Category Archives: prophecy

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: 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.

Devious Types

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Those OT people are what we call types. It is a kind of prophecy. But what it does is demonstrate that such a person is what Israel needed. Jesus was the antitype. Donald J Camp

Sure, provided there’s a supernatural entity overseeing the process. But is there?

Types and antitypes are the creation of theologians in the Middle Ages who sought to explain why Jesus embodies so much ancient Jewish folklore. It’s used today by Christians to assert that Jesus fulfils millions upon millions of prophecies from Jewish scriptures.

But does he really?

As Ark has shown us, the Moses story was created by plagiarising much older myths to construct him and his history. Now either the characters in this process were ‘types’ of Moses, he their ‘antitype’, or these earlier stories were plagiarised by Jewish writers to create Moses and his story.

Which is it? The first explanation is that all the similarities between Sargo/Inanna and Moses were engineered by a deity (or perhaps even Satan) with nothing better to do but to guide the typological process over centuries. The second requires only that human writers recognised a good story when they heard it and plundered it mercilessly for their own ends. A busy-body God or conniving writers with a religious-political agenda? It’s a tough call.

Jump forward a few centuries and lo and behold the same stories crop up again. This time, God has finally brought forth the man everyone has been waiting for. And, it turns out, there were clues to him all along in earlier characters and stories.

Either this or the creators of this character – Jesus the Christ – modelled him on those older fictional heroes, just like the rabbis who wrote about Moses years earlier. These new writers plagiarised stories of Moses, Abraham, Noah, Jonah and David (most of these largely plagiarised themselves), and made their hero do much the same things they did, but better.

So which is more likely? The divine manipulation of a middle Eastern tribe’s history and folklore forcing it to point to a Messiah who would bear no relation to that anticipated by the Jews? Or a total fabrication by clever writers who followed in the footsteps of earlier writers who also stole stories from older sources and recycled them as their own?

Don’t be fooled by fancy terms like types and antitypes. What does Occam’s razor tell you?

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.

We Will Judge Angels

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The guy in this video has had his mind bent by Paul’s crazy assertion in 1 Corinthians 6:3 that Believers will judge the angels at the Final Judgement.

This is pretty mind bending, I think you’ll agree, not to mention totally insane. The video incidentally turned up in my Facebook feed; I didn’t go looking for it. I’m not that masochistic. My Facebook is back to being inundated with posts and videos from evangelicals. That algorithm certainly needs attention. Just because I write about Jesus doesn’t mean I want to receive wacky posts about him from Christians.

Anyway, Mr Mind-Bent (I can’t track down his name) got me thinking what this judging will be like. For a start, and despite the video’s claim, Paul doesn’t specify that the judgement will be part of the Final Judgement. This is what he actually says:

…do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! (1 Corinthians 6:2-3)

My God, the Lord’s people will not only judge angels: they’ll judge the world too. We’re really in trouble if God is going to hand the job over to some of the most unstable people in existence. They are also, as the video claims, going to be unleashed on the angels. You might wonder, as I did, what the angels might need to be judged about. The Masked Singer maybe, or which of them farted in the elevator? It could be the Lord’s people will be required to sit in judgement on the Bad Angels: Satan and his minions who rebelled against God back at the beginning of time. Paul doesn’t specify, though elsewhere in the infallible, never-contradictory scriptures, the devil has already been judged (John 16:11) and his fate sealed (Revelation 20:10).

Why in any case would beings who can never sin merit judgement? Sin doesn’t exist in heaven. The presence of God makes it impossible, which doesn’t account for how Satan and his mob managed it. I’m sure there’s a Bible verse somewhere that gets round it some way or other.

Of course none of this judging of the world and angels is ever going to happen. Angels, God, Heaven: none of them exist. Our man in the video has had his mind bent for nothing. While he admits he doesn’t fully understand Paul’s claim, nevertheless he believes it. He has faith in it, he preaches it (‘preach it brother, preach it!’) and wants other people to believe it. He’d be better thinking it through then he’d realise – maybe just maybe – that the Bible is full of crap.

A Big Myth-take

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The nativity story is evidently a myth. The evidence?

The virgin conception and birth (similar to other myths);

Angels everywhere;

Warnings in dreams;

The wand’rin’ star;

Events created from out-of-context scraps of Jewish scripture (the virgin birth again; the shoe-horning of Bethlehem; Herod’s massacre; the flight and return from Egypt);

The heavy-handed symbolism (shepherds and their gifts; the magi and theirs);

Historically inaccurate details (disparate dates, the Roman census, Herod’s massacre);

Discrepancies between the two accounts;

The absence of the nativity and its events in the other two canonical gospels,

Disparity with later events in the gospels (Mary treasures the nativity events in Luke 2:19 only to seemingly having no knowledge of them later (Mark 3:12); John and Jesus are second cousins… or not).

And on and on.

Yet the story is analysed endlessly – two thousand years (almost) and counting – as is all that follows in the gospels. There’s a whole lot of jargon to intellectualise this , of what is, in the end, just myth: exegesis, hermeneutics, soteriology, apologia, discourse analysis, close reading. All exist to expose the truth embedded in the text and to defend it. Even those who acknowledge that the nativity story is myth (quite an attractive, cosy myth admittedly) want to confine this admission to the nativity alone. The rest – the symbolic miracles, unfulfilled prophecies, literary sermons, the metaphorical pericopes (more jargon!), the trial, crucifixion and resurrection – they want honoured as historical, factual and mystically embodying Truth. Unfortunately, all of these stories bear the same hallmarks of myth as the nativity tales. Why should these other stories be regarded as anything different?

**********

Christmas is upon us. I’m happy to call it Christmas; the name has a long pedigree and ‘Holidays’ has, in any case, its own religious connotations. Dennis and I will be spending it with my daughter and her family. I hope you too are able to enjoy it in whichever way suits you best.

A happy Christmas to you, both my readers.

Like a Virgin. Or Not

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To arrive at the nativity story most of us grew up with and which your kids and grandkids might well be performing this Christmas (mine are), the one with a stable, shepherds and wise-men, involves some cunning sleight of hand, not to mention a liberal dollop of invention.

The biblical ‘account’ of the story is spread across two gospels, Matthew and Luke. Mark hadn’t heard of it when he wrote his gospel so you won’t find it there. In fact, Mark’s Jesus doesn’t become God’s son until his baptism. Paul, writing earlier still, thinks God adopts Jesus only at his resurrection. Paul has no knowledge either of the nativity myth. John has no time for it: his Jesus is an eternal being who has existed with God from the beginning.

For Matthew, however, Jesus comes into existence when the Holy Spirit impregnates a virgin. Luke likes the idea and so copies it into his gospel. And now we have a problem: the idea that a virgin will bear the Messiah is lifted from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish scripture, which renders Isaiah 7:14 as –

Therefore YHWH himself will give you a sign: the virgin (almah) will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

In the Septuagint, the Hebrew word almah, meaning ‘young woman’, is translated as virgin. However, the word for virgin in Hebrew is betulah, an entirely different word. Isaiah 7:14 is not a prophecy that a virgin will bear a son: only that a young woman will do so; in other words, a commonplace event. Matthew allowed himself to be misled: in his eagerness to find prophecies of Jesus in Jewish scriptures, he alighted on a mistranslation. He wrote his story accordingly, riffing freely on the error. Luke picked up on it a decade later, adding his own embellishments.

Neither does Isaiah 7:14 suggest the child being talked about will be the Messiah, nor that he will appear hundreds of years in the future. As subsequent verses make transparently clear, a short period of time is all that is suggested; no more than a few years:

He (the child) will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste. YHWH will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah – he will bring the king of Assyria (Isaiah 7:15-17).

These are all events contemporaneous with the writing of this part of Isaiah. All that is being said is that a young woman will become pregnant and produce a child in the near future. Even before this child properly knows right from wrong, YHWH will bring Israel’s enemies down upon it. (Because he’s such a caring God.)

None of this has anything to do with a virgin becoming pregnant, nothing to do with a Messiah, nothing to do with Jesus. It is not a prophecy about him, even if Matthew persuaded himself it was. Shamefully, almost all modern ‘translations’ of Isaiah retain ‘virgin’, when they know perfectly well it is not the word used, and that the context neither supports it’s use nor makes it necessary. They do so to maintain the lie that Isaiah 7:14 is about Jesus and to give credibility to Matthew and Luke’s ridiculous fiction that he fulfilled ‘prophecy’ by being born of a virgin. It’s a deception that will be repeated in church services around the world over the next couple of weeks.

There May Be Trouble Ahead…

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Prophets, from left to right: Elijah, Julie Stephens,
Cindy Jacobs and er... Ed Miliband

Prophets don’t exist. A bunch of people intoxicated by religious fervour who think God has given them a special message that they must deliver to whoever will listen, are not prophets; they are a collection of extremists intoxicated with religious fervour.

We know this because no God exists. He can’t, as a result, drop messages, special or otherwise, into the heads of fanatics.

That’s it, really. No more to be said.

But so-called prophets exert quite an influence on our modern world. According to Abraham (I know, he’s a mythical figure but bear with me), God selected an ancient Jewish tribe to be his favourite buddies, so long as they did whatever he demanded of them, including hacking off their foreskins and that of their sons. What sort of prophet – what sort of God – comes up with this kind of lunatic fetishism?

Later the creators of a new prophet, whom they called Moses, came up with a story in which their hero encountered God in a bush (the symbolism is lost on us today.) This time he wanted his special buddies to invade their neighbour’s territory, slaughter them and take their land for themselves. This his favourite, de-foreskinned tribe did (modern genetic analysis of the peoples in the region suggests this isn’t what happened.)

After these fictional madmen came some potentially real fanatics who thought God had assigned them to lambast their fellow Jews for their shortcomings. These prophets promised the rubes rewards if they behaved as the prophets thought they should. These guys also came up with the idea that God would send a warrior Messiah to help his special little tribe take over the world. This is what happens when fanatics are allowed to get a hold of things.

A couple of centuries later, another self-proclaimed prophet turned up (or is invented) who seemed to think he’s the most special-est of all the prophets so far. This guy, called Yeshua (meaning ‘salvation’, so obviously not in any way symbolic) prophesied that the Messiah would be arriving real soon to sort the world out. He’d then hand it over to the Jewish people to manage. This guy’s script writers weren’t sure if Yeshua was talking about himself or some other supernatural character called the Son of Man. It doesn’t matter really. Nothing he prophesied happened when he confidently predicted it would: there was no Messiah who flies down from heaven, no final judgment, no great reset for the Earth. He was an absolute failure as a prophet; evidence, if more is needed, that those who claim to speak for God don’t know what they’re talking about. Don’t worry, though, this guy was recast as a resurrected Godman, just like the ones in pagan myths.

A few other prophets appeared around about the same time. In fact, the extremist who changed his name to Paul seemed to think that just about anyone could become one so long as they ‘edified’ the brethren. It was a few years though before the next really big so-called prophet came along.

In the 8th century, a guy called Muhammad said he was told by an angel who represented a different version of God that, amongst other things, Islam would spread worldwide and there would be an increase in senseless murders. These rather nebulous and self-fulfilling predictions are even now coming to pass. Muhammad’s future followers are indeed spreading Islam across the globe while senseless murders continue being committed, a good many of them by Muslims themselves.

While Muslims have made it clear that Muhammad is the final prophet, history has blessed us since with a few more. Joseph Smith in the 1880s was commanded by a different God (or maybe by the same one who’s changed his mind again) to start a new church and to obliterate anyone who stood in his way. He was successful in this enterprise, despite managing to get himself killed in the process.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that given their abysmal success rate and the number of people who have suffered or perished as a result of their endeavours that we’d have had enough of prophets. While churches cannot agree on whether ‘genuine’ prophecy still exists, the prophets keep coming. Fanatics the world over, every bit as barmy as their predecessors, appoint themselves some deity’s spokesperson, and the ‘prophetic’ pronouncements begin: meaningless theobabble spattered across the Internet.

The Day After The Rapture

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Are you still there?

Either the rapture didn’t happen or there aren’t many True Christians round where I live. I watched all day for them jetting into the sky to meet Jesus but didn’t see a single one.

What went wrong? That South African preacher Joshua Mhlakela who saw Jesus surely can’t have been mistaken. Jesus told him clearly that yesterday, or maybe today, would be when he’d be back to collect his Chosen and judge the great multitude of sinners. I even turned on the TV last night to see if it had happened elsewhere. I thought the Final Judgement was underway with some dude ticking off the UN. Turned out just to be some big orange guy, not Jesus in disguise.

So what now? I think I can guess. Jesus’ message to Joshua Mhlakela will be reinterpreted: it wasn’t that the Rapture was going to happen yesterday, or today. It’s the events leading up to the rapture that he promised would kick off this week. That’ll be it. The Rapture itself is still some time off, as it always is.

Mhlakela’s vision of Jesus was no different from the ones the earliest Christian believers had: those character with fake names like Peter and Paul. Dismiss the good pastor’s vision of the Lord and what JC purportedly said and you have to dismiss the visions of those early fanatics who operated under aliases. Visions, dreams and hallucinations have no bearing on reality, as Mhlakela and the thousands who believed him have demonstrated yet again. Christianity and many other faiths are founded on such imaginings. As Luke puts it in Acts 2:17 during ‘the Last Days’ of 2,000 years ago:

And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams (misquoting Joel 2: 28-29)

This is the basis of the Christian delusion, and every other.