apostolic succession via St. Peter is nothing but a joke. [Link]

Writing towards the end of the second century of our era, Irenaeus says that there existed then only four genuine graves of the Apostles, namely, those of Peter and Paul at Rome, that of John at Ephesus, and that of Thomas at Edessa in Mesopotamia.
-- The Twelve Apostles, published by Thomas Scott

Multiple death scenarios for many of the Apostles

Ecclesiastical traditions are much at variance with each other regarding the places where the Twelve Apostles died, or were put to death. Thus these traditions variously represent

Peter to have been put to death at Rome and at Edessa,

Philip at Athens and Scythia,

Bartholomew at Cyprus and at Milan,

Judas, the brother of James, in Phoenicia and in Persia,

Simon Zelotes in Egypt and in Mauritania,

Andrew in Scythia and at Patrae in Achaia,

Matthew in Ethiopia and in Persia,

Thomas in Edessa, Scythia, and India.

According to Matthew (xxvii. 5) Judas Iscariot hanged himself, but according to the writer of the Acts (i. 6) Judas fell headlong, and his bowels gushed out.

In reading these stories, any reader who knows that inversion of a story into its opposite is a characteristic of legendary history, must be struck by the numerous instances where the place where the death of one and the same apostle occurred is inverted north and south, east and west, V.C., Rome and Edessa --Scythia and India --Ethiopia and Persia!
-- The Twelve Apostles, published by Thomas Scott, 1870

More on the fictive Apostles. Further details on their fictional multiple-martyrdoms

Biblical Scholarship: NT and OT

Fact

The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Neil Asher Silberman and Israel Finkelstein, who are authorities on the archaeology of early Palestine,
discusses how archaeology has shown that there is no evidence for the existence of:

Abraham and any of the Patriarchs

Moses and the Exodus

The period of Judges and the united monarchy of David and Solomon

Not only have Adam and Eve and the flood story passed over to mythology, but we can no longer talk about a time of the patriarchs. There never was a 'United Monarchy' in history and it is meaningless to speak of pre-exilic prophets and their writings.
... the Bible's 'Israel' [is] a literary fiction ...
We can now say with considerable confidence that the Bible is not a history of anyone's past.
-- Thomas L. Thompson, Professor of Old Testament at the University of Copenhagen and one of the leading biblical archaeologists in the world

Many more reading suggestions for books on New Testament and Old Testament scholarship