Category Archives: Christian failure

The Kingdom

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So which is it? The Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven? Mark and Luke plump for God, Matthew prefers Heaven.

It doesn’t matter, you say? They both mean the same thing. Each comes from a different oral tradition.

But which did Jesus use? Did he say Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven? Did he use then interchangeably? If the latter, why don’t the three gospel writers reflect this, Mark and Luke dropping in the occasional ‘Heaven’ just as Matthew drops in Kingdom of God a couple of times. That they don’t would seem to tell us that their respective oral traditions conveyed only the version they themselves prefer. Two separate oral traditions then, which converge neither at their starting point not their end point in the gospels. While this suggests how unreliable oral traditions were and are, it gets us no nearer to knowing which Jesus himself used. One or other of these supposed traditions is wrong. But the discrepancy is not the result of different oral traditions: Matthew changes Kingdom of God to Kingdom of Heaven when he’s copying passages from Mark which are otherwise word for word. He feels free to alter this one term to suit his own theological ends.

Some theologians argue he did this because, being the most Jewish of the gospels writers, he needed to avoid using God’s name in full. Yet he does just that elsewhere in his gospel, including the two places where he refers to the Kingdom of God. Did he just forget to alter these particular references? The fact he’s altering Mark’s text at all should be a cause for alarm; changing the very words of Jesus. What was Matthew thinking? And no, Kingdom of Heaven doesn’t mean something slightly different from Kingdom of God as some desperate apologists argue: the fact it replaces Kingdom of God in passages that are otherwise copied verbatim from Mark eliminates this possibility.

The only explanation is that Matthew’s sect tampered with the word of the Lord just because they felt like it, for reasons now lost to us. Decades later, the writers of the fourth gospel do the same thing when they eliminate all but two of the references to the Kingdom of God. Yes, they reduce the main focus of the synoptic gospels the imminent arrival of the Kingdom, to a mere footnote. The coming Kingdom of God/Heaven just didn’t suit their agenda so they side-lined it.

The gospel writers felt free to alter, amend, improve, change and invent Jesus script as they saw fit. The evidence that they did so is right there in front of our eyes. Each sect made up and used (or didn’t) the term they themselves thought best described the coming of God’s rule on Earth. And the practice extends far beyond tampering with the Kingdom’s title and importance. And if Matthew, Luke and John did it, particularly the inventing part of their creations, them why not Mark too? Just because his gospel was the earliest doesn’t mean it’s any more an accurate representation of Jesus than the later ones. It doesn’t mean Mark didn’t invent his material wholesale either. If his successors are anything to go by, it’s likely that that’s exactly what he did.

Let me make another suggestion. The sect which gave rise to Mark’s gospel, later copied by a different sect from which Luke’s gospel arose, devised the term the Kingdom of God. The sect that produced Matthew’s gospels preferred to call it the Kingdom of Heaven for reasons best known to themselves.

No conflicting oral traditions required. No earthbound Jesus either.

Christianity’s Greatest Failures. And at Number One, it’s….

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The Return!

Or rather, the absence of any Return and everything that was supposed to go with it.

If Jesus had returned when the breakaway Jewish cult were sure he would, we would be living in a very different world. The Final Judgement and the establishment of the Kingdom of God would have happened 2000 years ago. The Earth as we know it would have been destroyed and reconstructed and the righteous dead resurrected to live in the Kingdom, worshipping Jesus all day long.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but none of this happened. According to evangelicals there’s still time (but not much). According to apologists Jesus’ return wasn’t meant to happen two millennia ago. That’s not, they tell us, what the early cultists believed.

To take either of these positions is to deny the evidence of the New Testament. Those who wrote its books believed the heavenly Christ would appear or be revealed very soon. That is, in the first century, in their lifetimes, while current conditions prevailed (specifically the Roman occupation.) Christians can deny this as much as they like but to do so they have to ignore so much that’s clearly and repeatedly stated in the New Testament. Let’s take a look at some of this evidence:

1. First is the innumerable references to the Son of Man, the Messiah, the Christ, Jesus appearing soon, first century time, to bring about the restoration of the world, the final judgement and God’s Kingdom on Earth. References like –

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. (Why is Paul telling the Thessalonians this if he doesn’t mean they’ll experience these things? Why does the Lord give him this word to pass onto them if none of it would be happening for thousands of years?)

1 THEsSALONIAnS 5:23

Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Again, Paul is addressing church members in Thessalonica, not self-obsessed Christians 2000 years later.)

1 CORINTHIANS 1:7

So that you are not lacking in any gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ (Paul doesn’t think to mention they’ll be waiting 2000 years? That’s because he had no concept they would be.)

MARK 9:1

And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power.” (Couldn’t be plainer, could it. But there are those who argue the kingdom of God did arrive soon after in the form of the church. That’s a disappointingly poor heavenly Kingdom, don’t you think?)

MARK13:26-31

…people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens…. when you see these things happening (the destruction of Jerusalem), you know that it is near, right at the door. Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. (Not you ‘will’ know: you know already, present tense. That’s the cult’s inner circle he’s talking to. Jesus says The Son of Man will return in the time-frame of their 1st century generation.)

MARK 14:62

Jesus said, “… you (the Roman authorities) will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.”

MATTHEW 24:44

Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect. (The ‘you’ being the audience for this gospel or, if you want to insist Jesus really existed, the people right in front of him whom he was addressing.)

MATTHEW 24:42

Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming (what day: he’s measuring it in days, not millennia. 2000 years is a long time for his audience to stay awake.)

JAMES 5:7

Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. (James couldn’t possibly be expecting the audience in front of him to ‘be patient’ for 2000 years!)

JOHN 5:28-29

…an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life…

HEBREWS 10: 25-25

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (It. Was. Expected. Soon.)

HEBREWS10:37

For, “Yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay (ditto.)

1 PETER 4:7

The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers.

REVELATION 1:7

Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.

REVELATION 3:11

I am coming soon. Hold fast what you have, so that no one may seize your crown. (Soon is not by any stretch of the imagination, 2000 years in the future. And no, a thousand years is not like a day to God, despite the forger of 1 Timothy’s excuses.)

REVELATION 22:12

Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done.

REVELATION 22:20

He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

(That’s enough. I’m fed up cutting and pasting, and you’re probably fed up reading these quotations. Well done getting this far.)

Moving on, there’s –

2. The evidence the earliest Christians believed the Messiah would soon appear to put their world to rights that’s embedded in the culture-bound parables. These are the little homilies that begin ‘the Kingdom of God is like…’ It’s like first-century virgins with oil lamps, farmers scattering seed by hand and travelling on donkeys as it turns out. These are stories written for a first century audience for whom they were familiar, daily features of their lives. Their creators wanted to convey the fact, as they saw it, that the Son of Man would soon erupt into the world as they knew it, donkeys and oil lamps included. They were not created for a 21st century audience.

There’s also –

3. The extreme morality espoused by Jesus; evidence the early cult believed the end and new beginning were nigh. They have Jesus proclaim a morality that can only be realised in the short term. Wealth and possessions are of no value in a world about to end; self preservation of no matter; prioritising family of no concern. Debasing one’s self in the service of others; selling your possessions – what good will they be anyway in the world to come? – and giving all your money to the poor; forgiving repeatedly; helping the sick, the naked and the imprisoned: these are what matter in a world that is going to end soon. These demands, unsustainable in the long term, are the treasures to lay up in heaven in a world that is soon to end. With this kind of morality, you can be part of heaven’s imminent arrival on Earth.

The evidence is clear: the early Christians, including those whose writing ended up in the New Testament, believed the Christ was coming to the Earth very soon. None of them knew exactly when but they were convinced it was imminent. And they were wrong.

Those who have predicted his coming in the intervening years were all wrong too. Those who tell us today that he’s about to appear are equally wrong. The promise or threat of Jesus appearing in the clouds and all that goes with it, is the greatest failure of the faith. Didn’t happen, won’t happen. It’s a fantasy generated by ancient zealots and sustained by deluded souls in denial of the evidence to this day.

Whatever excuses evangelicals and apologist try to make, the non-return (or first time arrival) of the Son of Man, Messiah or Christ is Christianity’s most monumental failure. 

Christianity’s Greatest Failures: 2. Morality

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And straight in at number 2, it’s Christianity’s Failed Morality!

  • Premier Christian News presents what Christianity is all about! Super-hero Jesus! He’s part of the X-Men (you know, the cross and all that)! Maybe The Tragic Trinity. Perhaps just a cheap Superman knockoff.

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What has this to do with Christian morality? Well, nothing, which is the point.

We need, so the Right tells us, to return to Christian morality in the West. It seems to me they know as little about Christian morality as Christian News does. All they seem to have in mind is something to do with family, being nice and kind and going to church.

I’ve really no objection to any of these ideals. If people want to waste their time going to church, that’s their right. But what is the ‘Christian morality’ they want us to ‘return to’? The Christian morality espoused by Jesus?

Not really.

Jesus is often credited, by those who’ve never actually read the gospels, with being an advocate of some sort of Universal Love. He wasn’t, of course; his cultish creators portray him as frequently abrasive, dismissive and exclusionary. His, or rather their, morality is far more radical, far more impractical and, let’s face it, far more antithetical to the family, marriage and society in general. He’s not all that enthusiastic about being nice and kind either.

  • He places adulation of himself above – stratospherically above – ordinary family allegiances. He sees commitment to the cult as far more important than any family ties (Luke 14:26).
  • He regards marriage as a distraction from working towards the Kingdom (Matthew 19:12).
  • He tells his disciples to shake the dust from their feet when people are not receptive to the cult’s message (Matthew 10:14). He seems to think this would show the world what undesirables they were.
  • He would really like to kill his ‘enemies’ (Luke 19:27).

In his latest book, Loving Thy Stranger, which I’ve just started reading, Bart D. Ehrman makes the case that what is startling and novel about Jesus’ morality is its expansion beyond family and community. He is the first, according to Ehrman, to promote a morality that encompasses the stranger and the alien. While of course Ehrman is attempting to show how right on and relevant he is in addressing a hot contemporary issue – immigration – he credits Jesus with too much.

The ancient world prior to the advent of Christianity had rules about the generous treatment of strangers, even if it didn’t always apply them.

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself (Leviticus 19:34).

There are numerous other verses just like this in the Old Testament, while the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis is about the maltreatment of strangers and the divine wrath that followed. There are also many verses about taking care of the poor. The theme is not unique to Jesus, nor indeed the scriptures. What is, is the extremes to which Jesus took the morality of the Jewish scriptures.

  • So it’s not enough just to help the poor: you must sell all you have and give the proceeds to them (Matthew 19:21). Jesus would sneer, I’m sure, at soup kitchens and charity drives.
  • It’s not enough, then, to give to charity or volunteer: you should regularly visit the sick and the imprisoned, clothe those without clothes (how you’ll manage this when you’ve sold everything is not explained), and welcome every stranger and outcast into your home. Not the state, not the church but you: you must do this to ensure your eternal life (Matthew 34-40).
  • It’s not enough to be kind; you must give to anyone who begs and lend to everyone who wants to borrow from you (Matthew 5:42).
  • It’s not enough to give to all who ask of you: you must go well beyond what they demand, to the point of giving them the shirt off your back (Matthew 5:40).
  • It’s not enough to be nice: you should put others before yourself and become a slave to all (Mark 9.35).
  • It’s not enough to tolerate being put upon: you should ask for more of the same abuse (Matthew 5: 38-42).
  • It’s not enough to welcome more maltreatment: you must love those dishing it out. Not just forgive them, not just pray for them (though that too) but love them (Matthew 5: 43-45).
  • It’s not enough to honour your parents and take care of your children: your allegiances is not to them but rather to unrelated people who happen to believe the same as you (Matthew 12: 46-50).
  • It’s not enough to be sexually responsible: if you can’t stop having lustful thoughts or playing with yourself you must gouge out your eye and cut off your right hand. Hyperbole perhaps (or perhaps not), but nonetheless Jesus demands you take drastic measures (Matthew 5: 27-30).
  • It’s not enough to marry, stay faithful and only have sex in the missionary position: Jesus prefers you don’t marry at all (Matthew 19: 10-12). Nobody’s going to want you anyway when you’ve poked out your eye and amputated your own hand.
  • It’s not enough to live by this morality: you must show the world that you do (Matthew 5: 14-16). Producing silly memes and making a nuisance of yourself on street corners (and calling that love) doesn’t cut it.
  • It’s not enough to be nice: you must be as perfect as God himself (Matthew 5: 48)

There’s more, of course, of this same extreme, unreasonable morality espoused by Jesus. He and his creators had what they felt were good reasons for promoting it, as we’ll see next time. My point here is that it’s so radical, so extreme as to be impractical and unworkable, which is why no-one has ever managed to live by it. Not even those people Don will tell us about, yet again, who build hospitals in Africa. Jesus’ moral demands go far, far beyond this, which is why Christians are compelled to explain them away, along with their own failure to comply with them. (Cue: ‘they’re hyperbole and/or metaphor’ and ‘we Christians are a work in progress.’)

But it’s not so much that believers fail; it’s that the morality they’re supposed to live by is impossible. It is that which fails, and always has.

Christianity’s Greatest Failures: 3. The Prophecies

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Jesus fulfilled somewhere in the region of 350 prophecies from the Jewish scriptures. Or so many desperate Christians tell us. The mere mention of something – anything – in the Old Testament that might be stretched far beyond its original meaning to apply to Jesus is interpreted as pointing to him. I’ve looked at many of these non-prophecies and supposed foreshadowing episodes before (here and here, for example), so let me make mention of another. John 5:24-29 is, according to newtestamentchristians.com, the fulfilment of Job 19:23-27, which goes as follows:

Oh, that my words were recorded, that they were written on a scroll, that they were inscribed with an iron tool on lead, or engraved in rock forever! I know that my redeemer[ lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me! If you say, ‘How we will hound him, since the root of the trouble lies in him,’ you should fear the sword yourselves; for wrath will bring punishment by the sword, and then you will know that there is judgment.

And here’s John 5:24-29:

Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.

According to newtestamentchristians.com, the Job passage presages the John in predicting the resurrection. Specifically, the passage from the fourth gospel shows how the Job prophecy has been realised. But the Job is not a prophecy. Just because it is supposedly fulfilled by the fourth gospel doesn’t make it one. To say it does is tautological; A proves B proves A. The author of Job was reflecting his character’s anguish at the trials and tribulations he had been through with the God-approved inflictions that had befallen him. The passage might also be symbolic of the trials the Jews had also suffered according to their mythic history. It had, and has, nothing to do with Jesus. You have to read a lot into it to see any connection between the two (they both mention judgement and the fact a redeemer lives, but that’s it).

Perhaps the authors of John detected an allusion to resurrection in general and then ‘reimagined’ it as applying to Jesus. Perhaps it’s only today’s Christians who do it. Either way, this is how gospel Jesus came to be created: he’s an amalgam of ‘prophecies’, incidents and characters from Jewish scripture. Nothing he does or says is historical or even original; it can all be found in the Old Testament (and in the case of Mark’s gospel, in Paul too). This isn’t because Jesus miraculously and supernaturally fulfilled 350 prophecies as he lived, died and revived. It’s because he was written that way. Everything he did while he supposedly lived, everything surrounding his death and certainly everything about his resurrection is recreated from Old Testament episodes and Paul’s ramblings about his heavenly Messiah. To see it otherwise, is to fall for the trick and succumb to the illusion. As the Religious Studies Center puts it:

What becomes clear from these varied techniques for using scripture is that the earlier Old Testament scriptures were an important resource from which to draw upon in the creation of what would become new or additional scripture, the New Testament. It also becomes evident that these scriptures were read, recited, and known well enough by the listeners and readers to use as support and authority for their teachings (my emphasis).

The New Testament shows us repeatedly that this is the case:

Mark 4: 11-12 (quoting Isaiah 6:9-10): Jesus told them, ‘The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that “they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding;
otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!”’’

Matthew 16: 13-17: Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. (Wasn’t Jesus ‘flesh and blood’ at this point? And weren’t ‘the people’ not far off the mark in equating JC with the ancient prophets? Fictional Jesus also stresses that Peter is a descendant of Jonah, another hint we’re dealing with revamping of older characters.)

Matthew 17: 2-3, 6-7: Jesus was transfigured before (the disciples). His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus… They fell facedown to the ground, terrified. But Jesus came and touched them. “Get up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.” When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.

Acts 1:3: After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.(That’s ’proofs’ from scripture: what else could it be?)

Acts 18:28: …(Paul) vigorously refuted his Jewish opponents in public debate, proving from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Messiah. (Not from Jesus’ amazing life, feats or resurrection?)

Hebrews: Every quote attributed to Jesus is lifted from Jewish scripture. (eg: Hebrews 2:12-13), likewise Revelation.

1 and 2 Peter quote nothing but Jewish scripture when talking about Jesus (this supposedly from a man who supposedly knew Jesus in the flesh.)

So no, Jesus doesn’t fulfil the innumerable ‘prophecies’ Christians claim. He was just written that way.

Strike up another big fail.

Jesus: the Man and the Myth

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There seems to be some renewed discussion online about whether Jesus existed. Let me tell you without fear of contradiction that the Jesus we know today most certainly did not. This is because the Jesus of the gospels is a literary creation. He is a legend, or, if you like, a myth. It’s possible gospel Jesus is based on a real individual. It’s possible too he was a remarkable, charismatic individual, considered by some to be the Messiah.

It’s possible because there were such individuals who made their mark around the time gospel Jesus supposedly lived. He might be of their number. But if he were, why did those who wrote about him decades after the founding of the cult that bears his name (or at least the title bestowed on him) base his story on the legends of older, revered figures, also likely to have been fictional? Why is so much of Jesus’ story a rewrite of the events of that other great Jewish hero, Moses? Compare the circumstances of their births, their mission to lead their people out of bondage, their sojourn in the wilderness, their control of the elements and so on (more parallels here). Why is so much else in the Jesus story constructed around unconnected narratives from Jewish scripture?

Was it because the real person contrived to include these events in his life? Was it God beavering away in the background, making sure Jesus fulfilled prophecies, while mirroring Moses supposed activities? Or was it because those constructing Jesus’ fictional life used Moses and other bits of scripture as the template for writing that life? (Apply Occam’s razor to arrive at the correct answer). And having done so, where does this leave the real Jesus, if there was one? Mired, as Schweitzer discovered over a hundred years ago, in an accretion of metaphor, allegory and magic.

It’s as if a biography of JFK were to be based entirely on the legends of King Arthur, with each episode a rewrite of a story about Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table. There would be the claim too that the Arthurian legends on which this work was based existed only to pre-empt or foreshadow the lives of the Kennedys. Of what historical value would such an account be? None whatsoever. It would not be unreasonable for a reader many years in the future to conclude that the JFK of such a biography had never actually existed. (There would of course be ample evidence outside this silly book that he did; there is not the same evidence for Jesus).

We might also look at Jesus’ lineage. Not those ridiculously conflicting genealogies at the start of Matthew and Luke’s gospels, but all the gods, supernatural beings and miracle men who preceded him. Did any of them exist? Did Baal, Apollo or Zeus? Did Sobek, Dionysus or Mithras? Osiris, Demeter or Romulus and Remus? The archangel Michael, Melchizedek, the cherubim and seraphim? Did the hundreds if not thousand of deities worshipped before Jesus really exist? People were convinced they did, sometimes believing such beings could assume human form and descend among us.* But in reality, none of them did; they neither existed nor, consequently, did they appear here on Earth. But apparently we must accept that Jesus, with his highly symbolic name and mirroring other, older miracle men, not only existed but walked the Earth as a manifestation of God himself.

Then there are all those literally incredible stories about him: the means of his birth, his walking on water while turning it into wine, his raising of the dead, his healing of the diseased and blind, his ability to ride two asses at the same time, the resurrection of his two day old corpse, his post-mortem ability to materialise in locked rooms, his beaming up into the sky… to name only a few. These are the characteristics, not of any other historical figure, but of a character in a fantasy. Each and every pericope in the gospels is not a record of real events but a metaphor, an allegory, of who early cultists believed their heavenly Messiah to be and what they imagined he’d accomplished.

He may have existed, of course, this real Jesus, but we will never know, nor will we ever know anything about him. He need never have existed as far as the gospels are concerned; they are interested only in his legend. Similarly, Paul and his Christ; Paul knows nothing of an Earthly Jesus and has even less interest in him. The writer of Hebrews views Jesus as a heavenly high priest not remotely connected with the gospel legends yet to be created. The spaced-out writer of Revelation and his vengeful archangel Jesus likewise. Jesus is whatever his followers want to make of him, including the bleeding heart of Catholicism and the good buddy of today’s evangelicals. Any real Jesus is superfluous. He might as well not have existed.

*See Ehrman: How Jesus Became God, chapter 1

Virgin Oil

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Dennis and I happened to find ourselves in the German city of Bremen recently where we visited the cathedral of St Peter. Apart from having a chapel in the keller of the church that looked suspiciously like an ancient Mithraic temple, the cathedral seemed particularly fond of the story of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, with sculptures of them on its walls.

The early church was obsessed with Jesus coming real soon to kick start the final judgement and inaugurate God’s Kingdom on Earth. Evangelists like Paul had told them so. The guarantee runs through all of his letters and presumably the rival preachers he mentions promised it too. The problem was that after a few decades of Jesus being a no show, some early converts had grown restless. How do we know this? Because later New Testament writers spend a great deal of time addressing the problem of Jesus’ failure to appear. The author of 2 Peter (3:8) comes up with the wholly unconvincing argument that with God a thousand years is like a day and he is giving more people the chance to repent. But this just doesn’t work as I explain here. In any case, 2 Peter is, like Jesus himself, late (most scholars place it in the early 2nd century).

The same issue concerns the writers who come between Paul and the forger of 2 Peter. The gospel writers were keenly aware of the frustration some in the early cult were feeling over Jesus’ late arrival. We know this was the case because the synoptic gospels are littered with parables and stories about why, forty years after cultists had begun looking to the skies for his appearance, Jesus still hadn’t arrived (see for example, Matthew 16.27-28; 24.27, 30-31, 34; Luke 21:27-28, 33-34 etc). Neither will you find any support in the New Testament for Jesus’ arrival being a ‘return’ or ‘second coming’. 

This is where the Wise and Foolish virgins come in. The parable is put into Jesus’ mouth in Matthew 25: 1-13. It’s a very peculiar tale, based on the idea that ‘the groom’ is about to marry ten young girls:

‘At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. The wise ones, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps.

The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep. At midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’ Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out. “No,” they replied, “there may not be enough for both us and you. Instead, go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves.”

But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived. The virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet. And the door was shut. Later the others also came. “Lord, Lord,” they said, “open the door for us!” But he replied, “Truly I tell you, I don’t know you.” Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.

Is gospel Jesus really endorsing marriage to multiple wives? He seems to be and certainly Mormon sects have taken him at his word. Whether he is or not, the point of the parable is to admonish those who are not prepared for the arrival of ‘the groom’ who has been ‘delayed’. Those who keep watching, however, are praised for their diligence and faithfulness. The groom is clearly intended to be Jesus; the foolish virgins those who have given up expecting him and the wise virgins those who still anticipate his arrival, symbolised by their keeping their lamps lit.

When the groom does finally show up in the story, he takes the wise girls into his wedding banquet (I think we know what that means) and locks out the foolish ones. When they bang on the door to be let in, he claims he’s never known them and shuts then out forever.

What a lesson for those who had begun to doubt that Jesus was going to come soon! What a promise to those who faithfully watched for him! The reward would soon be theirs.

Except of course it wasn’t. As we know, Jesus did not arrive when Paul, the early cultists and then the gospel writers believed he would. Mark, Matthew and Luke, while acknowledging that Jesus was ‘delayed’ nevertheless anticipated his arrival soon: ‘just a little while longer,’ they keep saying. ‘Keep watching’.

But it wasn’t to be. The foolish virgins, it turns out, weren’t as foolish as we’ve been led to believe.

In the Beginning, our End

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For God so loved the world that when the first humans couldn’t resist the temptation he deliberately put in front of them, he abandoned them, sending them, and every other creature that occupied the Earth, into terminal decline. He loved the world so much that because of this one transgression he introduced death into his not-so-perfect creation. And he didn’t care. He let them and their descendants all the way down to the present day waste away, miserably and painfully, until they were finally extinguished.

He had to adjust other parts of his creation to assist in this process. He changed the purpose of microbes and viruses so that overnight they became the agents by which he could wipe out the humans he loved so much. God knows what the original point of these creatures was, but he adapted and evolved them with his special magic to suit his new, all-loving purposes. He rapidly evolved still others – flies, larvae, scavengers and still more microbes – so that they became waste disposal systems. Without them, the corpses of all the humans and animals he’d condemned to die would lie around forever, cluttering up the Earth.

This is how the Bible tells it anyway (with a bit of extrapolation from me), the linchpin on which rests not only Judaism but Christianity too. Yes, I know it’s an allegory – though there are still many today who take it literally – but either way, it’s a terrible story. Even without an understanding of evolution, not to mention human psychology, it makes absolutely no sense.

The priest or whoever wrote it (it certainly wasn’t Moses) didn’t have special insight into the mind of God (guess why) nor did he know anything about any archetypal human couple. (He wasn’t there, see.) Instead, he saw the sorry state of the world, including how he and his fellow tribesmen lived short, brutish lives that after only about 40 years (if they were lucky) ended in a miserable death. It seemed irreconcilable with his deity who he felt sure must have created a perfect world. How could he not have? Disease, death and decay could only be the fault of humans. They couldn’t possibly be his perfect God’s doing. So he wrote his myth but still couldn’t exonerate YHWH – his neglect and callousness, not to mention the necessity to evolve microbes and the like to carry out his final solution for his so loved creation. He doesn’t come out of it well; he’s ‘loving’ but having unfairly tempted his creation, he takes offence when they ‘disobey’ and condemns them all, including those not yet born, to a short brutish life ending in a miserable extinction. That’s how much he loved the world.

The original author or someone after him tacked the Adam and Eve story onto an existing one about the creation of the Earth and from then on, up to modern times, his myth was accepted as the truth about our origins (and ‘fallen state’). How do we know this? Because this is how myths are created. They are early attempts to explain life, the universe and death, usually set in the distant past and involving the imaginary gods of the culture that produced them. They were never written, inspired or passed down by deities that have never existed; they’re explanatory stories made up by humans, all of them now redundant.

Written By God

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According to researchers, recent analysis of the Bible strongly suggests that it was written by God. I kid you not. The headline above, from Britain’s Daily Mail, proves it.

The researchers in question were ‘a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and a Lutheran pastor in Germany’. Their findings were announced by The Mail in its Science section, conclusive proof that God himself, the mythical creation of an ancient nomadic tribe, personally wrote the Bible! He didn’t inspire it or guide the pens of the men who put it together. Oh no, he actually wrote it.

How can we know this? Because there are way too many coincidences, too much foreshadowing of later events in stories written hundreds of years earlier, and too many fulfilled prophecies for it not to be.

This analysis is of course seriously flawed. Operating within the parameters that the far from objective ‘researchers’ set for it, the project told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Yes, there are some themes and ideas that run throughout the Bible but this is because its various authors were all concerned with the gods, one in particular. This is all they wanted to write about and all that subsequent editors were interested in too.

The Bible is noticeably short on recipes and sports reports because such things were of no interest to the priests and zealots who wrote it. We might have had a more engaging and less divisive book if these men and their later editors had been more interested in sport and cooking, but they weren’t and the Bible reflects this fact. But there’s nothing supernatural about this. The authors were, like many other ancients, concerned with meaning of life stuff and the God myths that seemed to them to explain it. The god the nomadic tribes of the middle east thought explained it best was YHWH. Far from being a consistent presence in the books of what is now the Old Testament, YHWH changes depending on who’s shaping the myths he plays a part in. This is not, incidentally, what theologians are pleased to call progressive revelation.

It’s a reflection of multiple authors writing over long periods of time in various contexts about the same thing. Nonetheless, the way humans relate to YHWH changes from book to book, as do his morals, demands and expectations. If YHWH authored the Bible, the one character he hasn’t got a grip on is himself.

Our computer specialist and German pastor also dredge up the discredited fantasy that Jesus fulfils all the prophecies of the Old Testament. Of course he does; that’s the way he’s written. His story – actually ‘stories’, plural – are rewrites of older myths, particularly those about Moses. Did Moses foreshadow Jesus, foretelling all he’d do hundreds of years before he was even born? Of course not. Did Jesus then knowingly mirror the acts of Moses during his life to prove he was God’s chosen one? Again, of course not; only a fool is taken in by this ruse. There have, alas, been plenty of them, including the present ‘researchers’.

The obvious explanation is the one that makes most sense; the Jesus stories are modelled on earlier myths and snippets from the Jewish scriptures without any of them needing to be remotely historical. The article mentions, for example, the description of the Passover lamb in Exodus 12 and gasps that, yes, centuries later, Jesus is referred to as the ‘Lamb of God’ (John 1:29). It doesn’t seem to enter the researchers’ credulous little heads that the later authors knew Exodus and decided to apply its imagery to Jesus. This is how the trick was done. There was no holy dictation making the connection. They simply applied earlier scriptures to Jesus and write his story around them. We can see this in another example from the report: Matthew used a mistranslation of Isaiah 7:14 as a template for his virgin-conception myth.

Claiming, as the researchers do, that the construction of later stories was God making sure no-one missed the point of the earlier ones is painfully niave.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice foreshadows Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. The details of the two works are, after all, remarkably similar. The only plausible explanation for these similarities is that Jane Austen’s hand must have been guided by a spiritual force to record events almost two centuries before they would occur for real in Helen Fielding’s definitive version of the story. This at least is what these present researchers would conclude if they ran an analysis of the two Mr Darcy books in the same way they have the Bible.

Meanings, Feelings and Escapism.

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This post is a response to an anonymous ‘comment’ by, I think, our camp friend, Don. I have asked him several times to ensure his name is attached to his comments but he persists in submitting anonymously. This is the reason I haven’t published the comment he so generously blessed us with in response to It’s A Small World After All. It has all the hallmarks of a Don sermon: it’s overlong, condescending and redefines words to suit his agenda. Here it is with my comments in blue.

Neal, you’d be right at home with Kafka and Nietzsche. Who is this ‘Neal’ of which you speak?

As you come to the end of the essay – good one by the way – I think you do something that many do; you confuse purpose and meaning. It is easy to do. Even the theologians do it. But you, the great Don Camp, do not because you know better than everyone else. We should all fall on our knees before such a wonderful and wise prophet.

Purpose is what I do or am to do. And I do need that. It is work. I think it is built into us. I feel like I have fulfilled my purpose when (I) serve others.

Meaning is what I receive. So we’re playing semantics again. Despite the fact that meaning and purpose are two sides of the same coin, you want to split them and make them substantively different.

I asked AI to define meaning and it came up with this:

There is no single objective meaning to life; instead, it is a blank canvas. Philosophically, the prevailing view is that you are responsible for defining your own purpose (my emphasis). People generally find meaning through personal connections, pursuing passions, contributing to the world, and embracing the experience of being alive.

Oh dear, even silly old AI ‘confuses’ meaning and purpose. Evidently it needs you, Don, to advise it.

Meaning is what I receive. It is joy. It is what I receive when I sit on a high cliff and watch sea waves crashing upon the rocks below. Or the joy I receive when I stand and survey rolling hills of sage and juniper trees and bunch grass bowing in the warm wind. Or the joy that sweeps over me when I sense God close and am embraced by his goodness. And in all these and many more I feel like this is what I was made for. In all these I feel a oneness and completeness. I could be at peace with these forever. These are subjective feelings, as you inadvertently acknowledge with your use of the word ‘feel’. For some reason you mistakenly interpret your own emotions as externally supplied. You say you ‘receive’ meaning in this way as if it’s transmitted from somewhere outside yourself. It isn’t; what you’re experiencing is ‘emotional reasoning’, mistaking emotions for something that exists beyond yourself.  

Your emotions are not meaning in themselves. Listening to the grass grow or watching the ocean waves for all eternity isn’t going to provide you with anything like meaning. Not that you’ll get the chance, of course, when you’re not going to live forever. How careless of you to confuse feelings with meaning, Don.

But I am brought back too soon to a world that is too much with us. That’s the fleeting nature of emotions, Don. Feeling the world is too much ‘with us’ (incorrect preposition?) is also an emotion, not an eternal truth. What it comes down to is, as Exub1a puts it, preferring your own constructed reality over the beautiful chaos of real life.

I think the two together, purpose and meaning, are what life is about. But they are only satisfying to me when they include forever. Oops! Offer is time limited and excludes forever. Sorry Don. You’re living in a delusion. Without that there is an incompleteness, like the loss when one who was part of that completeness dies. Says who? It’s a non-sequitur to claim that life without delusion is meaningless. Of course, it’s an assertion beloved of religionists who like to tell non-believers their lives are meaningless without their imaginary God. It’s a lie, Don.

Without that I at 81 would be an old man like Ernest Hemingway when the fishing and hunting and women were gone. The only thing left is to end it. Nonsense. You’re very fortunate to be 81. I know 81+ year olds, who enjoy life as I, a mere stripling of 71, do. Even when it is restricted by the infirmities of older age there is still much to live for. If your fantasy is all that makes your life worth living, you are indeed to be pitied (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:19).

 

That’s it, Don. If you want to comment in future your comment must include your name somewhere. Otherwise, straight in the trash it goes. And what would be the purpose of that?

 

Pray With More Urgency

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‘Try Praying’ it says on the back of the buses in the UK. Let’s pray for peace says the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the Right Reverend Sarah Mullalley:

…let us pray and call with renewed urgency for an end to the violence and destruction in the Middle East and the Gulf… May all people of the region receive the peace, justice and freedom they long for.

It’d be nice, wouldn’t it, if the world was at peace. I’m just not sure how praying ‘with renewed urgency’ as Ms Doolally puts it will make much difference. Or praying at all. She might as well beseech her flock to keep happy thoughts uppermost in their minds. The peace she yearns for is not, obviously, for Ukraine and other of the world’s conflict hot-spots. Only a week before the Archbishop beseeched The Lord for an end to (selective) violence and destruction, Muslim terrorists had again massacred Christians in Nigeria. Perhaps the Rev Malarkey didn’t pray urgently or with sufficient renewal because God evidently ignored her pleas. He makes no attempt to rescue even his own people; either that or he’s incapable of doing anything about megalomaniacs and murderous zealots. You’d have thought if he was opposed to us slaughtering each other he’d have put a stop to it already, what with all the urgent prayers down the centuries.

Meanwhile, over on the Dark Side, Pope Leo XIV has been assuring his devotees that God does indeed ‘reject violence’. This surely can’t be the God of the Old Testament who loves a good set-to, can it? Nor the God of the New who supposedly sent his son to be violently executed by the Romans. Nor the God of Revelation who plans to send that same gentle Son to slaughter most of humankind. God’s propensity for ‘violence and destruction’ is renowned and Leonardo has let that Oscar go to his head if he thinks otherwise. After all, any number of his predecessors have rolled up their finest-silk sleeves for a good old holy war, with God on their side of course.

Still, if those posters and the Rev Mullalley think prayer is our best hope, maybe I should try it. That bus isn’t going to get here on its own.