Category Archives: The human origins of religion

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)

Racism? What Would Jesus Do?

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The Church Of England recently issued guidelines to its London clergy advising them to preach anti-racist sermons and suggesting how they might go about it. Asked about it on UK TV, the reverend Sam Norton said he was worried that expressing concerns about the number of migrants entering this small island, many of them illegally, might unreasonably be construed as racist. He argued that it is not; I agree. The reverend was at pains to emphasise that racism was abhorrent (again, I agree) and was not something Jesus would condone.

So, again, Jesus gets a free pass. As he’s portrayed in the four gospels, Jesus is racist. Or, rather, the men who made up his script, the early cult members now known as Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, were. They were racist about those who were not part of the new movement, particularly towards those who were hostile towards it. Granted the gospel creators had Jesus say some pretty good things too: love your neighbour as yourself, love and pray for your enemies, the parable of the good Samaritan; all wildly impractical and widely ignored by Christians everywhere.

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. Hence, the Syrophoenician woman of Mark 7:24–37 whom Jesus calls a ‘dog’, dogs being unclean in Judaism. This woman would have had a paler complexion than Jesus, who would not be the fair Caucasian he’s often portrayed as being. His name-calling is racist; it is only the woman’s pluckiness that persuades him to respond to her pleas.

The story is repeated in Matthew 15:21-28 where the woman is said specifically to be from Canaan, Jesus says explicitly that he ‘was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel’. Earlier, in Matthew 10:5, he instructs his disciples not to take his supposed life-saving message to anyone other than his fellow Jews: ‘Do not go into the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter a city of the Samaritans’. Matthew would, of course, have his version of Jesus exclude those who were not Jewish. Jesus’ racism here reflects Matthew’s community intent on preserving their Jewish heritage. Which makes the anti-Semitism Jesus is made to express in the fourth gospel all the more startling;

You (Jews) belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies… Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God [‘the right cult’?]

This is the racism of John 8:44, the rift between the new cult and Judaism having widened by the time the fourth gospel was written.

There are those online who argue that even though Jesus was God incarnate, his ‘human side’ and his upbringing in a prejudiced environment account for his narrow views of ethnicity.  This excuses his racism, they say, and shows how like us he really was. It doesn’t. It reflects the prejudices and racism of those who created the various versions of him. (Alternatively, online Christians argue, as here, that the pericope is invariably read ‘out of context’.) And, please, don’t get me started on the overt racism of Jesus ‘Holy Father’, the genocidal tyrant of the Old Testament.

The Bible as a whole is rife with blatant, divinely-inspired racism. Apart from this, I agree with the reverend Norton: having concerns about the scale of immigration is not racism. Just as criticism of Jesus is not blasphemy and censure of Muslim beliefs and practices is not Islamophobic.

Jesus the Great Revolutionary

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According to Matthew and Luke’s gospels, Jesus was a revolutionary. He wanted to see the world turned around, the very meaning of the word revolution. He preached that the world as it was would be destroyed and remade, this time with the social order reversed. Those who had been first in the old order – the rich, the powerful, the cruel – would be made to be the last, while those who were formerly last – the poor, the downtrodden, the lowly, the compassionate – would find themselves in first place. They’d be best in show, the new top dogs and, in ways that really mattered, rich. Meanwhile, those who had really committed themselves to him, his closest followers, would become the rulers with him of the renewed revolutionised order that he envisaged: his Kingdom of God.

How would all this happen? Jesus’ Father in Heaven would soon be sending the Son of Man to set the revolution in motion. This powerful being, who perhaps Jesus envisaged as being none other than himself, would ensure all the unimaginable but necessary changes would be achieved. There would be some violence of course, because you can’t have a revolution without at least a little violence:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. (The Prince of Peace himself in Matthew 10:34)

Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. (Matthew 3:10)

Once the old is done away with and the new order established, there would be something of a socialist utopia on Earth. Everyone would share what they had; each would have his or her needs met by everyone else. Even those who came late to the party would enjoy all the rewards the new Kingdom had to offer (Matthew 20:1-16). There’d have to be some slaughter too of course: the one who advocated loving one’s enemies looked forward to exacting bloody revenge on his:

“But as for these enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and slaughter them in my presence.” (Luke 19:27. See also Revelation)

Except of course, none of this happened. The Son of Man did not emerge from the clouds when Jesus expected him to. He himself did not become the Son of Man, ready to kick-start the great social revolution. Instead, the rich, the powerful and the cruel put an end to Jesus’ revolutionary ideas; they were gaining too much traction among the poor and downtrodden and needed to be quashed. An uprising couldn’t be ruled out, specially as Jesus recognised the need for force:

From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has been coming violently and the violent take it by force. (Matthew 11.12)

He predicted too that blood would be spilt, going so far as to recommended his followers arm themselves:

He said to them… ‘the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, “And he was counted among the lawless”; and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.’ They said, ‘Lord, look, here are two swords.’ He replied, ‘It is enough.’ (Luke 22:36-38)

According to the gospels, the Jewish religious leaders persuaded the Roman authorities to do away with this dangerous revolutionary and insurrectionist. Once they were made aware of him, the Romans were more than happy to oblige. They mocked Jesus’ aspirations as King of the Jews and crucified him alongside other ‘rebels’ (Matthew 27:38).

His followers however were not yet ready to let go of him or his revolutionary ideas. Perhaps they saw the possibility of their ruling the world slipping from them. They continued to preach that he would appear again, possibly as the Son of Man, to bring about the revolution he had foreseen.

This is, as I say, Matthew and Luke’s version of events. The writers of the fourth gospel would jettison the failed New-World-Order narrative, building their own Superman-Jesus and dispensing entirely with the great social revolution. In their story, the Kingdom of God is ‘not of this world’ (John 18:36) but only in people’s heads.

The four gospels are, of course, make-believe; allegories of the hoped for Messiah. The Kingdom of God, the revolutionary leader, the reversal of the social order are what some of the earliest cultists wished for, looked for, hoped for. It is their aspirations that are reflected and embodied in the earliest gospels. Like the hopes and dreams of every cultist before and since, they came to nothing.

Many of today’s Christians would not, in any case, have cared for the Kingdom of God that Matthew and Luke’s Jesus is made to promote; far too much socialism and the wrong sort of people in charge. Jesus’ new Kings of the World would, in any case, have made a mess of things in much the same way as all those who took control in the revolutions the world did actually experience. Power, as Lord Acton put it, corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Better for Jesus that he became a personal saviour, confined to the minds of those who think he really existed, a mere revolutionary in the head.

The Real Jesus

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Dear Christian,

When you became a Christian, did you meet the man who wandered around Galilee 2,000 years and who, according to ancient stories, died on a Roman cross? Was it an actual human being you met at the moment you ‘saw the light’ (the clue’s in the term)? Or was it something – an emotional experience perhaps – that you interpreted as the presence of a heavenly, supernatural being? If you’re honest you’ll acknowledge you didn’t meet a real person but felt something that you took to be one.

When you pray to Jesus, exactly who are you praying to? Is it the man who drifted around Galilee 2,000 years ago? Are your thoughts magically transported back in time so he hears you, somehow or other, in his head? No? So do you pray to a supernatural, celestial Jesus who for the past 2,000 years has been sitting at the right hand of God in a mythical never, never land? I’m guessing you’ll say this is the Jesus you commune with (while disputing my calling heaven never, never land).

When you worship Jesus are your honeyed words whisked back 2,000 years to sustain a man who meandered around Galilee spouting profundities before getting himself killed? Or do you envisage your prayers reaching a supernatural figure living out there in space or maybe in another dimension? (C’mon, you know it’s the latter.)

When you say Jesus was present at the creation of the world as described at the start of Genesis, do you mean the man who, billions of years later, would roam around Galilee? Or do you mean a celestial  Jesus who was a part of the Godhead in some mysterious, inexplicable way? (I’m guessing, again, it’s this latter.)

When you say Jesus will judge the living and the dead at the End of the Age, do you refer to the man who lived 2,000 years ago, trudging around Galilee? Or do you mean some mystical manifestation of this character who’s eager to separate the sheep from the goats while hovering in the sky prior to massacring the goats? (It’s this version, isn’t it.)

In the Bible, did Paul meet the flesh-and-blood man who had slogged around Galilee a few years earlier? Or did he hallucinate a celestial being as a flash of light? (It was the latter, wasn’t it.)

When you speak of the Jesus who died on the cross to save you from your sins, do you quote the individual who supposedly drifted round Galilee 2,000 years ago? Or do you more often reference Paul, who never met him and knows nothing of his supposed earthly life? (You know which.)

Yet despite your belief in mystical, spiritual versions of Jesus, you are adamant he was not a mythical being. Not at the start of time, not at the end, nor in Paul’s writings; not in your own conversion, not in your prayers or worship and especially not in your own inner experience of him. No, he was, according to you, a very real person.

Yet there are no signs you believe in this historical Jesus, the man who allegedly roamed around Galilee two millennia ago. You ignore him and his teaching if favour of a celestial superman. How do we know you ignore him? All the examples above for a start, but there’s also the way you don’t do what he says. You don’t love your neighbour and enemies alike, you don’t sell all you have to give to the poor, you don’t give to everyone who asks, you don’t despise riches, you don’t refrain from judging others. You rarely turn the other cheek or go the extra mile and you are not prepared to forgive endlessly. You don’t accept that this man believed the End of Age was coming in his own time (or at least that his script-writers did) nor that he was disastrously wrong. It’s the cosmic super-being you go for every time.

How very strange. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful phenomenon, don’t you think?

Do You See What I See?

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Christianity with its visions of God, angels and resurrected god-men, is not distinctive. It emerged from a culture in which such epiphanies were commonplace and highly esteemed. Appearances of deities, other supernatural beings and dead people were valued as genuine encounters with a reality on the other side of this mortal life. Paul was a Hellenised Jew and a Roman citizen (if Acts 17 can be believed); it was perfectly natural for him and his contemporaries to see and hear things that weren’t there.

Not only was the fledging Christ-cult influenced by the superstitious culture around it, but was born too of Judaism, itself awash with visions, apparitions and revelations. How could the new religion fail to be when its originators existed in such a milieu. One or other of these ‘visionaries’ believed they’d seen a resurrected Jesus. Of course they did. This is how gods manifested themselves then; everyone knew it. There were even those who hadn’t really had any inner-visions but wanted to be regarded as mystics themselves so would pretend they too had had direct contact with the deities.

The human mind has always been susceptible to illusions, to the potency of dreams and to misinterpreting what is going on around it. It’s also prone to a spot of fantasising now and then. This propensity didn’t cease once Christianity established itself. Muhammed claimed to have been visited by angels who revealed new truths about the nature of God – not least a change in name.

In the 19th century, a young farmer, Joseph Smith, living during a widespread and particularly intense religious revival, imagined (or pretended) he’d been visited by God and Jesus. Later, he said he’d been visited by a hitherto unknown angel with the unlikely name of Moroni. The result of course was multiple wives for Smith and the foundation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Sufficient numbers of people believed Smith’s cockamamie stories about his alleged visions to commit to Mormonism. Smith wasn’t alone; others had visions of deities, including but not restricted to the Big Two, Jesus and his Father God. Hundreds recently saw the Virgin Mary hovering above New York City. They couldn’t all be wrong could they? Of course not, but they were all be deluded. Just like Joshua Mhlakela whom Jesus appeared to and told him the date of the Rapture was 22nd September, or possibly the 23rd, then with ‘billion percent’ certainty 7th October. Or maybe 8th…

This is how religions are made, changed and adopted: on a bed of illusory sand. If we need any further evidence that such experiences are illusory, created by the mind itself, then consider this: each time God, his angels or his Son appear in the religion-soaked brains of mystics and fraudsters, they reveal a message at odds with that revealed to previous visionaries. Each revelation has to be different of course. There would be no reason for such ‘visits’ otherwise.

Hence Abraham (or his script writer) imagining YHWH promising an eternal covenant and a new land.

Moses (or his script-writer) claiming YHWH had issued new laws while at the time commanding the slaughter of tribal enemies.

Cephas thinking he’d seen a risen Jesus who may or may not have told him of the imminent the End of the Age.

Jesus himself reportedly talking with his ‘Father’ about the necessity of his execution.

Paul flying to heaven so that Jesus could explain in great detail a new covenant, negating the original ‘eternal’ covenant with Abraham.

John of Patmos envisaging Jesus coming to Earth to slaughter the enemies he purportedly instructed his followers to love. (And Christians claim the Bible presents a unified message!)

All of these are manifestations of, and within, the minds of fantasists. Such manifestations are a naturally occurring malfunction of the brain.

And so it continues. Beware anyone who claims to have seen or heard from a deity of any sort. They, like their biblical counterparts, are deluded and almost certainly ill.

Mystic Revelations

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What do the three ‘great’ Abrahamic religions have in common?

They all started with visions, hallucinations, dreams and mystic revelations. They’re not only based on these but owe their very existence to encounters with the supernatural that took place entirely within people’s heads. This of course is if they happened at all; many of these encounters with angels and God’s revelations take place in stories that have all the characteristics of myth or legend. Even so, they reveal much about the primitive state of mind (still around today) that believed God frequently revealed himself to, and in the minds of, chosen individuals.

First, the grand-daddy of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism: 

When Abram was 99 years old, YHWH appeared to him. He said to Abram, “I am El Shadday. Live in my presence with integrity. I will give you my promise, and I will give you very many descendants.” Immediately, Abram bowed with his face touching the ground, and again Elohim spoke to him, My promise is still with you. You will become the father of many nations. So your name will no longer be Abram [Exalted Father] but Abraham [Father of Many] because I have made you a father of many nations. I will give you many descendants. Many nations and kings will come from you. I will make my promise to you and your descendants for generations to come as an everlasting promise. I will be your Elohim and the God of your descendants. (Genesis 17)

Then Moses:

The Angel of YHWH appeared to (Moses) in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed.

Then Moses said, “I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn.”

So when YHWH saw that he turned aside to look, Elohim called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” (Exodus 3)

Notice how the inner voice goes from being that of ‘the angel of YHWH’ to YHWH himself (or one of his aliases). The entire scenario is preposterous of course, as is the Abraham episode before it. I’ve omitted the other occasions YHWH is said to appear to Abraham, including the infamous Genesis 22, where YHWH instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son. These stories are legends written, created from whole cloth, centuries after Abraham purportedly lived. He, like the later Moses, is almost certainly mythical, a character created to represent the beginnings of the Jewish faith. Even his names are symbolic. In truth, no one knows how Judaism began.

Onto Christianity:

The angel said to (Mary), “Don’t be afraid, Mary; God has shown you his grace. Listen! You will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of King David, his ancestor. He will rule over the people of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will never end.” (Luke 1)

Did this happen? If you believe angels exist then possibly, but we know they do not. We also know that this is myth. However, Luke wanted his readers to know that Jesus’ birth was miraculous so invented a story in which Mary encounters a heavenly being. The gospel writer anchors the divinity of Jesus to an implausible event which at best can only be a young woman’s vision (though it most certainly isn’t.)

The same is true of the resurrection appearances. Here’s Matthew 28:1-8:

Now after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave. And behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. And his appearance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow. The guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who has been crucified. He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said.”

More angels (they multiply in later gospels); again at best, though still highly improbable, the angel(s), if seen at all, can only be a vision or an hallucination (or mistaken identity.)

Onto the only first hand account of an encounter with the divine that the bible includes, Paul’s:

God was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles… I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. (Galatians 1)

I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago—whether in the body I do not know, or out of the body I do not know, God knows—such a man was caught up to the third heaven. And I know how such a man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, God knows— was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which a man is not permitted to speak. (2 Corinthians)

This is all there is. This is the extent Paul talks about his heavenly encounters. In Galatians he admits that God revealing whatever it was he revealed was ‘in’ him, that is, in his own head. The bizarre tale he relates in 2 Corinthians reads like an hallucination (Paul says he doesn’t know whether it was in the body or out of it) which is all it could’ve been; there is no paradise or ‘third heaven’.

And finally, there’s Mohammed:

… while I was sleeping last night, the keys of the treasures of the earth were brought to me till they were put in my hand.”… 

The angel came to him and asked him to read. The Prophet replied, “I do not know how to read. The Prophet added, “The angel caught me (forcefully) and pressed me so hard that I could not bear it any more. (Sahih Bukhari 6998)

Encounters with heavenly beings in dreams, ‘revelations’, visions, hallucinations and invented stories: these are central to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The religions would not exist without them. Written as myth long after they supposedly occurred or referred to obliquely by those who claim to have experienced them, they are the products of fevered pre-scientific minds.

Post-script: I’ve searched in vain for Darwin’s admission that an angel revealed the process of evolution to him. I can only find his collection of evidence, his scientific observations and his careful analysis of his findings. Likewise Mendeleev who calculated the existence of elements that were at the time unknown. Likewise Crick, Watson and Franklin who discovered the structure of DNA. Strangely, none of these people relied on visions, dreams or divine revelations in uncovering truths about reality.

Omens and Portents

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Hey guys, can you help me out a little? The last few weeks I’ve experienced an omen. Or maybe it’s an auspice. A sign. Could even be a miracle.

That’s the trouble, you see. I don’t know which. And even if, with your help, I manage to work it out, I still don’t know what it all means.

You see, there I was in my favourite coffee shop waiting for my cappuccino to cool a little. I happened to look over at it and saw two dead flies floating on the surface. So naturally, I called over the server and said – you know what’s coming – ‘waiter, there’s a fly or two in my drink’. Now whether the flies had been getting it on with each other and decided the froth on my coffee was a good place to do it, I don’t know, but it led to their demise: death by conjugal drowning.

I got a fresh coffee.

Skip forward a few days and I’m about to have a nice glass of Merlot in my favourite Italian restaurant. There on the top, just after it’s been poured, is a solitary swimmer, another of God’s blessed little creatures backstroking its way around my glass in ever erratic circles. After I paraphrase the old joke again, the waiter removes the glass, fishes out the drunken fly and returns my wine. Or maybe he poured a fresh glass. Who knows.

And then – yes, you know what’s coming – a few days after that I’m having another cappuccino in a third establishment when another of the little blighters tops itself in my drink. That’s three times in only a few days. I mean twice would be a coincidence but three times! As Ian Fleming almost said, ‘once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern’. There was a pattern to my flysome encounters, and we know what a pattern means: it means a pattern maker! An intelligence behind this series of unfortunate events. But which? And what did they all mean? A pattern has to have meaning! What was the message I was being sent from the supernatural plane?

Was it an omen? A portent? A sign from above? Was God telling me something? If so what? Maybe you guys can help.

I just realised though that there’s a Lord of the Flies, Beelzebub, who might be trying to communicate with me. (Is there a Lord of the Slugs and a Lord of the Flatfish too? Logic dictates there should be… but I digress). In the Word of God (Mark 3:24 etc), Beelzebub is none other than the devil in disguise, an alter-ego of old pal Satan.

What’s Satan/Beelzebub trying to say to me by directing flies to land in my beverages? I really need to know. If only these all-powerful supernatural types could be a little clearer.

But Some Doubted

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We know that all the accounts of the resurrection appearances are inconsistent, incompatible with each other and read like visions or hallucinations. If that’s not enough there are two aspects of the stories that are delivered almost as asides that give the game away.

Matthew 28:17 records that

…the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.

Meanwhile, in a completely different set of resurrection appearances, Acts 1:3 claims that

After his suffering, (Jesus) presented himself to (his chosen apostles) 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.

These verses from Matthew and Acts are almost always overlooked by true believers. In the Matthew passage we have a number of the eleven remaining disciples doubting that what they were experiencing was the resurrected Jesus. That’s the same disciples whom the gospel tells us trailed round the countryside with him listening to him as he regularly predicted his death and resurrection. Yet when the resurrection happened (spoiler: it didn’t really) they doubted that what they were seeing was Jesus.

How can this be? Did he not look himself, as in the other tall-tales of his reappearance? Was he so changed he was unrecognisable? If so, how did anybody recognise him? That’s the trouble with visions and apparitions: they’re just not clear or convincing.

Luke, meanwhile, extends the time that Jesus spends with his followers from a day or so in his gospel to 40 days in Acts. This is when Jesus offers the ’many convincing proofs’ that he is the Messiah and has survived death. This really makes no sense at all. As I asked in a previous post (slightly edited here) –

By ‘many convincing proofs’: what does this mean? That he had to prove he’d come back to life? Couldn’t his old chums see that for themselves? Couldn’t they recognise the man with whom they’d spent the last three years (allegedly)? Or if they could, weren’t they convinced he’d returned from the dead so that he felt the need to prove it? And how did he prove it? With a death certificate? By letting them poke his holes? And this took forty days?

Isn’t it more likely they were subject to group hysteria and some sort of hallucination (they’d had hallucinations before – see Matthew 17:1-9) and they then had to convince each other that what they’d experienced was really Jesus?

This is what was really going on: it took those who’d hallucinated seeing the heavenly Messiah a significant amount of time (what ‘40 days’ actually means) to concoct what they thought proved their visions were real. Like Paul (perhaps copying him), they found this ‘proof’ in the ‘prophecies’ of Jewish scripture.

This is the ‘many convincing proofs’ Luke refers to. No resurrected god-man spent 40 days offering evidence from scripture that he was really back from the dead. The visionaries themselves came up with it. Unfortunately for them, relying on shaky exegesis and misapplied passages from ancient texts is no proof at all.

Try telling that to Paul and the gospel writers though. All of Christianity rests on the visions of a few and the ‘many convincing proofs’ from scripture that persuaded them that what they’d experienced was really the Messiah, manifested in all his glory.

We’re talking a faith built on sand indeed. No wonder those sensible early disciples doubted every part of it.

Spiritual Forces of Evil in the Heavenly Realms

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Original AI image from Night Cafe

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 6:12)

…you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. (Ephesians 2:2)

…the prince of this world now stands condemned. (John 16:11)

The first-century worldview of early Christian cultists was that somewhere above the Earth a battle raged between God and Satan. The powers of darkness – the devil and his demons – had in ages past launched an attack on the Lord and his angels. This war in the spiritual realm continued unabated up to the time when a cultist wrote Ephesians, pretending to be Paul. Paul himself had already alluded to Satan as the god of this age (2 Corinthians 4:4), while the authors of the fourth gospel would later refer to him as the archon – ruler and prince – of this world (John 12:31; 14:30).

Which just goes to show how the Almighty God they believed in was nothing of the sort. He had tussled with his arch-enemy for eons without quashing his rebellion and putting an end to his persistent attacks. The stand-off had gone on for millennia, and, according to today’s Christians, is still happening. A puny god it is who cannot get the better of one of his far less powerful creations.

And what are God and Satan fighting over? Us, apparently. The devil wants control of human beings.

Why? Who knows. In fact, according to Paul, Satan already has control over us. He enslaves us to sin, which in turn leads to death (Romans 5:12, 6:23). 

Not to worry though, Paul, fake Paul and the fourth gospel writers assure us that their enfeebled God has a cunning plan! He’ll allow a being who is precious to him – like a son, in fact – to be sacrificed so that anyone who believes in him will no longer be enslaved to Satan and sin and will be granted eternal life. How’s that for special magic!

Who shouted out from the back that that sounds like a cop-out? It’s a fantasy bordering on the insane. Like it or not, we are somehow embroiled in heavenly warfare, specially if we’re of the number who’ve bought into this malarkey.

While we’re at it, have you noticed how so many of the wars and skirmishes currently afflicting the world have religion at their heart? YHWH is scrapping with Allah, Allah is up against the Great Satan while Jesus – no stranger to war-mongering himself – presides over it all, leading the world to Armageddon and his own ultimate ‘return’.

Here’s my suggestion. All the gods and demons need to get their act together. They should agree to an ultimate slug-fest, a final battle in the spiritual realm to decide who’s really the Supreme God – the last deity standing – and leave us humans out of it entirely. Surely, being gods, they’re up for finding out who can piss furthest up the wall.

A preposterous idea? Of course it is. None of these fantasy beings exist. There’s no YHWH, Allah, Heavenly Father, Jesus, Krishna, angels, archons, Satan or ‘spiritual forces of evil’ to duke it out. There’s no ‘heavenly plane’ where they can get to it. Everyone of these despotic characters is a human creation, as are the wars, disputes and skirmishes they underpin. It follows that none of them can be the supreme god and certainly none of them are worth fighting over. It’s time we grew up and put away all of our childish imaginary tyrants.

Where are those stories?

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Those opposed to the idea that Jesus was only ever a mythical figure are generally dismissive of those who point to the evidence of the New Testament that this is precisely how the earliest Christians saw him. These critics lambast as ‘amateurs’, ‘pseudo-historians’ and ‘fringe’ enthusiasts those who don’t see any evidence for an historical Jesus. But such ad hominems are not arguments and they’re certainly not evidence that a human Jesus existed. When the books of the New Testament are arranged in chronological order, the very earliest writing about Jesus – Paul in the 50s and the creed of 1 Corinthians 15 – appear to view him only as a scripture-fulfilling spiritual manifestation.

So, was Jesus actually an itinerant preacher who traipsed the Earth in the 30s before rapidly evolving into Paul’s mythical Christ or was he a mythical being to begin with, only later to be cast as an historical figure?

It has to be one or the other. 

Within twenty years of his supposed death, Paul and others had experienced dreams, visions and hallucinations (Acts 2:17) that convinced them Jesus was a supernatural being in heaven. This doesn’t of course rule out that a human Jesus had actually existed, but it makes it unnecessary for him to have done so. Paul and almost all the creators of the New Testament books treat his earthly existence as irrelevant. Even when ‘proving’ their celestial Superman is the promised Messiah, they refer not to his activities on Earth, but appeal exclusively to what they believed Jewish scripture revealed about the Messiah.

According to these men, this is how they knew the Jesus of their dreams was truly the Saviour: the ancient scriptures. Not a single one of them says, ‘I refer you to Jesus’ miraculous birth in Bethlehem; I remind you that he changed water into wine, controlled the elements and miraculously multiplied food.’ Not one of them references his many healings, exorcisms and raising of people from the dead. Not one mentions the historical details surrounding his crucifixion, the empty tomb or the women who first saw him alive again. Not one relates a single resurrection appearance (beyond their own visions) nor do they mention the ascension or a looked for ‘second’ coming. Why not? Surely these would be the definitive indicators that Jesus was the Messiah, instead of, or at least alongside, the so-called prophecies of ancient scriptures.

The ‘why not?’ is because these stories – the birth, the miracles, the healings, the empty tomb, the bodily resurrection, the ascension and the rest – had, at the time Paul was writing, not yet been created. Consequently, they couldn’t be passed on to Paul when he met Cephas and James. There was no much-vaunted ‘oral tradition’ for him to call upon to fill in the gaps in his knowledge about an Earthly Jesus. There was no oral tradition because there was no Earthly Jesus to relate stories about when Paul was active in the 50s. This version of Jesus, created from Jewish scripture, Paul’s teaching and cult rules, didn’t appear until the early 70s. Even after Mark’s gospel and its copycat sequels, most of the writers of later New Testament continued to believe in and refer only to a heavenly saviour verified by ancient Jewish scripture.

But, apologists say today, no-one at the time would be taken in by talk of a Messiah who existed only in the heavenly realm. And that’s true; despite the Bible’s claims to the contrary, very few people were persuaded. But some bought into it, just as others at the time bought into Mithras. Mithraism was, for a while, more successful than the fledgling Christian cult. Yet its adherents knew Mithras himself manifested only in the heavenly plane. This didn’t stop multitudes of military men from joining the cult to worship him. It was the same for the other deities of the day. They too didn’t exist even if stories about their adventures on the Earth were widely circulated and, in all probability, believed by the gullible.

If, however, Jesus’ life on Earth had happened in the early part of the first century, how was it that 20 years after his death he had already become an angelic being without a past? Why had Paul, the writer of Hebrews, the pseudo-Pauls, James and John of Patmos never heard any of the stories about him, or didn’t care about them or felt they weren’t really evidence of Jesus’ Messiahship? Where are those stories? Outside the later gospels they don’t exist. It’s as if, when Elvis Presley died, no one cared any more about all the hit records he’d made and were instead only interested in his post-mortem sightings in laundromats and shopping malls. The process just doesn’t happen this way round.

No, it is far more likely that Jesus went from being a celestial saviour to having stories written about him, stories that are based on prophecies in Jewish scripture and Paul’s ‘revelations’. They are allegorical and metaphorical, wholly made up as the writer of Mark 4:11-12 tells us with the equivalent of a Clark Kent wink:

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!’