Category Archives: prophecy

Announcement

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The story so far…

While he used to argue vociferously that the gospels are history – remember they must be history because Pilate and Herod are in them? – our resident apologist has backed away from this position. He says now they’re not history as such but are only ‘like’ history, which means they’re ‘historical but not written as histories’, whatever this means. He derides the likes of Ehrman and Tabor for their inability to recognise this (newly invented) fact. These no-nothings make a category error when they confuse the gospels with history.

I suspect Don wants to reclassify the gospels because he recognises they make rather poor history. It’s safer to pretend they’re designed to be something else, something that doesn’t require external evidence to verify it: ‘announcement’, for example.

This, however, merely sidesteps the question of where the gospel writers got their information from. Don has previously argued that the gospels are based on eye-witness reports, Peter’s dictation to Mark and a reliable oral tradition. But conjecture like this is only necessary if the gospels are history. If they’re not, but are ‘announcement’ instead, then their sources need  be neither historically reliable nor demonstrable.

If the accounts are ‘announcement’ rather than history then where does their ahistorical, announced information come from? Fortunately, Mark gives us a clue:

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that “‘they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven’” (Mark 4:11-12, referencing and misquoting Isaiah 6:9)

In fact, the gospels’ ‘announcement’ is conveyed by a story constructed from supposed prophecies from Jewish scripture and the immediate concerns of the early cult communities, expressed in metaphors of the gospel writers’ making. All of the internal evidence supports this conclusion. In fact, the source of the gospels’ material is the same as Paul’s and that of other writers in the New Testament. Here’s how the great, self-appointed apostle puts it: 

My gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ [is] according to the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages, but now is made visible through the prophetic scriptures and is made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, for the obedience of faith. (Romans 16:25-26)

Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. (1 Cor 15:3-8)

Compare this with:

Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. (Gospel Jesus in Luke 14:21)

He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. (Gospel Jesus in Luke 24:25-27)

He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. (Gospel Jesus in Luke 24: 25-27)

(Paul) reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead. “This Jesus I am proclaiming to you is the Messiah,” he said. (Fictional Paul in Acts 17:2-3)

The revelation of the Messiah and the secrets and mysteries revealed to Paul and the other apostles are ‘explained and proved’ in their entirety by ancient scripture. But, these scriptures in and of themselves do not prophesy the kind of Messiah the early apostles envisaged. Rather, the scriptures are retrospectively pressed into service to match the revelations of the Messiah that Paul and the others experienced.

This is Don’s ‘announcement’: secrets and mysteries founded not on history but on revelation expressed through metaphor and the misapplication of scripture.

Christmas Quiz!

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See how you do in this year’s Christmas Quiz. Most of the questions are related to subjects we’ve discussed during the year.

  1. Which of the events listed are literary realisations of so-called prophecies from Jewish scripture?

a) The virgin conception and birth

b) Bethlehem as Jesus’ birth place

c) Herod’s massacre of the Innocents

d) The ‘Holy Family’s’ flight into Egypt 

  1. Which of the events listed are metaphorical?

a) God’s insemination of Mary with Holy Semen

b) Pregnant Mary visiting Elizabeth, herself pregnant with the child she’d christen ‘John The Baptist’ (sarcasm, for those who can’t tell)

c) The visit of the shepherds with their symbolic gifts

d) The visit of the magi with their symbolic gifts

  1. Which of the events listed are sentimental and/or dramatic invention on the part of the gospel writers?

a) The archangel Gabriel visiting Mary

b) Joseph’s dream convincing him Mary hadn’t been sleeping around behind his back

c) The no room at the inn scenario

d) Jesus being laid in a manger

  1. Which of the events listed are historical fact?

a) The Roman census that entailed pregnant women trailing off to their husband’s ancestral home

b) The angelic host appearing unto shepherds

c) The Star of Bethlehem hovering over Jesus’ place of birth / home

d) Jesus’ birth occur during the reign of Herod the Great (died 4 BCE) and while Quirinius was governor of Syria (appointed 6 CE)

         5. What do the answers to questions 1-4 tell us about the rest of the      gospel stories?

a) They’re equally fanciful

b) They’re all metaphorical

c) They’re invented, largely based on ancient Jewish scripture

d) There’s nothing historical about them either

        6. What do the answers to questions 1-5 tell us about those who believe these stories to be factual and true?

a) They’re gullible

b) They’ve switched off their critical faculties

c) They believe whatever they’re told

d) They feel compelled to argue that all of the fanciful stories about Jesus are true

 

Answers:

  1. Which of the events listed are literary realisations of so-called prophecies from Jewish scripture?

All of them are based on what Matthew found in Jewish scripture and shoe-horned into his Jesus fantasy.

  1. Which of the events listed are metaphorical?

All of them. You don’t think such blatantly symbolic events really happened, do you?

  1. Which of the events listed are sentimental and/or dramatic invention on the part of the gospel writers?

Oh come on, what else could they be?

  1. Which of the events listed are historical fact?

None of them.

  1. What do the answers to questions 1-4 tell us about the rest of the gospel stories?

They tell us the gospel writers – Matthew and Luke as far as the Christmas stories are concerned – were more than happy to invent stuff for metaphorical purposes and to make it look like prophecy was being fulfilled when it wasn’t. If they were prepared to do this for the Nativity them why not for all of their other stories, the resurrection included?

  1. What do the answers to questions 1-5 tell us about those who believe these stories to be factual and true?

Yup, they’re all of those things. And they won’t be happy till they’ve inflicted their damn fool views on you too.

So how’d you do? Well done to everyone who got full marks. Try to do better next time the rest of you. It really wasn’t hard.

A very merry Christmas to both my readers. See you on the other side.

If the Gospels were History…

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If the gospels were written by eye-witnesses, we should see the use of the first person singular or plural: ‘I saw this happen’, ‘we heard him say that’ and so on. This would not necessarily mean that the author was present, just as he isn’t in the ‘we’ passages in Acts, but it is what we should reasonably expect if the authors were involved in at least some of the events. There are no such instances in any of the gospels.

We would see gospel authors identifying themselves, at the start of their accounts, for example. We don’t.

We would not see an eye-witness lifting significant amounts of material from someone who wasn’t an eye-witness. Yet Matthew plagiarises Mark, ‘improves’ it and passes it off as his own. This isn’t eye-witness behaviour and it is not how eye-witness testimony works.

We would see the gospel writers cite their sources: Mark would tell us he’s recording Peter’s recollections and that he witnessed Jesus’ trial personally (there’s no evidence he did either, speculation from centuries later notwithstanding.) Luke would tell us which accounts he’s referring to in Luke 1:1-2. While we now know he too plagiarises Mark and quite probably Matthew, he doesn’t admit it. We would know the source of events that took place behind closed doors such as Jesus’ interview with Pilate.

We could expect contemporaneous accounts independent of the gospels, recording the miraculous events they claim occurred; the wandering star, the earthquakes, the hours long eclipse, the healings and controlling of nature, the resurrected zombies, the ripping of the 35 foot temple curtain, the resurrection of an executed criminal. Instead there’s nothing, not even in later works such as those of Josephus (because all of these events are metaphorical).

We should expect Cephas (known as Simon Peter in the later gospels) to have recorded his experiences with Jesus. Yet, when he gets his chance, in the letters he supposedly wrote (1 and 2 Peter), he makes no mention of them at all.

We should expect the Christians prior to Paul to have recorded some of these episodes. Some argue that they did, in a document now called Q, but this precious document was, unbelievably, soon lost or abandoned. Alternatively, they may not have seen the need to write anything down because they believed the world was about to end very soon. Either way – no accounts from them about ‘the history of Jesus’.

We should expect Paul to mention aspects of the Jesus story in his letters. After all, he claims to have persecuted Christians for some time before his conversion and to have met and conversed with Cephas for 15 days. Yet he conveys no details at all. Instead, he claims all he knows of Jesus derives from visions and ‘revelations’ in his head. His account of the bread and wine ritual informs Mark’s story of the Last Supper, not the other way round; it is – Paul says clearly – another ‘revelation’ in his head.

We should expect there to be details about Jesus’ earthly life in other books of the NT. Instead we find only a celestial high priest in Hebrews and a warrior Christ in the supposed visions of Revelation. Nothing historical here.

We should, if the gospels are history, expect them to read like history. History, including that written at a similar time does not include angels, devils and apparitions, magic stars, virgin births, miracles and supernatural healings. Where it does, as in Constantine’s vision of the cross, such elements are seen for what they are: myth, not history.

We would not expect the central figure of the gospels to be constructed almost entirely from parts of older religious writing. This is not a technique used in genuine historical records.

We would not expect to find the level of metaphor and mythic tropes – magic, supernatural characters, returns from the dead – in what is ostensibly an informational text. History does not rely heavily on metaphor and symbolic tropes the way the gospels do. There is no ‘logic of history’ in the Jesus story.

We would expect to see geographical and political details relayed reasonably accurately. Instead, Jesus’ trial arrangements are highly improbable; they do not conform with what is known about Roman trials – and we know a lot, because of the records they kept. Jesus would not have had a personal interview with an indecisive Pilate, who would not have consulted the mob, would not have sent Jesus to the Jewish authorities or Herod and would not have offered to exchange Jesus for Barabbas (there was no ‘tradition’ of exchanging one criminal for another) and so on. From what we know of him, Pilate would have authorised the execution without a qualm, as he did for many other would-be messiahs. The rest – the gospel details – are drama, Jewish scripture brought to life with added metaphor. Fiction, in other words.

The Son of Man

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I started wondering why, if his creators believed him to be the Messiah, they have gospel Jesus habitually refer to saviour-figures in the third person? He does it Matthew 23 which we looked at couple of weeks ago, when he talks about there being ‘one instructor: the Messiah’, and he does it repeatedly in all four gospels when he refers to ‘the Son of Man’. The term comes from Daniel 7:13 where it is rendered as ‘one like a son of Man’.

In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence.

The interpretation of which, supplied in Daniel 7:27, is that:

The sovereignty, power and greatness of all the kingdoms under heaven will be handed over to the holy people of the Most High. His kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom, and all rulers will worship and obey him (my emphasis).

The phrase used for ‘son of Man’, bar enash, means simply ‘human being’ and is used to contrast with the ‘beasts’ of nations that the ‘prophecy’ says will rule prior to this. However, as Daniel explains, the human being in question is the nation of Israel – the holy people of the Most High – who will finally triumph over the four beastly nations that will dominate the Earth first. The nation of Israel will metaphorically emerge from the clouds and join the Ancient of Days to rule from Heaven. There is no mention anywhere in the Daniel dream-prophecy of a Messiah or individual human being who will accomplish any of this.

As Neil Godfrey puts it:

The coming of this “Son of Man” is within the realm where one expects deities to travel. The coming is, moreover, to another station within the clouds, namely the throne of the Ancient of Days. The context again explains that this “coming” is effecting a change of rule on earth. A kingdom is falling, and freedom is given to “the saints of the Most High”.

Nevertheless, it is this title – the now fully capitalised ‘Son of Man’ – that Mark has Jesus assume. The other three gospel writers copy it from him. Paul, writing decades before them, seems not to know that Jesus used it. Evidently the celestial Christ he encountered in visions and revelations didn’t feel the need to mention it. (Hardly surprising when Mark is freely inventing years later.)

So what does this tell us about Jesus, or, more specifically, about how the Jewish Christians of Mark’s community viewed him?

A number of scholars (e.g. Ehrman, Carrier, Goodacre, Westar Institute) have argued (as have I in my own amateurish way) that gospel Jesus is constructed from ‘prophecies’ lifted from Hebrew scriptures. Other commentators have demonstrated how he is, in the first two gospels at least, the personification of the nation of Israel*. This isn’t just because he identifies with the son of Man figure in Daniel. He also equates himself with the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 and elsewhere. Strictly speaking, he is made to identify with the Suffering Servant by Mark and the other gospel authors, particularly Matthew, who all copy Mark’s original idea. As Isaiah 53 makes clear, God’s Suffering Servant is not a person: it is Israel.

Not only is Jesus identified with Daniel’s son of Man and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant – the personification of the Jewish nation – but Isaiah 53 is used as a template for his trial, mockery, crucifixion and resurrection. It is the nation that is God’s servant which, as Mark was writing, was going through trials, tribulation, suffering and apparent death: the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, with thousands of Jewish people being crucified by the Romans.

So it will be Israel, Mark hints in his extended parable, that will emerge resurrected and who will ascend metaphorically through the clouds to sit at the right hand of God to rule the nations. He leaves out the details of this resurrection and ascension from the end of his gospel because at the time of his writing they had yet to happen. But, he tells his readers and listeners, they will. They have to because Daniel and Isaiah say so: after suffering comes God-assured victory. Mark’s Jesus story, then, is an allegory of the history of the Jewish nation and its projected future. The allusions to Abraham, Moses, the Exodus, Elijah, Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, Daniel’s son of Man and the accompanying ‘prophecies’ make this more than apparent.

Gospel Jesus is a metaphor (or indeed a simile, one who is like a son of Man/the Jewish nation), his life made to conform in every respect with the history of that same nation. He is an allegory as Mark makes clear throughout his gospel. 

The clues are there for all to discern and as Mark advises, ‘he who has ears, let him hear’.

*See Watts: Isaiah’s New Exodus and Mark and numerous Christian apologists who make the same point: Google ‘Jesus and Israel’.

The Gospels and Other Fiction, part 1

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Christian apologists vigorously deny the idea that the Jesus story is fiction even though all of the evidence, both internal and external, points to the fact that it is. I’m not going to rehearse that evidence in this post (I address it in several earlier posts, including here and here, and there are always primary sources that, God forbid, defenders of the faith could read for themselves.) I’m interested here in looking at Christians’ defence of scripture as truth. What arguments do they have and better still, what evidence, that the gospels are historically accurate depiction of events in 1st century Palestine? Most of these arguments have been offered by our resident apologist, Don Camp, and although I’m fairly sure Don makes things up as he goes along, I’ll not reference other sources except where I’m introducing an argument he hasn’t offered.

‘Church Fathers believed the gospels were accurate, therefore, because they lived closer to the time of the gospels’ composition, they’re more likely to be right.’

Church Fathers, such as the unreliable Eusebius,, Papias, Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp were predisposed to believe the gospels were accurate; they had already converted to the faith and had a vested interest in seeing it promulgated and preserved. They were also steeped in the thinking of the age, typified by Paul and other NT writers, that the Earth was at the centre of a cosmic war between God and the forces of Satan. Above all, the Jesus story was theirs, a new revelation from God that didn’t, as far as they were concerned, belong to Jewish tradition or any other. It was new and it belonged to them: they wanted and needed it to be true. Later scholars, from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, did not come with these particular encumbrances and while of course not entirely free of prejudices of their own, considered the texts more dispassionately as history and found them to be wanting.

‘‘Mark’ is an accurate record of the disciple Peter’s time with Jesus.’

There is no evidence at all for this claim. Analysis of Mark (and also Matthew and Luke) demonstrates how the story is constructed around supposed prophecies from Jewish scriptures. Mark also incorporates much of Paul’s gospel to the Gentiles, a feature Matthew is at pains to ‘correct’. His Jesus is distinctly Jewish.

‘There was an oral tradition that accurately preserved the stories about Jesus until such time as they could be written down.’

There is no evidence that this tradition, if it existed, was accurate. It is, as Bart Ehrman shows in Jesus Before The Gospels, highly unlikely that it was. We know that stories conveyed orally are altered, embellished and modified with successive retellings.

‘There was an earlier document that preserved sayings of Jesus’ until such times they could be incorporated into the gospels.’

Then it simply vanished so that no fragment of it survived. The Church Fathers don’t appear to know anything about it. Wouldn’t such a priceless document have been preserved somehow, somewhere by someone? Q, as it’s called, is entirely hypothetical. It’s unlikely it existed. Even if it did, it is considered to have been a sayings gospel. It did not preserve details of Jesus’ life, death or resurrection. We’ll get to the so called ‘logia’ in part 3.

‘The gospels were written by eye-witnesses or associates of eye-witnesses.’

We know with certainty that this is not the case. All of them were written in Koine Greek and are carefully constructed literary creations. None was written in Palestine but much further afield and all reflect the concerns of the later cult. Over a hundred years after they were written, Irenaeus ascribed the names by which they are now known without any evidence that the authors were called Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Later compilers of the New Testament didn’t even know of ‘Mark’s’ primacy, which is why ‘Matthew’s’ gospel appears first in the New Testament. ‘Matthew’ and ‘Luke’ are heavily dependent on ‘Mark’ (as is ‘John’ for its overall structure), an incongruous and inexplicable approach for Matthew to take, and John too, if they were eye-witnesses themselves. Eye-witnesses do not need to rely on the testimony of people who weren’t.

More next time…

Eggs, Bunnies and Dead Bodies

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Easter rolls round again. The spring festival, which in English is named after a pagan fertility Goddess (hence the eggs and bunnies), was usurped by the church in the second century as a celebration of a dead man rising.

Sometime in the first century, a few desperate men had visions of a Yeshua – his name meaning ‘to deliver’ – shortly after his death (if indeed he existed). The visions, which were entirely in their heads, were so vivid, it seemed to these men that Yeshua was alive again. They began looking for his (re)appearance in the sky when they thought he would establish God’s Kingdom on Earth. It was a preposterous idea, but in preparation for his appearance, the men encouraged others to adhere to Jewish law so that they would find a place in the New Age.

A short while after, a different fanatic had his own vision. Saoul, who transitioned into Paûlos, thought he heard Yeshua speaking to him. Yeshua told him the conditions that needed to be met in order to secure a place in the new order: all anyone had to do was believe and they would live forever. This was all entirely within Paûlos’ head of course but nevertheless enough people took notice of his preposterous idea and decided to worship Yeshua.

Later still, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, which was the centre for those who’d come up with the original version of the preposterous idea. Almost all of them were eliminated. Not because of their preposterous idea but because the Romans were indiscriminate in slaughtering those they regarded as rebellious Jews. Their elimination cleared the way for Paûlos’ preposterous idea to flourish unopposed.

Around this time, a literate acolyte of Paûlos’ idea, who later became known as Mark, set about creating a back story for Yeshua. He based it on Paûlos’ teaching and on stories from Jewish scripture that he thought predicated Yeshua, though in fact they didn’t.

Two other cultists liked this idea but didn’t think Mark had done a very good job of it. They set about rewriting his story, adding even more preposterous elements. Finally, about 60 or 70 years after the whole thing had begun, a fourth chap, later called John, reimagined the Yeshua story. His version bore little relationship to Mark’s tale but this didn’t really matter as all the versions of Yeshua’s life story were made up. In any case, no-one would notice the discrepancies provided the four stories were never collected together.

And so Christianity was born, created from visions and false hopes, reinventions and fanciful fictions. The preposterous idea in its different forms appealed to people, now as then, because of its false promise of eternal life and as the means of avoiding an imagined God’s wrath.

This is the idea the church is celebrating, preposterously, this weekend.

As for me, my days of fertility are long gone, but I might, nevertheless, indulge in a little bit of chocolate egg.

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 there 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.