Category Archives: The Bible’s unreliability

Christianity’s Greatest Failures: 2. Morality

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

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

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

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

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

Not really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christianity’s Greatest Failures: 3. The Prophecies

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

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

And here’s John 5:24-29:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strike up another big fail.

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?

Virgin Oil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the Beginning, our End

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

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

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

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

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

Written By God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True Stories (or perhaps not)

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Stories work best. We’re all susceptible to them. As Yuval Noah Harari demonstrates in Nexus, we absorb them far more readily than cold hard facts, evidence, statistics. A narrative means much more to us, which is why humans have told stories since we evolved the ability to speak and, later – much later – write.

The gospel authors knew this and dressed up their beliefs about their heavenly saviour as stories about a man who lived and died in Galilee a few decades earlier. As we know, these stories became popular, were repeated and reshaped down the years by the church, still drawing people in today. They are effective because they’re memorable: the Nativity, the temptation in the wilderness, the miracles, the trial before Pilate, the crucifixion and resurrection are all well constructed narratives that draw on archetypes of human experience.

Within these stories, Jesus is made to tell his own: he, or more likely his writers, knew this was the best way to drive a point home. Even today, many people know at least the outline of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep. Only a few can repeat, far less explain, Paul’s convoluted theology from Romans. The gospels are effective because they, and the stories within them, are well put together, relatable and memorable. This does not, however, mean they’re true in any meaningful sense.

That’s the problem with stories. It’s difficult to know whether they’re true (as in factual), convey (universal) truths, contain some element of truth or are entirely untrue. What we need to do is search for any evidence that supports or refutes them. Very often we don’t. We accept them on the basis of their plausibility or on the authority of those telling them. Their pedigree plays a part too – as with ancient religious claims – as does the way they’re often accepted uncritically by other people. Our own predisposition to believe certain stories (but not others) is a factor too. Then there’s the way that constant repetition of stories endows them with the ‘illusion of truth’ or, as Nazi leaders put it, ‘repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.’ It’s a maxim still applied today.

Not many of us hunt down the evidence for ourselves, and sometimes there isn’t any to hunt down: did George Washington really chop down his father’s cherry tree and follow it with his ‘I cannot tell a lie’ shtick? Probably not, but there’s no way of knowing for sure – and surely millions of people who do believe it can’t all be wrong. Very often we are complicit in our own conditioning.

How about stories that circulate today? Next time I’d like to offer some examples. In the meantime if you have any suspect narratives we’re subject to, please let me know.

The Prophet’s Return

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He’s back! After all this time, Jesus has returned! He came through the clouds the other day to judge us and save us from our sin and ignorance!

Oh wait… it’s not Jesus. It’s Don. Yes, Don’s back, eager to rescue us from ourselves. That’s almost as good as JC making a long overdue appearance, don’t you agree?

Let’s see what the sage has to say this time. He commented on three posts: Racism? What Would Jesus Do?, Conversion Porn and Falling By The Wayside. I’m not going to address his comment on Falling By The Wayside as it’s merely a plug for his own blog, something I’ve previously asked him not to do. His other two comments are below. All typos, leaps of logic and condescension are in the originals.

First his response to Racism? What Would Jesus Do?:

A alwaysNeil, you display a particularly poor knowledge of he N.T. and a surprisingly poor ability to read a text given you are a literature guy. You should know, though perhaps it was not part of the curriculum, that any chunk in a text is connected to all the rest and should be read with that in mind. And you should know that there is a cultural and historical context to every piece of writing. You wouldn’t read Tale of Two Cities without considering those, right? Why read Matthew in bits and pieces, then?

Thanks Don, I do know how to read a book, but like you I focus on a particular section when constructing a blog post. Just like preachers do when preaching, just like the set readings do in the liturgy, just like Christian bloggers do. Just like you do, in fact. You do exactly this in the post for which you sent the link. Why do you do that? Don’t you know how to read a book?

All the same, I do set what I say in Racism? What Would Jesus Do? in context: the milieu in which Jesus and his scriptwriters existed. For example, I say, ‘Many of Jesus’ admonishments were written by cultists anticipating the end of the age for members of their own group; they were all too happy to lash out at those who weren’t part of it.’ We know this from the way NT writers address dissidents (‘anti-Christs’), Jews (‘children of the devil’ etc) and those they saw as opponents (‘evil-doers’, ‘dogs’). I also referenced the racism Jesus exhibits in the other gospels. Did you miss this? Do you not know how to read?

Your ‘argument’ is actually nothing but that old chestnut, ‘you took it out of context’. So tell me, Don, what would Jesus’ unpleasantness look like if it were in context as you might define it? Of course you don’t actually tell us how you define it: are you talking about the surrounding verses? The chapter? The whole gospel? The entire New Testament? The Bible from beginning to end? Would Jesus’ behaviour be any more justifiable in these ‘contexts’? Would you be able to excuse it more easily? Do tell us how a wider context would change what Jesus says.

Next, Don passes judgement on Conversion Porn:

Greetings Neil. It jewels to me from your tone, you have reached the bottom of the barrel. So let me give you some more conversion porn.

Richared Bransford, Air Force surgeon who after his toru went to Africa with African Island Mission and spent 30+ years building hospitals and medical clinics and training African medical personnel across east africa. And worked himself in surgery where I visited him in the early 90s. He didn’t write a book or get rich.

Corrie ten Boom. prisoner of the Nazis who lived (her family did not) to tell about how God changed her to love her captors and went on to tell how God made her a new person through her painful imprisonment. Yes, she wrote a book. The Hiding Place.

Harriet Tubman, a slave, who escaped and helped many, many of her fellow negro slaves find freedom. She did not write a book or get rich, though many books have been written about her and a movie was made more recently.

Eric Liddell, olympic runner and missionary to China where he served the poor and where he died in a Japanese internment camp in 1945. Poor I might add. He wrote no books and made no movies, though there have been those made about him.

These are some of the well-known followers of Jesus. Add to them many thousands who worked in rescue missions for nothing, who served as nurses, as my wife did, with no recognition, who fought slavery, who went to India, as my daughter did, to create homes for rescued traffic girls, who build homes for homeless people, as I have done, at their own cost. No one will ever know of them.

What about them, Neil? They believed the “conversion porn” and made a difference in the world.

Don, most of these examples are the same ones trotted out 55 years ago when I was a young Christian. No doubt these individuals did remarkable things, and ‘Richared’ Bransford too. But they’re a select few out of the millions of Christian converts in the hundred years since Eric Lidell. What about all those others? What did they all do? And what about the non-Christians who achieved as much?: Oskar Schindler, Nicholas Winton, Chiune Sugihara, Malala Yousafzai, Chen Shu-chu, Lou Xiaoying (look them up). And, seeing as we’re including people known to us, the young atheist surgeon, the daughter of a friend of mine, who has spent years now in African hospitals working for nothing, despite being diagnosed with cancer herself (now recovered, thanks to medical science, not Jesus).

You see, Don, you’ve selected half a dozen remarkable individuals out of millions without considering the context. Statistically, your examples are insignificant. Maybe most of them didn’t make money from writing books or otherwise cashing in on their service but as I noted in the post, there are certainly those who do. We all know of the many preachers and evangelist who are multi-millionaires. You’ll no doubt say these are not True Christians™, so should be disregarded. Except… they can’t be; they are Christians and they’ve done very well off the back of it. Conversion porn, indeed.

Don, if you’re back to commenting, bear in mind that you won’t get off as lightly this time as you did a couple of years back. I’m not going to put up with your sly ad hominem remarks, your limited, narrow perspective of the Bible, your evasiveness and condescension and your shoddy promotion of Jesus. Comment at your peril.

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.

Falling By The Wayside

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Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity was short lived. Those who trumpeted his being ‘saved by the blood if the lamb’* in 1979 were strangely silent about his leaving the faith in 1982.

Didn’t Jesus say this sort of thing would happen? Sure he did. In Mark 4:1-20 he warns that not everyone who heard ‘the word’ about the coming of the Kingdom of God would take it to heart. He dressed it up as a story about a sower who scattered seed willy-nilly so that most of it was wasted. Some fell by the wayside, some in shallow soil, some the birds carried away. Only a fraction of the message took hold, and those who in whom it did endured.

It’s as if Jesus knew in advance that many of those who heard his message once he’d gone would lack the resolve to persist in ’the way’. Or did he? Isn’t it more likely that by the time Mark wrote his gospel, 40 years after the cult had got underway, there were may who’d given up on the idea that the Messiah was soon going to come through the clouds to inaugurate God’s Kingdom on Earth. They had abandoned such a ridiculous notion and had left the cult behind.

How then to explain such a destabilising and unexpected course of events? Wouldn’t the Saviour have known this would happen? Of course. And so the parable of the Sower was invented to ensure it looked that way.

The writers of the fourth gospel try a different tack by having Jesus pray for unity (John 17:20-23) which of course they wouldn’t have had to do if there wasn’t already disunity. We know there was division in the early church because Paul and the authors of Hebrews and 1 John (2:!9) write about it. Hence the sticking-plaster solutions to the problem in the gospels – the parable of the Sower and Jesus’ unity prayer. It surely couldn’t be ‘the word’ itself that was the problem. No, it had to be the shallowness and flightiness of those who heard it. Or maybe, as Paul suggests, it was simply that God hadn’t chosen them, back at the dawn of time, to be part of his glee club. They were deluded if they thought so. Nevertheless, they needed a means of letting God and Jesus off the hook.

Bob Dylan and those like him in the centuries that followed didn’t stand a chance with this kind of reverse-engineered thinking. 

*Dylan’s own words in his song ‘Saved’ (1980)