Category Archives: Christian origins

It’s the End!

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AI shows how it’s done. Arrange your elements carefully, and – hey, presto! – Jesus appears!

I’ve reached the end! The end of Jonathan Cahn’s The Dragon Prophecy that is. He has me convinced: the end of the age and the world itself, is just around the corner. He looks around the world, particularly the Middle East, sees the state it’s in and dives into the scriptures to uncover the prophecies that presage present day events. He then reveals how, collectively, these scriptures accurately describe the state of the world today following Hamas’s invasion of Israel on 7th October 2023.

Had he collected these passages prior to 7th October, would they have accurately foretold the events of that day? They should’ve done if that’s what they are really about. So where was this expose before 7th October? Where were the books, by Cahn or anyone else, revealing how the Bible predicted in detail, events that still lay in the future? Predicatbly (pun intended), they don’t exist. Cahn’s The Serpent’s Prophecy could only be written with hindsight, after the events, 7th October 2023 in particular, that he’s decided fulfil biblical prophecy. The prescience of these ancient scriptures is only apparent, to Cahn if no-one else, in retrospect.

He gathers disparate verses together to demonstrate how they do indeed predict current events. He omits many that don’t, even though they too appear to prophesy the future. He does this because they don’t fit the picture he’s trying to create: his interpretation of events in Israel and the significance he wants ascribed to them.

Cahn disingenuously forces unrelated verses to work together, like pieces from different jigsaw puzzles, to create a picture that loosely and disjointedly conforms with and thereby confirms his own conclusions. 

The culmination of The Dragon’s Prophecy is that the time is right and the stage set for Christ’s ‘return’. Cahn advises his readers to surrender to him before he comes though the clouds to do unspeakable things to them. While none of the ‘prophecies’ he’s pressed into service have ever been fulfilled and are certainly not being now, this one must surely be the greatest of the Bible’s failed prophecies.

Does all of this sound familiar? It should. Starting with Paul and the gospel writers, numerous hacks have pulled together biblical prophecies to show how events of their times fulfil the conditions for Christ’s return.

More than this, the gospels were created in exactly the same way that Cahn creates his end-of-the-world scenario. Mark, Matthew and Luke, ruthlessly plundered ancient Jewish scripture to show how their suffering Messiah (whether real or not) was predicted there. Significantly, no-one prior to the early days of the Christian cult believed that these particular scriptures foresaw a suffering Messiah who would die for the sins of his people before coming back to life. The scriptures could only be made to do so in retrospect. After some claimed to have seen the risen Jesus, early cultists began to scour the scriptures for passages – how many they had to ignore or misinterpret! – that could be made to create a loose, disjointed picture of their super-hero. It’s how Paul attempted to persuade others that Jesus was the Messiah (1 Corinthians 15:3,4 etc).

So Cahn is doing nothing new, finding a ready audience for his particular sleight of hand.

When A Child Is Born… Supernaturally

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To what extent are the conflicting nativity stories in Matthew and Luke historical? That depends on whether or not you believe in the supernatural.

There is no evidence of a supernatural realm nor the beings who are said to inhabit it: God, heavenly Jesus, the Holy Spirit, angels and those they are constantly at war with: Satan and his demonic hordes. It is not as Jonathan Cahn describes it in The Serpent’s Prophecy:

Behind the perceivable realm lies another, beyond our ability to measure or quantify. Behind the history of this world lies another, unrecorded, unrecited, unknown. And behind that which moves and transforms the world lie unseen forces, causes, agents, undying and primeval (p3).

Cahn cannot possibly know any of this, any more than fake-Paul could when he wrote Ephesians 2,000 years ago (6:12). A reality that exists above and beyond nature – the meaning of supernatural – that is ‘unseen’, undetectable and ‘unknown’ is one that doesn’t exist, except in the imagination of a few fantasists.

Yet the supernatural is the basis of Christianity. Without it, its agents, as Cahn calls them, could not have interacted with the only reality there is. The Holy Spirit could not have impregnated Mary; angels could not have materialised to announce Jesus’s birth to a group of credulous shepherds; a divine being could not have communicated through dreams with Joseph and the Magi; a magic star could not have been manoeuvred into place over Jesus’ house. Most significantly, a non-existent God could not have sent his ‘son’ into this world.

It is futile to argue whether Matthew or Luke’s nativity narrative is the more historically accurate. Nor is there any point in trying to harmonise the two accounts. Neither is historical: the involvement of the supernatural rules out their being factual.

The inclusion of the supernatural in everything that follows is also fatal to claims made for the gospels’ historicity. The clues are there in the text: God’s pronouncements from the sky; the inexplicable miracles and healings; the presence of angels, demons and Satan; the dead rising; visions, prayers and prophecies. These tell us that what we’re dealing with is fantasy material. The creators of the gospels and other books of the New Testament had no more evidence than Cahn does that secretive super-beings existed, even if they did take them for granted. God and his interventions no more exist than Santa Claus and his magical Christmas deliveries.

Paul tells us that God raised Jesus from the dead (Romans 8:11). But there is no God, so he didn’t. There was no supernatural resurrection and without a resurrection there were no encounters, like those in the gospels, with a reanimated body.

Remove the supernatural from the Jesus story and there’s nothing left. Some wise advice lifted from Jewish scripture perhaps, plus a few cult rules, but that’s all. Paul’s experience of the risen Christ, like that of Cephas before him (described nowhere in the New Testament but allegorised in the gospels) and John of Patmos after him, were as Paul himself says, a ‘revealing’ in their own heads.

I hope none of this spoils Christmas for you. The Nativity isn’t a bad story, indeed it’s quite beautiful in places. But it is not historical. Like much in gospel Jesus’ life, and the resurrection itself, it is a fantasy generated by irrational and superstitious minds.

A very happy Christmas to both my readers.

Experiencing Jesus

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Back in my students days, sometime in the Middle Ages, I was involved in the conversion of a couple of friends. I’d only just met them, after starting college a week or so earlier. I was training to be a teacher and the college thought it would be a good idea if their new recruits spent a couple of weeks travelling to a school miles away to observe how education was delivered there (pretty chaotically it turned out.)

Jan, Karen and I travelled to the school in Rob’s Triumph Herald car. Rob was a new friend too. He and I met the first day of college and hit it off straight away, both being evangelicals (his guitar was covered in Arthur Blessit ‘One Way’ stickers) and bonding over our mutual love of Larry Norman.

Rob had one such sticker on the dashboard of his car and one day, on our way back from the school, Jan and Karen asked about it and what it was like to be a Christian. We had somewhere taken an unintended detour and the journey back to the college was taking longer than usual so we had plenty of time to share our faith with them. It was a dream come true – what committed Christian didn’t look for opportunities to witness to non-believers, which we did with great enthusiasm.

Before going off to college I’d had a strange vision: a vivid scenario playing out in my head. In it, some people I hadn’t yet met came to my dorm room and asked me to lead them to Christ. While I hadn’t seen my room at this point it turned out to look exactly as I’d seen it in the vision. Lo and behold, after our chat in the car, Rob appeared at my door that evening and said Jan and Karen had arrived at his room saying they wanted to become Christians. We took them to the little prayer room in the back of the college chapel and there the Holy Spirit took over. We prayed with ‘the girls’ and introduced them to Jesus. The entire room was filled then with another powerful presence like a wind or tongues of fire as we sensed Jesus there with us.

It was a powerful experience and for the girls an overwhelming one. They left praising the Lord on an all-time spiritual high. Soon after, Jan had to go into hospital (I forget why) and used the time to read the Bible we gave her in its entirety. She was on fire for the Lord there in that hospital ward. Later she surrendered her yoga materials to us once we’d shown her how the practice was Satanic and, doing the Lord’s bidding, we destroyed it for her. Jan and Karen joined the Christian Union, coming to the twice weekly meetings and began to attend the local evangelical church every Sunday.

To this day, Jan remains a Christian. I haven’t seen her for many years but we share Christmas cards and very occasionally comment on Facebook posts. Karen abandoned her faith a few years after her conversion.

How to explain this amazing experience? Conditioning meets emotion. That it was life-changing for both Jan and Karen (for a while) and also for Rob and me, was the result of our own intense feelings. Neither Jesus nor his Spirit was present in that little prayer room. We thought he was and that was enough. We didn’t need to see him, it was enough to sense his powerful presence (in reality our own heightened emotions.)

Wasn’t this how it was for the earliest Christians? Those Paul told about Jesus never actually ‘saw’ him; they felt him among them. This is how the gospels say it works, not the sighting of a physical body but the sensing of a presence. Matthew makes his version of Jesus predict that this is exactly what will happen (in reality Matthew is reflecting what early cultists had been experiencing for decades when he came to write his gospel):

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them (Matt 18:20).

In other words, a small group intent in their worship would experience the presence of their heavenly saviour. They would manifest a sense of his being there through their collective emotions, just as Jan, Karen, Rob and I did in that prayer room. As did those, like Cephas, who experienced him way back at the start of the Jesus movement, and as Paul did in his imagined encounters with the risen Christ.

No reanimated corpse required.

Revealing the Truth of John’s Revelation

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The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testifies to everything he saw – that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near… “Look, he is coming with the clouds,” and “every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him”; and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.”
So shall it be! Amen…

On the Lord’s Day I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet, which said: “Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches: to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.” I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands…

So begins the Book of Revelation, written by a fanatic identifying as John (think Steven Anderson) who finds himself on the island of Patmos ‘because of the gospel’, with an account of the imminent end of the world (1:3 ‘the time is near’ and 1:7 ‘even those who pierced him’ will see him.)

What follows is a disturbing and disturbed account of what the Earth could soon expect when Jesus descended from the heavens to wreak vengeance on sinful human kind.

John claims the scenario he’s about to describe was given to him by an angel who got it from the Lord Jesus Christ, who in turn received it from God himself (1:1). Or perhaps the angel and Jesus Christ are one and the same. Did John regard Jesus Christ as an angel, the ‘messenger’ of God (the literal translation of the Greek angelos)?

I’ve often wondered about this ’revealed’ business. Paul too talks about having Jesus ‘revealed’ in him (Galatians 1:16). What exactly are Paul and John talking about? John says he ‘saw’ (1:2) all that he’s about to describe in the next twenty-two tedious chapters, as if this ‘revealing’ is some sort of vision or hallucination. Given the complexity of what he then describes, this seems to me highly unlikely. He ‘sees’ in his mind’s eye god’s throne, attendant angels, the four horsemen, the opening of seven seals, the destruction of the world, the annihilation of most of mankind, the descent from heaven of the holy city, the intricate details of the construction of this city… read the book for yourself for even more. Even dreams are not this detailed or vivid.

I’m not convinced Paul saw the resurrected Jesus as a figure in front of him (or as a bright light or some other quasi-physical manifestation.) What Paul and John did when ecstatic with religious fervour – what John describes as being ‘in the Spirit’ – was concoct an explanation for the way they were feeling; Paul persuaded himself he’d seen a resurrected God-man and worked out over time what this might mean. He then attributed this thinking to his God and his divine influence. John under persecution (it’s generally accepted his being on Patmos ‘because of the gospel’ (1:9) was as punishment for being a public nuisance) fomented a doomsday scenario for those who persecuted him and the divine elevation of those who believed like he did, and attributed this to spiritual beings. The scenario was not revealed instantaneously to him by a supernatural agent; again, it was something developed over time – hence the quotations from other sources (1:7) – in an aggrieved fanatic’s head.

Revelation is a calculated literary construct, like the gospels themselves, devised and refined over time. John ‘saw’ none of it, nor did he ‘hear’ an actual disembodied voice telling him about living room furniture (1:12’s lampstands). No higher power ‘revealed’ any of it to him. On the contrary, he devised it himself, working out every aspect in his head. Either he was deluded enough to think he was actually being fed revenge-porn by an angelic Jesus or he cynically, deliberately attributed it to him.

There was not then, as there is not now, a heavenly Jesus who spoke to susceptible mortals here on Earth. The savage, avenging Jesus that John of Patmos creates from his own anger, bitterness and sense of persecution bears little relation to the other versions of the character in Paul and in the gospels (as Ehrman demonstrates in Armageddon). Revelation’s savage, slaughtering Jesus is at least the sixth manifestation of the character proffered in the New Testament. John demonstrates just how easy it was, and is, to invent one’s own version of a supposedly unchanging character (Hebrews 13:8; Revelation 1:8) and make him do, at least in your imagination, just what you want him to do.

A World When Revelation Was Possible

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Greek and Roman cultures of the ancient world were obsessed with seers, oracles, prophets, muses and the fates. Politicians, priests and ordinary people were desperate to know how to keep on the right side of capricious gods and what the future held. Word from the supernatural realm, channelled through seers and prophets, was sought after and valued. Visions, dreams, portents and auspices that revealed secrets and mysteries were highly prized. It was a world saturated in superstition. Jewish culture, operating within this milieu, was no different.

Jews too revered prophets, dreams, visions and divination. This is apparent in both the Jewish scripture, the Old Testament, and also in the New, the writing of the early Christian cult birthed from Judaism in a Greco-Roman world. There are in the New Testament:

6 instances of god-induced dreams;

11 visions of heaven and heavenly beings;

578 new prophecies;

300 or so supposed fulfilments of earlier ‘prophecies’;

‘An abundance of revelations’ (Paul’s phrase) as well as those of Revelation itself (one long revelation or a series of shorter ones?);

113 visits from supernatural agents (Satan, demons, angels);

Assumptions that dead people can reappear (Jesus mistaken for Elijah and Jeremiah; Elijah and Moses manifesting themselves);

Multiple ‘resurrections’ both before and after Jesus’s.

People believed this kind of stuff! The supernatural, prophecy, ‘revelation’ and resurrection were regarded as entirely plausible, a given in the culture in which early Christians lived. The pagans around them may not have subscribed to the new cult’s reworking of these superstitions, nor accepted that Jesus was the Messiah, but they would not have found anything amiss with the idea and presence of the supernatural, with its attendant revelations, visions and prophecies. These were the currency of the day.

That such manifestations were mistaken or misinterpreted by the new cult would have been the point of disagreement for most people (though its important not to over-estimate how many actually knew of the Jesus cult in its early days), not that it manifested and incorporated them in the first place.

In the first century world, revelations, prophecies, visions and the like were considered to be gifts from the gods. Paul insisted that what he ‘received’ was from the supernatural realm, specifically from the heavenly Christ (Galatians 1:12). Accepting this was a prerequisite for believing what he went on to say about salvation, resurrection and Christ’s descent from the clouds. The supernatural world and its ability to communicate with ordinary mortals had to be accepted as real before anything Paul said could even be considered. Fortunately for him, the culture in which he operated embraced the idea that this was a reality.

If, however, there is no supernatural – and let’s be honest, we know there isn’t – there can’t ever have been revelation, prophecy or God-given visions. With no heavenly realm to transmit revelation, prophecy and visions into the brains of seers, prophets and visionaries, from where did – and do – their revelations, prophecies and visions originate? From brains conditioned in an environment infused with irrational, magical beliefs, whether that of the first-century or one of the many Christian, Bible-soaked bubbles that exist today. ‘Revelation’, ‘prophecy’ and visions emanate entirely from the human brain. It is this which originally created revelations and now sustains ideas like heavenly saviours and supernatural resurrections. These things have no independent existence outside of the human imagination.

 

Heretic

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Let me recommend a film to you: Heretic starring Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East (opens in the US today.) Ostensibly a horror film, it’s actually a dissection of religious faith: what we believe, why we believe it, its origins and how we might break free from it.

While there are a couple of grisly bits in it, it is actually a psychological thriller, with Grant’s character, Mr Reed, intent on breaking down the faith of two Mormon missionaries who have the misfortune to pay him a visit. Despite the hapless women being LatterDay Saints, his arguments apply to all religious belief. The film is a vehicle for this breakdown and demolition of faith. It veers into unpleasantness only in its final quarter, after taking a cynical swipe at the idea of resurrection.

I’m usually averse to horror films and only went to see this one because of the plaudits Hugh Grant’s alternately fatherly and menacing performance received from critics. He really is superb and Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East are excellent as the missionaries, sustaining a Mormon sensibility until it becomes, well, unsustainable. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ script is incisive and engaging (if you like your religion ruthlessly dissected and exposed.) Heretic is highly recommended.

Neil’s Second Letter, to the Literalists

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Dear Literalist,

I’m confused. Please help me understand which Jesus you believe in, the one whose spirit dwells within you.

Is it the Jesus of one of the first three gospels? The rabbi who walked in Galilee two thousand years ago? You see, I expect it to be him but then I find you ignore most of what he says. You know, stuff like love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, sell all you have and give to the poor. So I can only conclude this isn’t the Jesus you believe in and commune with.

Is it the Jesus in John’s gospel? The problem with this version, I think you’ll agree, is that he isn’t the same as the Jesuses in the other three gospels. He feels kind of made up. Probably no more so than those Jesuses but, you know, more obviously so.

Or is it the Christ Paul talks about? The one he saw in his visions? Because this Jesus really bears no similarity to the ones in the gospels. Paul doesn’t seem to know those Jesuses. Paul’s version is a heavenly being like other demi-gods of the ancient world: Osiris, Apollo, Mithras, Romulus, even defied Emperors, all of whom mystics claimed to have seen in visions. Is this the Jesus you believe in?

Perhaps you believe in the Jesus some New Testament writers claim sits at the right hand of God the Father ‘interceding’ on behalf of sinners. It’s a mystery how they know this, but they seem sure, so no doubt this Jesus is as legitimate as any other. You’d be perfectly entitled to include him in your internal pantheon.

You may also believe, as Paul did, in the Jesus who’ll be coming back to the Earth real soon to put the world to rights. Except of course Paul thought this was going to happen in his lifetime as did the writers of the synoptic gospels, none of whom refer to Jesus ‘returning’. It’s as if they didn’t believe he’d been here in the first place. Still, nothing to stop you from believing your Jesus will return in your lifetime, like millions of others have done in the past two thousand years.

Possibly though the Jesus you believe in is the one you encountered in your conversion experience (or think you did.) The one who you credit with changing your life and who now ‘walks with you and talks with you along life’s narrow way’. I confess this is probably the Jesus I believed in when I was a Christian, with a few extra details added from all the other Jesuses. Of course, my Jesus wouldn’t have been the same as yours. He was my own unique creation, just as yours is for you.

Perhaps you’ve convinced yourself that your own personal Jesus is actually the spirit or ghost of the original. After all, earthly Jesus appears to say in some of the gospels that his ghost will stick around to ‘comfort’ his followers after he himself returns to the heaven just above the clouds. Is this the Jesus you know and love? Does his spirit-ghost dwell inside you? If so, where exactly does it dwell? In your head? And how do you distinguish the Jesus-ghost from your own thoughts, imagination and conditioning? (Asking for a friend.)

I’d really like to know which of these Jesuses is your Jesus. Perhaps he’s an amalgam of them all, a confection of best bits. Please let me know in the comments.

But, if you don’t mind me saying so, almost all of these Jesuses are entirely made up. They’re the product of the human imagination, making themselves known in visions and dreams; they’re the result of subjective emotional experiences, or composites made from different sources.

So your best option is to say you’re committed to the ‘real’ Jesus of the gospels. But as we’ve established, you don’t really believe in him or you’d do as he commanded. In any case, there are several different, often incompatible Jesuses in the gospels. Some of them have to be made up. Oh, wait. They all are. The real Jesus is nowhere to be seen. If he ever existed he’s lost to us, replaced by the heavenly being seen in visions and the metaphorical stories invented about him.

What a quandary! Let me know how I can help.

Yours,

The Apostle Neil

Dying For A Lie, part 94

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Over on Gary Marston’s Escaping Christian Fundamentalism, he has been arguing, along with some of you, about the resurrection with Joel Edmund Anderson, self-professed expert on all things Biblical. Joel – he has a PhD in Biblical Studies, don’t you know – has twice said in the discussion that the disciples would not have died for a lie, meaning they wouldn’t have let themselves be martyred if they hadn’t really seen Jesus alive again in the flesh.

I’ve addressed the assertion that they wouldn’t have died for a lie several times already on this blog: here, here and here for example, though some of my thinking about the Jesus phenomenon has changed since then. Nonetheless, I added my penny’s worth to Gary’s discussion (it’s difficult to get involved in real time because of the time differences between the US and UK):

And there it is again: ‘they wouldn’t suffer death and persecution for what they knew to be a lie.’

While you (Joel) mention the execution of James there is no evidence even in your hallowed text that this was because he believed in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

The later legends of the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul are just that: legends. (And Paul wasn’t even a disciple! Moreover, he is clear in Galatians that his experience of the risen Jesus was ‘in’ his head.) There is no evidence, none at all, for your claim that ‘the disciples’ (all of them?) died or were even persecuted because of their belief in a bodily resurrection.

If some were put to death, it could equally have been because of their abandonment of conventional Jewish beliefs; their provocation of religious authorities (there’s plenty evidence of this in the gospels); their replacement of emperor worship with a deified itinerant preacher or for political reasons. We simply do not know.

That said, there are zealots today prepared to die for lies (think 9/11, Islamist terrorists) so there is no reason to think it didn’t also happen 2,000 years ago.

This line of argument, as ‘proof’ of the resurrection is exceedingly weak, Joel, yet it appears to be all you’ve got.

Joel did not respond. I feel sure he will make the claim again at some point in the future because it’s what he, like many other Christians, want to believe, which is really what ‘faith’ is all about.

And now, the Conclusion

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It’s a game you can play all day.

  • First, choose a story – any story – from the gospels.
  • Look for all the metaphors in the story.
  • Note its allegorical elements.
  • Find either the myth from Jewish scripture and/or the part of Paul’s fantasy that the story is based on.
  • Read the story in light of these insights.

Once you’ve done this a few times – which you can, literally, till Kingdom come – you’ll realise that all the stories in the gospels are literary inventions. Stories that are replete with metaphor, reliant on earlier mythical sources and that read like allegory would be considered, in any other context, to be fiction.

And what will you conclude from this?

That just because the stories are from the gospels doesn’t grant them a free pass. Stories that fulfil all the criteria of fiction, as the gospel stories do, are elsewhere considered to be fiction: think Romulus, the non-canonical gospels, King Arthur, the Book of Mormon, the Chronicles of Narnia. So why not here?

That calling the stories ‘pericopes’, in an attempt to elevate their status, merely disguises the fact they are just stories.

You’d acknowledge that History, as in the recording of past events, is not written as allegory. It doesn’t depend on metaphor and symbolism to reveal hidden meanings. Historians reject or are highly sceptical of any accounts that depend on such literary techniques. They usually conclude these are not history, whatever else they might be.

You could, I suppose, try arguing that history in ancient times wasn’t the discipline it is now and did indeed incorporate elements from fiction. But you’d be wrong. Historical accounts of the first century have survived and do not confuse historical fact, however interpreted, with fiction. Writing that relies on allegory and hidden meanings is not considered to be history. You would then have to concede that the gospel narratives do not qualify as history. You would then be in agreement with the majority of scholars who think this.

Then you’d ask, why? Why, if Jesus was such an incredible guy, did so much have to be made up about him? You could, I guess, argue that an itinerant first-century preacher successfully manipulated events so that he fulfilled ‘prophecy’, complied, at least in Mark, with Paul’s (future) teaching and managed to make himself some sort of living breathing metaphor. Or you could conclude, applying Occam’s razor, that the stories are simply made up. And if you did, you’d be agreeing with Mark when he reveals that ‘everything is in parables’ (Mark 4:11).

You’d then ask yourself: if the miracles, the healings, the profundities, hyperbole, nativity tales, angels, demons, zombies, the transfiguration and much else besides are all fiction, then why not too the resurrection? Is it one of only a few episodes in the gospels – the crucifixion is often cited as another – that isn’t fiction? Is it the one of only a few stories in that’s factual and true? The empty tomb, the angels, the sightings by Mary, the disciples and Thomas, the fish breakfast, the ascension: are these historical when everything else is not? You’d have to ask on what criteria you were salvaging this particular story as historical when all that precedes it patently is not.

Then you’d have to start wondering if there really was a Jesus. The versions of him who appear in the gospels are constructs, characters created from metaphor, Old Testament stories and the teaching of the early Christian cult. If there really was a man who trailed around Palestine with an apocalyptic message, he is long gone. Indeed, he had vanished by the time the stories about him that we know as the gospels came to be written.

Jesus and the Blind Man

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This time we’ll take a closer look at Mark 8:22-26, a story about Jesus healing a blind man:

They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?”

He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”

Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Jesus sent him home, saying, “Don’t even go into the village.”

This parable is doing a lot of metaphorical heavy lifting.

First, it is located in Bethsaida, the home of some of the disciples as well as the place where Jesus does some of his most spectacular miracles, only later to curse the village for its lack of interest in him (Mark 11:21). It is symbolic of those who reject the cult’s message, or are too dim to see that their heavenly Jesus is the Messiah.

Second, the story is sandwiched (no pun intended) between the feeding of the four thousand, in which the hapless disciples fail to recognise Jesus’ miraculous status, and the account of Peter realising that Jesus is in fact the Messiah. The healing of the blind man, neatly placed between the two, is therefore an allegory within allegories about seeing (gettit?) Jesus for who he really is (i.e. what cultists believed him to be.)

Third, the story is a prophecy-fulfilled parable. Isaiah 35:5 says that when the Messiah comes ‘the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped.’ Jesus has to be made to do these things – he performs some ear unstopping too (Mark 7:31-35) – to show he is indeed the prophesied Messiah.

Fourth, physical blindness is a very obvious metaphor for spiritual blindness. The preceding story reminds those who can’t ‘see’ the cult’s truth for themselves: ‘Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?’ (Mark 8:18). This is itself a borrowing of Isaiah 6:9-10. Indeed, the entire story, together with that of the deaf man being cured, is a parable of Isaiah’s ‘prophecy’:

You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall indeed see but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.

Jesus’ healing of blindness then becomes a metaphor for seeing the light, as Peter does in the subsequent story when he finally recognises him, like the cult has done, as the Messiah.

Fifth, Jesus spits on or in the man’s eyes: a very clumsy metaphor for the streams of living water that emanate from God himself in Jeremiah 2:13. Perhaps too there’s a reference to the baptism ritual beloved of the early cult. (Christian bloggers themselves have trouble explaining this gross detail that Mark sees fit to include in his story.)

Sixth, in order to give sight to the blind man, Jesus (or rather the cult) first removes him – the initiate – from the village, from those who don’t even know they are blind. Next, Jesus/the cult shows him how those who are spiritually blind are no better than trees wandering around aimlessly (yes, Mark really does mix his metaphors). Jesus/the cult then opens the initiate’s eyes to the Truth so that finally he sees ‘everything clearly.’ He can now never return to his former state; his ‘home’ is with the cult, not with the spiritually blind outside it.

The story is evidently metaphorical. That Jesus spits in the man’s face is not, as some Christians claim, evidence that it really happened. It is weighed down by so much symbolism and clunky metaphor, and at the same time strategically placed between two other ‘seeing the light’ stories that its literary origins are apparent. Mark and his fellow cultists knew what they were doing when they dressed their beliefs up in stories like these. As they themselves insist, you need only open your eyes to see it.