Category Archives: evidence

10 Reasons Why

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I wonder what are the reasons those of you who were once Christians gave up on faith? Believers who know me far better than I know myself have attributed to me a whole range of motivations. Here’s a top ten of the reasons I rejected Jesus according to these spiritually astute know-it-alls:

In at 10 it’s…

You must have been hurt/had a bad experience of Christians. To which I answer, not particularly, though I did find the people I encountered in churches to be much like those I encountered in any other organisation I’ve been involved with. No different. Certainly no better, and in some ways worse when they squabbled or were petty and judgemental. Not sufficiently worse to make me abandon faith, but perhaps enough to make me ask whether Christianity really ‘worked’. Shouldn’t Christians who are new creatures, reformed in the image of Christ. be so much better than the rest of us?

At 9… You went to the wrong church. If so I must’ve attended several ‘wrong’ churches as I moved around the north of England with work. My wife and I always sought out churches with sound biblical teaching, so it wasn’t the lack of solid food that caused me to backslide (to use the Christian jargon.)

8. You wanted to wallow in your own sin. As I’ve said facetiously before, I like a good wallow as much as the next man and preferably with him. Back in the days of my struggling with faith, however, I didn’t find myself drawn to ‘sin’. I was trying to raise three children, do a demanding job and deal with the fallout from my boss’s affair with a colleague. My own sin was the last thing on my mind.

Related to this is the accusation that an apostate such as I wants, in some unfathomable way, to be God. Certainly I want to be fully human and to take charge of my own life, but aren’t these laudable intentions? It doesn’t mean I aspire to be God; I don’t want to be worshipped, don’t want to laud it over others, blame them for my deficiencies or send them to hell. That’s what God does, right? But it’s not me. 

7. You rejected Christ because you’re gay and didn’t like the constraints faith placed on your sexual behaviour. See above. I didn’t admit I was gay until several years after I ditched faith and it was several more after that before I came out, yet more until I did anything about it. But okay, if you want to reverse the order of events, I gave up on religion because I was latently gay. But not really, though certainly the abandonment of faith was a liberation; I could think for myself and was free, over a long period of time, to finally become myself.

6. You read the wrong books. I certainly did: C. S. Lewis (I still have my collection of his books), John Stott, John Piper, John Bunyan, Bonhoeffer, Joni Erickson, Corrie Ten Boom, Billy Graham, David Wilkerson… and the Bible. So yes, I wasted a lot of time reading this sort of thing, but I’m guessing that’s not what my Christian accusers mean. I read more widely as I moved away from faith which helped me break out of the Christian bubble, but this wasn’t the reason I left the faith. I was well on the way by this time.

5. You were never a true Christian. Your faith was intellectual or habit or emotional but not deeply personal. Of course I was a true Christian. Just ask Jesus. Oh… you can’t. I’ve written about this before as you’ll see here. I was as real a Christian as those who claim they’re the real deal now.

4. You were in thrall to non-Christian writers. Not in thrall, no, but these writers – Ehrman, the so-called New Atheists, science writers (Dawkins’ science books particularly), Pagels, Barker, Loftus, Alter and, yes, Carrier – make a lot more sense than those who write from the perspective of faith. These authors don’t seem to mind, indeed they relish that their readers think critically about the evidence they present. Mumbo-jumbo isn’t passed off as erudition.

3. You have no awareness of the spiritual; you think that only that which can be measured is real. This is true, but it is not why I gave up Christianity. It is a consequence of doing so. I have seen no evidence of a spiritual realm that exists outside the human imagination. If anyone is able to present evidence that it does have independent existence, I’m open to it. Until then I will continue to live with the understanding that angels, devils, demons, heaven, hell, celestial saviours and gods, like unicorns, dragons and Shangri-La, do not exist. It follows that as non-existent beings they cannot communicate with us nor await us as our final destination.

2. Your heart has been hardened by Satan. See above; there is no Satan. Hardening of the heart is a metaphor for those who don’t fall prey to Christianity’s fraudulent claims or at last see through them.

1. You gave up on faith because you realised none of it was true. Yes. Finally. This is why I rejected Christianity. It simply isn’t true, as I’ve attempted to demonstrate on this blog for the last 12+ years. Its third-rate fantasies, fake promises and failed prophecies are all evidence of its falsity.

But wait. None of the telepathic Christians who ‘know’ why I’m no longer a believer ever make this accusation. They would never concede that most (all) of what they believe simply isn’t true. But my life experience and my reading as I began to suspect Christianity was nothing more than a con have borne this out. Christianity is demonstrably untrue, theChristian God a fraud and supernatural-Jesus a fiction. This is why I abandoned Christianity.

How about you?

It’s life, Don, but not as we know it

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Don wrote:

Here’s the deal. Present evidence, not validations, for the natural fine-tuning of the fundamental forces and for the natural origin of those forces and I’ll use that as a model for my evidence for the existence of God.

I assume a non-answer is because there is no answer.

While I’m under no obligation to respond to Don’s challenge ( a fact he seems unable to comprehend) he continues to badger me to do so.  So here is my response.

Like many of your comments, Don, I really don’t know what point you’re making here. Your challenging me, I think, to provide evidence that the fine-tuning of the universe arose by natural means. I declined to engage with this evasive irrelevancy but as it is preventing you from answering our questions about the evidence for God, I’ll reiterate points I’ve previously made here and here. God forbid you should search for these for yourself, or indeed that you should remember the one from last year, which you commented on.

You  presuppose the universe is fine-tuned for life. The evidence demonstrates quite conclusively that it is not.  With 99.9999% of it inanimate, it is evident that what the universe is ‘fine-tuned’ for is inanimacy.

Statistically, however, given there are billions of planets, the likelihood that at least one will have conditions capable of giving rise to life is good. Indeed, the sheer enormity of numbers makes it highly probable. This is not ‘fine-tuning’, which implies conditions were created in order for life to arise.  They weren’t. Conditions happened to be conducive for life’s emergence, though only after 3.7 billion years of inanimacy. That is all.

You come at this from the assumption that life is the most incredible thing the universe could possibly produce. We don’t know this. If the universe were conscious it might think stars or worm-holes much more impressive. Life is but one of the phenomena the universe has produced. We think it’s the most amazing achievement because we are it. This doesn’t mean it is. Indeed that same conscious universe might regard life as a bothersome infestation of one of its more insignificant planets.

No God is required to explain the phenomenon of life and therefore, applying Occam’s razor, we can safely conclude that no God had a hand in its creation or development here on Earth. Certainly not your small, man-made tribal deity, YHWH.

So, as you promised, let’s see you apply these same principles to demonstrate your God’s existence and/or that of a supernatural plane. You can make use of empirical evidence, probability theory and logic but you mustn’t appeal to myth, the Bible or ‘spiritual experiences’ that originate inside people’s heads. Have at it.

Show Me Heaven

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On the radio this Sunday, a couple of presenters were discussing a woman’s Near Death Experience. Lynda Cramer claimed that in 2021 she had been clinically dead for 14 minutes when she visited Heaven for five years. You can see her raving about it on YouTube, while the Amazon synopsis of her book, Five Years In Heaven (of course there’s a book; four in fact) reads:

In May 2001, Dr Lynda Cramer died. This is the story of her Near Death Experience, outlining the five years that she spent in Heaven. Starting when she found herself “floating” in the living room for over 45 minutes, she then went on a journey where she entered Heaven, she then processed her Life Review prior to meeting her great-great-great-great grandmother who explained what Life Lessons, Life Contracts and Reincarnation are all about. Backed up by Medical Records as well as diagrams she drew, this is her personal account for anyone intrigued by what happens in the afterlife…

So, is this real? Did Lynda Cramer visit Heaven while she was dead for 14 minutes? She’s a doctor, after all, so superficially at least, she has credible credentials. Until you see that her PhD was obtained researching Near Death Experiences  themselves. Vested interest or what?.

But, let’s not be cynical; she has diagrams too, for God’s sake. What more proof could we ask for? We know too, because our resident Christian tells us, that dreams and visions like this are most definitely from God. Lynda’s experience ticks all the boxes, no matter what we sceptics might think.

Except, no. Lynda was not dead for 14 minutes. We have only her word for it that she was declared clinically dead, while she describes her experience as a Near Death Experience. The clue is in the name. If she was near death, she was not dead; her brain was still alive, if only just. Her mind was still active, creating, if this happened at all, a reassuring experience for itself as it came close to shutting down. There is well documented evidence that this is what the brain is capable of doing when it is close to death (but not actually dead).

Significantly, the scenario her mind created was informed by cultural, quasi-Christian images of Heaven, just as believers’ dreams of God are informed by the same images and characters that occupy their waking minds. My own dreams, for example, are populated by people I know and places I’m familiar with (though sometimes only vaguely; my subconscious fills in the details often in bizarrely imaginative ways.)

Nonetheless, Lynda’s life-changing 5 years visit to Heaven (during which she seems to have done nothing except admire mountains and buildings while blue balls, hijacked from science-fiction, danced around her) is just as real, just as divine, just as valid as the God-given dreams and visions Christians claim they sometimes have. Naturally, we sceptics can’t possibly appreciate these until we’ve experienced them for ourselves.

Lynda’s experience was a subjective, emotional experience while she was unconscious. But such ‘spiritual’ inner experiences are ‘real’ according to at least some Christians, and we can’t argue with that which we have not experienced  for ourselves.

Right, Don?

 

 

Jesus: not worth the paper he’s printed on?

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There is broad consensus amongst respected scholars that the Jesus of the gospels didn’t exist. This is hardly surprising. Gospel Jesus, as I hope I’ve demonstrated over the past few weeks, is constructed from fragments of Jewish scripture and Paul’s (and others’) visions and dreams. There is also good evidence, which I’ve not discussed, that some Jesus stories are recreations of legends and tales of other god-men (turning water into wine and the Road to Emmaus story*, for example).

All of which raises the question suggested by David Fitzgerald in Nailed, that if there was a real Jesus who was so incredible that he gave rise to an entire religion, why was almost everything about him invented? Why could his story not have been told as it was? Why didn’t his inspiring, dynamic personality speak for itself? Personally, I don’t care whether Jesus existed or not, but if the supposedly remarkable Jesus of history did once exist, he has been totally obscured by the stories, legends and myth that were constructed around him not long after he died. The celestial Jesus that today’s Christians claim to know personally, who they say inhabits their hearts while simultaneously living in heaven, is emphatically not the man who lived, but a myth. A different myth, even, than that of the New Testament. A non-existent star-man, waiting in the sky.

Jesus belongs with all those other heroes who may or may not have existed prior to their being turned into myth and legend: Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Saint Nicholas, Robin Hood, Paul Bunyan. There is very little evidence, apart from stories and legends, that any of these figures actually existed. More, it’s entirely conceivable that Jesus belongs to a still different group of super-beings: those who were created as mythic characters, including but not confined to, Osiris (and the entire Egyptian panoply), Apollo (and all the Greek gods), Romulus, Circe, Attis, the angel Gabriel, Mithras, Aladdin, the angel Moroni, Superman, Harry Potter…

There is meagre evidence there was an historical Jesus who, even if he did exist, is now buried beneath layers of make-believe. The Jesus who has come down to us through the gospels and the rest of the New Testament is fictional. From his fairy-tale origin to his fantasy ascension and beyond, he’s completely imaginary.

I’m conscious I’ve written other posts making this same point. I find that, whatever starting point I take, invariably I end up here. Whether it’s ‘prophecy’, prayer, promises, miracles, the second coming, any aspect of the faith, none has any substance. They’re ineffectual, empty and have no bearing on reality. The character who supposedly embodies and promotes them becomes, as a result, similarly void. Either Jesus was transformed into a fantasy figure soon after he lived or he was imagined, by the likes of Paul, as a magical being to begin with. Whichever it was, from the earliest days of Christianity, there was no way for people to hear of or know about a man who actually walked the Earth.

*See Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason to Doubt, pp 480-81

But Is It True?

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We can argue till Kingdom come (i.e. forever) about whether or not this or that Bible verse is meant to be taken literally or metaphorically (God couldn’t make himself clearer?) and whether a particular author was an eyewitness or not, but the bottom line is, ‘Is what the Bible says True?’ Nothing else matters. If it is true, then it’s claims must be accepted. It would be extremely foolish to disregard them. If not, if the Bible is one big lie, then we must consign it to the dustbin of history.

Is it true that whatever a believer prays for, God will provide? Jesus says so several times:

If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer (Matthew 21:22).

And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son (John 14:13).

Very truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you (John 16.23).

No, its not true. We don’t see ‘whatever’ and ‘everything’ being granted even when Christians pray ‘in accordance with God’s will’ as they like to qualify these promises.

Is it true that whatever a believer gives will be returned to him until it overflows (Luke 6:38)? While this is the foundation for the prosperity gospel movement it is patently untrue. Untrue symbolically too; if you give of yourself in God’s service you will be rewarded excessively? Just ask all those burnt-out ministers.

Is it true that with sufficient faith believers can uplift mountains and throw them in the sea (Matthew 21:21)? Obviously not, not even when this hyperbolic promise is interpreted figuratively. Christians can’t resolve their problems, work miracles or bring about radical change more than anyone else, and certainly not by ‘faith’.

Is it true that God looks after those he has chosen, to the extent he knows the number of hairs on their heads (Matt 10:29-30)? Evidently not. It didn’t work this way for Jewish people in the holocaust, it doesn’t work for the 10,000 children who die everyday of hunger and it doesn’t work for Christians, who fair no better than anyone else in life’s calamities.

Is it true that Jesus was born in Bethlehem under a wandering star? No. This is a myth constructed from older stories.

Is it true Jesus walked on water, turned water into wine and raised the dead? Or is it more likely these ‘miracles’ were created for him, ‘signs’ from Jewish scripture designed to present him as the anticipated Messiah? This is the more likely explanation. A man called Iesous did not really perform supernatural feats.

Is it true Jesus rose from the dead after three days and nights? No. While Mark (10.33-34) and Matthew (12:40) claim this was going to happen, they don’t even pretend that it did. Friday evening till Sunday morning is 36 hours, not three days and nights.

Is it true his disciples and lady friends saw Jesus risen from the dead? We don’t know; the accounts of them doing so were written forty and more years after the supposed event by people who weren’t there. The only eye-witness account of a risen-Jesus sighting is Paul’s and he admits it was in his head. So probably the answer is no: it’s not true people saw a resurrected physical body.

Is it true gospel Jesus existed? With his story made up from existing myths and mystical visions, it’s highly unlikely. So no.

Is it true Jesus sends those he’s saved to heaven when they die? The Bible doesn’t say he does; it claims he would be coming from heaven himself, in the time of those who were writing about him, to initiate God’s kingdom on Earth. So, no and no again; its not true he came down from heaven, in the time of those who were writing about him, to initiate God’s kingdom on Earth.

Is it true, that by believing in something akin to magic, people can rise from the dead? No. Believing a secret formula does not enable anyone to escape death. There is no evidence anyone has resurrected after being fully, properly dead because they believed something. There is no evidence anyone has resurrected from the dead ever.

Is it true that believing in Jesus makes people into new creations? No more than many other experiences in life. Does it make for better people – more righteous, more moral, more loving? Evidence from the Bible itself suggests not, as does the appalling behaviour of some Christians today.

Is it true that the spirit of this long-dead first-century itinerant Jewish preacher lives inside people today (John 14:17)? No, it’s not. There is no evidence that dead people, or celestial super-beings from some other plane, inhabit the living. Many believers are embarrassed to acknowledge even the possibility.

Is any of it true? We could play this game all day: taking any of the New Testament’s claims and stories and asking ourselves whether they are true. The answer will be, invariably and demonstrably, no. It takes the closing down of any critical faculties to believe they are, and mental gymnastics to maintain that, even if they’re not literally true, they contain hidden, profound truth. They don’t.

No Sign of Life

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For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. (1 Corinthians 1:4)

This, apparently, is what early Christians believed; Paul is thought to be quoting an early creed here. What an incredible statement it is. Incredible because of its demonstrable falsity.

‘Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures’: just where, in which scriptures, does it say this? Presumably Paul, or those he’s quoting, thinks it’s Isaiah 53, where it says:

…the Lord was willing to crush (his servant), and he made him suffer. Although you make his soul an offering for sin, he will see his offspring, and he will prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will triumph in his hand. ‘the Lord makes his life an offering for sin’ (Isaiah 53:10)

Unfortunately for Paul, most scholars agree that Isaiah 53 is not about the Messiah at all, but about the Jewish nation. It looks as if it neatly fits the much later ‘Christ’ because the Christ is a construct built on a handful of believers’ visions and this very chapter, which seemed, but only superficially, to validate their inner experiences.

Paul goes on to say, ‘he (Christ) was buried (and) was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. Here he is on even shakier ground. The Messiah was not going to die for his people – he would be a triumphant warrior king – and he certainly wasn’t predicted to rise from the dead. There are no references at all, anywhere in the Scriptures, to the Messiah being raised from the dead and certainly not ‘on the third day’. Paul is wrong. At best, he’s mistaken, at worst he’s deliberately perpetuating a falsehood.

When Paul wrote this, the gospels were still many years away from being written. All that new believers, in as faraway a place as Corinth, could rely on was the testimony of preachers who came to tell them about the Christ. Some of these preachers may have known Jesus personally (though I doubt it) but most, like Paul, had limited means of persuading those they aimed to convert that Jesus had died for their sins and had risen again. Not unlike today’s evangelists, all they offered was their own and others’ inner spiritual experiences and visions, together with ‘evidence’ from scripture. Paul admits this is all he’s offering here: ‘what I received’ and ‘according to scripture’. But there is no evidence from the scripture available at that time.

What’s a gospel writer to do? When Mark created his gospel, he undoubtedly knew of Paul’s teaching about the resurrection and he may have known of this early creed. Yet he knew also that there was no prophecy about Jesus rising ‘on the third day’, on which to build his story. Consequently, he has Jesus declare in Mark 8:12 that ‘no sign will be given’ (= ‘there’s nothing in the scriptures about this’) and he omits the resurrection from his story.

Not so Matthew. As is his way, Matthew scoured Jewish scripture till he alighted, in the absence of anything resembling a prophecy, on the story of Jonah. Jonah 1.17 claims preposterously that this ancient prophet spent ‘three days and three nights’ in the belly of a great fish – and Matthew decided, ‘that’ll do!’. He has his Jesus refer to the tall tale as a ‘sign’ that he too will spend three days and nights in the belly of the earth:

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees told Jesus, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from you.” But he replied to them, “An evil and adulterous generation craves a sign. Yet no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah, because just as Jonah was in the stomach of the sea creature for three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights…” (Matthew 12:38-40)

Contradicting Mark’s Jesus (‘no sign will be given’), Matthew also modifies the original belief that Jesus rose on the third day. Now it’s after ‘three days and three nights’, which does not mean the same as ‘on the third day’. According to Matthew’s own gospel, Jesus was in the tomb – the belly of the earth? Really? – from Friday ‘as the evening approached’ (Matthew 27:57) till before dawn on Sunday morning (Matthew 28:1). This only just qualifies as being ‘on the third day’, given that days are counted from evening to evening in the Jewish calendar; it certainly isn’t ‘three days and nights’. Jesus lay dead in the tomb for no more than 36 hours. The damn ‘sign’ Matthew is so eager to use doesn’t even fit his own story.

What a mess. It’s what you get when you lift any old tall tale from ancient scripture and use it as a symbol for your own made-up story.

This time it’s personal

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Desperately searching for another reason to dismiss recent critiques of Christianity, Don has suggested that my views and those of commenters here are somehow invalid because they’re ‘personal’. (I declined to publish Don’s latest comment in which he elaborated on this theme; not only was he already on enforced rest but he also decided to have a rant about ‘sexual depravity’. This would appear to have been directed  at my own happy same-sex relationship, as well as all other forms of consensual sex that God Don disapproves of.)

So what’s wrong with ‘personal’? My faith, when I had it was personal. I’d prayed the sinner’s prayer in which I confessed I was a sinner and I received Jesus into my heart (or so I thought) and began to live my life in accordance with what he required of me. This personal relationship with Jesus, as it was usually described in evangelical circles, was reinforced by the preaching I heard in church, by prayer meetings and Bible studies, by the devotional books I read, C. S. Lewis’s writing and the notes I used alongside my personal Bible reading.

I’ve written before how I abandoned all of this when, in a time of crisis, God wasn’t there, and I eventually came to realise, in what I can only describe as a moment of personal revelation, that this was because he didn’t exist.

I then set about discovering what it was I had believed for the previous 30 years; what were these beliefs that had shaped my life, determining what I did, who I married, my morality, my sense of guilt and failure… essentially all that I was. That quest, which began with my broadening my reading well beyond the bounds of devotional Christian books (how treacherous I felt when I first picked them up!) was personal. It was fuelled by the reaction of some Christian friends who attacked me personally when, still later, I came out not only as an atheist but as gay too. My dealings with one particular zealous and homophobic friend led to my first book and ultimately, over 12 years ago, to this blog.

RejectingJesus is a personal working out of my love-hate relationship with Christianity. It is, I hope, informed by my reading but it is first and foremost personal. The posts are my analysis of Christianity as it is practised and my own dissection of the Bible. I’m not a historian nor a theologian (thank god); my Masters is in English Literary Research and it is these skills, together with my knowledge of the Bible from my Christian days, that I apply in my sometimes irreverent analyses. Nothing is sacred, though I’m aware of the importance of providing evidence for my claims and, where relevant, in citing appropriate sources, which is why I provide links and reference relevant verses from the Bible. Perversely, Don also accuses me of being in thrall to the scholars I cite; the opposite of his complaint that posts are ‘personal’.

Do I then, as Don implies, try to discredit the Bible because I’m gay? Am I, as Don suggests, motivated by the ‘constraints’ the Bible places on my sexuality? I don’t believe so. Once I recognised that God didn’t exist, it followed that he could not have any opinion about homosexuality or indeed anything else. Like any other fictional character, his views were created by those who presumed to speak for him: ‘I am so mysterious and my ways unknowable. Oh, but by the way, I really don’t like those depraved gays. Feel at liberty to stone them.’ God’s self-appointed homophobes have to be challenged because of the damage they do.

Am I as an atheist predisposed to being critical of both faith and the Bible, as Christian readers sometimes say? Undoubtedly, but I’m no more predisposed than as a Christian I was predisposed to see God everywhere. As Nan put it in a recent comment:

Any individual who allows him/herself to put aside the centuries-long teachings of Christianity … and read the scriptures without bias and/or preconception … cannot fail to see the multitude of inconsistencies.

Nor can they fail to see the Bible’s flights of fancy, its reliance on dreams and visions, its make-believe and pretend fulfilment of prophecy, its forgeries and false promises, its disconnect from reality and magical thinking, its supernaturalism and sheer cultishness. Critically evaluating scriptures at face value, without making excuses for them or trying to guessing what the original writers might have ‘intended’ or deciding that unpalatable parts are ‘really’ symbolic/metaphorical is, however ‘personal’, by far the more honest approach.

To insinuate with a personal slur that having ‘personal’ reasons for criticising Christianity is a weak ad hominem. It does not address the arguments in question nor the issues at hand. Anyone who wants to demonstrate that what I say about the Bible, Christian belief and practice is wrong needs to provide evidence of their own. Insult, screeds of Bible quotation and ‘a legion of “work arounds”’ (Nan again) is not how to go about it.

 

Cruci-fiction

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Given the birth, baptism and wilderness narratives are fiction, why not then the other parts of Mark and Matthew? We’ve already seen how the trial and crucifixion in Mark are literary creations, which Matthew lifts and embellishes. The resurrection stories are also invented, which is why the different accounts are confused and contradictory. The likelihood that everything between the beginning and the end – Jesus’ ‘ministry’, miracles and preaching – is invented too, either by the authors of the gospels themselves or by those who preceded them. My money would be on the former; the stories are so carefully arranged, forming an integral part of a clever literary construct.

I have a growing, sneaking admiration for what Mark and Matthew, and later Luke and John, achieved. They consciously set about creating myth. When Paul and others preached that their Christ had died and risen again ‘according to the scriptures’ that’s literally what they meant; the Christ was discernible in Jewish scripture, his story laid out there for those with eyes to see it. Mark tells us as much in Mark 4:9: ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear.’

What he and, to an even greater extent, Matthew did, was construct a Saviour story from these elements. They saw him, or thought they did, all over the place. Whether or not they’re was an actual Jesus is beside the point. as is the extent to which the gospel writers may have used existing stories about him. Gospel Jesus is their imaginative creation from start to finish. His life, deeds and many of his sayings are put together by cutting and pasting scripture.

Cite any episode in Mark and Matthew’s gospels and it will have a precedent in scripture, either a prophecy (that invariably isn’t a prophecy) or episode (that was never about a future suffering Messiah) or character (usually legendary in their own right.) You can believe, as many True Believers do, that these ‘Old Testament’ episodes foreshadow the events of Jesus’ life. That he miraculously fulfilled prophecy through everything he did and said while here on Earth. Or you can take the view that doesn’t rely on faith in the miraculous, and recognise that he’s merely written that way. He’s the literary embodiment of scattered scraps of scripture.

On this much more realistic view, everything Jesus is made to do, particularly his miracles and crucifixion, is symbolic; a fictional enactment of scripture. Other aspects are drawn from Paul (the Last Supper/Eucharist, for example), claims of inner-visions (the resurrection) and early cult rules (behavioural expectations.) The events of Jesus’ earthly existence, as created by the gospel writers, have no historical basis; they didn’t really happen. I maintain that all of the gospel writers were fully cognisant of this as they created their respective symbolic lives for him.

According to Scripture

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A simple comparison of Mark’s and Matthew’s gospels is enough to demonstrate that the gospel writers invented their stories of Jesus. I’m going to take only a few examples over the next few posts, but the same analysis could be made of any of the episodes in the two gospels and yield the same results.

Mark starts his story with Jesus’ baptism and subsequent 40 days in the wilderness. The dominant motifs of both episodes are intended to alert the reader to the fact that Mark sees Jesus as the new Moses, preparing to lead his people out of bondage and into the Kingdom that God is preparing for them. The parting seas of Exodus 14 become the parting clouds through which God proclaims Jesus his Son, the 40 year trek through the wilderness (Exodus 16 etc) is replaced with Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness. 

Mark gives the wilderness episode a mere two sentences (Mark 1.12-13) which isn’t enough for Matthew. He embellishes it in his gospel, making it a full-blown fantasy, complete with a lengthy conversation between Jesus and Satan. Matthew invented this story. We know he did because:

it cannot possibly have come from an eye-witness (because there wasn’t one);

It is patently fantasy material, with Satan, ministering angels and teleportation;

it cannot have derived from any oral tradition (as it is an embellishment of Mark’s tale, invented only a decade earlier, designed to echo the Moses story);

It is designed specifically to extend the analogy with the Moses. In Matthew, Jesus encounters the same temptations as the ancient Israelites in their wilderness trip, but, unlike his forebears, Jesus triumphantly resists them. He then recruits 12 disciples to go on ahead of him (Mark 3:13-15) just as Moses’ appointed 12 spies for the same purpose (Numbers 13). 

Matthew has even more up his sleeve. He is fully aware of the parallels Mark has made between Jesus and Moses and adds a third to the beginning of his Jesus narrative. In his contrived nativity story, he rewrites the story from Exodus 1 and 2, itself a complete fabrication, in which Pharaoh orders the elimination of all Israelite baby boys. He lifts it directly into the so-called Massacre of the Innocents episode in his gospel.

Again, we know Matthew made this up:

Herod did not order any such massacre. It is not an historical event.

Matthew was determined to find incidents in Jewish scripture he could claim were really about Jesus. Here he is at it.

He is determinedly extending Mark’s metaphor; this is not material from any other source or tradition.

He constructs the narrative using additional ‘prophecies’ he finds in the scriptures. For example, the trip to Bethlehem and the flight to Egypt, neither of which happened (no other gospel writers knows of them.) The Egypt episode is an imaginative (and dishonest) expansion of Hosea 11:1: ‘Out of Egypt I called my son’. In context, the verse refers to the Jewish nation not a future Messiah. And who led the Israelites out of Egypt? Moses.

The nativity story and the Moses/Israelite parallels in the Egypt/baptism/wilderness episodes in Matthew are not drawn from tales of Jesus that were doing the rounds. They are clever, contrived literary creations. They tell us too that Matthew did not regard Mark’s more basic stories as history or biography. He evidently did not view them as immutable. He changes and adds to them to make his own points, ‘correct’ Mark, extend his analogies and emphasise that which he thinks Mark hasn’t emphasised enough. Throughout his gospel he’s prepared to create new incidents, even when they conflict with points Mark makes. He knows that Mark’s work, like his own, constitutes carefully devised stories and he feels free – compelled – to improve them. You can’t treat history this way but you can rewrite fiction.

A Star Is Born

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Did you know that the original, 1937 version of A Star Is Born may well have been based on a true story, first aired in an earlier, 1932 movie called What Price Hollywood? Yet every word of dialogue in the original Star Is Born was invented, all of its characters fictional, all of its scenes made up.

By the time of the 1954 remake, the female lead had gone from being an aspiring actress to an aspiring singer, played by Judy Garland, looking for her big break. Her mentor is still the addictive personality of the original film but this time he’s a has-been singer, not an actor, and crucially he doesn’t commit suicide before the film’s end (apologies for the spoiler.) Practically everything about this remake – its dialogue, characters, songs (songs? Where’d they come from?) settings and scenes – is different and, once again, is completely made up.

In the Barbra Streisand 1976 version, the female lead is once again a singer, her mentor a rock star whose career is on the slide. This film is about the perils of a rock’n’roll lifestyle and the passionate relationship between the two protagonists. It bears only the scantest relationship to its predecessors, never mind the original true-story that inspired the first film. Again, everything in it is pure invention.

Which brings us to the fourth version, starring Lady Gaga, that borrows a little something from all of the previous films. All the same, it alters the story, creating completely new scenarios, dialogue, songs and settings. It would be unrecognisable to the original audience of the first A Star Is Born, as different from that film as… well, as John’s gospel from Mark’s.

As the various versions of the film demonstrate, stories evolve. They are fluid and in their telling and retelling they change. Their creators adapt them and ‘improve’ them to meet the evolving tastes of their intended audience. They happily invent new episodes, new scenarios and new dialogue.

And so it is with the gospels: Mark’s original based on the visions of a few people from 40 or so years earlier; Matthew and Luke’s based on Mark’s – with their own largely invented additions – and John’s (the Lady Gaga of the set) a wild reimagining of all three. Apart from the outline of the story (which they get from Mark), every one freely adapts everything else: dialogue, scenarios, pericopes and, yes, songs.

We’ll look in detail next time at the evidence, still apparent in today’s versions of the gospels, at how we know this to be the case.